Blag

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/entertainment/5236087/fireworks-storm-erupt-sydney/

So the Sydney NYE celebrations are supposed to be an epic success this year, with 3 new types of fireworks (horizontal, sparkler and sunpods), 2 tonnes more fireworks used this year than previous celebrations, 100% carbon neutrality bla bla bla.

Guess I’ll be alternating between watching it live on TV and listening for the ring of pagers, as the casualty wards fill, and they start calling in backup staff.

Meanwhile, back to conjuring up my list of new year’s resolutions to break.

So I was at the “De Malaya” buffet restaurant tonight, a small to medium sized establishment just on Wicks Road (North Ryde) chomping through another plate of chips/prawn crackers/peanut sauce with chicken/black bean beef/whatever happened to take my fancy.

Having got quite bored as parents were chatting up the boss, (a friend, BTW, not to try and wean free drinks off him), I couldn’t help noticing a rather odd outfit sitting opposite – 4 caucasians. Not that unusual in itself, given the restaurant is on a busy street and all sorts of flotsam and jetsam meander in at all hours but their appearance and behaviour kept me amused for quite some time.

Going clockwise around the table, we had Nikki Webster, Crabbe from Harry Potter, Guy infatuated with Summer from Napoleon Dynamite, and copper from the movie Hot Fuzz.

…

Fuck.

This post is beginning to sound like something a chap in tweed, drinking earl grey might spout, while pondering whether or not to go to the Tower of London to ask the blimey’s for his bowler hat back. (Perhaps you’ve noticed the beige coloured text, added as an afterthought?)

Oh well, may as well post the crapeesh I’ve spouted at 2:08am in the morning.

*bangs head on table*

Real men don’t speak in literary English.

Nearly all tech gadgets are shipped with preset defaults, for quick setup and ease of use for the less technically minded. People use IE6/7 as it’s shipped with their computer (*gag*), browser home pagea are set to incumbent websites (www.tpg.com.au, www.msn.com etc), mobile phones get sold with cellular network kow-towing built in, Windows XP is sold with the garish “luna” theme etc etc.

This leads to problems when the usernames and passwords are left as publically known defaults – admin, user, abc123, username, and so on as it left people open to hijacking, identity theft, malware infections and the like. Manufacturers soon cottoned on and most devices now ship with stickers advising owners to create their own unique login, and to customise their security settings.

Which leads to some rather unusual names. Take the following wireless router SSIDs discovered while cruising down the street in the car with a laptop:

• ya-mum
• PENIS
• motorola8805 (default, no doubt)
• TPG_internet
• Myrouter
• bigtits
• Belkinrouter
• iinetadsl1500256
• fruitcake
• lollipops
• vaginaface
• subaruimprezzaftw
• lol
• myneighbourisgay
• rosepetal
• pencil
• fuck
• shitface
• johntchaikovsky

Interesting insight into people’s minds… makes you wonder what they were thinking when they set up their internet connection to go a-surfin.

Hmmm…

My beloved padded chair/step ladder thingy has claimed another victim – my mobile charger.

Cables seem to be sexually attracted to the chairs legs, as I often find them underneath the chair’s feet, in the process of being mangled. Victims as of 29/12/08:

• 2x Telephone cables
• 3x 10A 240V extension cables
• 1x Nokia phone charger lead
• 1x Headphones (well the left earbud anyway)
• 1x Hairdryer power cord
• 1x Paper shredder power cord

Time to fit foam padding to the feet?

The Netcomm NB5Plus4 ADSL2+ Modem Router. The perfect example of German engineering and precision.

Whoops, did I say German engineering and precision.? I meant cost cutting and poor design.

