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Steve Jobs 1955-2011; too soon for jokes?

October 12, 2011 in About, BTW, Everything Else, Humor, Internet, Music, Rants, Technology by bladerunner | No comments

Logo created by a Hong Kong student. Click for more information.

It’s true, I never was a big Apple fan. I got my kids iPods because they relentlessly kept on asking. Oh, and the players were free when I signed up for a bank account (back in the day).

I inherited the old iPods and am using one today. They are not bad devices: easy to use and pretty to look at. But they are overpriced and I hate having to use iTunes to access my music. I hate being sold new material at every turn. I would love to have a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Sure there were MP3s before the iPod. I don’t blame Steve Jobs for making lossy music palatable. But I don’t share in the global outporing of grief that’s on every TV, computer and iPlatform in the world, either.

And Steve Jobs has a family that’s going thru the grieving process. So why start these tasteless Steve Jobs jokes? We may as well ask why we climb Mt. Everest. It’s because we can.

And you have to admit that it takes talent to make a clever joke about a sad, troubling situation. Sort-of like those improvisation shows where a performer is asked to make a joke about starving Somalians. A very poor-taste request, but also a challenge.

So here’s some jokes about the death of the iconic founder of Apple and the creator of the greatest devices in the world:

  • I hear President Obama has been implicated in the passing of the iconic Apple founder…
    his economic policies killed jobs.

 

  • Steve Jobs’ funeral will feature a private viewing for his many fans.
    As each person passes in front of the casket, they’ll pay 99 cents.

Nobel Prize Update

October 5, 2011 in About, Everything Else, Technology by bladerunner | No comments

You may remember the story of our hapless Nobel Prize Hero, Doug Prasher. He lost his job in science and ended up driving a courtesy van at a Toyota dealership, but his research allowed others to win the Nobel Prize in 2008.  Things are looking up for him, we are glad to report. You can read about it here, starting with this excerpt:

 

After joining the Toyota dealership, Prasher applied for a couple of science-related jobs in Huntsville, but nothing worked out. On one occasion he had an encouraging meeting with the hiring manager at a local company working on microfluidics; when the interviewer learned that Prasher drove a courtesy van, his interest cooled. There is no way to know how many other potential researchers were driven from their studies for similar reasons, or how many potential discoveries were never made because of the psychological and practical difficulties of the scientific lifestyle.

Finally in June 2010, several weeks after my visit, Prasher’s luck changed. He e-mailed me to say he’d been offered a science job at Streamline Automation, a local research and development company. Staffed by about 20 people, the company does work for NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Defense. Prasher’s first task when he started in late June was to help develop technology to sense toxic industrial gases.

He began cautiously. “There was none of the tremendous relief you might expect,” he says. “I had been so discouraged over the years that my attitude was, this may work out and it may not.” Gradually he settled into the job. At home he occasionally took science reading to bed, something he hadn’t done in years. “A lot of the hangdog is gone,” Gina told me. 
In December Prasher won a six-month, $70,000 grant from the Department of Defense to develop a field technique for categorizing tick specimens according to their mitochondrial genes, in hopes of limiting the diseases a doctor might diagnose. It brought a sense of accomplishment that had been missing from his life for a long time. In January he told me that the cloud of depression he had lived under for years was finally lifting. Science gave him a sense of purpose.

We Wuz Hacked

August 23, 2010 in About, Internet by archangel | No comments

Sorry for the recent technical difficulties, the site fell prey to some sort of SQL injection attack that appended a malicious script that redirected users to a malware site. The tricky bastard used cookies, though, so you only saw it once. After that, visitors saw the regular site, unless they used “private browsing” in Firefox or IE 8; the lack of cookies causes redirects every time. Anyway, I scrubbed the database and upgraded WordPress to the latest and a few key plugins, so hopefully we’re safe until the next hack hits us. Just the cost of using WordPress, I guess. For full details, see this:

http://wiki.mediatemple.net/w/WordPress_Redirect_Exploit

We’re not hosted by Media Temple, but apparently a lot of the sites they host got hacked and their fix worked for us.

If you see any other problems, don’t hesitate to contact me. And thanks for ZBalance and my buddy Karl for pointing out the problem in the first place (I visit via the admin interface and Google Reader, which weren’t affected.).

Banned in China!

