Tag: Complaints

In the beginning there was the iPodService and the GearService. Along with the iPodService, there was the iTunesHelper, which in theory speeded up the launch of iTunes (yeah right), but is really to allow the ‘auto start iTunes when this iPod is plugged in’ option to work, along with supressing the auto-start handler for the iPod when it’s plugged in. Later releases of iTunes stopped shipping with the GearService, which meant one less thing running under the hood, but now iTunes 5 ships with a new feature: ‘Bonjour Service’. This is zero configuration networking in action. My problem is that it’s another Network service running on my machine. I’m of the impression that every open port is another potential way in for crackers and other not-nice people. The feature of talking from one iTunes library to another was embedded into the application, but now a large piece of this feature has been handed off to this new service.

I upgraded my laptop – more memory, and a larger hard drive. Not a difficult task, the longest piece of the job was resizing the partitions after dd’ing the smaller disk onto the larger one. Windows worked without a blink. It didn’t consider the upgrade reactivation-worthy (which is good).
Acrobat was a different kettle of fish – I needed to activate it again. I’m pretty much convinced that the activation data is based on the hard drive – probable the model and capacity. The tell-tale sign for this is that it refuses to work when you are running partition magic. As partition magic’s documentation is in PDF, this makes things quite silly.
This is ‘slightly’ covered on the activation FAQ, which mentions that if you low-level format your hard drive you’ll lose the activation information.

Turns out that the thieves were stealing only good gold items (there was an article in the newspaper). Mind you, they would have had a more lucrative haul if they’d stolen other stuff as well like PDAs, laptop computers, but I’m not one to complain about this.

It’s not really a complaint, as nothing was stolen. The Parents’ house was broken into and every room in the house was gone through, but from as close as we can tell nothing was stolen. My laptop was left in the room, there was a €50 note in my mother’s purse, none of the jewelry was stolen and, luckily of all, my father’s shotgun was still where he had left it. I’m convinced that the gun needs to be locked up, but as for the rest of the problems, it is really surreal. They had time to look through practically everything, but seemed to not take anything.
On the other hand they may have been looking for something specific, the question is what?

Here’s one from the symantec firewall ruleset:
Trying to access an SQL server with a blank password.
Obviously this is one in a long line of stupid f*ing user problems, but let’s be honest, this was while I was constructing the ODBC connection, I don’t have a blank password.
Another rule is FTP_IIS_Status_DoS, this one is particularly nefarious as I hit it regularly when using NCFTP. For some reason I don’t think ncftp is trying to DOS a remote server 🙂

Ok, teacher tells their class that the moon is not out during the day! How whacked is that. Then also proceeds to tell them that all rivers flow south. Downhill maybe, but south! this smacks of something out of 1984.
Reminds me of the occasion that I got screwed in a general knowledge quiz over the question… how much light does the dark side of the moon receive as a percentage of the overall light the moon receives. The reason why the dark side of the moon is called the dark side of the moon is that it is not generally visible from our perspective. The moon takes about 29 days to rotate on it’s axis; almost exactly the same amount of time it takes to orbit around the earth. If we see the same side of the moon all the time doesn’t that mean that when the side we see is a new moon (dark) the other side is bathed in light! Dammit, that was a fricking tiebreaker question as well.

This would be attributed as a whine from me; more or less. I’m regularly seeing people saying ‘factoid’ and then attributing it to a fact. The problem with factoids is that they are not true, they are not a miniature fact. Facts are facts; no matter how small or large the are.
The problem is that the reason whay factoids are called factoids is that they have the appearance of facts, but they are not. For the most part the reason why they are so is that they have been repeated so many times that they are attributed as fact.
Consider the oft touted ‘fact’ that Sweden has the highest suicide rate in the world. This is a true factoid. It originates in a speech of a US president, and has absolutely no basis in fact. It was used to argue that the social system in the country does not help the people in the country; for after all; they’re fucked regardless of how much money they put into it.

I came home to find my laptop had rebooted into linux (a much more sane operating system), without any information, I looked at the event log and found that I was being hit by the limit to te number of TCP/IP connections that can be made per second. I hit this when I open a group of bookmarks in firefox! There is more detail here, but the long and short of things is if you attempt to make more than 10 connections in a second you are rate limited, and a message is logged in the event log. It’s not tunable in the registry, you need to hack the tcpip.sys file directly. I presume the reason for not allowing the registry hack is to prevent virus writers/trojan horse writers from making alterations to the registry value, thus removing it’s capability. Annoying, but work-aroundable. SpeedGuide.net :: Windows XP SP2

Aaargh! I just lost 10 pictures from my holiday because windows deleted the files permanently when I selected an undo operation from explorer!
Windows must die the partially helping piece of shite that it is, at least with UNIX you know you’re operating without a safety net, and while you may mess up at least you know it’s not because the OS was being too helpful with it’s undo operations.

Ok,
first time ever I’ve missed a flight because I was too pissed to wake up in the morning. Let’s recap, I went drinking with fintan and lester in sydney, and left them at about 12.30 in the morning to get back to home. Of course, I got mega mega sidetracked getting back to the accommodation – I was giving ego advice to a bunch of goths – being drunk, I’m sure they appreciated it for what it was – drunken advice. I was woken in the morning by a thumping on the door – didn’t I have a flight to get and I was supposed to be checking out – they never talk to you except to throw you out.
What did I forget? my shampoo and conditioner. I now have to go find the bloody stuff again before my hair turns into a tangled mess. Maybe it’s time to get it cut – Liz’s input at this stage would be a resounding yes!
Of course, I’m sitting in the airport thinking… should I check my work email or not. This is of course rhetorical – the next time I expect to look at it is between the 25th and the 31st of December.