Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

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Hosts file for ad blocking

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

This is my updated anti-advertising / anti marketing hosts file for my windows machine. You can import it into your windows machine by using HostsMan available here.

Please note that if you are using Windows 7 or Vista, it is highly recommended that you allow HostMan to disable the DNS Client (DNS Caching) service after installing this hosts file and reboot. If you do not, a hosts file as large as the one below may considerably slow down your machine.

Right Hand Click on this link and do a “Save Target As”:
HOSTS.txt

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Unexpected Downtime

Monday, June 28th, 2010

Well, it seems that the upgrade of Apache on my box did not go as planned. Pretty much everything, and all dependencies had to be rebuilt from scratch. So, it was a bit of a process.

Well… We’re back up and running now, so what’s been up….

Work was insane for the last couple of months, but it’s quieted down in recent weeks. I’m actually getting a bit of time to work on personal stuff, and catch up on paperwork and the ole tax thing, which is a bit of a mess frankly. The simple truth is that I’m behind in filing because quite frankly, I can’t afford to pay them what they want and still keep a roof over my head. The business has been brutal over the last couple of years. Expected payments weren’t there, we had to lay off staff, and every damn extra penny got grabbed by one damn emergency or another. So it’s been trying. Now, that I’m not hemmoraging cash so quickly, mostly cause I’m completely out of it (lol) I thought I’d get caught up on the paperwork and see how bad it’s gonna be.

Well, the accountant is bad enough. Its $2400 bucks for them to file everything, which pretty much means that I’m absolutely penniless for the next month, and that’s BEFORE I deal with Rev Can. This so serious sucks. 10 years in the IT business and all I have to show for it is an increasing debt load to the government. *sigh* Well, I’m gonna try to keep some humor about it. At least I have a roof over my head, most of the gear I need to get things done, and I’m starting to get some time to do creative projects, like more painting and some audio work. I’m just hoping that I can get them to make a bit of money over the next while, cause I’m gonna need it!

I’ll be posting the latest projects in the next day or so.

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Another monday morning hacker attack

Monday, March 16th, 2009

Goddamn monday mornings suck lately.

Couldn’t get to sleep until 5:30 am – tossing and turning. 6 am I get a call for emergency. Same as last fucking monday, and the monday before, and the monday before… DDOS attack on apache. Of course, it’s still running, and the CPU usage is trivial, and all other services are running, and it returns requests eventually… So the crap monitoring service didn’t detect anything wrong…. So on a 1/2 hour of sleep, I’m trying to trace down the fucking origin IPs and block all of them, their ISPs and their friends ISPs… all the while customers are phoning me and yelling… God I hate mondays.

I have no idea why we’ve become a weekly target. The pattern suggests that someone is trying to fuck with one of our customers, but to what end I have no fucking idea. All I know for sure is that once or twice a week some fucker floods port 80 with junk from a few dozen new IPs, which I have to track down and block, and then spend the rest of my day doing due dilligence and filing complaints with unresponsive ISPs overseas who frankly just don’t give a fuck.

Now if I was just able to block all traffic from certain countries… Sadly, we have customers who work with reps in those countries, and thanks to DHCP and the universal presence of poorly secured windo$e computers…

There really is fuck all I can do but take the punch inna nuts first, block it and wait until it starts up again.

*sigh*

Explaining this stuff to a customer and how there is no magic bullet you can use to solve the problem is pointless. They just don’t get it, and even if they did, they just don’t care.

Not a lotta fun on an 1/2 hour of sleep lemme tell ya.

Man, I gotta find a way to get more sleep on Sunday nights. Nothing seems to work though. Sleeping pills, warm milk, regulated bed times, health supplements…. Maybe eating a whole turkey every Sunday….

Blarg. Maybe I can play hookey for an hour this afternoon and get a nap.

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Posted in Rants, Tech, Work | No Comments »

Japanese Robot Turns Psycho Stalker.

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

http://gear.ign.com/articles/959/959790p1.html

Now this would be an interesting twist on the terminator franchise. heh.

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Posted in Links, News Articles, Odd and Unusual, Tech | No Comments »

Killzone 2 Review

Saturday, February 28th, 2009

As far as shooters go, Killzone 2 is pretty fucking awesome so far. Picked it up today on a lark. I’ve got a bunch of other games in progress, but it’s from a great studio and is a PS3 only game, so it’s optimized for the hardware.

It’s pretty intense. You’re under heavy fire pretty much from the game start, and the AI is pretty damn good as far as such things go.

