Should I store my credit card in a smart phone wallet?
NO!!
Why?
Because if your phone gets hacked its NFC (Near Field Communication) equipment can be used to read the credit card data.
Read more:
Category Archives: Computers
Posts on computer science and the web, rants about OS:es, Window Managers, and the like.
Installing a mouse on Windows
After having tried to install a mouse (yes you heard me right, install a mouse) on Windows (now it makes sense, right?) I’m expecting to see a three headed dog walking on its hind legs.
Now, my mouse (my Microsoft mouse) was not supported by my computer (running Windows) so I had to rip the newer mouse from my Linux box and plug it into the Windows box, and after downloading, confirming the usage agreement (huh?) the mouse driver software installation progress *phew* started. After a lengthy stare period featuring a progress bar I finally had my mouse.
Yay!
While all that progressed I plugged the old (“unrecognizable”) mouse into my Linux box and lo and behold, it worked the instant I plugged it in. (Actually, no I’ve learned not to “lo and behold” Linux like decades ago, it’s SOP for that OS that simple things just work – sure you have to choose your graphics card wisely etc, but hell, a mouse pointer…?)
But Microsoft’s OS is superior… that’s what the Microsoft aficionados are whining anyway.
Oh, and pray the gods you always have access to Internet or your supersplendidgloriousfinesuperior Windows will have to work without a mouse…
Backing up Concerned Files
I work with installing and configuring software products. The following “documentation” on backup procedures for an imaginary software system called “Wolfram Idea Management” came to me in the half asleep/half awake stage just after waking up, but kind of before realizing it has happened.
And, no, I hope this has never happened for real! If there is a Wolfram Idea Management system out there, any likeness to that system is coincidental even if per chance the following document could have been ripped out of that software package’s manual pages – then any likenesses are still just coincidental. I’m just that good! (No I do not work with a system called Wolfram… Although the phrase “backing up concerned files” do come from work…)
Wolfram Idea
Management® Software
Backing up concerned files
Important! Important! Important! Important! Important! Important! Important!
ONLY RUN THE PREPACKED BACKUP COMMAND IN WOLFRAM® WHEN BACKING UP FILES!
The command is named “calli-fuckyou-fornia-dream.exe“
For the long explanation read the below text.
Important! Important! Important! Important! Important! Important! Important!
Please! Please! Please! Read the whole document before you backup the system!
IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT YOU DO READ THE WHOLE DOCUMENT BEFORE YOU BACKUP THE SYSTEM!
Disclaimer
Wolfram Idea Management Software® or its product Wolfram Idea Management® cannot be held responsible. We will not bore you or offend you by listing all different scenarios where we cannot be held responsible such as electrical incidents, water catastrophes, your dog eating the software, invasions of flesh eating plants, rebirth of Velociraptors, The Mother Of All Hangovers, Giant Ants etc etc etc. Instead we just come clean about it. We cannot be held responsible. The fact that we are writing this text in one huge paragraph does not have anything to do with the fact that our high school English teachers tried to throw us out the window when we presented our English papers – they resigned and threw themselves out the window instead … and they say lack of exercising and over consumption of Chips and Soda is bad for you? No, we write this text in one long paragraph with the hope that you will give up reading the text halfway through and just press the “Accept” button. Not that we are trying to hide anything in this text, well then part from the fact that this text actually contains nothing of value and that we have no clue what we are talking about, but read the first sentence in the disclaimer one more time and it will all become clear to you.
Thanks for your time and patience.
Backing up concerned files
It is imperative that you backup (please read the whole document before you do) all concerned files (and no other files) before you perform several important functions in Wolfram Idea Management®. Some of these functions are:
- Installing new Modules
- Upgrading the Software
- You should also have daily backups running
- You should probably back up the system before you shut it down
- …or start it up
- In fact, it’s probably best to keep the backups running back to back…
MAKE SURE YOU CAN RECOVER THE FILES!
We cannot understate this…
MAKE SURE YOU CAN RECOVER THE FILES!
You will need it!
Wolfram Idea Management Systems® require competent users in order to function properly. Please read the whole document on backup management before performing any backups!
Do not, I repeat, do not just make the backups!
Important! Important! Important! Important! Important! Important! Important!
Only ever backup the concerned files!
Never ever ever backup any other files!
THE SYSTEM WILL KNOW IF YOU DO!
Before Peter, our Technical lead and head programmer went on his “sabbatical” he told me about the backup routines that needed to be in place in order to keep Wolfram® running. I, being a mere mortal and not even half as genial as Peter, can only guess exactly what the reason for this is, but hey! I only work here, and when I go home I do not want to be haunted by crap that happened at work!
So anyway, as I’ve understood it we’re only talking about CONCERNED files here.
I asked Peter how to know what files were concerned and … well here’s an excerpt from that mail conversation:
What the **** man? Are you a ******* Inglorious Retard? ******* don’t ******* ask me about ******* concerned files! They are all concerned at one time or an other! Do you ******* get me? ****! I have to ******* take care of ******* every ******* thing all the ******* time! ****!
So the ******* concerned files are the ******* files with UPPER CASE. Exclamation marks are also not uncommon. They can also have a “.HELP”-extension. If a whole folder of files are concerned at the same time there may be a “RESCUE.US” or “HELP.US” or similar file in the folder.
Hey! I got a great idea for a Concerned Files Management module! I think this one could sell pretty big! Would you call up Tom and tell him to get going on a draft. I’ll be back shortly, just have to finish with my doctor first. (He’s looking at me right now, strange dude!)
Anyway.
There’s one thing you ******* just ******* have to ******* get into your ******* thick skull. Don’t ******* ever ******* never ******* ever go ******* backup the ******* enraged or p*ssed off files! Do you get me? ******* don’t you ******!
That means concerned files…:
- …have upper case letters in their names
- …have exclamation marks in their names
- …have a “.HELP” extension
- …are located in a folder with a “RESCUE.US” or “HELP.US” file or any other kind of plea-for-help/mercy-file
And when I asked him how to know what files were enraged or “pissed off” he… sent me another mail:
What the **** ******* **** is wrong with you you ******* **** ******* **** ant! Don’t you ******* listen at ******* all! ONLY the ******* concerned files, no ******* other file! YOU MORON!
A few mails back and forth later:
Okey, **********, so the p*ssed off files are bolded, or typed with red font or if there are more then 3 exclamation marks I’d stay clear of them. They may also have a “.****-OFF” or “.EAT-****” file extension.
Also they may be vibrating. In that case close the folder immediately, in fact, shut the whole system down until it’s stopped vibrating.
If several files are p*ssed off at the same time they’re located in a folder with a file named “****.YOU” or “EAT.****”.
Now for the enraged files (I can’t ******* believe THIS is something you have to ask me about, I mean how ******* retarded can you get?) The enraged files have fangs! So ******* go figure! And they snarl. I mean it doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out does it? IF THEY HAD A TAIL IT WOULD NOT BE WAGGING!
Christ!
So in short, “pissed off” files…:
- …have bold file names…
- …are typed with red (?!) font
- …have more than three exclamation marks (in the name)
- …have the file extension “.FUCK-OFF” or “.EAT-SHIT” (at least that’s what Peter yelled when I called to confirm… he also told me I had myself to blame for installing the censoring software on the mail server)
- …are located in a folder with a file named “FUCK.YOU” or “EAT.SHIT” (see above)
- …in fact I think any file with a four letter word (or several) in its name should be considered “pissed off”
Enraged files (those are very rare!)…:
- …have fangs
- …snarl
- …would not be wagging their tail if they had one
There seems to be other types of files too, but as far as I’ve understood they’re not much trouble until they get concerned, “pissed off” or enraged.
UPDATE: A poll among Wolfram Idea Management Software®’s users reveal that this problem seems to be very rare. As far as I’ve understood no real user has ever seen an enraged file. However there are a few “pissed off” files and a considerable number of concerned files in the system.
Important! Important! Important! Important! Important! Important! Important!
This part of the document is REALLY important!!!!!
