Category: Geekdom

Lost And Found

I thought I lost a big collection of links, but they were found when doing some cleaning on the hard drive. So here are a few of them.

Oh, and here’s a time-killing game for the evening to get you really frustrated going into Monday. I got up to 5630 on my first try before my eyes were starting to bleed.

April 26, 2009

Coder vs. Photoshop

So there’s a little piece of code from an image viewer for Mac OS X that is probably one of the best commented rants against a file format I’ve seen in a long time (and the fact that it’s against the Photoshop file format makes me life, since I work in that format every day). Observe (in case he changes his code):

At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns. If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignement should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included. Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD, of course, uses all three, and more. Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format. Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun. PSD is not my favourite file format.

April 23, 2009

CNBC’s Jim Goldman Is An Idiot

CNBC’s Silicon Valley Bureau Chief Jim Goldman apparently thinks Macs come with Photoshop, and that PCs need $600 extra to perform as well as a Mac (ideas which he blatantly took from this Business Week article, without credit). He also throws about a bunch of other lies, and recommends Geek Squad (which pretty much shoots his credibility in the toilet with me).

I’ll quote the Giz and this exactly sums up my thoughts about this:

Look, there are some valid reasons to pick a Mac over a PC, just like there are valid reasons to pick a PC over a Mac. But you shouldn’t smear blatant horses**t all over them, especially when it’s already confusing enough for regular people, your audience, Mr. CNBC Silicon Valley Bureau Chief.

I really should’ve stuck with technology reporting like I considered doing out of college with my fancy-pants degree, but I was married and had a kid before I graduated, so paying the bills immediately was of primary concern. While I have a great deal of respect for (most) reporters, money-makers most of them are not.

April 21, 2009

Evening Links

Cleaning out the drawers…

April 13, 2009

Random Link Dump

Something to keep you entertained this evening…

More sometime. I way behind.

April 9, 2009

Neverending Loop

Want to cause all sorts of havoc on a PC? Install the Google Toolbar and make sure that the setting that protects Google as your search provider and home page is set (I think it is by default). Then install Yahoo!’s toolbar and make sure the same settings are set on there. Watch the fun ensue.

</sarcasm>

Seriously, don’t do the above. I has a user complain about “some sort of Yahoo error that was causing him to not be able to work.” I went over there, and the Yahoo! search protection was trying to protect the Google software from updating the start page, and the Google toolbar was fighting with the Yahoo! toolbar to do the same. A constant stream of balloons and messages were popping up, with one program trying to out-protect the other. Once I uninstalled one, everything worked fine again.

Wonder what would happen if you threw the Ask Toolbar into the mix, as I’m sure it has similar features? I have an old XP system in the office, I’m almost tempted to try this.

April 5, 2009

Doomsday is Not Coming Tomorrow

I’ve already been asked several times the last 48 hours about the Conficker worm that’s supposed to activate tomorrow. Thanks to many doomsday scenerios being protrayed on TV news shows about what this thing could do, people are in a dither about it. Granted, it’s finally good that folks are being forced to think about their computer security, but it shouldn’t take some sensationalist news story to do so.

But the worst thing to do would be to panic, so don’t. I’ve already talked to several folks who said they’re just not going to turn their computer on tomorrow because they’re afraid this thing is going to hack into their computer, steal all their credit card information and passwords, take nude photos of their first-born child, and sell it all to the Iranian government or something ridiculous (somebody’s been watching too much Fox News).

For what you need to know, and what this worm is going to try to do and what you can do to prevent it, just read up on here, follow the directions there, make sure you’ve fully patched your system on Windows Update, check your system now, and sleep a bit easier. Also make sure your apps on your computer are fully up to date and patched with tools like Secunia (PSI) and the FileHippo Update Checker. As a precautionary measure, I’m making sure the systems here at the office (at least the ones I’m in control of, as there are real-estate agents here as well that I don’t work with) are not infected.

March 31, 2009

It’s April 1st Somewhere

And the April fools jokes are already hitting the Web, like this one detailing Internet Explorer 8.1’s new features.

March 31, 2009

Why Human Resources Should Never Be In Charge Of Hiring Geeks

Because they don’t look for the important things.

March 30, 2009

Router != Switch (or: Just because the plug fits doesn’t mean it’s right)

So the other day I was trying to troubleshoot a network issue at the office (which is always fun, as it’s usually something stupid that requires far too much time to figure out but only 30 seconds to fix). There were a couple computers in the office that couldn’t get onto the Internet. After checking the obvious (that the cable is plugged in properly), I head into the command line to try to ping our firewall, with no luck. I check to see what the IP address for the machine is (and to see if it even had a proper one) and noticed that it was in the 10.x.x.x subnet.

Since our entire network is on the 192.168.1.x subnet, I had no idea why this machine had a 10.x.x.x IP address. Just to make sure the network card was working OK, I manually changed the IP address back to an IP in the office subnet, manually putting in the OpenDNS IP addresses, and got online fine. But the minute I put the computer back to auto-detecting IP settings, it reverted back to 10.x.x.x, and couldn’t get online. I verified that the DHCP server on the network was running properly (it was), so it was either a) a weird thing is Vista that I’ve never come across or b) It was getting its IP address from somewhere else.

I assumed “b)” and installed Wireshark to look for DHCP handshakes and sure enough, there was another DHCP server running in the building somewhere that was overriding my DHCP server (which is basically a dd-wrt router, since that particular office is trying to phase out their Windows Domain/DHCP server).

So the hunt began for the rogue network device. After a bit of searching around the office, I found an old Zyxel wireless router (with a sticker from the long-defunct Unicom) buried under some wires in the corner of an office underneath a desk. It was plugged in where there used to be a switch (no idea what happened to the little five-port switch). Somebody must have figured that “Hey, this thing has network ports on it, it must work to connect all these random cables together.” And it would have probably worked fine, if somebody would’ve turned off the DHCP server on the thing. And it was only affecting a few of the folks in the office as the rest hadn’t renewed their DHCP request yet, so they still had the 192.168.1.x addresses.

But like I said before, pain to figure out, easy to fix.

So for future reference, just because it looks like a switch, and just because the the network cables fit, does not mean you should just randomly plug it in. Especially if it has a big ol’ antenna sticking out of the top if it.

March 23, 2009