Ok, so I was going to stay off this topic completely but there are things brewing that I just have to talk about. I played with an iPhone a few weeks ago and outside of the next to worthless text input the phone is really really neat. I think this phone may actually be considered a disruptive product in that it's going to send everyone else back to the drawing boards and a lot of really expensive designs will get scrapped. So you're probably thinking that I ran out and bought one. Well, no actually. I don't really like cell phones but I'd love to have a connected PDA but it looks like the iPhone and the iPod touch may just function very well in this role.

There are however a couple of reasons I haven't purchased one and now those reasons may be vanishing.......

I believe I have uploaded all the Paris photos that I'm going to. Some need to be rotated, some need to be deleted and some need to be loaded into the Gimp and worked on but none of that is getting done right now because it's taking me forever just to get them uploaded.

I'm working on the Slovenia photos now. I'd like to have them and the Croatia photos uploaded by the end of the week.

Western Europe 2007 photo gallery

I just ran across this news item a minute ago. Some of you know that I love my Gorillapods and take them everywhere. There are many shots that I just wouldn't have gotten without the gorillapod. Actually I don't use it quite as much as I used to since I got optical image stabilization which helps a great deal.

Anyway Deal Extreme has the original gorillapod on sale for about $6 including shipping! That's about 1/3 what I paid. Buy one now.

 

Since I'm back from holiday I've been putting a little time into grantmcwilliams.com again. My main interest is in making it less confusing, tweaking settings, and adding content. I still have a few issues with the setup like not being able to point a menu item (left side menu) directly to a photo gallery so instead you get the top level gallery and have to click on the category (travel, food etc..) in order to get to what you thought you were getting in the first place.

Wired ran a story describing Lukas Grunwald's Defcon talk on an attack on airport passport readers. After extracting data from the (read-only) chip in a legitimate passport, he placed a version of the data with an altered passport photo (JPEG2000 is used in these chips) into a writable chip. The altered photo created a buffer overflow in two RFID readers he tested, causing both to crash. Grunwald suggests that vendors are typically using off-the-shelf JPEG2000 libraries, which would make the vulnerability common.

Read the article at Wired.com

So I've been out of town on vacation for quite a while and my server and/or router went down while I was gone. I don't yet know why but they did. I'll be checking into it soon though. The server is in a temporary position in the house because the network is still being built so maybe it got hot. I don't know yet but for now it's up. I probably won't get around to adding too much content until next week.

There hasn't been a lot of posts here lately because of two reasons,1) I've been working double shifts and 2) I tried installing JCE editor (again and again) and finally toasted my site. I couldn't input any text whatsoever even after I'd uninstalled it and reinstalled TinyMCE. What you're seeing now is my site restored from backups. Yes, I keep backups.... I'm sure there are things that are missing that I will have to go around and fix but it's working and I can input text fine....

More later...

Grant

Quitting your job and travelling might seem like a really irresponsible risky thing to do but many are doing it. I spend three months a year in other countries and I insist on it when I take jobs. As I travel I meet people all over the world that are doing year long trips and some of them aren't just out of college either if you know what I mean. I met a woman in Croatia that had never travelled before and decided it was time so she found a way and was spending one year gone. It's common place in South America to find one year travellers going around the world.

The Washington Post wrote an article about this...

Grant

An interesting commandline calender. If you don't supply an argument it will show you the output of cal (current month) but if you supply it a number 12 and lower it will show you that month in this year but if the number is 13 or above it will show you a calender of the year specified.

#!/bin/bash
# Syntax acal 

function acal {
 m=""
 case $# in
    0) cal; return;;                #no arguments
    1) m=$1; y=`date +%Y`;;         #1 argument
    2) m=$1; y=$2;;                 #2 arguments
 esac

 case $m in
      Jan*|jan*      ) m=1;;
      Feb*|feb*      ) m=2;;
      Mar*|mar*      ) m=3;;
      Apr*|apr*      ) m=4;;
      May|may        ) m=5;;
      Jun*|jun*      ) m=6;;
      Jul*|jul*      ) m=7;;
      Aug*|aug*      ) m=8;;
      Sep*|sep*      ) m=9;;
      Oct*|oct*      ) m=10;;
      Nov*|nov*      ) m=11;;
      Dec*|dec*      ) m=12;;
      [1-9]|1[0-2] ) ;;         #numeric month
      *     ) y=$m; m="";;
 esac
 cal $m $y
}

acal $1