particlestorm.net

I uploaded all my photos to my server yesterday and made blog entries for them all. You can now access my photo album by clicking the “Photos” section on the left of the page. I am pretty happy with how the photos have been integrated into the blog. In the future, I will write a blurb on what the photos are showing along with posting the photo thumbnails. Please let me know if you have any problems viewing the photo thumbnails or the full versions.

Nasa and SGI just announced that the newly created Columbia Supercomputer is the worlds fastest, hitting 42.7 teraflops on the LINPACK performance tests. This beats the previous record, held by Japan’s Earth Simulator Supercomputer, of 35.86 teraflops. The new Columbia Supercomputer consists of 10240 Itanium 2 CPUs which live in 20 interconnected SGI Altix systems. And, of course, the system is running Linux

Slashdot and The Register are both carrying announcements of the success. You can also read the official press release from SGI by clicking here or find out more information on the new supercomputer by going to this SGI site.

Welcome to the new and improved particlestorm.net website! My site is now powered by the Word Press publishing backend. I have imported all my old blog postings but the comments have been losted. If your comments were important you can enter them again on the proper posting. Over the next few days I will add the other missing content (photos, magazines, books, projects, etc). Enjoy the new site, tell me what you think of it, and let me know of any bugs.

Microsoft has been on the offensive during the last year trying to convince the world that Windows is a better choice to Linux when it comes to servers. They have been doing this by “sponsoring” research reports, in other words paying large sums of money to “research” companies so they say good things about Microsoft. The latest is a report from Forrester that “Windows Users Haver Fewer Vulnerabilities“. This report is laughable to anyone who is involved in the computer security industry but, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t know better and are swayed by Microsoft’s propaganda.

For anyone who wants the true story, The Register has just published an in-depth report about the security of Windows and Linux. This report was written by Nicholas Petreley, who is a Linux supporter but is also a highly regarded Technology Writer and has written columns for InfoWorld and ComputerWorld.

The report itself is very detailed and backed by lots of hard facts. The Register has a good summery of the report but I encourage anyone who is interested to read the full report. Here are the links:

The full report in HTML format: Click here
The full report in PDF format: Click Here
The Register article about the report: Click Here

Today, on the way back from the mailbox, I had a run in with a local apartment complex dweller. Being only 9 inches long and crawling on the ground, I nearly stepped on him. I don’t know for sure what type of crustacean he was, being the first one that I have seen that wasn’t on a plate with a butter dipping sauce, but maybe my Dad can put his Biology degree to use and let me know.

After seeing him, I ran back to my apartment to grab my camera and then returned to the wild to capture my discovery on film. I moved him over from the sidewalk so I could get a better picture of him and he didn’t seem to like being picked up. He proceeded to square himself up to me and threaten me with his big red claws. I assumed he lived in the pond by the mailboxes and had gotten out for an afternoon stroll in the rain, so I let him be after snapping some shots. The pictures of my new friend are in my photo album.

If you are running out of hard drive space on your computer you might want to go to Best Buy today. There is a Western Digital Caviar 80.0GB internal hard drive available at the store for $25.49 after rebates! The drive is 7200 RPM and 8 MB cache, which means it is as fast as IDE hard drives get. I am leaving right now to go pick one up (you can never have too many hard drives) and you should do the same. Here is a link to the hard drive on Best Buy’s web site: Click Here.

I entered an entry into the latest Spread Firefox contest. I did this by posting some fliers by the mailboxes at my apartment complex and then submitted a photo of my work. Then, I woke up today and checked my rss feeds and found out that I had won the ‘Image Gallery Picture Of The Day’ contest on Spread Firefox! I get 100 bonus points and all the glory that comes with being a winner

I have received several inquires from Spread Firefox members on where I got the fliers for my postings. The first flier, featuring a very fed up user, was created by Firefox member CyberArmy. The second flier, the first page of a data sheet about Firefox, was created by the Firefox sfx team. I slightly altered the data sheet flier to make the web address bigger. Thank you both for the great work on the fliers. Below are thumbnails of the two fliers that link to high resolution tiff images.

So Aaron won’t be disappointed, here is my latest anti-Microsoft propaganda. Today, our buddies up in Washington released 10 more security advisories that detail 22 new security flaws. Everyone should now embark on their monthly pilgrimage to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and update their computers. With 22 new flaws for ‘bad guys’ to exploit I am sure a new round of viruses will be landing in your email anytime soon. Or you could download a free copy of SUSE Linux 9.1 from Novell and release your computer from it’s crappy Windows prison. If you have a little bit of patience, you can wait 3 weeks and then install the brand new Novell SUSE Linux 9.2 Professional edition when it is released in early November. Other good Linux flavors include Redhat, Fedora, and my favorite, Debian.

Yet another security flaw in the software that flows out of Redmond. This time, the poorly written piece of code is in the ASP.NET framework used to serve up web pages. Netcraft, the authority on tracking what is serving up the Internet, estimates over 2.9 million active web sites could be vulnerable.

What is really sad, but not very surprising, is how simple this exploit is. Simply by replacing a ‘/’ in a URL with a ” or a ‘%5C’ a web browser can gain access to a “password protected” area of the web site. For example, say your site has an administration section located at “http://www.mysite.com/admin/” which is only accessible with your user and password. Well, now anyone on the net can go to “http://www.mysite.com%5Cadmin/” and wreck havoc to your web site by changing all your settings or installing a virus.

Microsoft is supposedly focused on security but I just can’t believe they could let such simple security problems get into their code in the first place. Sometimes I think they took the so-called “Infinite Monkey Theorem“, the one about monkeys sitting at typewriters eventually reproducing Shakespeare, a little too serious and decided to employ a couple million monkeys to write their crappy code. What type of peer review process do they have where such obvious security problems can slip through the cracks?

For those interested, here is the link to Microsoft’s security advisory: Click Here