I overheat easily, and so I tend to leave the windows of my flat open wherever possible. This is good, but it does mean I occasionally suffer from bugs coming in overnight and biting me in the arse. Somehow – and for the first time in my life – I’m having problems with mosquito bites, after leaving a window open let them in while I wasn’t paying attention.

Can you see the metaphor coming, kids? I’m sure you can. Nevertheless, the above actually happened.

Tuesday I made a mistake. Or, rather, a series of mistakes. The first was disabling the active scan of AVG (my virus scanner of choice) because it was fucking up the IO of something I was trying to do. The second was clicking on an EXE from a site I hadn’t used before without the above running. Nothing happened.

Then I got a popup saying spyware had been detected, and did I want to install AntiSpyware 2009?

Then my desktop wallpaper changed to “SPYWARE FOUND! DOWNLOAD ANTISPYWARE NOW!” and I lost the ability to change it.

At this point I ripped the network cable from my machine. I had left Windows open, and now I was being bitten on the arse.

My backup system works, which is fortunate. I have a combination of cygwin, rsync and a framework of scripts to sync my user files to an external location and a backup drive. Within my user files directory are windows shortcuts that the windows version of rsync can treat as symlinks, and these go to things I need to back up outside the general framework of My Documents (Actually, I have a C:Global (Which is also ~aquarion/Global and /Users/nicholas/Global depending on OS) which contains subdirs of Documents, Pictures, Music, Projects and Savegames and syncs up over the machines).

This notably doesn’t include stuff on my Desktop (which is just as likely to be downloads as in-progress stuff) or the contents of my Ubuntu VMWare image which I tend to develop in. I lost everything I hadn’t checked into svn recently, which is probably a good thing to make me do so more in the future.

Windows install was nuked from orbit (It needed doing anyway, it was over a year old) and now I have a couple of days of installing patches (from behind my firewall, natch) and reinstalling things and typing in CD keys.

All while attempting to splatter that fucking mosquito.

Wireless Networking.

It used to be a truism of security that the only secure computer was one with six inches of air beyond every port. Then came WiFi, Bluetooth, IRDA and such other mechanisms. Unfortunately, it appears that every single writer of wireless router firmware, Wireless card firmware and wireless card driver software is the type of person who go to “Information wants to be free” rallies. Everything is fine, providing you don’t, ever, try to do something as freedom-limiting as secure your wireless fucking network.

(Aside: I know of no way of fucking wired-ly, and that all fucking networks will, by their nature, be mostly wireless. I can, in fact, not think of any exceptions to this last statement and would further request that I not be educated in this regard. Aside ends)

I have borrowed a Belkin wireless router for my new flat, which I configured in no-time flat. Well, no time I was being paid for, at any rate, so in contractor terms it was free. In actual terms it was several hours of faffing with ports and cables and netmasks and reset switches and that was before I turned on the wireless network.

Then I turned on the wireless network. I configured it to be WEP secured with a 128 bit key, generated from a ten byte string set by the administrator – me. I fed this to my laptop, and it was happy. I was suspicious, because my laptop is rarely happy with anything, but I moved on.

My desktop, though it won’t be on wireless often, was also happy. I began to fear.

Sure enough, the Wii disagreed, and demanded I enter the full hex key. Since I don’t have a USB keyboard right now, I did so with the wiimote, over a Long Time.

I’ve borrowed an iPhone from work (I may get one, because (a) SHINY, and (b) I hate freedom). That required the full hex key too.

So did my Windows Mobile smartphone.

I’m beginning to notice a pattern here. Every device without a proper keyboard demands the full hex key. Every device with easy entry of such just needs the passphrase.

I hate computers.

“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.

1. Watching Anime DVDs
2. Watching Anime DVDs on your Laptop
3. Watching Anime DVDs on your Powerbook
4. Watching Anime DVDs on your Powerbook, which is displaying them on the TV screen
5. Watching Anime DVDs on your Powerbook, which is displaying them on the TV screen, and using your bluetooth mobile as a remote control.

Win

This check will not reap results very often, but you will not only be glad that you did, you will have chocolate.

You moron.

Buy new Powerbook. Also buy USB external hard-drive to back it onto. Do so regularly.

Stage Two.

Home desktop starts making clicky-whirring noises of death. Live with this for a little while, but eventually get The Fear for my data.

Stage Three.

Open up the USB external hard drive and rescue from it the IDE drive it stores things on. Put that into desktop.

Stage four.

Install windows, Civ IV, City of Heroes, Ubuntu etc.

Play happily for a month or so.

Stage five.

Back powerbook up to work desktop.

Stage six. (This morning)

Turn on home desktop. Smell strange burning smell. Swear, turn off computer, check all connections, turn on computer.

DISK FAILURE.

Examine hard drive rescued from USB enclosure. Notice carbonisation of areas of main board.

Swear.

This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of Graphical User Interfaces in general.

In The Beginning was the Command Line just in case you haven’t read it, or haven’t read it recently.

1. Put PCI Card into machine
2. Put network card into machine
3. Download and burn IPCop ISO
4. Install it.
5. Put the ADSL Settings in the ADSL Settings Page.
6. Do something more interesting with the time you saved not [m]ucking around.

• http://www.caomhin.org/wibble/
• http://www.bentbacktulips.co.uk/index.xml
• http://www.caomhin.org/linklog/index.rdf (Kevin? What have you done now?)
• http://www.dearg.org.uk/diary/index.php?flav=rss (Invalid RSS)
• http://www.livejournal.com/~smin/data/atom
• http://accordionguy.blogware.com/blog/index.xml
• http://aeire.com/rss.xml
• http://www.hexkey.co.uk/lee/log/rss.php
• http://andstuff.org.uk/?flav=rss
• http://www.livejournal.com/~brad/data/atom
• http://www.lazyweb.org/index.rdf
• http://mpt.phrasewise.com/xml/rss.xml (Connection Failed)
• http://www.benhammersley.com/index.rdf
• http://www.livejournal.com/~jwz/data/rss
• http://www.livejournal.com/users/demiurgent/data/rss
• http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/atom.xml
• http://bash.org/xml/?latest
• http://www.livejournal.com/community/city_of_heroes/data/rss
• http://coh.warcry.com/scripts/news/rss/36.rdf

Okay, so I need to do the rm *.m4p afterwards, but still.

So, question one, what does it do, and question two, what is it for?

My soundcard craps out. DamnDamnDamnDamnDamnDamnDamn

Panic was the name given to my old Amiga 600, currently sitting in my grandparent’s spare bedroom along with all the other Amiga stuff, but I took a backup of its contents a couple of years ago (It had a 40mb hard drive which contained everything I owned. The computer I’m typing at has 100 gigabytes), and with that, WinUAE (which recently hit 1.0) and Amiga in a box I have brought it back from the dead, and am typing this from within iBrowse.

I felt a whim to play BASE Jumpers, an obscure game by a company called Rasputin, again. It’s not as good as I remember. Ah well, back to HL2…

“We had 12.9 gigabytes of (Microsoft) PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought, ‘What a huge waste of corporate productivity.’ So we banned it. And we’ve had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint. Now, I would argue that every company in the world, if they would just ban PowerPoint, would see their earnings skyrocket. Employees would stand around going, ‘What do I do? Guess I’ve got to go to work.’” – Scott McNealy Sun Microsystems, quoted in the San Jose Mercury News, January 27, 1997

Three times this week I’ve been pointed at that quote by different people, and so I have to point out that Sun now produce a PowerPoint clone (in the form of Impress for OOo). I wonder if they’re allowed to use it…

Linky

Open Selected Links In Tabs. I cannot live without this extension.

FireMule

Open ED2k links properly

Hash Coloured Tabs

Group tabs from the same website together

Image Assistant

Open This Image In PaintShop Pro

Reload Every

Reload this tab every $foo seconds.

Add & Edit Cookies

Artificially extend the life of your session cookies

Greasemonkey

Because it’s Greasemonkey

HTML Validator

Validation Is Good

Disable Targets For Downloads

Stops binary files being launched as empty tabs

Google Preview

Thumbnails of the site you’re about to visit

Session Saver

Get back to where you once belonged

Web Developer Toolbar

Edit CSS. Disable Styles. I use this daily.

PDF Download

Stop firefox opening PDFs inline

IE View

Because you still have to test it

Tabbrowser Preferences

Happiness is a configuration window.

One of the reasons it took me quite so long to buy a laptop was because I don’t trust them. I trust, to some extent, every machine on this network, because I built it by myself out of the very-expensive-lego that is the PC hobbiests stock in trade. Zephyr was built by me, Boilingpoint is made out of old bits of Reef is made out of old bits of Atoll is made out of old bits of Maelstrom, the circle of life.

I have owned, in my lifetime, three laptops. The middle one is Nemo. It’s a 486, it has no battery, no network, no memory. It’s single use is if all my other machines are dead and I need to vent in text format.

The first one is called “Despair”, and this is its story.

The Prince is the only person to have kept his psudonym from the days when I was writing in Opendiary as Ithen and was scared silly of real people reading my diary. He is one of the vanishingly small number of people that I’ve kept in touch with since pretty much playschool. He’s a very good actor, a very good friend, and we both gloss over the fact that we’re both too disorganised to meet up more than once every nine to twelve months or so. I have sung duets on stage with him, screwed up dance routines with him, and watched him wade deep into “Dude, that’s a bad idea” territory by asking one of our close-knit group of dramatists if the reason she’s so on edge (At the last rehersal before exam performance) is because she’s on her period. Okay, on that last occasion I remained as far away from him as was physically possible in the suddenly-awfully-small drama room, but – despite my desires – I was still there.

I was on holiday from university, and was wandering up to London to window-shop on Tottenham Court Road when I ran into The Prince at The Fictional Railway Station. Somehow I found myself a couple of hours later sitting on a couch in another actor’s apartment, fixing his computer. Actually, trying to get a P133 running windows 95 at 640*480 in 256 colours to access the Information Superhighway via the man’s Virgin.net subscription.

Geeks quite often find themselves in this situation.

There is a canonical Head and Shoulders advert that ran for many, many, many years on UK Tv, where they wash half a mans head in normal shampoo and half in Head and Shoulders. The man whose flat I was in was at pains to point out that he didn’t have black hair anymore, and never had dandruff anyway.

In return for getting his damned machine onto the New World, he gave me a laptop. I played Solitare on it for an hour or so until the battery started to go, so I plugged it in.

There was a series of entertaining crackling noises, then nothing. The power supply never spoke again, and neither did Despair. It was named later on.

I tell this story because my Powerbook power supply did exactly the same thing this morning. Blew the fuse on the lead that goes into it. So I tried my co-worker’s one (Recharging from his power supply worked fine) and it blew the fuse on that too.

I now have less than one hour’s charge left on my powerbook, and no way to recharge it.

Looks like I’m going to the Apple Store tomorrow.

Back everything up to /dev/null. Takes seconds, and you can always get them back from /dev/random. Eventually.

Sometimes it lasts ages, sometimes just minutes, but always it powers down like someone just unplugged it at the wall. I’ve made sure all the cables are reseated, I’ve tried unplugging things until it works – which it doesn’t – I even ran Memtest overnight to see if it was that and reinstalled Windows. The only thing I can do to make it reliably crash is play City of Heroes, and then it works for a few minutes.

I’m guessing either Power Supply, overcooked CPU or possibly graphics card/drivers. So I’ve installed Ubuntu to see if it crashes under that, if it does then I’ll roll back the ATI drivers and see if that fixes it, otherwise I’m going to be randomly buying hardware to see if it stops.

I hate computers.

It was, in fact, the power supply. So that’s a relatively cheap fix…

Nevertheless, I bought one. Because it was cheap.

(It does, I should warn potential followers in my footsteps, come with a half-filled colour cartridge and no black. Factor in another 15 (The same cost as the printer, fact fans) for a full black cartridge. Cheap printers are a false economy. Lesson ends)

Much of the work of getting this all working under Debian has already been done, and much of this article cribs liberally from the Gentoo Wiki article for the same thing.

These instructions are for Debian Sarge (That’s ‘Testing’) and so should also work with Ubuntu.

This is what you do:

Preparation:

(I love Debian)

Grab the Real Linux Drivers from Lexmark:

http://downloads.lexmark.com/cgi-perl/downloads.cgi?ccs=229:1:0:389:0:0&emeaframe=&fileID=1151

Installation:

Create a new directory, and put the file you downloaded above inside it. Lexmark’s drivers all extract to the current directory.

Be inside that directory

Bypass their horrible “auto install” script by running:

and then extract install.tar.gz (which also goes to the current directory)

You should now have a whole host of useless files and a couple of RPMs (Because we all know that everyone uses deadrat, don’t we? sigh) so we turn them into Debian packages using Alien:

And then “dpkg -i” on both of them to install. Make sure the printer is plugged in and turned on, and then run:

followed by:

Which should say something like:

direct z600:/dev/usb/lp0 "Lexmark Lexmark 510 Series" "Lexmark Printer"

Cups

Setting up cups is somewhat beyond the scope of this article, but what the hell.

Default install of cups doesn’t let anyone outside the local machine access the interface. If this is cool, great, otherwise edit the /etc/cupsd.conf file to let in anyone in 192.168.* or whatever your network’s on.

Cups interface is on http://localhost:631 (It’d be useful if the package mentioned that while it was installing, or something) the admin password is your root password (the username is ‘root’) so don’t, whatever you do, ever access CUPS admin over an Internet connection until you change that behaviour. It’s a stupid bloody default anyway.

So. Click “Administration”, “Add Printer”, Fill in stuff, “Lexmark” (Use the top one, rather than “USB #1 Lexmark” or whatever), Make is – duh – Lexmark, Model is the only one it gives you, Print a test page to make sure it’s working, if it isn’t, then “tail -f /var/log/cups/*log” to see why.

Have A Lot Of Fun.

So that’s a large pile of MP3s that have ceased to be, my backup of Aquarionics and all my archived projects, unless there’s some magic way of rescuing data from a JFS partition without actually reading it that I have yet to discover.

Suddenly, I have an overpowering urge to blow my next paypacket on a DVD writer and a raid system, and forget christmas. Most of the MP3s are also owned by other people, so I will be able to get most of it back, but the projects vault is something of a body-blow.

Grr.