Politics, at last

I usually don’t go into politics in this blog, but now I feel I have to.

Today we have the EU elections. Not that they mean as much as national elections, but they do mean something. I’m voting for the Pirate Party and I feel an urge to explain why.

It’s not because I support illegal downloading of copyrighted material, or hate artists or anything like that. I don’t do illegal downloading of copyrighted material for a number of reasons, one of which is that it’s probably illegal (in Sweden, it’s not all that clear), but mainly because I’m too lazy. As long as getting the content I want is convenient, and I can live without content that isn’t convenient to get, I see no reason to do the illegal downloading thing.

The thing that really gets me is that just to protect the copyright owner’s interests, we are on the road to introducing a police state mentality that would have made Joe Stalin proud. It’s simply not worth it. If I have to live either without freedom from privacy intrusions or without Eminem, I’d choose freedom any day (I take Eminem as an example simply because I really like his stuff). I can very well see myself without any of the music, movies, or books that are currently brought out, if that is what it takes. For some reason, I figure this is what the Pirate Party says as well. Or at least, they come the closest of all the parties to saying it this way, so they get my vote.

In short: if you can’t produce and publish entertainment without having to destroy our free society in the process, you can stuff that entertainment where the sun don’t shine, as far as I’m concerned.

MS patch of… Firefox?

To quote an article on annoyances.org about the new ClickOnce install support that MS has added to .NET:

The Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 update, pushed through the Windows Update service to all recent editions of Windows in February 2009, installs the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant firefox extension without asking your permission.
This update adds to Firefox one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities present in all versions of Internet Explorer: the ability for websites to easily and quietly install software on your PC. Since this design flaw is one of the reasons you may’ve originally choosen to abandon IE in favor of a safer browser like Firefox, you may wish to remove this extension with all due haste.

Unfortunately, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom has taken steps to make the removal of this extension particularly difficult – open the Add-ons window in Firefox, and you’ll notice the Uninstall button next to their extension is grayed out! Their reasoning, according to Microsoft blogger Brad Abrams, is that the extension needed “support at the machine level in order to enable the feature for all users on the machine,” which, of course, is precisely the reason this add-on is bad news for all Firefox users.

And then follows a convoluted procedure to hack the crap out of the registry. Go there, read it, do it, if you run Windows, this service pack, and Firefox.

Tech Republic put it like this:

In a surprise move this year, Microsoft has decided to quietly install what amounts to a massive security vulnerability in Firefox without informing the user. Find out what Microsoft has to say about it, and how you can undo the damage.

Read the entire Tech Republic article.

PS: this isn’t exactly news (the annoyances.org article is dated February 27, 2009), but I only just noticed through a posting by Rob S on a private list.

Evil after all?

I habitually block outbound connections to tracking services like google-analytics.com. (I use Little Snitch for this.) Just because I don’t like them. Recently I noticed I often can’t connect to youtube.com, getting “server not found” errors. Amazingly, once I let google-analytics through again, everything works.

I haven’t verified exactly why this happens so I’m guessing the DNS for google-analytics resolves to at least some of the IP numbers for youtube, causing this to happen. Maybe not, maybe something else is happening.

But that’s not the important question. The thing that disturbs me more is if Google is intentionally making life difficult for people like me that don’t want excessive tracking of their surfing habits. Is that what is going on? Is it the start of a new and highly evil trend?

Little snitch rules for outbound filters
Little snitch rules for outbound filters

ReadyNAS even easier

I have to add a little niftiness to my previous post about how to start a NAS over the local LAN. After diving into the WebRelay manual a little more carefully, I discovered that you can easily send commands using only the URL. The following command causes relay 1 to close for 7 seconds:

…so I created bookmarks for this one and the corresponding URL for relay number 2 (using relay2State and pulseTime2 parameters), which looks like this in Safari:

If you start the ReadyNAS by pressing the button less than 15 seconds, it starts normally. If you press 15 seconds or longer, you enter the diagnostics mode and we don’t want that.

To shut down the ReadyNAS while it is running, you need to press and hold the button for at least 5 seconds.

So I chose 7 seconds for the pulse, guaranteeing to only start up the unit or shut it down, without entering any weird states.

Oh, one more thing: the URL I use here only work if your WebRelay is not set to use password access for status changes. Including a password is a little trickier.

No, that IP is not the IP I actually use, and anyway, it’s all on a local net behind a firewall without portmapping.

Update: don’t use Safari 4 for these URLs. What happens is that one of them may show up on your “top sites” page, and they’ll refresh every time “top sites” is shown, typically every time you start Safari. The effect is that your NAS units will power on and power off at really weird times. Took me a while to figure this one out. And then I moved the bookmarks to OmniWeb instead, since it doesn’t have a “top sites” page. Problem solved.

Powering up your ReadyNAS NV+ remotely

I have two ReadyNAS NV+ units from Netgear and I’ve put them in a backroom where nobody normally goes. I don’t either. Now, for extra security in case of fire or a break-in, I’m actually moving them to a neighbor’s spare room, which means I can’t easily get at them anymore and the energy consumption could become a problem. As could the constant whining, but I don’t think so.

The problem with the ReadyNAS is that even though you can power them down through their config pages using a browser, there is no way to switch them on again short of actually, physically, walking over there and pressing the blue button. There’s no wake-on-lan or any other similar provision. The only alternative is to have it power on and off according to a schedule, which is what I have done so far. But if you do that, that schedule will be unnecessarily liberal, just in case you need access to the units. I’m mainly using them for Retrospect backups and disk images when doing recovery, and very little else, so I don’t even use them every day. I calculated that the 16 hours a day these two boxes are running, costs me around 900 kWh per year. That’s around $150 in electricity per year. And it’s ecologically rude, too.

Continue reading “Powering up your ReadyNAS NV+ remotely”

Merging mice

I’ve got this Wacom Intuos 3 tablet and I like it. The mouse, in particular, is very nice. Good feeling. As long as it works. The problem I’ve had is that my first mouse started to give switch bounce on the left button, and a problem with the scroll wheel, after about 16 months. Out of warranty, of course. So I ordered a new one for around $40. That one lasted eight months before it succumbed to switch bounce, but this time it was the right button. The distributor just sent me a replacement for free, and didn’t ask for the defective one in return. So I ended up with one good and two bad Wacom mice. Since I’m pretty sure the new one won’t last more than a year, or max two, it seemed prudent to start assembling a fully working spare from the two failed mice. That’s what this picture story is about.

Continue reading “Merging mice”

All those terabytes…

Just a piece of warning: Seagate has a serious problem. It seems that some series of drives have total failures within the first couple of months. It is claimed that up to a third of the drives will fail this way. This is all due to a firmware problem, according to Seagate. I’ve heard rumours of deeper problems, but that’s all they are right now, rumours. The affected series are roughly 500, 750, and 1000 Gb drives in the 7200.11 series, including ES.2 server grade and desktop grade. Jeez… yes, I’ve got a number of those…

Anyway, now you know. Gentlemen, start your worry engines.

Update Jan 20: Just talked to my distributor in Sweden (Dustin) about this. They don’t have any policy. They have no idea what I’m talking about, or maybe they do and just pretend they don’t, but they say these drives have a 0.2% failure rate and if one fails they’ll see if (!) they would do something about it. BTW, I have four that are one week old, and that’s their policy on this. And, no, they would not consider halting sales of these drives, even though the failure rate is estimated to 30%. They won’t consider changing the drives to another brand unless they’re bricked first (easily done, just update to the official SD1A firmware…) IOW, don’t trust your distributor. They don’t giva sh… at least this one doesn’t.

To follow this drama as it develops, check out the Seagate support fora.

A feature?

Had to use the Directory.GetFiles() method in .NET, so I read the description. Now, take a moment and read the following about how an asterisk wildcard character works in the search pattern parameter. Then tell me if this description is of a feature or of a bug. Windows, largely due to legacy, is full of this crap.

When using the asterisk wildcard character in a searchPattern, such as “*.txt”, the matching behavior when the extension is exactly three characters long is different than when the extension is more or less than three characters long. A searchPattern with a file extension of exactly three characters returns files having an extension of three or more characters, where the first three characters match the file extension specified in the searchPattern. A searchPattern with a file extension of one, two, or more than three characters returns only files having extensions of exactly that length that match the file extension specified in the searchPattern. When using the question mark wildcard character, this method returns only files that match the specified file extension. For example, given two files, “file1.txt” and “file1.txtother”, in a directory, a search pattern of “file?.txt” returns just the first file, while a search pattern of “file*.txt” returns both files.

and:

Because this method checks against file names with both the 8.3 file name format and the long file name format, a search pattern similar to “*1*.txt” may return unexpected file names. For example, using a search pattern of “*1*.txt” returns “longfilename.txt” because the equivalent 8.3 file format is “LONGFI~1.TXT”.

The conclusion must be that this function is worse than useless and bound to cause excruciating bugs in your apps. Better use the GetFiles() method without any search pattern and then filter using a regex.