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Author Topic: Geek Talk  (Read 28585 times)

Lindsey Buckinghmof

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #555 on: August 27, 2010, 08:47:46 PM »
Oh, wget!
yeah, that and webget have the horrifying -R recursive option. You don't want to use that on a really deep website. :eek:
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"...as hard as regular caulk" - Random Axe
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"lee marvin in drag is no way to spread the gospel, son." - TFJ
"It's one of our many romantic fantasies that keeps dragging us down as a species" - Random Axe;
"*drags taint* Oh cool, I didn't know you could do that." - mo.d
"You people are freaks. I can't take that kind of responsibility on right now." - :hoss:
"...there was more penis than I expected, which is not something I often have to say." - Random Axe

random axe

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #556 on: August 27, 2010, 08:49:59 PM »
I'm . . . not geeky enough for that kind of thing these days.

You used to be able to go to any of the shareware sites and search for web spider or crawler and find a zillion metasearch and auto-download tools, but now all I get is MP3 hunters, torrent assistants, and ugly fancy crap that's not right.
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PVC Barbie

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #557 on: August 27, 2010, 11:50:23 PM »
After something TERRIBLE happened with Netagent - I don't use any auto-downloaders. Never again. It ... lead to me destroying a HD with a 30+ pound magnet and some concrete solvent - and then tossing it in a dumpster behind the E. Mont P general store at 2 or something in the morning.
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"After walking away from the other people backstage, Justin Bieber found a place where we could be alone -- a bathroom. We went inside and immediately his personality changed drastically. He began touching me and repeatedly said he wanted to fuck the shit out of me."

Lindsey Buckinghmof

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #558 on: August 27, 2010, 11:51:47 PM »
Was Chris what'sisname on his way over to ask you to have a seat over there?
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"...as hard as regular caulk" - Random Axe
"21 years of marriage has dealt a death blow to all the local pizzerias." - :flipper:
"lee marvin in drag is no way to spread the gospel, son." - TFJ
"It's one of our many romantic fantasies that keeps dragging us down as a species" - Random Axe;
"*drags taint* Oh cool, I didn't know you could do that." - mo.d
"You people are freaks. I can't take that kind of responsibility on right now." - :hoss:
"...there was more penis than I expected, which is not something I often have to say." - Random Axe

stormneedle

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #559 on: August 28, 2010, 12:16:31 AM »
http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Web_scraping - I haven't written the MUMPS one yet, and the task isn't quite what you're looking for but it's close.
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“I'm generalizing from one example here, but everyone generalizes from one example. At least, I do.”

PVC Barbie

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #560 on: August 28, 2010, 12:18:29 AM »
Quote from: The Incredible Hmof on August 27, 2010, 11:51:47 PM
Was Chris what'sisname on his way over to ask you to have a seat over there?

Oh, we were way past that point. This would have been instant jail time. Ugh.
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"After walking away from the other people backstage, Justin Bieber found a place where we could be alone -- a bathroom. We went inside and immediately his personality changed drastically. He began touching me and repeatedly said he wanted to fuck the shit out of me."

bit zero

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #561 on: August 28, 2010, 12:26:58 AM »
wget's my tool of choice but it's not exactly what you'd call "easy to use" and has a tendency to try to mirror more than you want...
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random axe

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #562 on: August 28, 2010, 07:20:20 AM »
See, I used to have a good one that was very obedient about not leaving the domain you specified.  I can't even remember the name now.  I had one with "squirrel" in its name, but I don't think it was the good one.

The old ImageWolf / FileWolf programs would take a search term and just go looking, and there was often unexpected horror.  Rather like an incantation that doesn't specify a name.  Rig up a good pentacle, man.
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random axe

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #563 on: August 29, 2010, 12:39:29 PM »
I think I got my infected machine all cleaned up.  Malware still won't update unless I log in as the admin to do it, for some reason, even after a re-install, but otherwise it seems to be working correctly, and all the poison seems to have been removed.  Oddly enough, the trojan hid itself in the executable for a copy of Yamp that I had in a directory of stuff transferred from a really old machine.  Yamp!  I'd forgotten about old Yamp.

Anyway, this little adventure made me look at backing up my two main machines at home some more, and while trying to decide what was critical to have . . . I noticed that something's gone through my other machine and erased all the MP3 files.  Coincidence?  I haven't opened any emails from the hellniece on that machine in, like, years, if ever.

But WTF, man.  The album directories, etc, are all still there, but all the MP3 files are gone.  What really burns me is that there was not a single illegal MP3 file on that machine.  95% of it was just rips of CDs I still have somewhere, although a few of them have been lost or destroyed, but that isn't even the point.

:eyeroll:

:fuckyou:


I am kind of curious what would happen if I ripped a CD now, whether the MP3s would vanish or if it was a one-time thing.  Whatever did it is apparently able to elude AVG and Malwarebytes.
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random axe

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #564 on: September 02, 2010, 05:04:11 PM »
The MP3 thing bugs me more and more as time goes by, but it's a done deal, so . . . .  Meanwhile, if I leave the machine idle for about fifteen minutes, AVG pops up a warning that it nabbed a 'Generic Trojan' in the System Restore folder.  No matter how often it does this, it happens again.  Great!


