Horses are terrible people

It's Thursday morning and I'm in the Saddleback Church sanctuary for the Purpose Driven Worship Conference.  The rest of the group from my church and I are waiting for the morning concert to start.  It's been a pretty cool experience hanging out with other people in the worship and tech ministries at my church and attending the conference.  The music has been incredible, the people great, and the speakers, such as Marcos Witt , are amazing.  There are times where I can definately feel the Holy Spirt and His presence here and I'm very grateful for my church and Kevin, our worship pastor for sending me (And for my work allowing me to go in the middle of a stressful project).

For fathers day weekend we went camping at El Capitan State Beach.  On Friday, the boys and I boogie-boarded, body-surfed and made sand castles until late afternoon when we went down to the train in Goleta to pick up my friend Rick.  Rick's train arrived about 20 minutes late and upon his arrival we went to grab some subs and headed back to the camp site.  It was a very mild night, no need for a campfire, nor sleeping bags.  All and all, Friday was a great day for camping. 

Saturday was a foggy until late in the afternoon, but that didn't stop us for another beach trip and a fun time in the surf.  When we headed up in the mid-afternoon, Michelle, Eden and Mike had made it up for Saturday night.  Jan made it up a bit later due to a Saturday work schedule.

One of the cool things about El Capitan is it has hot showers and for $0.25 every two minutes you can try and take a relaxing shower, if you're mindful not to step on the sunken drain that's about 1ft in diameter and about 4" deep.

I took the photo above on Saturday night using a tripod and no flash.  I really enjoy no-flash photography at night and everyone was willing to be my photographic subject.  For some reason this photo of Mike reminds me of the action figure version of him made by Gentle Giant.  Here are a few other photos from Saturday Night.

It was a bit colder last night but we braved sleeping in the tent without the fly.  It was awesome going to sleep looking up at the stars and since the moon was no where to be found, it was a particularly dark sky night.  Eden did awesome in the tent and the boys seemed to enjoy their time on skateboards, bikes, and at the beach. 

Today was overcast until we left around noon, but we all managed to have a good time packing up, eating and hanging around the camp site.  The drive back was great with very little traffic.  It was a great fathers day weekend and I'm appreciative of my wife and friends making it such.

Coke Blak has to be the nastiest tasting Coke product to date.  I don't know what they were thinking.  I can't even drink it and just wasted the last bottle of the stuff from a four pack. I get the idea, but man they messed up.

I can't seem to get enough of the new Tool album 10,000 Days.  While I wasn't a huge fan of Lateralus, but this album comes across so strong musically, it's hard to put down.  I've tried to not play it too much because I don't want to burn myself out on it, but I've not been to successful.  I've listened to it generally to and from work daily and most of the day at work.

I love how they take their time on the various songs, two of which weigh in at over 11 minutes in length.  Both Wings for Marie and 10,000 Days provide a very personal glimpse of lead singer Maynards struggle in dealing with the handicap and eventual loss of his mother.  So much so it gives me chills when in 10,000 Days as a testament as to the understanding extent of her faith, he describes the loss the world has suffered by her death and at the same time how her death was the end of her 27 years (10,000 days) of suffering.

While both Vacarious and Jambi come across as a bit of a disconnect from the album, songs written to be singles while the rest of the album is clearly not written that way, they do not distract and are very strong songs unto themselves. 

Many people may not be happy with the departure of the sound of Ænima to the more progressive sound of Lateralus and 10,000 Days, to me it's clear that they are growing musically as a band and offering a more compelling album.  From the complex rhythms and driving bass lines to the airy guitar riffs, 10,000 Days is for me, their best album to date.  Even Lipan Conjuring adds to the overall mood of the album for me and has grown on me since the first time I heard it and questioned its placement (and even inclusion on the album).  

BTW the whole overlay of track 4 on track 11+track 3 is pretty neat, though not something I find worth listening to repeatedly.  The synchronization at 9 minutes in is amazing and rightfully could be considered Part 3 of Wings.

Google has yet again given us a glimpse at the future of business productivity with the release of Google Spreadsheets. This is the killer AJAX/Web 2.0 app. Its intuitive interface and collaborative editing features paint a future of Google as the productivity center for companies. No software licensing. No version incompatibilities. No having to move files from work computer to laptop, etc.

They started with Gmail, which has become one of my primary email apps. Add to that Google Calendar which is yet another brilliant collaborative app. Combine all this with Gmail for Domains and you might have a picture of things to come. Imagine "Google Office for Domains" where you brand the entire google productivity suite: Gmail, Calendar, Spreadsheets, and Writely with your company logo, and allow your users to have their own company based accounts. No longer do you worry about data backup, Google takes care of that for you. Your spreadsheet, word processing documents, calendars, etc are shared amongst your company and are available to the people that should be allowed to have them. 

You won\'t have to worry about steep per computer licensing fees. Perhaps the revenue model is the current adwords model, perhaps it becomes a monthly fee. Regardless, where other companies and open source projects attempt to give you the tools to have similar apps on your local intranet or your own servers, Google\'s service based approach offers a much lower cost option while providing a higher level of functionality and reliability.

Google Spreadsheets is a full functionality browser based application with integrated chat and collaboration. As you change a cell, others in your document see it change. As you change a formula, it changes for them as well. Create a spreadsheet and invite others to participate in editing it. It appears in their file folder, as it does in yours. You all have the ability to edit it at any time. Font formatting, sorting, multiple spreadsheets in a workbook, cell linking, it\'s all there.

