Etherpunk

So I recently formatted my computer and I'm slowly bringing things back.
I usually use Outlook as a local backup for my PDA.
Today was the day I decided to make a backup.
ActiveSync 4.5 and Outlook 2007 just *assumed* (like fucking idiots) that I wanted to keep my brand spanking new Outlook profile and *DELETE* everything off of my 8525 w/ WM6.

Great job Microsoft! It's no wonder people are losing faith in you.

So far since I've installed WM6 my phone has been pretty unstable. Rebooting on it's own and such. More and more I keep wishing something better was out there aside from Palm and Microsoft that didn't suck. Would be better if it was open source as well, so I can write my own software to do as I please.

I'm wondering if I *ever* want to give Microsoft another chance on my phones again. I think I may wait until Google does something and migrate to them.

Actually, at this point, I'm probably going to give Ubuntu / Linux a shot again as I really don't want to trust Microsoft with any data that is important.

NONE of my cd-roms worked. Even my emulated ones (that I use for mounting ISO files -- which, by the way, Virtual Clone Drive rox!) I found the answer on this page.

To resolve this behavior, follow these steps: Start Registry Editor (Regedt32.exe). Locate the UpperFilters value under the following key in the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} On the Edit menu, click Delete, and then click OK. Locate the LowerFilters value under the same key in the registry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} On the Edit menu, click Delete, and then click OK.

So I've started grepping the code for stuff.
I decided to start with the simple stuff -- the items in /bin.
I'm currently printing /bin/cp's files. I understand most of the C syntax but some of it seems so very complicated I can't wrap my mind around it. Sooo.. I'll do the next bext thing: Print it out so I can read it on the crapper.
I'm currently groking the 4.2 code and plan on eventually following -current and subscribing to the CVS mailing list when I think I'm 'good enough' (by my standards) to be able to understand what is going on and not waste bandwidth and their time.
We'll see how well I do... wish me luck. Or not. I'm doing it anyways. :-P

I have learned that Pidgin wrote a CLI version of their software called 'Finch'.
It's neat, you can SSH in to your home and fire up your IM client and *bam* -- talk to people.
It's still VERY flakey. For example, resizing the window causes a segfault.
It also doesn't appear to look the best across Putty either.
You also need to learn controls such as ctrl+w brings up a list of windows. Unless the field is a text entry field, you have no way of knowing where you are. I've just learned to count the tabs. :-P

So I installed FF when it first came out.
It was a fun game and had plenty of servers to play on. Not a lot, but enough to where you could almost always find somewhere to play.

The games main advantage is it gives you multiple classes to play and when you die you respawn fairly quickly.

For those who don't know -- I cuss a lot when I play.
I have absolutely NO problem avoiding servers that say "no profanity". Those are "family friendly" servers or something. Whatever. I won't step in your shit.

My problem comes in when no rules are displayed and arbitrary rules are made up on the fly. For example, on a particular map called 'hunted' it has 3 teams. The Hunted, Bodyguards, and Assassins. While you might expect the assassins to be spies -- they are snipers. BG's only have soldiers, medics, and heavies. Hunted is just a civilian with an umbrella as a weapon. Snipers have 4 weapons. Crowbar, sniper rifle, automatic rifle, and a nail gun. On a small few servers it is considered bad form to use the automatic rifle as they say you are supposed to snipe and that's it. Some of them make that rule on on the fly when it suits them. Some of them have awfully strange rules. For example, no mid-mapping. Apparently mid-mapping is attacking the enemy in the middle of the map. You aren't supposed to do that. Why? I have no fucking clue. They say you are supposed to attack the 'fortresses'. Um, what? I still fail to understand how to follow this rule. Can I attack them if they are in the fortress and I'm outside? Am I allowed to defend myself if someone breaks the rule? How do grenades work in that instance? So anyways, I usually request (or act in a manner that will) to get me banned so I don't have to worry about running across that server again.

