fractalnavel : All

tech notes: dear bill...

fractalnavel — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:07:40 GMT

just a couple more microsoft peeves that have been annoying me lately:

well, maybe i'll just tell you where to stuff it, instead:

Welcome to Windows Live Messenger Help

August 25, 2009 - Install the latest version of Messenger.

You need to install the latest version of Messenger. It includes security updates to help keep you and your friends safe online while you chat.

Starting September 15, 2009, users are required to have the latest version of Messenger installed on their computer in order to sign in and continue using the Messenger service. To download the latest version of Messenger, go to the Windows Live Messenger website.

thing is, if you go to update live messenger, you are forced to update every other piece of "live" software that you've installed as well. and don't forget that the "live" upgrade dialog also defaults to selecting every piece of uninstalled "live" software for installation as well - every time you do this. it won't remember that you've unselected anything the last time.

what about corporate users ? are entire enterprises being forced to update as well ?

more: Upgrade from Windows Live Messenger 8.5

every - ten - minutes:

yes, you can find "instructions" on how to change this behavior - not from microsoft, of course. but some of them are only temporary "fixes", and some don't work on all systems. like mine. if you have xp home, only hacks are available.

and before any linux weenies start getting all holier than thou over this shit, those installation processes aren't anything to brag about either. seems the only choice we have these days is between a dictatorship or complete anarchy.

there needs to be a "software professionals anonymous" (using the term "professionals" very loosely).

attempted selficide

fractalnavel — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:00:27 GMT

so i'm reading around the 'net, innocently, i might add (since all such anecdotal events are required to have occurred innocently), and i run into the following:

...

"The way to stop this collective madness is, of course, to get a committee on that and get a decent standard together. No, wait . . . . you wanted sane.

[kills self]

"The last time we did that we got XML, and no, the pain has not ended. Indeed, I would echo your whole comment, but change “C” to “XML” and poise a knife over my wrist."

...

[dadhacker, 2009.11.17]

NOOoooooo!!! SELF!! he killed self!

i am so depressed.

and here self was, just a minute ago, getting another cup of coffee, and ...

wait a minute - there's self now. grinning as stupidly as usual. well, ok - laughing at me.

self says that everyone has a self - even self has a self. ad infinitum, apparently. more likely, ad nauseum. so i guess it's ok to "kill self", since there are back-up selfs all the way down.

kill self! kill self! kill self!

self just laughs at me. he's holding a knife now...

no surprise here ...

fractalnavel — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:45:07 GMT

We have diagnosed you as most likely being a member of the:
Autonomous Rebels

To find out more about your diagnosed tribe, click the following link:

Autonomous Rebels

take the survey yourself, let me know what you are.

hitting the spot

fractalnavel — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:28:24 GMT

Look round our world; behold the chain of love.
Confirming all below and all above,
See plastic nature working to this end,
The single atoms each to other tend,
Attract, attracted to, the next in place
Form'd and impell'd its neighbor to embrace.
See matter next, with various life imbued
Press to one center still, the gen'ral good.
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving vegetate again;
All forms that perish other forms supply,
(By turns we catch the vital breath and die)
Like bubbles on the sea of matter born,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return.
Nothing is foreign; parts relate to whole;
One all-extending all-preserving soul
Connects each being, greatest with the least;
Made beast in aid of man and man of beast;
All serv'd, all serving: nothing stands alone;
The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.

—Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

(via "The Gripping Hand")

that excerpt fits pretty well, i think. that's all that was in the book; the final text. now i'm thinking i should probably read the whole poem. but i haven't been in that sort of reading mood/mode in a very long time.

ah well; time to finish my coffee and perform some (more) vegetation dissolving in the backyard.

moving right along

fractalnavel — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:57:43 GMT

what the hell happened to ...

