For the Love of Geeks

Nine hurricanes coming. Sugar OS may be spread to other systems besides OLPC. Meanwhile the OLPC folks say the next XO 2.0 will $75? Har. Twitter gets $15 million. How to beat jet lag? Don’t eat? The Netflix box is a streaming box not download and play. This is not the way to go. Google now trying to get that weird white space spectrum.

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Recently, I took notice of the online Q&A sites that have appeared all over the net. Most, like Yahoo answers, are basically just places where random people with no real background can answer questions that are posted, and so the answers are at best speculative, and most cases are completely wrong. Then I came across a site with a different feel to it, [ MyOnlinePros ].

The site makes the following claim :

MyOnlinePros is a site developed by Professionals for those looking for a top quality answer site. The founders of MyOnlinePros have planned a site that provides quality answers from Professionals, highly experienced in their fields, and who are true subject matter experts.

Have a dog question, cat question, or any pet question? We have Veterinarians and pet professionals who can assist you.

Have a question about your Ford, Chevy, or other model cars? We have ASE certified Mechanics who know the answer and can walk you through step by step to fix your car.

Have a question about that Penn Foster Exam, or stumped with your homework? We have Penn Foster experts, and professional tutors who can help you understand your homework problems.

Your PC not doing what you think it should do? Or maybe it is doing stuff you don’t want it to do… We have computer professionals who can handle that too.

It’s true you can find help online for free, but remember, you get what you pay for. Our small group of professionals have been verified as being able to give accurate information in a quick and friendly manner.
Our goal is to get customers the help they need, when they need it, at a reasonable price, and provide a rewarding opportunity for our Professionals.

Being the scepitcal sort, I decided to try out the service. For a few bucks ( they only accept paypal as payment ), I placed my question on the pets category about my dog. Within about an hour or so, I got a message saying that my question had been answered and it sure enough, it was a very similar answer to what was I given by my vet just a few days ago.

Vet bill - $70.00

MyOnlinePros - $8.00

I will grant that I would not likely replace my vet with MyOnlinePros, I know that I will probably go there from now on, rather then call my vet right away, and I will certainly be visiting the car category since I seem to be having more and more issues on that front these days.

All in all, it seemed like a very valuable experience, and as a tech geek, I may sign up to answer questions on their computer section.

After the release of the video trailer for the newest installment of the Guitar Hero video game, Activision has leaked out a few in-game screen shots to whet our appetites a little more, and truth be told, it is getting harder and harder to resist the purchase.

First of all, the music making aspect of the game looks pretty awesome.

Players can create and upload songs to GHTunes, which is an aspect of gameplay never really explored before. From the screen shot, a sizable learning curve seems to exist, especially if you are new to mixing and creating music, but given that my 14 year old nephew master Rock Band drums on hard in less then two weeks, I can only imagine the level of creativity some of these kids will come up with, and it makes me wonder if this will lead to a whole new type of musician being created.

Drums, will have presets available to assist in setting the tempo, like Hard Rock, and Hip Hop.  Speaking of the drums.  New information about [ the game's drums ] were also leaked out. The drum pads are “larger and quieter,” and velocity-sensitive. That means that the game will be taking advantage of the fact that the drums detect how hard they are being hit: perhaps making the drum beats louder.

It also seems that GH4 : World Tour will be providing the user a more detailed character creation process, allowing gamers to fine tune and create characters that could possibly resemble the gamer, although I am hoping that is not what is happening in this screen shot.

Overall, I am beginning to think that this will be a very loud response to RockBand, and other rumors are still being leaked that GH4 will include songs by Dream Theater, which would simply be AWESOME!

Core Security released the following security release:

Three vulnerabilities discovered in the iCal application may allow un-authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems with (and potentially without) the assistance from the end user of the application or to repeateadly execute a denial of service attack to crash the iCal application.

The most serious of the three vulnerabilities is due to potential memory corruption resulting from an resource liberation bug that can be triggered with a malformed .ics calendar file specially crafted by a would-be attacker.

The other two vulnerabilities lead to abnormal termination (crash) of the iCal application due to null-pointer dereference bugs triggered while parsing a malformed .ics files. The hability to inject and execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems using these two vulnerabilities was researched but not proven possible.

Exploitation of these vulnerabilities in a client-side attack scenario is possible with user assistance by opening or clicking on specially crafted .ics file send over email or hosted on a malicious web server; or without direct user assitance if a would-be attacker has the ability to legitimately add or modify calendar files on a CalDAV server.

Apple has apparently been notified of this, and is working on a fix, which is already 3 days past expected release.  Since the .ics file is what created the vulnerability, until the patch is fixed, don’t click on any of those, even if it comes from a known source.

Geo-tagging for the iPhone camera.

Yep, you heard correctly, Apple wants to give you the ability to Geo-Tag your pictures, in the same way you can find yourself on the google map.

Essentially, geo-tagging is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to media files such as latitude and longitude coordinates — or even names of places — so that those files can later be referenced, searched, and grouped based on their origin.

Side by side pics have been spotted online :

Location-aware services such as “Maps” and “Camera” on the iPhone v2 will ask the user’s permission before transmitting data used to identify their current geographical location.

In addition,  iPhone’s general preference pane will have a toggle that will allow users to enable/disable Location Services.

A lot of phones have this ability, so it is not blazingly new technology, but in true Apple fashin, I am sure it will be slicker and cooler on the iPhone.

If you’re like me, you have fond memories of complete weekends “squandered” with a 70 hour long Risk game with a group of friends.

As an adult, most of us don’t have the time to spend an entire weekend playing Risk.  However, thanks to Steven Chow, you can play online at [ Warfish.net ].  I know that Hasbro has put out various form of online and computer versions of risk, but nothing that compares to Warfish.  What is warfish you say

From the wiki :

Warfish.net is an open-ended wargaming platform which provides everything you need to design and play games, i.e. both game play features for gamers to play games as well as full set of game design tools for game designers to create innovative new games

Warfish, is a turn-based, online version of the game Risk that allows you to take your turn at your leisure, allowing games to go on for hours, days, weeks, and I have a had a few that went on for months.

Warfish, also gives you the ability to create and design your own maps to play on, and there are a ton of extremely talented map makers who have created a whole new risk experience.

Currently the site is invite only, but lucky for you, I am posting my invite link here [ come play warfish ] and look forward to getting a game on with all of you fine geeks

Lastly, Warfish is a great way to stay sane at the office, and is HIGHLY addictive…

Twitter is a micro-blogging social network system that has recently exploded into use.  Tech news geeks like [ Leo Laporte ] , [ John C. Dvorak ], and [ Tom Merritt ] tout it on a regular basis on tech news shows.  [ Barack Obama ] is using it as a political move, and until recently was the most followed person on Twitter.  You will even find famous people on Twitter, like [ Wil Wheaton ] and [ David Hewlett ].   This is all well and good, but is there a future for this social network phenomenon?

At least one VC Company thinks they do.  Twitter just completed a round of Series B funding in the amount of $15 million.  Tech Crunch, and others, are reporting that the principle investor in this round is Boston-based Sparks company and have based this round of funding on an $80 million valuation of Twitter.

But even as Twitter’s valuation escalates, and the service becomes more and more popular, problems with the service are prolific.  Several sites have come around for the sole purpose of letting you know whether Twitter is up or not.  Worse then that, though, only its Japanese edition displays advertisements, and the american side has not come up with any viable income streams.

Despite that, this geek loves the service, and uses it frequently, so feel free to [ follow me ].