Diary of a Wolfeman

Having watched too much TV lately, I’ve seen far too many Microsoft commercials. Here’s some commercials I’d like to produce myself and see on TV as a response.

Pan in on a nice suburban neighborhood, where all the houses save one are identical, with windowframes that bear a striking resemblance to a certain software company’s logo. On the porch of one home is a small package, with no return adress. A grandma-type person opens the package as she turns back into the house and shuts the door.

A moment later, hundreds of ravenous little creatures with snot dripping out of their noses jump out through the mailslot and go charging down the street, jumping in through all the other mailslots. Within seconds, every house in view has green slime oozing out through those windows, fouling the yards. Pan down a few houses to the one with a lawn-gnome-sized penguin on the porch – the little green snot-beastie falls unconscious after bashing his head on the mailslot. This house is still pristine.
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Variation: same street, only at night. A comical burglar is quickly going from house to house and making off with credit cards and other obviously important stuff. He gets in through open doors and windows or possibly by typing quickly on a keyboard to open up a ‘security hole’ in the side of the house.

When he gets to the house with a penguin on the porch, lights come on to full daylight bright, steel shutters slam down over the doors and windows, and sirens start screaming. The terrified thief runs away. The penguin looks smug.
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Car-themed spot. We start out driving an older car – it’s big and has a ‘W98’ on the dash, and is barely lumbering on. Camera swoops out the window into the car next to it – basically the same, but it’s moving a little better and has ‘W98SE’ on the dash. Swoop into the next car – still big, with ‘W2000’ emblem. Car jumps and slows, then all the dash lights go bright blue and it stalls. Swoop to next car, ‘WXP’ emblem – seems to be okay, until it too ‘blues out’ and stalls. Driver sighs and cycles the ignition switch. Car starts again, goes down the road, then stalls. Driver slumps over wheel while cycling ignition.

Swoop out the window into another car. This one is more sleek, and has a very pleasing engine rumble. We just drive down the road, passing a number of other cars showing symtoms similar to the others. On the dash is a penguin with ‘K 2.6X’. Driver seems very happy.

Over the past few months, I have been on both sides of technical interviews, and had the (mis)fortune of interviewing a couple of guys with bright and shiny new certifications – who didn’t know a damn thing about fixing computers. Sure, they passe their respective tests, but the tests were written in a theoretical environment, not an actual shop. To solve this problem in the future, I have developed…

The CTAT – The Cyberwolfe’s Techincal Aptitude Test

(Post your answers in the comments, I’ll grade them later.)

1. What two tools must you have to work on a PC?

2. What is the first thing you have to do to network two home computers for file sharing? Why is this stupid?

3. A computer comes to your bench with the “about::blank” problem, tons of pop-ups anytime you access the internet, and at least 5 things you know shouldn’t be in the task list. What two things do you ask the customer?

4. You have installed a new PCI soundcard in a machine, but it won’t work or the computer won’t boot correctly. What do you do?

5. Name three software applications a computer should not be without.

6. When all else fails, what do you do?

7. What is the most dangerous thing in a computing environment?

If you can answer those 7 questions correctly, I can train you on the rest.

Yes folks, it’s pretty boring around here indeed, because I’m writing about a new router here at Chez Wolfie. We upped to a Linksys WRT54G, instead of the combination ancient D-Link+Sony WiFi AP.

So, now we are up in the 802.11g range for wireless, with a much stronger signal here in the garage. I also took advantage of the shuffle to redo some of the wiring behind my desk, which cleared some tangles out. The true test comes this weekend though, when BtheFormerRoomie becomes BtheNeighbor – if he can link his WiFi kit to mine, he’ll just pitch in rather than transferring his current provider. Should it work, I’ll more than likely be bumping my service up a notch to compensate.

One of the other benefits is that the new router enables proper port forwarding, so I can let external connections in to our game servers when they are active.

Hey Impact – you need to pick up a copy of Mechwarrior Mercenaries! :)

McAfee Antivirus has been looking at Symantec’s Norton product for a while now, and they have gotten tired of being the No.2 AV product on the market. What did they do to solve this? The same thing Microsoft did with Windows: they went to the manufacturers.

New computers are mow shipping with McAfee from the factory. AOL’s AV product is from McAfee. Even Asus motherboards are coming with the software bundled into the driver disc.

All well and good, you might think, except for one small problem: in my humble opinion, it sucks. I recently ran across a new Compaq computer with the whole shebang of McAfee products installed, and they thought they were safe. I removed it and installed AVG. What did I find lurking on the hard drive of this supposedly well-protected machine? Five different Trojans.

