U.S. Treasury

One can buy U.S. government securities directly from TreasuryDirect.

Stocks

AMD AMZN GTE IBM INTC KO MSFT RGR XLNX
And the current darling of tech stocks: GOOG

Buying Gold

Lately I've been looking into dealers of precious metals. So far, the most interesting site I've found is Certified Mint (they have an old website here). The minimum order for gold is 1oz, as opposed to 10oz for many other sites, which is good for first-time buyers. They also purport to have quick turnaround, something important on my time schedule. For consideration....

Urban Legends - "Fucking, Austria"

This is great: Apparently there's a real town in Austria called Fucking. The picture at the bottom is hilarious.

Check out this big kitty, a "liger". Now I want to see what a "tigon" looks like....

"How'd ya get all the way up there?" (deer on an electric pole).

Supposedly all these things are legitimate. The world is a crazy place.

Steve Jackson Games

Whoa, Steve Jackson Games is still around! I used to play a bunch of SJ Games when I was a kid, like Ogre and Car Wars. I had GURPS but no one I knew played it. Designing vehicles in Car Wars was fun, which was probably one of the reasons I ended up being an optimization biatch in hard disk drives: I would try to produce the most kick-ass car given the design constraints and fixed funds. Learning the rules in a game was my kick as a kid. Should've gotten into science/engineering earlier. All this sounds weird, but that's my life.

Apparently there's an SJG online sales shop called Warehouse 23. Looks interesting.

Steve Jackson sounds like a character: An otaku if there ever was one, but I can appreciate that! Ahh, echoes of my otaku past takes me back to the idle days of my childhood.... Well, it was kinda a waste, but it made me me, so I can't second-guess myself too much.

Random News, 2005.06.01

Is Rodi BitTorrent’s Replacement? - Sounds cool. "Bouncing" is one way to deal with being analyzed. I have an idea on how to prevent the problem LaryTet mentions in the article, but I'll save that for my own P2P soft—whenever it is I manage to get around to writing one.
Would you have allowed Bill Gates to be born? - Sure. He's done more good than bad. This is the concern with eugenics, judging people on factors unrelated to their contributions to society. The debates on eugenics are going to get more intense as the capabilities for genetic discrimination increase. Me? Well, I'd rather know if a girl I was going to marry would impart propensity for a genetic disease to my children, even baldness for that matter, but is that capability a good thing? Maybe we aren't supposed to know.
The Midas Formula - Was Star Wars really that good? I liked the first movie (Episode 4) ok, but the rest weren't so great. Of course Han Solo is the coolest character in the films!
Linux Powers Airborne Bots - This is way cool. Now I want one of those Bladerunner model helicopters. I always thought "co-axial counter-rotating blades" was a cool phrase. Inter-disciplinary research is what makes science and engineering interesting.

玄箱ハック

最近玄箱に手を出してないけど、思想の流れがまたNASの方向に行ってしまって、僅かある時間でいじってみようと思っているところ。中尾さんとも話をしてるが、あいつは買って一年ぶりにやっと動くようにするってことはおかしい！僕は買い次第ドライブいれて使ってみたけど、やっぱり省エネをするためにコード変更を入れなくちゃいけない。（別にいつもディスクを回す必要ない。）その点にひっかかる、俺は。

玄箱 Debianサーバ構築メモ
玄箱ＨＧハック

役に立つかな。HGを持ってないけど、多分同じワザが効くだろう。

Windows NT Kernel Mode Drivers

I found this site when searching for info on some specific undocumented NT kernel commands. (See previous references.) This tutorial is pretty cool. The weird thing is that the people who wrote this, who are Russian, do all their drivers in assembly language. I remember way back on Win16 (Windows 3.1), some people did asm drivers, but nowadays I thought everyone used high-level languages. Weird, but cool!

Wired News, 2005.05.16

Belated....
Hey Google, Map This! - People with too much time on their hands, I guess.
Mario Takes New York - Pokemon Center in NYC?!
Microsoft Battles Halo 2 Holes - No surprises here.... Microsofties may be book-smart, but they don't know security. It's like the difference between being scholarly and being streetwise!
Out-of-State Wine Sales Upheld - Inter-state booze trafficking.
Super Water Kills Bugs Dead - Sweet! Let's hear it for super-oxygenated water!!

CNN News, 2005.05.19

Closing the circle of 'Star Wars' - Episode III, the end to a trilogy that should've never begun. Star Wars was better without the prequel! Midichlorians my @$$. Well, that doesn't mean I'm not going to see it—it's closure after all. Like watching Matrix Revolutions....
Why you're always cold (or hot) at work - I prefer to be cold. And I hate sweaty and smelly coworkers, so I'd prefer they be cold too.
Trump pushes own Ground Zero plan - Trump is about ego. Although nothing would get done without ego, the WTC isn't about ego, it's about global capitalism. Global capitalism is highly dependent on oil, which is why Al Qaeda's strike of the WTC was so symbolic. Anyway, the WTC should be rebuilt bigger and better, but the design should also be more advanced and modern. How does one design twin skyscrapers, anyway?!
Console makers brace for war -- again - Mmmm, PlayStation 3....

PC Mag: Building an XP-SP2 recovery disc

PC Magazine had an interesting article earlier this year on how to build a new recovery disc for use with Windows XP SP2 from an original XP disc and the SP2 upgrade distribution.

Port access on Windows NT-based OSes

I've been needing this for work for a while. Originally I was going to figure this out on my own, but I'm glad I waited—someone else did the hard work for me!
PortTalk - An application library to access I/O ports on NT. Comes with source code, which is a plus. This driver works with a companion program which creates a process for the desired program and passes the PID to the driver. Interesting solution.
dpointer - A blog entry with an interesting bit about the I/O permissions map and a link to UserPort. The latter sounds like PortTalk, and does come with source code.
NI FAQ - A National Instruments article on direct port access. There's some software that allows port access, but it doesn't sounds like it comes with source, and I didn't check.
Kport - Refers mostly to the first link (BeyondLogic). This plus PortTalk and UserPort give three examples of Windows device driver implementations.

Windows Product Activation Killer

Found some info on the Net about de-activating WPA so that SP1/SP2 can be installed on an OEM edition. The service packs disable upgrades on the original OEM keys, but by modifying the key, the service packs can be upgraded.

Since this stuff is pretty shady, I won't post any links here. Search for "Windows XP Key Viewer" and "Windows XP Service Pack 2 Keygen" by ORGix. In a way, it's amazing that someone figured out how to hack this stuff. One would think MS would have enough resources to develop something fairly uncrackable....

PeerGuardian 2

This open source project that allows P2P users to block access from IP addresses of known "rogue connections", e.g. RIAA, MPAA, etc., trying to put the legal smack down on your ass.

I especially like the hostname of the group: Methlabs. That's a name worth holding onto.

Top 250 movies of all time?

IMDB has a list of registered user-voted top 250 movies of all time. I've seen a lot of movies on that list, but not 3.5 of the top 10 (Godfather, Godfather Pt 2, Schindler's List, and I only saw part of the Shawshank Redemption). Well, "the best" always depends on one's criteria. Still, I wouldn't mind seeing a few more flicks that're on that list.

RFIC

This site rules! It's a bunch of tutorials on transistor-based analog technologies. Study materials are always nice to have. Especially to a digital boy whose analog skills are very weak.

The changes that keep going down...

I was looking for the changes that keep going down and found a review of The President's Analyst DVD online. I still don't know if it has the original soundtrack or not. Maybe I'll just have to buy the thing. I hope the original version my Dad has on Beta tape is still intact, but the problem is he doesn't have a working Beta deck anymore! All because of the changes that go round and round....

irt.org

irt.org is an interesting mini-encyclopedia of "Internet-related technologies".

Steve Ballmer

Gee, there's some none too flattering stuff about Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer out there on the Net. One parody video of the iPod commercials depicts Ballmer's so-called "Monkey Boy" dance. The inspiration for this was some videos of Microsoft events where Ballmer does some pretty wacky stuff. Well, we can't all be rock stars.

Money @ How Stuff Works

Noel sent me a link to this How Stuff Works site on business. It may prove useful for later endeavors.

Gaim, SILC, and Doxygen

I've been using Trillian as an IM client (mostly because of the name, from HHGTTG), but lately I've decided to switch over to Gaim. The decision wasn't because I'm a big fan of open source. Gaim has secure messaging (via SILC), supports Unicode, and there's a plug-in available for Sametime (what we use at Hitachi GST, because it's what we used at IBM).

Interestingly, Gaim's source has documentation in Doxygen format. This looks really cool in that it can generate a graph of source file relations as well as extract the structure from source files for rudimentary outlines of undocumented code. Back in college, a long, long time ago, I wrote an auto-documenter program in Perl for a software project. One of my teammates and I discussed making an improved version, but neither of us ever got around to it. I guess in the open source world, if it doesn't exist, someone will do it.

Distributed Sender Blackhole List

Amusingly enough, HGST's mailservers were just blacklisted on DSBL....

CNN News, 2005.05.09

U.S. deaths in Iraq surpass 1,600 - Sounds like we need to use more area-effect weaponry in Iraq.
IAEA: N. Korea could have 5-6 nuclear weapons - And it sounds like we need to wipe the North Korean government off the face of the planet. Bush probably shouldn't go around calling Kim Jong Il "an evil man" on TV, because he's supposed to be diplomatic, but the guy is.
Gas prices continue to slide - Not in Japan: it's \124 per liter here, or about $4.30 per gallon!
Bush in Moscow to mark victory in Europe - According to Putin: "Democracy cannot be exported to some other place. Democracy must be a product of internal domestic development in a society." Sounds like he's reasonably intelligent; at least he puts a smart spin on things. It's not good that the number of people still around who actually lived through WWII is getting smaller. Eventually people will forget the lessons learned from that war.
Report: Mars lander wreckage found - How can you tell from that tiny picture?
Math student indicted in $43M scam - Sheesh, 21 and he had a Swiss bank account? I'm jealous. There's some indictment info at the DOJ. Not very smart, though: bank transfers leave an audit trail. He should've learned about money laundering.
New rule could open roadless forest areas - This is not a good thing. Leave nature alone! The flip side is population pressure to expand: Americans don't like living cramped like people do in Japan.
New dinosaur caught in the act - "It also showed some change toward the larger gut needed to digest plant material rather than meat, as well as a lengthened neck and smaller head associated with eating plants...." So if you become a vegetarian, your head will shrink, you'll get a pencil-neck, and develop a fat gut!!

