Having finally read Claus' post about Kon-Boot from the 25th, I thought it pretty cool and felt like posting about it over here.

He goes into some detail about the tool, so you can check it out if it interests you. But here are the juicy and important points.

What it does is modify the operating system kernel in memory (grabbing control at the BIOS to bootloader handoff), changing the necessary parts to disable the need to use a password to log in. It runs off of a CD (or a floppy… maybe you could get it to work off a USB stick, too). Hot stuff.

From what I read at GSD, such techniques aren't new, but this is a pretty sweet implementation. It doesn't work with computers on a domain setup, but that makes sense; you would have to inject code into the server, too, to make it work, because the computer needs to authenticate with the server, and unless the server is compromised, too, it's not gonna let you login with out proper credentials (password, keycard, whatever). And even if you could get through to a local account on the computer, you might not be able to nab anything important since user data might be stored on the server. I'm not sure about the caching methods used, though (I'm talking about Windows here; I don't even know if Linux has domains). Maybe some user data would still be cached on the hard disk, I don't know.

In any case, it's a pretty cool technique, even if I'm not so geek about it as Claus.

It seems to me there was a point when blogging was 'in'. At least with the younger population. It was, well, a fad, and like all of them, it passed (or should I say will pass? passes?).

But why did the young'ns not stick around? I believe the answer to be simple: writing about what you did today gets boring after a while -- for reader and likely enough the blogger, too. And if you're not celebrity, what stranger in the world is going to read your boring personal weblog?

Now that you've figured it out, consider the hundreds of non-celebrity blogs that get a nice chunk of readership. Why do they get readership? Content, content, content. Plus presentation, of course. Your average personal blog might have a terrible template (or just a popular and familiar one), but I think people appreciate good design, whether consciously or subconsciously. It also seems to me that blogs with high readership have a topic, or a category to their posts -- thus a reason for people to come back: more content in that category. Example: Download Squad. Though it covers tech news, they are always talking about software, new and updated. So people have a reason to come back. Unless you are some hot celebrity, your personal life probably is not enough to draw someone back to your blog.

And one note: it seems to me that a lot of popular blogs (at least that I run into) are run by a team. Keeping quality content coming is important, too. Who would get used to watching TV if programs came on randomly, sporadically, and far between?

Enter microblogging, and by the numbers, Twitter. And Facebook*. Why do daily details of your personal life suddenly become hot fodder for the internet masses (OK, maybe just your friends, but I do have random people follow me on Twitter -- it's been spammers recently, though)? Manageability. Or should we put it, digestibility. And the social ties. One can eat spoonfuls, in fact, one wants to eat multiple spoonfuls in a day, but not six whole pizzas.

Check out this article, In defense of Twitter. After you read this quote from it, that is:

Of course you'd like to think that most of your daily conversation is weighty and witty but instead everyone chats about pedestrian nonsense with their pals. In fact, that ephemeral chit-chat is the stuff that holds human social groups together.

So while we post some more personal stuff to the blog (and it can't help bleeding through), I like to think of it as a sort of formal publishing platform. It's information, subjective and objective, and it's there for your taking. And if you feel like coming back because it interests you, do. If not, don't. If you're my friend, you might find such disconnected and random thoughts as Twitter produces to be noteworthy.

Anyway, some interesting thoughts…

*Facebook status updates

How annoying. A day or two ago, Javascript popups started opening in new tabs. They are popups for a reason. I had Firefox set so that links that would open in a new window would open in a new tab, but popups like this didn't use to be affected.
Anyway, after another Google today, I found the fix. 1st Byte Solutions has the answer. Quote:

if you open about:config in your address bar, you can change the setting manually.
Change: browser.link.open_newwindow
Mine was set to 3, which told the popups to always open in a new tab.

Niceness. It's a pretty easy fix. Set it to 2. I just wonder what changed it to 3. Wasn't me. It appears this is something of a longstanding issue; the Firefox team should probably add a GUI option for this. Check out this thread on Mozillazine, where the same fix is given (in 2004) and this one, where Tab Mix Plus is the solution (it occurs to me TMP might change that value).
Go give some kudos to 1st Byte if this makes you happy.

Update; Feb-15-2010: So it busted again. And this time setting browser.link.open_newwindow to 2 didn't fix it. Garr. Fortunately, setting browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction to 2 did fix it. Thanks, harrymc.

Today I found two extensions that can give you some more space on your bookmarks bar in Firefox.

First, the Multirow Bookmarks Toolbar, which gives you more rows as you need them. If your bookmarks overflow when you size down the window, it catches it then, as well as just a plain overflowing bookmarks bar.

Second, the Smart Bookmarks Bar. It removes the text on the bookmarks and leaves the icons, but shows you the text when you mouse over the icon, like so:

 

There are some options: you can choose not to show bookmark names on mouseover, to unhide the names of folders on the bookmarks bar, and to unhide bookmark names that don't have a favicon, and vice versa for all those. Also, you can adjust spacing and autohide the bookmarks bar (which I haven't tried out yet. sounds like it could be handy).

