Category Computers

Saturday became the day to install a new ceiling fan in our dining room.  It was quite an adventure, and ended up not going so well because we apparently bought the wrong type of fan.  We needed a flush mounted fan, but the one we bought can only be mounted with a down rod.  Frustrating to say the least.

What’s this have to do with a crashed MySQL database?  Well…

To wire up the fan I needed to cut the power to the upstairs, since that was the only place we could tap in to power.  Well, one of the many stupid stupid stupid things the guy [JACKASS] who owned the house before us did was make sure that the breaker panel in the basement was as inaccurately labeled as possible.  There were no breakers labeled anything close to upstairs so I had to play the flip the breaker and see what shuts off game.  During this excitting game I managed to flip the breaker my home server runs on.  Power was restored a minute later and the server booted back up, no problem… or so I thought.  I must have killed power to the server the exact second this ping logging script was doing it’s thing.

Read More

Acer, quite possible the shittiest, yet most popular, cheap ass computer company out there.  Why are they so popular?  Because their systems are dirt cheap.  Unfortunately you do get what you pay for.  You pay for shit, you get shit.  Acer shits on it’s customers all day long.
I’m pretty sure that e-machines put out better garbage then Acer’s crappy computers.
From the amount of Acer systems I have seen fail, I believe that it isn’t a matter of if your system will fail, it’s simply a matter of when. 1 year? 2 years? 3 years? Who knows…  I’d be willing to guess your Acer computer will fail with in the first 3 years.
I recently wrote about how OEM preinstalled software needs to stop, and Acer was the driving force behind that post.

Today, I bring you another reason why you should never buy anything from Acer.

Read More

This is a long one, but it is really a pet peeve of mine and I don’t know how I haven’t written about this before…

I’m sure you all know what this junk is… it’s software that comes installed already on the computer when you buy a pre-built system from companies like Acer, Lenovo, HP, Dell, etc.  The manufacturers often get paid large amounts of money to pre-install this crapware on your shiney new computer, or sometimes it is software direct from the manufacturer that they think will help you or be of some benefit.

Unfortunately this is hardly EVER the case and more often then not the software does more damage then it does good.

The 2 biggest offenders I have ran in to during my countless dealings with all of the major brands have been Lenovo and Acer.  Acer shouldn’t be that big of a surprise as they are generally a shit company.  They put out PC’s with shitty, cheap components which will fail, and even when you’re paying a premium for their gaming machine line, Acer still has to recall them all because they could potentially burn down your house, and their support is absolutely worthless.  I’ll save the Acer rant for another time though.  So really it should be no surprise when Acer installs software that will cause your machine to eventually bluescreen whenever booted normally (not in safe mode, thankfully).

Read More

I’m sure you’re following the situation more closely over at http://blog.boxee.tv/ but I’m glad to see Boxee has made Hulu work on their software again.
I’m glad they just didn’t lay down and say “oh well”.
Content providers need to learn the consumer will enjoy content they way the consumer wants to, despite what restrictions the content providers try to arbitrarily enforce.

Now if Boxee would just release current Windows builds 🙁

Well, if you haven’t noticed or heard yet, Hulu streaming has been disabled in Boxee.

I’m not going to go over WHY it happened, as it’s pretty well explained by the Boxee and Hulu teams here:

Boxee on the Hulu Situation

Hulu “Doing Hard Things”

What I will do is offer my opinion on it all… after all, that is the point of a blog, isn’t it?

Both Hulu and Boxee are amazing products.  Hulu brings together MANY different content providers in to one place and offers great streaming services for all this content in one nice, clean, easy to use site.  Boxee is a cutting edge Media Center style application that transforms almost any computer in to a very sleek meda-centric device.  While Boxee [on Windows] is still VERY alpha (read: buggy as hell, crashes constantly), there was one thing I found it actually did really well, which was it’s Hulu integration.  You could search and browse all of Hulu’s shows directly from inside Boxee.

It was a very cool feature, and the main reason I didn’t uninstall Boxee after it’s 10th time crashing while trying to scan my media from my network.

But as of today, that feature is disabled.  The decision was not up to Boxee or Hulu, but rather the content providers (NBC, Fox, etc…)

Read More

Seriously… what the hell is up with this shit Google?
I have now noticed this on all 3 machines I use on a regular basis… my desktop, my laptop, and my work computer. They all have at least 1 (if not more) GoogleUpdate.exe running on them, and it is hard to get rid of. Even if you end the process and rename the file, the next time you run a google app, like Google Earth, or Google Chrome, the program will reinsert the file on your system!
This is the kind of shit that really bugs me. Programs that feel the need to run background processes WITH OUT any obvious consent being given to them that are 100% unnecessary for day-to-day tasks.
There is absolutely NO reason why there needs to be a google update serving running in the background of every machine. This is horse shit and I’m done putting up with it. Firefox doesn’t need to do this and it stays up to date just fine.
Because of the GoogleUpdate.exe plague I have seen I will now be uninstalling any google products I have installed on any of my machines.
Good job google. First you change your iGoogle page all around and force me to leave that. Now you infect my machines with your constantly-running update service, and I remove all traces of your programs from my computer.  What next?  Your search results going to turn to shit?  Or have they already?  Maybe I should start trying out other search engines?
Good day Google. I see you’ve thrown your motto of “don’t be evil” right out the damn window, haven’t you?

Starting the first week in January, I started noticing my personal server getting pounded with requests looking for roundcube or mantis installs on my system. After doing a bit of research at the Internet Storm Center I realized it was a new vulneribility in these programs and these script kiddies were just scanning servers for the existance of these specific directories.   In the last couple weeks I have been scanned at least 25 times… so I decided to have a little fun with the script kiddies.  Now instead of getting an error 404 page, they will get… well, here is the code.  I’m sure you’ll see where their scripted scanners will be getting sent to 🙂

Redirect /nonexistenshit http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /mail http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /bin http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /rc http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /roundcube http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /webmail http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /mantisbt http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /tracker http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /bugtracker http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /bugtrack http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /support http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /bug http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /bugs http://www.fbi.gov/
Redirect /mantis http://www.fbi.gov/

Apparently all 1st Gen 30G Zunes with the latest firmware update from Microsoft died at midnight, pacific time last night.
None are booting up past the loading screen.
Even people that had theirs on listening to it…

Son of a B….., Right in the middle of Shine on you Crazy Diamond mine crapped out too.

…or hooked up to the computer charging report that their Zune suddenly crashed, rebooted, and froze up.

People have let their battery run down all the way to where it died, plugged it back in, and it is still not working. People have even tried a hard reset, nothing seems to be working

Well, I Pulled the Battery, and Used a Wall USB Plug and plugged my zune to that, and it booted to the main “Unlock Screen” and locked up, then I rebooted, and it cleared contents, asked me to re-install everything, and now its blank, stuck on a black screen, then i rebooted and back to lockup on the logo… nice..

What’s more is that since tonight and tomorrow are holidays, there will be nothing more then a skeleton crew working tech support at Microsoft, and I am 100% positive that their programmers aren’t working, so Zune owners will be getting the extra long shaft and probably won’t see any way to fix it until some time next week (my speculation).

The failures all occurred 24 hours before the new year roll over. I wonder what happened?

You know… if Apple was really on the ball here, they should JUMP at this opportunity. Run a fast hard advertisement telling people they can bring in their frozen 30G Zune to any Apple store, trade it in for a discount on any iPod/iPhone they have.
Could you imagine…

I hope I’m not alone in seeing the hilarity in this. It’s like Microsoft is giving a big fuck you to everyone who bought a Zune.

Oh well… I don’t have one. Back to listening to my iPod.

(More Updates After The Break)

Read More