BunkBlog

An enjoyable solitary evening for a geek:
Enterprise season premiere.
Twilight Zone series premiere
Renaming Gutenberg files from 1994 to be user-friendly, while listening to MIDI files of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Not at all unusual. 🙂
current_music: Beethoven’s Fifth – Second Movement
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The army has patches for every major unit, but the clipart collections that are out in the retail market only have some of them. Shoot, the 1st Cav patch in Corel Gallery is in greyscale! Like it would have taken any extra effort to slap in some yellow? Anyway, in my efforts to do many things in the army, including an awful lot of off-duty graphic design work, I’ve made a few patches and scrounged others together. So, click on a patch below to get the WMF file for it, or click here for the ZIP file containing all of them. The big image, by the way, is painted on my office door. No, I didn’t paint anything myself. I’m more a computer geek. 🙂

And, of course, there’s the Army seal, since the one that gets passed around the most has some Yen symbols in the middle of the words!

Just playing with new skills on Macromedia Fireworks…



Give you any ideas?
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Anyone know if there is a Livejournal module for PHP-Nuke? I’ve not installed Nuke yet, but I’d like to use it to spice up my site, but I’m not going to change how I journal things, so I’m not going to go to PHP-Nuke instead of LJ. If I can embed LJ in the center, like the PHP-Nuke blog tool does now…
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While ICANN is contemplating whether to continue allowing Verisign to be a domain registrar (which makes me think of Dominar Rigel but I digress), they are sending out renewal notices claiming absurdities.

Apparently my domain is up for renewal “soon.” By soon, Verisign means next July. What time scale does the company work on that counts any time longer than a quarter as soon? Just trying to rake in a little cash before they lose the business, I suppose.
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Explain this, oh great geeks on my friends list:
The DNS records for andysocial.com were updated at midnight Saturday night. When I query ns1.earthlink.net for andysocial.com I get the new IP address. When I query WinSock’s internal lookup for andysocial.com I get the old IP address. I waited until 2 full days had passed before I erased the account at Virtualave, so I figured I’d be safe. Hell, I was surfing through my site all day yesterday, on the new host. I even set up a subdomain for to use for her vanity site. I uploaded a boatload of pictures to the gallery. Yet, I cannot get to my site through my ISP. The log files show other people are getting to the site just fine.

Why am I being sockblocked, if the DNS servers I am querying know better?

Update: Earthlink’s local POP got their cache re-started again. How it went back from a working updated load to an older set of data is apparently pure fucking magic…
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current_mood: confused

I’m changing webhosts currently, moving from Virtualave to cclHosting. I have nothing particularly bad to say about Virtualave, except they are overpriced compared to other systems.

Because of the move, the DNS propagation is ongoing. By Tuesday, all should be right with the world and the domain should resolve to the new host, but right now some people will see the VA site and some the ccl one. I’m not quite finished populating the ccl host, so bear with me. I’ve got 55 megs of site stuff to post, after all.
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I never bothered to set a “robots” text file for my site, which explains some of the peculiar search results I get occasionally.

I noticed that I’d gotten 50 hits for “windows xp activation crack italian” as a search term, so I entered it into Google. Amazingly, my site is up toward the top of the hits, but the page it goes to is the stats page itself. It appears that once one person gets a strange search onto the stats page, it ends up being self-fulfilling, since the robots that index web pages hadn’t been told to exclude the stats directory. That’s been all fixed now, though. Of course, the Google cache won’t expire for months or years, so I’ll keep getting strange hits but at least now they won’t continue to multiply I hope.
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Finally trashed the cascading menu-tree metaphor for the site, replacing it with a frame-free DHTML-based menu system. Love that DHTML.

Anyway, hope it is easy to follow, I thought it worked pretty well. I even tested it in several browsers. It works in Opera, Netscape 6, IE, and Mozilla. Coolio.
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I’m thinking of leaving my current webhost (a thought that occurs several times a year as I encounter roadblocks in their service). I’m looking at DownTown Host right now, but I’m open to suggestion.

For about $100/year, I expect to have POP/SMTP support, as well as Perl/PHP and other CGI abilities. For some reason, Virtualave has gotten dumber and dumber over the past year or two that I’ve used them. Their email auto-responders no longer work, they claim POP and PHP but don’t actually offer it, and so on.
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current_mood: annoyed

The hotel I’m in this week has free ethernet hookups in the rooms (capped at 1.5Mbps but still faster than a modem by far), yet they charge for local calls. Huh?

