Think Before Clicking

I see a new MSN account details phishing site is making the rounds *sighs* A little hint for the less net-aware among us: if you click a link to was sent to you out of the blue and end up at a site asking for your account details (especially if the domain of the site you end up at has nothing to do with the link you clicked), then don't fill them in. Ever.

This time round it's http://www.free-offers-your-clicks.com (no, I'm not making it into an actual link), leading to http://www.blockdelete.com/ and all the fancy shaded colouring contained therein. If you check the Terms of Use they make it fairly clear that they'll be using your account details themselves, so I can't really fault them on that one. But really, it's not an official website in any way, if you randomly give your details out to these people then it's your own fault =P

Water Supply Fail

It's a classic scenario really. It's morning, 2.5 hours until my presentation (a mere 15 minute walk away luckily). I head for the shower, turn it on, nothing. Kemp gets slightly worried at this point. Try some taps, still nothing. Kemp gets very worried. Phone's the water company, it can take them up to 4 hours to find the problem and up to 24 hours to fix it. Kemp gives up.

I have 1.25 hours left until the presentation, let's see how this one plays out...


Update:
The water company (who don't so much charge me as anally violate me) phoned back and effectively said "it's not our problem". Did I say "effectively"? They pretty much said those exact words. Anywho, we've all been bitching at management and apparently they have someone working on it now and it might (*might*) be back up tonight. It has taken them about 12 hours to figure out the pump is broken. I could have told them that this morning, mostly due to my amazing ability to see the blatantly obvious...

Also, I did my presentation, I rocked. Thank you.


Update 2:
It's the next morning (3 minutes til afternoon in fact), still not on. What do we even pay these guys for? It's now between 30 and 36 hours since the problem occurred. The water company may suck at a lot of things, but at least they check it out within 4 hours (not 12) and quote 24 hours for the usual repair time (not the 48 that this is starting to look like). [Insert more rant here]


Update 3:
Well we've had two more excuses since my last update. The first was that they didn't have the key for the closet/room/whatever with the pump in, so they had to call a locksmith out (just how incompetent *is* the management?). The second was that they can't find anyone who can replace that particular pump. How about the guys who put it in in the first place? It's only a couple of years or so old. Surely the high-tech exciting world of water pumps can't move that fast?

OpenOffice Updates

OpenOffice updates: a renamed splash graphic and a library moved from one package to another.

Number of packages affected: 21
Total update size: 75MB

Modular my ass =P

Random IMs - Squishie Kemp

Overlord: XD
Overlord: Remind me not to get on your bad side
Overlord: =P
Kemp: lol, but I'm so soft and fuzzy
Overlord: PLUSHIE KEMP
Kemp: :O
Kemp: with foam accessories like a laptop and guitar
Overlord: And a USB PORT
Overlord: Kemp the Mass Storage Device
Kemp: THIS MUST EXIST

More Audio in Ubuntu

The first part of this is an addition to my earlier post on audio in Ubuntu. If you want a bit more detail about what you're doing with that fix then check out the original source, which also has some other useful links. After applying the fix I had problems with my sound crackling rather more than I like to hear. If you have similar problems then check out the Dmix page on the ALSA wiki, specifically the "Still Hearing Stuttering?" and "Comments" sections near the bottom. I haven't tried that extra modification myself (I was in the middle of something at the time and just disabled mixing again), but it looks promising and easy to do. That page is a goldmine of information about modifying your setup so it may be worth taking a bit of extra time to read through.

Ok, with that out of the way, how about visualisations in Rhythmbox? I use that as my audio player and I'm quite happy with it except it only has two visualisations available (I don't use them much, but they do amuse me so I like to have a few). Luckily information on this is easy to find and it turns out you need to install the libvisual-0.4-plugins package. I had a slight problem with one of them causing Rhythmbox to crash, but that may just be my setup as I don't recall seeing any warnings.

