Gary Rice – Page 4 – garyrice.co.uk

40!!!

After months of planning and lying about what I was doing, it is finally the wife`s 40th birthday!

I have spent months buying her 40 presents. Me and the kids coming up with ideas of what to get her. Some of the presents are useful, some of them are gimmick or fun things based on 40 years, and some of them, well some of them are for me!

I also spent ages sorting out how to give them to her and planning what would happen through the morning. A bit of teasing with the presents, making her guess what they were, as they were all in one box, she didn`t seem to like that! H read out what each present was about, in the form of some cryptic sentence. Somehow we managed to leave 1 present out of the box

I think that she was pleased with it all, she bloody well better of been as she got what she had been moaning about for months!! 🙂

Was also a very rare day, can’t remember the last time it happened, but Smokey, The Gladiator, The Ogre and myself were all together for a chat and a laugh, and boy was it a laugh.

As you can see the 2 sensible ones are on the right. The Gladiator, who we had not seen at his best for a long long time was doing his normal, tyre irons were mentioned, along with Grunda, the Stow and loads more shite, funny shite, funny shite that no one had a clue what it was about!!
There was also the obligatory `he`s gone missing` situation, where more booze was purchased, not sure why that was necessary as there was fuck loads there, but it did make for an interesting time.
Sadly due to family illness Smokey had to leave early, which has left me in a bit of a situation, mainly that there are now well over 30 bottles of cider in the garage that I got for him, it’s going to take me months to drink all that!

A reinstall?

Today I heard the words that I dread hearing, especially coming from someone with a technical back ground.

While looking to fix a problem, a problem that seemed to point to a few things as the cause, I heard `if I can’t fix it I will reinstall it`.

To me a reinstall of a computer is the last thing that should be done, and from experience it is only as a result of unexpected damage that is has to be done – like a hard drive failure that corrupts too many files, or as a result of someone getting impatient with Windows Updates and turning the machine off when it says not to! why would you do that?

So, I volunteered to take a look before the reinstall was started and had fixed the problem within a few minutes.

After I returned the computer, I sat and pondered on the thought processes involved in making the decision to reinstall……

Internal Logon Credentials

Today I went into town to a large retailer to order a gift for the wife.
Due to a couple of date issues and unknown factors I thought that it would have been the easiest option, rather than going online to do it myself – which is the way I tend to do things.

So, I’m at the counter wanting to place my order, where the female assistant was trying to log on to the computer. The normal explanations as to why she can’t log on are given, `it’s a bit slow this morning` and `my log on doesn’t seem to work`. She then went off to get someone to log on for her.

She came back and put a piece of paper on the counter and said `I’ll try these`. She then proceeded to log in while looking at what was written on it. I looked down at it and could see that someone had written a username and password on it!

Unbelievable to think that someone would not only give someone else their log in details, but they would also write then down (without encrypting them) and then show then to someone outside of the organisation they worked for.

I chose not to make a mental note of the details and then try them on an internet portal (no idea if there was one) while using the TOR network!

It amazes me what some people will do, given all the things that they must of been told by their employer and given common sense with security?!

Only those browsers? Really?

Well today I see another example of ridiculous browser wars at its best, or is that worst!

While looking at some issues on a CMS system, I picked the page apart find a very old version of a JavaScript component.

As I was using the latest version of Internet Explorer we had to play around with compatibility to get this website to work. After changing the User Agent String we were presented with a page saying that said that our browser was out of date. Fine, yes we may of made it report that it was out of date, which is something that seems to happen on an almost daily basis to some website here and there, but the options that we were presented with on the screen was ridiculous – upgrade your browser to Firefox, Chrome or Safari? Seriously? WTF? BOFW?

Not sure why they had chosen to completely remove Internet Explorer from the preferred list, but given what the website provider does and the sector that they are selling / providing to and given how systems are configured in that sector removing Internet Explorer has got to be one of the most stupid things to do.

I don’t give a shit what the Internet Explorer hatters have to say about that, sometimes there are reasons as to why you can only use certain software to do a job, and no matter what you do you need to cater for those scenarios.

Hopefully when the issue is fixed Internet Explorer will on the list of preferred browsers!

CryptoWall – OH, your fucked

My first dealings with a Crypto Variant today, CryptoWall

Someone that I haven`t done any work for for a few years contacted me to ask for some help as they couldn`t open their emails. So I remoted on and took a quick look for them.

First thing that I noticed when the screen loads is 3 files in the middle of the desktop called DECRYPT_INSTRUCTION. Straight off I knew that this was not going to be a good result.

I had a quick read of what it says and then a quick look at the My Documents folder and then proceeded to tell him, in a non technical way, that he was Fucked. I then explained what had happened and told him that there was nothing that I could do, something that I don`t often tell people. I wasn`t going to suggest paying $500 to get it all unencrypted only to find that it didn`t work.
Ironically the only thing that wasn`t encrypted was all of his Sage Accounts!

He asked how it could of happened and after a quick visual check I told him
Well, you are running Windows XP that has out of date virus protection, that would not of helped, you have probably opened up a few dodgy emails with attachments and looked at them. He did say that he has been getting a lot of emails with invoices in them! Oh Dear

Its not often that I cant fix something, but in this case I couldn`t, so I told him to turn off and unplug the computer and buy 2 new ones to replace what he had as they are well out of date and possibly open to more problems!

