Archive for October, 2008
Friday, October 31st, 2008
In addition to my Halloween plans falling through, I just found out that independent hiking on the Inca Trail is prohibited!
Since June 2002 trekking independently on the Inca Trail has been prohibited. Regulations state that each trekker must be accompanied on the Inca Trail by a professionally qualified guide. (source)
Posted in Backpacking, Travel | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
Problem
After configuring Safari and Firefox to use my local network's squid proxy, I got the following error whenever I tried to browse to a page:
ERROR
The requested URL could not be retrieved
While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.google.com/
The following error was encountered:
* Access Denied.
Access control ...
Posted in Technology | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
CAPICOM, a COM-based wrapper for the CryptoAPI library, is deprecated and on its way out. However, Microsoft has no time line for phasing it out, nor have they provided sufficient documentation of alternatives.
Many CAPICOM pages contain a confusing, bright-red header along the lines of:
[The SignedCode object is available for ...
Posted in Authenticode, COM, Cryptography, Technology, Win32 | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
Problem
Connecting programmatically or by using osql failed with the following, generic error:
error: 40 - Could not open a connection to SQL Server
My programmatic attempt looked like this:
string cs = "Data Source=localhost;" +
"Trusted_Connection=true;" +
...
Posted in ASP.Net, Technology | No Comments »
Saturday, October 4th, 2008
GnuPG, GNU Privacy Guard, is a free system for encrypting files, emails, etc. The GnuPG plugin for vim provides automatic encryption and decryption of files within vim. If you attempt to edit a GnuPG-encrypted file with vim, it will prompt you for the password, and re-encrypt the file ...
Posted in Cryptography, Technology, Win32 | No Comments »
Friday, October 3rd, 2008
A collection of solutions for Fantastic Contraption:
My Solutions:
Tube - a minimal tube crawler.
U-Turn - a floppy, crawling chariot.
U-Turn (again)) - a simple cart which uses leverage to apply force on the ceiling.
Back and Forth - an awful contraption.
Back and Forth - a better version which uses many wheels for low ...
Posted in Fun, Internet | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
These three games present interesting logic puzzles:
Fantastic Contraption - build a machine to get an item into the target zone.
Light-bot - provide simple commands to make your robot traverse obstacles (publisher site with annoying, talking banner ads is here).
Chronotron - solve puzzles using a time machine.
Posted in Fun, Internet | No Comments »