Older blog entries for mathrick (starting at number 67)

Today, kids, I have <s>so fucking maddening that I want to stab people in the eyes with a toothpick</s> an amusing story about computers.

Dramatis personae:

• Me
• Windows Remote Desktop
• Firefox
• Putty
• Mysterious Stranger

So, I was working on a friends machine via remote dekstop (which, by the way, is pretty sweet, with sound forwarding and stuff), and in the course of matters, I upgraded the copy of Firefox instaled there to 1.5. Then it stopped connecting to the net. IE works. Ping works. FF does not. Hmmm…

Okay, so I did what I needed with IE (bleh), and moved on to the part which required SSH access to the Uni server. Downloaded Putty, installed, ran, it dies with timeout. HMMM. Some thinking later, I figured it’s probably a firewall. Opened firewall settings, it’s OFF. WTF?. So I fiddled with it harder, and some 15 minutes later, I was able to determine that Windows’ firewall was indeed off, but Sygate Personal Firewall was ON. Okay, I thought, strange I haven’t noticed any indication of this fact, but ran Start->Applications->Sygate Personal Firewall. And then (enter Mysterious Stranger), it’s shown me this.
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WHAT. THE. FUCK!?
Just how incredibly, unbelievably cretinous shithead you have to be to invent something like that? Because it was blocking stuff, just not showing any indication of this fact. Of course, when I went to this machine, sat by the console, logged out, logged in again, and then connected via RDesktop, Sygate was magically able to show its UI! Person responsible for this should have all teeth removed without anaesthetics, and all programmers involved in creation of this abolition their fingers broken, just to make sure they won’t commit similar crime ever again.

(As an aside, I’m not sure that it showing its UI is a significant improvement over lack of UI, as then it regularly, every couple of minutes shows little info popup WHICH STEALS FOCUS OF YOUR CURRENT WINDOW, and also has “don’t show this again” checkbox which doesn’t work, so next time it’ll popup it again, with the same non-working checkbox again, and then, when my friend came back, and we tried to transfer some files via FTP, so he installed FileZilla or something, but it wasn’t working, despite us trying for some 20 minutes, and then I discovered that fucking Sygate was showing blocking question popups, but it was doing that on my account, which was fast-switched to his, fuck, where’s my toothpick, I’m gonna stab them to death, ARGH)

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Rich, it’s very possible that you’re missing something. I remember being surprised to see “automatically synchronise time with internet servers” on WinXP, so at least Windows you should have covered. Dunno about OSX and Solaris, but on Linux, I was able to finally not have to set up NTP myself (which never really worked), as after installing Ubuntu it had it up and running by default. So out of 4 OSes, at least 2 should “Just Work”.

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Today I spotted first comment spam that got through SpamKarma’s net, and I’m genuinely amazed. It has everything SK stuffs comment forms with, including JScript payload and encrypted payload, making it identical to hand-written comment. So, either the spam toolkit of this individual is much better than others, or perhaps it actually is hand-written spam :D.

(One scary thought I should probably not be revealing is that spammers might try to use real browser with a11y and/or lots of custom scripting as their spambots. Of course, it’d be orders of magnitude slower in posting spam, but would also give hit ratio unattainable otherwise. Eeeevil thought)

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reason #84.

(For those of us who need smart IME anyway, check out UIM, great stuff. Japanese and Polish diacritics at the same time are finally possible.)

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… that Danish and Norwegian are so similar to each other. Gives you immediately 2x more bang for buck for every bit of language your learn.

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As orph requests:

• Entire Honor Harrington series (that’s 9 or so volumes) by David Weber
• Deal Breaker by Harlan Coben
• Apocalypse Troll, again by David Weber, you can read it for free at great Baen’s site
• Left Hand of Darkness, by U.K. Le Guin (still reading)
• That great book about working in mine, whose title and author I can’t recall at all
• WÅ>ród znajomych, collection of essays and other writings by Leszek KoÅ,akowski

These are the ones I’m sure of, but I have strong feeling I’m forgetting something.

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Sure I can!

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Inkscape is double-plus neat, but it’s so incredibly, unbelievably, painstakingly slow it’s not even funny. Seriously. Yes, I know that perhaps using nightlies for Win32 isn’t exactly the recipe for fast, but even using native linux builds of stable version is good way to get some new wrinkles whilst waiting for results. Oh, and I thougtlessly tried new “Effects” menu in the nightly — oops. Now I know the meaning of slow. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to remove the effects, and undo seems strangely ineffective. Double oops.

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So, this macmarcel guy is a spammer, too. He has exactly two entries, and by odd coincidence I have read both just yesterday, one is stolen from raelity bytes, second one is from SimpleBits, clearly to give him legitimate appearance. Funny enough, he changed “Rollyo” to “Hollyo”, but didn’t bother erasing explicit references to SimpleBits. In any case, raph, you probably want to delete or disable his account.

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Whoever at MSFT decided to replace undisplayable CJK characters with ? deserves my most sincere kick in the nuts, deliverable whenever we meet.

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