AlanBarber.Org

Twitter Updates

Follow me on Twitter

Haven't posted in a few days because I've been a bit busy, nay more like disposed of.

Well Thursday I was in front of the computer all day playing blogshares. I literally spent most of the day buying and selling pretend stocks trying to get "rich".

However Friday morning sometime between 1am and 4am the power went out. It didn't come back on till around 5pm that day so not like I could even get on the net. However luckily I did have plans so I didn't sit around the house all day complaining about no net access.

I went to my grandparents house to setup their computer. It has gotten toasted by lightning and I brought it to my place to fix. It's a good hours drive and on the way my car started acting up again. I know what the problem is since it's happened twice before! I've already called the shop and will take it in Monday to get it fixed. Of course Monday is also my first day of fall classes so things are going to be crazy as usual.

I swear the big guy upstairs just likes to tease me every once in a while to remind me life isn't all fun and games.

Saw the newsflash today at FreeBSD.Org that the code freeze for the FreeBSD 4.9 release will start on the 25th of this month.

The code freeze is the first step in preparing to build a new release of the operating system. For those people interested here's the Release Schedule they will follow. If all goes well then FreeBSD 4.9 will be shipping around the end of September.

There are obviously many questions about whether this will be the last release for the 4.x line of FreeBSD. No one knows for sure as it really depends on how the 5.x line progresses. If they believe 5.x finally reaches a good level of stability and performance they may end the 4.x line. However more than likely we will be seeing at least one more release in the 4.x line.

The Australian IT is reporting that super spam king, Shane Atkinson, has shut down his business.

The New Zealand Herald newspaper last week did a story on Atkinson. As a result soon after personal information about Atkinson was found out and posted to the web. He's been reciving threats and such and says he fears for his childrens safety.

I'm calling it complete bullflop folks! It's nothing more than a big lie to get the heat off of him. I give it 10 to 1 odds that he's already setting up shop under new names and new locations. The work is too easy and the payout too great for a guy like that to stop!

I in no way condone violence but honestly folks the cold hard fact is that it's going to take reports of spammers getting physically harmed, homes trashed, etc before it scares any of these guys into stopping. Using technology might help cut down on spam but there are just too many idiots out there that continue to buy from spammers. No amount of discussion will stop it as it has become a part of life.

This is downright goofy folks!

There's a new DCOM RPC worm running the rounds. Officially tagged as
"W32.Welchia.Worm" by Symantec, "WORM_MSBLAST.D" by Trend, and "W32/Nachi.worm" by McAfee it's pretty much the same as the other DCOM RCP worms with one big difference. It's designed to fix the problem!

Get this people. When the worm finds an open system it infects the system and runs the worm on the new system. On the new system the worm searches for the original MSBLAST worm and removes it if found. It then automatically downloads the Microsoft patch to fix the DCOM RPC hole, installs the patch and reboots the machine. It then runs in the background searching out other open systems to spread to until January 1st, 2004. At that time it will delete itself.

There doesn't seem to be any trojan horse or payloads but as a virus/worm it should be considered dangerous. However this has to be the first time in the history of computing that a virus/worm actually fixes the very hold it exploits.

The person that wrote this should get nominated for misguided humanitarian of the year or something.

GameSpy has a rather short but great interview of John Carmack at this years QuackCon. They asked him a few questions about Doom 3, Quake 4, him building a rocket, and the future of Id.

Here is a quote from the article:
"GameSpy: As a triple-A company, can id work on any smaller ideas?

John Carmack: I thought it would be kind of neat if we took the DOOM renderer, and we had a team take previous games-don't touch the game, just revamp it graphically. Just take Quake II, and just use the DOOM engine to make brand new graphic models and everything. But don't spend time messing with the gameplay because we know that is pretty good. Just release it as Quake II Remix with brand new graphics technology and sell it at a middle-level price instead of a boutique price.

I thought that was a pretty good idea."

Personally I think it would be a cool thing to do. Long as they keep the prices cheap, like in the $20 range. No way I'd pay more for such old games, even with pretty, new graphics.

I got my fall class schedule today. Why or why did I register for so many classes? I totally forgot that I signed up for 18 credit hours. I took several classes this summer and I'm downright burned out. I really don't think I'll be able to handle 18 hours this fall.

6 classes total including: Physics, Statistics, French, Literature and Psychology, Unix, and an Operating systems & Networks class. Worse yet is it's a full week with classes from 8am to around 7pm every day!

Oh well I guess I'll just live with it. After this semester I technically only need 8 credit hours to graduate. So it looks like I'll be out of here this spring. That means it will only take me 5 years to graduate. Whoopee I won't be a 6th year senior!