Going Out Of Business

Saturday, December 4, 2010 in that poop is cold | Leave a comment

I’m sure its not unique to the Chicago-land area but since shortly after the dot com demise in ’99 furniture stores have had many “going out of business” sales. In the beginning  it seemed sad that all these stores where going out of business; some of them even more than once (wtf).  Now it is just a joke and obviously a scam to get sales.

See most people automatically feel they are betting a “deal” when a place is closing down, clearing stuff out, etc.  Though in all honesty it’s shit, udder, stinky crap.  Walk into 99% of these “going out of business” stores and you will find very high prices and stock of all the stuff that doesn’t really sell well (crap).  This is because all of the good stuff was put into a truck and sent to some other store to be sold.  That other store too will be closed down in short time.  I really think this is the furniture stores new business plan, open for a year and “clear out” stock and move to a new lease.

In Orland Park Illinois there was a store I respected for some time.  Many members of my family, including myself purchased furniture there.  About 4 years ago they had a going out of business sales, I was honestly sad they where going away.  Well as you probably guessed, they are still there, it was nothing more than a scam to increase sales.  Bullshit if they sold enough to keep the doors open.

Look around any Saturday, how many human signs do you see standing around promoting “going out of business” furniture stores?

How often do you verify file hashes?

Wednesday, September 22, 2010 in experiment, Internet | Tags: | Leave a comment

I want to know, how often do you verify file hashes?

Most of us are continuously downloading files from the internet.  With many of these files there is a posted hash value to verify the integrity of the file.  How often do you actually make sure that the file’s hash value is equal to what is posted?

If you are using windows there is a really convenient, easy to use program called BD File Hash.  This super small, .NET based application will calculate and verify file hashes using MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-256 algorithms.  If there is a different type of hash you require, leave me a comment and I will see if can be added to the application.

BD File Hash: http://bdfilehash.codeplex.com

BD File Hash has been found 100% malware free by Softpedia.

Assembly Info… File Version

Friday, August 20, 2010 in nerdiness | Leave a comment

You would think it’s simple enough to get the file version information as it is set in Visual Studio’s UI setting, but it wasn’t for me.  Even after Googling around I only discovered how to the the Assembly version, not the file version.  Well not until I found this article. The information is at the end of it and it basically goes like this:

string fileVersion = FileVersionInfo
       .GetVersionInfo(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location).FileVersion;

I then also wanted to get the date too.  This is how I did it:

string fileDate = System.IO.File
       .GetCreationTime(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location)
       .ToString("MMMM dd, yyyy")

FileVersionInfo is at System.Diagnostics
Assembly is at System.Reflection

The best thing is I no longer have to remember to set this stuff before packaging up my app for shipment.  Like I am doing right now:  BD File Hash version 1.0.10 going out right now.

Comcast Domain Helper Service will not go away

Friday, July 30, 2010 in computer hell, that poop is cold | Leave a comment

Comcast Domain helper service, a DNS breaking service which shows you search results when you try to access a site which doesn’t exist on the Internet (e.g. http://blah.blah).

Ever since I noticed this “service” on my Comcast account I have disabled it.  I don’t like it, I don’t want it, and basically it breaks the basic workings of DNS on the internet.  If a site doesn’t exist, I want a cannot be found error, not search page which is cached in my browser and forever holds the bad domain as real in my history.

So this evening I jump on the internet and mistype mail.yahoo.com, as I so often do for some reason, and notice that the Domain helper service is enabled, AGAIN.  This has to be the fourth time the service has reactivated itself on my account.  So I go out to my Comcast account to shut it down and notice that the option to do so no longer exists!  What!?

I call Comcast and the person on the phone is as befuddled as I am, plus not so happy that the option is missing from his home account also.

I have been on the phone for 33 minutes now while a resolution is trying to find a solution to this.  The end result at this point is that an “IT” ticked has been opened and this support person is to call me back with a status.

I wonder if I will ever actually receive that call?

UPDATE:

It is now Friday, August 6th, basically one week since I called Comcast and I have not heard back from them at all.  Not like I really expected to, though it would have been a nice change.

I am not looking forward to it, but I must fight my way through Comcast option-hold hell/support once more…

Update again:

Well the support joker never did call me. What did I expect, really support from Comast? No chance of that.  The good news is that the place on the Comcast customer site again has the place to disable the service.   YEAH

Home Router Vulnerability

Thursday, July 22, 2010 in computer hell, Internet | Tags: | Leave a comment

This is pretty nasty and will surly have a wide impact on home Internet users.  I just read about an exploit which has the potential of affecting millions of home internet users.  The exploit affects home routers and will be explained in detail next month at the Black Hat conference in Vegas.

http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/2010/07/13/millions-of-home-routers-vulnerable-to-web-hack/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/19/home_router_hack/

I shouldn’t have to say this, but IF YOU HAVE NOT CHANGED THE DEFAULT PASSWORD ON YOUR HOME ROUTER, DO IT NOW!!!

