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Fabrice Bellard has recently added kernel monitor support to QEMU (The QEMU Accelerator Module, or kqemu), allowing it to execute simple instructions natively on the CPU - much like other virtualization tools like VMware do. 

The speed improvement is dramatic and places QEMU near the the top with other virtualization technologies, though it lacks the high-quality GUI and administration tools of the other enterprise products.  Best of all, it’s completely free!

Slashdot is mentioning a new exploit that affects SP2 only.  It’s basically another “remote command execution” letting anyone run anything on your system.  No mention of it on blogs.msdn.com or Scoble’s weblog.

The sad thing is that those using XP SP1 aren’t affected.  It’s only those who are up-to-date with their patches.

Just to prove to myself that I’m still working on this cabinet, I started staining the sides with a black stain that I bought a few weeks ago at Rona.  This stuff should not be used in a poorly ventilated basement.

It’s looking good after the first coat, but it will surely need a lot more to get it the depth of black that I’m looking for.  I’ll probably end up having to put a really shiny topcoat on it to give it gloss I’m looking for.

After a month of playing around with the Primus service, it’s finally starting to settle into a stable and reliable home-phone system.  My major problems in the first few weeks were (in no particular order):

I signed up for Primus Canada’s Talk Broadband service last week.  Out of all the Canadian VoIP offerings, Primus was the only service I felt was up to the task of replacing our home phone entirely.

Talk Broadband is an MGCP-based offering.  This means that all your communication with the outside world goes through a central clearing house.  Contrast this with SIP, which is capable of working without a central server.