Well this week has just been one of these weeks were I didn’t even have time to shave. I had a number of assignments due this week and a couple of exams that took a lot out of me! I went to the library with a couple guys to study for our Physics exam and ended up staying late which definitely helped on the exam but unfortunately I got sick! So the second half of the week kind of sucked considering I had a cold and a pretty constant headache. Fortunately though I was able to get enough studying for my Physics exam and Differential Equations exam and feel pretty good about the grades on got on them.

All in all, this week has been crazy and I am so glad that it is over! There is a football game tomorrow and UF is playing Ole Miss. It is going to be AMAZING since I got front row tickets! Nothing like picking up tickets from the student ticket booth and seeing ROW 1 on the tickets! Heck yes! I’ll put up some pictures from the game since I should have a pretty sweet view!

I certainly have neglected this blog recently but really hope to start writing on it more. I have been fairly busy with work but I’ll be done working for the summer in about 2 weeks so that is pretty exciting! Then I’ll start posting some more and will be working on uploading some of the programming projects I have been working on for anybody to look at.

Anyways, time to talk about the title of this post! I have been looking for one of my flash drives all week and just could not find it. I threw some laundry in to the wash this morning and never bothered to check the pockets. I usually empty my pockets when I take my pants off so that I don’t let things go through the wash. Guess I forgot this time! My sister took my clothes out of the dryer and found my flash drive in there! Amazingly it made it through the washer and dryer without breaking! It does smell a bit like Tide detergent now but I plugged it in and it still works great. Therefore, my official recommendation on flash drives are these SanDisk Cruzer drives since they can put up with just about anything!

Well, summer started a couple weeks ago and I started working as a PC Support Specialist again! As a part of my first week of work I started work on re-doing 18 Dell PCs that are set up in a “museum” type setting. These PCs have a variety of interactive Flash applications and websites that visitors can use. Naturally, these PCs need to be “locked down” as much as possible so that people can’t just press CTRL-ALT-DEL or minimize the browser window and mess around with the computer. These computers were not set up very well initially and there have been plenty of instances of people accessing the computer and being able to see the network and change settings. There was even a case where a person decided to place links to pornographic websites on the desktop which is just horrible!

There are plenty of commercial solutions for locking down a browser and usually cost a considerable amount per computer. I decided to use freely available open source software to create the locked down kiosk solution that the project called for.

Naturally, I needed to start with a good solid web browser that would allow for the use of plugins and customization. Firefox anyone? I grabbed a copy of Firefox 2 since Firefox 3 isn’t quite ready for production use yet and went to looking for plugins that would help turn Firefox into a kiosk browser. I stumbled upon R-kiosk which was exactly what I was looking for! If you read through the comments on the R-kiosk description page you will see that there are a couple shortcomings. The most notable problem is that popup windows are automatically resized to take up the entire screen. Since the menu bar is hidden so that the user can’t simply hit the “X” users can get “stuck” on pop up screens! This is a major flaw in the plug in but rather difficult to avoid. Fortunately for my set up, I don’t have to worry about popup windows. The content that users can view is local to the PC and is not “live” internet content. Saman Sadeghi has an excellent tutorial about R-kiosk over at his website.

If you read the description for R-Kiosk you will see that it blocks many of the keys in Firefox in order to prevent users from doing certain things. It does work and prevents the user from right clicking and things of that sort. This is great but there are still a number of things that the user could do in order to get back to the computer. R-Kiosk doesn’t block things like the Windows key or other common key combinations like CTRL-SHIFT-ESC or ALT-SHIFT-ESC that would allow a user to exit the browser window or bring up the Task Manager. I needed to completely lock down the computers and only allow the user to do a small set of operations.

In order to do this, I needed a way to control certain key strokes and prevent common ones like the Windows key from working. The best way I found to do this was a simple free program called AutoHotKey. Many gamers use AutoHotKey to create, well, hotkeys, for their games! I personally have used it to create custom hotkeys that make repetitive tasks easier to perform. I created a simple AutoHotKey script that monitors common shortcuts in Firefox and Windows and makes them do nothing which is exactly what is needed when locking down a PC! Here is a copy of the script that I created:

/*
Ignore attempts to launch multiple instances of the program
*/
#SingleInstance ignore
#InstallKeybdHook
 
