Yes, I’ve just taken a deep breath and I am starting to update geekie.net. I will, once again, start to post articles about stuff I find interesting.
Let’s hope I will have time to continue posting. I do enjoy seeing geekie.net up-to-date.
As you can see, the site looks different. I thought it would be better to apply a new theme and work from there. The other theme was already a thing of the past and since I updated the engine (wordpress) I thought a new theme would also be a good move.
This theme I applied was created by Blog Design Studio and I already started to change it so that it fits geekie.net properly.

Well, I hope you enjoy the resurrection… happy bloggin’!!

. . . that the speed of sound is 343 m/s or 1235 km/h? Speeds higher than this are called supersonic and are usually referred by the unit Mach. Being Mach 2 two times the speed of sound (2470 km/h). Speeds after Mach 5 are usually called hypersonic speeds.

. . . that the speed of light is approximately 300,000 km/s (three hundred thousand kilometers per second)? To be more precise it is 299,792,458 m/s (meters per second).

. . . the distance from Earth to Sun is around 149,598,000 kilometers (almost 150 million kilometers)? To this distance we can call Astronomical Unit or AU.

. . . that with the above data we can say that light generated by the Sun will take roughly 500 seconds (8 minutes and 40 seconds) to reach us.

Last weekend I decided to clean up my computer. No, not the dust inside it (I did that 2 weeks ago). My Windows installation was a bit slow and it was time to do a full clean.

I decided to install Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux. It’s time to jump to the new operating system, I was still using XP. With Service Pack 1 and software houses already optimizing their software for Vista I think it is now the time to install it. Regarding Linux, from all the distributions available, I think Ubuntu is the best one for me. Clean interface, easy to use and update/install new software and good enough to use as a multi purpose server.

So, after I installed Windows and Ubuntu all was running perfectly. I even started to use Ubuntu as my preferred OS to play music, movies and to download from torrents. If you haven’t tried Linux yet, Ubuntu is a very user friendly that “almost” replaces Windows. I say almost because Windows has much more software support. So if you’re a gamer you probably want to stick with Windows (or buy an Xbox 360 ). But of course it all depends on your field of expertise and what you enjoy using. Some say Linux is the way to go, some say Windows and I had a friend of mine saying that Solaris is the one . I chose Windows and Linux.

Today I ran Media Direct (included in DELL laptops) and had an error. Running for a second time was ok (weird). This has caused my Grub boot loader not to start and to give an Error 17. There are lots of information out there about it. I actually spent around 2 hours researching how to get rid of it and to have my boot menu back.

This is how I got rid of the Grub error 17:

1. Boot from Live CD
2. Open a terminal session
3. Run “sudo grub” – It runs Grub with root permissions
4. In Grub prompt type “find /boot/grub/stage1″ – this will tell you where Grub was installed so that we can fix the boot
5. Still on Grub prompt: “root (hd?,?)” – Replace the ‘?’ with the values from the point 4 result. First ‘?’ is the hard drive, the second is the partition. This tells Grub that its files are on that specific partition.
6. Type “setup (hd0)” to install Grub into the MBR (Master Boot Record)
7. “quit” to exit Grub
8. You can now reboot and check if this fixed your Error 17. You should be able to boot properly now.

This has fixed my specific issue. If it didn’t help you, try reading the following articles which helped me understand what was going on. All of these can be found using “grub error 17″ on Google.

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=224351 - The one I used to fix my issue
• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=442945 - A nice forum discussion about Error 17
• http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/p15.htm - Useful information about the Grub loader
• http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/SuperGrubDiskPage.html - Supergrub application
• http://www.iknowkungfoo.com/blog/index.cfm/2008/6/16/Stupid-solution-for-Grub-error-17 - Quick fix for some Error 17 issues

It seems people (including scientists — they’re also people) are a bit skeptical about Kaminsky findings. There is some speculation regarding if this DNS/Internet bug story is really true. It seems that an almost identical bug was already found around three years ago. But, in the meantime, Kaminsky it getting all the attention from, at least, Internet security companies. And hey… Internet security seems ‘a bit’ related to his field of expertise. This last sentence could have two meanings…

Read the full article on Yahoo News.

