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A Fall Week

No, this is not another techie post. I think I’ll avoid writing those if I can, as this isn’t really the forum for that. And hey, this is supposed to be a personal blog about myself and not about technology. Although I love gadgets and technology, and it is a big part of my life, my life doesn’t equate to it… at least, I hope not

So anyways, I give you a recap of the last week of my life.

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Ultimate frisbee has returned after a 10 day hiatus due to the Canadian Thanksgiving break. We played both our games on the weekend on the Ottawa U astroturf. I love that stuff!

Once you’ve played on the fancy shmancy turf, it’s hard to go back to regular grass fields. No hidden ankle-breaking divots to run around, no slipping on wet grass, and no nasty stains. It’s always nice to play on astro-turf. I have even had a chance to play on the even fancier turf at the Landsdwon Football stadium. Fall Ultimate has been pretty awesome for venues.

I thought we’d be rusty after such a break, but we were revved up and we creamed both our opponents. Saturday’s game was pretty much a straightforward victory, even in the rain and without female spares. We played the same opponents we played during the finals in the summer, and again we beat them down. It was like deja vu all over again, as they continued to rely on the same defense that they tried to use in playoffs. Zone defense is easily beatable, especially when its the only defense used.

Sunday’s game was a little more of a contest. We were matching points tit-for-tat for about the first 10 points of the game. Offensively both teams were hot, and there was no real defense going on. We played a man at first, but decided to mix it up and go zone since they were considerably speedier than us. Our zone shut down their offense for some solid turn overs and we ended up creaming them thereafter.

Ultimate is great :-). I honeslty can’t think of any other sport that I would enjoy more. It’s very deep in both strategy and athleticism, so I’m continually learning the game. The assloads of running are starting to whip me into shape (I can walk flights of stairs without gassing, huzzah!), and the intellectual side of it is simply beautiful to see in action. To watch a solid offensive play in motion is a thing of beauty.

I guess the only way to describe it would be to say that it’s tons of continuous play and running like soccer, but the movement of the disc allows for a lot of strategy like in American Football.

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Saturday I was invited to a LAN party out on March road in Kanata. It was pretty fun as I got to play more Quake Wars: Enemy Territory, which just came out this month. What can I say? I can’t ever complain about 8 hours of gaming. Though we only had 6 guys playing, it was still fun to game in a group.

I also bought Team Fortress 2 which came out last week. It’s simply addicting as hell, and an amazing game. I basically had to choose between getting Halo 3 and getting TF2… I think I made the right choice. I really don’t have much time to burn on playing video games, so I’d rather spend my precious gaming minutes on a game that I would actually enjoy playing online :-).

It’s amazing to see that computer gaming technology has reached the point where games look like Pixar movies… rendered in real time. The graphics in TF2 are pretty close to what you’d see in Toy Story. It’s quite a feat when you think that something like Toy Story took millions of dollars of hardware to render.

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Renata usually does an annual pumpkin carving event, where we invite a bunch of friends and kids over to carve some pumpkins and have a potluck. So in anticipation we’re decorating and cleaning up the house to make room for it. Renata’s sister is also unexpectedly flying in from Arizona to spend the week, so our weekend, aside from Ultimate and the LAN party, has been spent cleaning up the place.

Living in a house has its costs I guess. I’m slowly adjusting to the suburban house-hold life style. I’ve learned that things are in a constant state of needing to be cleaned, and that yard work has be done more than once every 6 weeks… which I’ve been doing most of the time. Sigh…

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Linux HTPC, the Easy Way

Apparently I didn’t do my research well enough for my htpc box.

I completely retract my previous sentiments that it would take awhile to get MythTV on a new Linux install up and running. It is now as easy as a Windows MCE installation as there exists Linux distros that are packaged with MythTV, with the sole aim to run as a HTPC box.

MythBuntu, MythDora, and KnoppMyth (based on Ubuntu, Fedora, and Knoppix respectively) are packaged to get MythTV and Linux up as painlessly as possible.

Of course, you won’t get a full fledged Linux Desktop with some of the installations, but you also get something more slimmed down and streamlined for what an HTPC is doing. MythDora is actually pretty feature complete as a desktop.

