Category: Wottever

Empty Or Not?

From the Department of Insane Hacks

On Halloween, Windows played a dirty Trick on me, so I gave myself a great Treat: I blew Windwoes to hell and installed Debian. Life has been wonderful ever since — but that’s not what this story is about.

Because I like playing World of Tanks, I ended up installing Windows again, but only as a slave chained in a dark little dungeon that I could access when I damn well felt like it. One day, when I had booted into my little slave Windows to play, I wanted to do something Internettish. I opened the portable version of Firefox that was in a shared NTFS partition. Windows blue-screened out.

Something in that portable ffx was deadly. It may have come from an attempt to run it in Wine, or from an update done through ‘nix. At ay rate, it was thoroughly poisoned. I couldn’t run it, couldn’t delete the cache, couldn’t poke my nose into it at all without crashing Windoze. After three bluescreens, I stopped trying. It didn’t knock the virtual Windows over, so I tried to get rid of it from that.

Using Free Commander’s wipe function, I erased — oops, not quite all of it. The “Some files could not be deleted” dialog popped up. I looked. All that was left was a nested directory with NO FILES IN IT. OK, I step away from Windows and take a look with Nautilus. Yep, empty. But I still can’t delete it because it is “not empty.” Bash, what do you see? Nada. No files. It’s EMPTY. No command shows anything, deletes anything, does anything. It is empty, but it is “not empty.” I can even rename the top dir (from “Firefox” to “poison”), but I can’t delete anything!

I get mad. OK, you little SOB, you’re not empty — let’s see what happens if I put a real, visible file in you. Copy, paste. Ha.

Then I up-dir to the root of this odd family of not-emptines and…DELETE the whole shebang. No complaints. It’s gone.

I suspect a wee fukup in the Master File Table. Wottever, it’s just another one of those crazy hax where doing *something* shakes something loose and whothehell cares, it works.

The late perp:
/media/(UUID)/progs/poison/Data/profile/safebrowsing

The hack that wasn’t

I thought I got hacked yesterday. This line of text appeared — with no apparent cause — in a text file that was open but out of sight:

Cracked and cul De SAC and all will have some fun and this one th at a picnic

After finding no clues in any obvious way, I slept on it; modem and router unplugged, of course. Lying under my quilt this morning for some post-pee horizontal thinking, I went over my memories of events in the time between opening the text and being asked if I wanted to save it when I started to close it. The video player behaving oddly while the speech recognition software was still running…. I got up and performed some experiments. Uh-huh. The only hacker was in the movie.

I couldn’t reproduce the exact results, too many environmental variables, but oh teh lulz. That such a near classic neener line could result from a random series of coincidences. Must soak head more often.

The Tao of Budget

My mother once told me I should have a budget. Many years later, I aquired a parakeet, and named him Budget. Unfortunately, I couldn’t keep him….

What is the Tao of Budget?

To take an oversimplified view of the subject, let us say there are two basic types of budgeting: Big-Thingian and Little-Thingian.

Tom Chance is a Little-Thingian. He has some old debts and a few recurring bills. Today, he has a fistful of dollars (insert short snatch of movie theme). It isn’t enough to make a real dent in an old debt, nor is it enough to pay off an impending bill.

But Tom likes to think he’s a positive thinker. Wow, his glass is half full! So he drinks it. Literally.

When all the beer is gone, he still has debts and bills. And no beer.

Ben Buckmaster, a Big-Thingian, also has a fistful of dollars (insert short snatch of movie theme). He has old debts and recurring bills too, and not enough to pay off anything yet. Oh well. He leaves his half-empty glass under the tap. It will gradually fill if the faucet drips, and, if nothing else, it will still be there if he’s thirsty tomorrow. Ben has seen a lot of thirsty tomorrows.

Some days later, both Tom and Ben have found odd jobs that leave them with (insert short snatch of movie theme). Ben now has enough to pay his most pressing bill. He does so, and promises himself that if there’s a bit left over from the next paycheck, he’ll treat himself to a beer.

Tom, however, is in the same place he was before. Enough for beer and pizza, but not enough for child support.

Guess what Tom does. Again.

So…Ben is a negative thinker, right? A pessimist, a Scrooge, a tightwad, no fun. He won’t party because he can’t “loosen up” and forget his problems. Big-Thingians are No. Fun.

Tom is a great guy to hang around with. Too bad he’s in jail right now.

To sum up:

A Little-Thingian budgeter is in constant motion; he spends whatever he has. If it isn’t enough for the Big Things, he spends it all on Little Things.

A Big-Thingian budgeter rests in the Tao. His money grows through his inaction and his bills are paid.

A great Master once said, “It’s the priorities, stupid!”

Buried Treasures

Amazing what one runs across when cleaning out surplus stuff. Also amazing what one never notices until…when one notices it. I rescued this old label some time ago from a box that had been used for storage since whenever. Then it knocked around here and there and was buried, until I dug it up yesterday and scanned it.

Today, I took a close look at the scan image while touching up the color. There it was. The street address of my grandfather’s gas station. Yes, the old postcard that I spoke of here does show it.

