11-March 2008 to 17-September, 2008
| Wednesday, September 17, 2008: Browser Fingerprints
While none of these is as unique
as an IP address (which is recorded in the web server logs for every
page or image access), they are nonetheless varied enough as to make one
surfer pretty easily distinguishable from another. Some people use proxy
servers that use a random, different IP address for each page access
(not only the page, but each access of embedded pictures and other
content). |
| Monday, September
15, 2008: McAfee Antivirus Security Risk
|
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Saturday, September 13, 2008: Surviving Ike
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| Wednesday, August 27, 2008: A Big Security Warning I have had some hacking attempts made on a different web server I operate. Attempts were made to run the following script:
The hex part consist of ASCII characters that convert to this:
If I interpreted this correctly, it is trying
to insert a call to run some javascript from the site
www0.douhunqn.cn
into all the pages hosted by the server. There is
no way that script would ever work on my server, for reasons I am not
disclosing, but it looks like an attempt to put some javascript for
likely nefarious purposes on the web pages (so the attack is aimed
ultimately at the people browsing the compromised web server). |
| Boy, will I be in trouble for spilling the
beans? I didn't realize the top agents from our own American FBI spoke fractured English and used email accounts from Poland. The message asks me to keep this hushed up... FEDERAL
BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION FBI.WASHINGTON DC. ROBERT MUELLER III Email: federalinvestigation_feedback@live.com FBI SEEKING TO WIRETAP INTERNET ATTENTION: We believe this notification meets you in a very good present state of mind and health. We the Federal bureau of investigation (FBI) Washington, DC in conjunction with some other relevant Investigation Agencies here in the United states of America have recently been informed through our Global intelligence monitoring network that you presently have a transaction going on with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) as regards to your over-due contract payment which was fully endorsed in your favor accordingly. We will find a way to fix a schedule for you to come to our head-quarter in Washington DC to enable us advise you on what to do, but meanwhile you are further advised to be contacting us via email for now because we are having various investigations that we are working on now. Keep everything regarding to your transaction confidential for security reasons and note that we have not informed the local FBI department in your state regarding this matter because we want to keep everything secret until your fund is been transferred to you accordingly. We the FBI have purposely create an email in order for us to contact you personally and our phone codes departments are not aware of this new improvement,so don't call our service line regarding this email, soon we will provide you with a line you can call for more information about this contract winning funds. For the main time we the Federal Bureau of Investigation Washington DC will be helping you to monitor all the transaction with the Central Bank of Nigeria. we want you to have in mind that we are trying to protect you because your inheritance fund that is about to be transferred to you is a large amount of money, and we will advise you not to inform any one about this transaction until the corresponding bank have successfully transferred your inheritance fund. It might interest you to know that we have taken out time in screening through this project as stipulated on our protocol of operation and have finally confirmed that your contract payment is 100% genuine and hitch free from all facet and of which you have the lawful right to claim your fund without any further delay.Having said all this, we will further advise that you go ahead in dealing with the Central Bank office accordingly as we will be monitoring all their services with you as well as your correspondence at all level. In addition, also be informed that we recently had a meeting with the Executive Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, in the person of Prof.Charles Chukwuma Soludo and Mr. Kingsley Agwor along with some of the top officials of the Ministry regarding your case and they made us to understand that your file has been held in abase depending on when you personally come for the claim. They also told us that the only problem they are facing right now is that some unscrupulous element are using this project as an avenue to scam innocent people off their hard earned money by impersonating the Executive Governor and the Central Bank office. We were also made to understand that a lady with name Mrs. Joan C. Bailey from OHIO has already contacted them and also presented to them all the necessary documentations evidencing your claim purported to have been signed personally by you prior to the release of your contract fund valued at about US$10,000,000.00 (Ten million united states dollars), but the Central Bank office did the wise thing by insisting on hearing from you personally before the go ahead on wiring your fund to the Bank informations which was forwarded to them by the above named Lady so that was the main reason why they contacted us so as to assist them in making the investigations. They further informed us that we should warn our dear citizens who must have been informed of the contract payment which was awarded to them from the Central Bank of Nigeria, to be very careful prior to this irregularities so that they don't fall victim to this ugly circumstance. And should in case you are already dealing with anybody or office claiming to be from the Central Bank of Nigeria, you are further advised to STOP further contact with them in your best interest and then contact immediately the real office of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) only with the below informations accordingly:
