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So a buddy of mine likes to surf the web in Microsoft XP and MSIE. It turns out that his system has 271 known trojans all churning along. I asked him if he has had any credit card issues lately and he said yes. I asked him if he uses Outlook, and he said yes again. I asked him if he ever opens up attachments, and he said "Yes, but only from people I know."
Honestly, he is an idiot. How could these MS users use the most vulnerable programs known to be susceptible to trojans and viruses yet not take any precautions?
One project I want to do when I have a little break is to get either an Epia 5000 or maybe an ME 6000 and attach it to the back of a flat-screen. It should be relatively simple to do.
The idea behind it is to have the board chug along behind the screen invisible, silent and slim. I imagine that something like that would make a very good net cruiser, or a living room computer where silence is more important than CPU horsepower. If I end up building it I'll be sure to put up some pics.
Does the Roomba actually work? I mean, it looks like a cute gadget, but will it actually do what its promoters promise? Can I plug it in, just let it do its thing and have a clean floor? I have a dog, and I am worried that he might think it is a toy and try to chew on it. The thing does look like a low flying frizbee. In that informercial they have a woman kicking back when her Roomba sucks all the dirt off her floor, but I think it makes more sense for a single guy to have one of these, why clean when you can have a machine do it for you? That's if the Roomba actually does work and I could keep the dog away :-).
Ive been making progress on my pet project TrainGUI. First off Ive renamed it TestGUI as I have done some work on it other than during my commute to/from work. Yes I know its still a pretty name - maybe someone will suggest something better?
Ive upgraded to the latest fltk-1.1.6 and FLU-2.14 libraries and ported to WIN32 as well as DSL. Compiles under Visual Studio .NET and works great with ActiveState Perl :-)
Plenty of stuff left to do, I still need to be able to allow properties changed in the GUI to affect the controls themselves, and although Im supporting the entire FLTK widget set only a few fire any events. Still I guess I can fill in things like that later once I have the skeleton in place.
SaidinUnleashed, that iRiver music player *does* look very nice! So, let me get this strait, it is cheaper than the pod, plays mp3, ogg, avi and wav? Wow, so I could potentially rip dvds and play them on an iRiver H320. And it has 20Gigs so that could be a lot of potential video too. Very nice! That H340 is a bit steep for my blood, but maybe it will come down in price? iRiver is an interesting company, I like that ultra small music player they have -- it looks like it isn't much larger than a USB pen drive yet it has a color display and a built in FM tuner.
Still, I think I need a big player with a large hard drive, I mean, what's the point unless you could take your favorite music and a couple of vids with you? I guess they have to downplay the iRiver's ability to play avi files, but to me that is nearly as strong a selling point as portable music.
Today I used DSL to pull off some old .doc files from an ancient hard-drive which was mountable, but didn't seem to be bootable anymore. I must say that Damn Small seemed very handy for data recovery on this old computer because it didn't suck up all the ram. It makes me wonder what the professional computer data recovery specialists are using? Maybe they keep dsl in their back pocket? It is very cool to use Linux to recover a Windows drive.
Recently, I wanted to get a word count for an electronic copy I had of a book. Not the normal "number of words" word count, but the number of times each particular word was used. I wanted to know what the most common words he used were. Then I wondered what the most common two word combinations were. I couldn’t think of a good way of doing this except for writing a program, and that looked like a lot of work, so I let the whole project slide. Then I read about sed, and I realized that my goal was much closer and easier to reach than I thought.
Sed is a "stream editor." In a nutshell, it transforms an input stream or file and sends its output to the standard output. It can do things like finding lines containing certain words (like grep), replacing a pattern with another pattern, and replacing characters with other characters (like tr). I was shocked how easy sed was to use after a small learning curve. There are only 24 commands. What I hadn’t know before was the reason for a "non-interactive stream editor" is so that you can pipe input into it, let it manipulate the text, and then do whatever with the output.
Some how I don't feel right about buying it, but those little iPods, with their small form factor and 20GB of space, are just what I need to have my music with me in the car and at the office. Really, I do not trust my employer not to snoop around on my PC, so I better take my mp3's with me. I've noticed that there are special addition iPods like that U2 ipod version or fancy color ones -- I am not going to go for any of that, it goes against my sensibilities. Yet, I really think Apple did something very smart with this little music player.
I wonder what is inside the ipod? Is it a ppc board? I imagine people will be putting Linux on there eventually.
You all know that the last 5 years have been tough for us tech types. First we had the dot-bust, then we have the sucking of jobs to South Asia. It has been tough for us US based tech workers...
So, what does she expect? We aren't going to be having good times now are we? Oh well. So, now I need a divorce lawyer too. Well, at least we don't have any kids. Maybe we can file online? That would be quick I guess. I am not sure what we are going to do about the house. Maybe we'll sell it to pay for all the attorney fees? Life can be hell sometimes -- sorry for dumping this on the DS
I wish to make an attempt to rebuild the entirety of DSL with a few implementation changes - an attempt to squeeze a few more bytes out of the already tight DSL project.
1: everything (and I do mean everything) will be rebuilt from source using uClibc.
2: I will be building a 2.6.10 kernel using the knoppix 3.7 configuration.
3: SquashFS will be implemented upon KNOPPIX. sqsh type modules will be supported.
4: The x apps, all user applications, and basically anything non-system will be removed and repackaged. X-based user apps will be available in the least ram-using packages if available (like firefox), or be given a new package if not. The generic command line non-system and x apps will be in udsl-clapps.sqsh and udsl-xapps.sqsh.
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