Keeping me Busy

China Crafts Cyberweapons

The Defense Department reports China is building cyberwarfare units and developing viruses.The People's Liberation Army (PLA) continues to build cyberwarfare units and develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems as part of its information-warfare strategy, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) warned in a report released on Friday.

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And Here's a Google video

Ok, this took some doing. Rip the stream, recode the stream, chop it up to just here part, and upload to google video.

Broadcast vs Satellite

So yesterday, I stayed home. The original intent was to be here so Telecom Italia could bring us an ADSL modem. Party time right? Wrong ! I didn't really expect them to show. That's just their track record. However, Diane called me around 8:15am to tell me that her interview would be aired at 2pm. Begin mad scramble. I had no way to record it! First I tried the old faithful VCR. Of course the VCR is NTSC and the Sky receiver is only PAL, so all I get is jumpy non viewable black and white video, but the audio is good. So I then commence to trying to make my myth box do the job. It might work now, but I haven't had a chance to try it. I ended up dragging my big dual processor box up stairs to the Sky box in our bedroom to try and record. It worked. ATI All-in-Wonder card on Windows XP. So I setup the backup, my digital camera on a tripod in front of the TV, and sat down to relax. It was 1:45. At 1:55, I run back up stairs to start the digital recording. I hit the record button, and BOOM. Windows crashed. Cursing Bill Gates and of his software, I run back down stairs to start the camera after hitting the old reset button, then back up stairs to watch it reboot. It comes back up uneventfully and started recording. Woot! Time to relax a bit. I sit down on the couch and wait for my love to appear on TV. About 15 minutes later, Diane calls. RAI has called and told her they are going to air the segment at 7pm, so her and the kids will be able to see it. AH! No big deal, I'm ready for it now. So, 7:30pm rolls around, I've got the dually upstairs recording, and the camera recording the TV down stairs. And we wait. And wait. And wait. It's only a 20 minute show. Finally, the show ends and no Diane. WTF? Then the phone starts to ring. "We saw it!" "You were great!" Apparently, it was a "Regional" show. The Satellite company, Sky, apparently didn't choose our region to air tonight, so we saw the show for the Pumone region in northern Italy. We missed it. Needless to say, we were a little annoyed. Not to be deterred, Diane went to the RAI 3 website and found that they put the videos online. We just needed to wait for the latest update. So, finally, around 9pm, the updated. Click here for RealPlayer version. Of course the interview is in Italian, and its mostly the narrator talking. But you can definitely get a look at Diane's class room and her teaching. In the next day or so, I'll convert and post with either subtitles or with a dubbed track.

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Mrs A on TV

RAI, the Italian television network sent a reporter out to Diane's school today to interview her. They were impressed by the fact that she has managed to get her 5th grade class actively involved on the Internet with her blog at http://mrsascoolkids.blogspot.com/ . I was there and took some pictures and they are posted on her flickr site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrsascoolkids/ . So, check them out! We should have copy of the video here soon too.

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Don't be a statistic

Hundreds Click on 'Click Here to Get Infected' Ad

By Lisa Vaas

May 17, 2007

People will click on anything.



That was evidenced by the 409 people who clicked on an ad that offers infection for those with virus-free PCs. The ad, run by a person who identifies himself as security professional Didier Stevens, reads like this:



Drive-By Download

Is your PC virus-free?

Get it infected here!

drive-by-download.info



Stevens, who says he works for Contraste Europe, a branch of the IT consultancy The Contraste Group, has been running his Google Adwords campaign for six months now and has received 409 hits. Stevens has done similar research in the past, such as finding out how easy it is to land on a drive-by download site when doing a Google search.



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The sad part is someone paid money for this.

A study by the FDS research group reveals that French workers are the
world's biggest whiners while the Irish complain least about their
lot.(AFP/Illustration)



Yahoo Story

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For TJ ?

As I read this article, I couldn't help but think of my nephew TJ who watches a clock and waits for 6am before he gets up. Hey Sis!, Maybe this would work better for you.

'Reverse Alarm Clock' keeps the kids in bed so you can party

Posted May 11th 2007 1:02PM by Evan Blass

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Three
cheers for Professor John Zimmerman, who's finally doing some research
to benefit Joe Public, and who has invented a device that lets parents
sleep in late and put the kids to bed early on those long summer days.
Zimmerman, of Carnegie Mellon's School of Design and Human-Computer
Interaction Institute (and probably a parent himself), designed the
so-called 'Reverse Alarm Clock' to give the tykes a visual
representation of their expected schedule; when the clock's 'Sky
Display' shows a sun, young children know they're free to roam about
the house, but when a moon and stars appear, they'd better not get out
of bed lest the boogie monster devour them whole. So far the system --
which uses a parent-set sunrise and moonset calculator, and also
features a "Treasure Chest Music Selector" to pleasantly awaken your
own little treasures -- doesn't seem to be commercially available,
which is kind of a shame, because we know more than a few people who
would love to trick their tiny terrors into bedtime at five o'clock on
the daily.

Original Article here.

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Big Red Button.

Now this is funny. Its not really, but I had to laugh. We have a few red buttons were I work but they have plastic covers over them.



The Big Red Button

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My very own 128 bit integer !!!!

93 7B B3 69 8C 94 FD 03 1D 38 77 10 93 72 BE 77



Woot!



Get yours here.

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The Craziest Thing

So yesterday, we had a hard drive fail at work. It was on a mail/web server. The drives in the server were setup in RAID 0. This is a great setup if you want lots of space and speed. If you want reliability, its useless. One drive dies and you lose everything. While this normally wouldn't be that big a deal, I very quickly found out that there were no backups of the cgi scripts I had written for the box. 3-4 months worth of tweaking gone. I was upset to say the least. One of our resident geek-extremes in the Navy here, Eric Sprague, suggest freezing the hard drive. I was skeptical. I did a little research and found the theory behind it. When things get cold, they shrink. (This I knew.) With hard drives, if the bearings shrink, it increases the tolerances, and makes it easier for the drive motor to spin the platters. So, I called work and had them put the drive in a zip lock back, and place it in the freezer in preparation for recovery. When I got to work, I popped the drive in and booted it up. It worked!!! I was able to copy all of the cgi scripts and the entire web page directory off the server before the drive warmed up and died again. It only stayed up for about 3 minutes, but that was enough. Isn't physics awesome !

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Sunset over Ancient Achers

Sunset over Ancient Achers, originally uploaded by immauss.

Finally got around to stitching these together. I think it came out pretty nice.