Posts by waldo kitty

Crack coder wasn't allowed to meet clients due to his other talent: Blisteringly inappropriate insults

Re: One place I was at...

The fix, implemented in front of the customer, was to use a Sharpie to write "L" and "R" on the mouse buttons.

i had similar way back in the day... in the typing pool of one of our better clients... after waaaaaaaay too many support calls, i was tasked with "fix the problem!" and left to my own devices... that fix was to use gold rubbing stencils to put "ANY" on the space bar of every computer keyboard in the office... apparently many new users can be overly strict when starting out on computers and they were looking for the "Any" key when instructed to hit one... their upper management had a great laugh and bought me lunch that day! t'was quite fun, actually... although it did get very quiet back at our office with the lack of those particular support calls each day...

Game dev accuses Intel of selling ‘defective’ Raptor Lake CPUs

Intel selling broken CPU's, then try their best to cover it up, not like they haven't done that before!

can we say Celeron? ;)

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

when i was in the USAF taking electrical training as a prerequisite for my MOS, one of the safety films they showed us had a section with a hotdog wearing a wedding band... it showed what would happen when different electrical charges were applied... yeah... certainly eye opening and led immediately to quite a few of us transferring our rings from our fingers to our dog tag chains... without question...

If you're using Polyfill.io code on your site – like 100,000+ are – remove it immediately

Tip of the Day

remember to look at your whitelists! many have added the polyfill.io domains to their NoScript whitelist... pretty sure there are other whitelists it will be found on, too...

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

Re: Perspective

Maybe they could have hitched a lift on Elon's space launched Telsa Roadster. It must be approaching Voyager 1 anytime soon.

ummm... the Roadster and Starman won't ever leave the Sol system... their trajectory takes them just past the orbit of Mars where they loop back, go around the sun, and back to Earth's orbit.. they never had the speed needed to leave the star system... the Voyagers used planetary gravity assist flybys to gain the necessary speed for leaving...

currently, Roadster and Starman are 5.25 light minutes from Earth and approaching at 3.6 km/s... together, they have completed 4 orbits around Sol and are at the beginning of their 5th orbit in the 6 years since their launch...

https://www.whereisroadster.com/

72 flights later and a rotor blade short, Mars chopper loses its fight with physics

plastics?

guessing the blades were made of some sort of plastic? if yes, looks like plastic breaks down on Mars the same way it does on Earth... maybe a bit faster, though...

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

But why would a simulation create El Reg? Mmm... pizza

But why would a simulation create El Reg? Mmm... pizza

even the Sims have their daily news and pizza shops...

why can't we be a simulation?

Cat accused of wiping US Veteran Affairs server info after jumping on keyboard

Re: A cat that can type "DROP DATABASE veteran-affairs;"?

Perhaps it went like this:

i was thinking something more simple... like there was a file manager up with some of the config files selected... kitteh pressed DEL key (bringing up are you sure dialog) followed by mashing the ENTER key with fluffy butt (triggering Yes response in dialog)...

speaking as l'objet d'affection of my own owners, they used to come up with some of the craziest writings when they would sit on my flat keyboards licking and cleaning themselves... those keyboards now have hard covers over them and normal angled keyboards are used... kittehs don't seem to care for sitting on angled keyboards but they do still try to make biscuits on them at times... gotta go... i'm being commanded to put food in the dishes because they can see the bottoms of them... bbl... this might take some time ^•ﻌ•^

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

Re: Unique keys

What's the problem with Wanda Kershaw as a name?

the login name is the first three letters of the first and last name... so "Wan" and "Ker"... now put them together and see what you get ;)

Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it

Re: "Hairy jumper"

i was thinking of a jumper block on some pins that was somehow accumulating some sort of conductive dust fibers or similar that were shorting to somewhere else and bonking up the works :lol:

NASA finds crashing spacecraft into asteroids is a viable defence strategy

Re: From orbit?

What about the current planetary shield? I think it is being marketed as starlink

are those possibly AKA AG-1 or maybe pre-1 version numbering (AG-0.1 with AG-0.2 being launched now)?

What you need to know about the real-time capable edition of Ubuntu 22.04

nintendoeats wrote: [...] they are trying to show a correctly dept-sorted semi-transparent object with 500k vertices on an iGPU.

