average admins

I just ran across a pretty cool game over at http://www.addictinggames.com called N-Game.

The premise of the game is that you’re a stick figure that’s trying to solve the puzzle to let you advance to the next level. The physics are awesome and the gameplay is really well put together.

If you’ve got a few seconds, you should look into this. Highly recommended. Make sure you read the instructions first so you’ll know how to use some of the advanced moves like the wall jump.

Oh this site is great. It’s about all the people who have thrown their Wii remotes through their TVs. It’s amazing that so many people can’t hold on to those remotes and it’s equally as funny that the TVs these guys break are the big 50″ LCD kind. How hard do you have to throw a remote to break the TV? I’m guessing pretty hard.

This site is hilarious.

http://www.wiihaveaproblem.com/index.php

As you read in my last blog, I told of how I became to dislike the Samsung Blackjack. I returned it and began looking at the Palm Treo 680 and the Blackberry Pearl. The Treo was just basically the Treo 650 sans the antenna, which was a very nice little subtraction, but the Pearl really caught my eye and I’ve already had the 650! I already have the BB 7130c and I like the Suretype keyboard, despite what other people say about it. I, honestly, have yet to find something I don’t like about this phone. I mean this thing is almost as small as the Motorola SLVR. It is as thin as my RAZR closed, and is smaller than my 7130c. This phone has all the same features of the Blackjack, but is faster (personally I think this is due to the processor of the Samsung). It has a 1.3MP camera, qwerty keyboard, Bluetooth 2.0, MicroSD slot, PUSH email, Push to Talk, trackball (finally got rid of that horrible clickwheel), and an HTML browser. The processor is amazingly fast on this phone and has a very loud headset. The calls are crystal clear. I tested the headset at Ta Molly’s, which we all know is one of the loudest restaurants in town and it did very good.  I love the keyboard. One great feature that BB finally added was caller picture ID’s. I just hooked up my phone to my laptop and it sync’d with my Outlook Contacts, pictures and all. It took a little while to get used to not having the clickwheel, but i’m getting the hang of it. So, that’s it for now! If ya have any questions or wanna see the Pearl, gimme a holler!

The phone guru,

jason

I remember reading a cool article a long time ago about how it was possible for someone to create a backdoored image and use it to gain access to the internal network of the company he was targeting. The article was called Wardriving Into GIAC Enterprises with JPEG’s and is available here: http://www.giac.org/certified_professionals/practicals/gcih/0651.php

Well, apparently it’s STILL possible to backdoor an image, but this time it’s with JavaScript. I don’t know JavaScript very well but I can only assume that it’s possible to code a quick script to download any imaginable tool and execute it.

http://www.gnucitizen.org/blog/backdooring-images

Surely you’ve heard of how it’s possible, by just visiting a website, to have a JavaScript script sent to your computer which can do any number of things … such as port scanning your internal network, for example. SPIDynamics has written a POC that does just that. You can read about there here: http://www.spidynamics.com/spilabs/education/articles/JS-portscan.html. Now you know how to incorporate that code in a simple image.

If you want to test this out yourself and you don’t have a webserver for uploading images, try downloading XAMPP and setting up a webserver on your local machine. It’s perfect for testing web applications such as this.

I have been running Microsoft Windows XP in Parallels, a virtual machine application for Intel based Macs, on my MacBook and have been very pleased. I do however have a question about Windows XP specifically, although this question may apply to other versions of Windows. Why does Windows XP seem to run better in virtual machines than on actual PC hardware?

I use Win4BSD, a virtual machine application from the makers of Win4Lin for FreeBSD, on my FreeBSD 6.x laptop to run Windows XP and have experienced the same result there. I ran Qemu before that with the same results.

I know Chris uses VMware Workstation on Debian Linux with Windows XP installed and has expressed the same thing about his experiences. Actually, Chris said he had even better performance out of Windows XP by running Windows XP in his VMware virtual machine and then using rdesktop, an open source Remote Desktop Connection client, to connect to the virtual machine. Crazy!

I haven’t used VMware on a Windows box in quite sometime so I don’t know if there are performance gains by running Windows XP in a virtual machine on Windows XP. So, maybe someone out there in aa land can chime in on that. But, the question remains: why does it run better? Is the virtual hardware more fine tuned to run the necessities of Windows XP? If anyone out there has any knowledge behind Virtual Machine internals, please let us in on the secret.

I am also very interested to see if anyone else’s experiences mimic my own. Is it just me? Am I getting lucky? What’s the 411?!

Until next time…

I recently purchased an Xbox 360 and have been fascinated with the whole 360 dashboard experience and the Xbox Live! integration with all of the games. I especially like the fact that you can stream music, photos, and movies from a Windows XP or a Windows XP Media Center PC. That’s extremely cool. I have a Windows XP machine at the house, mainly used for playing Windows only games, but my stash of music resides on my MacBook. What to do?!

While browsing around the web I found a nifty little $20 program called Connect360 by Nullriver Software. This software integrates with your iTunes and iPhoto libraries so that you can stream media content to your Xbox 360 as if it were coming from a Windows PC. The software even updates the Last Played tags for your songs in iTunes, which is pretty cool, so your Recently Played playlist can be as up-to-date as possible.

While this is extremely cool, there is one downside… You can’t play any DRM content on the 360. Any albums/songs/movies purchased through the iTunes Store are not playable on the 360 due to the copy protection in place on those files. But! CDs you have ripped to your Mac using iTunes in AAC format are playable, meaning you could burn your purchased music to a CD and rip it using iTunes as AAC, MP3, or whatever and you’re good to go. Other supported audio formats are WAV, AIFF and Apple Lossless. In the photo category, you can display JPEG, RAW, GIF, PNG, BMP and TIFF images on the 360 straight from your iPhoto library. Currently, only WMV+WMA videos are supported for streaming video… Sorry, no Quicktime videos at this time.

All playlists from iTunes and iPhoto are intact so you can stream your slideshows from iPhoto and listen to your favorite audio playlist (minus any DRM’d content) at the same time for a wonderful media center experience. It is extremely cool to be streaming music from your laptop while playing Gears of War. The music on gears of War is good but having Metallica’s …And Justice For All or Sepultura’s Roots playing subtly in the background is a nice feature. In the end, the streaming experience sure beats having to rip CDs to your Xbox’s hard drive like the generation 1 Xbox. And doing it from a Mac, thanks to Nullriver’s Connect360, makes it that much better (for Mac users of course)!

Until next time…

We’ve all seen dual monitor setups and several of us use dual monitors which is very nice to have. Well the conventional way to run a dual monitor setup is to either have a video card that supports two monitors or to install two video cards in your machine. I know you’re thinking…”yeah yeah yeah, I already know this”. Anywh0, a year or so ago a few fellow Average Adminers researched high and low to find a way to run a true dual monitor setup on a laptop (two external monitors). Why…you ask? So that we could use a laptop as a primary workstation and have the same or similar feel as a desktop, by using dual monitors, a docking station, etc, and have mobile computing at the same time. Simple task you would think. Well not so simple we later found out. After lots of research we found a device or two that would allow you to run dual or two external monitors on a laptop, BUT if i remember correctly neither one worked exactly how we envisioned they would and not only that, they were very very pricey. One of the devices was in the $400 range I believe. And none of the devices were capable of displaying very high resolution. Ouch!…needless to say, we laid that idea to rest. Well it seems now (at least a year or so later) that there are some better more affordable solutions available. One that I accidentally ran across recently is a USB to SVGA adapter. I don’t personally own one so who knows how well it really works and handles multiple monitors but it sounds like this would have done the trick. It’s USB so that’s convenient, capable of displaying 1280X1024, and pretty affordable at only $79.99. Got pretty good reviews as well. Where was this a year ago?

USB 2.0 to SVGA Adapter

Well, I had the phone for almost 3 weeks and finally couldn’t handle some of the con’s it had. Go Here for my review on the Samsung Blackjack.  The con’s finally outweighed the pro’s.  The screen was getting increasingly dusty, on the actual lcd screen.  When clean, this phone is one of the hottest phones out there.  My other problems with the phone included:  the phone was so flat that your ear tended to hurt after long conversations, application loading just got annoying to wait for, the camera took like 4 years to load and it had no flash, and occasionally it wouldn’t read my microSD card.  Anyway, I had been looking at the Blackberry Pearl for T-Mobile and had done some research on it, but it seemed I would be stuck with my BB 7130c.  Then 2 weeks after I got the Blackjack, Cingular, those sneaky bastards, dropped the Blackberry Pearl.  I didn’t know this until yesterday.  So, with my ever growing disdain for the Blackjack, I took it back and got the Blackberry Pearl.  I will blog more about this later today, but right now, I gotta go!  For now, here’s the link to the Blackberry Pearl.

The phone playa,

jason

I spent a few minutes at work last night after everyone left to catch up on some Windows patches that, for whatever reason, weren’t being installed by the WSUS server.

We run all of our client workstations through a proxy that gets assigned through Logon scripts. Since I was logging on to these workstations as the local Administrator I was not getting the proxy settings assigned to me so I had to manually configure each PC’s IE settings twice (once to add the proxy and another to remove it). I only had a handful (maybe 20) of PCs to do this to so it wasn’t THAT big of a deal but it got me wondering if there was an easier way to apply the proxy settings to IE. After a quick Google search I found a site that explains what registry settings to make: http://www.adopenstatic.com/cs/blogs/ken/…/131.aspx

I’ve never used RegWrite in any of my scripts so I had to look it up:
http://www.devguru.com/…/wshshell_RegWrite.html

So here’s the final scripts that can easily be placed on a server for quick access:

IE-EnableProxySettings.vbs

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject(”WScript.Shell”)
WshShell.RegWrite “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ProxyEnable”,”1″,”REG_DWORD”
WshShell.RegWrite “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ProxyServer”,”proxyserver:8080″,”REG_SZ”

IE-DisableProxySettings.vbs

Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject(”WScript.Shell”)
WshShell.RegWrite “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ProxyEnable”,”0″,”REG_DWORD”
WshShell.RegDelete “HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ProxyServer”

A while back on the OSP site we had some discussions (which are now closed and point to this site) about the Unreal 3 engine. This thread also included some screenshots which can be found here. While we were all waiting for the next edition to the Unreal Tournament franchise, CliffyB snuck the technology into Gears of War for the Xbox 360.

I recently purchased an Xbox 360 and the Gears of War game and ever since I watched Chris and his brother Taylor (a.k.a. Xp1o1d5) I thought it looked very Unreal’ish and they agreed. Now, when the first screenshots for the Unreal 3 technology first appeared, I didn’t remember there being all the additional content near the bottom of the page on there like there is on the page now. The character renderings on the bottom of the page actually show the main character of the Gears of War game, Marcus Fenix. Sweet!

This game is mo-bad (do people say that any more?) and I recommend it to anyone with a spare $60 and an Xbox 360. If you don’t have either of those, find a friend who does. You will throughly enjoy your Gears of War experience. I know Chris, Taylor, Joey, and myself have really enjoyed the split-screen co-op mode. So, get out there and enjoy some of the Unreal 3 goodness!

Until next time…