Posts

I knew I didn’t like the sound of these things. Researchers were able to break the encryption used in RFID devices such as Exxon Mobil’s Speedpass…as well as newer-generation automobiles. Now I don’t know if that refers to such cars at the autoshow that auto-start when your bluetooth key gets close enough, but that sounds like such a horrible idea to me. There are so many bluetooth issues currently out there, that I can only imagine what people would do if they could sniff your bluetooth “car key”. I’m sure there must be more to it, but it’s still scary.

The site was really starting to bog down for some reason lately, but I figured out what it was. Turns out it was what I suspected all along. On my first site, I had some statistics on the pages about how many times they’d been googledbotted as well as any referer’s. However, I was generating that content from my Apache logs which I configured to log directly to MySQL and are now at just over 1,000,000 rows. Being that my server is a virtual colo (thank you, John Companies), the database was getting pegged out pretty easily. ...

Based on some recent statistics, looks like Chicagoist is telling me it’s time to move! tents his fingers

I had never come across S5 before, but it looks pretty slick. It amazes me what you can do with CSS and JavaScript these days. /me returns to writing apps that output in XML and are formatted using CSS and XSL

It’s freezing at work for some reason - maybe they turned the AC on early, who knows, but it resulted in this: [oracle@SQL02 ~]$ export DISPLAY=;) oops… somehow I don’t think that’s going to work.

Here’s a great cross site scripting cheatsheet. It’s the kind of text that shows you the things you didn’t even know were possible.

As I mentioned, I’ve been working with Microsoft’s Virtual Server lately to build virtual lab environment for testing and research. The box we put it on can only take about 16 virtual machines started at once, but that’s nothing a few more sticks of RAM won’t fix. Here’s a nice screenshot of those 16 VMs starting up at once: screens/virtual_server_taskman_02.png The box actually has two hyper-threaded cpu’s (which I need to disable), but the One Graph, ALL CPUs view was a little more impressive. And the systems were still very responsive. ...

I have finally decided to move my blog to a more complete blogging solution, WordPress. There are a few reasons for this. Probably the most important is that nobody links to me. My old custom-rolled blog didn’t provide for others to link back to me very easily. Nor did it allow for notifications of search engines such as Feedster and PubSub. I’m hoping that by using a blog engine that does these things, it will increase readership. We’ll see… Plus I get cool features now like search, categories, and soon a linkblog. ...

After Firefox completely died on me for some reason, I am now completely in love with the SessionSaver .2 extension. I started firefox and it loaded all my tabs and windows exactly where I had left off. Being one that frequently keeps >20 pages open at any given time, this is a lifesaver! I also just recently installed miniT, which allows me to dragreorder my tabs - one feature I’ve always thought was lacking in Firefox. ...

I finished finished writing a script to create environments similar to the TechNet virtual Labs. This thing rocks! I can’t wait to deploy it.