Roland's blog

technocite
1. n. a person who pretends to understand technology but in fact does not.
2. n. an organism that enters a technologic system and causes havoc (aka bug).
3. v. to ramble on and on about technology's danger to society.
4. v. a state of excitement due to techno music.
5. v. to cite works that make use of technology. (n. technocitation)

I want to beat on Linux for a minute. Sure, there are not many viruses out there for Linux, but that doesn't mean much.
The fact that linux has a system/user mode doesn't mean much either. Most vulnerabilities source from applications which may run in kernel mode and have issues. Also, does a virus need to have a root privileges to screw up your day? Of course not

Also, most distros come with a sudo feature which gives some sense of security. (i.e. switch to kernel mode) but that's in itself very unsafe. Here's the pseudocode for a virus.

Start in user mode and go into the background.
Do evil stuff.
Keep calling sudo until successful.
Do evil stuff.

The problem with all operating systems is that they are flawed, not necessarily because of coding issues, but because of people make mistakes. It doesn't matter what you run so much as how much you understand about operating systems and security.

I was reading a post at slashdot http://science.slashdot.org/story/09/12/11/1428252/Big-Dipper-Star-Actually-a-Sextuplet-System and there was mention of a star called Alcor in the Big Dipper. So, I head over to a domain registrar and see if I can get a similar domain. I tried alcore just to see if would pick the pun (similarity with algore) .. anyhooo  here were the recommendations:

Very weird!

I am taking B552 Knowledge Based Computation with Dr. Leake and he is an expert on Case Based Reasoning. This is a very good class for people getting started in AI. I often come up with ideas about what can be done with CBR systems.

It dawned on me as I was watching "The Office": How about building a system that would evaluate your email before you send it and indicate how inappropriate it is?"

The idea is to take a recommender system and turn it upside down. It is almost similar to spam filter. Maybe this can save many embarrasing moments for people.

Java FX is Java's take on doing web stuff, but again it comes in the form of applets. Two main reasons why applets failed to earn fame is because:

• The JVM loads slowly
• It uses too much resources, both CPU and disk I/O

It just amazes me that  Java has all the oportunity to produce much better things for the web given that it is a better language, and it has taken a huge beating over the years by Adobe's Flash and their crappy java like implementation Active Script langauge.

I never realized this before but the icons for Netbeans and VirtualBox, two products which I really like and owned by Sun Microsystems have very similar characteristics: the cube

I suppse it sort of makes sense given Sun's tilted square logo, however it's interesting to know if they were designed by the same designer.

I upgraded to Windows 7 Ultimate from Vista Basic, but netflix wouldn't show up in Windows 7.

I did do the Settings -> General -> Automatic Download Options -> Download Now and it didn't work.

Here's how you fix this problem:
1. Empty out the contents of c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome
2. Run Setup again - Use the Express settings if you don't care
3. Do the Settings -> General -> Automatic Download Options -> Download Now

Voila.

It would appear someone forgot to implement something in windows 7: