Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at June 26th, 2004

Doing technical support/system administration has some odd moments. Here are a few:

1. One of our directors has occasionally mentioned to me that she has pop-up ads come up on her computer a lot. No big deal, she uses Internet Explorer, what do you expect, right?

This week I had a little time and happened to be there when she had one appear. Her browser was not open. In short, someone had installed adware on her machine.

After a bit of work with a program called bazooka, I determined that someone had installed “System Soap,” a program that removes evidence of what web sites you’ve gone to. “System Soap” also installs adware which allows you receive ads at any time.

More investigation showed that System Soap could not have been installed accidentally. It apparently requires both a credit card number and an email address. When I mentioned that, she said, “Oh, that would explain these.” She’d been getting a System Soap newsletter for months, assuming that it was just spam.

Thus, it appears that someone else has been using “System Soap” at her computer for at least 3 months, looking at who knows what websites.

The person also appears to be stupid enough to provide our director’s email address rather than his/her own in the product registration section. Unfortunately, the person is not stupid enough to leave me enough clues to identify them.

Yet.

2. Yesterday morning I decided I’d finally install Windows XP onto one of the older computers at work. It’s primarily used by the business manager. The computer is fast enough to run XP, but it turned out that there were some other problems. The cdrom and the floppy drive both didn’t work, something that makes it impossible to upgrade the computer and calls into question a number of other things.

I knew that the floppy worked in another computer so the chances that it was the problem seemed small. Thus, the problem would have to be either the motherboard or the power supply’s connection to the two drives. Power supplies are $30-40 parts, but this was a custom Dell power supply… So, no garuantees that I could ever find one. And with motherboards you may as well buy another computer. It’s just not worth trying to upgrade only a motherboard unless it’s new.

So, the computer’s totalled. We bought another. It seems like such a waste because the computer works, doing everything it needs to, but, at the same time, if we ever need to upgrade anything at all, we’ll have to buy a new computer. Best to get it over with.

Still, on a gut level it annoys me.

3. After a few weeks of good service, SBC is again causing me pain. Sending email has been inconsistently available all week. The error message explains that the server does not recognize the username or password. Anywhere from an hour to four hours later, it will recognize the password.

SBC’s technical support has been very polite, but ultimately useless. They’ve explained to me that it’s probably a result of Yahoo upgrading their email services (SBC outsources email to Yahoo). Unfortunately, they also say that only webmail should be affected by that. We don’t use email via the web at all. We just use SBC’s smtp to send. Testing the webmail, however, did show that webmail works for us.

It’s just smtp with mail clients (like Outlook) that doesn’t .

Bearing in mind the sheer hassle we’ve had from this, I’m going to install our own smtp server next week and avoid the problem entirely.

Amusingly, sending via Yahoo’s smtp servers works just fine from my home account.

Posted by Jim at June 22nd, 2004

Brushing teeth is not for the faint of heart. It is, quite frankly, one of my least favorite moments of the day.

I can’t say that I have great fun with it myself, but brushing my kids’ teeth is much less fun than that. Basically the problem (at least with Rebecca–age 2) is that we have two different purposes for brushing.

What I want is to clean Rebecca’s teeth. What Becca wants to do is suck every last bit of the yummy, yummy toothpaste off of the toothbrush. Thus, my goal is to move the toothbrush lightly across her teeth while her goal is to open her mouth, clamp down, and keep the toothbrush in one spot.

Abby, by contrast, is slightly older than three and has more sophisticated desires. For Abby, brushing her teeth is part of the on-going project summarized in the phrase, “I do it myself!’ Any attempt to brush her teeth for her can and will be met with resistance in the form of crying/curling up in a ball on the floor.

She has realized the cold, unbearable truth that she does not control the universe. I
have revealed this to her–I and my irrational desire to be on time for work for once. Therefore, I must pay.

Why would I risk brushing her teeth? Abby, left to herself, will only brush the left side of the teeth on her lower jaw. She will also vary between running the water at full blast (taking every last molecule of toothpaste off the brush) or running it so very slowly that it may possibly get wet sometime in the next presidential administration.

I do try to entertain her and keep her mind off of the fact that her sense of control has been violated (”Abby, do you want me to brush your nose?” “No!” “How about your knee?” “No!”), but this is getting old.

Someday soon Abby and Becca will be able to brush their own teeth. I may feel some sense of loss when that happens, but not much.

Posted by Jim at June 19th, 2004

I do almost all of the cooking in my house. As someone with a background in social science (sociology, psychology, anthropology), Biblical studies, and a general interest in other cultures, I tend to lean toward learning about ethnic cuisines as opposed to learning techniques for making a specific type of food (bread, cake, soups…).

Given the amount of time I actually have to cook, I should be getting cookbooks named things like “Simple, Easy, Fast Reciepes for the Clueless Cook” or perhaps “Recipes from Foriegn Countries That Children Will Actually Eat.”

I actually lean toward cookbooks that have names like “The Complete Indian Cookbook” or “(Insert Ethnicity Here) Cuisine.” The are generally thick, have no pictures, plenty of text, and extensive explanations about how the climate, cultural beliefs, and thousands of years of history contributed to the creation of the meals found within the book.

They generally include glossaries describing the ingredients. Generally, you will need the description.

Titles like “Chinese/Indian/Korean/Whatever Cuisine” do not actually convey the contents of the books. They should actually have names along the lines of “Meals Requiring Obscure Ingredients Not Found Anywhere Near You” or “Recipes That Assume You’ll Start Two Days in Advance.”

In short, they are the cookbook equivalent of O’Reilly books, describing obscure meals much as your average O’Reilly book describes unix (the least intuitive operating system ever) or certain programming languages/techniques. One difference might be that these cookbooks put more of an emphasis on the authenticity of the ingredients.

My most recent cookbook is a pretty good example of stuff I like. Its named “Lebanese Cuisine” and appears to include meals that are made more or less as they would be made in Lebanon. Most of them look very good, but, it does include a few meals I will probably never get up the nerve to make.

That group includes:
Snails (live snails preferred, they die in the process of being boiled)
Eggs Fried with Chicken Giblets
Lamb Tongue Salad
Brain Appetizer
Brain Omelet
Raw Kibbi (i.e. raw ground beef)

Nonetheless,I can’t help but be curious. Perhaps I can find a restaraunt that includes a few on their menu.

Posted by Jim at June 16th, 2004

I woke up yesterday morning to discover that my main email account had 100 MB of space. Meanwhile, the Yahoo account used to manage my SBC internet now has 2 Gig of storage. Ironically, that’s the one I never use. Assuming that I might have to switch providers someday, I tend to regard my original yahoo email as my main address and the other as something that could disappear at any time.

Now though, the space alone tempts me to find some way to use it.

It’s rather strange to find how pervasive email has become in the general culture. I remember finishing college in 1991 and realizing to my dismay that I would probably no longer have access to any email account at all.

Western Theological Seminary (the next step after college) did not have email. It barely had computers. Ironically, I managed to continue having an email account through a local BBS, but that was it.

Since then, email’s ballooned into the public consciousness. I actually recieve email from my parents these days. Back when I was at Hope College, my Dad would have the departmental secretary print out his email and give it to him. In fact, back when I was at Hope, you had to get special permission to have an account that was allowed to email people off of Hope’s campus. This was because some students had once irritated some people off campus with their emails and the IT department decided that shutting that service down was an effective way of solving the problem.

After all, it’s not like it would have affected people much. Who did they need to email off campus anyway?

Well, in my case Ed and a bunch of people at Calvin for my Amber and Avalon campaigns (that’s right, fantasy role-playing). I managed to get an account through my Dad (with a little hesitation on his part) and all was right with the world.

If I remember correctly, that allowed me 5 blocks of space on Hope’s VAX, an amount that could be easily filled by the mailing list a number of my friends had created. Walking up to a terminal to find that I couldn’t do much of anything until I deleted my email was always an amusing experience.

Now though, it appears that I have more space than I could possibly need. I wonder how long it would take to fill 2 gigs with spam?

Posted by Jim at June 15th, 2004

Not only can’t the techs at the computer store find out ultimately what’s wrong with my computer, but they don’t want to work on it anymore. Apparently it has damaged equipment they’ve tried to put in it.

Worse, putting parts into the computer makes it act in unpredictable ways (unpredictible in the precise manner of the computer not working but totally predictable in that the computer continues not to work)..

