cobolhacker.com

This is a good damn picture. Better than some picture of a squirrel, I reckon.

Not something you see every day in the downtown.

We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability.

Pat Robertson == crazy person.

Since I’m a gracious sort of guy, my first assumption was that he was drunk or high. But deep down, I know that only crazy people preach such things when they are drunk or high.

Surely I’m not the only one who is beginning to get worried about the mindset of American religious conservatives.

This man is a preacher. Shame on him. I have little use for God and worship, but even I can wrap my brain around wisdom of Exodus 20:13.

Thou shalt not kill.

Hard drives are one of my primary sources of amusement.

When it failed it made a horrible slicing noise, kind of like a table saw.

It would appear as if one of the screws that secured the platter motor came loose and was taken on a 7200rpm ride inside this poor drive. The platter has been flipped over so you can see the scoring on what should be a shiny, perfectly smooth surface. Hard drive platters are rigid and very hard, but in some places that little screw hit the platter with such force that deformations can be seen on the other side.

Or, “Why Didn’t I Find Mozbackup Sooner?”

It’s a bit of a pain in the ass diving through all of those folders to get to the Mozilla profile folders so you can make a backup of your stuff. It is similarly a pain with Outlook or Outlook Express, for that matter. Sure they have export functions, but I usually find myself digging through various folders looking for inboxes and PST files. One thing Microsoft’s programs do have, however, is a decent import function. Getting your mail back into OE or Outlook is fairly easy. Same with the address book.

Addresses with Thunderbird are easy. There are import and export functions for that. But the restore process with mailboxes is a little more dodgy.

Thunderbird (1.0.6, anyway) has neither an export nor import function for it’s mailboxes because in theory it doesn’t need one. The mailboxes are mbox format files so in theory, you should be able to simply copy the mailboxes back into a new profile, provided you don’t mind digging through your filesystem a bit. But for whatever reason, it doesn’t always work for me, and I’ve never figured out what I was doing wrong.

Perhaps the reason why no one bothered to develop such a feature has as much to do with supposed ease of mbox, as it does with my suspicion that most of the Thunderbird developers use IMAP instead of POP (and therefore never need to import mail). The docs for Thunderbird talk about IMAP a fair bit. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, who knows. . ?

Anyway, now I’m rambling. So to make a long story short, I have found a handy tool that solves all of my problems. It backs up both both Firefox and Thunderbird profiles, mail, address books, bookmarks, even settings. It lets you import the backup into a new install.

There are people who actually want money for this kind of functionality with Outlook Express. This guy just gives Mozbackup away for free, just like all of this stuff. But it’s only for Mozilla. . .

A week and some, following my amusing, but ultimately futile dealings with Microsoft over their broken Windows Genuine Advantage program, I moved on to less stupid things. Content with my system of hacks and other evil, I hadn’t given the WGA any more thought.

And so the phone rings long distance. Nothing new — the phone rings long distance back in shop a dozen times a day.

But it’s that sound. It’s them. It’s that poor quality line noise I’ve come to enjoy. I suppose it could be a telemarketer trying to sell me collection services, stationary or long distance. . . but no, it’s a Microsoft tech assigned to my open case involving Windows Genuine Advantage. Yay!

Although he sounds similar, it’s someone new this time. He tells me that Microsoft has been having problems with the WGA system (no shit) and that many people have been having problems (no shit) and that they were very sorry for the inconvenience (no shit).

I want to tell him sooo badly that I’ve already found all the cracks I need to get around his employer’s pathetic attempt at DRM. But I don’t.

“So is it fixed?” I ask.

“Yes. There was an issue with the system that has been fixed now. I would like to do a download with you now, if this is a good time?”

Oh, now that’s interesting. There was a lot of speculation around the Net that there might actually be a problem with it, but nothing really concrete. This is quite the admission.

By the time the tech has finished telling me to open Internet Explorer, I’ve already opened Internet Explorer, gone to the Microsoft Anti-Spyware download page, downloaded the WGA active-X tool and proceeded to the Validation screen.

Thank You For Using Genuine Windows.

“Wow. That worked. So, what was the problem?” I’m not sure that he actually knows this, but it never hurts to ask.

“There was a bug in one of the .dll files, licdll.dll I think, that did not parse the Product ID number correctly. It would return a negative when it encountered letters.”

“Oh. Like the letters “OEM” found in like two-thirds of the copies of Windows out there. Don’t you guys test this stuff?”

“Uhh, well. . .”

I shouldn’t be hard on the fellow, as he is very likely a contract worker. So I tell him, “this is just great and I’m so happy that you got it all worked out. Thank you!”

So my problem has been solved, it would seem, in that kind of computer-patch, deus ex machina kind of a way that always seems happens with software. And I really hate it. I’ll never know for certain why. I suppose I shouldn’t complain, as the problem is fixed.

But the whole affair has been a colossal waste of my time, and all because of somebody’s broken Digital Rights Management scheme. This really chaps my ass. If it had any other software problem, I might have understood. But this was a bug in a system that provides absolutely zero utility to you, the customer. Zero. Zip. Nada. None. No additional functionality is provided by this system. It doesn’t make the computer go faster or work better. All Windows Genuine Advantage does is allow Microsoft to have its revenge on people with bootlegged copies of it’s software.

Since it has so little value to you, the paying customer, one would expect to never be bothered by its machinations. That it could go about its WGA business without bothering mine. I’d like to think this is an isolated event too, but I suspect consumers are going to have to endure a lot more of this kind of bullshit in the coming years.

I’m feeling the urge for some revenge. I’m actually tempted to send an invoice to Microsoft’s accounts payable department. You know, asking for my fair wage in helping them in diagnosing, testing and fixing this problem. I wonder if they would pay it?

they say a watched torrent never downloads.

but yet if i concentrate on it, it seems to go faster. . .

I have written about evolution before. Got called out on it too.

I stumbled across what another blogger referred to as the best Slashdot post in the universe. He might be right — I’m hard pressed to find a better one.

If you have ever wondered why evolution is able to do the amazing things that it does, read this post. It is one of the clearest explanations of the certainty of evolution I’ve ever read.

When normal people run out of hard drive space, they upgrade their hard drive, or maybe add another one.

Me, I make another computer out of junk, put a RAID array inside, and network it.

Because I can.


This is what a typical In-Win baby-AT tower looks like. Inside is an eight-year-old computer. There is a real, live, functioning Pentium-MMX 200MHz in there.

The mainboard is a late model super-socket-7 from Shuttle, with 128MB of SDRAM. This is the perfect starting point for a Linux-based network attached storage server.

Won’t it be slow? Meh. All it has to do is run Linux and Samba. A Pentium-200 can keep up to a 100Mbps link no problem at all. And it’s not like it’s going to have all that many clients. I don’t need a graphic user interface to manage it. I don’t even plan to have a console hooked up.

One of the priorities I have for this project is simple. Another is quiet. I like quiet computers; if this thing is to run 24 and 7, it has to do so quietly.

A interesting thing you can do with this model of tower is take part of the front off, substantially opening up the intake for the front panel fan. This gives me a great inspiration: make the CPU passively cooled!

Passive cooling is nothing new on a Pentium or Pentium 2 processor. Vendors like Compaq did it all the time. In the In-Win baby AT case, the front panel intake pulls air right over a CPU on an AT mainboard. With 486’s the mere draft was probably sufficient for passive cooling, but with a high-order Pentium CPU there needs to be some decent airflow. In most clone ATs like this one, this was usually provided by noisy direct cooling.

If the quieter, more efficient 8cm front panel fan can do the job, I’m all for it. So to give it every advantage, improve airflow and decrease noise, I decide to cut out the punch-out grill at the front of the case. Edges cause turbulence, which causes noise. If you remove all of the little punch-outs, you remove much of the turbulence.

Since I had already integrated most of the system when I decided to do this, I tape foam behind the grille to stop metal shards from spraying on to the mainboard while I chop. I suppose I could have dismantled the system too, but that seemed like work.

This is Cobolhacker modding a PC.

Notice how I am not holding the Dremmel properly. I’m just asking to have it buck and take a chew out of the back of my hand. At least I remembered the eye protection.

Now it has a hole in the front.

Fitted with a quiet, low-rpm fan.

The heatsink is a Startech heatsink for an AthlonXP with the retention bracket reversed so it presses down evenly on the PGA Pentium-MMX chip. The large amount of surface area on those aluminium fins is key to getting the heat off of that chip.

The yucky grey cables are PATA. Haven’t figured out what to do with those other than to shove them out of the way. I might replace them with rounded ones, or maybe not. They support the CDROM and the boot drive. The boot drive is an ordinary EIDE 6GB Western Digital. It contains all of /. Data storage on /dev/md0 is mounted separately in one of the home directories. While it makes downtime a little bit more likely, this arrangement makes upgrading the OS a snap.

The thin red cables are SATA. Some may be surprised to discover that Serial-ATA hard drives work just fine in a Pentium-200 if you add a Promise SATAII-150 TX2 Plus controller. The pair of SATA drives form a software RAID-1 array. RAID-5 would have been nice, but I only had two used SATA drives.

A panel is left off in front of the two SATA drives to give them more airflow. Interestingly, the front panel fan is now so efficient, that air comes out of this hole (had expected it to go in). The exhast fan in the power supply is not able to keep up. The effect is the same, the slow flow of air over the drives keeps them under 40 degrees Celsius under load.

Thanks to the decent airflow and the large heatsink, the processor also seems to be staying under 45. Although I can’t find any published information as to what the temperature of a Pentium chip should be, I figure that not burning to the touch is a first good step.

Anyway, the mod was a complete success, and this seemingly old and useless machine has received a new life storing my files.

Although there is this anarchist side of me that says throw it all out there and let the people who need to deal with it, deal with it, I’m more inclined to agree with the assertion that many in the computer security research disciplines are petulant shits.

There is this inconsiderate attitude among many in the security community that information needs to be free, like right now. I think this view is somewhat simplistic, and more self-serving than anything. A security researcher should remember this the next time he loses a credit card. Better hope the person who finds it isn’t speaking at BlackHat today.

Before I get to my presentation on the Infiltration of IOS Systems with the Ass2hat Hack, I’d like to begin by telling you about a moron who left his Visa card on the counter over by the consession stand. Even though I think he’s in the crapper right now, I’m still going to tell you the number on the card, the expiry date, the name and that little security number they put on the back. But if some of you seem to wind up with a few hundred dollars of Thinkgeek shirts, it won’t be my fault.

I think that giving a software vendor 30 days to fix a serious bug before you go public is reasonable, unless they give you some damn good reason otherwise. And if they tell you that they can’t fix it in thirty days, don’t try to extort money from them, ask if they need more help fixing it. Less problems and more solutions is what the computer industry needs.