Schinckel.net

Well, I’ve signed up for ADSL access with Optimum Internet, and it’s due to be connected on the 29th August. The connection seems to be there already when I plug my modem in, but I can’t get it to actually connect properly. I’m not sure if that is because I don’t have all of the settings correct, which I think I have set up, or if it just hasn’t been activated properly yet. 15Gb/month for $32.50, on a 256k plan. Unless I’m mistaken, 256k means 256 kilobits per second, which roughly equates to 32 kilobytes per second. That would indicate around 32 sec/meg, or 1.875 Megabytes/sec. Assuming this (best case scenario), that means it would take around 133 hours to download 15Gb. That’s about 5.5 days. So, maxed out, it should take me about 1 week to reach my quota.

Just for posterity:

Test run on 22/08/2006 @ 10:34 PM Mirror: Optus Test type: Dialup Your connection speed: kbps: 38.99 KB/s: 4.87 Mbps: 0.04

Courtesty of Oz Broadband Speed Test.

Why do Spam emails have so many spelling errors? Is it because Spammers can’t spell, or are they deliberately trying to beat Spam filters by introducing minor spelling errors: I suspect it is the former.

When playing World of Warcraft, we use a program called TeamSpeak to communicate, rather than trying to type madly like idiots. It works pretty well, and most users have a push-to-talk key setup, so that you only transmit when this key is pressed. This is all well and good, but sometimes users have the Alt key as their PTT key. But WoW uses the Tab key as Select Nearest (or next) Enemy. So, if our rogue, and Main Assist, _Heropsycho _is running towards a target, and talking, there is a fairly high chance he’ll Alt-Tab out of WoW, and have to wait for the system to catch up before rejoining the fight. And, it turns out that Hero is our main damage dealer, so being without him is rather bad. Enter this idea. Remove the mapping for the Win key, so this can be the PTT key. Save the following into a text file, with the extension .reg:

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    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
    "Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,00,00,5B,E0,00,00,5C,E0,00,00,00,00

Double-click this file, and restart. You can them map Win as your PTT key, and pressing it will no longer open the Start Menu. I mean, when was the last time you used this key to get to the Start Menu anyway? Or, you can get the file from http://files.schinckel.net/disable_both_windows_keys.reg.

I’ve had my Mum’s laptop for the last little while, as I prepare a multimedia display for my Grandfather’s 80th birthday party, and I happened to have it with me today as I stopped for a cup of coffee in Illy on King William Road, Hyde Park. When I turned it on, it complained about not being able to find it’s normal networks, so I looked at what networks were available. One of the unsecured networks is Internode, who apparently provide free wireless hotspots around the CBD and inner suburbs. It is limited to web pages only, and apparently session limits apply. So no monster 8 hour WoW sessions over wireless, but that’s a moot point anyway, as this laptop doesn’t seem to have the guts to run it…

I bought an extra 1 gig of Ram, and was extremely happy with it over about a week. And then bad things started happening. First, WoW crashed just after I got to a big boss in Scholomance. Then, I was getting reports from Windows that it was recovering from a serious system error, and finally Windows wouldn’t boot at all. I tracked all of this down to what I thought was a dodgy stick of Ram. Which I returned, and got a replacement. The guy at the shop mentioned then that there were some potential issues with using this particular Ram in a Dual Channel situation. That is where the Ram is paired in slots of the same value and speed for a supposed performance increase. Why he didn’t mention this before, when I first bought the Ram is beyond me, since I did specifically state it was for this type of implementation. So, I’ve solved the problem by not having the Ram paired. And that seems, for the time being, to have solved the problem. I’m not sure how much of a performance increase I would get from Interleaving the Ram, but I’m happy it’s working now without crashing.

I received another strange Spam message this morning - the subject alone got my attention:

I am Dislexic of Borg. Resistance is Futile. Prepare to have your ass laminated

Dyslexic: spelled wrong. But that’s one of the ironies of the word itself. Then, there was an image that didn’t exist, followed by a poorly transcripted excerpt from Anna Karenin:

“self-interest did not induce us to work for the emancipation of the serfs, but we did work for it.” “No!” Konstantin Levin broke in with still greater heat; “the emancipation of the serfs was a different matter. **There **self-interest did come in. One longed to throw off that yoke that crushed us, all decent people among us. But to be a town **councilor **and discuss how many dustmen are needed, and how chimneys shall be constructed in the town in which I don’t live–to serve on a jury and try a peasant who’s stolen a flitch of bacon, and listen for six hours at a stretch to all sorts of jabber from the counsel for the defense and the prosecution, and the president cross-examining my old half-witted Alioshka, ‘Do you admit, prisoner in the dock, the fact of the removal of the bacon?’ ‘Eh?’” Konstantin Levin had warmed to his subject, and began mimicking the president and the half-witted Alioshka: it seemed to him that it was all to the point. But Sergey Ivanovitch shrugged his shoulders.

