Monthly Archives: January 2008

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

Digg and its’ Top Diggers

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Digg is a great site overall, and I visit it quite a few times during the day to check out what’s going on and there’s usually something I find interesting on the front page.

This recent little debacle, revolt, or whatever the hell you want to call got me to thinking, how do these ‘Top Diggers’ get to those top spots?

I mean they’re the so-called Elite of Digg right? This essentially means that they submit the most stories right? The most stories that hit the front page etc… but how?

Don’t they have jobs? Don’t they have families? How do you just spend all of your time searching through stuff to find things to submit to Digg? I mean they’re not getting paid for it right? So, I have to guess that they are independently wealthy and I guess have nothing better to do with their time than find things to submit to Digg?

What did they do B.D. ? Before Digg? Seriously though, what did these guys do before Digg came around?

Don’t they have lives? Especially since it seems they hold so much weight on Digg, they’ve got to have money or something?! This latest little ‘revolt’ or ‘bunch of immature geeks crying because they didn’t get their way’ just proves that the power is not with the people… it’s with a select few that have nothing else to do in the world except try and find things to submit to Digg…

Then of course there’s the bury squad.. which I don’t even want to get into…

and of course all the other trends that we see on Digg like linking to blogs that link to three or four other places before they get to the actual story… Why do I have to wade through all of that just to read the story that interests me?

lately I’ve seen a lot of Engadget and Gizmodo appearing on the front page, don’t get me wrong, it’s not getting on them, I visit them often as well, but they’re a prime example of Diggs that take you to five other places to get to the original story… I’m guessing it’s because they are popular so that when someone sees the name Engadget or Gizmodo they blindly Digg it and it hits the front page shortly thereafter…

Prime example is something I submitted, this was a while ago, but I linked to the original story, 4 days later it’s on the front page but linked to Engadget and they linked to another, and they linked to another and they linked to yet another to finally get to the story… it’s goofy. They complain about Blogspam all the time on there but yet it’s there all the time on the front page, I see people all the time complaining about the same thing, why don’t you link to the original story instead of linking to a blog that then links to other blogs…

and as for the users on Digg, well most of them need to grow up, I don’t comment often because its pointless, immediately you’ll have someone flaming you and then burying you because they agree with the flamer, even though the flamer has no clue as to what was actually meant by the comment and just doesn’t plain understand it..

Oh well.. that’s enough.. bah

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Articles/Editorials, Rants!, Scams / Phishing/ Mail

Spammers and Hackers need to get a life or just up and die

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Since I have Counterize enabled on my blogs it’s always interesting to see what’s going on, and it’s kinda cool that the blogs will email me if there’s an error somewhere like someone trying to go somewhere on my site and not being able to access it…

Lately I’ve come across quite a few ‘hacker’ entries, and actually backtracked them to the originating server, and even went so far as to explore the stuff they’ve got in there, all of there hacking tools, like scanners etc. It’s really interesting because they like have their names right in there, or at least their aliases, they sign their programs and work, leave email addresses and IRC channel addresses to contact them with…

I also found it interesting that most of the hackers use PocketPCs to do this stuff…

Here’s a screencap from Counterize showing what I mean:

screencap.jpg

You can click the tiny one for it to open full screen to 1137×153 size…

anyway, I even went through their directories and downloaded the tools they use just to check them out and get some more info about them.. why, curiosity I guess…

as for Spammers, I was thinking, they are a real PITA, I get quite a bit of spam, thank God for Akismet really, but wouldn’t it be cool if those spammers would at least click on one of our ads? I mean they make use go through these junk messages/comments, couldn’t they at least make it worth our while to do so?

Back to the hackers… these guys are a trip, here’s an excerpt from their code:

# Release Name : XxX-SuperScan-XxX
#
# RFi Scanner Christmas Release ! 😀
#
# ————- [% Notes %] ————-
# This rfi scanner contains piece of code from; PitBull CreW, Mic22, Inphex.
# And also lets just say more version wil come 😛
#
# With this release you must be happy since its the best RFi Scanner around.
# And its even public, happy x-mas ! 😀
#
# You can also PM the bot with your scan, this is handy when you have loaded multiple scanners.

and here’s another that I found rather funny as well:

# Mafia_KB, i hope i pretty fucked up your sell
# asking 2000 fucking euros for a crappy scan ?
# this one is 1000 times better so i hope
# it affects your sell even more lol.

Oh well.. tis life I guess

350-018 is related to AES and EAP wireless protocols that maintain safe wireless access to devices across the branch networks. 70-297 is related to devising an Active Directory in addition to network infrastructure. 640-816 explains how VLANs produce logically detached networks and the requirement for routing between them. 156-215 generate rules and adapt a Security Policy’s properties. Candidates for 70-528 should have a functioning knowledge of Visual Studio 2005 and a solid knowledge of the latest features of ASP.NET 2.0.

Articles/Editorials

Woohoo Got me a Quad Core

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Yeppers it came in on Friday actually.. didn’t get it installed until late last night though…

Got the G0 revision as well, got the luck of the draw I guess, everyone seems to want the Q6600 with the G0 revision or stepping as some call it for it’s great overclocking abilities..


