Insecure Tech

Plexie and I are going to Australia in a week, this will probably be my only time ever going out there. She is speaking at a conference and we are going to make a vacation out of it. I am taking a week and 2 days off so we leave from LA on the fifth of sepetemeber and get back on the 14th. I get back into tampa the next morning and go back to work on the 16th. I am currently busting my ass trying to finish up as much coding as i can for this large project i am working on.

Since getting my laptop back from Dell, I wanted to dual boot with sometype of linux distro. My laptop came preinstalled with vista so I thought i would give fedora 11 a try. A co-worker said that he liked it so i thought why not give it a try. The Last time I used fedora was probably core 4 or 5 so I wanted to see the improvements they have made. I first tried the live cd to no avail, when i booted with the livecd i got a bunch of I/O errorrs. I went and downloaded the full DVD and installed with that, it resized my vista partition and installed grub as my boot manager.

I recently had my new laptop have issues with the power button. I spent about an hour on the phone with an entry level tech, that had me dismantle my laptop reseat everything, hard drive wireless card and memory which I told him wasn't the problem. I do have a bit of experience when it comes to troubleshooting and I told the gentleman that, to no avail. He finally agreed that the laptop's power button, which is located in the side of the lcd display was probably malfunctioning, what a shocker :). Dell then sent me a box to send the laptop out for repair which was about 2 weeks ago.

Coolest thing ever on slashdot today, a clock that uses fly blood for power. The premise is that the fly gets stuck in flypaper and then gets dropped in sometype of baterica and then the chemical reaction actually powers the clock. There are fuel cells in the blood that cause the reaction and thus the power. I can so see a PETA law suit in the works but it's pretty damn cool.

link to original article here

We had a good turn out friday night at the binrev meeting, I gave a short ettercap filter presentation and we played with backtrack 4 all and all a good meeting. Last night I actually had some time to record an HPR episode which will be released tommorrow.

I was in the middle of my daily read of slashdot and came across an article of a boy who was hit by a pea size meteorite. The first thing i thought of is how unlucky are you, seriously what are the odds of walking down the street and have a meteorite strike you in the hand causing you to have a scar. My second thought is if that would have hit him in the head he would be a dead because it left a foot crater in the street. On another note, I learned the definiton of smote which is the past tense of smite.

So i've finally returned to a normal schedule, I missed being up during the day. I have been super busy this week catching up on things and I think i've finally made some headway on a major redesign I am working on. I've still got alot of work left to be done but at least returning to days makes me feel that I am actually accomplishing something. Our new night guy has been working out with a few bumps in the road but we are getting there. Maybe i was too quick to judge him but we will see.

Well I've been on nights now for three weeks training our new night guy and I've officially given up on having a normal schedule on the weekend. I am just going to sleep when I am tired. If I return to sleeping at night on the weekend Mondays royally suck, and I am usually up way way to long. The bad part about working nights is that the last part of my shift when I am not training should be my more productive code time, however i am usually tired at that point and getting interupted constantly so my code production hasn't been very good these last weeks.

Being the geek I am, I don't tend to throw away any electronics at all. My justification is that I'll find some use for this particular piece of junk. Over the years I've collected alot of old boxes that others didn't want, and various other stuff. My frustrations started about a month ago when my media center pc died, the power supply had issues and the box was just old and slow. So I went to my collection of junk, thinking that I could put something together that would get the job done, and be faster then what I currently was using.

I've recently started playing with adsense on a few of my smaller sites. I am a big fan of using Drupal as my CMS and I did a little research and found that drupal has a modules for adsense, so I thought i'd give them a try. So I downloaded two modules, Adsense and Adsense injector and placed them into my /modules directory. i then went to the modules table in the administration interface, they appeared and I enabled them. I then proceeded to start playing around with the different options I had, i unfortunally couldn't figure out how to get the ads to appear on the site.