Instead of pushing their developers to write a better product, McAfee spent heaps of cash to get the vendors to drop the venerable (and top-notch) Norton Antivirus in favor of Mcafee.

Consider yourself warned.

This post over at Greyduck’s got me thinking for a few minutes.

Scary, huh?

Anyway, my thoughts revolved around how annoying the current crop of “helper apps” is becoming. You know, all that shit that lives down in the Windows system tray, waiting in the background for you to do something with their product. HP printer utilities, MSN messenger, digital camera software, etc., etc., ad infinitem. It drives me batty to watch a modern computer chew on the ‘Welcome’ screen for a full 2 minutes waiting for it to load all that into memory when a clean XP install can boot in 45 seconds. Then it does some more chewing when you actually log in. Is it really too difficult to double-click a frelling icon?

Even worse, these programs no longer leave traces in the Startup folder of the Start list. The only way to prevent them running at startup is to dig through 5 pages of configuration options and uncheck the “run at boot” option.

Then it hit me: the software vendors are walking the same path as the TV execs – you know, the one where they pitch every show they have at the average 12-year-old. They’re pandering to the lowest common denominator…

The AOL users.

It makes sense if you look at it in a certain light – AOL has been the biggest ISP for internet eons, largely due to their marketting campaign. They have been flooding user’s screens with useless, unwanted crap for years now, and their subscribers have simply dealt with it, since they have never known there was another way. Obviously, software developers for the mass market have decided to follow AOL’s playbook, writing software that monitors your system all the time, lying in wait for you to plug in that camera or watch a streaming video. Those little things that you maybe do twice a month – but still it waits, like a circling shark…

This has led us to an unfortunate impasse, one where the average computer user, instead of getting smarter and more savvy as they continue to use this most able tool, is getting dumber and letting other people make their choices for them. This is giving us a country full of people who just basically click on everything that comes across their screen.

A world ripe for spyware pushers.

I have this to say to the software vendors of the world: Yea, though your user base may have sheepish traits, it is possible for them to learn. Write software that requires a decision to use, not something that sits there like a bandit, waiting to ambush me should I even think of hovering my mouse near the taskbar. Make them learn to use their computer, one tiny step at a time. They can do it. Really.

Here’s a fun one-

Went to a customer’s house out by Reed College today. It took me almost a full half-hour just to find the place, despite having turn-by-turn instructions from Google Maps. Whoever designed the roads out there did so by following a drunken squirrel with no idea where he was going.

ME: knock knock
CUSTOMER:”Hello?”
ME: “Hi, I’m here to fix your computer. I understand you’re having trouble with the mouse and the audio.”
CUSTOMER:”Yes yes, come in. Here it is.”
ME: “Hmm…wireless.” wiggle wiggle wiggle. Pop open battery compartment. “When was the last time you replaced these batteries?”
CUSTOMER: “Uhm…never?”
ME: Swaps batteries. Wiggle wiggle. “That seems to have fixed that. Now for the audio.” Clickity-click click. “There we are, it was just muted – that multimedia button right there next to the minus key on the numpad must have gotten pressed.”
CUSTOMER: “Oh.”
ME: “Can I do anything else for you while I’m here?”
CUSTOMER: “No, I suppose that covers it.”
ME: “That’ll be $52.50”
CUSTOMER: Writes check
ME: Smiles and leaves.

From the Techie’s Dictionary, or People I Have To Deal With At Work:

The ID10T: A person with so little computer knowledge and skill that no matter what they do, they will somehow manage to break something. They also tend to fill your day up with inane tasks that they could conceivably manage, were they actually to stop and think for more than 10 seconds. See also “Starfish” and “Luser”.

The Power User: Someone who knows just enough about computers to get themselves in serious trouble. Signs a Power User has been ‘customizing’ a computer include error messages on startup, virus/spyware infections and a sheepish look on their face as they explain that “the problem came out of nowhere” instead of admitting that they were fucking with the registry.

The haxorz, 1337 and script kiddies: Quite often your teenage neighbors, who have spent enough time on the ‘net to learn how to download illegal software and spend most of their time flexing their ‘muscles’ by kicking people offline in IRC and utilizing cheat codes to camp on your respawn point. Indicator signs include ‘modder’ cases slapped together with poor technique bearing tell-tale traces of Mountain Dew and keyboards with the “Z” rubbed off.

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Yesterday, having gotten almost everything else re-configured the way I want it, I went after getting the sound to work on my Slackware install again. Unfortunately, everything went kerplooie on me to the point it wouldn’t even boot anymore, and I was once again faced with a re-install.

