One of my favorite Firefox extensions I have been using for a year and a half is called Foxmarks. Foxmarks is a bookmark synchronizer that keeps your different Firefox installs all updated with the same set of bookmarks. For me there is nothing more frustrating than not having that one cool link you saved on your computer at home and for the life of me, can’t remember how or where I got it to begin with.
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Tag Archive: software
Last summer I had it with HP support. My first dealings with them proved to be successful back in 2006, but something terrible has happened since. My brother who lives in Oregon needed help with getting his HP PC up and running after it had been infested with “Internets”. I felt bad that I instructed him to to re-partition his box without checking with him first if he had his OEM cd’s. Okay… secretly I wanted to get him to use those LiveCD’s I sent him the year prior; just kidding, but that was what was left for him at that time.
So I ordered him his OEM CDs next day on a Friday in 2006. Naturally he doesn’t get them until Monday. All must have been well since; I don’t recall to be honest. He says he was able to get the box back to where it was without using the CD’s. A year later he has the same problem but the CD’s fail on the last CD. I suspect it is damaged, but he cannot continue. I call HP and ask for a new set to replace the defective CD’s.
An afternoon in Hell is what I spent on the phone trying to get to the right department. After countless pass-offs and a couple dropped calls, I finally get a native English speaking gal thinking I’m gonna get this one real soon now. But no she can’t find my original order of which I had the emails for still. Evidently they decided to just dump all previous orders from an older database without cross-referencing to the new.
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Day one cleared up all the FUD! Kids are happy, wife is happy, I’m happy. I really didn’t doubt the outcome. Am glad for it to have been received so well. It is key to get them to sit down and just use it.
My wife discovered her card games and much more. The kids have yet to discover any of the installed games; they just played on their Webkinz site. I finally sat down as well to look at a few of the bazillion games. I first got a little gitty when I saw Doom and how well it performed. It brought back memories of college days. I knew instantly how much better it is now compared to the 386/486 machines we originally played it on. Looking forward to Heritic the same way. I wonder if Decent is available?
I have a 3D graphics card but have yet to install the closed source driver. I need some pointers… Scott, you know what card I have… give me some tips! Will be sweet when I get Beryl going with this too!
I also took a peek at an emulator. Don’t recall the name, but apparently it only works with a select few games and providing you have the data files/CD. More for some older role playing games. Still interested in using wine or other suggested emulator.
Friday I decided to finally get caught up with the latest Gaim IM. I’m using FC5 most of the week while at work. I had been using the latest stable 1.5 RPMs. The past couple weeks for me have been a hassle with requests for authorization and tons of spam/bots from foreign lands. For some reason my privacy setting would never stick for ICQ and MSN accounts. Even if I set them for the current session, the spam bots seem to get through still. Who knows! Maybe it’s just because I authorized so many already. So this is one of the reasons I looked for a newer version even if it’s still beta.
Some other background into understanding what I have been struggling with first. I had been using a couple other yum repositories known not to be compatible with others out there. I used them because the current Fedora repositories were not supplying what I needed for mplayer. So lots of newer development libraries were installed on my system. More and more I had been running into conflicts so last week I decided to find the packages I installed and uninstalled/re-installed the Fedora versions after taking the mentioned alternate repositories out. That project went rather well.
After starting to compile Gaim, I found a few more problems with newer existing libs that prevented other needed libs. I had to uninstall those and simply yum install them again.
Compiling Gaim is rather straight forward and was satisfied. Gaim-encryption was another story. After getting all the devel libs all straightened out, I was faced with this:
checking for GAIM… configure: error: Package requirements (gaim) were not met:
No package ‘gaim’ found
Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.Alternatively, you may set the environment variables GAIM_CFLAGS
and GAIM_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.
I tried a few different things to help it find Gaim but got my best tip from the Ubuntu forums folks. Find the gaim.pc file and set the path to it as in:
./configure PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
The Ubuntu folks had stated it as:
PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/gaim-2.0.0beta3/lib/pkgconfig ./configure –prefix=/opt
I’m sure this would work in this order too.
I have done this many times following various instructions when installing perl modules but for the most part they all tell you to:
download > extract > cd into extracted dir perl Makefile.PL make make install
I remember there was an easier way that went out and fulfilled all dependencies but I could never remember because I just followed the README file. Today I read a post where at least a couple folks gave the same instructions I recalled using:
perl -MCPAN -e shell install modulename
Much easier!
UPDATE:
Another poster made another good suggestion of keeping with RPMs. Once you have exhausted your means to find an RPM of the module by using existing repositories either stock for most popular or repos like dag for other minor modules. If you then didn’t find your module there and want to continue with RPM you could use cpanflute2 to convert from the CPAN tar files into RPMs. It’s in the perl-RPM-Specfile package, which you should be able to install via yum.. However I have not used this and rarely find myself insisting on RPM’s in every situation. The only service I see this providing is a quick clean removal if necessary.
Damn those company computer guys! 
I came into work this morning about 10 and load up my VMware Player running FC5 via USB and fire up CAD or other work apps as usual. I tinkered around in a report program called LogPlot that generates graphical logs of dill logs. I hadn’t done more than a half hours worth of work and I notice a window pop up showing a progress bar and two buttons: Reboot Now and a disabled Reboot Later button (Similar to shown but this one is from a more recent one). Not thinking much of it for probably 30 seconds, I decide “well I better start shutting VMware down just in case as you never know.” Besides I wanted a clean shutdown since this runs off my USB drive.
The progress bar got to the end and I half expected the “Reboot Later” button to become available but it didn’t and I started seeing the usual flickering of icons disappearing. Crap! I’m pissed! This wasn’t critical but could have been. So I decided to send IT a bitch email:
I just want to respond to whomever rolls out the workstation updates that I lost about a half hours work just now because I was unable to choose the “Reboot Later” button as it was disabled. Yes I briefly saw the message and assumed it was doing the installs and that the reboot later button would become available after the install. The lost work was not critical and can be redone quickly, but my point is that you need to loosen the grip and give us the chance to save. We are not all sitting at our desks to see these things just pop up out of the blue.
Thanks for your consideration,
Normally they are quick to respond but not this time. Will see what if any response they might have. IMO, they behave as if IT is what makes the company our primary business. I know company IT guys often get brushed off as not important, but in my position as a CAD guy, I generally look up to my superiors being scientists and engineers, not the IT guy. I’ll have to blog again to give a better insight as to why I have such a bitter stance with my own company’s IT guys later.
In a second attempt to establish a secure connection to our original Orinoco wireless network yesterday afternoon, I made some advancements but one fatal blow had to be thwarted. The fact this AP1000 is rather ancient from 2001 era, its technology was pretty proprietary. Only other Orinoco clients would be able to connect if I enabled WEP security. I don’t know everything about HEX key security, but Orinoco seems to think one can just convert a passphrase by hand with their key code chart provided in the help documents!?! Okay so provided I used this, all is fine with other Orinoco cards but no way to fake this with a Liksys card which IMO uses true HEX security. Using the same passphrase and automatically generating the 26 character HEX does not even come close to what Orinoco would have you use. Even if I manually enter the Orinoco version… no go. So what do ya do? Replace it with a WAP11 running for $70 now! So I had a shop guy hoist me up in a cage to access the old chrome dust infested AP and replaced it with the WAP11. Even the Orinoco clients can connect to this with WEP enabled! Just need to enter the 26 character HEX manually is all. Unfortunately the furthest user continues to have 48% power. So my next plan is to find a booster which is what we already have on the other wireless network at both ends.
First thing this morning I thought it was going to be a printer hell day. First the wife of my boss calls with problems printing on their all-in-one HP printer. Seems that it just needed a reboot. I’m wondering if she thinks logging out is the same as a reboot. So now I think I may have found a better solution… but not as effective if ignored. I changed the Windows updates to download but prompt for installation rather than install automatically. I’m guessing that it installs and requires a reboot that in was not prompting for when nobody was logged in. So I guess as long as they don’t simply ignore the requests now. Time will tell. Secondly the boss calls just as I hang up with his wife with printer problems. It was printing only the header of the emails and stopping without ejecting the remainder of the page. Who knows! I do a power cycle there and run a print test.
While out running errands today when I picked up that AP, I also picked up a card reader for the boss. He wanted me to pick up the card reader from his home office while out at that end of town. So anyway it was nice to have it work without using the CD to install it. I just needed to run through showing him how to send photos as attachments through email.
Got my receipt for an upcoming Security Conference! This will surly be fun. I will get to see some of my old instructors from my CAD days out there at the college. I was grateful to know that the boss is all for extending my knowledge in security issues. I had no resistance what so ever in selling this to him in getting his approval. This conference will primarily be a Microsoft solution style but… several of us from the Linux community have banded together to come to this. To date we are not a part of their speaker/seminars, but who knows, they may have some sort of open forum discussion to attend. I ordered a couple shirts to wear during this too. Nothing offensive. Just a Tux patch on one and a work shirt with a “31337″ patch. Surly to loose enough there I’m sure! Rocky had the first Security Conference a few years ago I helped out with and we had quite the turnout. Wanted to have Kevin Mitnick come but he was a bit out of their budget. However they did get Marty Roesch, the father of Snort and Kevin Fenzie a well known security consultant from Colorado based Tummy.com. Not to mention several local computer guys in the area.
Finally getting around to posting today. Was meaning to do all kinds of things the past couple days but time keeps slipping by.
Loading up my usual tabs in Mozilla, I noticed my family photo gallery site was running rather slow. Then I notice that there was 8 guests on the site! My poor little server! The load was rather low tho around 0.37 at times. It was my upload on the cable modem that was the bottleneck. Turns out that some web forum was on to a couple of my photos of the World Trade Center and Baghdad. They were not my photos for sure… I had run into them while carousing through someone’s FTP site. One is 14MB and the other is 16MB. The density of the 14MB photo of the WTC is rather packed. It takes a good CPU to process this size of image. So this forum post was mostly about how their computers either gulped it up or died in the process. Some did complain about how slow it was not really knowing it was from a cable modem. They wrote it off to all of them hitting at once. There was easier ways of finding who the referrence was but I just noticed a ref when I was tailing the access log. So I jumped on their forum and posted a question as to “where the heck did you find these photos?” The poster responded that he noticed it from another forum. They were all rather nice folks… a DSL forum from the UK. The easier less fun way I found the original forum was form the httprefs log from the PostNuke CMS I use. This turns out less posts but more hits. Actually I should recalculate. The second forum seemed to pop in with several different ref pages so I would have to say today’s did make a bigger presence. The first forum hits came yesterday. I didn’t even notice. The fun part was that I discover that the guy who posted the original post yesterday happens to live here in Billings! Now I did show this at our last LUG meeting in January or maybe December. This guy had a birthday on January 14th turning 18. I only know one guy who could have been there but it seemed rather strange from the quality of his posts. Seemed to be Windows type questions and this guy is a hard core Linux guy. So I hesitate to place my bets on him. Will have to update later.
This same guy showed us a cool thing to do with SAMBA clients; smbclient -M . I was going to email him to ask what that was but another friend I had been talking with for most of the day via ysm (ICQ) informed me. What this does after executing the command is lets you type a message then ctrl-d to end and send to a Windows PC. So I popped one off to our receptionist and said “I know what you did last summer!” She immediately ran over knowing it was me since it does say who it was from. She thought it was pretty funny. So I sent the same to our backup receptionist only I added “All your bases are belong to us!” She didn’t respond much to that. However after I confessed, our receptionist remembered that phrase when they both started work there. I sent a couple test faxes to our main fax machine via fax software. The former receptionist seemed a little frazzled so I didn’t want to freak them out too bad. Anyway the receptionist caught onto it and I fessed up to that. So now they probably think I’m really some kind of hack prankster.
Earlier in the day I had been bouncing back and forth between a few projects that for the life of me don’t know what kept me going back and forth. I was troubleshooting that Quickbooks deal and trying to get the wireless connection on the secure AP working. Also trying to get this Orinoco antennae converted to use a SMA connector. I first needed to figure which of the hundreds of connectors I needed. Not sure that will be too easy since I’m sure it will require a special order and some way to crimp it. I think I’ll just get another Linksys card. They seem to have bigger antennae. The Quickbooks deal may be at an end sadly. The install to my bosses laptop failed too. So this means the data is messed up. So unless I can get it wittled down to something like the last 6 months of data, I don’t know if I can help much. However I did find that a new CD for his broken 2003 version could be replaced for $20. I also found some error logs that showed more detail about what errors were repaired during the upgrade. None however show failed attempts to fix the data. Like most of the day went, this paragraph is depicting how I bounced around so much. The wireless AP WEP I had been using before was incomplete. I am male! It was right in from of me when I wrote it down the first time. The dang thing was word wrapped! Who would ever think they would word wrap a 26 double digit form box screen? Linksys.
Well it seems another new virus hit today. Got the first couple form the Boulder LUG list then later they started coming into the company system. Our scanner calls it Worm.YoursID but Symantec calls it by several names W32.Beagle.B@mm mainly. This one seems rather wicked for forging addresses like I have ever seen so not sure what it’s purpose is yet. My guess is that this one was poorly written because they have less random points. You can ban about 4 domains and a handful of known attachments.
Life is getting back to normal. Had a great weekend. Most ppl might not think it was so great. But knowing how good it had been, my family is getting back to its better days again! I do need to get out of my dead-beat Sundays. The past few weeks I have neglected to shower, shave, or brush my teeth on Sundays. Just hanging around the house in my pj’s or previous days clothing. Total laziness! Of course the kids get that way too, but they do that even on the weekdays.
Worked on a friends PC Saturday most of the day. Didn’t need the bootleg Quickbooks CD after all. Turns out his 2004 CD is a full version. I thought this might be an easy one and just uninstall, clean up the directory and reinstall a fresh copy. He did have a working 2003 version on another PC and I got his backed up data restored into this so he at least has that as his backup. There was some bad data integrity found and fixed. I also attempted to condense the data that stretched back to 1998 or so! That was the kicker that took most of the day. But even with the fixed data 2004 wold not work. So I need to do some online forum chatting to find another solution. I also plan to barrow another XP box to test on. Seems he may have had some Windows updates needing to be done as well. However he being on dial-up left me setting it up and leaving for the day.
The bosses 21″ CRT monitor started making strange flickering a couple times this morning. Turns out we got his PC in December of 2000. I think it just went out of warranty. It had an extended warranty even. So a replacement is looking like $450-500. So I talked him into getting a flat panel and putting his PC upright on the floor. Suggesting a 17″ for about $430-450 he opted for a 19″ at $680! Sometimes I think he just waits for others to suggest getting things fixed or upgraded before he does something for himself. He has this old crappy cheap office chair and the arms were all broken up. He finally went out to get a new one and it turned out something was wrong with it. So he returned it and our purchaser ordered a replacement arm for the chair. I assume it was free as they probably send this stuff out as missing parts all the time. So he still has this crappy chair! Don’t know how he does things at home. I think his wife must handle all that kind of detail. It wouldn’t fly with her! Maybe this is a humbling part I need to learn.
Bresnan came with the new cable modem. So I had to run over and get the server refreshed with this. The guy that set it up said he was able to register it with them. But he seemed to insist that I needed to reboot. After I couldn’t get my Linux server to connect outside I humoured him and restarted the server. Still not connecting. By this time another tech came and had me point the browser to their modem and I went through their registration process and all was well. So I’m guessing that there might be some time-out issue that occurs after registering you need to have a connection process happen. Although I have no idea what he did while I was driving over. So now I have USA Digitals cable modem and called their corp. office up to check for any history on them ever replacing our modem. Turns out this is the third modem they have ever registered for us. Now I just hope they will be honest about identifying one of those other two MAC addresses as not theirs. I don’t think we need one anyway, but I just don’t like being ripped off any more. The lesson learned now is that you either be present at all times of tech services or write down all your serial numbers when you purchase these types of equipment. After a couple calls back and forth with USA Digital, we have come to a conclusion! It seems that modem models ending in “R” are retail models. It just so happens that the one we have does have the “R”. A call back later and they concede it must be ours then. Hey at least they had been pretty honest the whole time and not trying to be evil. They probably now have a task at hand to get a db going on their units vs. customer units.
Spent the afternoon creating DNS records for several known big ad trackers such as doubleclick.net and fastclick.net. The zones I have created now point to the machines themselves. By that I mean they point to themselves instead of the real site. Seems to be working. Will have to make sure no error logs are filling up somewhere tho later tomorrow.
Got a call earlier this week from a fellow Christian friend wanting my assistance with his Quickbook troubles. Seems during an upgrade to 2004 software left him with a malfunctioning application. In attempts to go back to the previous version, he snapped the CD in half trying to get it out of the case. Bummer! Talking with Intuit via India, they offered to restore him for around ~$700. So today I have been scouring the net for a bootleg copy somewhere. He at least has the license to make it somewhat legal.
Installed the replacement PC for Building B this morning. Problem is the optical mouse is a USB mouse and there is no USB connector on the PC. Dates this somewhat eh? But hey this Dell smoked the IBM with less of hardware even. Go figure. So I am working together a shopping list. I need a couple mice and a 5 port switch. Optical mice run nice in the dirty place we have here. Need the switch to replace the base 10 hub that connects our conference room and Building B to the LAN. The wireless to Building B is a max 11 anyway but the conference room needs much faster with Made2Manage classes coming in there. It run like a turtle when we had our M2M consultant come in last week and that was with just an educational company.
I tried upgrading the firmware using Internet Explorer and that seemed to do the trick. A bit disappointed that they Linksys might require such a browser to do such a simple task. Oh well I seem to be buying less and less of their products these days anyway. Had two 5 port switches go bad on me in less than a year.
My brother called me last night from the Big House in OR. Sounds like he has picked up some interest in Linux! So I think I will send him a book on this OS. We seem to have a lot of the same passions. Now if he would only open his mind to what the Lord has to say. I sent him a three book series of John Elderidge’s. Mostly for the Wild at Heart book. Never got a chance to ask him about it tho. He just seemed very interested in a lot of security and such for computers. Well so do I but it’s very hard to grasp even at my status.
Thursday mornings I get together with a few guys from our church for breakfast and do a Bible study. We have been reading a chapter a week out of the Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. This is my third time through this book. We often go off on tangents and today’s was on baptism. The oldest in our group seems to be thinking a lot about the purpose for being Born Again as an adult. By this I mean being baptized by water submersion. He, like others in the group was baptized at birth and went through confirmations later in life. Our leader mentioned some one might think this as a scape goat thinking that all I need to do is baptize my kids early and they would be saved automatically. No more worries. Too sad for thinking that way. We all agreed that it’s not required for being saved. I put my thought in saying I did it for two reasons: Worship and as a demonstration of my love for the Lord as a public display. Not as some private back yard hot-tub baptism. I think those who do it that way have a misunderstanding of baptisms purpose. It’s not a form of works! I too was baptized earlier as a child at 8 for the Mormons. I knew at the time I was too immature to understand why I was doing this. So shortly after accepting Christ again back in the Summer of 2001, Kassie and I were baptized again. I denounced the previous baptism based on a disbelief in what I was doing. Besides… my god-parents were split up later in life and were not model godly people. We also spoke about the purpose of god-parents. We don’t do sponsors in our church for dedications or baptism however, but I’m speaking about those churches that do. I often get disgusted when ppl choose ungodly ppl as god-parents for their newborn child. Some even think the purpose is for choosing guardians in the event the parents pass on before the child matures. I find that hardly legal. But today so many ppl choose their cool friends or even their siblings. Not even sure the thought passes their minds as a test. “Do I want these ppl to care for my child after I’m gone?” How does that work anyway if you choose two sisters? Oh the dumb things we humans instill as traditions in our lives!
This afternoon has been fairly productive! Got some petty cash and stopped at the CNC shop to pick up the equipment for USA Digital to cancel the account. Get to their office and find the gal is out to lunch and to return about 2:13PM. That’s just crazy! So I had to pick up a couple switches and a couple mice. Swing through the Arby’s drive thru and get a Jamoca milk shake and back to USA Digital. Had a few minutes to wait yet. Their records state that they own the cable modem! Man oh man! So I get back to the office and try digging up some receipts. No luck. So I figure that with all the troubles we have had with the wireless connections there, they must have switched out our modem with theirs. That could have happened over a year ago. Besides… even if I had the receipt I would need the MAC address to prove. That way they could track down where mine went also. So I called Bresnan to get a leased modem from them before pulling out USA Dig’s. They only charge a $3 lease fee. Besides that Bresnan forgot to not change us the fee anyway. Guess it worked out for him then. So now I have the optical mouse on Building B’s PC and replaced the 10 base hub with the new 100 and bumped the speed for the master port and it’s rocking and rolling!
Tomorrow I need to put my ups in line and test out an old 8mm tape drive out. Just realized it is a 24GB drive! My current one is a 20GB Traven.
