Whoppix security boot disk

Whoppix is a customised knoppix bootcd for security testing (and hacking) and the main website also has some very good video tutorials on how to use some of the tools. One of them shows how to crack wep in 10 minutes (although the wep they crack is a 64 bit code and if you are using wep then you *are* using a longer key aren’t you????). As an aside, my firefox seems to hang at the end of the camtasia show but it does eventually get back to my control.
Security Forest also contains some information too.

Our stuff is here….

I phoned the moving company up this afternoon as we had a letter saying that our contents were due to arrive at the end of May and our stuff is now sitting in a box on the pier in New York. They were talking about delivering it to us in two weeks and I had to remind them that they were putting it in storage until we had a job and a house. Good job I mentioned that as I would have not been happy if they turned up one morning with a big truck!

Photo processing

Kristen has been doing a lot of scrapbooking recently and rather than use up a lot of her parents ink we decided to use Samsclub to print some photo’s off (as the price is 17 cents a picture for 6*4″ photos, 1 hr processing with pick up at the store. 11c for mail order.) The quality of the pictures is not too bad but as you’ll see there has been some cropping of the photo which Kristen was not expecting. This has ruined a couple of the photos as having the top of your head missing does not make a nice portrait.
Here we have the original picture as uploaded from the computer (Click on the thumbnail for a large version of the file)

However the version that came back from Sams club had been cropped to the following image.(I’ve cropped the original photo to get this image shown as I don’t have access to a scanner at the moment)

(Yes I know the cropped version looks bigger but that is due to the proportions of the thumbnail pictures).
In this particular shot it doesn’t matter too much although the heads have been chopped off a little. This cropping would be a major drawback to using this facility. At least some other services ask you where you want to crop the photo.
I’ve got some codes for 36 free photos with winkflash so I’m going to try these at 16c a photo and Dimeprints are 10c per copy. In the end I created a spreadsheet to work out which was going to be the cheapest for a certain number of photos (as the postage costs make some services cheaper than others at different quantities). Of course this all assumes that the cropping is user controllable and the quality of the pictures are the same. I’m going to send some of the samsclub pictures to the other services so that I can do a comparison.

4400

I watched most of the first season of 4400 yesterday as USA was holding a marathon rerun of the first series before the premiere of the 2nd series later on in the evening. It was a good series, similar to the x-files but not as spooky but with more of a focus on the real life effects of being dumped back onto earth after being away for x number of years. The funny thing is that at the moment I am currently reading Jasper Fforde’s Something Rotten and the main character is struggling with the exact same issues. I wonder whether Jasper watched the tv series too.
One of the annoying things with watching that much tv is the amount of adverts you have to sit through and you would have thought that they DON’T need to advertise the premiere of the 2nd series EVERY time there is an advert break. After all, if you are sitting there watching a whole series, it is extremely likely that you are well aware of the premiere and you just want them to get on with it.
I had tried to get the dvd out of the library and blockbusters, but neither of them stock it. I’m surprised as blockbuster had a whole stack of tv series but not this one. (It was available on bittorrent though but its too risky to start using that sort of network)

Guest blogging?

I was reading another one of my reads this morning, 2guys2cities when I saw that the post on backup strategy was written by Mike McBride. Is that what you were *really* doing whilst you were pretending to be on holiday Mike? I’ve come across several blogs where people have had guests in to say something – normally whilst they are away on holiday or something. I wonder if there is a market for babysitmyblog.com 🙂

MCP failure 2nd chance 2nd time around

Microsoft have extended the 2nd chance scheme to retake an mcp exam if you fail as long as you take the exam before the end of august. Sounds good and I’ll probably take advantage of at least one of these. I only spotted their initial offering 3 days before the end of the first scheme so didn’t have time to take an exam (not that I’m intending to fail but it is nice to have that safety net)

Stopping zombies?

Interesting to see that it looks like the police are getting involved with contacting isps to ask them to do something about pc’s that are infected with viruses and acting as zombies according to net4nowt.
Wish they would do something about the french isp hosting phishing accounts. I received an email on Friday asking me to verify my ebay information and checking the website it is hosted on Amen’s servers. There was no email contact information on the website, their “online chat guide” is permanently engaged and the only way to contact the support department is to register with them or be an existing customer (I wonder if an EX customer like me is included in that latter category). An email to [email protected] has so far only come back with a (autoreply) statement saying they will take immediate action to stop spammers and to forward them the headers – which I did on the initial posting.

New church visit

We went to a new church yesterday, Fellowship Baptist Church in Dublin which seemed to be a much closer fit to the kind of church that we were looking for. I cracked up though when the first song that the (very talented) pianist played was the UK National Anthem – I almost felt like standing up and saluting. Apparently the national anthem is also a hymn over here. As it is Memorial Weekend they also faced the American flag and said the Pledge of Allegiance, the first time I’d heard it said in a long time and probably the first time that Kristen had said it in 6.5 years.
The church had powerpoint for the songs with none of the fancy animated backgrounds which was great AND they even had the projector mounted on the ceiling (fancy that Danny!!!!)
The music was an interesting mix of old hymns (but played at a good pace) and also new songs.
The preaching was excellent, with some humour at times but not too much with a pretty energetic pastor who walked around the platform but again, not too much that it was distracting. They are about to start a new series on Sunday evening with two disciplines – one of which is learning Greek!
They do need a new website (do I sense some steps forward?) but it is good to see that their calendar of events is uptodate.