After AT&T acquired Cingular, they released a software upgrade for the 8525, one of their Windows Mobile devices. In the upgrade, they added an extraordinarily annoying boot-time animation to the phone. When you power on, you see an animated picture of the Cingular “flying bars” and then the AT&T logo. It wouldn’t bo so bad… Read More: Turning off startup animation and sound on an HTC Windows… »
At around 3:21pm US/Eastern on November 4, 2007, a zombie botnet began a dictionary spam attack against one of the domains I host. zombie botnet — a group of PCs that have been broken into by a hacker and turned into “zombies,” i.e., PCs over which the hacker now has control, so that he can… Read More: zombie botnet spam attack from over 3,000 IP addresses in… »
Recently, I needed to set up a chroot environment for an ssh user on one of my Linux machines. That is, when this user logged into the machine, I needed it to be trapped inside a chroot “jail”, i.e., a sub-hierarchy within the filesystem, such that it would only have access to the files within… Read More: Setting up a chroot environment for an ssh user »
Seen in a posting on-line from someone discussing the positive impact of taking regular breaks from one’s day-to-day routine: “I guess Jesus knew what he was doing calling for the observance of the Sabbath…” *sigh*
I recently switched from Speakeasy DSL and a Verizon land line to Comcast High-Speed Internet and their Digital Voice® local phone service. The executive summary is that I’m very happy so far.
Continuing the theme of the day… I coded and submitted an enhancement to INN’s “makehistory” program to support throttling by load average, so that my computer at home won’t be completely hosed for a half hour after every unclean shutdown and restart while makehistory rebuilds my news history file.
A few days ago, I described the experience I had trying to buy an HP Photosmart C5280 All-in-One (printer, copier, scanner) and Photo Value Pack under a promotion being offered by HP. The printer arrived today, and I set it up. My first impressions of the printer itself are quite good — it’s a really… Read More: First impressions of HP Photosmart C5280 »
HP is currently offering a promotion which includes rebates on several of their All-in-One printers as well as a $15 rebate on an HP Photo Value Pack when you purchase one printer in particular, the C5280. See here for more information about this promotion. Then read on for the experience I had trying to take… Read More: It pays to shop around »
I bought a Netgear wireless router (model WGR614v7) early in May 2007 so that I could use WiFi at home. I’ve since exchanged it for a Linksys wireless router, and I will never purchase another Netgear product. Here’s why…
Recently, a backup tape containing over 800,000 unencrypted names and social security numbers for Ohio taxpayers and state employees was stolen from the car of Jared Ilovar, a 22-year-old college student working for the state as an intern.