Interesting tidbit: Microsoft Links Malware Rates To Pirated Windows

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Microsoft Links Malware Rates To Pirated Windows—Slashdot

I’ll believe this when Microsoft releases all versions of Windows as Open Source under the GPL, and only makes a profit by selling support contracts—fat chance of that happenin’ and you can bank on it.

In the past near-decade of using Windows based computers, the machines in my care probably have one of the lowest infections, compared toanyone I know, who is an “Average, gullable, luser”. Do stupid things and your box is trashed, it won’t make a difference whether or not you paid for it.

Hmm, if people are going to start blaming outdated pirated copies of windows for the spread of malicious software: how about Microsoft try ditching the pseudo-worthless WGA garbage and making the Windows and Native APIs more restrictive in what they can tamper with?

Oh yeah, just blame other people, real s.m.r.t. idea.

Interesting tidbit: Man accidentally ejects himself from plane

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Man accidentally ejects himself from plane—The Guardian World News

Oh man, this guy is never going to live that down! Sheesh, how stupid do you have to be not to know what’s going to happen if you yank the ejection rip-cord seated between your legs? Haha, that just sounds so wrong in of it self!

Here’s to narrowly evading the receipt of a Darwin Award, one lucky son of a bitch at a time !!

Playful time passing, computer geek style

database store {
  table tags {          /*
                         * Enumerates all tags in usage
                         */
    id        name;
  }
  table tasks {         /*
                         * Stores data for each todo with
                         * tags being a splitable string.
                         * Three date fields are used, marking
                         * when the item was set, completed, and
                         * a special 'mark' field, for things such
                         * as the do by then or piss off dilemma.
                         */
    id        tags       task       date_set    date_mark    date_done
  
  }
}

Just a simple structured annotation to the SQLite3 schemas that are in my brain at the moment.

Perhaps it would be more effective to encode the tags as a bitmask created from tags.id rows, mmm. The real question I suppose is can I actually insert the atribtrary data I want into an SQLite database and be able to query it without hitting any hard limits. Not that I’m likely to hit any there might be, lol.

I’ve been very busy of late.

I’ve been very busy of late.  By my own calculation, ma is now sucking an additional 2 1/2 hours or more out of every day of my life, just through lunch/dinner prep! Today she also decided it was time for redoing the kitchen and has managed to rattle my nerves accordingly to get what she wants. While I generally like an excuse to work with my hands, I don’t really care much for moving shelves around, along with all the junk on them, let along the priority interrupts that have to be fired later when I am “Done” but there’s still more odds and ends.

A distinguishing feature between me and the rest of my family, I do things myself, they can’t be arsed to do more then coerce someone into doing stuff for them.

The Encapsulated Package Installer (EPI) project was let out of the bag not to long ago, but in a good way; since it’s picked up steam again. In the past couple days I’ve started work on the build system, and filed off several memorandums while refining the standard.

Our build system is being designed with distributed functionality in mind, making it play nicely with jails and machines on a private subnet. The overview I sent in an earlier memo, described a build system so knock out dead dead sexy, it ought to be illegal!

One of the ideas I’ve been mulling over for a while, is ways we can improve the security model used in EPI; after much thought on the various methods, I’ve cooked up a scenario that would allow running the optional scripts without root privileges, while still expressing obtrusive functionality through the EPIL script API in ways that is “To eat your heart out, PBI”. I need to do a bit more study, but I like the idea.

Joy, dinner is ready and I’m not done writing this post yet, courtesy of her royal highnesses interruptions! Sigh, there’s just no way to win.

I managed to spend a portion of the day playing SWAT, maybe 5 or 6 missions worth. At this point in life, it’s one of the few pleasures I get beyond engineering software systems. Oy, there’s no peace to be found here :'(. In just about every action or endeavor, my mother manages to make me feel utterly miserable. It’s like a universal constant… for more years then I care to recall right now.

As far as efforts to consolidate my explosive todo list, I’ve been thinking about setting up some web software on Vectra, for triaging todo’s: the next best thing is Google integration with “Tasks” but I could use something a bit more dedicated. The best software that’s interested me, is one of the hosted apps on SourceForge, but sadly is not yet compatible with the database backend I’ve got to work with atm. Maybe later I’ll find some time to take a look at some webware. I can’t afford to take time to whip up one of my own, to busy cleaning todo’s off …. sigh

So, where have I been lately?