NAME: PROF.CHARLES CHUKWUMA SOLUDO
Email: contractfeedback@live.com
NOTE:In your best interest, any message that doesn't come from the above official email address and phone numbers should not be replied to and should be disregarded accordingly for security reasons. Meanwhile, we will advise that you contact the Central Bank office immediately with the above email address and request that they attend to you payment file as directed so as to enable you receive your contract fund accordingly. Ensure you follow all their procedure as may be required by them as that will further help hasten up the whole procedures as regards to the transfer of your fund to you as designated. Also have in mind that the Central Bank of Nigeria equally have their own protocol of operation as stipulated on their banking terms, so delay could be very dangerous. Once again, we will advise that you contact them with the above email address and make sure you forward to them all the necessary informations which they may require from you prior to the release of your fund to you accordingly. All modalities has already been worked out even before you were contacted and note that we will be monitoring all your dealings with them as you proceed so you don't have anything to worry about. All we require from you henceforth is an update so as to enable us be on track with you and the Central Bank of Nigeria. Without wasting much time, will want you to contact them immediately with the above email address so as to enable them attend to your case accordingly without any further delay as time is already running out. Should in case you need any more informations in regards to this notification, feel free to get back to us so that we can brief you more as we are here to guide you during and after this project has been completely perfected and you have received your contract fund as stated.Thank you very much for your anticipated co-operation in advance as we earnestly await your urgent response to this matter.
Best Regards, Robert S. Mueller III Email: federalinvestigation_feedback@live.com
|
| Below I have placed a copy of a
letter I wrote about poor service levels. I redacted my address and
phone, although if someone really wants them, it should not be a
difficult search to find it. Wesley Howe XXX XX XXX Rockdale, TX XXXXX (XXX) XXX-XXX Cobalt Broadband Corporation Sunday, July 20, 2008 AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MANAGEMENT: I wanted to allow you the opportunity to understand why I have come to regret switching from satellite internet service to Cobalt Broadband. I can summarize the reasons pretty well with one word: Reliability. When you have things stabilized, your service works well, and would be worth what I paid for equipment and installation. At far too frequent intervals, however, the service level is poor or non-existent. Short interruptions are quite frequent, and while lasting only ten minutes or so, they interrupt task I was attempting in the middle. Today, the services is out. It went out last night at about 9:00 PM, went in and out for an hour or so, and then just stopped. Although I didn’t report it until 1:00 PM today, we are now at 23 hours or so of outage. I have looked at your contract, and while you may be performing within the defined service parameters if you get things working before 1:00 PM tomorrow, or whenever, being technically right and doing the right thing are not the same. I wouldn’t willingly trade 1/30 of my monthly fee for even 4 hours of downtime, let alone 24. I suppose you know that your reputation is pretty poor on the internet. I know that it is hard to please a lot of people, and that often the most vocal complainants often lack justification for their position, but I know first hand that you hold your customers opinions in low esteem, and your poor reputation is well justified. When I have called on a Friday about service problems, the call was not returned until Monday. You schedule upgrade work, with attendant downtime, in prime usage hours, the afternoon and evening. Even the Cable TV companies know to schedule downtime outside of their peak customer usage times. You guys cannot be in as technical a business as you are in and not have enough smarts to figure that one out. There is no way I could recommend your service to any of my neighbors unless you would make dramatic improvements in the reliability of the service. Your phone system has done as much as it can to discourage customers from contacting you, with the multiple menu levels, the long, droning announcements about “rebooting”, and the lack of a queue… you just go into an endless cycle of five rings followed by a message about pressing ‘5’ to leave a message (that may not be returned until the next week), repeated until I either give up, or leave a message that can be ignored until next week. Sincerely, Wesley Howe
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| Thursday, July 17, 2008: Updates have been scarce lately, because I have spent so much of my time working on the CustomSims3.com website and on writing SpView. In fact, the drought here started soon after the last entry, when EA release their Spore Creature Creator package. Since then I have done a lot of analysis of the game, and I wrote a model viewer for it, which is posted on the forum (linked above). Today we are going to review a pitiful scam attempt that has been emailed to me three times by some misguided fool with criminal intent but a total lack of cunning and polish. We start here, with an introduction:
I don't know who Bill thinks I am, but it is not
likely I will allow him to "intimate" me. I ought to be pleased I
have the opportunity to "...authentically apply for supply...".