Enjoy :-)

Random IMs - Powerloss and Cows

Kate: hmm. lights keep going down here, bit worrying
Kemp: ninja attacks?
Kate: apparently one of the substations of something set on fire and they're sorting it out
Kate: so hopefully won't go off completely
Kemp: eek
Kate: would be bad seeing as the only power to our flat is electric. no gas!
Kemp: same here
Kate: and i really want a shower before i go to bed cos I was rectalling cows for an hour today!
Kemp: I love your job ^^

Random IMs - Ninja Football

Third blog post of the day :-o No intro this time, I'll let the quotes do the talking.

ErEf> what kind of football game needs to be 3.5gb?
ErEf> ffs
Kemp-> one involving ninjas
Kemp-> high enough res to see them
ErEf> you would need a lot more than 3.5gb to see a ninja clearly
Kemp-> not clearly, just enough to know roughly where they are
ErEf> ah
ErEf> still would need around 4.2 tho
Kemp-> "Ok, something's happening... erm... looks like someone has the ball, someone in black. GOOOOOOAAAAALLLLL!!!! Where did that come from? No-one here knows."

And elsewhere...

Overlord: XD
Overlord: How much detail would you need to CLEARLY see a ninja
Kemp: we don't have enough space available to find out
Kemp: nor sufficiently advanced camera technology

Windows XP Startup Items

Well my XP login time has got ridiculous, not to mention something killing the tray ("notification area" if you're being strict on terminology) the first time I log in which means I have to log out and back in again for things to work. Anywho, let's see what has sneaked into my startup list since the last time I cleaned it out... Sorry about the size of this post btw.

IMJPMIG: This is "used to simplify the input of Asian characters in the Microsoft Office suite". I don't input Asian characters, nor do I use MS Office. Goodbye to that then.
TINTSETP (x2): Again an IME related thing, but apparently a bit more important. I'll keep it until I find out it's irrelevant to me.
asrunhelp: Something ASUS related. Seems to be under review at various process description sites. It can stay for now.
NvCpl: If you're not using an nVidia card beware, a virus uses this name. My own copy here is a legit service (unneeded though and will come back every time you install new drivers). This one can go I think.
nwiz: As above, this can go too.
Acrotray: Acrobat nonsense. Never found it useful, never will. Go away and stop re-adding yourself.
[no name]: No command being run either. This can go.
Center: Great name guys... Anywho, this is used for ASUS WLan cards. Not necessary then and I don't even have one anymore, so definitely not needed here. It goes.
qttask: A good reason not to use Quicktime, just keeps coming back. Not needed, kinda pointless, it goes.
DragDiag: ADSL modem utility. I use an ADSL router at the moment, so this can go (I actually manually close it every time I log in, so this'll be a nice change =P ).
InCD: I don't use InCD stuff, so this can go. I've never trusted on-the-fly writing of CDs/DVDs.
NvMcTray: Something from nVidia. I don't really care about it, so it can go.
W: Erm.... gone.
MSMSGS: Go away, stop coming back. I renamed your directory so you can't run anyway.
ctfmon: Language bar and alternative text input for MS Office. I use none of the things in that sentence. Goodbye.
Adobe Acrobat Speed Launcher: Speed my ass. Gone.
Adobe Gamma: See above.

That looks to be all. I've skipped over the ones important to the applications I use. What starts up with Ubuntu for me you ask? Well there's... erm... there's gotta be one thing at least hasn't there? The network manager applet? A few agents to help me out? GDM?! It's all hideously outweighed by the hundreds of services and processes that my Windows sessions spawn. Ah well, it gives my HDD and RAM a workout I guess...

STS-120 Launch Post

Looks like we missed the launch this time (only by a whole day...), so here's a belated launch post for you. Also, I know the only reason Ryv ever visits is the chat log posts =P

Overlord: awwwwwwwwwww
Overlord: Missed a shuttle launch
Overlord: STS-120 launched yesterday
Kemp: belated magic carpet?
Kemp: in its honour
Overlord: /me is currently listening to: Star Trek - First Contact - Magic Carpet Ride - Steppenwolf (Star Trek - First Contact).mp3 [04:25m/320Kbps/44KHz/foobar2000 0.9.4.5]
Overlord: As I watch archive footage =P
Kemp: lol

Oh, and trivia.

During STS-120, the lightsaber used by actor Mark Hamill in the 1983 film Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi will be flown to the station, and returned to Earth. Stowed on-board Discovery for the length of the mission, the fictional Jedi weapon is being flown in honor of the 30th anniversary of director George Lucas' Star Wars franchise.

Audio In Ubuntu

This is one for those of you fed up of only being able to play sound from one source at a time in Ubuntu. In fact, only being able to have one application open that may want to play sound.

"Hmmmm... I want to watch this video clip. Oh wait, I'm playing music so I can't. I know, I'll pause the music. Oh, still no luck. Stop the music? Oh, freakin' great. I'll just completely close the music player shall I?"

"I can't play music, what's going on there? Oh, I know, I had a flash animation open in my browser several hours ago and it hasn't released the sound device yet..."

Anyway, there's a new blog here which has all the answers you need (the only answer you need to be precise).

Enjoy your new freedom :-)

tv-links Shut Down

Major pirate website shut down
Wow, FACT actually did something. I continue to be amazed.

Fact claims that tv-links.co.uk was providing links to illegal film content that had been camcorder recorded from cinemas and then uploaded to the internet.

Well I'm sure his visitors enjoyed watching low-res, badly coloured, shaky versions of new releases with terrible audio. I've seen a few CAM releases in the past and you couldn't force me to watch another for almost anything.

The British Video Association estimates that at least £459m was lost to the video, film and TV industries due to piracy in 2006.

Half a billion? Yeah right. I don't have a TV license (I don't watch TV on a TV) and therefore I'm contributing to that loss, but not because I'm a dirty pirate. I'm contributing to that loss because TV has bugger all on these days that's actually worth watching. Why would I want to pay for a TV license to watch, maybe, one show a week? If I'm lucky... I'd rather go somewhere (legit) that lets me watch decent shows on demand, even if it does cost me as much as a license. Actually, someone with a TiVo/MythTV box does nicely also...

Draft Code

The first writing is almost always a throw away, you should expect it and accept it, it will be significantly better the second time around. Once you build the code once, you have learned 90% of what was wrong with the design. A large rewrite at that point will pay off exponentially down the road.

Source (the jump to that post doesn't seem to work in IE, use Firefox :-)

This is very true, and my burning of an old codebase is very overdue. Damn the fact that it works just enough to not make it as a priority item... Anyway, I'm pretty sure this should be considered the coding equivalent of drafts of a document.

Loopback Partitions

I guess moaning about Wubi previously pretty much guaranteed it would fail on me, and true to form it has. I don't know if this is actually a Wubi issue or a Gutsy development issue as I haven't had much time to check out reports yet, but I figured I'd present an easy solution for an easy problem, just in case you hadn't done this before.

The backstory is I grabbed the latest package updates (beta Gutsy gives me up to a couple hundred a day) and later ended up hard-resetting the system after a lockup that refused to be fixed another way. At this point serious alarm bells are ringing (especially if you have rebuilt three corrupt partition tables on two machines at various points). Anyway, no corrupt partition table this time, but Ubuntu refused to boot with Grub giving a message about "unknown device string". XP was still fine so I booted into there while I considered my options. Not knowing enough about Grub configuration to fix the obvious error I decided to directly mount the disk image under Windows and grab some files I needed that way. Unfortunately I couldn't make this work as it insisted the image wasn't formatted (I had already installed the Ext2 IFS so that wasn't the problem afaict). In the end I copied the entire image onto my USB drive and took it home, where I used the easy solution:

sudo mkdir /mnt/temp_home
sudo mount -o loop -t ext3 home.virtual.disk /mnt/temp_home
cd /mnt/temp_home

Oh look, there's all my files. One happy Kemp :-) Now to fix the booting problem...

Wubi Dangers

So yesterday I had a rather tense time trying to help Overlord fix his laptop. He covered the story in his blog but I figured I'd blog the solution we came up with here too for everyone's benefit.

He had installed Wubi (warning: read this first and remember it is an unofficial beta product) on his new laptop and it was all working fine. That is until the next morning when he switched his machine on to find it stuck in a loop running the POST, searching for an OS, failing to find it, and rebooting to start the process again.

