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I don't know how I've missed this for the (at least) 3 years this song and video has been out, but I just discovered it tonight and it's wonderful. Inspired by Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, well, the title kind of gives it away. The song is by the Greenskeepers.

A couple of weeks ago a customer brought in an HP DV9000 series laptop that was sluggish and he said the wireless wasn't working. We figured it was a virus or some other not so nice hardware conflict, but after a re-installation of the OS the problem with wireless not working persisted. We tried some drivers and after several failed attempts found a post online about many many of these occurrences in the DV series, ranging from the wireless problem to black screens and more.

I finally stumbled onto this page detailing the models that have been given an extended warranty that if I remember correctly runs out in September or there about. So if your computer is exhibiting symptoms it's worth the time to see if your particular model is covered. We were able to get the customer a replacement motherboard and other fixes because of this warranty extension completely free of charge (including shipping!)

A while back me and some friends were messing around in the lab at school and figured out that by replacing sethc.exe (the executable run when sticky keys is triggered) with, well, anything, you're able to run that new program with at least administrator privileges under any account (that is if you made the change as an administrator of course). We replaced sethc.exe with cmd.exe and were able to spawn an admin shell from even non-admin accounts simply by hitting shift 5 times quickly.

That's bad of course.

In Windows XP we were able to launch it under SYSTEM credentials. The SYSTEM user account has privileges higher than that of a normal administrator, so that makes it doubly bad. In Windows Vista (Home Premium) if you invoke sticky keys on the login screen you get an administrator shell and calling explorer.exe aside from possibly having some weird side effects, will log you in as SYSTEM as well.

Despite the fact that I said that I saw no immediate need to upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.1, one of my friends convinced me that I needed to try it out. So far I haven't really seen a difference except for layout and UI, it might be a bit faster, but not exceedingly so. I installed the Kavana 6.1 ROM. Setup was fairly simple, just follow the prompts. Once finished I noticed incorrect key mappings for some keys and so I installed the eT9 language pack linked on the download above. This fixed a majority of the problems but there were still problems with alt keys.

I read through some tutorials and thought I was going to have to write my own keyboard layout file and registry entries to use, this turned out not to be the case, thank goodness. I was poking around the directories (initially the Windows directory) but found what I was looking for in \Program Files\eT9\. Here are all the files that the eT9 install installed and fixing my problem was as easy as editing the eT9.Excalibur.0409.kmap.txt file (409 is the ID for English). The structure of these files are really simple provided no one messed up really badly and wrote the wrong hex for the keys, that would be less fun to track down. I've posted the fixed eT9.Excalibur.0409.kmap.txt file.

I'm assuming what I have is a standard US layout, so if you're having problems with the English layout for the eT9 pack, download this file and just drop it in \Program files\eT9, do a restart and hopefully all will be well.

Note: For some reason Drupal decided that it needed to rename the file eT9.Excalibur.0409.kmap_.txt, take out the extra underscore when you download.

Late January and most of February for me was spent in the hospital. It was at this time that I realized that my phone was not quite up to par for being away from a computer for extended periods and it was then that I decided when I got out I would get a smartphone.

Unlike a lot of people these days my fetish isn't the latest and greatest phone. I've gotten by for a long time with a simple flip phone that just makes calls and texts with little else notable about it. I only know about the iPhone and the Google G1 because they got a fair bit of press. Enough press to know that I didn't want either; not because they're bad phones, but because of the cost of the base phone plus the required data plan.

When it came time to look for my "perfect" phone I asked a couple of people that were far more knowledgeable in the mobile arena than myself and finally figured out that I wanted an HTC Excalibur (more commonly known as the T-Mobile Dash). I didn't really have a lot of requirements in my search. I knew I wanted it to be in the $100 range and WiFi would totally be a bonus so as not to have to get a data plan if not absolutely necessary. Hotspots are everywhere now it seems and being able to tap an existing network for a quick email check or something seems a far better alternative to a ~$20/month data plan.

Just my notes from my assembly class way back in 2006, its usefulness may vary for you.

Here's a bunch of code from past data structures projects. It used to work at one time and I got A's on all of the projects so it did what it was supposed to (at least back then :)). I know my coding practices aren't the best in the code examples provided (I was bad about separating implementation specific code from structure code) but given the scenario (class) I was going for working projects instead of pretty code :). Most of this is C++ with one project in Java (hash table example). If anyone finds any of the code useful for examples or whatever, great! Enjoy.

I have been a fan of Backtrack from the good folks over at Remote-exploit.org for a long time now but their new release of Backtrack 4 has gotten me all excited again. There are tons of new, incredibly awesome, features in BT4.

One of my favorite additions is Maltego Community Edition. For those of you who don't know Maltego is an insanely powerful data gathering/forensics tool that can show a seemingly endless set of relationships between entities including people (social networking site affiliation, phone numbers, email, etc), servers, IP blocks and more. It's nice to see something like that get added. I only had one small problem with this distro and that was setting up Fasttrack, i'm not entirely sure the SVN servers are up at the moment, so that could've been part of the problem but I'll get it working eventually. So, for any of you that are the least bit interested in information security or anything of the sort download BT4 (I recommend the VMWare image) and play with it on your network. Endless fun to be had.

Here is a presentation I gave at the Phi Kappa Phi student research conference presenting initial findings in our bioinformatics research:

Bioinformatics Presentation

Steven and I playing some improv we thought wasn't too bad: