Hell Yeah Bitch! .com

I’ve got accounts on AIM, Yahoo!, MSN & ICQ because I’ve got friends on all four services. I’ve switched from Trillian to Gaim to Fire and now to Adium to manage all my account connections. One thing has been consistant throughout: ICQ Spam. Here’s just some of the past month’s worth of junk that pops up on my computer:

1:39 PM May 2 154925039: hi! want meet ? you can see my photo and camshot http://24.18.162.102:8180/index.html

5:26 AM May 15 166595611: Need extra cash?
You can earn 2k weekly
5:26 AM May 15 166595611: Join eMaxCash partnership program!
Contact us > icq 190733722

9:50 PM April 25 176967616: hi! How are you? Do you want to know new great thing?

2:51 AM April 30 216161879: hello
11:05 AM April 30 216161879: hi
7:02 PM April 30 216161879: hello?
7:03 PM April 30 216161879: hello?

7:04 PM June 5 228533728: Do You smoke ?

i sale cheap cigarettes. 1 carton (200 cigarettes) for $8.4 (Marlboro, Camel and etc…)

visit site: www DOT discount-smoke DOT com

8:06 PM June 6 301830580: Hello! You Wish to learn as to earn many money? It completely not difficultly, simply type in the brovvser: “money-book” and “.net”

And my favorite just because it’s so balantant advertising:

6:45 AM April 6 254582560: Hi,
May I point your attention to the book Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict.
Google banned Shoher’s website from the ad program for “unacceptable content.” The book, however, is honest and rational.
Please download the book free from www.terrorism-in-israel.com
Best,
Alex Hertz
alex@terrorism-in-israel.org
6:46 AM April 6 254582560: For more information visit our site http://tr.terrorism-in-israel.org

There’s links galore in all these messages, but I stripped them out for all of our saftey. So, this is it. I’m done. I’m tired of coming back to my computer and having a dozen random messages and just as many requests to allow people to add me as their buddy. As a note to all the people that I regularly chat with on ICQ (Mike: you’re the only one, actually) catch me from now on on AIM or Yahoo! or MSN, and I might even start signing in to Google Talk also.

This is where I work. Working for a ‘last-mile’ internet provider means that I’ve had to go to a lot of places that a well-fed and pampered West County kid from St. Louis would never, ever, ever expect to end up. I’ve climbed numerous water towers to install antennas and modems. I’ve been up on free-standing towers to sight-in 15 mile wide wireless links, making millimeter-by-millimeter adjustments to get things just right. I’ve hitched my laptop up to more rooftops than Michel Dell ever imagined one of his notebooks would ever see (add to that a few crawlspaces too, and you’ll begin to get the full picture). I’m on gravel roads more often than paved, and my territory is roughly 70 miles wide E-W, another 70 going N-S. Running coax or Cat-5 around 100 year old farm houses is a weekly event, and I’ve actually almost gotten used to the unbelievable reek of cows and pigs.

But not until today was I unable to do maintenance on some of our internet equipment because of a nippy horse. Until today. Click on the photo for a larger version.

This was on MacOSXHints.com a few days back, but it’s handy enough to repeat: Convert image file types via Terminal using sips. To convert a .tiff to a .jpeg:

sips --setProperty format jpeg --setProperty formatOptions normal bluetooth_broke.tiff --out bluetooth_broke.jpg

There’s a line break in there just so that it displays correctly here… You can convert a dozen different filetypes, play with it for a while to figure it all out.

I’m getting pretty sick of hearing “MP3 Player” 5 times every commercial break.

At one point will people stop calling them MP3 players and start calling them “Music Players” or “Digital Music Players” or something else? Anything at all? Most players manufacturers don’t even want you to use MP3s, they want to be used with AAC or WMA. Of course I realize that MP3 is the catchy term (for some reason) that the public is familiar with, but really when will it stop? The tech community really needs to thing of a new catchy term that can be used for all of them that isn’t tied to a file type that everyone still supports but no one wants you to use.

Steve Jobs is doing and suing everyone and everything he can to protect the term “iPod” from this fate, so thats out. Lets call them…ok, I don’t know what to call them. But some marketing firm needs to get on this; maybe that same team that made up “WiFi”. That term means exactly dick and the public eats it up. We need something like that for MP3 Players.

Of course, none of this will help with the annoyance for this holiday season, but next year it might.

Suggestions? Anyone?

[ Attention: Geeky post ahead! ]
So I wiped out my last machine running Windows Saturday night and turned it into my primary Linux server, which now runs Fedora Core 4. Everything was great, except for Samba. I couldn’t get Samba to work at all. I set up the configs the same way I did on the old server, I added the users correctly, I did everything but my iMac just couldn’t connect. It kept returning “Username or password not correct.” or “Share not found.” I had other things to do, but I couldn’t get to them because of this stupid issue hanging over my head!