Black listed, Really? WTF

One of those days today!

I was asked to take a look at a SBS2011 server by someone today as emails were not being sent but were being received.

So I set about sorting through the list of errors in the event log, as per normal there was a to be expected reboot right in the middle of everything!
It kind of reminded me of when I got contacted by my old employer, after they had made me redundant, to look at a problem that stopped their Service Management System working. The idiots that they brought in to oust me had applied all their skill (all 3 of them) to fix the problem and come up with 4 reboots! Yes 4 reboots! Needless to say that after 4 it still wasn`t working. So a quick look through the logs I found the issue and reported back to them.

Anyway, I looked through all the logs on the server, but couldn`t see anything, so I checked out the send connector and see that there was a huge old queue reporting DNS lookup failures.
So I checked that the Smart Host was in DNS. I then checked that I could connect to it on port 25, which I could. I tried a DNS Reset and Flush just to be safe, but it didn`t work.

I disabled the Smart Host connector, created a new send connector and set it up to send via DNS, and the emails left the queue.

I then reported back as to what I had done and asked them to check out to see if they had paid the bill for the Smart Host. Later that day I got a call to say that it was a fault with the Smart Host, apparently the company that provided the Smart Host service had one of their internal desktop machines infected with a virus by an employee and it has spammed out a load of crap! Jesus! Seriously?

I was somewhat surprised that
A) They got infected with a virus!
B) They were sending emails out on a connection that was used as a smart host by a customer (and most probably more than one)!
C) They told a customer exactly what had happened!

A quick check showed that they were on some black lists for sending out spam.
I will leave that a few days before I check back to see if they have been removed…

The mutts first birthday

Today is Muddy’s first birthday and as she is part of the family we celebrated it.

We all took her out for a walk after dinner and I tried to recreate the photo of me and her the day we got her.

Unfortunately the lump was far too big and too heavy to lay her on my arm, but I did pick her up and get an almost as good as the original dopy look out of her.

I think she enjoyed it as she found a few lumps of shit to roll in and wipe her neck on!

Almost a full get together

Today, an event almost happened where the creating force behind my sn ow ey domains were together for the first time in years, our annual Easter Egg hunt for the kids.

Sadly the Ogre was not with us, which was a shame as I had cooked him 12 sausages on the bbq, and knowing how he likes his grub I didn`t want to let him down when he turned up.

There was Smokey, The Gladiator and Me (Snowey) together for a few hours, a few hours to have a catch up, a laugh, a piss take, some food, more of laugh, lots more piss taking, lots more food, even more piss taking, even more laughs and so on…
Highlight has to be when The Gladiator turned up with his sun glasses only to find that they were a pair of 3D glasses from the cinema. Oh how we have missed him!

We even managed to participate in a `Dads` egg and spoon race. Smokey tried to do a sneaky and hide in the toilet, but I wasn’t going to let him get away with that, so with the promise of a bit of bluetak to keep his egg on his spoon we had the race. Surprisingly Smokey won and took away the prize of an Easter Egg. Was gutted as I had my eye on that…

It was a shame that The Ogre wasn`t there, but hopefully he will be coming to the Munters birthday in a few weeks time….

Rexcam, like Yodacam but with a snake called Rex

I’ve had yodacam running for nearly 10 years now, recently I added a few pages for Rex, H`s corn snake so people could see them both, and for H to record shedding and feeding as a bit of a project.

He kept asking me when it would be going live so he could tell everyone, which got me thinking about adding a webcam in with Rex.

I got out all my IP Webcams out and got the smallest one I could find, made some authentication adjustments to the .Net code that pulls the image and put it in the corner of rex`s vivarium.

I then decided to buy rexcam.co.uk so that Rex could have her own bit of web space, and H had more to tell people – for a few quid and an infrastructure that was already pretty much set up, a new logo, a quick copy, paste, ctrl-h and replace all, Rex had her own website ready to go.

There is currently one webcam in with her and I’m working on adding a second, i just need her vivarium to be a bit bigger so that i can put the webcam somewhere out of sight or somewhere that is not that obvious.

But for the time being, H is happy and he gets to show of his snake to everyone, and I guess that its all about making your kids happy isn’t it?

Self-assigned job title

Today, while waiting for what seemed like a never ending installation, there was a short lull in productivity. To fill that rare gap I engaged in a conversation about job descriptions.

It reminded me of the days gone by at my last job where the organisation chart and employees job descriptions were amended when a new contract bid required it!

After a lot of discussion and ideas for each other we whittled the list down to just 1 for each person. The list was as follows –

Micro Management Specialist
Part Time Unaware Operative
Piss Taking Strategist
Vacab Consultant and Pun Controller
Chief Grumpy Office and Junior Piss Taking Executive

Needless to say that I was given `Piss Taking Strategist`, which I have so say I was more than happy with.

Much like a self-signed SSL certificate the self-assigned job titles mean very little outside of the office, shame though as it would go great with my `Sex and Distribution` name badge that I got from Microsoft all those years ago….