Don’t think it really matters?  Well here is how easy it is to get a list of default passwords.

If you don’t know what to do, call someone who does know what to do.  If you don’t know who to call, call me (i.e. leave me a comment) I will be more than happy to help anyone secure their home network.

To Code or Not to Code

Tuesday, July 13, 2010 in life | Leave a comment

That is the question isn’t it.  One of the single most difficult professional decisions anyone will make is, do I stay comfortable as a master code slinger, or do I step into the world of management?

For me it always seems to be the other way around.  I never got into hard-core programming until I was a one man shop or in a managerial/lead role.  And I truly love to write software applications, I find it to be such a rewarding activity.  Specially when others are using, and better yet, making money using the software you have developed.

Though time and time again I am pulled to lead instead of producer.  Maybe I am just slow and sucky and nobody has the heart to tell me?  It’s possible, sure.

Fact is, I am there again at my current job and this time I am really, really OK with it.  I am managing Information Systems again, which I seem to always have a bear of a time with aystem admin’s ( I think it’s because I spent 8 years as one myself).  So that isn’t the highlight here, but a necessity of the corporation.  What I am heading up is Information Security, and that has me really charged up.  I have always worked with security, at both a technical and managerial level.  It is a really important step in my corporation’s life and I am going to bring them to that level while at the same time, bring myself up a few levels too.  It is exciting, scary, overwhelming and challenging.  What else can I ask for out of job?

I have made the hard and firm decision to obtain my CISSP certification.  My goal is to sit for it in October; kind of  a birthday gift to myself.  I have looked at this certification for years and shied away from it.  Not this time, I will complete it.  I know at least three of our clients have asked if we have a CISSP certified member on staff in the last year.  It’s a logical supported next step, and having support from senior management is always a big plus.

Now here is the other exciting side to this. I will not be coding much at all at work.  Why is this exciting to me?  Simple, I will not be tired of coding and I can work on my own projects!  There is nothing I like better than coding stuff I want to.  I would guess most core developers think this way.  I have lent a hand to some open source project and developed some of my own crazy stuff.  My current one, which I personally find very useful is BD File Hash.  A Windows Forms base file hashing and hash compare tool.  Hey someday ask me what the BD stands for.

So as you can see I am hitting the best of both worlds here.  I am greatly improving my professional aptitude and still able to do the things I really enjoy doing. On top of it, I work two miles from my house, so I am not a complete stranger to my family.

Don’t worry, I”ll always remain  your IT Slug!

Wow a pain with Parrelles Plesk

Tuesday, July 13, 2010 in computer hell, Internet, that poop is cold | Tags: | 1 comment

I have been using Planet SMB hosting for a year or more now, and find them to be an adequate host who give a lot of stuff for the dollar.  I wouldn’t run a high availability application on them, but than again, I am not doing that, so it all works out.  I highly recommend them for any developer who needs a place to showcase stuff and use as a staging site or fee-based hosting site for their clients.  To clarify, when I say high availability, I don’t complain about them having downtime, because I really don’t experience much at all.  The issue I do have is wait times.  For applications to spin up, and the Plesk Panel which seems to always be painfully slow and times out. No phone support, though emails are usually answered in a decent amount of time.

The issue I had with Plesk is that when I setup my domains (I get 5!) an expiration date was set on them.  So today at some time they just stopped working!  WTF!  I know I never set this date, is this some strange default which was set?

I set in a critical ticket to PlanetSMB and it’s been 15 minutes and no reply.  In this case I figured out what happened, but I still want to see how long it takes to reply to my critical ticket.

UPDATE: So this is cool, I heard from PlanetSMB Support (Mike Eldredge actually, the owner) in 16 minutes with a good answer to my issue.  So he was right on it with the critical ticket, Yeah Mike!

Taking all the way to the stop

Wednesday, June 16, 2010 in Internet, life, nerdiness | Tags: | Leave a comment

Happy Summer!  The kids are out of school and already bored.  My oldest son though is really into reading this year, I mean REALLY into it.  He has probably read 10 books already on summer break.

His school has a degree program for reading books during the summer.  Basically the students get a star for each day they read more than twenty minutes.  My son has been doing much more than that I thought it would be great to keep track of it.  I am sure looking back at the list at the end of the Summer he would be pretty impressed by the list too.

My first thought is that I would set him up with a blog, and he could type in the books he read on any given day.  He and I have done some basic web page building together, so I thought he may get a kick out of this.

So I added a new blog to my account here at WordPress and picked a theme I hoped he didn’t think sucked.  When I went to add his as a contributor to the blog I discovered he needed an email address to that.  Hmm….