You can read more about it here: http://www.linux.com/feature/118668

It just goes to show that if there is demand, the Linux community will adjust pretty quickly to fill in the gaps.  It’ll be interesting to see how these distros will mature in a year or two.

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Linux HTPC: Ubuntu + MythTV

My parts came in and I found some time this weekend to assemble my HTPC. I’ll explain some little things I found in my weekend project.

Hardware:

As I mentioned earlier blog post, the whole rig ended up costing me a little over $500 after taxes and shipping. For those interested, the specs for my machine are:

• Generic value Biostar motherboard. ~ $60
• 1 Gig of Value DDR2 RAM ~$30
• AMD Athlon X2 3800+ CPU ~$90
• 250 Gig SATA Hard Drive ~$80
• Generic DVD-ROM ~$25
• Antec NSK2400 Case ~$100
• nVidia GeForce 7200 GS ~$60
• Microsoft MCE USB Remote ~$35

As you can see, I avoided “high end” parts, as I’m not looking for performance here for my system. Watching movies and listening to music doesn’t demand much performance, so there’s no need to break the bank for expensive parts when they’re not needed. With today’s modern CPU’s, a “value” CPU goes a long way. Also, most of the low end components generate little heat and in effect, little noise.

There are some things I would change though if I had to rebuy everything again. I would’ve bought the EE (energy efficient) version of the AMD CPU, which draws only 65 Watts of power. I also could have avoided buying a video card if I bought a motherboard that had integrated component out. I am very happy with the 7200 GS video card though, as I bought it specifically for the fact that it has no fan.

One very nifty thing about the Microsoft Remote Control is that it comes with two infrared sensors that effectively turn the remote into a floating mouse. It acts exactly like Nintendo’s WiiMote, which is super handy for navigating around the desktop while sitting on your couch. I haven’t set up that functionality yet, but it is supported on Linux.

The Antec NSK2400 case is very slick for the living room. It looks like a piece of home theatre equipment, and like most Antec cases I’ve come across, it’s very well built with lots of attention to details. The hard drive and optical drives are stored in separate compartments, with little racks for quick installation. You just slide the drives into the racks and tighten the screws, and voila, your drives are mounted to the case nicely. The case also comes with quiet fans and a power supply that’s near silent too. All in all, the NSK2400 is a great case and a great buy at only $100.

After installation, the entire rig was near silent. Without the little blue power light, I wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s on or not in my living room.

Software:

Now you must be wondering, how hard would it be to install Linux, MythTV, and get it running to be a fancy home theatre PC? Have no fear, cause I’ve blazed this trail this weekend and it turns out that it’s not all that bad.

Ubuntu has been THE Linux distribution for user friendliness and ease of use. It also is very active and has a ton of support since it’s become so popular. Hell, the Linux installation base doubled this year and I’m going to make the safe assumption that this is due to Ubuntu. I have played around with other distros, but to get something up quick and fast, I like Ubuntu.

However, when I say installation isn’t “that bad”, I mean to say that you will have to do a little legwork to get it up and running. This basically means that you will have to open up the command line console and follow instructions to get things working. Also, you may have to open up some config files in a text editor to make some changes. However, the semantics behind the commands are things you don’t have to actually know. You don’t need to know “what” is happening when you run things, it’s just that you have to step through the instructions. You only need to be capable enough to follow simple instructions like:

1) Open a command console.

2) Copy and Paste this exact command: “sudo apt-get install mythtv-themes”

If you can do that, then you can get it up and running. You may run into some driver issue if you are using obscure hardware, but if you use run-of-the-mill mainstream stuff it should simply work out of the box. If you have hardware that is less popular, you may have to do some Google sleuthing to see if someone has run into this problem and has solved the issue.

As I’ve mentioned, due to Ubuntu’s popularity, if there is a driver issue that hasn’t been resolved in a release, someone probably will have. It also helps that Ubuntu is updated and released once every 6 months, so most issues are resolved pretty quickly. Though the new release (7.10) is coming out in a week, I couldn’t wait to get my box up and running so I settled for 7.04.

It took me only about 20 minutes to install Ubuntu onto the box. All of which required me to hit “OK” and “Next” about 3 times and to choose the hard drive partition I wanted to install to, and then letting the installer do its thing.

