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1376
Living Room / Re: web hosts
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 21, 2014, 12:08 PM »
All right DC brain trust... my company is in need of a new web host for our clients, as Hostgator has been in a significant state of decline over the last couple years. Ideally we're looking for shared hosting plans as VPS managing/reselling has proven to be more trouble than it's worth for a shop as small as ours.  

I can read feature lists and prices as well as the next guy, but what I'd really like is recommendations based on real experience--especially if you've used a host for a long-ish time and are happy with them. Obviously reliability is important, customer service being a close second priority.


It's been a while, but if nothing else but for education, a few years back I did a slightly unorthodox survey of free (but payment greatly appreciated!) web hosts from FreeWebSpace.net.

The point is, a while back I wanted some simple hosting for my own projects and got tired of fake outfits folding in four months at a time, so I set out to find a couple long haul guys.

http://www.freewebsp...build-my-host-spread
(Tip - scroll to the end of the thread to post - you likely don't care about my multi post history to get there)

Of my four winners, the two I recommend are either Seraphim Labs or Decker Services. By now both have been in service for some 5+ years. Post in the thread to say hello and get some basic info to sign up because that forum saw a rash of fake signups but once they see you with my referral they'll know it's a different league.

Once you request hosting aka it's easy to prove you are not one of the junk spammers taking over that service area, you have a good shot at either. And they have decent techs to solve problems. At the total worst if you tell them TaoPhoenix sent you, you can get the other one to spot help any rare problem that pops up on the other's service, which is pretty rare.

1377
General Software Discussion / Re: Overclock help required !
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 21, 2014, 12:01 PM »
You didn't say what OS you are running. For Win Vista/7 and maybe Win8 there's a system setting to "tune to best performance" that tells it to quit wasting time on drawing Aero/esque beveled edges and stuff.

You should define "which program exactly do I want to run faster". So if it's just point-and-click, that's one fast and easy trick. If it's not a game, what else do you need to run faster? Aka why are you doing this?

1378
Non-Windows Software / Re: The Selinux coloring book
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 19, 2014, 07:40 AM »
That's epic and even a humanities ... uh ... type like me sorta understands!

1379

Yeah, nice Shades. While the timestamp on my copy is a little strange, apparently it did clear up a few dead index entries and stuff.

So let's hope that helps me.

1380
Please ... Take the time to run chkdsk C: /R completely (Don't make me beg damn it!). Because there is almost never only one error - there may only be one bad sector ... But there will be quite a bit of stuff riding on it.

Iceberg tips should not be ignored.

-Titanic.

Okay, I found time to do that last night. I don't know what it fixed because it rebooted after it was done, but I'll trust it did whatever useful things it wanted to.

1381
I have seen it let people down time and time again. The only reason it enjoys the popularity it does is because it's free.

There was also that little matter over the last few days where a defs update killed most XP boxes (and some 2003 servers too), no effect on Win 7 or 2008+ servers.  (That's System Center Endpoint Protection, which is MSE plus reporting.)  I couldn't help but wonder if there was a little "nudge" built into that.

Yikes! I didn't hear about this! I haven't downloaded new defs in a while - so I should avoid it?!!

1382
To comment on the original topic, friends don't let friends use Microsoft Security Essentials. Seriously!

I have seen it let people down time and time again. The only reason it enjoys the popularity it does is because it's free.

Well this is a bit of a surprise, I thought it was supposed to be at least decent. But now it's "yelling at me" about the end of OS support so for that reason as well as it's been saying "service stopped" several times now for the first time ever, I'll probably switch it out kinda soon.

1383
As far as I know, a defrag will not do much for you with regards to bad blocks. Checkdisk does move blocks of data around after it cannot repair bad blocks on your disk and marks these so the filesystem will not use them anymore.

That is at least the concept behind it. But often the capabilities of the software falls short and you have to resort to 3rd party software. HDSentinel, HDDscan (and for real pro's: MHDD) come to mind.

I ran part of a chkdsk and it did delete one bad index entry. But for the full scan I think the file check will take a long time "step 4 of 5" so I'll try to remember to run it all again before bed one of these days.

1384
Only after these more pedestrian causes have been eliminated should we start looking for signs of Ziggy Stardust's Uber hacker spiders from Mars.

But doesn't everybody do those first before running over to the PC security blogs?
And yes indeed, it does sound a lot like a HD just might be starting to go...

Well, not that I ran to a blog - it was more an off the cuff question based on general confusion. So if a couple of opinions are coming in re hardware failure, maybe that's "the lesser evil" but it's also where my skillset drops off a cliff. Meanwhile it's still okay as of today. I'll try a couple of those checks to see what's up. Maybe a defrag will move stuff off a bad sector too.

1385
Living Room / Re: Cute jokes' thread
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 16, 2014, 07:12 PM »

I like to occasionally post a joke note from some totally unrelated thread over here. Over in that sorting thread, Randall Munroe of xkcd made a guest blog on Reddit.

http://www.redditblo...-sorting-system.html

And then he coined an awesome little phrase:
"Locust Locus". And for some reason that struck me as a perfect little project for someone with time to burn to do to the Locus Plague of the Old Testament!

