OwlManAtt’s Blog

I have just finished reinstalling yet another luser’s windows machine after they demolished it surfing porn with IE or opening e-mail attachments from stan_the_hackerman@l337d00dz.org, and I have come to a decision.

Windows is not more usable than Linux is, and if you disagree with that statement, you are a fucking idiot. Why?

It’s quite simple, really. After you have finished installing Windows, you need to install drivers for your hardware so you can have basic functionality such as a decent resolution, sound, or network access. After that, you need to install the applications that you will be using. The major ones that people use (Office, Photoshop, Macromedia Studio MX) all come on CDs, so you are required to play disc jockey between reboots.

When you finish installing a modern distro (such as Fedora, SuSE, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, etc), you probably won’t need to go and install any additional drivers. You may wish to install nVidia’s proprietary drivers, but it isn’t required to get a decent screen resolution. If you have some obscure bit of hardware, you may need to compile a module, sure. But for the most part, once Linux is installed, you don’t need to even think about drivers.

And during the installation of any modern distro, tons and tons of applications will be installed for you. Image editing programs, office suites, media centers, messanger clients. You name it and it’s probably already there. And if it ISN’T there, you can probably download a package and have it installed with one quick command. No CD changing, no rebooting. Just click-click-click boom. You now have AbiWord. You now have gAIM. No fuss.

Linux’s two major DEs also have a good deal more features in them than explorer.exe does. Glancing at my screen tells me this. I’ve got something that checks my e-mail for me, a dictonary applet to look words up really quickly, a weather applet giving me the current condition and temperature, a clock, six virtual desktops, and a system monitor.

I didn’t need to get any of those things from some shoddy web company, they came with GNOME. There is not an ounce of spyware on my computer (nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be), yet I have all of that.

I don’t get why people tell me Windows is just easier to use because it isn’t. It’s a pain in the ass.

Yea. Just had to get that off my chest.

Development is really cooking over on my new project. We have not one, not two, but three coders working on things. My major project today was cleaning up the items script. Considering that I cut the damn thing down from ~500 to ~250 lines, I’d say I did a fairly good job at it.

The only complaint I have is the current server’s (which we won’t be staying on for much longer, I believe that we’re getting the hell away from that host as soon as we get to beta) PHP config. Display_errors is set to off, meaning when a script has a parse error, it dies and doesn’t tell me why. That is probably the most annoying thing on earth.

I mean, how much would you like to have just gone through 250 lines of code, uploaded, and had it not work? Where do you begin to search for an error?

The solution was to comment out large portions of code to figure out the general area of the error (because the page won’t just be blank if doesn’t give an error), then zero in.

Yea. It’s going good. But moving on to the next matter of business…

I haven’t been taking many photos in the last few days. I guess the novelty of having a digital camera has worn off. So I was thinking about projects I could do with the camera, and all I came up with was a ‘day in the life’ sort of thing.

Kinda like a photoblog for a day. I’ll carry the camera around, fill a few flash cards with high-res images, bring it all home, and then dump it all on kato and do a writeup to go with it.

I figure it would probably be best to do this on Tuesday, since that’s an A day, and my A day teachers are generally more cooperative and friendly than the B day ones.

Mm. Yea, that’s all for today.

A few days ago, I dropped an ad on Apex’s forums whoring my coding skills. I didn’t expect anything back from that - I was way too picky about the sort of project and people I wanted to work on/with.

As you can see, there was one person who posted a reply telling me that he would contact me in a month. I told him to go strait to hell, because he obviously didn’t read the bit about me not wanting to work with douchebags who run around and call everyone a faggot when things don’t go their way.

Expecting the reject to be my only offer, I was surprised to get a message via MSN this morning. Someone representing a new petsite, alpha-quality, fairly competent, and had some damn good artwork done.

After a breif Q&A session, I was on board. So expect me to be plugging and hyping the site when it gets closer to release.

What I have just gone through is nothing short of fucking stupid.

At some point yesterday, some brightstar at Cyberpixels decided to fuck around with the PHP config, or something. The results of their little game were the total and utter disablement of my blog. After a few hours of waiting, the problem fixed itself, to an extent. (I still had to go and fix a few coding errors in this blog that were causing problems with the new config.)

I will once again say what I have said before: LEAVE THE GODDAMN CONFIG FILES THE HELL ALONE. It’s fine. Really, it is. You don’t need to go and break my shit again. You’ve already secured us to the point of the poor customers not being able to twitch. So LEAVE IT BE.

Now, me not being able to login made me a bit twitchy. I had assumed that someone had taken advantage of some obscure AJ-Fork secuirty hole, so I changed the password for the one admin in the user file, because the hash in the file was different then the password hash I had just generated of the exact same password.

Funny, that was. You see, today I decided to fix this shit, because I wanted to make a post. So I broke out the code and started hacking away. After about an hour, I discovered why I could not log in to the admin panel.

The fuckhead who wrote AJ-Fork stores the password hash’s hash.

What the fuck? What strange, twisted mind came up with something as stupid as that? A once-hashed password is more than enough protection. Anyone with common sense would assume the password was run through the md5() function once, then stored.

But no. I have to go code-trawling to figure this out. Asshole, I hope you get leukemia or something.

Happy new year, cyberpixels! May you have horrible luck and go out of business in ‘05! Then maybe I’ll have an excuse to get a decent host.

And to everyone else: Happy holidays. Luck in 2005 and shit.
New Years Party Picures.