Important! Important! Important! Important! Important! Important! Important!
As far as I’ve understood it you cannot just go and backup the files. Peter puts it like this in one of his support conversations (I am so glad I installed the censoring software in the mail server, however I still think this particular customer saw it fit to take their business elsewhere… I guess some people just don’t appreciate genius…):
What the **** are you ******* doing backing up the ******* files you ******* **** ******! Who the ******* **** told you to ******* back up the ******* files? Are you a ******* file copying ****** pedophile too? I bet as soon as you ******* get a ******* urge you go home and ******* *** **** your ******* ugly mother!
You don’t ******* ever ever ever use the ******* backup command! You can’t ******* let the files know you’re ******* backing them up you ******* ****!
I bet you tried to back up the p*ssed off and enraged files as well? Didn’t you you little **** ******* *****!
Well good for you, now go **** you wife’s ******* chiwawa pet dog you ******* animal ******!
It is, at this writing, unclear exactly what the effect of backing up files other than concerned files would be, but it seems backing up the files in the system in the right way is really serious business!
I asked him how to go about keeping the files from “knowing” (I think there’s some kind of FileSystemWatcher function in the system…) that they are being backed up:
What the ******* **** is your *********** ******* retard moron problem you *********** ******* ************ *********** ******?
I told you I renamed the “copy” command to “move”. That way the files will think they are going to be moved off the system. Once they realize they aren’t you can always tell them their clones are living happily in Copyland.
Don’t ******* ever ******* tell them ******* they were ******* backed up. If they get that they’re all going to be p*ssed off or even enraged and then you’re ******!
Oh, and for clarity and simplicity I also renamed the “move” command to “copy”. That way things work like you expect, but like in a mirror… You’ll get the hang of it!
After some pressuring from our customers Peter made a backup program called “calli-fuckyou-fornia-dream.exe” it is recommended that this program is used to perform all backups in order to avoid problems.
However there seems to be some features missing in this program why it’s important to make manual inspections of the backups from time to time.
Peter puts it like this:
Those ******* impotent *********** ******* *********** at that ******* *********** **** hole of a fckign *********** **** ***** of a company called ******* Microsoft are ******* complete ******* *********** and ******* ***** all of the ******* lot of them!
They ******* closed my feature request MSS-3564-2098-7624-5632-4907 “Implementing IsVibrating and Color for Files in C#”.
What the **** is the ******* problem with these ******* *********** ******* ********? What the **** do I have to go over there and ******* do the ******* programming myself?
I’m not the ******* *********** ****** that implement the ******* vibrations and colors in the ******* first ******* place and who the ******* *********** ******* **** in their right ******* *********** ******* mind goes and ******* implements fangs in a ******* file system?
**** THOSE ******* ********** IMPOTENT PSYCHOPATHS!!!!
All in all, performing backups in a correct and safe manner will ensure you many joyful hours with Wolfram Idea Management!
Thanks for purchasing the product and supporting further development!
Wolfram Idea Management Systems® are actively taking part in the new fabulous Ingenious Wave taking place right now allover the world. We strive to make Ingenious Software, and in general we’re geniuses already from the start so we have a good head start on the competition! Wolfram Idea Management Systems® is a forerunner in Idea Management. Wolfram Idea Management Systems® are the only system you need! With our modules for Bookkeeping, Taxes, Instant Messaging, Warehouse Management, Laundry Management, E-mail Management, Calendar Management, Infant/Pet Surveillance and Management, File Distribution and Storage Management, On-line Banking Management, Stock Analysis Management, Coupon and Sales Management, On-line Shopping Management and many many more you have all your needs covered in one neat package! We are also serious about the environment and we have several Ingenious Programs for managing our carbon dioxide footprint, such as our Buddy Lights Out Programs and Telecommuting Programs.
WordPress RSS Feeds: Create Your Own Links
I decided, after some “experiences” to add a blog post about adding a link to the WordPress RSS feed of your site.
I may be missing something, or may not have come across the right plug-in or something else, however, I was unable to add RSS to my site. Either I got my feeds full with garbage and (I think) advertising from the plug-in author, or the simple little itsy-bitsy tiny RSS feed plug-in managed to make all my “Edit” buttons and links unreachable in edit mode (like when you wish to change the Publish date or the post slug).
Now there is a built in WordPress RSS feed widget, however it imports some one else’s RSS feeds while I want to have a link on my page that exports my RSS feeds. And, no, using the built in plug-in on your own site does not seem to make anything else than a list of links to your posts.
Either someone forgot to explain RSS feeds to the WordPress coders or, as I said before, I may not understand it.
Anyhow, I finally did it myself instead.
This is how I did it:
- Add a Text Widget to your theme’s widget area
- Put some HTML into the Widget
- Check out WordPress’s RSS Codex page
1. Add a Text Widget to your theme’s widget area
You do this via “Appearance > Widgets” from the admin menu in WordPress.
The exact name of the widget is simply “Text”. It comes built-in with WordPress.
I used the text “RSS Feeds” as Title.
2. Put some HTML in the Widget
Here are two variants, one for the twenty eleven theme and one for the twenty twelve. The only difference is that the twenty eleven looks better as a list. This text goes into the larger text field of the widget.
Twenty eleven:
<ul> <li><a href="http://YOURSITENAME/feed/" target="_blank">Posts</a></li> <li><a href="http://YOURSITENAME/comments/feed/" target="_blank">Comments</a></li> </ul>
Twenty twelve:
<a href="http://YOURSITENAME/feed/" target="_blank">Posts</a> <br/> <a href="http://YOURSITENAME/comments/feed/" target="_blank">Comments</a>
Replace YOURSITENAME with the name of your site (e.g. www.example.com).
The ”target=”_blank”” section of the “a href”-link ensures that the link is opened in a new window.
3. Check out the WordPress RSS Feed Codex page
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds
The codex page contains some more links, for instance to posts in categories and tags.
It may also be good to check that page to see that the links used here are still correct.
If you want to try other links simply replace the URL in the href=”URL“ part of the a-tags above.
watch – Linux command
The Linux watch command is a nifty little tool that can be used when you want to keep the result of a command under constant watch.
Here’s a sample for watching the /proc/mdstat file.
watch -n1 cat /proc/mdstat
The “-n1“-switch tells watch to refresh every “1” second (“-n2” would consequently mean, “refresh every 2 seconds” and so on).
The “cat /proc/mdstat” is the command to keep an eye on. “/proc/mdstat” is a process file that displays the state of md-raid drives in the system.
Press “ctrl-C” to stop the running command.
This is an example of “watching” the free memory:
watch -n1 free -m
If you add the “-d” switch, watch will mark differences between the runs.
watch -d -n1 free -m
And with the “-d=cumulative” switch the differences will be marked cumulatively between runs:
watch -d=cumulative -n1 free -m
You may also watch for directory changes:
watch -d ls -l
If you do not specify a watch interval (using “-n“) the default is set to 2 seconds.
For more info, see the manual pages for the watch command.
For watching files see the related “tail” command.
PEBCAK and other ways to blame the user…
In IT-support jargon the expression “PEBCAK” (meaning “Problem Exists Between Chair and Keyboard”) is used to blame the user of the system for any computer related problems they are experiencing while using said system – since they are located “between the chair and the keyboard” in most usual situations…
PEBCAK can be found long before the program reaches the end user
I had a fun thought about the expression PEBCAK. Given my many years in IT development I have observed two things:
- Few programmers write their programs without sitting on a chair in front of a keyboard…
- PEBCAK is just as likely to start way before the software reaches the end user.
If you think the Project Cartoon is a gross exaggeration (you are probably an ordinary, unsuspecting computer user, and a victim :P…) I have to inform you, it’s not… The sad truth is that programmers have never been in control of systems, and even the most stable and dependable systems have flaws.
Even NASA has PEBCAK
Did you know that up until 2007 the space shuttles never flew missions over the new year… why? Because their computer systems, programmed in the 70ies, had no stable support for year changes…
Searching to find my source on the above statement only produces two slashdot articles with links to, now non-existing, articles on CNN and Reuters. (Although I just came across this fact a couple of months ago, so either the conspiracy is recent, or my Googling skills are decreasing…) Anyway, here’s the slashdot links:
- NASA Avoids “Happy New Year” On Shuttle
- Computer Date Glitch May Limit Next Shuttle Launch
- There’s a quote from one of them here
- And the forum post “NASA Computers? Happy New Year – NOT!!!” goes into it in some detail. It in turn quotes an article in “Florida Today” from Nov 7, 2006, titled “Glitch may force NASA to launch shuttle early; Dec. 6 slotted for Discovery”
I’m not going to search for pacemaker system errors or similar, but I can guess the mitigating circumstances are that you’re not in space when the problem occurs and might actually get into the hospital in time…
If you like to read more about programmer initiated system errors (and errors initiated by IT projects) you should check out The Daily WTF.
ISO 8601, or not…
I think Sweden adopted ISO 8601 sometime around when it came. Before that we would write dates as day/month-year (that would be discouraged format number 11 on the image to the right).
Then came along Internet Information Server (IIS) invented by an American firm you might now, called Microsoft. In the US where Microsoft lives, dates are written using discouraged format number 1, or perhaps 2, unless it’s 3 or 4, I never manage to keep track.
Most of the time it’s possible to just ignore the highly illogical way of mixing up days and months and years in the US way of writing things. ISO 8601 goes from larger to smaller, the old Swedish way went from smaller to larger, the US way goes from uh… large to smallest, to largest…
However, a project I was involved in a couple of months ago used some form of standard date widget in IIS (Internet Information Server, Microsoft’s Web Server) that used discouraged format number 1 above.
Now for the fun part. In my humble and naïve mind this should be a question of just setting a language setting somewhere in the web server to get it right. Apparently it wasn’t (!?) Instead everyone was running with the totally confusing US-dates. The budget did not have room for making the change, and it seemed everyone humbly adopted… after all, there was a “date browser” that could be opened pressing a button (first time it took a minute to open, but then it was business as usual). I’m guessing they used that function to get their dates, or perhaps I’m just an old fossil that doesn’t adopt well.
So the punchline (unless the previous sentence wasn’t punchline enough for you…): yeah standard until some guy comes along and wants it otherwise, and this guy has all the power… then it’s a (quote-unquote) “standard” and not a standard any more.
MS Outlook laughs at your feeble attempts to use it…
Not only doesn’t it work, it laughs at you while you try using it… or well, it’s being scornful. I’m talking about Microsoft Outlook, that gave me the following comment (underlined red) when I tried to use it today.
So was the information helpful?… uh… I guess compared to faking that it can do the work and then tell me in about a week that sorry, I was just kidding, it is in fact helpful to get to know it cannot be done already on Monday…
Happy Monday!
Why the death penalty is wrong – in my opinion
Can you give life back to the dead?
I think the best reason not to use the death penalty is found in the Lord of the Rings:
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
In my opinion, the largest problem with death penalty, compared to for instance life time imprisonment, is that death penalty is final. There is no going back from it. Once someone has been executed you cannot say, oops, we killed the wrong guy, sorry, here’s a settlement… If the wrong person gets imprisoned, even for many years, the wounds can still be healed, the person still be compensated, and life can go on.
Continue reading Why the death penalty is wrong – in my opinion
Unity tip: Open more than one instance of a program
In Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, using Unity, if you have opened an instance of a program, clicking the application icon for that program again will only select the most recently displayed window of that program.
Clicking again displays all windows of that program in a scaled down version (á la OSX 2000 or similar).
However, in order to open a second instance of a program you have to mouse-wheel-click on the icon (I’m only guessing, but middle-button-mouse-click might also work, left-right-mouse-button click does not…)
Another way to do it is holding down the Window-key and Shift while pressing the number for the application you want to open another instance of. Holding down the Window-button alone shows the numbers (but the applications on the bar are numbered starting with 1, but excluding the “Dash home”).