Diary of a Wolfeman

You’ve heard me talk before about the benefits of having a Linux live CD handy for doing repair work – today I’ll tell you about the best one for rescuing a Windows system: Knoppix.

From the website:

“KNOPPIX is a bootable CD with a collection of GNU/Linux software, automatic hardware detection, and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices and other peripherals. KNOPPIX can be used as a Linux demo, educational CD, rescue system, or adapted and used as a platform for commercial software product demos. It is not necessary to install anything on a hard disk. Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it.”

So, your Windows system has crashed, you can’t get it to reboot, and you need to rescue whatever data you can before you accidentally destroy it “repairing” Windows. Drop this CD in the drive, reboot – instant operating system.

The really handy thing here is that the system is set up to automatically detect and mount all the partitions on the hard drive. You can transfer them by all the regular means – floppies, network, even CD-R (provided you have more than one CD drive – you can’t pull the Knoppix disc once launched). In the rare event that the problem is a file error, you can set the windows drives writable and replace the files in question rather than doing a re-install.

I used the Ratboy’s computer for a test run, and it found all three of his drive partitions with no fuss.

Knoppix is based on Debian, so while it’s a version number behind in things like the kernel (2.4) and KDE (3.1), it’s rock-solid, which is what you really want for a rescue disc. Get yours today from one of the download links on the site – your best bet is the BotTorrent feed.

You knew it had to happen sometime or another.

A few years back, somebody got the bright idea that the next thing your Windows desktop needed was a little bit of porn. Virtual Girl was what they came up with, and the program has an animation of a girl that strips on your desktop. Completely useless, except as a distraction.

In the Linux world, programmers are all about eye-candy and distractions too, but have a hard time making a program that doesn’t do something useful. Enter Hot Babe. This is a linux cpu monitor program. It puts a cartoon of a hot babe (duh) on your desktop. The busier your cpu gets, the less she wears.

Just another tidbit that goes toward the theory of geeks being better in bed because they never get any, and spend all of their time thinking about it :)

Yes! For the first time ever, folks, I now have a Linux system that actually does everything I want it to do. (At least, until I think of something else hehe)

Today, I managed to install the 2.6.7 kernel, with only a couple of minor hitches. Feeling emboldened by my success, I took the next step and began wrangling once again with the ATI drivers.

These proved a little more difficult, as they required a patch to be installed before they would install. Things finally installed correctly, but still weren’t working – until I remembered that X.org uses a different name for the configuration file. A quick rename of the file, and I am now cooking with the full use of my rather expensive video card :)

Now to go play some games!

There’s been alot of updates coming out lately for Linux users, and SuSE has been really good about keeping up with everything. Their YOU program (Yast On-line Update) checks a local mirror for updates and lets you know when one is due, or it can be configured to do everything on it’s own.

Saturday night, I ran into a problem. A new update was indicated – a kernel update to handle some security issues. Everything looked to be fine, and I rebooted as instructed. Only it never came back. What I got instead was “waiting for device /dev/302…not found.” At which point it locked up. Same thing in the ‘failsafe’ boot option.

Not good, sez I.

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As a cable guy, I’ve seen some pretty odd arrangements in apartments. Most people don’t realize this, but most of the apartment towers downtown were constructed before cable tv was invented, so they had to retrofit it into those buildings in any way they could.

In most of them, it was a simple matter of running the cable down an elevator shaft and branching off at each floor. Others were forced to bring it up in a column through each apartment from the basement all the way to the penthouse. Many have their cable outlets in starnge places – not out of choice, but out of necessity. There’s only so much you can do with concrete construction.

One of these buildings can come slightly back into fashion now. You see, the only place they could get a cable outlet was in the kitchen, roughly behind the refridgerator. Well, LG Electronics has the perfect solution for them now: a ‘fridge with a built-in LCD TV. This device serves mainly as the display for the built-in internet capability of the unit, but you can hook a DVD player up to it and watch movies instead of streaming something from the cooking channel.

The device hosts a slew of other functions as well. It has a photo album, capable of storing images downloaded from your digital camera. I suppose you no longer have to worry about what to do with your child’s lovely fingerpaintings – now you can scan them into the fridge and display them as a screensaver. It can take memos, shopping lists, etc. etc.

Not a bad implementation of tech, but I know how bad I get sucked into the tv when I’m in the living room. Do I really want that to happen while standing next to a hot burner? And what happens when I drop the remote into the stew?

