Viva Emptiness - Matt's Blog

“Enough is enough!..”

matt — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 16:17:40 +0000

“..I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!”

Yep Yep.
I finally got around to watching Snakes on a Plane yesterday. It was predictable, shallow, and well just silly.

I enjoyed every minute of it.

It’s unlikely to be remembered, hell most people have already forgotten it, and it hardly does much for human/snake relations, but who cares!?! Mr Jackson is great as Neville Flynn (only he could make a character called ‘Neville’ cool!) and there’s loads of silly deaths.

Just don’t think about the cavernous plot holes:

Nast bad guy in prison - post film: “Dammit, next time we’re just going to put a bomb on the plane!”

Sucked into LOTRO..

matt — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 11:59:13 +0000

I play games on my PC (and PS2 - Guitar Hero rules!). I’ve played loads over the years, though most of the them First Person Shooters(FPS) - I was in a Vietcong clan for a while and still play Counterstrike Source sometimes.

As far as computer Roleplaying Games(RPGs) are concerned I’ve played and enjoyed Baldurs Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and more recently Elder Scrolls Oblivion. I have avoided the Massive Multiplayer Online RPGs - the likes of World of Warcraft, for the simple fact that I know they will suck me into them as I’m easily addicted. So I avoided them.

Until The Lord of the Rings Online.

See you, I’m also a huge Tolkien fan, and the thought that I could walk around Middle Earth and interact with others was too tempting to miss. I bought a copy and am now sucked in good and proper. In fact, I love it to pieces. I’ve only been playing a couple of weeks now but highlights include:

1. Walking around Hobbiton - it’s soo cute. I want to live there!
2. See the distant hills reflected off the Midgewater Marshes.
3. The quests in the Great Barrow of the Downs. It’s dark and creepy and amazing.
4. Seeing Weathertop in the Distance. Wow!

So, if you play on the Eldar Server. I’m Feydin - Dwarven Champion. Send Tell and have a chat, let’s quest together.

Axe High!

Configuring NFS for Idiots!

matt — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 23:00:16 +0000

For a number of years I have run a Linux Laptop (Fedora core as it happens), and until recently my main PC has been windows. During that time I’ve wanted to share the files in my home directory on said laptop with my Windows system and have configured it as a Samba server. It’s worked like a dream and I have no complaints.

As you may have read, I recently converted my PC to Ubuntu and still wanted access to the folders on my laptop. So.. like an idiot I installed the samba client and ‘connected to the remote computer’ using SMB.

Like an idiot!

To recap, I have a Linux PC AND a Linux Laptop and I am using a WINDOWS file sharing protocol to connect the two! It dawned on me yesterday what a fool I was!

The answer was simple: NFS

D’oh!

So, time to loose the Windows protocol and do it the unix way…

First, setting up the laptop as a file server.
All I wanted was my home directory available to my main PC.
To configure NFS firstly I had to edit the /etc/exports on the server so I added the following (as root):

/home/matt 192.168.1.2(rw,sync,all_squash,anonuid=500)
/home/matt is the local directory I want to export
192.168.1.2 is the IP address of the computer allowed to connect (in this case my main PC)
rw means it’s read/write
sync means the server is not going to respond until its written to disk (safer, but marginally slower)
all_squash maps connecting users to anonymous
anonuid=500 sets the anonymous user uid as 500 (in this case my ID)

Saved the file and started the nfs service.

On the client, as root, I ran:

mount -o soft malachi:/home/matt /home/matt/malachi

soft means it’s a soft connection and my PC isn’t going to hang up if the laptop is turned off.
malachi:/home/matt is the name of my laptop and the folder it’s sharing.
/home/matt/malachi is the local folder on my PC that I want the directory on my laptop mounted on.

A quick ls -l /home/matt/malachi shows all my laptop files! Easy!

As I want it to mount on boot I added the following, as root, to the /etc/fstab (all on one line):

malachi:/home/matt /home/matt/malachi nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr,soft

Done!

I can now remove Samba and rely on good old NFS.

The move to Linux…

matt — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 22:25:16 +0000

I did it.

After over 10 years of playing with Linux but never feeling that it quite had the maturity, I’ve made the switch on my main PC. Why didn’t I move before? Because in the past I would spend 5 times as long configuring my system to print, or for USB, or for Office apps, or for… well you get the idea..

As much as I love playing with PCs, when it comes to my ‘main’ OS I really want things to just work. No messing. I want tinker under my own terms, not because I have to. There’s also the subject of applications and games that don’t run on Linux, and the fact that my family still want to use Windows. In any event I will have to dual boot for their sake.
But! I made the decision after looking at the current distros; seeing how clean and easy they were to configure and control, and so, with my new 500GB hard drive installed, the move began..

First decision, which Linux distro? I decided on on Ubuntu 7.04, very popular and it default to the Gnome desktop (I’ve never really liked KDE).

My PC has 3 physical drives:
120GB (NTFS C:)
80GB (spare)
500GB (NTFS F:)
I’m not going to go into great detail on the install, as it went like a dream. I installed Linux on my 70GB drive, using 2GB for swap, and the rest for the / partition (I really couldn’t be arsed with slicing it up, and I intend to store all my data on the 500GB drive anyway. LILO handles the dualboot with Windows fine.
After the install I followed the excellent guide on configuring the perfect desktop on www.howtoforge.com (which, I should add, needs to be in your list of favourites if you use Linux!). Thanks to Falko Timme for your guidance! This install also includes the NTFS configuration tools and I can read/write see my NTFS drives
Once I had everything working (and yes, it all does!) I then decided to make my desktop 3D by installing Beryl and and configuring it to use my Nvida 6600 GT gfx card. After enabling the Desktop Effects and downloading the nvidia driver, I used the excellent Synaptic Package Manager to install Beryl, and suddenly my desktop looked really cool, complete with a 3D cube that I can use to rotate to my 4 workspaces!

Next I migrated all my Thunderbird emails, literally just a case of copying the profiles folder to the correct folder in Linux and updating the profiles.ini file. Firefox bookmarks were equally simple.

To overcome the problems with Windows programs, I again referred to howtoforge.com and used vmware server and convertion program to give me an image of my existing Windows system to run inside Linux! Works like a dream.

There is only one snag. There is a bug in the Nvidia drivers which causes a black windows in Beryl when it runs about of graphics memory. I’m still looking around for a fix for this, but it’s not a big deal.

So…I’m done! My desktop is officially Linux. Bye bye Microsoft (or at least as much as I can get rid of!)

There’s more to do, but at the moment it’s looking good! And the 3D desktop is sooo damned cool, even my non-geeky friends are impressed!

New SATA II Hard Drive - With added pain

matt — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 08:39:17 +0000

Why don’t PC upgrades go easily? huh? huh?

Actually I have had worse experiences, but anyway..

I decided I needed a new hard drive for a number of reasons

1. I’m almost out of space
2. I AM going to intall Linux on my desktop (finally) and make that my primary OS.

Looking around I decided on the Western Digital WD5000AAKS 500GB SATA II without actually finding out if I could run it! I already had 2 HDs and figured I would have to swap on out. As it happens that wasn’t necessary as I had not used any of the SATA channels on my Abit KV8 Pro motherboard, or the SATA power connections on my PSU. On top of that I even had the space in my case for it!

All was looking good.

Attached everything, fired up the PC, entered the BIOS. Nothing. It didn’t see the drive. TBH I had no idea what to expect - would it see it on an IDE channel? I already had 2 HDs and 2 DVD ROM/RAM drives installed so…erm…

Ignoring that I booted Windows XP. Nothing. Hmmm..

OK. Time for the Ubuntu live CD. Booted. Nothing. Double Hmmm..

