Securitron Doom/Linux Blog.

 

Spybot crapness

WTF is this?



I had this happen when I was using this Windows XP machine and it spat out an error when I reverted the settings of IE back to normal. But it would not allow it and it showed this error. The buttons are not visible and you have to click on the edge of the button to activate it. Another reason to not use MS software.
¶ 5/08/2006 12:52:00 PM 0 Comments Links to this post

 

Windows

I have just got a copy of the Doom2.exe file and I can use it to run Dehacked to make some useful dehacked patches for my Doom projects. If only someone could make a *.bex editor... I went to the supermarket to get some cereal tonight and there was a box of cereal for $3.99 and one for $6.99 that were exactly the same weight and size, yet one had different ingredients. But not by much. Yet it was $3.00 more expensive. Not much I know but why is this? Just because the box that was cheaper had the bag inside 70% full and the slightly more expensive one has it 80% full? It is a huge conspiracy I think. Just like the shows on Discovery Science Channel where they were taking about the Aliens that are ruling the planet, and they are lizard people just like the ones in the movie V. George Bush is one, and PM Tony Blair and the Queen. Very funny indeed, and they think that the Pyramids in Egypt are portals to other dimensions.

I went for a walk before to while away the afternoon and I ended up walking about 40 KM. And it was freezing cold and threatening rain too. But it was fun... Although now I am quite worn out and now I just want to type this and have a nice cup of tea. But it was very good because I walked up a high mountain where it snows in Winter and it was freezing cold. But it was also perfectly still and totally silent. No bird noises or anything. But it would not be as nice to be walking around if there was snow falling, since I was only wearing runners. Some people go for walks in the evening, but not to the extent I did. But I was pretty tired after that walk though, my legs were so sore, but it was the weekend, so I had plenty of time to rest and recover. But it was fun and only took me 4.25 hours to walk about 40KM. Not bad huh?

There has been talk in the news about a hacker who got into the American Department of Defense computers and the computers at the Aeronautics Administration I think and they had blank Administrator passwords. Now this is a total joke. Who is in charge of these machines? Someone who does not care about security for sure. I hope someone had the sense to fire them. But it is annoying when there are people going on about hackers when there is a different definition of the word in the FOSS community. Just a thought. But most of those people in the press who write about IT have a quite limited view of the big wide world. But they need to be more educated on the differences between hackers and crackers or malicious computer users and software writers. Like those people behind the www.findthewebsiteyouneed.com fiasco. And the melissa virus, although well written according the the source code I have seen, is still a malicious virus. And Windows XP, which can bring your whole machine to a crashing halt. Although I have seen one person who installed Windows XP `Service pack 2' and it fucked their whole machine up. The sound stopped working along with the network service for the LAN connection.

I was using a Windows XP machine recently and I was copying a couple of files from the hard drive to my USB drive and the fucking god-damned shit eating OS locked up. I pressed the power switch and it would not respond to that at all and I had to pull out the power cord and wait a minute and push it back in to reset the machine. What a heap of utter shit. Linux is definitely my preferred OS. Why the hell fucking crap does a machine using the ATX power supply not respond to the reset button when you are pressing it when it is locked up? I hope Windows Vista will be more secure than Windows XP, but will it be more stable than Windows XP? I think not. BSD and Mac OS and Linux are more secure and stable than Windows XP and come with heaps of software. FreeBSD has heaps of software available in /usr/ports and this is more than enough reason to switch. And FreeBSD comes with Koffice which has the same features as OpenOffice.org but loads much faster. Much faster indeed. So it should not be that difficult to speed up OpenOffice. Not having sections written in Python should help. Not that I have anything against Python, but C++ is still faster.

And Linux is quite unlike Winblows, where any file is writable and if you are running as an unprivileged user programs will not function properly. Now that is a joke. Windows Vista may have the same problems as Windows XP & 2000, we will see.

But of course, the Windows people are not going to have restricted user accounts on their machines, it would be too much hassle. I.e more hassle than just running as Administrator or using runas. Which sounds like sudo but I bet it does not work as well. Linux works well running a restricted user account, within reason. You do need to add yourself to the audio and cdrom groups to access those devices, especially me, I am running the 2.6.15 kernel with selinux so I have greater security. My whole system loads up very fast indeed, I compiled the kernel with the essential modules compiled in so I do not need a initrd to load the drivers from /lib. The kernel loads instantly and goes straightaway into the init process. Then I just need to setup the sound with alsaconf as root and I am done. But since I do not need to re-boot unless it is necessary, I have no need to go through this process over and over. And my machine uses the text based login instead of the graphical bootsplash favoured by many linux distros. And I use the vga setting set to 0x307 to get a 256 color 1280x1024 resolution text console. Very nice when using GNU Midnight Commander. And I am using the KDE desktop. Way better looking than Gnome. Gnome is a mess of dependencies when installing the desktop from source. But for KDE, you have the kdebase and kdeartwork packages which include heaps of software.
¶ 5/08/2006 11:31:00 AM 0 Comments Links to this post