|
Attck of teh AzN Cow flu!
|
|
|
| Zicam |
[Jun. 17th, 2009|11:07 pm] |
Long time no post, mostly due to excessive busyness (or maybe just too much gaming). Also I am pissed at BF2 right now so I am in a ranting mood. (also I spend most of my social networking on facebook these days).
So apparently Zicam's active ingredient is Zincum Gluconicum. I was googling this today, with various people bloviating about whether or not it really does anything or is harmful etc. (Since the makers are being accused of Zicam causing anosmia). Not sure why people are skeptical about this. We already know zinc is an immunomodulator since it affects metallothionein and alters: antibody expression profiles as well as Th1 and Th2 populations. MT modulation appears to shift host defenses away from bacterial while possibly enhancing antiviral responses (most likely due to the ab isotype change and downregulation of various stuff: read the MT papers by Lynes, et al).
So what's the problem, people? (Sure immunomodulation can result in funkiness, but DON'T say Zicam doesn't do anything...). As to whether it causes anosmia, I dunno (and what mechanism would that involve? something with the signalling pathway or downregulation of ORs, or just outright killing olfactory neurons in the nasal epithelia?). Heavy metals are peculiar species... |
|
|
| STO: trying to be everything? |
[Feb. 15th, 2009|12:15 am] |
Based on the interviews I've seen, Star Trek Online is going to be like: Star Trek Bridge Commander (shipboard stuff) + Starfleet Command (SFC-style tactics and crew selection/bonuses) + Eve Online (skill training + exploration) + WoW (instanced battlespaces and WoW-style Factional Warfare) + Fallout3 (Over-the-shoulder shooter)?
Screenshots look pretty nice, although because it's Cryptic-style, there is a bit too much comic-like style going on - still prefer EVE-style artwork... |
|
|
| Bad Battleclinic.com web security practices |
[Feb. 14th, 2009|02:56 pm] |
1. On the login page, when entering an unregistered username, the web app returns with "No such username". This is a particularly insidious form of information leakage because it allows you to mine for valid usernames for password guessing.
2. The registration verification email contains your password, which means it's not being one-way hashed in any way. |
|
|
| Why do legit mailers abuse their hostnames? |
[Feb. 10th, 2009|04:43 pm] |
It makes me unable to use reject_unknown_sender in any meaningful way. Mail coming out of your relay should be using MAIL FROM that has an A or MX record! |
|
|
| Bluemars is dead again |
[Jan. 20th, 2009|11:09 am] |
Stream seems to be down. :(
Soma Space is ok, but still haven't found the perfect electro ambient spacey channel yet :( |
|
|
| Ahh IRC, how I love thee <3 |
[Jan. 9th, 2009|12:03 pm] |
10:36 -!- Topic for #distributed: Welcome to multiplayer Notepad
10:36 -!- Topic set by Nugget [] [Wed Jan 7 23:32:52 2009]
If you think about, it totally makes sense. IRC is the MMO text editor :) |
|
|
| Firefox vs. IE vulns (and more RHEL WTFs) |
[Dec. 19th, 2008|11:38 am] |
Ok so the IE vuln is basically rooted in oledb32.dll. Everybody thought this was silly.
However:
The way that RedHat fixes the recent firefox vulns apparently requires not just the Firefox package to be rebuilt but requires changes in nss and nspr as well! AND ON TOP OF THAT, apparently the nss and nspr packages are dependencies for openssh on RHEL 5, so it's not like I can just uninstall that crap... WTFWTF |
|
|
| yay mmorpg dramas! |
[Dec. 13th, 2008|03:35 am] |
|
So apparently there was a mineral duping exploit revealed by CCP, and now everyone is comparing it to the previous "t20" scandal or thinks that a troll on another forum by a banned player is gospel. Just because Iran Contra happened doesn't mean 9/11 is all conspiratorial, people, geeze. |
|
|
| coding music, revisited, again |
[Dec. 5th, 2008|11:04 pm] |
So, I am totally in love with this track: Waltz into the Moonlight, by Tryad (Try^d). I first discovered it when watching one of Mike Wesch's youtube videos. I noted in an earlier post that finding similar sounding tracks Jamendo was proving to be difficult.
This piece reminds me of the soundtrack to Gattaca, but much more mellowed out (I dug out my copy a few minutes ago, and it's just not the same) by replacing the main strings with the piano and substantially breakbeating the rhythm... It's like the difference between Salt'n'Peppas "Push It" and Timbaland's "The Way I Are". In any case, this is a really great piece of music to code by, when I don't feel like listening to trance, and I wish I could find other tracks like it. (The rest of the Tryad album isn't as great, mostly because it has some funky vocal tracks and a funky industrial one).
I also tried out some of the other music Mike Wesch has used for his videos, such as There's Nothing Impossible by Deus, but this one certainly takes the cake... |
|
|
| official maintainer status! |
[Dec. 4th, 2008|11:14 pm] |
I'm now listed as the maintainer for databases/freetds. Now onward to databases/unixODBC! |
|
|
| web 2.0 tagging gripe? |
[Dec. 3rd, 2008|05:41 pm] |
I noticed on Jamendo that there's no "real(tm)" way to search for multiple tags at once. Since tagging is sort of a poor man's ontology-builder, you'd figure that searching for a set of tags would narrow down results to point to content that had all of these tags defined for it.
Specific use-case:
I like Tryad. Tryad has the following tags on Jamendo: electro ambient pop triphop chillout piano classical melodic atmospheric ethereal. So theoretically, if I can search for all of these tags at once, I should get (theoretically) everything that sounds like Tryad.
So why can't tags work like the boolean ad hoc searches used to?
(Interestingly, one site I know of which supports such tag-chaining is cheggit.net (NSFW)). |
|
|
| sysinstall fixup |
[Oct. 18th, 2008|12:46 am] |
Mostly for ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) uniheliodem if he's interested:
Too late for 7.1 probably, but someone ought to patch sysinstall so that it writes a gjournal label after partitioning, prior to disklabel, and then set the default newfs to use -J. Or provide an interface to do that (like a gjournal step after partioning, before disklabel under the custom installation method). The appropriate module is (now) part of GENERIC so there is really no reason to no longer not use it (like the triple negative there!?!) (then again, I am whining because I just provisioned this box and forgot about it...). |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