Upon booting up on Ubuntu, I couldn’t get my wireless card to connect to the network correctly. However, on the Fiesty (7.04) quick start page it mentioned that I might have to disable a module to get it to work. This sounds “tricky”, but it involved nothing more than me copying and pasting the one command I needed into the command line. Ubuntu comes with a handy graphical tool that’s very similar to Windows XP’s wireless network tool. You just click on the network you want to use, and off it goes.

Next, I couldn’t seem to get my integrated sound to work. I Googled the device that’s on my motherboard and found a thread on the Ubuntu forums explaining that I’d have to download the drivers and install them to get it working. Realtek, the brand for my integrated sound, had Linux drivers on their website. I downloaded them and ran the installer. A minute later I had glorious sound!

I proceeded to read the instructions on how to install mythTV from this site: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MythTV

The Ubuntu documentation is very well written, and catered for us “newbies”. It even walks you through all the steps to get Ubuntu installed and setup. I followed the instructions a bit, and about an hour later I had MythTV up and running. I had to tinker around with some config files to get the remote working exactly the way I wanted, so that added about another hour’s worth of time.

I also configure some other bits to tie up loose ends. I installed SSH, so that I could configure the box from my main PC. I also installed all the codecs required to play various video files (mkv, xvid, divx, etc…) and I got SAMBA up and running to share files over the network with my windows box.

MythTV

MythTV is very slick.

It comes with an RSS aggregator so that you can get your news/blog feeds delivered to you in the living room. It also had channel guide listings, which it grabs from the internet. I didn’t test this, as I don’t have cable, but I could see it being super handy to browse and set your recordings for the PVR and general TV watching functionalities.

It even comes with its own web-browser, so if you had a wireless keyboard+mouse in the living room you could surf the ‘net within it using any browser you fancy. And it has a weather lookup plugin, which I couldn’t get to work. Apparently, it grabbed its data from msnbc, and msnbc had changed their XML data. So unless you do a little coding to get it up, the weather feature doesn’t work until the next release of MythTV.

Unfortunately I don’t have cable TV, so I couldn’t test its PVR abilities. Which I guess are its main features, but playing my videos on it have been a dream.

Conclusions

After $500 and about 6 hours setup time (including hardware install). I was able to getan HTPC running in my living room playing high def video to my TV.

Considering that TiVo costs $300US for an HD version + a monthly subscription, Bell sells their PVR box for $550, and the fact that an HTPC is an all purpose computer, it’s pretty hard to deny the value that a cheap HTPC can gbring you.

As for software, Ubuntu + MythTV offer a strong combination of user friendliness, cost ($0), and functionality. Albeit, setting it up is not for the impatient. It is definitely more involving to get it up and running than Windows Media Center edition. Whereas Windows MCE may have taken me 2-3 hours to get up, this whole project took me about 5-6.

However, the end product is much nicer. As MythTV evolves and grows, and with Ubuntu versions getting hammered out every 6 months, it won’t take long before installation time is shorter and features become even more slick. With Ubuntu 7.10 coming out in a few days, I might give that a twirl sometime soon. I’m fairly certain that someone in the community will streamline the installation to the point where you just run a script and everything will be setup for you, it’ll happen eventually (I’m just too lazy to make it myself :-p).

You cannot overlook the tweakability of a computer either. With a little tinkering, you can get a lot of features that you want that you can’t do with a black box. You’re not locked in by hardware, and with Linux, you have pretty much free reign as to how you want things set up.

So is it worth the cost + time to get a htpc up? Without a doubt. You get PVR functionality without the monthly fee, at roughly the same cost. Add in the fact that it does way more than what a standard PVR does, then surely it’s a great investment. However, even with a Windows MCE install, it does take a little bit of time to get things setup. In the end though, the investment in time should be well worth it.

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Andy McKee

So I’ve been practicing a lot more classical guitar since Renata bought me my new one. I’ve been showing some gradual improvement, but there’s still a lot that I need to work on.

