Fairly boring retailer promo for Windows 386… until the 7 minute mark when the crack gets smoked:

• ntsecurity.nu - toolbox » This is a tool that lists processes in your Windows system and the ports each one listen on.
• Flatland: The Movie »
• www.virustotal.com » Virustotal offers a free service for scanning suspicious files using several antivirus engines.
• Building Games in Flash5 Part1: Player Movement and Fire »
• Auto-Tracing: How To Convert Bitmaps To Vector Drawings - Robin Good’s Latest News »
• Game Maker Pages »
• Welcome to the Build Your Campus in 3D Competition! » Simply model your school’s campus buildings in Google SketchUp, geo-reference them in Google Earth and submit them through this competition web site to earn lasting online glory and, for the winners, an all-expense-paid visit to Google.
• Store an entire image on a photon » Researchers at the University of Rochester have made an optics breakthrough that allows them to encode an entire image’s worth of data into a photon, slow the image down for storage, and then retrieve the image intact.
• Flash experiments, games, and tutorials »
• Create Flash Games using Flash MX Actions .fla source template provided »
• Macromedia Flash Games Tutorials »
• Extract image from background in photoshop »
• Toblo - Block-destroying CTF Action » Toblo is a free, fast-paced capture the flag game that has two teams using the world as weaponry, throwing bombs, and generally destroying things…
• Plextor exits CD DVD markets » Shinanokenshi (the parent company of Plextor) has decided to exit the market for consumer CD and DVD products. The Plextor brand name will remain for industry use products and digital playback units for the visually impaired.
• Guildmates.com » Find old and new guildmates from MMOs

Wordpress 2.1 codename “Ella” is out.

I usually upgrade right away, but this is a pretty major change, so I’m still trying to gauge whether all my plugins will work before I switch drzy over. Especially since I have slightly modified some of the files by hand.

edit: I took the plunge anyways. After all, backups are pretty easy to restore. The category-link merging has slightly messed up my left sidebar layout and the way I imagine the site to work. Also, pages are no longer connected to posts, so the “About” page keywords do not work. Otherwise, everything else seems to function.

Once again, let me know if you find otherwise.

• The Secret Tunnels Under UT » Tynan is⦠Better Than Your Boyfriend »
• CatGenie.com » The automatic cat box that’s just like a cat. Completely self-washing.
• Cheap, safe drug kills most cancers - health - 17 January 2007 - New Scientist » a cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their âimmortalityâ. The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA)
• ABC News: Hope for Pancreatic Cancer » Two New Studies May Suggest Treatment Options and Preventive Measures for this Deadly Disease
• Halting problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia » Given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program finishes running or will run forever, given that input.
• Bat bomb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia » Bombs attached to Bats were developed for world war II
• Hungry For a Month: November 2006 » Man spends one month by spending only $30 on food… for the whole month.
• Wii Seeker » Find a Nintendo Wii near home
• CES 2007: John Carmack And Todd Hollenshead Speak » Carmack speaks on things, including the non-necessity of Vista
• The PayPal Security Key - PayPal » Paypal gives away (for $5) a security device to add an ever changing code to your login.
• Novint » Designer of a consumer haptic controller
• Novint Controller at PCWorld » physical feedback controller, not just "buzz"
• Animal Trustees of Austin - Home »
• FOXNews.com - Sting May Be Reuniting With The Police »
• ABC News: Woman in Water Drinking Contest for a Wii Dies » I had never heard of water intoxication until this article. Very sad.
• Alliance - The Silent War⢠» Upcoming FPS with wars and weapons from many eras.
• Turbo Crazy » Turn a Stir Crazy Corn popper into a Coffee roaster

The peeps at Wordpress decided to to fix a php vulnerability and was couple more things with a new release of version 2.0.7. They reported that 2.0.6 would be the last release before 2.1, but I guess it was severe enough that an immediate patch was warranted.

The 2.1 release is still set for the 21st of the month, so we’ll see how that goes.

drzy has been updated. Again, if anything looks screwy, see you in St. Louis send me a message.

• Narbacular Drop » The game that inspired Valve’s Portal
• Voyage century Online Community Site, Free 3D online adventure game » Free MMORPG featuring pirates ansd ships ansd suckh. Seems Korean based and touts "Free Forever".
• Extratasty - Get your booze on! » Drink experimentation
• WaffleImages: Upload » image hosting
• ImgRed.com - Image Redirection » Instant image redirection to image service
• QDB: Quote Database Home » The venerable quote database from IRC logs. Always good for a quick laugh, even though IRC slowly fades away.
• AMD Launches DTX Form-Factor Initiative - Articles / Reviews | TheTechLounge » New motherboard form factor from AMD, announced at CES
• Ask MetaFilter | Community Weblog »
• DevImg.net - Developer Image Exchange »
• Throwback Entertainment » Throwback took over Acclaim games after they went bankrupt
• www.rvhouse.net » Revolt multiplayer tools
• Revolt Pub » Revolt forums
• Re-Volt Zone Tracks (well… and cars too) »
• Abandonia » Abandonware games and tools
• DOSBox » DOSBox emulates an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, modem, etc., necessary for running many old DOS games that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems
• Counter-Strike » Creating a Counter-Strike Server »
• Cisco sues Apple over iPhone trademark »
• Paper Art »
• The Apple iPhone runs OS X - Engadget »
• Apple - iPhone - High Technology - Tech Specs » The iPhone specs released
• w900i High-Fidelity Media Guides »
• James Bowie High School Alumni » Austin, Texas
• Digital Archive Project » Mystery Science Theater 3000 tapings

