Those darn pirates

I was having to reinstall Windows on a custom build box today when I realised that the computer didn't have a Windows key on the side panel anywhere. I called the lady up and she said her brother put the computer together for her (he installed both Mandriva and XP for her, a dead giveaway that the Windows was bootlegged). She said she would have to call him and get the key. She called back about 10 minutes later with the key. She started to say the key and I automatically knew that the key wasn't legit. I still wrote the key down just to say I did and as soon as we hung up, I googled the first 10 characters and sure enough, like 100 sites popped up with the same key without even going past the first ten characters. After that, I decided I would call the lady back in about twenty minutes and say the key wasn't working. When I was done googling, I went to work on another machine that would just freeze up randomly (it had about 450 virii, didn't get a chance to check for spyware). I noticed that the key they had on the side of their HP was for home, but they were running pro. So, I checked the properties on the computer and saw that the computer was still on service pack 0. That is also a dead giveaway the windows is pirated. I grabbed our key finder cd and stuck it in the computer while in Safe Mode and checked the key just for gits and shiggles. It was the same key the lady had read to me 10 minutes earlier. I lawled. I guess that just shows how prevalent Windows piracy is.

Resizing Partitions

I haven't posted anything in a while, so I figured I would post something while I was waiting for 5:00 to come. Guess what, it is on resizing NTFS and FAT partitions.

This is something I have to do on a regular basis in the shop. I use GParted, the GNOME Partition Editor. You can either use the Ubuntu LiveCD or the GParted LiveCD (GParted LiveCD is easiest IMHO if that is all you are doing). I created a custom LiveCD that does a lot more than both the CD's put together, but that doesn't really matter right now. What matters is how to prep the windows box before resizing the partition. What you should do first before anything else is clean up the drive, remove any data that doesn't need to be there. I recommend CCleaner for that. That makes the defrag go a lot smoother since there isn't unused data all over the place. After all that data is gone, defrag the computer. Again, I would not recommend using the built in windows defragger, use Auslogics Disk Defragger. That pushes all the data to the front of the partition so that data loss isn't a big deal. All these tools can be found in http://files.volatileminds.net/tools as long as some other nifty ones such as registry cleaners and registry compacters.

glhf

New Ubuntu DFW Site

Since Canonical can't seem to get our site fixed, the Ubuntu DFW LoCo team has taken it upon themselves to get a new site. Since I am the team leader and since I have some pretty rocking hosting, I figured I would hook us up. Our site is now http://ubuntu-dfw.volatileminds.net. If you run Ubuntu and live in the DFW area, feel free to join and hang out.


EDIT: We are now working on getting the http://dallas.ubuntu-us.org...

Where I think spam is going

From email to telemarketers and with the advancements in CallerID and programs like spamassassin, the spammers are fighting a losing war right now. But with the ever rising popularity of IMing with things like MSN, AOL, Yahoo, etc..., I really think within the next couple of years, we will find spammers using these mediums as a new way to spam. It would be just like telemarketing or email spamming from the spammer's sense. They could require you to supply a screen name instead of an email address and they would sell said screen name the same way they would sell your email. The "beauty" in this is there is absolutely no antispam for IM, the spammers would bank for at least a couple of years until some really solid antispam comes out. And then the antispam in question would need to be able to cover all the various protocols such as oscar, MSN, Yahoo, etc which would be a complete nightmare from a developer's standpoint (especially with MSN and Yahoo). Now you can block people on most, if not all protocols, but a spammer would be able to create as many accounts as he wanted as long as the screen name isn't taken. That reminds me of another thing I could see happening to th IM world, screen name parking. It would work the same way domain parking would work, except it doesn't cost any money from the parker's pockets. It is pure profit.

I need a new cell phone

Ok guys, I am looking for a new cell phone. I don't want to spend more than a hundred dollars because I will only have it for a couple months at the most. I don't need an mp3 player or any PDA features, just a phone (bluetooth is ok). If you are selling one, I would like to see it. If you have a suggestion, I would love to hear it (maybe craigslist or ebay links?). Thanks!

64-bit stupidity

So, while compiling bkhive, samdump2, clamav, and some other things on the live cd, I realised as I was compiling the last thing that I was using a 64-bit OS. The live cd is 32-bit, so I was compiling all this stuff for a 32-bit on a 64-bit computer. Not good. I am not a happy camper right now.

GNOME 2.20 on Ubuntu Feisty

So, the only reason I wanted to upgraded to Gutsy was because I didn't feel like compiling GNOME 2.20 and Gutsy came with it pre-installed. Tonight, I folded and decided to compile GNOME since I really wasn't impressed with Gutsy. I already have a lot of devel packages installed on my system, so I am sure these are not the only packages you need (like libglib2.0-dev, libgkt2.0-dev, build-essential). I downloaded GARNOME from ftp.gnome.org and unpacked it to my desktop. cd to the garnome/desktop folder in the folder you just unpacked. If you have all the dependencies, make paranoid-install should work right out of the box, but for me I had to get the following packages:

sudo apt-get install libglitz1-dev libglitz-glx-dev libtiff4-dev python2.5-dev flex libgdbm-dev libxml-simple-perl libmagick++9-dev



Anyway, this week sometime Christer Edwards from the Utah LoCo group will be coming down to teach some classes and would like to get some dinner with me and a couple more of the guys in the DFW group. Hopefully, this will be Thursday.

Gentoo has taken about 3 days to compile so far, though I have messed up a lot. Once I get a working copy for a LiveCD, I will test it out and see how it performs against my Ubuntu ones. If the change isn't significant enough to spend more time on it, I will just drop it and use Ubuntu. So far, it is looking as if it will beat Ubuntu, but I can't say for sure, yet. I want to build a 64-bit and 32-bit version of each just to be thorough. I will try to have a solid beta of both Home and Pro uploaded by the end of the weekend (probably Ubuntu). I keep saying that to myself whenever I get free time ("yeah, lemme just upload this no...wait, what if I did this...") and I end up starting a lot of work on it that really isn't needed. It is a bad habit, but maybe I can get myself out of it.

I received my openSUSE 10.3 box this week and am absolutely thrilled. I can't wait to get it loaded in a VM to test it before I put it on a working computer. I am sure it will exceed my expectations, but I am just being paranoid.

Right now, I need to get out of the house, maybe I can convince Richard to go to Starbucks after his Calculus test...