Nicotine Vaccine... WTF?!

While browsing the news sites, I stumbled upon this Nicotine Vaccine video on Reuters. Nicotine (smoking)... Vaccine? Since when is smoking caused by a virus?

A vaccine is a biological preparation that improves immunity to a particular disease. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism, and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as foreign, destroy it, and "remember" it, so that the immune system can more easily recognize and destroy any of these microorganisms that it later encounters.

What's next? A vaccine for Kleptomania? Bad driving? Being obnoxious? This is (in my opinion) nothing more than an effort of Big Pharma to have us take more and more drugs. They have to do something to keep their investors happy since more and more drug patents are expiring.

iMac 1TB Disk Went Missing in Action

Updated on Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 19:54 by Willem

Updated on Monday, December 20, 2010 at 12:44 by Willem

Updated on Tuesday, December 21, 2010 at 14:35 by Willem

Updated on Saturday, December 25, 2010 at 11:41 by Willem

It's been three weeks exactly (well, almost), and my new iMac i7 27" went to the repair shop.. (*sniff*).

The iMac booted normally this morning, but after a couple of minutes, the fans started kicking in. A new sensation for me. I have never heard a fan in this, or my other (i)Macs. At first I thought that my external drive (Drobo) started making the noise, but the Drobo was silent.

Turned out the fans in my iMac started blowing (hard), and the airflow was relatively warm. Too warm for a Mac which has been switched on for about 10 minutes with no real CPU intensive tasks running.

First I checked the Activity Monitor and 'Top' in the Terminal app to see if there was some program that consumed too many CPU cycles. Nothing there. On average, the CPU was 3% busy.
Next thing to do was resetting the PRAM/NVRAM by holding the Option-Command-R-P combination during a power-on of the iMac. This also made no difference (booting went a bit faster though).

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Internet Data Retention Law is Live in the Netherlands

It's a fact. As of this Tuesday, the Dutch ISP's are required (by Dutch law) to log all Internet activity of their customers and store the data for 12 months (at the moment). Gitmo Nation has expanded a bit further to the east, according to the No Agenda podcast host Adam Curry (which is a great podcast by the way).

Anyway, the logging is no longer limited to the basic IP connection data, the new law requires the ISP's to log the following information:

General Internet Access:

• Loginname
• IP Address
• Name and address details of of all the parties involved (when available)
• Time and Date the communication took place
• Used service(s)
• The callers phone number in the case of dial-up Internet access
• The number called for dial-up Internet access
• DSL, phonenumbers, MAC address (when using public/ISP sponsored WiFi/Network access)

E-mail:

• IP address used to access or send e-mail
• User ID
• E-mail address of the sender, recipients etc. (basically the FROM, TO, CC and BCC fields)
• Registered e-mail alias addresses when available
• Time and date of the communications
• Name and address details of all the parties involved (when available).
• Method used in sending/receiving the e-mail (webmail, POP, SMTP, IMAP, etc.)

Internet VoIP:

• Phone numbers of both parties
• IP addresses
• Name and address details of all the parties involved (when available)
• Time and date of the communication (start and finish)
• Protocols used during the communication
• Successful and failed attempts to communicate

The 'fun' part is that the Dutch government won't (or can't) give a real reason why this information is required..... Why can't they give the proper reasons for creating and passing this law. Theoretically we still live in a democracy.

My thought is that it's probably based on some vague report by some high-profile consulting company that scared the shit out of the politicians (accountability??). Especially the terms 'child pornography' and 'terrorism' are most likely THE keywords on which the decision is based. And no one wants be publicly not against those two.... And so the privacy of the Dutch citizens crumbles, and crumbles.

Time to start using more and more encryption in all of your communications if you ask me, and start running your own services on a server in your attic .

/me is removing the dust from his PGP keyrings....

Microsoft Automatic Reboots

I ran into the most annoying (understatement) thing about certain Microsoft automatic updates (on Windows XP Pro). It seems that last Tuesday was yet another 'patch-Tuesday'. Nothing unexpected about that, but this update (or at least one of them) required a reboot of the PC (yet, still nothing wrong with that).

Normally, the automatic update process bugs you about rebooting, but somehow this reboot interface had a timer. A timer of 5 minutes. After these 5 minutes the PC will reboot.

Totally ignorant to open (modified) documents. The shutdown process kills all open programs / documents and reboots. Without waiting for user input on e.g. saving files.

I tested this with opening a notepad document, altering it and leaving it open. After 7 minutes, the PC had rebooted, and all changes to the document were lost.

Yet another 'Thank You, Microsoft'

Major Wordpress 2.6 Bug

A couple of days ago I upgraded to Wordpress v2.6. After the upgrade I opened the blog, and added a new post. Both of those actions worked properly.

After the upgrade I noticed a major decrease in comment and trackback spam. But today I discovered the real reason why comments AND page views were close to zero.

There's a bug in Wordpress 2.6 where the permalinks are not working correctly. If you're using permalinks with the date, name, etc. (e.g. /index.php/switched-to-mac/) you get a 'Not Found' error. A definite WTF moment.

