August 2003

Pretty geeky but, then, who else would need to diagram a network? Developer’s page is here.

Windows::Developer Network magazine’s published an analysis of C# in an article titled “Does C# Measure Up?”. They compare it against C, C++, D and Java. Article info is here and the comparison is here.

From Nstorm, the guys that brought you Elf Bowling, they’ve now got Elf Bowling 2 and Elf Bowling 3! These things are a real hoot. In the first game, Santa shoots his nasty little elves out of a very large bra (!) at some targets painted on nearby mountains. 2 and 3 continue the rather sick (but funny) tradition.

From Rootsecure.net comes this link to the details of an Oklahoma City contest. Too bad 802.11b is only 11Mbps!

Happened across this in a LangaLetter. It’s supposed to work for any NT-based system (NT, XP, Win2K).

Offline NT Password & Registry Editor, Bootdisk. Note that it can/will screw things up if Encrypted File System (EFS) is used insofar as the encrypted files will be unreadable until you recall the original password.

Also listed: Trinity Rescue Kit – a Linux-based toolset which includes networking support and tools to make use of the network and it supports NTFS.

Check out the article … it’s got more tools (application-level password tools, for instance) as well as links to other sites and searches for more.

Here’s a link to his column in today’s Mercury News. Some good links in it and some good information, too 🙂

Sorry, been mostly offline for the better part of the last week. Lots of stuff going on — home, work and play — and just not enough time to do it all.

My Archos Jukebox Studio 10 arrived on Friday (pretty good as I took the free shipping and Amazon estimated it would arrive anywhere from the 19th to the 21st). Charged it overnight and loaded it up with about 50 of my CDs on Saturday. I back up my CDs to MP3 at a fairly high bit rate — generally VBR with a min of 160 — but they only took up about half of the 10G I have available.

Just about the best part, though, is Rockbox — an Open Source replacement for the firmware for most of the Archos line. I didn’t know about Rockbox when I bought the thing so that wasn’t a part of the reason I bought it, but the firmware adds a lot of function and the support from that group of people is just phenomenal. If you’re thinking about buying a portable MP3 player/recorder, I’d suggest you seriously consider Archos! It’s not the best or sexiest or coolest hardware around but you can’t beat the support. Maybe there are similar things around for some of the other hardware like Creative, I dunno, but Rockbox is aces in my opinion.

And to think, I just kind of happened across it while looking for information about the jukebox online. Sometimes the Internet is a wunnerful thaing!

Ran across this when I was tyring to find reviews of the Archos Studio I bought. No reviews of what I bought but it’s a good informational site.

Found a note about OurNotePad.com in one of the ASP.NET weblogs. Another interesting idea: an free online notepad that can be shared amongst users. Not too sure of the utility of this particular idea but I haven’t had a chance to play with it much yet. I think you’ve already grasped the basic concept. It’s simple, yes, it’s not as fancy as a weblog or a forum … and that may be its beauty. The interface is a little cluttered for me and I can’t get to the notepad sheets themselves without using the mouse but I’ll diddle with it and we’ll see.

Another free service: OnlineHomeBase.com. This actually predates OurNotePad, I think. It’s OurNotePad.com on steroids in that it provides a calendar along with a notepad organized in to “sheets” wrapped up with notification capabilities (email and cell phone) and collaboration. It has free-form text entry and it (supposedly) figures out what’s what (reminders and such) based on context.

Hmm … am I gonna have enough time to explore this stuff?

I got my confirmation mail from RSSJobs and am not impressed! Below is a copy of the headers. Note the from line, that it comes from an Earthlink account (64.203.48.190), that the IP address sending it to Earthlink is an unroutable one (probably a NAT firewall at home) and there’s no host/domain name in the SMTP chat. The service is probably legit but it looks like it was thrown together by someone with the germ of a good idea and no real experience. Nothing wrong with that, I guess. We’ll see.

From: “nobody@.”
Apparently-From: [email protected]
Received: from unknown (HELO 192.168.1.2) (64.203.48.190)
Received: from localhost [127.0.0.1] by 192.168.1.2 (AppleMailServer 10.2.3.0) id 3213 via TCP with SMTP; Sun, 10 Aug 2003 07:55:06 -0700