Ok, so I’ve finished migrating my pseudo-static content from my Wordpress database to actual directories. It can be reached via the navigation in the top right, or here:

• /study
• /writing
• /tools
• /contact
• /about

Check out the /tools page, by the way; notice that it validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict. Yes. Kneel before Zod. Oh, and my brand spankin’ new custom CSS stylesheet validates too. I made that thing by hand, completely CSS formatted — no tables or nuthin’.

Now for the most difficult part — making an entirely separate stylesheet just for my main page (this blog), aka “Operation Un-Gimp”. This stylesheet, like the one for my static content, is going to be tableless and all that good stuff, but it’s also going to have a left-floating sidebar in the primary content area, i.e. it’s going to look just like you see here, but with no tables whatsoever. I’m redoing the entire thing from scratch.

Wish me luck.

If you come to the site tomorrow and see nothing but a bunch of bright green Wingdings, you’ll know it didn’t go so well.

http://andrewhammel.typepad.com/germanjoys/2006/01/theawesome_pow.html

If you have any interest whatsoever in understanding why the West seems perpetually at odds with the Islamic world, go read this right now:

http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/newsweek/101501_why.html

OMFG — this guy is unbelievable. This guy is going to be very famous, very soon.

Video: Russian Street Acrobat

This guy is simply amazing; check out his pencil drawings. http://arminmersmann.artroof.com/ 

For anyone interested, here’s the initial few pages under the new custom, static layout I’ve designed from scratch (XHTML and CSS). So far I have /tools, /contact, and /about. If you’re into this kind of stuff let me know what you think.

This laptop will be mine soon (when I say soon I mean in 2015 when some become available).

Is it just me or does the feature list for Windows Vista sound like that of Windows 95 with some extra stuff? Better search capabilities? Better Graphics? Come on. How hard is that to do comsidering where they’re coming from? The OS is fundamentally the same OS that came out in 95. It’s much more stable and much faster, but there haven’t been any breakthroughs — nothing remotely comparable to the difference between OS9 and OSX.

Look, I’m not saying Vista is going to suck. Hell, XP doesn’t suck; it’s a decent OS, all joking aside. But how does Microsoft hope to compete with likes of Apple when their brand spankin’ new flagship OS is essentially a reskinned Windows 95/98/2000/XP? I don’t think they can. I think they are going to flop big time on this one. Why on this one in particular? Because this time someone is waiting in the wings with an alternative.

I think 2006 is going to be the year of the Apple. Between the new Macs that just came out and the non-event that the Vista release is going to be, I’d say Microsoft is going to enter 2007 seriously back on its heels. Once people start seeing OSX en masse, and get the news that the hardware is no longer alien, I think people are going to start flocking to Apple. That’s not to mention the iPod effect.

Anyway, we’ll see. My prediction is like 15% marketshare by 2008.

I’ve written a simple tool for speeding up the scanning of multiple networks using Nmap. It also does a bit of service analysis based on the results and outputs a list of live hosts for use with other tools.

It’s called Scat (Security Consultant’s Assessment Tool), and it’s available for download if anyone’s interested.

Tool: Scat

(Commence with the “crappy” tool jokes)

An excellent piece about how so many miss the point of what college is:

http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/archives/2005/11/yourcollegeis.html