A week or so ago a co-worker of mine showed me a program he was playing with- Google Earth. Its a beta, and I had heard of it before, but it hadn’t really intrigued me very much until Dan showed it to me.
Google Earth is cool
Tag Archives: Science-and-geeky-stuff
Trojans…
First, let me dispell any misapprehension you might have regarding this post: it is not about condoms.
Now that I have that out of the way, what *is* this post about? Yesterday I was checking out other blogs by doing some searches on Technorati. One of the ones I clicked on caused my virus checker to throw a fit. Apparently, the site I was going to redirected me to http://please click run to remove virus .c4tdownload.com/click_run_to_remove_virus.exe. Firstly, I thought I was going to a blog, not a software install, and secondly, the “virus remover” was actually a trojan (Win32:Trojan-gen. {Other}).
Fun with Ecto
I imagine lots of folks out there in the Blogtopia (Blogverse? Blogvomit?) are geeks like me. I run my own web server here in my house, so when something doesn’t work…I get to fix it.
Two hours ago, I installed WordPress, this blogging application you see before you in all its currently bland glory. One big thing I wanted to try out was the concept of “offline” preparation of my little news items. There is this application for that purpose that I thought sounded nifty- Ecto. I’m using it now…two hours after I started.
What the heck is this?
Blogging…I’m pretty sure that term was invented by the same group of irritating people who more recently came up with “podcasting”.
I’ve had what I call a “vanity” website for about 9 years now. I have been posting stuff about myself, that interests me, or that I wanted to experiment with all that time. But I’ve never really called what I do “blogging”, even though my most recent website incarnation has looked an awful lot like a blog.
Computer upgrade 2005…
Well, its that time of year again…time for me to break my computer in the name of geekdom…
For 2005, my objective was a bit different- stick mostly to upgrades that can be transferred to the next “version” of my computer- things that I don’t need to throw away in a year. Because the next upgrade will be large- in 2006, I expect to move to a new motherboard supporting PCI Express slots, which means a new video card, and while I’m at it, an new processor…ouch.
So, for this year I’m replacing my monitor, my memory, and my hard drive subsystem. In some respects, I wish I’d stuck to just those things but, since I had to reformat the hard drive as part of the upgrade (see later in this posting), it seemed like a good time to upgrade the OS…
Halflife2 Memory error/Direct X error ”fix”
I’ve been playing Halflife2 recently. Its a great game, fully deserving of all the praise its been receiving.
Unfortunately, it was crashing a lot for me. And I was seeing different symptoms, making it hard to try to debug
Continue reading Halflife2 Memory error/Direct X error ”fix”
”Star” releases Staggering amount of energy…
The natural universe is an amazing place. Our sun, which warms us at a distance of 96 million miles for billions of years. Black holes, with gravity fields so intense that light itself can not escape. And neutron stars… Continue reading ”Star” releases Staggering amount of energy…
Psychic random numbers..
I read a story today about some interesting observations being made using simple random number generators.
In a nutshell: some scientists developed a simple little box that is supposed to be a pure random number generator. This box design was used a couple of decades ago as a control system to see if people could somehow influence randomness with their minds. It was shown that ordinary people could apparently do so. A number of other scientists began coming up with more elaborate experiments to get to the bottom of this effect. Continue reading Psychic random numbers..
New planets discovered…
I was reading a news blurb in Astronomy magazine the other day about some new planets discovered around distant stars. Some of these planets are pretty weird.
An important couple of points need to be made first before I talk about the planets. I’ve got to mention that IANAAOAA (I am not an astrophysicist or an astronomer), so everything here is just a lay-persons perspective. From what I understand, scientists are not discovering these weird planets because they are the only type of planets around distant stars. They are finding them because the techniques they currently have will *only* find weird planets. Basically, the only methods they have at the moment to detect the existence of a planet boil down to detecting variations (“wobbles”) in the rotation of the star they are looking at. To make a star wobble enough to detect currently requires an extremely large planet (Jupiter sized or bigger) or a largish planet that is very close to the star. Future detection methods will hopefully allow detection of more typical planets
That said, some of the weird planets they are finding are really weird…
Continue reading New planets discovered…
Microsoft goes nuts with IP…
Apparently, Microsoft is now offering the opportunity for companies to license from them most of the underlying protocols behind the Internet. Little things like TCP/IP and DNS, for example. Continue reading Microsoft goes nuts with IP…