Cheerio!

Today I came across a link to a web page that purported to make available various wallpapers included in the Windows 7 releases to date. That page is located here. More specifically, the downloads referenced are located here.

However, if you were to open that link, you would likely find yourself confronted by an unsightly window requiring you to complete an online survey prerequisite to access of the wallpapers. I hate online surveys. The corrupted, beastly things are laden with bloated spam offers. Never, NEVER sacrifice your personal email address to these bloodsucking devices (if the need should arise, I suggest a disposable email such as offered by mailinator.com). And, after a cursory review of the comments at the bottom of the page, I see an attempted justification of the survey requirement... to avoid server shutdown. LAME!!!

Ha. Allow me to provide anyone interested with the direct download links to the zip packages containing the wallpapers (with the exception of the RC1 wallpaper download, which appears to be MIA). Actually, even if you have no interest in the wallpapers, I would suggest pure spite as a motivation to avail yourself of the downloads. A protest of the sick and juvenile institution of an online survey.

So, to get down to business. There are a few methods available to circumvent the undesirable restrictions. Being the rookie operation this apparently is, you can simply view the source of the page, and pick out at your leisure the download URLs which they carelessly leave lying around. Alternatively, you can copy the source, edit the scripts out, and reload the then uninhibited page. Furthermore, I imagine the use of NoScript or some such apparatus would effectively render the script nugatory.

For your convenience, though, I will post the links here:

http://windows7-wallpaper.com/wallpapers/windows7wallpaper.zip
http://windows7-wallpaper.com/wallpapers/rc1wallpaper.zip
http://windows7-wallpaper.com/wallpapers/win7build7000.zip

Note: I include the RC1 link in the event it should be restored to functionality, for which we may certainly hope if we wish to experience such content as referenced here.

Enjoy.

Update: the RC1 link appears to be working now.

Just a quick post to expand on my comment in a previous post on switching to AHCI mode (to enable full SATA functionality) after installation (in IDE emulation mode) of the operating system. See this for further information. This is particularly useful if, for whatever reason, an F6 floppy install of the SATA drivers proves futile.

Here is the thread I found. I basically followed those instructions, except it's an MSI-specific forum, so I believe the IATA621_CD.EXE file specified may be such. I also believe the IATA88CD.exe file I found on my driver disk from Gigabyte is the corresponding file. Nevertheless, to be safe, I downloaded the Intel Matrix Storage Manager executable directly from Intel, to be sure I had the real goods.

I then followed the instructions, but I used the text found here. It was a bit of a long shot, perhaps, but mine is a ICH10R-based board, and that was supposed to work... and it did! I did have a couple devices (IDE primary and secondary controllers, to be precise) show the infamous yellow question marks by them for a few reboots while I installed other drivers, and then they resolved themselves.

So, there you have it: an ex post facto method to enable SATA mode.

NB: Only tested with 32-bit Windows XP Professional and the specified Intel chipset.

So, three things:

I had been wishing for a sort of label management tool for Blogger. Finally, I just did a Google search (doh!) and found that Blogger itself has a sort of label mangement. So, it looks like I can edit labels fairly easily and delete rarely used ones. Sweet. Check out this Blogger help page and this blog post at BloggerStop.net for a guide to a few common actions.

Second thing: Windows Live Writer. I had been using a beta version for a while, and a few weeks ago updated it to a 2009 version. It's not the snappiest in performance, but I think the updated version improved that. I'm happy with it; it works well for what I do. I can save drafts, link up a storm, and pull up cached copies of posts. I know there are other blogging applications out there, I haven't tried any yet, but maybe I will in the future.

And finally: feed widgets. I have been checking out a few recently to use for a feed from the CaringBridge journal for Isaiah. WidgetEasy is quick and, well… easy, except it broke somewhat on that feed. Arg. Also no customization. Feed Informer I found via a Wild Apricot Blog post; it requires registration but is pretty customizable. You make digests: they can contain more than one feed if you want and you can set some options relating to filtering incoming items, sorting, and such. One thing I like is that it seems to (at least with some templates… I shall have to investigate what exactly causes it), you can truncate the post content; for the Isaiah feed on PAN, I used a template that had a read more.. link. Nice. And finally, from a comment on that post, Feed2JS. It's quick, it needs no registration, you can plug in CSS styling.

Edit : April 24, 2009:
Some more info: you can truncate post content with Feed2JS also, if you turn off HTML display from the feed. Also, you can run it from your own server. And finally, the Feed2JS server caches feeds for an hour; seems to be faster than Feed Informer, which is nice; it was getting behind the feed on the Providence blog. 60 minutes is much more acceptable.