Aquarionics

I'm Dithering. Having planned to go yesterday for three weeks,...

I'm Dithering.

Having planned to go yesterday for three weeks, I started packing this morning, at about 2am. It's now quarter past twelve, I've missed the train I intended to catch, and I'm aimlessly wandering, hoping I haven't forgotten anything vitally important.

Like clothes, for example.

Three weeks back at Uni. Fun. Three weeks of exams and panic. Fun Squared. Although my Dad has lent me his Laptop for the duration, which makes life a lot more interesting. So i managed to use that excuse to play with the Laptop, installing C++ Compilers and other things I possibly won't ever use. But D-Time is approching, and I must find some shoes before the train ride. Who knows? I may even pass.

Office XML to be real XML after all

I got an interesting email today.

It being Saturday, this is a rare thing. Well, it's a rare thing anyway, my email has been 90% spam since january, but this was interesting in a sort of XML-type way, so you get to hear it to.

Last week, Microsoft put a new newsgroup on it's public NNTP server (news:msnews.microsoft.com) called microsoft.public.office.xml, which immediately caught my interest. A little while ago, there was some question over whether MS was going to back down on the "Office Will Do XML" stuff, so I asked. I was answered. This is what they said:

From: "Cybarber"

Hi,
There has been a lot of talk about Microsoft scaling down on XML in the versions of Office 2003.

Hopefully this rumour is unfounded and XML functionality will be in the Standard edition aswell.

Is there any clarity about this subject already?

From: "Joe_MSFT"

In short, yes, the Professional version will have additional XML capabilites from the other editions, primarily those based on how customer-defined XML schema can be used. This was done because the product editions have been designed to meet the needs of different audiences. A brief overview is here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/office/factsheets/OfficeSKUFS.asp We will be publishing more details in the coming months.

Can you use XML with all 2003 versions - yes. They will all continue to have XML Web services support through the Web services toolkit and Word and Excel will be able to be saved in their respective native XML file formats that allow for content reuse, transformation, construction and such.

--
Joe Andreshak, Microsoft Product Manager
This post is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights
Sample code subject to http://www.microsoft.com/info/cpyright.htm

From: Aquarion

Does this mean that any given Office 2003 file in it's native XML format - from any version of Office - can be transformed by, say, an XSLT stylesheet?

It's possible to remain within XML specs, yet having the main content in a binary format, and I've heard rumours that this is the case.

From: "Joe_MSFT"
I'm not sure I understand what you're asking, but let me explain.

The binary file format is separate from the XML file format. With Office 2003, users can choose to save Word and Excel files in EITHER the binary or XML file format. The binary file formats are similar to what has existed for the previous versions.

The Word XML format is new for Office 2003. Previous versions of Office will not know how to interpret the XML and simply open it as a plain text file. There is no straightforward way to convert old binary files to XML files, however you could open an old binary file in Word 2003, for instance, and now save it as XML. This XML file is now usable by any program that can interpret XML tags.

Hope this helps,
Joe

So it looks like all versions will save as XML, but only the high-price versions will have all the XML modification/DTD stuff in it.

Networks are weird

A query for the networking geeks in the audience…

• Box A runs Windows XP, it’s an Athlon 2000XP.
• Box B runs Debian Sarge, It’s an Athlon 1200XP.
• Box C runs Debian Stable, It’s a Celeron 300mhz.

Downloading a file from a HTTP server with Box A takes $time

Downloading the same file with Box B or C (Or similerly sized files from the same server, so no caching) takes $time/3

Downloading said amount of data from the same server with Box A running though a squid cache server on either B or C also takes $time/3

All are plugged into the same hub, behind the same router, on the same ASDL.