 The Internet… That vast universe of bits and bytes (more like Terabytes now) have now a patch. That is a bit weird isn’t it? The Internet having a patch? It seems like I’m talking about some piece of software.

But it’s a fact. The Internet had a huge bug in the DNS protocol (Domain Name System) and was discovered by accident by Dan Kaminsky, which works with IOActive. He is also a former employee of Cisco Systems.

This bug seems to be quite bad, it would allow someone (a hacker?) to redirect all wanted traffic to a specific point. Imagine you are accessing your bank account through your bank’s online system and that someone forwards you to a clone of that site that does not belong to your bank. It would be possible to get all your bank account details and codes without you noticing, which would not be good news for you.

Hopefully this bug is now being fixed and the Internet will be healthy again.

Read the full article in Yahoo! News.

A Swedish court has read the sentence and The Pirate Bay (a very popular file sharing, torrents web site) owners will now have to pay the amount of €123,000. This seems the end of The Pirate Bay web site, so if you are one of the (illegal) users of it you better start looking for an alternative. . . er . . . I mean . . . Stop using those kind of web sites. Ask for a pay raise and start paying for your stuff

Read the Tech.co.uk article.

It is now available the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 RC Refresh. It doesn’t have any major differences from the original SP1 RC, although it fixes some issues with SP1 RC itself. Microsoft will probably release some more fixes/updates in the near future, so if you already have SP1 RC installed don’t bother installing this one. You also need to uninstall Service Pack 1 RC in order to install the Refresh update.

You can check all the Hotfixes and Security Updates included in the Service Pack 1 here.

Click here to go to the Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh website.

I don’t know about you but I uninstalled Windows Vista (Home Premium) a week ago. I think it’s quite a nice Operating System but not for gaming. I usually play World of Warcraft and I can say that Vista steals around 10 frames per second from me. With Windows XP Media Center Edition I get those back. It’s not a big difference when the game is steady at 50-60fps but once I get to Shattrath (the main city in the expansion pack) it usually comes down to 17fps. With Windows XP I get 28-30fps.

You must be thinking, what a crap computer he’s got. Well, I have the DELL XPS M1710 which has a 512MB GeForce 7950GTX. I don’t call that crap. It’s quite a nice graphics card although the new DirectX10 ones are much better of course. And yes, I play it with the native resolution for my screen (1920×1200) with everything at maximum resolution. I am not complaining, I am just saying that with Windows XP I can have better performance.

All this boring introduction :p is just to say that finally we have Service Pack 1 available. Hopefully will fix some performance issues. Check out Tech ARP’s article about “What’s New In Windows Vista Service Pack 1?“.

Interested in installing Windows Vista SP1? Click here to go to the SP1 page in the Microsoft site.

It looks like there weren’t big news for gamers, at least not for Xbox 360 owners. We were expecting to hear some exciting news on some nice hardware to be released later this year or even an entire new Xbox but it seems that he had another plans

Bill talked about the future, TVs, the Zune music player and some more Microsoft related products and technology. I personally enjoyed the “Bill Gates last full day at Microsoft” video. It was quite funny to watch, specially the gym bit Skip to the 10 minutes if you’re interested in checking that out

Watch the video:

http://wm.istreamplanet.com/customers/ms/01062008_300.asx

(you need Windows Media codec to play this video)

Want other resolutions? Watch the live webcast of 2008 Microsoft CES keynote in the Microsoft website.

You all know about the CES 2008 which is happening right now in Las Vegas. If you are interested of knowing more about what’s going on in this great exhibition head to the CES coverage site in Engadget.

As a note, Engadget is (in my humble opinion) the best technology blog out there and they have people doing the coverage of what’s going in the CES exhibition in Las Vegas.

Visit the Engadget’s CES homepage: http://ces.engadget.com/