Author Archives: Chris

About Chris

Chris is an IT/IS management professional with over a decade of experience in IT, IS, Network Engineering, and Telecommunications integration. Chris specializes in web server deployment and information management. This includes CMS, CRM, and dynamic content deployment. Chris also manages a full service Video Head End with over 200 digital TV channels. Chris also has five years of project management, knowledge management, and engineering design experience. He specializes in both the Agile and Scrum project management methodology. He also has a background in computer forensics and information security including federal or state compliance audits (such as SOX).

Classic DF – 7/3/01

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July 3, 2001: [•] Milosevic is learning just how ironic life is. [•] Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is all too eager to call off a cease fire with Palestine. [•] The US serviceman in Japan accused of rape by a woman has been handed over to Japanese police for questioning. [•] It has been 30 years since Jim Morrison (The Doors) died. [•] The US has asked a jury to sentence Khalfan Khamis Mohamed to death for bombing a US embassy in Tanzania in 1998. [•] Uganda has reopened the Rwenzori Mountains National Park citing that it has evicted rebels from the area. [•] UNITA rebels have asked the US and Russia to help end the civil war in Angola. [•] Alfredo Astiz has surrendered himself. [•] Mexican President Vicente Fox married his spokeswoman, Martha Sahagun. [•] Muslim rebels in the Philippines say they will continue taking Europeans and Americans hostage until the government withdraws its forces from the Basilan island. [•] Cheetahs in Iran are endangered. [•] Quick! Arrest that woman! I can see her ankle! [•] Lebanon plans to eradicate cannabis crops… maybe. [•] The Department of Consumer Protection is looking into claims that ACME Rent-a-car did not provide fair warning to consumers about its speeding policy. [•] The TechX Tradeshow showed off upgrades a plenty. [•] Having wolves in Yellowstone has cut the coyote population in half, but that may not be a bad thing. [•] The Duh Study of The Day: 5.2 million children/teens have hearing loss. What did you say? What? Huh? 🙂 [•] An old story I missed, but should note: Scientists have engineered mice that are immune to certain breast cancers. [•] Laid off workers are reporting their former employers’ pirated software habits to the authorities. He who laughs last indeed. [•] New Mexico teenager Jason Schwab has been charged with hacking into NASA in April of 2000. [•] The world gets a taste of what happens when crazy people get a hold of powerful technology. [•] Did a missing 14-year old girl run off with boys she met on the Internet? [•] Short Line/Coach USA wants a piece of the Metro-North Railroad and Woodbury Common Premium Outlets planned commuter parking lot. [•] The Warwick Town Police lost their case against a man they charged with DWI for driving his truck down his driveway to pick up his trash cans. LOL [•] Do me a favor tomorrow: Don’t be stupid with fireworks and blow off a limb or something! [•] A drug raid in Deerpark yields 3 arrests, Sean T. Pennell gets arrested after crashing his car because he was DWI, and the Tappan Zee Bridge goes online. [•] Creed says its next album will be comparable to U2’s The Joshua Tree. I don’t know, those are big shoes to fill. [•] At last count there are 120 unreleased recordings of Kurt Cobain. Tu Pac eat your heart out. [•] Chino Moreno (The Deftones) decided it would be cool to drink lots of vodka, throw up, show his penis to the crowd, and get beat up. Sounds… ummm… interesting. No wait, let me amend that. Sounds retarded and interesting. [•] Signals to Noise has a very promising line up. [•] A very large ice covered object has been discovered between Pluto and Neptune. [•] The 2002 Ford Thunderbird: It doesn’t suck. [•] Ford recalls 1997-2001 model E150, E250 and E350 trucks due to fuel tank crack issues. BMW recalls models equipped with four-cylinder and six-cylinder engines that were built between October 1998-March 2000. [•] You can now buy an Acura RSX (Kick ass!). [•] A sneak peak at the new VW Microbus. [•] Napster has shut down its file trading service to update its databases. [•] Azazel finally updates! GASP! 🙂 [•] Mermaid gets new fish. [•] I would just like to wish everyone a Happy Fourth of July. Freedom rules!

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Classic DF – 7/2/01

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July 2, 2001: [•] So much for a Mideast cease fire. [•] VP Cheney returns to work after receiving a pacemaker. [•] The IRA has been accused of not disarming. [•] So much for a Macedonia cease fire. [•] Hong Kong celebrates 4 years of Chinese rule. [•] A bomb exploded in a theater in Karachi, Pakistan killing 1 person. [•] Algerian rebels kill 6 people at a night club. [•] South Africa buries the last Rain Queen. [•] Argentina has put a warrant out for ex-Navy Captain Alfredo Astiz for torturing and killing pregnant women. [•] Gun fights in Kashmir leave 7 people dead. [•] Iran has arrested 11,892 drug addicts and traders, not to mention killed 9 drug traffickers in a major 4 day drug crackdown. [•] Forget Delia’s! The main attraction in Saudi malls is the beatings. [•] A teen picks up a hand grenade left over from a 1994 civil war in Yemen and gets blown up. [•] Japanese police may issue a warrant for a US soldier believed to have raped a woman. [•] A man killed 2 of his children and critically injured another before being shot dead by police in Syracuse, New York. [•] A car is hit by a train killing 5 people. [•] Tampa, Florida is using 36 cameras to scan crowds for wanted people. [•] A prostitute admits to killing 6 people in Florida. [•] Famous guitarist Chet Atkins has died. He was 77. [•] Dust from Africa is crossing the Atlantic Ocean and bringing germs to the US. [•] Sony drops the price of the Playstation 2 to $280. [•] Japan Telecom launches a Mini-disc music download service at train stations. [•] Cisco routers and switches running the IOS HTTP server are vulnerable to hackers. A patch is available to fix the issue. [•] Microsoft is dropping Smart Tags from Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6. [•] Scientists believe there is a link between testicular cancer and infertility. [•] ICQ gets hacked. [•] Smells like… crap. [•] Major thunderstorms take out power and phone service in the Mid-Hudson. [•] Jack C. Morgan is charged with the negligent homicide of his brother, two men are charged with burglary, a riot almost breaks out in Newburgh, a man runs from cops for no reason, and an auto accident leaves 2 people in bad shape. [•] Courtney Love continues to be a huge bitch and insist she is the sole owner of Nirvana’s music. Hello! Courtney you were no where to be found when Kurt Cobain hooked up with Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic. You’re a greedy self-centered liar. I can see making sure Francis (Cobain’s son) gets something, but she deserves nothing. [•] Ministry turns up in A.I. and kicks some major robot ass! [•] Hey! I patented the wheel first! [•] The 2002 35th Anniversary Camaro will be Chevy’s last run of the car. [•] Nissan revises its Z concept. [•] The NICB says that import cars cause insurance fraud (No comment). [•] A guitar lesson from Edge of U2. [•] The uphill battle against porn and search engines. [•] Intel says that 1.8GHz and 1.6GHz Pentium 4 processors should be available to you right now. [•] Azazel and I went to the Warwick Fire Department’s carnival this past weekend. It was all right. The fireworks, however, were awesome. I still hate carnies though. 🙂 [•] We even saw Immy! [•] And Mermaid! [•] And Verona! [•] And Flying Moose! [•] Hey, that’s a run on sentence! [•] Finally, the brand spanking new V.90 Help is up and running for your nerd loving pleasure.

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Classic DF – 6/28/01

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June 28, 2001: [•] Wang Guoqi, a Chinese doctor, has testified that China harvests organs from executed prisoners whether they consent to donate or not. [•] Comedian Paula Poundstone has been charged with child molestation. [•] US Secretary of State Colin Powell and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat are meeting today. [•] The ETA blew up a package bomb in Spain injuring 10 people. [•] Possibilities of land invasions loom in South Africa. [•] For the first time in 10 years police begin patrolling Mogadishu, Somalia. [•] Ethnic violence is spreading across Nigeria. [•] In light of a recent kidnapping, Colombia has suspended the Copa America soccer tournament. [•] A bus crash in Haiti kills at least 40 people. [•] Peru has called their ambassador to Japan home. [•] Kamel Naji Kamel goes on trial for being a suspected terrorist with links to Osama bin Laden in Jordan. [•] A bus collides with a truck killing 17 people in Iran. [•] A man convicted of murder in Yemen is forgiven at the last second. [•] Jack Lemmon has passed away. He was 76. [•] V.90 Help is officially remodeled and hardcore to the bone (Ummm… OK). I hope you like the new design. We’ll be adding more features as time allots.[•] Bored? Pissed cause Napster has been over filtering music? No problem. Hungry Bands offers you a chance to listen to underground and unsigned artists looking for listeners. Check it out! [•] Today’s post is short (as you can tell). Lots of going ons at work! So we’ll close this post out for now. We’ll be back next Monday with more fun and frolic. Word!

