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  <channel>
    <title>rax262</title>
    <link>http://virb.com/rax262</link>
    <description><![CDATA[I am a veteran code monkey who's worked with technology for over half of my life. In other words I'm good with computers. I first dabbled in tech back before MySpace pages, Instant Messenger and even the World Wide Web. Folks found out pretty quick that I could fix computers and so I was quickly gained a reputation as a computer guru around town.]]></description>
    <generator>Virb 2.0 (@rax262)</generator>
    <language>en</language>
    <item>
      <title>Thankful</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1081122</link>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm thankful to have everyone back home tonight.  My son was hospitalized 9 days ago for a severe case of RSV.  It's been tough but thankfully our family pulled together and received a lot of help from extended family and friends.

I'm still reflecting on our health care experience but I expect you'll see a formal synopsis of both my experience as well as the successes and failings of the current system.  There is a lot of talk about nationalized health care, at least for some, and I believe that this will harbinger of change within the medical "industry" as a whole.

As I'm fond of saying:  Stay tuned.  More as it develops.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:53:25 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1081122</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Too Sexy for the Superbowl</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1062707</link>
      <description><![CDATA[What do PETA, GoDaddy and a fly by night adultery site have in common?  Their commercials are all too sexy for NBC Sport's coverage of the Super Bowl. Thanks to the Janet Jackson debacle which exposed millions of pre-pubescent boys to their first glimpse of boobie,  the network has adopted puritan morals save for the outright lust of money.

Our first contestant is PETA, the People for the Eating of Tasty Animals some other such nonsense.  Their ad depicts beautiful women making out with salad.  If that wasn't weird enough the entire clip features a hard rock background track and smacks more of a Victoria Secret rip-off than any given shampoo commercial you might see in France.



New meaning to the phrase: I love broccoli..


In the second corner we have Adultry.Com this time parading as AshleyMadison.com. She not only encourages you to cheat but convincingly makes the point that it's far better to see an attractive model humping a football than to picture two monkeys doing so (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fanswers.yahoo.com%2Fquestion%2Findex%3Fqid%3D20071021175213AAOqHmI&ei=MamDSeySBpGYsAO0x5jBDQ&usg=AFQjCNFtgoiwyLfmAC5NSN3G8vrbpa6CCQ&sig2=C5vhUUDect4XmnVTDQlw8A).


actual complaint (http://blog.peta.org/archives/veggie_love.pdf) I found it to be quite invigorating.  Can't say I ever considered an eggplant erotic.  Second place goes to Ashely Madison's house of violated pigskins for no other reason than the sheer amount of traffic to GoDaddy's video site made the Danica shower scene unwatchable.  Nice try Bob, how about going for that Dale Jr cannon thing next year?  You can bet your wife's biological upgrades that millions of dejected and heavily tattooed #8 fans would love to see that.

]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 31 Jan 2009 02:43:44 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1062707</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Daytona 24 Hours 2009</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1052090</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Keep up with the action via Live Timing and on Speed (http://laptrax.racersites-cluster.com/OrbitsServer/jsp/ViewRace.jsp?sid=475).  This year's event started at 3 and runs well into Sunday.  Keep tabs on all of my commentary via Tumblr (http://rax262.tumblr.com/) and Twitter (http://twitter.com/home).

Updates:

Interesting fact: Last year's race winning Ganassi car spent a total of 18 1/2 minutes in the pits. That was 25 pits stops over 24 hours. Everything is set up for quick change: rear end assemblies, suspension, brakes, and even radiator.

Looks like Dempsey's team is going to need some spares. Jep Thorton puts it into the tire barrier and brings out the first caution 2 hours 50 minutes into the event.

Daytona 24 morning report

Settle in, have some breakfast and get ready for eight more hours of racing. Overnight both Michael Shank Racing and Krohn Racing DPs are out. Penske, Brumos, Ganassi, on the lead lap and in contention overall. Farnbacher leads GT and is eighth overall followed by The Racers Group at a mere 1:02 deficit.