... 'summer' ? not just this one, but the season of 'hot'. and what happened to 'Summer', in a personal or cultural sense ? aging is part of it. global realities are also.
... google app engine: maybe they felt that cutting free quotas by 90% earlier this summer wasn't generating enough revenue. recently there was a datastore operation 'anomaly' that lasted twenty-two hours, at the beginning of which the cpu costs associated with certain common data api calls more than tripled. and it has remained that way, without explanation, despite numerous inquiries by gae developers.

gave up on yet another forum. most people don't seem to really want help, they're there for some other reason. a lot of people seem to need help, though. i am not your online therapist. anyway, one to go. and maybe the game one, too.

i was reading a story of poul anderson's the other day in a largely forgettable and forgotten scifi anthology i found at the internet archive. It (the anthology) is still decent reading, containing a few classics, and now carries a bit of historical interest as well, in terms of its contemporary contextual cultural referents.

anderson's story "the man who came early" is about a modern u.s. soldier stationed in reykjavic who is mysteriously thrown 1000 years into the past. the story proceeds from the perspective of the icelandic chieftain that finds him. vintage anderson work, in the historical detail, mood and characterization.

and it's - depressing. the soldier's modern skills, even those he thought were archaic, are useless. not too long ago i was reading a thread on some forum somewhere about "what would you do if you were thrown a thousand years into the past". and in among the usual silliness, there were a number of folk who realized, yes, most modern humans would be largely useless in that situation, and they would be doing well if they could just keep their mouths shut, avoid getting immediately killed, and survive through performing hard labor in exchange for the charity of necessities provided by a contemporary inhabitant. there may be some extraordinary individuals who could thrive in that context; seems doubtful.

and no, my thoughts don't stop there. but this post does.

feeds: not an information promiscuant (huh?)

fractalnavel — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:27:16 GMT

rss: i don't subscribe to much, and most aren't very long term, being related to transient interests, but here's a few that i find useful in various ways. copy / save / import the opml in your favorite feed reader, if you care to.

<opml version="1.1">
    <head>
        <title>fractalnavel feeds</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <outline text="ACME Updates" xmlUrl="http://www.acme.com/updates/updates_rss2.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="AWS  Product Advertising API" xmlUrl="http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/rss/rssmessages.jspa?forumID=9" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Backreaction" xmlUrl="http://backreaction.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="ClubOrlov" xmlUrl="http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google Analytics Blog" xmlUrl="http://analytics.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google App Engine Blog" xmlUrl="http://feeds.feedburner.com/GoogleAppEngineBlog" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google App Engine Downtime Notify Google Group" xmlUrl="http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine-downtime-notify/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Google App Engine Google Group" xmlUrl="http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/feed/rss_v2_0_msgs.xml?num=50" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Michigan Tech University Jobs" xmlUrl="http://sowacs.no-ip.com/rss/scraped_rss.aspx?src=mtujobs" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="NCZOnline" xmlUrl="http://feedproxy.google.com/nczonline" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Peter's Blog" xmlUrl="http://peter.michaux.ca/feed/atom.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Planet OLPC" xmlUrl="http://planet.laptop.org/atom.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="Predictably Irrational" xmlUrl="http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?feed=rss2" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="The Bottom Feeder" xmlUrl="http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="The Way the Future Blogs" xmlUrl="http://www.thewaythefutureblogs.com/feed/" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="xkcd.com" xmlUrl="http://xkcd.com/rss.xml" type="rss"/>
        <outline text="_The Alternate View_ columns of John G. Cramer" xmlUrl="http://sowacs.no-ip.com/rss/scraped_rss.aspx?src=altview" type="rss"/>
    </body>
</opml>

i have cleaned a few out that are only useful to me administratively.

no, really - that's pretty much it.

no middle ground

fractalnavel — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:43:26 GMT

beginning without ending is neither
ending without beginning is death
after the beginning the void is mere curiosity
before the ending it is infinite unknown

left over garlic bread, toasted & buttered, fresh coffee.
couple hundred pounds of old magazines - gone. more to go.
yahoo: replaced nyt with washington post.
ninety days without tv.
old unread books are that way for a reason.
i am my own bot.

