Ramblings

Lenovo IdeaCentre K210 Desktop PC LCD Bundle

SAVE $200 – Lenovo IdeaCentre K210 Desktop Combo – Intel Pentium Dual Core 4GB DDR2 500GB HDD Vista Home Premium SP1 w/19″ LCD $499.99 (US).

These Lenovo IdeaCentre desktop PCs include the latest technology for an amazing audio visual experience, game play and game compatibility. Get more detailed 3D effects and performance thanks to Intel GMA 3100 graphics with advanced high-definition video playback capability. Running with the Intel Pentium Dual Core E2140 processor, 4GB of DDR2-667 memory, 500GB SATA II hard drive, Intel Pro 10/100 LAN, and a SATA DVDRW drive. Plus, it comes with a webcam and running Microsoft’s Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 32-bit operating system to help you organize and play with all of your multimedia stuff. The Lenovo IdeaCentre K210 desktop computer with the Intel G31 Express chipset is perfect for the present and ready for the future.

Lenovo IdeaPad Y510 Laptop Computer

SAVE $200 – Lenovo IdeaPad Laptop – Intel Dual-Core 1.86GHz 2GB DDR2 160GB HDD 15.4″ WXGA WinVista Home Premium $549.99 (US) Price after $50 MIR, rebate expires 08/10/08.

The Lenovo IdeaPad Y510 notebook PC– your new home and home office entertainment center that makes your ideas come to life. This elegant and versatile notebook packs a lot of power and performance in a small, highly mobile package. This masterful 6.4-pound PC features a 15.4-inch display, an Intel Pentium Dual-Core T2390 1.86GHz processor, a 160GB Hard drive, and 2GB of DDR2 memory, and a DVD Recordable optical drive — all running on the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system. This Lenovo IdeaPad Y510 boasts Dolby Home Theater premium audio with four speakers and a sub-woofer, Multimedia Control Center to give you a one-stop total entertainment environment with a convenient Shuttle Key that puts volume and equalizer controls with easy reach.

Walmart.com Back to School Specials

Here are some great back to school specials from Walmart.com.

Shop and Save with Back to College at Walmart.com

Back to College Furniture and Decor at Walmart.com

Dell 15.4″ Inspiron 1525 Flamingo Pink Laptop PC w/ Pentium Dual-Core Processor T2370

Canon Pixma MX300 All-in-One Photo Printer/Copier/Scanner/Fax

Sony 15.4″ VAIO VGN-NR330E/S Laptop PC w/ Intel Pentium Dual-Core

HP Pavilion a6403w-b Desktop PC w/ 20.1″ LCD Monitor, Intel Pentium dual-core processor E2160

Vizio 22″ Class HD LCD Television

Sanyo 19″ Class Widescreen LCD HDTV w/ Digital Tuner, DP19648

iPod Classic 80GB Value Bundle with Your Choice of Three Accessories. Only $259.88 at Walmart.com!

Updated Google Earth Layers and NASA

Google has added a NASA Google earth layers group to Google Earth, and they have updated the European roads in Google Earth, adding 15 new countries in Europe, as well as adding more content for the Netherlands, like business listings layers and country names in Dutch. Get Google Earth as part of the Google Pack here,

A few months back, Google Earth team and NASA began a collaborative effort to bring awareness and promote knowledge of NASA’s “earth” programs. After months of production, the “NASA” layer group is now live in Google earth.

Personally, I find it quite eye-catching. People are usually familiar with NASA’s space missions, but not everyone knows that NASA also devotes a considerable amount of effort to Earth explorations. This new NASA layer group showcases some of their most interesting content.

The new “NASA” layer has three components:

Astronaut Photography of Earth
Satellite Imagery
Earth City Lights

Source: NASA in Google Earth

The Satellite Imagery layer highlights some of the most interesting Earth imagery taken by NASA satellites over the years. Some place marks also offer the option of downloading additional imagery from different years or seasons and overlaying them on the earth’s surface.

“Earth City Lights” offers a new perspective on this popular image. One can identify some interesting urbanization patterns around the globe. I find it even more interesting to have roads and place name layers on at the same time as I fly over this layer. The United States interstate highway system appears as a lattice connecting the brighter dots of city centers.

Computer News for 5/20/2007

Symantec false positive cripples thousands of Chinese PCs A signature update to Symantec’s anti-virus software crippled thousands of Chinese PCs Friday when the security software took two critical Windows .dll files for [tag]malware[/tag].

According to numerous blog entries from Chinese computer users, a virus signature database seeded yesterday mistook two system files of a Chinese edition of Windows XP SP2 as a Trojan horse which Symantec dubs “Backdoor.Haxdoor.” The anti-virus software — Norton AntiVirus, for example, or the anti-virus component of the Norton 360 or Norton Internet Security suites — then quarantined the netapi32.dll and lsasrv.dll files.

“With these files removed, Windows XP will no longer start up, and even the system Safe Mode no longer functions,” said one user writing to the alt.comp.anti-virus newsgroup this morning.

Google Licenses Technology for 3D Maps Google has licensed technology that will enable [tag]Google[/tag] to map out 3-D versions of cities world wide.

According to a Mercury News report, the technology was developed by a team of Stanford University students and was used to run a robotic car that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge.

Although Google is the market leader in mapping, to date it has lagged behind Microsoft?s Virtual Earth in terms of 3-D functionality.

Dell announces the models for Ubuntu We will be launching a Linux based OS (Ubuntu) on the E520, 1505 and XPS 410 starting next Thursday, 5/24. We expect these systems to be less than 1% of our OS mix for the entire year which is ~20,000 systems annually. Please cover the huddle deck below with your team by EOB Sunday. If any questions come up, please let me know so I can address them before launch.

The goal of launching Linux is to continue to give our customers more choices to customize their new Dell. Providing more options to our Linux Enthusiast customer group will hopefully create even more Raving Fans!!

Governments using filters to censor Internet, survey finds With the aid of sophisticated software, government censorship of the Internet is spreading into a global phenomenon, with tech-savvy governments filtering forbidden themes from politics and human rights to sexuality and religion, according to a new academic survey of 40 countries.

In the past five years, the practice has grown beyond a handful of countries, including Iran, China and Saudi Arabia, to 26 nations that block a wide range of topics as they adopt filtering techniques, according to an OpenNet Initiative report to be issued Friday in Oxford, England.

Todays Tech News

Lots of interesting tech news today, lets get to it.

Universal search: The best answer is still the best answer Google updated their search engine results, they are introducing content from Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into the search results, and making one big pile of stuff, instead of keeping it separate like they used to.

Making The Switch From Twitter to Jaiku Tired of the downtime Twitter has had lately? In a post from Techcrunch, Duncan Riley talks about people making the switch and some of the tools already available and some they want. He’s not switching, btw, and neither am I, at least not until everyone else does. Mine has been quiet recently, but you can check it here, Jimmy Daniels Twitter microblog.

More Firefox Bloat? Say It Ain’t So, Mozilla Do you feel bloated? Er, I mean, does your Firefox feel bloated? You’re not alone…

New Stuff At My Yahoo Michael Arrington covers the new stuff from My Yahoo. No, not my Yahoo, your Yahoo, no, just read it…

BitTorrent in Focus: TV-series are Hot TorrentFreak says TV is hot online, with 50% of people on BitTorrent downloading TV shows, while TV shows only make up 10% of the available “content”. Interesting, sounds like good news for Joost.

Latest AACS revision defeated a week before release Remember when Kevin Rose lost control of digg? I said they should just give up on the [tag]DRM[/tag] because someone will always be around to crack it for them, well they already have. A new volume key used by high-def films scheduled for release next week has already been cracked. The previous AACS volume key was invalidated by AACS LA after it was exposed and broadly disseminated earlier this month. The latest beta release of SlySoft’s AnyDVD HD program can apparently be used to rip HD DVD discs that use AACS version 3. Although these won’t hit store shelves until the May 22, pirates have already successfully tested SlySoft’s program with early release previews of the Matrix trilogy.

Google to Yahoo and Microsoft: the $1.65 billion was worth it Can you say du huh?

Microsoft apologizes for Halo 3 problems, extends beta The press invites sent out before the Halo 3 beta became widely available were the calm before the storm apparently, as there was a problem with gamers who had the Crackdown invites grabbing the file yesterday. Frank was caught up in the foolishness and it seemed like the entire Internet was going to come down. I know how hard it is to plan something this big, but seriously, this is Microsoft. They should have been better prepared. Now we’re at the point of apologizing, after a very unhappy player-base spent a frustrating day yesterday pulling out their hair waiting for the beta to become available.