O.U.C.H.!

i'm guessing someone finally/eventually takes them and their project to a properly GPU-equipped system... maybe even explaining or at least attempting to explain the difference between their iGPU and something that actually does the job they want/need done...

More victims of fake crypto investor scam speak to The Register

wait! what??!?

[...], so Hunter turned his phone to face the two men, [...].

Fewer than 30 seconds later they returned the phone to Hunter [...].

"In those 15 or 30 seconds that they had my phone, [...]

how does "turned his phone to face the two men" turn into "they had my phone"??? never, Never, NEVER 1) hand your phone to someone (you don't know) and 2) always expect anyone to immediately start snooping on it... i mean...

"nonononono... i'll hold it... you just take the picture..." geez...

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

Re: Not very "Trusted" I guess

Foolish people (and even some not so foolish) have always been and will always be susceptible to scams.

reminds me of The Wizard's First Rule: "People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."

granted, it is from a fantasy novel series (yes, i've actually read the first 13 books in the series) but all of the Wizard;s Rules do actually fit in today's world and they make a lot of sense...

Re: Whereas, in real life . . .

Probably luring the victim to Rome, to a certain hotel, cloning his/her hotel room key, or the rfid, or bribing the cleaning lady...

Then, using old-fashioned spying micro cameras or malware, they got the images of the seed phrases necessary to make the transfer of funds to happen.

Better to have camera detectors before conducting cryptocurrency transactions, plus a fresh and clean PC / Macbook.

according to the article, Shams created the new Trust Wallet while still *at home* before the meeting using a "device that Webaverse didn't typically use"... my understanding is also that the hotel lobby was just a convenient public place to meet... Shams wasn't staying there...

the article does not say what the "device that Webaverse didn't typically use" was... that makes me wonder if the device was maybe intercepted in-transit and replaced with a modified one before Shams received it... i also wonder about possible wifi traffic interception to/from the device where the thieves recorded and decoded the traffic and/or maybe stole some session token(s)...

granted, there's not a lot of detail given which is also understandable... we (TINW) don't really want the thieves knowing that their process has been cracked before they are run down... hopefully Shams or someone with him had the wherewithal to get some video/pics and voice recordings of the people they met with...

anyway, those are my initial thoughts during 1st c0ffee of the day...

Eager young tearaway almost ruined Christmas with printer paper

Re: Instructions and washing instructions

How about the instruction to "Hit any key", resulting in people apparently asking where the "Any" key is.

yes! BTDT... left an entire (legal) office, one afternoon, after having been tasked to "fix this problem"... the fix? lovely gold rubbed stencil letters spelling "ANY" on each and every space bar in said office... i recall something like 50 systems in the typing pool area and i think on the order of 10 or 15 partners so yeah... 60-65 space bars proudly exclaiming they were (also) the "ANY key"... bosses never asked how i fixed the problem... they were just happy that we were not having to field numerous phone calls from them every day... especially since someone determined calls like those were "unbillable time spent"... that firm was one of our top clients for many years to follow, too... those were the glory days! LOL

No, you cannot safely run a network operations center from a corridor

Re: Classical "Told you so"

I've seen some cable porn that will make most techies shed a tear!

yup! every time i see such i have two immediate thoughts fighting to see which gets to the forebrain first...

1. that's an extremely pretty flow of cabling.

2. i sure don't want to be the one to have to cut that apart to replace/trace a cable.

NASA Geotail spacecraft's 30-year mission ends after last data recorder fails

COSPAR/NORAD numbers

FWIW: the GEOTAIL craft is known as COSPAR 1992-044A and NORAD 22049... not sure why they were left out of the article ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If your DNS queries LoOk liKE tHIs, it's not a ransom note, it's a security improvement

Re: Am I being Dense?

So, if this hack.... (for in my mind it is a 'hack') is a workaround to prevent cache poisoning, then surely the workaround for the workaround is to poison with all the variants.

ummm... isn't there still only one cache entry for the domain even though there are many possible case variants? it is only the conversations between DNS servers that carry the caSe ChanGes, isn't it? if i'm correct, then there's still only one normalized(?) variant of the domain name in the cache... the question is if the one that is cached is the correct one and that is determined by the conversation between the servers... i think...

if caching DNS servers were to have to cache all the case variants that cross their desks, we'd have a new(?) problem to deal with... that being "cache explosion" which could eat server memory (or storage) till OOM failure(s) lead to DOS and we certainly don't want that...