aol: well, at least the _lawyers_ aren't going hungry ...

fractalnavel — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 11:20:00 GMT

a couple of years ago i noticed aol appending advertising to my email, and i sent them a note, and got back nonsense.

now, we get more nonsense in the form of what any reasonable person would have to assume is a pathetic joke - a class action lawsuit over that practice. and here's how the proposed settlement works out:

"... AOL has agreed to pay up to $250,000 in fees and costs, in addition to the $103,000 in charitable donations, and the costs of administering the Settlement, including the notice process. ..."

are you fucking kidding me ?! and it gets better:

"... The Settlement provides that all current AOL Members will be provided e-mail notice of the footers and their ability to discontinue the footers via AOL Keyword: Footer and http://footer.aol.com, and that, if AOL continues to append footers to its Members’ e-mails, such notice will be provided both to all new customers upon their registration of an AOL account and to all current AOL Members on a regular, periodic basis (every six months for two years). ..."

so here's the plan: aol can continue this practice - as long as they spam us even more !

you just know these jackasses are having a good laugh over this one. this shit isn't even pocket change to them.

i went to fight a speeding ticket once. the same sort of mindtwisting bullshit ensued. the cop said i was doing 25 in a 15 zone, for ten over the limit. i said no, the limit was 25 there. the judge said well then, you must have been doing 35, since the cop said ten over. i shut up & stood there. **

assholes.

------------------

** or did the cop say 35 in a 25, i said i was going 25, and the judge said then the speed limit was 15. whatever it was, my head swam as reality shifted.

i made coffee today !!

fractalnavel — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:44:00 GMT

and if you think that's trivial, you clearly hadn't seen my kitchen recently. all it took was a few hours of cleaning sinks, stove tops, counters, dishes, microwave, and stuff, and things, ... so now there's a (mostly) clear floor, and clear counters. still a lot more to do here. step by step, inch by inch ...

motivation ? i got a bag of white castle coffee on my last trip there. dammit, i wanted coffee, and i was going to have coffee - even if it meant cleaning ;-)

dead & dysfunctional thing update rambling:

i found the critter in the garage. the smell had stopped a week or so ago. poor little chipmunk. i need to put a critter door in the garage so any inadvertent captives have a way out. that, or make sure there's always several days supply of water, & perhaps food. i mean, put yourself in the trapped critter's place. jesus.

new router: the expedient thing to do was to cancel the "home wireless networking" package i had subscribed to, and just get the plain ol' cable modem from the store, since otherwise i'd have had to wait for a delivery - they don't stock the one that i had. it was actually very convenient - all in one modem / router / wireless access point. the isp would upgrade the firmware remotely every now & then, which was interesting, because my original 802.11b turned into .11g at some point.

now, i wasn't thinking this thing through. for some reason when i went to get the modem, i thought it would be like my old one, only no wireless - i.e., it would come with firewall & router. and then when i picked up the "wireless router" across the way, i thought it was only going to be a wireless access point. lucky for braindead me, those two mistakes cancelled out nicely. the modem is a plain old modem, and the router is firewall plus five port switch plus wireless (linksys wrt160n, for the geek-curious). which actually put me a bit ahead of the game, as i could retire the plain old switch i had been using.

the nice thing about the old setup was that the only unprotected line was the coax coming into the house. now, the ethernet port out of the modem is also unprotected, which is possible to inadevertently hook up to with an unprotected machine. the other thing i liked about the old device was the dummy lights - more informative than the net total of what i have now. and yes, i used to look over at them quite frequently; it's a reality check along the lines of "ok, nothing is supposed to be accessing the internet right now - so what the hell is that blinking for ?". etc.

pain in the ass reconfiguring again. i duplicated my prior network, which is more work, but this way the individual devices didn't need changing. the xo kept hooking up its wireless mesh networking to the .11n service, which was interesting, but not useful. and then there was the most pathetic hunk of shit software that i've seen in a long time, for its size: that damn auto-setup cvrap that comes with the router - over a gb of sheer uselessness.

on the bright side, i can make better use of opendns now. i still need to run my own dns server since i have a number of internal aliases in use. although - it seems that could be done on the router... hmm.

when i got the orginal "home wireless network" package, they also provided a .11b usb & pci card. i never noticed, but i guess those were outright purchases, since apparently they weren't recorded as leased equipment or anything. not that those things are all that useful now, but in case i (ever) have visitors with laptops & no wireless, those could come in handy.

oh, what else:

was surfing around in the scifi stuff, landed on scalzi's site for a while. remember katrina ? yeah, how soon we forget. well, there was a set of long comment threads on "being poor is ...", with a number of interesting links to other - opinions. something to be absorbed. and more personal motivation.

slowly weaning myself from the last couple of tech forums; these i've been frequenting since may. i had already called it quits on a couple of others that i had hung around on for quite some time. trying to put this summer's project(s?) on auto / unattended mode. this will leave me with one ocassional recreational forum, which i enjoy, actually.

mmm, coffee - second cup ;-)

my other brain is in the shop

fractalnavel — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 21:37:43 GMT

been running across some really good scifi short stories & related items in online collections lately, thought I'd pass on a few:

they're made out of meat - terry bisson: classic, apparently; pretty straightforward. fermi's paradox solved - one way.
the singularity - t. bisson: (essay) what i've been saying for years - hey, people - it's all over ! and the bit about collective infinite regress navel gazing as well (of course).
a canticle - t. bisson: (story background) bisson's comments on the completion of miller's "canticle" sequel. whets one's appetite, all right.
tva baby - t. bisson: holy cvrap. surreal violence, or violent surrealism ? your choice. personally, i think the whole thing is in his head. or mine.
the things that make me weak and strange get engineered away - cory doctorow: doctorow's themes seem to stay consistent. this has echoes of all kinds of classics. very nice, a few plot & dialog inconsistencies, though. computer style geek ? this one will resonate.
understand - ted chiang: mind blowing. pun? what pun? i can remember a story with a similar theme but completely different context; lost in the mists of memory, ironically. got a few sigma under your hat ? then you'll "get" this.
we haven’t got there yet - harry turtledove: if you like theater & especially shakespeare, you'll love this. very high quality work. well, of course, look who's done writing.
--and he built a crooked house - robert heinlein: an old crusty classic from an old crusty classic.

many more here (where those came from):

the old scifi.com shorts collection - classics & originals, from the internet archive's wayback machine. there are apparently more than is listed; the heinlein one above, from this site, doesn't show up here.
tor.com stories online - i was surprised to run into these, on a publisher's site. some (most?) have audio available.
infinity plus - huge collection of authors & stories.
and don't forget 365 tomorrows - daily scifi short shorts for several years now, has outdone itself.

electronics? _what_ electronics?

fractalnavel — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:21:35 GMT

from: the depths of the dust bunny graveyard in the land of dysfunctional devices
to: perhaps not-so-interested parties
via: dial-up (woohoo! we're blazin' now!)
subject: update on internal landscaping; circle of life; and, wtf?

message follows.

not sure what's with roadrunner lately. for the last several months it seems every little rainstrom drops my cable modem connection. for years this was only a rare event. then yesterday evening, after some storms passed through, same thing. the poor little modem went through it's usual frantic gyrations to call home. except this time, after about an hour of trying, poof - all lights went to black. trying power cycling, only the ethernet indicator light comes on for a few seconds, then goes away. no power light. modem is hot, so is the power supply. i'm thinking, dead supply. well, ok, there's something to be said for consistency - now everything is useless in this place - tv, self, modem, washer, dryer, ... whatever it is better not be contagious. on second thought - too late.

