Flag Waving

I hesitate to even mention this here, but there’s such a fuss being made about it right now it’s unavoidable. The Paris High School band put on a show Friday night called “Visions of World War II”. During the show, songs were performed representing all of the countries involved in the war. While these songs were being played, flags representing each country were displayed on the field — including a nazi flag.

Unfortunately, last Friday was Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, and some people found this insulting. So far, we’ve been mentioned in just about every newspaper in the country as well as on MSNBC and CBS News.

It’s really sad that people are getting so upset by this. The whole point of the performance was to be patriotic and to honor the veterans of the war. All of the countries from the war were represented as a sort of history lesson. Out of the 7 minute show, the nazi flag was only shown for a total of 14 seconds. The show ended with a collection of patriotic American songs and the flying of the U.S. flag.

Of course when the media got a hold of it, the entire point of the show was lost and we ended up with headlines like this – Texas band performs with Nazi flag on Jewish new year. This has obviously led to a lot of misinformed people calling the office today. One man even demanded that our “nazi band director” be fired.

Oh well. Luckily, Americans as a society probably have the shortest attention spans in the world. Most people wake up in a whole new world every day. I’m sure that tomorrow everyone will find something else to scream about and Paris High School’s 15 minutes of fame will be over…

Community

The other day when I was talking about the IBM Linux commercial I mentioned the community aspects of open source software. To me, that’s the best part. The idea that everyone helps each other create something great.

Here’s a good example of that: A few weeks ago I was downloading a new theme for GNOME. It’s called MetaXP and it makes the desktop on your Linux computer look just like Windows XP. After installing it, I noticed that the restore button was a little strange, so I opened up the file and fixed it.

I then e-mailed my fix off to the original author of the theme in case he was interested. He e-mailed me back a nice thank you and said he would give me credit for the fix. Keep in mind this was not a huge job, maybe five minutes of work just correcting a few lines. Today, the updated version was released and my name was mentioned. You can see a screenshot of it here.

Time flies

Well, it’s almost here. In a little over 2 months I’ll be graduating.

I passed my Intro Sociology CLEP test on Monday with a score of 74 (out of 80). That means I have all the hours I need to graduate in December. I turned in my graduation application on Wednesday and paid my $20. I guess that means it’s official. It’s strange though, it hasn’t really soaked in that I won’t be taking classes in the spring. Luckily, I have plenty of other things to occupy my free time.

I’m in charge of the PHS Robotics Club now. We’re competing in the BEST Robotics competition which will be a lot of fun. The only bad part is the meetings are every day after school until 6pm. So most days I don’t get home until about 6:30pm, except for Wednesday when it’s more like 9:00pm.

The reason I’m out so late on Wednesday’s is because that’s when we have the meetings for our CSCI 440 Project Development Class. Basically, we’ve started a software company called and we’re developing a system for school nurses to use to keep track of student health information. Unfortunately, the instructor decided that the scope of our project was too small, so now it’s grown into a monster that no school nurse would ever want to use. Oh well, as long as I get a grade I’m happy.

New Linux Ad

It’s not very often that I watch football on TV, but I spent a lot of time watching it yesterday. I even watched a little tennis. I was trying to catch IBM’s new ad featuring Linux. Unfortunately, I always seemed to miss it.

Linux is hardly ever mentioned on TV, even though it seems to be taking over the world of computers. I guess it’s true that the revolution will not be televised. Anyway, I found out this morning that you can download the ad from IBM, and they have a transcript available. The best line from the ad is:

Collecting data is only the first step toward wisdom. But sharing data is the first step toward community.

Not many people understand Linux, but whoever wrote that line really gets it.

SDL Tutorial #2

I’ve added a new tutorial about SDL. This one is called Moving Sprites with SDL. Beginning programmers frequently ask how to make things move around using the keyboard with SDL, so I thought I’d attempt to explain it.

If you’re a programmer, take a look at it. Also, let me know if you find any silly mistakes. Believe it or not, I have been known to misspell words from time to time…

Saved by Open Source

Like most people, we’ve been fighting the latest Windows worm at work for the last few days. We never got the Blaster worm that seemed to cause most people so much trouble. Instead, we were hit by Welchia (aka Nachi), a variant that was actually designed to clean up after Blaster. Welchia was designed to infect vulnerable computers and automatically download the patch from Microsoft. Instead, it just killed our network.

We’ve been installing the patch and cleaning off the worm with a program from Network Associates called Stinger since last Wednesday. This has been pretty effective, but there were still a few infected computers on the network. We tried using the “process of elimination” to find the infected machines by unplugging different parts of the network and waiting for our connection to improve. That proved pretty much impossible since there were several infected computers in different locations.

After fighting it this way for most of the day, I finally decided to do something different. I had played with a packet analyzer called Ethereal in the past and decided to give it another try. After a few minutes of downloading and installing I had it going. Within the first minute of capturing traffic I recieved over 6000 ICMP queries from only two computers. These two obviously had the worm. Two phone calls later these were patched and cleaned.

After that our network connection was almost perfect. I sat around and surfed the Internet for a while longer waiting for the connection to go down again. When it did, I captured another minute’s worth of data and quickly found two more infected computers.

Tomorrow morning when everyone gets back to work, I should be able to easily track down any remaining infected computers. After that everything should be back to normal on our network. All thanks to an Open Source program.

In case anyone’s curious, I did the same thing with my home computer that I do everytime a new WIndows virus or worm comes around. I smiled and laughed, because I’m running Linux…

Cool new program

I just stumbled upon a nice new program called BloGTK. It’s just what I needed to easily update this page.

This post is pretty much just a test to see if it’s working…

Junk Mail

Do you know why we get so much junk mail these days? It’s the same reason we get so many telemarketing calls – because it works. People are actually dumb enough to buy the things they see advertised in spam.

This article in Wired talks about a security flaw at a spammer’s website that made their log files available. According to these logs, this one site has received about 6,000 orders for their “magic” pills since July 4. Even worse, most people ordered 2 bottles at about $50 each.

According to the article, the site is owned by a 19-year-old high-school dropout. He buys the pills for $5 per bottle and pays other people about $10 per order to send out spam. So if each order was for only 2 bottles (some were for more), that means he made ($600,000 – $60,000 – $60,000) $480,000 in about the last 30 days. That’s nearly half a million dollars for doing nothing.

I’m definitely in the wrong line of work.

It seems to be working

It looks like my forum is working so I added a link to it under navigation. Now if I ever find time to add any new material to the site, people will have a place to go and talk about it. I guess for now, people can just go talk about how lazy I am…

There’s one thing about the forum that I need to change, and then I’ll be uploading the source in case anybody else wants to use it. If you want to take a look at it, check back sometime after my Advanced Database final on Thursday.

It’s that time again

The good news is, my presentation went well in class today. I showed off the forum that I mentioned in my previous post. Now all I have left in this class is the final on next Thursday. After that it’s just one more semester and then I’ll graduate in December.

Now for the bad news. Since summer’s almost over, that means all of the students will be coming back to school soon. We only have about two weeks to get labs set up, user accounts and directories created, software loaded, and everything else that has to happen before students can be set loose on our computers at work.

I guess it’s not so bad. The fall semester always seems like a race to Christmas break. Since I’ll be already getting my degree this December, who knows what else Santa might bring me…