Stay out of the pits

Lesson for the night brought to you by the #99 Gainsco team: Never change out hardware (gear cluster) when a sensor will suffice. The driver reported shifting problems so the team set about replacing the entire transmission gear cluster. The work put them many laps down but before they could return to the track they found that they *also* had a problem with a sensor that allows the driver to shift without lifting the throttle. Speculation is that this sensor could have been the problem and that changing the cluster unnecessarily put them further in the hole than they needed to be.
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 25 Jan 2009 07:01:52 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1052090</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Joomla 1.5</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1051155</link>
      <description><![CDATA[I'm kind of late to the party but I've finally started playing around with Joomla 1.5.  I tried to do a site conversion a few weeks ago and managed to break nearly everything on this site.  Thankfully the new, completely rewritten Joomla is cleaner and so packed full of features and supported components that I can easily recreate this site from scratch.

The only problem now?  Transferring most of my content to the new site and tweaking a brand new template.  So why the sudden kick-in-the-pants drive to convert?  Well I'm working on a site project for someone else and I wanted to start with the latest and greatest version of the Joomla CMS.

Oddly enough I've noticed that the economy has affected even the free software sector of the net.  A few years back you'd have to pay between $15-$50 for a site template.  These days they are cheaper or as cheap as free.  Awesome!  Makes my job much easier.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 24 Jan 2009 16:02:03 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1051155</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Will Code for BBQ</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1038045</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Truth be told I'd write code for a nice cup of fresh ground coffee and some Lexington style BBQ. Personal favorite?  Richard's in Salisbury.  Check out this interactive map (http://www.ncbbqsociety.com/bbqmap/trail_map.html) of great BBQ places across North Carolina.




For those unfamiliar with pork BBQ, there are primarily two styles in NC.  Here's the lowdown:

N.C. Eastern Style Sauce: A vinegar based sauce made generally from a mild vinegar, water, white sugar, hot peppers, black pepper and cooked down a bit.

N.C. Western Style Dip: A vinegar based sauce with the addition of tomato (paste, puree or ketchup) plus brown sugar and spices. West of Raleigh, NC this condiment is referred to as "dip". The terms Western Style and "Lexington Style" are interchangeable. The Western Style Pits also put this ]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 17 Jan 2009 16:22:12 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1038045</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Dealing with Kido, the Conficker worm</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1025579</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Friends, let me tell you what.. it's been a helluva week.   It all started at the end of last week with the infection of several servers at work.  By Monday our entire system was under attack and things were breaking down.  I've lived through several attacks but this one was by far the worst, most sophisticated attack I've seen to date.

Kaspersky anti-virus initially identified the virus as Net-Worm.Win32.Kido (http://www.threatexpert.com/report.aspx?md5=1db5476c766555c9995b25d19f97b9bc), but the virus is more widely known as Conficker around the net (http://www.napera.com/blog/?p=360#more-360).  The virus is very crafty about how it infects and replicates.  The initial infection vector was an unpatched system using the vulnerability published by Microsoft in late Oct, MS08-067 (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/Bulletin/MS08-067.mspx).  The patch addresses an RPC hole which allows the virus to infect the system via File and Print sharing.

We quickly found that Kaspersky's firewall was unable to block the RPC requests and in a matter of hours every vulnerable system was infected and the rest were under attack.  Our first order of business was to disconnect every system and to run an offline scan via Kaspersky's Live CD. This was very slow, most likely because of the large amount of data on some machines as well as the NTFS file system integration of the Linux distro used by the Live CD.

What we didn't realize is that many of our hardened Windows 2003 servers were also infected and that the worm was quickly setting up trojan download programs as well as a web servers and other distribution systems.  At some point the virus changed direction and began infecting patched machines via escalated privileges in Active Directory.   Once infected the virus began installing web servers, creating automated processes, hijacking auto run settings and creating a multitude of registry key entries.

