Checksum Arcanius

Well, the title says it – I was hacked. I supposed it was going to happen sooner or later – I didn’t check my logs, installed insecure software, used insecure installations, and well, I guess I showed up on someone’s radar. Which is kind of flattering actually. Whoever you are, theo, admin of xboxevolution, email me – I won’t press charges or anything, but I would like to hear from you.

Its back up now, but terribly unstable, and grep and gzip are all busted up, reducing the system functionality to staggering along at best. Work on sf2 has picked up dramatically, with FreeBSD 4.9 looking like the OS of choice. CVSUp is compiling right now – when that is done, I can update the ports, then instlal the server programs – exim, apache, and proftpd. Then I can work on transfering the files over, followed by setting everything up so it works. I guess this site will be the first to go, since this site is the most visited and most updated.

Early this morning, Silverfir.net began showing symptoms of some malady. After I got back from church, the symptoms persisted, so I had Amy restart the computer, but to no avail. The next step was to get up close and personal with wadi, the box currently serving Silverfir.net.

I was unable to figure out exactly what was going on, but on startup, right after init loaded, the computer would stop doing anything – it echoed keystrokes, but it wouldn’t respond to the three fignered salute, or continue booting up. Finally I tried Ctrl-C and it continued in its boot process. So long story short, after ctrl-c’ing multiple times, the computer finished booting, and seems to be serving properly once again. But it can’t handle any restarts without human iutnervention, for unknown reasons. I will have to bump the priority level of setting up a replacement to the venerable but rapidly fading wadi.

I would have posted an interesting thing about IIS webserver acting up, but Greymatter (my blog software) seems to have issues with HTML code, so no.

I’m still being late to class; Multivar is still interesting; Tennis is fun; I have dust problems in Photography.

I’m learning a lot more about Inventor. I actually got a piece of the arm drive assembly completed today, thanks to some helpful guidance from Larry.

Thats all for tonight.

Read the Blog and learn!

Here is the difference between speaker out and line out (credit goes to the original author here):

“Its all a question of impedance, speaker out is expecting a low impedance, 4-32 Ohm object to be stuck on it. Line-out is expecting a high impedance (I think 1kOhm) object to be stuck on it. If you dont put the correct matched object on each output you get a loss of signal quality.

With highly strung amps you can actually do damage but the cheap stuff on a soundcard is pretty immune. Also a PC soundcard generates so much noise that the increase by the impedance mismatch is hardly noticeably. Normally all I really see is a drop in frequency response.”
–Graeme

“Impedence” is the ratio of voltage to current – similar to, but not exactly resistance. Read more about it here if you are interested.

Music:
I have found that even high quality MP3’s reconstituted through a high quality player on my laptop into my stereo system simply cannot compete with the original CD. The weakest link here is, I believe, my laptop. I have tried similar tests using my desktop (with the audigy II platinum) and haven’t been able to detect reasonable differences. My laptop, on the other hand, even with the volume turned all the way up, doesn’t seem to output enough voltage to simulate a line out. Its plenty loud in headphones. I wonder how much line out is supposed to be?

Money:
I asked the CEO of T-Mobile for $4,000 today. Actually, he’s going to give the information I gave him to his marketing department. I hope I did a good enough job on it to get something. Also, I gave similar information to Mr. Chaplin of Chaplin’s Automotive Group, a contact that happened because of my mom, bless her. We’ll see how that goes.

Thanks:
I finally got around to start writing thank you letters to the very nice people who hosted Scott and I while on our roadtrip. I am now awaiting more addresses to write more letters. People are good, life is great, and I am indeed blessed.

Today –
Classes: Tennis (suggestion vastly improved consistency), Math (fun, impending test): 8:40-11:30
Lab Work: Photography (2 more 8×10 prints): 11:30-1:00
Home: Resurect Palm m500 (success): 1:30-3:00
Larry’s: Solidify Robot Arm Design (coming together, my job is shoulder drive)
UW: Drop off Bob and Jake, Eat (yummy Pizza)
Home: Email and Counterstrike (sucked)
Bed: Sleep (now)