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[15:56] Google Maps Street View
Today Google released Google Maps Street View at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference. There's a bit of information about it on the O'Reilly Radar but it's best to just go play with it: Across the road from the Googleplex.
[18:38] One Terabyte consumer hard drives
Holy crap! Hitachi have released the Deskstar 7K1000, a one terabyte consumer level hard drive! A brief search turns up a price range around the $US400 mark which I think is pretty damn reasonable for that much storage.
Of course, it is now:
a) completely impossible to back your stuff up to anything other than another hard-drive; and
b) completely irresponsible to be running without at least RAID 1 on anything that you're storing your massive collection of photos, videos and random text data that living a digital-life implies.
Note to self: Must do something about backups...
[Posted at: 18:38 18/05/2007]
[22:41] Sysinternals Got Bought!
Wow, Microsoft bought Sysinternals on July 18 and I completely failed to notice until now! This was around about the time I was busy getting married and moving and not having internet access so I guess that's probably why.
Looks like Mark is still happy to document his discoveries though and all the old freeware tools are still available here, which is nice! Looks like there're also plans afoot to roll a lot of stuff into something called the Diagnostic And Recovery Toolset (possibly just a rebadged Winternals package) early next year. Hopefully having these guys on the inside will mean less problems occur outside 'cause they've already hammered on things before they get to the public arena. It should also mean that the OS will have a lot more useful CLI features shipping with it by default (I hope).
[Posted at: 08/11/2006 22:41]
[22:09] Microsoft Doesn't Hate Linux (as much) Anymore
Here's the official word from Microsoft and Novell.
Go check out the furore.
[Posted at: 02/11/2006 22:29]
[08:36] They seek us here, they seek us there...now they find us?
www.polarrose.com is a web site proclaiming to be the homepage for some rather interesting functionality - it's not open to the public yet so it's hard to be sure. Allegedly, it will give you the ability to provide a photo of a person which it will analyse and then scour the internet (or at least Flickr) for photos that it thinks contain the same person, possibly identifying the person in the photo...
I imagine that if this actually works then they'll be bought fairly shortly by either a government (why track license plates when you can just track the people) or a company already in the field trying to sell face-recognition systems to airports/governments. I guess it would also be quiet valuable to larger search engines or social-networking sites also: "Scan your old school photos and find your old friends online today!".
There's nothing on the website regarding the name, Polar Rose, but I thinkg that it comes from a shape described by a polar equation; a branch of mathematics "...useful in situations where the relationship between two points is most easily expressed in terms of angles and distance...". This probably refers to the method used to create a model based on the picture but also has interesting allusions to the social connectivity of the photos being searched!
More information here, here or here.
[Posted at: 23/10/2006 08:36]
[17:39] Cisco changed their logo
For some reason, known best to Cisco, the classic Cisco logo has been retired and replaced with a (to my mind) rather dinky new one that for some inexplicable reason reminds me of bath toys?!
[Posted at: 19/10/2006 17:39]
[09:24] Bug? WScript and CScript execute Shell.Run differently.
I've been trying to debug something this afternoon and I've just realised that the reason it's not working is because the two Windows Scripting Host engines, WScript and CScript (possibly the W and C stand for Windows and Command-Line respectively) treat the Shell.Run method differently!
To see the bug in action, create a .vbs file with the following content (which comes from the page linked above):
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Return = WshShell.Run("notepad " & WScript.ScriptFullName, 1, true)
You can specify the engine to use on the command line. Run "CScript.exe test.vbs" or "WScript.exe test.vbs" to see each in action.
When run, this should execute the notepad program and then wait for the process to terminate before exiting. Under the CScript engine this is exactly what happens. When the WScript engine is used the script terminates as soon as the notepad proces has been spawned.
I've not found a KB article acknowledging this just yet but I can confirm that this happens on Windows XP (Version 5.1.2600) using WSH 5.6 8515 and Windows 2003 Server Standard (Version 5.2.3790) using WSH 5.6 6626.
[Posted at: 18/08/2006 17:24]
Updated 23/08/2006 20:48: I raised a bug, or as Microsoft calles them "Feedback Item", specifically Feedback ID 182672, mostly because I wanted to try out the Microsoft bug tracking facility: connect.microsoft.com. It was actually pretty easy to find and use, I'll be interested to see if anyone actually picks the bug up or not though...
[15:34] PasswordSafe 3.01 is out
My favourite password storage facility, PasswordSafe, has just had a major version release. It's had both UI and behind the scenes updates including the ability to collect URL and general notes as well as normal username/password pairs, a brand new DB format and a switch from Blowfish to Twofish. If pwsafe would keep up then everything would be perfect!
[Posted at: 19/06/2006 23:34]
[15:14] Stinking SPAMwhores
Seems that some bastard has started spamming me via the pollxn comment engine. The IP's from the logs aren't really very helpful and my random sampling has ranged through Russia, Japan, Malaysia, Barbados and even the United States! I suspect that they're using a spider but perhaps it's just a search engine looking for common comment engines.
Step 1 in the anti-SPAM offensive has been renaming the pollxn.cgi script. If it's a spider and is even vaguely intelligent then this will do absolutely nothing to stop it so I'm hoping it's not!
I was thinking of implementing a gruesomely simple CAPTCHA for pollxn but I'll wait and see what happens next. I suppose this is a good time to think about whether it might be time to move back to a proper CMS. Blosxom is nice and simple and very easy to use but there's a lot more that I want to be able to do and I don't know if I really want to write my own CMS (which is essentialy what I'm now doing). It has been fun and interesting but I'm not really game to allow my non-web-savy developments out to play on the internet and with so many good packages out there written by people who actually know what they're doing maybe I should spend my time doing something more useful...
[Posted at: 19/06/2006 23:14]
Updated 20/06/2006 23:17: Day One - no sign of intruders so far...
Updated 21/06/2006 18:17: Day Two - BAH! Foiled. Picked up another six advertisements today. Going to have to do something about this. For now comments are suspended.
[04:45] Ethereal is now WireShark
It seems that everyones favourite network protocol analyser Ethereal is now known as WireShark. It's allegedly not a fork because the entire dev team is following the project lead and creator (Gerald Combs) to his new job. It's all explained in the WireShark FAQ, in this Ethereal mailing list post and on the WinPcap news page.
I'm finding it a little odd that this is addressed as "...almost (but not quite) a fork..." on the FAQ and nowhere is there any mention of Ethereal ceasing development!? I wonder if it will actually fork and what that will mean. Hopefully it means that we get two really free open-source good programs instead of one!
[Posted at: 09/06/2006 12:45]