Laptop Madness

Nakao-san and I got in a discussion about notebook computers (as well as mini-notebooks and sub-notebooks) rather than doing real work. Well, I just wasted an hour and a half of my life in a stupid CI meeting, so I'm even worse for the wear. My worklist is pretty long, too.

Vaio 505 - This is the only PC notebook I really have any interest in. Thin, "single spindle" (no optical drive), usable keyboard, and decent specs (for a laptop). Unfortunately, the price tag is still a bit too hefty: it used to be about \250000, now it's more like \170000 (~$1600). The weird thing is that for heat dissipation, there's a large space between the keyboard and the screen rather than for usage as a wrist-rest.
OQO - The OQO's been out for a while, so where's model 2? What I really want is a Vaio 505 that's also a tablet. The thumbpad on the OQO is just not suitable for writing code or docs on the fly. Otherwise, I'd get a Zaurus. The Transmeta processor probably is none too fast, either.
Vaio Type T - Nakao-san's drooling over this one. Not bad. Still a little too thick, and the battery placement leaves something to be desired. Then there's the price tag.
Muramasa - Another oldie from about the same generation as the 505. This is closer to the OQO in that it uses a Transmeta Efficion. Nakao-san mentioned Toshiba released a newer machine, but I'm not a Toshiba fan. I'd rather go Sharp than Toshiba, at least until they put out something really cool that makes me look past the brand name.

Step-down transformers for 120V to 100V

Nisshou Transformers (Japanese) - These are high-capacity step-down and step-up transformers. Another link.
Prices @ Sawada Denki - They don't have the one I want (NDF-1100U).
FamiNet - They do have the NDF-1100U, and for a reasonable price. I'll order from them.
User's Side - Here's a shop in the U.S. that sells the NDF-1100U—in Japanese, no less!—but they want 50% more than FamiNet. Since I'll be headed to the U.S. soon anyway, I may as well buy it in Japan.

Router Blah

In reading a BitTorrent FAQ to find out more about the protocol (specifically trackers) work, I needed clarification on how "modern" NAT routers do their thing. I referred to a couple online docs that were pretty helpful. The How Stuff Works article is widely quoted.

OpenBSD FAQ on NAT
How Network Address Translation Works

When I reasoned my way through NAT after reading the IP and TCP RFCs (in 1997, before I knew of its existence, which was 1994 according to RFC 1631), it made sense to rip out the original IP address and TCP port address. However, some protocols like FTP include the IP address, making NAT even more invasive and complex. BT's protocol is pretty simple, relatively speaking. The trouble with NAT is the lack of bidirectional protocol capability across multiple machines. Using port forwarding, it's possible to do this on a single designated host.

Now there's "UPnP", but it's unclear at this point if there are any security issues exploitable from the protocol itself. There are several sub-standards (pun?), such as Basic Device, Internet Gateway Device, Wireless LAN Access Point, and even for HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air-Conditioning).

Torrent Reactor

Quite the collection (music, movies, warez, pr0n). Just beware of the layer ad that pops up...it's not appropriate for work!!

News (?), 2005.05.07

Judging a Book by Its Contents - Indexing "statistically improbable phrases" from books sounds like a good idea. In one of William Gibson's books, he uses the phrase "hepatic corona"—as improbable a phrase as any.
Wikipedia is a real-life Hitchhiker's Guide: huge, nerdy, and imprecise - Yeah. Objective documentation is difficult even when one has the pretense of being objective. Wikipedia is useful for a quick overview, but the factuality is questionable as well as the objectiveness. Especially with political content: that's always up for interpretation.

ファゴット(バスーン)フェスティバル - "Fagott Fest"?! Apparently "fagott" means "bassoon", and is indeed in some dictionaries.

Knoppix & BitTorrent

The other day when I went to download the latest Knoppix distribution for my mini-ITX setup, they offered an option to get the distro via BitTorrent. I had downloaded BT in the past (mid-2003), but finding torrents was too much of a pain in the butt, so I never really used it. Now torrents are a lot easier to locate. Anyway, so I downloaded BT again, and snagged Knoppix 3.8. This site in the Netherlands has some "interesting" torrent links.

Go Arnold!

Schwarzenegger praises Minuteman - Arnold kicks butt. Tell it like it is, Arnie!!
'Tiger' roars into stores - Maybe it's time to buy a Mac mini....