crazyskillsbloginitiative

Symantec has tossed me a copy of Norton Internet Security as a thank you for hosting the Windows 7 launch party.

Usually, I wouldn’t consider running a Symantec product on my system, but I figured I’d give this one a shot to see if it is one that I would recommend. Well, I started the process last night at 10, and let me tell you - it was a process. Mostly just because I registered for NIS using a different address than I gave Microsoft for the launch party. So that took awhile, but I have to say, I went to symantec.com and chatted with a representative who eventually really took care of the problem and gave me the registration key I needed.

Ahh but the trouble didn’t end there. I consider myself somewhat experienced in working with firewalls and such, but I just couldn’t get certain programs to run and connect properly to servers.

The trick, as it turns out, was that NIS and Webroot do NOT get along. Really, NIS has adware, spyware and virus protection as well as the firewall, so Webroot is not really needed. But *bam!* I uninstalled Webroot and everybody started working. So the two do not get along.

Once I got this issue resolved, everything is running great. The rules I created are doing what is expected of them and the running processes of NIS are using about 2% of my processors, which is fine by me - I have power to spare.

So, a couple of things: If you are running a low-powered PC, I don’t know that I would recommend NIS as it does have a lot of “features” and does use processing resources continuously. Also, if you have a different firewall, I’d probably recommend Webroot for your spyware, adware, malware, virus protection needs. If you need a fully-featured suite of all of this and more, and have the processing power to spare, NIS 2010 seems like a strong choice.

“Some date the dawn of the net to September 12, 1969, when a team of engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) connected the first two machines on the first node of ARPAnet, the US Department of Defense-funded network that eventually morphed into the modern interwebs. But others — including Professor Leonard Kleinrock, who led that engineering team — peg the birthday to October 29, when the first message was sent between the remote nodes. ‘That’s the day,’ Kleinrock tells The Reg, ‘the internet uttered its first words.’ …A 50kbps AT&T pipe connected the UCLA and SRI nodes, and the first message sent was the word ‘log’ — or at least that was the idea. UCLA would send the ‘log’ and SRI would respond with ‘in.’ But after UCLA typed the ‘l’ and the ‘o,’ the ‘g’ caused a memory overflow on the SRI IMP. … ‘So the first message was “Lo,” as in “Lo and Behold,”‘ Kleinrock says. ‘We couldn’t have asked for a better message — and we didn’t plan it.’”

I am not really sure how to go about this. There was a time, right around the time when the Challenger exploded (1986) when I thought the space program was pretty cool. You know? You have a government and private organizations investing in a program to explore the vast regions of space - probably eventually with the goal of colonizing other planets or something.

But am I the only one who thinks this is a ridiculous waste of time and money? When you have a space program which costs the average American taxpayer 67 gazillion dollars a year and a national deficit of $11,904,908,462,105 as of 28 Oct 2009 at 07:55:47 PM GMT, it just seems like a luxury we can’t afford. I mean has there really been any positive monetary gains as a result of our space program? If there have been, please let me know.

Look, I think the ideas of colonizing other planets, discovering we’re not alone in the universe are pretty cool, but that’s not what we’re doing. We’re just paying repeated visits to a dead rock and building and modifying a space station that doesn’t do anybody any damn good either.

Next time we have trillions just laying around after we pay our debts and really do something about our health care system, then what the hell - let’s explore space. But until then, please stop wasting my money.

Ok so I do know what it is - I put together a “rock” playlist on my AppleTV. And it includes my favorites of the genre. Including such popular favorites as Led Zepplin and Rancid but also personal favs from a time gone by in the local music scene, Salvador Deli, the Spoo Monkeys and Shrug. It’s some great stuff. I so much enjoy listening to this. I just don’t get what “people” want in music. And by people I mean the majority. Why is pop culture so pathetic when really talented musicians have to have real jobs?

Yeah. No I’m not talking about a place for a tasty sandwich. I mean Machel Hicks and Ronnie Hall (and at times various talents such as the bassist Michael Christmas.) This, to this date, is some of my favorite music I have ever heard. I am fortunate to have done work with the band back in the 90’s and they were cool enough to burn me a full CD of unreleased stuff. Oh man. If I could have done more to see to it that they would have the exposure they needed to really “make it big,” I would have. Hell, who knows, they might be still together as the “earth’s mightiest band.” I miss these folks. Ronnie, Machel, I wish you both well - in whatever your endeavors these days.

Peace,

Orb

engadget.com/2009/10/26/brother-nec-look-to-invade-your-retinas-next-year [engadget.com]

Engadget.com reports today that NEC is developing a new type of computer display, one which beams an image directly onto your retina using lasers. This image will appear to be about a meter in front of you and be about 10cm wide.

You may have heard, GeoCities is shutting down today. To commemorate the occasion, one of my favorite sites, xkcd.com [xkcd.com] has redone their site in true 1995 fashion. You’ve got to see it!

As it turns out, earlier reports of the world ending in 2012 were incorrect and based on a misunderstanding possibly caused by poor translation. The date we all need to fear is now December 23, 2220.

So.. It has been a long while since I have even thought of this.. but back in the day, I remember creating a RAM disk - probably 256k in size or something - I’m telling you, it was way back in the day - but it seemed to me that the principle would still hold true. As of the time of this writing, I have 8G of RAM (out of a possible 16 limited by the mainboard), no swapfile and a 4G RAMdisk, leaving me with 4Gof usable RAM for the system.

You might be asking yourself, “Why?” Well, I’ll tell you. Speed. I have loaded Battlefield 2142 and Firefox both onto the RAMdisk, as well as Firefox’s cache folder and the temp and tmp folders of Windows 7, and it is really flippin fast!

The instructions I used (more or less) are on this page [ocztechnologyforum.com] of the OCZ Forums. The nice thing about using this method and application is that it saves the contents of your RAM disk when you shutdown your machine and then loads it back onto it when you start up. This does, however, cause the machine to take an extra 10-20 seconds to start up and shut down (with a 4G RAM disk.) The difference in the performance of the applications on the RAM disk is well worth it though. And honestly, how often do you reboot or shut off your machine?

You will notice there are other RAM disk softwares out there, some costing as much as $100 or more, but if you follow these instructions given here, it is all free.

So there you have it. I wouldn’t do this with a main production machine without reading up on it some first, but it is treating me quite well.

Have fun; take care; see ya next time.

-Orb

German shepherds: 1.1 hectares, compared with 0.41ha for a large SUV

Cats: 0.15ha (slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf).

Hamsters: 0.014ha (two of them equate to a medium-sized plasma TV).

Goldfish: 0.00034ha (an eco-finprint equal to two cellphones).

For more information, read the full article on New Scientist [newscientist.com]

So. Seems the good ol Federal Government decided to host an event where they gave out H1N1 vaccines. It was today up at the Butler County Fairgrounds. Yeah, so we arrived about 9 (the event began @ 10) and there were quite probably a thousand people there or maybe more.. It’s hard to tell when you’re talking about so many people and you can’t see them all. We figured we’d be early, get the vaccine and be back home in time to get back to work / make my 3:30 appt today. We waited about two hours and the end of the line, the supposed building where they actually were giving out the vaccines, was nowhere in sight. Oh but it gets better. Then it started raining. And yeah it’’s October 23, so it’s a little chilly too (upper 50’s so not too bad) and then to top it all off, we got back to the car to find us parked in. People had parked way too close to us on all sides. Anyway, I was determined to make my 3:30 (which I will be able to now, btw) so I inched back and forth, by braille, and eventually freed my poor automobile.

The sad part was that they just appeared to be nowhere near prepared for the turnout they had. We saw probably two guys wearing reflective vests trying to show people parking spots, but that is chaos when faced with how many people turned out for the event. When we left, they had closed off the entrances to the fairgrounds and weren’t letting anyone else in.

I can appreciate that they wanted to offer the vaccine (regulate?) to everyone and therefore assumed Federal control of the event, but if I had to say, they had no idea what to do with the number of people who showed up. There was [i]a[/i] cop there too, but he was just sitting in his car out of the rain like a true public servant.