Broken Blogs

If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.

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Death to Windows. Long live Apple!

by The Broken Blogger

Categories: Complaints, Technology

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Published on: April 23, 2012

Last year I bought a $600 Dell laptop with Windows 7. It came with a slew of applications including a free one year subscription for anti-virus. Normally I just use Microsoft’s free Security Essentials AV, but my laptop came preloaded and it allowed me to procrastinate changing the anti-virus software for 12 months, so why not?

Well, I should have known my laziness would get the better of me…

So my laptop caught a virus after my one year subscription expired but before I got off my lazy duff to install MS’s Security Essentials. Now I am a pretty savvy computer guy, having worked in IT since ’95, troubleshooting PCs and Macintoshes for America Online when everyone still asked “do you have the Internet?”. But, as luck would have it, I caught a boot-sector virus, one that installs itself at each reboot regardless of what you do with the files while the operating system is up. Now I have been complaining for about 10 years that the PC manufactures and specifically Microsoft (which essentially has the PC world wrapped around it’s little finger) needed to reassess its core components and underlying infrastructure, wipe the slate, and start fresh from the ground up. I mean seriously, we are still suffering in the PC world from architectures that were invented 30+ years ago! Let me gripe about some of what should have fundamentally changed by now:

Why does an installed O/S need access to the boot sector? Microsoft should disable the ability to write to the bootsector in their operating system if it booted from said device.

In that vein, why do PC manufactures allow the O/S to touch the boot sector? The BIOS should abstract that part of the hard drive and only make it accessible to alternatively booted media.

Everything should require certificates to run.

What I mean to say is that every executable should be signed by a publisher. All publishers should have to register with the operating system manufacture, any executable that is modified (by a virus for example) would have an invalid hash and wouldn’t be allowed to run. Any publisher that was known to create faulty or malicious code would have their certificate revoked and all of their software would stop running on all computers that checked the certificate revocation list.
PC BIOS manufactures should only allow the BIOS to be modified by code that was signed with a proper certificate.
PC manufacturers should NEVER write ANY part of their BIOS to the harddrive or any other media accesible to the O/S.

Consider for a moment the implications… the almost immediate halt to viruses and malicious code. No longer would I have to suffer through boot sector viruses that I can’t clean because my PC manufacture writes the BIOS to the harddrive and the virus was smart enough to modify it such that I can only boot from my fixed disk, so I can’t remove the virus. You know, the one smart enough to not allow me to remove it from the operating that was stupid enough to allow it to run.

So, now that I have a $600 brick sitting in my living room, hours wasted troubleshooting a device that never should have allowed such blatantly obvious malicious conduct to happen to begin with, and a level of frustration so high that I had to force myself to stay in my seat for fear that I would throw the laptop in the pond outside my deck. Instead I channeled all of that anger into a less than planned financial decision, but a decision I had been considering for years nonetheless: time to buy a Mac. Specifically an iMac. Jump in a lake Dell. You won’t see another penny from me Mr. Gates (and now you can’t afford to sterilize another 100,000 people in a third-world-country through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation without my valuable financial support).

It has only been two days since I received my iMac, but I have managed to successfully transfer every song, picture, or document I ever cared about. I have fallen in love with the intuitive nature of the Mac, while struggling to work with the trackpad (its more about muscle memorization than actual frustration. I imagine this is what the 40-and-over crowd went through in the mid-90′s when trying to get used to a mouse). I understand the Mac is much more expensive, but I have to say (in the very short time I have had it) that the lack of frustration just might be worth the money. [Caveat* I am still in the honeymoon phase so take this with a grain of salt.]

Who can argue with such beauty?

At the end of the day, I am beginning to see why people can be almost militant about their Macs, and I certainly can get behind the idea that the PC architecture, along with the Windows operating system is so far behind where they should have been, peddling the same old hardware or the same old code with a new shiny start-button.

Wisconsin senators living “abroad”

by The Broken Blogger

Categories: Politics

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Published on: February 21, 2011

The Chicago Tribune is reporting that the Democratic senators from Wisconsin are hanging out in Chicago to avoid creating a quorum in the state senate and forcing a vote on the budget that they say “tramples on the rights of public workers”.

