It's not a "Southern thang" anymore

Finding a great place to get away from work for an hour can be more difficult than it seems. We learned that the hard way. For us, Town Fryer was a rare find that offered a great place for out of the ordinary food and a fun time. Friday lunch at the Fryer became our lunch tradition. Unfortunately it was short lived once we found out the Fryer will be closing. Clevelanders who have had the opportunity to eat there will be losing more then just a restaurant, they're losing a great time in a fun and welcoming environment. It will not be easy to find a replacement for the Fryer, we will miss you :(

If you haven't had a chance to experience The Town Fryer, visit http://www.thetownfryer.com/ and stop in before they close for good.

Windows Vista. . . It's nice!

The RTM version of Windows Vista was released to business users about a month ago and I had high hopes. I've always liked exploring different operating systems, and in the past few years I've found at least a few things I've really liked in most. When I saw the first build of Vista, I knew that this OS would be huge. I write this post under Vista Business Edition running on my Mac and the look and feel of the OS is just as appealing as the hardware it's running on !(MacBook) Since the release of OS X, Macintosh had the eye candy that Windows lacked. Apple became more of a style than anything, and the Ipod was the perfect companion. It looks like Microsoft is finally catching up with their latest operating system. If your hardware supports it, Vista's Aero Glass gives your windows theme a transparent look,(shown in screen shot above) and the start menu has a sort of Gnome look to it. Many Mac fanatics will argue that Vista is a carbon copy of OS X. I do admit the argument can be made, but my rebuttal would be that Mac stole ideas from Xerox from the beginning. In my personal opinion, if every OS stole what's good in another, users like us win.

In a nutshell:
Vista looks and runs nice even if they stole from Apple. Let's hope they market it better then the Zune.
It will get bombarded with hack attempts to highlight any security holes hackers might find, but Windows users are used to the patch your OS everyday thing anyways.

Asia scrambles to restore communications after quake

Hate to always link to articles but it's hard to find time to add content to this blog, here's the article!

Converting DVD movies for the iPod using Mac OSX

Found a very nice piece of software called Handbrake that allows you to convert a dvd to Ipod format. Handbrake is completely free and can be downloaded here

Anders.com has a full tutorial for both Mac and Windows users!

Fantastic Four: Rise of Silver Surfer

You can view the trailer Here.

View the Solar System with Stellarium!

Stellarium is an awesome open source program that allows you to view the solar system! Stellarium is packed with features and is unbelievably accurate. Check it out @ www.stellarium.org

Asia wakes up to life without technology

BANGKOK: It was a tsunami for the digital age, a collapse of the virtual world that radiated through much of Asia and beyond after an undersea earthquake late Tuesday off the coast of Taiwan.

People woke Wednesday to find themselves without e-mail or the Internet and, in some cases, without telephone connections, cut off from the real world around them.

The earthquake, which triggered a tsunami alert and some physical damage, ruptured two of the undersea cables that are part of a communications fretwork that circles the globe.

Coming on the second anniversary of the Asian tsunami that killed 230,000 people, it was a reminder of the world's increasing dependence on communications technology.

Financial companies and technology services suffered most directly, with banking services and securities trading all but crippled. Operations from travel agencies to newspapers to schools were struggling to maintain their routines.

Full Article

Report: Apple forged options documents

BusinessWeek

NEW YORK

Shares of Apple Computer Inc. fell Wednesday after a legal publication reported that former company executives apparently forged documents to maximize executives' stock option profits.

The Recorder, a San Francisco-based publication owned by American Lawyer Media, reported late Tuesday that federal prosecutors are looking into forged documents at Apple related to administering stock options.

The publication also disclosed that CEO Steve Jobs has hired his own outside counsel separate from the company's legal team.

Apple is one of nearly 200 companies that have disclosed SEC, DOJ or internal investigations for potential backdating of stock options. Backdating refers to retroactively pegging the strike price of an option to a day when the stock traded cheaply. Options with low strike prices are more valuable to their owner because they are less expensive to exercise.

In October, Apple said an internal investigation raised concerns about how two former officers recorded and accounted for stock options. Citing people with knowledge of the investigation, The Recorder reported those two former officers were General Counsel Nancy Heinen and Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson.

Shares of Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple Computer fell $3.84, or 4.7 percent, to $77.67 in morning trading on the Nasdaq. The stock has traded in a range of $50.16 and $93.16 in the past year.

