I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry. ...yeah, it turns out that it's at the bottom of the page.

So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.

I'm digging G+ more and more. Feel free to add me to your whatever circles. I have a "/.ers" circle.

my g+ profile

I did have teh lulz...

Slayer goes to church

The other day my family was playing Candyland. Our daughter was getting into it so I started playing some classic Star Trek fight music.
The music ends just as she advances to GLORIOUS VICTORY!

YouTube video here

It's awesome, not that I'm biased... :)

I just received mail notification that a fellow user has bought me a gift subscription to slashdot. I'm already friends/fans with the person but his email address isn't visible so I can't thank the person off-/. (wimp, change your privacy settings and deal with the spam! :P )
 
Not sure what I did to deserve it, but I thank you!
 

Short Flash vid...
http://en.tackfilm.se/?id=1273610622233RA56

Canadian pre-orders started today.

64 GB WiFi version ordered, should be here by May 28. No need for the 3G version, I can tether with MyWi on the iPhone.

My dad picked up the similar model on a trip to the US last week. Was playing with it on the weekend, awesome device. Perhaps not magical but still most impressive.

I've lurked at /. without posting for ages, mostly because I just don't have the time to interact like I used to.

But I've been clicking through the old RSS feed more and more lately, and when I saw the PAX Plague thread today, I came over to comment, since I'm kind of affected by the whole damn thing. I thought I'd take a look around since I haven't been here in awhile, and I saw that there are freaking ACHIEVEMENTS associated with our accounts. It's silly, and I'm sure it's been here forever, but I thought it was awesome and I was delighted when I read it.

I didn't realize how much I missed Slashdot until I spent some time here today, and I bet that anyone who joined in the last 2 years doesn't even give a shit about my stupid comments or anything, but it felt good to come back here, and feel safely among my people again.

I need an achievement system at work, "Kept eyes open during entire meeting"

As mentioned in the previous entry, I updated Zone Alarm after high DPCs caused by version 7.5s outdated True Vector service (vsmon.exe) caused my system to become unusable. The problem disappeared and everything was fine until a new problem occurred: Firefox would hang after ~30 minutes usage, refusing to load new pages. Firefox would also refuse to quit or start again, requiring a restart of the computer to fix this ... before it would happen again. Ridiculous.

I did a little Googling and the evidence seemed to mount up against the new version of True Vector. Suggested solution: use a different firewall. Uninstalled Zone Alarm. Installed Comodo Firewall. Using it in Custom Policy Mode pretty much replicates Zone Alarm's pop-up allow/deny dialogue (with the minor niggle that the 'allow permamnently' tick-box's state is persistent (from a previous answer) instead of always defaulting to 'do not remember this answer' - and so allow or deny on a case by case basis unless a deliberate exception is chosen.

Firefox no longer hangs. Seems to confirm that True Vector was indeed the culprit. Silly Check Point.

The Comodo firewall seeemed to have issues with Avast! antivirus (not exactly confirmed - it caused running firewall after initial reboot to fail) so I uninstalled Avast! (which I liked) and used Comodo's antivirus - along with the entire Internet Security Suite (using the built-in Defence+ instead of Windows Defender). I do like all the information that Comodo gives me (details of every connection etc.) although some aspects of it are slightly non-intuitive (especially compared to ZA's user-friendly interface).

One day and one night running successfully. Early days.

After the latest round of updates from Microsoft, Vista's Deferred Proceedure Calls would go though the roof on certain network activity. Actually it was rather too high before the latest updates (as of the date of writing) but they increased exponentially after the updates.

Before the updates, and for some time now, on loading a webpage in either Firefox or IE, especially one that had heavy image content, audio would stutter (in Winamp and other audio programs) and the mouse pointer would jitter. On my Quad core Core 2 Duo Quad Q6600, Core0 would be at around 85%. The others would spike at around 50 to 75%. The fault was due entirely to high DPCs. Running Azureus would result in similar high DPC. It was suggested that the shitty audio drivers (Sigmatel) were to blame. This turned out not to be the case.

After the updates, the situation worsened, with Core0 pegging at 100% and the others reaching up into the 80s. I could do nothing else while a graphic heavy webpage was loading, or a torrent was downloading (seeding was without incident) as my mouse pointer lurched all over the place and the system was almost entirely unresponsive. Process Monitor revealed that the vsmon.exe (Zone Alarm) was doing an awful lot of something.

I checked for an update for Zone Alarm (7.5) and updated to version 8 and all these problems went away. Whatever Microsoft had been tinkering with had severely fuxx0red with what Vsmon.exe was trying to do, and it couldn't keep on top of things anymore.

Once again, Zone Alarm, that free, ubiquitous (and actually not too shabby) firewall had proved to be the culprit. Nothing to do with Azureus, Firefox, Sigmatel audio drivers, my chipset or Vista.

I had this come to me today.

Is this legit? A well crafted spam/mining operation? Sent to zillions of /.ers?

My tinfoil hat is buzzing, probably for no reason as is the norm.

Dear grub: My name is Lily Liu. I am a PhD student carrying our a project with my supervisor Christian Wagner (iscw@cityu.edu.hk) who is a professor at City University of Hong Kong. We are trying to understand the popularity of Slashdot to its active contributor, such as you. We hope you might be able to help us in our effort by answering three questions.

*Question 1:*
In your opinion, what (if so) makes Slashdot special among online discussion sites? Is it the content, the group of people it draws in, the discussion engine (e.g., content rating and filters), or possibly other factors?

*Question 2: *
Compared with other discussion sites you know or/and have used, do you consider Slashdot's technology platform to be better? In other words, does it encourage (a) more sense of community or (b) more active participation?
(In answering please also feel free to mention the other discussion site or sites you might be comparing to)

*Question 3:*
As a unique user in Slashdot, could you please rate your own reciprocity by assessing what you get from the community compared with what you contribute to it?(you can give an answer such as: i think i get more or i contribute more,of course we would be very appreciative for your explanation of detail)
**

Please let us know at your earliest convenience. We will quickly summarize results and gladly send you a summary, if you are interested (and sufficient replies are received to create a meaningful summary).

Thank You for Your Time and Valuable Feedback!

Sincerely,
Lily

Rock Out video from the great new disc Motorizer.

They had to change "Rock out, with your cock out, impress your lady friends" to just "Rock out, rock out, impress your lady friends"

Ah well, all is great. Hope they make it back here, you feel like you've been through 10 rounds with Mike Tyson after a show.

Just over a minute, you have time to check out this great ad spoof.

Some time ago I asked for virtual machine advice. Having read the comments and other stuff on various blogs and sites I opted to try VMWare, VirtualIron and VirtualBox.

Here we are nearly a year later and I have to say that (IMHO) Bang for the Buck goes to...drum roll VirtualBox!

The basic edition is open source, well supported and just plain works. A small download of less than 30 MB will get you running.

It isn't a bare metal install, but on my testing with Linux as a host OS it screams running XP and OpenSolaris. I have an OpenBSD VM set up but haven't gotten X to work yet. Installing the guest extensions gives you all sorts of cool stuff.

Eleventy thumbs up!