tonyandkirsten.org

I just discovered reCAPTCHA, and so far, I love the concept. I really love that they make it easy to use this on your own website.

I wanted to spread the word among the techie (and tech-interested) types that come by this site.  reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA system from Carnegie Mellon University that also powers public OCR projects. The concept is simple. Public OCR projects generate tons of words that are difficult for machines to recognize. These are made a little harder and then used as a CAPTCHA for comments or email addresses to prevent spam. The results are then used to digitize books for the public domain. It’s totally win-win!

So, go check it out.

Also, while I’m at it. Everybody should be using something like the GRC password generator to generate passwords. Nice and strong. Useful for wireless access points and personal passwords. You just need a secure way of storing these, since I doubt you’ll remember a long one.

A little background would probably be helpful on this one. The room we stayed in at Abbott Northwestern was really warm, had no Internet access for patients, and cell phones were not allowed. In between visitors, these ideas were ones that crossed my mind.

It’s worth noting that some of these activities are illegal or unethical — you shouldn’t do illegal or unethical things. It’s also worth noting that I only went through with a fraction of the ideas below.

• Figure out whether or not cell phones really do interfere with the infant security system (as posted).
• Find a way to really interfere with said infant security system.
• Notice that there is a Wi-Fi signal broadcast to your room, with the ESSID: 2WIRE450.
• Upon noticing that the Wi-Fi is WEP protected, ask your nurse for the password.
• When told that the password is only for hospital staff, politely thank the nurse for the information and then ask another staff member until you find one that doesn’t realize that guests aren’t supposed to have the password.
• Impersonate a technician of the “Two Wire” wireless company and ask hospital staff for their site’s password.
• Knowing the WEP is pretty weak security, look up the how-to for running aircrack-ng to crack the WEP key.
• Go through the how-to on cracking WEP.
• After realizing that your Wi-Fi card’s driver needs to be patched to perform and injection attack, notice that there is already a PC in the room, plugged into ethernet.
• Attempt to login to the PC using common passwords.
• Try plugging into the other ethernet jack in the room.
• After finding the second jack dead, decide whether or not a rainbow tables-based attack on the PC will be detected or not.
• Wait until a nurse shuts down said PC for the night, and then plug into that jack with your laptop.
• Post pictures to your website with this ethernet connection.
• Find a way to remove your identification bracelet without breaking the band.
• Find another couple with a good sense of humor.
• Convince said couple to swap bands with you after each shift change, just to keep the staff on their toes.
• Play staff bingo! Just draw up a bingo board with random names in the squares. After meeting a staff member, cross of their name. Normal bingo rules apply. For an easy version, use only female names; to increase the difficulty of the game, add some male names to the mix as desired.
• Play security staff bingo. The rules are similar to staff bingo, but you are restricted to only using the names of security staff that visit your room.
• Play advanced security staff bingo. This game is similar to security staff bingo, but you can’t mark a square unless the security staff member in question escorts you to their office for a conversation about expectations for guests of the hospital.
• Blog.

http://tonyandkirsten.org/pictures

You might have noticed that the link to our photo gallery disappeared a little while ago. That’s because the Wordpress API for dealing with bookmarks changed from version 2.0.x to 2.1.x, and that broke the code I had in my header for the links.

With no functional photo gallery link, I decided it was high time to switch photo gallery software. The plugin to link Wordpress and Coppermine was abandoned by its author. To top that off, Coppermine has had a rash of security vulnerabilities discovered, and it’s a major pain to update when you have a large photo library. Meanwhile Menalto Photo Gallery is easily managed with the Dreamhost “One-Click Installer”. So, I one-click installed it and migrated our photos over.

With some help from the WPG2 plugin and a couple lines in .htaccess, we’ve got a new photo site to debut!

I realize that it’s not perfect yet, and may very well break on your browser. I haven’t thoroughly checked and fixed the style of the gallery to fit within the page. So, if something looks funny, comment on this post, and I’ll see if I can get it fixed.

Oh, and we’ll post pictures of our new baby when he comes!

It’s done! (Mostly)

After 5.5 years of research and 6 months of finishing the writing, I’ve sent my thesis off to my Program of Study committee!

They will, of course, have changes that they’d like me to make (and I’d like to make them too, so that the thesis gets better). But the bulk of the work is done! The thesis goes to the grad college by the 28th of Nov.

Now, all I have to do is defend it. That’s happening next Friday at 2PM, and it’s open to the public, if you’d like to attend (seriously, only come if you’re interested, because otherwise you’ll be bored and you won’t even get to talk to me much until around 5 PM).

So, here’s the link to the thesis, just in case you wanted to read it.

Anthony Hill’s Thesis

It’s true!

Needless to say, a larger company with a real future in the online community of Ames, IA (and surrounding areas) has made an offer that I couldn’t refuse.

So, I sold out.

PlanetRock can now be found at the redesigned Rock ISU web site. (If it doesn’t look new, try refreshing it later in the day.)

Complaints can be sent to the new management.

We went to the ISU Surplus Sale today. If you haven’t had the pleasure of attending this sale yourself, picture it as sort of a weekly geek garage sale. This is where the university sells off old computer systems, old lab equipment, old furniture, and sometimes even old foodservice dishes and equipment.

They also sell off “lost and found” type items that are never claimed. You could get yourself a new (well, slightly used) winter coat for only $5! (So yes, there are defiitely non-geek items at this sale too).