I’m self-taught, so the lack of proper-technique is starting to show. I’m also pretty new to it. However, I bought myself a few classical guitar books and they’ve helped me spot the “how-to’s” and the what-not-to-do for classical guitar. This has helped me play better for sure, and has given me new gusto for wanting to improve. I’ve learned a few new songs, and have polished some of the ones that I already know. Maybe I’ll post some recordings when I have some time. Classical guitar is beautiful, and I hope over the years my hobby will help me play great music.

Another inspiration to help me pursue guitar has been the guitarist Andy McKee. He’s an amazing acoustic guitar player, and his songs are great. He doesn’t play the classical guitar, but rather the steel string acoustics. His finger picking style and technique shows incredible mastery.

I ordered his CD “Art of Motion” off of the internet and it finally arrived. It’s definitely one of those CD’s that I won’t be able to forget out of my collection. Here’s a clip of him recording one of the songs off the disc:

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HTPC Impulse Buy

So I bought a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) on a whim last week. Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly a whim as I bought components to build one… online… which is definitely an indicator of premeditation. But who’s counting? It’s not my fault I was surfing my favorite online PC parts vendor, adding all sorts of parts onto my virtual shopping cart, punching in my credit card and address, and hitting “OK”.

It’s also a really silly buy considering I already sort of have a HTPC in the form of the XBOX 360 sitting in my living room, which connects to my PC to stream movies and music. But I demand performance, damnit, in ways that the 360 can’t give me.

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Why the Xbox 360 is shitty as a Media Center:

Namely, the 360 is a very frustrating media center to use. It will only act as a streaming media center if it connects to a computer running Windows Media Center Edition. You can’t actually store video files on the 360 on the hard drive, and you can only stream them. The 360 does indeed come with a hard drive that stores movies, but only videos that come in through Xbox Live are stored on there, you can’t just dump anything you wish.

My TV is a fair ways away from my computer, so a wireless connection is my only option here. To get smooth, stutter-free video requires that the wireless network is performing well… and in peak hours it doesn’t. Around me I can pick up 7 or 8 different wi-fi connections, which all interfere with my signal. This means that sometimes I can’t even watch video until the interference calms down since I don’t have a hardwire ethernet cable hooked up to my xbox.

Moreso, the 360 only can view movies that are in Microsoft’s proprietary WMV format. Almost all pirated movies and TV shows on the internet aren’t encoded in WMV for many reasons (well, it’s simply a shitty format). So to stream a non-wmv video to my living room you have to transcode (re-encode to another format) your video into the wmv format, which results in a lot of definition loss. Think of it as taking a photo-copy of a photo-copy.

Also, the Windows Media Center interface is lacking. Strange, considering that Microsoft has built its software around usability to have a product that lacks in usability. It handles small archives of data “okay”, but when I use it to serve my fairly large mp3 collection (40 gigs or so), the interface is cumbersome. There is a search function to look for artist/album names, but the search seems to miss a lot of valid hits. I have given up on the search feature altogether and I usually end up scrolling through my artist lists to find a particular album. Trying to reach the “R” section to listen to some Radiohead typically involves me holding down the “next” key for a few minutes to scroll to it. Like I said, painful.

In the end, the streaming videos fail to deliver all the features you’d expect from playing back video. Pausing, rewinding, and fast forwarding sometimes works, sometimes it doesn’t work at all, and when it does work it’s very clunky. I seem to only fast forward in 30 second intervals, meaning that if I want to stop watching a movie in the middle, I have to hit fast forward a hundred times to reach my desired location. Hitting rewind, depending on the type of file streamed, sometimes rewinds back 5 seconds, or sometimes it rewinds to the beginning of the video altogether. I’ve had some instances where hitting rewind takes me back to the beginning, but hitting fast forward doesn’t work… so it means sitting through stuff to get back to where I was. Ouch.

Finally, I want the flexibility to NOT run Windows Media Center on my PC. The Media Center component is integrated into the operating system, so I can’t simply install it on top of my XP Pro install as an application or service. Linux support for the 360? Forget it.

So for all these reasons, it’s frustrated me enough to buy my HTPC… even though the Windows Media Center with XBox 360 sorta works.

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Hopefully my HTPC will provide me with a great media center experience that is lacking with the 360.

