Diary of a Wolfeman

The past two days at work have almost been enough to make me want to quit my job and go back to cutting firewood or pumping gas for a living.

Monday: had to call my 9am in-shop appt to remind him about it. He came in at 9:45 for help getting his wifi card to work – just as our wifi test routers dies. No problem, I’ll ad-hoc with my laptop…(quick flash of BSOD, then spontaneous reboot) What do you mean NO OS FOUND?!?

Later that morning, drive out to cool oldster’s house to tell him his computer (that we built two years ago) needs at the least a nuke-n-pave and maybe a power supply. Wait, what’s this “adblaster” program? It lets you send thousands of emails at once? You’re a SPAMMER?!? AAAUUUUGGGHHHH!!!!

Then I find out a solution I proposed and partially implemented for a new customer isn’t going to cut it – 10 minutes before I was to go finish it up.

Tuesday: Spent 3 hours hammering at a laptop that I later find out may or may not have a networking problem – first, we have to see if the Sonicwall’s stupid 5-user license (on a biz-class firewall? WTF?) may be watching MAC addys and killing me.

Spend the rest of the day at aforementioned Monday site bashing away at a Linksys WRV54G router and VPN connection. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. At least, not until there is more than two positive user reviews on the entire Internet. Great product in theory from one of the top manufacturers – who completely dropped the frelling ball when they built this stylish piece of shit. Spend the money on a more reputable router and hire a specialist to install it.

You have no idea how much that last part hurts me to say. The Great and Powerful Techie From Hell says to get a specialist. Ugh.

I have been sitting here reading the news releases regarding the Shuttle program and the changes you have planned for our Space Program, and I just have to ask: were you not paying attention?

Burt Rutan and Scaled Composites were able to produce, launch and successfully recover a vehicle to LEO for a very mere fraction of the cost of a traditional Shuttle flight last October, and here you are going back to the Apollo configuration of a capsule at the tip of a rocket. What gives?

SpaceShipOne would require merely some scaling-up to handle the Shuttle’s current role, and in fact Scaled Composites has plans already laid for such a vehicle designed to be able to dock with the ISS. Why are you not bringing them into this project?

Currently, the Shuttle is utilised for launching payloads into space, personnel transfers to the ISS, and a microgravity test lab. In my opinion, we should leave the heavy lifting to unmanned rockets for larger satellites – a proven technology. The ISS was designed to take over the Shuttle’s microgravity labs, and we should allow it to do so.

Scaled Composites’ Tier Two program, however, is specifically designed to handle the personnel transfer duties to the ISS and should be used – the cost savings over the current Shuttle program would be significant, allowing us to do more for our NASA tax dollars.

Wake up, people.

Considering how all of the comment smap I get around here consists of nothing but a link, I am now implementing the “no-follow” attribute on all links posted here on the blog. That means the search engines won’t follow the links, and the linker will not get their page rank increased.

So neener!

If that doesn’t stop the bullshit, I will simply disallow all links in the comments and be done with it. Seeing as how there is maybe one comment on this whole site with a legitimate link in it, I don’t think it will be much of an issue.

It seems that I somehow managed to get a black line into my spam comment filter’s blacklist – which appears to be the equivalent to a star-dot-star wildcard, killing all the comments.

This has been fixed. Bash away!

Boing Boing: Microsoft “Genuine Advantage” cracked in 24h: window.g_sDisableWGACheck=’all’

That was pretty quick!

Should you actually go straight in to the updates page, it will tell you to run the validation, and you might get some strange replies. I didn’t get a copy of the full text, but two machines I ran updates on today gave me the same notice. It went something like this:

You computer checks out as having a version of Windows purchased from an OEM manufacturer, but the computer hardware it reports seems to be different from what the intended hardware was. This is ok for now, but may be a problem later on.

WTF? What kind of hardware was it intended for? These were corporate-licensed copies, built on Intel processors. (Insert sound file here.) Were these copies intended for an Apple? A SPARC? Maybe an Atari?

