Roborooter.com

One of my new interests Cory Doctorow read a book (which is just as much in interest) called The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling. If you're curious why a bunch of kids playing on computers have an entire culture to work with then you should probably read this book. If you're curious about why in the beginning of the movie Hackers an entire SWAT team was allowed to storm a house (and presumably took every computer, electronic device, and piece of paper in the house for an indefinite period of time) then you should probably read this book. If your curious how the first and largest network in America came about and why it's owned by AT&T (and still is) then you should read this book.

In fact let me help you out. I have an edited podcast of Cory Doctorow's reading and a Gutenberg PDF of the book. Both perfectly legal as Bruce not only let his book be distributed for free electronically (since 1992!) he also gave Cory permission to read it as long as he distributed his reading for free. See where I'm going with this? Cory publishes all his work under The Creative Commons License which says as long s I mention it's his work then I can share it as much as I like.

So have it it. I made a torrent, you can download it right here.
DOWNLOAD TORRENT OF THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

What's a torrent? Well I can't blame you it's sorta new, and not everyone knows what it is yet. Go download uTorrent or azureus and read up on how torrents work. Both utorrent and azureus have documentation on how to use them but you basically take my small file and use it to get the set of files for the Hacker Crackdown. It's a large mp3 and a pdf. I'd give you the files right here but they're big and I have to pay for my server's bandwidth! In fact I have a large enough audience that if I offered both files up for download and paid for all the bandwidth that you would all use I'd be in the poor house pretty quick.

So as long as people will "seed" the torrent (as I do at home, but as of this writing so do 15 other people so I don't even have to anymore.) then anyone can download the files free of charge. And it frees me of charges too, because you're getting the file mostly from each other instead of me.

I'm glad technology like this exists.

There was this convention in New York last weekend that if I had more time (or were two people) I would have gone to, but I was just too tired. It was called the "MoCCA art festival" and from what I can gather it was amazing. Hundreds(?) on artists from most of my favorite webcomics attended. I could have met them all. On the other hand I went to the Cony Island Mermaid Parade instead and got to see Adam Savage among hundreds of other crazy interesting people. (Not meet though, he was too busy being a king of the Parade. I'll be posting my photos later.)

R. Stevens of the illustrious Diesel Sweeties (now in papers!) pointed out Matt Madden and his Exercises in Style where he took one simple real world situation and presented it a about 10 different ways. And if I read this right he has a book coming out with a lot more. It's really neat. I like the concept.

I've got most of my comics in RSS feeds these days so I don't need a list of links to click anymore. Seriously Google Reader is amazing. (Click here for a feed of most of the comics I read daily — note that link is not how I read them daily, I use google reader, that's just a prettied up rss feed..)

–Francis

I suppose you'd call this a live blog?

The event of an evening! PETRA LIVES!

My raid, my backup server, it's now named (hold on.. I got to log into it, setting up drivers and whatnot..) Petra!

I decided to revive the name since the old Petra couldn't possibly still be around anymore. She was my first server! and she was stolen by Stuyvesant high school back in 2001. I could still access her up until 2003 when she was rooted and I moved all my crap off of it, came up with better passwords and quit being so naive about computer security. (I sucked and continue to suck at it… I hope my clients don't read my blog.)

The only reason why I suck (despite not keeping on top of everything) is that eventually, bugs will be found in anything and be used to execute code. And once you got your own code running the box is yours. So I've been keeping safe by not running any servers, nothing to attack.

I'm keeping this server off my network, and keeping my clients data (and mine) encrypted so even if the box does get rooted (and by all means it's possible) the worst that will happen is everyone needs to backup again. That being said, there's a lot to do to lock this thing down, that I wont go into here.

Wooo!!!

I've never had an array so big. *snif

I've got to reinstall, and I'm probably going to go with the 32 bit version of windows 2003 server. These screen shots are on a .. trial.. copy of Windows Server 2003 x64 (64 bit version) but since none of my software runs 64 bit.. there's no reason for it. And even if I could find a reason for it, I'm not convinced that all the drivers have 64 bit support. (I hate this motherboard vendor.) The unused 65.18 gig volume is for booting. When I get my copy of 2003 server, I'll slipstream the raid drivers and install directly to the raid), the 1331.79 gig volume is for the backing up.

Oh and the reason why I couldn't get it to work the first.. 5ish times was that the bios was out of date, some chipset wasn't getting called right and during windows install the system would lock up. I was convinced it was the raid (I've had bad luck with them in the past.) and it took until tonight to make the free time (seriously, all my neighborhood friends were busy, all of them) to pull the raid controler and determine that it still didn't work. The not working of this motherboard had me so enraged that I was ready to toss it and buy another one. But then I'd have to make sure it took the same cpu and ram and everything.

I ended up finding a bios update…

I recently got really good at putting bios updates in floppy images and then burning cds with floppy emulation boot loaders. Sounds complicated, but it's not (I just have a really stupid way of doing it, I wish I had a single program that could do it or something), most computers with floppy drives have broken floppy drives, and most older computers that need bios updates need to do it in dos, which means booting off a floppy. (Well most of the time.. these are computers, 10,000 ways to solve any problem.) Came in handy at work.

Yawn, I'm going to let the raids rebuild over night, and I've got to find some way to reset the raid controller's password (I set it one night while drinking, I was very happy I got the thing powered up) because I forgot it. But even if I don't finish this tomorrow (well.. I wont) I need to get my copy of windows and the backup software. I'm just happy this project is back to moving along.

=D

–Franics

Interactive Mosaic Zoom Photo Thing

Just start clicking, you'll see, A lot of repeats the deeper you go, but there are some really good photos in there. I wonder if I could program this trick, use the photos from the gallery or something. (*Stores that idea for a different day*)

Anyway, Enjoy the link.

–Francis

First of all, everyone should know SkiFree.

I heard rumors of a mac port but for now here's our 32 bit windows binary. =)

Oh yea, I went skiing too!