game shot

I found one place that has more flash games than any other site I've seen so far. I feel a little guilty using it because all they do, is repost games from other web sites. However, since they are so complete I use them a lot. My favorite kind of flash games are turned defender. Elemental current defense was the first one I played on this site. Since there are thousands to choose from, I never really get bored. I do not trust this site very much, I would not be surprised if there was malware on it. As long as you use no script you should be fine on any web site.

Game shot

No script is a plug-in for Firefox that will block flash, javascript, and other client-side tools from on untrusted sites. and my opinion, is the ultimate tool for protecting yourself online. For some people, I could see how this plug-in would be a pain. the more protection you need online, for example, if you are a heavy user, the more work it will take to have this program protect you. If you spend the necessary time to list sites as trustworthy or not, I am sure you will also find this plug-in to be adequate protection from malicious web sites.

storms in Chicago

Thursday evening, Chicago was rocked by major storms. The power went out around 4 in the little suburb my parents live in; It didn't turn back on until Sunday night. Even then, there were others near by that didn't have power. Then I discovered that the cable was out... So while I had power from Sunday night, I didn't get internet until Wednesday morning.

Naturally, when I did get my internet back, I spent a lot of time on my email.
I have been up and running for 24 hours now; but the city still looks pretty bad. Many blocks still have lots of debris on them. Also, there was a lot of flooding. Every so often you catch a whiff of something sewer-like.

I would like to write a lot more about this, but I'm going away again this weekend. My grandparents are throwing us a bridal shower! Grandma wanted it to be more of a get-to-gether, since the parents haven't met yet; so there will be guys there as well. I plan to make one posting while I'm down there. Till then!

missing the point of DRM free music

There are now a few places to get DRM free tracks. As cool as this is, many of the stores seem to be missing the point. Without the need for DRM, these companies no longer need special software running on the device to buy that music. A company could setup a music download service that is entirely web based. Think of the ability to go to the same website on your smart phone, desktop, or even a myth TV box, and download music. One store, one url, any device.
it's completely possible right now. However no store allows you to do this, I wander why; as I sit here at the walmart music download site, with the message saying I can't view there site on my mac.

high def flash

watch for an update to flash offering h.264, and other new codecs. The quality of youtube is something I have complained about from time to time, it's nice to get your way!

Virgina Tech System X

I thought it was so cool when Virgina Tech bought all those 1st gen g5 macs. They then upgraded the computing farm in 2004 to the xserv and xserv RAID. This year they started doing Simulation Of Cell Division. As far as I know, this kind of work has never been done before. Given the amount of computing power it takes, if it was done, someone knows about it.

fuzzer, javascript security tool

fuzzer is a joint project of microsoft, mozilla, and Opera. (claims that Opera is using mozilla's project are only partly true link to the script is attached)
For those that don't know; fuzz is a debugging technique of throwing random data at a program to try and make it fail.

jungle disk is out of beta

Sorry I'm so slow reporting this;

For about a year now, jungle disk has been a free download for making a web-dav drive out of your amazon s3 account. Now they are asking for $20 as a one-time fee for each S3 account you have. This will cover as many computers as you want to run it on. That means a corperation using one S3 account can get one copy of jungle disk, then they have an off-site shared network disk. Granted, it's not designed to be used like that; but with a little work, it could be.

I also have worries about amazon's new pricing structure. It makes a side-by-side comparison harder to do. Also, the lead amazon holds in discount, reliable storage is sliming. For now, I trust there network over others, even though they did have a major service outage; as a home user, such an event doesn't matter. What really counts is they don't have major slow-downs during peek hours.

skype outage

Please allow me to jump on the band wagon for this one.
Darn you Skype! Very wide spread problems on Skype's P2P network. They say it will be 12-24 hours just to get everything up and running again!

streaming content

I was looking at doing a live stream of the wedding. Inorder to get a good feed, I would need around 60Kbps Doing this event live no longer seems like the way to go. I will be saving it to a file and then serving it up; offering it as a streaming download. I can then offer a higer quality feed; and

finding cloths on amazon

I went looking for shirts on Amazon, and discovered that they added filters to find only stuff that is in your size! They often have things that are end-of-season that are only sold in some sizes. That's not all; there are also filters for discount amount and color. It's so nice to be able to find just what you want, and omit everything else.
I think I'll be buying a lot more stuff this way.