Month: July 2004

Somedays IT is fun…

I come into work, and my boss is on me immediately: “I can’t log in, I get an error message that the system time and the domain time is not synchronized”. But I push him off, because somehow someone inside the LAN has contracte the Mydoom virus and is sending out emails out the wazoo.

Then I get an email from an off-site employee who is here for the week asking me if the Mydoom emails are “really” from us IT guys. Also, she happens to ask if we have anti-virus software BECAUSE SHE HAS NONE ON HER LAPTOP! Clue #1 on where to look for the virus. Sure enough, her unprotected laptop has been have relations with a nasty part of the internet…

So I go and remove the virus from her computer, install the corporate Symantec AV, check the registry and other startup spots, and run ad-aware just to be sure. (Mydoom did a nasty because the virus executable ‘services.exe’ shares a name with an actual Windows system service, so if you try to kill it, Windows won’t let you. If you try to delete the startup entry in the registry, the executable puts in right back in. So you have to start up in Safe Mode, THEN delete the registry entry. Tricky…)

She’s good now, so I turn to my boss’s time problems. I ask him if the time is correct and he says yes. I try to log in as admin and I get the error message. I log into the computer domain and check the time. Looks good, time zone’s correct, but wait! It’s 10:12 on his computer, as it’s 10:12 on the server. But it’s daylight, so the 10:12 PM!!!! on his computer MIGHT be a little off. I set it back to ante-meridian, and all is well.

Then I get a call from another manager who got one of the mydoom emails telling me Symantec AV won’t let him open the attachment. Somehow, I manage to politely tell him we IT guys didn’t send the email, but that it’s a virus (mind you, we’ve sent 80 million emails out warning the masses).

I know we need to strip out attachments from our email and scan them before they get to the users, but the sendmail guru here is overworked, so I get to deal with the, uhm, “computer ignorant” sometimes, and I just have to shake my head…

My $.02 vent Weed

Hi everyone, just thought I would take this opportunity to introduce myself. My name is Curtis Koeppel, I am Christy’s cousin, however,I affectionately refer to her as my sister. I am a single father of a 7 month old little girl who is the angel in my life. I am a full time student, attempting to be a paralegal when I grow up. Not sure what else to say.

Curt

So, the other day I picked up a gently-used Power Macintosh G4 400MHz for $227.00 off eBay. Yes, this is a gizmo post, so sue me. Anyway, it had a DVD drive (a big plus in my book), Mac OS 9 installed (but no restoration CDs), and according to the seller had a “problem with the hard drive”. He was not sure what the problem was, but after some random time period between a few minutes to a few hours, the operating system would report that it couldn’t read the hard drive and die.

Sure enough, when I received the unit and disconnected my kids computer to hook up my new toy, it had this weird behavior. Disabling extensions didn’t seem to help. So I bought Mac OS 10.3 (Panther, which as of this writing is the “latest and greatest” Apple operating system) from CompUSA for $134.00 (people have informed me I way overpaid for the OS, but, well, I could get it that day that way, and in a retail box with support and everything), took it home, slapped in an old hard drive I had laying around, pillaged memory from my kids’ computer, installed it…

And whaddya’ know? It works great.

So the point of this post is to outline some of what I consider “essential” utilities to enjoy my Mac. For certain applications, I’ve had to hunt down the odd helper app or two to figure out how to use my Mac in “unique” ways. The cool thing is, even without the knicknacks, Mac OS X comes with a ton of useful stuff that covers most of my day-to-day activities; for the things that require specialized software or hardware, like my multitrack studio recording, I still have to use the Redmond operating system.

• OpenOffice.org. OK, I admit it. I’m a cheapskate. If I can avoid paying for something, legally, I will. However, as my subscriptions to Transgaming WineX, Crossover Office, and frequent computer software purchases attest, I’m not averse to supporting software that supports my interests.

  Anyway, OpenOffice.org has everything I need for day-to-day office work. I’m a sysadmin, not an analyst or professional typesetter, so I’ve found it to be an ideal word-processing and spreadsheet platform. Occasionally, I’ve run into weirdness with importing or exporting Microsoft Word .doc documents, but lately that’s becoming more and more rare as OpenOffice.org improves the product.

• Fink. If there ever were to be an essential administration toolkit for UNIX administrators working on a Mac OS box, this would be it. They ported Debian GNU/Linux‘s “apt” utility to Mac OS X, along with a boatload of GNU, free software, and open source software. Combined with X-Windows that ships with Panther, I can have nearly any utility that I’m used to up and running on my Mac in moments — long enough for a download of the application and any dependencies. Installation was painless, and unlike Cygwin (a UNIX-like environment that runs under Microsoft Windows), there’s no weirdness with file permissions or illegal names. Mac OS X is UNIX under the hood, and I’ve already built several utilities not made for it that work just fine under it.
• Patchburn II. iTunes, Apple’s all-in-one music ripper, player, and online music store, is a wonderful application. When I compare it to hideos abortions like MusicMatch, which combine crashiness, bloat, and poor usability in one disgusting blob, I just go ‘wow, how did I ever do without a good MP3 jukebox?’