/*
Disable a series of keys
*/
 
!F4::  ; Alt F4
!Esc::  ; Alt Escape
Lwin::  ; Left Windows Key
Rwin::  ; Right Windows Keyl
^Tab::  ; Ctrl Tab
!Tab::  ; Alt Tab
!+Tab::  ; Alt Shift Tab
F7::  ; F7
^+Escape::  ; Ctrl Shift Escape
!+Escape::  ; Alt SHift Escape
^A::  ; Ctrl A
^R::  ; Ctrl R
^P::  ; Ctrl P
^X::  ; Ctrl X
^C::  ; Ctrl C
^V::  ; Ctrl V
^T::  ; Ctrl T
!VK24::  ; Alt Home
SC135::  ; Firefox Quick Find
SC145::  ; Num Lock
 
SC03A::  ; Caps Lock
SC046::  ; Scroll Lock
!LButton::  ; Alt Left Click which starts download in Firefox
^LButton::  ; Ctrl Left Click which starts download
!MButton::  ; Alt Middle Click which opens a new tab in Firefox
^MButton::  ; Alt Middle Click which opens a new tab
+LButton::  ; Shift Left Click which opens a new window in Firefox
+MButton::  ; Shift Middle Click which opens a new tab
+VK0D::  ; Shift Enter which opens a new window
!+VK0D::  ; Alt Shift Enter which opens a new window
!VK0D::  ; Alt Enter which starts download
^VK0D::  ; Ctrl Enter which opens a new tab
^+VK0D::  ; Ctrl Shift Enter opens a new tab
^!VK0D::  ; Ctrl Alt Enter opens a new tab
^Escape::  ; Ctrl Escape
!Space::  ; Alt Space which opens menu bar
!+Space::  ; Alt Shift Space which opens menu bar
return
 
/*
Set Alt F9 to exit any open Firefox browser
*/
!F9::
 
IfWinExist, ahk_class MozillaUIWindowClass ; Firefox
 
{
 
WinActivate ahk_class MozillaUIWindowClass
 
WinClose, ahk_class MozillaUIWindowClass
 
}
 
return

As you can see, the top section of code monitors for all sorts of hotkeys and shortcuts. I’m sure that there are more that I didn’t come up and I’d love comments if there are anymore that would be helpful to block! The comments in the code make it rather self explanitory. The first section monitors for keystrokes and that has no action for each keystroke. Looking at the syntax of the AutoHotKey code, notice the “::” that comes after each Key sequence. Normally, the action for the hotkey would come after the double colons but my script assigns no action to each key stroke. You will notice that there are a number of characters that are used to represent certain keys in order to detect the keystroke. For example, the “!” is used to represent the Alt key. A full list of these character to key associations can be found at the AutoHotKey site. There is also excellent documentation available that can help your further explore AutoHotKey.

The second half of the code monitors for the Alt-F9 key sequence. This sequence was my testing “exit key” used to get me out of Firefox. This will be set to something more complicated, like a series of four keys, so that an administrator could make changes to the machine. If the AutoHotKey detects that Alt-F9 was pressed, it will check to see if any windows exist that belong to the MozillaUIWindowClass. It then closes them which would get an administrator the computer’s desktop.

Whew! That was a lot of information! I’m going to take a break now that I have explained a good amount about R-Kiosk and using AutoHotKey to limit key strokes. In the next installment I’ll talk about my modifications to the Firefox userChrome.css file which allowed me to hide all the features of the Firefox environment except for the back and forward buttons.

After finishing off my duties at the Engineering graduation last night it was time to finish preparing for my move back home for the summer! I am officially done living in dorms! Next year I’ll be living in an apartment off-campus with my own bedroom and own bathroom! CAN’T WAIT! I definitely enjoyed living in the dorm and I’m glad that I did it. It was a very interesting experience and I met some very strange people along the way but I guess that is the point of college! I am glad to be done with freshman year and very glad that I can finally relax and enjoy not having to go to class and study for tests! I will certainly miss living in Beaty Towers and I’ll miss having my roommates and other people around all the time in case I get bored. It feels great to have the first year done and even though it seems like there is so much more college left, there really isn’t! It will be over before I realize it and then I’ll be forced to get a full time job and see what I really learned. So exciting! I can’t wait for the future.

Now that I am back home and have a full desk to myself, I was able to redo my computer set up. I bought a second Acer 22″ monitor at the start of the year to use as a TV and later took it out of use when my room mate got a new 26″ LCD TV for us to use. Now that I have a new graphics card and two monitors I finally have my ideal dual monitor set up! Here is a picture:

I’m pretty excited that I finally am able to use this as my set up! It consists of 2 Acer 22″ LCD screens, my “Hackintosh” desktop running Mac OS X Leopard and a Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. I feel more productive already and I definitely enjoy being able to watch a movie or TV show on one screen while writing an e-mail or surfing the web on the other! I know that this set up will also help a lot when I am trading on the Forex market but I’ll write more about that sometime later. Overall, feels great to be home and feels good knowing that I have nearly four months of summer ahead of me!

Well, I started this blog a few weeks ago with the intention of keeping up with it. Then again, most people initially say they are going to keep up with a blog and then stop within a couple weeks. Starting a blog for most people is like making a New Year’s resolution the lose weight: worthless is most cases!

Things have been rather hectic lately with the end of the school year finally here. I have one more exam tomorrow morning and then a Physics final on Saturday and then I’ll be done with freshman year! Oh, the joys! I’m definitely excited for the summer and glad that I can finally relax and not worry about studying and going to class until the end of August!

In other news, I have become a rather crazed Apple fanatic. In the past two months I have bought an iPhone, started using a Leopard desktop full time and bought Apple stock! I would definitely say that I fully enjoy using Apple’s wonderful products. The iPhone has been utterly amazing! I went from a piece of junk Motorola v360 flip phone to a “compact computer” for a phone. I remember buying the Motorola v360 about two years ago and being pretty psyched that it had a Micro SD slot that would let me store about a gig of MP3s on my phone. The iphone I bought has 8 GBs of space and can do a million more things compared to the v360.

I have also switched over to a Leopard desktop for full time use. I still use my laptop for CAD work and for some Windows based programming but am fully content using Mac full time now. I personally find that it helps me to work better. I actually enjoy having to do homework at times just so that I have a good reason to use the Mac! The entire look and feel of the operating system is so refreshing and fun to use. Everything is “smooth” looking and makes you feel like you are engulfed in an experience as opposed to staring at a boring screen as you work on something.

To top off my Apple craze I also bought some Apple stock! This was certainly a milestone for me since it was my first stock purchase ever! Considering how much I enjoy making quick money with a minimal amount of work, I don’t know why I didn’t invest in the stock market earlier. Granted, its rarely easy to make money on the stock market without serious research, making any profit kicks the crap out of the 0.20% interest Wachovia would be paying me to have my money in a savings account. I’ll definitely see if my investment was a wise one tomorrow afternoon once able announces their earnings! It’s either going to sky rocket or plummet and I’m obviously hoping for the first one!

Well, that’s all for now. I’ll leave you with a link to my development website:

http://www.stokedev.com

I’ve developed a couple small web applications for the iPhone and will be working on more soon now that my finals are coming to an end. Here are links to my applications on Apple’s website if you are interested:

Money Shuffle: a simple currency convertor for the iPhone:

http://www.apple.com/webapps/calculate/moneyshuffle.html

iDeals: a deal of the day tracker for the iPhone:

http://www.apple.com/webapps/utilities/ideals.html

I was studying for my Physics quiz the other day and was reading a chapter on Gravitation in my Physics book when I stumbled upon the term “Great Attractor.” To quote my book, “The Local Group is part of the Local Supercluster of galaxies that is being drawn by the gravitational force toward an exceptionally massive region of space called the Great Attractor. This region appears to be about 3.0 x 10⁸ light-years from Earth, on the opposite side of the Milky Way.” WOW! What an interesting concept and strange phenomenon. The first thing I thought of when reading this though was, “Could that be heaven?” The name fits. The concept fits since everything in the Universe is being drawn towards it. And it just sounds good.

I did a quick search on Google to see if other people made some type of religious connection with this idea of the Great Attractor. I found an article by James McGillis talking about the same idea. He approached the topic in a very metaphysical sense which was interesting to read. I like the idea of thinking about God or heaven being out there in a specific place in the Universe but at the same time I don’t know if it is reasonable. I am a firm Christian and I believe that God is omnipotent and omnipresent. That would mean that God would have to be in this Great Attractor region but also everywhere in the Universe at the same time.

All in all, I just like the idea of the Earth being attracted to this defined region in the Universe called the Great Attractor which in actuality could the location of “heaven.” I guess you could say that it is a very cliche idea but a fun idea to contemplate all at the same time.

Here are a couple interesting pictures illustrating the Great Attractor.

One last interesting fact! The Great Attractor is “attracting” galaxies and Superclusters at velocities in excess of 600 kilometers per second!

Hello world! I have decided to start another blog! I used to have one over on wordpress.com but then I stopped keeping up with it for some reason. I now have my own domain name set up and hopefully will be added lots of stuff to my site in the near future. I hope to upload some of the random computer projects I am working on and just talk about life. Hope you enjoy my blog! Thanks for stopping by!