Category Archives: Technology

Flashback Trojan on Mac OSX

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Apple makes some marvelous products. In this case, I’m talking about Apple Remote Desktop. With ARD I was able to scan every single one of my client Macs to check to see if any of them were infected with the Flashback Trojan Horse. Before my scan I would have sworn on whatever-you-like that none of my systems that I manage here at WMU were infected. Turns out I was right.

Macs really aren’t susceptible to viruses and the biggest threat comes from Trojan Horses. To scan a mac for infection you just open up Terminal and run these two commands:

  • defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment
  • defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES

If you get an error from both of those commands, you are in the clear. It’s quite easy to do, mostly just opening up Terminal and copying and pasting and getting the errors and being satisfied. The removal instructions are straightforward to follow, so even removal of an active infection should be a snap.

If you try these commands and don’t get errors, don’t panic. Just let me know and I’ll find a way to help you out.

It's silly, and you should stop doing it.

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Email confidentiality footers annoy me. I see them frequently on many emails that I get and I think of them as meaningless text that really should be ignored. That an email is somehow a private exchange of information is laughable. Email is sent in plaintext using an open protocol and on the wire it’s all unencrypted.

What really brings this to the forefront is when I see these meaningless bits of mental flotsam and jetsam clogging up my email box because someone set a vacation autoresponse and their membership on a email list is causing them to constantly reply with a “I’ll be out from…” email with this stupid block of text at the bottom asserting that the email is the property of blah blah blah.

Writing email has the same security protections as writing a postcard and tying it to a bird and letting it fly off. Your assertion that your communications are somehow proprietary or classified is utterly hilarious.

If people really wanted to make this not so utterly irrelevant, they should use public-key encryption or at least something like ROT–13 encryption so that the text isn’t readily apparent and takes some work to decode. Sending plaintext with this silly block at the bottom just musses up the display and doesn’t mean anything to anybody. So stop it.

Tearing Down

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While doing the usual weekend chores last Sunday I bumped the vacuum cleaner into the table where my old computer and desktop used to be. Ever since my iPad and iPhone the location and nature of much of my computing tasks at home have radically shifted. I no longer spend such long hours sitting in front of a huge machine playing online games. Now I just use my phone to tend to email and read for the most part.

This change in how I use technology isn’t reflected in this room upstairs in my house that has for the most part been neglected. So there needs to be a reckoning. I need to sort through this area and pitch what has to be removed and generally de-clutter that part of my house. It feels a lot like a callus that has built up over time and it’s a kind of clutter that you don’t really see any more except when you run the vacuum cleaner into it. There is a general sense of simplification that appeals to me and this table full of wasted technology needs to be figured out.

Along with this I have five closet areas that need to be generally gunged. There is a coat closet on the ground floor that needs to be seriously organized, the guest room closet needs to be exhumed and dealt with, then all the upstairs closets need to be gone through. There are things I no longer need, want, or can use. Clothing, knick-knacks, and various orders of past debris that all need to be evaluated and sorted and organized.

This weekend I think will be a fantastic opportunity to address these situations, at least for as much as I can do on my own. We’ll see just how much progress I can make.

Serenity

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At work I get two 15 minute breaks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I usually just work right through them paying no attention to the time I could be devoting to other things instead of work. I get into ruts where I put my head down at 8am and pick it back up at 5pm and the whole time in between I’m engaged with something work related.

This can sometimes lead to irritation, aggravation, and this maddening buzzity restless feeling that sticks with me and starts to wear me down. If the weather is good and I’m in the mood for it I will take a jaunt around the campus which can help. Recently however I’ve been trying to find room in my life for meditation and it struck me that if I could find the right place, that I could get away for half an hour. I figure nobody would have a problem if I bound my two breaks up together and used it for something possibly good for me.

That’s exactly what I did this afternoon. Around 3:45 today I polished off the last of the tea I was drinking and grabbed my iPhone and found a little out-of-the-way place here where I could relax and meditate. I didn’t fall asleep, but I was able to get to that magical place. Each time I do it, it gets easier to reach it, each and every time. There are two apps that help keep me focused and keep me from running out of time. The first app I use to create natural sounds around me is called Naturespace and I went ahead and bought the “Entire Catalog” program option which unlocks all of their soundtracks. I especially prefer the track “Zen Wind and Water” as it features windchimes which I really like listening to. The program works with my earbuds to mask outside noises, so there is nothing to upset me while I’m trying to relax. The second app I use is Chronology and I set it for 30 minutes with a double-horn alarm at the end. When I prepare for my session I find a nice quiet place to sit, one that nobody is using and nobody would go looking for me in, and I start Naturespace and Chronology, get everything started and start to concentrate on my breathing. As usual when I’m coming down I can feel the relaxation hit my shoulders and neck first. As I’m trying to quiet my thinking my mind starts tossing stray noise at me to get me to do something else. At first it took a long time for that to quiet down, but after several sessions it doesn’t take that long and once I achieve my goal it’s as if my mind fits into a groove in my consciousness. The stray noisy thoughts are gone and they don’t bubble up. It feels almost like a physical ‘fwump’ as it clicks into place. I could try to bring in some noise but it doesn’t work. It’s just me and my breathing and nothing else. If I stay very still I can even slow my breathing down, I start to lose proprioception and unless I’ve got joints under stress I start to float away. It has nothing at all to do with falling asleep. There are no hypnic jerks, and there isn’t any loss of consciousness. I’m able to act if I must, but it’s quite nice just to exist in that state for a time.

When I hear the double-horn from Chronology I know that my 30 minutes are up. When I open my eyes and shift posture my proprioception snaps right back together but my mind retains this quality of serenity for a long while afterwards. I’ve found it’s easier to read and easier to concentrate afterwards, as if I’m still carrying crumbs of that meditative state around with me for hours afterwards. I still feel it even now, and it’s been about twenty minutes since I left that state. If nothing else, I feel much better afterwards than I did before. The maddening buzzity sensation is gone and I don’t feel quite as busy as I was just an hour ago.

If I notice any other differences, I’ll be sure to blog about them.

Spinning Governor

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I’ve come up with ways to cope with the network connection throttle that I recently discovered was behind a lot of my network woes here at work. In my regularly scheduled workaday use of the Internet I usually find myself consuming at least 150 connections if not more because everything I use was built with the assumption that establishing multiple connections is free and easy. There is no parsimony when it comes to using the network, and you see this exemplified most of all in the design of browsers like Firefox. When you fetch a page, most modern browsers will attempt to also-fetch possible pages you may want so that they can appear faster. This is fine if you have an unlimited number of connections that you can make to the network. That isn’t the case here.

I can live with the throttle. I understand why it’s in place and knowing that it exists helps in that it keeps me from questioning my sanity when I didn’t know it existed and thought the problem was with me or my computer. It’s neither. So there are some ways to address my problem. Specifically the route to a better life is ironically through the same devices that are at the center of the entire ‘running out of IP space’ problem, iOS devices. My iPhone and iPad have apps that can bring me interfaces to Internet resources that I need to use, and they can free up my computer so that I can help avoid the connection quota throttle. For example, instead of opening up Toodledo in Safari I can open up the Toodledo app on my iPhone. Different device, different connection quota. My iPhone doesn’t make so many connections and if I did need that feature I could very easily drop wifi and use the 3G data circuit. I can do a lot of other things too, like manipulate Asana, run my eMail through my iPad, that sort of thing.

So, in a way, the connection throttle has shifted the load from one device to three. At first this was kind of a pain in the ass, but over time I’ve come to see that this could become more efficient. It frees my computer up for the heavier things, like Google Reader and such. We’ll have to see how it goes.

Mopping Up

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At work we have moved to a new “Engagement Platform” called iModules. Some of you already know something about this as I’ve shared stories about it with some of you before.

The system is up and running. I have to admit that I’m quite glad that the implementation phase of the project has reached a conclusion, as it took six months to get this wobbly-legged foal up on it’s feet and bouncing around.

This entire project still has some pieces to mop up, most notably the mopjob that I have to do surrounding our old platform, WordPress. Honestly I’m sad to see our use of WordPress in this regard come to a close as WordPress has been a wonderful platform and still is for my personal blog here as well as my “Captains Log” blog. I still maintain the “Captains Log” blog, but there have been lessons in using that as well. That particular one uses WordPress’s own P2 theme and for a time I opened it up and made it publicly available. This turned out to be a great mistake. I got heat from nearly every corner, mostly to do with keeping technical details private to non-maliciously violating an email clickwrap nonverbal unsigned unread agreement. I admit that the draw that the WordPress platform provides, free clouded hosting can’t be beat as far as I’m concerned. So for the “Captains Log” P2 blog, it’s gone private which makes all the previous gripers go silent as they can’t get past the “Please Login” barricade. So, once again thanks to WordPress I’ve found yet another way to “Have my cake and eat it too”.

We have moved the work stuff off to iModules and you all can see the efforts at our new site, MyWMU.com and thanks to our students and our staff who moved the contents off of our WordPress site and onto the new site, the speed of which was honestly shocking to me. Now the mopping up is all that remains. There were three blogs, Old WMYou, WMYou, and Western Express. The first and third have been backed up and purged from the system, but the middle one is stuck and I have a support ticket opened up with WordPress to help address it. We’ll see how that goes.

I will continue to update my personal blog, of course, and I will continue to enrich the P2 “Captains Log” and I really think other organizations should make use of WordPress for this great feature. It’s a great way to keep information handy, and takes the onus off the staff to remember the past as the system does it for you, time and date stamps, tags, categories, and the commenting system – not that the last part is really used for our P2 blog, but still. Not having to worry about hosting, cost, security, not to mention the ubiquity of ways to access the WordPress system make it the most compelling way to manage the working log of any business or help desk.

The only thing that I would like from WordPress, but would likely start running into real money (which I would pay, mind you) would be a Help Desk CRM overlaid on top of their P2 theme system. Some way for people to email problems or browse to the site and enter issues and the system gives them a trouble ticket number for tracking and we can lurk in the dark, hovering over this blog. That would leverage the logging goodness of P2 and it’s great usability and I don’t think it would be all that hard to code. I know there are Help Desk solutions for WordPress.org, but I really REALLY prefer to use WordPress.com. Perhaps someday in the future WordPress.com will get around to something like this. Time will tell.

Too Much

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Anytime I walk into a library, a bookstore, or any other place where a lot of media is all concentrated together either for lending or sale or just browsing the same thought occurs to me: How can anyone have any hope of seeing what is to be seen?

I’ve mused about this for a very long time. It strikes me that the entirety of the human oeuvre could be represented by Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere. That thoughts and ideas occupy another sphere overlaid on the Earth, created by thinking creatures. This is very handy as it brings the idea of a sphere right in to the concept at the center of my writing. Is it possible anymore for any one of us to possibly see the entire sphere from one side to the other? I think there is a personal horizon that each of us is chained to, we can only see that part of the noosphere that we are either local to or interested in. Ultimately this question becomes a concern for answering the really big and important questions. The sense that we won’t cure cancer, we won’t stumble into room-temperature superconductivity, or practical fusion energy without some sort of broad synthesis across multiple disciplines. The way it feels to me, and I don’t have any proof of any of this, it’s all just intuition here, is that humanity has created a huge repository of ideas and that if the right person at the right time had access to the perfect constellation of ideas that some of the answers to the really big questions would pop out in a kind of ‘eureka’ rush of creativity and development.

I’ve spoken of these things with some friends especially when I’m in a pensive mood and the situation for such deep discussions are ripe. One thing that is a recent turn is the advent of social networking. We are relating more and more to each other, communicating more, writing more, talking more, sharing more. There are structures that have formed like Wikipedia which to me resembles a coral reef of information more than how it’s plainly stated, a free online encyclopedia that is crowdsourced. I suppose it’s the romantic in me that sees information not being added to Wikipedia as a matter of some dedicated purpose but rather that it’s information that washes up onto Wikipedia and builds over time. In Clive Barker’s Great and Secret Show the principal characters had something very much akin to how I consider Wikipedia (and other sites, really, that operate like it) in the dead-letter office. That little chunks of Art wash up over the years and collect like cruft in this office. That information created by all of us washes up on Wikipedia and collects like cruft on this site.

It is important to get back to the beginning again, that when I walk into my local Barnes & Nobles that I have the distinct feeling that I won’t be able to read and understand the contents of that building. That’s just the start. Then you expand it out to Waldo Library, and then the Kalamazoo Public Library, and it keeps on going all the way out to the Library of Congress and then kind of crashes upon the concept of the Internet as a whole. There is no time, there is not enough energy in my life to do any of that and that life demands so much else from you that even if you wanted to do anything of the sort there just isn’t any time, hope, or inclination for it. In a way, I posit that the content that humanity has created has defeated humanities hope to encompass it. So there may be the answers to life, the universe and everything out there, it’s just that none of us have hope to put the threads together and start drawing some of those big conclusions.

Perhaps however there is some hope in social networking and Wikipedia, structures where disparate information washes up and because it’s concentrated the threads are closer, easier to tie together and maybe we can move forward using those systems to help us. A lot of this is covered by Wolfram Alpha as well as some other artificial intelligence projects where information scientists have sensed this potential problem and maybe a machine could encompass human content and help us understand what it is that we’ve created.

This all may be the pressure behind the next stage of human evolution. First we took care of the needs of our genetics, making survival a triviality. Then we exploded with ideas, creating a noosphere too large for us to handle, and then the next pressure is based on encompassing and cultivating that noosphere. We need to get to the next stage of development which isn’t so much expanding as concentrating what we have already discovered about the world and about existence. In a way, perhaps the next stage of human evolution, the continued pursuit of ever more complicated cortexes in our brains will come in the generations to come. Children born with the tools needed to begin the pursuit of collection and concentration, eidetic memory, highly efficient relationship cognition. Children able to walk into a library and in an afternoon consume every ounce of information contained within the walls. It’s going to be those with those innate talents who may be able to bring what we imagine and what we dream about into reality.

How about the rest of us? In that perhaps technology will provide us a shortcut, perhaps a preview of what is to come for us all. That we can get peeks into what may be to come through things like Wolfram Alpha, through the AI projects, hell, even through something as quaint as Wikipedia. If nothing else, it is interesting to think about and engaging to talk about.

LJ – Network Hell

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From 5/20/2003

Now so much in the Arrgh department but in the Duh department I just discovered that some of my UA shirts that I like so much for my workouts are starting to show some erosion from the label on the shorts I’m wearing when I work out. The label is rough enough to really rub the surface of my shirts making them marred. This irks me.

What really gets me is something I came across while helping some people over at OIT install the new Groupwise system on our servers. The one tech complained that he couldn’t get files over to our DEV_1 server at all. I thought that was strange so when I got back to work I checked out the server and in 190 days of uptime it recorded 6 million alignment errors, 6 million frame errors, and 7 million collisions. At first I thought it was the drop cable, so I found another drop cable, tested it, tested good, then put it in. The server saw nothing different, still logging alignment and frame errors and collisions aplenty. I then took my handy-dandy Fluke NetTool and plugged it in between the server and the Cisco 2900XL switch. Klump-perthank-perklunk. The Fluke instantly started recording frame errors, collisions, and alignment errors on the left RJ jack, the jack heading to the switch. At this point I thought maybe I had a bad port, but I was a little leery about that because it was a brand new Cisco switch, to have a port go from hunky-dory to completely floppy like this was something I’ve never seen happen. I wandered about my Fluke tool’s display for a short bit to see if there was anything else I could notice and voila, there it was, small and out of the way, but I found that the switch (while capable of full duplex) was only set for half duplex, while my server was set for full duplex. What irks me is that this switch didn’t automatically shift from half to full as I thought all switches were designed to do, but just sat there for all this time piling up the errors I didn’t know were piling on because nobody complained. I think what really irks me is this fancy-dancy Cisco 2900XL switch is a *managed* switch, which means they can control the ports activities from remote. I would think that setting full duplex would be something so brainless that turning it to half-duplex would be a challenge. I can’t wait for what tomorrow brings, because I have a work order to have them fix it. One of the little things that I’m not allowed to do anymore is touch the networking gear on my own – that’s all handled by the university. God help us all.

Can you hear me now?

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When infrastructure fails, it takes an absurd amount of legwork to compensate. This is my story of this absurd compensation. I’m writing this now because I might as well, it’s not like I have anything I can actually do without this particular infrastructure.

My work computer used to be on the internet, now, not so much. No sites are really accessible so now I have to find another way onto the network, as my employer can’t manage. Although to their credit, they are trying to fix it, but this problem has plagued us for months if not years, so I’m not holding out much hope.

So, Ethernet is a complete loss. What else can we use? I have an unused 4G Verizon Pantech USB card here, so I plugged it in. Turns out I need VZAccess Manager to make it work properly. Still can’t access the network however! What is a geek to do? I set up my iPhone for Personal Hotspot and connect that way. It’s slower but I’m actually on the network now downloading VZAccess Manager from Verizon.

Then once that’s downloaded I’ll close my Personal Hotspot connection, install the software, then get the 4G modem up and running. A part of me laughs bitterly that I have to go to these lengths just for the basics of my job, but that’s the nature of this place. I’m not going to cast any aspersions on Western, I’m done with that. You only complain when there is some glimmer of hope that things may get better.

So that got me thinking, if we’re all having these problems and there are 42 of us, and these 4G cards cost 42 dollars a month, that’s $1,764.00 dollars a month for internet services that are more reliable than the local network at this University. So, do we pay a hefty monthly fee to Verizon to replace our network? Of course not! We’ll continue to struggle and make do with the network we have here, as useful or not as it is.

I just find it hilarious how far I have to go to access the network. I would laugh if I wasn’t crying so hard. Oh well.

LJ – Information Horizon

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From 4/27/2006

I began a tangential discussion with a friend a few days ago, regarding something I’ve been thinking of for quite some time. That if you were to visualize the combined intelligence of the human race as a sphere, an imaginary object that contains all the thinking, all the printed words, and all the media that humanity has expressed since we began thinking and recording those thoughts into media that such a sphere would be truly immense.

Then I imagined what one person might look like in the context of that thought-sphere. A dot, a very small very bright dot. Now for each person, you can look around, you can explore and you can learn – this I associate with movement and increase on the surface of this imaginary sphere – the more you know the bigger your dot.

What then, is the chance of any human being able to approach the horizon of that sphere? Or more likely, is it even possible?

In the case that it is not possible for any one human being to reach the horizon of the information sphere then the next logical argument would be that humanity exists on this sphere, that there are people covering every surface of the sphere, just that nobody will be able to visit all the “islands” in this sphere of knowledge. What then for our fate? If we haven’t the hope of integrating all that we know, how could we possibly think that we can consider new things – unless the sphere looks more like a puffer-fish than a beach-ball, with localized growth building up mountains of insight, surrounded by plateaus of general knowledge. What really gets me is the fear that we do have many if not all the answers we seek already, it’s just, there is nobody around bright enough and fast enough to integrate all the separate islands of knowing into a cohesive and definitive answer.

What might happen if someone miraculously did acquire the breadth of knowledge that would be regarded as a span across the horizon?