Diary of a Wolfeman

You knew it had to happen sometime or another.

A few years back, somebody got the bright idea that the next thing your Windows desktop needed was a little bit of porn. Virtual Girl was what they came up with, and the program has an animation of a girl that strips on your desktop. Completely useless, except as a distraction.

In the Linux world, programmers are all about eye-candy and distractions too, but have a hard time making a program that doesn’t do something useful. Enter Hot Babe. This is a linux cpu monitor program. It puts a cartoon of a hot babe (duh) on your desktop. The busier your cpu gets, the less she wears.

Just another tidbit that goes toward the theory of geeks being better in bed because they never get any, and spend all of their time thinking about it :)

Yes! For the first time ever, folks, I now have a Linux system that actually does everything I want it to do. (At least, until I think of something else hehe)

Today, I managed to install the 2.6.7 kernel, with only a couple of minor hitches. Feeling emboldened by my success, I took the next step and began wrangling once again with the ATI drivers.

These proved a little more difficult, as they required a patch to be installed before they would install. Things finally installed correctly, but still weren’t working – until I remembered that X.org uses a different name for the configuration file. A quick rename of the file, and I am now cooking with the full use of my rather expensive video card :)

Now to go play some games!

There’s been alot of updates coming out lately for Linux users, and SuSE has been really good about keeping up with everything. Their YOU program (Yast On-line Update) checks a local mirror for updates and lets you know when one is due, or it can be configured to do everything on it’s own.

Saturday night, I ran into a problem. A new update was indicated – a kernel update to handle some security issues. Everything looked to be fine, and I rebooted as instructed. Only it never came back. What I got instead was “waiting for device /dev/302…not found.” At which point it locked up. Same thing in the ‘failsafe’ boot option.

Not good, sez I.

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As a cable guy, I’ve seen some pretty odd arrangements in apartments. Most people don’t realize this, but most of the apartment towers downtown were constructed before cable tv was invented, so they had to retrofit it into those buildings in any way they could.

In most of them, it was a simple matter of running the cable down an elevator shaft and branching off at each floor. Others were forced to bring it up in a column through each apartment from the basement all the way to the penthouse. Many have their cable outlets in starnge places – not out of choice, but out of necessity. There’s only so much you can do with concrete construction.

One of these buildings can come slightly back into fashion now. You see, the only place they could get a cable outlet was in the kitchen, roughly behind the refridgerator. Well, LG Electronics has the perfect solution for them now: a ‘fridge with a built-in LCD TV. This device serves mainly as the display for the built-in internet capability of the unit, but you can hook a DVD player up to it and watch movies instead of streaming something from the cooking channel.

The device hosts a slew of other functions as well. It has a photo album, capable of storing images downloaded from your digital camera. I suppose you no longer have to worry about what to do with your child’s lovely fingerpaintings – now you can scan them into the fridge and display them as a screensaver. It can take memos, shopping lists, etc. etc.

Not a bad implementation of tech, but I know how bad I get sucked into the tv when I’m in the living room. Do I really want that to happen while standing next to a hot burner? And what happens when I drop the remote into the stew?

Well, today is a special day. (Short-bus kinda special to be sure, but I’ll take what I can get.) This is the 100th post on this blog!

I was tempted to delay for a couple days to hijack the upcoming fireworks for my own celebration, but was too impatient :) So instead, we’ll just throw some out right now.

[BOOM]
“Ooooh!”
{POW]
“Aaahh!”
{POP-POP-POP-BANG]
“Pretty!”

That’s right, folks, we here at the Diary spare no expense when it comes to our celebrations.

(We now return you to our regularly scheduled boredom.)

Yahoo! News – U.S. Steers Consumers Away From IE

The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team touched off a storm this week when it recommended for security reasons using browsers other than Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer.

The Microsoft browser, the government warned, cannot protect against vulnerabilities in its Internet Information Services (IIS) 5 server programs, which a team of hackers allegedly based in Russia has exploited with a Java script that is appended to Web sites.

There ya have it folks.

Well, I wrote in and cancelled the contract today for the telephone tech support job I have been (theoretically) working for the past two weeks. In that time, I have spent 56 hours on the phone, but was only able to bill for less than 5 hours. As I said before, I would need to be averaging that amount of time daily before it would be worth the effort.

Now, this isn’t the fault of the company I was working for or a lack of skill on my part – there simply weren’t enough inbound calls. There were times every day where the phone simply didn’t ring for over an hour. (And that call was likely to be a hang-up or other no-bill.)

So, back to pimping my own business and looking for a regular 9-5 job.

The SANS – Internet Storm Center reports that a new Browser Helper Object has been seen in the wild that, if installed, will monitor and capture login and password information before encryption / SSL and deliver this information elsewhere for capturing.

A “Browser Helper Object” is a DLL that allows developers to customize and control Internet Explorer. When IE 4.x and higher starts, it reads the registry to locate installed BHO’s and then loads them into the memory space for IE. Created BHO’s then have access to all the events and properties of that browsing session. This particular BHO watches for HTTPS (secure) access to URLs of several dozen banking and financial sites in multiple countries.

When an outbound HTTPS connection is made to such a URL, the BHO then grabs any outbound POST/GET data from within IE before it is encrypted by SSL. When it captures data, it creates an outbound HTTP connection to [web address deleted] and feeds the captured data to the script found at that location.

Folks, I’ve spent the last week and a half doing non-specific telephone computer support, and fully 80% of my calls have been virus or malware issues. I cannot stress how important it is to NOT use Internet Explorer due to the security issues and ease-of-compromise inherent in that product.

I highly recommend The Mozilla Foundation’s offerings, both the full suite and Firefox. If you feel that free software just can’t meet your needs and you absolutely must pay for something to get any value out of it, then go buy a copy of Opera. The differences between the two products are small enough you won’t really notice, and both are fully standards-compliant and secure.

I’ll get off my soapbox now.

Once again, I have proved worthy of the title “Techie from Hell”. Yesterday, the washer went on the fritz, spewing water for about 20 minutes before we caught it. Today, after a fairly rudimentary and minimal websearch, I determined the source of the problem, and after work tonight repaired it.

The fix? Three zip ties.

Found this european article by way of Wired Tales:

Boom for Busty Danish Natural Resources

Eva Andersen reported some very good news in yesterday’s Jyllands-Posten (Danish Women Are Bursting with Health): the trend has been upward (meaning, I suppose, “outward”) for some time in women’s bust-sizes there. She reported agreement on this point among anthropologists, gender-researchers (k?nsforskeren – you know, those fellow students who were into “Gender Studies” back in college) and, most definitive of all, national underwear producers.

Now, I myself have noticed this phenomenon here in the States, only I saw it way back in the spring of 1990. I don’t know for certain if this has remained a constant in the intervening years or if it has ebbed and waned, but I notice the difference now as well.

See, back in ’90, I was in my senior year of high school. I had survived the ’80’s and was looking forward to graduation and the new decade. For those of you who did not experience this timeframe, you may have noticed that all of the movies geared toward the younger crowd from that time (you see them on USA Network,) featured leading actresses who were rather less endowed than what you see today.

Now, I only noticed this in spring because that’s when the jackets started to come off for the warmer weather. I got to comparing the new Freshman class to my agemates and realized that the only Senior girls with comparable bra sizes were generally larger girls.

At the time, I felt kind of robbed, ya know?

In the years since then, I had no real reason to hang around a high school, so I don’t know what it was like. I can tell you though, that as I have travelled around I have seen fairly consistently that women about three to five years younger than myself are generally buying larger bras than women my age or older. Now that my own son is in high school, I have once again noticed the disparity – and felt like a dirty old man for noticing. (Ahh, the wonders of fatherhood!)

Some might want to chalk this up to the current trend toward obesity here in America, but I would have to disagree. My last job had me driving by both a high school and a college on a daily basis, and most of the girls were of an average, healthy weight.

I have two theories for the difference:

The first is that it might be due to the trend of girls to go through puberty at a younger age. This is theorised by many (if not proven) to be the result of a fattier diet these days. Now, medical science says a girl will enter puberty and have her first cycle when her body is physically capable of bearing a child to term. The magic numbers here are 107# and 14% body fat – when these conditions are reached, menses begins. So, if we eat a fattier diet, a girl retains more fat and adds weight more quickly, thus enters puberty much younger and has more years to develop physically. Seems reasonable enough, no?

The second is that it may be something in the milk. Think about it – the farmers are going to want to select the cows who produce the most milk, and they quite possibly have added supplements to their diet to further increase their production. Who’s to say it wouldn’t have a similar effect on the milk-producing organs of a human female?

It could also be a combination of the two. Of course, I should probably stop wondering about it and simply enjoy the results ;)