PG2 on Vista

I had a bugger of a time getting PeerGuardian2 to work under Vista. SO, I figured I'd document my solution for others so they don't have to experience what I experienced. The biggest problem is that there are like twenty-thousand people out there that THINK they can show you how to use PG2, but most of the time they're completely wrong. That said, here's how I did it:

1. Uninstall any instances of PG and/or PG2 that you presently have installed.
2. Make sure the "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2" directory is COMPLETELY empty.
3. Download and install PG2-RC1 from PhoenixLabs.
4. Go through the on-screen dialog
5. Create a batch-file that includes the following:

del /Q "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\cache.p2b"
del /Q "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\history.db"
del /Q "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\lists\*"
start "C:\Program Files\PeerGuardian2\pg2.exe"

...the batch file is how you will launch PG2, not by any other means. That's it. It works like a champ.

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Python in a hosted environment

I have a server that I can't exactly install whatever I want on. I need to be able to talk to a MySQL database from a Python script. I didn't have any of the database interfaces installed, and couldn't install them system-wide. What is a geek to do?

Fortunately, Python's package installer is pretty smart. SO, I created ~/python, and then used ` python setup.py install --root ~/python` to install each module I wanted to install. Next, in my actual code, I used the following to ensure python could find the modules...


import sys
sys.path.append( '/home/hostedby/python/usr/lib64/python2.3/site-packages/' )
sys.path.append( '/home/hostedby/python/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/' )


One note: ADOdb requires MySQLdb, but the errors you get from it are completely non-sensical and do not give you even the slightest indication about the inter-dependancy. You could have figured this out by reading the README ,but who does that?

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My New Bumper Sticker

I found my new bumper sticker tonight... I'm bitter.

Mostly, I'm bitter that Initiated Measure 11 was defeated. I had really hoped that South Dakota would be the state to re-kindle the Supreme Court decision about abortion. I guess that plaque I have that says, "if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans," is as accurate now as ever.

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My "new" laptop

I'm posting from my "new" laptop. This is what I suspect will ultimately supercede my ASUS Eee PC, which seemed like a good idea at the time. That said, this little box isn't over-sized (yet), but I'm working on it. Here's what its go, at this moment:

$ dmesg | grep -i vga
vga1 at pci1 dev 0 function 0 "ATI Radeon Mobility M6 LY" rev 0x00
wsdisplay0 at vga1 mux 1: console (80x25, vt100 emulation)
$ dmesg | grep -i cpu
cpu0: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz ("GenuineIntel" 686-class) 2.40 GHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,CFLUSH,DS,ACPI,MMX,FXSR,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,SBF,CNXT-ID
cpu0 at mainbus0
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0/16: reported by CPUID; using exception 16
$ dmesg | grep -i mem
real mem = 267411456 (255MB)
avail mem = 250511360 (238MB)
spdmem0 at iic0 addr 0x51: 256MB DDR SDRAM non-parity PC2100CL2.5

My immediate needs for this thing are: 1) a new battery (its a laptop, afterall), 2) a wireless card (a PCMCIA card that works with OpenBSD), and 3) more RAM. If by some miracle I got all three of those things taken-care of, I suspect this would be a fairly respectable little laptop! I think I could get it all taken-care of for under $200, so I'm going to see what kind of price I can get for my Eee PC...if I can get $200+ for it, I'm in like Flynn!

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cable modem woes

TCP has a 16-bit port address, which allows for 65535 ports for source and destination ports. That fact appears to be lost on the vendor of my cable modem as they seem to think that 40960 is all that anyone would EVER need, however that fact is not lost on me. I have discovered this limitation "the hard way." I've crashed my cable modem three times this week while trying to conduct a pen-test for a client.

In all fairness, it seems like assuming a home user would not exceed 40960 simultaneous or embryotic connection is reasonable. That said, it still seems assinine not to support either the full-capabilities of the protocol's specifications OR that if it isn't going to handle all 65,535 ports that it at least not just die violently.

Ironically, this is not the first device I have discovered this limitation (which is why I know what is wrong here.) I've discovered this limitation in a variety of firewalls: Novell BorderManager, SonicWall, and various Linksys devices. This is, however, the first layer 2-3 device I've discovered the problem on.

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fslint

Frequently, I find myself manually cleaning-up garbage files produced by various applications... be they the random swap files produced by `vi`, backup files ('*~'), or other similar riff-raff... with OS X, it had gotten so bad that I wrote a script to clean-up after Finder -- flushFinderCrap. Incidentally, I'm not the only one to loath the manual nature of this task, and some enterprising chap has written `fslint`. Bravo.

`fslint` basically automates the process of finding garbage files, or files that are otherwise undesireable, and reparing the issue(s). I highly recommend it.

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AIG Executives Blow $440,000 After Getting Bailout

This is simply criminal. Words to describe my disgust and anger elude me.

In other news, I finally figured out the link between the so-called "corporate papers" market, the mortgage crisis, and the bail-out. I certainly won't bother attempting to articulate it here, but it was a proud day for me...now if only it weren't so bloody depressing.

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