Now to start off, dont get me wrong. I think Japan is a really cool place and beg my wife to let us go to Japan one day. Japanese people are very respectable and very knowledgeable in general.

Now for recent events. At the time of this post Japan had raised the allowed limit of exposure to radiation from 100 milisieverts per hour to 250 milisieverts so that workers can work for longer periods of time in the radiation.

Radiation’s effects on health are measured in sieverts. Though individual differences exist, a higher dose than 250 millisieverts is known to cause a temporary decrease of white blood cells and other acute symptoms. Regarding that problem, the ministry says that it has duly consulted experts about effects on the workers, noting that “the international standard is a limit of 500 millisieverts, and there is no clear medical evidence for acute health problems below 250 millisieverts.”

Something I dont quite understand, and im sure there are various circumstances on why. Japan is a technology super power ranking in at 3rd in the world behind Finland and the United States. If they are so advanced. Why are they resorting to tactics proven to be outdated since World War 2. They are going in to the Nuclear Reactors like Kamikazes to cool down the reactors. I understand the intentions are to save their people. But seriously.. A country that is responsible for some of the most advanced robots and cars in the world, and they can’t just send in some sort of basic Rover or Robot to walk in and hold the hose almost directly on the reactors so their people can stay out of harm’s way? I mean makes more sense to me than randomly shooting into the reactors with water jets or dumping water from above when only about 2/3 (at most) of the water is getting near its destination.

I recently setup a new Dedicated Server with DirectAdmin.

It was about a day after getting everything up and running I noticed the bandwidth usages were not updating on any user. There was many questions on the DA forums for this issue but none seam to match my issue.

after poking around I found a string of commands.

# echo ‘action=tally&value=all’ >> /usr/local/directadmin/data/task.queue
# ./dataskq d

Running the above command resulted in the following error..
“error while loading shared libraries: libmysqlclient.so.16″

Im running Debian 5.0 64bit and found Direct Admin has this file hosted on their servers for download. http://files.directadmin.com/services/debian_5.0_64/libmysqlclient.so.16
(Please goto http://files.directadmin.com/services at the bottom of the page lists what folder to look in based on your Distro)

Running the following commands fixed my issues..

wget http://files.directadmin.com/services/debian_5.0_64/libmysqlclient.so.16
mv libmysqlclient.so.16 /usr/lib64/libmysqlclient.so.16
chmod 755 /usr/lib64/libmysqlclient.so.16
ldconfig

So I was burning a bunch of .iso’s today and ran into a weird issue.. All of a sudden my burning software was telling me I didnt have a burner anymore.. Checked in “My Computer” and saw the drive as CD-ROM even though it had a blank DVD-R in the drive.. So I Ejected the disc a few times and still no change..

Now Im not one for rebooting my computer but this computer has been hibernated about 30 times without a real-reboot.. So not wanting to reboot the computer I poked around trying to solve the issue.. I figured out a quick fix. This might not work for all people but it did the trick for me..

goto “My Computer” or I guess “Computer” as its now called in Windows 7
Right click the DVD-RW drive (now called CD-ROM), click properties
Click the Hardware Tab, Now if you move the popup window around your screen so you can see the “Computer” window behind it watch what happens next..
Click “Properties”
Click the “Driver” tab
Click the “Disable” Button, at this point you should have seen your drive disappear on the “Computer” window.
Now click the “Enable” Button, should be the same button that was labeled “Disable” before
You should now see your DVD-RW drive as it would normally have appeared in the “Computer” window..
And it should be working properly now!

I have been using Astraweb for over a year now as my Usenet provider.. Speeds have been great.. I always max out at 2.07MB/s which is the max speed of my Internet.. I have never experienced a downtime with Astraweb and they offer SSL connections! They offer many packages but really the DSL Special is all you need.. No speed limit, no transfer limit, ssl support, US/EU servers, 20 connections and 688day retention which is growing daily! At $11.00USD/month you really cant go wrong.. Beats Netflix for me..

Just my 2 cents..

So Just thought I would post a follow up..

I have been using Gomez Peer Zone trouble free for almost 2 years now.. I signed up in December of 2008 and have been using it on all my computers since.. There has been a few months which i didnt make the payout minimum ($5.00) but those were months when i had most of my stuff in storage or was moving or was not near a computer very long.. But the balance has always rolled over to the following month. As of this moment my total earnings from Gomez Peer is..

Lifetime Earnings: $71.96
Current Account Balance: $4.00
Earnings Close Date: 2010/07/31

Gomez though has been late at making payments sometimes has always come through with payments.. I have tested the client on the following OS’s WinXP (SP0,SP1,SP2,SP3)/Vista (32/64bit)/Win7 (32/64bit)/Server 2003/Server 2008 and seems to run just fine taking little to no resources.. Does not cause any issues on the servers i have it running on, and does not inter-fear with my movies or games on my desktop

Just thought I would pass on some peace of mind about the software..

So im sitting here writing (more like learning) jQuery code for a project im working on.. and I was running in to an issue with IE7.. Heres what was going on and how I fixed it.

- my primary page index.php has a function defined that captures click events on different images and executes a $.ajax which sends a request to my proc.php page.
- proc.php accepts arguments and processes a MySQL UPDATE query and then returns what it processed.
- the function on my primary page then takes the response html and depending on the response changes the image that was clicked to a new image that relates to the html response.

this was working fine in Firefox with Firebug but in IE7 it would only work on the first click then I had to refresh the page to be able to click the image again and get same result. Turns out IE7 was caching the result and not processing it again even though the script was telling it too. so a work around I found was to add the following to the top of my proc.php


header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT");
header("Cache-Control: no-cache");
header("Pragma: no-cache");


This more or less tells the browser don’t cache this page, and this page is old so you need to re-fetch it anyhow.

There is probably more ways to do this.. but this one worked for me!

So a buddy of mine has the Sprint Hero (Android OS) loaded with the latest Sprint update which is Android OS 2.1 at the time of writing this.. I have the Verizon Eris Rooted with Android OS 2.1.. So 2 different phones.. 2 Different carriers.. 2 different Roms - 1 is over the air updated from Carrier, other is Rooted rom from the Internet.

My buddy was going to check out a website on his phone (url wont be disclosed) when he opened up the default “Internet” app and cleared out the address bar and typed “http://www.re” with no quotes, the auto complete came up as http://www.redtube.com this is not a site he has ever been too on his phone.. To confirm this wasn’t just by chance I grabbed my phone and attempted to recreate the issue.. it did the same thing on mine..

The above picture is of my phone please note the following.. I have never put that url into my phone before.. the restockit urls are from my history cache.. redtube came up even above my phones history cache..

So Google.com Promotes RedTube?  For anyone that does not know.. RedTube is NOT SAFE FOR WORK!! My buddy would have gotten in trouble if someone else at work was looking over his shoulder and saw that popup..

The other day I was trying to access the c$ share on a Windows XP Pro desktop from my Windows 7 workstation in a workgroup environment (not a Active Directory Domain).. and kept getting Access Denied when i knew the username and password was right.. was trying using “administrator” and “computername\administrator” as usernames still nothing.. Confirmed it working with a different Windows XP computer.. So I knew it was something to do with the Windows 7 PC..

So I spent a few days fighting with this one.. doing everything from changing workgroups on both computers to adding accounts to both computers to making countless fix’s in the registry and local security policy’s on both computers.. I even ran system updates.. then finely on like page 30 of like my 20th search on google for an answer on this one I found it.. and it was so simple!

So here it is..

On the Windows XP computer do the following..

- Start the Microsoft Management Console (MMC) Local Security Policy snap-in (Start, Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Local Security Policy).
- Expand the Local Policies branch.
- Select Security Options.
- Double-click “Network access: Sharing and security model for local accounts.”
- Select “Classic-Local users authenticate as themselves”, and click OK.
- Close the snap-in.
- Reboot the system for the change to take effect.

