The Major

Author: FourMajor

  • 315 Seconds

    I’ve decided that in the run-up to school starting again part time, I might as well work on my career skills a little bit more. So I am going to go for my CCDP (Cisco Certified Design Professional), because with the tests that I passed for my CCNP, I only need two more test to get the CCDP.

    One interesting thing that I have read so far is that network engineers are expected to achieve 99.999% network availability. This means that in the course of a year, up to five minutes and 15 seconds of network downtime is acceptable. Yikes.

  • Copyright, or Lack Thereof

    I just realized I had no information about copyright on my blog. Well, I added the following to the bottom of all the pages: “Copy this content freely — no attribution is needed to the original author.”

  • “Censoring a Number” on Slashdot

    Slashdot has an article up about how the MPAA is sending takedown notices to websites that publish a certain number called the HD-DVD Processing Key. This number is used to decrypt (and hence, watch) HD-DVD movies. Certain privileged companies get to use this number so that their players can play these movies. But what if you wanted to watch your HD-DVD movie in Linux, or with some other unsupported method? You’d need this number.

    Well the first comment to the Slashdot article had that very number in it. I find this hilarious…a slap in the face to the MPAA. Oh, what is the number, you ask? 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

    Hack away.

    source: http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/04/30/spread-this-number/

    Update: and…we have 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63.com. Also, Wired joins the fight.

    Update 2: Kevin Rose does the right thing.

  • “Skateboard” Part III

    Here is a good article on “Skateboard,” the legless man that got around on a skateboard: Tenderloin mourns an original: Legless panhandler known as ‘Skateboard,’ killed by mail truck, lived life on the edge

    Thanks to Alyssa, SFGate reader extraordinaire, for the link.

  • WordPress Search and Replace Plugin

    So a few weeks ago I made a change to my site on how the permalinks were displayed. A permalink is a link that you can use permanently to link to one of my posts. So if you wanted to say “Look at what this idiot Stu said about Democracy” on your blog and link to a post that I had written rather than the main page, which changes, you’d link to a permalink of mine.

    The permalinks had previously been displayed as: http://www.fourmajor.com/?p=291

    I changed it to: http://www.fourmajor.com/index.php/2007/04/24/heartbreaking-update-on-the-legless-man/

    When I put an image into one of my posts (such as a picture or a screenshot), I would write the HTML like this: img src=”images/image.jpg” That way, if I ever changed the name of my website to, say, bestwebsiteever.com, I wouldn’t have to change any of my image tags. Well, when I changed my permalink structure, all this got broken. Instead of looking for fourmajor.com/images/image.jpg, my web server was looking for fourmajor.com/index.php/2007/04/24/images/image.jpg. This obviously wasn’t going to work. I figured there had to be a better way…

    Thankfully, there is. What I did was to download this nifty search and replace plugin. I replaced all instances of “images/” with “http://www.fourmajor.com/images/”. This way, I can use the permalink format that I like. And should I ever change my domain name, I can simply do another search and replace. Oh, and for good measure: w00t.

  • House Panel Approves Subpoena for Rice

    House Panel Approves Subpoena for Rice

    By 21-10, the House oversight committee voted to issue a subpoena to Rice to compel her story on the Bush administration’s claim, now discredited, that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa.

    This should be good…

  • Heartbreaking Update on the Legless Man

    Remember the legless man that got around on a skateboard that I posted about in January? Well there is a tragic update on him. He was struck and killed by a mail truck today. After seeing him and writing about him, hearing this definitely made me a little upset.

  • Sweet Sweet Webmail

    I’ve been thinking for a while now that while GMail is great, I’d really like to host my own mail. Except I would want webmail, and I don’t want to use SquirrelMail. Well, after a little bit of searching, I found Roundcube WebMail. It’s AJAXy and it is GPL. Looks good to me. Of course it is still in early development stages, but I’ll take a look at it.

    And now…A screenshot.

  • That’s a Lot of Blogs

    “Since 2004, the number of blogs on the Internet has grown by a factor of 50…”

    from MotherJones (Internet Don Chooses Sides in 2008 Race)

  • Bob Dylan

    I haven’t listened to much Bob Dylan. I really need to. I really like the songs “John Brown” and, as of tonight, “Masters of War.”

    Time to hunt down VNV Nation – Judgement and Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero