This and That

In the "slip of a forked tongue" department, Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft's security program manager admits to Wired that he uses Firefox. If you haven't switched yet, you should have your head examined.
And for all those conspiracy theorists out there (you know who you are). This guy has put together some pretty compelling evidence that NASA (or someone) is editing the photos from Mars! Amongst other things, they appear to be hiding active volcanoes, water, and life! I have to wonder if this isn't just some MAD Tennis gone horribly horribly wrong.

Gmail file system

This is a damn cool little hack... and of course it only works with Linux. A Squash Playing Buddist (his words, not mine) named Richard Jones has combined the power of Linux with the speed and storage space of Gmail to create the Gmail File System! This means that anywhere one has Linux and an internet connection, one can have a 1gig drive to store things on!
Some fool just sent a Gmail invite to my Gmail account, thinking I was someone named Steven apparently? I think I have a good idea of what to use it for now!
I also have 6 invites if anyone wants one.

The middle capacitor is normal, those on each side bulge. Notice how the light reflects differently from the bad ones because the angle is different due to bulge. 

The capacitor on the left (with the red arrow) is leaking. The capacitor on the right is bulging. Neither is good. 

The whole motherboard, each small red arrow is a blown or bulging capacitor. 

Singing the Blown Out Motherboard Blues

My computer has been a bit unsteady lately. Sometimes it refuses to turn on. Other times it will just reboot itself. Finally last night around midnight I decided to get to the bottom of the situation. I poked and prodded around for a while, unplugging one item or another, resetting the CMOS, etc. After a few hours of no luck, I decided that I better pull it out of the case entirely and make sure that I wasn't having some sort of problems with it grounding out. As I studied the motherboard I realized that many of the capacitors did not look right. On closer inspection I saw that some actually had ruptured and leaked their fluid! It was then that I remembered the big scandal that was going on a few years ago over capacitors. Apparently some fellow in Japan stole the formula to the electrolyte they use in capacitors, and took it to a company in Taiwan. He got the formula wrong however, and all of these cheap capacitors made using it are prone to blowing up. Becaues of this a good deal of the motherboards manufactured between 1999 and 2001 have these faulty capacitors. By this time it was about 4:30 A.M. so I went to bed.

Anyway, after reading dozens of reviews, I've decided to get an ASUS A7V600 for my next motherboard. Sure the KT600 chipset isn't quite so snazzy fast as the dual channel nForce2 Ultra 400, but the reviews say that this board is stable, and stable is what I want. Plus, with built in SATA RAID and Gigabit LAN, it is plenty cool. It also has NO ON BOARD FAN one of my major criterian in choosing a motherboard.

Check out the pics above to see the blown capacitors.

Cool medical things and Loathsome Lurkers

There were a couple of cool articles on MSN today, the first is about a man in Germany who had a new jaw grown and implanted successfully. It isn't known whether the bone-marrow stem cells injected into the titanium jaw-shaped form differentiated into the new bone, or if the cells were recruited from the tissue in his back where the form was implanted while it grew, but whatever the case it is fairly impressive that he has a jaw after nine years of not having one. I have to wonder if this isn't the first step towards someone getting their bones replaced with titanium reinforced ones, and then maybe some big claws built into the hands, super healing powers, a strange hair due, and a visit to the court house to change his name to Wolverine.
Apparently Bush is also nervous about this possibility, as he and his continue to block stem cell research in the US. Or maybe he is just really nice, and wants to give other countries the chance to become the next major centers for innovation in the medical arena? Of course, with Bush's new policies on foreign students, medicine might not be the only field he is offering up to other countries on a silver platter.
In contrast, the Bill Gates of medical & bio technology is emerging In California, and guess what, it is Bill Gates! Bill and a number of others are working to get a bond passed which would raise 3 billion to fund stem cell research in California (dodging Bush's fanatical ban of the research altogether, and causing much consternation in conservatives there and elsewhere). The list of supporters is long and recognizable. Many have medical conditions, or have children with them. Meanwhile, conservatives opposed to medical advance are bombing stem cell labs, apparently considering it their God given mission to kill those who try to regenerate organs and cure diabetes. I would like to express how incredibly messed up these people are, but I don't know if I could do it without a lot of expletives, and this IS a family blog after all.
Finally, on the home front, mere days after I opened a few ports on my firewall so that my little Linux server could go out and explore the vast wild land which is the Internet, some chumps have already decided to attack it. One in particular was persistent, trying to guess root's password about 200 times. Grabbing his IP from the logs, I looked him up on ARIN and much to my surprise it was the State of Utah Government! Initially I figured that it must have been that rat bastard Orin Hatch (may his sudo-religious soul forever burn in Hell Fire), but he just isn't techno savvy enough to do such a thing, and has no reason to know that I think some of his policies are the most loathsome ever oozed forth from a putrescent, cancerous sack of tissue such as he is. Instead I believe that the attacking system must have been broken into by some sort of Internet worm which was just blindly scanning the net looking for someone to try and spread itself to. Once it found me, it settled in to do it's dirty work. Probably the whole job was perpetrated by some no-account script kiddie who knows enough to download a rootkit and not much more. Mostly this is what one sees on the net. The true Dark Jedi Masters are generally smart enough to be focused on more sinister goals. My little servers and meager bandwidth would be of no interest to them (and a good thing too I might add, defending myself against a REAL attack could be trouble).

