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So recently my girlfriend opened US Bank savings and checking accounts, and as part of the deal received a free flash drive. The representative told her it has some promotional files on it, but they can just be deleted. Not quite. When I plugged the flash drive in, two drives appeared on my desktop (Ubuntu). One was what I expected, a USB mass storage device. The other was a CDROM drive. I looked at what was on it, and it was just a bunch of promotional files and programs. Well obviously this cdrom popping up every time you plug in the drive isn't very nice, so I tried to remove it. Reformatting the device didn't work, it just cleared out the USB mass storage device. I ran dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb to zero out the entire drive, in case reformatting somehow missed something. This destroyed the MBR, partition table, everything. But when I plugged the device back in, the CDROM was still alive and kicking. So this wasn't a hidden partition on the drive, this had to b...

Google talk has recently added a groupchat feature to their talk gadget. This allows multiple users to join a common channel, like IRC or a chatroom on AIM. This is a great feature, and I have personally used it a few times now for working on homework assignments with a small group. However, it is currently only supported (AFAIK) on Google's Flash-based talk gadget. This is alright because of its compatibility with anything that can run flash, but a flash-based client can only do so much. I use Pidgin as my chat client. Formally known as Gaim, this open source program can connect to all major protocols, including the Jabber network, which is what gtalk is on. So when I heard Google was supporting groupchats, I was eager to see if I would be able to connect to the server using pidgin, like I would be able to on any other Jabber server. Well, unfortunately, that isn't available (yet, I hope). It looked like I would be stuck using the flash client. However, there is a way...

Linux is going to replace Windows. For me, at least. No more crashes, no more slow load times, no more Windows. Moving on to better things. Like Fedora Core 5 - it rocks.

Today I was blessed to be reminded why I am so happy I am not in the dorms. Don't get me wrong, I did like the dorms when I was there. However, today Cari (oh so foolishly) clicked on a link in a random IM sent to her. Sure enough, it wasn't really a picture of her that someone found; it was a virus! Now normally I wouldn't be too afraid, an IM virus can't be that dangerous, and sure enough, one reboot-into-safe-mode-and-scan later, as well as a system restore just for good measures, the computer showed no signs of illness. As soon as she got the virus, resnet made her try to log back in (not sure why or how it knew to make her do it) but when she did she was told her computer was 'infected' and she should fix it. Of course, they don't let you access the internet , so you need to fix it via other means. Luckily, we were able to fix it, and so we optimistically logged back into resnet , smuggly celebrating our superiority to the virus that tried to...