I always forget about bash.org. It is one of the sites that changes little over the (many) years, because it doesn’t have to. While my own IRC usage has pretty much completely stopped, I’m shocked at how many people still use it regularly. In fact, there are tons of younger kids starting to use it, when I thought it was usurped by things like web-based chatrooms and IM services.

And bash invented internet celebrities!

Anyways, on to some quotes:

[@Headknocker] what happens when 5 emos sit in a square room?
[@Headknocker] one dies because he has no corner to cry in


[Thrae] Your testes are egg-shaped, because testes used to be ovaries before your gender was determined pre-birth.
[Thrae] All men started out with female sex organs until gender was specified. It explains a lot, eh?
[ckknight] we overcame adversity.

[starshipparsley] This is a beautiful equation.
[starshipparsley] e^pi( i ) + 1 = 0
[purple.toupee] omg that just blew my mind
[starshipparsley] I am reading the Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers right now, and it is nerdgasmic
[starshipparsley] Did you know that pi/2 is 1/root(root2 + root(root 2 +root(root 2 +….)
[purple.toupee] !!!!
[starshipparsley] This kinda stuff is so freaking awesome!
[purple.toupee] math = power
[purple.toupee] math is knowledge, knowledge is power, power corrupts, therefore math corrupts
[starshipparsley] Math = the only kind of sexual pleasure I’ll probably ever have

and for those of you who have never heard of IRC, or not read bash before, or just haven’t seen it… the classic bloodninja:

bloodninja: Baby, I been havin a tough night so treat me nice aight?
BritneySpears14: Aight.
bloodninja: Slip out of those pants baby, yeah.
BritneySpears14: I slip out of my pants, just for you, bloodninja.
bloodninja: Oh yeah, aight. Aight, I put on my robe and wizard hat.
BritneySpears14: Oh, I like to play dress up.
bloodninja: Me too baby.
BritneySpears14: I kiss you softly on your chest.
bloodninja: I cast Lvl. 3 Eroticism. You turn into a real beautiful woman.
BritneySpears14: Hey…
bloodninja: I meditate to regain my mana, before casting Lvl. 8 chicken of the Infinite.
BritneySpears14: Funny I still don’t see it.
bloodninja: I spend my mana reserves to cast Mighty F*ck of the Beyondness.
BritneySpears14: You are the worst cyber partner ever. This is ridiculous.
bloodninja: Don’t f*ck with me bitch, I’m the mightiest sorcerer of the lands.
bloodninja: I steal yo soul and cast Lightning Lvl. 1,000,000 Your body explodes into a fine bloody mist, because you are only a Lvl. 2 Druid.
BritneySpears14: Don’t ever message me again you piece of ****.
bloodninja: Robots are trying to drill my brain but my lightning shield inflicts DOA attack, leaving the robots as flaming piles of metal.
bloodninja: King Arthur congratulates me for destroying Dr. Robotnik’s evil army of Robot Socialist Republics. The cold war ends. Reagan steals my accomplishments and makes like it was cause of him.
bloodninja: You still there baby? I think it’s getting hard now.
bloodninja: Baby?

I swear I felt just like these poor kids on my last final of the last semester.

(click to make it bigger)

• Samsung SGH-a707 (Sync) issues with Samsung PC Studio » Solved problems between Bluetooth and USB connections from the Cingular Sync ( Samsung SGH-a707 ) and the Samsung PC Studio
• City of Austin - Buy Green, Drive Clean »
• WordPress 2.0.6 released »
• The second Xbox 360 revealed: codename Zephyr - Engadget »
• Peter Marigold » A shelving system that expands and contracts to fill different size gaps.
• Raging Against Self Defense: A Psychiatrist Examines The Anti-Gun Mentality »
• PeakStream » PeakStream, a software start-up that has been operating in stealth mode for over a year now while developing a new type of software platform aimed at making multiprocessor systems easier to program.
• Science’s 10 most beautiful experiments »

Recently, I updated my aging phone on our Cingular contract with the Samsung SGH-a707, also known as the Cingular Sync.

I have been pleased with it so far, especially the bright and very sharp screen, the 2 megapixel camera, and the shape and feel of it. One great feature that I have yet to have on a phone is the Bluetooth connection. The SGH-a707 performs great with it on general file transfers and such, but I wanted to use Samsung’s own PC Studio software so that I could more easily transfer files and manage my contacts.

Unfortunately, this is where the problems occur. Luckily, I found the solutions for them.

