Category: Technology

“I can’t even get Richard the third to move….  My game is NIBBLES with the text changed.”   Hillarious!

from http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001178.html

Watch out for this worm on Facebook. More on the Facebook Sercurity page.

From Critical Section:

   1. Turn your email client off.  Pick the moment at which you’ll be interrupted.
   2. Never criticize anyone in email, and avoid technical debates.  Use face-to-face meetings or ‘phone calls instead.
   3. Be judicious in who you send email to, and who you copy on emails.
   4. Observing some formality is important.
   5. Don’t hesitate to review and revise important emails.
   6. Remember that email is a public and permanent record.

Neat old cypology.

I’m thinking about changing my keyboard layout from QWERTY to DEVORAK.  Lots of things I’ve read on the net have people going cold turkey (using their QWERTY layout keyboards with DVORAK) but I don’t know about that.  I think it would take some getting used to…but it couldget me to be a better touch typist.  What do you guys think?

I had a friend that had some problems with his Linksys wrt54g (version 8) wireless router. The problem was that via ethernet, the speed was acceptable; however, over wireless, the speed dropped off to well over half speed (indeed it was more like he was only getting 1/3 to 1/4 the speed he should have). If affected both of his computers as well as anyone else who hooked up wirelessly. I looked and looked for a solution.

I tried tweaking the wireless settings, g only, channel setting (tried several of them), the MTU, and just about everything else that I could find. But nothing worked. He was still getting poor wireless bandwidth but acceptable wired bandwidth.

As a last ditch effort, I flashed the router. I hated to do that because I was worried about bricking it…but I ran out of ideas. His router had the original version 8.0 firmware on it and linksys had a newer version available (I think it was 8.05 or something). The release notes didn’t say anything about fixing wireless speed, but I was out of ideas. He was willing to let me flash it, so I did. Lo and behold, post-flashing, the speed issue was fixed.

I don’t know what the problem was. I think it was some problem with the version 8.0 firmware and not a harware issue. Why else would it have worked?

Oh well, i’m blogging this in the hopes to help someone else out there that is having the same problem. I searched and searched on the net and no one ever mentioned this problem or idea. If you find the article…good luck.

Picture from everdaniel

I ditched skype. From this paper it looks like the Chineese Government is reading the skype conversations of people. If they aren’t it sure looks like it.

I know many people called me a freetard for my stance on free software. However, at least with free software, you know if there is or is not a backdoor (well, you can at least find out…or pay someone who can find out). You can look at the code, you can compile your own, in short….you can know. With non-free software, you have no idea. If I were still using Skype, I’d ditch it right now.

Picture from re-ality

I’m using the Joomla Podcasting Component by Joseph LeBlanc to generate my podcasts on this site. Today was the first real podcast I put up…I noticed that my podcatcher wasn’t downloading the mp3 file so I went looking. It turns out that my enclosure URLs were being generated incorrectly.

I normally enter the fully qualified URL instead of the path (long story). Everything was playing correctly; however, the podcast XML wasn’t being generated correctly. It had my <site URL> + <path> + <enclosure tag url> included. So, if I had entered something like “http://media.maxsons.org/MaxsonPodcast/2008/20080919_MaxsonMissionMissivePodcast.mp3” into my enclosure tag, the enclosure URL was getting generated like “http://www.maxsons.org/media_files/http://media.maxsons.org/MaxsonPodcast/2008/20080919_MaxsonMissionMissivePodcast.mp3” See the problem?

Well, the error was in the podcast.php file (line 345 to be exact). that line says

$paramarray[0] = $mosConfig_live_site . “/” . $params->def( ‘mediapath’, ‘images/stories’ ) . “/” . $paramarray[0];

Well, you only want to do that IF you haven’t included the full URL in the enclosure tag already. So, if you want to make the fix, just change that line to these two lines:

if(!strstr($paramarray[0], ‘http://’))

$paramarray[0] = $mosConfig_live_site . “/” . $params->def( ‘mediapath’, ‘images/stories’ ) . “/” . $paramarray[0];

Or, just download this zip file and overwrite your existing podcast.php file (it is in <your site’s install directory>/<components>/<com_podcast> directory).

Now, you’ll be good to go. This code is distributed under the GPL (choose your version).

I’ve mentioned before about podcasting, but I’ve never really done it. But, I want to start. I think I’m going to shoot for a 10 minute thing once per week, but I don’t have too much to talk about. Can you post some seed ideas here for me? A buddy of mine suggested food, weather, and a word of the week. Any other ideas out there? What do you want to know about?