Diary of a Wolfeman

Here’s a damn interesting (although long) read: the entire complaint filed by AMD vs. Intel.

Down toward the bottom (about page 40) it describes how Intel’s compiler (the one given to independent software vendors) deliberately fouls up code when run on an AMD processor.

Now, when I asked why my boss doesn’t really carry any AMD product unless by request, he quotes to me all the times he has run into problems running business software on AMD chips. It wasn’t an AMD problem he kept running into, it was an Intel nastiness executed at the programmer level.

To continue our company’s standard ‘car analogy’ series, it would be like building a carburettor that could sniff out the difference in gasoline producers, and deliberately making the car screw the mixture up unless it tasted Chevron Techron. (Come to think of it, I have been hearing all those ads for ‘Top Tier’ gas lately…)

The dirty bastards.

A parent’s primer to computer slang

No, I am not kidding. To wit:

While it’s important to respect your children’s privacy, understanding what your teenager’s online slang means and how to decipher could be important in certain situations and as you help guide their online experience. While it has many nicknames, information-age slang is commonly referred to as leetspeek, or leet for short. Leet (a vernacular form of “elite”) is a specific type of computer slang where a user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically—creating the digital equivalent of Pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics.

Ok, on the surface, the whole thing is almost legit – parents should be watching their children’s on-line activities. Anyone who says you should watch your own children has my attention for showing a brain cell.

Down at the end of the article, though, they go through a few examples of common leet words. Specifically, “Leet words of concern or indicating possible illegal activity”. You know, the ones that may indicate piracy, like warez, sploits and pron.

So, the message is that parents should check on their children, but the only real worry is whether or not they are pirating software or trafficking in pornography. Never mind the cyber-stalker your 12 yr old daughter has been chatting up in the dominatrix chatroom. It’s all about the bottom line, wot?

Please, stop the hurting…

The St. Petersburg Times writes today about a man being arrested for using someone’s un-secured wireless access point to gain access to the internet. They do not know what he was doing yet, but he was acting in a very suspicious manner, and the article goes on to describe some of the possible nefarious activities he may have been up to.

I can’t stress this enough, people: you have to set up the security features yourself. Wireless routers and access points ship from the factory with all the security features you could want, but they are turned off by default. If you follow the simple tutorial included in the documentation, however, you can turn all of that on – it only takes five minutes. Here’s a short look at what you can do:

Router Password This is the password you need to enter to access and change the router’s settings. By default, this will be blank or the same as the administrative login. Change this first thing to keep others out, and make sure the remote admin setting is turned off unless you really need it.

AD-HOC Networks This is what you call it when your computers connect to each other without the use of a router or access point. It can be usefull for file transfers to strangers, which is obviously both good and bad. Turn this off.

SSID or ESSID – This is the name of your network, so you can easily identify yours from your neighbor’s. D-Link routers use ‘default’, and Linksys call theirs ‘Linksys’ out-of-the-box. Not changing this value will lead others to think your network is open and invites hackers and bandwidth snatchers.

You can change this to anything you like, within a limit of 28 or so characters. In my line of work, we set up quite a few of these, and every time I set one up, I can ‘see’ at least one default network name. (Funniest SSID I’ve seen:” justworkdamnit”. Apparently somebody was having issues.)

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As a quick warning, I upgraded the blog tonight due to a security hole in the php – please let me know if you encounter any problems. The nice part is it took me only 15 minutes.

So there I am out at one of our corporate client’s locations today when one of the SalesFeebs walks up to me, asking why his computer is so slow.

“Slow?” Sez I, “I just doubled your RAM a week ago – it should be screaming.”

Some few minutes of investigation later reveals that the network is being dragged to it’s knees by something. This is pretty bad, since the most important software they run is network-enabled. Time to do some packet-sniffing…

Packet-sniffing leads to crawling behind the racks to trace a patch cable, which leads to their security cameras. Cameras? WTF are they doing on the network? Call to the boss:

ME: Why are your security cameras connected to the internet?
BOSS: Mr. C likes to check them from his house, why?
ME: It’s killing the sales network, and that new software you just spent so much money on needs the bandwidth.
BOSS: What can we do about it?
ME: You can bring in a third DSL line for the cameras. That will take about three weeks and cost you another $50 a month, plus some additional hardware.
BOSS: Hmm….can’t we do anything else to speed things up?
ME: Well, I can always disconnect the camera system’s internet, but that might irritate Mr. C.
BOSS: To hell with him! He can watch Baywatch reruns instead. Kill it.
ME: *poik*
SalesFeeb: Hey, the network’s back!

Due to a slew of trackback spam in the past couple days, I have disabled trackbacks for the next week or so. Hopefully they will get bored by then and stop.

I’m closing down the shop today when I get a text message on my cell from a number not in my address book:

“Can i see ur boobs”

Oooookkaayyy….on a whim, I call the number up and get voicemail. Shrugging, I leave a message:

“I received a text from this number a few minutes ago, and I think you’ve got the wrong number. But if you’re really into the Man-Boob thing, I don’t see why not…”

Later on, I get home to find an email from Thecyberwolfe Security Assistant, asking me to click on a link to my own domain to verify my account details.

Blink

Yup, that’s right folks, some idjit tried to phish me from my own domain. Here’s the really funny bit: whois tells me the originating IP is leased from a French ISP.

I’ve been p(h)oissoned. :)

Or “Birthday Toys pt. II”

Greyduck and I went down to do some research and birthday shopping at Fry’s this evening after work, and came back with a happy new set of 5.1 speakers for the computer. It came down almost to a coin-toss at the end to decide between an Altec-Lansing rig that was on the demo board and a Logitech rig that had received good reviews, but was not on display. The result? A Logitech X-530 rig. It has an additional 10 watts of power compared to the Altec set, for just $10 more. So, back to Chez Wolfie and 20 minutes or so of rewiring later…

These speakers rock.

Serious room-shaking power, with remarkably clear and precise sound at volume. Yes, there are bigger and badder speakers out there, but for at least double the price. Not to mention I would never get the full use out of a more powerful set – I just don’t turn music up that loud. (I don’t even have an amplifier in my car.) These will do very nicely indeed.

Now we need to play MechWarrior again so I can hear my enemies fry in perfect clarity :)

Today being my official birthday (as opposed to the day the party was thrown), I figured I had best play with my new toy and connect up the new VHS/DVD recorder. Being greedy (and not really wanting to tackle the rewire job that putting it in the living room would be), I opted to hook it up in my room upstairs. All went well, until I realized something: I have a crappy tv in my room. It only has VHF coaxial inputs.

Whoops. Now, technically, it is possible for me to still use the new unit with the old tv, but I would have to buy an RCA-to-VHF converter, something readily available at the Radio Shack down the street. Experience as a cable guy, however, has taught me that these devices introduce scads of interference on local broadcast channels, with channel 6 getting hit the worst. Gee. That’s the channel I record…

So, after I got Pookie into bed tonight, Greyduck and I took turns crawling behind the mammoth entertainment center. After several RTFM bouts, we managed to get things set up and working, replacing the existing pair of units. The Daily Show was on by then, so I dropped in a DVD blank and stabbed ‘record’ on the remote. Lo and Behold! It worked as advertised, and played back with no issues. This is just a quick test mind you, and I will endeavor to fully test the capabilities of the device over the next week or two. I’ll write up a complete review and reveal the make and model of the device when I have a complete study.