Windows and temp files

As anyone that knows me can appreciate I am not a fan of windows. For some time now there has been only ONE thing that windows can do that I can't really do properly in Linux and that is play games. In particular Linux is rarely capable of playing any of the MMORPGs that I like to play, so to that end on my desktop machine I keep a couple of partitions free and install windows on them. Generally I install windows on its own partition, one that I can just blow away and reinstall every few months when the seemingly inevitable corruption sets in, and another which just stores things like the games themselves. I recently had cause to burn a dvd from an image I had stored on another machine, but given I was playing a game at the time I thought I would simply copy it across to my storage partition and burn it. Unfortunately upon examination I discovered I only had 1.5 GB of space free on my storage partition and the dvd image was 4.5gb. I started to look at data I had stored on the partition under the hopes that I could find something to delete and thus make enough room to copy the image over. Now here I will digress a little and point out that I HATE how by default windows won't let you do anything irrevocable, by that I mean, in a default windows install its a 4 step operation to really delete a file. You start off saying, delete that, then it says are you sure, then it puts it in the trashbin and then you have to delete the trashbin, then there is the automatic system snapshots and other things that go on. The long and short of it is that windows very effectively protects from the normal user making a fuck up and thus from that perspective I guess its a good thing, the problem starts when the user isn't the normal user. In my case when I ask the OS to delete something I expect it to be delete, right then right there, I don't want to have to go through hoops to get it to do that. Why not have this inbuilt protection? We all make mistakes I hear some of you say, well thats true we do but this protection comes at a cost, space. You see by making sure that you arn't really deleting the files windows has to store copies of the things that you delete everywhere, in our typical example there is the copy of the file in the trashbin and in the system snapshot. Now while thats fine if you have a HEAP of space, in my case I actively USE the 1.5tb of space i have on my network and I am not keen on windows wasting a significant portion of the space I make available to it on protecting me from mistakes (in reality I can restore things that I accidently delete even with all these things turned off, its just a pain). Theres the background now to continue with my main story. Anyway there I was poring through the partition trying to find something to delete and I noticed an option in the properties section that starts a windows cleanup wizard and I thought "its been years since I tried a util like that maybe its actually decent by now", so I started it up. Immediately I was presented with some choices about what kind of files it should look for / delete and being very cautious I only ticked the option I thought to be the least important, the one called "temporary files". After marking it I clicked the wonderful "Next" button and the system started to whir. I waited for about 10 seconds and then I started to think it was a little odd, it shouldn't take that long to find and list the temporary files for me, I waited another 20 seconds and then it proudly finished. It was about then that i noticed the terrible truth, windows in all its wisdom had decided that a "temporary file" was rather then the generally accepted use of the term meaning "a file that is generated during the course of normal use by an application and deleted at the end of the applications running" was actually in fact "any file that wasn't registered as belonging to a program as registered by the master install application list. This meant that because the majority of information was things like backups of my cd collection, games that were installed before the latest reinstall of windows (which resides on another partition for this very reason) were considered "temporary" and the result? All of them were deleted. Thanks a fucking bunch windows.

Frustration

A friend of mine recently had an experience with his bank. I find it interesting peoples responses to such incidents, personally I would have had the bank manager explaining to me why I can't access my own money and, if nothing further happened, I would have had the bank in court. Not that I would expect to actually achieve anything but because that kind of behaviour pisses me off SO much that I am happy to lose some time and money just to make a point.

Blogs and OSS

I just read some interesting articles. The first one was a discussion about OSS and its model in terms of what business could learn from it. It was very derrogatory about current businesses and in particular. The second article, if you can call a small blog that, was a lot more condemning, in particular it attacked professionals. Here is where I have a problem. I fully agree with what I suspect was the sentiment behind the blog, that is that you lose a lot more then you gain with conservative, politically correct views and restrictions, but what I have a problem with is the use of the word "professional". I would be interested to hear from others, but to me professional does NOT have the connotations that the author of the blog and Paul Graham seem to have. To me a professional is someone that gets the job done, when and how he says. He is first and foremost a man of his word, he is reliable. That does not imply that he is conservative, stuffy or overly dignified, rather, that he is someone you can rely on to get something done in the manner which you would want it done yourself. Is that so different from what everyone else thinks of as professional?

Happy!

Just read an interesting article over at timesonline. I found it interesting because it largely gels with things that I have discovered about my own psyche, ie that the drive to achieve is larger then the satisfaction of the achievement.

Playing catchup

Well its been some time since I blogged, and playing catchup on that much missed information closely resembles other aspects of my life right now. Lets see where to begin.

I guess the main impact right now is work. Work has been going mental as we have auditors over from Canada on behalf of the Tasmanian government making sure that we are compliant with their regulations in order to issue Betfair with a gambling license down there. That means that my team is frantically running around trying to pre-empt any questions that might arise and ensure that all the projects we had planned on finishing in the next 6 months are actually done this week (while the auditors are here!). Combine that with Sham doing his CISSP prep, Adrian with a bunch of commitments limiting his time at work and my scheduled appearence at Linux World expo on the gentoo booth and you have 3 very busy people. On the plus side I have been getting on top of ESM, well as much as you can given their general lack of Unix experience, but more interestingly I have been spending a lot of time getting to play around with the various sourcefire kit that has arrived. Big toys for big boys :) Actually it was fairly amusing for a while as I have been doing a lot of Gentoo work on Snort which is what lies at the heart of the Sourcefire kit. That has in turn meant that I was spending a lot of time on IRC (not like I don't anyway) chatting to the devs of both snort and sguil (I might as well add a shameless plug for sguil here as I think it is probably THE best security tool I have played with for a long time. Imagine being able to see attacks as they come in, stop them, replay them, even pull exploit code out of the traffic stream on the fly!) and of course that meant chatting to a few Sourcefire employees. What they didn't realise was that I was also a serious customer of theirs so they got quite confused when I started asking questions on IRC about their high end kit and various problems I was having with it. In the end it worked out well, I managed to get their tech guys in the states hassle their reps in the UK and I think my level of service might even get a boost because of it, certainly my updates are coming quicker ;) In summary the incredible pace at work has been dominating my life for the last month or two.

What makes my lack of time even worse right now is all the interesting things happening outside of work. I mean 4 months ago I was starting to get bored, work was a bit trivial and there was not a lot of interesting things happening outside of work so I was spending my time gaming. Now I don't have enough hours in the day. One of the things that is taking up more and more time is my Gentoo work. I have just finished a whole bunch of ebuilds which will result in me adding sguil to the tree very shortly (read in the next day or two) as well as doing a lot of crypto based stuff that should see a lot more automation and ease of use for the full harddrive encryption stuff that I have been working on.

The Linux world expo wasn't really as good as I had hoped (I will be writing an entry on it over on my gentoo blog which can be found here). There was nothing really remarkable on display and while the show was free, to hear the talks cost something like 80 pounds which I thought wasn't worth it. I ended up spending most of my time at the Gentoo booth chatting to people about the pro's of Gentoo and hopefully getting quite a few people to at least try it out. I also enjoyed the chance to meet some of the other devs and talk tech, though that was a little limited as I managed to miss the after show drinks due to other commitments. Anyway more on the show on my other blog.

I bought the smee.id.au domain two years ago, and like clock work APNIC (the company responsible for registering domain names in Australia) is now informing me that I have to fork out more cash to keep it. The main reason that I bought the domain was as a christmas gift to my father / step mother / half sister, but I have failed in my mission to get them to use it. Its an interesting tale of it own actually, as my father uses MS windows ME and it seems that the version of outlook / outlook express that come with it can't properly talk IMAPS/POPS/ and as a result he has been unable to use his MUA of choice to see his smee.id.au mails. Of course I have a webmail interface setup and running, but while everyone I know seems happy to use gmx/yahoo and hotmail for some reason they don't like my webmail setup ( which is even more powerful and less complicated with no ads!). So I think I will let the domain expire on the 25th December and move this blog back under the disciplina.net domain and be done with it.

One final note, as a favour for a friend I have setup two sites, one relating to politics the other economics. If you ever had an interest in either of those subjects have a look and see if you are interested in contributing something to what he is trying to build.