Yahoo! News – U.S. Steers Consumers Away From IE

The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team touched off a storm this week when it recommended for security reasons using browsers other than Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer.

The Microsoft browser, the government warned, cannot protect against vulnerabilities in its Internet Information Services (IIS) 5 server programs, which a team of hackers allegedly based in Russia has exploited with a Java script that is appended to Web sites.

There ya have it folks.

The SANS – Internet Storm Center reports that a new Browser Helper Object has been seen in the wild that, if installed, will monitor and capture login and password information before encryption / SSL and deliver this information elsewhere for capturing.

A “Browser Helper Object” is a DLL that allows developers to customize and control Internet Explorer. When IE 4.x and higher starts, it reads the registry to locate installed BHO’s and then loads them into the memory space for IE. Created BHO’s then have access to all the events and properties of that browsing session. This particular BHO watches for HTTPS (secure) access to URLs of several dozen banking and financial sites in multiple countries.

When an outbound HTTPS connection is made to such a URL, the BHO then grabs any outbound POST/GET data from within IE before it is encrypted by SSL. When it captures data, it creates an outbound HTTP connection to [web address deleted] and feeds the captured data to the script found at that location.

Folks, I’ve spent the last week and a half doing non-specific telephone computer support, and fully 80% of my calls have been virus or malware issues. I cannot stress how important it is to NOT use Internet Explorer due to the security issues and ease-of-compromise inherent in that product.

I highly recommend The Mozilla Foundation’s offerings, both the full suite and Firefox. If you feel that free software just can’t meet your needs and you absolutely must pay for something to get any value out of it, then go buy a copy of Opera. The differences between the two products are small enough you won’t really notice, and both are fully standards-compliant and secure.

I’ll get off my soapbox now.

Our friends across the trench have come up with an interesting idea. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. (Article courtesy of BusinessWeek Online.)

Excuse me, but is that your finger ringing?

So, with this new job doing tech support, I realized I will need to be running Windoze most of the time to help me remember where all that stupid stuff is, so I booted XP up today for the first time in several weeks.

After dinking around for a while, I got distracted by something else long enough for the screen saver to come on -the default Windoze logo drifting around the screen.

“This will not do,” I says to myself. Out comes firefox and I do a google search for the Matrix screensaver I used to have. Several versions were found, most of them crippleware.

All in all, I failed to find one that did the normal 2D effect correctly without having some stupid logo showing on the screen, so I removed them all.

In the process of removing them, I noticed several other new entries in the list of programs. Five, to be exact, and all of them malware I did not authorize to install. (I had even read the EULAs that were displayed to me, and nothing of the sort was ever mentioned.)

So, I went ahead and uninstalled them, and one brought up a little feedback form asking me why I was deleting their fine software. I selected “I hate popups” from the drop-down menu. It had another question: “What would have prevented you from uninstalling this software?” I selected “I would have done it no matter what.”

Then, joy of joys, it gave me a text field for “Additional Comments”.

[knuckles cracking]
“In my opinion, malware programmers such as yourself are the lowest form of life on earth, lower even than ambulance-chasing lawyers and used-car salesmen. So low, in fact, that it should not be illegal to kill you. Failing that, it should be okay to rip your balls off with pliers and cauterize the wound with a red-hot poker to ensure that you never breed. If you do have children, they should be removed from your custody immediately before your taint washes off onto them.

At the very least, I take some relief in knowing that you can never walk into the street and proclaim your true profession without being run over by some poor little old lady who has been hounded incessantly by offers to show her how to enhance her penis. You must forever hide yourself from society, pariah that you are. No one enjoys the ‘products’ you create. Entire on-line communities have formed with no other goal than to stamp you out of existence. You, sir, are a bane on society that must be exterminated.”

Ahh. Feeling much better now.

That was pretty quick – the folks over at the Mozilla Foundation decided the 0.9 pre-release only needed minor tweaking, because they posted the full 0.9 release not too long ago.

New for this version is a handy profile importer that correctly imported all of my bookmarks and saved passwords with no fuss and an updated default theme. Getting a new theme and extensions was quick and easy, much more streamlined than last time around.

They’re claiming a 3% speed increase, but I’m not alert enough to measure that small a chunk of time. It seems quicker, though, as I mess around with it. Don’t take my word for it folks – go get it and try it for yourself.

Happy surfing!