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Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Today: SysAdminDay
Friday, July 25th, 2008, is the 9th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. On this special international day, give your System Administrator something that shows that you truly appreciate their hard work and dedication…
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Climate Change: Canada we’re coming
Risk advisory firm Maplecroft has published a “Climate Change Risk Report” looking into the vulnerability of 168 countries to the impact of climate change. The study does not review the severity of the threats in general, but instead evaluates the ability of each of the countries to adapt and withstand potential change.
The report includes a vulnerability index and comparable country scorecards with risk indices, risk indicators, maps and graphics.
Not unsurprising the developed nations with…
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Web: Naked Girls for Captcha solving
While reports that online porn sites offering free access when the visitors enter the right response to a Captcha secured entry field have been around for a while (see for example “BoingBoing 2004″ ) with recent rises in spam originating from Google, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts the discussion on that topic is on again.
Captchas or “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” that are within these relay attacks defeated by visitors to the…
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CNCI - A new cybersecurity program
It’s G.W. Bush’s single largest request for funds in the 2009 intelligence budget and its a “highly classified, multiyear, multibillion-dollar project“.
It goes by the name CNCI aka “Cyber Initiative” and the director National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, calls it a pro-active measure to protect the US Government computing infrastructure and in the future potentially also the computing environments of (US) private entities.
While the secrecy surrounding the program does not even provide specific funding figures or a breakdown, the House Intelligence committee in its report on the program “recognizes” that “…it will be imperative that the government also take into account the interest and concerns of private citizens, the US information technology industry, and other elements of the private sector…“.
They call it a public-private partnership and outlined how the oversight should happen by a panel of lawmakers, executive branch officials and some private sector representatives. And the House has already approved 90% of the requested budget.
So far so good, sounds all nice and positive - a fresh start, “unlike any model currently existing“, well, well, well if your memory in that branch of IT goes back long enough (10 years+) then you will say together with us: Nice words but we have heard them before and when we acted within the scheme we got heavily burned and a bunch of gov. crooks around the world filled their pockets with Billions of Dollars.
So if its a “fresh start” back up your words with actions!
Demonstrate that you have learned from the past mistakes and…
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USA: Largest Wind Energy project approved
With prices of oil and natural gas skyrocketing, Texas, home to some of the largest US petroleum industry conglomerates, is already planning ahead of current boom times for a future that could turn this state into one of the World’s biggest producers of alternative energy.
Following Oil Billonaire T. Boone Pickens’ declaration of “going green” and his initial purchase of about 670 MW wind turbines from GE earlier this year, regulators have now (preliminary) approved a plan to invest about USD 5 Billion into the electrical grid infrastructure connecting new alternative / wind energy projects in the wind-rich West and the Panhandle to the urban areas of Texas.
According to the approved plan…
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Video: Bottom-up skyscraper demolition
Japanese construction company Kajima is currently in the process of constructing their new headquarters building and as part of the work it had to demolish their old high rise buildings used for that purpose before.
Unlike today’s common approaches to demolishing high rise building from top floor down or via controlled explosions, Kajima has developed a new method that allows to dismantle the building from bottom up. Besides that heavy machinery used in the demolition work does not need to be brought up to the top of the building…
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News: Disgruntled IT Admin blocks access to SF city network
From time to time there are stories passed around how a single tech employee is holding a company or agency hostage over a personal dispute or after being fired. This time its a story about an senior admin from San Francisco.
As the SF Chronicle reported yesterday he was arrested by Police this weekend and is being hold in jail on a USD 5 Million bail. He’s accused of having tampered with San Francisco’s new fiber network that provides access for officials to government documents, their emails and the administrative systems…
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A Cheatsheet for Firebug
During the current renovation of Duvet-Dayz (the next parts come online after the weekend) we have used one great tool extensively - Firebug.
Like with other debuggers or development tools there are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to remember. But forgive us, when you’re working with many different tools - from Photoshop to Development IDE’s to debuggers, not everyone can remember 150 different keyboard shortcuts and then use the right one at the right place.
So like many others we work with cheat sheets aka help sheets - short summaries of the most important commands on one or two pages that are available for almost all tools we use. When we started using Firebug we search on the Internet but we could not find a cheat sheet for this tool.
There is of course the documentation on the “Firebug web site”, well done but quite a few pages to look through whenever you just need a quick glimpse with a help sheet.
So we created our own Firebug cheat sheet and would like to share it with everybody…
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Space: Gaja calling
f “Contact” with Jodie Foster was your kind of movie then you should have a look at the real-life version of sounds and noises recorded in space.
Watch the video for the sounds Gaja sends out into space that might be heard by other “aliens” on their planets…
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Humor: A White Noise web site
Enough said or to much noise around you - click over to Simply Noise. This web site allows you to enjoy “auditory zen” - “white noise” in configurable comfort zone(s)…
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