They’re writing up an insurance quote at the moment, arguing that it all results from electrical damage.

Posted by Jim at June 13th, 2004

I read the comic “User Friendly” regularly. It’s a comic about the workers at a Canadian ISP. While I don’t find it as funny as when I first encountered it, it is funny enough to read. Basically, there are only a limited number of jokes about Microsoft I can read and still laugh.

Today’s comic, however, is sadly appropriate for at least some blogs.

Posted by Jim at June 12th, 2004

On Thursday, I passed a kind of computer milestone. I (for the first time ever) brought one of my computers into an actual shop for someone else to diagnose the problem that I’m having.

I have mixed feelings about this.

On the one hand, I could probably figure out the problem myself. That’s one of the things I’m responsible for at work. On the other hand, diagnosing hardware problems is much easier when you’ve either got a lot of experience or you’ve got a lot of equipment, allowing you to swap parts in and out until you find the one makes things work.

I have two computers at home, but I didn’t really want to take apart my working computer to test problems on my non-working computer. Also, buying the parts as I went seemed likely to rack up at least as much money as bringing it into a store and having someone with extensive knowledge look at it.

Thus, both my wife and I are using the FreeBSD box for the weekend until the XP computer gets fixed. In the meantime, I’m dreading the possibilities. For example, I’m going to be really pissed if I have to pay for a motherboard replacement. Owing to the fact that the current motherboard uses sdram, I’ll probably have to buy new ram as well. Current motherboards don’t use sdram anymore. Having to buy a new cpu will also make me unhappy, but since the current cpu is fairly decent, it’ll at least be available.

Probably at a low price too.

I’m taking it as a given though, that it’ll eat up my on-the-side-consulting-money for the month. That’s irritating.

On the bright side, fixing the computer might count as a business expense. I’ll have to keep the reciept.

Posted by Jim at June 10th, 2004

The grocery store typically go to puts out a lot of free samples. The best of these undoubtedly include the bread, some of which appears to be made in the store.

Recently the store has made a strong effort to stop people from using their hands to pick up the bread. Prominent signs display messages to the effect of “Please use the tongs. If you pick up bread with your hands, people will get sick and die and it will be ALL YOUR FAULT.”

Admittedly that’s not precisely the message, but that is the gist of it.

While most poeple’s response to a sign like that is to cooperate and follow directions, other people will view the sign as an invitation to be obnoxious. Many people in the latter group are teenage boys.

Thus, I was not too surprised to see the incident that follows:

Two teenage boys walk up to the free bread samples. One decides to grab some bread. He picks up the bread with the tongs and then places the bread directly into his mouth (that’s right… with the tongs).

Yuck.

Posted by Jim at June 9th, 2004

Though I do know enough about PHP to put together a mildly complex registration form for a conference, I still have much to learn.

Right now I’m in the process of rewriting GRACE’s website such that anyone in the organization can change and edit text on the site. As a result, I have to learn how to allow PHP to edit files. The goal is to allow people the ability to edit only those parts of the document that I trust them with (text) and leave the rest alone.

This means that I’m in the process of investigating how PHP reads in and writes out files. Here’s one amusing thing I’ve learned: fopen (the command for opening/writing files) apparently does not lock. This means that if two people edit the same file and attempt to write the file at the same time, fopen will attempt to write both versions at once, creating a file full of utter gibberish.

So… it looks like I may have to write my own locking mechanism. That or allow only one person to edit files at a time.

Originally, I was going to let MoveableType handle this, but, the number of authors makes that more expensive than I think we want to bother with.

Posted by Jim at June 7th, 2004

Owing to the fact that I’d like a fulltime job, I’ve been looking through the “Jobs” section of the Grand Rapids Press lately.

Typically I look through the computer related ads, then search for IT positions that should have been placed in the computer section (but weren’t), and finally I look for positions related to my statistics/social science background. This means that I typically end up reading through all the ads.

As I went, I discovered an ad that said, “Manage a Concept!” That sounded interesting, if rather abstract. I read further.

As it turned out, the local Hooters was hiring managers.

I’m still not precisely sure what concept a person would be managing at Hooters, but I suspect it has something to do with boobs.