Just found Flock...

Seems very cool... I will test drive this new social software...

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Moi...

Summer is coming to an end and all the children are returning back to school....

The summer has been freaking hot which was verified with my electrical bill bring 100 % bigger then usual. But what can I do. The house needed to be kept cool as there is one in the oven .. so to speak.

I start off with the best intentions with writing this. Thought me studying for the CISSP would motivate me to keep my thoughts on paper but alas, I let it go for the summer.

One thing that I would like to say is that Katrina hit the US gulf coast this week and there are reports of thousands dead. I have the utmost sympathy for them but I ask myself what were this people thinking. A Cat 5 hurricane is bearing down on a city 10 below sea level and you thought to stick around. I heard of a story on CNN that mentioned a pregant woman needed to swim to help to get medicine for here 5 year old and went into labour. The new baby is fine (so I heard) but the women has no idea where her 5 year old is. This really bothered me!!

No one can stand up to the fury of Mother Nature.

Hopefully more to come,
F1fan

PS> for those still wondering I have not yet writen the CISSP.

Been a while again...

I've been busy completing my 11 week CISSP course at a local IT traing school (and yes, there are still IT schools around after 2002). I passed the course and got my 'certification' :-)... now, I only have to pass the USD$499 exam (if I schedule early).

'Spring is in the air' FINALLY. This winter has made me a little stir crazy, and it is nice to see that Ferrari is doing poorly in 4th place in the constructors championship. Ferrari have always been poor winners and losers. Just look at the ruckus caused when Williams/Mclaren (Michelin) found a loop hole with tire width. Had Ferrari lost the championship all hell would have broken loose in the FIA.

Another example is Ferrari not signing the season's testing ban. Sure they are the only top team on Bridgestone tires, but that's there own fault. The excuse that the team needs more time testing as Michelin has 7 teams to draw data from. WHINERS

Till after Behrain

F1Fan
"It is my duty to completely drain you..."

Found some interesting articles today on the internet...

It looks like someone figured out how to use the drift in computer clocks to ID your machine anywhere on the internet. In a worst case, a laptop can be I'd from anywhere it plug in/accesses the internet.

New Release:
http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/security/0,2000061744,39183346,00.htm
Technical Paper:
http://www.caida.org/outreach/papers/2005/fingerprinting/

I find this article to be one of the scariest I've seen in a while. The implications are wide reaching. What if this 'skew' is measured by computer manufactures at shipping time and then forwarded to interested parties... Why use cookies to track your activity anymore when you could use this method.

Mr conspiracy ... I know, but just trying to think outside the box.

F1fan.

PS> Season starts this weekend!!! Can't wait.

Thought to post some of my pictures from the weekend car show here. Even though I am a formula1fan, this was my first F1 car that I have seen up close. I even got a close shot of the diffuser.


Toyota F1 Car



Toyota F1 Diffuser

I can't wait for the new season to start... only one week away!! Qualifying and no tire changes are going to drastically change the season. From my readings, the teams have already made up the 20-30% loss in downforce the 2005 regulations were supposed to impose on the teams... it now comes up to the tires. Will teams pit more often for fuel and keep the car light to save the tires OR force the tire manufacturers to bring harder tires. But this then slows the cars as the harder the tire is the less 'sticky' it is.

My predictions for the 2005 season...
TEAMS
1. BAR Honda is going to do very well, might take the constructors championship.

2. Renault (historically very easy on tires) will give BAR a run for the constructors.

DRIVERS
1. Kimi to win the World Drivers Championship.

2. Jenson Button to give Kimi a run for his money!

Only time will tell...

F1fan

My Sony Trinitron died!!

I had a 15 inch Sony Trinitron 100 GS monitor for my workstation. Yesterday after booting the machine I noticed a little green key on the bottom left corner of the screen. After google'ing the problem Sony's suggestion was to send it in to the factory for repairs... Ya, right I was going to do that!!

So I went shopping and picked myself up a new monitor. A BenQ FP731.


BenQ FP731 Monitor

Being the cheap guy that I am, I went around to a couple of stores looking for deals. I went into the local BestBuy where there was a flyer special on a 17 inch NEC, but they didn't have any in stock!! It must have been one of those items that the business uses to try to get you to come visit the store in the hopes that you would buy something else.

After the BestBuy guy told me there were none in stock, I asked him what other monitors he had in stock and he told me to go and try FutureShop down the road. I guess he didn't want to sell me a monitor today. This is the first time I have had bad service here, better not continue if they want my money!

After all that, I picked up the BenQ (who ever they are) 17 inch monitor for $299 bucks... not a bad deal!! For the price, I think that it is a pretty good LCD monitor. I have surfed the Web, watched a DVD and booted to Fedora and WinXP and they both look great.

NOTE: When using Fedora Core 3, I selected the generic LCD monitor driver at 1280 X 1024 (supported by my Intel 845 chip) and it worked the first time. You can never know when configuring display drivers in Linux for integrated graphics cards what the result will be.

I'll try and update the site on what I think of the monitor so far.

F1Fan

Finally I got this picture posted on my blog... F1fan is a play on words.

F1fan for formula1 racing fan and F1fan for pressing the f1 key on the keyboard for help.

F1Fan

That wasn't so bad!!

Been working through all the CISSP chapters (taking a CISSP prep course) and the networking section was so bad. I thought it was going to be really tough but I had a lot more knowledge than I thought.

One point my instuctor pointed about me was that I had a knack about thinking outside the box, but that it might hurt me when I go to write the CISSP exam. I need to remember that the exam is based on the perspective of a manager with a security background.

I can see a vulnerability with systems, programming logic and how those assumptions network administer and programmers can be used to take advantage of systems.

Last time I really had a chance to program was about 2 years ago. So, I have been trying to back into it. Wrote a little web site that when I get administrative rights to the network, I can query all Windows logs from my .NET application. There were a couple of tough hurdles but it works in beta. Now I just need to add some finesse to it. Gave me some confidence to try something harder. I will let you know what that project is.

l8ter,
F1fan