OwlManAtt’s Blog

For those ignorant fools who do not know, Stargate Atlantis premiered last night. A two hour episode, w00t. (Because the rule is during a two hour episode something has to blow up every THREE SECONDS!) It was alright. I like the whole ancient-ship-goes-through-stargate concept. And the sheild on the gate is cool. You put that up as the Wraith drones fly in…no problems anymore.

But yea.

As of late I’ve been reparing windows PCs for people (and making money). Thursday I did a format on some dude’s box, as his FAT was fucked. The one thing I learned there is that soundblaster is an asshole. The driver is such a dickhead.

And tonight, a box came into the shop that seemed to be spyware-dominated. It would start up, then explorer would preform an illegal operation. Then you could do some stuff. Depending on what you did, the computer could crash. Mostly anything you did crashed it.

After about four painful hours of trying to save it, I gave up. Looked to me like a bad case of porn surfing with IE. (An icon labeled ‘XXX’ on the desktop, I ask you…). The windows install was totaled. I ran Adaware, spybot, WinDoctor, scandisk, some tools on Ultimate Boot Disk, and Norton Anti-virus. So I shall format it in the morning.

And now, the furure…

Tomorrow (Sunday) I will be attending an SCOSUG meeting. SCOSUG is the Southern Connecticut Open Source User Group. Meaning it’s a bunch of people who run linux/bsd. There is going to be a talk on Python and its uses, which sounds fun.

Yep.

Recently gotten into a cheezy RPG called Furcadia. It’s something you wouldn’t expect me to enjoy at first. Once you get beyond the fact that for the most part it’s a glorified version of AIM (And yes, I say AIM because it isn’t exactly an open protocol, but people have back-engineered it), and still damn fun. Some interesting folks on there, I’ll tell ya.

Theres a scripting language used on the maps you can make called DragonSpeak. The editor, which is a hacked up version of notepad, doesn’t work under WINE. The text gets garbled up when you try and work in it. So after some research, I find that all of the dragonspeak is kept in two files. I’m going to attempt to write a parser, make a GUI text editor, and have it set up like the modified notepad. It’ll probably turn into a mess, but it’s worth a shot.

And now, on to the Yahoo story.

Some dipshit cracked my mom’s yahoo account and changed all of the info. No lost-password recovery thing, because the birthdate, zipcode, secret question, etc etc were changed. We had gotten an e-mail saying the password was changed, with a nice IP at the bottom.

So, I take the e-mail and find the IP. I run some scans/traces, and find that we have a german (Or european, at least) windows user on our hands. (With plenty of services open. I dropped his IP into the nice happy cracker chat room. God help him. Yes, I know the IP could of changed to some innocent person by now. Shoot me.)

After half an hour of looking, I finally find yahoo’s god damn (long distance) number. I get a tech on the phone and start crying about it. He asks for my mom, so I give the phone to her. He transfers her to account security. I sit in the phone for 45 minutes (Poor phonebill) listening ot crappy music that sounds like it came from some shitty gameboy game (Pokemon music…gah!) and finally get a tech. She has my mom tell her the old information, which they have logged. She gets a new password. None of her groups were fucked with, none of her moderator powers abused.

So with that done, I proceed with trying to read the ISP’s german abuse page. After 20 minutes of translating stuff, I send them an e-mail. Shortly after, I get a reply saying that they pulled the bitch’s plug. (I love their service. Either they have some -really- good logs, or he did this a few times before.)

So, another win for the Owly.

Moral: Don’t fuck with my shit. It won’t end well for you.

Well, by now some of you might (not) of (cared) heard that Kronikpets is being sold/closing. We’ve stopped maintaining it, and in a few days it will be off of the server. Sad, eh?

However, me and Phreak might work on a project together. It will probably be a pet site, but we might do a recode of Evantion (change /blog to /cp2 in the URL for story). A fresh start, from the ground up. All Object-Oriented and stuff. Unfortunatly, he had to run off to work before we could relly get discussing. If anyone has any idea/suggestions, drop me a comment.

Oh, and Mandrake 10 is out. Could of fucking sworn 9.2 came out last week, but whatever they want.

And now I have something to bitch about for eveyone - The lack of a free tool, which runs under windows, to safely resize a FAT partition.

Yes folks, I’m asking for a windows application. Why, you may be pondering? To benefit linux, of course!

You see, I’ve gotten John wanting to give linux a spin as a duelboot. However, he needs to resize his partition to do this. He also doesn’t want to reinstall XP again, as he just did it a day ago. So, I set out on an epic quest to find a program he could use. I came up with this:

• Partition Magic - costs $40.
• DiskDrake - only runs under linux.
• FIPS - Over 5 years old. Apperantly, it runs under windows. But, the documentation said you might be able to cut your Windows 95 partition with it. Scary.

So, as you see, no tool. If it weren’t for the good, God-fearing people of Kazza, Microsoft would of kept a user, which I simply cannot allow.

Installing NVIDIA Drivers, wiki.linuxquestions.org

I contributed that guide to the new LinuxQuestions.org Wiki a day or two ago. I’m quite proud of it, even though it lacks information on getting into a terminal-only mode. It even got linked from the OpenGL page.