I’m putting this post up in case I lose the link to The Hunt For Gollum – fan made film – it looks to be about 45 minutes. I’ve been meaning to watch it for a while, I’m not usually into fan made films, but ……..

Ever had to determine if a site was really down or if it was just you that couldn’t reach it? If you have access to multiple computer networks you already have some ways to determine if it’s a problem with the site or just your connection, but…. there is a good online tool for that.

Down for everyone or just me

I’ve been using 1000BT switches here for a year or more now, but just today have I run across the need to make a crossover cable. Many 1000BT (*gigabit ethernet) devices support “auto-mdix” which basically means a direct interconnect no longer needs a crossover cable. However, some devices don’t do this and it looks as though the crossover style is a bit different than that of the older 10/100 cables. (Since all 4 pairs are used, all four pairs have to be reversed…)

Anyway, here is the page I used as a model.

Essentially one end of the cable is white-orange/orange white-green/blue white-blue/green white-brown/brown and the other end is white-green/green white-orange/white-brown brown/orange blue/white-blue (I haven’t tested this yet – will update when that’s done.) Although – that seems to be backed up by this wikipedia page.

Php list is a great mailing list manage package. But, from time to time you already have a list of users and want to import without requiring everyone to go through phplists web based signup process.

So… this document can give you a walkthrough of how to do it.

I usually try to avoid talking about politics here really because I don’t want this to be a political blog. I am going to make an exception right now to talk about a concept. I’m going to try to stay out of the party/candidate discussion, but just want to make a question on this idea. I’ve been bothered though the last few weeks about some things I’ve heard said that no one, NO one I’m hearing on EITHER side disputing. It bothers me because I think it runs contrary to just WHAT we should be voting for and what elections are about. Now, I’m trying to make this discussion not about one candidate or the other, but to the concept behind this argument.

What I’m talking about is that I’ve heard some people suggest that “many middle class voters vote against their self interest” when choosing one candidate or another because the other candidates policies are in their “self interest”. Self interest? SELF interest?

Hmmm… I thought we were voting for what is right for THE COUNTRY. It’s in MY self interest to vote for somebody that says everyone should mail me $100. Sure. But it’s NOT RIGHT! Now, a lot of times voting for what is in your own best interest also coincides with what you think is in the country’s best interest. Obviously though, that’s not always the case. Sometimes what is best for the country as a whole does not benefit you nearly as much as those policies that might be damaging to the country and only personally beneficial.

Is it that we have become so narcissistic and self absorbed that the greater good doesn’t matter, only what WEh get out of the deal?

What do you think?

We’re back up after a very strange outage. The 500 internal server error was because our .htaccess file was sideways.

What I mean by sideways is that part of a line had been truncated which led to an incorrect htaccess rule and all sorts of error pages thrown up.

Interestingly the only thing happening prior to the first errors was a page edit here in Wordpress. I updated my dd-wrt page last night right before the errors started getting tossed up. Is it possible that wordpress 2.6.3 stomped on my htaccess??? Don’t know, but we’re back up now.

Yesterday news broke of an out of cycle security patch for Windows. The bulletin is available from Microsoft. Apparently the vulnerability was in the Windows Server service (XP, 2003, 2000, 2008, Vista ALL affected though regardless of server/workstation/client/desktop/etc…). The RPC handling (remote procedure call) is the achilles heel this time around. It sounds as though as many as 100 instances of this flaw being exploited had been seen in the wild, but use was increasing which prompted the out of cycle release. This is the kind of vulnerability that could be exploited by a worm that could give rise to a worm reminiscent of the Blaster Worm. (Worms are self-replicating viruses that spread over networks without user intervention.)

The telegraph brings us this survey which claims that 10:04 PM is the most creative time of day. To contrast that 4:33PM is the least creative time. It’s not clear HOW exactly the survey was conducted, but apparently I would be among the 25% of people that burn the midnight oil working on their ideas… What I find more interesting is that most people lose their creative ideas by failing to write them down!!! (Carry a small notebook with you, you’ll be glad to have it.)

Interestingly I’m writing this as we’re approaching 10:04PM local time!! So, what do you think – what is the most creative time of day? (Comments are Open

How many online backup solutions ARE there now? Anyway I’ve seen another cross platform solution in JungleDisk. It’s available for Windows/Mac and Linux and uses Amazon.com’s storage as a backend. The software itself is free you just pay for the storage you make use of. (15 cents per GB using Amazon’s S3 service.)

That’s not bad considering that the Amazon S3 storage should be fairly reliably backed up. I’ve noticed several other startups making use of S3 as their backend recently including some video delivery services.

I’ve always had more than a passing interest in astronomy and physics… so when I found reference to this video series explaining how to visualize four spatial dimensions. Multiple spatial dimensions are the domain of math, but I’ve always suspected that the universe has 4 spatial dimensions… anyway interesting stuff to think about.