May 17, 2009 in About, Internet by archangel | 5 comments

Update: See the comments for more details and links to learn about the Great Firewall of China and how to test your site.

Update 2: We are no longer banned!

I started tracking stats on Google Analytics about a year ago. Since that time, over 36,000 people have visited the site (thanks!). Of that 36,000, only one person was in China. One! I think I can safely say we’ve been banned, locked out of the Great Firewall of China. I wonder if it’s the words “covert organization” or “free speech” that is keeping us out. I must say, I am pretty proud that we’re the first result when Googling “covert organization” – with or without the quotes. Great success!

Full Disclosure: There are about 21 countries on Google’s global map for which we have zero visits (versus 170 countries that have stopped by). But I’m pretty sure none of those 21 have 1.3 billion people.

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Crack Team Guides

November 30, 2008 in About, BTW by archangel | Permalink

I’ve added a guide section (look to the left) and inaugurated it with a Barbecue and Grilling Equipment Buyer’s Guide. You can leave comments on guide pages just like any other post. I hope you find it useful.

Crack Team 2.5

November 10, 2007 in About, Internet by archangel | Permalink

The server migration is complete and I’ve added lots of cool stuff. While this isn’t as drastic a change as when I switched from Movable Type to WordPress, it’s the biggest change since then. Here’s what’s new:

WordPress 2.3.1
I was way behind, but now we’re on the cutting edge. The upgrade includes tagging and auto-save, among other things. It also has a better visual editor.

Tarski 2.01
The latest version of this theme, which includes a new header image that nicely demonstrates The Crack Team’s plans for world domination. Most other changes are invisible to users. Mainly it’s compliant with WP 2.3 and supports tags. Of note to bloggers is an option to reverse your page title, so the post title comes before your site name. That’s good for search engine optimization.

Subscribe To Comments
When you comment on a post, you can request to be notified by email of any follow-up comments.

Social Bookmarking
When you view a single post, you’ll now see a row of icons to bookmark that page to del.icio.us, Facebook, Google, etc. Let me know if one you use is missing.

Footnotes
On longer posts I love to use footnotes, so this is great for me. You just wrap the footnote in double parentheses. For example1. Just make sure there’s a space before the opening parentheses.

Contact Form
I added a simple contact form; you can see it at the end of my profile page. It uses both CAPTCHA and Askimet to prevent spam. I know CAPTCHA isn’t foolproof, but as far as I can tell Askimet is. It’s saved me from over 5,000 spam comments since I switched to WP. If any author wants, I’ll set up a form for them.

In addition to the software upgrades and plugins, Inmotion keeps separate server logs for each domain and subdomain I host, and separates out webmail. This means AWStats will report more accurately. Granted, I’m sure I won’t want to see them since they’re artificially inflated right now. But that which can be measured can be improved.

Hopefully all this is useful and not just a novelty. If you have any suggestions, just leave a comment. Thanks.

  1. Here’s a footnote [↩]

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Server Maintenance

November 7, 2007 in About, Internet, Technology by archangel | Permalink

Well, it’s more like server removal. I’m switching from a self-hosted server to one at Inmotion Hosting. It was fun while it lasted. Ok, so it wasn’t really fun, because I hate system administration. And that’s why I’m switching it out. Some things get worse when they’re out of my hands, but other things like regular backups, security and bug fix patches, etc. get way better.

They’ll be handling mail as well, and as a result I will be getting rid of my CrackTeam.org email address. I technically have 6 email addresses and by far the Crack Team one gets the most spam. Not that I see any of it – I have excellent spam filtering. It’s 97% accurate and has protected me from over 69,000 spam messages to date. I don’t know that Inmotion will be nearly as accurate though, since they use SpamAssassin, and I use the BayesSpam plugin for SquirrelMail. Anyway, I was worried about getting rid of it until I realized that almost none of my friends use that email; it’s mainly used to register for web sites. I can use my Yahoo account for that, since their spam filtering is excellent as well. If you were using my Crack Team email, please switch to one of my 3 main personal email addresses.

Anyhoo, the point is that the site will be going down, perhaps tonight, so don’t be surprised. Hopefully the whole thing won’t take long, and we’ll be running on WordPress 2.3.1. There should be some nice new features.

