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Messages - Ehtyar [ switch to compact view ]

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1
Good morning dc!!

I know I'm a month late, but perhaps I haven't completely missed the party (fashionably late...right?). What a great thread to read. Thanks mouser for harassing me until I got in here (you get the bounty it seems), and congratulations on such an amazing achievement (no we cannot pretend we walked through the wrong door)!! Unfortunately I cannot claim to be a lurker like many others, I must live with the shame of having abandoned DC. Who could possibly believe it's been almost eight years since I first came to DC, and it's been two since I was last here :(. I can't really say quite what happened, I guess things just kind of got in the way and much like with f0dder a nagging sense of guilt kind of crept up on me. I've received several emails about this thread, but I knew it was going to take forever to get through the existing posts (how could I possibly post without reading through them all?), and that I'd end up writing half a book in response, so it had to wait until things calmed down a bit IRL (my apologies mouser). In the end it looks like it's taken about three hours haha.

As a quick asside, I'm afraid I must concur with db90h Mouse Man, we should have SSL by default up in here. Paging Gothic Man! Also the server costs do seem incredibly high. It's high time I did DC some favors, so hit me up in PM if you're in need of any help there.

--boring stuff starts here (or perhaps two paragraphs ago)--

So I guess the biggest change has been my moving to the USA (away from the "insane crazy creatures" [yes I saw that mouser, and the other one like four posts ago, you just watch yourself]) in November last year (and who knew we had so many Australians? This is basically one big Aussie thread). It's been great so far (except for living in Miami, yuk). Big change number two is that I'm now married (the reason for moving to the US) which is awesome (to a guy in case of any of the third-person pronouns I use later on confuse anyone). It's been a long time coming (been doing the long-distance thing for as long as I've been on DC), but had to wait for DOMA repeal etc etc. He's graduating next week with a PhD in forensic psychology (have you graduated yet mouser or are still getting crap from Josh on a daily basis?), and the day after we'll be moving up to Virginia (yaaaaay!) to accommodate his working for the FBI in a one-year post-doc doing deception detection research.

In other news that will surprise everyone, I'm no longer an avid news reader. That too went by the wayside as real life got in the way. The main reason for that was probably the reduction (or elimination) of my daily commute when I started working remotely. In general I've fallen away from most of the online communities I used to be a part of in favor of devoting more time to real life. I miss it a lot actually. I tend to peek at the front page of Reddit during those standing-in-line type moments, though I've probably been spending more time on /r/thebutton recently than I'd care to admit. I'm a little less cagey these days about putting personal information online, but you'll still never catch me on Instagram or Facebook or any of that crap - I can't stand LinkedIn as it is. I still can't handle coffee, but caffeine (usually in the form of black tea, which until I left home was drunk from one of the DC mugs which mum insisted on keeping so now I'm using some target crap) has become a dietary staple. Some days I wonder if it keeps some kind of undiagnosed ADHD at bay. I'm still not keeping myself in shape like I should, but the old ball-and-chain has me eating fairly well (mostly - the easter candy...well...). Some random memories that came back as I was reading this thread include meeting App, my lovely mugs (and mouser being far too generous with the swag, especially mailing it to .au), the fun times in IRC, TNT (of course), and that one time Josh learned how use a webcam (*shudder*).

On the work front, I'm now a filthy Mac user (like seemingly everyone else on this thread). I hate Apple just as much as always, but it was a necessary change to continue into the work I wanted to do (and, honestly, Microsoft are far too retarded/clueless these days to be trusted with an operating system). I do appreciate how much more it resembles Linux than Windows does, and there's a pretty decent community around making it even more-so (homebrew mainly). I'm still a hardcore android user, currently on a 1+1 running CM11 (see, I don't even have time to update my handset these days! :_(). I'm still an open source nut, and have long since moved away from the desktop-support side of IT, and am now working mostly with high-scale Linux infrastructure and software development, primarily for early start-ups (keeping my distance from the suits and 9-5ers as much as possible). It's a lot of fun, and who could turn the opportunity to be constantly learning new stuff on the job? I'm currently working one full-time job and one part-time job (the full time since I got US employment authorization, and the part-time is winding down the Australian job I kept while waiting for authorization) which is burning me out pretty effectively, but the part-time should be over soon.

