This is probably the latest April Fools joke of the year, or not; perhaps no one found it until today. Nonetheless here is the “leaked” source code for Windows Vista. I just hope Microsoft doesn’t come and sue me or something!

If three years ago you were to tell me I’d be on a Cyber Defense team that would be capable of winning a state competition then go onto a regional competition and then make it to a national level competition; I’d never have believed it. Now if your wondering what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition hosted by the Center for Systems Security and Information Assurance (CSSIA).

Now this is really a big thing, it may not seem like it; Heck I don’t even fully realize how big this is and I’m a part of it. But this is an event where select colleges come to compete against each other first at a state level, then onto a regional level, and finally to the national level. It tests how participants can handle a mock up network against real life situations be it through defense against hackers or simply adding some new type of application to the current network structure. This event is only four years old, and my college Baker College of Flint, Michigan has been participating in it for the past three years. But over the past four years this competition has really built up to becoming a huge thing in IT World of Business. We’ve even caught the attention of the US Government.

Now this is how I got caught up into all of this. If you really want to know more about the completion itself check out the National CCDC website. Anyways, I received a call one Saturday morning three years ago sometime in January about being put on a list to participate in a computer security competition. I was kind of shocked about it and didn’t really know what it was all about. But over the next few days I started hearing more about from friends at the college who was also approached about it. Now right from the start I didn’t think I was good enough to be on this team having no background or idea about computer security at the time. Nevertheless I was selected as one of 8 participants to represent the college. The catch was to participate we needed to submit a resume about our computer knowledge and I believe an essay. (certain details a fuzzy to me being it was so long ago.) I remember it was deadline day and we had to have our stuff in by then to be able to participate, and I hadn’t done anything. My main reason for not doing a resume or essay was that I thought there was a ton of candidates and I had no chance of being selected. Yet the team captain who was in charge of getting things around for this, insisted I get my stuff turned in, so I quickly wrote up a resume and essay and emailed it. Turns out they only had 8 people in mind and they just wanted the resume and essay for please the deans or something like that. But I was on the team, and as a Linux administrator at that. I will always say this competition is what made me so knowledgeable at Linux and pushed me more away from Windows Administration; which is true. So anyways I was on the team and we were set on preparing for something we had no idea what we were getting caught up in. The details of how we did the first year isn’t really all that important, but the fact was we were a small college competing against universities. We figured we had no chance, but it was worth traveling and getting away to have some fun.

Now I never competed the second year the college went, being I attended a different campus, but the original team was mostly there take away a couple members. And they did great, the second year they participated added a state level competition and they took first place which qualified them to go to regionals and they fared well I’m told at regionals. But this year the third year is when our college shined. I’m going to get out of the way the irony of third time’s a charm, because oddly it really is. We qualified for regionals at the state level competition taking second place by a difference of one point. Going onto regionals my only mind set was “we made it this far, I expect nothing else”. But to my surprise after sitting in a warm over crowded lecture hall waiting for the results of this years regional competition, I uttered a “holy shit” as the first place team, the team who would be going to San Antonio, TX to compete against the top six teams in the nation.

So now I sit hear with only two more weeks before I board a plane to Texas, still not having the fact that we are Midwest Regional Champions and are taking on all the big boys sink in. I guess I’ve done god for myself being someone who never really thought he was good enough to be able to do this.

People get the idea that I’m a Windows hater. I carry around a Macbook, I’m largely into Linux, I own a t-shirt that states “rm -rf /windows”, and from time to time I can be quick to point out the flaws of Windows. The thing is, I really don’t hate Windows; it’s just not my 0perating system of choice.

Now I do own a mac, its a Macbook laptop.  It’s the best laptop I have ever owned. It does everything I need it to.  It has good battery life, which is a huge thing with me.  I mean it is a laptop, it is suppose to be mobile; so why shouldn’t I expect it not to have a battery that lasts more than an hour? It’s very light, weighs only 5lbs. So I don’t have to break my back when carrying it with me along with my books to school.

