“One of the best known anti-spam forwarders is Spammotel (what a name!) which also offers a pretty sophisticated, award-winning plugin for your email client, which allows you to keep track of whom you have given which of your email addresses. This, of course, makes it dead easy to test Websites’ privacy policies. Moreover, it makes for a great tool to help you organize the email you actually do want to receive. Windows only.”—Courtesy of Sitepoint.com
I forgot to mention a possible bug in Windows XP running Black Ice Firewall that I encountered yesterday. I ran a full UDP scan without pings for every UDP port in existence and it crashed my XP box. I could still ping it, but every service was stopped and I could not get into the system. If someone else knows about this or has a fix, please let me know.
I dont know what to write. There are SOME interesting things going on, but I dont want to jinx them by talking about them too much. I did read some stuff on the blog for Howard Dean 2004 which I thought were interesting and somewhat promising. That is the unofficial blogspot blog for Dean. Here is the official Howard Dean for America . I strongly believe that his grassroots campaign might be a really good way of getting to the core of Americans.
I might finally get my Macintosh Fix. Amy (Ann’s daughter) has a Mac G3 Tower that she does not use and needs an x86 PC to replace it. I am replacing the motherboard, processor, etc on Jennifer’s computer and will have some spare parts. That will mean everyone will get what they want.
I am also in the throes of midsummer blues. Summer vacations are almost over and I have to get back into classes again. Im taking graphics this fall which should be very interesting, along with advanced computer architecture with Kaur. I also hope to have some work done on my thesis. I THOUGHTthat I had gotten my advisor decided upon, but no such luck. I will keep everyone posted about that.
I am also going to have to get my butt moving and get the PHd applications out to the three places that I am applying to. Namely, The University of Michigan, Case Western Reserve and Ohio State University. From what I understand about the present state of admissions, I will have to do some buttkissing and some fingerlicking to get admitted (even with my 3.9 GPA and 4 years of actual industry experience).
On another note, My father is doing very well and is getting better everyday! I am supposed to talk with him tonight. I want him and my mother to come and visit again, but I have to wait till he feels a little better.
PS: As a disclaimer, I am not overtly political (yet) and my opinions are simply that.
This is really cool! I have to try this as soon as I can get a minute to go out and buy an el cheapo camera from Best Buy TheNerds.net and a large party baloon from one of the party stores. I think this will make really good pictures. I know of a camera from best buy (the pencam) TheNerds.net which costs about 40 bucks and weighs less than 9 ounces with batteries. I would also need some fishing line and I should be in business. Oh yes, here is the Aerial Digital Photography from a Baloon link. I am excited about it. If anyone reading has seen or built or used one of these, please leave a comment. Micah, I think this would make PHENOMENAL panorama pictures!!
I have setup a view source php file which lets you view the source of any php file on this server. To look at the source of this index, Click Here!
Been working really hard on scripting and writing webpages for the department. I am still working on the Automata Page for Dr. L and I have written some scripts to get the live links, upload files and comment box that he wanted. All of these scripts are written for the public domain and if you would like to get a hold of them, please email me. I also wrote a VBScript to uninstall BitTorrent if you run into problems uninstalling the product. Get it here. You can change the registry keys and he program files link to get it to uninstall any program. This is also under GPL and freely distributable. I am NOT reaponsible for any damages, please use at your own risk!
I found a place online that collects old browsers for download. I was led there while I was trying to search for a way to download a script from a CGI-BIN without actually executing it. I wrote a rudimentary browser which makes an HTTP-GET and gets a partial response but was also told that really old broswers did that as well. So I went looking and guess what I found….Netscape 0.93 Beta Check it out…download it for yourself. It is quite a bit of work and was still called the Mosaic Project back then. It made my day!
Leave me a quick message on the bottom right hand corner of the side toolbar. It is simple, quick, easy and I know who has been visiting. Leave your comments too. 