Makes a bloke feel so proud.
I noticed that in this paragraph
bill_thomson1234@yahoo.gr
is not the same email address as
bill_thomson234@universia.cl, which is the return address on the
email. Perhaps I should try to contact him at both, since he
promises "...more lively information.". I wonder if that is what he
wants to intimate me with?
Gee, I wonder if I might be doing something wrong
here, outlining the entire plan in public, without regard to "...the
confidential nature of this...". But I think I will post it anyway.
I've never been to London, and I bet this guy hasn't been there
either. Notice he still hasn't caught his capita letter typo on "THomson". |
| Thursday, June 12, 2008: Kaspersky (antivirus) gets good and bad (mostly bad) marks in this post. First, they responded promptly to my email, and when I responded with the requested system information, they answered back promptly. However, from this point on, thing go downhill. Kaspersky tells me they do not support RAID configurations. Well, they do not have to do anything they don't want to do, and the marketplace will sort that out, but they could well have ruined my data by causing my computer to lock up. They should at least stop the process and tell me. Oh, and they said they don't support RAID configurations, but they have published nothing to indicate that. I searched their website and forums about it. This is so bad, I am at a loss for words. Doctors are taught "First, do no harm". Well, their program will certainly cause significant problems for anyone that uses it with a RAID configuration. Essentially, they have undisclosed defects in their software that can damage your computer by locking it up, forcing you to unplug it to regain control. And we all know that this is not a good practice. I have a UPS just so I can at least shutdown normally if the power goes out... generally, at least here, if it goes out and doesn't come back in two or three seconds, it will be an hour or better until someone gets way out here and restores service. So, for any outage I shutdown the computer, because I have probably only 10 minutes or so of backup. So Kaspersky, which is otherwise a good product, will probably be going in the dumpster here. I need protection, not aggravations. |
| Wednesday, June 11, 2008: Today will be HP Computer's turn in the barrel. I have uncovered a serious problem with one of their latest computers, and they want to pat me on the head to make the issue go away. I bought a new HP Pavilion m9250f computer, which has an Intel Core 2 Quad processor (64-bit), 4 gig of RAM and dual 500 GB disk drives I have arranged as mirrored (RAID 1). I uninstalled the Norton Antivirus that came with the computer, you need only look at previous entries here to learn why I don't use them. I installed Kaspersky antivirus instead. Under most conditions, this computer operates well, and I like it, in spite of the aggravations that Windows Vista offers. But, when the memory usage gets very high, the computer locks solid, and the only resolution is to unplug it. Everybody knows you shouldn't do this, and every time it happens the Intel Matrix software that controls the disk mirroring has to verify the entire contents of both drives, a process that takes several hours. What triggers the lockup is high memory use. This happens reliably when I try to scan a disk drive with the Kaspersky antivirus. Now I know that Kaspersky has or is exposing some issue with excessive memory usage, and I am giving them an opportunity to address the issue. If they don't do so in a reasonable time frame, they will be featured in a future missive. Regardless of what program causes it, the computer should not lock up. What HP has asked me to do is uninstall Kaspersky antivirus and install AVG. This is merely an attempt to paper over the flaw. I have asked HP to get a trial copy of Kaspersky and send the issue to the lab. They have not done this, I suspect that they consider this too much service to give a customer. You need to treat problems at their source, and retain a reproducible cause. Not try a bunch of doubletalk on the customer to see if you can make the problem go away. If the wheels fall off a car at highway speeds, no one would accept the manufacturer telling them to just drive 30 MPH or slower. They are hiding from the problem, and I intend to let everyone know about it. For the time being, I am unable to perform a full disk scan. All the new files I get are being checked, so I am getting along by not running a full disk or system scan until the problem is resolved. But HP has joined my gallery of rogues for their lack of support. |
