Axodys

Talking Moose says Rich Folks: Invest in Us Again! “Let’s be honest here. The reason our economy is all cramped up is because rich folks are hoarding their money and they’ve cut off funding to all the companies that they poured money into over the past five years.”

I especially like the Moose’s solution to the Microsoft monopoly problem “Think about it, what’s the best way to spank Microsoft? Have the government come out and say “we’ll throw in 20% of the funding for any company that’ll compete with Microsoft.” I’ll bet that within a decade we have a dozen or so companies and Microsoft will have a series of new competitors to keep their monopolistic-practices in check.”

They Rule is a revealing Flash database combination that lets you investigate all the connections between the corporate ruling class. Cool (but scary) stuff. Thanks for the link Anil!

MacFixit has a nice tip on installing the new Toast 5.1P1 without rebooting your MacOS X system. I tried it and it seemed to get the job done. I’ll have to try burning a CD when I get home from work.

On a related note my PowerBook uptime is currently 15 days, 6 hours and 42 minutes.

When I got home from work yesterday, I discovered that my Qwest DSL connection didn’t seem to be working. It looked like it was functioning normally based on the green glow of the LED’s, but my computers were acting like they couldn’t get through to the rest of the Internet. After I tried telnetting into my Cisco 675 and wasn’t succeeding I decided to shut it down and try again. Thankfully it cleared things up, but I still had no idea what had caused the problem.

Today while browsing through Slashdot for information on the Code Red worm (I have a sneaking suspision one of my Windows 2000 servers here at work might be infected) I discovered this tidbit: “It appears that due to the way the worm formats its HTTP request and the semi-random way it seeks out vulnerable systems, it is also causing Cisco 67x DSL routers, widely deployed by Qwest, using firmware prior to 2.4.1, as well as some others, such as 3Com LanModems, to crash — recoverable only by a power cycle.”

This new information also makes me wonder if the mysterious HP LaserJet printer crashing we experienced yesterday here at work could be caused by an infected server sending out malformed http GET requests to it. I know that some of the newer HP’s have built in web management… obviously this is going to require further investigation.

In some random Spokane news, it looks like we’ll be getting our first new skyscraper in several years. Downtown Spokane has a handful of fairly tall buildings, but I’ve always thought it would be cool to add a few more. Hopefully the Riverside Centre and its “high technology office space” will be able to draw some interesting technology companies to Spokane.

I missed this article on Ferris basketball star Sean Mallon’s experiences at the Nike Camp since I was out of town last week (and don’t get the paper anyway), but I tracked it down this morning. It’s pretty exciting to have a player of Sean’s caliber on a team you help coach.

I don’t use Blogger any more since I’ve moved over to Greymatter, but I noticed today that the Template Contest - Winners were finally announced. Some nifty designs over there. Makes me kind of depressed when I look at the state of my site here.

My mom had mentioned seeing something about this on 60 Minutes recently, but I hadn’t seen or heard anything about Jonathan Lebed: Stock Manipulator, S.E.C. Nemesis — and 15 until I came across this link to the New York times article. I’m not quite sure what my opinion of the matter is because the article’s author does have some interesting insights into the S.E.C. and the modern stock market that I hadn’t been exposed to before. There’s no question that financial analysts influence the market every day, and even if they aren’t directly profiting from the information they’re dispersing it’s not as different from what Jonathan Lebed did as the S.E.C. would make it out to be.

After listening to the MacWorld New York keynote this morning I was surprised that no significant hardware announcements were made, but I certainly wasn’t disappointed in the news I was able to hear. The new 800 MHz midrange G4 with built in SuperDrive looks especially appealing because I’m fairly interested in digital video these days. I’m seriously looking forward to the day that I can burn my own DVD’s and have them play on any DVD player. I’d also like to convert a lot of my dad’s old basketball game video tapes to a format that won’t degrade and this looks like a sure-fire way to go about doing that.

As far as the rest of the keynote announcements go I didn’t tune in time to watch the MacOS X 10.1 demos, but from what I’ve read so far today significant speed improvements have been made, and that to me is a very big deal. I just wish we didn’t have to wait until September for the new update. I’ll make do though because a quality release is worth waiting for.

Now I need to try the Toast 5 MacOS X preview edition. If it works reasonably well I won’t have to reboot into MacOS 9 again and I can keep adding to my current uptime record of 13 days, 4:37.

One cool aspect about MacWorld New York is that the keynote address will actually be taking place at 6AM PST, so I should be able to catch up on all the breaking news shortly after getting up. Or I could just get up a little bit early and try to watch the quicktime broadcast live.

Ferris Team III won their last game of the season and as a result managed to qualify for the playoffs which start Monday. The bad news is that in order to win the playoffs for our league, we’re going to have to beat the two teams that we were never able to beat during the regular season. The good news is that winning Monday’s game is well within the realm of possibility.