The story line and gameplay is a little bit quake4 / resistance 1amp;2, and what the fuck is it with all the goddamn baddies in world war II looking german stormtrooper outfits these days? Was there some sort of sale on 3d wireframe models of world war II material recently?
Well, despite a suspicous lack of any originality, it rather makes up for it with well designed, action oriented levels, and just about the best graphics work in a PS3 title that I’ve seen. So, I can forgive it for being a little less than original considering that they may have done the ‘same old thing’, but they’ve done it much better than anyone else. In fact, graphically speaking, it may be the best title I’ve seen on a console to date. Well… MSG4 might compare, but the interminable cutscenes in that game started to annoy me by the end, so minus 4 million points for clubbing us to death with a story that nobody cared about after about 20 fucking minutes…

But I dirgress… Killzone 2 is a great next gen shooter, and engaging enough to keep even us jaded old bastards that have seen everything, playing into the wee hours of the morning.

Considering that some of the current PS3 titles rival the best of the PC games and there isn’t so much as a dropped frame or any image tearing on my big screen flat panel, it’s an impressive piece of work.

(And to all you M$ fanboys… Don’t even talk to me about the travesty of technology that is the 360. Sorry to the fanboys, but if you didn’t learn your lesson with the first one, and expect the second one to actually work… well… you had it coming.)

So, I’m about 10% of the way through the game in the first couple hours, which is telling. I’m expecting that the single player game is probably going to be pretty short. I suspect that this is going to be a real winner for multiplayer however. The controls are sane and easy to master, leaving you to the fine task of actually trying to thing your way through levels and executing your plans, instead of screaming at your TV and throwing your controller at the nearest wall – such as in the battlefield series.

Seriously, what 32 fingered ADD whackjob thought up those controls. If it wasn’t for some stellar graphics work, the game would be my candidate for coaster of the year. Sadly however, that honour has to go to Overlord. Now that… that game just… sucked. No… sucked is such a weak word. Mind you, that abortion of a game called ‘The Force Unleashed’ is a close competitor. Lucas Arts, you should be ashamed. Call it what it it – super mario jedi and be done with it.

I’m gonna go play Need For Speed undercover for a while now.

Posted in Reviews, Tech, Video Games | No Comments »

Coraline Review, and Ibex Sucks

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Meh…. Ibex wouldn’t recognize the new raid controller config, so the update went very wrong. Between scouring newsgroups and reading up on kernel patches it took me until 2 am to get my system back to where I wanted it, only to discover that my carefully crafted bluetooth hacks to get my fancy ass keyboard and mouse working all went to hell. I gave up and went to bed.

Saw Coraline in 3D yesterday. It was fun. Not the best movie to be sure, but still quite fun. A little too nerf’ed for my taste, but then again, they really were aiming at kids with this. It’s sad, but so much good fantasy and horror gets nerfed for consumption by kids, and I don’t see why. ‘s not like the nightly news isn’t a horror show all by itself, and children are already little monsters. The whole point of grimms tales was to scare the pants of kids and make ‘em think twice before running off into the woods alone with a stranger, or eating a magical mushroom.

Coraline is actually a pretty spooky book. It reads more like a ghost story than any sort of animated romp. But I wasn’t expecting the movie to live up to it. I was however dissapointed in how nerfed it actually got. And what the fuck was with the addition of the boy? He had no point whatsoever in being in the damn movie.

Artificial injection of a love interest in a children’s movie?

Dear gods, please deliver me from markters.

3d was pretty good tho. N33t.

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Posted in Life, Movies, Reviews, Tech, Work | No Comments »

10 Years Uptime Comes to An End

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Well, it’s the end of an era. My personal NetBSD server, the one with an uptime of almost 10 years, finally died an ignoble death yesterday. The HDD finally died, probably because of a faulty IDE controller. She’s dead.

:(

Kali
RIP
1998 – 2008
I’m gonna try to rebuild, but it won’t be the same. The ole girl was a true friend.

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This raid controller rocks!

Friday, February 20th, 2009

This raid array is pretty smokin. I needed new storage the other day, so I bought me a stack of 1 TB disks on sale from NCIX, stuck em into my box, and put ‘em into a raid 5 configuration. It took a bit of fucking around to move the windo$e installation onto ‘em (thankfully robotcopy is on the vista installer disk), but the NIx stuff, as always was pretty easy.

Getting it to play nice with the OS’s however… that was a bugger. I wanted to make sure that my block size boundary and my stripe boundarys were the same (or rather 2x) so that any write would line up perfectly and reduce the number of operations required to keep parity data up to date. That way my write speed wouldn’t be crippled, as is all to common under windows when using raid 5.

Well, much to my chagrin, Windo$e doesn’t wanna boot from an NTFS volume with a 64k allocation unit size, so using a 32 k stripe was outta the question. So it took a bit of fucking around to get a good combination and multiplier, and tuning the onboard controller, and one hell of a lot of time rebuilding the array.

Well, it finally all worked out. I’ve been checking things out with diskbench, and I’m getting 180mb write a second burst, 228-330 mb / second sustained (depending on fragmentation), and a whopping 1180mb/second read on a 3 TB filesystem. Fucking cool.

I got to thinking that back inna day, when I was at Portal, the entire net content, whether via usenet, the web, gopher, archie (yeah, I’m actually that old. One of the few that ever did IP networking while the net was still only university and government), etc – the combined filesize of everything, – the whole lot of the net – was estimated to be a whopping 2.6 TB. Less storage than I have on my home computer now. The amount of contiguous storage I have here under LVM would have cost billions of dollars just 10 short years ago.

It just amazes me sometimes.

To think that when my 13 year old self upgraded my TRS80 to 32k of RAM, and bought a 128k floppy reader, I thought that it was more storage and ram than I could ever use in my life. *lol* We now have games that take up more storage than all of Norad had available until the early 90s.

Now think of all that storage for all those servers online… just for advertising and porn… lol.

Posted in Reviews, Tech, Uncategorized, Work | 12 Comments »

Wonder if I Could Build A Full Spectrum Light

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

found full spectrum ‘sunlight’ LEDs online. Very cool, and only 1.38 each. Problem is that the minimum order is 100. Hmmmm….

You see, I had this crazy idea for a blue umbrealla that shone sunlight down on the person using it. I figure that if I can’t find sunny skies during the rainy season here, well by the gods, I’ll make ‘em myself.

A decent bright blue umbrella, an altra light 6v Rechargeable Lithium Ferrous Polymer power source, about 4 bux worth of components to make a driver, a bunch of the right kind of LEDs and some waterproof tubing… I can make my own personal localized sunny day.

So talking with the dad today about law courses. I’m starting to have the time now, if not the money, and have been seriously looking into it. He’s got the contacts and resources to help out, still having some pull in that area, so we chatted a bit about it today. It has to be night courses and I can realistically only do three days a week right now, but it’s a start. Every damn day I find more and more cases where I need to navigate the treacherous waters of law in order to conduct my daily business. However, amongst lawyers in this country there are jack shit who know anything about science or tech, and the few that do are priced way the fuck outta my range. Its actually cheaper to try to get a degree. Seriously, I’m not kidding. lol. It’s also pretty much a requirement for some of the other things I want to try to do.

I can’t see myself practicing law as a carreer, I’m a tech to the bone. However, to land really the big projects, especially in biotech, and to have the chance to work on cutting edge stuff a law degree or an MBA in addition to math and comp sci is vital.

Who knows though. I could get halfway through and discover that I love it, or maybe decide that in fact I’d rather take up bungee jumping with monofilament. Guess I won’t know until I try.

So, I’m doing the getting tran

The only thing that I’m a bit concerned about really is that historically I tend not to like lawyer types. I think there’s probably a pretty big difference between some privileged kid taking law to be a rich lawyer, and someone who’s taking it because they need it to develop an existing business they spent the last 10 years building. Also, crazy hair, and a tendancy to wear a lot of black leather probably won’t endear me to a flock of 20 something preppies. It seems minor, but spending your nights, or having to work on projects with people you can’t stand can be really frustrating.

Well, I gotta return some calls before 5. off I go.

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Crysis kicks ass – If you have the hardware to play it.

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

Crysis kicks ass once you have hardware fast enough to play it. Jeez… It took a year for the hardware to catch up to the game. it was dissapointing at first, but now I finally can see what they heck they were aiming for. hands down the most visually rich and stunning game ever. holy crap.

Seeing as the rain has been chasing me inside, and I’ve read and studied till I was blue in the face, and there is only so much time you can spend in the gym every week, I’ve been replaying all my old games with the new hardware. Some seriously dope shit in some of the games that was waiting for hardware to catch up with them.

Can’t wait for COD5. Got kinda bored with COD4.

Well, I think I’m off to bed right away. ‘s gonna be a busy few weeks what with VIFF and all. Need my beauty sleep. Well, if not beauty, then at least my ‘less grumpy’ sleep.

Have I mentioned recently that I think Grant Morrison is a f*ing genius?

Posted in Life, Tech, Uncategorized, Video Games | No Comments »

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