Cheating Death......

Andy Wilsheer is one lucky photographer (and he's got coconut sized pure brass family jewels). Check out the series of images he shot as a runaway dragster flies by his lens. Absolutely incredible.

Prague in all her glory......

Well, if you like the city of Prague like I do (by far my favourite city to visit in Europe), you'll get a kick out of this 18 GigaPixel gigantic panorama photograph (Credit: Jeff Martin) shot from the TV tower. This image is the largest spherical panorama in the world as of Dec. 2009. Follow this link and make sure you're on a fast computer :-).

It's been a little while since I've posted any pics. I've been transfering my workspace from my old Macbook Pro to the new 27" iMac, so things have backed up a bit. Here are the pictures from a recent trip to Portland Oregon to attend the Super Computing Conference.

As usual the complete set can be viewed on flickr.

Black Screen (of Death) solution for Windows (XP, Vista, 7, NT, 2K, 2K3, 2K8)

It looks like in trying to make the OS more secure, the latest MS updates (KB915597 and KB976098) "could" actually break the windows login process. From what I understand the access permissions on the winlogon shell entry for explorer.exe are invalidated after this update and hence the OS will not load explorer.exe (and you end up with a black screen). The whole story can be found over at Pervx's Blog site plus a potential rescue program (and how to use it).

As bad as MS is -- sometimes -- with their updates, I think this one is the worst. Although, if I were MS I would have probably done the same thing. Too many malwares attach themselves (or attack) this entry, so it makes sense to tighten up security around it. You could argue that this problem has been around since the dawn of windows, so why wasn't it fixed in Vista, 7, etc before they were released, but that's another matter :-). Hopefully you're not one of the people with it, but if you are, try the Pervx fix before you "format c:".