Archive for the Computers and Internet Tag

Intel Macs Today… My predictions through 4/1/2007

So, I was a bit surprised at the choice to release a 32-bit iMac to succeed the G5. Most experts seem to be saying this won’t matter for most people, but I disagree. The 64-bit capabilities of the G5 are pretty important for editing home or professional video, and that is one arena where the Mac is competing very well
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The lowdown on the disk of doom…

Monday we heard back from OnTrack. They say there’s nothing more they can do. It’s dead, dead. No bits to scrape off. All gone. Apparently it suffered massive head crash and the surface damage was too severe. However, there are some other prospects for recovering some of the data. For example, Jen sent her sad tale of woe to the
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You will give me Tiki!

All (remaining) Beavis and Butthead jokes aside, this rather nifty looking device is the perfect gift for any tech wizard with a desk that wishes it were in Hawaii. Admittedly, I think it would be a bit more useful if it were a touch larger and housed a 2.5″ hard disk. However, this device uses flash (a-ah…) memory and tops
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As the hard disk churns…

So, we heard back from Gillware yesterday. They were unable to recover any files. They did, however, suggest that the drive might still be recoverable by OnTrack, and offered to put them in touch with me. OnTrack called within an hour and was very optimistic. Gillware offered to send the drive to OnTrack free of charge, and it arrived OVERNIGHT!!!
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That sucking sound …

That sucking sound you hear is Jen’s hard drive imploding under its own mass. Around noon it died, and bad us, we haven’t backed it up in a long time. I have a backup set of DVDs labeled May 2003… So, the question, in addition to what to do about the data loss, is what to do about her computer.
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You ain’t all that.

Very few things amuse me more than insignificant wannabes who think they can own my box for more than a few minutes. My system paged me last night about 5 minutes after some dork exploited a hole in Drupal 4.6.1 and started laying down tracks all over /tmp, /usr and /lib. Unfortunately for the snot-nosed little weasel, my machine is smarter than the average script kiddie and immediately detected something was amiss.

On the slightly sophisticated side, the attacker used chattr to try to make clean-up a bit more difficult for me, denying the removal, replacement or renaming of offending files. However, the idiot pulled down a rootkit that should have replaced a number of system utilities and didn’t even use it to cover tracks. What a loser.

Unfortunately for me, when such things happen, I need to run a full analysis to be sure they didn’t leave anything behind. Believe it or not, that is easier and takes less time than restoring from known-good backups. So, a few hours later of letting the machine do most of my dirty work and confirming key details by hand, and we’re back up, patched and running.

Taming the beast – Part 3

As a brief follow-up to my experiences with the Tiger upgrade, I have some news about my iFruit. As you may recall, I had trouble syncing my PDA after updating to Tiger. The fine people at Mark Space made a valiant effort to walk me through isolating the issue, with little success. However, their 4.0.5 “final” update to the Missing
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Taming the beast – Part 2

After taming the Mini… it was time to update the iBook. This went pretty smoothly. I used the “upgrade” installer, since this was a machine that had never been tainted with the kind of firewire brain swap that seems to have affected the Mini originally. Having built Fink on the Mini in advance and done my homework on a few
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Taming the Beast – Part 1

After a few days of exploring Tiger on the Mini, I had a small but important laundry list of things that simply must be fixed before I can use it. First, the system seemed sluggish, which is odd because everyone that is happy with Tiger remarks on its speed. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Classic environment didn’t work at
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Tiger: First Impressions

The install on the Mini went rather smoothly. I popped in the install DVD, clicked “install,” rebooted, answered a few questions, and walked away. When I came back, the familiar LoginPanel.app greeted me with a list of users, inviting me to log in. This is where the only two issues I have experienced surfaced. First, the system was so busy
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