Over the holiday weekend, I experienced the ultimate computer security mechanism:
“Spontaneous Security”
I was using my new Dell Latitude E6420 to do some network reconfiguration when the machine started acting weird with regard to the network.
Since this machine runs Windows 7, I decided to just reboot it to clear the network configuration.
After I restarted the machine I was asked for a password by the BIOS.
The odd thing was … I never set a BIOS password.
OK, it’s kind of obvious that GoDaddy is getting desperate … after the whole SOPA flap, and their rather abrupt back tracking, I decided that enough was enough … it’s time to move domain registrars.
The first step in moving registrar’s is to remove the transfer lock on the domains … this lock prevents the domain from being transfered to another registrar without your permissions.
When I tried to do this at Go Daddy, I noticed a new bit of text on the dialog …
“Go Daddy opposes SOPA”.
Um … yeah … right.
Sorry guys, but you can’t change your positions that fast.
A lot of my peers are getting active on ‘Professional’ social networking sites … like LinkedIn.
The question I have is: If you worked at a company that went through a number of acquisitions (like I do) … do you list the employment at each company individually from the date of the aquisition … or do you use the date that you started with the first company, but still list the new company?
This is a case of Discover card FAIL followed by a Discover card WIN.
In early December, Bally Fitness sold the bulk of it’s health clubs to LA Fitness.
As you might have heard in local business news, the transfer was not handled very well by Bally or LA Fitness.
Well, to add insult to injury, Bally almost screwed me over.
In late November, they charged my Discover card $240 for my annual renewal … unfortunately, I had never approved the charge.
Our area has never gotten good cell phone coverage. Doesn’t really mater what carrier we used … AT&T or Verizon.
When AT&T announced that it was going to be making “MicroCells” available, I decided to get one … as it would help our cell phone coverage.
The MicroCell has been working fine for more than a year … but, all of a sudden (or so it seemed), it stopped working correctly.
I contacted AT&T and they tried a few things and asked me to try cycling power (unplugging it and plugging it back in). Nothing worked. I asked them to check to see if it was still under warranty … it wasn’t.
The Illini Secular Student Alliance responds to the notorious Brother Jed …
We will oppose your hate and venom with love and laughter, and we will win
Brother Jed is a frequent visitor to many college campuses where he preaches fire & brimstone to students on the public areas.
I actually saw Jed when I was attending (albeit briefly) Illinois State University back in the mid 80’s.
His strategy was pretty simple … if you weren’t as devout as he was (and nobody is, of course), you were going to hell. He simply yelled and screamed the same mantra ad nauseam.
In my opinion, Brother Jed has a serious psychiatric problem that needs treatment. But I pretty much think the same about most religious extremists.
You can find more information about Brother Jed on Wikipedia.
A while ago I wrote about my iPhone Complaint … where all the accessories I was looking at were designed to fit the iPhone itself and not when it was in a case.
I was expecting to the have the same complaint about my new Motorola ATRIX … but, so far, it looks like I won’t.
I purchased a the Car Dock accessory for the ATRIX and was expecting to have to remove the phone from it’s case whenever I wanted to put it into the dock.
OK, I’ve had this phone a few weeks … time for me to list some of the things that I don’t like about it.
First a caveat … in general I do like this phone a lot. Some of the things I’m about to list are possibly due to policies imposed by the mail services I’m using.
Here’s my list … in no particular order … Continue reading
It’s happened again … I had some really GOOD tech support.
The phone adapter for our VOIPo service died … no dial tone, no connection, nothing.
Oddly enough, I could log in to the devices web interface … so I contacted VOIPo customer support. After a few email exchanges, it was determined that they would need to do some interactive diagnostics to determine what was going wrong.
I called them and talked to James … he had me test a few things … and then said something truly amazing … “Could you put the VOIP adapter in to your routers DMZ so I could take a look at it directly?”.
Here’s a problem I just encountered … and, unfortunately, haven’t figured out a solution.
A customer is trying to run my Eclipse RCP application … but it’s crashing because it can’t find ‘com.mercury.javashared.agentloader.AgentBootstrap’ class (which is apparently part of the HP QuickTest Professional product).
Turns out they had the ‘JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS’ environment variable set to ‘-agentlib:jvmhook’ at the system level (set in the Windows control panel).
This was causing the boot loader to try and load the class that couldn’t be found.
A temporary work around is to set the JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS environment variable to blank every time they launch the application … but that’s a major pain in the long term.
I’d like to fix this by finding a way to override the JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS environment variable in the eclipse.ini file, or possibly providing a different ‘-agentlib’ parameter option that will supersede the existing value.
I guess I could provide a batch file that clears the environment variable before invoking the application … but that’s kind of kludgy (IMO).
Of course, any product that sets a global environment variable such as this is (at least in my opinion) seriously broken. The only global environment variable that any application should set (or even be allowed to set) is maybe the path.