sitzmar! do what now?

cool artwork

I was digging around for some new desktop wallpapers, and stumbled across the the website of David Lanham. Dude does nice work. It's vibrant, delightfully creative, and fun. In a word, awesome.

Oh Yeah, Happy Halloween!

quick question

magic dns phone trickery

I got a new cell a few weeks back, a lg vx5200 to be precise. Very nice phone, but those buggers over at verizon have gone and locked down all the neat features so that you have to use their 'get it now' service for pictures/ringtones/games/etc, which of course costs $$.

I quickly located the wap proxy settings and set it to an open proxy server, thereby avoiding verizons $5/mo fee. However there doesn't seem to be any way to download and save pictures or files of any type. Booo!

I read about Humpa's Picserver which supposedly allows you to upload and email pictures for free, but you have to be able to change the submit url on the phone, which as you may have guessed, verizon locked down. Nutbunnies!

Not one to give up so easily, I decided to pull a little switcheroo on the phone. I knew that the phone would still be using the defined proxy, so I setup squid as a proxy on my bsd box, and added a few choice entries in my hosts file to basically hijack any requests for verizon services to the webserver running on my box.

The hijack actually worked, and instead of going to http://mw2.vzwwap.com/pixplace it was sent right to my webserver where Humpa's Picserver was running. But, I still couldn't upload or download pictures. Seems that all the uploads are handled via sms/mms. Arg! Foiled again! (if I'm wrong about this, someone let me know)

I'm getting a data cable soon, so once I get that I'm going to look into changing some of the other defaults locked into the phone. The dns servers are my first target.

Fight!

Having two virus scanner installed at the same time is not a good thing. And despite numerous warnings, some people still manage to do it. I sigh and laugh when I overhear a consultant on the phone with someone who has gotten themselves into this predicament. The best part of the conversation is when they have to explain why having two scanners is bad. One explanation is that the virus scanners fight with eachother and thats what makes the computer slow.

This conjured up a mental picture of the virus scanners as professional wrestlers:

Norton: Hey, I was here first buddy! I'm gonna scan that file! *flex*
McAfee: Hey Norton! Your mother's a whore! OH YEAH!

fight fight fight

Broken chair over the head

fight fight fight

repeat forever