guapacha.com

I tried installing my employer’s VPN client off my new thumb drive yesterday, the machine had to reboot and it never came back up. Tried booting ‘last known good configuration’ but that doesn’t work, can’t even get into safe mode, gets so far and reboots. I tried the XP recovery console but it lists no services and says it can’t read the directory. I thought I’d put another install on my C drive, boot from it and see what I could do but the install CD says the CD drive needs to be formatted. Well, first, no, and second if it is unformatted how come just a few minutes ago you read the boot sequence from it?? I hate computers.

Last week at work I upgraded JDeveloper and Oracle’s Application Server and now my main project no longer executes properly. I know its a configuration issue but I really don’t have the interest in switching out files and parameters to fix what was never broken.

Did I tell you I hate computers?

We all know how great google maps are, now I discover they can lookup tracking numbers for you even when you don’t know the carrier. Just type in the number to google and it will determine your carrier and show you the page.

So his holy royal all-knowing majesty Tony Blair today announced that the UK election will take place on May 5th. I had been trying to get a postal vote so I could contribute to his smacking but its proven beyond me to fill in the form (where was I living 15 years ago?). I’ll be in England for my sister’s wedding so perhaps I’ll get the joy of watching Tony eat some humble pie on the TV. Man, I never thought I’d find myself rooting for the Conservative party but Tony needs to go!

In cool news, google maps now has a satellite view. Look up your address and see what it will look like before you get there – very cool! And I already love the way they present the maps. Is there nothing these people can’t do?

Every year at the Infosecurity Europe conference, the organisers try to get the pulse of the local population by seeing how easy it is to coax their secret password information from them. Previous years had 70% of the respondents giving up their information for chocolate, this year it was theatre tickets.

Of 200 people who were surveyed in London on their thoughts about theatre:

• 100% provided their names upon request
• 94% provided pet’s names (common passwords) and their mother’s maiden name (common second form of authentication) when told actors frequently use both to create stage names
• 98% gave their address in order to receive a winning voucher.
• 96% divulged the name of their first school.
• 92% provided their date of birth and the same number supplied their home phone number

What good is spending $thousands on security when people give it up this easily!

The results of the 2005 Bloggies are in and sadly there are no awards for guapacha this year. Amazingly, the fine blogs to the right were also overlooked! Maybe next year.

In the ‘is-there-nothing-Google-wont-do’ category, there is now Google Maps which looks to be pretty neat. I really like how you can drag the map around with the mouse, no clicking pan arrows to move around. In contrast, have some fun at Microsoft’s expense…..

1. Go to http://mappoint.msn.com/DirectionsFind.aspx
2 Plan a trip from Haugesund, Norway to Trondheim, Norway
3 Laugh

Had to spend some time this evening implementing some hacks to the MINI blog website, after a period of no comment spam the onl*ne p*k*r dickheads were back in force. Hopefully I have them this time – I renamed the comment script and put a dummy form in the page which mentions the original filename but doesn’t appear on the screen. Well, I am sure it will hold them for a little while longer. Next up will be blacklists! Kinda over the top for a pointless little site like mine.

Tuesday morning update: here’s something new…. trackback spam? This morning this website had a bunch of trackback’s from the dickheads, I’ve not seen that before.

Today was the big day in the Apple Calendar – the keynote speech by Steve Jobs – at MacWorld. There had already been plenty of rumour about what was coming (and lawsuits to boot!) and it seems like they were right. Most interesting to me:

The iPod shuffle: tiny new iPod with no face, upload 240 songs and away you go for up to 12 hours. Only $149, too. Perfect for working out or doing stuff where you don’t care about choosing tracks etc.

The Mac mini: a barebones Mac, add your own keyboard, mouse and monitor. Stylish and ergonomic as one would expect, and only $499. I’ve wanted a Mac in the house for ages but couldn’t justify the price, this just might be the way to do it. With a DVD-burner superdrive, maybe it can become the business machine, though it might not be fast enough.

Amazingly, Apple sold 4.5 million iPods during the 2004 holiday quarter, compared to 733,000 in the previous year’s quarter. Holy cow! Is there anyone left on the planet who doesn’t have one??

Google have published their 2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist , a summary of search activity for the year. A few highlights:

• Most searched term: Britney Spears
• Most popular man: Orlando Bloom
• Most popular sport/hobby: Poker Chips
• Most popular cuisine: Pizza

Go check it out for yourself.

I need a distributed bookmark management system. I have bookmarks on my home computer, another set on my laptop which I bring with me to San Diego each week, and my desktop PC here at work. I add to the bookmarks on each machine but almost always forget to spread them to the other machines, so I want a way to do it automatically. Except that the work PC shouldn’t get the, er, non-work safe items.

Anyone have any recommendations? If it was integrated into Firefox, that would be a major win but it doesn’t have to be. I’ll do some research over the weekend and post what I find but please leave me a comment if you know some good solutions.