self has been doing a little bit better, though. removed six thirty+ gallon trash cans of beer bottles over the last week. plus two little recycle bins full. sad that they won't take the contents of the trash cans for recycling too. it would take months to get rid of all the bottles in that puny little bin. it cowered in the corner when it saw the task that lay ahead, so the trash cans and i took pity on it. when will they make recycle bins for dedicated beer drinkers / bottle hoarders ? whaddya mean, "no demand" ?

found seven mini-kegs in the rubble. those are gone now too.

the newly freed dust bunnies have been attacking my toes. i mean, perhaps they are just trying to show their gratitude for their new found liberty, providing nice, soft, gritty instant felt slippers as they tend to do, but i find this unnecessary in the summer. i have had to walk outside fairly frequently to clean my feet. glad it had rained; no telling what the neighbors would have thought had they seen the fuzzy footprints on my driveway.

anyway, back to the dead modem - remember the dead modem ? well, i called support after laughing at their online live chat feature sputter incoherently as it tried to load over a dial-up connection. the nice young lady on the phone actually seemed to know what she was doing, and - biggest surprise, come to think of it - she was a local person. either that, or they've started giving excellent american regional accent & micro-geography lessons overseas. after giving me the location of their nearest store where i could trade in the broken modem for a working one, she mentions that she was there the other day, and that the store is between a maternity shop and a victoria's secret. i found this hilarious, and she didn't get why. not really something you explain to strangers over the phone. clearly a young'un, this one. she had called my modem "old" at four years (i still think it's five), and she had not seen this type often before. her youth was not shown so much by her lack of familiarity with somewhat aged equipment (heh), but by the lack of temporal context exhibited in her comments.

continuing on through the piles just a bit, i managed to open some birthday & christmas cards & gifts from the last year or two. thank god there was nothing perishable that would have evolved into something alive. i had my trusty letter opener ready, though - just in case. oh - and thanks, everyone ;-)

speaking of life, something seems to have died in my garage, at least if one can go by smells on this sort of thing. damned if i can find it though, and that's the cleanest space here. well, whatever it is, it will eventually mummify and stop stinking. like last time...

at first i thought maybe jeep was, you know, having - issues - so i pulled out all the carpets and scrubbed those for the first time in years, then took him down to the power wash for a bit of attention: engine, interior, underbelly, everything. strange, though, how that mummified bat stuck to the middle of the radiator just won't come off, even under xxx psi of water pressure. (yeah, most vehicles get insects; jeep gets bats.)

but no, whatever the smell is still remained. i'm afraid to look too hard, though. a few weeks ago the neighbor was worried about her missing cat...

well, that's about it for now. still a lot to do. time to go pick up that new modem.

end of message.

feedhub spyware ? - NOT

fractalnavel — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:36:00 GMT

update:
all right, this was a big doh! moment. while puzzling over this particular item i had forgotten about my published browsing history feed, which normally i keep pretty constantly aware of. i was just not making the connection for some reason. so it's not so much that something here is calling feedhub, it's just feedhub having a reference to that history feed - which, through a feedhub - newsgator connection, i may have inadvertently created myself.

how did i discover this, you may ask ? well, it wasn't me - someone at feedhub is apparently suscribing to one or more blog search feeds for their product (i'm guessing), and my post showed up, and they promptly sent me an email explaining the above. i needed to have considered that someone (me, or anyone) could have been using feedhub with that feed.

so, out of fairness to feedhub, and the desire to spread humor even if it's ay my own expense, i have updated this post. so there.
caveat moron.

strangest thing. i've been running a new website this summer on google app engine, providing a niche webservice. it has been seeing significant usage, so i've been keeping a close eye on things in case the gae free quotas are approached.

