Jory Stone's Place

I've moved my blog to my primary domain, www.jory.info, with hosting by 1and1, a fairly decent host with good prices.

I've setup yet another website.
My previous host Dreamhost deleted my host account without warning and hasn't responded to my questions yet.

Now I've moved my site to silenceisdefeat.org, which is quite an awesome free service ($1 donation required to get an account). They've been stable for over 2yrs and provide 50MB of free space.

My site is also now in blog format, hopefully it will make it easier to update

Well, I've redone my website. Gone is the Mambo CMS PHP and back to nice lean XHTML and CSS. The Mambo CMS was easy to use, but required being online to make any changes. It also was a pain to backup, you had to backup both the files and the MySQL database. Also it was exploitable, being PHP, I really should have keep it updated to the latest Mambo version but that was too much work for a website as small as mine.

Also called The Advancement of Jory Stone

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Cicra Prehistoric times: An Amstrad, believed to have a 2x86 CPU.
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Cicra 1996: An IBM 486 50Mhz with 20MB RAM and a 2x CD-ROM.


Cicra 1998: Then on a 6x86 133Mhz with 96MB of RAM.


Cicra 2000: Now with a M2 250Mhz with 160MB of RAM.


2003: Then a T-Bird 650Mhz with 320MB of RAM.
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2005: After that a Athlon 64 2800+ with 512MB of RAM.
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2006: Currently with a Intel Core 2 E6300 with 1GB of RAM.
<No Picture> Continue reading "The Life of Jory Stone in Pictures"

Dad had new tires put on the van today. The old tires were well worn, one was balding so bad you could see the metal mesh underneath. Another slowly leaked air and had to be aired up everyday before driving anywhere.

I spent most of today outside cleaning Mom's AC and playing with Lily. I didn't plan on playing in the pool but I slipped and fell into the pool, and so since I was already wet I went ahead and played with Lily for a while. Took me quite some time to dry even though it was scorching outside today. I think a have a light sunburn, it doesn't hurt but my skin is visibly red.

In the computer side of things, I setup my local Linux box to act as a caching http proxy using squid. It was very easy to configure and setup and it actually does seem to help. I expect with all four computers using the proxy we should benefit from visiting the same sites.

After setting up the proxy I thought about RAID-5, the Linux box is also our backup server. Every night all our systems do a daily backup via ftp to the Linux box. RAID-5 would make me feel much safer and would actually be very easy to setup.

After googling a little bit I found this interesting article on Tom's Hardware about using Software RAID-5 in Windows XP Pro, http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20041119/.

After reading that I think software RAID is much better than hardware RAID for the recovery aspect, as with hardware if your RAID controller fails you will need to buy another one of the same model if you still can. With software RAID all you need is a system that has enough IDE (or SATA) connections.

The cost of software RAID isn't high either, just the cost of the hard drives. Buying three 160GB hard drives for a total of 320GB of storage in RAID-5 comes out to almost $200.

Wow, I haven't written a blog entry for quite sometime.

I've been busy looking for my own car and working to have enough money to actually pay for the car

I recently bought a laptop and have been using the wireless lan. I must say a notebook is one of the coolest things I've messed with. Being able to move from room to room without any hassle. Using it in the car it sweet to, of course I only use it when I'm not driving... One thing that amazes me is hot the laptop gets whenever you really start using the cpu. I don't know how it compares to other laptops, but it gets hot enough that it actually burns my bare legs. You have to wear some jeans to keep your legs intact while doing heavy processing. Light processing like surfing the internet, listening to mp3s, chatting, and compiling doesn't heat it up very much so those tasks work very well on it. However I'm afraid to do any video encoding for fear that it would melt itself. Continue reading "Long time no see"

Only a week left of college this semester. It has has just flown by.

I managed to apply for FA early enough so that this Fall I will be getting some aid. But I had still missed the deadline for the extra scholarships offered through the college. I had only missed the deadline by two weeks

I've been taking my younger brother to praise team practice at the church and have been thinking about getting a laptop so I could work while there. During the summer I could really use it, since right now I'm just using that 2-3 hours we stay there to study. But when college is over I'm not going have anything useful to do.

I looked at Walmart's $500 laptop, quite nice for the price. Though for me the cpu is too slow, not enough memory or hard drive space. I've read the 1Ghz VIA C3 is roughly equal to a Celeron 633Mhz which isn't too bad but it would be too much of a slow down from my current A64 1.8Ghz. I think 1Ghz should be useful. The 128MB of RAM is also much to small, 512MB would be the ideal amount as I multi-task like crazy. 20GB would barely hold all my mp3's much less my development tools and code. I think I could manage with a 40GB, of course my dream laptop would have a 120GB+. Hey I said dream laptop

I cleaned out a bunch of spyware from my mom's computer today. She said every time she opened Internet Explorer. The desktop would be flooded with popups, the cd-rom tray would go in and out, and a voice would keep crying out "Help!".

I had tried out AdAware many times and this stuff seemed to keep coming back. So, I tried out Bazooka http://www.kephyr.com/spywarescanner/, it doesn't remove the ad/spyware just scans and provides instructions to remove it. It took about a hour or so to remove everything.

Afterwards I download the new Mozilla Firefox 1.0 Preview Release and installed it to replace Internet Explorer, hopefullly it will stand up better in stopping evil-ware.

I ordered a Kingston 256MB SD memory card from newegg.com for $29, with a $10 mail-in rebate it's $19. The same price as a 64MB card at Walmart.

http://www.domainsite.com/ isn't offering free 1-year .info domain registers anymore. I had got http://jcsston.info/ when it was free. But it's really cheap $0.99 for 1-year. One cool thing about their account system is that they are good about the passwords. They will ban your IP after 10 invalid password tries. When I entered a wrong password once they sent me an e-mail with the IP of offender (me), and recommended I change my password. A bit overkill maybe, it these days of people worrying about ID theft that is really useful and I would like to see more sites treating invalid passwords more seriously. I sometimes forget my password and have to try a few times, but if I don't get it in 9 times I should click the "Forgot your password?" link.

I got bit/stung today when walking again. Only went 7 laps this time, last time I had got 27 laps before something bit me. It didn't swell up as much as last time so I suspect it was a different bug. I'm not sure if I will try walking outside again, getting twice in a row isn't a good track record. But I've walked for a few weeks without any problems.

I dislike ad-ware and spy-ware, if you want money for software sell it.

I was just working in MS VS.NET last night and I started getting a bucket load of stuff being installed. I wasn't browsing the internet or anything, though I'm on a LAN, but connected to the Internet via NAT. I pulled up the task list and ended the dozens of processes but they keep respawning. After I finally got it under control, I had to remove Active Alert, ATP, Bargain Buddy, BMSE dbl, Download Genie, IE Help, IEC System, Internet Optimizer, ISTsvc, SE Assistant, SE Help, Search Assistant, Search Function, Sidebar Search, SlotchBar, and TV Media.

I wonder what those programmers were thinking.