Category Archives: archive

In Pursuit of Curry Sauce

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My wife and I were reminiscing recently about the wonderful fish and chips with curry sauce that we had on our trip to the UK. I did a bit of research to see if there was anything that we could get that was close here in Canada. I found a product that I thought we might be able to order and get shipped here.

Well, Cheryl was more resourceful than I, and found a local supplier of British imports, and picked up a package! What a wonderful surprise when I came home! A quick trip to the local ‘British’ fish & chip shop and we were set.

Now, if only I could find a local supplier for Pot Noodle…

Microsoft Dodges a Bullet?

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I’m sure just about everyone has heard about the little worm that’s spreading around the Internet. Heck, even my mother asked me about it when I last talked to her. Microsoft’s solution to saving their precious WindowsUpdate service was to take down the URL completely.

Actually, the news stories are a little misleading. They’ve taked down the windowsupdate.com URL, but the windowsupdate.microsoft.com URL is still up and running. I giess Microsoft’s just fortunate that the worm author just happened to point to the alternate (shorter) URL and Microsoft’s WindowsUpdate feature built in to their operating system uses the longer URL. They’d be in big trouble if the worm was going to hit the same URL as the WindowsUpdate feature requires. Maybe next time they won’t be quite so lucky.

As an aside, here’s an interesting link to a tool put out by Microsoft that will allow the user to scan an entire subnet for machines that are still vulnerable. I found this a few days ago, and used it on our corporate network. Even though we regularly patch our machines, it still found a couple of machines that got overlooked.

All Natural

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This is hands-down the all-time funniest thing I have read on the Internet in as long as I can remember. I sent it out to my co-workers, and I had my entire department in tears. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Sharecropping

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Slashdot had an interesting article that likens developing for a closed source platform to sharecropping. The article rang true with several things about Microsoft that I have come across recently. One of these is Microsoft’s recent purchase of GeCad Software. Microsoft specifically mentions that it’s a purchase of intellectual property, and that they have no plans to continue to develop GeCad’s products. This is rather unfortunate, because GeCad’s RAV antivirus software is a wonderful Linux-based antivirus mail scanner product. I wonder if the prospect of destroying a Linux product had anything to do with Microsoft’s decision. If I was Symantec right now, I’d be very worried about Microsoft muscling in on territory that’s been fair game for years.

Slurpee Conspiracy

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In case anyone is interested, tomorrow is Free Slurpee Day at 7-Eleven. I’m starting to notice a trend at my local 7-Eleven. The slurpees are getting runnier. As I was approaching the machine, I though I spied the Coke slurpee was perfect. From a distance, you can tell by the colour of the mix in the machine exactly what the consistency is. The Pepsi one was very dark, and obviously very runny. Well, as I approached the machine, I realized that someone was playing a cruel trick on me – it wasn’t Coke – it was Vanilla Coke! What an awful slurpee flavour (it’s terrible as a beverage – freezing it does nothing to enhance the experience). What was I left with? Grape, or some mexican thing. Ewww.

Talking of slurpees, I ran across this online diary the other day. It’s obsessive-compulsives like this that help me feel normal.

Field Day

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What a busy couple of days. Last Saturday/Sunday was amater radio’s annual Field Day event. This is a 24 hour event that involves lugging thousands of dollars worth of radio equipment out into the middle of nowhere, and proceed to chant the same incantation (“CQ Field Day, CQ Field Day”) into the microphone for 24 hours, only to gather up all of the equipment and take it home again. The weekend consists of junk food and mosquitoes.

Actually, it’s lots of fun. It’s basically an emergency preparedness exercise, with a big social element thrown in. This year, we were located in Mission Creek Park in Kelowna, BC. This gave us great public exposure, with lots of people asking us questions.

This year was a double-whammy, because right after Field Day was the annual Canada Day contest. This time, we were holed up in our club shack, but the incantation was similar (“CQ Canada Day, CQ Canada Day”). I must admit that this year I sneaked away from the Canada Day contest to grab some decent shut-eye in my own bed.

Now it’s time for me to get back to work…

Web Site Log Files

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I’ve spent the entire day converting log files. To be more truthful, I spent an hour or so crafting a Perl program to do the actual conversion, but I’ve spent the rest of the day watching my machine crunch away at the log files.

We had an ‘incident’ on our Packeteer AppCelera box. We are running beta software (we’re in the same building as their Canadian office), and there was an issue with a recent beta that caused the log files to be exported in some wierd internal format instead of W3C format. I had to convert two and a half months of mangled log files. At 4pm on a Friday, it’s finally done.

Once we discovered the problem (why did it take me two and a half months to notice the problem?), Packeteer immediately got the programmers involved, found the bug, corrected it, and immediately compiled a new build for us. Now that’s service!