Elliott C. Back: Technology FTW!

I came across this playing the Facebook Poker game today, the chances are pretty low:

I think the chances are about .2%, if I’m calculating correctly, to get a 666 anywhere in your hand. SCARY!

And here’s a flush on the flop… weird!!!

I was somewhat scared when I noticed this list of usernames / passwords for MySpace. Yeah, someone actually managed to hack my MySpace account, which is more incredible given that I don’t ever log into it:

Myspace hacked accounts 3/20/08
Here a list of myspace accounts and passwords

Example:
Username : Passwords get it

MySpace is pretty advanced in this regard; somehow they detected that my account had been compromised and when I logged in now to change the password, I received this neat message warning me:

MySpace Announcement: Your account has been phished!

What can I do?
Change your password. And don’t use your current password ever again. Why do I care? We’ve blocked your account until you change your password. This means you can’t send a message, post a bulletin, send a comment or add a friend until you’ve changed your password.

What does “phished” mean?
“Phished” means that someone stole the email address & password that you use to login to MySpace. They might be sending out messages, comments or bulletins as you!

How did this happen?
You went to a fake page that asked for your MySpace login email and password, and you gave them your info. Only login to www.myspace.com. Learn more

I’ve changed all my users and passwords now, but still it’s a tiring experience…

Gawker is running an interesting story, Sarah Palin’s Personal Emails, about how Sarah Palin’s personal emails were leaked to Wikileak’s Sarah Palin Yahoo inbox 2008. Apparently an unknown individual loosely associated with the anti-Scientology movement Anonymous obtained access to gov.sarah@yahoo.com, Sarah Palin’s email address, and took some screenshots of the emails he found there:

It looks legit! The offending posts, screenshots, heretofore unseen family photos, and emails have all been deleted from Imageshack and 4Chan. But we have them. You want to read Sarah Palin’s email?

It’s kind of sad to see Palin’s email only has 174 total messages. I’ve been using email for hopefully less time than her, yet my gmail account has 48,163 email messages in it (say three years worth. Perhaps John McCain picked a running mate for VP as technically inept as he is.

Disclosure: I think Sarah Palin sucks for a VP pick.

Update: The suspect who allegedly hacked Sarah Palin’s email is University of Tennessee student David Kernell. His father is democratic state representative Mike Kernell. Interesting…

If you get the following command when trying to build a package from source on linux (Fedora 8 in my case), chances are you don’t have GCC installed:

configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH
See `config.log’ for more details.

The solution is simple, run one of the following commands to install a C compiler:

CentOS: yum -y install gcc
Fedora: up2date -i gcc

For me, this installed a few additional helper packages to get me started compiling C-code:

Installing:
gcc x86_64 4.1.2-33 fedora 5.3 M
Installing for dependencies:
cpp x86_64 4.1.2-33 fedora 2.9 M
glibc-devel x86_64 2.7-2 fedora 2.4 M
glibc-headers x86_64 2.7-2 fedora 599 k
kernel-headers x86_64 2.6.26.3-14.fc8 updates-newkey 746 k

If you’ve encountered this error while trying to build a PHP plugin or an Apache extension, then you’re simply missing the PHP-Devel package on your system:

-bash: phpize: command not found

To fix this, simple issue one of the commands, depending on your linux O/S:

CentOS: yum -y install php-devel
Fedora: up2date -i php-devel

Personally, I run yum on my fedora machine, so I would simply use it to install the package. If you don’t have yum, check out Managing Software with Yum, a great guide for sysadmins.