I say poorly transcripted, as there are at least two spelling errors here, bolded above - and I’m not sure that flitch is a real word either. There is an attachment, which appears to be an image/gif, but I can’t view it. I’m not sure if it’s a virus attached to appear like an image - if it is it’s a very small executable - or some sort of advertising Spam. But there are no links in there, and I can’t figure out what they are selling, other than perhaps poor copies of famous Russian novels. There are a couple of headers worth noting: From: "allisyn breanne" <flimflammed@cdg.org> X-Mailer: The Bat! (v3.0.0.9) Professional I wouldn’t put much strength in the first one being legit, but the second one might be the name of a Spammer client. However, the only reference I can find to it in a very quick Google search is a list of serial numbers for it. That’s ironic, a cracked serial number for a spamming email client…

Always Attempt Alliteration. Anyway, I regularly check my Spam filter, as occasionally I come across a message or two that shouldn’t have been classed as Spam (commonly called Ham, which I think is really cute). Often, I will look at sender names to sort this out. Today, I got a nasty surprise. One of the girls I have coached, and now play Touch Football with is Laeticia Douglas. Today, I got a Spam with the sender name Letitia Douglas. Totally freaked me out. Well, not really, but made me notice enough to blog about it. The contents of this message were more than a little difficult to understand:

the hoydenish not bugging some childlike in infinitesimal ! miller some bantu it ordinance in cope in anonymous but belying may apportion the buckboard in spore or antiphonal ! chlorinate ! buses it’s drool may beryl see scum be wrench or taketh it currant but substantive or aureomycin on lexical on economic , presume in holmium may rio ! dryad a aware a arson it ani may decimal it balsa some mumble may verdant see stirling on screech but mont it shipley , cepheus the inharmonious ! osteopathic it panhandle Naw email hier

I’m fairly sure it’s generated by a computer, although the level of literacy amongst some of the players on WoW makes me wonder at times. There was a link at the end, in the last two words, but the site timed out. The attached image shows it’s an ad for some type of loan. I’m pretty fine for loans at the moment…

I have my own domain name, schinckel.net, which is registered with MyDomain.com, and has several sub-domains, which are mainly shortcuts to other sites I manage. Including this one. I also use their email forwarding service, and have it forwarded to my Gmail account. Which is pretty good, but occasionally they have a glitch, and email doesn’t get through, or is delivered late - in some cases up to a week late. This is usually not a big issue for me, as most of my email contact is not urgent (I tend not to use it for business or work purposes), however for my partner it is a real issue. Having a reliable MX server is important for her. I’ve also recently been accepted into the Gmail for Domains programme beta, and am going through the process of setting this up. I won’t create a tutorial - if you don’t know enough about how to do this, I’m not going to try to help you out for free, but I will detail some of the issues I have come across. The first account you create will be the admin account. I set this up as an admin@ address, and then decided I wanted a matt@ address also. I then deleted this, and created a pointer from matt@ to admin@. Later, I decided I would recreate the matt@ address, and use a seperate account for admin related email, even though I will have my email client check both accounts. But, I get the error:

We were unable to create matt@schinckel.net as a new account because you recently deleted an account with the same username. If you or one of your users needs to receive mail at this address, you can create matt@schinckel.net as an email list or nickname.

The Read More page then indicates:

I deleted a user, and would like to recycle the username. What are my options? There are a couple of things you can do if you’d like to recycle a deleted username.

• Create an email list with that username immediately.
• Wait five days, and create a new user with the deleted username.

Guess I won’t be going live for another 5 days… The other main issue I am having at the moment is with account creation. Sometimes (rarely) it works, but mostly I get the following error:

Failed to create account! Service is unavailable, please try again later

I’ve also set up a URL forwarding, so that mail.schinckel.net points at the right location on the gmail servers. This is seeming to take a while to propagate, but it will make it much easier for other users.

Just spent four full days in Melbourne. It was cold. Went over there to catch up with some old school friends of mine, whose birthdays parties we’d missed in the past 12 or so months. Was drunk pretty much non-stop for three days. Used to be able to do that without blinking. Have to blink now. Bought World of Warcraft after having a bit of a play over there. So, you may never hear from me again, apparently… Oh, and this one, from xkcd.com is for Wayne: