The greatness that is Bob Harris

They all descend from a common ancestor; lots of common ancestors, actually.

— from Bob Harris' current poll.

Ya rule, Bob.

My terms are net thirty

Noticed, the other day, during a routine check of running processes somebody new and uninvited. Seems the ubiquitous and annoying 'MySearch' toolbar had, at some point in the past, installed itself on one of my Windows boxes.

Spent a bit of time yanking it out, marvelling at the pushiness of the thing. No fewer than three dialogues in the uninstall insisting that this is really a quite lovely piece of software, so are you sure you want to get rid of it? really sure? really, really sure?

Yeah, I'm sure you stupid buggers. Yanked it out, went hunting down all the registry keys and executables, made sure it was really gone. Apparently this is a 'ware that's not always real good about honestly going away when you tell it to do so.

Also in the pushiness category: it's a bit incredible that it even got installed in the first place. If it slimed its way in through some dumb Explorer scripting thing, this speaks volumes about how ubiquitous this stuff is, since I almost never use Explorer for exactly those sorts of reasons, and it couldn't have had a lot of opportunities. It's also possible, I guess, it got installed at some point when I installed some shareware. Which was careless, but I was trying out a few odd widgets for an odd project about a week ago, tried four or five of them trying to avoid writing a few things myself (which, in the end, I wound up doing anyway), and foolishly didn't watch what the installs were doing to my system as closely as I should have.

Found myself thinking as I went through this that I should bill these clowns. Didn't take real long, but at my consulting rates, it's still an invoice worth writing. Hey, assholes: no, I don't want your software, even if it is (as the malware sites seem to feel) mostly pretty harmless. I do crypto work and security work, can't just have stupid shit like this running on my boxes just 'cos some marketing genius thinks installing software without really asking folks about it is a good idea. So here's your invoice for my time. My terms are net thirty. Have a nice day.

A small but dangerous thing

Installed the new Opera (8.0) on one of my Debian boxen recently. And discovered its RSS stuff was that little bit smoother than it had been in the last version. Click a feed, it offers to subscribe much more readily. And it seems to get RSS updates a lot better than did the old version.

Which is bad. It's way too easy. My collection of feeds is growing dangerously rapidly already. I don't have time for this. Text... text... an ocean of text... blogs... everywhere... can't... breathe...

Note to folk doing renovations

The basement bathroom in our lovely home has a roman tub. Big, beautiful thing. You can almost swim laps in it. Yes, this is a bit decadent, for a basement bathroom off a spare room. But then, we didn't put it there.

Anyway, whoever did put it there, well, they obviously weren't thinkin' too hard when they did about the fact that mechanical stuff does break down now and then.

Yep. Fun stuff, finding out that the handheld shower's tube has cracked so any attempt to turn on the water means water goes just about everywhere but through the showerhead, and the hose is attached (like most of the stuff mounted on the deck of a roman tub) to a fixture under the tub...

And it's all sealed in. Real tight. Like, behind a layer of tile and two layers of plywood tight. No access panel, no nuthin'. Whoever did this musta figured them fixtures wuz forever.

This, by the way, is par for the course for our place. Place is absolutely lovely inside, in places. Some real thought has obviously been put into it, over the years, making things pretty...

But little things like actually installing sound plumbing behind all those pretty fixtures, and leaving actual openings into the attics via which they can be inspected, those are the sorta things it seems some previous renovators skimped on a bit, here and there.

Fortunately, I'm a veteran.

Twenty minutes or so after I've figured out there's no real way 'round it, I've got one of my drills, my jigsaw, and my reciprocating saw out, various masonry and tile blades and bits at the ready. Forty minutes later, I've cut a hole for access, and have got at the plumbing (and am discovering, as you'd figure is only typical in our place, that there's only something like two inches between tub and wall in which to move the wrenches actually to get the tube off). Inside of an hour and a bit, the tube's off (and I'm discovering it's an odd custom thingy ya can't just go fetch from Home Depot, which is also quite typical).

And, by the next morning, I've got the appropriate replacement tube from a speciality plumbing supply shop that groks roman tub fixtures, and have put a reasonably pretty cover plate over the access hole (removable, naturally, since today's lesson is mechanical stuff does break now and then), and we're on our way.

Note to folk doing pretty renovations: it's really a lot more trouble cutting through tile and plywood with masonry blades and bits without scuffing the neighbouring tile than it is to design an access panel into the thing in the first place. Thanks in advance.