Dan Price’s blog
Weblog of a cyber-geek

Inactivity - I’ll start off by apologizing for the long period of inactivity since my previous post. This is mostly due to a lack of enthusiasm to do anything worthwhile, serious boredom, a hectic few weeks at college and the transition to a new server for my hosting company. Anyway, I hope I’ll be able to blog a bit more now as college winds down.

Programming - I’ve been busy doing a bit of programming recently at college for the course. We’ve focused on Visual Basic.NET since it’s supposedly one of the easiest languages to learn and fairly easy to code in (since you don’t need to focus on hand-coding the GUI). Read the rest of this entry »

According to a recent development with PS3 processor chips, hackers may well soon be able to hack 8-character passwords in a matter of hours.

This is certainly a startling development. Personally, I had no idea that PS3 CPUs were even this powerful anyway - supposedly much more powerful than a regular home computer when it comes to processing power.

However, this development won’t affect my choice of games console! For those not in the know, I hope to very soon be getting an Xbox 360! Might be a while off yet though…

I was just looking around the Prime Minister’s petition site earlier when I spotted a rapidly growing petition concerning making the Monday after Remembrance Sunday a national holiday.

Not only is this a good idea simply because it would help us all appreciate what we have (a democracy) but it also bridges the gap between late Summer and Christmas during which there aren’t any national holidays. We all get a day off and respectable reason too!

If you’re interested, here’s the petition: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/remembermonday/

Dan

OK we’ve been learning about Operating Systems and more recently, security on computers at college. We installed firewall software (ZoneAlarm to be precise) which was a new experience for some of the class members, although not myself.

Afterwards, we were told to open the Telnet service by going to Start, right clicking My Computer > Manage, then Services and then  turning it on from there. We pinged a few people’s IP address in the classroom and had great fun creating new folders etc. by typing “telnet [IP address]” and then the chosen command. The whole purpose of this was to see what the firewall would block and what it wouldn’t. The ping tests we usually blocked off (timed out) but the telnet thing wasn’t as long as the service was activated.

Anyway, I wanted to try this back home with my bros PC. Sadly, he’s running XP Home and telnet doesn’t come included with it. I tried going from his computer to mine as I’m running XP MCE 2005 but the router probably blocked it since I couldn’t connect. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a hilarious article I found when I was browsing around the net. There are actually people that ARE this annoying!

MSN Messenger users will agree with me that people with connection problems that sign in 10 times in about 10 seconds is also a great annoyance. There are probably hundreds of other things I could list, but it’s nearly 11pm and my brains turning off!

Before today, I knew that Google gave Mozilla, the corporation behind the Firefox browser, a reasonable amount of it’s money. However, I had no idea it was as high as 85% - this begs the question that if there was a conflict of interest between Google and Firefox, would Google use it’s power to manipulate the browser to it’s own gains? According to Christopher Soghoian’s article, Google has already been playing with Fire.

You’re probably wondering why Google is even interested in promoting Firefox.

Here’s a couple of quick facts regarding the browser and the search engine: Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been reading Stu Nicholl’s CSS Play article recently, entitled “Back To Basics” - I know some of this, but some of it I didn’t know. I’ve been searching for a fix to ensure that the background of my site fills the screen on IE from the top to the bottom, whether or not there is that much content. It’s definitely worth a read in my opinion.

It’s that time again - Wikipedia is begging for finance publicly, but this time their campaign is being commanded by an illiterate monkey. The notice is on a rotated basis, but this is the message I received when visiting the site:

The site is already getting a bad reputation, and some have nicknamed it “Wreckipedia” so this isn’t the perfect time to start employing a primemate to run the publicity campaign!

For those members on Webmaster-Talk, you may have noticed I’ve been a bit quiet during the past couple of days. No I haven’t gone mute or lost 3 fingers on each hand, I’ve been busy with a new project.

This ambitious project is a new template download service, Whym Templates, where I hope to upload free templates designed by yours truly for public use. It’s not an original idea, but one difference is that I’m not forcing anyone to place links in the footer.

I hope you’ll all support me with this - it’ll only be useful if people actually download something!

Dan