The first thing to do was obviously a Google search, which resulted in several hits. The first hit gave us a vital clue: partition boot sector corruption was occurring. After some fiddling this eventually triggered a memory of a similar experience I had once with Wubi causing partition table corruption after a lockup and unsafe reboot. That time I had used a tool to manually recreate my partition table (luckily I didn't have a complex setup) and write a functioning boot sector to the relevant location. That wasn't an option this time as the tool wasn't immediately available, so I suggested my old backup option. This involved using the XP install disc to fix the corrupted boot sector via the Recovery Console. I only had an XP Pro install disc and the installation on the laptop was XP Home, but luckily that isn't an issue for this type of operation. The first thing we tried was chkdsk to find any obvious filesystem errors, but this did nothing. Running map showed why: the filesystem type could not be detected (a previous data gathering mission [not mentioned above] with an Ubuntu Live CD was able to extract the filesystem type strangely). Knowing that the most likely cause of the troubles was the partition boot sector being corrupted, the next program to run was fixboot, which confirmed the corruption, detected the filesystem as NTFS, and wrote out a new (supposedly working) copy of the boot sector. With fingers crossed we rebooted and waited... only for it to continue happening. Suppressing some combination of cursing and tears we booted once again into the Recovery Console for another try. Again the first thing to be run was chkdsk and this time it actually did something and mentioned fixing some errors, though it didn't say what they were. At this point I was silently praying it knew what it was doing because if it had picked up the wrong filesystem type it could be happily trashing the files on it. map was then run again and still no filesystem type being shown for that partition ("I have a bad feeling about this", praying again I wasn't right about chkdsk being bad). As a last ditch we ran fixboot again (again, seriously, fixing this was enough to induce OCD in someone) and then map and... WOOT! The filesystem was shown as NTFS. Crossing our fingers again for the reboot we waited for the POST stuff to happen and then... Windows. Lovely lovely Windows. I never thought I'd say that. Overlord understandably purged all trace of Wubi from his system and vowed never to use it again.

I think the magic combination was the fixboot-chkdsk-fixboot, though I can't be sure. I certainly don't want to have to do this again.

I should note that I am using Wubi on my machine here (not only that, but running Ubuntu Gutsy beta under it) and I have only had the problem resulting from the lockup-reboot, but I may very well have just been lucky. Basically, an OS with reverse-engineered drivers for a badly documented filesystem with no journalling/transactions available running under a beta installer/loader isn't the best thing to have on your machine. You have been warned.

Bouncers Fail

There is a popular drinking establishment near to me. I won't say which one, but it has an attached Weatherspoons and is a mere few minutes from my place, you should be able to guess. Actually, I say "popular" but to be honest it's not all that good and has been getting rather dead. It has come to my attention that towards the end of the night when it's a bit quieter (and presumably easier to get people individually) at least one of the bouncers has been hanging around outside the female toilets and not allowing girls in unless they do certain things. My sources include an actual near-victim. Now you can write this off as typical bouncer behaviour all you want, but this place isn't a night club (where people seem to accept this sort of behaviour for no good reason). As far as I'm concerned, this is sexual harassment at best and potential rape charges at worst. Needless to say I will not by spending any of my money there in future. And no, I won't be revealing my sources, nor are they probably anyone you could easily guess. I encourage anyone who receives this type of behaviour to speak out and make a fuss, don't let them get away with it quietly.

So as the number of places I am willing to spend money continues to shrink, Whitefriars wins and will always win. Give them all your money =P

Nerdosity

Blame Iris. I'm happy with the result either way. And it's nerdosity, not nerdousity.

---

The Parting Of The Server

The Parting Of The Server

Doctor Who and IRC, what could possibly go wrong?

Random IMs - Bad Quiz Joke

StanMarsh> Baby Names Beginning With "F": Meaning: Occupational Surname
JagerKemp> fourier
JagerKemp> he transforms things
JagerKemp> oh my god, that joke was bad, even for me

(Stan is our quizbot)

RIAA For The Lose (Always)

RIAA gets some class

RIAA tried to shake down 10-year-old daughter, suit claims

I totally believe that happened, and someone needs to slap down the RIAA either way.

Flash

"This morning's unprecedented solar eclipse is no cause for alarm"

I'm pretty sure there is precedent for solar eclipses occurring...