Surfing The Web So You Don't Have To
I’ve mentioned before how Google has a uncanny way of indexing things that you might not want indexed, and it only gets more interesting. Google Labs has introduced a new code search feature that is already finding lots of interesting stuff.
Long story short, put passwords on any compressed archives you post on a public space, unless you want Google to index their contents.
On less-than-invasive news, Google now has an XML-RPC interface so you can ping it with your Weblog.
The talk given Mischa Spiegelmock and Andrew Wbeelsoi at Toorcon that discussed a security flaw in Firefox was actually meant to be humorous, not cause the mass panic it did.
Why no links posted yesterday? I was dealing with troubleshooting Internet connectivity for a local real estate company (and we all know realtors, no matter the company, panic when things don’t work exactly right or how they’re used to), so it tied up most of my day yesterday. And what made it even more difficult was the car mechanic problem: You know how when you take your car to a mechanic and it suddenly stops making the noise you were bringing it in there for? They’ve been complaining about this ‘net connection for several days, but every time I’ve been there, everything’s been working fine. And since I was getting vague “The internet is broken”-types of notes stuck to my desk on my days off, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
After several days of troubleshooting and testing I was finally able to recreate the errors they were getting (after basically making an agent in the office my MLS guinea pig and having her run a bunch of tests for me) in a controlled environment (meaning my laptop versus their laptops or desktops systems that typically have 500 icons on the desktop and about a dozen toolbars installed in the browser). I came to found out that there were random packets that were getting dropped between the expensive Sonicwall firewall and the Cisco 2300 T1 router, as I could connect directly to the T1 router and not have the issues I was getting. Taking down their Internet connection for about five minutes sure bugged everybody — boy, what would the world be like without being wired up all the time!?!?</sarcasm> — but that was the only way I could test it was to give all the bandwidth to me temporarily.
To prove my theory, I went in to town and bought just a cheap Linksys router/firewall that would route everything, configured it, plugged it into place, and suddenly things started working again.
At least that’s what I’ve been told — I haven’t heard any complaints today. The router has a basic firewall on it, which is basically all their were using the other firewall for, so it’ll work until I can price out a cheap Smoothwall box to build for them (as I’ve had great luck with my Smoothwall boxes, having installed four of them).
More links coming today as soon as I get caught up from ignoring the world and hiding in a network closet yesterday.
Since I’m a Firefox 1.x guy…
You are most likely a little bit geeky and proud of it. You are a strong supporter of the Open Source movement, and you think that RMS is “the man”. You really don’t care if FF is faster, or safer than IE – you would use it even if it performed 10 times worse. You are just happy that you have a free, open source browser with a huge community that is supporting it. At any given time you have installed at least 7 extensions that you couldn’t live without.
Yeah, pretty close. What does your browser reveal about you? (and they pretty much cover everything out there covered, including the various versions of MSIE, Firefox, Netscape, AOL, Opera, Lynx, etc…
I was taking some pictures at a house today, and happened to glance on the bookshelf to notice some old magazines. Like 10 year old magazines. One of them was a 10-year old copy of PC Magazine (with a cover story about online services like Prodigy and Compuserve — those were the days), and happened to turn over the magazine to look at this back cover ad (sorry about the crappy quality — my flatbed scanner as work was on the fritz, so I had to take a picture of it).
Back in the day that $4000+ laptop was top of the line. With its 90mhz Pentium, 10.4″ screen, and 810 megabyte hard drive, you were cruising in style. For nearly $5000, you could get a Pentium 120.
But if you were a businessman, you might be more interested in this offering:
So for $15,000, you could get two servers with Pentium 133mhz processors, 32 megs of ram, 4GB hard drives, plus they’ll throw in a 12-port 10-Base-T switch. Damn, that’s sweet!
It’s amazing how much hardware you can by for that price nowadays. Sadly, though, this is about the time I graduated high school, and I paid nearly $3,000 for a Pentium 133 system when I graduated — it was a speed demon compared to the family’s 486SX25.
This has to be one of the coolest hacks this guy has done (and he’s done a great number of clever modifications).
If I was making as much money as this 2006 IT Survey Calculator says I should be, I’d be a happy man ($53,000+, according to the site). Geeks: What does it say you should be making?
If you want to play around with Windows Vista, you can get the Windows Vista pre-RC1 ISO file here. They’re limiting the downloads to 100,000, and the download is 2.6GB.
Any geek knows that there’s a small bit of power that comes across a USB cable when it’s hooked to your computer. So in theory, if you have enough cables hooked to your computer (not through a hub), you can get some serious juice out of it. Somebody rigged up 30 USB ports and managed to cook some meat with it.
I don’t know if I’d eat it, though.
You’ve probably all seen the Chuck Norris random fact generator. While hilarious, I think the random facts about encryption-guru Bruce Schneier are just as scary as a round-house kick to the head from Chuck. Granted, you have to be a geek to appreciate stuff like this:
Bruce Schneier once broke AES using nothing but six feet of rusty barbed wire, a toothpick, and the front axle from a 1962 Ford Falcon.