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Cascades: Not Just a Pretty Mountain Range

August 27, 2007 in About, Technology by Assassin | 2 comments

Not being a network or IT professional I am sometimes forced to listen to people who supposedly know more than I do.� I’ve been wanting to add wireless capability to my existing wired home network.� Our current router had a lot of configuration data in it for servers operated by Agent Archangel so the plan would be to add another router to the system so we wouldn’t have to bring the crack team network offline.� The sales associate at Fry’s electronics informed me that the only way it would be possible to keep my current router would be if I purchased a wireless access point (WAP).� For those who don’t know, a WAP costs more than it’s wireless router counterpart and has much less functionality.� It’s basically a wireless router & switch only without the router & switch part.� Why anyone would pay that much for a device that does so little is beyond me.

Anyway, on a whim I decided to try it�(since I�was�pretty sure the concept should work)�and went and purchased a Linksys WRT350N Wireless-N Router.� I disabled the DHCP and gave the router a new IP address compatible with our network and then plugged one of it’s local LAN ports to one of the local LAN ports on the existing router.� Voila!� I now had a working wireless network connection.�

The magical networking term that describes what I did is “cascading routers” and you can cascade many routers together (this was all news to me).� For some reason I was only able to find this information on the Linksys support site after I knew what the term was.� I swear it wasn’t there before I knew it.

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Coming Soon: The Crack Team 2.0

June 1, 2006 in About by archangel | Permalink

Yeah, I haven’t been terribly attentive to the site lately, and nobody else has been picking up the slack (you slackers!). The main reason is that I have been investigating upgrading the blog software, and I’ve decided on WordPress (what, you thought I ran out of things to say?).

For authors, the change will be pretty mind-blowing. I don’t anticipate it to a big adjustment, it will just be easier to do certain things, and will have a lot more potential for kick ass features. One of the WordPress idioms (or that of certain themes) is the “aside”. This is basically a real quick post, just 1-3 lines or so, to give people a heads up. We write some serious content here, and I’d like think that some of it is of journalistic quality (I won’t pontificate on the journal). But that also brings a certain intimidation factor, you feel like you have to write a whole article, edit it, proofread it a couple times, etc. Asides take the onus off the writing process, so you can just write stuff like:

X-Men: The Last Stand was outstanding. Yes, you should see it, and yes, in the theatre! Make it a good one!

See how easy that was? Let’s face it, you don’t need a whole review for a movie like X-Men; people on the fence just want to know it lives up to the hype (it does), and those on the other side of the fence won’t be convinced by your review. They also don’t read this blog, because it would steal time from reading GayCowboyBlog.com, and eating pudding. In short, an aside is something you might preface with “BTW…”. (In fact, putting any post in the BTW category – and only that category – will render it as an aside.) Asides can also have comments, so it’s a quick conversation starter. I’ve often said you should post anything you would email or forward to more than one person, and now that can include quick links.

“Pages” are another WordPress benefit. They are separate from posts, but just as easy to create, and perfect for more permanent content. A prime example is Agent (author) pages – each agent can now write his own bio, and include a link to his personal post archive. If you have Rhapsody, Netflix, flickr, or del.icio.us accounts, it should be easy to include content from those in your page… I originally envisioned this site as an awesome knowledgebase of things we thought kicked ass. Pages allow us to slap together an article collaboratively. Best Restaurants. Best TV Shows. Best Movies. Best Albums. Lists are simple and powerful, and as team members of The Crack Team, we have an obligation to the public to disseminate such vital knowledge. We are saving lives.

There might be other cool features, check out the WordPress site (esp. themes and plugins) and let me know what you think. It may take some doing, but a lot more should be possible.

Also, I’ve started to set up “professional” blogs for various people, including Hulagun, Mystery, Masterchief, ThinkTank1, and myself. These are blogs to discuss serious topics related to your profession, and have domains like firstname.lastname.com. It’s stuff you want your name attached to, and while it probably could go here, I know that few of you who read this are really interested in my take on software development and its industry. If you are, good news, I’m creating a blog for that! And Hulagun will talk about design, Mystery, the entertainment industry, Masterchief, robotics, etc. Anyways, if you are interested, please tell me now whlie I’m setting things up.

Stay tuned for more…

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Team Comparison

March 19, 2006 in About, Humor by bladerunner | 8 comments

A little dated, but here is a matrix that says it all (circa 1997).
All references to “Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension” are duly trademarked.

CT.jpg

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