I'm known as a dick on many servers to the enemy. My *entire* goal is to distract them or otherwise get them away from friendlies. I do things that aren't so nice... like infecting them in their spawn. Or infecting snipers in their towers... or being a sniper.. or laying det packs just outside the doors.. or sabotaging their sentry guns (very fun). I also do a TON of smack talk. I also don't bitch when someone smack talks me either. It's all in fun.

Anyways, the popularity of the game is declining and the only servers left are those with odd rules that I don't care to follow. Even given that information, many people don't play anymore so it's very difficult to find one popular enough to play even if I wanted to. So, sad to say, I am uninstalling this game. I'm told it's better than TF2 but TF2 got more marketing (duh, it's written by a real company as opposed to hobbiest [is that even a word?]).

Oh yeah, on a side node, they stopped infections from spreading... so yeah... medics are weak now.

I think I'll go look in to Unreal Tournament (whatever version they are on now) and see if that fits my fancy...

Discrimination based on age is illegal -- only if you are old. This assumes the young have *every* advantage over the older. This is false. The young don't have as much experience. It appears new legislation is being looked in to: here is the link to el reg. "Employers need to ask themselves is there any less discriminatory way to achieve the same result?" said Barker. My only problem with this is that it can effectively screw others with experience. For example, let's say we have a highly experienced programmer and she don't need much money to make me happy. For person 2 we have some kid who knows enough C to do the job is also looking for a job and is seeking the same amount person 1 is looking for. Obviously person 1 is the person you would choose, as you get the most bang for the buck -- probably. Person 2 can now make the prospective employers life more difficult by saying "well, you chose her because she had more experience! SUE BLAH BLAH BLAH". So now you have to go significantly out of your way to prove person 2 wrong ahead of time by doing a metric fuck-ton of paperwork. The reason employers like experience is that it implies proficiency to a certain level respective to the amount of experience. That implication can be wrong -- which is why they may have those interviews where you figure out some bizarre set of puzzles or something respective to what they want. An interesting dilemma.

Etherpunks' mail is handled by Google Accounts, so I can get that cool snazzy GMail service. Every now and then I notice I'm using around 400MB or so of space (of the allowed 2GB or something -- Google Accounts doesn't get the same amount of space as regular GMail accounts) and want to delete things. My first thought is "what if I delete something I want to keep?" and my very next thought is "hmm.. I need to backup everything... crap-taculous....". So I setup a POP3 account and being downloading. Google only allows you to download a few megabytes at a time -- probably to avoid slamming their servers, so getting all your mail can take a while. Something to note -- it downloads everything. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g, I think. Such as sent items. All of this comes to your inbox. So don't forget to set filters to put things where they belong. Burn this folder/file (PST for those using Outlook) to a CD/DVD. Or put it in your regular backup storage.

So, yet again, I'm left disappointed with Vista Business. Sure, it's pretty. Sure, it has many features that I enjoy that XP doesn't have (out of the box).

• It does not have proper OpenGL support (or at least with my Radeon X1600 Mobility, for my Sager NP 5760 Notebook).
• It's still a good bit of a memory hog
• Watching clips from across my wireless network is a pain in the ass at times. More specifically, everything *but* watching them is a pain in the ass. For example, right-clicking on a file to see how big it is or wanting to append it to WMP.
• iTunes still seems flakey is shit. In fact, I've even had it lock up explorer pretty bad -- to the point bringing up task manager was impossible (or took longer than 5 minutes; which at that point I deemed it never coming up) and required a reboot via holding down the power button for 4-5 seconds... This, at one point, caused my iPod to lock up and I had to Google to see WTF happened and I then learned how to force iPod's to reboot.. which seemingly fixed my iPod that was locked up.
• I almost feel like learning .NET 3.5, the new compact framework for .NET 3.5, and all that new fancy stuff is a little too bleeding edge. In fact, I'm seriously considering bailing off the .NET train and going to some OS independent language -- perhaps Mono or Java. I have no problem programming in VI or notepad. IDE's are nice, but I'm not willing to buy Visual Studio 2008 when it comes out, I think. We'll see if I actually hold to that though...
• Not enough vendors are caring about Vista users *fucking still*. Some are still pointing fingers... yeah.. I got a finger for them... (this one isn't Microsoft's fault, but it still hurts my impression on Vista)
• If I leave my printer unplugged (from the USB) for a few minutes, when I plug it back in I have to reconfigure the damn fax... every...freaking...time. WTF is up with that? Again, probably not Microsoft's fault -- probably HP's. Perhaps even mine for missing some "save this forever-until-it-becomes-rust-or-bad-plastic" setting...
• This one is VERY minor, but something I noticed -- Gimp doesn't take entirely correct screen shots -- the mouse pointer seems to have a strange black'ish circle or something. I wonder why...

So, at this point, one may be wondering why I'm even running a Microsoft OS instead of Linux. The answer is -- Microsoft Office 2007 rules. I really enjoy it. It took me a while to get used to it, but I really do enjoy it. I don't recommend it for people who are slow on computers, however, but I do recommend it for advanced users. Another reason is I'm hoping SP1 will fix a lot of the weirdness, although I doubt it. I want to give them the best shot they have. Alternatively, I could just wait until June '08 and see where it's at there. I seem to hack off the "activiation" wizard because I format and reinstall every 6 months or so... they don't like that. They can bite me. Without teeth. Gums only. :-P

New clothes I need to get.
Being as my new job probably wouldn't be too happy if I wore my cargo pants and the "i read your email" shirt and the fact that most of those are pretty worn, I need to get new clothes. My parents live close to one of the major Dillards outlets that ship discount clothes (usually barely out of season or when Polo or whoever comes out with a new color schema), they offer to get clothes for me there. I'll write the list here under /clothes.

• Polo type shirts -- I'll even try a light pink one... Preferrably 5 or more
• Under shirts -- 5 or more, smalls. Dad knows the ones I like. I only have 2 at the moment.
• Pants -- Regular nice jeans and Dockers. 3 (32/30) Jeans, 3 (black, 32/29) Dockers.
• 2 shoes -- my current ones went to the beach... and are exceptionally difficult to clean to condition that won't leave me with sand everywhere. Bleh. :( and I liked those too. :'(

So, today I finally plugged in to the switch and did some work on it.
My initial goal was to get it in to a basic switch mode -- 10/100 auto-detect mode for all ports being on a single network.
First thing I had to do was reset the password. Easy enough, plenty of pages through Google to help through that one.
Next thing was to play around and get familiar with what it could do. I found that Wal-Mart owned it, at one point, and that Wal-Mart's network is forced to be 10mb half duplex. Interesting. In the process of trying to figure out how to change it to be full autodetect (for both speed and duplex mode) I found that forcing it to be a certain setting speeds up plugging in to the network a little bit, but from what I could tell it was not enough to really matter (or at least for my situation).

I then learned that every port has to be connected to a vlan, thusly if everything is on a single vlan -- it's just a regular switch. Google showed me how to do this easy enough, except it couldn't tell me how to do multiple ports at one time. At this point I decided that I should just re-flash it and start to build it from the ground up. So off I go to getting the firmware.

I found I already have an account on Cisco's website, however the user details isn't filled in enough to get the CNA software. It claims I'm missing some info -- but as I look at it, I *DO* have that filled in. Odd. Oh well, I can do it all via CLI anyways. So I get the firmware needed, reflash and weed-whack. I find out I got the wrong firmware, I need the one without the LRE (or IRE?). So I get the correct one and start it over and have ti launch the config util. I get it configured the way I want, I see what by default everything is set to auto and is on a single vlan -- rock on! So at this point it's just little things to fix.

And little things I do fix, such as the time, hostname, etc. My new goal is to have it do SPAN so I can have Snort monitor LAN activity for crap-ware. The end result of Snort will be to have it on 3 sides. Outside the firewall, on the WAN side. Inside the firewall, on the WAN side. And on the LAN itself. The reason for the first one is so I can compare to the second and see what it's blocking -- just 'cuz. No real reason.