Dearest Keeper of the basicer website,

One of your friends, Travis, wrote an article about a girl named Stephanie Benore. I don’t know if you know her at all or how well, but if you have her phone number or email address I desperately need to get in touch with her soon.

We met on a service project trip to Louisiana and I am coming to her hometown this weekend and want to meet up with her. I only have her mailing address.

Please help me if you can, stranger.

Sincerely,

Beth Lunik

First of you can apparently get a copy of DivX Pro for free if you put a little graphic on your website promoting the file format. (see this page for details). I happen to like the DivX format, so I figure Ill give it a shot. Besides the logo kidna blends in nicely with my website.

Also you can see that I added a single google ad to the header of my website where there was previously empty spcae. I figure I would give it a shot and see what sort of impressions and click through I got. If I get a fair ammount of income I plan to redesign my site.

What Are They Doing?

By: Travis

Anyone with Z lunch has probably noticed by now. The four kids that sit at the table in front of the men’s bathroom. They sit there for the entire lunch period and play as many games of chess as they can before lunch is over. By doing this Robert Blanckaert, David Burwell, Travis Valentine, and Calvin Andrews have attracted a great deal of unwanted attention to themselves.

The purpose of this piece is to dispel the rumors and myths about these mysterious youths that call themselves… The Checkmate Alliance! Okay, maybe they don’t call themselves that yet but Travis is trying bis best to get the others to accept the title.

Rumor #1: “They’re betting on the games.” FALSE. There is no gambling occurring on these games. It’s all for love of the game.

Rumor #2: “They are members of the chess club.” FALSE. Davison High School doesn’t have a chess club.

Rumor #3: “They are unusual people by nature.” TRUE. They are very unique individuals and frankly don’t care what you think of them.

With those rumors dispelled I think that the next logical step would be to answer the burning questions everyone feels the need to ask. Here are the most common ones;

Question #1: “Where did you get the chess clock?” The answer is; Robby doesn’t know, his uncle gave it to him for Christmas.

Question #2: “Why are you playing chess at lunch?” Because they enjoy chess and it’s the only opportunity they get to play each other.

Question #3: “Are you guys in the chess club?” NO! Davison High School doesn’t have a chess club.

Question #4: “Can I play winner even though I don’t know how to play?” No. They just want to play a few games with each other while they eat. Leave them alone.

So… now you know. The true stories of four miraculous youths that posess the supernatural ability to… play a board game at lunch. Come to think of it… that’s really not all that cool… do you think you can leave them alone now?

A few days a go Erika, friend of mine, need an assignment printed that she had done at school in publisher. I constantly tell people how much publisher sucks, and that you should never do things in publisher, but she apparently never heard that from me. I figured that Microsoft had some sort of program like the word viewer that would allow me to print publisher files, and that it shouldn’t be any problem.

Apparently there is no such program. Fortunately I already had Publisher 98 installed from some previous fiasco, and figured that would work. After Copying all the files to the hard drive first, I open the folder in windows explorer, right click, and select the print option. A totally blank piece of paper comes out of the printer. After explictedly opening the file in publisher I get a error message that publisher can not open documents from other versions of publisher.

So, I go about trying to find another application that can atlest print them. Now if you know anything about OpenOffice.org, it can open just about any file format ever created… except publisher. I call some people about finding a copy of Publisher 2000. My friend lets me borrow his Microsoft Office Professional CD, and attempt to install publisher. Now I try to install Publisher with the CD-Key that was given to him when he Legally Purched the Software. Now that CD key didn’t work! After typing it in 3 times to make sure I am just not typing it wrong, I go about finding another CD-Key thats going to work. After trying 10 other CD Keys, it finally accepts one.

OK we have Publisher 2000 installed. I double click the file to open it, and it opens in Publisher 98! Frustrated I find the Publisher 98 exe and delete it, then open Publisher 2000 buy its exe. I open the files, and once again, I get a message saying Publisher cant open files from other versions of Publisher. Now I know that some of the computers at school have Publisher 97 on them, and theres no way I am going to get a copy of that. I talk to Erika about what version shes used, and by asking her about suddel differences about the GUI, I established that is must be Office XP, or 2002. So I look into getting a trial version. Apparently the only thing available cost seven dollars, and they have to send it to me on a CD.

So, somehow we needed to get these Publisher files into something I can open. Now in Publisher there is a way to save your file as a globally openable (in publisher anyway) Publisher 98 file. My fear with that is that the conversion down would break a lot of things. The best idea I could come with would be to save them as images that I could print out in  PhotoShop. Theres apparently a way to save any image in office as a TIFF file. However that requires something called the Microsoft Document Writer, that acts like a printer. So that would have to be installed on one of the computers at school, and all 15 publisher files printed to that and saved as TIFF files before I could go home and print them.

So with this information, I go about finding a copy of this Document Writer Addon. I found the expanded help file for it, but not the actually addon. Nope, you cant seem to download this stupid fake printer thing. I considered taking a ScreenShot of each one, but there are high quality pictures in them, and the alignment might not come out right. So I consisted exporting them as a Postscript file. Postscript was how you printed on Mac OS 1. Anyhow, I know Ghost can print Postscript files on a just about any computer with a printer. But humm… the ghost Mirrors seem to all be down. Photoshop should be able to open Postscript files! It dose! Wow, that only took two days to print some files!

-bash-2.05b$ whatis love

love: nothing appropriate

Im now the proud owner of basicer.com. You might see the site go down until all the DNS servers get up to sync with the new changes. For some reason only www.basicer.com works at the moment, but Im looking into it.

I decided that I needed to update the news on my website. In fact lots of people have decided that and decided to let me know. I’m not sure what to write about though, I’m not much of a blogger. Perhaps a link to this is good. Or, perhaps this will do. Ive considered rewriting the story system based on the fame its gotten. If you’d like to see that, feel free to bug me in one of the ways listed here ^_^.

If your curious about what I’m working on these days, its Dolphin, a Rcon Bot for the HalfLife and SourceEngine. If you play counter strike and are interested in giving it a whirl, bug at the link above (the one with the ^_^ in it). I’m also writing a Source engine BSP decompiler to screw with the entities of a map; its called (Uninspired) MapMod.

If you where keeping up on Isle of Departure, I decided games like that where bad; so I stopped developing the back end code for it. Not to mention it ran too slow. If you liked using the CGI-IRC system to talk to your friends during class, Id like to take the time to say I didn’t write it, some one else did. I just installed a copy on my website.

If your that annoying kid from BIT (you know who you are), and are trying to figure out how The Fox Works, you’ll never figure it out, so make sure you set your twenty bucks aside and don’t steal it.

I was talking to a friend about my site, and noticed that it was time to bust out the good old halloween skin. What dose this mean might you ask? This site is about a year old! So I think it’s time to put up some long term traffic stats.

Total Unique Visitors This Year: 22,250

Bandwidth Served: 31.2GB

Today I took my first stab at linux hacking. A friend of myne is opening a shell company. We where discussing how he could monitor what his tech support guys where doing. The tech support staff would need to be able to use ‘su’ to access customer accounts; but if he gave them access to root, they could cover their tracks.

To solve this problem I modified the `su` program and called it TechSU. It allows anyone who can execute the program to become any user but root. (The program has to be chown root and chmod +s ofcoure). All activity is loged (in the normal su fassion, but for both sucess and failure).

The sugested implementation is to create a techsu group for your tech staff, chgrp the progarm to techsu, and chmod the program 710.

For source or a RedHat 9 Binary, send me an email.