freemode.net

Where will you find the equal of the English golfclub?    [ Geekiness ]

Oh my, Anglophile spamtext. This is rather amusing. Be so kind as to click below to peruse the source of this auto-generated spam derived from The Apple Cart by George Bernard Shaw.

We're going to pretend this never happened.    [ Geekiness ]

It's been on the Slashdots and Digg already, but these are funny. Star Trek Inspirational Posters! (Also see Demotivators).

My favorites:

"CONTINUITY - We're going to pretend this never happened."

"EXPENDABILITY - Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Ensign Ricky are beaming down to the planet. Guess who's not coming back."

"TWENTIETH CENTURY EARTH - It must have been a great place, because they were always going there."

Mailinator    [ Geekiness ]

Need a throwaway, insecure email address?   Get Mailinator.   It's not really a replacement for Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail, but it works well enough for one-shot emails without attachments.   Check out an example - here's the current messages for foo@mailinator.com.

(Re)use an old Palm    [ Geekiness ]

hackaday has a way to re-use your old PalmOS devices (I've got a blue 2MB Visor in the basement that I haven't plugged in for over 2 years now) as an LCD display for your Linux box.   Earn your geek points and hustle over there for a look-see before Slashdot burns it down, y'all.

Certifications    [ Geekiness ]

Certifications I need to work on:

CCNA 640-801, 90 minutes, 55-65 questions, $125
* Resources: CCNA Prep Center, CCNA Instant Answers
* Need to work on: OSI model, subnetting, switching

RHCE RH302, 3 hour + 2.5 hour lab, $749
* Resources:   RHCE Exam Prep, RHCE Courses
* Need to work on:   Kickstart installs

SCSA Solaris 9 Upgrade Exam, 60 minutes, 41 questions, $100
* Need to work on:   JumpStart, Flash archives, volume management

25m downloads in 100 days    [ Geekiness ]

Slashdot has the story, links and commentary.   Go Firefox go!

Death watch for TiVo?    [ Geekiness ]

Linked from hackaday - Engadget has a TiVo death watch going.   Not surprising, the tech's cool, but TiVo doesn't seem to know how to make money on their devices.   Guess they'll end up in the same pile as the Amiga and the rest of the old computers that time has passed by.

Latest (last?) Gartner IDS report    [ Geekiness ]

Gartner, ye olde purveyor of Insighte Into The IT Fielde, has graced us with an interesting new report on the state of IDS products.   In short:

• Current IDS (intrusion detection system) technologies just ain't cutting the cheese when it comes to return on investment - they're costly and not that effective at improving security
• New IPS (intrusion prevension system) technologies are the future of this field, since they detect and automagically block attacks instead of merely detecting attacks (oooh, shiny!)
• IDS vendors need to integrate IPS functionality into their product lines soon, or they'll die a grisly death

Well, grisly in a "corporate board meeting regarding our bankruptcy filing" sense.   Nothing that you couldn't pick up from using this stuff yourself, but go and buy the article if you want all the fun Magic Quadrant who's-hot-who's-not-for-CIOs details.

A discussion about this came up at work where one of the security team guys (Kevin) strongly objected to the report, pointing out how the Enterasys Dragon product far outshines its competitors in the IDS arena.   I agree, but... well, my inner debater got the better of me.   Hence the following treatise:

Eras on the 'Net    [ Geekiness ]

Something other than a political rant - I'm trying to do some research on the different eras of the 'Net, and came across Hobbes' Internet Timeline, which I know I've read before.   It's probably the best online resource for raw historical data on the Internet itself, certainly better than some other goofball sites.   The ISOC's Internet history site has some good links as well.

But how can you categorize eras on the Internet?   I know I've seen some vast changes in the 9-ish years I've been using it, but what are their key differences?   Since I've started reading Quicksilver a few days ago, I'm in a Aristotelian or Linneanian mood to exert order upon the world by classification.

Security Basics    [ Geekiness ]

Every so often, people ask me where they can find more info on IT security.   I had put this list together a little bit ago, but hadn't posted it.   It includes links for reading material, organizations, tools and newsletters.

Treo 600 - part 2    [ Geekiness ]

More testing - under certain circumstances (for example, using the website navigation links while browsing The Onion, which Handspring was nice enough to include links for on its default homepage), the web browser will barf up a "Browser Error - Failed to pass data to exchange manager. (0x1511)".   There's some generic error codes mentioned in the PalmOS 5 API docs, but they're mostly can't-find-library, low-on-power, low-on-memory, and connection-cancelled generic errors.   There's also a good higher-level description of what the Exchange Manager is.

Another issue - every so often, especially after synchronization and turning the wireless mode on and off, then on again, network connectivity becomes very lagged to the point of generating can't-connect-to-system timeout errors.   Only solution I've found so far is to reset the OS, and then things work rather well.

Handspring Treo 600    [ Geekiness ]

Just got a demo unit of the Handspring Treo 600 for eval purposes @ work, started playing around with it.   Tested out the browser after poking around, and of course tried to pull up slashdot.   Main page works fine, but if I try to log in, I get a:

"Browser Error - Unknown URL: http://slashdot.org/users.pl"

error dialog box.   Pah!

More to come on this.

Oliver Cromwell    [ Geekiness ]

Found this article from the New Statesman on Oliver Cromwell, linked from Chris Lightfoot's blog.   I had dropped a wee bit of code into Chris's driftnet software a while back (so I could run it on my Solaris boxen) - small world.

Gamecube!    [ Geekiness ]

Jessica & I picked up a Nintendo Gamecube over the weekend, plus three games - BTVS 2: Chaos Bleeds, Metroid Prime and Sonic Mega-Collection.   Vampire slaying, interstellar bounty-hunting and 16-bit classic gaming, hoorah!

The overhyped threat    [ Geekiness ]

The best bit I've seen on the much-overhyped threat from "hackers" last weekend (supposed mass-defacement of websites for 500MB of free hosted space) is Politech's post on the topic.   3le3t gR337z t0 n1pC! :)

Moore's law hits my pocketbook    [ Geekiness ]

So it's been nearly a year since I last upgraded my home PC.   The 1.4Ghz Athlon is running on an EPoX 8KTA3+ mobo with two sticks of 256MB PC133 modules from Crucial and PNY and is supplemented by an eVGA 64MB NVidia GeForce2 MX card that got decent reviews and was comparatively cheap at the time.   The system works pretty well minus occasional overnight random reboots, but the latest and greatest games slow down a bit, and the Civ3 PTW TETurkhan Test of Time mod takes a looong time to get through turns.

It's time to start looking around and see what's on the market, and play the "how much can I get for how little?" game again.

Square + Enix = Squenix?    [ Geekiness ]

As reported by Yahoo and GamePro, and as seen on Slashdot, Japanese RPG studios Square and Enix are merging.   Could be a good move for Square, given that it lost so much money on its Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within movie.   Either way, the resulting company will be the dominant force in the Japanese RPG market, and have a huge share in the US RPG market.   Here's hoping that this results in more games like Chrono Trigger and fewer games like Kingdom Hearts.