Archive: 20070108
Note to self: All the walking in DC is making me go through tennis socks faster than I can replace them. I've blown through six socks in three days because they've ripped through without warning walk walking down the street. This is a little annoying because I feel like a slob. It's 2007, so the time for upgrading is probably upon most of us. To wit, here's something that should leave just about everyone drooling in anticipation: This Thursday upcoming, Hitachi will put their one terabyte hard drives on the consumer market with an opening price of $399us. The drives are designated 7K1000 and are designed for desktop and server class machines, and are at this time aimed at people who store massive amounts of video and audio data, though anyone who has built a personal file server to hold data is probably looking hungrily at their favourite tech store's website while waiting for them to appear in the catalogue. I know that I'm pondering how long it'll take to get two of them so I can build a file server that'll get Lyssa and I by for a year or two...
Another random thought for the day: Figure out what, if any sci-fi conventions that J.C.Hutchins will be attending and cosplay as John Alpha. That could be fun.
It seems that Acer's been doing something screwy with their disk images of Windows on their laptops - like an ActiveX control that can execute arbitrary commands through Internet Explorer. The control is called LunchApp.APlunch, and takes as its arguments a hard drive designator, a command to execute, and arguents to that command and executes the whole shebang.
...like so, if you're running IE on a reasonaby recent Acer laptop.
There's an up-side to this: If you're running IE7, you'll get a warning bar at the top asking you for permission to execute LUNCHAPP.OCX. The original author of this warning is still trying to track down which Acer laptops purchased from which regions of the world have this little beastie in them, so please leave him a comment with whatever you discover.
You'd be amazed what a single person can do when they do their homework and talk to the right people...