The modem/router is useless. It constantly crashes, and I have to reboot it up to several times a day. Symptoms include:

1. Forgetting what DNS is, whenever you run bittorrent, or any other program which opens many network connections simultaneously. The only way to access websites is by entering in the IP address directly
2. Refusing to route any data whatsoever when the ambient temperature exceeds 25*C
3. Overheating and locking up whenever the throughput is higher than ~ 1mbps, or when you stream multimedia or download large files
4. Internal web server/user interface not responding to commands after the modem has been left on for more than ~ 7 days
5. Throughput slowly decreasing over time to the point where the LAN connection is dropped, especially noticeable when transferring large files between PCs
6. Freezing, and refusing to do anything when there are more than 5 clients connected at a time
7. Randomly disconnecting computers

Rather than rant and rave unproductively, I shall point out its flaws… before melting a hole through the f!@% thing with thermite.

There are two problems with the router – insufficient RAM, and poor enclosure design, leading to overheating.

Whenever you open multiple network connections (e.g. Bit torrent, which may open hundreds at a time), the router chipset, or CPU, in this case the Texas Instrument AR7 chip can not handle the load, and in combination with the limited ram available, simply crashes or drops connections. Think of it as like running Windows Vista on a Pentium 200mhz with 8MB of RAM. It would have cost Netcomm all of… 40c more to upgrade the RAM and cache size, but they decided to reduce costs and make an inferior product.

Also, the enclosure which Netcomm designed for housing the circuitry is unsuitable, as it provides inadequate ventilation. Like conventional PCs, the router also crashes when overheated. It looks as though Netcomm has gone for style over functionality, though to be honest, it looks like rubbish anyway.

While upgrading the RAM and cache is not possible without extensive effort, a simple hackjob fix would be to either remove the top of the enclosure, or to fit the chipset with a heat sink and drill additional ventilation holes in the case.

*NB: I think Oz Techeducate (www.oztecheducate.org) (the site providing free blog hosting for me) was run using a NB5Plus4 router several months ago, when they had server issues and had to resort to a backup link. Explains why the backup was frequently offline too… crappy router :@

Seeing as I’ve been getting a lot of hits from Whirlpool users, for all you those who have ended up here looking for the firmware updates, or help with Bit Torrent and/or NAT, try sending a Whim to Quentin (Rep for Billion/Minitar). His profile is at: http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-user.cfm?id=87096

Related: Billion 7401VGP R3 (http://theparanoidtroll.com/blog/?p=155), More (http://theparanoidtroll.com/blog/?p=242)

Heh, call me a fanboi, but Internode now has the 2nd largest ADSL/ADSL2+ network coverage in Australia.

Yep, almost as large as hellstra (telstra).

They have access to Agile (their sister company), Optus and Telstra DSLAMS, which achieves near full coverage of Australia. It’s also a godsend to those on unprofitable exchanges where Telstra is the only ISP to have DSLAMS installed, or those on RIM/CMUX’s who could previously only achieve 3mbps, if they didn’t sign up to Bigpond – Internode’s pricing undercuts both Optus’s and Telstra’s own internet plans.

While taking a stroll through Myer looking for specials on Boxing day (ignoring the housewives all clamouring to get a bit of Scanpan action), I came across a few items in the electrical section which caught my eye. (No they were not porn mag dispensers.)

• Electric pasta cooker
• Golf ball washer
• Hot dog machines
• Omlette maker

I am not sure which viewpoint I should take, so I shall present both points of the argument:

OMG some people are so freaking lazy and purchase stupid pointless appliances like these!!!

OR

WTFH, manufacturers produce these retarded products and people actually buy them?

In all serious though, you don’t need any of these things! They are for imbeciles who marry their sisters!

If you have dirty golf balls, then chuck them into a tub of water. Voila! The electric pasta cooker requires so much work that it would be easier to drive to the nearest Italian restaurant and pay through the nose for plate of tortellini. The omlette maker just happens to be an electric frypan, with round moulds welded to its base… * Brainwave * Or… buy an electric frypan for $5 cheaper and you can use it as an omlette maker and a frying pan! 2-in-1! The Asians and Curries will love that!

For the record, some of the jazzed up hot dog makers look more like futuristic sex toys, than cooking implements.

Every Christmas, Myer, Big W, Target, Bing Lee, Clive Peters, Good Guys, Retravision etc etc etc are flooded with all these stupid novelties – hot dog makers, pop corn makers, ice-cream makers, electric pasta cookers, 500-in-1 toaster ovens, omlette makers, pancake makers, proffertjes makers, milkshake makers, ice shavers, glorified toaster ovens, blinged up food processors with $30 cashback offers, multipurpose cooking utilities - whatever the hell they are.

STOPPIT! Cease and desist from producing and “innovating” these retarded appliances, stop wasting impulse buyers money, help the environment, reduce electricity use and leave more shelf room for the chocolates!

Bad manufacturers! No profits and a spanking from Santa would be my gift to them.

…I’ll go back to making out with my hot dog maker now

<begin rant>

Don’t get me wrong.

Firefox is my preferred browser. It’s customisable – skins, themes, dictionaries, plugins, it’s more stable that IE6 and IE7, it’s more secure and has much higher performance i.e. it loads much quicker, renders scripts faster can handle a plethora of open tabs and so on.

So when Firefox 3.0 came out, just like other Mozilla zealots around the world, I clamoured to get my hands on their latest masterpiece. And it was awesome. Switching tabs was noticeably snappier, memory usage was reduced significantly, it crashed less, the new add-ons manager was great, and the new URL bar was fantastic.

Months later…

Firefox 3.0.5 just came out.

And now I regret not being sentimental and staying with Firefox 2.0.20.

Sure, its now discontinued, but unlike Firefox 3.0.x, it doesn’t suck donkey balls and laaaag every time a page has flash content on it. It doesn’t get slower and sloower and slooower and sloooower as time goes by. And it doesn’t shit itself when you have multiple tabs and windows open. And the sideways tab scrolling isn’t cunted.  And so on, and so on.

Damn Firefox 3.0.x is annoying. Damn Firefox 3.0.x for being such an improvement in general over Firefox 2.0.xx.

:@

So what now?

Back to Micro$hit Winblows IE7 where it takes a full 13 seconds to open, and another 5 to realise that it needs to load the homepage? Or * shudder * Crapple Safari for Windows, the incumbent bloatware and swiss cheese of security? Maybe the niche user browser Opera? Perhaps any of the other hundred of other hackjob browsers, developed by their respective die-hard user base.

-.-

<end rant>

Merry Christmas to you all!

May you be endowed with lavish gifts while keeping in mind the meaning of christmas or something…

And for those who don’t celebrate christmas, enjoy the holidays anyway

Lo,

Well, time for another list. And this time, its for the most useless staff, customer service representative, supervisor, manager, help desk person, analyst or whatever you want to call it person.

I’ve even dedicated a page to it!

(Look on the RHS)

It will be updated whenever I am so ill fortuned to meet one of these vegetables, whether in person, on the phone, or over the interwebs.

Charlie Cox (the blonde racing driver who sounds like a 50 year old smoker) is leaving Top Gear Australia. Charlie’s leaving because of other business commitments, and because he’s moving back to the UK (Top Gear UK envy?).

Replacing him is James Morrisson.

Will a jazz musician give the show the face-lift that it needs? I doubt it.

When Top Gear Australia started, the majority of viewers both Australian and international hurled abuse at the hosts and producers – challenges were lame, cars were average, jokes were forced and no one knew who the SIRPC celebrities were…

I’ll confess to being one of the few that said – “give them a chance, it’ll get better as they develop their own style”, though by the end of the season, I still fall asleep watching the show.

I can only imagine how bad the American and Russian Top Gear will be when they finally air.

Nathan Rees (Premier of NSW) has finally given in and reinstated the student free travel scheme. About bloody time too! The government can afford $1000+ payouts to people for financial help during the economic crisis, yet it couldn’t afford the $90 per student to subsidise a years worth of travel without some persuasion from the public.