For a few days now, my Mac has been asking me to give permission to Google Chrome to use the passwords in my Keychain. I couldn’t figure it out until I realised Chrome was updated to 6.0.472.33 (beta, of course). Now it makes sense. Kudos to Google for keeping security in mind.
Author Archive
Now it all makes sense
Sunday, August 15th, 2010Why not to overthink a problem
Thursday, July 15th, 2010I’ve recently become the proud owner of a 27″ iMac, with the i5 quad core processor and 8GB RAM. It’s faster than stink, and I love it.
Unfortunately, my background does not permit me a full move to Mac OS X, because I have written several applications for Windows, and I must support SQL Server databases for several customers.
So … laziness dictated (it’s a known fact that all software developers are lazy, otherwise they wouldn’t spend so much time trying to do so much with so little code) that instead of installing a brand new virtual machine running Windows XP Professional, I would simply reuse the one from my Windows 7 install (Virtual XP), and do an in-place upgrade using my Action Pack licence to get around the licencing issues.
In other words, I wouldn’t have to reinstall SQL Server and Visual Studio, and copy over all my files and code.
It worked beautifully. Except, for some reason, my virtual machine seemed to be shutting itself down every night around the same time. At first I thought it might be the Windows Activation thing getting confused, because I was doing something unusual.
But, after rerunning the in-place upgrade with an XP SP3-streamed install last night, and reactivating my OS, the machine shut down all by itself tonight at 11:17pm. I know, because last night I checked when it happened, and tonight I made a special note to see if it happened again at the same time.
Sure as bears in woods and Catholic Popes, it was a definite recurring problem. Was the OS infected? I checked. Was the activation a problem? I couldn’t think why it would be, and I reactivated to make sure.
So I went onto Google, my saviour. I call it that because Google has saved my job many times. Tonight, I searched for “XP shutting down same time every day”. The first few pages were garbage, but then … oh yes, then …
“Check if you have any scheduled tasks that might be shutting down your computer” in some or other forum.
*Click* goes the brain, and let me explain why.
I wrote a little application called ShutOff 2000. For the past few years, I’ve been working here and there on its replacement, ShutOff 2010. One of the new features of ShutOff 2010 is its integration into the Windows Task Scheduler for all versions of Windows, from lowly XP up to 2008 R2.
And because I do my best work at night, I had tested it to shut down every night at 11:17pm, just to see if it was saving the scheduled task correctly.
And then I forgot about it.
Until tonight.
Yes, you may laugh at me.
Funny things on Canadian television
Saturday, May 22nd, 2010Cash Cab
Canada’s Worst Driver
Canada’s Worst Handyman
Disclaimers before shows, and after adverts
The adverts.
Ok, I lied
Saturday, May 22nd, 2010So I lied. A few other things have happened in the last couple of months.
I’ve released a third beta for ShutOff 2010, and new versions of the Password Generator 2010, Simple Lotto Number Generator 2010, and the ShutOff 20×0 registry cleaner.
Simple HexConverter 2010 is also almost ready for release.
Yes, I sold out with the names of those products. I decided to plug in “2010″ and “Simple” in as many places as possible. No, I will not apologise.
You can find these new products at http://itsol.co.za/.
What else? Ah yes, a complete stranger told me of changes to the WordPress table structure which necessitated changes to the SimplePHPBlogToWordPressConverter (another name I shall not apologise for, despite it being a bugger to type). Since my involvement in said project is now over, I made him a project lead and he committed some code changes. Thanks, Hans! (I think his name is Hans.)
Not much else. Promise!
Still alive!
Saturday, May 22nd, 2010Not much to say. Sorry for my readers (all three of you). So much has happened, and yet not much has happened. It’s the same as when you catch up with an old friend and find out that apart from that big piece of news, they are the same person.
So for the record, our big piece of news is that we’re part owners of the clinic. Other than that, not much else! 
O Canada
Saturday, March 27th, 2010I’m writing this in our new home of Lloydminster, on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan. Facebook friends have seen photos and read updates, but I haven’t had the time to actually write up something here. Also, I forgot that I have this blog …
So, Canada. Why Lloydminster of all places? What about Vancouver? Toronto? Ottawa? Well that’s an easy one: Lloydminster needs doctors, and I’m married to one. In fact, I’m married to one of the best doctors I know, and I’ve seen my fair share.
We left Johannesburg on the day after Julius Caesar was assassinated, and the day before St Patrick’s Day. Off to Zurich on Swiss International Air Lines, with a seven hour layover before flying to Toronto for a three day holiday.
Except our Toronto flight was cancelled.
So what do you do? All flights out of Europe were full. If we wanted to get the next one, we’d sleep in Zurich’s airport because we didn’t have Schengen visas. We’d also miss an entire day of our Toronto trip and lose bookings on various excursions, which cost a fair amount of money.
Fortunately we had decided (well, I was dragged along) to get US visas a week before we left. That was fortuitous because we were able to get Swiss to fly us to Toronto via Boston in the US. Massachusetts, thank you very much.
We didn’t see much of Boston: some blurry photos in the skywalk, and a four hour sleep in the airport’s Hilton Hotel.
We got to Toronto 14 hours later than planned, but sufficiently rested (well, barely) to make our bookings, which included a very pleasant surprise in the form of “Young Frankenstein, the Musical”.
Toronto is a distant but good memory already, except for the tooth ache. Ah yes, I managed to bring over an abscess with me. $83 to see a dentist, and $36 for the antibiotics and painkillers, were almost as painful as the toothache itself.
The city seems very clean. The Canadians were super friendly (and mostly still are – you get the feeling that the writers on “How I Met Your Mother” are just exaggerating real people).
The food is expensive, though. $10 – $15 per person per meal, and up to $50 or more eating out. Unless you like beef. Beef is cheap. Luckily I like beef. On the other hand, there’s cholesterol. So, ja. The portions are huge too. I’ve left a few plates and glasses with food and drink respectively.
Best burger ever: Hard Rock Café in Toronto. Seriously.
Niagara Falls was really awesome, though a little chilly. This winter thing tends to run a month later than you’d expect.
After Toronto was Saskatoon, or “Toon Town”. It is the biggest city in Saskatchewan, with over 200 000 people. Regina (rhymes with, well, yes … moving swiftly along) is the capital, with fewer than 200 000 people. Huge, thriving, mega cities, as you can imagine.
We were taken on a tour of the city, and half an hour later, we ate food at one of the finer establishments. Then we were taken to shops. Lots of shops. Lots and lots of shops.
Registration at the College of Physicians and Surgeons was quick, at 2 hours and 15 minutes, and then a Lloydminster doctor’s husband (Tommy) came to fetch us. We joked and said to bring a big car because we have lots of luggage. He arrived in a Toyota Tundra. Not the small one either.
The drive to Lloyd, as the locals call it, took around three hours, but fortunately it went quickly because Tommy is a good conversationalist and was able to tell us a lot about the city, the clinic, and other things like how to buy a car.
We got to Lloydminster and went to visit people at the clinic, and then off to our new house. It is a two bed apartment on the ground floor, with a thermostat and lots of storage space. It was missing window treatments when we arrived, like curtains and / or blinds, so we hung a sheet for the first night!
It snowed on Tuesday and Wednesday. 10 – 12cm in fact. I think they arranged it just for us.
Today we bought a new car: a Nissan Rogue SL something or other. It’s shiny and has a sunroof, which is really important for these weather conditions . Marinus loves it and I really like it too. We looked at a black Ford and a red Toyota, but the Nissan stole our hearts. My Mandela-emblazoned card helped pay the deposit.
I think it’s bed time. But that should get you into the picture for now.
NCANE.COM going open source
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010I’ve decided to take my short URL generator and make it open-source. This is for a number of reasons, but I think primarily because I’m emigrating, and sometimes you need to just let things go.
ShutOff 2000’s code will also become open source when I release ShutOff 2010 (that’s a long story – don’t ask).
NCANE.COM’s code-base will be available on Google Code. I’ll update the blog with its exact location when I’ve created the project.
In case anyone is interested, I’m using the MIT licence. No GPL for me, thank you very much.
UPDATE: The project is now at Google Code. You can access it from: https://code.google.com/p/ncane-com-short-url-generator/
I smite thee, spammers
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010As the founder of the Smiters of Iniquity, I hereby smite all spammers.
Yesterday, ncane.com and I were targeted by spammers, where a spam email went out to (I expect) thousands of people, purporting to be from me (including my personal details from public DNS records), and a short URL generated by ncane.com.
An over-eager recipient of this spam decided to report it to the entire world. My upstream providers were included, as well as the ISP from where the spam originated. That’s to be expected, and I would have done the same. However, the South African Police were also included, along with various other parties (Federal Trade Commission? Really?).
I’d like to say this guy overreacted, but with the status of spam today, did he really?
I’ve since responded to every contact on the list he reported to, stating that my identity was stolen and abused in this email, so hopefully level heads will prevail. The email clearly did not originate from my server, and my ISP seems to be happy (so far).
I’ve also been forced to update all of my domains’ registration details with an additional layer of obfuscation (without breaking the law of course). I should have done this a long time ago because this was only a matter of time, considering my approach to spammers. But again, why should I have to hide my DNS details in the first place?
If this affects me any more, I think I’m going to throw in the towel and cross over to Google completely, cancelling ncane.com. Seriously, this sort of thing is not good for my mental health.
Some people might say that I should have just deleted the spam I receive instead of reporting it and taking on the spammers as I do, but if I don’t do it, who else will? We’ve become deluged by this spam, and it’s simply unacceptable.
Anyway, that’s my rant for today.
In Lloydminster, it’s just gone 10 a.m.
Monday, February 8th, 2010And boy, is it nice and brisk!
Best firewall ever?
Monday, February 1st, 2010I got this in email. I cannot vouch for its accuracy, but it made me smile:
1. One human cell contains 75MB genetic information.
2. One sperm contains a half of that; that is 37.5MB.
3. One ml of semen contains 100 million sperm.
4. In average, ejaculation lasts for 5 sec and contains 2.25 ml semen.
5. This means that the throughput of a man’s member is equal to (37.5MB x 100,000,000 x 2.25)/5 = 1 687 500 000 000 000 byte/second = 1,6875 Terabyte/secThis means that the female egg cell withstands this DDoS attack at 1,5 terabyte per second, and only lets through one(!) data package, thereby being the best freaking hardware firewall in the world!
The downside of it is that this only small data package that it lets through, hangs the system for the whole of 9 months!