Meanwhile, I noticed a drop in disk space, and some hunting around revealed that Opera has a new way of storing its History now . . . and the new method tends to mysteriously eat up unlimited disk space.  The Opera people know about this but apparently haven't fixed it yet.

My History setting tells Opera to remember the last 5000 addresses -- separate from any content caching -- which for some reason was taking up over 520 MB of disk space.

Seriously, software people, just stabilize the damn app and leave it alone.  Want to add features?  Firefox has the right idea on this one.  Keep shit separate as much as possible.  Don't break what's already working.
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mo

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #565 on: September 02, 2010, 05:18:48 PM »
I was reading a thread the other day where several people were expressing disappointment with AVG and recommending avast! instead. YMMV
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random axe

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #566 on: September 02, 2010, 05:21:49 PM »
I'm in favor of anything that fulfills the two conditions Works and Can Be Afforded By Me.

AVG has mostly been a dynamite free product, but it's just failing to cope with whatever my hellniece infected my machine with, and it, too, tends to leave huge old files on the drive.  My machines have small (by current standards) drives, and I have the world's shittiest luck with flash drives, so I hate to clutter up with gunk.

I'll give avast a look.  Thanks!  :thumbsup:
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random axe

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #567 on: September 09, 2010, 06:19:11 PM »
Longish story; :doh: ending(s):

So . . . yesterday, I was getting Generic Trojan warnings from AVG.  The warnings came from SVCHOST (bane of my happiness) in some magical system restore directory that AVG couldn't do anything about.  Meh meh meh.

Turn everything off, log into Admin account, update AVG, turn off System Restore, and disconnect from the internet.  The full scan takes like two hours, and I'm too paranoid to leave the machine logged into the Admin account and connected to the net for two hours, especially unsupervised.  Start full scan.

Go to work.  Come home hours later.

Scan found nothing this time.  Well, fine.  Close AVG and fire up Malwarebytes.  Try to update, and I get a generic I Can't Update And I Don't Know Why!!!11! error message.  In the past, that's meant the damned system's infected with something smart enough to block security software updates.  Crap!

Yes, it took me over an hour of effing around before I remembered I'd disconnected the internet connection.  Why can't Windows automatically notice when you're trying to access the net but have it disconnected and TELL YOU?  Seriously.  This would not be difficult.

Bonus:  While Malware was running, I happened to glance at its progress and note that it was scanning and scanning and scanning a temp directory I'd never seen before in a weird subdirectory of the root Documents and Settings directory.  WTF?  When it was done, I went and looked.  The subdirectory was only visible from Admin and had 11 GB of trash files.  I'd had problems with corrupted files on a flashdisk like a year before, and every time the system had tried to recover them it had apparently created temp subdirectories there with garbled versions of the files.  A bunch of the corrupted files were zip files, and those had ballooned gruesomely when it tried to recover them.

Mind you, this machine has a 40 GB drive, so 11 GB of garbage is annoying.  Also annoying is that no Remove Junk Files utility had ever found them, either.

Fortunately, and surprisingly, Windows let me erase them without comment or complaint. :shrug:
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random axe

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #568 on: September 10, 2010, 02:52:30 PM »
OK, the latest one:

I have two almost identical ThinkPads, running allegedly identical Windows XP SP3 installs.  Each one has an Admin account and one user account, all password-protected.

For stupid reasons, on one of them the Admin account appears on top at the Windows log in screen, and on the other the Admin account appears at the bottom.  This latter one gets the most use.  As a result, on the other one, last night, I accidentally clicked on Admin but typed the User password.

To my dismay, Windows accepted the password and logged me right in.  I hastily logged back out and logged in with the User account.  The passwords are not similar.  I tried this on purpose today, and, yep, it logs right in.  Today I noticed that at least it actually logs me in to the User account, not the Admin.  Nothing other than those two passwords will log in at all.

On the other machine, this little trick doesn't work -- Windows actually wants the right password for the account you're trying to log into.  So WTF?  In a way, it's convenient.  I just type the password for the account I want.  But it's not as advertised.

Tomorrow, if I remember, I'll try this on the machine at work, which has three accounts rather than two.
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random axe

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Re: Geek Talk
« Reply #569 on: September 10, 2010, 05:04:11 PM »
Never mindish:  I finally noticed that one of the machines is actually XP Professional and the other is XP Home Edition.  They have the exact same build number, but the interface is slightly different in ways that I thought before were just my failing to get Windows settings configured how I wanted them.

:eyeroll:

XP Home Edition is the one that just logs into whichever account I enter the password for, regardless of which account I told it I was trying to log into.

Now I just have a CRC data error to deal with . . . apparently I'm being punished for something.
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