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1

So, PayPal has thrown down the gauntlet on the safe browser war.  According to an InfoWorld article, they have declined to add Apple’s Safari browser to their list of safe browsers due to the lack of native anti-phishing technology.
I find it interesting that one of the features they explicitly mention in the InfoWorld article as […]

Privacy, Research, Security

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When reading an article from ScienceDaily that was referenced on Slashdot, I noticed that at the end of the article there was an option to copy a citation reference for either the MLA or APA style.  At first I thought that this might be unique to that particular article, but then after more investigatio, it […]

Research

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0

Here is a recipe that I got from my Aunt Cindy.
Ingredients

1 3/4 pounds of carrots, peeled & chopped 1 cup white sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour 3 eggs, beaten 2 teaspoons confectioners’ sugar

1 stick butter

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a large pot of boiling water, cook carrots until very tender.  Drain […]

Food, arfore.com

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2

Today’s video is a collage of various scenes from a whole slew of anime shows. If you watch it closely you will see some scenes from Akira, Wolf’s Rain and Witch Hunter Robin, to name just a few.
The music used is Best of You by the Foo Fighters. This song appeared on the […]

Anime, Music

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1

This next week the Senate is expected to vote on legislation to delay the transition of broadcast television in the United States from analog signals to digital signals.
The initial deadline was to have been February 17, 2009, however some in Congress as well as President Obama claim that more time is needed due to the […]

Technology, Television

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Fringe, a new series on the Fox network that is using a new format Fox dubs Remote-Free TV. The episodes are longer than your average sitcom.  The Wikipedia entry on the show states that this series will have less commercials and promos.

While this is true, one of the interesting bits is that before each commercial they […]

Television

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0

This is part one of a short series of articles detailing the process I went through to restore a friend’s table pc after her hard drive dies due to a head crash. Background

My friend has a Gateway CX210X Convertible Notebook. This model uses a SATA internal drive. Her drive died sometime last Friday afternoon […]

Computers, Operating Systems, Windows

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One of the small annoyances I have with Firefox is the default URL used for the Google search plug-in.  While I generally just type in a search term and hit enter, I do sometimes just hit enter without a corresponding search term just to get sent to the main Google page.  Why do I do […]

Mac OS X, Software, Windows

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0

Those of you out there who are running an installation of SCT Luminis 3 may have noticed that the browser check always comes up warning you that the browser is unsupported when using Firefox 2, even though all the features seem to be completely supported.
This is due to the fact that the browsercheck javascript does […]

Linux, Mac OS X, SCT Luminis, Software, Windows

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0

Well, over the weekend some of the other sysadmins of the world provided the solution to the Office 2007 file download problems.

It’s all about the mime types. For those of you not in the know, a MIME type is an Internet Standard that is used to help webservers and e-mail servers know what kind of files are being served up and sent out. Check out the Wikipedia article for more.

Apache, Linux, Windows

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1

So with the impending roll out of Microsoft Office 2007 here at work, we have discovered something interesting. Apparently IE 6 and IE 7 don’t understand how to deal with the new file types that were introduced with Office 2007.

Windows

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0

Everyone wanted DRM-free music and EMI partnered with Apple to make it happen.

Now apparently it’s not being done right. Of course, we all knew that the account holder name and associated e-mail address was being stored in the DRM encrypted tracks. But somehow everyone seems to think that Apple was going to just cease to embed that because the song was DRM-free.

Ars Technica has a story up on this.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some data was being analyzed in aggregate, although Apple’s current privacy policy does not appear to allow for this. As with the dust-up over the mini-store, Apple should clarify what this embedded data is used for.

Copyright, Cyberspeech, Music

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0

So, according to a story on Reuters, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is evaluating whether or not to ban Novell from didtributing future versions of their Linux OS.

“The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft,” Eben Moglen, the Foundation’s general counsel, said on Friday.

Copyright

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0

I you have read my previous post, GPG Best Practices, you will know that I am a fan of setting expiration dates on my GPG keys.
This has not always been the case. As with many computer users I tend towards the lazy, and if I can keep from having to re-learn a password by […]

Computers, Cyberspeech, Privacy, Security

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1

Like many people who have some concerns over security on the Internet, I have started to use digital signatures for all of my mail sent from my regular e-mail client on my Mac.
While there are several avenues for this, I chose to use GPG. While I know that this means jumping through a couple […]

Computers, Cyberspeech, Privacy, Security

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0

Everyone wanted DRM-free music and EMI partnered with Apple to make it happen.

Now apparently it’s not being done right. Of course, we all knew that the account holder name and associated e-mail address was being stored in the DRM encrypted tracks. But somehow everyone seems to think that Apple was going to just cease to embed that because the song was DRM-free.

Ars Technica has a story up on this.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some data was being analyzed in aggregate, although Apple’s current privacy policy does not appear to allow for this. As with the dust-up over the mini-store, Apple should clarify what this embedded data is used for.

Copyright, Cyberspeech, Music

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0

So I ran across a story on Slashdot about how ABC/Disney had a blog shutdown over the posting of some audio clips from a radio-station affiliate in conjunction with the blogger’s letters to the radio station advertisers over their tacit support of the comments and views of the talk radio hosts on the station.

The Slashdot post linked to a blog posting on the Daily Kos: State of the Nation that had more details.

Blogging, Cyberspeech, Free Speech

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While re-loading the OS and apps on my iMac at work, I ran into major issues whilst updating MS Office 2008.  When running the first update, Office 2008 SP1 (12.1.0) I had no problems, however none of the other updates would run.  I kept getting the error “You cannot install Office 2008 Updates on this […]

Apple, Mac OS X, Software

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Lately I have noticed that when browsing the web my external hard drive would spin up when there seemed no need.  I had just given into the mysterious and not concerned myself with this until yesterday.
After a few searches, I turned up a post on Apple’s discussion boards entitled Safari pauses & spins up ext […]

Apple, Mac OS X

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I noticed something today in the new iTunes Store interface.  When you hover over a song in the store you are presented with a nifty play icon that replaces the track number in the album listing.  This is quite similar to the iTunes Store interface functionality on the iPhone/iPod Touch OS.  Clicking on the play […]

Apple, iTunes

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6

So this morning I fired up my iMac at work to continue on with editing this PHP form I have been working on.  Now I usually use TextMate for my daily editor, since it is very lightweight.
Since I hadn’t actually created a TextMate project file, I just selected all the files and opened them using […]

Apple, Software

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In my process of tranferring my DVD collection to a digital media server I discovered that the Apple TV software is smarter than I thought.
I have been ripping my DVD collection using Handbrake on my Mac and transferring them to a Windows box which is shared out via my internal only network to the Apple […]

Apple, Apple TV, Technology

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0

At work we run the WebCT Vista course management system by Blackboard.
Recently I was requested to figure out how to import the security certificate from the command line so that we could add this to the login script used for our campus computers. The main reason behind this was to eliminate the need for […]

Java, Security, WebCT Vista

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0

Last week my friend Lindsay and I were making the rounds of the various thrift stores and used furniture stores in Valdosta.  It is quite interesting to see what people get rid of and to think of ways to use some of it.
At one of the thrift shops we found three VSU glasses.  One of […]

Culture, Miscellaneous

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I just got finished reading Stealing MySpace by Julia Angwin.  In it there was this great conversation about the firing of Ross Levinshohn by Peter Chernin, the soon-to-be former COO of News Corps.  Here it is: “You’re not happy, are you?” Chernin said. “No, I’m not,” Levinsohn agreed. “This isn’t working out, is it?” Chernin said.

“No, it’s not,” […]

Miscellaneous

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5

Lately there has been a lot of flack going on over the Early Termination Fee (ETF) system that the major cellular carriers use to encourage consumers to abide by the length of the contract that they have signed.
Apparently a lot of people are upset that the various cellular carriers are wanting to charge a fee […]

Miscellaneous

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1

So the USGS has almost completed the survey of the Bakken Formation. Estimates on the amount of oil contained in the shale formation range from 900 billion to 200 billion barrels. A poster on Slashdot said that “Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence.”

What exactly is energy independence? […]

Miscellaneous

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1

While watching Shark tonight I saw a commercial for the new Dyson root 6 handheld vacuum cleaner.  The commercial was pretty cool.  It showed the vacuum cleaner being built, in a Lego-like fashion.
Aside from the coolness of the commercial itself, it occurs to me that the design of the root 6 is quite similar to […]

Miscellaneous

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