 ;D
1386
Okay, today was a weird day.

For no apparent reason while surfing what I think are safe sites, about 2PM my computer suddenly quit responding! Well, whatever etc, time to reboot. And then upon rebooting, processes started failing to load at very low levels! It was easy to tell that both mouse and keyboard were working, aka not a simple bad battery. But what was really scary is the comp didn't want to accept the function key to choose boot modes! (I think it's F8) to go into safe mode! Then when it did boot up (partially), it worked for like five seconds before doing anything would lock it up!

Has anyone here had their comp used in a botnet? What does that look like? That was my guess, though I was thinking virus, or hard drive dangers (though the pattern felt wrong for that one), and a couple other things. The suddenness and "thoroughness" were unnerving because the usual sequence of Go-To tricks weren't working. No easy Safe Boot. No easy System Restore.

I got a break when I went to the Bios and turned off Quickboot, and some logo setting, and something else. Then that slowed the machine down long enough to get the F8 boot menu to show, and Safeboot with networking worked, and it stayed there. So I made some copies of some important data to the spare internal drive. And I had browsers, so a vague memory led me to check the web and remember msconfig, where I turned off a bunch of stuff, a couple of which looked rather fishy. I went for a System restore to a couple of days ago, and that partially worked. Then on a boot in debug mode and a couple other variants, something finally gave way and MsSecEssentials sent a different notice "this process has stopped. Restart the process?" and then it's been fine since (though I haven't rebooted since all that!) So I still don't know if it's completely fixed.

Yeah, I need to do all those virus scans and stuff, but I think that can wait a little since it all seems to be back and I need to have my energy up for all that to concentrate. But it's leading me to think, is MS isn't officially doing security updates on XP anymore, how long before someone finds something really nasty and just goes mass comp hunting?

1387
Ya know, computing in the 80's with everyone's first starter machine just wasn't this hard. "Company sold products. Consumers took their pick of five that they wanted. Then the deal was done".

Are you kidding me? Back then if you needed a patch for your OS or agame...or a device driver you were either on the phone paying Ma Bell out the butt for long-distance charges or you were on an online service like CompuServ paying $6/hour...at 300 baud!

Even then there was no guarantee what you downloaded was going to fix your problem. And if it didn't, you were still out the money.

Naw, not kidding at all. A better way to put it is that without these multiple semi-redundant blogs/services, news simply didn't get out at all. Our family treated each machine like a disposable commodity - it either did whatever it did or three years later the newer flashier one had it baked in. It was a far different "paradigm" from what is going on now.

Another way to put it is that as a family pretty heavily on the Mac track early on, we didn't know about complicated 30 day prerequisite timelines to 0.1 Update 1's to early OS's. They just did whatever they did. So update to System 7 - yay. Then by the time you cared about System 8 (and Apple's Dark Period) a new machine already gave you all that goodness.

1388
Not clear to me - I presume you can still update to the prerequisite level after that date? If you can it is no different to pulling support for Windows XP SP1 after SP2 had been released a while. Just a mandatory free update to get future support which is business as usual for MS.

If you can't even get updates to take you to the prerequisite level to allow future updates then that is mad - there are plenty of Windows 8.1 machines on the shelves in shops that won't be at that level? And is the free upgrade from Windows 8 to 8.1 going to include the latest updates?
-Carol Haynes (April 15, 2014, 12:24 PM)

I dunno, some of you gang support clients and you are working too hard to figure this out. Pretty scary for "medium Joes" who are still grappling with the end of XP.

Ya know, computing in the 80's with everyone's first starter machine just wasn't this hard. "Company sold products. Consumers took their pick of five that they wanted. Then the deal was done".

I liked the simplicity of MS's screwup of Vista that Made WinXP and later Win7 the easy path to take. Now we both have to deal with Win8/Non-Metro's mess and another round of temporary destructible upgrade paths. It's just making the XP-Holdout option stronger until gawd help me Win9 ... is a win.

1389
Let's do some music silly.

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=TNRQVKjqKP0

Tell me the 30 seconds from the 2 Min mark doesn't just pwn you for an hour!

 ;D

1390
(see attachment in previous post)

(Name the pet something you remember)
Oh has nothing and related ever been so true!
1391
Post New Requests Here / Re: Folder Lock
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 14, 2014, 06:40 PM »
Hi, mahanaim, and welcome to the DonationCoder site.   :)  As you can probably guess, with the way the Windows file system works, what you want is not an easy thing to do.  Typically, it's going to require a low-level file system driver and that's well outside of the realm of a simple AHK script.

However it feels like another one of those things you'd just think that in 14 years of XP history, someone else has just wanted that! I just don't know how to hone in on it efficiently though.

"Innovation" - when you think your obvious little tool just can't be that hard to do, but you fail to find out the obscure guy who did it exactly once before!

1392
DC Gamer Club / Re: Rusty's Real Deal Baseball: Most Effed Up Game Ever
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 14, 2014, 06:36 PM »
Heh. A couple of thoughts.

First something tells me one of our veterans has seen text versions of this kind of thing way back in the old days, maybe though without the raw dollar spend aspect, but in game currency.