Speed is entirely based upon your browser and computer. While it\'s not the fastest thing in the world with large amounts of data, it did load and open a document on my computer faster than Excel.

If I had the change to buy the already expensive Google stock, I\'d be picking it up right about now.

&t

Over the years I've always been amazed at the amount of immaturity on the internet. Add immaturiy to the illusion of anonymity that most people seem to have on the internet and it can be a recipe for large amounts of hate. There is a certain type of users on GameSurge that typifies the worst the internet has to offer. Some are racists, some are wannabe eThugs who pretend to be gang-bangers and talk like idiots.

Then you have the kids who have too much free time on their hand and made to order trojan horse applications at their control. They've managed to infect hundreds or thousands of Windows machines which are generally more open to takeover. There are libraries of these trojans freely available with source code and generally these kids don't have to (and don't ) know anything about programming and are not good enough to program such things on their own.  If left to their own devices without any examples or code to use, they'd just go back to perusing the internet for porn. The sad thing is these kids are generally under the age of 18 and their parents either don't know or don't care about their activities. I say the parents don't care because on multiple occasions I have tracked down these kids and spoke with their parents.  Their lack of understanding about what their children are getting into leads them to generally ignore the behavior.  They wouldn't let their kids vandalize other peoples property, but when it comes to terrorist like activities on the internet, it goes right over their heads.

Here's an example of a kid who may either be posturing or actually have a legion of infected machines at his control:

(h4ck3r) u <3 cokc eh fag??? 
(h4ck3r) w8 til i intorduc u 2 my boatss!@! 

This past weekend one of our security guys on GameSurge noticed the #botnet channel and its topic.

-OpServ- #botnet Information 
-OpServ- Created on: Sun Jun 04 08:41:44 2006 (1149439304) 
-OpServ- Modes: +stnC 
-OpServ- Topic (set by xenex`, Sun Jun 04 13:53:10 2006): GameSurge will be DDoSed on 6/6/06 at 6:06pm PST. Be ready. 
-OpServ- Users (1): -OpServ- @xam (~zgqwz@68.180.9.13) 

I should point out that the ~zgqwz@68.180.9.13 user is probably on via an infected machine.  When we try and block these users, they just connect from any of their  "legion" of infected machines with different address.

As of right now (1.5 hours earlier than the threat) I'm being DDoS'ed (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) for ~300mbit/s. Now mind you that's not a big attack. Frankly it's a small attack compared to many of the attacks we've received. The point is more that these kids don't know or don't care about the implications of what they do. These attacks affect everyone from the users of the infected machines they use, their ISP, every ISP between them, to the target machine. Often times these attacks are so big as to affect other customers of the ISP where the target machine is being hit. I've seen ISP's fold under pressure, such as The Planet and Speakeasy.

When one talks about recourse for actions like these, it can be a nebulous area. Sometimes the authorities will get involved, most times they will not. Attacks like these cost money and time. For every person you hear about on the news getting busted for DDoS'ing, there are hundreds of others. I've seen kids grow from being in their mid-teens to adults, the whole time attacking people, and while I know the authorities know about them and their activities, they're not "big" enough to warrent the expense of prosecution.

On GameSurge we keep an extensive database of our users who participate in these activies, cataloging their trojans, names, real life information if possible, associations and logs of activities which we provide to various law enforcement agencies.  To date we've found limited success in doing this and have seen some of our "Script Kiddies" and attackers prosecuted for their activities.  In most cases they are not prosecuted for attacking us directly, but rather for their other activities which our information has helped, at least in part, uncover.

DDoS'ing and threats of DDoS have been used to extort people and they've been used to try and stifle competition. DDoS'ing also comes up as an act of eBullying, kids who aren't socially adjusted, who are probably bullied in real life use it as a release to be the aggressor.

The sad thing about this phenomena for me is I'm now at a loss as to what to do about such things. The authorities do what they can, I'm sure, but in the long run I've found the only real option is to weather the storm and move on. I guess being attacked is one of the ways to know you're successful, but it sure sucks as a thank you for providing a free community service to people.

;p>As I finish this blog entry the attack subsiding and is down to 70mbit/s. In about 20 minutes it should subside completely, for now anyway.

In browsing iTunes Music Store a bit ago I stumbled across Les Claypool\'s new album, of Whales and Woe.  I was looking for Dynamite Hack\'s Boyz-N-Tha-Hood cover, which I found as well.  After buying that and playing it for the office I treked over to AllOfMp3 and bought the new Claypool album.  While it starts off fairly experimentally and it\'s not exactly the Primus sound some people may be looking for, it does have moments that hearken back to Primus, such as Lust Stings.

 A common theme throughout the album is the addition of xylophone and saxophone to most tracks.  This adds an interesting texture and contrast to the bass heavy sound with filler guitar.  Les is clearly trying to progress his musical sound while not throwing the baby out with the bath water.  Parts of the album, such as Off-White Guilt, sound more like progressive rock than anything else, and I don\'t think that\'s a bad thing. 

If everything went as planned, the boys should be on an airplane about now heading out for summer vacation!  Needless to say, the Roy household is very excited.

After maintaining the same blog index, images, videos, etc for a few years, I\'ve decided it\'s time for a fresh start.  I\'ve setup a new instance of Framewerk and I\'m currently working on a new design and populating the new site.

Unfortunately previously linked content will no longer be available, and I have no intention of making it available.  I will be adding a new gallery system for my photography and will make it full of web 2.0 ajax goodness.