Instant Messaging Stupidity
Yahoo! and Microsoft are entering a race to see how many people they can boot off their instant messaging networks. First, Microsoft made MSN unavailable to netizens (like me) using 3rd party software. Yahoo! promptly did the same thing this weekend. I’ve been using Bitlbee for a few months now, however, two of the four protocols that I used are now broken. It’s like the phone company insisting that you have to buy _their_ phone to talk on _their_ network. Oh, and don’t think AIM/ICQ are any better, they intentionally broke Trillian at least 5 times before giving up. So, if you’re wondering why I’m no longer on MSN or Yahoo, now you know.
SteakumCam
Old Steakum managed to go around willy-nilly, secret squirrel, and take some pics of the Dayton engineering building. Go here to marvel at the digital masterpieces.
Scrmable
jwz cetread tihs scprit that alwols you to smacblre wodrs lveniag the fsrit and lsat lteetr in pcale. The trheoy beihnd it is that you olny ralely look at the first and last ltteer of a wrod to dmretneie it’s mainneg.
Screen RPM
In an effort to create my own crappy linux distro, I added a new screen rpm for redhat 9. Download it at your own risk here:
OpenSSH 3.7.1
These are the openssh 3.7.1 rpms for redhat 9.
Valid C Code
The following is valid C/C++:
_10: 1; goto _10;
Add these lines to any program for a special surprise (aka infinite loop).
Bitlbee Screen Shot
The Gnome screen shot from a week or so back made it to bitlbee.org’s screen shot page. Wilmer van der Gaast and Sjoerd Hemminga are software geniouses. If you haven’t tried bitlbee yet, it’s like trillian for people who know better. I connect to bitlbee via irssi on gnu screen.
OpenSSH Vulnerability
I just compiled some OpenSSH rpms for Redhat 9 to protect my firewall (with ssh open). You can get them at the normal place:
Yawn!
I’m a hardware junky as much as the next man, but the past few months has been a little slow going. I guess the Athlon64 is going to be released later this month, and a new ATI Radeon 9800XT in October which will be interesting to see. It seems to me that things are kind of slowing down in the industry overall. I kind of feel like the computer industry is like what the auto industry was in the 1960’s. All the 1337 h4×0rz back then were obsessing about making their cars more powerful. A lot of young lonely men wondered, “How can I squeeze a few more horsepower out of the old Rustang?”
Yes, it was an exciting time to be an automobile enthusiast in the 60s just like it was fun to be a computer enthusiast in 1990’s. Just replace “horsepower” with “megahertz”, and you realize that it’s the same phenomenon. Just like the auto industry, the computer industry has stabilized and is becoming rather uninteresting. Not a lot of people get excited about Mustangs anymore, and I don’t get that excited when Intel goes from 3.066 GHz to 3.20 GHz.
Gig List Update
I just updated my about page with a gig list for the next few month’s.