The weather has taken a turn for the cool lately. A little bite of autumn is in the air, it is colder outside than in, and bike ridding has been a much less sweaty affair. Isaac and I went out for a little fun in the Owyhee foothills near the Reynolds Creek drainage. Going up was hard painful work that required low gears and lots of “spinning.” Coming down was a lot of fun however, 40.1mph of it at one point! (well, a bit scary too, asphalt and gravel look kinda scary at this speed). This is Isaac's new pimp-mobil. It carries bicycles, AND gets the chicas! Amaziiing..... 

Conservatives lack conscience? And other stories

The New York Times has an interesting article about how the part of the brain responsible for controlling emotions and empathy (the amygdala) responds more strongly to images of violence in liberals than in conservatives. So maybe this is why the current administration doesn't seem to feel very bad about untold thousands of wounded, 11-40+ thousand civilian casualties, and 1000+ military personnel casualties in Iraq. Hopefully the Wizard of Oz will give Bush a heart soon... or wait, I mean a brain, oh what the hell give him both!
Oh, and if you don't want to fill in all the registration business for the article, check out BUG ME NOT for Firefox!
Also, this article reaffirmed my longtime distrust of hooking a camera up to my computer. Apparently there is a worm going around that allows a remote viewer to see whatever your digital video camera sees, whether you think it is active or not! More detail on the worm can be found here.

SCO gets the smack down

In true 1-2 knock out punch style, IBM delivered another major blow to SCO, filing a motion saying that SCO illegally copied and distributed 783,000 lines of code from IBM. The situation is that IBM contributed a bunch of code to the Linux project under the GPL. When SCO decided to claim ownership of Linux and charge licensing fees to anyone using it, they violated the GPL, and by their own actions made it so that they couldn't distribute Linux legally any more, and especially not IBM's part of it. Despite this, SCO kept distributing Linux, and put themselves into a very sticky situation. I have always figured that the powers that be withing SCO would try to litigate themselves into prosperity, and then sell the company before their house of cards came tumbling down. It looks like IBM is spraying that house of cards with lighter fluid, and plans to burn it to the ground before anyone can buy. Three cheers for IBM I say. Suddenly Linux has legal muscle. Bite this penguin, and it will bite back.

A little luck

So apparently God and all her minions were smiling upon me today. Not smiling as much as free, but about $73 worth, which is at least a few grins. Where there had been no used copy of the physics text yesterday, now one had appeared as if by magic, and at a significantly more reasonable cost. Sure there are a few bent corners, some scuffs here and there, a little highlighter, but I figure all of that just lets me know what to pay attention to. Plus, $73 is roughly 15 lunches at China Star. It is all about having priorities! Anyway, gracias a dios, and if a used copy of the o-chem text would just show up on the stack at about half price, I'll consider being a true believer (nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Say no more).

Book store funding terrorists?