Once we realized this latest vector we immediately disabled file and print sharing for all computers and effectively eliminated this method of infection.  However many systems were badly infected and were still able to infect USB thumb drives and to hide malicious executables deep within the system.

It was only by running several tools like Sysinterals (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/25e27bed-b251-4af4-b30a-c2a2a93a80d9.aspx) Process Explorer, Autoruns and RootkitRevealer that we realized the damage inflicted.  Thankfully the tools were able to identify and remove most of the changes.  We also took the time to uninstall via Add/Remove Windows Components all IIS related services where they were not needed.

Additionally we found that Conficker also disables several services including Automatic Update and BITS (Background Intelligent Transfer Service).  Once these are turned off the system will no longer be able to pull down Microsoft Updates.  The worm also hijacks the DNS Client cache to prevent MS Update, Kaspersky and other Anti-Virus programs from contacting their update servers.  To correct this you need to disable the service and reboot the system to clear the cache.

The most frightening thing about Conficker is that it's a quick adapting, very sophisticated worm which is well beyond the capability of most script kiddies.  While it's hard to pin the worm on any particular group you can bet your paycheck that it's the work of an advanced group of hackers with nothing less than malicious intent in mind.
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 11 Jan 2009 00:35:14 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1025579</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Dakar Rally 2009</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1013483</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The rally is back but what is Dakar without well Dakar?

Though the 2008 Dakar Rally was canceled due to security concerns the event is back in 2009 but this time on a different continent. This year's rally takes place in South America and leads me question whether a rally more than a thousand miles from Dakar should be called the Dakar rally?

While the use of the name is a bit questionable the greater travesty is that the once linear route  is now circular, starting and ending in Buenos Aires. Regardless of the change Versus has once again picked up limited coverage and will air highlights nightly beginning on Sunday, January 4th.  Check out the full schedule at Paddock Talk (http://www.paddocktalk.com/news/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=100339&newlang=&topic=26&catid=) and the official website Dakar.Com (http://www.dakar.com/2009/DAK/LIVE/us/100/index.html).]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:07:31 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1013483</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>The Plan</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1012480</link>
      <description><![CDATA["Russians don't take a dump, son, without a plan."

Now that the holidays are behind us I think that it's high time we discussed the plan for 2009.  For starters my primary goal, besides wealth and fame, is to expand agricultural operations in the respect of "What can I get away with in suburbia".  Years ago when I lived in an apartment I dabbled in back porch gardening.  I was somewhat successful and I expect that I can expand upon that with yard.

The problems are numerous including finding space, conditioning the soil and raising multiple batches of "heritage" plants which may or may not tolerate the season here in North Carolina.  Still in spite of the
challenges and hard work involved, the gardening project is the cheapest hobby I can muster during these lean times. Here are a few of my ideas so far:



Several tomato varieties including pink, green and purple varieties.  Breeds for taste and natural disease resistance.

A common variety sweet corn. Nothing outlandish but supposed to taste better

Purple pumpkins.  A bit strange but these will make excellent and scary jack-o-lanterns.

While jumbo limas.  My last batch of Ford Hook were good but not perfect.  Will probably plant a test patch of these.






]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:37:09 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1012480</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Santa Claus Bailout Hearings</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1007345</link>
      <description><![CDATA[
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:31:58 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/1007345</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>An early Christmas present</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/997575</link>
      <description><![CDATA[..for the people of Tempe Arizona/



Rebloged from Dvorak.org (http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2008/12/23/ho-ho-ho-santa-filmed-disabling-speed-cameras-in-arizona/)

]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:38:01 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/997575</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Traveling with Kids</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/992828</link>
      <description><![CDATA[As our children grow older I find myself looking for tips about how to keep them calm on long car rides.  While we don't fly very much we occasionally make the 4 1/2 hour trip to the beach which can be stressful.  I found the following article on Kiplinger.Com which contains many hints for parents with small children who'll find themselves traveling this holiday season.