I don’t live in Wisconsin and can’t speak to the specific details of said budget, although in general I think all governments are too large and need deep financial cuts that will of course upset public workers. But this predisposition to think that the democratic arguments about the budget are wrong creates an interesting dynamic for me: I applaud the Republican senators and governor for paring back the size and entitlement dispositions of government, while I simultaneously applaud the Democratic senators for standing for what they believe in by depriving the senate of a quorum of senators.

It is situations like these that make me proud to be an American and a small part of this great (and sometimes insanely bizarre) system. Kudo’s to both parties in Wisconsin! May Freedom (and Liberty) Ring!

-The Broken Blogger

Linking Facebook and my Blog

by The Broken Blogger

Categories: Technology

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Published on: February 20, 2011

I just added two new pluggins that integrate my blog with Facebook. The first one updates my Facebook profile every time I make a blog post (and this post is the test to see if it works). The second pluggin allows people who are currently logged into Facebook to use their Facebook IDs to post comments (single-sign-on at its best).

So, this was just meant to be a quick test. Did you all see the linked FB post? Can you comment using your FB credentials?

-BB

All the Reasons why (new) Metallica Sucks

by The Broken Blogger

Categories: Complaints

Tags: Heavy Metal, Metallica, Music, XM Satellite Radio

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Published on: October 3, 2008

I bought a car recently. I traded in my ’05 Kia Sorrento with $550 monthly payments and 17MPG for a much cheaper ’08 Hyundai Accent with $400 monthly payments (after financing what was left in payments on my Kia) and 34ishMPG to save money. Yes, the average American’s financial belts are tightening… but that is a different post.

My car came with three months free XM Satellite Radio service. I have never used their service so I spent the first few days of car ownership messing around with the XM-Radio more than the car itself. I came across a channel dedicated to Metallica and it plays nothing but their music. At first I was giddy, but then I realized that a station that plays nothing but Metallica music is going to play a *wide variety* of their songs, and I hate anything new they have done. Let me explain…

I was 14 years old in 1988 when Metallica released “…And Justice for All”. Before that time I still had not “decided” the kind of music I really liked. But after listening to this band called Metallica, and hearing what they could do with some distortion and excellent drumming, I found my genre. So, being the metal-head I was I had to get everything Metallica: Kill ‘em All, Ride the Lightning, Master of Puppets, Garage Days. That mixed with my learning the guitar and discovering other legendary bands like Led Zepplin, Pink Floyd, and some marginally decent bands like Megadeth, AC/DC, etc. really made me appreciate the skill that those 4 members of Metallica really had.

Then came the beggining of the end … 1991′s release of “The Black Album”. Up until that time there was really only 1 Metallica song I didn’t really like: “The Thing That Should Not Be” (mostly because it was entirely too repetitive). But with the release of “The Black Album” I had several songs to choose from. I really tried hard to like them all, but I just found some of them hokey or just stupid lyrically if not musically. There was still plenty to like, but it was about 50/50 with this new album. That is about my normal “likeability rating” for other albums, not Metallica. What were these guys thinking? And then I started hearing every preppy in high school and the neighboring college blaring the latetest Metallica songs out of their BMWs and it hit me: My band had sold out. This wasn’t a mistake by them, this was a shift to get them mainstream.

As heartbroken as I was, I was still willing to give them another chance. And did they know ever how to disappoint. Load came out in ’96 and I have to say it was aptly named: it was a load, a load of $%&^!. Metallica reached new lows even in the cover art:

The cover of Load was created by Andres Serrano, and was called Blood and Semen III. Serrano pressed a mixture of his own semen and bovine blood between sheets of plexiglass. [source]

Metallica's "Load" Album

In aquiring XM-Satelite Radio service I decided to give Metallica another shot. Perhaps I had been too judgmental, perhaps I just didn’t get where the band was going at the time, perhaps I had needed 10 years to clear my head and give them another shot. Perhaps I was right the first time…