| Tuesday, June 3, 2008: How many times have you seen a line like this in a new report "Shares of Microsoft fell 11 cents to $27.69 in afternoon Nasdaq trade."? (This one was from a Reuters article about Microsoft releasing beta 2 of IE8). I see them all the time, in virtually every article that mentions a publicly traded company. And I think most of the time, including a statement like this is dumb. The price change they quoted was under one-half percent. Perhaps new people don't understand, stock prices go up and down with the ever changing balance between buyers and sellers. Some news, particularly bad news and buyout offers, moves stocks, most articles do not. News articles that include data like this, with minimal pertinence, could as well be written by robots. We could create a rule and place it in a program, tacking it onto the end of the text from the press release. Real writers think about the pertinence of what they write. If a dog bites a man, it matters whether it had been vaccinated against rabies. If a dog wins a prize as the world's ugliest dog, it is irrelevant. And what about all of the bloggers that insist on disclosing if they have any financial interest in something they are writing about. Do we care? My stock ownership interests change from time to time. But you can believe that if I decided Microsoft or Adobe or whatever was the new best thing, I wouldn't go back through my archives here and change one single opinion I reported about them. While I do not at present own any shares of either company directly, I probably have an interest in them through some of my mutual fund ownership. |
| Wednesday, May 28, 2008: It seems Microsoft is still as brain-dead as ever. I decided recently to look into upgrading my CPU to a multi-core model, and remembered that Windows XP Home did not support multiple processors. So I ordered XP Professional, and spent almost a day getting it installed and my system back like I wanted it. First, since I had upgraded XP Home to Service Pack 3, the installer program bailed on my, saying I had a newer version of Windows installed. I could have installed XP Professional overtop, but of course all the settings and programs would be wiped out. So I had to uninstall SP3, reboot and then start the upgrade again. That worked. But after I restarted the computer, it did not access the internet properly, and only after I did a second restart did that work properly. What I had then was Windows XP Professional with SP2, Internet Explorer 6 and Media Player 10. So I had to download and install SP3 next. That failed, just like I described in the May 7 entry. And the same solution was required... that took at least an hour alone. Then I succeeded in installing SP3. about 10 updates (hundreds of megabytes) later, I had IE7 and MP11 and all the available updates. In the process, a number of settings were changed. Among the aggravations were the Flash 6 add-in, which I had disabled, became re-enabled. Sites I previously accessed began to ask me if I wanted to use Active X, which I usually refuse. Of course, they were using banner ads with flash versions. I refuse to be bullied into using Flash, or updating it, or supporting it here in any fashion. Sites that require Flash get passed by, I will not be a part of that vendor-driven movement. So after I got the add-in disabled again I thought I was back to normal. Then I went to my Media Player and looked in the library. The majority of my songs were shown with doubled entries, one with a star rating, and a new one with no rating. So I had to delete hundreds of entries, as I have a lot of music (some MP3 music I downloaded from Amazon, and a lot that were ripped from CDs). Essentially, the whole process took all day. I have company, and I spent some parts of the day with the company while some of these processes played out, and some waited for a while because some programming whiz decided that you needed to be there and available during an installation to answer some inane question instead of placing some button that says "just do it" and report the results. They need a Nike button. And someone at MS needs to think the customer aggravation issues through, because eventually someone could offer an alternative that people might adopt en masse. One of those people could be named Steve Jobs. If Apple can make their Mac-with-the-same-processor-as-a-PC run Windows, and can produce versions of Quicktime that run on a PC, that they could make versions of their operating system that run on a PC. I know they have a vision of themselves as a computer hardware company, but I suspect that their OS and programs are what enamor their users more than a sleek looking package. After 25 years, someone should have figured out they aren't winning the manufacturing war, look at their eventual adoption of the same-processor-as-a-PC. Of course, Mr. Jobs is a pretty smart guy. Results count, and he has a lot more results to show than I do, so I would guess he has thought this all through before. But I do not have any "we always did it this way" biases in my thinking. I would certainly consider a dual-boot PC, although I do not think I would be very pleased developing software for the Mac OS... Apple has always been very dictatorial and rigid about what third parties can and cannot do on "their" platform. They have missed a lot of opportunities in the past by being unbending in their ways. I no longer own any Macs, nor any Apple stock, so if they want to be thickheaded, it is no loss of mine. |
| Sunday, May 18, 2008: I read a book I thoroughly enjoyed. It is called "The Pixar Touch" and was written by David A. Price. I haven't read a book on anything related to computers that interested me as much since Tracy Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" (which was published in 1981, but which I remember reading in a soft-back, rather than a hard-back edition, so it must have been a bit later when I read it). Mr. Price managed to put a very human face on the events that led to the founding of Pixar and its eventual acquisition by Disney. Especially because of my deep interests in 3D graphics, which are normally fed solely by very technical texts. Mr. Price did not write a technical book, it is a human interest book and a story of the birth and evolution of a revolutionary force in Cinema and 3D graphics. We all remember the Pixar movies, and what an impact they had, even people like myself, who, having no children at home have little excuse for viewing animated movies. The non-technical explanations Mr. Price has made of the very technical achievements that were made suffice to describe accurately the topics without bogging the storyline down with detail. A quick Google search will reveal the deep details and importance of Z-Buffering and the Catmull-Rom spline, two of the many inventions of just one of the founders of Pixar. These guys are PhDs, and few would expect they would have the breadth of talent and interests to write and direct digital animated movies and commercials, and lead a successful business endeavor, instead of a few treatises in a scientific journal, or perhaps I mean in addition to. Mr. Price really starts with the beginnings of Dr. Ed Catmull's career to trace through the genesis (and by the way, the computer video imaging of the Genesis Project in the Star Trek II movie was a major breakthrough along the way). Special appearances are woven into the story of characters whose names we all recognize, like Steve Jobs, the Woz, Paul Allen, Bill Gates, John Warnock and too many more to just list repetitively, as all of these people had some influence in some way on the way that history played out. So, in my opinion, worth the time invested in the reading. |
| Wednesday, May 7, 2008: While I shouldn't make a habit of kicking Microsoft every day, they manage to make it so easy to do. Take Windows XP SP3 (please). Today, my computer told me this IMPORTANT update was available (I don't trust Microsoft enough to allow updates to just be installed, and today we will illustrate why). First, I had to go through the required update of the Genuine Windows (dis)Advantage tool. Then of course, it downloads the downloader, and then proceeds finally to download the update itself. It has a progress bar that sits at the same spot for long periods of time. What use is a progress bar if you cannot tell if the program is actually progressing or not? Yes, folks, this is the company that would have you believe it has the smarts to go it's own way on developing web ads and such. These guys have been working on Windows XP for what, five years now and they can't even make a service pack correctly? Yes, twice I tried to install the service pack. Both times, at the halfway through point on the progress bar, I got a critical error beep, and a box that said "Access Denied". Access to what, it didn't say. I suppose a mere user isn't entitled to know what is going on. Then it proceeded to uninstall the service pack. That failed the first time. And at the end, both times, I got a message that the update installation failed and that Windows XP might not run properly. Really reassuring. Fortunately, it appears to be OK. I guess I will have to rely on the Service Pack being a compilation of previously released patches, all of which, I think, are installed. It sure is comforting to know that the wizards at Microsoft are taking care of the security and integrity of your computer. (Not!) UPDATE: I finally got the SP3 update to install. I searched and found that Microsoft knew about the problem. Let me help you parse this correctly, Microsoft issued an update, notified me it was available, and it had a defect that caused it to fail to install, possibly damaging my computer software, and they knew about the problem and instead of fixing it, wrote an article, admittedly for advanced users, in which they detailed how to verify the error cause and fix it (you have to download and run subinacl, using a script they wrote). This is absolutely preposterous. I am having trouble maintaining my sense of decorum... it would be easy to slip into a long stream of expletives. What COULD they be thinking? Given the environment, how can they expect to survive the jungle of trial lawyers out there? Any manufacturer that knowingly continues to ship a defective product runs a high risk of being sued and facing a judgment with substantial punitive damages. The first step the update installer says it is following is "Inspecting your current configuration". I cannot believe there is a software design engineer working at Microsoft (or anywhere else for that matter) that could stand up to a trial lawyer questioning how they could know about a problem and run a program that is "inspecting" and cannot find a known issue that inhibits installation. All I can figure is that, with Mr. Gates out of the driver seat, Mr. Balmer is determined to push ahead and such every last drop of financial blood they can get from the eventual corpse of Microsoft, and leave the remains in bankruptcy court, where someone will no doubt decide that all those people cannot afford to update Windows BS and they will create a quasi-governmental corporation, taxpayer subsidized, to continue to maintain Windows. Just like Amtrak, it will be cheap, slow, buggy and all about yesterday's technology. |
| Tuesday, May 6, 2008: Today, we kick Microsoft around a little. I know, having a battle of wits with Microsoft is picking on the unarmed, but it can be fun. I guess that's why so many people do it. One of my biggest peeves with Windows is when I put some program in the background and start typing in another window, only in the middle of that the program decides it wants to ask me something stupid like "I know you clicked on this, did you really mean it?" and makes itself the front window and sticks the dialog box in my face. Inevitably, several characters are typed before I can respond to the interruption. Your train of thought is broken, some of what you typed is gone and will have to be redone, and worst of all, if you press return it will make the OK box be hit, and who knows what happens then. This is not just annoying, it can be dangerous to your data. Want to have a really scary thought? Think of Microsoft software in your car. Sure, I would trust these guys to design something my life depended on. Really. Right now, their software uses voice recognition to control music and telephones only, and has been available exclusively on Fords, although that expires later this year. However, given the miserable design of Windows programs controlling the user, the thought of depending on their software to remember to continue operating the engine when the phone rings is hard to accept. |
| Sunday, May 4, 2008: Today I give out another STUPID award, this time to PETA. The people at that outfit must be jokers, taking all the animal loving suckers for a ride, because they sure seem to go to any length to get a little publicity. Probably helps attract donations. This time, they have asked Kentucky's authorities to suspend the jockey that was riding the horse than broke it's front ankles in the latest Kentucky Derby and had to be killed (short for euthanized). They want an investigation, apparently they think that somehow the jockey is at fault because he was allowed to "whip the horses mercilessly". I guess it must make them cry to see a thick hided animal like a horse be swatted with a puny riding crop while it does what it evolved to do, run fast from danger. They also want "softer, artificial surfaces for all courses". What the heck? This is an animal that, in nature, runs on rocky soil effortlessly, but PETA wants softer race courses for the poor wittle horseys. What a crock. I know that the political people that received their complaint will have to handle it with deference and respect, but they'll get no respect here. Free speech doesn't mean you have to respect idiotic babble from single-issue zealots. |
| Friday, May 2, 2008: Normally, politics is not a component of my blog here. There are plenty of other places to learn about whatever politics you feel is important. And really, this is not going to be about any political position, rather, I am going to lambaste one particular opinion writer for being, well, just plain STUPID. A writer named Ted Rall wrote a piece (located here) titled "Arrest Bush". The premise is that since Bush has acknowledged that he authorized the prisoner questioning that the Chief of Police for Washington has "probable cause to arrest a self-confessed serial torturer and mass murderer". What a crock. The author of that comment is twisting facts to support his personal political prejudices. Where does he figure the Chief gets her jurisdiction? Regardless of whether anyone believes that what President Bush is or isn't criminal, none of the events occurred within the jurisdiction of the Washington, DC police. Official government actions in Federal facilities, such as any discussions by the President in the White House, are not subject to any laws or actions of the District of Columbia. The President answers to the Congress, which has the sole power to remove him from office. The actions themselves happened in foreign places, again outside the jurisdiction of the Washington, DC Police Chief. I think Mr. Rall is not clever at all in his calls to "arrest Bush". All he is trying to do is appeal to people who blindly hate Mr. Bush, and there are plenty of those. He is pandering, probably hoping to sell more books. Personally, I am thankful we have had someone powerful and decisive to lead the nation through some dangerous times, and no amount of Monday morning quarterbacking by the liberal weenie class will change my opinion, or that of history, which will mark Mr. Bush's actions as a high point in a troubled time. |
| Sunday, April 27, 2008: I am slow on the updates here. I have been busy with many other projects, and this one just gets passed over. On our ranch, we continue to see new calves. We found two that were born Friday and Saturday... we didn't look as much those days because it was wet from the thunderstorms that came through. I am not grousing about those, because we need the rains to continue or we will have a bad summer. So far, I am pleased with the calf crop, although prices have been poor. I expect they will improve as conditions change. I was working with Ogre3d, an open-source graphics rendering project. It took this old dog a while to learn some of the new tricks that were needed to get my latest exploration going, but I built a program with which I can load a Sims2 format mesh and then select a texture file for it and add the texture, and I can manipulate the camera position with mouse movements. It is not close to anything that would be regarded as useful, and with the exporters and plug-ins available now for Sims 2, it is not needed, but