Well I have thought about setting him up with an email address in the past, but never did it as there was really no reason and he is only eight.  So I went to Comcast to set him up with a family account.  The didn’t have the name I wanted, damn.  Well I found one close enough and went with that.  At least Comcast has some parental controls, I’ll have to look deeper into that.

I set him up with a WordPress account and when there to log him in.  When I logged in with his account to verify everything I was greeted with a page of many, many blogs.  Well this is not good, he doesn’t need to be exposed to to this, too young yet, too dangerous.

Going to the next level

As I pondered this in a background processes it hit me, what about setting up a new domain and hosting the stuff myself!?  I checked at GoDaddy and shit, the domain is available, excellent.

$10.67 / year for the domain, not so bad.  $9.99 for privacy, what!  that’s a bit outside.  Then it hit me again, Dreamhost.  Dreamhost has a free domain with a paid subscription and I never used it, perfect.  Off to Dreamhost…

I was able to create and host the the domain on my current account and loaded up a WordPress blog in about 10 seconds.  Added an email address and we are ready to go in a more “controlled” environment.

So a simple idea has bloomed into a fully hosted domain with private emails and sites, all for an eight year-old.  I am the Tim Allen of the Internet!

So my son and I went over some of the stuff I put together and he is pretty interested in it all.  As expected he is a bit overwhelmed.  That’s OK, we’ll take it a step at a time in what ever direction interests him most.

A new convenient way hash compare your files

Sunday, June 13, 2010 in nerdiness, programming | Tags: | Leave a comment

I just finished a new file hashing tool, BD File Hash, which is hosted on CodePlex under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).

The goal behind this Windows tool is an easier way to verify files you download from the internet.  Many applications, ISO’s, and other files usually list a hash with them.  This hash is used to verify the file you downloaded is the same file the author meant you to download.  It prevents you from using corrupt or exploited downloads by allowing you to verify the file before you use it.

The problem I had with most file hashing tools, is that they needed to be run from a command line, or you had to open the hash value into a text editor and copy/paste it into the hashing application to be compared. So I wanted BD File Hash to be a convenient way to verify files using hashes.

BD File Hash has the following capabilities:

  • Right click any file and select BD File Hash from your Send To menu
  • Use a file picker to select the file with the authors hash value, it will automatically be parsed from the file and entered into the BD File has application
  • Easily hash to files to see if they are the same
  • Supports MD5, SHA-1, and SHA-256
    • Please recommend any other hashing algorithms you may need.
  • Save your default hash type to the one you use most often

BD File Hash requirements:

  • .NET 3.5 SP1
  • Windows Installer 3.1

Give BD File Hash a try today!

Gas Prices, An Economic Measuring Stick

Monday, April 19, 2010 in interesting view | Leave a comment

Like most Americans I have no idea what controls the prices of gasoline.  There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to why the prices fluctuate.  The local state government lifts taxes on gas for a short period to reduce the prices (Something Illinois did a few years back).  Though for some reason the price per gallon doesn’t go down by the amount of the tax removed.  Okay, perhaps the price of gasoline kept rising and offset this a bit.  What is really disturbing is when the tax was put back on the gasoline the price rose more than the tax!

What I have been trying to understand is what happened in September of 2008.  Starting in September 2008 until mid December 2008 the price of gasoline dropped by $2.70 (from $4.30 -> $1.65 ref.)  No government “stimulus”, no action by other groups.  Basically the economy was officially in the shit and gas prices plummeted, but why?  I wish I have an answer, but I don’t.

Now, sixteen months later gasoline has been on a steady increase, rising as the “economy improves” (so they are saying).  No reasoning, no rationalization, it just is.  The true control of gasoline prices is so controlled.  I believe it is used as a way to control our economy.  If you think about it there is currency more important to the global economy than oil.  NONE.  If you come up with one, I would love to here it.  Everything relies on oil and its prices have a heavy affect on the lucrativeness of all operations.

We saw this prior to September 2008 when gas was expensive and everyone was crying about it.  I am not saying it wasn’t a real issue because it was.  Nobody enjoyed paying $80+ to fill up their vehicles.  But of course it hit everywhere.  Carriers increased costs and added “surcharges” to offset the increased fuel costs. Airlines did the same.  They needed to show their customers that their price is low, but there is an extra charge for gas.  To me their price is high as I always conciser the bottom line, its irrelevant how they got to it.

So keep an eye on the general gasoline prices in your area and listen to the Markets reports. As the markets improve you will surely see the prices rise and rise.  The will keep rising until  the masses start crying again and everyone ends up paying for their ‘relief’ (the money has to come from some place, right?).

Maybe there is something to using gasoline prices as an economic measuring stick.

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