Metallica has decided to replicate all the things that were detrimental in the Black Album. There it seems that James Hetfield thought he was an honest to goodness singer instead of a heavy metal “singer”. His constant attempts to carry a melody are precisely why his vocals don’t work anymore. His bizarre lyrics haven’t improved since his “Of Wolf And Man” days where yelling “Shape Shift” as a chorus was apparently acceptable. Kirk Hammet still hides behind the Wah Pedal he found during the Black Album and he hasn’t let go of that security blanket. I can hear the bassist now, which is good, but despite Cliff Burton’s writing strengths Metallica never really had strong bass riffs in their music. Lars’ drumming might be the only thing left that is worth anything, but really, who wants to listen to a drummer when you have to put up with all of the other crap Metallica does in their songs?

XM, you can blame Metallica for not being able to snag just one more member. I just might have been willing to shell out the monthly cash if Metallica were still a real heavy metal band. As it is, I guess its back to the iPod for me after my trial subscription runs out.

Google’s Chrome – Why do you care?

by The Broken Blogger

Categories: Technology

Tags: Google, Google's Chrome, Jason Spence, Microsoft, Web Browser

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Published on: October 1, 2008

Jason Spence has written some disparaging remarks about Google’s new browser named “Chrome” recently. Now I am not a “Google fanatic” (despite the theme of my blog) or web browser expert, but I would like to counter Jason’s article because I think he missed what Google was after. Jason seems to feel that Google created their browser to compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and as such picked a name for their browser that was less than marketable.

But in order to understand what Google is after, you have to read what they say about their own browser.

We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

Now Jason was right about one thing: Google is trying to compete with Microsoft. But he missed the application they are looking to compete against. Google isn’t out to compete with Microsoft’s IE, Google is going to compte with Microsoft’s Office, Microsoft’s Instant Messaging, and Microsoft’s product line in general. Google is looking to build the browser that is capable if utilizing a web site that publish all of those product lines from the Internet instead of the desktop.

Its a briliant move *if* they can quickly follow that up with that “killer app” online. Google already has Wrightly, but they need to have more of an online presence with a more robust interface if they expect to compete in the application wars, and that is precisely why they build Chrome, to give them that edge.

So Jason, I agree that their name could have used more time in a conference room at Google headquarters before being chosen, and I agree that Google is trying to “stick it” to Microsoft, but I think its about the online application market, not the Internet browser wars.

9 year old argues with his mother on a Xbox Live Clan Match over Chocolate Milk.

by The Broken Blogger

Categories: Complaints

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Published on: July 27, 2006


A 9 year old boy who would have died by my hand 30 seconds into this if he was in my house and talking to my wife like this. It would be funny if it wasn’t such a scary thought that there are parents who let their kids act like this.

Silly Silly Mel

by The Broken Blogger

Categories: Uncategorized

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Published on: April 28, 2006

So I walk into work today to hear 3 co-workers laughing right by my cubicle. After I inquire as to the cause I am treated to a viewing of the trailer to Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto” (Watch the trailer).

I like Mel Gibson, most of his movies, and his directing. And I have seen this trailer before. It looks like a very good movie, but it doesn’t look funny. So what was the big deal? It turns out Mel has a sense of humor and has 1 frame of the trailer with him in it. Go to the link above, watch the trailer, and right after you see the monkey, pause it and go backwards frame by frame. I have posted a picture below just to prove it to you.

And special thanks to Jason and Joe for telling me about this.

-Z

Pesky Left

by The Broken Blogger

Categories: Complaints, Politics

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Published on: March 9, 2006

Most who know me know my political and social beliefs, but for the sake of those who don’t, and this posting, I will keep my views of the example subject matter to myself.

Tolerance: There is a word (or rather some of its derivatives) that I have heard spoken (and in my opinion misused) quite often; generally in the social arena, and generally by those of the left leaning political spectrum. I don’t mean to bash the left or its goals or ideals, I just have an issue with hypocritical statements and ways of thinking.

Just so I don’t offend any particular group (like I really care if I offend you) let me first state that every group, organization, community, sect, cult, government, etc. etc. etc. is guilty of some kind of hypocritical jargon. Since at the core of those and every organization are human beings, and I think we can all agree that in the grand scheme of things, humans have a hard time seeing other points of view, the “big picture”, and admitting that they could be wrong on certain topics. So we see hypocrites in Church, Hypocrites in government, hypocrites in the news, hypocrites at our grocery store or at work.

