The command line is a very powerful thing as demonstrated at Sun Ray Bog when they tackle the war on terror.
$ cd /middle_east
$ ls
Afghanistan Iraq Libya Saudi_Arabia UAE
Algeria Israel Morrocco Sudan Yemen
Bahrain Jordan Oman Syria
Egypt Kuwait Palestine Tunisia
Iran Lebanon Qatar Turkey
$ cd Afghanistan
$ ls
bin Taliban
$ rm Taliban
rm: Taliban is a directory
$ cd Taliban
$ ls
soldiers
$ rm soldiers
$ cd ..
$ rmdir Taliban
rmdir: directory “Taliban”: Directory not empty
$ cd Taliban
$ ls -a
. .. .insurgents
$ chown -R USA .*
chown: .insurgents: Not owner
But wait! There’s more!
via Boing Boing
Powdered sugar. Colette dropped the DJ moniker, came out from behind the decks, and has arrived with a sticky sweet confection in Hypnotized. The album plays just as one might expect from Colette; the production is top notch and flows much like her earlier mix albums with care and precision given to how each track plays on the those before and after it.
Hypnotized is a breezy affair with lyrics touching on the well covered topics of sex and flirting though do not let the lightness dissuade you. The album captures the mood of summer with its languid mid-tempo beats and shares much in common with the Hed Kandi Beach House compilations where you can sing along with out being compelled to stop and ponder the meaning of the words and their impact. The music is for fun, no more no less.
If you are in the market to drive summers streets with the windows down singing with out a care or you want to bounce about on a hot, sticky night than Hypnotized is your album. As with most of her work Colette delivers and her latest does not disappoint.
Well, it appears as if one of the more useful Firefox extensions is experiencing some security related woes. The fine folks working on Greasemonkey are calling for users to either patch their version or uninstall it immediately. They state:
The flaw allows any website which matches at least one user script (even * scripts) to read any local file on your machine, or to list the contents of local directories. The flaw applies to Greasemonkey on all platforms.
I’m working feverishly on a fix for this. But this will take several days. In the meantime, I strongly recommend that everyone either install Greasemonkey 0.3.5, or else disable or uninstall Greasemonkey completely.
Greasemonkey 0.3.5 is a “neutered” version of Greasemonkey, lacking any of the GM* APIs which make Greasemonkey scripts more powerful than regular HTML. This means that scripts which depend on GM* APIs will fail with Greasemonkey 0.3.5.
So, heed their advice and either patch your Greasemonkey install or drop it until the security issues are fully resolved.
NYT reports that Corrupted PC’s Find New Home in the Dumpster. Let me get this straight, rather than exerting some care or caution with your computing habits you willfully discard your computer, an object chock full of PCBs, into a landfill and replace it with another.
On a recent Sunday morning when Lew Tucker’s Dell desktop computer was overrun by spyware and adware - stealth software that delivers intrusive advertising messages and even gathers data from the user’s machine - he did not simply get rid of the offending programs. He threw out the whole computer.
Mr. Tucker, an Internet industry executive who holds a Ph.D. in computer science, decided that rather than take the time to remove the offending software, he would spend $400 on a new machine.
This is behavior that I might expect from any old executive but there are two things that cause me to pause and reflect. He works for Salesforce.com so surely he must have at least passing knowledge about how to secure a computer against malware and viruses particularly given that the article states he has a Ph.D. in Computer Science. Did Lew Tucker at least keep on top of the patches and service packs issued by Microsoft? Likely not. Is Lew Tucker’s background in CS center largely around theory? Likely. If he had more practical knowledge about desktop computing he would not be blithely tossing his PCB laden computers into a landfill. That is of course if he really cares about the world we live in which judging by his nonchalance it is very lkely he does not.
Here are some clues for all the idiots like Mr. Tucker who would pitch their PCs into a dumpster because of Bonzai Buddy (note- Windows users only):
- Stay on top of patches and service packs at Windows Update.
- Get a software firewall like ZoneAlarm.
- Download, install, and use Anti-Spyware products. SpyBot and AdAware are two very capable packages.
- Purchase and use an anti-virus solution like Symantec’s Norton Anti-Virus.
- Use another browser. IE is the root of many of your problems, Mr. Tucker et al. Get Firefox.
- When all else fails remeber that you have a disc labeled Recovery. Use it.
Now, if this is too much for you to do than I suggest you get an alternate OS. Apple makes a great product and I have found that Linux suits my needs just perfectly, I recommend Ubuntu. If that is too much that I recommend you get yourself a day planner and leave computers well enough alone.
Rant material provided by the fine folks at Gizmodo.
I was browsing Yahoo! News the other day and stumbled upon an interesting article about some software that attempts to match listeners with musicians and it sounded intriguing enough that I decided to grab the software and give it a shot.
Indy is the first one I gave a shot at and the first thing that I noticed was the spartan nature of the application sort of resembling an iPod Shuffle but with a screen and a ratings bar, granted the intention is only to sample new artists, not serve as a media hub. It serves up a wide mix of artists bouncing between singer-songwriters, jazz vocalists, quirky rock acts, to everything in-between. A nice touch is the ability to visit the homepage of the artist just by clicking the scrolling display which makes it very easy to learn more about the music that is being played. The icing on the cake is that the music is downloaded and stored locally, organized into folders by rating.
Overall, Indy is a nifty little tool though it would be nice to see a couple of more elements added to the service. One enhancement that would go a long way would be the ability to specify the types of genres available for listening so that the user can either narrow or widen the available selections based on their personal preferences; being able to skip the occasionally grind-core track would be fine with me. Also, having message boards where listeners and artists could communicate with each other could go a long way in providing a richer experience for all of those involved, at the moment the experience feels a tad isolated.
If you are in the market for something new and like taking aural risks give Indy a shot.
In the next post I’ll take a look at iRATE Radio, which hopefully won’t sound as angry as its name implies.
