Author: pksan

spammy spam all over the spam

Posted on by pksan

In the last days there has been an influx of spam comments on this blog.

I’m quite curious about what the trigger was. Google says i’m not linked anywhere on the open internet but on my last.fm user page. While this may not be great in terms of public visibility, it is obviously not true, which means a lot of content on teh intertubes, more than i thought, is hidden from google. Other links exist, like one at my posterous.

spam
spam

Anyhow, i guess some botnet has launched a crawl of the web, looking for blogs and then spamming them.

Whatever the cause, the spam has a peculiar property. No payload (links) in 80% of the cases and indiscernible blabblings with not-interpreted html links thrown in in the rest of the bunch. I’m seeing this kind of stuff at the support email address at work too. What happened? Have the botnets gone mad? Was the payload corrupted? Did some spam summer-intern got the format wrong? Who will ever know what happens in the shady business of spammerworld…

I quite liked the experiment conducted by University of California and UCSD that shows that despite meager margins (0.00001% response rate for spam mails), a 1 million strong botnet could yield over 2m in revenue a year. If only the overall loss in productivity in the economy weren’t a few multiple times that amount, i would tip my hat to those pesky spammers.

Apple,…

Posted on by pksan

…i hate love am angry with you.

Because you make beautiful looking pieces of technology that are a joy to work with. But then they fail. Invariably. You see, the beauty of a relationship with a technological item, in contrasto to one with a real human being, the technology does not die. Never. It will always be there for you.

I am typing this on the sexy, lean, engaging Powerbook one can see in all it’s glory a few posts below and everything is perfect. Except that Leopard is sluggish. Because you shipped faulty mainboards and i’m stuck with 1 GB of RAM. The screen freaks out every time the PB comes out of sleep.

You see, the problem with being perfect is that once you err i hate you even more because i know you could have acted otherwise. But you did not. Deliberately? My offended self thinks so.

At the end, i’m just a marketing student and you have just bad customer services and don’t like to admit your errors. That puts a strain on our relationship, you know? But otherwise, you’re quite perfect. But don’t push it. It’s the small things that end even the most engaging love story.

Shuffling Drives: A Powerbook DVD-RW in a MacBook?

Posted on by pksan

Fast answer: Maybe.

Long answer: uuuuuuhm. Well. Lemme think. Duh. Ok. Maybe?

Since i’ve welcomed a MacBook C2D 2 GHz to our all-mac household, i’ve been between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand the MacBook is fast, small and lovely all around. On the other hand, it’s “predecessor”, a PowerBook 15″ 1.5GHz, now retired from mobile duty, sits on my desk, hooked up to a 17″ LCD and being a great dual screen workhorse (and after a small project of mine also silent AND cool). Anyway, i think this issue will be for the next post.

Now this otherwise lovely, if somewhat battered, MacBook has only a CD-RW. The Powerbook has a DVD-RW which cannot be used since the slot-in drive is covered by the notebook stand it’s sitting on. You see where i want to go here.

Straight to the porn:

In their gory entrails: MacBook and Powerbook
In their gory entrails: MacBook and Powerbook

You can see how the logic board of the MacBook is really small compared to the larger one of the Powerbook. Nothing surprising given their different specs, but still worth a mention.

So, after taking out the two drives i compared them and sadly, the DVD-RW of the PowerBook was quite substantially higher than the MacBook drive. Bummers. This seems a no-go (or better, a no-fit), although the specs were the same (standard PATA notebook drives).

BUT. Upon remounting everything, i found that the sort of cage that gets mounted at the side of the drive leaves some room for a higher drive, so maybe…. At this point however i had already given up and just wanted to put those macs back togheter. Still now i’m left with a lingering doubt if after all it would have been possible. After reassembling them they still work (i’m always surprised, given my amateurish skills in laptop (de)assemblage) and that’s good news. Another good news: i’ve modified the stand so that the PowerBook drive is again usable. Sorry, MacBook, will be for another time.

getting (old) iPatch patches to work in Leopard

Posted on by pksan

There are some no dvd or hardware check disabling patches for Mac OS X games that aren’t working anymore in Leopard, crashing on start if not launched with rosetta and failing the verification of SHA1 checksums for the files to be patched even if they are the correct version. Some examples for this issue are the patches for Civilization IV and Call of Duty 2 for Mac OS X released by… (argh i have to check this at home).

As I found out, in order to fix them download iPatch 3.7.1 from http://www.ipatch.org/US/index.html and then explore the package’s content. You will find under /Contents/Resources an app called iPatcher, explore that file’s content again by right clicking and find a nice unix executable-style file named, you’ll never guess it, ipatcher under /Contents/MacOS/. You’ll need to copy this file over to the /Contents/MacOS folder inside the patch application package, overwriting the old ipatcher (size 204 or 208 kb) with the new one (size 212kb).

Now launch the game patcher thus modified and voilá, it will happily patch away.

Thanks to the author of those patches whose name i will add here in a couple of hours.

Some things.

Posted on by pksan

Well…

0) welcome to all new subscribers. there have been a few. why don’t
you add me on twitter? phikappa’s the name.
1) i should integrate this posterous on my webpage, as i should do
with the twitter updates.
2) i never thought there would be a page 2 on this blog. i mean, when
did i have ever taken something so far as to page 2?
3) i started http://spiritof48.wordpress.com and as it looks it is not
something that will reach page 2.
4) i met someone who reminded me of how cool being geeky is and that i
should not repudiate my geekery as much as i do
5) speaking of geekery, my project of transforming my old ipaq 3660
into a online music / last.fm streaming station is still out on the
ocean. phyton is installed and lastfmproxy sort of running, but, alas,
no web interface so far. on my wlan-enabled htc wizard everything is
fine, i hope phyton+lastfmproxy will love the cf wlan card and bind to
an IP address.
5a) installing a semi-actual version of phyton onto a complete enemy
of connectivity like the ipaq (no wlan, no bt, only ir. IR!) is crazy,
but feels warm and fuzzy. still, not surprisingly, i need the wlan
card to make that thing useful.

that’s all. for now.