Thursday, June 29, 2006

Windows Redefines "Don't Delete"

Finally it was time to build Windows from scratch again. I had been using the same Windows XP installation for the past three or four hardware platforms. I know, this is sheer lunacy, but Windows takes such an effort to get together, and after all these years I had it working how I want it, and to start over always seemed too daunting a task.

Except for all the bluescreens of course. A few too many, and a windows build of several years old almost takes as long to boot up - so a bluescreen is a double wammy. I lose whatever I was working on, plus have to wait 15 minutes boot time before it is usable again.

But the point of this story is user account deletion under Windows XP. At one point in my migration from old to new, I needed to delete the account on my old windows install and recreat it on the new. This was carried out in the new Windows installation on a new partition, but the user account profile I wanted to delete was pointing to the old Windows installation on the old partition. If that makes any sense.

Nevermind. So I just wanted to delete the account. Just the userid. And when you attempt to delete an account, Windows says "do you want to delete it all, or just the account and leave the files?"

Which is great - I just wanted to delete the account. And leave the files. So I agreed to this with good old windows, which then informed me that it would move all the files of the user to a folder on the desktop. And off it went. Now the old profile and the current profile were on different partitions, so this move would actually be a copy and delete - so would take forever to move the 4gb profile I had accumulated (thanks Google Desktop Search). So I waited.

Then bing it was finished. So the account was gone and the files were in this folder here, and I could start moving them to my new account. Except of course they weren't. Oh the folder was there, and in it was another couple of folders, containing my old desktop icons, my documents, my music and my photos. But nothing else.

So where was the Application Data folder? Where was the Local Settings folder? Gone. Deleted. Deleted even though Windows promised me that it wouldn't. Because now I discover that what it meant was: "I'll copy every thing that I think you should be concern with, but delete the rest." And of course, why would I want to concern myself with all those system folders? Apart from the fact that the Application Data folder contains my email. And my bookmarks. It also contains a whole ton of other data that the various applications I use rely on.

And I'll bet bottom dollar that if I was using outlook, it would have saved the pst, and if I was using ie, it would have saved the bookmarks folders.

But no, apparently "don't delete" means, delete most things, but leave the documents. The moral is to not use the control panel account management for this, but to get into the Users and Groups MMC plugin and delete from there.

Monday, June 12, 2006

zencore Take Down

Suddenly, one of my scripts at zencore.com / biz / co.uk started causing issues on its hosted server. To the point that the entire server would crash. Understandably, my hosts at http://www.livehost.net weren't keen for this to happen and so suspended my account.

But what caused the errant script causing the problem to become errant? It certainly hadn't changed in months even years. The script in question was a redirect script that was used for outgoing links and I wonder it if it might have been hijacked by someone for purposes unknown.

However, this means that zencore is down, and in the main that isn't a problem. The content was mainly me going on about stuff. However, "gridstat" was a service provided to give people a way of putting their http://grid.org statistics on their websites as a graphic image. This needs to be addressed as there are still many people using it.

So while zencore itself needs a bit of a refactor for new purposes, the gridstat service needs to come back online.

Soon

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Spam Shrapnel

I thought I had it sussed. Spam. Careful use of throwaway email addresses. A "honeypot" spam address that is all over the internet that I can use to develop Bayesien spam filters to clear out the one or two items that sneak into my real email.

It was all looking good for just a few months. Perhaps a couple of years even.

But then... Some git spammer has decided to use my com and co.uk domain as the source domain for their spam. But not the .biz interestingly. So now I get hardly any spam at all, but I get stacks and stacks of undeliverable emails where mailservers have responded to the fake spam address on the spam email sent to a fake email address, because the address didn't exist. Or it did exist and they are full. Or the mail server recognised it as spam and incomprehensibly sent an email back to the "spammer" saying so (if you are not clear on why this is brainmeltingly pointless, please ask).

So now I have had to train my spam filters to recognise undeliverables and just about any other mailserver type communication and consign them to the spam bin. Which of course means that if I ever send an email now to a typoed address, I will never see the undeliverable.

This is immensely frustrating. Somewhere there are teams of spam servers sending spam to mailservers all over the world, and I am getting the fallout.

Was this intentional? It is just part of the process these days to use real domains as source addresses, or is this aimed at me? It cannot be, but it is hard to consider it just bad luck.

A few goes at looking through the mail headers from the kind mailservers that forward the original email to me in its entirety seems to show no commonality. No clues as to who is doing this and where from. It is doubtful that the IP addresses that I glean from this process are anything more than zombie relays, so following this up and reporting to the Russian and Chinese IS abuse addresses aren't likely to help.

So that leaves me with precisely nothing to do except wait for it to stop...

Unless someone out there on the internet has any ideas...

ATI Introduces Physics - Time for 3 Video Cards in Your System

So a couple of posts ago I put out the suggestion (which was in fact ATI's (sort of) in the first place) that old Shader 3.0 cards could be used as physics engines rather than consigning them to the bin.

Clearly, ATI are playing attention to my blog. Only not too closely it seems, because they are suggesting buying yet another graphics card to handle the physics.

Its like all they want to do is sell more and more graphics cards.

Story at Digg
This morning ATI got a few of us together in order to show us their new physics technology. Godfrey Cheng showed off what he referred to a �Boundless Gaming.� ATI�s goal with Boundless Gaming is to provide the most immersive gaming experience as possible.

read more | digg story


Yeah, I know. Digg. Well it isn't all bad.