uruloki's lair

I’m in a class this week for work. It’s nice since I’ve been here about four months and now I can finally get qualified. The other nice thing is that after 15 years of playing with networks one way or another, I understand subnetting. In fact, I can subnet the crap out of any network you can name, even a VLSM. Hopefully I can remember this for longer than the final test…

Speaking of computer stuff, the below is completely done on a computer. No live shots.

The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.

Tags: Stupid people, Technology by uruloki
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I talk a whole bunch about information operations. Don’t read unless you want to sleep.

Tags: Politics, Technology by uruloki
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As much as I’ve scoffed at Mac zealots, I’m going to admit that the Touch is a pretty cool piece of hardware.

Tags: Technology by uruloki
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Via /., I found this nifty examination of the whitehouse.gov site

Description. You want to read about the code structure of the new whitehouse.gov website on this historic Inauguration Day of the 44th president of the USA. The site is built on ASP.NET.

What follows is a lot of good discussion about how the site is built, how it could be done better, and even some nifty easter eggs in the form of links hidden in the JavaScript. The really fun part was the last line:

Finally, remember that the administration and President Obama were not the ones who wrote the code here.

Seriously. Either a) you’re not nerdy enough to notice all the stuff that was detailed or b) you’re nerdy enough to know that the Big Cheese never writes that stuff. Why do we need to start making excuses about who is doing what already?

Tags: Politics, Stupid people, Technology by uruloki
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I got into the Closed Beta for WAR finally, and had a great time. Then the Preview Weekend hit, and I started to get hit with CTDs, lag, and other wonky server behavior. The Scenario servers liked to make me wait for 15-20 minutes and then give the “2 minutes to server shutdown” message when we’re about 20% into it. So, I’m going to wait to play WAR until the Head Start kicks off, especially since all the work in beta gets wiped and I hate to waste work.

Meanwhile, we had a nifty one-shot on Brutallus (only our second kill) in WOW. Ugly, ugly kill, but a kill nonetheless after a two-shot on Kalecgos. Unfortunately, all of the WOW servers in what looks like our battle group are now experiencing lag and DC’s, which means no loot and no continuing the raid. Today’s random intersection: crappy servers, I hate you all!!

Tags: Gaming, Technology by uruloki
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I don’t know about you, but when I’m driving in an area with little to no traffic signage or other guidelines I’m usually much more cautious. It turns out that pretty much everyone is:

A year after the change, the results of this “extreme makeover” were striking: Not only had congestion decreased in the ­intersection—­buses spent less time waiting to get through, for ­example—­but there were half as many accidents, even though total car traffic was up by a third. Students from a local engineering college who studied the intersection reported that both drivers and, unusually, cyclists were using ­signals—­of the electronic or hand ­variety—­more often. They also found, in surveys, that residents, despite the measurable increase in safety, perceived the place to be more dangerous.

It would be interesting if some of his theories could be applied in here in the U.S. rather than increasing the number of traffic cameras while shortening the yellow lights to make money.

Tags: Life, Technology by uruloki
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I ran some security upgrades on the site and promptly ran into a problem with the user permissions not being set right. Google to the rescue.

Once your tables are renamed with a different prefix, you need to modify the prefix_usermeta and prefix_options tables with the following code:

Replace all occurrences of prefix with your changed version and you are good to go.

Tags: Technology, Web site by uruloki
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I just upgraded to WP 2.5.1 to fix the security bug that was in 2.5. It basically allowed exploits to be run on blogs with open user registration, which used to be this one as well. Immediately after I upgraded to 2.5, I looked at the user management page for the first time in, well, ever. I’m a very good writer to a lot of Russians apparently, since I had about 390 random—spam-like—emails registered on the site mostly with .ru* extensions. The highlight of the list was EltonJohn and RonPaul, who I think registered to approve of everything I have ever said. After the cleanup and just before 2.5.1 went on, I had to go clear another 34 “people” that had registered. The site is now closed to open registrations, I have to approve everyone now.

Then there is the home computer. I’ve been running out of space on the hard-drive and wondering where it’s all going. A couple of nights ago, Disk Defragmenter highlighted a file it couldn’t move since it was too big for the available space on the HD. My Function Key Controller driver has somehow ballooned to 1.3 GB. The download from Alienware? 1.3 MB. Something has taken up residence so it is time to do a full clean on the harddrive. I’ll also be running WinDirStat or JDiskReport to figure out where some of the big files are that I never use.

I’m also doing the pricewatch.com surfing to try and find another hard drive with decent space that is under $50 so I can get it without checking with the CINCHouse.

Tags: Technology by uruloki
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Forget my current job, I want to work on this project.

The Reynard project will begin by profiling online gaming behavior, then potentially move on to its ultimate goal of “automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world.”

Money qoute from the comment section:

Maybe they can start by data-mining Barrens chat.

Or the /trade channel. Would the ERP people get picked up for solicitation?

Tags: Funny, Life, Technology by uruloki
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This is quite honestly another step up by the Chinese government:

“Xiao Chen” is his online name. Along with his two colleagues, he does not want to reveal his true identity. The three belong to what some Western experts say is a civilian cyber militia in China, launching attacks on government and private Web sites around the world.

It’s in the same area as the missile shootdown that they performed last year, an public escalation of what their known capabilities are. It’s getting hotter.

Edit: Now that I know it’s open source, I can safely say that we’ll find out more about Chinese hacking and infiltration all over the place. Like in that new router you just bought:

Until a source in China tipped off the FBI, no one could tell that the parts were Cisco knockoffs rather than the real thing.

Tags: Technology by uruloki
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