I went to Best Buy today and guess what? Yes, another employee left himself logged in on one of their terminals. This time it was the one in the CD section. Will they never learn? I didn’t touch it because I was in too deep a shock from seeing that they had 5 or 6 rows of of “Rock and R&B” but only gave 1/4 of a row to dance. Sigh
Oh, and that new computer I talked about yesterday turned out to be quite a catch: 1.3ghz Athlon, 256MB RAM, GeForce2 MX. I still don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet. I’m thinking Shorewall.
Blackbox released their full 2003-2004 catalog. 1000 pages of networking goodness. Mmmm…
Speaking of networking, I put some new cat5 in the house today. That sucks, as always. When oh when will they fix the wireless standards?
Three posts in one day!
Anyway, I fucked up the blog index by accident and had to start over with a fresh one. I’ve tried to recreate the old index as best I can but if you notice any discrepancies (I don’t have a copy of the old one handy…) or just have any comments in general regarding the blog layout/style sheet, post it as a comment.
Also, you’ll now notice that there are archives in the middle iframe at the bottom of the page! Yes sir, 11 months of Pig Monkey-goodness. But wait, there’s more! You’ll also notice a little ‘XML’ button that links to the RSS feed of this very blog. Yup, put my blog in your Mozilla sidebar, Ximian Evolution, or any other newsreader.
I just got back from the Matrix Reloaded: The IMAX Experience. That was fucking awesome. Not only was the movie unspeakably sexy on the eight story high wrap-around screen and the 12,000 watts of digital sound but there were no previews/commercials (they played the soundtrack from the first Matrix instead) and we had chearleaders entertain us before we were seated (no joke, I think they were on some sort of field trip or something). Anyway, go find an IMAX near you and see the movie! There are three in Seattle, but it’s only playing at the Boeing theatre at the Pacific Science Center. It’s well worth the $9.50!
Oh, and they’re now playing the new Revolutions trailer at the end. I would have liked to see the old one…
Equilibrium
I bought this one from Best Buy last week. If Fahrenheit 451 had sex with the Matrix, this would be their offspring (with a little 1984 mixed in, as well). The story takes place in a post-WWIII world where emotion is outlawed. The movie follows the top Cleric (an elite police force who’s job it is to kill those guilty of ‘sense-crime’) who misses his dose of an emotion-blocking drug and begins to feel. All in all, it’s a pretty good movie. The action isn’t as good as the Matrix, but they have their own fighting style called gunkata instead of your classic kung-fu stuff (mostly beating people senseless with guns, not much kicking or anything). You should definitely rent it.
Pi
This is one fucked up movie, but in a good way. The director won Best Director at Sundance (‘96 or ‘97, I believe). It’s about a brilliant mathematician who believes that everything can be explained by numbers. He’s searching for a 216 digit number that will “decode the numerical pattern beneath the ultimate system of organized chaos- the stock market.” Of course, this 216 digit number also happens to represent the true name of God. So you have a mathematician on the brink of insanity being chased by some crazy ass Jews and a psycho bitch from Wall Street. Did I mention it’s all in black and white?
In other news, I finished building 3jane into it’s new case. It is a Black X-Dreamer ATX PC Case with 350 Watt P4/AMD Power Supply and Build-In Thermal Monitor. This is one nice case. The entire case looks so professional and it’s so damn shiny, I love it. If I saw it on a store shelf anywhere I’d think it was a $200 case but no: it’s only $70! My only complaint is that the generic power supply is a bit loud but, hey, it’s practically free.
Verizon goofed when installing my new circuit at the CO so I haven’t had internet at home since Friday. I’m still checking my email at work everyday, though.
Covad (they provide SpeakEasy with bandwidth) is going down to slap Verizon in to shape, so hopefully I’ll have internet by Friday.
As many, many people have noticed (my email is flooded every morning), the proxy is down. Dreamhost took it down because of “excessive resource consumption”. Here’s a copy of the email:
Hello,
As you may have noticed, I've removed the execute bit on nph-proxy.cgi.
This type of program is not generally allowed on our servers,
particularly when it results in excessive resource consumption.
Please let us know if you have any questions regarding this.
Regards,
William
I’m not going to fight them on this because it puts them in an awkward position: in one hand they have free speech and in the other a possible security hole and “excessive resource consumption”.
I am working on getting it up at another location (if anybody wants to offer me space at havenco, feel free!), but that’s taking a while seeing as how I have no internet. In the meantime, use Garnet’s at http://proxy.ccrepair.net.
I finished reading Simon Singh’s The Code Book yesterday. It is a short (350 pages compared David Kahn’s book which is over 1000) history of cryptography from the ancient Greek’s Linear B script all the way up to quantum cryptography. I think it’s unique in that he not only describes the code to you but takes you through the process of breaking it and manages to tie in the intriguing back story, as well. You get cryptography, cryptanalysis, and a mystery story in each chapter. I’d probably recommend it to anyone with an interest in cryptography (no math required).
The last chapter (A Quantum Leap into the Future) also manages to serve as a great introduction to quantum theory. He provides a short overview of the two camps: superposition (the cat is both dead and alive) and the many-worlds interpretation (the multi-verse, the cat is dead in one universe and alive in the other). And yes, this does tie into crypto!
It appears that WiFi will not be used at the 2004 Olympics in Athens because of security reasons. Could this be a sign that the general public is catching on to the insecurities of 802.11b/g/a? Certainly the people who put on the Olympics aren’t the general public but I wouldn’t consider them hackers or geeks, either.
