Linux Mint Saves the Day

So, there my wife and I were...  Just sitting in front of our television, preparing to continue our binging of Jessica Jones when, for some presently unknown reason our media computer would not boot.  After a bit of investigation I determined that the six year old Seagate hard drive had ceased working properly.  At times the BIOS would see the drive and Windows would partially boot but inevitably lock.  Other times, the BIOS saw no hard drive.

So...  No Netflix, no Winamp, no YouTube, no Hulu...  Nothing but on-the-air broadcasts.  We live in a rather rural area that is only covered by Iowa PBS, and affiliate stations for ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox.

Last night I thought, rather than buy a new hard drive for this old computer, why not just run Linux Mint from a live flash drive?  And there it was...  Just that easy.  Well...  almost...

After getting Linux Mint running on a 16GB USB flash drive, I tried Netflix using Firefox.  Netflix complained that the browser wouldn't handle it.  OK, I download, install and try Chromium.  Nope...  Same thing.  After 30 minutes I discovered the solution...

If you want to watch Netflix on Linux without doing a lot of tweeking, use the Google Chrome browser.  Just install and use. No tweeking or adjusting.  It just works.

Many thanks to the Linux Mint and Google Chrome folks!

Anyone Else Tired???

So, this is my "on-call week" for week.  That means I need to be available constantly from 8AM Monday through 8AM on the next Monday to fix things at work.  Usually not much breaks; us programmers don't like to piss-off the other programmers when they are on-call by writing shit code.  And...  none of us want to get 'the call' from any of our bosses.  Seriously, we are all professional and most of us have worked where I am employed for the last fifteen years.  Personally, I am at nineteen years later this year.

Anyway, being on-call occasionally requires waking up at any hour of the night to fix something that is broken.  Two nights ago something little broke at about 5AM.  It was a simple repair but I couldn't go back to sleep.  Last night I had trouble falling asleep and this morning had to wake up at 4AM to assist with a software roll-out.

I'm tired.

Over the years I have created a list of activities that are verboten on days such as these.  This list includes: buying things online; bidding on items in online auctions; signing anything important; investing; handling power tools; motorcycle riding (or bicycle riding for that matter); boating; building bon-fires and working on the household electrical system.

This morning I added another item to my list of verboten activities...  updating computer operating systems.

I foolishly thought updating my Debian Linux machine would be a no-brainer...  Log on as root and apt-get update and then apt-get upgrade.  Several packages did indeed update.  Even saw a few comments about a kernel upgrade.  No biggie.  I just sat back, focusing on my coffee and the software rollout, allowing the upgrade to continue.

Coffee break.  I check the upgrade and YEA, it is complete.  I then start  my backup script; just a mount and then a call to unison.   BBBZZZTTTTTT!!!!!!!  I see an error...

mount error: cifs filesystem not supported by the system

You see...  I have a Verbatim NAS I use as a hot backup for all my PCs.  My Linux backup script simply uses mount to connect to the NAS and unison to perform the backup.  After the update/install it was just not going to work!  I scrambled...  My Windows machines could connect to the NAS.  My other Linux computers could connect as well.  I was pissed.  I searched and poked and tried different things for hours.

Then...  after several coffee's and a few ef-bombs, something occurred to me...  I hadn't rebooted the machine.  Shit!  I rebooted and SHAZAM, all is good in my Debian Linux world.  Nap time... that's allowed.

What to do with all that speed???

So, computers based on quantum physics are already being planned, designed and in some cases even being created.  The electronics used in quantum computing do not rely on relatively slow semiconductors; they use near instantaneous quantum technology.  No, I don't know the details, but I do know that once some developers get access, there will be abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions built, to the point where a quantum computer will perform about as well as a 80386 running OS/2.

A Base-64 Decoder That Works!

Let's face it...  debugging ASP.NET production websites can be challenging.  HTML sessions are 'stateless', meaning from one post to the next, the server has no idea what post came first.   For example, let's say there is a website that prompts the user for their name on one page, and on the subsequent page the user is prompted for their address.  Well, the server has no intrinsic way to join the data together from those two pages to save it all in a table somewhere.

Web scripting language use various methods to store this state information.  Some use cookies to store the data from one page to another.  Some use a unique key, placed into a cookie, or in the URL as a parameter to retrieve the data from an internal 'session store' on the server.  ASP.NET can save the session state several ways.  One way to save part of the session state is in something called a ViewState.  This is basically the state of a page; just part of the entire session state.

Well, this ViewState is stored right in the web page as a 64 bit encoded string.  It's not encoded but definitely looks that way.  It's unreadable without a decoder.  Anyway...  If something is stored in the ViewState, programmers can have a bitch of a time trying to pull it apart and see the data.  But...  This information can be invaluable to debugging a production problem.   There are varied ViewState tools on the web for decoding this gobeldygook into something that is somewhat coherent.  I use Base64 decoder and encoder at motobit.  It's simple and works.

So, Trump Is Our President

What the hell is this company coming to???  Think I will create a series of these...  Share as you wish.  Some may not be safe for work; you have been warned!

Simple Is Still Simple

Yes, contrary to the conventional state of technology and computer programming, simple is still simple.  Well, at least it should be.

Quite frequently I read different articles about programming in an attempt to maintain professional relevance.   Some are well written articles on good programming techniques.  Some are poorly written but the core material is still good.  Some are well written pieces about some fluff fad and then there are occasionally the poorly written article about some programming technique or library or concept  that has 'bad idea' written all over it.

Solution to DDOS Attacks from the IoT

Last Friday, October 21st, the company DYN was the recipient of a rather massive DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack.  Companies and tinkerers won't like this simple solution because it causes them to do a little extra work.  If this potential solution doesn't solve the problem, it would certainly mitigate it.

It's simple.  For those old enough to recall free AOL disks, remember how many included an account password printed on the CD/disk case?  Well, the same thing could be done for IoT devices.  Manufacturers of these things could simply print two random English words on a label and stick it on the IoT Device.  This password is burnt into the device as its factory default.  There is no standard factory default.  Let's face it...  The bulk of people using and installing IoT devices either don't know there is a password on their new-fangled refrigerator, or they just don't care to change it.

Seriously

water-wood
january-carolina
protien-curious
wrecked-quipped

These passwords would be so much better than admin or system or the ever-popular password.