Okay, so good cripes, I went to check out what books for a measly two classes would cost me, and yeah, over $300! One small soft cover 150 page lab manual is $52 new. It was probably close in weight to a chunk of gold of the same value. A hard-cover o-chem book is over $150, and physics demands this goofy pack of books which run $164. Now I know knowledge is supposed to be of great value and all that, but this is ludicrous. As far as I can tell, the only rational explanation for these outrageous prices is that the money is funneled into some terrorist funding network. These people are wide-spread too. I checked online at a few different used places, and nothing was much cheaper! Oh well, I guess it's like "a wiser feller than myself once said, 'sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes the bar, well, he eats you.'"
(p.s. name that movie, and drink a White Russian--dare I say caucasian?--when you do)

Caution Horses

is the name of a Cowboy Junkies album that I kinda like when I'm in the right kind of mood, and the sign they should have posted on Stock Trail road tonight. After a few days of slacking (okay so maybe it has been a little over a week) I went for a jog tonight. I had forgotten the mass of trucks, trailers and horses that I'd seen mustering on my way home from work. I think that my estimation of 500 head was pretty accurate but I didn't realize this until I was right in the thick of the herd. Yes, the Caldwell Night Rodeo is upon us. Luckily a certain chica took me horse riding a few weeks back, so my innate distrust of equines is at an all time low at the moment. Nevertheless, I spent most of the run walking around horses and steaming piles of horse dung (not so easy in the dark, let me tell ya). The horse-folk seem to have a few levels of decency on the carnival goers I was wading through earlier this summer however, and I got no harassment despite going amongst them in running shorts and blue polyester jersey, so that was nice. I also learned that truly serious horse owners dump that whole pickup business in favor of a semi-tractor. Some of their horse trailers rivaled semi-trailers however, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.

A rainy day

Today is a drizzly rainy day, which is nice because it means that the heat has finally broken, but also means that I have to subsist on a Nature Valley bar and a banana for lunch because I don't want to ride home in the rain. Nevertheless, I love rainy days. They remind me of being a little kid in Seattle. I especially like how concrete smells when it first starts to rain, and how the little birds come out and sing in a happy quiet way. The rain does have some downsides however. For instance, there are about 500 horses at the Caldwell fair grounds today, all wet, and a bit smelly because of it. Also my lawn will most certainly grow even faster (where is a huge truck full of gravel when I need one).
Today is also a good day because GROKLAW published a review of the motion IBM filed last week to dismiss SCO's contract claims. Basically SCO has been trying to make a quick buck off of the Linux community by claiming ownership of Linux source code, claiming that IBM gave Unix source code to the Linux people, and suing people to try and make them license their copy of Linux with SCO. All of it is total garbage of course, and as the details have been fleshed out, it is looking like SCO has been bluffing the whole time. This latest filing by IBM basically drops the axe on SCO's spindly neck. HOORAH! The GROKLAW site is overwhelmed with happy readers right now, but a synopsis of the IBM filing may be available there if you are patient. The Register also has an article about it.