First, after downloading version 3.01 of the software, as listed on the Samsung support site as appropriate for this phone, I am not able to initialize a serial Bluetooth connection through the software. The install of the software goes without a hitch, but after detecting the phone properly on the Bluetooth connection, it fails to connect on the serial port designated for it. I tried manually creating serial ports and connecting to it, with the same problem. The Bluetooth adapter and the phone report there is communication going on in their icons, but the Samsung PC Studio fails to connect to this stream.

It turns out the SGH-a707 comes default from the factory with a connectivity setting that interacts directly with Windows Media Player. After switching to the included PC Studio profile, the PC Studio software then connects perfectly (well, almost. Read more below). The way to do this on the phone is to go to Menu >> Settings >> Connectivity >> Select USB Mode >> PC Studio.

Well, that worked perfectly, but only because I had already installed the newer version of the Samsung PC Studio software, version 3.1. The SGH-a707 support webpage only lists version 3.01 for download, even though the newer version has been out since 11/22. If you try to connect to your phone contacts in PC Studio 3.01, the software will hang and you’ll have to end the task manually. In 3.1, this issue has been fixed. I have no idea why Samsung doesn’t list the newer version on the support page.

You can grab it here: Samsung PC Studio 3.1

Hopefully this will save some stress for those of you who get this new phone. The only other issue I have with it is the fact that the back battery cover very easily slides off. That problem is not isolated to my phone, as I tested a few others. While it had never fallen off, I was concerned about losing it. So, I just put a small strip of clear tape over the seam, and that keeps it in place.

update (2/16/08): The above links may or may not work, the current Samsung PC Studio is version 3.13 and the link to downloads is now here.

Wordpress 2.0.6 has been released. It includes some security fixes and minor bugfixes detailed here.

Here’s what’s new:

• The aforementioned security fixes.
• HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
• Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout.
• Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.

For developers, there’s a new anti-XSS function called attribute_escape(), and a new filter called “query” which allows you filter any SQL at runtime. (Which is pretty powerful.) Thanks to Mark Jaquith for handling this release and Stefan Esser for responsibly reporting the security issue.

The Wordpress team states that this is the last update until version 2.1 is released.

drzy.com has been updated to this version. Please send me a message if anything acts up.

Or fill in your own reactionary title. I mean, just wow. even the “experts” consulted for this news bit, on kids using 1337 typing while chatting, are dimwits. They did at least get it right that it has been around a long time, and not just for “kids these days”.

Shows exactly how much research actually goes into local news networks’ investigative reports. At least it’s good for a sardonic smirk. Oh, I mean: LOLZ! IR IN UR B4$E, K177!N UR D00DZ!

Another year has snuck up on us. Let’s make it better than the last.

Stastný Nový Rok!

• Peony Asian Cuisine » Possibly Filipino food place in Austin
• Scotsman.com News - UK - Housework cuts breast cancer risk »
• China heralds year of the fluorescent green pig - Science - MSNBC.com »
• Wired News: Hacker Con Submits to Spychips »
• Bot-infected PCs get a refresh » zombie PCs get replaced at Christmas
• Ninjawords - a fast online dictionary »
• Script.aculo.us: How to easily AJAX your site - Download Squad »
• Banana Bunker » Protect your banana
• The Anatomy of Web Fonts [Design Principles] »
• Common fonts to all versions of Windows & Mac equivalents (Browser safe fonts) - Web design tips & tricks »
• LiveScience.com - Scientists Create Molecule-Size Keypad Lock » Scientists have created a keypad lock a single molecule in size. This lock only activates when exposed to the correct password, a sequence of chemicals and light.
• Vampent :: vNes (NES emu) » vNes, the fastest and best NES emulator for mobiles.
• How many did God kill vs Satan? | Rational Responders »
• Star Wars original set still up in Tunisia » While ruthless Hollywood knocks over the set of each movie as soon as the director shouts his final "Cut!," Tunisia, where George Lucas shot most of the "Star Wars" scenes, still keeps the original set from the ’70s, protecting it from the burning sun and
• The superlions marooned on an island | the Daily Mail »
• dodgeball.com :: mobile social software »
• kottke.org :: home of fine hypertext products »
• Text Link Ads - Smart Link Marketing »
• cre.ations.net - Creation: Body mod - Turn your pee blue! »
• Researchers catch giant squid - CNN.com »
• Giant Squid Captured, Filmed for First Time »
• Brickfield - A Battlefield 2 Modification » Lego inspired BF2 mod
• Mod DB - Play something different »
• AJAX for n00bs »
• Goldeneye Source » Goldeneye redone for the source engine (just hit beta status)
• PCB - Gauntlet » gauntlet sprites
• opacity.us - Abandoned Photography and Urban Exploration »
• How to Split Wood by Ron Hall exercise, firewood, self employment | Gather »
• gmmktime Error in WordPress and MagpieRSS » My Digital Life » gmmktime() expects parameter 3 to be long
• KoolStuff4Kids Perler Beads »
• isnoop.net »