But the core of my “rant” is this: It seems like a rather large “chink” in the left’s political armor to label others as intolerant or judgmental. Why? For the very reasons I detailed above. The left is not immune from judgmental thoughts and processes. They just pretend like they are. And that is a hypocritical stance. For example, a common lament for those who don’t go to church is that they have tried it, and hated that the church was filled with judgmental intolerant people. Hello!! Of course it is, the church has humans in it doesn’t it? What did you expect, heaven on earth? I don’t see that excuse stopping you from going to bars, work, grocery stores, social gatherings, etc. All those places too are filled with intolerant judgmental people. Secondly, how judgmental is it of you to then label the vast majority of church goers in one fell swoop? How “intolerant” does that make you?

And that to me is the weakness with the left’s pursuit of social justice. The left has to judge those it deems judgmental, thereby becoming what they would rid the world of.

In addition to that chink in their armor, I find their “hijacking” of the word intolerant to be amusing. It amuses me to the point of frustrated hilarity because they are using it in situations where the definition would not apply. In short, they don’t know what they are talking about. Again, (I suppose) an example is in order… Gays and “gay rights” is a major tenant of the left’s social justice ideals. And those that do not agree with their philosophies are labeled “intolerant” and ignorant. But the left doesn’t seem to know what the definition of tolerance is, and is therefore hard pressed to use its antonym accurately. “Tolerate: To put up with something or somebody unpleasant.” You cannot “tolerate” that which does not bother you. You do not “tolerate” the fact that you have a good paying job. You don’t “tolerate” having a million dollars in the bank. You don’t “tolerate” a fun evening out with your friends or your spouse. You have to not agree with it or be bothered by it to “tolerate” it. Therefore when the left calls a pastor who is speaking out about a gay lifestyle “intolerant”, they have to assume that because he does not agree with the gay lifestyle and its ramifications, that he himself discriminates against gays at every opportunity. By making that assumption the left has just pre-judged the pastor and become judgmental and intolerant of those speaking their minds.

Conversely, the left is not a tolerant political or social harbor. It is filled with humans just like the right side is. They do not “tolerate” the gay lifestyle, thereby getting to claim that they are tolerant. The gay life style does not bother them, therefore it is impossible for them (by definition of the word) to be tolerant of gays.

At the root of all of this is the problem with politically correct behavior or the attempt to enforce it. In order to setup “rules” of correct behavior or thought, you have to define bad behavior and thought; in doing so you take on the role of a judge, and must become judgmental in order to enforce those social moorings that you are attempting to create. Now I believe that humans (under certain circumstances) should be judgmental. We should prejudge at certain times. But that is not the claim of the left. They claim that we should never prejudge or become judgmental. In doing so they became hypocrites (just like everybody else).

-Z

Firewall the movie

by The Broken Blogger

Categories: Movie Review

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Published on: March 6, 2006

Hollywood always seems to mess up technology and guns. Everywhere you look in a Hollywood picture, something is always wrong with one of the two of them.

Take guns as an example. Here are some wonderful things that happen in movies when it comes to guns:

Characters walk around with single-action automatic pistols where the hammer is not cocked. They proceed to pull them out of the holster and fire with them as if they were previously ready to fire.
After a shoot out, characters reload their automatic pistols (where they did not use all the ammo and therefore there is still a round chambered) by popping in a new clip and pulling the slide back. Yet the round still in the chamber never falls out.
Idiot “gangsta” wannabes fire their pistol sideways instead of up-and-down. Barrels are set at angles to counter the effects of gravity. If you shoot your pistol sideways you negate that feature and help ensure that you can’t hit a damn thing.