Traveling With Tots: A Survival Guide (http://www.kiplinger.com/features/archives/2007/11/tottips.html)
Whether flying or driving with a young one, a little preparation can go a long way toward saving you money -- and keeping your cool.

Via Kiplinger.Com
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 20 Dec 2008 15:18:35 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/992828</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Screw You Yahoo</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/988438</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Reblog from TechCrunch



The Story:
Michelle Chappel, who created the video above, writes in to give us her view of the fall of Yahoo from an insiders perspective:

I have a news tip about a topic you]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:47:35 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/988438</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Kick Ass and chew gum</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/985758</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Today marked the official deep-six of social blogging site Pownce and as such I downloaded my entries and comments for storage.  In the recent weeks I've begun to acclimate myself with Tumblr, a suitable replacement, and to continue my brief Twitter updates  My only fear now is that given the current market and finance conditions either Tumblr or Twitter meet a similar fate as Pownce, gobbled up and shut down.

Across town in our little electronic village my friend Jason (http://browsersnake.blogspot.com/) is undergoing gastric bypass surgery.  I know that his wife is nervous, justifiably so, but she's still found time to write about the experience (http://bypassjourney.blogspot.com/).  I hope everything goes well with the surgery and he makes a speedy recovery.

Little did I know but after the surgery you can't chew gum.  With that in mind I think Jason should start using a new trademark line such as: "Its time to kick ass and chew bubble gum I don't chew gum."  Duke Nukem would be proud.

]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:54:23 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/985758</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Soady Pop</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/974066</link>
      <description><![CDATA[What's more disturbing that a recent trend in secular violence or the terrors of an economy in recession?  The utter decline in journalism.  Take for example this puff piece from CBS about the rise of "teen bombers". (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/12/09/cbsnews_investigates/main4659056.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_4659056#ccmm)  According to the one guy at the ATF they interviewed over half of "Explosive Incidents" are perpetrated by kids under 18.

The meat of this article consists of one guy's opinion and three examples which were most likely Google News searched.   Two of those articles involve a "bomb" made from a soda bottle and a process that would most likely be featured on Myth Busters.  The third sounds more serious but probably involves either gunpowder or compressed gas (or both).

Hey, I'm not saying what these kids did was right but what CBS is doing isn't any better.  They are scaring the shit out of people by carting out the ATF (otherwise known as the Branch Davidian burn down crew) and trying to piece together a story from some rant they probably read on some mommy blogger's site.

Consider this:  The Fed have done such a great job at stopping domestic terrorism that the only people who can get away with anything are jackass teenagers who raid mom's cleaning supplies.  Or on the other hand the Fed is doing such a lousy job that the only people they can catch are the aforementioned bumbling teenagers. Take your pick but either way more in danger from a case of influenza than jr's "science experiment gone bad."]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2008 23:31:20 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/974066</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Pownce is going away</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/972264</link>
      <description><![CDATA[All hail the our new overlords:  Tumblr

Very much the same feature set as Pownce, Tumblr allows you to post images, quotes and attach files.  I also test drove Jaiku but the service was too much like Twitter and didn't offer anything compelling beyond.  So I've transfered microblogging responsibilities to Tumbler.  Visit it at rax262.tumblr.com (http://rax262.tumblr.com/).

Btw, I'm still working the kinks out of the microblog feed box on the right.





]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:00:49 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/972264</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>I hate Yahoo</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/972263</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Despite the fact that many users still use the free email service, I have accepted the fact that the company has been on the downward spiral for some time and that even Karl Icahn can not save them from themselves. If Microsoft buys Yahoo mail I hope they fix the myriad of spam prevention problems that they have which makes the life of every system administrator a living hell.

