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Archive for category Tech
Stumbleupon
May 13
After much too’ing and fro’ing.
We apologise for the misunderstanding regarding your query.
Kindly note that to apply for a garage card linked to your cheque account you will need to visit your nearest branch with your ID book.
For security reasons the site only allows you to apply for a Stand Alone garage card.
Yup, for “security” reasons… *cough*bullshit*cough*.
j.
Tough Love and Web Browsers…
Apr 15
I am a comment reader… it’s a bad habit, but, like Pop Idols Auditions, morbidly addictive.
Today I did it again and then wanted to hurt myself.
A comment on a story about german hackers who have crypto-analysed, and cracked, the Keeloq system used by the majority of car manufacturers in their wireless, keyless entry systems. ie. Probably your car’s remote control.
I just don’t get it. This is just another example of the waste of a good mind. If these so called “hackers” would apply some of the God-given talents to some CONstructive activity instead of DEStructive tinkering this screwed-up world we exist in would rapidly change for the better. The same goes to the button pushers who develop video games. WHAT A WASTE! What good comes from a stupid video game depicting death and destruction? This is a blatent demostration of a society with no BALLS! These video-playing little flakes will hide in their homes pushing their little buttons until someone kicks in the doors and all of us wind up speaking Arabic or (worse) Chinese! They won’t have the muscle it takes to defend themselves and our country. How about applying some of that talent to creating something this world NEEDS! In the meantime, hack into one of my cars…I have a real trigger to pull not some plastic button.
– Jim Rhea, Bowling Green, KY
Jim Rhea, you are everything that is wrong with the world.
Converting to FUPPES
Apr 7
I have a dirty little secret.
I have an XBOX 360… yes, a Microsoft product in my house!
Anyways, in order to play movies which are stored on my fileserver, on my xbox, over the network, I needed to run what is called a UPnP server which shares all the files. However, Microsoft being Microsoft, decided to slightly pervert the UPnP protocol and only support their own special version. ie. They want you to run a windows computer to stream the files from.
I don’t do windows… but months ago, in desperation, I installed TVersity (a windows program) on my VMWared XP box that I use for website testing in Internet Explorer.
TVersity, like a lot of windows software was buggy and bloated and did stuff I didn’t give it permission to do, like download 9 gigs of podcasts and free online movies for me. Anywhere else in the world that would just be annoying. Here it’s R600 worth of bandwidth you never realised you had used.
Anyway. There are basically 2 open source equivalents. I’d tried both before upgrading to Ubuntu Gutsy and both gave me issues when I didn’t have time for issues so I gave up.
Recently I had time to spare (a rarity) so I decided to tackle them.
First up was uShare. A great little app which installed relatively easily on gutsy. uShare’s flaw though is that it doesn’t do transcoding so you can’t watch movies that aren’t in one of the formats that the xbox understands AND it doesn’t support virtual folders based on mp3 tags.
Next up was Fuppes, (Free UPnP Entertainment Service) which can be a tricky install but once I had it installed and had correctly configured my virtual folder markup syntax it worked flawlessly… and it’s written well and can be quite fascinating to see in action because it exposes the UPnp protocol allowing you to see what’s going on behind the scenes. Being a nerd that’s a bonus.
The other problem with TVersity is that it used to crash every night. (remember, it’s Windows software)
Fuppes has been running for a few days now and is working flawlessly.
VIVA OPEN SOURCE!
her vs me
Apr 3
her: ok, click on “credit card”
me: but I want to apply for a garage card.
her: yes, it’s the same thi… oh, wait, no, not there.
me: uhuh.
her: Ok, click on “Garage card for existing card”.
me: Ok.
her: no wait, that can’t be it either.
me: Ok, why don’t you find out and call me back.
her: Yes, there is another way though.
me: Yes?
her: You can visit our website.
me: umm? Which website?
her: our website…
me: but we’re on your website right now.
her: No, this is the internet, you can try apply on our website.
me: ummm…
She called to help me apply online because I emailed to say their site was confusing.
