Dave’s Ramblings

A great funny passed on from a friend;

A passenger in a taxi tapped the driver on the shoulder to ask him something. The driver screamed, lost control of the cab, nearly hit a bus, drove up over the curb, and stopped just inches from a large plate glass window. For a few moments everything was silent in the cab, then the driver said, Please, don’t ever do that again. You scared the
daylights out of me.” The passenger, who was also frightened, apologized and said he didn’t realize that a tap on the shoulder could frighten him so much, to which the driver replied, “I’m sorry, it’s really not your fault at all. Today is my first day driving a cab. I have been driving a hearse for the last 25 years.

But one of these guys sure would… AMD not only walking through the doors of dual core processors for our new toys, hell they are busting the doors down. Two CPU cores running on a single chip, multi threaded consuming roughly the same power as a single core processor, and similar heat ratings, no need to add another pound of copper for a heatsink or 4 more case fans, but still getting MORE POWER! Of course in the usual AMD fashion, far superior performance than its comparable Intel offerings. For those not so techy, imagine the ability of your machine to handle two tasks simultaneously and really fast!

The AMD Athlon 64 X2!

For the real fanatics, TechReport has a ton of benchmarks and more details (and yes I did read every page!) [insert ‘Homer Simpson drool’ effect]

For right around a grand you might be able to get your paws on the 4800+ X2 sometime next month.

Another security patch release of phpBB was released today now up to version 2.0.15.

Get the vew version or patches directly from phpBB.com.

l.i. Changes since 2.0.14
Fixed moderator status removal in groupcp.php
Removed newlines after ?> on some files - Thoul
Added admin re-authentication (admin needs to login seperatly to access the ACP) - backported from Olympus
Fixed vulnerability in url/bbcode handling functions - PapaDos and Paul/Zhen-Xjell from CastleCops
Fixed issue in admin/admin_forums.php
Suppressed warning message for fsockopen in /includes/smtp.php - Thoul
Fixed bug in admin/admin_smilies.php (admin is able to add empty smilies) - Exy
Adjusted documents to reflect the urgent need to update the files too (not only running the database update script)
Updated the readme file
Added one new language variable
Added general error if accessing profile for a non-existent user
Changed session id generation to be more unique - Henno Joosep
Fixed bug in highlight code to escape characters correctly
Reversed the 2.0.14 fix for postgresql because it produced more problems than it solves.
Added reference to article written by R45 about case-sensitivity in postgreSQL to the readme file
Fixed bypassing of validate_username on registration - Yen
Empty url/img bbcodes no longer get parsed

For all of you who have been bitching about the use of Radio Frequency ID’s (RFID) that have been proposed in the past for placement on or within items at your local grocery/department store here comes another step of this becoming more a reality.

Robots to help out blind shoppers as reported on BBC News They use laser range finders and some sort of RF scanner to help locate items.

Yes I suppose the privacy issues will rear its head again, do I care if someone knows I purchased a screwdriver set, pliers, some electrical tape, wire, soldering iron, two boxes of shotgun shells, and three boxes of rat poison, MAYBE the FBI, but then again if I was stupid enough to purchase items like that together and intended to do harm… then I deserve to get caught. Knowing somewhere there is a record I bought 4 steaks and a case of Mountain Dew and these items were tracked and stored in some database somewhere… who cares? Not I.

I can’t stand shopping, when the day comes where I can order groceries via a website and have them delivered to the house I’ll be just tickled. Yeah I know there are places around where this is a reality today. Aside from food items, if I can’t order them and have UPS bring it to me, then I generally didn’t need it anyhows. RFID’s or not.

I quick shot Angel got of our granddaughter holding one of the pups from our recent litter. They are both just adorable, but Smidgy (Jorden to the rest of the world) was named by me, and as soon as I found out it drive my now daughter-in-law crazy, well that was like adding gasoline to the fire Another long story, enjoy the picture.

The puppies are located in south central Wisconsin and are now just over a week old, so they have quite a ways to go before they are ready for their new homes, the has already been forming. We have 5 males and 2 females, 5 of the 7 are tri-colored, meaning black/white/tank or liver/white/tan, and lets face it, English Springer Spaniels are just great pups to have around.