I don’t know why the package was sent there instead of to my grandparents’ residence, but it makes a remarkable contribution to my growing collection of digitized memorabilia. In all the stuff I have gone through over the years in this house, it is the only thing I can recall that has that address on it.

Old shipping label
Old shipping label

I’m sure that I will discover more occurrences of the address as the “house arcaeology” progresses — and plenty of other interesting things long shoved aside. I also dread finding them after they have been destroyed by mice, silverfish, and leaky roof. 🙁

Whodunit, IrfanView or the Windwoes Gremlin?

This is not a problem with IrfanView, but it is involved with it.

Something strange happened while I was browsing a folder of old images with some new work being added. There is one TGA file among the JPGs, PNGs, and BMPs. I noticed the image in the thumb viewer and made a mental note to go back to it. When I looked for it again, it didn’t seem to be there. Then I saw that its thumbspace was blank.

In a file manager window it showed the wrong icon, and when opened in IrfanView it was blank. It had been normal only minutes before.

A little investigation showed that the file type designation in the Windows Registry had switched from “IrfanView TGA” to “IrfanView SGI”. (I don’t even have SGI files associated with IV; I don’t have any.)

This must have happened while I was fooling around with the other files, because IrfanView was not blind to the file when I started.

The other odd thing is that after I fixed a few things in the Registry, IV sill did not display the file.

I rebooted to make sure the registry changes would be effective, and something else went weird. The window of a program that runs at startup was not showing. It had to be brought back on screen with a window hacking proggie.

I suspect Windwoes is having me on a bit. That is not a good sign. Is SilentBob getting delusional? Am I going to have to *gasp* kick some file and drive ass? Lordy, I’ve got a lot of gigabytes invested in this Vista monster. 🙁

11-05-21 update — still farked.

Well I’ll be dipped

I have Windows Live Writer sitting around doing nothing. So finally I decide to see if it’s good for anything. Turns out maybe it is. Smile

alienprog

Anyhoo, that’s insomnia for ya.

Oh – drat – of course the bloody thing wants to check my spelling.

Worse than that – the only browser it knows is Idiot Exploder.

0-tweeple

I need a new list in Twitter: People who don’t tweet. They make me nervous when they follow me. I suspect them of having suspicious motives. Well, some people on Twitter do have very suspicious motives. A few of them are stupid, evil slimeballs. It’s harder to figure out the 0-tweeters, and they make me think of 0-post forum members, who might be lurkers…or…hackers. Makes me nervous.

The 0-tweeple can’t be evaluated by their tweets. One has to poke around and stalk their followers and friends. That is irksome and time-consuming, but I am compelled to do it. I want to know something about the people who associate themselves with me. So, I will make a list, and put all the 0-tweeple on it. Then I can keep an eye on them ;).

When is a blog not a blog?

I don’t blog often, but at least when I do it’s my own content. Unfortunately, there are a shitload of “bloggers” whose only aim is to get as much traffic as possible, by any means possible. I assume that they are doing this for the sake of some sleazy advertising on their sorry moshblogs that I can’t see because I have pretty effective ad-blocking on most of the time.

Anhwhey, their shitty little lazy trick is to dumpster-dive for content in the sump-pits of content mills, resulting in a motley mix of copycat content. Try this: go to almost any blog that is posted on with great frequency and constantly tweeted. Copy part of a sentence from any post. Take it to Google, in quotes so that the entire string is searched for, not just parts of it.

How many results do you get for that string and all of the material surrounding it? Only the original(sic) blog? Odds are good that you’ll get one or more, sometimes many more; sometimes even the true original source.

This is even more fun when you can nail a distinctive typo or usage error. Pseudo-bloggers can’t be bothered to check the verity, much less the quality, of the content-farm garbage that they post.

IMHO this kind of blogging is just another variety of SPAM, spewed out over the Internet to clog search engines rather than dumped in our inboxes, forums, or blog comments.

Wottever II

Still out of luck with excluding stuff. My best option for now is to turn off the tweet digest — I don’t really need it anyway.

Meanwhile, spam goes on. Most of it wouldn’t fool a month-old puppy, but who wouldn’t like to be flattered all to heck with:

Wow, incredible blog layout! How long have you been blogging for? you make blogging look easy. The overall look of your web site is fantastic, as well as the content!

or —

I like the valuable information you provide in your articles. I will bookmark your blog and check again here regularly. I’m quite sure I will learn many new stuff right here! Best of luck for the next!

Except, of course, that both warm-fuzzing inanities were posted by the same shitbot, linking to the same product. A useful item, perhaps, but Not On My Blog!

I was delighted to receive a nice chunk of novel to beta read a couple of days ago. The long wait was worth it; I devoured it ravenously and tossed the bones back with lots of pointy comments. Now waiting on chair’s edge for the rest of it.

That inspired me to go back to my own novel-in-waiting and make a few small edits where I can now see that I did not make things clear enough. I’m very happy with those tiny but — IMHO — important changes.

wottever

The front page excluded category plugin still isn’t working.

I am still working, but entirely behind the scenes. Actually not so bad for me, but awkward for my employer.

I’m not very talkative today; it all drains out on Twitter, I guess.