AlexH

Kids these days!

Police use Facebook to douse party plans

Ontario Provincial Police used the Facebook networking site to thwart an illegal bush party planned by teenagers over the weekend.

More than 700 teens had said they would attend the bash, on private property in the Tillsonburg area, about 175 kilometres southwest of Toronto. Party details had been posted on a public page of the social networking site.

Now get off my lawn, dagnabbit!

Another step in my mouse reduction:

Francis Tang: Geek Stuff | Win2k/XP Ctrl-Caps swap

XEmacs/Emacs users will understand this well: the Ctrl key is in the wrong position on modern PC 102 key keyboards. A better place for the Ctrl key is where it used to be, i.e. where the Caps key is now.

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There is a lot of confusion going on about Amazon EC2. I know I didn’t fully understand it when I signed up, but now that I’ve played with it for a while, I feel that I can comment on how it works.

• It is a full Linux machine. You can install anything on it. The only thing you can’t change is hardware. Kernels are a bit complicated, but doable. If there are things missing from the base images, the Amazon crew can provide it, if there is demand.
• It’s on a ram disk. That’s how you think about it. If you turn off the power, it goes away. BUT! If you reboot, it’s still there.
• You can save your images. They get saved to S3, and can be reloaded in the future. However, this is a time consuming process.

What it’s not:

• Something that private data can be stored on. There are too many variables, too many places a hacker can get in. When I talk about private data, I mean something that is under NDA or legislated to be private. I don’t mean passwords to a website.
• An infinitely expandable server.  1GB RAM, 160GB disk space, that’s it.  If you want more, you create a new server, and it’s up to you to deal with load balancing, new hostnames, getting the data to the image, etc.

Technorati Tags: Amazon, EC2, Elastic Computing Cloud, S3, Simple Storage Server, Web Hosting, Data Center, Utility Computing

Speaking of software updates, Google Reader has been updated.  It now feels more like GMail rather than a standalone application.  They also added a feature that should be in every RSS reader, ‘mark all read’.

Dave Winer writes:

It’s valuable, it really is, I point to Wikipedia articles regularly, but always with an implicit caveat. I can’t be sure that the article I point to today, that I believe is accurate today, will be accurate tomorrow.

Ah, but you can.

Click on the history tab, then click on the most recent date. It gives you a URL of the version that is current, so if it changes in the future, you will still see the version that you were looking at today.

It even shows a set of links to navigate revisions.

For example, the current, as of May 25, Diffie Hellman key exchange.

But this is actually a problem for the Internet as a whole. For example, how do I find out what a Google search would have shown me a year ago vs today. Do they keep that kind of data?

I was just checking my incoming links (which doesn’t change very often ) and found Drew’s blog. I’ve updated the links on my sidebar to add him in there.

I was a little slow on this blog, but now it’s done, and things seem to be working properly!

A roundup of cat related sites. Got any more? Post them!

Stuff On My Cat

Kitten War

Cats In Sinks

Cute Overload (okay, it’s not all cats, but it’s got a fair amount of cat content)

Disclaimer: I don’t like cats, I kick them when other people aren’t looking.

You can plug your keyboard into either PS/2 port. I spent about 5 minutes trying to figure out why Tracy’s keyboard didn’t work, and mine did, after moving our computers. I couldn’t see the back of either machine but I thought I remembered which socket was for the keyboard. Even though I guessed wrong, it worked on my computer, so I was confused why it didn’t work on Tracy’s computer even though I could feel that it was plugged into the same socket.

Of course, it still needs to be in the right socket to get into the BIOS menu so I’m going to change mine around as well.