BenV's notes

Needless to say Adobe had an update today.
Since we’re running a windows 2008 server with users that don’t have administrator rights, Adobe is very annoying to start with.

<Adobe>”Hey I have an update! Oh, I can’t install it because you need administrator rights, but I’ll keep bugging you with it anyway, MWHOAHAHHAHA”

So if that isn’t enough already (and they have an update about every week … if not more often), the piece of cancer can’t even update. Even when running the updater as administrator:

Mysterious fail

Of course it would be terrible to state what the problem is, so they only give you “Error: 1403” to work with.
Thanks Adobe, really useful. It’s unfortunate that some morons here insist on needing it (Because some idiot customers send us PDF files with chinese fonts and other rubbish that isn’t handled well in better pdf readers).

Feh.

If you’re like me you probably already hate the scumm that’s called Sony.
For installing rootkits on your pc. For taking away the ability to run linux on your PS3.
For being a Sony Cancer.
They’ve been assholes for as long as I can remember. Just check out their latest Playstation network agreement if you want to see how they trample your rights.

Anyhow, the guy being sued by them today (geohot – the one giving back linux on the ps3) has now setup a donation place to get some good lawyers.
So if you have a bit of coin to spare for a good cause, this is it. Anti Cancer! Pro Linux! What else could you want to spend your money on? 🙂

They’ve managed to piss me off once more.
I had to do a windows reinstall (XP of course) for some idiots that fubar-ed their machine, so after the usual install, 5 million windows updates, service packs, reboots and firefox install I figured I should probably install flash for them.
How hard can it be to install Adobe Flash? (continue reading…)

How incredibly stupid can they possibly get… like a dumb user that keeps running virus infected “naked hot girls!!!” screensavers, they keep adding DRM.
And now we’ve reached the point where they expect you to stay connected constantly to play a single player game.
Aahahahaha. Bye bye Ubisoft, may the pirates laugh at you and dance on your grave.
Alas for Settlers 7.. could have been an interesting game.

However, I expect them to revert their plans when enough badmouthing hits the news and make them “only” half as bad as they currently are.
We’ll see.

I can’t for the life of me begin to imagine why anyone would use cmake as an autoconf alternative. (continue reading…)

This game has been released a couple of days ago, and if you’re a fan of Baldur’s Gate and such games (like Neverwinter Nights) I’m sure you’ll like this game. So when we heard it was released we immediately moved our computers together so we could play a game just like how we spent countless hours playing Baldur’s Gate. (continue reading…)

Yesterday evening I was curiously looking at some tcpdump traffic that went through our dom0 of Xenbro. There seemed to be a ton of weird DNS requests. And with weird I mean spamlike domains, like familiesfirstmedical.com. After wondering for a bit I realized they were coming from our service domU that runs mail for the junerules.com domain. (continue reading…)

Version 2.8.5 is here! Some important security hardening going on, fixing a trackback DoS attack (or so they claim). Some more details over here. As usualy the automatic update failed for me, so once again the fix for this error:

Download failed.: Operation timed out after 60 seconds with 1538482 bytes received

Either patch it manually:

• Edit wp-admin/includes/file.php and change line 448 to a more reasonable default.
• The line sould become something like: $response = wp_remote_get($url, array('timeout' => 600));

Or use this patch:

--- wp-admin/includes/file.php.org 2009-10-21 17:03:47.000000000 +0200
+++ wp-admin/includes/file.php 2009-10-21 17:03:06.000000000 +0200
@@ -445,7 +445,7 @@
if ( ! $handle )
return new WP_Error('http_no_file', __('Could not create Temporary file'));

if ( is_wp_error($response) ) {
fclose($handle);

[Download not found]

When I tried adding the above patch as a download (using the download monitor plugin) I got this failure:

File type does not meet security guidelines. Try another.

What the fuck guys, this is a TEXT file. Grepping through the sources I find the wp-admin/includes/file.php file to be the nazi. Apparently I’m not allowed (as site admin) to pass this current_user_can( 'unfiltered_upload' ). Security hardening, yeah… against idiots perhaps.
I’m expecting an update of either wordpress or the download monitor plugin soon.
Meanwhile I simply uploaded the file manually and added an existing download. Pfffrt, the hassle.

Today the project to try out is Widelands, apparently a Settlers clone.
Since I loved the Settlers (the first one was the best) when the graphics were still acceptable, it is interesting enough to try it out. What I loved about the Settlers was the whole simulation concept. The construction of buildings, the little lemmings that moved the goods around, chopped down trees, fished, etc. The entire war aspect of the game was terrible (what do you mean my maximum level guy just got p0wnz3d by their new lowlevel rookie?!) . Therefore I liked the games that followed less and less. Settlers 2 was acceptable, a welcome upgrade in graphics and interface and stuff like that, but the war aspect… blegh. Then at 3 I had enough of the series. Why can’t it be a simulation where tribes co-exist in peace? I see how that might not attract many gamers, but how about an option huh? Another thing that was great about the Settlers 1 was the multiplayer multi-mouse splitscreen mode, where both players had a mouse on 1 PC and could control a single empire together. With SVGA mode it was great 🙂 (continue reading…)

Yesterday evening after getting tired of playing the Aion open beta (it was the last night of the open beta, so we felt like at least reaching level 10, which we did… and then we could ~FLYYYY) we decided to go downstairs to watch some series on our beamer. So we fire up the machine connected to it, which runs everything from NFS. It didn’t take long for the boot screen to come up and after the default selection was made for us it ran through the boot process spewing out the usual kernel messages….. (continue reading…)