In my experience since becoming a “Mac user” Its the”Window users” that are the most prejudiced than anything.  I constantly hear supposed witty remarks like “Oh, look at the cute little toy laptop.” or “Why don’t you go out and use a real computer?”  It’s ridiculous that people are so insecure towards difference that they have to resolve to mockery. I mean talking about throwing stones in glass houses. But to each his own I guess.

It’s surprising how many people are Mac users these days.  When I worked at a local electronics’s dealer selling Computer’ I was surprised to find out 10 out of the 12 people I worked with in my department, the Computer department , were Mac users.  Here are people who are selling other people Window’s PC’s, and they don’t even use the damn things themselves! Of coarse I was just as guilty as my co-workers.  Trying to sell Windows Vista is hard enough, but when you don’t even use it, it doesn’t in my mind make for a well qualified sales person.  At least in my mind I’d expect that a sales person would have knowledge of the product they are selling; at least I’d hope.

As I’ve said, I don’t hate Windows.  Actually I like Windows XP, I was one of the early adopters, I had my copy the day of release.  I even got a window sticker, and button that had the Windows XP logo on it.  Now as far as Vista goes, that’s a different story.  Then again I’ve never had a real good experience with it.  When it was finally released I snagged a copy and put it on a box to play with it.  Even sup’d up a box to adequately run it.  I played around with it a bit, and was turned on by the eye-candy. Then two days later, I go to fire up that box and get a boot message stating that the boot loader couldn’t locate the file system. So I fired up a bootable cd to do some diagnostics and found the file system was very much intact.  Now that and the fact I really don’t have the system that can run it too well all goes toward the reason I have yet to upgrade.  I have tried a couple times, even slapped 2gb’s of RAM into my main box, but still it wasn’t enough.

Now I’ll admit I can be just as critical about Windows as someone can be about Mac. I can be very quick to point out the security vulnerabilities and the constant need to update.  But I actually use a wide array of platforms.  I have linux machines, windows machines and a mac. Getting them all to communicate with each other can be a pain, but I manage to get it done. Which means I have experience in an uninterpretable environment, something you tend to see a lot of in the real world.

I’ve never really had much of a backup scheme before, actually never had one at all.  But when I got OS 10.5 on my mac I couldn’t resist but utilize one of the most impressing features released with this version of OS X.

The main draw to me is that it is really nothing to setup.  The mac pretty much takes you through the steps of setting it up with no mention of differential or incremental.  I devoted 250 gigs of a 500 gig external drive to time machine and over the past 3 months of it running I have only used about 82 gigs of it.

Now I could have some deep very technical back up scheme if I wanted to, and have some ideas on the tables for my server and windows machine.  Working with almost every different platform of OS, I need different forms of backup solutions.  The logical one for my mac which is my mobile machine (a macbook) the backup needed is mostly my user files.  I don’t do too much production work on it other than a bit of web design I dabble in.  But all that is backed up by time machine.

I recently listened to Net@Nite episode 48, where Amber and Leo began to talk about IM Clients and how today’s teenagers are moving away from the treditional IM Client such as MSN or AIM and are just using Myspace or Facebook to keep in touch with their friends.

Now, I can remember always having AIM or Trillian open on one of my pc’s, getting tons of IM’s from poeple.  But over the years I spoke less with them, if it wasn’t me or them were too busy to chat, we either talked on the phone or left messeges on Myspace or Facebook.  And for the longest time I left the IM Clients open just to read the funny comments someone would leave on their away message.

Its not that kids aren’t IMing each other, its just on a different platform.  For one texting has become a big thing for today’s youth.  I’ve personally never understood the concept of  sending a text message
on a phone, when you can simply call the person.  That is until realized that the phone is the new client for Instant Messaging these days. It’s more than just the phone, such sites like Myspace and Facebook is very much a mechanism  for today’s teenager.  Where when I was in high school you had 80 - 100 people on your Buddy List, now its 100 - 300 friends on myspace.

Yet it goes far beyond simply chatting, its also a web presence, that originated from quick website wizards provided by free hosting companies.  I can remember quite a few of my friends making a   from some obscure site.  In 5 minutes you had a fully functional web page running that was your little place on the internet.  In fact I recently found one of my old sites, still running. (sadly upon posting I have been unsuccessful in finding it again)  Back to my point, the new vessel for getting your web presence is now through sites such as myspace and facebook.

Myspace has already included an instant messenger service where you can IM a friend you see online.  And soon Facebook will provide this service as well.  Is what your seeing develop is these services becoming the one stop for all you social needs online.

While I have given up on IM Clients and have let my login rest in peace, I begin to move on to what may surpass myspace and facebook in a few years.  Such new sites such as twitter and pounce, where I have found enjoyment in being immersed in the network  keeping up-to-date with friends and people of interest.

You know its a good game when you replay it over and over again. Everyone has their favorite game that they love and keep throughout the ages, for me it’s Half-Life.

I must have beaten the original game more than 20 times over the coarse of the years. It’s game I tend to put down for a while then pick back up again, to do all over. Along with it’s predecessor and expansions, the entire franchise is perhaps my all time favorite game. Now I must admit that I have as of yet touched Episode One or Episode Two, along with Portal. But I do intend to in the near future. After I brush the rust off of coarse and get through the first two games again.

Many people feel that Doom and Wolfenstien where the pioneering games for the First Person Shooter genre, which I totally believe is so. But if it wasn’t for Half-Life the genre would have died out. Undoubtedly one of the longest lasting pc games of all times Half-Life not only brought a solid enjoyable story line for single play, but also a scalable multiplay which led to the mod Counter-Strike one of the top online games for many years.

The fun didn’t only stop at the original game, with the release of Half-Life 2, valve not only was able to repeat their prior success, but also brought a solid gaming engine that would fuel other games still being released this very day.

As everyone knows the format war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray is over; Blu-Ray being declared the winner.  But is the war actually over or was that just a small battle within the actual war? As far as physical media goes Blu-Ray has achieved victory, but as far as formats goes there is yet another contender….. Digital Media.

Announced at this years MacWorld expo, Apple announced that Movie Rentals were now available via itunes.  Along with this a great number of Movies and TV Shows were also going to be available through itunes as well.  Now itunes has dabbled a bit into this territory by offering tv shows that recently aired for purchase, but it was never is such a large degree as it is now.  With the added support of many studios ; Warner Brother being a big supporter;  Apple was able to launch a huge Digital Media store right out of itunes.  Not only has apple jumped on this band wagon, but Microsoft has also incorporated a renting system through the xbox live market place long, and Netflix, who has offered the service to download movies to the pc for some time just in a limited selection but has now opened up their library.

Now may may be skeptic about not physically owning the movie they buy by not having a dvd or Blu Ray disc, but this is no different from the switch from cd to mp3.  In the beginning when the concept of mp3 first came out, many people couldn’t see themselves not buying a cd for a bunch of files that would just sit on their computer.

I remember first hearing about mp3’s in 1998.  I had to do a debate for speech class and my partner and I chose mp3 versus cd. I had t support cd, which I figured was an easy winner.  Which at the time it was, no matter how hard my partner tried to defend mp3’s the class just couldn’t grasp the concept of it.  My partner even had an mp3 player, it was a rio player. But the audience just couldn’t grasp it.

I didn’t catch on to the concept of mp3’s until 2001, my reason for switching over was to use my pc as a stereo.  Which I literally ripped 90 some cd’s onto my computer, at that time it took nearly a week to do because I had to write the tags for each cd myself.  Many of my friends were catching on too with napster and kazaa being so big at the time.  Yet still many just downloaded the songs and burned them onto a cd. But that year did spark a new generation for music too when the first ipod was released.  It was the first mp3 player with reasonable space for many peoples taste.

But back to my point, as with music, video has seemed to take a similar path.  From tape to disc.  Could we be seeing the next actual step for video by looking at the history of music?   From tape to disc, to your hard drive.  Its not inconceivable being more and more people own computers these days, and tons of people own an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 which has the ability to play these movies in one way or another.  Then there is the apple tv, which I wouldn’t be surprised if different forms of the device start appearing in the near future.  With internet speeds becoming faster and faster everyday in time waiting for it to download won’t be an issue.

The battle is over but the war has begun between Blu-Ray and Digital Media……

this is the first entry…… I’m still working on getting things organized, and deciding what I plan to do with this site.