Apparently NASA‘s Deep Space 1 probe has just been officially decommissioned, slightly over two years after its planned End of Mission date. What caught my eye on this was that DS1 was the first experimental spacecraft to test an Ion Engine — a technology developed in the 1960’s, and for many people, first mentioned on TV’s Star Trek. Apparently the little craft did pretty well for itself. About time NASA had a success!
Tech
Tech-focused ramblings. Computers, blogs, and whatever else fits.
I’m shocked. Really.
Generally, I’m not much of one to take pleasure in others’ misfortunes. However, I do have to admit that it does my little Mac-lovin’ heart proud to be walking around Seattle, WA — just down the road from the pit of despair itself — and to see every newspaper stand in town featuring a headline in large, bold type, across the entire width of the front page proclaiming “XP VULNERABLE TO HACKER ATTACKS”
Windows? XP? With bugs? Naah. You’re kidding. No way. I never would have guessed.
Keep in mind, this comes from a company that, when they were advertising the then-upcoming release of Windows 2000, their sales brochure triumphantly proclaimed that Win2k “includes tens of thousands of bug fixes from Windows NT 4.0!!!” (Note: For those that may think I’m mis-remembering or flat-out making this quote up, many more citations can be found with a quick Google search.)
Excuse me? Your marketing scheme for your new high-end ultra-reliable ultra-secure server operating system is to freely admit that your previous high-end ultra-reliable ultra-secure server operating system shipped not just with bugs…not just with a few bugs…but with tens of thousands of bugs?
Yikes.
New blog software – MovableType
Okay, I’m finally up and running! This kept me up longer than it should have, as I’m supposed to be packing so that I can head up to Alaska right after work tomorrow, but it’s done now. I switched my weblog software from NewsPro over to Movable Type. Took me a bit to get everything set up and configured right so that it didn’t require re-coding this entire page, but everything seems to be up and working now.
There’s a new comments system to play with, and in general a lot more features for me to experiment with. I’ve still got some cleaning up to do — for instance, the archives aren’t online yet, nor do I know if I can enable the search or e-mail functions the way I had them just yet, but I’m looking into it. I’ll get to that some other time, though — at the moment, it’s time for me to pack, and then get some sleep.
That’s more like it
Okay — finally figured out the tricks to the css code I was working on, so now the site looks like I was aiming for way back when when I started this whole redesign thing. It’s a fairly minor change from what it’s been for a few months, but I like this a bit better. It’s about time I got it figured out…managed to do it without screwing things up this time. :)
Two more projects coming up — the first is going to be changing the .cgi I use to post news to Moveable Type, as it’s got a fair amount of features that my current .cgi (NewsPro) doesn’t have, or if it does, they’re not quite as smoothly integrated. Secondly, finally going through the rest of the site and actually getting all the pages using a consistent look — something that I just haven’t gotten done yet. Ah, well.
But for now — time to head out, get some food, do some shopping, and other fun things along those lines.
Hasta la bye-bye.
Site fixed, new addy, and LOTR
Okies — first off, I was able to restore this main page from a recent backup, so the page is back to normal again.
Secondly — www.djwudi.com is active! Yay! I’ll go ahead and leave the old djwudi.dyndns.org addy active for a while, but the preferred address for my site is now www.djwudi.com. Woohoo!
Lastly — just got back not too long ago from Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. In a word — incredible. I’m not sure I can get much more than that out yet, a more detailed review will have to wait, but…. Well, I enjoy fantasy movies, and they’re a lot of fun, but this is the first time I can remember that a fantasy film was that good and true to the spirit of the genre, completely sweeping you up in its world and carrying you along the entire time. Just wonderful.
And it’s going to be a long year until the next part….
Argh…
Well, I was experimenting a bit with the layout of the site, and managed to more or less hose things fairly well. So…things don’t look quite right at the moment. I’ll try to get them straightened out as soon as I can, but not sure when that’ll be — tomorrow night is Lord of the Rings, so I’ll be home late. Grrrr….
Catch up: Downtime, Pigface, Godhead, Gravity Kills, Concrete Blonde, and Alaska
Well, now’s as good a time as any to play a little catch up after the past two weeks or so of the server being down.
Privacy, shmivacy
Wheee…more fun news from our dear friends in the FBI: “Magic Lantern”, a government developed ‘trojan horse’ style virus that appears as an e-mail attachment. Once on your machine, it can record keystrokes (in other words, anything typed on the keyboard — letters, e-mail, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.) and transmit them back to the FBI for analasys. As if that wasn’t bad enough, antivirus software makers are considering intentionally not scanning for this particular virus — in essence, selling crippled versions of their software. More info can be found at Wired and The Register. Just thought this deserved some mention.
‘Twas the night before – Thanksgiving?
Well, it is. Lots of creatures stirring, though — and since they’re not content with just stirring, apparently shooting bottle rockets off outside my window is the next best alternative. Hrmpf.
XP sucks!
I got sent this image (click for a larger version) tonight. According to the site it was posted at, this is a truely genius piece of work — someone actually managed to scale up to wherever the sign is and alter it. In other words, this isn’t just some joker with Photoshop at work — this is a real-world hack job. Just wonderful…goes to show that there still are some truly cool people in the world.