Voyager 1 data corrupted by onboard computer that 'stopped working years ago'

Re: Foresight

Just look how long older appliances lasted, compared to modern ones.

cars... older ones just run and run and run... in an accident, you can actually buff out the damage... with modern cars, there's no amount of buffing damage out and they seem to be engineered to be thrown away after 5 years... it really is a sad state of affairs...

Kappa -->

Re: Foresight

this is known as "paying attention to all the details"... something which is sorely lacking in much of today's projects and code...

that's an old guy, not a windows user -->

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Cool Running

The trick worked on drives in the past because back then the bearings did wear out and increased tolerances together with less than stellar head positioning would lead to read/write failures.

not only that but there was also the protective coating on the platters that, in some cases, would soften from the heat of operation... when the drives spun down the heads would settle into the now soft coating... when the drive cooled off, those head were effectively cemented to the platters...

when the drive was powered back up, the heads would prevent the platters from spinning... this is where the quick spinning or light thumping would come in handy to pop the heads loose and let the drive platters spin properly... freezing the drive would, in many cases, allow the coating to shrink away from the heads so the platters weren't held captive when power was applied...

yes, sometimes a head might get torn off the arm it was mounted to... i'm sitting here looking at a clock made from an old ST-125 that had this happen... luckily it was the last head in the count that came off... luckily? yeah, because i low leveled the drive and told it it had one less head... yeah, that reduced the available storage space and the data was lost but it worked well enough for the tasks it had to do... that drive ran for another 5 years or so before being replaced by a larger drive and one that didn't have the sticktion problem...

since it was already damaged, i removed the cover to get at the insides... the bottom side of the bottom platter had a nice clean circle scrapped into it where the head had gouged out the material... i powered the drive and used a screwdriver to carefully scrap another circle for added decoration... then i removed the platter motor and replaced it with a clock work, figured out how to mount that one platter, and applied a ring of numbers along with some clock hands... the cover was replaced with a custom hand-cut plexiglass cover and boom! one hard drive clock was born :)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/rxtjboh29ee0a0b/st-125-hard-drive-clock.jpg?dl=0

Re: Lost dog pictures

Aren't hard drives sealed

no, they weren't... they had small ventilation holes to keep the air pressure equalized...

if so how could there be any moisture inside to condense?

moisture on the outside can also cause damage... especially when it forms across two or more non-insulated wire traces or through holes on the board...

on a similar note, i was called out to a rock quarry back in the '00s to fix a system that was "acting weird"... getting to the site was a bit of a wonk because the dirt roads were eaten away by all the large heavy trucks and several weeks of rain... i ended up parking my car at the entrance and riding in in one of the dump trucks because the road in was so bad... a few of those holes would have swallowed my car quite easily...

upon opening the system to take a look at the insides, we were greeted with a layer of silica dust about .25 inches thick (about 6mm) completely blanketing the motherboard and all the surfaces inside the machine... dry silica dust is generally not much of a problem other than when it builds up enough to slow or stop the fans... moist silica dust, on the other hand... well... electronics and moisture don't mix too well... especially not when the electronics are old original IBM PCAT systems that are not cleaned on a regular schedule... they did at least have a "keyboard condom" in place because they had had to replace the keyboard several times from all the dust...

yeah, they purchased a new(er) system and spent i don't know how much on fitting a decent air filtration system along with scheduling regular cleaning and removal of the captured dust...

Re: Seems ok

Someone has been reading too much BOFH ;)

there's no such thing as "too much BOFH"... ever O:)

Re: Seems ok

You're absolutely right. He should have done it as a favour, and then noted he was a bit short of cash at the moment

this might have been fine, but...

and could you lend me £100 to see me through till payday.

this, on the other hand, indicates he would pay the £100 back on or about payday... terms like "lend" and "borrow" mean "pay back" which, in this case, would mean he did the task for free... now, if you had said "and could you let me have £100 to see me through till payday." i would agree with you... terminology is important... very important...

Linux kernel patch from Google speeds up server shutdowns

Heh, I remember solving this 8 years ago... https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/5/8/512

interestingly enough, that original patch author responded in the latest thread about this ;)

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[e-mail]/

Client demo in 30 minutes. Just what could go wrong?

Re: X25 woes

It took me all night, many tired calls to HP support, with the first lines asking the usual trivial questions, before ending up at the X25 L3 specialist which gave me the solution, one I would have never found alone.

did you really leave us hanging like that? i mean...

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/wisdom_of_the_ancients.png

FBI seizes $3.6bn in Bitcoin after New York 'tech couple' arrested over Bitfinex robbery

Re: Am I a bad person...

after watching 5 seconds of that video

wait... you got to see it? it has been marked private, now :(

I own that $4.5bn of digi-dosh so rewrite your blockchain and give it to me, Craig Wright tells Bitcoin SV devs

Re: In summary then ...

He did but they too were accidentally thrown out with his collection of Napoleon memorabilia.

is that all in the tip with the accidentally thrown away hard drive? or is that another guy i'm thinking of? if it is the same guy, i wonder if him searching for his Napoleon stuff might get him closer to the lost HD?

Paris because crying over spilt milk (aka lost stuff)

Microsoft closes installer hole abused by Emotet malware, Google splats Chrome bug exploited in the wild

it is the season for giving gifts, right?

i mean, what better gifts to give than fixes for defects that allowed unwanted gifts to be given?

seems legit :)

Log4j doesn't just blow a hole in your servers, it's reopening that can of worms: Is Big Biz exploiting open source?

Re: Don't forget the other bugs introduced by copy-n-paste software

There are no serious integrity checks run on newly-acquired libraries or on code cruft. "It's been working before, it should work now.)[sic]

you know this is part of the problem, too, right? everyone checks for their "desired working output" but who in their right mind bothers to check for "undesired output"? i mean, this is what unit testing was developed for but who actually uses that any more? "it is too old!" "it is too '90s" whaaawhaaawhaaa

this is in the same vein of not bothering to use stack or heap checking or even bothering to check that a buffer is large enough to hold what you are trying to stuff into it... this is the kind of c4rp that has allowed buffer overruns and so many of today's infestation techniques to proliferate... Kappa Kappa Kappa

Re: Java is so 1990's

Java is so 1990's

You should have stopped using java decades ago, so.....

sounds like you are also saying that COBOL, FORTRAN, ADA, and even C and its derivatives should also not be being used... are you suggesting that we should return to ASM or is that also ""too old"" for you?? i mean... Kappa

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

Re: Reclaiming Private Call Costs

After all, the plumber who fixes your boiler charges for parts and labour for the hours he spends in your airing cupboard, not an additional 30 mintues for invoicing.

ahhh, but he does... you just don't notice the extra $$ or five built into the hourly rate specifically for invoicing time ;)

Waterfox: A Firefox fork that could teach Mozilla a lesson

Re: Palemoon, check. Seamonkey, check.

Notepad++ is surprisingly competent for pure html.

the question, then, is "is there a native notepad++ for linux and mac?" ;)

What a clock up: Brit TV-broadband giant Sky fails to pick up weekend's timezone change, fix due by Friday

Re: Clock embuggerance day

After that your motherboard clock will remain persistently UTC, and the operating system will display the correct time from that based on the time zone that you tell it you are in.

this is how it should be done, yes... then one simply has to remember that the BIOS clock is UTC if/when they have to change the battery or the BIOS clock loses its time for some reason... aside from that, be sure to select the proper timezone representation and bob's your uncle... most of the time...

IT god exposed as false idol by quirks of Java – until he laid his hands on the server

same here...

i applaud microsoft/apple for bringing the computer to the common man but i thoroughly detest them for turning me into a toaster repairman...

icon because is it the only thing left at the end of the day...

Re: Laying on of hands

have you forgotten the four basic unspoken rules?

- programmers only look at and think about code...

- technicians only look at and think about hardware...

- if hardware is the problem, don't expect a programmer to fix it unless you are looking for them to (blindly) (try to) code around the problematic hardware...

- if a program is the problem, don't expect a technician to fix it unless you are looking for them to (blindly) (try to) add faster CPU/GPU, more memory, and/or more storage...

there are more but these are the main ones that form the base everything else is built on...

Sharing is caring, except when it's your internet connection

Re: Ah well...

Oh - El Reg - have you given up completely on finding stories you could plausibly fit around the pic of eeePC beach girl?

are you talking about one of the ones here?

https://www.theregister.com/2008/10/02/eee_girl_saga_continues/

Re: "What the neighbours made of their sudden disconnection is . ."

