Monday, January 30, 2006
The Balloonist
I've always loved this joke...
The Balloonist
A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a man below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The man below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet about the ground. You are between 40 and 42 degrees north latitude and between 58 and 60 degrees west longitude." "You must be an engineer," said the balloonist. "I am," replied the man, "but how did you know?" "Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost." The man below responded, "You must be a manager." "I am," replied the balloonist, "how did you know?" "Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are exactly in the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."
The Balloonist
A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a man below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am." The man below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet about the ground. You are between 40 and 42 degrees north latitude and between 58 and 60 degrees west longitude." "You must be an engineer," said the balloonist. "I am," replied the man, "but how did you know?" "Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost." The man below responded, "You must be a manager." "I am," replied the balloonist, "how did you know?" "Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are exactly in the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."
Get Perpindicular!
Hitachi has recently started shipping their "perpindicular" storage Hard Drives. Whats a perpindicular storage you ask? Check this out.. "Get Perpindicular!"
Monday, January 23, 2006
Hey Man...want some hash?
I was parusing some old email today and somehow ended up at a webpage written by Jesper Johansson. Jesper is a Senior Security guy at MS that I've seen speak a few times at various conferences in the past. He's probably best known as the Microsoft guy that told everyone "Write down your passwords!"... which isn't a bad idea! Anyway, back to the point of this blog. The page that Jesper has written dealt with how LM and NT hashes are created and stored in AD and SAMs. I use a 17 character password, which every time I type it in front of someone, is met with a confused and strange look combined with some comment like "Gee..think your password is long enough". To which I respond "Gee..think we could stop storing LM hashes on our servers?". Anyway, there's lots of articles out there on why you should use long passwords on Windows servers, like this one from Mark Minasi. And here's the very good article by Jesper on Windows and Passwords.
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Google Personalized Homepage.. To Go!
A few weeks ago, Google announced that anyone with a gmail account and a web-enabled phone can now get there gmail by browsing to http://m.gmail.com. Well, it looks like they've One-upped it yet again. Now you can not only get your gmail, but everything else that you want on your personalized google homepage. All of the details are outlined at http://mobile.google.com/personalized/index.html. Now you can set up the rss site feed from this page.. and view it on your phone. How cools is that!? :)
The irony of it all, is that as Microsoft tries to get up to speed on all of the web 2.0 hype, they are SORELY lacking in the ease of use area, atleast for now. I know that slingbox recently added support to watch content from your personal DVR, Tivo, or just cable, on your cell phone.. provided it is running Windows mobile edition 4 or 5. So it looks like Microsoft is banking on selling a lot of OS's for phones, while Google is putting it's eggs in the "We'll do it all from the web side" basket. Starting to sound a lot like a "Thin-client vs. Fat-client" debate.
The irony of it all, is that as Microsoft tries to get up to speed on all of the web 2.0 hype, they are SORELY lacking in the ease of use area, atleast for now. I know that slingbox recently added support to watch content from your personal DVR, Tivo, or just cable, on your cell phone.. provided it is running Windows mobile edition 4 or 5. So it looks like Microsoft is banking on selling a lot of OS's for phones, while Google is putting it's eggs in the "We'll do it all from the web side" basket. Starting to sound a lot like a "Thin-client vs. Fat-client" debate.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
Longtail...
While scanning thru my Outlook RSS feeds, which are different than the Site Feeds I read on my google homepage, I ran across this link in Robert Scoble's Scobleizer blog. It's about a site written by Francis Shanahan that will do extensive background Recon on a product that you are shopping for. It looks like the page was originally called "Longtail" which I think is a catchy name. Longtail refers to the idea that a product would be too costly to keep on a traditional brick-and-mortar store due to the storage, shipping and other costs. However because of the lack of inventory costs and things associated, an online retailer can keep those one of a kind and hard to find items available for sale. The site now has the name BaeBo.. which..means nothing to me. :) It's cool in that it will automatically use the API's provided by Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Flickr, Ebay and others, and provide you with everything you could want to know about it. A nice use of combining a lot of disparate info into one useful page that can notify you via RSS of something you want to keep an eye on.
1st Post on the Geek Side
New Blog..
This page will be used for the random geek musings I find on the net. After getting a few complaints from people that my personal blog page was entirely too geeky to be enjoyable, I've decided to create another blog that I will use for the geeky things I find. My personal page, http://bradmyers.com, will still be available and will contain more day to day things. Hopefully neither page will suffer, but we shall see. I still believe the easiest way to keep track of web pages you enjoy reading is to create a personalized Google homepage (or yahoo!) and just add the rss Site Feeds to the page. My 2 site feeds are http://bradmyers.blogspot.com/atom.xml for the personal page, and http://sys4dmin.blogspot.com/atom.xml for the Sysadmin geek stuff.
Hope that helps,
Brad
This page will be used for the random geek musings I find on the net. After getting a few complaints from people that my personal blog page was entirely too geeky to be enjoyable, I've decided to create another blog that I will use for the geeky things I find. My personal page, http://bradmyers.com, will still be available and will contain more day to day things. Hopefully neither page will suffer, but we shall see. I still believe the easiest way to keep track of web pages you enjoy reading is to create a personalized Google homepage (or yahoo!) and just add the rss Site Feeds to the page. My 2 site feeds are http://bradmyers.blogspot.com/atom.xml for the personal page, and http://sys4dmin.blogspot.com/atom.xml for the Sysadmin geek stuff.
Hope that helps,
Brad