I haven’t been keeping up with my journal lately, things have been hopping quite a lot recently.

Wednesday night, my mother had to be taken to the hospital. I spent the night on the couch, trying to keep the dogs sane; Willow & Coco have been bark happy! Thursday was basically spent on a mixture of travel, hospital, and chores. Got to spend some time with my brother after we visited our mother, I was there about three times during the day. Another night on the couch lol, and Coco doesn’t exactly like to *share* that much!!! For years my mothers thought that she may be diabetic, so finally being in a doctors care for, I guess the first time in 21 years; ma was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Friday saw the conclusion of testing, and it appears the main problem is Diverticulitis. Who would’ve thought having a high(er) fiber diet in your 30s and 40s was going to be important twenty to thirty years later? So far, things seem to be pretty good. Ma should be coming home tomorrow, eh today, or at the latest Sunday.

For what hours I haven’t been in a hospital room, I’ve basically been home with the dogs. I don’t mind being alone as much as I would’ve thought, but I am really glad to hear that ma is coming home soon. It’s too quite without her, and the dogs are not used to just having me around the house.

Two things that I have learned, is if I ever had to live alone, two fundamentally important things are a good radio (that gets 94.9) and gloves ^_^. Actually, I think this was the first time in my life, that I really had to wash dishes—I’m not about to have her come home to a kitchen full of crap. For some reason, without my mothers constant interruptions the day time has passed much slower then I’m accustomed to; so rather then quickly flying by days and slow nights, things are on a more natural pace. It will be nice to be able to sleep in my own bed again as well, rather then taking the nights on the couch. While Willow will hog my bed at night, Coco doesn’t care much and won’t often venture that far away from the living room, unless she wants to hide in my closet lol (oft’ during thunderstorms).

Getting a little drowsy now, and I should be getting to sleep, only GOD knows when the phone is going to start ringing in the morning. Heh, and actually that is an interesting thing that coems to mind now that I write this; although I’ve probably spent as much time on the phone in the past three days, then I have in the past three years. One thing I have noticed is that while ma has been in the hospital, there hasn’t been tons of calls from creditors all freaking day; there’s only been two or three at the most. Anything else would have to of come through when I was visiting at the hospital.

Spooky, ain’t it?

of passwords and tags

Having some spare time, I set to updating my code books while I wait on the Google Wave video to reload; I had to pop off at ~55min for a Live Operation ;). Ahh, crud! Now it looks like I’m going to be interrupted by dinner 8=).

Around late April, I devised a new schema for how I handle my password management—yes I am insane. I actually do have an encoding system for increasing password strength, that is tied to how my brain functions. It’s built from a system of standard passwords that are pseudo-salted with mnemonics that are tied to both the schema and how my brain internally organizes data. The end result, a systematic password that is more difficult to brute force, and hard to guess unless you are me ;).

I’ve just converted about 50% of my core services to the new password system, and I’ll do the rest tonight.

At the moment, my bookmarking has been focused around delicious. The pattern I have chosen for tagging is roughly the same as what I’ve been using in Gnolia; Category/Sub-Category/… and in place of larger meta tags (e.g. Programming/Perl) I’ve bundled the tags. It’s an informal hierarchy but rather nifty. Gnolia lacks bundles which I dislike about it, but honestly the only thing Delicious’s method offers in improvement, is you can’t forget to add the meta tag along side the regular one (e.g. Programming/Perl/Frameworks).

The tags I’ve arranged are strongly organised, I like keeping things tidy. There is a simple “Personal” tag for things connected with me, Services/ for various services: Services/Webmail for example contains marks for Google and Live mail. Programming/Language/{Distributions,Documentation,Modules,Frameworks, …} is also in use

For some reason, I love organizing crap…. lol.

Present open-loops

  • General SAS related work
  • Making my game prototype load key=command mappings out of an rc file
  • Finish Cara’s skins
  • Get to work on pipin-ims backend daemon
  • *Several* personal but business related web-projects
  • Continue compiling my letter about PC-BSD shortcommings
  • Setup/test CppUnit, Boost, and POCO
  • Customize Irssi and evaluate its possiblities for replacing Weechat
  • Figure out how much crap didn’t make it onto my todo list before it fell off
  • Work on the SAS Tactical Command Interface
  • Work on several other small SAS-related projects

and all I can think about right now is a quick snack…. lol