I’m up later than I wanted to be because the timed PowerPoint/MP3 -> Flash presentation transfer I agreed to do for a friend ended up taking longer than I thought. The PowerPoint part of it wasn’t bad. MSDN turned up a nifty object model chart and reference and the VBA debugger does everything you’d expect and want it to do. While I suppose Flash MX is an improvement, the development environment is still woefully lackluster. The included ActionScript Dictionary is shitty, there’s no object model chart (I still don’t know what the built in objects and collections are), and the debugger is weak sauce. Not to mention ActionScript itself still sucks. Oh sure it’s mostly ECMA on the outside, but it’s still a hacky Lingo-ish bastard child on the inside. I spent a while looking for a proper timer/sleep function (it’s not there), and also under the false impression that I’d be able to implement a controller model / actionscript without having to attach it to a frame (also not there). I ended up hacking it together with nested clips and gotos. Que lame-o. I should probably start throwing up full write-ups of these things on their own pages…

On the bright side, I thought up of some things related to this that I can add to Rasmus’s presentation system. I’m actually still sitting on some code that I should check in. It’s on my todo-list, but I’m just so busy right now that I’m not even thinking about anything other than making it through the next few weeks.

Obvious tip of the day: when installing VPN software, it’s advisable for said installer not to be on a networked drive.

After getting the last parts, I finally got around to setting up my SCSI array. The IBM ServeRAID cards pulls from Computer Geeks. These are pretty monstrous cards. They’re full length with 5 orange status LEDs on the back. The actual board has 3 Adaptec AIC-7880P chips, a PowerPC 403GC controller, and 3 other custom IBM chips. It apparently supports up to 45 SCSI-2 fast/wide drives, configurable in RAID 0, 1, 5, w/ failover and hot-swapping. (Newsgroup discussion of some of the particulars) The ServeRAID Manager software is also rather nifty.

Coupled with the pair of Ultra SCSI 5GB Fujitsu drives I picked up on the cheap, it runs louder, hotter, and transfers slower than the Western Digital 120GB drive I’ve been using for the past few months (being moved to my file server system), but um… that’s besides the point, right?

Everyone at USC has been getting a lot of Korean spam lately. Apparently sometime back, USC’s directory was harvested. Of course, these spammers don’t care that 99% of the people receiving these messages won’t even have the proper character set to decode this, much less be able to understand it, after all, it’s not their resources that they’re consuming. This, incidentally is why Cory is dead wrong. This current trend is untenable because spam doesn’t just cost the time of the person receiving the spam, but there are real costs involved along every single step of the way.

Ultimately I believe that the only way that will be feasible is for there to be some sort of sender-based fee, whether it be virtual, like camram, refundable micropayments, or any of a number of other ideas. Until then, things like SpamAssassin, TDMA, etc may help stem the flow, but simply aren’t viable in the long-term.

DEFCON X is going on right now. Unfortunately, because of lamers, the forums are down. Hmmm:

At DC 9 we grew the coverage of the wireless network to cover most of the Alexis Park. We operate an 802.11b wireless network with a gateway to the net. It is a wide open network with no WEP security, assigning addresses by a DHCP server. Yes, people mess with the DHCP server, but all in all it works well.

NEW for this year: DEF CON will continue to grow the network, as well as provide some dedicated servers for attendees to use. For example we will have a web/ftp server set up where people can upload pictures they have taken in order to share them with the rest of the con attendees. DEF CON will also have a limited amount of 802.11a access points for Really high speed access. While all this great bandwidth is limited by our net connection, it will be great for people on the local network to swap pictures and data.

Me personally, I would be way too terrified to have my wi-fi turned on at DEFCON. But that’s just me.

I was searching around the Trillian site for some compact skins and found a good one called Microscopic. What sets it apart is that while it’s very small, you can also set the options so you can view avatar icons. That’s good. Also, there’s a little customization utility which will make setting up the skin easier. While I was looking around, I also found nikebball87’s skins. I remember Dervish from years back when I was using that skin on ICQ. Currently, I’m using his port of the Geek skin.

One thing that’s interesting is that both Microscopic and Geek both have alternate contact list modes (Trillian Bar as it’s known apparently). I had no idea this existed and had to do a search. You can switch to it on the skins that support it via Preferences, in the Contact List panel at the bottom. I’m not sure how useful it is (although w/ it rolled up, you can keep it on top of everything), but it sure is nifty.

One of my friends was working on the new He-Man cartoon concept a while ago at Mattel. Looks like it’s finally hitting the airwaves (and more importantly, I suppose, the toy shelves). Here are a bunch of clips from the San Diego Comic-Con.

While I was looking for some links, I found this great list of The Ten Strangest Masters of the Universe Figures Ever!. There are some hilariously bad ones in there.

Arggh. This is probably my current biggest annoyance with Mozilla as a user – the mail client always brings down my entire browser. Worse yet, Total Recall isn’t useful because it doesn’t remember tabs. Therefore I lose everything I’m browsing whenever some malformed foreign-language spam rolls in. Would it be that hard to simply allow multiple instances of Mozilla?

Heh, TouristofDeath.com has a Rate my Domokun page. I don’t know why, but I find this one just to be completely hilarious. Must be the Bert is Evil nostalgia or something.

fluffy grue has a k5 diary entry that traces through the backstory behind some of the in-jokes, but he misses one of them. Although more obvious in say, this image, the other images are also play on the jesus images (in addition to the domo, Sex Kitten and goatse.cx)

• gti-vr6: Library of things GTI VR6 (A3/Mk3 & Mk4)
• Specs, warranties, recalls, TSBs, etc.
• Differences between 99 GTI VR6 and 95-98 GTI VR6
• Differences between GTI VR6s, from 95 on
• Edmunds.com: 1998 Volkswagen GTI perfmance, specs
• Golf V (2003/2004) pictures