Monday, December 24, 2007

Credit problems


Unpaid credit cards bedevil Americans - Yahoo! News
Experts say these signs of the deterioration of finances of many households are partly a byproduct of the subprime mortgage crisis and could spell more trouble ahead for an already sputtering economy.

"Debt eventually leaks into other areas, whether it starts with the mortgage and goes to the credit card or vice versa," said Cliff Tan, a visiting scholar at Stanford University and an expert on credit risk. "We're starting to see leaks now."


Don't use credit cards as a bank! the interest rate will get you! I know a few friends that had this problem... one missed payment.... pow!

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Blackberry link to download facebook

http://www.blackberry.com/facebook/mobiledownload

I had a hard time finding the link to download facebook for the blackberry. you think you would be able to easily get it over the air(OTA.)

Traffic Gauge worth getting?

TrafficGauge Mobile Traffic Map of Los Angeles and Orange County

My wife drives through about 2 hours of traffic every day. It's the reality of living in LA. Most people I talk to in Los Angeles commute on average about 40 minutes a day. The traffic gauge provides real time wireless traffic. Price 80 to buy, then 10 bux a month for the subscription for real time traffic info. 

Thursday, December 13, 2007

test cat 2

testcat

 

where does the cat live?

live writer test!

funny pictures

Thursday, December 06, 2007

underground hackers


DailyTech - Study: Insight into Chinese Underground Hacking Economy
In all, the study claims that 1.49% of Chinese websites have malicious content within them. The study measures 145,000 of the most commonly visited Chinese websites and found that 2,149 of them contained malicious content. Each time a visitor to the websites containing malicious content visited that had certain software vulnerabilities in their browser or applications, the machine was compromised and some sort of malware was installed unbeknownst to the computer user. This kind of attack is known as drive-by-download-attack and the malware is typically a Trojan of some sort that harvests information and sends it to the attacker.

The study describes what it calls actors from the underground economy. The first actor is the Virus Writer, who has a certain degree of technical background allowing them to program viruses and zero day exploits. The virus writers are driven by profits says the study. On the underground market virus writers typically earn around the equivalent of $1.34 USD for the sell of Trojans they write.

A website master/cracker is the next player who attracts web traffic to a site with free goods like music or applications. These webmasters/crackers then sell the traffic to “envelope stealers” for around 40 -60 RMB ($4-$8 USD) per 10,000 visits. The envelope stealers attempt to harvest username and password combos for given sites, like online games. These envelope stealers then sell the harvested information to virtual asset stealers for tens of RMB, or around $1.35 USD. These players also sell access to infected computers for pennies to about $1.35 USD.

Virtual asset stealers buy the password, username combos from envelope sellers and then gain access to accounts in popular online games where they steal game assets like weapons and coins to sell for real world profits. What the study calls one QQ coin sells for about $0.70 USD. The final piece of the underground economy is the players who buy the stolen game goods. The study says these players are most often teenage males very into online games who spend their parent’s money.


apache deployments!


Indigio Blog - Colorado’s premier Interactive Agency blog - specializing in SEO, Creative Design, Development and Analytics » Blog Archive » Easier Production Releases
Set up an external dns entry for example.com and www.example.com (and the appropriate firewall rules to get port 80 of that IP to this apache box) and you now have a website that load balances over two separate clusters. You’re ready for a release during BUSINESS HOURS!

Choose a cluster to release to first and comment out all of its servers in the web-prod balancer. Run an apachectl graceful and you should then have no traffic going to that cluster. Shutdown the cluster, do your release thing, start up the cluster and then send QA off to test the cluster using the specific prod-a or prod-b.example.com url. Once QA confirms it’s good, uncomment the cluster from the web-prod balancer and comment out the other one. Fire off another graceful restart and repeat the release procedure on that cluster.

And *poof* you just rolled out a release with no downtime and very little impact to end users! Of course, this was just a very simple example. You can get much more detailed in your cluster design, especially with JBoss and different components. Just remember your individual clusters have to be completely separate. They can’t share any resources. Although, in all my experience they’ve always shared a database. You just need to make certain that any database updates the devs require you to make for the upgrade won’t cause the older release any harm.

This concept should work in most situations, just could take more planning/design/set up. I’ve got a similar set up running with 36 JBoss servers, 18 in each cluster. Quite a bit more had to be configured, especially to make sure that each individual cluster acts independently, and then there’s the SSL issues and sticky session requirements. But it’s so worth it though, and everyone will love you for cutting out the need for past midnight release “parties”.


I should set this up!

Monday, December 03, 2007

pooor kity


Cat survives 19 days with jar on head - Yahoo! News
BARTLETT, Tenn. - Tabitha Cain has fed a feral cat she calls Wild Oats for several years, but now she's thinking of changing the feline's name to Survivor.

That's because she says the cat survived for 19 days with a peanut butter jar stuck on its head.

"We tried to get her, but being the type of cat you can't catch, she kept running and hiding," said Doretha Cain, Tabitha's mother.

The family saw the cat several times with the jar on its head and tried in vain to catch it. But after not seeing the cat for a week, the Cains feared the worst.

"I thought she was going to die with that jar on her head," said Tabitha Cain, 25.

They found the once chubby cat on Wednesday, too thin and weak to flee. They caught her with a fishing net and used some oil to get the jar off her head.