To make a long story short (and less boring) I finally ran accross something that sovled my problem. Actually there were two problems. In Fedora 4 there is an issue with Samba where the permissions on the /etc/samba/smbpasswd file can not be read. It looksl like the permissions are fine, but the server can’t read that file, and thus can’t find the user information. Problem one solved by touching a file in the root directory (Sorry, I’ll find the exact file when I get back home.) Problem 2 is that, unbeknownst to me, in Fedora 4 directs samba traffic by default through the security module SELinux. So I either had to mark everyfile I wished to share via samba or I could just turn the selinux intergration with Samba off with a command (That I will share when I get home.)

Finally it works…and I only wasted 2 – 3 hours total.

So would you? Would you run an ad-based operating system? Maybe the OS would be cheap, or free, and in a bar across the top would run ads that you can’t remove, would you run that on your machine? Everything else worked fine, there were just ads on it. Maybe the ads took the form of a pre-install spyware machine, with the occasional pop-up and a start page you can’t change. Or maybe the ad was a wallpaper that changes every 30 minutes to a new ad. Would that be worth the cost of an OS? According to a leaked memo, Microsoft has at least been exploring the idea.

Read the rest of this entry »

Nethercomm, a San Diego based company, has announced its plans to try to deliver internet connectivity via the gas lines that run into most homes. They claim that the technology, based on a ultra wideband wireless signal, can deliver up to 100 megabits per second to every home. Of course, none of this is tested…or built…and there is no actual findings that this can even be done. Basically, they have squat…which to me sounds like a perfect time to announce their new “product” to the world.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve seen the movie Hackers right? Yes, I know its dumb. Yes, I know its fake as hell. …and yes, I, for some reason, love that movie too. Anyway. Remember towards the end of that movie where they are “hacking the Gibson” and they all boot up their chunky little laptops? Each of them has a cool little video / movie / animation that plays when they boot their computer, before they get to their desktop. I want that. Don’t you think that would be cool? Sure it might be annoying everyonce in a while when you just want your laptop to boot up quickly so you can get something done, but all those other times…it would be awesome!

So how do we get that to happen? That I don’t know. Apple does this when you first install Tiger or get a new Mac, they play that little “welcome” video. So I did a little digging. I found where the movie is stored that plays on initial setup, and I found out that deleting a certain XML file will cause the system to go through the setup again…but thats as far as I’ve gotten.

Does anyone have more suggestions on how to get this hack done? Does anyone really even care if this hack gets done?

Bring ‘em on – the more the merrier. I gravitate towards the tech podcasts (This Week in Tech, Diggnation, CNET BuzzCast, SETI) and news casts – NPR has a ton of their stuff available for download. I drive a lot for work and regular radio is just not an option. On average my iPod has about 10-15 hours worth of podcasts at any one particular time. I could go on with what I listen to, but no one cares.

The point of this ramble-in-progress is that with the 33 different podcasts that I subscribe to, iTunes starts to break down a bit. iTunes will pull the newest RSS feed from all the podcasts all at once. This is not too bad since it’s just text that is being transfered. But then it tries to download every single new episode also all at once – 10 or 15 or more large mp3’s all fighting for bandwidth.

I’ve found that because of this a good number of episodes just die in downloading and you end up with 5 minutes of a 30 minute show. One of my CNET BuzzCasts was 9 seconds long.

There is no ‘reload podcast’ button.

If iTunes choked your internet connection and botched a download your S.O.L. You can’t reset the feed to redownload an episode. You may be able to unsubscribe and then resubscribe and get a new feed but that is a pain in the ass and I’ve not tried it (and won’t).

Please iTunes, do two things for me in your next version:
1) Download just one mp3 at a time.
2) Give me the option to redownload a podcast that got botched in transfer.

Love & Thanks, Dan.

So I’ve pretty much decided that I will be taking the plunge and buying one of the new G5 iMacs when they hit stores here in St. Louis on October 25. Rest assured I will give a full review in a week once I’ve set it up and gotten a chance to play with it a bit. I realize the fact that I’m buying a new computer is not news-worthy, but I think the problem I’m having might be worth a read. The question I have been turning over in my head the past few days is: Should I have at least one Windows machine?

In my current home networking setup, I have: 1 iBook, 1 Windows XP machine, 1 Linux server. When I get my shiny new iMac, my plan was to bump the XP machine to another (faster) Linux server, and move my media files off the older computer to the faster Linux server and then use the older Linux server as a web / asterisk / whatever server. After the initial euphoria of the thought of living in a Windows free house, I got a little worried that I might, at some point need a Windows server. What if I can’t open some a file or a friend’s hard drive? What if I need to run a program that is only on Windows? …etc. Do I really need at least one Windows box or am I just nervous about that annoying yet comfortably easy to use Windows box not being around for the first time in 10 years?

What do you think? If I got with a *nix (fedora and OS X) based world at home (I still have to use Windows at the office), will I be a fool or finally liberating myself? Please, do try to keep the” Windows sux” comments to a minimum, I know it sucks, but the majority of the computing world runs on it, so will I be screwing myself by taking it away?