I went on NCIX.com and picked up as many parts as I could in the “discount bin”. An HTPC doesn’t necessarily have to be powerful relative to today’s modern PC’s. What it does have to be is quiet. This means the cooler the components, the better as you have to avoid adding fans to the machine to keep it running.

I don’t need the fastest CPU out there for it either, as decoding movies onto the screen doesn’t require too much performance or ram. I’m also not looking for a beefy video card, as beefy video cards tend to draw a lot power, thereby increasing heat and noise levels. I bought the Geforce 7200 GS, which set me back about $60. It had exactly what I wanted, an HDTV Out port and passive cooling (no fans!). Apparently I didn’t do my research thoroughly enough (hence the “impulse” buy) as I could’ve bought an ASUS motherboard that had onboard video with an HDTV decoder and port built in. I also should have bought a cheaper single core processor, instead of the dual core one I got instead, as the single core draws less power. Oh well.

Shipping was free, and since the company was based in BC I didn’t have to pay Ontario PST. My grand total after taxes was about $540. Not a bad deal considering I got an entirely brand new PC out of it, which in all accounts runs faster than most machines out there. I did try to hunt around for a used PC before buying it, but buying a decent used machine for a good price is hard.

A machine that’s roughly 2 or 3 years old would’ve worked for me easily, but computer prices back then were much higher. Also, people don’t realize how fast computers depreciate in value. So most used PC’s out on Craigslist, Facebook, and classified boards cost WAY more than what’s justified. People buy a machine for $1000 three years ago thinking they can sell it used for half the price… unfortunately for them, $500 goes pretty far these days in terms of hardware. If anything you might get 20 to 25% of what you paid for, and the general public doesn’t seem to realize this.

Anyways, I’m thinking of slapping on Ubuntu Linux on it as the operating system, and running a media center program called MythTV. I also bought a remote control to work with it. Running Windows Media Center on it would defeat the purpose of getting it, and being locked into Windows for a media center box is very limiting since I can’t interact with the machine without a keyboard and mouse.  Having a keyboard and mouse lying around in the living room is a big turn-off.  At least with Linux I can control my media center box remotely through the command line terminal on my PC.

In the end, I’m hoping to have gotten a nice HTPC for only about $500.  Not only will it allow me to watch movies and tv shows that I pirate from the internet (I don’t have cable TV anymore, as I download everything anyways), but it will also act as a PVR, music box, and basic gaming machine (I have all the SNES and Nintendo games as Roms).

Now all I need to do is wait for my parts to come in the mail anytime now!

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Epic Ultimate

This weekend has been a little overkill for Ultimate. I can probably say the same for the entire Fall season for that matter. Playing three times a week, with games on Saturday and Sunday, is really starting to wear me down.

Playing with a higher tier team, on Rainbow Trout, doesn’t help much either, as they have pushed me to play harder and stronger. I’m learning a ton, as I’m now easily the weakest member on their team, so it’s well worth the pain. Believe it or not, my soft and mushy legs are starting to take a bit more shape from all the running I do on the field.

Anyways, for some reason Trout, which is in the middle of the ladder for our tier, was pitted against the 3rd ranked team in the tier. A huge mismatch in terms of games scheduling. Everyone from both teams were perplexed as to how this could possibly happen. We knew a few of their team-members, and they were generally all athletic and competitive 20-somethings that have years of experience. Excluding me, Rainbow Trout is composed of 30 and 40-somethings that are out to have a good time.

Leaguerunner, the Google software that manages the ladders gave us 1:4 odds of winning the game.

Worse yet, when we showed up on the field, we had only 1 spare for women and men. Meaning the guys would have to triple shift and the women would have to play two shifts before subbing off. “Less Talk More Rock” showed up with two full lines of young, chiseled, and athletic bodies ready to rip us to shreds. There guys were tall (which does help in Ultimate), all ripped, and played on competitive upper tier leagues. Their ladies were no slouches either. Not only did they outclass us physically and in experience, but we had to play twice the amount they did due to our lack of spares.

David vs. Goliath, Ivan Drago vs. Rocky Balboa, Canada vs. Russia in an 8 game super-series. An upset here would be epic, but very unlikely.

