The Parting Of The Server

The Parting Of The Server

Doctor Who and IRC, what could possibly go wrong?

Random IMs - Bad Quiz Joke

StanMarsh> Baby Names Beginning With "F": Meaning: Occupational Surname
JagerKemp> fourier
JagerKemp> he transforms things
JagerKemp> oh my god, that joke was bad, even for me

(Stan is our quizbot)

RIAA For The Lose (Always)

RIAA gets some class

RIAA tried to shake down 10-year-old daughter, suit claims

I totally believe that happened, and someone needs to slap down the RIAA either way.

Flash

"This morning's unprecedented solar eclipse is no cause for alarm"

I'm pretty sure there is precedent for solar eclipses occurring...

Banana-jacked

A new brand of computer crime is sweeping the nation, could you become a victim? We bring you this exclusive report so you can know the facts.

Picture a summer's day, you leave your computer downloading a selection of legally purchased music or movies to enjoy later and go outside for some fresh air. Unknown to you, a member of a fast growing underground group of hackers has set his sights on your property. This time it isn't your credit card numbers or logs of your browsing and chatting history, this criminal is after something bigger - your fruit. That's right, recently an exploit was discovered that allows anyone with the right skills and tools to remotely log into your computer and steal any nearby fruit right from the bowl it is sitting in. Since the initial discovery of this exploit, originally found to exist in all Windows versions but shortly after also discovered in the Linux kernel, fruit thefts have risen exponentially. Each day new tools are becoming available to make the process ever easier to perform.

We spoke to one victim, Mr Joe Samson (28) from Reading, and found it had caused him great inconvenience. "I went out for a cigarette," he told us, "and when I got back all my pears were gone. I had to go to the local shop to stock back up again." He went on to describe the counter-measures he has taken against this happening again: "Now I keep my fruit bowl on the other side of the room, and I only leave my PC on when I absolutely have to."

Linksys, a division of Cisco producing domestic routers, recently released a statement saying that they are looking into providing anti-fruit theft built into the products. Firewall providers are reported to also be looking into methods of combating the problem.

Dr Taki of the Virtual Fruit Theft Research Group at Cambridge University, recently formed to assist the industry in this area, told us that "these hackers in the majority case don't seem to be launching these attacks towards a goal of simple possession of the fruit, instead it seems to be a question of status. The higher profile the target and the larger the fruit taken the more they appear to be respected by their peers." He then went on to say that "there does appear to be a rising number of people outside of that community who are interested only in the theft aspect and who are using prebuilt tools to automate the process. These people are especially dangerous as they do not have any code or system of ethics of the form that those mentioned earlier do."

Our advice to our readers is not to leave any fruit near to a computer unattended and to switch off your computer when you are not using it. We will bring you more news as it breaks.

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Disclaimer: Obviously this isn't real news. I'm not a news blog and the story is frankly ridiculous. Anyone who actually needs this disclaimer here shouldn't really be using the internet unsupervised (though I do have some programs I can sell you that will speed up your connection 600% as well as protect you from psychic mind control rays).

Expandable Data

I'm running out of space. Think about that for a moment, I have about 1.5TB of hard disk space on this machine... and I'm running out. I remember a time when I was pushing the space available on a 1GB drive. My next machine had 20GB and I got nowhere near filling that up. Next was a 40GB one and I was even further away from that, until I went to uni and discovered the sheer amount of things you could download (oi, get your mind out of the gutter, I don't think I could realistically collect 1.5TB of that). Since then, no matter how much space I have I'm always short.

I'll say this again. I'm running out of space on a machine with 1.5TB. A couple of years ago I couldn't even dream of having that much. Hell, we held a mini virtual celebration when our whole filesharing network broke 1TB. What the hell is going on?

Random Quotes - Firefly II

From The Message.

River: "This food is problematic."
Jayne: "Girl's a mind-reading genius, can't even figure out how to eat ice planet."

River's very cute when she can't figure something out. Oh and the look of defeat a couple of shots later makes you just want to hug her, poor thing still standing there with the ball of food on a stick.

And yes, I'm watching them all. Again. So sue me *.


* Please don't

Random Quotes - Firefly

I occurred to me that I have no Firefly or Serenity quotes, save the ones in the sidebar/footer of my blogs. That must change, so here's two from Shindig (episode 4).