There are many more, but that is not the point of my post. I watched the movie Firewall with my wife last week, and noticed a very quick scene where Harrison Ford’s character issued some Cisco commands on the screen. It was too fast for me to see what he was doing, so I managed to get a screen shot of it from the Internet and this is what it says:

Last login: Mon March 21 08:54:32 on console

welcome


[rw8051:~] lwrawl%
Router(config)# access-list 1 deny 172.16.4.0 0.0.0.255
Router(config)# access-list 1 permit any
Router(config)# Interface ethernet 0
Router(config-if)# ip access-group 1
[rw8051:~] lwrawl% Rule Initialized

The parts that I am interested in are the lines that start with “Router”. The first 2 “Router” lines create a basic access list named “1″. It denies traffic with a source ip address of 172.16.4.0 – 172.16.4.255. The next line then allows all other traffic. When you create an access list there is always a “hidden” line at the end. It is called an “implicit deny” statement that would read “access-list 1 deny any”. So if Harrison Ford’s character had not entered in the second line of the access list, it would have denied all traffic.

So-far-so-good. We have a basic access list and now we need to apply it to an interface. So Harrison Ford enters the third line so that he can configure the proper interface, in this case the first Ethernet card (Ethernet 0). The fourth line applies the access list to the interface, except that there is a problem with the syntax here. When you apply an access list to an interface, the IOS wants to know if it should apply it to incoming traffic our outgoing traffic. So depending on the flow of traffic, the line should have read “ip access-group 1 in” or “ip access-group 1 out”.

Not a biggie, it is a movie after all… but my real issue with this is that this is an access list to block someone from the Internet that is trying to access the Bank’s internal network. And to top it off, the man he is working with makes a statement similar to “…and this will avoid false-positives too!”. If you don’t know networking, here is the problem with that statement and Harrison’s access list. The attacker is coming from the Internet. The 172.16.4.0 network is not an Internet routable address. So the attacker cannot be coming from that address. Yes, it is possible that the bank is NAT’ing outside addresses to internal IPs but then that opens up a Pandora’s box of issues that I won’t go into here. Secondly, assuming that the 172.16.4.0 network did work over the Internet, this access list does nothing for “false-positives”. In fact, he just made it so that legitimate users of the bank’s network who live in the same neighborhood as the attacker can’t access the bank’s network either.

All said, I think it was great that Hollywood used a real product from the real world to do the job that it really could do in the script. They just need to work a bit harder at getting the details down.

-Z

How to create 100,000 "undeletable" directories

by The Broken Blogger

Categories: Technology

Tags: No Tags

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Published on: February 9, 2006

Ok, I am in a generous mood, so get ready for an evil trick you can play on your co-workers.

Before I give you the code, and tell you why it works the way it does, I need to explain some functions of Windows. For backwards compatibility with older MS-DOS type applications Windows has a few system files named things like “com1″, “com2″, “lpt1″, etc. Since these are reserved system file names, you cannot create any file or directory named after any of these files. Try it! Make a directory called “com1″. I bet it didn’t work. Conversely, you cannot delete any file named after these system files.

Now suppose for one minute that there was a “secret” way to create a file called com1. If you could place this file into a directory of your choosing, you could render the directory itself undeletable. This works because in DOS and just about any other file system out there, you cannot remove a directory unless it is empty. If you don’t have access to delete all the files in a directory, you cannot remove the directory itself even if you have permissions to delete the directory.

So even if you are a local administrator to the machine itself, you could not remove any directory that had a com1 file located within it. Even if you had full control over the com1 file, you couldn’t delete it because it is a system file and windows won’t let you.

I am about to give you the code, but before I do, let me just brag a little that I used this against a friend who was having “pissing-matches” with me about being the more technically inclined person. Needless to say, he never figured out how to delete the 40,000 “undeletable” directories I placed in the root of his C: drive.

FOR /L %%i IN (1,1,100000) DO MD %%i & echo %%i > \\.\c:\%%i\com1

Not that hard is it? If you create a new text file, paste this text in there, and save it as nodelete.cmd then run it, you will create 100,000 “undeletable” directories on the root of your C: drive.

I will leave you to figure out how to remove them. (It really isn’t that hard to figure out considering you now know how to create them.)

Also, it would probably be best if you started the batch file with the “@ECHO OFF” so that the command interpreter doesn’t have to echo back all that data.

Have fun. Let me know how it works.

-Z

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