Category: Geekdom

I’ve Said It Once, and I’ll Say It Again…

…I do not control the entire Internet. Contrary to the popular belief of some of the folks I deal with on a daily basis (but don’t actually work for), if the Web site you’re trying to visit is down, and you haven’t tried visiting other Web sites, don’t blame me until you actually try some other Web sites. If you can’t get to any sites, then you can bug me. If I can get online, so can you. If I say the Web’s working fine, don’t sit there and waste more of my time (and my boss’ money) telling me it’s not.

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(Yes, I know I’ve made a similar rant before, but it doesn’t hurt to reiterate it.)

Mario Bros. Played By Software

I can’t wait to see the results of the Mario AI Competition:

This competition is about learning, or otherwise developing, the best controller (agent) for a version of Super Mario Bros.

The controller’s job is to win as many levels (of increasing difficulty) as possible. Each time step (24 per second in simualated time) the controller has to decide what action to take (left, right, jump etc) in response to the environment around Mario.

Update: Looks like somebody’s been working on this, with fairly impressive results:

Monitor Your Servers With Your Phone

Does anybody know if somebody’s made an app like Pigs Can Fly Site Monitor for Windows Mobile? I can see that being stupidly handy to have on my phone. I’ll have to dig through the XDA-Dev forum, as I’m sure there’s something that some hacker has created — it just made be a pain to find.

One More Reason To Not Use A Mac

With a bit of work, the firmware of some Apple keyboards (A keyboard with open programmable firmware? That’s a big mistake.) can be hacked so that the bad guys can have complete control over the system, recording your keystrokes, reinfect the computer if the hard drive is wiped, etc… . In other words, really bad news.

It makes me wonder if other keyboards that features any sort of programmable features could potentially have an issue like this. Scary stuff, indeed.

(Yes, that headline was intentionally written to incite the fan boys. Just relax, it’s a joke, as there are plenty of good reasons for each platform, I know that.)

It’s Sysadmin Day

Everybody thank a sysadmin, because without them, your life would suck. I’m celebrating by remotely trying to bring a network back up after a storm-caused power outage — and it’s not working well, so I’m going to have to go to the office, I think (this is my normal day off).

How To Use Your Printer to Freak People Out

I’ve mentioned before how you can use Google to find unsecured Web cams and printers. The folks at Reddit found another open printer URL, but the best part was this comment, which makes it so you can change the status display on some HP printers, with some hilarious results.

Users are Lazy, Stupid, or Lazy and Stupid

Which is why tech support will always be necessary, contrary to what some CTOs think.

Finding The Printer With Most Operating System Plug-and-Play Compatibility

We have a homeowner at the office that’s wanting to put a printer in his Sunriver home for guest/renter use. Personally, since I don’t want to get (and won’t take) the late phone calls from guests complaining they can’t get it to work because of driver issues or what not (probably my biggest concern), I’m trying to find something compatible with as much as possible without requiring a driver disk. That pretty much eliminates any printer you can find on the shelves now, as I don’t think there’s a printer you can buy new now that doesn’t require you to install drivers either off a CD or from the manufacturer’s web site.

So I’m looking for a list of built-in printer drivers for Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Mac OS X (Windows 98 would be nice, too, but not holding my breath). I’m basically trying to make it so that the folks in the homes can take a cable, plug it into their computer, their computer will recognize it, and go, making it as easy as possible for everybody involved.

I’m digging through Microsoft’s Web site, but it’s obviously a slow process. I’ve found the Windows Logo’d Products List, but I’m pretty sure that includes stuff that has been tested after the release, and encompasses far more than what’s actually included with a default Windows XP install.

Anybody have any ideas? Anybody had to look into something like this before? I know some of the older HP LaserJets will work on just about anything, but not all of them have USB ports on them, and some of them are huge. It’d just be nice if there were a list of built-in drivers somewhere for the various operating systems (and if I can find one for each OS, I’m going to compile it all into one place).

How To Quickly Lose A Sale

If you’re going to sell many thousands of dollars worth of servers to Opera for use in their datacenters, you better dang well make sure that you don’t have code on your product’s web-based administration interface that doesn’t work with Opera.

HTTP Compression in IIS 5 Sucks, But Is Fixable

This is probably going to be a foreign language to most of the folks here, but I’m throwing it out there anyway, and mostly for my bookmarks.

I’ve been experimenting with adding gzip compression to reduce browser load times across some of the sites I maintain. I’ve had it enabled on Bend Blogs dynamic pages forever, as it’s built into Gregarius (working on compression and consolidating some other content on there as well to reduce lookups). I’ve enabled it on this site, as well as my office’s site on most pages (some didn’t do too well with it for reasons I’ll look into later, so I had to do it on a per-page basis with ob_gzhandler instead of on a site-wide Apache basis like I did here).

The one thing I was having trouble was figuring out how to do it on Internet Information Server 5 (IIS5 in Windows 2000). We have an online booking server here in the office that runs IIS5 (can’t be upgraded to IIS6 easily — tried once, blew things up, not doing it again). The directions here didn’t do anything. Was glad I wasn’t the only one that had trouble. Thankfully, I was directed to FlatCompression, which enables easy ISAPI filtering to enable compression on IIS5. Considering that the online booking software our business has to use is already slow (no fault of mine), anything to help speed up downloads is always good.

So if you’re still stuck running an IIS5 server, do yourself a favor and get FlatCompression installed and test here and here to make sure it’s sending gzip/zlib/compressed content properly.