Sorry about the outage for the past 24 hours, I had to apply some critical patches to the software I run here. I haven’t had much sleep over the past week due to client projects and my knee keeping me up. So yesterday I left the city early and wanted to go home and get some sleep. When I got home I had an urgent message from VBulletin letting me know of a critical update, so I decided to do the necessary patching before I went to la..la.. land. Go figure why is it that when you least need something to blow up on you, it happens. During the updates everything blew up and I ran into dependency issues with libraries. Needless to say at 4am I threw in the towel since I needed to be at a client in Rockland at noon. When I got back I went back to work and after a couple of hours I have it back up and running. The dumb thing I did with wanting to rush to bed was not doing a database dumb. The backups I had were a couple of weeks back, so I wanted to get everything back with the directories on the system rather than killing the machine and restoring from backups. Needless to say the DOC was able to recover everything. So to vent my frustration I am going to be in a CounterStrike: Source marathon. Woe is the individual on the opposing team that runs into me tonight, because I am going to be taking out my frustration on him and give him a serious beat down.
Media Center 2005 & Orb
Over the weekend I built a Microsoft Media Center 2005 system. I have been a serious DirecTivo user for the past couple of years. I have hacked them made them network accessible to offload recorded shows. I have also added larger hard drives so I can record over 200hrs on one box. The DirecTivo also lets you record two channels simultaneously. The only problem I had was the lack of being able to offload recorded shows to DVD. Stand alone Tivos have been able to do this for over a year. With the recent announcement that DirecTV is going to start selling there own PVR, it looks as if the DirecTivos are close to end of life. So I decided to build my own MCE system with a terabyte of storage and give cable a try. So I have two tuners built into it, which are attached to two cable set top boxes. So now I have the same functionality as my DirecTivo with a slicker interface and a DVD burner. So far I am very happy with it and it was worth the investment. In the near future I will write an article on the construction and installation of the software. I took a lot of great pictures during the construction of the system. Also I just started using a service offered by Orb that allows me to stream live TV, recorded TV, photos and MP3s to any network device (laptop, PDA, smartphone) from my MCE system any where in the world. It was very simple to setup and the quality was pretty decent. Hardwarezone.com has an article on an announcement made at CES regarding Orb and Netgear partnering. Check back soon for more of my impressions of Microsoft’s upgrade to its Media Center and the article I am writing.
Bad Tech in Hollywood
I can’t remember the last movie that was largely based on technology that got any terminology or its proper use correct. They hire technical advisors to make sure that what they are portraying is correct. What they really need is someone to make sure the technical advisors actually know something. I just watched the first 24 minutes of 24 which will air on Sunday. Don’t worry I am not going to give anything away. If you’re a geek or at least know some terminology you will be bent over laughing within the first 10-15 minutes. It’s like someone picked up a Linksys router manual jumbled some keywords around and made a portion of the script from it. If anyone from Hollywood reads this, I’m available to be a technical advisor. At least you might get something right for a change. Don’t get me wrong, I love the show. I’d just wish they would take the time to make some things that are supposed to be intelligent actually intelligent.
Microsoft AntiSpyware (Beta) Publically Available!
Well Microsoft got this out pretty quick, considering they just acquired the Giant Software about 2 weeks ago the maker of the AntiSpyware. For details on the recent acquisition read the InformationWeek article.
You can download the beta version of MS AntiSpyware here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=321cd7a2-6a57-4c57-a8bd-dbf62eda9671&DisplayLang=en
Attacks on Microsoft WINS Service hole raise alarms
Internet security monitoring groups are warning Microsoft Windows users about new Internet attacks aimed at Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003 machines running WINS (Windows Internet Naming Service).
Read Article @ Infoworld
phpBB users beware!!
Anyone running a forum server using phpBB need to take precautions immediately. There is a worm that is targeting phpBB code. The worm is called Sanity.A and it using Google to find server running phpBB by searching for ‘viewtopic.php’. Once a site is compromised it searches for several web page extensions and then defaces them. If your running a phpBB forum go this link: http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=240513
For information on this story go visit the related story @ Yahoo
Give your Photo iPod the Playboy touch
Playboy is starting a service called iBod which allows you to download photos of 25 models for your Photo iPod. For more information or to download this package visit:
Microsoft fixes ‘critical’ XP firewall issue
Microsoft has quietly released an update to Windows XP to fix a potentially serious configuration problem in the firewall that ships as part of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).
Read Story @ InfoWorld
New IE Exploit Spoofs Web Sites
The bug, which has been confirmed on a fully patched Windows XP system with IE 6.0 and Service Pack 2, could allow a scammer to display a fake Web site with all the attributes of a genuine, secure site, including the URL and the icon indicating SSL security, according to researchers.
Read More @ eWeek
FCC gives thumbs-up to in-flight broadband
High-speed Internet access may be coming to a flight near you. The FCC has voted to allow in-flight broadband, but is hesitating on green-lighting cell phone usage.
Read Story @ ARS Technica