I am pursuing it regardless, because sooner or later there will be some other game format that needs exploring, and I will have a framework to do it with. When I switched Internet Service Providers a couple of weeks ago, I had to move the Linksys Wireless Router from my computer room to Kay's, and thus my computer was no longer connected via Ethernet directly into the router, but instead via a wireless adapter network that plugged into a USB port. Since I have so many ports used I had to plug it into a port on an external hard-drive, which I did not like. I bought a Linksys wireless game adapter. It had a software program I used to configure the adapter (mostly the security data was all that had to be added). Then, all I need to do is plug it into the Ethernet port and it connects to my network. It has been working well, and once setup is a simple and effective solution to routing data without adding any new wires, which I am opposing because this is a new house, and I do not want to spend the money required to run the wires hidden, and certainly do not want them tacked along the baseboard across several rooms or across the front of the house. |
| Tuesday, April 15, 2008: This, by chance, is the big rush day for many people... in the U.S. Income Tax returns (or an extension request) must be filed by midnight. Fortunately (or by design, really) my tax forms have been complete for weeks and the return filed. But I was not always this efficient about things, and more than once drove to a special pickup point at the main post office where I lived to drop off a letter to make sure it was postmarked on the 15th. A long time since the last post. A lot to talk about, but first a part of the delay has been because of Internet Service Provider issues. Right now, I have three ISPs, a dialup, a satellite link and a wireless link. I had, for almost two years, used only a satellite link from WildBlue. It has a bandwidth cap, which is labeled their "Fair Use Policy". What it means is that, while they want customers, they don't want them to use the service too much. So if you use more than so many gigabytes in any 30-day period, you get flagged and they slow your speed down. That was not so bad, but you also get put on some sort of restriction that effectively make the internet unreachable for the entire evening. That sucks, big time. I ran over my limit, in part, because I bought a new laptop and downloaded a lot of things I had on my other computer. I tried to purchase their more expensive package, which is faster and has a higher limit, but first they bunged the order up, and it didn't go through. Then they put the speed limit on my account. I got the package upgraded finally, but I have to wait until my account gets below 70% before it gets put back to normal. As I see it, it is fair only to WildBlue, and given all the trouble I have had with them over missed installation appointments, and the sometimes miserable stability issues (partly caused by weather), I am fed up. I had a wireless link installed. This is basically a WiFi setup, from a carrier name Cobalt. I had to have the antenna put on a 40 foot pole to get it to work (we live 'way out there). It does work. It is much snappier that the satellite link (which suffers a lot of lag due to speed-of-light issues). But the download speed seem like it has a cap on it, at around 256 Megabits (25 Kb/sec download speed). I suspect that this is a network imposed limit, perhaps they are "managing" their network like Comcast, quietly limiting things and hoping people don't catch on. However, I am probably going to keep the service after the free trial ends. I can work around the download speed issues (it is still a lot faster than dialup), and the surfing is really nice. Due to my overabundance of caution, I will likely not disconnect the satellite connection until a while has passed and this new connection stays working right. While I do not usually want to use this forum as a political venue, I am appalled at the state of freedom (well the lack thereof) that is in France. Talk about Political Correctness gone amok, the train left the tracks in France. The government is prosecuting Bridgette Bardot for some comments she made against immigration, the latest in a letter she wrote, previously from two books. She is being tried for "inciting racial hatred" for speaking against the heavy immigration into France, especially Islamic peoples. In her case, she is railing about that because of some of the practices that conflict with her beliefs in Animal rights. I don't really agree with any of what she says, but I think even the liberals here in the U.S. would be against the kind of limits on speech that appear to be standard in France. I don't think there are enough jail cells in the U.S. to hold all the people that would challenge those kinds of limits were they to try to be imposed here. It is totally opposite of the common belief in free speech rights. While name calling is not considered in good taste, and that or profanity makes most people ignore the content, people do not get arrested here for speaking out against something, and when they do it makes big news. It is pretty well established that you can lose your job, your friends and your money, but with a few exceptions (like blabbing governmental secrets) no one goes to jail here over something they said. I guess the French have the government they want, or deserve. They are certainly not timid, the violence of the French Revolution ("Heads will roll") shows that, so if they tolerate those limits, it must suit them. But it would not be tolerated here. It was enshrined in the FIRST amendment, showing that it ranked first among the ideals we hold dear here. |
| Thursday, March 20, 2008: We went to Bryan today and I decided to follow through and buy a laptop. The hardware seems acceptable, considering the tradeoffs that need to be made for a portable device. But the software situation is deplorable. I spent almost an hour waiting for it to "install" itself, and at least two more hours uninstalling all the crippled demo programs that were pre-loaded on it. And it still has 30 Gb of used space on the disk (two is the swap file, but good grief). And then a good bit of time getting rid of Symantec (Norton) Antivirus, which reminded me that I had sixty days of my subscription left, and required a reboot to finish. See my previous rants about Symantec. Did I mention Vista is as slow as, well, it is very slow rebooting. After I finished that, I moved a copy of Kaspersky Antivirus to the machine and installed it (I have a 3 machine license, this is license #2 on that). That worked well, the USB memory stick was recognized immediately (although there are now at least a dozen choices that need made to keep a dialog box from opening when the stick is inserted). After I got the security package installed I connected to my wireless network. That should have gone well, but I had a difficult time discovering that there was a slide switch that shuts the wireless network power off, and that I had switched that off thinking it was a slide switch to open the lid. Once I had stumbled through that, I needed only to enter the security code for my network and I was online. I have even less charitable things to say about the Operating System. Windows Vista Home Premium, of course. While I am not a Microsoft Certified geek type, I have been watching Windows develop since version 1.0. And while everything before 3.1 was almost unusable, but still more attractive than DOS, Vista is just the pits. In its present state it is just too aggravating. It is no wonder that Microsoft has made such a small dent in the market with it. If you want a Nanny to watch over you and keep you from making mistakes, it may be your cup of tea. For anyone willing to be responsible for their own actions, it is truly miserable. Security has me steaming. Certain directories come preconfigured to be unavailable, and you have to edit the permissions. But after doing so, trying to open "Application Data" even for reading, every time you try to enter the directory, it seems to "loop back" and display itself within itself. And the directory "Documents and Settings" itself is locked, even after you change the permissions. Denied. Denied. Denied. Who do they think owns this computer? I am trying to be rational and keep Vista on there, instead of replacing it with Windows XP, and since the main thing I want is to browse the internet and maybe edit some documents from the recliner chair instead of my desktop. But at the present state of development (and yes, I downloaded and installed all of the updates), it is far from ready to be installed on my main machine. We will see if Service Pack 2 improves things enough, although I expect that will be a long wait. Maybe some improvements will dribble in along the way. I haven't added enough old programs to test the compatibility mode, but I am not optimistic about a lot of it. I have read many unkind things about Vista, and so far, most of the things I read are true. At this stage of development, replacing Windows XP with Vista does not appear to be a wise thing to do. If Microsoft wants to get a lot of people to upgrade to Vista and have that boost their earnings, they are certainly not doing the right things to get the job done. |
| Tuesday, March 11, 2008: I have been slow at updating this blog. I have been very active online, you would need only look at my CustomSims3 forum to know I have been active recently. I have also been able to get outside and work on my ranch with the improving weather. Spring is rapidly approaching here, the wildflowers (Indian Paint Brushes) and the early weeds (Broomweed) have started appearing. I like the warmer weather, although soon enough I will be complaining about the heat. Wild hogs are becoming a problem. Two days in a row, I looked out in the very late afternoon and saw a large group of them rooting around in one of the pastures. I shot at them with a .22 magnum rifle. While none of them went down, I would be surprised if I didn't hit several, at least. I don't think most that were shot face good prospects for a long, healthy life afterwards. I would have to use a more powerful rifle (which I own) to stop them in their tracks, but if it reduces their numbers it is a good thing in my opinion. I also haven't seen them back, pigs are smart, and will avoid that pasture if there is danger. That is an accomplishment also. The property that they ran off to when I started shooting is owned by Alcoa, it was a buffer zone between here and their former strip mine, and is just leased out for hunting right now. So there is something for the hinters to shoot at. |
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