--boring stuff probably ends here--

Alright, that's enough bla bla bla from me I think. I'll sick my head into the (new, as I understand it?) IRC channel in the next couple of weeks (probably after the move) and see if I can't troll Joshua a little. Thanks again mouser, it's been so great reading this thing, and congratulations again on a job very well done.

Ehtyar.

2
Living Room / Re: Amazon creepy ...
« on: March 12, 2013, 05:37 PM »
In addition to Adblock Plus, NoScript, Ghostery, Cookie Monster and RequestPolicy, I also use RefControl, which may be of interest to y'all. Together they make browsing new sites pretty painful, but once a site is set up how you like it it's all good.

Thanks for the tip on Collusion.

Ehtyar.

3
Living Room / Re: Exchange E-Mail hosting recommendation needed
« on: December 04, 2012, 08:08 PM »
Gmail will do calendars in Outlook. A business account is $50/yr/pp.

Ehtyar.

4
General Software Discussion / Re: Are you going to wait for Windows 9?
« on: November 25, 2012, 06:27 PM »
I haven't read the thread, but I will be waiting for 9 in the hopes that Microsoft come to their senses. If not, I'll either continue to wait depending on how Windows 7 support is still going or finally try to make the move to Linux as my primary desktop OS, though that would make using Windows at work painful.

Ehtyar.

5
Developer's Corner / Re: FTC to give $50,000 for robocall solution
« on: November 01, 2012, 09:41 PM »
$50k wouldn't fund research for a terribly long time - especially without the ancillary resources available to the government. Typical government - "look, we're doing something about it!" when really they're just frivolously spending your money. Wonder how much it costs them per year to handle all the reports and followup.

Ehtyar.

6
Living Room / Re: Dropbox Security Failure
« on: August 01, 2012, 07:04 PM »
Any company not comparing every major password breach against their own users' credentials (especially the freakin' staff!!) (not to mention having a higher authentication barrier for staff) should be ****.

Ehtyar.

7
General Software Discussion / Re: Simple means of joining images?
« on: April 30, 2012, 08:53 PM »
Not sure how much control you're after, but for the sake of completeness ImageMagick/GraphicsMagick convert with the -append switch will join images.

Ehtyar.

8
Living Room / Re: Arrested and Convicted for Tweeting in the UK!!!
« on: April 17, 2012, 07:00 PM »
My hope is that any kind of significant widespread monitoring of the internet will serve to promote the use of SSL. Granted SSL is flawed, and will continue to get more expensive to implement until Microsoft wake the f**k up or IPv6 is fully deployed, but it should be sufficient to protect those of us who care (and thus keep one of our own eyes on the SSL certs and ciphers our browsers are accepting).

Ehtyar.

9
Living Room / Re: Arrested and Convicted for Tweeting in the UK!!!
« on: April 17, 2012, 12:23 AM »
NSFW and "illegal"
The "spokesman for Bexley Council" is obviously a retarded cunt.

:Thmbsup:

Ehtyar.

10
Living Room / Irrelephant
« on: April 16, 2012, 10:01 PM »
irrelevant.jpg

Ehtyar.

11
Living Room / Re: Spoons
« on: April 16, 2012, 09:49 PM »
As though we needed a reason to institutionalize Stevie.

Spoons.
That. Was. Brilliant.

Ehtyar.

12
Since the conversion will be in bulk, I'd recommend making direct use of ffmpeg (powers most video converters including the aforementioned winff) or mencoder (sister to mplayer - choose/find a build that suits) (alt1) (alt2).

If using ffmpeg, you're probably after a command line similar to this (audiophiles/videophiles please stop reading here):

Code: Text [Select]
  1. ffmpeg -i "<input>" -vcodec libxvid -acodec libmp3lame -ac 2 -sameq -f avi "<output>"

See docs here for any other bells and whistles you might find useful. Be warned that using -sameq is likely to make some of your videos rather large - consider modifying bit/frame rates or frame size to compensate (lossy).

Ehtyar.

13
Would GrepWin do?

Ehtyar.

14
General Software Discussion / Re: BULK Rename Utility
« on: April 04, 2012, 08:51 PM »
rename.pl  :Thmbsup:

Ehtyar.

15
Living Room / Re: Microsoft is Censoring MSN Messenger Chats
« on: March 28, 2012, 12:21 AM »
As though we needed an excuse to switch to Jabber/XMPP.

Ehtyar.

16
Reads like satire. If everyone in this thread so far hadn't taken it seriously, I'd be inclined to think it was a joke.