Faced with the prospect of “gee, what won’t work this time?”, I decided to give SuSE 9.2 Pro a try on a real machine. (The last test was on a laptop). My roomie told me of this wonderful thing called apt4rpm, a port of the Debian apt-get tool, which should alleviate the problems inherent in an rpm distro. With that in mind, I went for it.

The nice thing about commercial distros like SuSE is their hardware-detection – I was able to set up basic 3D support during the install, and Sax2 correctly set my screen dimensions to 1280×1040 without any serious tweaking. Again, sound worked on the first try, with the exception of many of the multimedia apps being crippled due to SuSE’s worries about copyright.

The major wrinkle came in trying to set up apt4rpm. In the SuSE version, the security feature that checks the GPG keys of the packages before download is enabled by default. A handy security idea yes, but having it on by default means you can’t install the keys because the keys are unknown! It took the roomie and I some searching to figure out how to turn it off, and once we did things actually worked. Now, to install new software I can either use a command-line version or the Synaptics Package Manager GUI to simply select the software I want installed. The program will automatically install any necessary dependencies, and off I go.

The odd thing about SuSE is that they do not include Koffice in the main grouping. I prefer Koffice over OpenOffice.Org because it runs leaner, and all my email settings and website membership logins are stored in a kspread file, which I could not read in OO.o. Thanks to apt4rpm, though, I simply had to select the Koffice package group and voila! Now I can feed my email addiction :)

*Update: okay, maybe not so voila: I’ll need to upgrade KDE before I can install the current version of Koffice. I think I’ll ghost an image before I do that…

I’ll let you know in a few days how things turn out, but for right now, I am happy with SuSE again. We’ll see how long this lasts.

Y’know, Arch Linux is leaning towards a new release, and they have the pacman thing…

Okay, not you specifically, unless you happen to be an older version of Windows.

This article at the Washington Post goes into a survey that shows a rather scary percentage of computers today are still running Windows 95, 98 and Millenium.

Well, duh, I could have told you that.

While the big boys of business may have the budget to upgrade all of their systems to XP, most of your average businesses either don’t have the money or don’t have the pressing desire to do so. They aren’t worried about security or new features – the software they are running is old too, and runs just fine on their older systems.

Of the companies I have done work for this year, the ones that have upgraded anything have done so for one of two reasons: their software went obsolete or their hardware gave out. Anything that is still working, is well, still working and therefore does not need to be fixed.

Some of these might have migrated to XP for the better security, if it wasn’t for the fact that there is no way to run it on their older hardware. $1000 for 7 new licenses they could have done, but not $7000 for new computers.

Some have done partial upgrades by accident – they needed to buy a new computer for expanded staff, and were unable to get an older OS. Most times, they just have to make some minor tweaks to get the old software working on XP. A medical office that calls us has recently had to scrap all of their computers, though, because the software they use has finally been axed, and the new solution won’t work on less than XP.

For the home user, there’s no need to upgrade until it breaks or they get new toys that won’t play nice. (A customer who ended up buying a new computer to use with his new iPod comes to mind.) Avid gamers spend the dough on hot hardware, but solitaire and tetris players chug right along. I still hear alot of “What do you mean it won’t work now – it’s only 5 years old!”

Imagine their expressions when I tell them about Moore’s Law and what it means about hardware obsolescence. These are the same folks who buy a car and drive it for 15 years. Then I have to tell them it will cost them $700 to use the iPod they got from their kid for Christmas.

I told you when I wrote the first post on this topic that I was knee-jerking, and I was right.

Posted earlier today was a response from the folks at AOL, claiming that the section of the TOS that was quoted in the Slashdot article referred, in fact, to their bulletin boards and forums, and that they did not monitor the Instant Messaging conversations.

This brings things a little more into perspective. Still, I am glad to be quit of any and all things AOL. I created the account originally to converse with one person, who also uses Y!Messenger, so there is no need to keep my AIM account active.

Still, there is a good bit to learn about this: if you plan on making money from an idea, be very careful who you tell it to and where you tell them. For the price of an envelope and postage, you can irrefutably stake your claim to any original work. Write it down on paper, stuff it in an envelope, and mail it to yourself. The cancelled postage will have a date stamp you can use as proof of prior art in court (provided the seal is intact until you get it to court).

For those truly worried, most banks offer free or nearly-free Notary service. Once again, you write everything down and take it to your bank to have a Notary witness and stamp the work. Voila, almost as good as a patent.

For the rest of us out there, it pays to remember something I read in a David Eddings book:

“No crime is complete until you’ve tidied up.”