Oh well, we knew it was a huge mismatch, but we’d all thought to just give it our best and try to have a good time out of it. It was a windy day, so at least that might give us a fighting chance with the elements making the disc a little less predictable.

So we pulled the disc to them for the first point. We ran down the field to quickly force a turn-over near their endzone, which we converted to a goal. We all kinda looked at each other and went “huzzah!?”. I thought we were just lucky on that one.

So we pulled the disc to them again. They were able to get a few good passes to make it up the field, but we played strong defense and turned it over. Now normally on a windy day you play something called Zone Defense. As the name implies, the defense sets up players in zones in the field to maximize the area of defense to try and shut down short passes. On a calm day it’s not a strong strategy, as it’s easily broken, but with a touch of wind it’s very effective.

Call it hubris, or being arrogant, or over-confidence, but they decided to play man-on-man defense. I guess they thought they could out run and use their athletic advantage to crush our offense. To their surprise we were able to beat them down with our fast striking and smart positional play. We quickly converted for another point.

Point after point, we were able to shut them down with our tight zone defense and capitalize on offense.

Near the end of the game, out of their frustration possibly, they started to get really nasty. Calling fouls that didn’t belong, and just generally being overly aggressive. I guess being beaten down by a lower tier team was too much for them.

The 12-8 victory was the sweetest game in a long while.

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Storm Botnet

As an avid reader of slashdot, I ran across an article on building a personal mini-super computer. It’s called Microwulf, which is a play on Beowulf, a type of super computer built by clustering commodity computer parts that you would find in stores. Basically, the Microwulf is a supercomputer comprised of 4 motherboards, 4 cpus, and 4 sets of ram merged together to form one machine. Computer parts these days are dirt cheap, so building your own mini-supercomputer is relatively inexpensive. The act of combining computers together to act a one machine is called clustering, and a Microwulf cluster is simply a 4 node cluster.

For the low low cost of about $1000, you too can build your own mini super computer that’s able to pump out 26 Gigaflops, providing more computing power than the world’s most powerful supercomputer in 1990. Granted, 1990 is almost 20 years ago, but the supercomputer that held that title back then cost hundreds of millions.

Now imagine if you scale that idea of clustering to millions of machines, then you’d have a massive grand daddy supercomputer. In fact, one of these things already exists, and it’s owned by a group of criminals.

Yes, the most powerful supercomputer in the world, the Storm Botnet, is not owned by NASA, IBM, or by the US Military, but by ill-intentioned criminals.

How is this possible?

Microsoft Windows Monoculture

Almost everyone in the world uses Microsoft Windows on their computer. Grandma uses it, little jimmy uses it, and most likely you’re using it right now to read this shoddily written blog. I use it at home and at work.

The downside to being that popular means that there are malicious hackers out there who create viruses that target Windows. Like any legitimate software vendor, you want to release your software to reach as many people in the world as you can.

Another downside that has nothing to do with the disadvantages of popularity has something to do with the nature of Microsoft Windows itself. It’s insecure. Yes, I said it. It’s so insecure that you need to go out and buy third party anti-virus/firewall tools, like Mcafee and Norton, to keep your system safe. You have to do a Windows update every so often to prevent your system from being intruded upon. The way it’s designed creates a lot of security vulnerabilities.

I won’t get into specific details, but there are other OS’s out there (well, namely Linux-variants) that are fundamentally more secure than Windows. So being insecure has nothing to do with popularity.

Now what happens when you combine the risks of having an OS monoculture with an OS that is fundamentally insecure? You have a massive network of computers (the internet) that is incredibly vulnerable to malicious attacks. These two components together allow for internet worms and viruses to spread rapidly.

Storm Botnet

The Storm Botnet is essentially a large network of computers infected with a virus. The total number of infected machines ranges is estimated to be larger than a million machines, perhaps even reaching ten million, and the number is still growing.

Internet worms and viruses aren’t something new, but a botnet is something different. When a computer becomes infected with the Storm worm, it turns the machine into a zombie. The infected machine waits for instuctions from the botnet, and upon receiving those instructions it will do whatever it is asked. Each machine that becomes infected becomes one more machine that the botnet is able to control. If an infected machine was commanded to view a particular webpage, then it would. Public and decentralized servers on the web provide access points for these zombie machines to receive their commands (like IRC chatrooms, which are a decentralized and public).

