Category Computers

I made a quick little war drive tonight between my Girlfriend’s parents house to our place (only a mile or 2 apart), and I was surprised at the number of Wireless Access Points… not only WAP’s, but completely open and un-secured WAP’s!

Take a look:

All of the Green flags represent completely open WAP’s.  The Red ones are using some type of encryption whether it is worthless WEP or one of the nice WPA’s.

I used my HTC Fuze and it’s built in GPS running Wififofum to generate the Google Earth file loaded in to the image above.  Pretty neat stuff.

Just an interesting little image I thought I would post.  It kind of tempts me to do a more detailed drive of some surrounding blocks, just for the fun of it.   Plus there is one network that is just DYING to be cracked… “ZeroCool”… what a tool.  I may have to break out my bootable BackTrack USB thumb drive on that one…

Some people may think keeping a 55gb archive folder with program installers dating back nearly 10 years is a bit excessive.  But when you have the disk space, why not?

Today, it just saved me a TON of head ache and trouble.
Since 2005 I have ran a USB Power Commander 3 on my motorcycle.  It connects to my 2004 Kawasaki ZX6R’s onboard computer and basically allows me to remap air/fuel ratios.  This is necessary because I have an aftermarket exhaust system on my bike, and if I didn’t remap my air/fuel to add more fuel the bike would run lean, which is VERY bad for any motor.

And since 2005 I have not messed with it.  I loaded a custom air-fuel map, made some tweaks, and have left it alone ever since, which is exactly what I should have done.  Except that my buddy Jon was FINALLY putting one on his 2004 Suzuki GSXR 600 after just getting his exhaust on, so it was time I play with it again.  Since 2005 I have gone to a new laptop then the one I originally used to program the unit on my bike, so I needed to reinstall the software.  I headed off to the Power Commander site to download the latest version.  I got it all installed and off I went to test.  It seemed to work except I noticed something odd… the throttle position values for Closed and Open were way off and the software wasn’t displaying my TP value.  On top of this, the map was showing all 0’s where it should be showing percentages…  I didn’t mess with it any more after that.  I went over to Jon’s, we got his all set up, got the map loaded, and the TP values worked exactly like they should have on his bike.  That puzzled me a bit, but I figured it was due to his Power Commander having a much much newer version of the firmware on it then mine did (which is the cause…)

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On June 16th the new Ghostbusters Video Game came out.

Being a HUGE fan of the series for the majority of my childhood, I decided to do something fairly rare (in my world at least), and that was to actually purchase the game.

Luckily it was made available on Steam, which I already have an account on and is where I’ve been buying the majority of the [few] game I actually purchase.  Steam has so many advantages to it, I feel it really adds value to a game when you can buy it through Steam.

But anyway, I was playing some Ghostbusters tonight having a complete blast.  After destroying the Stay Puft Marshmallow man, it was time to return to the Ghostbusters HQ.

Upon arriving I decided to take the spare down time I had and explore the HQ a bit.  I mean, what child of the 80’s WOUDLN’T want to walk around the GB HQ?  And let me tell yah, they got it PERFECT.  Not only the HQ really but the whole game is done very very very well and you can really tell while playing it that they put a lot of time in to the story and game play to make it an authentic and enjoyable experience.

During my wondering around I noticed Winston hunched over a computer screen.  I looked at the computer screen and started laughing… here is what I saw (cropped image):

I know it’s a little hard to see… but it is the final screen from the absolutely ABYSMAL original Nintendo Ghostbusters video game!  Complete with misspellings and completely fucked grammar.  I couldn’t help but laugh, and it really made me appreciate the detail put in to this game even more… even giving a little jab to the complete abomination known as Ghostbusters on the Nintendo.

I’d also like to say that if you’re a fan of the movies, a child of the 80’s, you will LOVE this game and I really suggest you buy it to show your support for projects such as this one.  The game isn’t just a game, it feels like you’re part of the movie.  It really makes you want to get out your little plastic proton pack with yellow foam confinement beam, run around the backyard, and bust some ghosts!

Around a year ago I wrote about getting 800mb of space back after installing SP1, and I come to you today with a similar tip for SP2!

This one is not as dramatic as 800mb, but I did gain back around 400mb of disk space.

Just as with SP1, this works by removing backup files made during the service pack install, making it prememnant and impossible to remove.  Just keep that one fact in mind.

Just pop open your favorite command prompt, and issue compcln

It will ask you to confirm, and then it’ll get to work.  After a couple minutes you’ll have your reclaimed space!  (And a permenent SP2 install!)

For nearly all servers you don’t really need to worry about configuring this since most servers can keep their time by themselves.

But every once in a while you run in to one of those black sheep servers that seems to lose time every time you turn around.  The particularly annoying thing is that if the server’s time is incorrect, all computers attached to that domain will be incorrect.  This can make troubleshooting difficult if you’re going off of times in logs, and log times are completely wrong.  I ran across such a server today.  I KNOW I have set this server’s time in the past and it seems every time I get back around to checking it, it’s is out of sync by 10, 15, 30 minutes, or even more then an hour!

So after digging around and trying a couple different things, I came across some instructions and a handy utility that got the server’s time sync’ing to the NTP’s time servers reguarlarly to ensure the server never loses time again, which I’ll share with you.

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Trying to not be a negative nancy, I decided to post up a quick article on a great experience I had today with Dell’s customer support.

A client called me saying their server wasn’t booting.  I went out there and to make a long story short (about an hour of troubleshooting), I determine 1 of their 4 sticks of ram was faulty.

I called Dell support and with in 2 minutes I was speaking with a live rep.  I told him I had some bad ram, and he said no problem… took maybe another 5 minutes of him typing things up, and he is over nighting me a stick of ram to replace the faulty one.

I loved the whole experience.  It was incredibly simple and they didn’t treat me like an idiot and make me run a bunch of bullshit diagnostics that I had already done my self troubleshooting and figuring out which stick it was.  They took my word for it.

I wish all service calls went like this.  Simple, to the point, and gets the problem resolved.

I’ve also had similar great experiences with HP’s support.  Dell and HP are both winners in my book for having excellent support centers!

Maybe Acer should take notes and get their act together.

IPCop is a really neat open source project that can basically transform any old computer with 2 NIC’s in it in to a hardware firewall, VPN server, and Web Filter, among many other useful things.

We use it quite a lot where I work and we’re always looking for the smaller, better IPCop box.

The most recent version we went with was a 1U half-depth rack mount server from the guys over at abmx.com.  This unit was both cheap, and met our needs of a rack-mountable IPCop machine.

The slight downside to this machine was there was no CD-Rom drive in it as our past IPCop boxes have had.  In addition, there was no IDE port on the motherboard (only SATA), and we didn’t have a SATA CD-Rom drive hanging around the office, so I set out to figure out how to install IPCop from a USB drive.

After a ton of searching I came across some instructions, which I will post for you in case you ever want to do the same.

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Hahahaha, oh Acer, you make this too easy.  Their top of the line gaming system, costing well above the $2k mark, failing brand new out of the box.

In Acer’s defense though, it could’ve happened during shipping.  Turns out the video card had come lose and wasn’t seated properly any more.  Ryan took it out and put it back in correctly and the system booted ok.

Still funny though 🙂