Microsoft Updates Live Maps Adds GeoRSS Support

Microsoft has released a new version of their Live Maps program, with this being the sixth different update since it was first released in July 7, 2005. Listed among the updates are bug fixes, performance improvements, enhancements, GeoRSS publishing of Collections, which would allow you to include a special markup to encode the geographic information of every item in the collection, area calculations and more. GeoRSS was just released in the Google Earth program as well, so we should see some great collections, google earth layers and all kinds of great add-ons.

You can now read reviews of businesses entered by other users, as well as adding your own ratings and reviews for any business in Live Maps. To get started do a search for businesses in the Yellow Pages like this search for Book stores, restaurants and Supermarkets. Click on one of the listings to bring up its details page, like the one shown below for Bailey-Coy Books. There you can see the average user rating for the business and page through reviews previously entered by others. We’ve partnered with sites like Judy’s Book to feed thousands of quality reviews into the system already. Of course you can contribute your own Rating and Review right there on the details page with the ‘Write Review’ button. Had a good experience with a physical therapist? Tell your neighbors about it. Tired of the over hyped bar in Belltown that’s too crowded, serves watered down drinks and takes a 10 dollar cover weeknights even though every other place on the block is free? Call em out on it..

RSS is a family of standard formats used to publish frequently updated content, such as blogs or news feeds. You can now subscribe to an RSS feed for a Collection so that you can be kept up to date as the author of the Collection adds new items. When you subscribe to a Collection?s feed, your RSS reader automatically receives updates as the author makes changes. Source: New Version of Live Maps Launches!

I can see this becoming a great feature on Live Maps and Google Earth, but I have no way to monetize Live Maps, yet, so I will probably work on Google Earth instead.

Command Line Tips for Linux

I’m still learning Linux little by little myself, I just use it on a couple web servers, so I don’t actually have to use it too much, so the command don’t stick with me for very long, hehe. Seomoz.org has a post today about command line tricks in Linux, and about every comment adds some more, so this is a really good page to reference if you are still learning how to use Linux. Here are two and three.

2. tail -f /some/file

This tails a file: it’ll read what’s at the end and output it to your terminal. The -f parameter tells it to keep outputting as the file grows. I use this a lot when examining log files that are constantly being written to.

3. ctrl+z and bg

ctrl+z is the long lost brother of ctrl+c. It’s a signal that tells the process to suspend execution, while ctrl+c terminates it. Ctrl+z is useful if you execute a process but you want to get control of your shell; it’ll suspend the process and send it to the background. Think of ctrl+z like minimizing a window, except once it’s minimized it’s not doing anything anymore. If you want the process to stay in the background but continue running, that’s where bg (background) comes in: typing bg once a process has been suspended makes the process resume but still keeps it in the background. Source: Web Developers: 13 Command Line Tricks You Might Not Know

Even if you don’t use Linux but are into web development, seomoz.org is definitely a site worth checking out.

Microsoft Patches PatchGuard Hack

Microsoft is definitely not happy that a security software vendor has bypassed the kernel protection software in Windows Vista, PatchGuard, and said that it would not be wise to continue because Microsoft will close any flaws discovered, making any software dependent on it, obsolete, and this, says Microsoft, could make users of such software unprotected and dealing with more problems because of such attempted access. Sounds like they are trying to draw a line in the sand.

“Microsoft is aware of public reports of ways to subvert the kernel in Windows Vista and has addressed them in current builds; however, we have not received any other reports of ways to subvert the kernel in existing builds of Vista,” said Adrien Robinson, director of Microsoft’s Security Technology Unit.

“If a vulnerability is discovered in Kernel Patch Protection, Microsoft will issue a security update as part of the standard Microsoft Security Response Center process.” Source: eWeek

Security vendors have been beating up this topic for a long time now, and Microsoft recently agreed to provide APIs that they could use to access the kernel, but the security vendors are worried about the timeliness of receiving the APIs. Authentium’s work around was to take advantage of part of the kernel that allowed the os to support older hardware. This is NOT the last we’ll hear about this subject.

From the Compaq FAQ: Where’s the Any Key?

This is the real FAQ from Compaq. Ahh, users, thank God for em.

The term “any key” does not refer to a particular key on the keyboard. It simply means to strike any one of the keys on your keyboard or handheld screen.

From Compaq via digg.