I’ve run a few benchmarks and already compared to my C2d6420 and the 6600 blows it away easily in most things…. Like I ran 3dMark06 without SLI enabled and got 6306 3dmarks compared to the 5543 3dMarks of the C2D6420.. I ran SiSoft Sandra CPU Arithmetic test and got 44449 MIPS, compared to the 19776 score of the C2D6420..

In time I’ll post up a brief comparison over at DSM, but for now I’ve got other work to do…

Articles/Editorials

CatGenie Self-Washing Cat Box WTF?!

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I have cats, and of course one of the pain in the arse things about them is cleaning the litter box and I’ve seen some interesting products to alleviate the chore of cleaning the litter box but this thing is about the oddest one yet…

It requires electricity, running water and a drain to use it… I think it’s much easier the old way eh?

On the website you can even find videos and such showing it in use, it’s interesting, it washes and dries the cat litter after your cat does its thing in the CatGenie… it seems like a lot of work and extra expense because you have to buy special ‘washable’ cat litter and these filter cartridges as well to be used with it, yeah I think I’ll stick to buying a $5 25lb bag of cat litter every month…

Here’s some info from the site:

Cat Genie
Self-Flushing, Self-Washing Cat Box

The only automatic cat box that flushes away waste
and, like a cat, washes itself clean.
-CatGenie uses permanent Washable Granules that never need changing
-For your cats, it’s like using a clean box of cat-comfy, normal-size cat box filler
-For you, CatGenie works like a modern washing-drying, cat toilet appliance
-After a one-time, simple DIY hook up to water, you’re set
-Push a button or preset CatGenie Cat Box to start automatically
-Used and recommended by veterinarians, nationwide

CatGenie Tabby Package
includes:
CatGenie Self-Washing Cat Box, Two Boxes of Washable Granules, Two SaniSolution Cartridges good for two months with two cats, T-Adapters for setup. Free Shipping. A $417 value for only $297.

CatGenie Tuxedo Package
includes:
CatGenie Self-Washing Cat Box,
5 SaniSolution Cartridges good for
5 months with two cats,
Two Boxes of Washable Granules,
GenieDome with SideWalls,
T-Adapters for setup.
Free Shipping.
A $512 value for only $359.

Payment Plan
Only $99 to Start

Try it Risk Free
90-day Money Back Guarantee

Requirements:
One-time, simple setup to cold water, a drain or toilet, and electric. CatGenie is 19″ wide in front, 16″ wide bottom back, 17″ top back, 21″ high, 24″ deep allowing for hoses. Water Supply Hose 8′ long, Drain Hose 10′ long. CatGenie Colors. Base: Pearl Gray, Top: Porcelain White. Assembled CatGenie weighs: 25 lbs.

Somehow I don’t think the setup is ‘simple’ as they say, anytime you’re mixing water and electricity it isn’t a ‘simple’ setup….

Articles/Editorials

blah blah blah

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Oh well… my quad core is delayed till the end of the week, or early next week.. so bummer there…

but I just got a Playstation 2 for free.. not bad, my wifes friend had two of them and gave us one to give to our kids for their birthday at the end of this month, so that was nice… I haven’t owned a console since the original playstation..

and I brought my mom home from the hospital on Saturday, just got home from visiting her… she’s got to go in and get a bunch of tests done and we found out that since now she is considered a ‘hardship’ case the hospital has a fund that helps to pay for her new medications which is very helpful considering she’s taking I think 10 of them now with more to come…

as I said I was just down there and we were discussing things and going over her paperwork, insurance policies and everything… it’s odd to be sitting there talking to your mother about how she wants to die, she wants to be cremated, with no ceremony, and she wants to get an official do not resuscitate letter drawn up as well in case something should go wrong she doesn’t want to be on life support etc… it’s depressing, all of it, really it is……

Articles/Editorials

Scythe Ninja Copper Review posted!

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So, I posted my review of the Scythe Ninja Copper today over at DragonSteelMods, (link HERE) and it’s the first official English language review of it… I guess that’s something special eh?

and next week I’m getting me a quad-core! a Q6660 Kentsfield to be exact.. not sure what the stepping will be, but I don’t really care as I don’t overclock as a habit, it’s more for reviewing things like ram that I OC, any other time I run at stock, I like things to be nice and stable at all time… something to look forward to anyway, a bright spot…

Articles/Editorials, Rants!

Happy New Year… I guess…

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Umm.. Happy New Year I guess…

I still feel like blah, but not as bad as I was…

and my mom is now officially on the Liver Transplant waiting list and it’s going to be a while apparently before she gets out of the hospital..  so she now has an infection in her kidneys and her liver, and her spleen is enlarged as well… they are talking about putting a shunt? or stint? in place to help drain the fluid, supposedly it will go straight to her kidneys so she won’t have to keep coming back to the hospital to have it taken care of ‘manually’ this is of course just temporary while she awaits a transplant…

What a way to start the new year eh?

::gack::