Wonder what combination of morons came up with this plan. “Let’s charge extra for calling out for pizza hut, but let them use a high-speed telecommunications system for free.” Not that the $110/night is free but still…
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In a sign that Microsoft is not as invulnerable in every market they enter as the anti-MS fanatics would like to claim, Nvidia has lost a lot of money on Xbox chips. The Register has a story about the seven million dollars the graphics chip manufacturer has lost on the chipsets sold to Microsoft. Since Nvidia’s chips are the largest piece of the Xbox, they must be thrilled at the contract they signed with MS on this one. 🙂
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current_mood: amused

I’ve put up a new tutorial for budding userpic designers – transparent layers.
This is the method used to make the following userpic:

I used Photoshop, but if you’re using Paint Shop Pro, you should be able to adapt the concepts to the different menus.

Let me know if there are other tutorials that may be helpful.
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current_mood: accomplished

I’ve recently been getting a lot of viruses sent to me. Since I’m not an idiot, I don’t open every attachment sent to me (which is a good reason to avoid Outlook Express since it does that all by itself), and I run my antivirus updater regularly so I’m relatively safe.

What is wrong with the rest of you morons? I know there are some LJ users that are infected with Klez, because you idiots have been sending it to me. What’s truly insidious about some of the newer virii is that you can’t tell who sent you the damned thing because they spoof the headers. All I know is what machine it came from (usually AOL – go figure).

For those of you that are unsure of your antivirus protection, go get Norton, pay the 30 bucks and run it religiously. You know what Klez will eventually do to your computer? Erase every single file. You know when Norton began protecting against it? November of 2001. Yet it’s the most common virus on the net right now. How can you be online in 2002 and not have an updated antivirus program running? How dim can you be?
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current_mood: annoyed

According to this article, the recently uncovered SSL vulnerability in Internet Explorer is actually a bug in every Windows Operating system.

Microsoft officials said it makes sense for the operating system to provide cryptographic services to any application that needs it, instead of each application having to include its own cryptographic technology.

But Culp said that the SSL flaw doesn’t affect any other application outside Internet Explorer and that it’s a client-side issue only.

Sooooo, if the only program that uses the crypto functions is IE, why are the functions not part of the browser again? Please explain this to my poor confused brain…
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current_mood: amused

Hey, check it out. Space Imaging has a picture of the week page, where they showcase a crisp piece of satellite imagery. This week’s photo is Toronto. Can you see your house? 🙂
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current_mood: happy

Played some more Sims this weekend, after avoiding it as if it were heroin. Maybe crack. Anyway, after much wasted time, I realized the logic behind the game is bizarre. The burglar has this magic bag, which he uses to hold his ill-gotten gains. This guy can throw a lamp, big-screen TV, and a damned chair in that thing and still toss it over his shoulder like Santa Claus. WTF?

And why don’t these morons get to have weekends off? What kind of life involves 7-day work weeks?
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current_mood: amused

People who use my server’s bandwidth without asking are just rude. Someone had linked to the (now departed) Lianna’s Nekkid XXXmas images, so I kept moving them around to foil their off-site linking. Now, someone has decided to use one of the LJ userpics I made as an avatar on some board named “Suddenlaunch” – that one JPEG image is now the most requested file on my site, and is adding noticeably to my bandwidth usage.

Whoever is using that image – it’s been renamed. If I find it being linked again, I’ll delete it. Stop doing things without asking. That’s rather presumptuous.
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current_mood: annoyed

OK, please someone explain to me this anomaly:

According to the user agent logs for my site, I’m disappointed to see only 0.5% of the visitors are using Opera – my primary browser. I recently downloaded Mozilla 1.0, and I’m thinking I may change my primary browser soon…

Anyway, the anomaly is this – there was no version 5 of Netscape (also known as Mozilla due to a long history of rivalry with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champlaign’s Mosaic program). There was a version 4.x and now version 6.x, yet there has been only one hit in the month of July from “Mozilla/6.xx” and 2025 from “Mozilla/5.xx” browsers. So, does this mean that the user agent tag sent with every HTTP request from Netscape 6.x and Mozilla 1.x is fictitious? Does Netscape/AOL intend to keep identifying their browser by one lower number internally than externally? Isn’t this rather confusing to the software developers?

I need a more mentally stimulating day job…
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current_mood: bored

The MPAA and RIAA want to become their own law enforcement agencies, and the U.S. Congress is aiding and abetting them. This story has a few more details on a recurring trend among the major entertainment industry giants – they are not just above the law, they are the law.

Basically, the MPAA and RIAA want to be allowed to break into your computer if they have probable cause to believe you have stolen some of their music or video files. Since when do we allow anyone besides a legally recognized law officer to decide on probably cause? Why would anyone think it’s a good idea to encourage the entertainment giants to crack into your computer? Kind of raises the level of insanity a bit too far, in my opinion.

Of course, we should all feel reassured by the MPAA’s senior VP for government relations, who says that law-abiding Internet users should not be concerned. Yeah, that’s what a lot of police states tell you – if you have nothing to hide, why be worried about invasion of privacy?

current_mood: aggravated