Google has released their Zeitgeist 2005. Zeitgeist is German and would translate roughly as “spirit of the times”. The idea is to give a snapshot of what people are thinking about and searching for over the course of the last year.
They’ve done some interesting graphs as well of search terms when events happen.
One of the things about running KDE in linux is it can be a big resource grabber and be slow starting. By contrast “light” window managers can be up and running in a relative flash (xfce). OSnews has a story on SUSE/Novell KDe developers that have managed to get down to 4-5 second start time for KDE (which is fairly impressive.) Here are a few of their blog entries on the matter.
I’m finding a bit more about the upcoming WordPress 2.0 release. I haven’t had time to test the RC in the 5 minutes since the last post, but I have been able to read a few sites. It looks like most of the big changes are “under the hood”, which sounds promising. It sounds as though more interesting extensions might be more easily do-able…
I see in the dashboard that the third and (last?) release candidate for WordPress 2.0 is officially out. There is word that the final may come Wednesday or Thursday of this week. I haven’t had much time to see what features may be new… but if possible I may try it out this week. I don’t know of any security related problems with the current version that would require an urgent move.
Deep breath time. We’ve covered a lot of good topics and it’s important at this point to take a close look at what we’ve talked about and think. “Am I overwhelmed?” If so that’s fine. Maybe you don’t have enough time to think about all of this network security stuff. Maybe, no matter how hard you try it doesn’t make sense.
Ok, another reboot after the BHO cleaning. Things are a good deal more responsive now, less disc swapping going on. (I suspect that those three missing BHO entries may have been causing the slow down, but I don’t know.) Installing wintop so that processes can be monitored. Also, getting spybot S&D *(search and destroy) installed and copying update from disc. The system is pretty much won at this point, I don’t see anything running that I haven’t LET run at boot, everything that I had as suspect has been disabled, now it’s just a matter of cleaning up the remnants and leftovers.
Ok – Nvidia driver was an easy one, download the latest from nvidia.com stop the X server, run sh NIVIDIAlongfilename.run, hit enter a few times, wait and eventually…. restart the X server log in and glx hardware accelerated goodness awaits…. Really and truly that was simple (a lot simpler than what I had tried with the urpme/urpmi of the nvidia rpms.) I should have just done that when the urpmi didn’t seem to have things working.
The SecurityFix is reporting on a security breech at reevesnamepins.com a company that supplies (among others) law enforcement personnel. Apparently, CardCops (which monitors for possible stolen data), discovered names and addresses of several law enforcement officers from across the country. The common denominator seemed to be recent orders at reevesnamepins.com and the company has confirmed a recent security breech.
It’s not often that I get to talk about some of my hobbies on this site. The Genealogy sites are reserved for one of those hobbies, but time certainly takes it’s toll and frankly it’s hard to have much time for my hobbies these days. One of those that I’ve developed in the last few years is shortwave radio listening. I’ve mentioned a software program that can help you use nternet resources to find programming to tune in to (or figure out what you heard.) I’ve talked about my favorite radio (the Sony ICF-SW7600GR).
This one is going to be tougher. Of what we’ve looked at so far this will probably take more work and learning than any of the others. The good news is, depending on your situation you may need to do less here. IF you have decided that your pc (or network) has ports open to the outside world, so that incoming connections can be listened for. You NEED to do this. For every service that is accessible from the outside world…