Why? And how can I fix this? (Apart from installing Linux on A, which is mostly a games box ATM, and dual boots to Gentoo anyway)

Reasons IE Sucks chipmonks though chainlink fencing, Number 11 in a series of infinity

Given this URL:

http://www.aquarionics.com/gallery/Gid_[and]_Suzi’s_New_Year_2003

IE does the following:

http://www.aquarionics.com/gallery/Gid_%5Band%5D_Suzi/’s_New_Year_2003

Now, I realise the escaping error in the generated URL was my own stupid fault, but the fact that IE automatically reverses any backslashes in a URL - to retain compatibility with Windows’ broken directory seperator – is interesting. It means, for example, we can do this:

@import url(”/assets/cssspecial-ie-stylesheet.css”);

and IE will load it (It will try to “fix” the broken backslash) where Gecko/KHTML will attempt to load a file called “cssspecial-ie-stylesheet.css” in the assets directory is interesting. New browser-hack?

This isn’t news, really. When the first version of the new, all accessible RNIB site went live (And I ranted about it) some of the links contained backslashes, and thus broke for Mozilla, and it’s still annoying, but it might be useful.

What would be really interesting would be combining this with an IIS server. Does the server resolve it as the right path on the system (The Windows one) or as the RFC 2068 compliant one?

My solution, by the way, was to rename the album to “New Years 2003” and leave the escaping problem until I’ve got time to fix it properly.

Pendrive Good

Yesterday something bad happened.

Yes, it was Valentines, not traditionally a day my mood is good (Especially with the whole “togetherness” aspect of local programming that’s particulally annoying at the moment).

Yesterday, though, the hard-drive of my desktop decided that since nobody had sent it a Valentines card, today was a good day to die. Click. Boom.

XP decided it couldn’t find it’s system files. Couldn’t recover it’s system files. Couldn’t reinstall it’s system files. Couldn’t go on living. Goodbye, cruel world, may you find a better operating system than me. Blam.

This was annoying, because I was looking forward to playing computer games all weekend. Nothing more than that, really, because I run something of a Teflon Windows install. Nothing sticks. Everything I want is kept on the server (My ‘My Documents’ folder is a subdirectory of my home dir on the server, shared over Samba), All I have to do is format the hard-drive, shove my Windows XP CD in one drive and my Unattended Install Disk into the floppy drive and come back in a half hour to a clean, new windows install.

Nuh-uh.

You see, somewhere between now and last November – when I wrote that article – I’d decided that the most vital thing I needed was not my emergancy must-have-so-system-downtime-is-minimal floppy diskette, but a dos-boot diskette so I can play my older games still. So I had copied an image of the diskette onto c:, and turned my emergancy-vital-important diskette into what was, now, three and a half square inches of worthless plastic.

At this point I called myself a number of impolite things. I told myself I was being a bit harsh on me, but I disagreed and continued raging on the general theme of me being a moron who didn’t deserve a computer.

I reread the article I wrote last time, wished my writing style was slightly less florid and slightly quicker to get to the point, downloaded the example file and recreated the disk. Mere hours after the inital crash, a spinny-rotaty question-mark informed me that I was now in the New XP Experience! Yay. Rapture. Spiraling shapes of pure entertainment, now go away and let me get to my desktop.

It went away and I was left in teletubby-land. With a speed caused by months of experience, I got rid of teletubby land (Replaced with a rather nice picture of a Cambridge sunset) and turned the green/blue to darker-green/silver. Then I realised the important thing.

I had no drivers.

You see, I don’t keep installation CDs. I have this connection to the Internet, no bandwidth limits, and the exact knowledge of what is in my computer. I can get drivers from the source, damnit.

Or rather, I could. Right now my connection to the Greater World is via my dad’s PC. The contents of our home-network are my desktop and my server, because my parents object to having wires trailing around the house (Don’t have time/money/equipment for wireless). Hmm.

I do, however, have an MP3 player.

I have, over the last few years, spent quite a lot of money on MP3 players. I had one of the orignal Rio’s, a replacement cheap one when that died, a Rio600 when the buttons fell out of the cheap one, and my current one. The best example of why Digital Rights Management is a Bad Idea (And yes, Virginia, there are good reasons for both DRM and copyright, but that’s another article) is that my current MP3 player is the first one that Just Works.

It’s a USB Mass Storage device. PC, Linux, even OS X recognises it as a USB Mass Storage Device. It’s a 128mb USB hard-drive that has a headphone socket and will play any MP3s it finds though it. It has a built in USB plug, too. It Just Works.

Therefore I was able to spend an entertaining day ferrying my MP3 player between dad’s computer upstairs and mine downstairs containing drivers for the sound, 3d, modem and network cards; Direct X; Game, System and Application patches; without having to burn CDs of them.

I did, however, lose my game saves for every game that doesn’t follow the (sensible) Microsoft recommendations and put them in the My Documents folder where they won’t get lost. This is, obviously, most of them, so I’ve spent most of today burning backups of my server home directory (Dying hard-drives concentrate the mind with regard to backups) and wandering back through “Prince of Persia: Sands of Time”.

Oh, and watching Office Space (IMDB). Which is good.

Infected

I just avoided getting infected by Beagle by my virus checker.

I got this e-mail:

Dear user of Tmbg.org,


	
Our main mailing server will  be  temporary unavaible  for next two days, 
to  continue receiving mail in  these days you have to configure our  free
auto-forwarding  service.

	
For details see the attached  file.

	
In order  to read the attach you have to use the following  password: 04185.

	
Have a good  day,
    The  Tmbg.org team                             http://www.tmbg.org

to my drw0rm@tmbg.org address (The address I occasionally use on usenet). Now, apparently it’s purely coincidence that it happened to pick the right body (tmbg.org _is_ a free forwarding service, and has had a couple of problems recently) and looks roughly right, but it fooled me (In my defence, it’s first thing in the morning, I haven’t had my tea yet, and I’m dosed up to the eyeballs with cold remedies) and if it can get me – who knows about these things – it scares me how many others it would have got.

The only reason I have Norton installed at all is that yesterday we had a virus scare in the office when a co-worker opened an attachment ‘from’ the CEO and he got an e-mail to himself from a mangled form of his address. After scanning the headers, we unplugged her PC from the network, grabbed Norton and the latest signatures (More difficult than it should be, since Norton’s site focuses on you using the Auto Update service, but since we couldn’t put the computer online until it was disinfected these were recommendations we couldn’t follow) (Incidentally, Norton at 25mb & another couple for the signature file made me once again glad of the pen drive for transferring them).

It took just under two hours to do a full sweep of her machine – during which she couldn’t do very much – and about the same length of my time over the course of the day to sort out the thing, which is about four hours of company time yesterday wasted on a virus (Or, to put it another way, given how big a company we are, one third of the company out of action for quarter of the working day).

Incidentally, recommendations to switch to another OS will be laughed at, since of the office me and this co-worker are the only people not using OS X, and it’s kind of useful to have at least two people using the platform we’re currently developing for.

Not that I would refuse an iBook if offered, of course.

This arrived this morning:

Dear  user  of  e-mail server "Aquarionics.com",


	
Some  of our clients complained about  the spam  (negative e-mail content)
outgoing  from  your e-mail account. Probably, you have been infected by
a  proxy-relay  trojan server. In order to keep your computer safe,
follow  the instructions.

	
Advanced  details can be found  in attached file.

	
For  security reasons attached file is password protected. The password  is "80362".

	
Have a good day,
    The Aquarionics.com  team                               http://www.aquarionics.com

Pity I didn’t recieve this one first, really.

XP hotfixes since SP1

Since it’s taken me all morning to find it, and other people may find it useful:

A list of all XP Security Patches since Service Pack 1

This avoids the Catch-22 of having to put an unpatched Windows box onto the internet in order to get all the security patches to make it safe to put on the Internet. Be aware, however, that XP Service Pack 2 is on it’s way and that’ll include most of these with it.

A note on research, here. I spent about an hour trolling the Windows XP microsite looking for a list, wandering though the Expert Zone (“Focus on New Users” was the lead headline. Define Expert) and generally seeing if it was actually where it should be on the site, and then gave up and typed “hotfixes since XP Service-Pack 1” into google, which got me a PC World article sending me to a download page, which sent me to a Microsoft Redirection page sending me to the aforementioned MSKB article.

This is, in fact, bollocks. Columbus had better navigation than that when he sailed to India. Microsoft may not want to admit it, but there are major holes in XP as released, and even in SP1, and it’s really important to be able to get your machine secured as quickly as possible, and not even mentioning the above article within the security section of the offical XP microsite is just stupid. The Trustworthy Computing thing is a good idea, and deserves kudos, but won’t work unless we – as Sysadmins, users and developers – can trust Microsoft to admit when something is wrong, and hiding a list of security updates (It is, however, an extremely impressive list of updates) doesn’t inspire that kind of faith.

Magic Blue Smoke and Mirrors

Okay, so I melted a floppy drive. Could happen to anyone. Who hasn’t done it? I mean, there they are, solid plastic, sitting in your computer case. Obviously at some point it’s going to melt. It’s just going to.

So this is what happened, This is why I hate technology and am going to forthwidth go live in a bunker. No. A monestary. Get me to a monestary, because if this is what it means to be free, I don’t need it.

(Today’s obscure reference brought to you by Winamp)

(Tails of technological woe start in three paragraphs time, feel free to skip to them)

I had a computer called reef. It was a good computer, the heart of it was the Celeron 333 my parents bought me for my 18th birthday. It’s a grandfather’s axe thing, I’ve replaced the Mobo, memory, hard-drive, graphics card, case, keyboard, mouse, floppy-drive and network port, but it’s still the Celeron my parents bought me.

The Mobo is a little dead, in fact, as at some point 2002 the PS/2 ports on it died, and since it lacks decent USB support (Or anything else) it means I can only access it remotely, which isn’t any problem as it’s a server. It’s main functions were replaced mid last year by Atoll, a 2ghz Athlon doing exactly the same things at 5x the speed, so here I have a spare box doing nothing that I can’t use as a desktop.

I also have a new broadband connection arriving on Tuesday, and the router I used to use with it is an ADSL router, and this is cable. New solution time. I decided to turn reef into an IPCop box (I’ve used IPCop before, I’m used to how it works, and I understand it in a way that I don’t for – for example – Cisco routers) which would stand between our network and the rest of the world. So far, so hoopy. Pol has also lent me a Wireless Router, and I can therefore switch to Wireless and get rid of the unsightly cables that have littered every other house I’ve lived in.

Because I can’t plug a keyboard into reef (prospective firewall, welcome back, woe fans) I decide to put the componants into Maelstrom (my desktop box) install IPCop onto the HDD like that, and then transfer it all to reef and then go. I get as far as turning reef into a reef/maelstrom hybrid and halfway though formatting the old HDD before I realise that maelstrom has a 6 gig + 20 gig HDD, and reef has a 20 gig HDD which it doesn’t need. I therefore put Maelstrom back together, rescue important things from the six gig HDD (onto the secondary HDD) and install IPCop onto that. It’s about this time that I realise I’m going to need another NIC, so I put Maelstrom back together to get online and buy that.

‘cept I’ve just reformatted my Windows drive, so I’m going to have to reinstall Windows (No broadband + No install CDs + Winmodem == No Linux). It’s about this time that I plug the power for the floppy drive one pin to the right of where it should be. I wonder where the smell of TCP is coming from. I start the install process, with my Unattended Install Floppy in the drive (This floppy, as you may remember, makes Windows install itself without any input from me). Setup doesn’t read it. The smell is getting stronger. I note that the BIOS doesn’t see the Floppy drive on reboot. It’s really starting to smell quite bad now. I turn off the computer and check the connections, realising that the floppy-drive power cable is really quite hot now. A short tug and I have a twisted mass of plastic, two pins of the power connector, and a really fucked floppy drive.

Did I mention the floppy drive has my WinXP Serial number on it? It does.

Did I mention that this number’s only other place of existance is in the home directory of the server that I now cannot access because my computer is buggered?

It is.

So, girlfriend’s laptop, serial number, reinstall Windows.

“Drive F: (Secondary hard-drive) isn’t formatted. Would you like to format the drive you put all the important files on three paragraphs ago?”

No.

“It looks like you’re having a bad day. Would you like some help?”

Fuck off.

I ordered some new parts from Dabs. They arrived next day. Yay Dabs.

I fiddled with the cables. I could see my old Hard-Drive. Yay cables.

I installed IPCop with the new NIC. It worked. yay IPCop.

It didn’t boot. Boo IPCop.

I tried to reinstall IPCop, but it wouldn’t boot. Boo IPCop.

I tried to reboot windows, but it wouldn’t boot. Boo Windows.

I tried to boot with a handy Gentoo Live CD, but it wouldn’t boot. Oh bother.

Apparently the secondary hard-drive was still not working. I discovered this by a process of elimination about an hour later.

I installed IPCop. It worked. It booted. I put reef back together. It booted. I put maelstrom back together with the new floppy drive I bought from Dabs. It booted, but performance was crap. I reinstalled Windows. It booted. It worked. I watched Bubblegum Crisis 2040 for several hours. Yay Anime.

Right, part two. Wireless networking.

On one side of my bedroom, I set up the wireless router and plugged it into my hub.

On the other side of my bedroom, I set up maelstrom with the new PCI Wireless NIC I’d bought from Dabs. After a little mucking around and leaning on the reset switch of the router until it forgot it’s old password, I configured the router to work.

(Not work the way I want it to. All I want it to do is act as a hub and forward packets to the router. I don’t want it to filter them – that’s why I want IPCop – or be a DHCP server – that’s why I have another server. All I want it to do is allow access to anyone with the password, which is – in case you’re in Letchworth – Swordf1sh)

It was now accepting packets (Though not doing anything with them. No point until the ipcop box is online) but could the Wireless Card see it?

Could it hell.

Was it that the Router wasn’t configured right?

Was it that the card wasn’t working/configured properly?

How the hell could I tell the difference?

Upon all these questions I gave up and went to bed. It was late, and I was tired.

Next morning they were both able to see each other.

No idea why.

Two hours later I couldn’t see WLAN (The router’s Wireless Network) at all, but was apparently connected to ‘default’. Yay open wireless networks. In this case, someone running XP with default config (I was even able to access the net with it for about 10 minutes. Then it broke. No idea why).

Then Maelstrom stopped being able to see the secondary hard-drive again.

Now it can’t see the wireless card.

I hate computers.

So I went to watch anime instead.

Then I ran out of episodes.

I hate everything. I’m going to bed.

Schizophrenia

pick an operating system

Infested

[11:36] {gilmae} how are we all today?
[11:37] {Aq-Work} Not too bad
[11:38] {Aq-Work} Currently I’m clearing the data off a W2k box so I can reinstall it
[11:38] {gilmae} employed again, i see
[11:38] {Aq-Work} Yeah
[11:38] {Aq-Work} This job would be easier if the main drive wasn’t compressed
[11:38] {Aq-Work} Actually, it’d be easier if the machine had been built after 1998 too
[11:38] {gilmae} why, i ask?
[11:38] {gilmae} wh…ah, that’s why
[11:39] {Senji} Dh000m
[11:39] {Aq-Work} Plus, if it had more than 256mb space left on said drive
[11:39] {Aq-Work} Which is where the (compressed, note) swap would be.
[11:39] {Senji} Have I said Dh0000m yet?
[11:39] {Senji} compressed swap?!
[11:39] {Aq-Work} Oh, and it’s infested with spyware
[11:40] {Aq-Work} Plus, it’s been though two OS upgrades and three companies since it was last installed.
[11:40] * Senji hands Aq a Fuckoff Large Magnet.
[11:41] {Aq-Work} Oh, and every Prettyness enhancer is turned on, from drop shadows to Active Desktop
[11:41] {Aq-Work} s/is/was/, obviously.
[11:41] * gilmae hands Aq a new drive and a bucket of acid
[11:41] {Aq-Work} In fact, with all this, it was apparently completely usable up until last week
[11:41] {Aq-Work} when she installed a security update.

[11:43] {ccooke} so reinstall to the 10g?
[11:43] {Aq-Work} I have to make it usable first so we can drag the accounts data off to the server
[11:44] {Aq-Work} Plus, I only have an XP pro disc, and the chances of this box being able to handle XP are slim to the non-existant.
[11:44] {ccooke} :-)

MLP

What if Microsoft redesigned the iPod packaging?

And if you can tell me the name of the track that accompanies most of this, I’ll be your friend forever.

Piracy

“And this, this is just cheating.”

“It’s a valid critical form, and it seemed to go down well.”

“Pah. It got needlessly self-indulgent towards the end. The punctuation stuff? Far too self-referential. Avoid it in future.”

“I should avoid talking about the form within the form?”

“Indeed you should.”

“Bit late, then.”

“Somewhat. Today, incidentally, I am not your guilt complex.”

“Oh, good. He was annoying. Who are you?”

“Nonspecific, though I am the part of you which is constantly typing @-signs instead of quote marks, because you’ve been using Mac keyboards too long”

“Can’t I just fix the keyboard layout?”

“And avoid wearing out your backspace key? Silly, twisted boy.”

“That’s two Goon Show references in as many entries. Someone will complain.”

“I’m sure they’ll never notice.”

“So, what are we here to discuss?”

“Windows.”

“Why?”

Today I installed Windows. I do this quite often, because I run a Teflon windows install. All important stuff is on the server, MyDocs in Windows is aliased over there, so effectively I can wipe clean XP when it reaches the end of its half-life, which is between one and six months. This one was brought about because the central hard-drive in my desktop was beginning to error out (To the point where Ubuntu wouldn’t even read from it, though windows still booted) and I decided to upgrade to SATA. As I type hundreds of gigabytes of games installs are copying across, but that’s not the annoying bit.

For the first time in quite a while, I’m running an entirely honest and legitamite copy of Windows XP. My first ever copy came from an MSDN disc, but I lost the code to a while ago, and since then have been using a key I can no longer remember the origin of. Having now lost that key too (It was on a floppy disc) and since I actually have a job and do use Windows (My desktop is mostly for Internet, games, coding and Paint Shop Pro. Games and PSP require Windows (WineX has some problems with some of the games I play) and the other two I use open source software, albeit on Windows. I don’t currently have a Linux install on the desktop (though Debian’s on my server), because – as I said – it won’t read my disk). So I bought a copy of Windows XP Pro.

Breezed though the install. Entered my Product Key to prove I am not a pirate, for I am no longer a pirate. Waited a bit. Was told I had to Activate Windows within 30 days, and that my clock’s date was wrong. Tried to activate Windows, Couldn’t contact server. Fixed clock. Installed stuff. Reboot. Now it was 30 days later (fixed date, remember), I couldn’t log in unless I activated Windows. This time it connected, and Windows was Activated (until I change my hardware) to prove I am not a pirate, for I am not a pirate (Pirates don’t have to activate Windows). Right, next, patches. Automatic update, update automatic update, reboot. Automatic update, install updates. Windows Genuine Advantage. Woo. I install Windows Genuine Advantage, which examines my system and concludes that I am not a pirate, for I am not a pirate. Takes me though a wizard of how wonderful it is not to be a pirate. Apparently, as a proven not-pirate, I am entitled to download the Karaoke Plugin for Windows Media Player! I am such a lucky boy.

Friends do not let friends do Karaoke.

This was all so much easier when I was a pirate.

The same goes for movies, games, music. While it is technologically easier to download a DVD from Bittorrent via The Pirate Bay, that’s what people will do. That’s why the iTunes music store is so sucessful, because it _is_ easier than buying a CD, you’re already in your music player, you don’t even have to shift contexts. And I have more to say on this subject, but Windows won’t shut the hell up about having to reboot my computer now.