February 22

Sum of the parts

I have decided last week to keep both my twitter and tumblr accounts. This blog now has the widgets that gets the feeds of both micro-blogging sites. To enable me to blog from areas that prevents me from accessing them *cough*office*cough, I have signed up with twittermail and ping.fm which allows me to post via email and instant messengers. The instant messenger portion was previously handled by imified.com but their bot is no longer reliable thus a need for replacement.

To keep things simple, this blog will contain the full flege ramblings. The twits will be limited to short updates and “heat of the moment” rants while tumblr will retain my initial purpose for it: a host for shorter blog posts that may or may nob be converted to a full post.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? 🙂

ciao!

Category: Garbage | LEAVE A COMMENT
February 15

The percent fallacy

How many times have you heard the phrase “I will give my 101%” or “You can count on a 120% effort for this project” and think its a good thing? It is becoming one of my pet peeves because people are getting more stupid each time that escape their mouths.

The word percent comes from the root word “per centum” which literally translates to “by the hundred”. Nowadays it is taken as “a portion of the whole” where whole is pegged at 100. When it comes to effort, there is no such thing as going over the top. It is just plain impossible. Some might argue that they just mean going the extra mile but in that case that person was squandering because they were not giving it their all during the other times that they are giving their 100%. They were lying when they said that they were giving their all during all those times so what makes you think they are not lying to you now?

In the fields that require physical exertion like blue-collar work or sports, it is not uncommon to hear that somebody has died because they went past their limits. These are the people who gave their 100%. These are the people who really gave their all and paid for it dearly. Keep that in mind the next time you hear somebody spouting a figure over 100%.

ciao!

Category: Rubbish | LEAVE A COMMENT
February 15

MSI Wind connectivity of a different sort

When I bought my Sony-Ericsson(SE) K618i a couple of years ago it was because I want to be able to jump into the 3G bandwagon and have information in demand. While I was able to setup a SMART 3G account, browsing was limited to using the built-in browser which is pretty limiting (pun intended).

My attempts to tether my old Fujitsu-Siemens laptop using bluetooth and cable was not successful. Another factor might be because the laptop is too heavy to lug everyday to work and our home in Binangonan has non-existent 3G signal since we are in a mountainous region. The MSI Wind changed all that as portability is not much of an issue right now.

Being able to use my 3G phone via bluetooth is still a frustrating exercise and my iniitial attempts to use the SE phone suite is not much better. Everything changed when I explored the phone’s connectivity menu that I almost slapped myself for being stupid. For those that have SE phones, the following instructions may be useful for you:

Initial Requirements:
– A SE K618i phone with a configured 3G account. Refer to your telco provider for the setup instructions.
– A corresponding data cable for the phone.
– A laptop or desktop with enabled USB ports.

Instructions:
– In the phone menu, go to the Settings Menu.
– Navigate to the Connectivity->USB menu
– Configure the USB Data Accounts to your telco. Mine uses the “Smart Internet” configuration.
– Select the USB Internet item and set it to “On”
– Plug-in the cable to the port and the USB jack into your desktop.

That’s it. the USB Internet item actually makes your phone be detected as an ordinary USB Ethernet device which means your operating system will begin querying for an IP address when it detects it. Of course this assumes that your system is configured this way but most come this was as a standard. I use this setup for both Windows and Linux with no problem. I get varying result depending on location but this is handy when I need an internet connection in a jiffy. This also means I can put off buying a USB plug-it device until the price gets more wallet-friendly.

I am guessing the USB Ethernet option is also available in other Sony-Ericsson phones but I have not seen a similar feature on my wife’s Nokia E51. I haven’t looked thoroughly but will post an update if I do find one.

ciao!

Category: Gadget | LEAVE A COMMENT
February 15

Might as well be dead

I can’t believe that it has been three months since I posted something here. Time flies when you are really busy and when you are pissed off (not in that order :P). Hopefully I will be able to finish up some items I want to blog about and stop being a slacker. 🙂

ciao!

Category: Garbage | LEAVE A COMMENT
November 10

The ultimate solution for company data loss…

Or your money back!

Sounds like a pitch for snake oil medicines. 😀

Tonight I opened my company mail and I found a curious memo about a new guideline about backing up data on company owned machines. The first though that entered my mind was “WTF, another roadblock for doing backups?”

Reading the memo, it made some sense if you apply some common sense. And then I tried reading it from a “Security Expert slash Manager extraordinaire” perspective who follows everything by the book and then my world shrunk by a magnitude of ten. The phrasing combined with current practices is enough to give me the shivers if I think about embarking in a simple task of performing backups.

In line with the company’s commitment to protecting client data, effective immediately we are implementing the following process for backing up data on company-owned machines (desktops or laptops):

You may not back up any sensitive data residing on a company-owned computer (Laptop or Desktop) without permission of the IT Support team and obtaining a signed form. Only encrypted back ups are allowed, including copying files to flash media or CD.

Not bad eh? Not until you read that you need a very high approver before you can even think of performing a backup. If you need an analogy then think of the company as ruled by a god and you need the approval of the high priests. That approval is now on top of soaking one’s self in gasoline, rolling in live coals, and dancing a cha-cha number on top of broken blades and glasses.

To top it all, the last sentence was like adding insult to injury:

Further details will be released this week, as the IT Support team mobilizes to handle this task.

Yeah, I am brimming with confidence that the over-worked and ticket-closing trigger happy support team is able to take on this new task while spreading cheer and world peace. I am saying goodbye to backups then. I think it is easier to just slaughter some chicken and offer it to my anito to protect the company data that I am working on from sudden glitches and electronic crashes.

ciao!

Category: Rubbish, Work | LEAVE A COMMENT
November 8

Access denied for local Windows Admin User

My Windows XP installation is acting up again. For some reason I cannot pinpoint directories will change permission and it locks me out with an “Access Denied” permission. The problem is that I am logged in as a local administrator (hey, its Windows so its the only way to really work while in it 😛 ) and following the maxim “Computer Security stops with full physical access” then everything should be available to me. First reaction would be to check and modify the file security properties but since I don’t have “access” then the Security tab will not show in the properties window of the file.

Normally I would note the directory down somewhere in the desk, wait finishing my current work, and then reboot to Linux and access the files. Linux allows me to bypass the NTFS access control list so I can take out the files and move/copy them to a new location before deleting the old location. I run a chkdsk next time I boot into Windows to reset the index and have a semblance of sanity in the drive.

Today this can’t be my route as it locked a directory containing some files that I need for the current document I am working on. Rebooting to Linux to bail out Windows is not an option so I searched a way on how to circumvent this, and now I have two (well technically one with a backup).

CACLS

CACLS is the built-in command line utility for modifying file access control lists in Windows. Invoking the help file (cacls /?)presents a pretty concise and helpful help message. To give my user account full access to the misbehaving directory and all the files inside, the command is

cacls [path to directory to be change] /T /G Erin:F

where /T specifies that all contents of the directory will be modified and the last switch tells the utility to give user name Erin full access.

If the cacls command still fails for your admin user, then try using the SYSTEM user as that generally have more privileges than the administrator users. You basically need to execute the same CACLS command under that privilege but the “runas” command will not work as you will need the SYSTEM password. You will have to trick the machine into opening the doors for you [insert devil grin here]. Not really, I was talking about the Scheduler trick that is only accessible to Administrators and some special user groups.

AT HH:MM /INTERACTIVE cmd.exe

HH and MM is to be replaced with the time + one or two minutes from the current system time (use 24H format for the hours). This will trigger the task scheduler to open a command prompt at the set time which uses the SYSTEM account. You can try the cacls modification from the resulting prompt.

And if all else fails, there is always Linux. 😀

ciao!

Category: Non-FLOSS | LEAVE A COMMENT
October 23

Feeling stupid

A common computer prank is to take a screenshot of an unattended Windows desktop, configure the desktop to hide all shortcuts and the taskbar (for more kicks, move it in the left or right side) and then set the screenshot as the wallpaper. The pranksters then wait on the wing for the unsuspecting user to keep on clicking the applications in the screenshot and scratch their head why nothing is happening.

There is another behavior that makes this prank effective: tunnel vision. If using a big screen then people would have a tendency to zoom in on the middle portion and not pay much attention on the edges unless really needed. This and my work on “environment support” ensures that I make an ass of myself once a week. I normally take desktop screenshots when working with different applications. I usually position the different application windows in such a way that all the information are in a little portion of the screen. I then past the screenshot in mspaint, select the portion I need and send it to the other support team.

And then I move on to the next task and sometimes I forget closing the mspaint. Sometimes the mspaint window ends up getting the focus and then I start clicking on the the app window buttons or menus and wonder why nothing is happening. It is only after a few seconds that I notice the palette on the left side, or the title bar at the top. That is the time I press alt+f4 with a vengeance for using part of my 5-minutes of daily foolishness at that moment. 🙂

Just letting out some steam and sharing as this is the second time that it happened to me this week.

ciao!

Category: Garbage, Humor | LEAVE A COMMENT