F-Secure just announced that a remote exploit vulnerability has been found in the Skype chat client. People are advised to update immediately.
I know a lot of people on my flist use Skype regularly, so I wanted to make sure and point it out.
Tag: computers Page 2 of 3
What a fun weekend. A little dabbling in technology, a little trip to the past…
First of all, happy birthday to one of my dear faraway sweethearts, maedbh7! *hugs and kisses*
Thanks to everyone for the hugs and well wishes on Tuesday. The day really did get better after lunch, and by the time I got home I was feeling pretty human.
Spent the evening installing the new PSU I bought to replace the suspected bad one which had rendered my computer dead. I was gratified that after swapping them out and connecting everything up, that it sprang back to life as if noting happened. Yay!
Wednesday did turn out to be a better day, despite having to get up very very early to move a couple of servers from our office to the NOC. See, now that we’re pretty much entirely hosting our services over there, there’s no need to spend thousands of dollars on a 45mb/s DS3 pipe to this building, but we did still have two machines over here that needed to be over there. Due to coordination required on the second of these, we moved the first one at 7am, and the second one at 10:30am. Fortunately, neither causes any sort of customer outage, so we didn’t have to rush about madly trying to minimize the downtime (if they had, it’d likely have been a 3am sort of thing).
After work, which ended a little early thanks to the early start, I drove over to Athens to collect khaosworks, who is staying with us for a couple of days until he flies to England en route to Singapore for the summer. We got back to Alpharetta about 6:30, waited for kitanzi to get home, and then went to dinner at Roadhouse Grill.
When we got home, we settled down to watch the first episode of Season 4 of Coupling, which Terence had downloaded from USENET. (May I pause here to say, simply, I *love* the Internet?). There’s a new character to fill the absence left by the departure of Richard Coyle, which is unfortunate, but we’ll see how he turns out. This wasn’t the best episode of Coupling ever ever, but it was very funny and we enjoyed it quite a lot.
Today is being a slightly quiet and I consider this a good thing.
Thanks to everyone for the hugs and words of encouragement. After lunch things did calm down a bit and my headache finally went away (lending credence to the theory that it was a blood sugar problem).
Also in good news, I picked up a new 500w power supply at Micro Centre while I was out at lunch, and installed it when I got home. It definitely turned out to be the problem, as my system sprang to life immediately after this swap was made.
Tomorrow will be a long day, but I dare hope it will be a better one. 🙂
You have days. Some days are good. Today, not so much.
We went out last night and spent some time with bedlamhouse and ladyat celebrating their daughter’s graduation from Emory University. That was a lot of fun. I even watched a basketball game, something I don’t think I’ve done with any real amount of interest since NC State won the NCAA championship in 1983. Ok, I exaggerate. But not by much. 🙂
This morning, however…
I woke up with a splitting headache. Given that I had exactly one beer last night, I don’t think I can claim it was drinking, though given the huge piece of cake I ate and other sugar-laden things, it’s possible it was blood sugar related. As I type this at nearly 1pm, it’s still not really gone away, though painkillers are helping manage it.
So I got up, grabbed some advil, and then went out to check my e-mail.
And my computer was dead. The button on the front doesn’t respond at all. The fan isn’t turning, though there is a linklight on the NIC, so I’m pretty sure the power supply conked out. Not a huge fix, but annoying. See, for all that I tend to be up early in the morning, I’m not *really* a morning person. I fake it well, as long as I can follow my routines and rituals in the morning, and having those disrupted makes me cranky. I jumped onto Kitanzi‘s computer to quickly check my e-mail and discovered that buy.com, from whom I had yesterday ordered an SD card from because they sent me an e-mail quoting a fantastic price (256mb for $40.99 after rebate), had sent me an e-mail cancelling my order because the manufacturer had apparently discontinued the product without their knowledge. This did not add to my happiness level.
So I took a shower and headed into work. While halfway through my morning meeting, I got a call from one of my guys that the Win2000 webserver had died halfway through a reboot and could not be reached remotely. Which meant having to drive over to the data centre to reboot it. So I went and did, and came back, picking up lunch on the way. I’ll probably have to go over there again this afternoon too.
Through all of this, I’ve been scatterbrained and unfocused and feeling just a bit ill.
Not a good day, so far. Hopefully, the afternoon and evening will be better.
All too often, when someone writes about an interaction with a tech support organization, it’s to vent. So it’s only fair to write about good experiences as well.
If you’ve ever had a problem with transferring text from an application like Microsoft Word to an all-text medium, due to Word’s fetish with “smart quotes” and other silliness, check out The Character Cleaner, which will convert the special characters into straight-text suitable for using on webpages.
(Found via jimhenleyrss)
Once upon a time, I took a lot of photographs. Whenever I go somewhere with a descent camera, I tend to snap off a lot of pictures, because I enjoy it. And when I get home, I put them on my webpage.
What I’ve always been really bad about is actually going through and captioning them, and providing thumbnails, and all the other things that really make a photo archive usable by, say, people who aren’t me. It was always one of those “things to get around to” that I never got around to.
Well, some time ago,
Wow.
No, let me make this clear…
WOW!
The software was everything I wanted and more. It took a couple of hours to get working, mostly having to do with upgrading PHP and Apache on my server and installing several graphics manipulation packages for the program to do its magic. But once it was working, it was amazing. It automatically generates thumbnail pages, in a grid sized to your choosing. You can manipulate images on the fly, rotating them, resizing them, reordering them, however you like. If you want to remove a shot, just click on the “delete photo” button, confirm your choice, and its gone, and the thumbnails are regenerated to get rid of the gap. I was impressed.
The first batch of photos I set up were the shots I took at the Quinze Filk Festival last October. Those had seen these before will know that there were a large number of completely useless shots mixed in with some that were rather good. Once they’d been imported into Gallery, kitanzi went through all 900 shots and threw away nearly half of them. There’s still some that are fuzzy or blurred, but the overall set is quite watchable. (And now needs to be captioned.).
The program managed uploading pictures as well, so it can be used to completely take over the management of this entire set of my webpage. You can even enable it to allow visitors to leave comments on pictures, so they can help with captioning, or just giving feedback on your photography.
I’m very happy. If you want to see the whole archive, go here. Note that large sections of these photos STILL aren’t captioned. Its the ongoing project. But the photos are all there.
Now, I just need a new camera. I was lusting after the new 8 megapixel cameras while browsing at Circuit City last night, though the reviews I read on the Sony DSC-F828 lead me to believe it’s not quite mature enough to spend that kind of money. I am thinking strongly about the Canon G5, which fits much more easily into my budget. Then I can take a few thousand MORE photos for my website.
bounce Happy ACat!
From epi_lj, I find that quislibet has translated a large portion of Sir Mix-a-lot‘s seminal musing on caliphygian bounty into Latin
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I just got another one of those annoying “We protected you from a virus!” emails. The thing that made this one noteworthy, though, was the oddity of its report. It starts by saying it wanted to warn me “that the e-mail sent by <not disclosed> to <not disclosed> is infected with virus”. It then proceeds to give two blocks of instruction, headed “If you are the sender” and “if you are the recipient”. Er, I’m not sure: am I <not disclosed>, or am I <not disclosed>. If only technology wasn’t so confusing…
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Shout out to my pal Graham — welcome to LJ, musicmutt!
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Happy birthday to the seriously cute magid!
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Lots of cute usericons out there, but this one nearly made soda come out of my nose (courtesy of dpaul007)
An interview with Don Woods, one of the original authors of the Adventure text game!
Thanks to hitchhiker for the link!