ianknox.net

I love a good hack. I use XP and have been tinkering with custom themes lately. Like many I used TGTsoft’s StyleXP. This is a decent enough program but it runs as a service and takes up valuable system resources. In today’s surfing on the subject I found a nifty little patcher that will update your uxtheme.dll file to allow the use of non-M$ signed/checksumed themes! Joy and rupture. Here it is if you want to give it a whirl. It was made by the good folks at www.xp-erience.org. Regretfully it looks like their site has been shut down.

Note: This is for Windows XP SP1 ONLY! don’t be a tool and try to use it on something else and break it.

I was feeling witty and a little geeky today as I installed a fresh copy of FreeBSD 5.1 on my experiment computer this afternoon. I thought I would share my new motd, inspired by Stanley Kubrick, the USMC and Robert Jones:

FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE (GENERIC) #0: Thu Jun  5 02:55:42 GMT 2003
---------------------------HOBBES----------------------------------
|  This is my unix box.                                           |
|  There are many like it, but this one is mine.                  |
|  My unix box is my best friend.                                 |
|  It is my life.                                                 |
|  I must master it as I master my life.                          |
|  My unix box, without me, is useless.                           |
|  Without my unix box, I am useless.                             |
|  I must secure my unix box well.                                |
|  I must secure it better than my enemy who is trying to hack it.|
|  I must dectect him before he dectects me.                      |
|  I will...                                                      |
-------------------------------------------------------------------
|  If you don't belong here, please fuck off.                     |
|  If you do, have a nice day and be kind to the bandwidth.       |
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ok I went ahead and imported all of the old entries from my blosxom blog to this one. Some of the formating may have gotten fubar but all the important stuff is there.
Now to actually write something new.

As you can see I’ve moved my blog in an affort to write more in it.
Why you ask?
Simple really I felt that it didn’t belong on a work computer, and I felt that the fact that it was hosted at work limited the things I felt I could talk about.

You will also notice I moved from blossxm to Movable Type.

The main reason is that its just easier, esp since I don’t have a shell account where it’s hosted now.

Anyway I hope I’ll start writing in this again soon. Over the next few days I plan to move all the old stuff over and then on to the new.

Ciao for now.

So As mentioned ealier I’m a bit of a music “guy” no I’m not one of the
guys who spend thousands on super high-fi speakers and pre-amps and all
that jazz, but I do have a deep love and respect for music of almost all
kinds. I must have a bit of an inflated ego to think that anyone else
would like to listen to the music I do because I have had a shoutcast
server up and running for a few months now. As a way to tie it into
blog-o-rific I wrote an extremely simple little plugin that reads the
recent tracks log file from MALTX (my mp3 player of choice) and makes the
most recent one availible to blosxom. I am widely know as a bit of a
wannabe programmer so I’m sure the code is fundementally broken and I deserve to be shot.
So do you if you use it. You can get it here. You
can also see it in action on the top of the page right below the banner.

In my never ending search to find the best deal on anything and everything I stumbled upon the latest invention from our good
friends at Google. It’s called Froogle. A
cursory look seem to indicate some real good deals might be found here. For instance I did a quick and dirty trial on a few
bits of electronics.

Fuji A 201 Digital Camera:
Froogle: 149.78
Pricewatch: 141.00
E-bay: 140.99

Geforce 4 ti4200 128mb
Froogle: 119.00
Pricewatch: 125.81
E-bay: 134.50

120 GB EIDE HD (any brand)
Froogle: 107.97
Pricewatch: 96.99
E-bay: 129.99

As you can see it hangs pretty well with the big guns plus it’s only in beta! There are a few obvious features that
aren’t included (namely sort-by-price and a way to filter out and/or convert foreign currency). My only concern is that once
businesses find out about it the GoogleBombing will begin in
earnest. Check out while it still.. works..

I was getting sick of collapsed whitespace in my story blocks so I ripped off Robert Jone’s most excellent amps plugin to replace every instance of 2 whitespaces in a row with a whitespace followed by a non breaking space. It seems to work alright. If for some unknown reason you want to try this on your blog get the plugin here.

I was doing a little Googleing for open directories this evening. It is completely amazing what you
can find if you poke around a little. Todays top find has to be an
entire collection of bizzare and amusing shockwave files, complete with
two Mac/switch parody commericals (which I love). Check them out here and here.

I know it’s ugly.. like REALLY ugly but expect that to change over the next few days.

Many thanks to the folks at blosxom and Todd Larason for the help!