Autodesk is mom jeans
Mar 14
Where do I start?
Ok, firstly, the Mom Jeans thing is a polite way of saying “you suck”. It comes from the Hillary meme.
I’ve been planning on building a multiple hard drive mount for ages… Yes I’m a nerd, get over yourself.
Basically I want to build something that can hold up to 8 drives and cool them efficiently. This will sit next to my server and be plugged in via 1m sata cables (as soon as I can find someone in SA who has them)
Being the nerd I am I’ve done some sketches and technical drawings of what I want to put together, but since I am such an incredibly raging nerd I figured I would download the autocad trial and model it properly so that I would have a very accurate cutting list. (The chassis is going to be made out of wood)
I go to the autocad website and click download trial. It says that this offer is only available in the united states and canada… and they do IP based filtering to enforce that.
Now please, for the love of science, WHAT THE EFFF?
What is so special about your trial software that other countries can’t have it? Seriously? Oh, they’ll SELL it to me no matter where I live… but if you want the trial you have to be in North America. What kind of stupid, idiotic, short-sighted, ignorant pea brained idiot thought this up? There I was thinking autocad is so cool and I’m going to use the trial to model my little weekend project… and I end up thinking you’re a bunch of idiots. Well played autodesk, well played.
Obviously I could connect to a shell server in the US and download it from there and then pull it down to South Africa, but, THAT WOULD BE BREAKING THE LAW!!!
Or I could just download the full version that won’t expire via bittorrent.
Doing either would be illegal.
Obviously I did neither.
j.
(As a side note: Yes, I realise that autocad is windows software and I will need to run in it a virtualised windows environment. I could not find any open source alternatives that looked like they would do the job. May the nerdosphere have mercy.)
(As a secondary side note: Autodesk, why do you do this? May I offer a suggestion? Your software is very specifically for a particular set of specialised industries that rely heavily on it. People like me just want to model our little weekend projects. I’m sure there are plenty of people just like me who have probably broken the law (unlike me,obviously), propagating your piracy problems. Why don’t you offer a free lightweight cad program that can be used by hobbyists. I’m sure you know what kind of feature sets would be applicable to hobbyists and what kind of features you could only make available in the full version. This would result in an entire community of people who love your software and your company. Those kinds of people do not pirate. )
Hi Steve
I assume you don’t check this email address but I figure it would be a good place to vent my anger towards you.
Why is there a R 2259 difference in the price of a low-end macbook in South Africa compared to the price in the US?
Who gets that all that money?
Thanks
j.
Many years ago I worked for a company who was a Microsoft certified partner. This was a long long time ago and I must admit that back then I was quite impressed by the fact that they were Microsoft certified partners… until I started working there. Redmond hands out certifications like a crack whore hands out cheap tricks — indiscriminately and to anyone who’s willing to pay fifty bucks.
Needless to say, this morning I was reading my gmail when I saw an ad for a “Microsoft GOLD Certified Development Partner based in Cape Town” and being the sado-masochist I am I clicked on the link… it was one of those /showpage.aspx?page_id=36 sort of sites. Ugly, but not necessarily dodgy. I put an apostrophe in the page id to see if they were cleaning their inputs and behold:
Line 166: Octigon.Octane8.Containers.Page tempPage = this._page;
Line 167:
Line 168: while (tempPage.Id != 1)
Line 169: {
Line 170: if (tempPage.Parent.Id == 1)
This shows that the site is vulnerable to sql injection… which, while not necessarily implying that the site can be hacked, does imply that, given enough time, you probably could hack it or at least cause some damage. The page also pukes out all kinds of file paths and stuff that would be useful if you were trying to do them harm.
The point here is this. Why is a web development company who are obviously bad web developers Microsoft Gold Certified?
The answer can only be that Gold Certification means absolutely nothing.