Happy 4,000th Randy Johnson!
Randy Johnson just threw his 4,000th strikeout! That makes him just the fourth pitcher in Major League Baseball history to get to 4,000. Not only that, but Johnson is also the fastest pitcher ever to get to 4,000, and in my opinion, he could easily move up to second place on the all-time list within the next few years (if his knees hold out).
Editor’s Note:I know this isn’t about tech, but its about my other love: Baseball. I’m actually thinking about getting into more baseball talk on this site or do another completly seperate site all about baseball news and views. Any views on that? Anyone into baseball too? Just checking.
WWDC 2004
Having just finished watching the Quicktime Stream of Steve Job’s keynote, I feel that I should at least venture my not-so-humble opinion on the events.
1. I wish I had more money, so that I could buy a G5 and one of those displays.
2. Didn’t Steve say that the “OS X transition was over” last year at the WWDC? So its still over? Ok, got it.
3. That guy that was talking about Maya, was a little weird. I don’t know how, but I know some of you are feelin’ me on this one.
4. I really happy that that woman from Microsoft (Roz Ho?) didn’t blabber on at this one again about Office 2004 (Which, by the way, I love)
5. When I first heard of Spotlight, I thought it didn’t sound like the revolutionary thing Apple was treating it like it was. I looks awesome though.
6. Safari RSS and Automator are two things that I think I could really get into if I got a chance to use them.
7. I would be freakin’ pissed if I was the guy that started the widely popular Konfabulator site. For those that don’t know…Apple kinda ripped him off with their Dashboard idea.
8. iChat AV looks awesome! Not sure if anyone noticed, but they even show the reflections of the video streams in the multible video chat window.
mfflynn@gmail.com
So I have a GMail account now. Its nothing that great.
Its a nice web email…lots of space, and laid out nicely. But nothing that really deserves this amount of craziness.
The popular question: Invites? If I get any more, I can and will pass them out via this site.
When The Internet Attacks!
If you are looking at this site via Internet Explorer, especially if you are using Windows…close your browser and surf the web via Firefox, Mozilla, and if you are on a Mac, Safari. If you haven’t downloaded any of these, then go to download them first.
A brand new threat to your personal security has been released today by several agencies and departments, including the Homeland Security Department. Here it is from their site:
US-CERT is aware of new activity affecting compromised web sites running Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS) 5 and possibly end-user systems that visit these sites. Compromised sites are appending JavaScript to the bottom of web pages. When executed, this JavaScript attempts to access a file hosted on another server. This file may contain malicious code that can affect the end-user’s system. US-CERT is investigating the origin of the IIS 5 compromises and the impact of the code that is downloaded to end-user systems.
Web server administrators running IIS 5 should verify that there is no unusual JavaScript appended to the bottom of pages delivered by their web server.
This activity is another example of why end users must exercise caution when JavaScript is enabled in their web browser. Disabling JavaScript will prevent this activity from affecting an end-user’s system, but may also degrade the appearance and functionality of some web sites that rely upon JavaScript. US-CERT recommends that end-users disable JavaScript unless it is absolutely necessary. Users should be aware that any web site, even those that may be trusted by the user, may be affected by this activity and thus contain potentially malicious code.
This is a very serious threat and becuase their has yet to be a patch released from Microsoft, you need to update your antivirus and really stop using Internet Explorer. Some security groups are saying that you should not be on the internet at all today other than 100% necessary tasks.
Another bang up job by Microsoft.
Source: (Its EVERYWHERE) US-CERT | IIS 5 Web Server Compromises
Gmail Cravings At All Time High
With the amounts of GMail inivations flying around the internet in the last few days, it looks as though that Google’s GMail is about to go public. Of course, noone seems to realize this, and with the rash of GMail invites comes a sort of minor geek hysteria echoing around the internet. Don’t believe me? Check out this blog post on Kevin Rose (of Screensavers fame) where he gave out a few invites and urged others to do the same. He just recently cleared off most of the comments, but it was over 2,000 last time I checked.