If we take a conservative estimate on the number of infected machines, then the botnet easily surpasses the computational power of the most powerful supercomputer on the planet.  Theoretically, it could pump out picoflops of computing power whereas the most #1 ranked supercomputer currently is measured to produce close to 300 teraflops, a whole order of magnitude less.

The power of controlling all these machines anonymously in a decentralized manner allows for the criminals who control Storm to wreak havoc on the internet in all sorts of ways.  Storm has been used in what’s called “pump and dump” scams, where it spams the internet with stock “tips” on particular stocks.  Investors who get mislead will invest in targeted stocks, inflating a stock’s value.  Those who owned the stocks prior simply dump the stock once it becomes inflated.

Another usage of wielding such a massive botnet is to target specific websites with Denial of Service attacks.  The botnet commands a large set of machines to continually browse a page.  Servers that can’t handle such a huge volume of traffic are brought down.  This allows for the controllers of the botnet to sell their attack services to the highest bidder.  Lately there have been many attacks on anti-phishing sites, and there’s a lot of speculation that South African phishers have “hired” Storm for this service.

The Storm botnet is beyond a proof-of-concept of the failures of having an operating system monoculture.  If all internet users ran a larger variety of operating systems, then something like this could be minimized.  Viruses and worms will always exists as long as there will be disgruntled 14 year olds out there, but the magnitude of their effect could be reduced.  Often, viruses and worms are written only to target a specific operating system.  A linux machine is immune to the botnet virus, in the same effect that a linux virus can’t attack a Windows machine.

Hopefully the size of these malicious botnets will shrink as Linux and other operating systems become more widely adopted.  The Linux user-base is definitely growing in size, and as more Linux distro’s become more user-friendly it’s only a matter of time before a significant market share of computers run it.

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For Hire: Web Developer

Yes, I have gone into the business of being a web developer consultant-type programmer. Last week I finished a contract job to develop Renata’s sister’s real estate website. It’s not the most glamorous job someone in Computing Science can get, but who doesn’t mind the extra cash on the side, and at consultant/contractor prices, it’s a nice chunk.

Her site, www.thebestarizonahomes.com (not my aesthetic design, I simply implement what the client wants), is developed using Drupal, a powerful open-source content management system. It’s a bit painful to get setup, but once it’s going it’s a great tool for non-techie’s to add and manage content on their websites. My super duper secret side project will be developed in Drupal, so I’m glad this contract gave me the chance to play around with Drupal in a more professional manner.

So I asked her if I could post a link to my personal site to perhaps get a few more web-dev contracts, and she gave me the great idea to start my own company. So here it is, my web design company site is located at www.xorwebdesign.com. I’m not quite finished filling in all the content, but I should be done soon within the next few days.

If any of you reading this needs some web dev contracted out, or someone who does, feel free to pass on my site. As I’m a lazy bastard who doesn’t want to do any real marketing, I’d give out a nice 10% referral bonus if I drum up any business.

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The Tale of Two Computers

So through a long tale of trial and error, I have somehow ended up with two completely functional and fast computers.

This is my long and drawn out story of computer mundaneness and frustration:

Six months ago I told Renata to buy a Gateway computer from Futureshop since it was a good deal.  Great performance for the price.  So she got it.  And I realize that Gateways aren’t the best for high performance computing, but for non-gaming stuff it’s a pretty good deal considering you get a pretty decent machine.

Then I moved here and needed to upgrade it so that I could play the latest and greatest games.  I bought a brand new video card for a lan party here in Ottawa a few months ago.  When I installed it, I found out that I needed a new power supply to drive the video card.

So I bought a new power supply.  Stuck it in, and it seemed to work like a charm.

I found out at the LAN party that my machine over heated with the new video card/power supply because the case was too small … so $130 later I bought myself a wicked gaming case that has like 6 fans.

When I went to install THAT, I found out that the gateway motherboard doesn’t fit into the new case since it doesn’t follow the standard specs.  Sonofabitch!