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Classic DF – 5/17/01

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Two years ago I embarked on a journey. I decided that I wanted a media presence. I was frustrated by the lack of technical and artistic information on the web. No one was talking about MP3s or Napster yet. There was little help with computers. You were on your own. After a long walked that ended in Daemon Immortalis’s apartment I founded DigitalFl00d Studios. I declared (with him as my witness) that I would decimate our art to the world and provide a place where our viewpoints could be displayed. The next day I bought digitalflood.com and with the help of Rock we set up an account on Jeph.net.

I have had a web page before. Infact, I’ve been on the web for five years. My previous iterations were simply lots of links and poor HTML. I was learning. What do you expect? With digitalflood.com my main intention was a simple yet effective layout with interactive features. V1.0 was very ruff and probably deserved beta status. V2.0 incorporated layer and DHTML, which works horribly under Netscape. V2.1 switched back to tables and standard HTML4. V3.0 (the current version) added DHTML that was Netscape compatible, but still had some Internet Explorer goodies. V3.5 is in the works. I’m mum on that subject still though.

We started by simply ranting. Then we would fight with the locals. Then we started fighting with other web pages. More ranting. Finally I started covering the News since things slowed down on the art front. Since then we have two main outputs: News and Computer/Internet Troubleshooting. Who would have thunk it? 🙂

The day of rant and E/N may have passed. Today I try to focus on art and world issues. Our recent CVS vs. Warwick page is an example of local activism in action. When we aren’t causing trouble we are making art. Music and art are still regularly produced works. We have a large network of supporters and friends who help us out (You guys rule).

We have over 80,000 hits since our inception. We average 400 hits a day. It is the you the viewer who really deserves the most credit. You keep me working and producing. Without viewers I would have no reason to create. I thank you for your time and your persistance. In reality this is not just digitalflood.com’s birthday– It is the day we celebrate art and technology as one.

As a special treat digitalflood.com would like to present to you our animated short All Your MP3 Belong to US! Based on the short video intro for the Nintendo video game Zero Wing the animated short brings you to a place where the evil RIAA rules. Lars of Metallica fame finds himself thrust into the role of an evil overload for the RIAA. His rule is being threatened by a small band of infidel haX0rs called Digitalflood. Their MP3 might has grown too strong. Lars grows weary of their lies and attacks our heroes at Digitalflood. Can they survive? Find out now.

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Classic DF – 2001 Digis Awards

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The 2001 Digis Awards™ – digitalflood.com’s Best of The Internet Awards
The Digis Award™ (pronounced Did-geeze) is the hardware/software compliment to our Fluddies Award™. While the Fluddies™ go to web site or products for the Net, the Digis™ focus on the hardware/software that we feel deserves recognition for its contributions to technology. As always you may not agree, but that’s life and it’s tough like that. So there 😛
Hardware Category :
Best Complete Home PC Manufacturer: Dell/Alienware — For the second year in a row Dell snags this award. However, this year we felt that Alienware deserved a nod too. Both have committed their companies to producing the top PCs on the market. Both have excellent reliability, construction, and technical support. More important is the overall quality of the components. Top parts are easy to order. I would still suggest strongly that Dell discontinues using the Aztech MDx series of modems as they are pieces of junk. Other then that little SNAFU I would easily recommend either to a friend/relative.

Worst Complete Home PC Manufacturer: Tiger Direct Systems — Can you say “garbage”? I knew you could. It’s funny that garbage and Tiger aren’t closer in the dictionary. They sure mean the same thing. Every Tiger Direct System comes with 16-bit wave table sound. That’s sort of like a pretend sound card. Worse yet, you get a whopping 4MB of video RAM. Nice. If you figure out which modem you have in the PC you’re luckier than most people. You’d have better luck buying a box and painting the word computer on it.

Best Commercial/Workstation Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Dell — Yes, two years running my nonlinear DV editing system/AV nonlinear system of choice is a Dell. Why? High end video card meets high end sound card meets lots of good stuff. Every component for every price range is suited for its role. From simple office applications to high end work stations you can’t beat the price or the components.

Worst Commercial/Work Complete PC/Server Manufacturer: Compaq — Two years running Compaq has snagged this award. Why? Simply put, I have never seen a company pride itself on unreliable components. Yes, their bottom end machines come with PC Tel HSP modems. Yes, they are the worst modems on the market. Yes, the video RAM is completely shared and lacks the power for any 3D application out there. It’s kind of sad. Compaq recently put together a real good PC (Presario 5900Z), but for most consumers it’s too late. They have already found aforementioned greener pastures to buy in.

