Patches and Hidden Software Installs

So, I mostly agree with this article: http://windowssecrets.com/2009/08/13/01-Sun-Apple-Microsoft-install-chaff-with-patches. It's about how many "critical security updates" install other software by default. I know this is how some freeware programmers actually make money so I understand if they do it. However, in the interest of not misleading the customer, the check-boxes for other software should be defaulted to being unchecked. Especially in a corporate environment, when I see unknown software popping up on a client computer, it can be a security breach in and of itself.

at$t wtf?

WTF AT$T? Why do you allow tethering with a BlackBerry but not with the iPhone?

vmware fusion, you dissapoint me

Maybe the vmware folks haven't figured out how to utilize the Nvidia chips on the new macbooks, but the 3D performance in my virtual XP Pro machine sucks. I'm playing Civilization 4, a turn-based strategy game that uses 3D models and terrain, it's video requirements are pretty slim and yet there's lots of lag and clipping. I don't even want to try playing Fallout 3, a full-blown FPS-intensive game.

please log off

From the great folks at thinkgeek, a bumper sticker perfect for these times...

There's no doubt about it. The end of the world IS coming. We're just not entirely sure how or when. We're pretty sure there'll be a broadcast message, though, about 10 minutes before the entire system goes down if the sysadmins have their shit together. But it's best to save your work often in case they don't. They might be as surprised as we are if it all ends in a total system meltdown.

And be sure to log off. You don't want your session to remain active through the apocalypse. That would seriously suck.

c'mon Mcafee, I don't want to go back to Norton

Actually, I'll probably just go with Grisoft's AVG.

So here's a weird thing. I have a client who's laptop keeps BSOD'ing with a 0x0000000F4 Error (there may have been some extra zero's). He kept telling me that Windows was blaming McAfee every time he rebooted from a BSOD. Well, I decided it wasn't McAfee because I saw a lot of things pointing F4 errors as relating to the Hard Drive. Now I realize the guy is right. I captured one of the minidump's (windows error reports when the system crashes) and analyzed them with windows debugger, a neat little tool if you've never done it before. The minidump is here if you want to take a looksee. The minidump points to mfehidk.sys, a Mcafee file that apparently is included with Active VirusScan 8.5.

Now, here's the weird (and very frustrating) part. I used McAfee's management console on the client's server to uninstall VirusScan 8.5. And the error still happened! If there's one thing that I hate, it's programs that don't *!%&#ing uninstall correctly. And I realize now that I have encountered this before when I was trying out VirusScan 8.5 without the management part. It seemed to leave behind the autoupdater as well as the Outlook scanner .dll's.

I'm exhausted now, so the problem won't get fixed til' tomorrow. But I just wanted to rant a bit.

DD-WRT

I'm moving to a new place and was shopping for a new wireless router. I had heard about the reliability of the Linksys WRT54GL before but I didn't know the full details of how it could be customized. What I found out, to put it mildly, was very exciting. After looking at the product on newegg.com (my favorite online store) I found out that the firmware could be upgraded to something called DD-WRT. Now, firmware is a bit of a misnomer because you would think that it meant it couldn't be messed around with; but, lo and behold, changing the firmware is as easy as hooking up a laptop directly to the router and transferring some files. For those of you not in the know, DD-WRT is basically a mini linux operating system that turns a home-consumer wireless router into something that would excite any aspiring hacker / network engineer. I wouldn't even begin to list all the capabilities... you can find them here.

Now, the real reason why I'm excited is that I'll finally have WOL (wake-on-lan) capability for my home computers. Right now, I leave my PC at home on all the time. It's a good thing my electricity is flat-rate included in my rent. But my new place will be different; plus, I actually do care about wasting electricity, I gotta fight global warming somehow. Anyway, mucho props to the linux geeks at the DD-WRT org. As someone wiser than me once said, "It's not what you sell, it's what you make".

Citrix - Great Software, Horrible Customer Service

I'm writing this as I'm on hold with Citrix. I have been passed back-and-forth between customer service and technical support twice already. All I really need is a new TS CAL license keys for Citrix Access Essentials. The inital purchase got us keys that worked with Windows Server 2003. We decided to go with 2008 and that's my guess as to why the keys won't work. They did, however, get the Citrix Access Essentials key to work for the user-licenses on their software.

I really don't get how you have to have license keys for Terminal Services Users as well as license keys for Citrix Access Essential Users. But I guess that's what this company gets for choosing third-party remote access software. Good god.

Maybe I should call Microsoft and try to get new TS CALs from them; I'm surprised to say it, but they might have better customer support than Citrix.

n-central application compliance

What good is the application compliance service if Windows is being constantly updated anyway? Ok, I admit the license compliance feature, which shows a birds-eye-view of software that is installed across the entire company, is useful for ferreting out unwanted software.

Back to the application compliance, I reversed the detection so that it would show an error if it detected x unwanted application. The only problem is again that it is an all-or-nothing test! I can't tell it to show an error if x or y application is found. Now I remember why I deleted the Application Compliance service from all company's initially. Bleh.

n-able

Yeah, in parallel to the last post, N-able should definitely use the blue icons for disconnected instead of using red x's for everything. What's more, it should show the percentage of failures and not just a all or nothing picture. For example, let's say I have a customer with 100 devices and 5 services per device (services are the variables being monitored which can be Cpu, disk space, applications installed, etc.). If just one of those services on one device is malfunctioning, I get a big red x when I look at the customer. Like this: It doesn't bother to notate that 99 of the devices are functioning fine!

n-able

Long time since I've posted...

Ok, this is going to be a page to complain about a certain product known as "N-Central 6.5 SP2" made by a company named N-Able. I usually refer to the product as N-Able so forgive me if there's any confusion.

Anyway...

Gripe #1: When I do the NOC or All Customer View it almost always shows customers with Red X's making it look like most of the customers devices are failing. When in fact it's usually due to a few workstations that are turned off. And that's what I can't understand, how can a monitoring probe be intelligent enough to get performance and capacity metrics on everything from CPU's to DNS to Exchange to Sql Server and yet it doesn't know when a device is just turned off! How the hell am I supposed to show this to a customer when there are red x's everywhere?

Dude Dell - Firefox Snafu

http://partner.dell.com/ is down. Well, I think it's down. Nevermind, It's just not working with firefox.

P.S. I'm going to start posting twitter-length blogs (~140 characters max)

parallelism

In social sciences we say, "Correlation is not causation"

I think the computer science version would be, "Temporal Contiguity does not equal causation"

Let me explain. Many people, myself included, think that because error y happens right after event x that event x must have caused error y. But event x could have caused event t which stopped protocol a from working causing error 1. There, now you got it.

a few of my favorite things

Just spent the last hour playing a protein-folding game. That's right, a computer game about protein-folding. If you wanna play, go here: http://fold.it/portal/adobe_main. It's addictive and it has the bonus of benefiting medical science.

Also, I love Pandora.com. I think I'd rather have it than iTunes. That's saying something.

just when I thought

Just when I thought everything that could be done has been done... Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2 are coming out! Yet another chance to teleport my mind back to the free-gaming adolescent days of yore. Oh diablo and starcraft, how I love thee. The hours spent playing were only a "waste" to the un-enlightened. Please, God, hasten the day that these games are available to play.

http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3
http://www.starcraft2.com

n-able 6.5 training

Just a couple random text strings from N-able training on N-central 6.5

It's funny that I know how Smart Folders work from the Smart Playlist function of iTunes.

The hierarchy so far:
Dashboards contain folders contain devices. Confusing enough for you?

microsoft training by quickstart

This was supposed to be published a while ago:

*The author makes no claims to coherence or correctness, read at your own hazard.

In San Jose right now attending Microsoft Training by Quickstart Intelligence (quickstart.com). I think I'll have to ask the instructor at the break about active directory, agpm's, etc. (because I wouldn't want to admit I don't know things in front of my IT "peers").

Sidenote: I wonder who would win in the competition of "Most Obscure Acronyms" contest: the Military or the IT industry?

In two days, my fellow cohorts and I will be learning the wonders of MDOP (Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack).

Licensing: A method of selling software that is meant to be so confusing that the client ends up paying any price that is proposed.

Yikes, does anyone know how many applications Microsoft makes?

not artificial intelligence

Just something I thought about last Sol Day (05/11/08):

Instead of AI it should be called NBI where
NBI = Non-Biological Intelligence
and
BI = Biological Intelligence

Furthermore:
NBI(-) = Non-Biological Intelligence less than that of the average biological intelligence
and
NBI(+) = Non-Biological Intelligence greater than that of the average biological intelligence

*Note: There will be a standard error to the above two terms because our measurement of biological intelligence is not very reliable.

Lastly, in reference to when we merge with NBI:
ABI = Augmented Biological Intelligence (it is assumed that the augmentation is by a NBI(-))
CI = Companion Intelligence (it is assumed that the companion intelligence is NBI(+))

As for the issue of whether or not the superior intelligence of the "companion" will make all the decisions for the less intelligent biological aspect of the pairing, well, I'll leave that up to you, dear reader.

information exchange

Idea: (Copylefted by Scott Garrett Daniel, Inc.)

With the advent of information being a real commodity, how will it actually be exchanged? Well, if you take for example, the knowledge of how to solve a specific computer problem, that kind of information is usually esoteric and hard to generalize and apply to other problems. This is why, when I search for solutions in Microsoft Knowledge Base, it often takes extra experience-learned tricks to implement said solution. Now, if there was an artificial intelligence that recorded every one of my solutions to computer problems, that might be valuable information. But only if said AI could also find some way to generalize the solutions and find potential "buyers" of those solutions. Any input on this would be awesome.

it's official

I am now part of MoonKnight Networks, Inc. My official title is "IT Consultant". The sad thing is that I don't think I can serve my old clients now. With the caseload as it is. I suppose I can tell them I'm out of commission for right now, adjusting to this new position. That might work.

So much change. So little time. Where's my nano-machine neural implant to handle all this processing of multiple streams of data?

Oh, I am reading "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil. Awesome book. It makes me happy.

ridiculousity

Ok, so I'm checking out www.sbsummit.com on my PC running Windows Vista Home Premium. I open up Internet Explorer 7 and install Flash Player so I can watch the video stream of the webcasts. What I get is an awesome video of a black screen. It doesn't work. Ironically, the first webcast I was going to view was entitled "The Vista Advantage".

So, now, I jump over to my Mac machine running OS X 10.5 Leopard and open up Firefox 2.0.0.12. I go over to www.sbsummit.com and the webcast starts playing immediately.

Imagine that.