Time for a trip to both the Abit and the Western Digital sites as well as a flick through my motherboard manual (which was no help!)
It didn’t take me long to find out that:

1. Windows XP does not natively support SATA drives (downloaded a VIA SATA driver off the Abit site)
2. My SATA interface has a problem with SATA II drives and the BIOS will not see them as there is a problem auto-negotiating the transfer speed. There is a quick fix for this - install a jumper on pins 5-6 to set the speed at 150 MB/s. This is documented at the Western Digital site.

So I jumpered the pins and it still was not seen in my BIOS, however the SATA RAID utility appeared on Boot! Excellent! Booted Windows - still nothing. ARGH! I delved into device manager and Windows XP had not started the damned SATA driver I had installed! So I started it and up comes the drive. Of course Ubuntu was seeing it fine…

Two hours of formatting later and I have a new Hard drive installed.

Finally! I now had 500GB more space and am going to use it all for data, this will free up my second IDE drive for Linux.

Next. The installation

Best Scifi Ever? Firefly.

matt — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 16:56:38 +0000

Someone once said (apparently) that the World is divided into two groups of people - those that have read The Lord of the Rings and those that are going to read The Lord of the Rings.

I think the same thing can he said about watching Firefly.

Joss Whedon’s superb scifi was released in 2001 one and was cancelled by Fox (henceforth referred to as ‘Morons’) before the year was out. The list of crimes committed by the ‘Morons’ is lengthy:

1. They expected another Buffy or Angel. Both good entertainment, but neither is going to change the world.
2. They didn’t start with the 2 hour pilot ‘Serenity’ which explained the backstory, introduced the characters, etc.
3. They showed the episodes at different times every week, out of order.
4. They didn’t air every episode that was made before pulling it.

Surely one of the ‘Morons’ must have hated Joss Whedon.

In what has become a perfect example of the power of fandom, Firefly didn’t die. It lived on the in hearts and minds of the thousands of fans (The ‘Browncoats’) whose lives had been touched by this amazing show. They petitioned, they wrote letters, they championed the cause. The bought the DVD (the first and only way to actually see every episode in order) in thousands.
The end result of this was Universal Studios being convinced that Firefly deserved a chance and in 2004 they announced the release of ‘Serenity’ the movie.

I’ve seen a number of different series over the years, but none are as good as Firefly. You can keep your Star Treks, your Andromedas and your Stargates. Firefly beats them all. If you’ve not watched it you need to. Seriously, it really is that good.

Shiny!

Time for Linux..?

matt — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 16:16:14 +0000

My recent virus problem, everlasting love of Linux especially with the release of Beryl, and decision that I hardly play PC games any more is making the case for me to make my main OS Linux.

I’m very close to making the jump away from Windows completely - I’m on XP at the moment and see no point in moving to Vista or the latest version of office. Right now the reasons for me keeping Windows are:

Games - esp Steam/Counter strike
Photoshop
iTunes/iPod support
Programs my wife uses (OU software that uses Windows)
Looks like the best thing for me to attempt is a dual-boot system, with Linux as the default. We’ll see how I get one.

MSN W32/IRCBot-WV Virus

matt — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 21:10:25 +0000

ARGH!

I got hit with an MSN malware virus on Sunday and it’s taken me two days to clear the fucking thing off my system. All because I accepted something off a friend on MSN.

If you accept it, it writes to your registry (registering a COM object) and places files in your %system% folder. It’s a pig to remove.

I now believe that:

1. Microsoft are stupid cunts

2. Virus writers are just cunts

(Actually thinking about it, I already knew both of those things..)

You’ll know you have it because it launches MSN and sends the virus to all your online contacts - great way to make yourself popular.
So, how does one remove the virus?

Firstly it’s worth noting that Mcafee won’t find it, and from what I can tell neither will AVG. In fact the only AV vendor (at time of rant) that knows about it is Sophos and they have reported on their site.

