Asymptomatic

I got a Gmail account today. Everybody else has one, so why shouldn't I? Of course, picking a name that hasn't already been taken was a challenge. The "ringmaster" account was taken, and I really don't care to use my real name as an email address. I spent some time putting in some names that I've used for email in the past, along with some new ones.

• "Reorx"- My XBox gamertag, but too short.
• "Charon"-From my BBS days, but taken.
• "s247lo"-From my BBS days, but impossible for anyone else to remember.
• "Kushiel"-Not taken, but the mythology is too small.
• "dissonance"-Not taken, but hard to hear the spelling when spoken.

In the end, I chose something clever for my epithet. I'm sure that with a little thought you can guess what it is, since it's probably the most clever word in this post that I could have used....

I started up Babylon this morning to get the definition of a word, and it displayed this huge advertisement for the newest version, 5.0. But my question is, Why Upgrade?

Babylon is a very cool tool. I use it all the time. With Babylon running in the tray, you hold down the control key and right-click on any word on the screen. Any word, even in window title bars or graphics. Babylon uses some kind of OCR algorithm to read the word, then fetches the definition from its dictionary.

Well, it's nice to have some translation features, but they are really not that handy. What I really want it to do is four things:...

It's got to be the stupidest name I've heard for a thing, but I've finally broken down and installed one.

Basically, a Wiki is a piece of software that allows you to create and edit web pages in a most free-form manner. In fact, the design was intended such that anyone could come along and make changes to any page that they wanted and add any page that they thought was needed.

At first this idea might sound crazy, but it turns out that it's very good for creating collaborative documentation online. For example, one of the best resources on the net right now is the Wikipedia, which is a fantastic complete user-written encyclopedia. Amazing....

The server was hacked sometime early this morning. I'm not sure exactly when, but I think it was between 8 and 9 am EDT. The only thing changed was teh blog breakdown page. I'm not sure if it was deliberate or an unfortunately unprevented accident.

I have since disabled WebDAV for the whole server, and enabled the integrated Windows 2003 firewall. I don't know if this will prevent the problem because I'm still not quite sure what caused it.

This post is password-protected so that nobody can read it and get the idea to start messing around trying to deliberately hack the server, just in case this was somehow accidental and I haven't effectively plugged the hole.