Trials, Tribulations and Testing

Well, I have been messing around with the old computers lately. I put a new Athlon XP 3000+ processor in my main system, and I am getting Linux running on another box for use at the college. Hardware changes always introduce unknowns into the system however, and this new processor seems like it might have a few quirks to work out. So far the system has done a few odd little reboots and freezes. Strangely these only occur when I am not here. Stress testing with Doom3 (which gets 3fps better now) shows the chip as running totally stable. I am running the memory and bus at a higher speed (333 and 166) so maybe they don't like this speed, or maybe the processor (which is OEM) is a bit flaky but only on rare occasions? It is hard to say. Initially I thought I had some major troubles until I realized that I'd turned the voltage down on the old 2200+ to keep it cooler. The new processor apparently won't run at anything below default however, and might even need a little extra juice for full stability. It seems to be running between 110F and 120F which isn't bad, but a little warmer than I'd like. Maybe more juice and a bit better heatsink will be necessary.
Of course, the hardware in the Linux box to be is also doing its dead level best to give me trouble. It is an Athlon XP 1600 with an older model motherboard. I think one of the 256mb sticks of ram I had in it was bad because it was doing some crazy stuff until I pulled that (which means the hard-drive isn't bad as I first thought) so I am down to 256mb on that beast. Hopefully that will be enough for running all of the things I hope to run. I might have to get a cheap KM400 chipset motherboard, case, and ram for the xp2200 processor that is now sitting in a bag just so that I have a decent set of hardware for Linux. We'll see.
Meanwhile, I met with Chad Dr. Ayers today (Where was the rest of the research group? Will we ever know?) to discuss the location of our new lab, and get an idea of what Ayers has in mind. I am somewhere between thrilled and excited about all of this, but with O-chem, Physics, lots of lab and computer setup hours, work, and maybe TA'ing staring me in the face like a 5-barrel shotgun, there is a little dread thrown in there. O well, I'll sleep when I'm dead I guess. Ayers did hook me up with the Instructor's Guide for Discovering Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics. Apparently this is the *teachers edition* of a book that the Molecular Bio class will be using this fall. This is the class that I might be TA'ing so having the teacher's edition will be HUGE! Anyway, looks like the Linux install finished successfully, so I best get to evaluating open-source document and project management systems. Yee-haw ;)

Hacking in our modern age

Wow, I read a few spooky articles about a tool called the Metasploit Project which was recently demoed at a Black Hat Security conference. This tool makes it a whole lot easier for someone to exploit remote security holes on a number of different types of platforms at the click of a mouse. A tool like this is very useful to system administrators who want to test the security of their own networks, but also makes it much easier for people to hack into remote systems without knowing very much about the complexities of hacking at all. It doesn't expose new vulnerabilities, but does make known ones much easier to exploit. The adventurous should try it on their own systems.
As a side note, computer hacker types are generally grouped into two or sometimes three categories. Black hat hackers are a bit more devious, and probably do things they shouldn't. If they find vulnerabilities in systems they generally keep them quiet and only tell others in the black-hat community. White hat hackers are generally professionals who engage in hacking sort of activities as part of their job (sometimes I fall into this category). Upon finding vulnerabilities they alert the software manufacturer first, and the security community after a certain period of time. Then there are the gray hats, who are somewhere between the two. They announce vulnerabilities to the general public (black-hats, white-hats, and manufacturers) and probably do questionable things from time to time.

Back!

I made it back from the BRIN/INBRE conference. It was quite exciting. Lots of smart influential people working hard at setting Idaho up to be a major player in the emerging Bio-technology industry. I listened to a lot of talks, met a lot of the key people doing research in Idaho, and started getting an idea of where I might fit in this exciting new field. Biology and computers, together at last. It is almost as good as "beer that has candy floating in it".
In other exciting news, one of my best friends of all time, LaDonne is here today, and coming to visit! I haven't seen her since her wedding at least a year ago so it will be great to catch up on everything that has happened to us.

Mandrake 10.1 beta released! And an update on the varmint situation

I woke this morning to wonderful news. Mandrake, my favorite Linux distribution in the whole wide world a million, has released their 10.1 beta with all sorts of groovy new features. Check out their press release for more information (and yeah, BitTorrent is pulling it down at around 70K/s as I type). If I have time, I will install it on one of my test systems when the download finishes. It looks like it is 1.9gigs however, so that could take a little while.
Meanwhile, Old Man Geeze has had some success in his war with the various varmints which are overrunning the little one acre farm. I went out to visit yesterday, and he had a skunk caught in a trap he set in the chicken run, and a dead marmot or rock chuck or something which he picked off at 20 yards with his trusty bolt action rifle. A trapped skunk is a tricky situation to have on one's hands, and this skunk was certainly a prime example. The last one he caught trying to eat chickens stunk up the woodshed for three years! It seemed that the only humane solution was to put him (the varmint, not Geeze) out of his misery however, so Geeze did his best to send the beast on to the next world with a minimum of stink. Having dispatched two varmints in one day, Geeze was whistling a happy tune like the brave little tailor until Mom noticed dirt and sticks flying out of another hole under the woodshed. The battle rages on.

Promiscuous Penguins, etc.

