This Geek

I’m finding a lot of forms that validate email addresses are marking email addresses with a + sign in it as invalid. What crap! A + sign is a perfectly valid character in an email address. I wish people would catch a wake up, and code their validation according to the RFC’s. Argh!

If you weren’t aware, GMail and GMail hosted domains support the use of + signs in email addresses so that you can classify email. So for eg, you can go to a site and sign up for an account, you can set the email as something like: youraddress+sometexthere@domain.com - and you will receive the mail. You can then know immediately where it came from - even if it’s spam, you can know where the original source was.

So you think that if you buy computer components all of the same brand, that the things would work perfectly together, right?

Riiight.

My Antec power supply decided to die on me this morning. So, obviously I need to find something to replace it quite urgently, at least until my new parts arrive.

So I run around, and I find a Gigabyte brand power supply that will hopefully do the trick, especially considering that my chassis, motherboard, and graphics cards are all Gigabyte brand.

My first problem is that I’m running an SLI setup, and this new power supply only has one PCI-E power connector. No problem, I hack together a converter cable from my dead power supply.

I happily install the Gigabyte power supply into the Gigabyte chassis, plug the cables into the Gigabyte motherboard, and then attempt to plug the PCI-E power connector into the first Gigabyte graphics card. Guess what? The cable is too short.

Now that just boggles the mind. You would think they would test their components with their own products, but obviously not.

Our department at work is getting ever smaller. There are now exactly 2 permanent staff members left. One of our team resigned awhile back and has been contracting for the past few months, and that’s due to expire at the end of may.

Anyway, sometime last year, management hired a Dutch contractor as technical manager for our department. After about 6 months, he learned the error of his ways, and after making some changes to our infrastructure that made our admin lives more difficult, he left.

Another foreign contractor was hired to replace him. He seemed nice enough, friendly, etc, until one day last week he decided that he just had to exert his power and completely alienate and piss off the entire department.

It seems he’s one of these sociable creatures that just cannot handle being left out of things, so to make himself feel better, he set about to completely rearrange our offices and desks to suite his completely fucked up view of things. We were very happy in our little individual cubicles, with our blinds closed etc. Now this fuckwit has removed ALL the partitioning in the office, and is insisting that we have to sit in clusters, facing each other This brilliant decision was most likely arrived at without one modicum of thought towards us and our feelings, nor for the practicalities of sharing office space.

Since I sit at the bottom of the passage leading in to our offices, I can now see and be seen by everyone that enters the area. I can clearly hear other people’s conversations on the other side of the office, and noises from machines that never used to bother me are much louder too… Never mind the fact that I can no longer have a private telephone conversation.

His arguments? There is no privacy in the office! He was quite adamant about that. He even went so far as to relate a story about how he gleefully listened in to a personal conversation some woman was having at one of his previous jobs, and then butted in and offered her advice etc. Obviously the woman was peeved. And he was proud of that example! I mean, what kind of cunt must you be to do something like that? Sure, you may not have much privacy in the work place, but any decent human being would at least pretend not to hear a private conversation, and would at least feign ignorance… That at least would afford one the semblance of privacy. And the fuck you say! The south african constitution says that everyone has the right to privacy, and in the workplace, one can expect a reasonable right to privacy! So fuck your “there is no privacy in the work place” bullshit.

I have my car serviced by Lindsay Saker East Rand Mall. What a bunch of sharks. I’m fuming.

First let me give a bit of history:

About two services ago (45,000km), I took my car in for a standard service. During the day, they phoned me and told me that I absolutely had to change the brake pads on the car at a cost of (I forget now, but it was approximately) R1600.00, because there was no way that they would last until the next service. Fortunately, not being too stupid, I had checked the brake pads myself before I took the car in, and they were just peachy. Puhlenty of pad left. I told them to get knotted. The pads lasted quite well until the next service, even a few months after before I had both front and back replaced, with new disks besides, for a little over 2k.

Anyway, this time they call me and tell me that I should get the chips on the wind screen fixed. So I fall for that - at a cost of R350-odd. A little while later, they call again, and tell me that I absolutely have to have my windscreen wiper blades replaced at a cost of R450, a fuel filter at R350, a rib belt at around R650, have the radiator flushed for around R350 and serviced for around another R400 or something. I flipped. I know for a fact that I can get new wiper blades for around R200 - which is still quite expensive as these things go, but then they aren’t normal blades, and it takes all of 5 seconds per blade to switch them out.

I told them to do the rib belt and the fuel filter and to leave the rest. I’m stupid, but not that stupid - and I’m definitely not made of money.

I think next time I’ll take my car to a different dealership - these guys are pissing me off. Not to say that somewhere else will be any better though.

I got to bed very late last night. Kind of got addicted to Lego Star Wars 2 that I bought for my son. Anyway, as is typical, I’ve had no bloody chance to sleep in. My wife had to go to work early this morning for some inane reason, and she accidentally left her alarm on, so it went off next to me and woke me up, but before I could get back to sleep, my phone rang - standby support call, argh! So I got up to go take a look at the network link in question, to discover that it had come up again 10 minutes previously. As I was about to phone the dude back, he called me and said never mind. Sigh

We run McAfee as our corporate antivirus software. It’s fairly nice to manage via ePolicy Orchestrator, and I haven’t really had any issues with it, apart from corrupt Framework agent files now and then etc. Until I rolled out VirusScan 8.5 + AntiSpyware.

We use several remote admin tools on our network, one of them being TightVNC. So, because of this, in the Unwanted Programs Policy, I disable the category to detect remote admin tools, thinking that our remote tools would be safe.

I roll out 8.5 to a few machines here and there for testing purposes. It’s been running on my entire department’s machines since the 21st December, and it has been running on about 7 additional test workstations scattered throughout the environment for the past two weeks with no issues.

So today is the big rollout day where we deploy 8.5 to the rest of the company.

The next thing, I notice that our monitoring workstation has a virus alert on the screen. I go take a look - and discover that McAfee has gleefully deleted Tight VNC - detecting it as RemAdm-TightVNC. Hmmm… RemAdm… Remote Admin perhaps? That category that was UNSELECTED for detection? Yep.

Since our monitoring workstation is set up in a really inconvenient place to work on it (hence the desire for VNC), I decided to try remotely execute a few commands in an attempt to solve the situation.

Oooh. Guess what - psexec is detected as RemAdm-PSKill.

What I find hilariously funny is that I have PSTools installed on my workstation - in my Windows directory for that matter, and I have been running McAfee VirusScan 8.5 for the past month with EXACTLY the same policy that is installed on our monitoring station, yet it has NOT picked it up. It also fails to pick up UltraVNC which I have installed on this workstation. Gotta love the selective detections.

So I add all those detections as specific exclusions in the Unwanted Programs Policy. Then I get to thinking, “What else is this fucking software going to detect and delete?”

To the knowledgebase, Batman!

I find an article referencing Antivirus 8.0i, explaining how to get a list of PuPs (Potentially Unwanted Programs) from a command line tool called csscan.exe. The article says to run csscan.exe /TARGET APPLIST >c:\applist.txt

I run it and view the resulting applist.txt.

>CommonShell Command Line Scanner (VSCORE.13.3.1.100) > >Engine Version : 5100.0194 >AV DAT Version : 4947.0000 223716 detections Built Tuesday, January 23, 2007 >Extra DAT : 0 detections > > >Summary :- > FilesFound : 0 > FilesScanned : 0 > FilesNotScanned : 0 > > ObjectsFound : 0 > ObjectsInfected : 0 > ObjectsCleaned : 0 > ObjectsDeleted : 0 > > FilesInfected : 0 > FilesCleaned : 0 > FilesMoved : 0 > FilesDeleted : 0

Wow, quite a list. Well, I figure that since the article was applicable to 8.0i and not 8.5, they might have changed the command line a bit.

Indeed they had. Now there was a nifty parameter called PupList.

>Please wait … retrieving list of names from the Anti-PUP DAT >Detection name list retrieval failed

Fun fun. So I try all the other *List parameters, and discover that the only one that works is VirList, which helpfully lists most detections in the DAT files.

I also discovered that csscan.exe can be used to restore the backups that are made before files are deleted.

>csscan.exe /BackupDir C:\Quarantine /RestoreBackup RemAdm-TightVNC

There’s quite a lot of nifty things that can be done with that csscan.exe. Pity it’s not documented somewhere useful. :p

Welcome, welcome! I’m the Devil. Welcome to Hell. What? Don’t look so shocked. You were expecting Saint Peter were you? Oh, stop sniveling. It’s too late, you know.

Yes? No, no mistake young fellow. You are all here for the same reason. Pardon? You mean you don’t know why you’re here? Oh, go on. Pull the other one.

Fine. You’re here because you’re the bunch of inconsiderate ponces that chose to drive with their rear fog lights on when there was no fog.

What? Outrage? You must be joking! If anything, the outrage is coming from the people who had to drive behind you. Anyway, enough bickering. You’re here now, get used to it.

Your eternity will be spent driving a car at night in the rain. You will always be behind someone with their rear fog lights on. Your only company will be the radio, set permanently to Jeremy Mansfield on Highveld Stereo.

Cruel? Of course I’m cruel. I’m the Devil! You should have thought of that before you switched those rear fog lights on!