On the sillier side:
"DonationCoder starts out by giving you programs for free. But then by asking, with a very soft timeline, once someone in the CodingSnack section has bailed out your bacon, then you choose to give money. Then because while repeats are welcome, only one donation is "officially encouraged", so that makes the programs all free again for a while!"
--> Mouser Pwns Nintendo by ten years, and besides games it's programs that really help you!
 ;D :D
1393
Living Room / Re: Are your websites secure? The heartbleed bug
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 14, 2014, 01:34 AM »
Passwords, hmm? I never got motivated enough to get into those password vault programs - I just wanted the world to have at least a little simplicity. So I might just put a 1 onto the end of them all.

1394
Living Room / Re: Are your websites secure? The heartbleed bug
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 12, 2014, 08:45 AM »
http://www.usatoday....sco-juniper/7589759/

Reports coming in from unconfirmed sources that the NSA has been utilizing Heartbleed for years.

Of course, I have to say I totally saw this coming. This is the kind of massive security breach that would explain their uncanny ability to get into any system anywhere at any time. A simple exercise in spreading disinformation to seed people's trust in the affected library and cover up the flaw would allow them to preserve it for so many years unnoticed.

Which means that all those people concealing their activities using SSH, Tor, and proxies? Yeah. The NSA was way ahead of them.

-SeraphimLabs (April 11, 2014, 03:21 PM)

Yeah, just last year we were talking about the Agencies "looking dumb". How many Cheshire Cat levels does it take!? Look Dumb/Be Smart/Look Dumber/Be Smarter...

So if all those Tor/proxy tips never mattered anyway, then I guess I saved myself a chunk of time "just being dumb"...

1395
Living Room / Re: Are your websites secure? The heartbleed bug
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 10, 2014, 09:41 PM »
Ooh, right on time.

Slashdot's copy:

http://it.slashdot.o...as-an-honest-mistake

"The Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL wasn't placed there deliberately, according to the coder responsible for the mistake — despite suspicions from many that security services may have been behind it. OpenSSL logs show that German developer Robin Seggelmann introduced the bug into OpenSSL when working on the open-source project two and a half years ago, according to an Australian newspaper. The change was logged on New Year's Eve 2011. 'I was working on improving OpenSSL and submitted numerous bug fixes and added new features,' Seggelmann told the Sydney Morning Herald. 'In one of the new features, unfortunately, I missed validating a variable containing a length.' His work was reviewed, but the reviewer also missed the error, and it was included in the released version of OpenSSL."

1396
Living Room / Re: Are your websites secure? The heartbleed bug
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 10, 2014, 02:30 PM »
I can't help but have my tinfoil hats out for this one though. This will be the first time that I have ever heard of Linux having a crippling security flaw that was not also found in Windows. And for it to exist in such a vital library that has been in use for such a long period of time, all I can say is NSA was here.
-SeraphimLabs (April 10, 2014, 12:07 PM)

Checking the Wiki page now...
http://en.wikipedia..../wiki/Heartbleed_bug
"The vulnerability has existed since December 31, 2011, and the vulnerable code has been in widespread use since the release of OpenSSL version 1.0.1 on March 14, 2012"

So I'm lost, sometimes we joke about the Agency social media programs being rudimentary or whatever, but however this bug got in there, it took two years to find?! I thought there were like 50 geniuses scattered around the world who spend their days proofing out big ticket code. Different from bugs not getting fixed, if it wasn't even found for two years...

Ow. I think I cut myself shaving with Occam's Razor.

1397
Heh Crabby is on a roll!

 :)
1398
Living Room / Re: WinXP is officially dead!
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 10, 2014, 01:18 AM »
I actually think Win 8 will be the last (ok maybe second to last) "for sale" as opposed to "for lease" OS Microsoft will do.
...
Sometime around (or shortly after) the release of Windows 9, the era of being able to "buy" a boxed version of a Microsoft OS (or probably any other MS software product) will come to a close.
 (see attachment in previous post)
Brave new world folks! Brave new world...

Well, I'm hoping it's "shortly after" because I want one last good Win OS to ride into the sunset with and I'm banking hard that it's Win 9. With Steve Ballmer gone I'm really putting my hopes into that new CEO. He's got a big ship that won't turn corners fast, but I'm hoping he goes more towards the basics. And yes MS absolutely can allow another OS to sit on people's comps for 12 years. They just have to get very narrow metrics right.

1399
Living Room / Re: WinXP is officially dead!
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 09, 2014, 05:32 PM »
WinXP, the most successful OS of all time.  True?
To my mind, Windows XP's importance in history is on the level of the light bulb.

Or something. MS had nothing viable to offer for some eight years, so XP became "where it's at".
1400
Post New Requests Here / Re: Inverse filter for white windows
« Last post by TaoPhoenix on April 09, 2014, 04:02 PM »

I got pretty close even on Chrome with the combination of tricks I was talking about, but Chrome just blinks a white page before it remembers it's supposed to be using a theme. The best case I found was a Chrome theme called Hackervision but there are glitch spots.

Sorry!

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