A semi-common sight in DC are street musicians, people who stand on street corners or sit just inside the entrances of Metrorail stations and play instruments of one sort or another. Every once in a while you'll see one within spitting distance of an office building, something that has become a bit more rare since 9/11 since physical security has become such a big deal in this country. Most people don't even stop to listen to them because they're too busy doing what they need to do to keep their lives running smoothly, which seems to consist of running …
Easter weekend is always a busy one. Either we're getting ready to head back to Pennsylvania to spend the day with one or both families, cleaning, cooking, or getting ready to have people over for dinner. As it turned out, we accomplished most of the tasks on that list, as well as a couple that weren't, all in preparation for Grant and his girlfriend to come over on Sunday afternoon for dinner.
The task began on Friday night with a couple of loads of laundry and cleaning up around the apartment, followed by driving over most of creation on Saturday …
.."Old virus detected - contact your hacker for an update." It seems that malware authors have taken this joke seriously, and are offering subscriptions to website operators that make use of their software. Malware tends to evolve fairly rapidly to get around the cleaner software, which means that sites that deliberately infect web browsers have to keep up to date to keep as many systems as possible infected. Prices tend to start around $66us and climb from there, depending upon how many systems a particular website is able to infect.
It has become apparent that it is possible to not only …
Frankly, I've just been too tired. Not so much physically tired, though that has been creeping up on me over the past day or two, but a sort or weariness that has settled into my bones and is slowly but surely slowing me down. I've been doing a lot of running around lately and that hasn't been helping - we've got family coming into town for Easter this weekend, so Lyssa and I have been running around getting some last minute stuff to make dinner on Sunday, like a new cutting board (our old one broke a couple of weeks back …
But seriously, Google's added some interesting features to their mapping webapp, namely, the ability to draw and customize your own personal maps, which can then be shared with others, if you so desire. There is now a selection tool which lets you define routes and points on the map, a tool that lets you put flags on land- or placemarks, and a utility that'll let you define shapes, a utility that I think has a lot of potential.
Ron Huebner, a sewer maintenance worker in Minneapolis, Minnesota was treated to a much more rude surprise than usual while cleaning out a sewer pipe last month: Blood. Gallons and gallons of animal and human blood dumped into the sewer by a nearby medical research facility.
The company that owns the facility, as it turns out, has a permit to dump blood in just this way. Still, Huebner is pretty shaken up, because he was doused with the stuff, and wound up with it in in most of the orifices of his body. That's not something that you just shake …
A presentation at Black Hat Europe 2007 by security researchers from India has blown the security of the Windows Vista bootloader wide open, and compromised the security model of Microsoft's latest operating system at the lowest levels. Vipin and Nitin Kumar of NV Labs figured out how to write what the popular press is calling a 'bootkit' that runs off of a bootable CD or DVD. The bootkit searches the primary drive for a copy of Windows Vista and executes it while making modifications to the code running in memory transparently - because the OS trusts the 'trusted' bootloader implicitly, it …
On the second of April the United States government opened the Immigration and Naturalization Service's offices for applicants of H1-B visas to apply to enter the United States to work in the tech industry. They can only accept about 150,000 applications for this particular visa every year, which allows skilled tech workers to live in the United States for up to six years while working in their fields of expertise.
In his standup show No Cure For Cancer, Denis Leary used to joke about all of the drugs that Keith Richards has done, and about how people would have to smoke his ashes because he'd all but used up the entire supply of illicit drugs on the planet. In a recent interview, Keith Richards of the band the Rolling Stones admitted to snorting his father's ashes mixed with cocaine. A spokesman for the music magazine NME was reportedly able to confirm that the story was not, in fact, an April Fool's joke.
