In2SciFi

I’m finally back online and able to post again, so I’ll be starting again in the next several days as I catch up with things. What amazes me most while I’ve been offline is the volume of spam posts there have been to the blog. So many attempts to get something posted! All of the attempts were so obvious, yet they keep coming in. I sometimes wonder why, but I’m sure I know. It doesn’t require any effort. Adding one posting address to a list and everything else is automatic. What a waste.

We’re in the process of packing and moving right now (I expect to actually move in about a week), so while I’ll try to post some updates during that time, problems with Internet access and such will likely cause difficulty getting online. I’ll be picking up again for sure once we’re settled in our new location.

Since I started this blog, I’ve been trapping spam and rejecting it before it gets posted. I’m amazed at how much there is targeting blogs like this one. There is no discrimination, no attempt to get it to any sort of right place. Further, there is no apparent concern that it doesn’t get posted, just that it gets submitted. It’s hard to believe someone pays for this stuff, but obviously they do.

I’ve got to ask myself WHY? Why would someone PAY to have someone do this?

The stuff they’re trying to post isn’t just ’spam’, it’s junk. There’s no relation to the topic, just get some links out there. The worst ones are the ones that are trying to social engineer by posting something that LOOKS OK superficially. They have embedded links to questionable locations that have nothing to do with the topic or the words in the post.

So why? It’s simple really. People are making money at it. In fact, people are making millions of dollars doing this.

WOW! I didn’t see this one coming, but it’s been too long in coming ” … there are too many technologists in technology”. I found this in the article ‘Memo to Vendors: Here’s How to Build a Winner‘ by Mike Elgan of Computerworld writing for PCWorld.

Elgan lists the following important points:

• Consistency
• Simplicity
• Performance
• Stability

In his words, all of these boil down to the issue of Control. Who is in control of the application? He goes on to discuss the flaws in usability testing ad the sort of issues that concern the people running them, but his point, and mine as well here, is that it’s more about how the person FEELS than the goal they’re trying to achieve.

When your customer faces your system, what do they see in their minds eye and what do they feel? Do they seem to see a technologist staring back at them explaining things in arcane language and getting upset when they do something wrong? Or do they see a friendly, helpful interface that gives them control over their destiny?

My contention is that too many systems are built by technologists without any understanding of the customer’s point of view. Not just what they’re goal is, but how they FEEL about your company as they’re dealing with you.

I found a wonderful visualization of the collapse of the economy when I went to the Spirituality, Science, and Technology blog today.

The post talked about a paper on the Epidemiology of the Credit Crises which was found while reading Chemoton § Vitorino Ramos’ research notebook. I tracked it back to the original paper which you can download and read as a PDF.

The paper also refers to a page with a video of the collapse that you can download and review. The paper was written by Reginald Smith of the Bouchet-Franklin Institute in Rochester. This is very impressive and very interesting to look at. However, you also need to look at his cautions:

• This is not ‘market contagion’
• This shows correlations, it’s nor about causation
• While this uses the word ‘Epidemiology’, it’s not about a mechanism

As an educational piece, it’s an interesting insight into the progressive collapse we’re all now experiencing.

In my last note on Movie Series, I forgot to mention an important one. It came up last night while watching one of the entries in the Star Trek Series.

Star Trek (Movies from the original series)

1. Star Trek II - Wrath of Khan

by far the best of all of the entries … it is completely engaging and worth rewatching.

2/3. Star Trek 3/6

I can’t decide between these two. Both were good, though no where near as good as Wrath of Khan

4/5. Star Trek 4/5

Again, I can’t decide between the two, except I found both disappointing.

2. Star Trek 1

The worst of the series. I thought they’d killed it with this one.

A few friends of mine and I were talking about movie series and books, we came up with some ratings for which movies we thought were best and how they compared to the books if we’d read them.

Jurassic Park series

1. Jurassic Park (book)
2. Jurassic Park (movie)
3. Jurassic Park III (movie)
4. The Lost World (book)
5. The Lost World (movie)

Indiana Jones Movies

1. Indiana Jones I
2. Indiana Jones III
3. Indiana Jones IV
4. Indiana Jones II

Star Wars Series

1. Star Wars IV
2. Star Wars VI
3. Star Wars V
4. Star Wars III
5. Star Wars II a toss up with Star Wars I

Some times it’s just fun to speculate about which is better than the others and why. Of course, we could look at a series that went continuously downhill, like Jaws I-IV. Jaws I was superior and each movie afterwards was exponentially worse than the ones before.

Why don’t I ever see it mentioned that the dream of a popular UNIX system with a killer desktop is real … and it’s the Macintosh with OS-X!

Everyone is so focused on Linux that they forget that Apple brought UNIX to the desktop as part of OS-X and they made it nothing less than great. There’s no hype … well … there’s ALWAYS been hype … but Apple did hit it as hard as most UNIX vendors did, they brought it out and made it work.

I always loved UNIX from the first time I got my hands on it. UNIX is great. It’s definitely a programmer’s environment which makes it easy to do a lot of things.

I also loved the Macintosh. I had my hands on one of the early 128K models and loved it. I bought several including one of the early powerbooks and carried with me everywhere (even when that meant carrying a LARGE case to get it somewhere).

Windows has always been OK, but frustrating. I’d much rather be using UNIX for most things and Mac for things I want a GUI for, but I couldn’t afford to carry 3 computers to get what I wanted. Beyond that, everything I needed to work with was on Windows, not Mac or UNIX. So I’ve been carrying Windows laptops for years. That’s changed though.

With the advent of Parallels and the Macbook Pro, I could carry ALL of the environments I loved best with me and use whatever I needed to get my work done. Now OS-X has become my primary application platform with all of my normal apps there. However, Windows has a number of apps that I run, some of which go as far back as WIN98. I can run all of those easily under Parallels. For activities like Penetration Testing or low level network programming I work on the Linux platform because nothing beats the programming environment on Linux these days for this kind of work.

A local friend’s computer was giving him problems, so I stopped by to help. I found much more than I expected.

FIRST - everything was operating erratically. A variety of programs wouldn’t work, nothing seemed to make sense. A warning kept coming up saying that the machine was infected, but no details could be found nor could the source of the warning.

SECOND - the machine wouldn’t follow it’s boot sequence. It wouldn’t boot from the repair disk or any other disk, it always went to the hard disk even though we went in and adjusted the boot ROM to change the boot order

I tried different approaches to get in but nothing worked. I recommended that my friend wipe the disk and completely rebuild it, but he didn’t have a set of distribution disks and would have to buy some. The operating system was preloaded but he didn’t have any distribution disks to go with it. Beyond this, he wanted very badly to save a collection of pictures on the disk that hadn’t been written to CD yet.

I agreed to bring the computer back to my place and work on it, but I couldn’t promise much because of all the problems. Nothing seemed to work, so I decided it was time to shift directions and move to Linux.

Working on Linux gave me tremendous flexibility AND assured me that I’d be working with a system that shouldn’t be susceptible to the problems my friend was having. I also wanted to play with some other distributions to see how they all worked. I downloaded a Number of Linux distributions and burned them to CD :

Knoppix
Trinity Rescue Kit
System Rescue CD
Ubuntu 8
Fedora 9

I had plenty of experience with Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian. Knoppix I’d worked with a little as a recovery CD and as a demo CD. I have a virtual Knoppix and a virtual Unbuntu on my laptop that I use when I need Linux. I hadn’t yet tried Fedora 9 or Ubuntu 8, so this was a good excuse to work with them and I’d never tried the specialized packages ‘Trinity Rescue Kit’ and ‘Security Rescue CD’, both of which interested me.

At this point, I’ve got some of what my friend wants, but there’s more that could be done, so while I’ve got the computer I’ll play a bit. Here’s what I’ve done so far:

1) After trying to boot Knoppix and other Linux repair disks and not being able to, I disconnected the hard disk and tried again.

Once I disconnected the hard disk, I found that the CD/RW disk didn’t recognize the disk inserted in it, but the CD-ROM drive did, so I changed boot configuration and started Knoppix.

2) With Knoppix able to load now, I first did hardware checks triggering MEMTEST on boot and running it through it’s paces, then running checks on everything else I could. Except for the RW CD disk, everything appeared to be working. I tried to write CDs with the CD/RW but it didn’t recognize that there was a disk inserted. I need to do some more tests on it. For now, I can use network disks to get done what I need to.

3) I reconnected the hard disk and again was puzzled when the computer wouldn’t boot according to the boot sequence. However, I noticed that it seemed to try everything in the proper sequence as I had it set up (CD-FLOPPY-HARD DISK). With a bit more experimentation, I found that if I closed the CD door just as the boot process started, it recognized the disk and booted properly. It was replicable, so I went with that for now. I still don’t understand the boot problem, but it’s of less importance than saving the files my friend doesn’t want to lose, so I’ll come back to it if I have time.

4) I booted Knoppix and checked to make sure I could mount the hard drive. Using CLAMAV, I ran basic checks on the drive, but it failed during the process. There was no explanation, so I decided to try another system.

5) This time, I booted the Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK - another Linux bootable CD), mounted the hard disk again, and using TRK’s Virusscan to select the Grisoft AVG scanner to rescan the disk. This time I picked up several worms on the hard disk and repaired them.

6) With the disk at least cleaner, I rebooted to Windows, but it’s still so messed up it’s just not useable. More work yet to do. So I booted back to Knoppix

7) With Knoppix running and the hard disk mounted, I searched for picture files and copied them off to my network drive. At this point, I’ve pulled about 4Gb of pictures

That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. I’ve got the pictures saved that my friend wants. I don’t want to wipe the disk because he’s out of town and won’t be back for several weeks. I need him to confirm that I have everything copied off that he wants. Once I’m sure, then I’ll help him reformat and setup his system again. In the mean time, the system is mine to play with and I want to try other tools out to see what I can do.

One of the things I’ll be playing with is some of the raw access that I wrote about in my book DOS Programmer’s Reference. A lot has changed over the years, so I’ll update my programs to handle changes in the systems as I play.

While my book is now out of print (after 4 editions), many people still find it useful for what they learned from it and for working with older systems. Some copies are still available used through Amazon.com:

Oveall, my friends computer should give me a chance to play with some of the known problems, try out some of the known solutions, and see what else can be done.

I really like Stephen Donaldson’s writing, what I don’t understand is why. Here is an exceptional writer who makes what he writes come alive in my head. More than many other writers, when Donaldson describes something, I come away feeling like I’ve actually seen it. But why?

What I’m trying to think about is not the power of his approach, but what it is that gives it that power. If someone else described the scene, it wouldn’t be as powerful. Why?