When you change the permalinks setup in the wordpress admin pages to default the pages/posts are accessible again. It seems that the issue is known and will be fixed in Wordpress 2.6.1. Untill then, most of the Google search results which end up on my website will result in a 'Not Found' error.

I would go back to an earlier version if I could. After the upgrade (which I thought that worked correctly) I removed the 2.5 installment... Yet another lesson for the future.

UPDATE: the pageviews are returning to normal :)

Teh Internets Are Gone!!1

OK... Disaster struck... Yesterday morning I had a flashing DSL LED on my DSL modem. Flashing ain't good. A stable green light is good, flashing is bad, very bad. Flashing means it tries to connect to teh Internets, but it can't. Thankfully, I have a nice neighbor with no encryption on his wireless. Downside is that I need to sit in the hallway to use it. Hopefully the problem will be fixed tomorrow. If not you might be reading this somewhere next week (if ever). UPDATE: Well things are improving (a very tiny little bit). Statistics show, that the website is available 15% of the time instead of 2%. An optimist would say; 'an improvement of 750%'. My opinion is not that optimistic I might say...... UPDATE#2: No idea what's wrong with the Internets connection. Last night it downloaded three movies worked without any problems. This morning I had to switch it off and on to get it going again. I must say that the modem itself is running awfully hot. In the mean time I have two different types of modems in spare (510i and a 546i). Strange thing is that the logs show disconnections due to idle time?? Idle? The thing hasn't been idle ever since I installed it. UPDATE#3: Well, the techies suggested a downgrade path to check if it might help. Off course, I'm against this. This means slower lines, slower downloads etc. It's like going back to the digital stone ages. Furthermore, it worked perfectly over the last 7 years.... The performance didn't degrade over time. The performance just said 'poof'. Anyway, in the meantime I'm back to 4Mbps, and things seem to look good, but it also looked good yesterday. So until further notice this website might be online (or not, or whatever).

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Dying PC

Now it's time for apple to start shipping 'Leopard' as soon as possible. I don't want to buy a iMac now, and buy Leopard next month (even if it is with a discount). Today my Windows PC started to show major hick-ups. The drives are making 'clacking' noises together with high pitched sounds :cry: . Also the system freezes up every ten minutes or so. So, you can imagine that I'm starting to backup my stuff with the hope that it makes it to the external drive. Every time the system crashes (during the copying) I see my digital life flash in before me.... Hope I can make it before the flames come out..... UPDATE: OK, I finally got my data of the PC, so that's one worry less. In the mean time, I've ordered a new hard drive. If that doesn't solve the problem, I guess I have to upgrade prematurely to an iMac..... The current components are all quite old, so I have to replace everything if it's not just the drive. I might sell the GPU (NVIDIA(Asus) 7900GTX/512MB/PCI-e). So if you're interessted

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Speed Photography in New York

And again a ridiculous law in the United States. The land of opportunities, and lame laws. Starting in August 2007, you can't be in one place for more than a half hour to make (scenic) photographs or shoot some video. This includes the setting up of your tripod etc. So no more waiting for that special sunset, or waiting for the sky to clear for that one special shot of/for your sweetheart. To make it even more ridiculous, you also need an insurance of 1 million USD if you need more time (which means you need a special permit). No doubt that this is initially intended for the professional movie makers or photographers, but there's the fear that this will be abused to harass the common man/woman/tourist. It must be very handy to have very general laws/rules, which the government can interpret as they see fit. Why don't they just pass a law which is states "It's illegal to....". In this case they can fill in the blanks whenever they want... Oh wait, they already did... The Patriot Act.

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Illegal HEX codes

As some of you might know, the protection of Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD movies is based on a 'secret' key. You need the key to watch protected movies. The (software)players for these movies are able to 'decrypt' these keys from the disc containing the movie. So you already have these keys on the disc. They (the movie companies) just try to hide them from the user (security through obscurity). This is not strange that they use this scheme. It's just the way DRM works on these discs. Due to the lame-ass DMCA law in the United States, it's ILLEGAL to try to find the key on the disc :???: . Somehow a HD-DVD key got discovered (or leaked), and it's going around the great Internet. Several websites have been approached by lawfirms to take the pages down. This key is represented by a hexidecimal code. How the hell is it possible to declare a hexidecimal string illegal?? The same string can also be represented by a different format (e.g. BASE64). Is this also illegal? Since we dont know other hex keys for decrypting copy protected content, every other string of hex codes might also be illegal. Image this; what if the 'next' key might represent the number pi (03 14 15 92 6.....)? Does that mean that all math books need to be burned? Just another example of the fucked up DMCA law in the US. B.t.w. wondering what the last part is of the key... just use Google to search for "09 F9 11 02 9D".... Google knows he rest.

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Internet Porn On A Different 'Channel'

Most internet traffic for browsing is using ports 80 (http) and 443 (https). The wise governor (Huntsman) of Utah has suggested to ban pornsites from these default ports. This way it should be easier to block traffic to these sites (just block the porn-port). So I guess that the following ports will be used in the future of Internet browsing:

• 69 - porn related websites
• 666 - websites about satanisme
• 1337 - TechTalk
• etc.

Thankfully, the world is bigger than Utah, but I do feel sorry for those who live there......

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