I was hax0red
I was looking through my English notebook trying to find where I wrote down the requirements for our project. The first thing I found was an old paper that I would have used to study for a test on a book involving death, salesmen, and New England. The notes were not written by me.. well the first 1.5 lines were. My physics binder was also hacked and covered in subliminal messages, some that were not so subliminal. The most common phrases/words throughout the binder were "I bring you fire", "h4x0r3d", and "Google". Can anyone guess who the potato that did this to me was? He seems to be the type that likes leaving clues and messages during his hacking. Unfortunately those types tend to be the ones that get caught most because they end up leaving too many clues.
Completely unrelated to the above: I downloaded the whole phrack archive, renamed them all to .txt and put them on my iRiver to read in class when I get bored. phrack.com is blocked for mentioning the word hacking and although there are many mirrored archives of phrack most of them are gzipped tarballs which Windows can't unzip... why XP why?!
image001.jpg, image002.jpg, image001.txt, image002.txt
Linux 2.6.10 works!
I got my new kernel working. I now have a good .config file that has been fixed so that USB works, LAN works, and I can actually see output on my monitor in the terminal. All I need to do now is strip the kernel down as far as possible to make a faster system that is customized for my liking. I'll take out things that I won't be needing anytime soon like Firewire support etc. I'll keep a backup bulky kernel to boot into if I ever end up needing support for something in an emergency though.
The best news, my iRiver works! At the moment all I have on it is Queen, Emerson, Lake, & Palmer, Bob Segar, Eric Clapton, and The Strokes. As I rip more CDs and think of more artists I'll be putting more on. The sound quality is amazing. I like the WOW feature that emulates surround sound in headphones. Also the headphones that we bought from iriver (not the ones included with it) sound perfect. The only thing bad about them is that when you walk you hear a whistling because they arn't the big bulky kind with sides. Although that is also a good thing because they arn't the big bulky kind that are uncomfortable.
My favorite radio station sounds crystal clear on my iRiver. I can't figure out why they didn't add AM support also though. I'd like to be able to listen to 640AM weekends from 12:00 - 15:00, I'm curious because I've never remembered to tune in and haven't heard Laporte talk in almost a year now.
Linux 2.6.10
if(`date +%j`>358 && `date +%Y`>2003){$santa="Torvalds";}
I downloaded Linus' holiday gift last night and attempted to compile and install my first kernel. I had some minor issues at first (no LAN, video drivers messed, etc) which I solved. I only have one gripe left, in the process of fixing the other problems I managed to "break" the ability to use USB disk drives. I cannot use my new iRiver (more on that later) or my flash stick. The strange part is I can't figure out what did it and I don't think the problem is in the USB section of the kernel. I'll get it up eventually. I can't wait to listen to all the albums I got.
As you can probably tell by my now almost empty wish list on Froogle I received many many music albums for Christmas. My current collection now includes Steppenwolf, Led Zeppelin, Blue Oyster Cult, Eagles, Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, CCR, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Styx, Starship, Rolling Stones, Cars, Yes, Bob Segar, Black Sabbath, Doors, Cake, U2, and White Stripes. (I didn't get those all for Chistmas.. that is my current collection)
Thought from the sky: how does the name blogg vorbis sound? Cheazy? Ramble On better?
all we are is dust in the wind
Ever feel like you are being watched? Is your online presence bigger than you? Then buy lawyer-in-a-can and sue the world!
Every month or so I end up finding another dark little corner of cyberspace (excuse my Canadish) where my name or alias lurks. Sometimes it's someone linking to me or it's words that I wrote but I was given no credit for it which is even weirder. At least I haven't given many people access to most of my accounts, otherwise I'd find myself saying things I never said and I may find my presence in places that even a grue would not venture into.
A related dilbert strip
There's a new gimp in town
Paint.NET is an image manipulation program for Windows made using Microsoft .NET's C#. Paint.NET is similar to the GIMP feature-wise but it has a very different look that is more similar to Adobe Photoshop. Hast brings up a good point that Paint.NET uses a MDI which makes it very difficult to use with a dual monitor setup. I still go for the GIMP because it is cross-os compatible and mainly because it is open source. I need to load up the old WINE and check this out though. More updates on my findings later maybe.
Fixing A Hole
I just found ripperX which is a great little CD ripping program that seemed to work fine but I think I broke it with one album somehow... not sure. Until I fix it somehow I'll be using Sound Juicer as usual. I recently became interested in Space Elevators. The concept of them has been around for a long long time. There was a Slashdot post on the topic recently and a Google Group on it. It is an interesting real-life physics problem that has not yet been solved.
Did you know John Lennon wanted Jesus, Ghandi, and Hitler to appear on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Album? Have some sympathy and some taste.
I may as well make this post a tad bit more bloated by asking for suggestions to rename my blog. I'm ready to just name it Rambl3 0n or something of the sort.
Only in California
California has had many great things. We had the Eagles with their California rock. We have cities like Los Angeles, San Fransisco, and San Diego. We have farms, wilderness, beaches, and the Sierra Nevada. We also have the Governator, El Camino Real, and the 5. California is also known for crazy laws.
Rock & Roll Obsession
I have been looking at RollingStones magazine 500 Greatest Albums of All Time for a few days now. I just found out they made a 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Looking at the songs on the list brings music to my ears. About half of the first 100 are on my absolute favorite songs that I put on my favorite mix albums.
Imagine by John Lennon makes me feel as if I know the man. Hey Jude, Yesterday, and Let it Be are just ... well they are. Purple Haze is what keeps Hendrix alive. Day in the Life, Sympathy for the Devil, Light my Fire, and Stairway to Heaven are so different that they can't be compared at all. Hotel California is the best recording known to man kind and All Along the watchtower reminds me of the jester and the thief. I'm just going to stop talking now before I get to the second hundred out of five.
This is a very good example of why I want to name my blog "Ramble On." I need more suggestions for names though because "Ramble On" doesn't have a techie twist which I am looking for. It does however quote a very good song.
Flac to Ogg Converter
Over the summer I updated Loran Hughes' mp3ogg shell script to make version 2.0.6. The script converts mp3 files to ogg files while preserving the ID3 tags. The script currently has the capability to convert a whole directory or just one file.
Yesterday I found Jason Buberel's perl script that uses a Linux emulator to convert flac files to ogg files. I converted the script to a Linux version which was very easy since it used a Linux emulator before. Version 1.0.0 can convert a whole directory that must be specified as a variable. No tags are dealt with currently and the script currently works similarly to mp3ogg. mp3ogg converts the mp3 files to wavs and then to ogg files whereas flacogg converts the flac files directly to oggs. The quality of the files converted with flacogg must be changed with a variable. I am trying to keep the code looking consistent in flacogg by using Allman style indentations (see Jargon file).
Download flacogg
Shopping in Cyberspace
I've been shopping online recently for Christmas presents. I had an interesting experience getting (and not getting) Quake III Team Arena, only to realize that I needed Quake III Arena for it to work. I bought Relentless Little Big Adventure for mikrasov from a small company through Amazon. When I received the package it instead included a sealed version of Jeopardy. I sent an email to the company and they replied promptly with a very sincere apology. They were afraid that it was not human error which would mean that their automatic databasing system had become corrupted.
The company told me I could keep Jeopardy and they shipped me another package with the game I had ordered and some "bonus" CDs. The packaged included Relentless Little Big Adventure, NHL 2000, Nuclear Somethingorother, Somethingorother Crimes, a blank-looking unlabled CD-R which contained the instructions for the game I ordered, and some racing game. I threw in 4 techno CDs and called it a Christmas present. Only one of the techno CDs was illegally pirated because the others were legally free music by Strojovna on MagnaTune.
I have to give William Gibson credit for coining the term "cyberspace" which I noticed is used on the Road Runner manuel that I threw away a few days ago. Read Neuromancer to find out where half of the plotline and terms used in The Matrix came from
Doors and Windows
"People are Strange." I left Windows June 4 for Fedora Core 2. I switched to Slackware 10 around September 15. I just realized that in the last three months I haven't booted into Windows at all besides at LAN parties when I play Quake III (which I don't have for Linux yet). After seeing my parents' problems in Windows everyday and after not being able to fix a good portion of their problems I have decided that I am very lucky.
I've sent mail directly from my computer using sendmail when my smtp server on my website was being tempermental. Windows does not have anything even similar to this, in fact many Windows users reading this may not even understand the concept of the simple program I just mentioned. I used whois today to find information on a website for someone and I used a perl script today (rather than a shell script) to solve a problem I had. I don't think Windows even has the capability to execute perl scripts like batch files and even if it does you have to hassle with installing perl to do so.
I can use nmap whenever I want or run a command like sed or grep to find/replace text in files easily. I would need to download a program in Windows to do this same thing. In fact I had to download GNUWin32's port of sed to accomplish the very simple task of converting instances of "%20"'s in a string to spaces because this is apparently not possible to do in DOS. Sorry for the Linux rambling. I just realized how lucky I am now. Thanks Geri for introducing me to Mandrake, Redhat, and Debian.
How to beat the system.. and the man
I found a way to get around paying to "addon" a domain to your hosting. Simply change the .htaccess in the main public_html directory. Example:
RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} treyhunner.com
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !trey/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ trey/$1 [L]
The above will redirect all incoming HTTP traffic via the treyhunner.com domain to the trey directory. This will essentially seamlessly treat trey/ as the main directory for treyhunner.com for HTTP purposes.