Is that not enough proof of the needless insanity on the internet about a glorified Hotmail account? Well then you need to check out The GMail Machine. Where idiots that have way too much time on their hands refresh this page over and over again waiting to the number that has been now forever locked to wanna-be computer hackers: 1337. When you see that number on your screen (it looks to be run by a basic php random number script) then you get one of the GMail invites that this team of people have collected. The site has been refreshed 107,789,351 times, and has transfered over 501.93 GB of bandwidth. Even more sad is that if any of these people would bother to read the news they post on the site they would see this:
Someone has hacked my gmail account (g.machine@gmail.com) making it impossible for me to get into to send out codes to all of you. Everytime someone wins on the site it sends an email to that account, so i can send you a code. But i can’t get into that email, if anyone else can figure out a method into the account that would be great, but until then i can’t send out invites to anyone.
Sorry,
Scott Meinzer
Basically all those people drooling over a GMail account are wasting their time even more so, becuase they guy running this can’t send the GMail codes out anyway.
UPDATE: He has just fixed his email account and now the partons of this site are completly wasting their time. However, it only really makes this excercise insignificatly less lame.
Now its not that I don’t have a urge to check out GMail’s services. I do. I have been in fact looking for a reliable secondary e-mail account. (Spymac, didn’t really work out as I had hoped.) However, even though I would take an invite if someone offered it to me, I would not pay money, or trade anything of any sort of value or even waste my time reloading a site in the hopes that I will get an invite and get to use a web-based e-mail account for one or two days before it goes public.
Give me a break.
Downhill Labs: Fight The Man
If you read this site much at all, you know I love Downhill Battle, the site all about fighting the record companies’ stupid moves. Well, they recently launched Downhill Battle Labs. It is a great place to find great little apps and scripts that help fight the “power”. I really don’t use much of it, but its fun to see what is out there.
Also, if you are wannabe film maker, be sure to check their Movies For Music film contes.
Another Way To Find WiFi Networks
War Kayaking…yes, War Kayaking…someone has done it. …and they made a video.
The guys at Engadget have a nice little peice up for their “How To Tuesdays” about their latest War Kayaking adventure.
As the summer approaches, we crawl out of our protective wired covered lairs to sometimes partake in outdoor activity. Last weekend, we went kayaking around Lake Union in Seattle, WA and of course, we couldn’t help but bring along a lot of equipment and decided we’d hunt for open wireless spots, this friends- was “War Kayaking” we found a ton, charted it with GPS, Wifi finders and we’ll show you how we did it for this week’s HOW-TO Tuesday.
Its worth a read, and if you are too lazy to read, check their video.
The Fight Against Blog Spam
The guys a Gadgetopia have been fighting with spam on their comment system for some time now, and I think they finally have found a good way that should work…at least for a little while. Of course, the answer to this problem is beautifully simple.
I renamed the Movable Type comments script. I have had exactly one spam in the last three weeks.
Spam bots, it seems, are designed to go after the default script name. You can rename the script (view the source sometime to see what I called it) and change the value in the mt.cfg file. I’m sure my log file is full of 404 requests to mt-comments.cgi.
It doesn’t seem that spam bots are parsing the comment forms to find the name of the target script. It’s probably just a matter of time.
We here at Hell Yeah Bitch! .com, however, do not have this problem…we aren’t that popular yet.
The Army Gets A Taste For Apple
Virginia Tech, a few months back, created a supercomputer with 1100 dual processor G5s. Well their supercomputer has fallen off the list while they wait for their upgrade to G5 XServes, but either way, the Army has taken notice. The Army is creating a G5 supercomputer of their own for different training operations, and is being created for them by their contractor, Colsa and will be called Mach5.
Colsa will use Mac OS X as the primary operating system, though it will evaluate other options including Red Hat Linux and Yellow Dog Linux, Whitlock added.
MACH 5, which stands for Multiple Advanced Computers for Hypersonic, G5, will occupy 42 racks and 600 square feet of floor space, said Anthony DiRienzo, a Colsa executive vice president. Apple was the winning bidder among six companies, DiRienzo said, declining to name the competitors.
Pretty cool huh? Well if you haven’t heard enough about this yet, you can be sure that you will hear a lot more about this in a week during the Steve Jobs’ keynote at the World Wide Development Conference.