I’m such a sellout. But hey… I tried out Google Ads on my Hampsterdance page about a month ago and I’ve ALREADY MADE OVER $0.74 in clickthru advertising!! Hampsterdance is the most popular link on my whole site so I don’t expect to rake in quite so much from the rest of the site.. but hey.

The ads appear in the right column, below my links and such.

2-5-04 update: I removed them from my blog. It just doesn’t seem right.

If Zonealarm says, “Generic Host Process for Win32 Services is trying to access the internet”, “Validation: Not available in ZoneAlarm”, “Application:svchost.exe” you should Allow it to, and Remember this setting.

The Generic Host Process is a good program from Microsoft. Google for it to find out more.

I can’t tell but I think this switch sometimes flips to “Deny” on it’s own, which is a bad thing because then the computer will have no internet access. 2 clients have told me, “I don’t know, I don’t think I denyed it.” Comments?

This happened on Zonealarm 5.5.062.004

I think I got myself sick by not cooking these chicken patty things enough. :-( My stomach is unhappy, I’m dizzy and most unnerving, I’ve got general muscle weakness. It took me a while to figure out that last one because normally when I’m sick (a cold or something) I have joint pain. After getting up and flopping back into bed several times with this new weird feeling I spent the effort to figure out what the heck was wrong.

Blech.

And what the hell is with me. I’m over 30 and I still don’t know how to cook chicken safely? I’m so dumb.

And sick.

I feel better now than I did 3 hours ago so I’ll just let it run its course. I had to cancel a Computer Guy session because I didn’t feel well enough to drive. I kept envisioning myself driving along and throwing up on the windshield. Then I couldn’t see out the front and I’d crash and not feel up to actually getting out of the car. And then the car would catch fire and I’d burn up :-(. I guess my imagination hasn’t been dulled by this illness.

Blech.

1-21-05 Update: I’m feeling much better. It’s kind of weird to not eat for 24 hours and not feel the worse for it. Actually, it’s a bit refreshing.

Picasa 2.0 kicks butt. I found the original Picasa a few years ago and loved it. I’ve only been playing with the latest version for an hour or so but it looks like they’ve cleaned up all the shortcomings of the original software and then some. And the best part is, it’s FREE! Google bought the Picasa company and is giving it all away. It looks like their strategy is to get ahead by being a part of the picture making process and being a preferred (but not required) vendor for some photo related services. Darn it, they hope to get ahead by being the best. And I think it might just work.

Get Picasa.

PS. I want to know who wrote the readme.htm. It is wonderfuly written. Uplifting, conversational, tremendously informative, witty without being smarmy, well laid out… The damn thing is a model of what a readme should be.

I include the readme after the cut.

Continue reading ‘Picasa 2: goodness’ »

Halflife 2 is an AMAZING game.

First, the realism is just… unreal. I could gush about that for a long time. The physics are so realistic and the texturemaps and polygons and… [gush gush]

The gameplay is terrific too. I’m occationally a little miffed that the game designers push me “down the tube” in a linear fashion, but I forgive them for the plots they put me into. I’m put in the place of a reluctant hero, struggling to survive and occationally kicking some bad-guy butt.

I’ve tried a few times to write a story about my adventures… but they just don’t hold a candle to the experience of actually being there. Yow, I just said that I was “actually” in a place that doesn’t exist. Metaverse, here we come!

This works great. Stolen from here.

Cygwin + Rxvt

I’ve been playing around with Cygwin since I’m forced to run WinXP on my work laptop. Cygwin’s great, I’ve used it on and off since when it was GNU-Win32 by Cygnus, but there’s a lot of improvements to it in the last year or two.

One of the things that’s irritated me is that the default console uses the cmd.exe shell as a base – makes it hard to copy + paste with the mouse, among other things. After some effort, I found the right combination of tweaks to get Rxvt working as a decent console in Cygwin.

[You’ll of course have to install Rxvt from your favorite Cygwin mirror. – Lee]

Step 1: Edit ~/.Xdefaults – the settings below create an 80×80 terminal window with a deep-blue-black background and yellow-white text (looks nice, easy on the eyes) and assign VIM-style color codes:

(see comment 6. A change might be needed to this code. I haven’t tested it yet but you might need it. Tell me if it works for you please)

! ~/.Xdefaults - X default resource settings
Rxvt*geometry: 80x80
Rxvt*background: #000020
Rxvt*foreground: #ffffbf
!Rxvt*borderColor: Blue
!Rxvt*scrollColor: Blue
!Rxvt*troughColor: Gray
Rxvt*scrollBar: True
Rxvt*scrollBar_right: True
Rxvt*font: Lucida Console-12
Rxvt*SaveLines: 2000
Rxvt*loginShell: True
! VIM-like colors
Rxvt*color0: #000000
Rxvt*color1: #FFFFFF
Rxvt*color2: #00A800
Rxvt*color3: #FFFF00
Rxvt*color4: #0000A8
Rxvt*color5: #A800A8
Rxvt*color6: #00A8A8
Rxvt*color7: #D8D8D8
Rxvt*color8: #000000
Rxvt*color9: #FFFFFF
Rxvt*color10: #00A800
Rxvt*color11: #FFFF00
Rxvt*color12: #0000A8
Rxvt*color13: #A800A8
Rxvt*color14: #00A8A8
Rxvt*color15: #D8D8D8
! eof


Step 2: Modify your c:cygwincygwin.bat to invoke your shiny new Rxvt instead of cmd.exe:

@echo off
C:
chdir C:cygwinbin
set EDITOR=vi
set VISUAL=vi
set CYGWIN=codepage:oem tty binmode title
rxvt -e bash --login -i

From IEEE Spectrum Magazine, January 2005

THEN THERE’S THE INTERNET’S utility for planning and coordination. There are any number of sophisticated tools for collaboration, plus the obvious ones of e-mail, instant messaging, and chat rooms. It’s easy to build a new, temporary identity and post entries from public Internet kiosks and cafes. There are plenty of ways to hide or encrypt messages, or terrorists can just speak obliquely.

Weimann says that Mohammed Atta’s final message to his fellow 9/11 terrorists was: “The semester begins in three more weeks. We’ve obtained 19 confirmations for studies in the faculty of law, the faculty of urban planning, the faculty of fine arts, and the faculty of engineering.” Weimann believes the talk of various “faculties” referred to specific facilities, such as the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Sifting the plans from the chatter is perhaps law enforcement’s greatest task.

Here it is. You can find new blog entries on my new blog.

I installed Bittorrent on my spenix.com account. I may be volunteering a little technical help in distributing this year’s Burning Man Screen Saver for The Burning Man Screen Saver Project.

I’m a bit excited since I submitted about 15 photos of my own to this year’s project. The Vault of Heaven screen saver is due out in April or so.

On a side note, if you have any large files you need distributed, I’m now your go-to guy!

4-10-05 update. The Screen Saver doesn’t need Bittorrent. Oh well.

This is why: http://livejournal.com/

Temporarily Unavailable

LiveJournal is currently down due to a massive power failure at our data center. We’ll provide updates at /powerloss/ as they’re available.

Continue reading ‘Why I run my own blog: Livejournal outage’ »