On a lighter note, tech article of the day, Super Plastic Both Attracts and Repels Water! That is awesome. The applications are huge, as are many of the scientific discoveries/developments I mention here.

Current projects:
* libpsocks - ICMP tunnel wrapper library for TCP.
* Compress - Dead simple python script for taking in a data stream and using huffman optimal encoding to try and reduce its size.
* Socket tutorial from beginner to advanced.
* Article on how to identify which PID a packet may have been sent from.

I'm not sure how much I'll actually finish because I have a short attention span and I just want to chill out at the moment!

Reading this I'm thinking of looking at renewing my passport! I'm not a fan of the identity database and when its in place it will be hard to remove. There is no assurances of security and the government will be able to track nearly every one of our moves. The cost is also too high for a system which mostly reminds me of a Big Brother like state. I really don't understand why they want to do this, I can't see any obvious benefit that justifies the cost.

Pay £51 for a 10-year passport while you can. The charge for ID registration and a record for life will be at least £93

This post is just letting people know why not so many posts have been made lately, I'm in the middle of my exam period so most my time is either chilling or studying.

However I am inspired to rant abit right now, since I hit the power button on my laptop, wanted to rush off to my exam this morning (09:30 saturday, how harsh is that?) and it does the typical XP thing "This program isn't responding, should I end it?". Now this wouldn't be so bad except when you're in a rush and you want stuff to switch off you just want to hit the button and run right?

Okay fair enough it's nice to have that option but I'd just like to be able to override it. I mean even when I do a force shutdown using the shutdown utility from the command prompt it asks all these questions. Sort of defeats the object of forced shutdown.

Blah, so anyway I noticed it still hadn't shut off before I left, flipped open the top and saw one of these messages, clicked end task, couple seconds later another, clicked end task, having figured it was shutting down now I left. I came back to find it still on, yet more end task dialogs. So I click them and close the top again. Couple seconds later I note its still on, I open it again and saw that all of the desktop, explorer, and such had gone, all that remained was my wallpaper but the system was still on and showing no signs of going through the shutdown proceedure. This has happened many times to me with XP.

Its frustrating because simply when I hit power, it means I want it off now and I'm leaving. Otherwise I tend to use the menus. No option for this behaviour. Hell as mentioned earlier even force shutdowns don't work. So I end up holding the power button until the interal mechanics of the laptop hardware kill power. At last!

I hear (but not from personal experience) that a Macantosh switchs off so easily (crashing), and WindowsXP just doesn't want to turn off at all! Whats the deal with that? Did Microsoft care so much about uptime they made the system to argue with the user?

Ok I'm not serious, I'm just tired of XP not behaving the way I'd like.

Speaking of OSX, this was published a couple days ago about Apple closing down the OSX source code. Sounds like bullocks to me, but it's their OS.

Also on the topic of Apple one of their Macbook Pros burnt a womans leg. I didn't think the burns looked that bad but I can imagine how a device like that, burning someone would be supprising.

And last, but not least, check this out. Its an article about a turkish guy who on the 17th of May, hacked, defaced, and tagged over 38,000 sites, most of which were secondary page defacements (pages that are not the front page). That guy must have been completely over caffinated to tag that fast, even with mass-attack scripts. zone-h believes its the largest website hack attack in hisotry. zone-h article. All I can say is, wow. The full list of defacements made in the first wave I've mirrored at nulldigital