Zoey: "Planet's coming up a mite fast."
Wash: "That's just 'cause I'm going down too quick. Likely crash and kill us all."
Mal (walking out): "That happens, let me know."

Zoey: "If I were going to wear a dress I'd want something with some slink."
Wash: "You want a slinky dress? I can buy you a slinky dress. Captain, can I have money for a slinky dress?"
Jayne: "I'll chip in."
Zoey: "I can hurt you."

Random Chats - Recursive Posts

Kemp-> did you see I had a new IM post up on my blog ryv? I know how you love them :P
Ryvern> yes
Ryvern> i did
Ryvern> thanks Kemp-
Ryvern> :p
Kemp-> I would blog me telling you about it, but that'd create some kinda wierd recursive post

Oh well, I gave in, let's see if the universe implodes.

Forceware 162.18

From the Forceware 162.18 release notes (flagged as an application issue, not a driver one):

Elder Scrolls 4 Oblivion: Running at 2560x1600 with NVIDIA Enhanced Application mode 16xQ, extremely rare 1‐2 second pauses occur during some fighting. [262685]

This appears to be an application issue in how large textures are created during the in-game fighting.

If I ran it at those settings I'm pretty sure I'd have extremely frequent 1-2 minute pauses, screw an odd second lost here and there.


Edit:
Reminds me of a similar bug report in the release notes once. It was a very new game at insanely high resolution with max AA and AF applied running on a GeForce4 series card. I can't remember very well but I believe the report mentioned the game crashes to the desktop on launch. If it didn't you'd wish it had done...

Waffles

Overdue a bit, but just because Ben told me not to encourage her I'd like to say potato waffles always win.

STS-118 Launch Post

As always, the launch IM log.

Overlord: ~5 mins
Kemp: oh yeah *hunts feed*
Overlord: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/main/index.html
Overlord: ~1 minute to go XD
Kemp: woot, music ready?
Overlord: Of course
Overlord: /me is currently listening to: Star Trek - First Contact - Magic Carpet Ride - Steppenwolf (Star Trek - First Contact).mp3 [04:25m/320Kbps/44KHz/foobar2000 0.9.4.3]#
Overlord: =D
Overlord: SRBs are gone
Kemp: GET THEM BACK, QUICK
Overlord: XD
Kemp: lol "providing the endeavour with a kick in the pants"
Overlord: Negative return passed
Kemp: I'm about 5-10 secs behind you [ed: my feed was delayed compared to Overlord's]
Overlord: FUCK, IT EXPLODED
Overlord: *shot*
Kemp: BRACE FOR IMPACT!
Kemp: (I still have time to :P )
Overlord: XD

If Only... - Maplin Guides

Quote from Maplin's description of their 2008 catalogue:

We have also added 15 new ‘how to’ guides on everything from networking to ID theft.

Vista Zip Support

Taken from here and based on Vista's support for creating a zip file with your choice of contents, I assume XP might be a bit worse (after all, they've had many years to fix it up).

I captured a Process Monitor trace of the compression of a single file and counted the associated operations. Just for this simple case, Explorer opened the target ZIP file 14 times, 12 of those before it had actually created the file and therefore with NOT FOUND results, and performed directory look ups of the target 19 times. It was also redundant with the source file, opening it 28 times and querying the file’s basic properties 17 times.

[...]

Zipfldr.dll, the Explorer file compression DLL, was in most of the stack traces, meaning that the compression engine itself was ultimately responsible for the waste. Further, the number of repetitious operations explodes when you compress multiple files.

Optimisation needed much?

CollegeHumour Clips

Just some random videos for you, all safe for work. All comments from the video pages, not me.

Minesweeper : The Movie
Now that it's a movie, you can use it to procrastinate for a full 90 minutes.

Biff Song
Biff, from the Back to the Future trilogy, performs a song he wrote about the same inane questions he gets asked on a daily basis.

Run Like Hell Man
And it burns, burns, burns... the swing of fire.

Tom Hanks 007
Interesting fact: Tom Hanks has been in 23 movies and a whopping 21 of them have been very good.

Who's That?

"It's Holly Valance, she was in neighbours remember? She's not actually naked, she does that in a different video."