+ abnormalbehaviourchild is very prolific. Niko Stumpo’s style is intense and unrestrained. I saw a tshirt she and Scien did for Threadless, a tshirt company in Chi-cago that takes designs from it’s community and prints 4 to 6 each week. link via monoki via a random link on confusedkid, via …

+ Just a tip to anyone trying to come up with a budget for painting the interior of your home. It is not cheaper to do the interior than the exterior. Think of it this way. Not only are there the same amount of walls on the interior as the exterior, but there are more. Visualize that there are walls defining the main box of the house, and within that box there are walls defining the boxes of the individual rooms. Plus there are ceilings in every room and much more trim…I just spent 3 1/2 hours checking out a house and calculating my estimate, only now I hear they have a budget of around $3000 for the interior and around $6000 for the exterior. My number came in around $5800. - I guess I won’t get that one…and I guess I no longer do estimates without knowing the budget first.

+ Just installed the freeware application Cerberus FTP Server, and it’s simple enough that a dummy like myself can install and set it up in under 2 minutes.

…provides powerful, multithreaded FTP server performance without sacrificing ease-of-use. Designed to use very little CPU and memory, Cerberus features a user-friendly interface that can be easily hidden or accessed from the system tray. The server is able to listen for connections on multiple interfaces (Multi-homed PCs), run as an NT service, resume failed transfers, and offers an easy-to-use manager for controlling user access to files and file operations. Connection limit, timeout, and IP access can be controlled by the administrator as well as a variety of other settings. In addition, Cerberus FTP Server offers statistics on connections as well as robust logging capabilities.

+ David ICQ-ed me a great link to a SecurityFocus column by Scott Granneman who describes a visit from Dave Thomas an FBI agent who’s also a computer security expert. Granneman teaches security at Washington University in St. Louis and had Thomas speak to his students, friends, and associates on security threats; trojans, viruses,spam, and internet crime. That it’s possible to purchase millions of creditcard numbers for a few pennies seems pretty out of control.

Dave also had a great quotation for us: “If you’re a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac.” Basically, police and government agencies know what to do with seized Windows machines. They can recover whatever information they want, with tools that they’ve used countless times. The same holds true, but to a lesser degree, for Unix-based machines. But Macs evidently stymie most law enforcement personnel. They just don’t know how to recover data on them. So what do they do? By and large, law enforcement personnel in American end up sending impounded Macs needing data recovery to the acknowledged North American Mac experts: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Evidently the Mounties have built up a knowledge and technique for Mac forensics that is second to none.