This Nerd Heard…

Ok, I was pretty pleased with the results of my previous shield so I decided to get one for my digital camera.  The camera is a pretty typical Canon A510 or whatever.  It’s got a nice 2.5″ or so LCD display.

I put the invisible shield on last night around 5pm.  It went on rather well.  It fit so precisely that you cannot even tell that it is on my camera.  It looks perfect.  Best of all, it should be completely scratch proof.  I tried to feel the seam on it and I could not.  I suspect that this will help to keep it from coming off.  We’ll have to wait and see what happens over time, of course.

No Scott, you can’t scratch my screen. 

Ever since I got my xbox, it has had a problem when displaying.  It doesn’t happen constantly, or even consistently.  But every time I play, the display will go all crazy and start acting very jittery.  It’s hard to describe but basically the picture remains intact but gets shifted left and right really fast.  There may even be a small up/down component to it.  Obviously, it can be very difficult to play the game for the 2-5 seconds that it continues to do this.  I thought it was a bug that everyone experienced when in 1080i, though I could find no one else mentioning it on the net.  When I first contacted Microsoft about it, they blamed it on me.  They stated I needed to change the hardware settings to the output of the game (i.e. 720P for almost everything).  I tried explaining to them that the native resolution of my TV is 1080i and that everything ended up as a 1080i signal, it fell on deaf ears.

 My experience with support though suggested to me that it was a common problem.  Well after dealing with it for months, I mentioned it to my brother.  He has the same native resolution and he told me he has no problems at all.  So we swapped xboxes and I couldn’t reproduce the problem after several hours of playing.  I’m going to keep his for a few more days to verify.  But, I called support and told them I didn’t have this problem on my TV with a different xbox.  Their fix for the problem was hilarious.  Here it is:

 1.) Play one of the games that you experience the problem with (all games, coincidentally). 2.) When the problem occurs, yank the power from your xbox and then all other cables (while it is still on). 3.) Unplug all the wall cables. 4.) Plug everything back in again.

 I thought those were odd steps.  Who ever heard of a manufacturer telling you to not do a graceful shutdown on your computer hardware?  At least they conceded that if that doesn’t fix the problem that they will repair the unit.  So we’ll see what happens to my poor little xbox.

In his podcast for the week, Major Nelson interviewed the VP over digital media at Microsoft.  The big discussion, HD DVD and why it is better than Blu-ray.  He indicated that Blu-ray is more susceptible to scratches because the data layer is much closer to the surface of the disk.  He also talked about the sub-par performance of the Blu-ray movies that have come out.  Well, after looking at DigitalBits, they have confirmed that there appears to be a problem with the first round of Blu-ray titles.  But they also indicated that there is a problem with the HDMI output on the only available Blu-ray player.  This likely has a lot to do with the conception that Blu-ray movies just don’t look as good right now.  The Microsoft exec attributed this to the fact that they can only make single layer Blu-ray disks right now.

Which one will win out? Probably neither.  All Blu-ray players are going to support DVD which means that it won’t be difficult for them to be made to support HD-DVD.  The downside?  If you can only play one, you’ll have to go through the headache of returning disks because your not so techno-savvy relative gave you a Blu-ray disk instead of an HD-DVD disk (or vice-versa).

Well, for those of you who don’t know, I bought myself a Creative Zen Vision:M.  It’s sort of a personal media player, it’s the same size as the iPod Video 60GB.  Fits perfectly in the palm of one’s hand.  Only problem is, the thing scratches easily and is rather susceptible to finger prints also.  I had been looking around for the perfect case when I stumbled upon the Invisible Shield.  It arrived in the mail on Friday. 

For those of you who don’t know what it is, it is supposed to provide front and back protection.  It is virtually puncture proof and scratch proof.  I’ve seen them key the heck out of an iPod with it and not leave a mark.  I thought it would come in two pieces, one for the front and one for the back.  It came in four pieces instead.

Installation was rather interesting.  I had to put this tiny piece on over the slider (kind of like the scroll wheel but just up and down).  It was a bit awkward since it was so small.  Next I put a piece over the upper half (screen, etc), and then a piece on the lower half (over the buttons).  After that I put the backside on as one giant piece.  It had little flaps to cover the corners and around the power switch, headphone jack, and the port for connecting to my computer.  It was a bit awkward to put on also because it was more difficult to line up. Plus, the Zen has some indented spots where I ended up with some big air bubbles.

After putting everything on, I was instructed to let it sit for 24 hours so the cover could bond firmly.  I let it sit for maybe 16 hours before I started playing with it.  I haven’t tried to scratch it, and won’t try to do so, but it looks great.  Can’t even tell that it’s on when I look at the screen.  It also doesn’t get fingerprints on it nearly as easily either.  So far I am rather impressed.  We’ll see how well it sticks over time.

The servers are all set up.  I even tested myself to make sure my outgoing mailserver is not susceptible to spam relaying attacks (http://www.abuse.net/relay.html).  It’s good to know that I won’t be making the world’s spam problem even worse.

 I’m in the process now of probing my ports (www.grc.com).  I’ve only had to open a few ports up, thankfully.  I still need to add a cronjob that checks for package updates on a daily basis though.  I can’t believe the security vulernerability that Microsoft released an update for today.  They had a flaw in XP Service Pack 2 (and probably every other OS they make) that allowed a remote attacker to gain control over the box using DHCP!  That means that if I wanted to, I could set up a rogue DHCP server at work tomorrow and potentially exploit this flaw if I wanted to.  This is obviously a huge problem.  I’d rather not have any of my home computers hacked, so I need to be careful.

 Anyway, big thanks to srippee for providing me with some of his server setup experience.

 Edit- Oh and I looked through my access_log and within hours of getting my http site up, I was already getting hit by robots! It’s amazing.  Those automated robots have too much time on their hands.

Well, I think I have all my servers set up.  I just haven’t tried A) a pops or imaps connection or B) an authorized smtp connection.  I’ve locked down smtp really tight so that I don’t have to worry about ending up on the RBL.  Wouldn’t want to lose my brand new domain name’s ability to send email in just a few days.  That would be a travesty.

 Oh and as for the whole house fan, well it wasn’t exactly a smashing success last night either.  Of course, after looking at a minute by minute graph of the temperature last night, I can see why.  It didn’t really cool off much until well after 2am.  Though I did see some literature on the company’s website that indicates it ought to cool off a house almost twice as large as mine in as little as 15 minutes.  We’ll see about that.

So I’ve been working on getting Apache all set up on here and also getting a mailserver going.  It’s just not a fun task.  After spending hours trying to figure out why my virtual servers weren’t working in Apache, I found out that it was the “SELinux” garbage that I installed that was causing me problems.  It completely changes all the permissions rules for Apache so that only files owned by ‘root’ can be read.  Now why would I want root to own everything?  I suppose you could argue that it keeps an arbitrary user from being able to run content that might cause your box problems.  But if I setup the box properly, then only certain people can access my virtual web servers anyway.  I can also setup Apache to run pages as the specified user and control how much CPU time, memory and other resources they get.  So why would I want everything owned by root? I thought the best way to secure a box is to do as little as the root user as possible?

The mailserver setup is tedious also.  I haven’t finished that yet.  I think I can receive incoming mail on it now, but I haven’t even tried.  I suppose today I just don’t have the patience for it.  I think that is why Microsoft products are popular with some.  They don’t have the patience to take care of all the tiny details that one might have to worry about in Linux.  Maybe I’ll finish that up tonight, but most likely I will not even bother.