Today, I saw one of these (tagged at a price of 25 cents, if I recall correctly):

Well, it wasn’t exactly that model, but pretty much the same concept. It was probably at least 25 years old and very possibly older.  Haven’t a clue what it is? Imagine putting a phone headset onto those cups and using it to send data from your computer!
This is what passed as a modem in the late 60s and 70s, until the Hayes modem was popularized starting around 1981 (that was a more “modern” modem you could actually plug into a phone line). These accoustic coupler modems went at the rip-roaring speed of 300 baud. That’s 300 compared to 56k (56,000) with the fastest dial-up modems today, which again are slow compared to broadband internet services.

I think part of what I found so amusing in seeing this at the surplus sale (other than wondering where this has been sitting for the past 20 to 25 years that it hadn’t been sold off already) was the tag on the item.  It didn’t say “modem” or even “old modem” or “antique modem.”  It said “Old School Modem.”

You can learn more (just as I did) about old school modems at Wikipedia.  (And yes, computer history is one of my many geeky interests. It’s fascinating!)

As of last night, I have 820 bookmarks in Firefox on both our computers. (Actually, that might be up to 823 or so by now). I have been keeping my current collection of bookmarks going  (and growing) from computer to computer for a little over six years now. While a few of these bookmarks are Tony’s, the majority of them are mine. Looking back at the nested file-folders of bookmarks (now nicely organized into a dozen or so top-level categories) is like a walk down memory lane of past trips, projects, and research interests. I guess you can say I am an electronic pack-rat. I hate to delete any bookmarks (unless they were for something truly transitory, like a special event or a reminder of where to find an item I have since purchased) — you just never know when they might be of interest or come in handy again.

As of last night I also finally have a way to keep my bookmarks in sync between the two computers (and if you use firefox on multiple computers you might want to check it out too). It’s a little extension called “Foxmarks.” It seems to work like a charm and also has a way for you to log in to a webpage and access your bookmarks on their server — great for those times when you need to look up a website while not at your own computer.

Hey everyone!  This weekend is VEISHEA!!!!

In honor of the festive weekend, I’m taking this server down on Saturday.  So, there.  You have to go out and enjoy the outdoors / see people on campus!

Well, that, and this server will be used on campus at the Chemical Engineering Graduate Student Organization (CEGSO)’s booth near Marston.  Come on by and see us make biodiesel before your very eyes.  We’ll also be making GAK and letting you peer (through this computer) into the world of molecules, polymers, and proteins.

It should be good!  So, come out out to the ISU campus!

I will back up my files before I have several DVDs worth…I will back up my files before I have several DVDs worth…etc.

I really should know better. We have had several hard drive failures over the years, and I have been fairly diligent at backing up my pictures and documents. But, I had been waiting until the second hard drive was closer to being full before burning a bunch of DVDs. My plan had been to, at that point, transfer the archival files for my teaching tape digitization project to file storage at the church building, making more space on my computer for doing more tapes.

Before I get any further, let me say that near disaster has been averted. I didn’t want to panic anyone…

Back to the story. So, the hard drive has been coming up with some errors and corrupted files over the last couple days. I just assumed it was probably due to writing and deleting such a large amount of data all the time. (The program uses one format, I export into another, and then end with a third and fourth format for final storage — the first two, larger files get deleted each time). I hadn’t done any defragging or error checking since starting the project and it probably needs it badly. And it sure didn’t help that on Thursday Madeline turned off the computer in the middle of me exporting a file.

The last night, when I was in process of exporting a file from Audacity, the folder where my tape project files are was blank! After opening and closing the folder a couple times, it was still blank. I would have burst out into to tears if I wouldn’t have seen that Windows still thought the drive was just as full as it had been the day before. As it was, I felt sick. But, I was not in dispair since I have a wonderful technical genius of a husband who could figure out where those files went.

As soon as Tony got home, he started a recovery process that involved tranfering the files to other large hard drives in the house. So, far it looks good. I may have lost about 6 or 8 files that I will have to re-do, but that is nothing compared to losing the few months of work I have put into the tape digitization project so far. As soon as those files are recovered, they are getting burned on a DVD. And I learned my lesson — I’ll now be burning DVDs of my lossless archival files each time I have a DVD’s worth, if not more often!

There is very little other explanation why there have been so many technological failings impacting my life lately. It started with the laptop’s hard drive going bad several weeks ago. At least nothing too important was lost, other than some sent emails and web bookmarks I hadn’t thought to back up.

Around the same time we started having some issues with our back-up desktop computer, where we generally store our music files. This wasn’t really a new problem, but an old one re-occuring that we don’t completely know the cause of. Since there wasn’t really room on our main desktop computer to store all the music files (It nearly filled the hard drive when we had them on there for a while), I don’t have a very easy way to manage my ipod shuffle right now. We got a good deal on a new hard drive for Tony to build a media computer, but that project is taking longer than expected, especially since it just something Tony works on in his spare time.

And, of course Tony’s computer at the office got hacked last week, and all our websites were down for a week. All that was lost was a few pictures that can be restored from a back up DVD we have at home, so that is good news.

Then, rocksiu.com email crashed on Monday…Everything is probably back to normal with that for everyone else, but since I am using a protocal called IMAP that I don’t think anyone else on our server is using…I still have problems I don’t think anyone else is having. Like there is no way to receive new emails except by exiting the email program and then restarting it. And of course since we are talking about Murphey’s Law, it completely figures that the only email messages I am still missing are the ones I absolutely have to have — the ones with Daylights articles attached that I should be editing this week. Mike Biang is trying hard to recover them and I have faith that he will find them…but is just the final annoyance in a string of several weeks of technological foibles.

I am trying to take joy in these trials and I don’t think I am doing too bad a job at it…though I am sure Mike must be getting sick of all my whiny emails…