On Windows 7
*if* you have already tried accessing the Windows XP computer before applying above fix you should reboot the Windows 7 PC to avoid issues.. otherwise if you rebooted recently and haven’t tried accessing the Windows XP computer.. Wait for it to finish booting back up and access it just like you been use to doing it with windows 2000 and xp for years.

I have confirmed this working on 3 different networks. Just to make sure all the other random registry and Local policy changes i made trying to get things working were not needed..

I have also learned this fixed remote admin functions.. I was playing with DameWare NT Utilities on the network (from my Windows 7 workstation) and noticed i was having similar issues with it on Windows XP computers.. When I applied the above fix to each Windows XP computer. Like magic everything started working in DameWare!

Apple’s iPad, released Saturday, has been scrutinized by hundreds of reviewers, disassembled by iFixIt and others, and fiscally analyzed by Wall Street, but it wasn’t until Monday that the most pressing question about the “magical and revolutionary” device was answered.

That question, of course, is: Will it blend?

Tens of millions of YouTubers have watched Blendtec’s deadpan blendologist Tom Dickson over the years as he has popped a series of devices and ingredients into his company’s voracious Total Blender to answer that pressing question.

Into the maw of that industrial-strength yet designed-for-the-home machine have gone, among many other things, an iPhone, a half-dozen Bic lighters, a gaggle of glow sticks, and a can of Coca-Cola along with a rotisserie chicken - which resulted in the tasty smoothie known as a Cochicken.

Today, it was the iPad’s turn. Of course, you fans of the “Will It Blend?” series know well that the mouth of the Total Blender is too small into which to slip an iPad. But worry not, as Dickson has a straightforward methodology for overcoming that obstacle.

You can observe Dickson’s technique, and discover the fate of the fanbois’ delight here

Somewhere in a corner office at Cupertino’s One Infinite Loop, we can only imagine, a certain “CEO of the Decade” is not amused.

(Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/06/ipad_blend/ )

Vietnam tersely rejected charges from Google that tens of thousands of Vietnamese-speaking PC users around the world were targeted by hackers.

The country’s Foreign Ministry published a statement on Saturday after fielding a question from the press about Google’s blog post, which was published on its online security blog on March 30.

“Such comments are groundless,” said Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nguyen Phuong Nga. “We have on many occasions clearly expounded our view on issues relating to access to and use of information and information technology, including the Internet. Vietnam law puts in place specific regulations against computer virus and malware as well as on information security and confidentiality.”

A Google security official, Neel Mehta, wrote that the company had discovered a type of malicious software that was disguised as Vietnamese keyboard language software. The software was used to spy on the owners of computers and to conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks “against blogs containing messages of political dissent.”

“Specifically, these attacks have tried to squelch opposition to bauxite mining efforts in Vietnam, an important and emotionally charged issue in the country,” Mehta wrote.

Following up on Google’s research, security vendor McAfee said the malware created a botnet whose command-and-control systems were located within IP (Internet Protocol) address blocks assigned to Vietnam.

“We believe that the perpetrators may have political motivations and may have some allegiance to the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,” wrote McAfee CTO George Kurtz.

McAfee said the attacks do not appear to be related to Aurora, an extensive hacking network linked to China and outed by Google in January. The company two weeks ago defied Chinese law and stopped censoring its search results in China in protest. Google said that hackers targeted the Gmail accounts of human rights activists along with intellectual property of at least 20 other companies.

The Vietnamese malware purports to be the VPSKeys driver used to create accent marks in the right locations on Windows machines, according to McAfee. The code is less sophisticated than the malware used in the Aurora attacks, McAfee said.

On Tuesday, computer security researchers released a report on a new cyber-espionage network that once again targeted entities such as the Indian military, the Office of the Dalai Lama and the United Nations.

The Shadow network was traced to Chengdu, in China’s Sichuan province, where the perpetrators used a variety of social networking tools to control compromised computers. As of Tuesday, China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT) said it had not been notified of the report by the researchers.

(Source: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/193526/vietnam_rebuffs_hacking_claims_from_google.html )