Solarwinds LEM is awesome

I got a new job doing InfoSec and they put me in charge of SIEM. The product they put me with is awesome. I love it and love the culture.


Solarwinds Log & Event Manager has made my job so much easier. You guys should check it out. Solarwinds LEM

MyHeritage Morph

MyHeritage: Celebrity Morph - Genealogy databases - Family tree school project

MyHeritage: Celebrity Morph - Lineage - Descendants

Rosy not working

As you may know, I recently got my Google Wave account and I have wanted to use some of the web-bots to make it cooler. The one that I'm interested in the Rosy, the instant translator. Rosy was designed so that translation can happen with any combination of the 40 most spoken languages.

My Gmail account has the default language of Italian. I do this, because I speak Italian and kinda like to stay current with the technical terms of Italian. I've been trying to get Rosy to automatically translate my wave posts into Italian, but I can't get it working? I think that maybe I have a bad link to the web-bot. When I add it, about 100 blips are added to my wave for any character that is added to the wave. It's hairy and has a lot of bugs. I'll keep working on it, but it's a Google product and that's why it's currently Beta, like everything that Google creates.

I'll keep you posted.

Google Wave and getting used to it.

I just recently got my Google Wave invite. I was really excited about it. Especially because I signed up to do a presentation on Google Wave and still didn't have an account the week before it was due.

Google Wave is a new collaboration, web-based protocol for better and "awesomer" communication. This was designed to eliminate the multiple copies of emails, frustration with instant messanger, and multiple documents for the same topic.

One of the things that I had to get used to was how to comment, edit, and reply to waves. After watching a few YouTube videos and messing around a bit on my own, I could really find the usefulness of Google Wave.

I'm really looking forward to using this more. For example, my wife and I and a few friends are really into emergency preparedness. It's a lot of fun to have interesting articles, comment in-line to others comments, and other things. I'm looking forward to getting the "Web-bots" to work.
Stay tuned.

New Magic Mouse by Apple

One of the perks of working at the Merrill-Cazier Library is my supervisor wants us to stay ahead on current technologies. At the library, we try to do quite a bit with Apple computers. Just recently, Apple released it's new mouse, the Magic Mouse. For those who are familiar with the trackpad on all new MacBook Pro's are familiar with the "gestures" that can be used to navigate web pages, applications, etc.

The surface is sensitive to touch. It still has the regular features of any mouse including left-click and right-click. As for actual buttons, there aren't any. There are not scrolling features. To scroll, you just drag your finger as if there were a wheel to track with. One of the features I really like is the "Swipe" gesture. You can use this to move forward and backward in iTunes coverflow, web browsers, etc.

As for ergonomics, it's fairly flat, but I like that because it's more relaxed and I don't have to "perch" my wrist like I do with other mice, or playing piano, etc. If I were a reviewer, it's give it 4 or 4.5 stars.

Upgrading my xbmc

When I first took on the challenge of softmodding my xbox, I knew that I would want quite a bit of room on the xbox to store my music, movies, etc. When you get an xbox, the stock hard drive is only about 5-8 GB big. To do this, you need to get a hard drive to replace it as well as the software necessary to clone the new hard drive. I bought a Western Digital 500GB IDE hard drive from Newegg.com. The one I got only cost $70. Once I had that, I just needed to download the necessary software. To clone a xbox hard drive, I use xboxhd maker. This is a terminal-based program that is used to format, partition, and clone the old hard drive onto the new hard drive. The tutorial that I used was found at here: http://www.techfreaks.org/articles/modxbox2.shtml. As the tutorial shows, you first need to backup the C and E drives as well as the eeprom.bin file. This is used instead of the HD password on xbox hard drives. Once you have these, you can restore your xbox no matter what happens. After that, you run a batch file that will create a linux.iso that is used as the boot disk for xboxhd maker and the necessary files to clone the hard drive. I loaded the new hard drive into a computer and fired up the boot disk and when through the instructions. After formatting and partitioning, it only took about 12 minutes to do the entire clone. After all of this, you just lock the hard drive and then swap out the hard drive into the xbox console. Voila! you have a 500 gb HD in your xbox. It was interesting using old tools like Midnight Commander and such to clone a hard drive. Looking at what I have now, I somewhat do have an old computer that you hook up to your TV. Feels like those old Commodore computers.

XBMC

I finally got it working. For the past month or two, I've had a "back-burner" project that I've been working on off and on. I'm sure if I dedicated a day to it and had all the necessary tech, I couldn't probably crank it out in a few hours. I'm talking about Xbox Media Center. This is a cross platform media center that you can use for all sorts of awesome stuff. I basically turned my brother-in-law's Xbox classic into a linux machine that I can stream tons of movies, videos, music, etc.

This is the tutorial I used. http://www.techfreaks.org/articles/modxbox.shtml

Basically, you need to copy a linux installer on the xbox hard drive (as a gamesave) and a game specific gamesave. In my case, I used Splinter Cell. Once you do that, you follow the directions. Basically, this bridges two connections on the motherboard and breaks the encryption that Microsoft put on the Xbox console. It's pretty nerdy.

Once you've done this, you have a "modded" xbox that you can load stuff on. I went further and installed XBMC, so that would be my default dashboard. Most people would stop at this point and be happy. Not me. I continued and installed a 500 GB hard drive. I like having a hard drive 100 times larger to store my games, music, videos (all legal) on the Xbox. More details to follow on my next post.