A good friend of mine who sometimes is called Miss Fyn, sometimes Fynnilicious, and occasionally Francesca de Argentina sent me an interesting tidbit. Apparently Dr. Hunter, a professor at Cambridge University (she is no relation to me as far as I know – and que lastima too, I want to visit Antarctica!) did some observation of penguins and has recorded numerous cases of penguin prostitution! Yes, sex for pebbles. Apparently some of the males seem to realize what is going on, while others think they are courting legitimately only to end up short a few stones and singing the blues. What an odd world we live in.
Also I went for a little bike ride with Isaac and Kristen tonight. We were only out for an hour, but rode 15 miles over some fairly hilly terrain so it was a nice workout. On one particularly steep downhill spot I hit 31+mph, a new personal record (and kinda scary on a bicycle). The uphill spots went a bit more slowly. Bicycling is certainly easier on the old joints than jogging however, and one goes SO much faster.
A new release of Firefox (0.9.3) has come out to fix a few bugs. If it seems like a nuisance keeping up with the updates, don't give up hope. Apparently there is an auto-update feature in the works, maybe for version 1.0. Plus, it is better to have an update to install, than to surf unprotected.
And finally, I am headed off to a conference at ISU this Sunday which has me all excited. Apparently there will be some heavy hitters there however, so I might be a bit out of my depth (at least in the bio and chem stuff). I am looking forward to trying to hob-nob with serious scientists, and especially to making a long list of all the cool computer stuff a certain college near me needs to acquire. I will take my laptop and try to look professional. On the down side, this means I won't be here for the next two inventories, I will have my cell, but I am really hoping that late night calls won't be necessary.

55.1 miles of wifi!

Wow, I thought that I was a hard-core tin-can-antenna kid, but these guys managed to shoot a 802.11b signal 55.1 miles without external amplification. That is a long way! Of course, they had some 9+ foot satellite dishes, so that probably played a big part in their success.
In other news, this server is awesome. Six hot-swappable scsi drive bays with hardware RAID 5, dual Opteron processors, a slim sexy 2U case, and up to 16gigs of ram. Look at it shine in all of its 64bit splendor. We might get one for our central server here at work, but three of them would look so nice running as a Linux cluster in my basement.... Anyone have an extra $10k?
Today is another inventory day, the last one went fairly smoothly (all things considered). A number of small things have been fixed, a few features have been added, and some things have been streamlined, so here's hoping that all goes well. Needless to say, it could be a late night.

The Genius Within, a review

Well, I was going to go for a little run tonight to try out the new running shoes I got (and boy do they feel nice and springy compared to my old ones) but between lightning, wind gusts, a few drops of rain, and a certain spooky game which I played for a few hours earlier, I decided after about a block that not running would be the better idea. Instead I finished the book The Genius Within by Frank T. Vertosick Jr. It was a decently good book, with a few interesting ideas, but like most of the books I've read which fall into the "written by scientist for the general public" category, this one lacked something in literary quality. I think this is a side effect of writing and reading tons of primary literature. This sort of author seems to rely on very few devices, chief among them is making some claim which is mildly strange, and then going on for pages about how unbelievable we are sure to find it. I sometimes want to scream "SHOW DON'T TELL!!" at them. They also seem to rely on repetition far too much. Read Part 1 of this book, and see if you can keep from cheering when “Poor Tom” (which apparently is his legal name) finally kicks the damn bucket. Anyway, on to the meat and potatoes.
The core thesis of this book is that most, if not all living systems, can be understood more accurately as intelligent networks. Many of the peer to peer file sharing networks like KaZaA are variations on this sort of network theory, and it is really sort of cutting edge stuff. Unfortunately I have only read a few papers on it, so I am no expert by any means. The idea is that one can get intelligent results out of many unintelligent entities by connecting them to one another, and then allowing them to modify their connections, create new connections, and destroy old connections based upon the amount of traffic which flows across these connections, and inputs from the outside world. Vertosick's idea is that we can explain the apparent intelligence of bacteria rapidly evolving to deal with new antibiotics, immune systems memorizing huge lists of antigens, and other highly “intelligent” behavior by applying network principles. He says that this intelligence is an “emergent property” of these large groups of communal entities. For the most part, I find it difficult to disagree with his conclusions because they provide an enlightening way to look at the complexity in biological systems.
In my opinion, his most interesting point is that there are many different manifestations of intelligence and that competition dictates that all surviving organisms must be about equally intelligent in one way or another, or they would have ceased to exist. This is by no means a revolutionary statement. What he is doing here is redefining intelligence to be what a biologist would traditionally call fitness. In the same vein one could argue that all organisms are roughly equal in their fitness level or they would have rapidly ceased to exist already. We can see this clearly in species which are no longer intelligent/fit enough to co-exist with humans and are rapidly going extinct. When it comes to evolutionary theory, it has always been my experience that people don't realize that the fitness of a species is heavily dependent on the environment in which it exists. Putting things in terms of intelligence may make this concept easier to grasp.
This book covers a wide range of topics from the smart, but slow intelligence of the evolutionary process, the genetic learning and problem solving bacterial colonies display, and the speedy intelligence of the vertebrate brain. Vertosick's goal is to explain all of this to someone with little background in biology or computer science, and he doesn't do too terribly at it. He does brush over some of the more complex topics, and spends much to long on some simple ones in my opinion, but this is probably to be expected in a book with an uncertain audience, and such a wide scope. Over all, I would say that this book would be better off if boiled down into three or four 30 page papers, but it isn't too bad.

Premature Ejectulation

So I got called into the advertising department today where one of our two MACs was refusing to boot because it had a bad zip disk in the zip drive. It would start to load up its GUI thing, and then just freeze there. The advertising guy was about ready to throw it out the window, so I intervened and started messing with it. After trying the normal peaceful solutions I had to resort to violence and riped the front cover off. There, just were it was supposed to be was the eject button! I have long pondered why in God's holy name the Mac people hide the eject buttons, and I think I've finally figured it out. See I think Steve Jobs has a problem with premature ejectulation, so they covered up all of the buttons in order to make him drag the little disk icon to the little garbage can. PC users on the other hand are expected to have more self control and wait until the light goes off before ejecting. In linux, things get even more complicated because you have to umount first... or at least you did before the new kernels and automount tools became available.
(Note all obscene comments will be deleted. This IS a family blog after all. And this means you MIKE!)

This daemon hell beast wants your soul.... you have a big gun. Can you really ask for more than this in a game? 

Big day for Bug Bounty Hunters

I was quite happy to read that the Mozilla Foundation (of Firefox fame) is putting a $500 bounty on serious bugs in their software. Unlike a lot of software companies (Microsoft for instance) who try to keep security problems hidden from the general public, Mozilla is taking a much more progressive stance by making their development and bug resolution processes transparent. By doing this they ensure that all of their users are aware of security problems should they arise, and that fixes are promptly created. In contrast, many of Microsoft's security problems are kept quiet and only known about by Microsoft and malicious hackers for disturbingly long periods of time. Here is an interesting article about these two approaches. Amazingly it was published by ZDnet, a group which is usually pretty pro Microsoft, but in this article they very much support a transparent, full disclosure approach.
In other news, Doom3 comes out tomorrow. It is already floating around in certain channels. We can expect to see a serious decrease in productivity from IT people for the next few weeks. This game is HIGHLY anticipated (and pretty much guaranteed to scare you witless).

This is a high-speed shot (hence the blur) of the horse cantering. Cantering is tons of fun but a bit scary because it feels like the horse is suddenly going quite a lot faster. It is much less painful than trotting however, and getting from the trotting stage to the cantering one can be a big relief. 

In this picture you can see how the horses two diagonal legs are doing the same thing. Apparently this means that the horse is trotting. Trotting is the least comfortable option in my opinion. 

Okay, going from slowest to fastest, here are some action shots. In this one, the horse is walking (the most comfortable speed, but kinda slow). If you go to this page you can see the differences in each gait type. It is quite interesting to me that horses have these different gaits, very much like a car has different gears, if only the shifting up part was a bit easier, and the shifting down part didn't happen automatically....