Having worked with all major providers I can say that Yahoo is the least responsive and the most byzantine when it comes to both mail compliance and the application for white list process.  Massive layoffs and the fact that no one wants to be their CEO is an indication that things will inevitably get worse before they become better.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2008 01:00:48 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/972263</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>A Black Wednesday</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/959805</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The trouble with firefighting is you have to know what to douse the flames with.  Wednesday there was a major emergency with our system at work.  To make a long story short there was a hardware failure, which brought down part of the application and emphasized the importance of checking your redundant backups.  In this case a fail over device did not fail over gracefully and as a result caused an outage to some customers.

To the novice computer user this might seem like gibberish.  When the cause is finally located some question why we couldn't simply "swap a few cables" and make the system work again.  Indeed, in this case, we could have moved a few cable connections but to do so without first troubleshooting the system is very bad.  For starters you risk causing more problems by making a spur of the moment decision without knowing what has gone wrong. Imagine one morning your car won't start so instead of trying to figure out what is wrong with it you start ripping wires out from underneath the hood.  Chances are good that you won't fix the problem and will probably make it worse.

The second drawback to rushing through a solution is that you never really find out the "root cause". In our case the problem appeared to be a bad wire but in fact was due to a bad cable connection plug.  We could have swapped cables all day and never solved the problem.  However we methodically swapped cable and then plug until we figured out which of the two was bad.  Of course the first cable/plug combination we tried was not the problem so we had to mindfully put everything back like it was before moving to the next item.  Had we not done this then I'd wager that the system wouldn't have worked even after we found the bad plug because we could have easily made a mistake which cause yet another problem.

The moral of the story is that while you must try anything and everything to fix a technical problem you need to be mindful to always put things back like you found them.  In a pinch you can always switch back to the default but many times this configuration either won't work well or at all.  Systems and devices that are extremely flexible are often designed this way for a reason: No single solution solves all problems.  Custom configuration is part of the game and if you begin to change these settings you can often make things worse.  Of course this doesn't mean you need to be afraid of troubleshooting, you just need to take good notes of all your changes.
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 02 Dec 2008 10:01:31 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/959805</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>A grassy hill in the sun</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/946287</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Life can be stressful at times and though we think that we have a handle on it we can never truly return to the carefree days of our youth. That is except when a little one asks us, with great innocence and expectation in their eyes, to "roll down the hill with me daddy." It's not about the dirty clothes or the silliness of it all, it's about having fun. It's all that matters on a cool autumn day.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2008 05:04:06 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/946287</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Cornucopia of Crab</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/944111</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Way hey and away we go..  crab fishing returns next weekend to the sunny and now cold island.  Sadly I still haven't eaten the crab I caught last time.  I strongly suspect a seafood themed meal either around Christmas or New Years Day.  

In other seafaring news I believe I *almost* have my maritime themed music channel on Pandora configured to perfection.  It's an eclectic mix of Great Big Sea, Stan Rogers, The Pogues, The Dubliners, Flogging Molly, etc.  I'm still exercising veto power over a few fringe Gordon Lightfoot and Garnet Rogers tunes that pop up from time to time, but overall it's a station that I can listen to for hours without hitting the "fast forward button".

Check out Great Big Folk (http://www.pandora.com/stations/4bcd54b3559e818abd13f5f9332bdf479d65bae90eaced8a)
]]></description>
      <pubDate>Sat, 22 Nov 2008 15:08:46 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/944111</guid>
    </item>
    <item>
      <title>Meet the latest tech gadget: The Pomegranate</title>
      <link>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/936685</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Hottest new cellphone in the world!

Pomegranate is feature packed (http://www.pomegranatephone.com/).  Surf the web, answer email, enjoy a cup of coffee or even practice one of those old hobo tunes as you sit by your barrel of burning stationary after a high profile mega-layoff.  John C. Dvorak says "This thing kills the iPhone, Blackberry, Treo".  No John, the Pomegranate can't really kill (at least in this revision).  Stay tuned for the 30-0-6 Sarah Palin Moosekiller special edition!

Note:  This is a parody and a viral marketing campaign.. but it's funny.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:00:16 -0800</pubDate>
      <guid>http://virb.com/rax262/posts/text/936685</guid>
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