at times when looking at one of the server log analyzer reports, i notice a particular user agent: "FeedHub MetaDataFetcher". only sporadic access by this, and very low volume, it shows up under unknowns. i haven't bothered to categorize it as bot access, or a user of the service yet, since i haven't been able to associate it with a particular account's behavior.

and then, strangely, i saw an address showing up on another report, one that only appears on a page that only i personally should have access to, on an https only page, and only when i'm logged in [only, for good measure]. and no, it wasn't me using it - it was the feedhub bot. what the hell ?

i had used the link once, five hours before, while testing, from my primary machine. so how did feedhub get hold of it ? that page can't be accessed by bots - externally. the clincher is that i found the feedhub bot accessing another similar link - one which i had only created manually & pasted in the browser address bar.

so something must be on my own system - and i don't mess with shady apps on this box. i try and be very careful about what i install, where i browse, and i always have (that damn resource sucking) anti-virus & firewall software running. ok, it's been a while since i've run specific anti-spyware software, but the completely up to date version of av that i'm running is supposed to take care of that too.

a brief search around the web reveals no mentions of this sort of feedhub behavior; it seems not to be associated with malware in any way. but i've never used their rss aggregating product. the only rss software i've used on this box is was newsgator, which i've long since stopped running, and windows live mail. and then there's that kludgey msfeedsync process that runs as part of ie8 & integrates with live mail.

but there's no particular reason this situation would necessarily be associated with an rss reader (although it seems most likely). checking browser add-ins - google toolbar is most notable, and a few bookmarklet scripts - nothing looks remotely suspicious.

something pretty clearly is calling back to feedhub when i access links to xml files, and then the feedhub bot goes & crawls them. i only noticed when the link in question happened to be on my own site. maybe i can catch this with some sort of netmon tool. kind of a bitch to do, and i'm only making assumptions about its behavior, which, if wrong, will mean i don't even know where to start looking.

so: how long has this been going on, and why, and how can i stop it ? and what else might be happening that i don't know about ?

damned unknown unknowns.

and this week's "wtf?!" award goes to - yahoo!

fractalnavel — Fri, 15 May 2009 20:54:10 GMT

there's someone i'm interacting with that i want to (continue to) use my fractalnavel identity with, and i remembered i had a yahoo account. so i send myself a test message there - and find the following:

well, surprise, surprise... "mail plus", eh ? you betcha there's money involved:

wasn't yahoo mail another one of those full service, free account deals ? well, if it was, it sure isn't anymore.

we're moving backwards, folks.

money - goood; mistakes - baad

fractalnavel — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:50:10 GMT

so i get a slightly thick envelope in the mail from the irs. never a good sign.

or so i think. it seems i made a mistake on my return - forgot to include a "Recovery Rebate Credit". what the hell is that ? "that" is $600, according to the treasury dept. huh - ok - works for me.

but how did this happen ? i used an online tax preparer, been using the same one for years, never any problems. now, missing $600 ? shouldn't that have been done automatically ? or, if it needed my intervention, shouldn't a big red flag have been thrown to bring my attention to work that needed doing ?

eh, no biggie, since this is one of those things that the irs says it will calculate for you if you leave it alone. and sure enough, they did. and in a very timely manner too.

they also managed to calculate my penalty for late / missing quarterly estimated payments. which was the same amount i had already calculated & paid. cool. yeah, i was just not sure how much i would work last year, so i let some of that stuff slip. and i could have saved a few bucks by using an annualized income method, but that would have taken extra mailing & potential discussions with the irs - something worth a few dollars to avoid.

and in a separate envelope - the check. dang, our tax dollars at work.

potter three, redux

fractalnavel — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:51:03 GMT

well, looky here, we're going to try again:

Sun, 3 May 2009 00:00:00 UTC
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)
******

[141 minutes]

PG

this after just over a year ago it was pulled from the schedule at the last minute. never did find out what had happened there. well, we'll see. at least it appears on today's schedule this time.