Sounds like the keyboard lock they used to put on PCs, probably only 2 or 3 variants on most PCs

same for lawn mowers and small tractors... then there's the thing that if you have a key to a piece of Caterpillar brand of heavy equipment, you have the key to all of them... John Deere and others may be the same... it can be painful when you figure this out after having been taken for $50US for a spare key and you find they are really a dime a dozen...

How to keep a support contract: Make the user think they solved the problem

Re: Melting

The replacement ECU was hastily modified by removing the battery and reconnecting it remotely through two fly leads.(just in case!)

we used to do similar in our computer shop... desolder the onboard battery and solder in a replacement AA battery pack... mount the pack to the wall of the case with double-sided tape... some of these replacement packs conveniently came with plugs on the wires that plugged onto the header on the board... otherwise we just soldered the wires to the same places where the battery was soldered...

the main idea was that we 1) removed a possible corrosion problem from the board, 2) made it easy for the user to replace the batteries when needed, and 3) alleviated these types of board-level repairs in the shop... #3 especially because there are inordinate numbers of college trained electronics techs that couldn't solder their way out of a wet tissue...

i can't even begin to count the numbers of boards we had to replace the traces on because of bad batteries leaking and damaging the boards... that was if we could even get to all the damaged traces to replace them... the ones with through-the-board connections were especially painful to deal with when those were also damaged by the leaked corrosives...

Florida man accused of breaking Mastodon's open-source license with botched social network launch

Re: Wonder if there's a software developer somewhere...........

get that dosh up front, first! no development done at all until the bank account is loaded.

What do you mean you gave the boss THAT version of the report? Oh, ****ing ****balls

well done!

this article got an honest full on belly laugh! excellent job and perfect report!

Twitch increases bug bounty payouts after source code leak by... wait, is that it?

Re: And this offer comes

"It is easier to get money from poor people" Gunilla Goodmountain.

yep... it is easier for a poor man to get $10 each month for a pair of paper boots than it is for him to save $100 for a better pair of boots that will last for years instead of just 30 days...

Ex-DJI veep: There was no drone at Gatwick during 2018's hysterical shutdown

Not quite clear...

it is not quite clear in the article but i'm guessing that Brendan Schulman was an executive at DJI and is now moving to Boston Dynamics?

Audacity users stick the knife – and fork – in to strip audio editor of unwanted features

perhaps NTAT?

NTAT == No Telemetry Audio Tool

Hmmmmm, how to cool that overheating CPU, if only there was a solution...

Re: no such thing as a stupid question?

The only stupid question is one you ask twice.

unless you have short term memory loss and don't even remember asking the question in the first place... then it is only (possibly) stupid to those being asked the question if it is their 2nd or more time around the barrel...

signed,

yes, i do know where the ANY key is

Ouch! When the IT equipment is sound, but the setup is hole-y inappropriate

It hadn't occurred to them to look at where things were plugged in before unplugging them.

parallel printer (DB25) into an external SCSI port (also DB25) on a SCO Unix station... on boot, things didn't work properly and took a couple of hours to figure out... especially after the system reconfigured itself during that initial post-cleaning boot... why? both 16bit cards were addons and both inadvertently and accidentally swapped into each other's slots... it was the slot position in the case, not the specific card, that was remembered for the cables to plug into... first time ever working with SCO Unix... not so much fun as much as informative and quite the learning experience...

We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again

Re: Reminds me of a server issue we had.

Or you could have adjusted the HDD delay in the BIOS?

IF the BIOS had such, yes... otherwise, you had to find some other way to delay the BIOS boot... adding more RAM was one solution... putting the HD on a separate power supply and turning it on first followed by the PC power supply a little later was another solution...

Here's how we got persistent shell access on a Boeing 747 – Pen Test Partners

Re: How long...

Well, we are all going to die…

yup! birth is a death sentence, after all...

Does the boss want those 2 hours of your free time back? A study says fighting through crowds to office each day hurts productivity

Re: Who got the extra time?

in many cases both, employer and employee, have benefited from W@H...

the employee benefits as noted by other responses... more rest time, more family time, being able to start work less stressed, etc...

the employer benefits by the employees being more productive and able to work their full shift due to the above...