What this means, folks, is that MS tracks which vendor bought which batch of license keys as a means to help them catch piraters. So, if you had an XP key installed on a Dell that was originally sold to HP, it would send up a flag to Redmond when you tried to validate it. It also seems to be tracking what the original hardware was intended to be, so changes you made to your system may be a problem down the road, if you happen to be an upgrader like myself.

Bastards.

Here’s a milestone for you: last week, we tipped the scales at 2010 unique visits to this site. I think that’s more than the entire first year put together…

I was also the recipient of a fair amount of traffic from Google searches – I’d tell you what they were looking for, but unfortunately my host doesn’t include that part in the analysis page; I’d have to go digging through the raw logs. That’s just way too much work this late at night.

Let’s see here…

An intermittently bogged-down network at a business client’s has been giving me fits for almost two weeks now. The problem would show up for a few hours, and then go away. Similarly, if we re-booted the router, it would go away. Replacing the router, however, did not fix it. We couldn’t isolate the problem down to any one device – everything checked clean through the diagnostics, we were just getting hammered.

So, we put the original router back in. And it uhm…just works fine now? What the fuck? I put 15 hours into troubleshooting this goddamn thing and it just goes away?!? Argh!!

Near as I can figure, the most likely cause is a hacker. With no commonality of occurance on the inside (I.E., different computers on / off, different days of week / times of day / duration…) there has to be something on the outside.

Looks like it’s time for an intrusion detection system.
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How do you know when you can trust your teenager? When he still asks if he can go to a party, despite being 17, having a cell phone and knowing I will be out most of the night on a date. Of course, he still bitches when I ask all the “who what where when how many adults?” questions, but at least he asked :)
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It is hard to be a morally honest and true employee sometimes – especially when you don’t think you are being paid enough. In my line of work, people often ask you to take care of things for them, and I get hung up on the idea of doing the work for myself or bringing them in as a customer to the shop.

If I bring them in as a customer, it will increase the revenues for the shop, thus allowing my boss to give out raises.

If I do it myself, I get all the money now.

The real hesitation for me comes from the fact that ever since he hired me, the boss has been going on about how our managed services contracts will eventually float the business and get all of us raises. It has been 7 months now, and we have only sold 4 contracts of the 130 we need to get me what I’m worth. On top of that, when work gets slow, he implements mandated un-paid days off.

OK, this has only happened to me once, but it’s his first response anytime we get slow. It’s a stick I’m tired of being beat with.

I think this customer is mine.

…nor is the inordinate number of 419 scam emails I have been recieving lately – at least 4 a day for the last week and a half.

I have no idea what prompted this – the email address in question is posted on a website, so it could have been a simple trolling. Then again, this is also the email address I use when communicating with my elected Representatives, Senators, and the White House.

Makes ya wonder, eh?

Me? Foment conspiracy theories with zero evidence? Never!

One of the biggest garage concerns of a techie like myself is the ability to find anything you are looking for quickly. What stands directly in the way of this is actually having your tools organized.

You see, there are many different classes and uses of tools, and I have managed to get things organized into different tool boxes according to this. Computer tools in one box, car tools in another, and some specialty tools on a rack in the garage.

The problem comes when you move your tool boxes around. Back when I moved into the new shop at work, we didn’t have any tools to stock the place. I just shrugged and brought my kit from home.

Of course, the tool I’m looking for right now is in the box at work.

Feh.

I’ve been noticing lately that the old laptop here has been getting kind of slow and boggy after I leave it running, so I’ve been thinking about a reformat and looking around to see what’s available. Slackware has been good to me, but there were still some quirks that I was hoping to work out.

There’s been a lot of talk in the trade mags and websites about Ubuntu Linux, and I have been meaning to check it out. The Roomie reminded me that he had already done so, and highly recommended it – it’s based on Knoppix, which is in turn based on Debian, which is one of the most stable versions of Linux available, and Knoppix is known for it’s hardware detection abilities. Why not? sez I.

What I actually installed was Kubuntu, which is simply the KDE version of Ubuntu, which normally ships with Gnome. I’ve never really liked Gnome for silly little personal reasons – don’t let my opinion stop you from using it.

The installation routine isn’t as pretty as SuSE’s YaST or Fedora’s anaconda, Read the rest of this entry »