wce.80d.org

My father was in town last week to take me to the Sabres/Canes Eastern game 7 semifinals. Very exciting. Our Sabres didn't quite take it but we had a lot of support there regardless. Good time.

With "Sweep" done, Wake Drama and my friend Maciej put another short, tentatively titled "Test," in the can Sunday. It's about a young couple in the midst of a pregnancy test - results unknown. Shot it in one day. If you take a look at my MySpace page and browse through the comments, you can probably see a shot of me holding about $2500 worth of gear, a selection of the equipment we used to shoot it. Afterwards, after Maciej fed us (it was his script :), himself, Rob and I went to see "The Sentinel" at the Blue Ridge theatre. Cool conspiracy theory stuff but a little bit action-cheesy about 3/4 of the way through. Enjoyed it.

Coming up this weekend is CarolinaCon2006 which I am thinking about attending. It sounds pretty neat. If you can go, you should check it out. It's Friday 6p through Sunday morning. It will be relatively geeky and "technology enthusiast" oriented and, for most, rather sleepless. It's at the Hampton Inn, 3621 Spring Forest Rd. in Raleigh. $20 cash at the door. If you want to book a room, call and tell them you're with CarolinaCon. I'm pretty excited about it.

At the greenhouse today Shuhai and I recovered the side of one of our houses with double layered poly, I cleaned the evaporative cooling pads of all the dead alge that grew on them last year, and I caulked all the aspirated air monitoring tubes with silicone to prevent the mist from the high pressure fog system from corroding the contacts and humidity sensors inside. His study is now up and running and things seem to be going pretty well.

I was icerocketing myself this afternoon for no reason after work and came across some new stuff that google hasn't picked up. It's a nice search in that it displays little clips of each web page that show up in the results. Supposedly good for blog searches.... Haven't used it before today.

Read my rant on stopping useless PGP keys from clogging up the public keyservers out there. I'll iterate more someday or update this post later on what all this stuff is about. My public key is here and I encourage you to use it to encrypt your messages when sending me email (cyrus at 80d dot org). Read more about PGP here. PGP is a way to both ensure that only I see email you send to me (nobody can read it along the way) and a way for you to ensure (to some degree) that the email I send to you has not been forged by somebody pretending to be me.

Today I installed 14 humidity sensors at the greenhouse with Shuhai and cleaned out the evaporative cooling pad water reservoir. It was hot out there. One challenge we had at the end of last year, trying to weigh mist, that's right - about a tenth of a gram at a time, was the resolution of the scales we are using. I suggested today that we put the pan of oil (oil so the mist doesn't evaporate when it sinks (not always easy in itself)), at the end of a lever and let the mass of the water push up on a mass that goes on the scale. The mass puts the scale in the middle of the range (loaded configuration), hopefully where it's most accurate, and the weight read by the scale goes down when the mist collects, but the measurement is 'amplified' by the lever. Hopefully we can do it accurately and without a great deal of expense.

I had a long converstation last night with my mom about life and where I'm going. It was insightful for the both of us.

CUTE!!! video. Laughing babies make you smile.

A link to my friends' radio show :: the Twisted Pair radio show with Al and Y0rii. I know them through my local nc2600 group. We meet at BitPlayers in Raleigh on the first Friday of every month. There's a 'gear swap' tomorrow. Bring some technical gear you've been trying to get rid of and maybe somebody will take it off your hands. If you'd like to find the 2600 meeting closest to you, go to 2600.com and look to the worldwide meetings list.

More on the anti-mouse stance. Learn the excellent text editor vim by using this really neat tutorial to radically flatten the learing curve. It's not intuitive in any respect but if you edit any quantity of text on a daily basis, do not deny yourself learning the vi/vim keybindings. You can find a few more resources by googling or looking to my 'learningunix' page. It's worth it and I use it every day.

Happy 5 May!!!

Do you feel safe on that wireless connection you use at the coffee shop?

Most "unprotected neighbor" and coffee house wireless systems are completely open and unencrypted. This makes it convenient for you to check your email, IM chat, or browse the web - no password needed - but also convenient for snoops. Everything you do on the network - for the most part - every image that you download, every word you type in AIM, every sentance of email you send or receive, can be seen by others around you.

Even when it's "encrypted" it could be easily spied upon or forged. Here's a link to some tools that can be used by nefarious foes to break the encryption or pose as a legit access point, capturing all traffic you unknowingly send through them. Computer security isn't easy. If you have a choice when setting up an encrypted wireless connection, choose LEAP or WPA/WPA2 encryption over WEP when you can. WEP's design is poor and is easily attacked. (And breaking this stuff doesn't take more than a $200 laptop and a wifi card.)

Don't be paranoid, but don't convince yourself that nobody is looking over your shoulder either. Your packets are flying through that coffee sitting in front of you - and flying down the street as well, right out the window and ready for capture. More on how this works. I'm just trying to help make you aware of what's out there... Because knowing is half the battle. :)

(Yes - the yellow address bar in firefox and/or the lock icon at the bottom of your browser can protect your web sessions from onlookers. Use "https://" addresses when you can and read the security popups carefully so you don't fall victim to a phishing attack.)

[reported at thestreet.com]

Apparently the world's 3rd largest PC maker, Lenovo™ will be moving it's headquarters to Raleigh, NC from Purchase, New York. Yes - these are the guys that acquired IBM's PC business in 2005. (I've got a Thinkpad T43 for work and it's wonderful.) Originally named Legend, the small PC manufacturer from a one-story bungalow in Beijing, was renamed to Lenovo in 2003; taking the Le from Legend, a nod to its heritage, and adding novo, the Latin word for new.

Homework late again? You're not a skilled procrastinator. The Procrastinator's Formula explains.

… Once he perfects this gift, this wonderful talent, the procrastinator becomes capable of compressing lengthy chores into a single day. … However, this method should not be attempted by just anyone. A slight miscalculation in the length of time to delay work could prove disastrous, something only the veteran procrastinator knows how to avoid. …

You can also sample some of this author's other labors in the form of wicked eye candy for your desktop. Best. Screensaver. Ever. … though without an OpenGL 3D-accelerated video card, pretty tough to enjoy…they will be too slow to be very much fun. If they run slow for you, "ass-slow," try searching for updated drivers for your card. A similar OpenGL project can also be found for Windows[screen shots] and the GLX port thereof for Linux[screen shots].

Download the Fireflies screensaver for:

• Windows
• RH9 Linux .rpm
• (woody|sid) Debian .deb (Debian, btw, is another flavor of GNU/Linux, should you be wondering....)
• OSX (src also available @ Stephane Sudre's website)

You can also get the Windows Standalone version that allows you do do a few cool things with the mouse and keyboard you can't do with the screensaver. (It requires SDL. See the README for info on installing and mouse/keyboard controls).

Trust me. Really cool screensaver. His name is Matt Perry. He hacks OpenGL; among other things.

Here's what he has to say about his essay regarding, those whom many often refer to as, the slacker: This is an essay I wrote in my high school English class Sophomore year. It's my favorite essay I've written for a school assignment, and also probably the best. In fact, it's quite possibly the best essay ever written, by anyone, ever. Well, maybe not. But it was good enough to score an A+ in high school. So read up and enjoy [The Procrastinator's Formula].

The World Community Grid's mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. Our work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. Our success depends on individuals - like you - collectively contributing their unused computer time to this not-for-profit endeavor.

The grid has two active projects at this time.

1. FightAIDS@Home, launched November 21, 2005, is a project focused on using computation methods to identify candidate drugs that have the right shape and chemical characteristics to block HIV protease. This approach is called "Structure-Based Drug Design", and according to the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, it has already had a dramatic effect on the lives of people living with AIDS.
   

2. Human Proteome Folding focuses on providing scientists with data that predicts the shape of a very large number of human proteins. These predictions will give scientists the clues they need to identify the biological functions of individual proteins within the human body. With an understanding of how each protein affects human health, scientists can develop new cures for human diseases such as cancer, HIV/AIDS, SARS, and malaria. You can learn more from the layperson guide or a more detailed description at the Institute For Systems Biology.
   
   

   You can help by clicking "Download Now" at