So I went to go out and by a motherboard to fit the cpu that I originally had, so that I could fit that motherboard into the new case.  The motherboard was a “refurb” and it didn’t work at all.  The gateway machine’s CPU was a Socket 939, which is a little outdated so it’s hard to find a brand new mother for it.  So I decided that I might as well buy a new CPU and motherboard.

I bought a brand new CPU and motherboard yesterday.  Came home to install stuff, and then found out that no… my DDR RAM sticks don’t fit into this motherboard as the new motherboard only supports the latest type, DDR2.  BLARGH!!!

So to shorten the story, I bought a new CPU to fit the new motherboard to fit the new case to fit the new video card and powersupply, which all didn’t work with any of the gateway components.  I reassembled the gateway machine and now it’s back to where it originally was before this whole ordeal.

So if anyone’s interested, I have a fairly new Gateway desktop for sale with the following specs:

•  AMD Athlon X2 64 Bit 3800+
• 1 Gig of DDR ram
• 250 Gig hard drive
• 2 DVD drives: 16x DVD-RW and 16x DVD-R
• TV Capture card
• Integrated sound/video/network.
• 56k modem
• 9 in 1 flashcard/memory card reader
• Firewire and USB2 ports.

I must say, one of the best things about this computer is that it’s SUPER quiet.  It doesn’t have a massive roaring video card fan, and the CPU is passively cooled (well, sorta) as it has a massive 3×2 inch heatsink.

For sale for a good price

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Top of the Bottom - Division E Champions!

I’m delighted to report that our Summer Season Ultimate team, The Buddha Bellies, has finished playoffs as champions of our division. We’re the champs of the bottom pool! Booyah!!

The weekend has been a whirlwind of Ultimate. With a game on Friday, two on Saturday, and two more on Sunday, I’m definitely happy to have a chance to have a breather.

Friday’s game with the Buddha Bellies was a win against last place “Super Troopers”. Unfortunately the game wasn’t the most enjoyable as they were nasty to play with. Every called foul was contested aggressively, and they didn’t hold a great deal of sportsmanship. At least we beat them 12-6. We eventually discovered that this bottom tier team was stacked with ringers!

Saturday’s games were played with Rainbow Trout (I’ll be playing with them full time this fall). I was asked to sub in for them for finals, and I had an amazing time out on the field. Our first game was against, surprise, the same ringers that were brought in to face the Buddhaa Bellies on Friday’s game. For clarification, Trout plays at a much higher tier than the Buddha Bellies, so it was a bewildering to see how they stacked their team so badly. The “Killer Cods” were too much for us Trout, and we lost a closely contested game.

The next game followed up against a bunch of beer loving tye dyed hippies. We beat them fairly easily as they were short of spares and eventually gassed after 3 hours of Ultimate.

Saturday night was a blast as our team mate Bart had the entire Buddha Bellies team over his place for BBQ and foosball! Yes, it was like I peaked that summer day with a nice sunny day of back to back Ultimate, followed by foosball, burgers, beer, and some fun company. Amanda brought a funky game called catch-phrase that was a blast too.

Sunday was the semi-finals and finals for the Buddha Bellies. We were able to absolutely crush “Flick Fever” in the semis. We reached half with the score at 8-1, but then slacked off and they managed to pull up a few points. It ended with a win for us at 15-6, with plenty of time to spare for the final game.

We played for the division championship against the “Ultimate Virgins” in a rubber match from the regular season. We beat them and they’ve beaten us in the regular season, so we were anticipating a hard fought battle.

The first half was a tough game, going back and forth, and we were able to break away for 2 point lead reaching the half. We quickly grew wise to their defense, and shut them down offensively in the second half, and it was smooth sailing in the second half. We took the championship game with the score 11-7.

Free beer and food followed for the champs, and it tasted like sweet victory. Okay, maybe it tasted more like shitty beer and stale hot dogs… but who I am to complain. Anywho, we invited the team over to our place afterwards for pizza and beer, and a jolly time was had.

I’ve had a wicked fun season with the team, in that we played hard on the field, had fun off of it, and really made good friends from it. I’m sad to see that the season has ended, and that the team won’t ever be the same. But C’est La Vie. There is always next year, and maybe we’ll be able to pull together a team for the fall.

The Buddha Bellies… all in gangster pose:

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