Posts from — January 2012

The ABC reported on a recent decision of Israel’s highest court: Israeli court upholds controversial marriage law

But the court has ruled that human rights cannot override Israel’s security concerns, with one judge writing that: “Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide.”

So they believe that The State is more important than mere people. The State apparently has the right to do whatever it wants to people as long as it claims to be for ‘security reasons’.

There is more than a little Roger Taney in these comments. It leaves unanswered the question of why people would belong to a state that had no regard for their rights?

You can’t tell the players without a program, so get your Super PACs program from the people at Open Secrets.

You need to know who ‘Restore Our Future’ is shilling for when they run their ads [Romney] and not confuse them with ‘Winning Our Future’ [Gingrinch].

There is no need to discuss the logic of the names, because there is none. The future is what happens – it can neither be ‘restored’ nor ‘won’; it just happens. I would note that it happens to be rather bleak at the moment, but nothing any of the Presidential candidates is talking about doing is going to change that. [Note that I am including Zero in that assessment.]

You can consider the situation in Europe as a preview of the US future under the Austerians.

Many thanks to Rorschach112 at Geeks To Go for pointing the way to ending the problem, and to the lads and/or lasses of Kaspersky for their TDSSKiller that took out the problem.

The machine was invested with a problem with many names: Win32/Olmarik, Rootkit.Win32.TDSS.u, Win32/Alureon.F, Backdoor.Tidserv!.inf. It installed itself in the boot area of the hard disk and communicated with various malware sites.

The clues that it was on the machine were the redirection of search engine results and an increase in boot time. Eliminating the stuff you could see would only last until you re-booted when it would relaunch and recreate what you deleted.

ESET warned about it and blocked the calls to the ‘mothership’, but it couldn’t remove it completely. Messing about in the boot sector is definitely a specialized field, and if you aren’t 100% confident about what you are doing, you could render the computer inert.

I don’t need the computer I cleaned up, now that I have the emulator working, but it is always good to have a back-up.

En Garde!

What was that?

[Editor: Lucrezia scans for trouble as she takes in the afternoon sun. When you have been as nasty as she is, this is a reasonable precaution.

Friday Ark

In the early hours of January 13th, 1969 I was forced to accept something that I had known for a while, but had pushed to the back of my mind: I was mortal and was going to die.

This was the first of several incidents when my chance of survival was a good deal less than 1 in 2. This wasn’t the scariest, but it was the first, and following on the heels of the terrible events of 1968, it had the biggest impact.

In the end the only “death” was an airplane, Rivet Ball, the Air Force’s only RC-135S. The military version of the Boeing 707, the fuselage broke in half, like an eggshell, on impact. A very talented pilot, John Achor, the aircraft commander, was responsible for that miracle.

I provide more detail on my other site.

I finally have an ancient piece of software up and running on the laptop, which is very good news. My second machine is still infested with a rootkit worm, and that will be the next step.

This program started as a mailing list on a Kaypro CP/M at the dawn of microcomputers, running on one of the first popular wordprocessing programs, WordStar. It them progressed through dBASE II, dBASE III, dBASE III+, and finally its current compiled version with Clipper.

Most of the program was last changed in 1998 in anticipation of Y2K, but there are annual updates to certain of the printing modules. It is a custom accounting system for a very niche market, and produces output to run on several specialized devices.

For years I have been looking for ways of converting it to the Windows platform, but there is no current program that will enable a programmer to re-create all of the features. It is very frustrating because accounting was once the raison d’être for computers, and now it is relegated to a miniscule segment in the microcomputer world. People adapt their business to a couple of popular programs, rather than creating something that works the way they do.

C’est la vie …

Update: I forget to mention the minor hurdle imposed by the power company. They made a ‘courtesy call’ [a robocall by any other name is just as annoying] informing me that at an unspecified time probably in the next 7 days they would be swapping electric meters in the area, which means if I have to leave for a few minutes, I have to shut everything down.

They are installing ‘new, more efficient meters’, which translates as the auto-reporting type that will allow them to fire even more people and reduce their ‘costs’, but have no effect on mine, as the savings will go to higher profits, not lower bills.

I will rarely be around for the next few days as I have multiple computer issues on multiple computers that I have to clear up.

First, they changed the assignment of delegates from Iowa, with Romney getting 13 and Santorum getting 12, and the others getting stiffed. No explanation, just the new numbers.

New Hampshire normally has 23 delegates on offer, but they moved their primary date and the RNC dinged them 11 delegates, so this is a race for a dozen delegates. Just so you know how totally irrelevant all of this is, it takes 1144 delegates to win the nomination.

With 95% of the votes counted it’s Romney [40%], Paul [23%], Huntsman [17%], Gingrinch [10%], Santorum [9%], and Perry [1%].

Next up is South Carolina, which is a much bigger state, so it is totally ignored because all it has are delegates, not the ‘magic anointing properties’ of Iowa and New Hampshire. That’s where the ‘Newtron bomb’ targeting Romney is set to be used by Gingrinch’s superPAC that is in no way affiliated with the official campaign [nod, nod, wink, wink].

The FAA has finally come to its senses: Whooping cranes are cleared for takeoff after getting FAA exemption.

A group has been raising whooping cranes, and then releasing them into the wild to increase the tiny number of the endangered birds. Part of the process involves teaching them about their migration flight, and this is accomplished by having an ultra-light aircraft act as the lead bird to show the young birds where to go.

The FAA got its knickers in a bunch because the people who fly the aircraft are full-time employees of the non-profit that conducts the program, and the pilots are thus being paid. The license used for an ultra-light is highly restricted, and it can’t be used for commercial purposes. It has been difficult for the FAA to understand that the people flying the aircraft aren’t professional pilots, they are bird handlers who have volunteered to fly the aircraft, to act like an adult whooping crane.

The FAA finally decided to allow the flight to continue, and we can only hope it didn’t destroy the chances of the birds to survive.

As has become routine, TSA not only didn’t back down, but it doubled down: TSA defends cupcake confiscation.

That’s right, they confiscated cupcakes because the frosting was ‘gel-like’ and violated the rules about carrying gels on the aircraft. This was the same excuse they used when they confiscated my Mother’s chocolate pudding, despite being a sealed commercial container.

It is irrelevant that this stupid rule arose from a British incident, and the British have since discontinued it, because the hysteria about the possibility was shown to be totally in error – you can’t do what ‘the terrorists’ said they were going to do. It was a dumb rule, prompted by ignorance, and pathetically still in force in the US.

The only good part of the article is the reaction of the bakery that made the cupcake – they have changed the name from red velvet to ‘National [Security] Velvet’.

With 100% of the votes counted in Dixville Notch [the polls open at midnight and close when everyone is done] Huntsman and Romney are tied with two apiece while Paul and Gingrinch are tied for third with one apiece.

All media outlets are required to send someone to Dixville Notch for all elections and report on the results, no matter how meaningless they actually are. Without the Internet you would have to wait until morning to find out this crucial piece of information.

New Hampshire gets to go first because … well, it could be traditional … or not.

It is a hell of a way to select a candidate, and it’s all ours.

Full disclosure: yes, I knew this trivia was coming, and I’m as guilty as CNN for reporting it.

Busy day, actually doing some real work for a client who is making a transition. Doing it I learned that you get the complete Windows 7 system no matter which version is running on a new computer, and then you have to pay for the ‘key’ to get the appropriate level [Home, Professional, Ultimate] that is used. It makes upgrading easier, and Microsoft saves money by only producing one product disk.

Since Windows 7 doesn’t include a calendar, I grabbed VueMinder Calendar Lite [the free version] to see if it would do the job. Overall, I’m very pleased with the results. I would recommend it for people who don’t want to trust their life to a Microsoft web app, the M$ solution for the absence of Outlook in Win 7.

My day was a lot better than Steve Bates’s. He had to deal with the flooding in Houston caused by a front moving through.

I gave a neighbor a ride to his job, because his car is down for repairs. There is nothing in the way of public transportation here, so his options were to get a ride from someone, or pay more for a taxi than he would make by going to work. The round trip is 25+ miles, so that’s at least a gallon of gas every day.

I heard the relevant quote on NPR when I was out today, but the link to the story on the CBS site wasn’t obvious, so here is the USA Today version of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta admitting that there is no evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapons program.

He falls back on a variation of the Hedgemony’s ‘weapons of mass destruction program related activities’, i.e. Iran is doing things that could be used in a nuclear weapons program in the future. He doesn’t say what those things are, perhaps it is physics courses or mathematics, but the fact that the possibility exists is enough to impose all kinds of sanctions on Iran.

I have no idea what Iran is supposed to do, because Saddam did everything required of him to prove that he didn’t have any WMDs, but he got attacked anyway.

Let’s be clear that Iran is following the rules and has the right to do what it is doing. The US did nothing about Israel, Pakistan, or India when they developed nuclear weapons, and the less said about the mess the Shrubbery created in North Korea when he reneged on the agreement put in place to stop their nuclear weapons program the better.

Iran has absolutely no reason to believe anything the West says. The West has broken agreements with Iran on multiple occasions, so promises of a supply of fuel rods from outside of Iran are not going to be accepted. The West, and especially the US, has no credibility anymore.

Iran has a right under international law to control the passage of shipping through its coastal waters, and portions of the Strait of Hormuz goes through Iranian waters.

Iran is not violating any rules, but at the insistence of Israel, the US is seeking to punish them.

Via Susie Madrak, a post on the MSNBC technology blog about a possible shut down on January 23^rd by Wikipedia, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others over the pending SOPA legislation.

GoDaddy has already lost about 35,000 accounts after it came out in support for SOPA [the ‘Stop On-line Piracy Act’] by people who have read the law and object to it.

This is another attempt by the half dozen media conglomerates to harass their customers who refuse to buy the over-priced garbage that the corporations are attempting to push. The bill aims to make ISPs agents of the media conglomerates.

If the media companies would like to put a dent in real piracy, they might consider not having their CD/DVD operations located in China. The same warning goes to the ‘designer labels’ pushing their over-priced trash. If it is produced in China, it will be copied, often by the same company that makes the ‘real’ product.

If you out-source the production of your product, you have lost control of the product.

С Рождеством Христовым to my Orthodox friends who are still waiting to see how the calendar reform works out.