According to various reports 1 2, Chuck Yerkes died recently in a motorcycle collision.
If this is the same Chuck Yerkes I have listed on my muppets page, I don't really see what the sad faces are all about.
She revealed my pre-birthday present: 12 liters of Matilde Kakaomælk. That's 3.17 gallons of chocolate milk for the metrically and language challenged. I have a picture which I will be uploading at some point.
I was talking to a music critic tonight who is as disassociated with most contemporary music releases as I am. He reviews music and video games on Pop Matters. Check it out. It rox0rs.
If you are in Dublin, please consult my travelplan and let me know when/where you'd like to hook up.
The annual update of Needful Things has taken place, and you know what that means: It is my birthday on Friday. Someone buy me that ThinkPad X40, for the love of christ!
Updating my Nvidia drivers has improved my Doom 3 fps rate to acceptable levels.
Somebody please respond to this cry for help:
*** pfendt (~pfendt@adsl-69-210-35-56.dsl.milwwi.ameritech.net) has joined
channel #openbsd
<pfendt> i am not alone, i hope in having issues getting x configured
*** Signoff: pfendt ("Client exiting")
You might not know this, but I am an emotional guy. This tribute video touched me deeply: World Trade Center Tribute.
In Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows XP, Microsoft are introducing a number of 'innovations' according to the release notes. These innovations include the Windows Firewall and disallowing anonymous access to RPC. Let's look at that again. Microsoft considers it an innovation to block TCP and UDP packets, and to require authentication before executing code on a host.
Ahem. "Innovation, noun. 1. the introduction of something new. 2. a new idea, method or device." I must be missing something here.
SP2 also includes memory protection which tries to restrict exploit code from being executed on a vulnerable system. Probably simple to bypass in this first version, and as long as users mindlessly click on attachments, it's not really the biggest threat, as I see it. SP2 introduces an Attachment Execution Service (AES), which tries to limit the system access available to files received via email or IM. This will probably be popular with home users, at least until a bug is discovered which allows processes to circumvent the restrictions. I hope corporations take a different route than allowing their users to distribute files via email.
<holsta> I thought we were trying to *avoid* people executing files
they recieve via email.
<DrJolt> Maybe you are. Microsoft isn't.
The Windows Firewall is enabled by default and contains plenty of hacks to allow things such as multicast and broadcast based systems to work anyway. I would rather they shipped XP with no listening network services. End of story. Windows Messenger contains functionality to block incoming filetransfers based on the file extension. JPG and GIF images are considered good and allowed through. PNG images are not. Many extensions require the user to make a decision. Most users can't make these decisions.
I wish Windows would stop looking at the file extension at all, and look at the header of the file instead.
SP2 causes Outlook Express to be able to render incoming HTML as text plain. If you use Outlook Express, this is probably the biggest reason to install SP2. The biggest reason for organisations with an IT infrastructure to install SP2 is the enchanced control over IE, such as ActiveX policies. Users want SP2 because IE allows them to block popups natively, and has resume support for file downloads.
Technical people will like the new installer. Makes way for fully automated installs of XP and relevant applications without resorting to lame image-based solutions such as Ghost.
Final verdict on SP2: Too little, too late. The Security Center is fucking
annoying, but thankfully it can be disabled in services.msc. You
will want to disable Windows Firewall also.
(Source: Changes in Windows XP Service Pack 2.)
It is past 4am on a Monday morning (so I suppose I should really post this on the 9th) and I cannot sleep. I arsed around on the computer until half one and then went to bed because I was tired. I failed to sleep. Not thinking about anything in particular, just could not sleep. I got back up at 3 and now I have been sitting here for an hour reading Paul Ford and browsing CiteSeer. Why can't I browse porn sites like regular people? Maybe the lack of porn in my life is the reason I can't sleep during certain periods.
Oh, I watched Gothika the other day. Whatever score it has been getting in reviews and on IMDb is too low. A fine, fine horror movie.
Suppose my employer asked me to compile a list of songs that expressed the nature of the situation, the list would look something like this:
You get the idea.
Doom 3 Time Demo Results: 2148 frames rendered in 191.5 seconds = 11.2 fps.
That's a Athlon XP 1500+, 512MB RAM, nVidia 5200FX w/128MB RAM running 640x480 using medium quality textures with all advanced settings off. Dropping to low quality textures gives me 11.3 fps. What the fuck.
Switching to high quality textures in 800x600 with default advanced settings drops me to 5.9 fps. No wonder I can't aim worth shit.
This heat is not sitting well with me. I made the mistake of not drinking enough water yesterday and my sheets were soaked with sweat this morning. I felt like I had been squished by a steam roller. I think this is the first time ever I took a sick day due to heat.
I bought a huge fan which keeps me relatively cool so I have been working at home. The cooling in the office at work is really quite pathetic and it has left me feeling ill more than once.