Added a link to my cam on Spotlink. I may run the cam when I'm online, but it's pretty pointless, since it just points at my face...whoopee! Just go on over to the section in ObCam on the right. The reason it's been a deadlink all this time is due to my old cam not working. Now the cam is hosted on another site that provides free service...it came with the new cam. Bought a Philips too....might as well since I own the stock.
Valentines Day has been good to me so far. Hope you are all enjoying it too! I bought an optical wheel mouse from Microsoft today. No more mouse ball, and the wheel is just fantastic. USB installation for the cam AND the mouse....that was easy! All hail MS-OS!

Today I had my first ever root canal. It went surprisingly well, and very fast. He was basically finished in about 20 minutes, with a bunch of finishing touches stretching it to about 35. The whole procedure was remarkably painless. He's very good at what he does (like 90% root canals) obviously, and I found myself laughing during the process. Laughing at the stupid fear I had over having it done. Of course, now that it's over, I'm not laughing any more. My mouth is sore and I'm thinking about forgetting the 'be brave' stuff and taking the codeine they gave me. But, the Motrin is helping a great deal, and I just need to see what the rest of the night brings.

Breaking Headlines! Sun Shoots Self in Foot with Java! God, I hope they fired the lawyer that made this deal! Java is now OFFICIALLY dead, if it wasn't already. How can you have "write once, run anywhere" if you can't run on Microsoft Operating Systems? What a stupid move! And $20mil? What was that? Probably the severance pay for the legal team that thought up the lawsuit in the first place. At least, I sure hope so.

Got a new dog today! A Shih Tzu puppy! He's 8 weeks and he is so CUTE! Do you want to see him?! A family was selling him for $250 and we've wanted to get a pet for a while. My son named him "Spike Jr.", but I wanted to call him Applet.

Hey, ya'all! Snort version 1.7 is out! Just click, and download the RPM (if you have RedHat) and install it. Lots of nice new functionality, INCLUDING the beta code for TCP stream reassembly. Dynamic/Static rules processing and plenty of other nice new features just waters my mouth!

Whew, what a week!
Bought a 40 GB hard drive (ATA100 compatible) - Read online how there's not much speed increase unless you have two high speed drives since the drives typically don't pump data that fast. Most motherboards do ATA/66 nowadays. I was running out of room on my motherboard for drives anyway so I also purchased a PCI-bus controller. It turns out my Linux configuration doesn't recognize that controller (and drivers are unavailable still), so I can only use the new space in MS-OSes.
Taught some cub scouts how to use a hammer, screwdriver and pliers this weekend. That was fun! If you're not into scouting, and you have kids, you should try it. These kids really enjoy doing new things every week!
Have managed to get SnortSnarf and Snort working together in tandem to give me a web page for intrusion detection on a small network at work. I've found some articles that will help me make it work better, and there's also some automated scripts for downloading the newest intrusion signatures. I'll be implementing that soon.
Taught my son to play Magic:the Gathering which I had bought him for Christmas (the Starter set) and he's really getting into playing it. It involves a little more thought than his Pokemon cards, and I enjoy playing it with him.
Been playing with my cable modem at home, downloading stuff from the net left and right. Lots of updates for Linux. I'm running RedHat 7.0 and I'm waiting for them to release the rpm with the new 2.4 kernel in it. The automated up2date tool they include is a very nice addition. Makes the patch process practically painless!
Hint for anyone wanting to run Linux - get more RAM or don't run X-windows stuff. You can do a lot without using X-windows with a slower box, but X will make a small box do a SSSLLLOOOWWW crawl. My box at home has a 400 Mhz Celeron in it, but X is nice and speedy now with 256 MB RAM.
Read Lockergnome! Get free software. HotDog Pro ver5.5 was given away free to Chris' readers in daily Lockergnome this week. No support, but for all you powerusers who don't need it.....hey, it's free!

Looking at IDS systems this past week. I've implemented two of them, a personal IDS called BlackIce and another one on Linux called Snort. As far as BlackIce goes, it's a pretty solid inbound firewall. It doesn't have any outbound firewall functionality (yet), but its IDS system is very nice, and it's incredibly easy to use, while still allowing power users to configure it with the config files.
Someone else had set up an interface that takes Snort output and makes pretty HTML output. It's called SnortSnarf. I'm going to try to implement that next. If anyone has any experience with these tools, let me know what you think. It looks nice and has links for different hack attacks so you can just click on them to jump to descriptions, etc.

Unbelievable...I knew that our cable company has one of the worst service records, so WHY did I think their Road Runner service was going to be any better? I've had the service for 8 days so far, and I am more than just displeased. It's starting to border on disgust. I've had problems with speed fluctuating (from 1k-1Mbit over a period of 10 minutes - up and down, up and down) and now a 6 hour (ongoing) outage. Right now, I am dialed into the Net through a modem connection because my network connection is down.
But THAT'S NOT THE WORST OF IT. The worst of it is that I was given an estimated up-time of 5pm, then 5:30. Then, at 5pm, their customer service went home for the holidays, without telling the national Road Runner service desk what the problem was, or when it is expected to be fixed. For all I know, we may be out until Tuesday because everyone left for Christmas.
It's all about maturity. The Internet just isn't mature enough, folks. Until the ISP's deliver the type of service we expect from the phone company (not that they're perfect...), the Internet will be a toy.
[BIIIIIG SIGH!]

Called and cancelled my Sprynet account today. It's amazing that noone has thought to provide email forwarding for deleted accounts. I mean, sure, I've left as a customer, and you don't want to make it easy for someone to leave your ISP service, but some do-gooder at the IETF should have added email forwarding to SMTP (or ESMTP) to provide forwarding options, complete with reply to originators as to your new email address. Even snail mail provides for this option.
For those of you thinking about changing ISP's, I would suggest BigFoot's email for life. It's a nice service [when it's working...I've caught it being down twice in the past month]. Of course, you get what you pay for - case in point the big HotMail fiasco.
Changing email addresses can be cleansing though. Gives you a chance to get off all those SPAM mail address lists and force you to clean up all your online memberships. Maybe I'll actually get organized this time, and document all my online memberships this time....nah!!

Got my cable modem! I'm not too impressed with the speed thus far, though. I'm seeing throughput of 150-250 KB/sec. A T1 can spit 1.5 MB/sec and I know in some areas, a cable modem can run maximum around 4-6 T-1s. The cable guy recommended an in-line amp to me because the cable is split 5 ways in my house. I may try that, but first I'll ask a neighbor of mine to compare speeds with me. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know.