cobolhacker.com

That’s right FOSS lovers… not only can you enjoy Ubuntu Linux on your computer, you can enjoy it in your cup too! I saw the bottle at the local liquor store and couldn’t resist.

The brand offers four varieties of wine. The one I grabbed was the Shiraz and it turned out to be quite enjoyable.

From their website they state:

This full red wine’s bouquet suggests ripe berries overlaid with green pepper and spicy flavours. There is excellent follow through onto the palate where the peppery flavours dominate. The well-integrated ripe tannins make for easy accessibility.

This sums up the drop nicely. As wine goes it has a fair bit of alcohol in it — 14 percent by volume — but as with most red wines this doesn’t mean anything other than it’s little boozier than your regular vin de table. It’s dry, but not as stiff and chewy as some Shiraz I’ve had. It’s peppery for sure, but there is also a slight fruitiness to it, in both the bouquet and the palette. I couldn’t pin that part of it down completely, but in my opinion it’s not a good red if it doesn’t keep you guessing.

All in all, Ubuntu is a really easy wine to enjoy, even if you don’t drink red very often, and it’s a good representative of the Shiraz flavour.

Like Ubuntu the Linux, Ubuntu the wine is also a quality product from South Africa and is distributed by KWV International.

While looking for something completely different, I stumbled some data about a question that has been  at the back of my cluttered mind for a while.  How big is Blizzard Entertainment?  Not in terms of staff (their website says they have over 250 staff), but in terms of computer infrastructure.  It must take a lot of computers to run an online game as big as World of Warcraft.

I have my answer now:  9000 servers (page 12).  And judging by what I hear from WoW players, it’s still not enough.  Amazing what you can find on the American Securities and Exchange Commission.

There was even some controversy about this publicly available shareholder presentation, with Blizzard threatening bloggers who reposted it.  Not sure why all the hubub, but interesting nevertheless.

A winter sunset, as seen from the back of my shop. The picture was taken a few weeks ago. Not a great picture, but not bad for being shot on the little 1.3Mpx camera in my cellphone.

The computer had been admitted to the shop with frequent reboots and failures to start. Once in the shop, it booted fine and everything seemed normal at first. Then the crashing began. For an Athlon XP board that usually means the board was slowly killing itself, becoming increasingly flaky as the years went on. A common problem with Athlon boards from that era.

Except that the old mainboard wasn’t actually killing itself. No, the evil little power supply was slowly killing it, savouring every crash and blue screen. The seemingly normal, happy, functional supply waited patiently until the malfunctioning mainboard in the unit was replaced. Then it struck quickly, like a wild animal.

The Asus board had been so much fun for so long, but now the power supply lashed out furiously at the innocent Asrock board, killing it instantly without so much as a sizzle, a pop or a puff of smoke. A bench network card, used only for testing, was dispatched without mercy. Wrong place, wrong time… every bench component knows the risks.

Burning up the five volt line it began to destroy the electronics in the KVM switch, too. A whole other unsuspecting computer was attached! But the Starview switch was braver than most. Rather than just submitting and fusing, it fought back and burned out completely, giving its life to protect the other devices attached to it. Its bravery will be remembered.

Now isolated from all computing hardware and completely insane, the power supply turns itself on and off like a Christmas light, buzzing like a bee. Steady voltages don’t matter in its crazy little world any more — they now fluctuate so wildly the tester can’t even pin them down. Labeled, disconnected from the mains and shelved, it will never hurt another component again. But the damage has been done.

The power supply (centre) with its victims: An Asus socket 462 board, an Asrock socket 462 board, a Realtek network card and Starview KVM switch. Incredibly, the CPU and RAM survived the attack unscathed, probably protected by the voltage converter. They should be thank the maker good and often for it. In all, nearly $400 dollars worth of equipment was destroyed by The Attack of the Killer Power Supply.

Today was my yearly beating from the Yellow Pages company. This happens every year. One of the many indignities of running a small business is dealing with people who have you by the short-and-curlies. You can’t not advertise in the Yellow Pages and the Yellow Pages people know it.

It’s mostly a waste of my time, but since I’m a nice person at heart, so I don’t get on the salesman’s case (much). He’s just a regular joe working for the Man like everyone else. I patiently let him tell me about whatever new advertising products they have then politely decline to buy any of them. I even let him down easy about increasing the size of our ad.

“A number of other companies in the area have gone with the half page.”

While I’m not rich yet, I’m not hurting for business. Besides, the big ads look kind of garrish. I don’t really pay that close attention to it, but I’m pretty sure that prices have increased slightly this year. They increase slightly every year.

“Not to downplay the usefulness of your publication,” I tell him, “but being listed in it modestly like I do represents over two thirds of my $380 a month telephone bill. We’re a small town computer service shop. Do the math. And I also have to advertise in the phonebook from the local newspaper too.”

As always, I ask about their yellowpages.ca website. It shows up quite frequently on seaches these days. The URL for my firm is listed in there, yes I know, but how much does it cost to actually turn it into a link? Ah, I see. Still thirty dollars a month. They are in the business to make money, I’m told, it’s as simple as that.

You know that a pair of anchor tags is 15 characters worth of extra data, excluding the URL. A machine is generating that code. The page has to be served anyway. I doubt the extra bytes are going to blow the hosting budget.

Fuckers. That’s like two bucks a character. If some sucker was willing to pay me two dollars a letter I’d be blogging full-time rather than listen to some dude tell me that it’s okay to pay $360 a year for something that Google, Yahoo, MSN and all the rest give me for free.

If you are a Battlestar Galactica fan (like me!) check out the Season Three gag reel.  Hilarious!

the kittens are shreding my furniture

right in front of me those bastards

but they are so cute

ph34r the cuteness

In the last few weeks we have seen at least half a dozen machines infected with a pernicious little piece of adware called Virusburst. It’s really annoying, almost as annoying as CoolWebSearch used to be. When a computer is infected with it a little flashing icon in the system tray will pester you with little popups that say things like:

System detected virus activities. They may cause critical system failure. Please, use antimalware software to clean and protect your system from parasite programs. Click this baloon to get all available software.

If you click on the “baloon” it takes you to a site where you can purchase Virusburst and presumably rid your system of the annoying popup. Yeah right. If buying this software seems in any way appealing to you, you need to cancel your Internet account right now, return your computer and take up a safer hobby like basket weaving.

Getting rid of it is tough. Norton, AVG, Ad-aware and Spybot don’t catch it, and I didn’t find anything in Hijackthis to work with. I was about to resign myself to hunting for it the old fashioned way with prcview, but then decided to take a chance on googling the problem. This isn’t always the most optimal thing to do. After a few hours of hacking you often discover that none of the dozen solutions you found actually work.

This time it was all good. As it turns out, the nice folks at Bleepingcomputer.com have already done the hard work for me and are offering simple and effective instructions for removing Virusburst. Made my life way easier. Thanks guys!

The various Big Media baddies in the U.S.A. have managed to shut down popular bittorrent search engine Isohunt by pressuring its Internet service provider. Now Isohunt must hastily relocate their servers to the real land of the free, or at least until that new bill gets passed, anyway.

Here’s a great quote from the Slashdot discussion.

torrents are just the hurricane katrina of the internet.

Cripes, I *WISH* torrents had that sort of speed. :-\

BTW, I fully admit to being a looter. I know the law. I just don’t give a shit. In a world where our government is selling us out to another country, where illegal aliens are given more rights than citizens, where some soccer dude can get handed a quarter of a -*BILLION*- dollars for playing a game, why should I be a nice little nobody who follows all the rules? Fuck all that. It’s every man for himself from this point on.

Some producers of media are adamantly opposed to the upcoming future of sharing, but there is very little they can do about it now. It will happen, whether they like it or not. Napster and Lokitorrent were early casualties, Isohunt might be the latest, but the sharing won’t stop.

The real question is, will this change happen the easy way or the hard way?

One of the most common questions we get asked at the shop is, “How often should I get my computer cleaned?” Another is, “Why should I clean my computer?” Physical cleaning is as important a maintenance activity to a computer as getting an oil change is to a car. Cleaning can also be taken to mean “getting rid of all the viruses” but this article focuses only on physical cleaning.

In order to continue to function properly a computer needs to be cleaned on the inside. Most personal computers are air-cooled so after a time they will have sucked in a fair quantity of dust, fibre, dander and hair. Consumer grade computers do not have air filters and do not have cooling schemes that can resist dust for a long period of time. Even if you have the cleanest home, your computer will still find a way to get dirty on the inside.

Excessive dust buildup can slow airflow and cause the machine to overheat. Abrasive dust particles can slow down and seize fans, also leading to overheating. When overheated, a computer will run slow, lock up randomly and in extreme cases, burn out its components. The preventative solution is to get it inspected and cleaned periodically.

How Often To Inspect and Clean
The short answer to this question is once a year.

The long answer has more to do with usage and environment. Since the computer is only sucking in dust when it is running, a computer that’s only on for a few hours in a week isn’t going to take in all that much dust in a year. Such a machine only needs to be cleaned every three years or so. On the other hand, a machine that runs most of the time should be at least looked at every six months or so. If the computer lives in a dusty environment like a workshop, kitchen or factory these times should be halved.

If people smoke regularly around the computer, treat it as if it is in a factory. Cigarette smoke is particularly nasty. It produces a thick, yellowish, sticky dust that is hard to remove and very damaging to fans. The residue from cigarette smoke can become conductive if it is thick enough, leading to shorts on the mainboard and ultimately to the malfunction of the computer. Really, you should just not smoke around your computer.

It should be noted that pets don’t particularly worsen a computer’s dust intake. Maybe if someone had 15 cats it might be a problem, but the presence of a few pets in a home doesn’t seem to affect the amount of dust a computer sucks in. It does however, change the nature of the dust. Pet dust tends to be more hairy.

Another thing we have noticed is computers installed in rooms with no carpets take in a lot more dust. Our current theory is carpets and fabric tend to trap much of the airborne dust which is then vacuumed or washed away periodically. If your computer lives on a hardwood floor, you might want to consider cleaning it more frequently.

Will I Have To Buy Parts?
Sometimes. If the computer hasn’t been cleaned for a while, some of the fans will likely need replacing because the abrasive components of the dust can increase wear on the tiny fan bearings. As a machine ages the fans will wear down normally and require replacement. Sometimes an entire heatsink will need replacement because it does not take a standard fan.

How Much Does It Cost?
If your local computer store is charging more than forty bucks in labour for a simple physical cleaning they are ripping you off. A notable exception to this might be the replacement of a northbridge heatsink, which often requires the removal of the entire mainboard.

At FCP, the cost of an inspection and cleaning usually costs $30, plus any replacement fans ($10 or so) or heatsinks ($10-40). Physical cleaning is often done along with other maintenance activities.