Archive for October, 2005
Birmingham Code Camp
Oct 18th
There are still spaces left for
The Agenda is interesting; there are an unbelievable NINE tracks:
http://www.alabamacodecamp.com/AlAgenda.aspx
You can sign up here:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032280737&Culture=en-US
If you fancy a ride there in a swanky BMW then just email and I’ll let you know my travel plans. Ok it is only a stripper 325i but I love the car, although it will be traded for a ‘99 Miata soon so I’ll be able to afford to race what I drive – the BMW had two warranty issues that followed my driving school so it has not hit the track again. The dealership is always great but I don’t want to abuse the warranty, I have already had a full set of new rotors and pads + the rear diff fixed which I know were all due to
my driving. Now should I NOS the Miata…. Yes I am a law abiding 35 year old UMIST grad with a white collar job; sometimes no one would guess 
While I am talking cars here are two pictures of my humble steed in two different situations. The second one is ultra-cool and will be explained in a future post. In a post after I explain how to obtain a Realtor license and just how much cash it will save you when moving house (I said that I would do that how long ago?):
DIY on the house this week – good job I have a (folding) trailer
Plugging into ODB-II, who needs the dealership?
Charleston Code Camp (with pics)
Oct 18th
Boy am I late
blogging about this one. Well it was a great day with many great speakers, info on
who spoke about what is still up here: http://www.gcnug.org/Default.aspx?tabid=81
Everyone I met
was very friendly including these guys I had lunch with:
The food at
lunchtime was the best of any Code Camp so far, just look at the happy faces below
who hung around for seconds:
Finally I attended Doug’s Indigo presentation. He is below setting up and no
one owned up to taking this picture before he was ready:
It was great to meet several stars/ future stars at the Queen Anne Revenge. Some of
the people I enjoyed meeting are Frank
Lavigne (and wife), Lou
Vega
, Bill
Ryan
, Will
Morganweck
, Robin
Edwards
and the guy who made it all happen Chris
Williams
. I met loads more great people there and at the Code Camp so sorry to miss some
names, but my memory is terrible and I think everyone ran out of business cards by
10am – I know that I did!
So
how was it personally? Suzanne and I traveled to Charleston the evening before Code
Camp and
dined with the other speakers at the Queen Anne’s
Revenge. I spoke at 9am and we had to close the doors to the room nearly
ten minutes before starting due to having no more space! The presentation
went fantastically with pretty much zero nerves – see y’all, all it needs
is practice, if I can become a competent presenter then anyone can! Suzanne
and I left Charleston on Sunday morning arriving back in Atlanta in time for tea.
A perfect weekend
SysInternals Root Kit Revealer
Oct 18th
Episode nine of Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast covered Rootkits – I thought I knew what a root kit is but was wrong. As always Steve’s podcast starts out very basic, but the latter half generally has a few nuggets for more technical peeps . This week is no exception, I learned that to be infected by rootkit technology means your operating system has been compromised, and as yet AdAware and cannot help.
You can listen to the podcast or Google for more information on Rootkits, but the most important point is that SysInternals have the only tool that can help. SysInternals Root Kit Detectors will read your file system and registry without using high level OS calls and compare the results to those when using OS calls. Any differences indicate an OS call has been intercepted.
Get the free tool here: http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/RootkitRevealer.html
Security Now is here: http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm