The Bald Heretic – Short, bald dude with a goofy beard – Page 175

Googleplex

Picked this up at the Grooveblog

Google Complex

THE DALLES, Ore., June 8 “” On the banks of the windswept Columbia River, Google is working on a secret weapon in its quest to dominate the next generation of Internet computing. But it is hard to keep a secret when it is a computing center as big as two football fields, with twin cooling plants protruding four stories into the sky.

When I mentioned this to Bill Shirley he asked the question; “Does it show up on Google Earth?” and that got me thinking and we all know that can only lead to trouble.

The article above indicates that the location of the complex is in The Dalles, OR.
I brought that up in Google Maps.

The Dalles

If this is correct, the likely location would seem to be east or north/west of the airport.
I tried to zoom in various areas but was greeted with this:

No zoom for you!

The thought plickens!

Trained professional on a closed course – Do not attempt

As I have mentioned before, I get computer questions in all flavors. Some relatively simple,
others far beyond the scope of the service I provide as a free service in e-mail.

Every now and then I get one that sparks my imagination.

A few weeks back I got an e-mail from one of my readers. His dilemma was that he had 8 floppy diskettes with some important data on them that he could not access. As luck would have it he copied the data to the diskettes using Windows 95 and employed a feature known as DriveSpace which was the Windows 95 version of DoubleSpace.

DriveSpace was a compression utility that would would, in essence, double the capacity of any drive that it was used on. Unlike compression utilities like WinZip which allowed you to compress files into a single archive and recover them, DriveSpace created an archive on the disk with the compressed data and used a virtual disk to view the data and extract it on the fly. Basically a 1.44 MB diskette appeared to be a 2.88 MB diskette.

You could also use it on you hard drive. Imagine the glee of expanding your 100 MB hard drive to 200 MB!

I never trusted DriveSpace and in my early tech days when Windows 95 first came out I saw drives that were “DriveSpaced” go belly up on many an occasion. Microsoft abandoned the technology after Windows ME.

So this guy e-mails me and wants to know if there is a utility that will extract the data from these 8 DriveSpaced diskettes. He had a Windows 98 computer but it won’t let him get at the data on the diskettes. It only reports that the diskettes were created in Windows 95 and the DriveSpace that came with Windows 98 would not work.

After I dug around and exhausted my research options I came to the conclusion that the only way this data was going to be retrieved was to load Windows 95 and get after it.

I negotiated with the guy and said I was open to the challenge and told him to deliver the diskettes to me as well as an install CD for Windows 95. If I was able to retrieve the data he would pay me X number of dollars. If I failed I would charge him nothing. He agreed.

When I got the disks and took them home I had a plan. I use VMWare on my main PC. This is an application that will let you load a guest operating system inside a window of your main system. Loading the operating system is basically like installing an application. When you are done you can remove it and your base system is unchanged.

It took some wrangling. My system has no floppy disk drive nor floppy disk controller and Windows 95 requires a boot disk to install. I had to make a DOS boot CD and start up the virtual machine and then swap CD’s in mid install.

You old timers remember how long it took to install Windows 95 when it came out?
It took about 10 minutes on my modern system once I got it going.

Behold!
Windows 95 running in a window of XP on my 3700+ AMD XP system!

You’ll notice Internet Explorer 3 and Microsoft Internet Mail and News (the precursor to Outlook Express). IE 3 displays Google very well. It blows up on the Java intense sites like Yahoo.

The mail program is barfing on the rich text HTML message from my friend Lenicia.

As cool as this is, there was still the matter of recovering the data from the diskettes. Since I have no diskette drive and no means to hook one up I figure that I’ll just copy the raw data to a CD and then try to extract the information inside my virtual Windows 95 machine.

After meticulously copying the 8 diskettes worth of data to a CD it’s the moment of truth. I load the CD and start the DriveSpace program and….no dice. From what I can gather, DriveSpace will not work on a “read only” disk, even if you are only using it to view and extract the data. This is most unfortunate.

I finally opted to just install Windows 95 on an old system I had been using as a backup. I used a spare drive and loaded it up. I pretty easily extracted the data at this point and copied it to the drive. I then swapped the original XP drive back into the master space and booted it up and was able to access the files using Windows Explorer. I burned them to CD, delivered them to their owner and collected my fee.

I would have liked it if my virtual Windows 95 system would have worked to recover the data.
Curse the death of the floppy disk!

Still, what trip down memory lane and what a trip to see Windows 95 again.

**UPDATE** I just discovered that VMWARE will work with a USB floppy drive.
Too bad I discovered this after I went through all of that.

Deadliest catch

We all have our guilty pleasures. Mine is coming home on a Wednesday night after the radio show and watching the DVR capture of Lost. Well, it was until the season ended. I bide my time now with Commander in Chief until my precious is returned to me, after the summer comes to a close. Yessssssssssssssss….

Cynthia is not much of a TV watcher and does not share my interest in these shows. That being said, she has her own serial vice in the form of The Deadliest Catch.

The Deadliest Catch is a television series / documentary that chronicles the events on-board six fishing ships in the Bering Sea during the Alaskan king crab and Opilio crab fishing seasons.

The show’s name is not derived from some type of fierce man-eating crabs as one might imagine (or hope), rather it is in reference to the very real possibility of meeting an untimely and frozen death while crewing one of these god-forsaken vessels. Death that may come in the form of a rogue wave or an errant piece of ice-laden gear crashing down on your head.

Personally, I find the program difficult to watch. It’s quite stark and doesn’t pull any punches. You will be watching and *snap* that guy’s leg is broken or *splash* he’s overboard and has seconds to live….oh, he didn’t make it. Really rather gruesome and yet, Cynthia loves it.

She cannot seem to get enough of the show and I asked her why she liked it so much. She told me, quite plainly, that when she watches those guys go through what they do to make a living it makes her job seem a little bit easier to deal with.

Can’t argue with logic like that. It’s all about perspective.

phliKtid

Last night’s show was pretty good. At least we managed to entertain ourselves and that’s always a plus. My friend Jennifer came out for a bit of an internship on the phones. Groovehouse showed her the ropes and she did a good job during the second hour managing the incoming calls.

As we were all preparing to go home I was stuck by the true geekiness of the crew of the show. We are SUCH nerds.

Take, for example, phliKtid…
He’s the man behind, well…behind EVERYTHING. Just click on these images to see what I mean.

phliKtid is the brains behind the hilarious promos that run for the show and he’s been running the sound board and has taken on the role of engineer for the program.

phliKtid is the subtle nerd. He’s a systems administrator for a local medical college and he’s a Free BSD user. He doesn’t “toot his own horn” so much but there is one concession he makes to his geekitude.

Check out his vanity plate on his motorcycle.

Aww, yea!

Give me an A! Give me an L! Give me another L! Give me an E! Give me an N!

When the stars align and the moon is just right, spending an evening at Shoeshine Charlie’s Big Top Lounge (that little place 3 doors down from the Continental Club) enjoying the musical stylings of Allen Hill, self proclaimed “King of the Oldies” and his band or renown, The Allen Oldies Band can be a singular magical experience. Last night was one of those nights.

The Big Top is one of the harder venues to photograph. The lighting, while pleasing in some regards to the naked eye, is not camera friendly in the least. I am continuing to experiment with the manual setting of my camera and I am pleased with the results. Even so, it is becoming more apparent that I will need to upgrade at some point if I want to get better results. I have definitely run up against the limitations of this hardware.

More images of “The King”

Geek Gathering – 06/02/2006

Another excellent gathering of the geeks!
There were many new toys being oogled by a room full of nerds and nerd onlookers.

Dwight Silverman, self proclaimed Microsoft lackey and friend of Bill, was spotted with a new Macintosh computer. He claims it belongs to his daughter but there was a unmistakable gleam of delight in his his eye as he explored the features.

Barrett was sporting a new 17″ Macbook and Russell Holliman of Mobilepodcast fame was toting a brand new Motorola Q phone.

It was also a pleasure to meet Matt B. of mattsapundit.com.

In terms of gadgetry and attendees this was probably one of the geekiest geek gatherings in a long time. That’s probably for the best since my friend Jennifer decided to pay a visit. She’s expressed an interest in helping Groovehouse out with phone screening duties on show nights and it’s important she fully realize what she’s getting herself into.

A few more photos here.

Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt

As many of you know, Cynthia is a fan of the art of quilting. We have several handmade quilts she has lovingly stitched together and she is, even now, mapping out her next project.

A few weeks back I got an invitation to the media preview for the GeeÂ´s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt exhibit. This invitation came in via my contact e-mail for the Houston Chronicle.

From the web site:

GeeÂ´s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt examines the resurgence of interest in quilting in the GeeÂ´s Bend community and documents the development of key traditional quilt patterns””housetop, courthouse steps, flying geese, and strip quilting through the presentation of outstanding examples created from the 1930s into the twenty-first century.

We had just watched the PBS special on these quilts a few weeks back so I knew EXACTLY what this was.

Sensing an opportunity to take Cynthia to something quite special I replied to the invitation. I was very frank about the fact that I would not be able to promote the show in my capacity as the Helpline columnist for the Houston Chronicle but did indicate my desire to attend. The event organizer replied that they would be happy for us to be there and confirmed our RSVP.

It was a wonderful event and Cynthia and I both got some great pictures and an opportunity to chat with many of the women who created these fabulous quilts.

Louisiana P. and Mary Lee Bendolph – Artists

Mary Lee shares a wonderful quilting anecdote with Cynthia.

The show runs June 4 – September 4, 2006 at the Audrey Jones Beck Building of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Spread the word!

More pics from today’s media opening available here

The weakest link

For all your firewalls, intrusion detection systems, passwords and password policies it just takes one uninformed and well intentioned employee to bring you down.

It’s called social engineering and it is the most effective “hacking” tool available. I had my first experience being on the receiving end of a concerted social engineering hack and emerged victorious.

Yesterday around 3:30 pm I was at my desk when the receptionist put through a call from one of our senior VP’s. I was rather distracted with a few things going on so I was caught a little off guard. The VP in question is someone I know fairly well and have a bit of a rapport with. He asked how my holiday weekend was and we exchanged brief pleasantries. Since I was rather busy I politely moved the conversation to the business at hand and asked him what I could do for him.

He told me he needed a copy of the company Global Address List in Excel format.

[pause]

For the record; this would be the contact information for every single employee in our company. About 800+ contacts. No small thing.

[/pause]

One thing that tends to set me apart from your average IT flunky is I am not afraid to ask blunt questions and I had one for Mr. Senior VP.

What on earth for? This was an odd request and it set off alarm bells immediately. I’m not about to hand off this proprietary information without following some type of protocol even if you ARE a senior VP.

He proceeded to explain to me that he was on the road and his daughter had accidentally taken his laptop to school and he needed employee contact info ASAP. It kind of made sense. We are going through a buy-out/merger. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a senior VP would need this information as part of maybe planning our ultimate re-organization. Still….

He was on a cell phone so it disguised the voice somewhat. It did sound like the VP.

I suggested he access the corporate e-mail system via our web interface. There he would have access to all the contacts in the GAL. He said this was not acceptable and that he needed it in a form that could be printed out.

I continued asking questions like “what is this for?” “Is there another way?” “Can you come into the office and get this?” and one final question “Is this something you would prefer I stop asking questions about?” to which he replied “yes.”

At this point he tried to pull rank. He told me that in his position he should not have to explain himself to me. This is when I was sure there was a problem. Either the person I know is acting EXTREMELY suspicious and out of character or he was not who he claimed to be.

I generated the Excel spreadsheet by exporting the GAL to a file on my desktop. I had to make a decision quick. I asked him how he wanted this delivered to him and he said “e-mail it to my personal e-mail address” and proceeded to give me an address of files@somethingoranother.com…

My thought was that if he could access his personal e-mail then he could access his corporate e-mail and I told him I would send it there. He asked me to CC the funky e-mail address and I said I would not do that. At this point I told him outright that I wasn’t even sure I was dealing with a company employee and I implored him (just in case I was wrong) to please understand that I am only protecting the company. I basically told him I would e-mail the file to his corporate address and he could then forward it as he pleased.

He was not happy but relented and agreed to my solution. At this point I was a little flustered and after I sent the e-mail I went to my boss to explain what had happened in case I managed to piss off a senior VP. Not something you want to do when they are likely evaluating current and future company positions. I have denied the requests of senior management before, citing company policy. When you do that you are putting your job at risk. I knew I was right but I feared there might be repercussions.

5 minutes later I got an e-mail from the senior VP in question asking what the heck this was that I had sent to him. I explained it and told him he could delete the message.

Turns out whoever was on the phone was impersonating the VP and was totally pulling a scam.

Had I not been alert I could have easily handed off confidential employee information to god knows who.

Let’s be careful out there!