Masterful analysis...

From a recent item at The Register, on the C# programming language:

The frequency of bottom c-sharp (or d-flat) is 17.32Hz. With a speed of sound of 346.05 m/s (the speed of sound in air at a temperature of 24.41 degrees Celsius), the wavelength is exactly 1998 centimetres, which divided by the number of letters in "doh" (which is "C" in the doh-re-mi scale) is 666. Spooky, huh?

I'm sure this was done tongue-in-cheek, but equally sure that someone out there would gladly run with this... maybe someone can get hold of the origami freak who "found" evidence of the 9/11 attacks in the new U.S. $20 bill?

No responsible journalist would touch this, of course. Does anyone have Peter Jennings' number?

Cheers...

My day has been made...

...and 'alice' has been rooted.

Lee and I went over to play CashFlow earlier in the day and while I had a middlin' good time, Lee didn't particularly like her partner in the game (chosen by lot) and wasn't able to completely follow the flow of the game, either. Her team and my team were both able to "get out of the Rat Race" in the game, but the folks who got out ahead of us eventually won. Interestingly enough, the three teams who made it to the big time represented a secretary, a truck driver, and a mechanic, with limited resources as compared to the doctor, who never was able to "get onto the Fast Track."

The game attempts, in a simplified way, to mimic the principles in Robert Kiyosaki's book Rich Dad, Poor Dad. There, Kiyosaki hammers home the point that if you have no passive income to offset your expenses, you're stuck in the rat race, i.e., you keep living basically from paycheck to paycheck and cannot stop doing so. In the game, once your passive income exceeds your living expenses, you are deemed to have gotten out of said race, and are now operating on the "fast track," where it is much easier to pursue your dreams.

Strange to say, but every time I'm exposed to the game, I can feel my thinking process changing (and for the better, methinks).

* * *When I went to the store this evening to see about recompiling PHP so I can install and use phpMyAdmin, I noticed that my root password no longer worked. Changing that password is simple if you're at the machine, and once I did so, I took a look at my logs and found that someone had apparently used some kind of ftp exploit to gain root access to my machine.

If the cretin hadn't changed my root password, in truth, it'd probably have been some time before I'd have noticed anything.

I took a look at some of the log files on the machine and noted that the intruder used mail to send about a dozen messages (I assume to some friends). Otherwise, I can't tell what, if anything was changed. Being the somewhat paranoid person that I am, I have to assume that unpleasant surprises may lurk on the machine, and thus, will have to wipe the disk clean and reinstall everything from scratch.

In retrospect, my error was in allowing ftp access to the machine. I should have simply left ssh and httpd and killed the ftp to minimize the risk of someone getting into where they do not belong.

The nasty part about wiping the disk clean is facing the prospect of reinstalling Win4Lin, Windows, and Office so we can make use of the store's pricing spreadsheet. An alternative would be to revise the spreadsheet so it works under OpenOffice (not a simple task, upon initial inspection), or to develop a CGI application that works with MySQL to display the same info.

I'm not so sure I can work that fast.

In the meantime, all outside access has been shut down to the machine.