  Unfortunately, there was one problem: my brand-new HP dvd420e (alternately, “dvd 420e”) 8x DVD+-RW Firewire/USB2.0 drive wasn’t supported natively by iTunes. So I couldn’t burn my purchases from the Apple Music Store to CD and take them with me easily. What a bummer. I downloaded Weird Al Yankovic‘s “A Complicated Song” and “Ebay” as my very first purchases, and was sad that I couldn’t burn them to play on our CD player.

  Anyway, that’s where Patchburn II comes in. Although it’s “beta” (read: potentially unstable) software, it seems to work well enough. You simply run the utility, and, if it recognizes your drive, it will allow you to install a driver for it that is supported in iTunes and iDVD. One reboot later, and I was easily, and trivially, burning my MP3 and M4P (Apple DRM protected files) to CD. Stuck ’em in the CD player in the kitchen, and it was a beautiful thing. I’d literally been hunting, on and off, for days looking for a way to make my DVD burner work with iTunes, and I’m glad I found one.

• Mozilla Thunderbird. This email reader is simply the best-in-class. Although I goofed around with Apple’s “Mail” application, it just didn’t do the trick; it was slower on my large IMAP mailbox than Thunderbird, didn’t have as good of junk mail filtering, and had some very unusual user interface choices in identifying new messages (read: no highlighting!) that I immediately was turned off. Thunderbird on Mac OS X is every bit as good as it is on other platforms, and was surprisingly responsive on this aging Power Mac.
• iPhoto. I can’t improve on this built-in photo app. Some people have complained of slow performance, but even on an individual library with several thousand photos, performance was choppy but acceptable. Maybe I’m just used to working on crappy 700MHz-class PCs and the 400MHz G4 is actually faster, but regardless I really like it. One day soon, I must try out their online photo printing service. Anyway, absolutely killer app that makes Microsoft’s “My Photos” folder look rather under-featured.
• Using the gimp-print drivers without any configuration was just awesome. I have an HP Laserjet 4 SI laser printer with duplexer (a big, 100+ lb beast in my basement), and it was so nice to just put in the IP address, pick a usable driver, and have the OS do the rest. I did buy the Postscript upgrade card for the printer so that I can do real Postscript printing rather than printing pictures of my rasters, but they both are quite usable for my light printing needs.

Anyway, I’m certain that eventually the honeymoon will be over with my “new” (to me) machine, but for the time being, I’m definitely liking it. I have a fully-featured, fast command shell (which is important for me as a UNIX admin), access to all the usual free software utilities to which I’m accustomed, and an extremely well-designed user interface (oh, man, comparing Apple’s “Dock” to the taskbar in Windows… wow, what a bunch of better-made choices) that even my kids can pick up on in short order… well, it’s a lot of fun.

Things I’m still looking for:

• The “Classic” environment install, from a retail box Mac OS X to a clean hard disk, is a pain. It would be very nice if there was some all-in-one Classic zip download from Apple so I don’t have to install an old hard drive, zip up the OS 9 System folder (a whopping 300+ megabytes), and then unzip it to Mac OS X in order to run kids’ games and old Mac-compatible applications.
• A good primer on Python programming using “cocoa”, the Mac OS X GUI toolkit. Haven’t dug very hard yet.
• An inconspicuous, wireless way of pumping tunes from my Mac to another room. The Airport Express with AirTunes seems like a reasonable possibility there, but it’s incompatible with my existing 802.11b wireless network — ugh. $$$$$ to upgrade…
• A cheap 802.11g/b non-USB adapter (maybe PCI or FireWire?) for my Mac. I don’t want USB, because this old Mac only has USB 1.0 — or a maximum throughput of about 10 megabits/sec. Rather slow if I were to upgrade to 802.11g @ 50 megabits/sec. Firewire’s 400mbits/sec throughput would be really reasonable, though. And forward-compatible should I ever upgrade my Mac.
• An in-line spellchecker in my browser. KDE‘s “Konqueror” has had this for a while if you have ispell (or is it aspell?) installed: it highlights possibly misspelled words in your text window, which would have been a great thing for this blog posting.
• Network hotsync for my Palm Tungsten C. That is one of very few annoyances I have moving from Microsoft PC-land: the Palm Desktop for Mac OS X doesn’t support network hotsync. I’m used to just walking into my house and pressing the hotsync button; my Tungsten then hooks up to my wireless network, finds my PC, and syncs up. It’s much faster than syncing via a USB cradle, and far more convenient. Though I use the cradle for recharging anyway, and it’s now hooked up to my Mac, I miss the speed of wireless hotsync.
• Better keyboard and mouse. The hockey-puck mouse is annoyingly small for my hand. I don’t care to have fifty buttons on my mouse, and Goodness knows my children have a hard time remembering right-click, left-click, middle-click, but a scroll wheel is handy 🙂 And though the keyboard is a pretty translucent deal, it’s rather small and uncomfortable to use for extended periods (except in my lap; maybe a wireless keyboard, eh?).
• A way to access the F9, F10, F11, and other special buttons using a mouse/keyboard combination. Maybe I just haven’t found it yet, but I use the F9 (show all windows as small versions of themselves to find the right window) and F11 (move all windows offscreen temporarily) keys a LOT. It would be nice for them to be where I don’t have to look at my keyboard to use them.

That’s it for now. Overall, for the UNIX or GNU/Linux administrator, Mac OS X is an excellent choice of operating system to take care of business. For those, like me, at home on the command line, the pretty GUI is a nice, usable bonus. For people like my wife and kids, I think this system approaches nirvana of usability at the moment. It was trivial to hook up my digital camera and have the computer “do the right thing”, and equally trivial to do most other things — except try to hook up an unsupported Firewire external DVD drive.

I apologize for not posting many blog entries myself lately. Between trips to Washington, D.C., St. George, Utah, and taking care of various things, my time has been intensely short and precious. I promise to be more verbose in coming weeks 🙂 Quick news about me:

* Bought myself a new (to me) Power Macintosh, and stripped another one of my computers to provide parts to get it running again. For the money, it’s quite, quite cool.

* Trying to complete a project where I work, and it has been incredibly mentally taxing.

* Had to take down barnson.org’s photo gallery due to security exploits. Will have a new one up, once I have about four hours to put together.

* Needing to upgrade my Drupal weblogging software. Got a good working prototype, but a few niggling problems, like my theme not working, have prevented me from upgrading.

* Had to deal with a spammer creating hundreds of anonymous postings on my site. So glad that I don’t allow anonymous publication — you need to have a working email address to post without moderation. Still, the cleanup from that stunk, even though nobody could see the spam but me.

* Doing my regular volunteer work for The Free Software Foundation has been taking up some spare time, as well as some charity work for other organizations. I must learn to say “no”…

So what’s new for you? Other than Sammy’s house, of course 🙂

Now that I’m a proud new homeowner (really, home-dweller as Shani bought the house), you are all going to have to endure my tales of first-time owner/dweller. Just be thankful you’re not getting the tale of why I was hunched over in my living room at midnight trying to remove purple candlewax from the hardwood floors by flashlight, using a cheap plastic knife.

Before moving into the new house, it was decided that my responsibility would be divided between the inside of the house and the outside of the house. I’m not a landscaping or gardening pro by any means, but I have years of lawn-mowing experience, which is more than my years of staring at failed light bulbs and saying, “Do we get a plumber to fix this thing? Or what?” It was easy to make me overseer of all things exterior.

A week ago we moved into the new house. I circled the premises and created a list of tasks that needed to be accomplished immediately. This list included:

1) Buy a couple gallons of Diet Coke 2) Call Mom and ask her what to do

Then I went inside and set up a huge downstairs entertainment system that included surround sound. Meanwhile, my Mom decided to come out from DC and make her inaugural visit to Minnesota (not unlike current VP Cheney, who came here yesterday for the first time). Mom has been given advanced photos and blueprints. She’s already calling local nurseries. She will undoubtedly reconstruct the entire aesthetic.

Meanwhile, a visit the local hardware store occurred yesterday. I purchased a lawn mower and ladder. The reason for the first is obvious. The second purchase was because I noticed that, from standing on the ground in the front yard, I was able to stare up 13 feet and actually see the roof gutters overflowing with twigs & stuff. In my estimation, given their demographic and disposition, the previous owners avoided climbing onto the roof and removing the crud from the gutters. This means that the gutters had been accumulating swill for the past 5 years.

With the help of my trust inside-house partner, I scaled the ladder and peered into the gutter.

Let’s just say that it was the combination of every episode of the Discovery channel. Except there no were sharks. At least, I didn’t come across any sharks up there. Larvae, grime, mushrooms, small green plants, branches, decaying leaves, spiders, webs, cocoons, ants, and other assorted nature lovelies grimed up to the brim of the 5-inch gutters. Too bad I forgot to pick up some gardening gloves at the hardware store.

Nasty. But 2 hours and a couple showers later, I was a content man, knowing that the gutters were clean.

Finally: HOME DEPOT UPDATE: I have been in the house for eight days and still have not had to make a trip to Home Depot.

EDIT by matthew: Fixed a couple of half-quotes that were Microsoft “smart” half-quotes. Those are borked in any browser but Internet Explorer.

My best friend, (no names mentioned) has been a “bad” influence on me. Before we started hangin’ out, I had never dyed my hair or had my nails done. Three months ago she convinced me to dye it. My hair dresser gave me highlights and sent me on my way and I was perfectly pleased with that.

Then for Mother’s day she convinced me to have my nails done. They used to be long and strong on their own, but not since I’ve had kids. We all benefit from long nails!!

So last night I took the plunge … my hairdresser moved so I found a new one, had her cut it and dye it “apple cider” brown. When everyone saw the box with the color I had chosen, they told me, “Why bother, it’s the same color as your hair!” But I’m just plain chicken. Those boxes of dye sat on my bathroom sink for a month before I finally made the appointment.

My hairdresser was rinsing my hair and I saw purple running down the sink. I was thinking, “What have I done?”

Now the background before all this is that my mother has red hair. When she started dying her hair to hide the gray, she dyed it red and it went carrot orange. So she has to die her hair brown and it goes a nice auburn red. This is why I bought the brown die, instead of trying even an auburn color. But purple? I was getting nervous.

Once she rinsed out the dye and washed my hair, she cut it as I asked. I told her if she cut it too short, I’d have to hang her by her toe nails. I also told her she’d better do a good job to hide my gray or I’d come back to haunt her!

When all is said and done, I looked in the mirror and my “apple cider” brown hair dye gave me beautiful auburn red hair. So now Matt will feel like he’s got a new wife, and I finally took the plunge! We’ll have to take a picture sometime and have Matt change my avatar.

EDIT by matthew: Fixed a couple of tpyos.

Yes, I too was a big Transformers fan when I was a kid. Man, I loved those first two seasons, especially the characters like Ironhide and Ratchet.

So, it was a shockt to me when I finally got to see Transformers: The movie. when the Bad Guys (Decepticons) show up on the Good Guys (Autobot) ship.. and kill every good guy I liked execution style within 20 seconds.

Upon closer viewing, at one point, a new character is looking on a scrapheap, and clearly the bodies of two others I liked were there. Later, we see an old favorite ripped into pieces as he is eaten.

Now I know, the death of “Optimus Prime” is supposed to be the big thing.. but he dies heroically.. it was the callous cold death of these characters that really was kind of messed up in my eight year old little world.

As I got older, I realized that these kinds of decisions are often marketing decisisions.. or actors quit. So, when everyone but ripley died in Alien3, When Tasha Yar died on Trek, when Dax died on DS9, when tessa died on Highlander, I saw the pattern.. it is made quick and “pointless” to shock the audience..

What does this have to do with the price of beans, I don’t know.. suffice to say, when you’re a kid, maybe death should be a few steps further away.

A Constitutional Amendment that is being debated in the Senate today and that is expected to come up for a vote this week, would add these 53 words to the Constitution:

“Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution, nor the constitution of any State, shall be construed to require that marriage or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon any union other than the union of a man and a woman.”

I know we’ve talked about this before, but since there’s now a Senate floor debate, and possible vote, it seems pretty relevant. I think it’s absurd that my congressional reps are being hounded by the White House to pursue amending the constitution over something like this. Really a great way to spend my tax dollars.

Recently, I’ve been reading up on the ancient Roman civilization. Bush reminds me so much of the imperial dictators like Caligula and Nero. Only, Bush can’t outright order people to be killed. At least, not in his own country. Imposing laws that limit human rights and personal freedoms is outright ridiculous.

Sammy G

Last night Matt and I went to see Phantom of the Opera in Salt Lake. Matt actually planned his flight home from D.C. according to our date schedule!

Matt had seen it twice before but I had never seen the Phantom. We enjoy theatre, and go watch comedy theatre about every other month, but this was a big treat. We paid for the expensive seats right up front and enjoyed every minute of it!

Now I know that these people are professionals, and they do this for a living, but I was highly impressed at the quality of the performance. For example, the orchestra stayed in tune. Matt laughed that I noticed that, but I’ve played in orchestras and it’s not easy to stay in tune after playing for so long. The props and background were amazing. There were awesome special effects and the actors were great.

So what can I say? It was worth every penny.

Thank you so very much for your hospitality in Matt’s behalf while he was in the area! He had a great time, enjoyed hanging out and reminiscing. Of course we missed him terribly, but we spent that time in Idaho hanging out with my folks.