Added Word of The Day to the links on the right hand side. It take the html from the dictionary.com website and parses the content to just display the word of the day without bugging you with any ads or other malicious material. It is a very cool script which take any available text information from the web (HTML, text etc) parses through looking for tags to start and stop reading data from and then spits it out into a webpage. Let me know if you would like to get a hold of it and I will put it up here. On second thought, here it is wordofday.pl
Remember that little issue I had with my car on my birthday? Well, I finally got the insurance company to send me a check to get it fixed and get me a rental. Is it just me or are insurance claims adjustors just very lazy and lackadaisical? I must have called her in excess of 25 times in the past two weeks and have gotten ONE call returned. She was simply sitting on my estimates and had idea that they were even sent to her. After she finally answered my phone call, it took her one minute to look at them (after she realized they were there) and then agree to send me a check for the estimate amount. If she would have just looked at them once before, the job would have been complete and case closed. Just so that my readers know NOT to go to this insurance company or ask for a different adjuster, I was dealing with AAA Michigan and the adjustors name was Pam Smith. She was rude, didnt talk fluent english and simply did not give a hoot! Leave comments with your experiences on here.
We went to the Great Lakes Crossing Shopping mall today for a little bit. I have always liked their store selections and the mall looked really busy this time. It was a good sign. People were actually buying stuff, unlike the last time we were there. I really like the fragrance depot store there. I bought some Farenheit (at less than half the price than Dillards). I also looked at, at concurrently drooled over a watch that I want to get when my old one dies (I have had this Casio for over eight years now, it is a wonderful watch!). I own a Triple Sensor Casio PRt-40 which has been discontinued. I also found out that the GPS watch that I want has been discontinued and retails for over $500. I am now looking into replacing my old watch with something similar, another Casio Sea Pathfinder
I promised myself that I would only post news if it is under special circumstances. So here it is! My father underwent angioplasty and got a little blockage removed in one of his arteries and he is coming home Monday. WooHoo! No more problems and the doc gave him a wonderful outlook, he feels better too!! Knock on wood that everything stays well for the time being. So there!
Slashdot has a post this morning about the RIAA going after possible file swappers who are sharing as little as 8 of their files. Most of these people are from the Verizon network. So if you are a Verizon customer, your internet connection is being snooped for information, big time! Now I am aware that BEX snoops and keeps track of my connection as well and I have proof that my packets have been analyzed at times before reaching me, but I am not as paranoid about it. I have decided (and have warned friends ) about the dangers of file swapping at this time. I present this danger to you, my readers, again. I know that they (the RIAA) are being allowed a lot of freedom to persecute the “offenders” and they are doing everything that they can to possibly cease and decist file swapping. Personally, I couldnt care less. Here is one question for possible RIAA backers reading this. Didnt people record on tape and play back songs from the radio a decade ago? Wasnt that illegal? How come it was not such a big issue then? Is ripping from an internet radio station within the edge of being slightly illegal that we wont get persecuted? What if I rip internet radio stations such as WGTE or Rick D’s top 40? If I understand the law correctly (which I am pretty sure I dont, so be sure to correct me) it is very legal to listen to online radio stations such as the ones I mentioned above (which have explicit permission to broadcast copyrighted music). So without actually hacking into my computer to see what I am doing (which would make them felons, hackers, phreakers etc.), the RIAA or its affiliates would not know if I am ripping the radio stations or not. (I might have to spoof the ripper tags to make it look like a player, a breeze in programming terms as they are mostly open source) So, a quick conclusion is that the next p2p revolution is going to come in the form of rips of internet radio stations. It would work wonderfully and if you used all of your bandwidth, you could probably rip 5-10 radio stations at the same time. This would mean 5 songs per hour per station on the average or about 720 songs per day. Not bad. Hmmmmm…. 
PS: The views expressed here are completely just that, scientific and educational views. They do not mean that I participate in file swapping, in sharing or ripping of radio stations or any activity with my computer that is considered illegal. This is NOT an admission of any sort of guilt or wrongdoing, so please dont treat it as one!
It is a wonder how a person (namely me) can become so engrossed in their problems and their life that they become whiny and bitchy and keep ruminating the same bad circumstances, completely ignoring the future and the good things that lie in wait. So, barring really special circumstances, I will keep this blog free of depressing thoughts and will concentrate on fun things.
To start off with, I am almost done with the project for Dr Makki. I wrote it on Survey of Credit Cards, Smart Cards and of New Research in Secure Payment Methods for the Internet. So check it out if and when you are interested. There is a very detailed explanation there of how a credit card and how a smart card works and some good explanations of RSA and DF encryptions.
Jennifer has a couple of kids here from Poland (exchange students/summer trip) and we are going to see the Tall Ships exhibit going through Toledo on Saturday. Check out the really cool website (Tall Ships Toledo) and if you like water and old outriggers like me, you will love it! 17 ships are going to be here in Toledo Harbor.
Another program I would like to get an opinion on is called SuperSpeed XP Pro. I downloaded a demo for a while and was really impressed with the performance gain of my machine. I run a tight XP box with a Gig of RAM and an athlon 1.8 and XP tweaked to the max. But, imaginary or not, Photoshop ran like I always dreamed it would. I could tweak a 200 Meg file almost instantly! The software can be found at http://www.superspeed.com and can be downloaded from various sites on the internet. (the trial version, search google)
I have been catching myself trying to get a lot of Kazaa Lite lately. I have been trying really hard to keep from donwnloading MP3s and other junk from there but I seem to be drawn to the lure of new music. So, on that impulse, I simply switch to an internet radio station and curb my desires.
I will have to get back into blog writing again. This past week has been too hectic to write and I miss it.
I received an email from my parents this morning which says that my father is going to get admitted to a hospital on the 18th. He is going to get an angiogram done which gives the doctors a better idea of what is going on inside the problem vein. If the blockage is very big, he will get an angioplasty done and from what I understand from Ann, if things get really bad on the oeprating table, they will perform an open heart right then and there. If things stay this bad and he does have to have an open heart surgery performed, I will have to go home and take care of things. Jennifer wants to come with me, bless her heart and she wont hear it any other way. I wish we were going home under happier circumstances, but better now than never. I hope everything will be fine at school when Im gone, but I really dont care, my family comes first no matter what. I also think there is some law that protects me from problems if there is a family emergency. I just pray to God nothing goes really wrong between now and my father’s angioplasty.
I was talking with my parents last night and Dad told me that he was having some serious health problems. He has a heart blockage of some kind and his blood pressure is high. This is very strange considering the fact that he is a very healthy man and has had very little health problems outside of a bad stomach. I am a little worried and they are going to have to cancel their plans to come and visit this fall. It sounds like he is visiting a number of specialists and he is going to get on some strong medication for the next three months. After those three months he will get a checkup again and see how things stand. My mother is very worried as well and I could tell from the tone of her voice that she is unhappy that I am this far away during their time of distress. He might have to get an angioplasty done if things dont get better. I am seriously considering going back home for a few weeks if he does have to go into surgery, however basic the surgery might be. I am stressed. We will find out more in the next few weeks.
I met Jason for the first time when I went to Direct Computer to interview with Doug. He was a quiet man and nice to me when I said hi. He struck me as a softspoken, friendly guy who liked working on computers. I chatted with him for a bit tonight. After I quit DirectPc, he continued to work there till he got his degree (this spring). He now has a job in upper Michigan and is moving there this weekend. I will miss Jason. He is a good friend and a very nice man and his friendship means a lot to me. We flew remote control airplanes together, went tubing together, rode around the three wheeler, did all sorts of stupid things and still were good co-workers. Never did our friendship interfere with our work. I wish him the best of luck in his present endeavour. He has found a really nice woman that loves him and is willing to do a lot for him. My parents love him as well. It makes me giddy happy to see him doing this well. May God be with him! Kudos!
We had some serious thunderstorms last night. I know I lost power for a while because my linux server had rebooted itself. Jennifer called me at 6 in the morning because she had no power since three this morning and they had no water as a consequence. They wanted to know if they could come over and shower and stuff. So it was an early awakening. I was just glad my power wasnt gone for a very long time. I have a lot of work to do this week. I am still working on the proposal dor Dr Makki. I did find a very interesting program called Internet Screen Saver Maker This will solve the problem of letting people in the labs know information about our Samba server before they log on. It lets you make a screensaver with information that can be updated at predefined intervals over the web. Very interesting idea. I did look into writing a screen saver myself, but it was going to be a LOT of work to figure out all the mouse clicks and settings and then impliment them. I did find some very good preliminary source code for this, but it would still involve a lot of coding, probably a couple of weeks’ worth. If you would like to check this out for yourself, go to Code Project, make a free account, and do a search for “Holistic Screensaver”. It is a very very well done and comprehensive project by a professional.
All rolled into one, the 4th of July was fun. But I had a lot of work to do as well. I had to work on Dr Ledgard’s project, finish working on Dr Makki’s proposal and find time to do everything else. I am tired, I feel a little ill as well. I think my stomach is having problems with the recent heat wave. I now remember why I like the cold so much. I am also itching to go out and look at some motorcycles and Jennifer seems ok with that. But I am also worried that I am biting off more than I can chew. The financial factor is not that important, I am more worried about whether I am indulging too much or that I am becoming too material. I will have to think about that. Why is it that I become thoughtful and introspective when the weekend comes to an end? Is this what they call the Monday blues? It should be a fairly busy week next week. I have to get the estimates for my car door and find time to take it in and also pick up the rental along with keeping up with automata. Oh, I helped Jon get his stuff together for our conference on the 9th. I will also have to write up another few pages for the report for the independant study for Dr Makki. On another note, I am thinking of going to DC at the end of the summer for my vacation. I have not seen Kaushik in a long while and it would be nice to hang with him for some time. We would not be staying with him, so it should not be bad. I would also like to go back to Chicago to visit. I miss the city. Introspection makes me write a lot. I like that. I can almost type at the speed of my thoughts. That is really different for me. I have come a long way from having to look at the keyboard while typing just a few years back. My english is beginning to get worse as well. I have caught myself putting down really bad constructions and then just ignoring them. I need to pay closer attention. If anyone reading this lives close to Toledo and has a motorcycle to sell from the 1970s (in other words, sub $1000) please email me dinki@mac.com
Here are 2 of my MOST favourite pictures in the whole wide world. Jennifer took them last winter when my parents were here. They make my heart melt. I love you Baba, Ma!!
The pictures we took on the 4th of July are online now. Here is one of me and John on the paddle boat I had talked about. We had such a good time!
I am writing this post using the w.bloggar software. I have been getting a lot of hits from my own computer because I have been using the webpage to actually write the posts. I have looked at a buinch of peices of software to use as a blogging tool, but this one seems to be the best so far. Grab it at http://bloggar.cjb.netIt looks like this will even let me put in HTML and javascript.
Remember I had talked about putting up the VBScript files? My script can be used as an addition to the normal login script for a windows NT, windows 2000 or Samba domain controller. This script takes checks the logging in username against a flat test file and if the name is found, prints out the contents of the text file which follows the username in the list. It then either logs out or restarts the client. This is very useful in larger enterprise like settings to lock out users or send out messages to users in a completely automated fashion, like an MOTD on steroids. So here is the uploaded file… messages.zip
PS: This program sucks, the original post did not show up with ANY of the links. There must be some problem with the XMLRPC.php link. I will have to look at the blogger APIs to figure out what is wrong. Till then, it is back to posting with the webpage, which I dont mind at all. I have fixed the links though, hope it looks better!
Fireworks went off yesterday in most parts of Toledo. It is almost always a very pretty night with lots of bright colors and muffled bangs. Jennifer and I went to her Mom’s friend’s place in Sylvania. They live right next to a man made lake and have a little paddle boat. John and I got in the boat and paddled out to the center of the lake. We had the best seats in the house! Pictures to come soon. The water was nice and cool and we had a large viewing area. This weekend will be really busy. I have to work on a project for Dr Ledgard, work on my own research proposal, help Jon get his act together for our conference in San Francisco and I have to spend time with my girlfriend. Wish me luck! I have been writing some really nice VBScripts and will post them on here sometime. I have also been asked by the editor of bleedinedge.com to write a weekly article on his website which I might take up if I get to write about Macintoshes and Linux.
I have finally had a chance to go through the birthday pictures, clean them and get them on a thumbnail page. It has been a busy few days! I have a whole lot of solving and typing to do for my teaching assistantship and I also have to finish working on rewriting smbpasswd sor the profile login thing. We went for a very long walk yesterday. It was wonderful weather and Luckey had such a good time. Jennifer has checked out the price for a hitch for my car and it is going to set me back about $116. She will pitch in to buy the bike rack so we can go biking again. The trunk mounted rack was annoying me and I took it back. My Birthday went with a little bit of a hitch but it was wonderful to be able to do what I wanted! Craig and I had a very good time drinking beer, talking about friends and old times, calling friends on the phone and watching movies. We even went down to the Taste of Toledo for a little bit. I have posted all of the pictures on Birthday pictures page. My car was damaged by a Michigander guy and his family in a huge red Dodge RAM pickup. I was parked in Sam’s parking lot and was sitting in the car and waiting for Jennifer to get something from the store. This family parks right next to me and opens their door. The wind catches the door and you will see the result in the pictures…LOL
Their insurance will take care of it though, so I am not that worried and I get to drive a new rental car!!
Gotta get to work soon, I have a busy day ahead of me.