Best Processor Manufacturer: AMD (Thunderbird Athlon) — I know the Intel Pentium 4 is the fastest processor on the market, but can you get one? Maybe. Besides with twenty-some-odd step caching you really don’t see any true application performance beyond what you would expect. So that is why I chose the AMD Thunderbird as the better CPU. It offers real world performance, as well as, gaming performance that can’t be beat. What can I say? I’m biased.

Best Sound Card Manufacturer/Chipset: Creative Labs (Live 5.1! Platinum) — Creative Labs (mostly through buy outs) has conquered the sound card market. With the advent of their Live! 5.1 sound cards this year Creative has put itself in an excellent position to conquer not just gaming, but also DVD playback. This certainly would only further their excellent chip set and sound creation capabilities as they continue to expand their markets. One question: Where’s my professional musician workstation sound card? You guys need to go there!

Best Graphics Card Manufacturer/Chipset: ATI (Radeon) — If you told me a year ago I would name ATI as the best video card maker I would have laughed at you. A year ago they sucked bad. Their cards were archiac pieces of silicon. However, with the Radeon we finally saw a real video card that could not only touch, but possibly burn the mighty nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra chip set. The Radeon rules when it comes to large polygon fills. It has a wonderful graphics rendering engine and offers the very fast DDR SDRAM for memory (64MB of it!). Smoking.

Best Modem/Communication Manufacturer: US Robotics (Performance Pro Internal PCI) — We are about a half year into US Robotics being a self owned entity again. So far, so good. They have recently started production of a V.92 standard modem. We’ll see how that goes. For now though, the US Robotics Performance Pro owns the roost. It is hardware controlled and therefore very fast. Unless your line levels are horrid (read: sounds like underwater) you should be able to get a connection to your ISP.

Best Hard Drive Manufacturer/Series: IBM (Deskstar 75GXP) — With 75GB of storage space and one of the fatest access times around you can’t go wrong with a Deskstar. The spindle runs at 7,500RPM and works wonders in RAID 0 (striped=speed) configurations. You simply can’t get a faster large drive, but it will cost you a good penny. Performance like this isn’t cheap.

Coolest Innovation: TDK BURN-Proof — The VeloCD would be a cool CD-RW burner on its own. Couple the technology called BURN-Proof (it elminates something called buffer underrun errors that occur when you multi-task) and now you have a super kick ass CD-RW. BURN-Proof has had few competitors (Sanyo makes something similar), but TDK gets props for being the first. Thanks to BURN-Proof you can burn MP3s while playing Quake III. Thank you TDK!

Stupidest Innovation: The AMR Standard — I can picture it now: A bunch employees of a computer technology development company are standing around and one of the software programmers says, “Gee, I wonder if we can make software modems perform worse and cost less?”. The engineer to his left says, “Yeah! We could not only emulate all the modem functions in software to drag down system resources, but we could also halve the pin bandwidth and use an on board sound card to interpret the data!” The marketing guy says, “Sounds ineffective, cheap, and prone to errors. I’ll get right on the ad copy!”. Yes, AMR (stands for Audio Modem Riser) is a daughter board that hooks up to your motherboard in a small PCI-like slot. The slot has a DSP (digital signal processor) which interprets the modem’s data. It actually is a glorified sound card and it isn’t really that great of a sound card (think 16-bit sound “yuck”). Recently the AMR Standards Commission unveiled its next generation standard ACR (Audio Communications Riser) and it’s just repackaged crap. You’re be better off screaming out your window to your ISP.

Software Category :
Best Operating System/Shell: Microsoft Windows 2000 (Service Pack 1) — I know what you’re thinking. Service Pack 1 isn’t an OS! Well, I wouldn’t argue with you. However, considering that the only major OS leap was a new Linux Kernel (and it does rock indeed) there is only one other OS that came out this year that is on mainstream PCs right now: Windows Me! It sucks. Oh, boy does it suck. So, as far as I’m concerned Windows 2000 Service Pack 1 is definitely the most stable mainstream OS out this past year. In fact, it even boots faster. The crashes are far and between (for Windows anyhow). As long as you stay away from those other nasty Microsoft products with all those evil security holes you’ll be pretty secure. Not bad for a Microsoft product.

Best Office Software Package: Microsoft Office 2000 — I hate to have to admit it, but Microsoft Office 2000 with all the Service Packs is great. I’ve seen business of all sizes use the various programs to stay in constant contact with to-do lists, task management, internal e-mail, and document sharing that significantly improves productivity. I held off at first last year and chose Sun Star Office 5.1 over the initial Office 2000 release due to bug concerns, but with the latest Service Packs the programs seem stable. Coupled with the fact that Star Office has yet to offer comparable features to Office 2000 or a better integrated Windows desktop pushed the nomination away from Sun this year. Let’s hope Sun figures all this out before it’s too late.

Best Graphics & Art Creation/Manipulation Software: Adobe Photoshop 6 — Adobe Photoshop 6 is simply the best version of Photoshop ever. Every feature that you know and love from previous iterations is present. All the excellent plug-in utilities still work wonders on your art pieces. Whether you are an amateur photographer or a professional designer, Photoshop has something to make your pieces ready for the web, printing, color separations, or even to animate short graphics (via Adobe Image Ready). Maximum PC dubbed Photoshop “The Fireworks killer”. I wouldn’t argue with that. It truly is the best at what it does.

Best Web Creation Software: Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 — I started using Dreamweaver two years ago. I fell in love with the simple interface, the vast expandability, and the robust HTML support. Dreamweaver 4 has managed to improve upon perfection somehow. Everything a serious web developer needs is available upfront. Sure, raw HTML coding may be “smoother”, but if you need to revamp an entire web site and only have under an hour to do so you quickly would see why WYSIWYG and site wide management is needed. Plus you don’t get all the extra garbage code you find in other WYSIWYG editors. I can’t rave enough about Dreamweaver so I’ll shut up while I’m ahead.

Best Sound Editing/Tracking Software: Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 5 — When you take an already powerful sound editor and incorporate both audio, as well as, video multi-tracking into a product. Then you put into that great product features for future codecs. You have probably have the most powerful sound editor out right now. That is exactly what Sound Forge 5 brings to the table. If you need to manipulate sound or record professionally look no further. I’m literally blown away by all the features available. Putting it into a musician’s perspective: It’s the equivalent of finding that perfect guitar that you can’t help, but play all day.

Best Internet Software: Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 SP1 — With the advent of Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 the browser finally gets stable and out renders Netscape 6, as well as, its predecessor Netscape Communicator 4.76. The browser wars are over and Internet Explorer has clearly won. Not that everyone is happy about that.

Best Software Innovation: Linux Kernel 2.4.2 — Linux is not only free, but it works (a novel idea). It networks easily. It is secure. It is resource friendly. What else do you want? Well, what ever you want the new Linux Kernel 2.42 has it. Boosting support for upcoming technologies and keeping Linux competitive with Microsoft’s OSs was the main reason for the new kernel. However, Linus Torvalds (the inventor and ring master of Linux) stresses this was not simply a catch up effort. Linux has placed itself in the forefront with a kernel capable of handling high end applications and evolving PC platforms. With several improvements and bug fixes; the new Linux Kernel stands as a strong heart to a robust body. The update was a long time a coming, but obviously worth the wait. Microsoft watch out– Linux is back and better than ever.

Worst Software Innovation: Microsoft Windows Media Player 7 — When Microsoft sought to conquer the broadband media market they tried to go big. An application that could play MP3s and streaming video. An application that could integrate with your OS. An application that could crash randomly and lock up your system for no reason. Well, maybe the latter wasn’t the original intention, but that is exactly what happens. The Media Player manages to hog resources like no other program. It takes forever to load. Unless your PC is high end you can forget about it. Sure, the Windows Media Format is smaller than MP3, but who cares? Who wants to save 10Kb per minute? It doesn’t matter! It’s just another attempt for Microsoft to conquer the market. This time they failed miserably. Microsoft: Stick to flaky OSs and leave flaky media players to the pros.

Worst Software: Microsoft Windows Me! — Windows 98 Second Edition worked. That obviously was a bad thing since with Windows Me! (Me! being short for Millennium) they managed to break everything again. Sure, dial-up networking is now in the control panel. So is the “secret” task bar options. Big freaking deal! The rest of the OS doesn’t work! Everything you install crashes. No drivers from Windows 98 work in Windows Me! And don’t even get me started on the networking issues. Everything you knew and loved about Windows has been changed for no reason what so ever. I’d ask why one more time, but I’m probably wasting my breath. For a simple “upgrade” from Windows 98 it sure changes everything. In the end, that is definitely a bad thing.
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