Vista Security Flaws Uncovered

by Michael Calore

Tuesday, 26 December 2006

One full month before Microsoft Windows Vista ships to consumers, hackers and security experts have already discovered six serious flaws in the operating system. Vista was made available to business customers one month ago. Since then, the experts have been throwing everything they can come up with at this build of Vista hoping to discover possible vulnerabilities before the general public starts running the OS on their home machines.

John Markoff of The New York Times profiled the security software firm Determina and its tests to uncover exploits in Vista.

Here are some of the flaws, paraphrased from the NYT story:

• Determina discovered a bug in Internet Explorer 7 that allows malware to be surreptitiously installed on a user's computer if he visits a "booby-trapped site" while browsing the web.
• Determina also discovered a way to disable a network's Microsoft Exchange server by sending an infected email.
• An unnamed Russian programmer discovered a way to hack his user permissions on all Windows systems on a corporate network using a Vista exploit. This is particularly dangerous, since a hacker could use his increased privileges to circumvent IE7's built-in sandbox controls.
• Tokyo-based company Trend Micro has discovered a hacker on a Japanese message board offering to sell information about a Vista security flaw for $50,000.

Flaws are to be expected, especially in something as widely used and anticipated as a new version of Windows. Microsoft will most likely be releasing patches constantly during Vista's first six months on consumer desktops. Either way, if you're planning on running Vista right away, invest in some security software -- and use Firefox!

Shocked? I hope not ;)

Craythur is your desktop to go.

I stumbled upon a pretty cool AJAX desktop called Craythur. Creating an account is free and easy. Craythur allows you to Upload files, create tasks, calendar entries, etc. all from your web browser using their desktop-like interface. Looks a lot like Aero Glass. Nice work if I may say so myself.

Sun's Looking Glass 3D Desktop Released

Looking Glass, which was first shown off in 2003 and released as an open-source project in 2004, allows users to run a Java-based desktop environment on top of Windows, or on Linux or Solaris. The software allows certain applications to be run in a "2.5D" environment, allowing them to be rotated in 3D space to maximize the available desktop space.

The interface also includes a launch bar along the bottom middle of the screen, similar in appearance to the Apple OS X's Dock.

According to the developers, Looking Glass includes several interesting features not included in either the Apple or Windows OSes: the ability to "fly" left or right to a new virtual desktop, or to use the "back" of a virtual window. Windows can also be organized on their "side," allowing a "bookshelf" view of the available windows. Users can download the new Looking Glass interface from Sun's Web site.

ExtremeTech Article

VerizonMath T-shirt contest winner!

I won first place in the T-shirt contest! check it out, Verizonmath.

Fantastic Four: Rise of Silver Surfer

So my girlfriend and I went to see Night at the Museum yesterday and happened to catch the trailer of the Fantastic Four sequel. Good luck finding it online, I've looked many places and could only get a very poor quality cammed bootleg of it, barely watchable. Stay tuned to Fantastic Four, or go see Night at the Museum. You won't be dissapointed, the movie is great!

VerizonMath

Check out this horror story of just how bad Verizon Wireless customer service is. Make sure you have at least 20 minutes for this blog. George is the man for posting this! Verizonmath, http://verizonmath.blogspot.com

Funny Computer Errors

Perhaps the best error message you will ever see! If you have some funny messages post them!

VMWare releases Fusion for Mac OS X

The new VMware desktop product for the Mac, codenamed Fusion, allows Intel-based Macs to run x86 operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris, in virtual machines at the same time as Mac OS X. It is built on VMware's rock-solid and advanced desktop virtualization platform that is used by over four million users today.

With Fusion, you can run traditional PC applications on your Mac: if you need to run PC applications, you can now do so by leveraging the power of virtual machine technology.
Fusion allows you to:

* Create and run a wide variety of 32- and 64-bit x86 operating systems on OS X without rebooting. You can simultaneously run PC applications next to your OS X applications.
* Leverage Virtual SMP capabilities to gain additional performance improvements. On any Mac with dual-core processors, you can assign multiple CPUs to your virtual machine to gain additional performance for CPU-intensive workloads.
* Access physical devices from the virtual machine: read and burn CDs and DVDs, and use USB 2.0 devices like video cameras, iPods, printers, and disks at full speed. Even devices that do not have drivers for OS X will work in a virtual machine.
* Drag and drop files and folders between OS X and virtual machines to easily share data between the two environments.
* Leverage the cross-compatibility of VMware virtual machines. VMware virtual machines created with existing VMware products are all cross compatible, including virtual machines created by VMware Workstation, VMware Player, VMware Server and VMware Infrastructure 3.
* Run any of the 360 virtual appliances available from the Virtual Appliance Marketplace (http://vam.vmware.com).