By the way, I'm thinking of changing the name of the blog. I'll take suggestions. Thusfar I've thought of /dev/SpaceElevator, chmod -R +r *, 6.67300 × 10-11, 6.02214199 × 1023, Schrodinger Life, and Paradoxical Chaos. (I'm making some of these up right now)
Thou Shall Not Like Piracy
A student of Richland High School wrote an essay about how piracy is a good thing for the music industry. He happened to get an F on this essay and blames it on his teacher's views against piracy. His paper was an average paper in my opinion. It definitely shouldn't have received an F, I would say a B or an A for a normal level English class.
I actually find it more odd that his schools mascot is a bomber. Richland High School is the proud home of the bombers. Do they train their students to bomb communists, anarchists, and pirates? I would say this and this promote violence and make this school all the more controversial. Maybe this school should just be shut down and taken out of its misery.
Wonders of Wikipedia
I found out that the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, came out on my birthday. WorldWideWeb was made by Tim Berners on a NEXTSTEP platform. NEXTSTEP was a Unix-based operating system that created the ideas of a dock, real-time scrolling and window dragging, and many others. The GUI for NEXTSTEP looked similar to WINDOWMAKER.
My crazy binary finger counting system
I forgot to post about this... or maybe I subconsciously avoided posting about it because it is so strange. Basically I couldn't sleep one night and as random thoughts flew through my head as they usually do when I try to make my mind blank I had a strange thought that I latched onto for some reason. I realized that one could could count to 1023 on one's fingers which is much more efficient than the usual 10. The way you would do this is to use a binary system. Your thumb on your right hand has a value or 1, your right index finger 2, right middle finger 4, etc. I also realized that rude gestures could be represented in numbers. I had seen a shirt that used this concept with 4 being the middle finger. Asuming your left thumb is 32 then 132 would represent a doubly rude gesture. Some gestures that require certain positioning of the hand or motion could not be represented and therefore American sign language could not be converted to numbers.
"Two (10) riders were approching."
"I see the bad moon arisen"
I didn't realize Google Groups 2 Beta had such interesting groups. There is a Space Elevator group for people like me that like physics and find hi-tech beanstalks interesting. As Led Zeppelin might say it's like a spring clean for your green beans.
Today is sponsored by the word "Music"
Everytime that I look in the mirror
All these lines on my face gettin' clearer
The past is gone
It went by like dusk to dawn
Isn't that the way
Everybody's got their dues in life to pay
Those who wish to be
Must put aside the alienation
Get on with the fascination
The real relation
The underlying theme
I know what nobody knows
Where it comes and where it goes
I know it's everybody's sin
You got to lose to know how to win
Living in a fisheye lens
Caught in the camera eye
I have no heart to lie
I can’t pretend a stranger
Is a long-awaited friend
Half my life is in books' written pages
Live and learn from fools and from sages
You know it's true
All the things, come back to you
All the world’s indeed a stage
And we are merely players
Performers and portrayers
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage
Sing with me, sing for the year
Sing for the laugh and sing for the tear
Sing with me, if it's just for today
Maybe tomorrow the good Lord will take you away
Every other verse is from either Limelight by Rush or Dream On by Aerosmith
My Geekcode
My geekcode:
Version: 3.1
GCS d- s+: a--- C++ UL+++ P+++ L+++ E@ w++(+++) N++(+++) o? K- w-- O? M- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP- t 5? X R tv- b+ DI+ D G e- h !r y?
Decode it here
AntiG4TechTV is planning on buying TechTV!
AntiG4TechTV is planning on buying TechTV from G4! They are accepting donations to raise between 400 and 600 million dollars. This is the one thing that I would really like to have changed on tv. I used to watch TechTV with Leo and Patrick almost every day when it used to be 1.5 hours long. Then it went down to 1 hour long, then Leo left, then the merger, then Patrick left. Now most of the cast and crew is being gutted out and the Pulse cast is replacing them.
Go TechTV!
SandTrap is Progressing
I recently fixed some bugs in SandTrap, a perl script I made a while back. I had never really implemented certain features well and clearly documented them in the readme file and with comments. I am using SandTrap on the TPIT website now. The website is completely rendered in perl in the background and uses SSI to keep the .html extension.
My perl code has really progressed since July. I am now pretty confident with using MySQL in Perl scripts and I'm getting to know and understand the language much better. The more I understand it the better I like it. I've gotten used to the two types of concatination operators for numerical and string concatinations and I've become accustomed to using regular expressions to solve many problems.
Asia, Disease, and the Letter 'G'
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