Brian's Blog

The past couple of weeks have been "interesting". Interesting in that I've spent so much time shaking my head in disbelief. I've mentioned that I think my work has been reduced to cleaning Viruses and Spyware from Windows PC's. I think that's true to some degree but these idiots who keep bringing in their PC's without any Antivirus software on it for me to fix are driving me insane. I mean, if you choose to run that giant petri dish that Microsoft passes off for an OS and not run Antivirus you are just asking for it. To me its kind of like spending a week at a brothel without a box of condoms, then wondering why it burns when you pee. Really, there is no excuse. Especially when you can grab Norton Antivirus 2005 for something like $50 or download AVG from Grisoft which is free for home use. Today was a particularly bad one. I had to disinfect a PC and found 6318 instances of just Netsky. Then, I was asked, "Is it bad to not have Antivirus"? Then there was spyware on top of that too. Sometimes I wonder why people don't show more interest in Linux or Mac.

I made an attempt to learn something about udev last night. I'm running Slackware Linux 10.1 which doesn't have udev by default yet. My 2.6.10 kernel is home grown and should be setup correctly so I grabbed the udev slackpack with swaret. I didn't even get as far as learning the rules or setting custom permissions because, for some reason, it just decided to not see my DVD/CD-RW which is on hdc. There was also other very odd weirdness that I can't explain, such as su stopped working, and I couldn't open an xterm or aterm. I'm guessing it's because the tty devices weren't setup right. Which tells me I'm missing something in my home grown kernel. Perhaps I'll just use the stock 2.6.10 kernel which should hopefully work. I can't say I really need udev since things work 100% on my system now, but I'd like to at least know something about it.

Not that I need any more computer books, but I decided to order up a copy of Knoppix Hacks which looks like a good book and has gotten killer reviews on Amazon. I took a look at the table of contents at Borders this weekend and it looks chock full of ways to use Knoppix to bail out Windows. Which is my primary use of Knoppix anyway. Maybe one of these days I'll actually read a novel or something instead of a technical manual.