The easiest way that I can find to remove the virus is to do it yourself:

1. Get Hijackthis from:
http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en-US/threat_analytics/hijackthis.php

2. Run it and check the results, you’ll see:

O21 - *blah blah class stuff* followed by “sysprinters.dll (file missing)
This is the registry entry with pointing to the offending file. Check this in Hijackthis and click “Fix Checked” - accept the message.

3. Reboot and remove the following files:
c:\documents and settings\*your id*\new.txt
c:\windows\myalbum2007.zip
c:\windows\sysprinters.dll
c:\install - with a couple of files in there including credits.bat

4. Done! Now go and apologise to all your friends…
Obviously finish with another check on Hijackthis and run a full AV scan.

Update

I ran through http://www.virustotal.com with the following results.

AhnLab-V3	2007.7.2.0	07.03.2007	Win-Trojan/MesenBot.24040
AntiVir	7.4.0.37	07.03.2007	Worm/IRCBot.24040
Authentium	4.93.8	07.03.2007	W32/Backdoor.AZWK
Avast	4.7.997.0	07.03.2007	no virus found
AVG	7.5.0.476	07.03.2007	BackDoor.Ircbot.AK
BitDefender	7.2	07.03.2007	Win32.Worm.Potos.A
CAT-QuickHeal	9.00	07.03.2007	no virus found
ClamAV	devel-20070416	07.03.2007	no virus found
DrWeb	4.33	07.03.2007	Win32.HLLW.Sodoku
eSafe	7.0.15.0	07.03.2007	Win32.IRCBot.acd
eTrust-Vet	30.8.3761	07.03.2007	Win32/Lekne.B
Ewido	4.0	07.03.2007	Backdoor.IRCBot.acd
FileAdvisor	1	07.03.2007	no virus found
Fortinet	2.91.0.0	07.03.2007	W32/IRCBot.ACD!tr.bdr
F-Prot	4.3.2.48	07.03.2007	W32/Backdoor.AZWK
F-Secure	6.70.13030.0	07.03.2007	Backdoor.Win32.IRCBot.acd
Ikarus	T3.1.1.8	07.03.2007	Backdoor.Win32.IRCBot.acd
Kaspersky	4.0.2.24	07.03.2007	Backdoor.Win32.IRCBot.acd
McAfee	5066	07.03.2007	no virus found
Microsoft	1.2701	07.03.2007	no virus found
NOD32v2	2376	07.03.2007	Win32/IRCBot.XW
Norman	5.80.02	07.03.2007	no virus found
Panda	9.0.0.4	07.03.2007	Suspicious file
Sophos	4.19.0	06.28.2007	no virus found
Sunbelt	2.2.907.0	07.02.2007	no virus found
Symantec	10	07.03.2007	W32.SillyIRC
TheHacker	6.1.6.141	07.02.2007	Backdoor/IRCBot.acd
VBA32	3.12.0.2	07.03.2007	Backdoor.Win32.IRCBot.acd
VirusBuster	4.3.23:9	07.03.2007	no virus found
Webwasher-Gateway	6.0.1	07.03.2007	Worm.IRCBot.24040

My own AV software (Mcafee) still doesn’t detect it! Greaaat…

Food for thought next time you consider buying a new AV tool…

Shakespeare? In Love..

matt — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 16:17:23 +0000

Remember the 1996 film version of that famous Shakespeare play ‘Romeo and Juliet’? You know the one, with guns, set in Verona Park? Put the name Leonardo DiCaprio everywhere? We’ll I watched that again yesterday, probably the first time in about 10 years.

What a great film! Romeo and Juliet was always my favourite of Shakespeares plays and this adaption is so cool it really does stand out from the screen.

But you know the thing I noticed the most on this viewing? Claire Danes. I’ve not really watched much of her work, but I was blown away by her performance in that film. It was nothing short of mesmerising. I think I might go and watch it again today

Er…

matt — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 23:43:43 +0000

I’m the worst blogger ever. I have nothing interesting to write.

Um.