A Sobering experience?

Gosh, security must be improving if it's been over a month since all the MS Windows machines got together and pounded the world's mail servers into the sand.

Various news services are reporting Sober.N, Sober.O, Sober.P and Sober.S (won’t anyone stand up and claim Q?) attacking everything in sight and using up a significant percentage of the world's email badwidth, but the’re mostly reporting it as “a computer virus”. Repeat the mantra after me:

It is not a computer virus!

It is a Windows virus!

It does not attack Linux!

It does not attack Macintoshes!

It only attacks Windows. As usual.

Yes, I get a lot of work from tragedies like this. People pay me a lot of money to fix their broken Windows installations - and then don’t add it to the cost of ownership of Windows. Why not? Microsoft insists that ownership costs continue after acquisition, and in this case they’re right. So why not add the two to five hours of rescue and reinstall, at top dollar, each, that their machines seem to need about once a year due to the inherent insecurity of MS Windows, MS Outlook, MS Internet Explorer and MS Office?

Free tip, guys! A Linux install costs half as much - at top dollar - and lasts a lot longer, and we do software RAID (a protection against hard disk failures) at no extra charge. Tell all of your mates!

Comments

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

Plantagenet Penguinista

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