Ehtyar.

17
General Software Discussion / Re: Is WinZip still worth updating?
« on: February 07, 2012, 04:33 PM »
People still use Winzip?
People still use WinRAR?

Ehtyar.

18
Living Room / Re: Don't be a free user?
« on: December 15, 2011, 12:11 AM »
To avoid this problem, avoid mom-and-pop projects that don't take your money!
Or get your sh!t out of the "cloud", and stick to Free Software that you contribute to.

Ehtyar.

19
Up until recently, browser compatibility. Same reason we're still using dedicated IPs for SSL instead of server name indication. However, I'd agree that there is no longer an excuse for either of these not being implemented.

Ehtyar.

20
Living Room / Re: Products designed to fail, a documentary
« on: November 11, 2011, 05:49 AM »
+1 Gigabyte. I've no experience with ASROCK personally, though my last employer used ASROCK in the white boxes they built before switching to dell, and many of the more recent white boxes often outlasted the Dells (though that's not saying much).

Ehtyar.

21
Living Room / Re: Products designed to fail, a documentary
« on: November 08, 2011, 08:49 PM »
Jeez I wish I had this kind of spare time.

Ehtyar.

22
Living Room / Re: Products designed to fail, a documentary
« on: November 06, 2011, 07:17 PM »
I must say I am a member of the naive club here.

Most of my troubles had been with clothing - fabric that just doesn't hold up, pairs of pants typically last me months, not years. For quite some time I've been considering things before I buy them in relation to how long I expect them to last. I now purchase pants and shoes from stores that sell to tradesman, I purchase business laptops for personal use (my lenovo laptops are without a doubt the longest lasting and most indestructible pieces of technology I own), I build my own desktops from parts from vendors who have a history of avoiding bad capacitor suppliers and so on. Without being consciously aware of it, I've spent the past few years of my life gradually moving from mainstream purchasing behaviours to ones I expect to result in the best possible longevity of what i buy.

The Lightbulb Conspiracy has made me very concious of this process now. I'm at a point now where I'm happy with almost all the products I purchase, longevity-wise.

That said, watching that video made me absolutely livid, and I'm astounded that the ongoing degradation of quality has not been more noticeable to the general populace. Products from certain companies with bad reputations always struck me as obviously of low quality in one aspect or another, but intentionally designing them to fail brings corporations down to a whole new low. My first thought was "how is this legal?!?!", but you quickly come to realise that those who would be in a position to protect consumers from this type of behavour are most likely getting more than their fare share of the money getting thrown at bad products. Disgusting.

Ehtyar.

23
DC Gamer Club / Re: Any Magicka Fans Around?
« on: October 21, 2011, 08:11 PM »
- was bugged as hell - dunno how does it work now,
-fenixproductions (October 21, 2011, 07:56 PM)
As mentioned previously, this was resolved fairly early on. Apparently Steam released the game prior to completion.
- multiplayer was not fun for me at all - too many things on the screen for such low resolution.
-fenixproductions (October 21, 2011, 07:56 PM)
Not sure what you mean by this.

Ehtyar.

24
+1 for Security Essentials. I agree with all the other choices except for Firewall - those things generate more confusion than helpfulness, and I don't see how they help prevent infection (assuming the machine is not directly connected to the Internet, in which case you're buggered regardless).

As for rescuing the machine, I'd probably just schedule restore point creation daily or something like that. Little effort involved, and it should sort out most types of infection.

Should any businessy types come across this thread, a skim of the NSA hardening guides (page erroring at time of writing, google cache here) can provide you with some helpful nuggets.

Ehtyar.

25
DC Gamer Club / Re: Any Magicka Fans Around?
« on: October 21, 2011, 06:12 PM »
I should also mention that you're gonna want a few hours of solo play under your belt to get the hang of casting and pick up some of the more elementary magicks. Generally speaking, the more powerful spells involve more (or more complex arrangements of) the elements, so if you wanna dive into co-op or duel as quick as possible looking a few up online might not be a bad idea.

A few hours? :tellme: I had the idea of just playing through the campaign from the beginning (as a noob) cooperatively with someone else. Is that not a good idea?
Well I'd expect you'd have trouble contributing to gameplay. As with any game, experience makes a better player, so the experienced player would likely end up walking the noob through the levels. If both players were noobs, it wouldn't be a problem though.

Ehtyar.

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