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Yet more Mohammed controversy

Apparently it doesn’t take much talent to get the headlines these days - doodle a bit on a napkin and call it “Mohammed as a dog” and you should be all set. Well the Muslims are up in arms anyway, this time over Lars Vilks set of sketches showing the prophet Mohammed as a dog.

It’s entertaining to watch at any rate, might be an opening here - maybe even I can make a name for myself as a controversial artist by jumping on this Mohammed drawing bandwagon!

Posted in Politics | 286 views | 1 Comment »

Blog storm

Those of you not currently residing under a rock, may have heard of the Storm worm, a somewhat nasty trojan that’s currently making a mess on the intarwebs. So far it has been spread primarily through email, adding infected hosts to it’s ever growing botnet which experts estimates numbers in the millions of nodes by now. The worm also leaves behind a rootkit.

Well things have taken an interesting turn recently, as it appears the worm has now started spreading through blogs as well. Not through the all too familiar comment spam either, but through blogs created on free blogging networks such as Google’s Blogger.

Posted in Web | 690 views | 4 Comments »

Bioshock shipping with rootkit?

Looks like 2K Games are in for a rough ride with it’s much anticipated release of Bioshock, the successor to the popular System Shock games. Following several blog posts, a slashdot article and an uproar on 2K Games’ official forums, it’s clear that the much maligned SecuROM DRM/copy protection is present on the DVD, in the Steam version and even in the downloadable demo.

The invasive DRM software is almost impossible to remove, even after the game itself is long gone. What’s more, it prevents the game from working when certain antivirus products and security software is running. I am definitely going to sit this one out (a bloody shame, I was really looking forward to this game) but it will be fun to see what the fallout of this debacle will be.

Posted in Gaming, Rants | 378 views | 3 Comments »

I’m Doomed

I’ve always had a soft spot for ID Software, having grown up on games like Commander Keen, Wolfenstein, the Doom and Quake series, as well as spin offs like Hexen, Heretic et al. So when ID Software decided to release their entire back catalog from Commander Keen to Doom 3 on Steam I was quite happy.

What’s more, they decided to actually sell their entire back catalog in one huge bundle! Needless to say, I was easily persuaded. Credit card in hand, I began the ~4GB download, and I’ve spent this entire morning playing Commander Keen… Good thing I bought a new über gaming rig! CK and the older DOS titles actually come bundled with DosBOX, so they run quite well even on Windows Vista.

Posted in Gaming | 279 views | 4 Comments »

The Maxtor MSS2

Yeah it’s a product review. No, it won’t be pretty, but it will be kinda short. The Maxtor MSS2 is a 1 terrabyte external network attached storage device (NAS), with 2 500G Maxtor SATA drives configured in a RAID (default RAID0). What’s more, it’s a worthless piece of shit. An unmitigated disaster of a product. The firmware, even after 2 upgrades, is unreliable at best. Expect almost daily reboots to keep the damn thing running. That in itself wouldn’t be so bad, if the disks didn’t fail after a month or so. Well one of them anyway, but it’s a RAID for fucks sake. Hope you didn’t store anything important on the thing!

Now I know what you’re thinking - I just got unlucky and had a faulty device. Were it only so - we have 2 of the damn things at work as well. One failed in almost the same manner - first the NIC became unstable, then one of the drives died. The second one keeps crashing, needing regular reboots, and I’m guessing it’s only a matter of time before a drive dies in that one too.

In summary - stay well clear of this thing if you love your data. Personally I’ll be buying Western Digital next time.

Posted in Gadgets, Rants | 422 views | 4 Comments »

Move completed

So, the move to a new web host is finally completed, more or less. Some DNS issues remain, but it should be working now. Running a backup of the site off a fresh WP install, so some features will be missing. I’m going to re-install all plugins and customizations I had on the old site, and work on the theme a bit.

If you find any bugs or missing stuff, please let me know. You should notice a dramatic improvement in performance over the old site, and since I am now on a virtual private server I will probably be adding a few nifty features that I could not implement with the old host. We’ll see, should probably get the site working smoothly first I guess. Now I need some sleep. Bah.

Posted in Futt Dot Org | 281 views | 3 Comments »