days and nights

So in about 9 hours, I have an interview/meeting with a guy that is a recruiter with KForce. I am hoping these guys actually have something for me. I have just started this job search thing and I am already sick of it.

In other news, I have started working with Fedora 9 a little bit. I love it. So far it is much better than Ubuntu 8.04 in almost every way. Wine works out of the box, which is a definite start in the right direction. Beyond that, the boot times are MUCH faster for the same machine. I do have to say that I am now running a 64 bit kernel now as opposed to a 32 bit kernel with Ubuntu. Regardless, what a difference. Everything from install to initial login was smoother and more efficient. In my eyes, Fedora 9 is the way to go.

I will update as soon as I have any information on the job search. I have four major opportunities I am looking at right now. One in Utah, two in Dallas, and one in New Jersey. I am really hoping to either stay in Salt Lake or go to Dallas. New Jersey would be an adventure, but it would be quite a change. And starting over is a bit of a pain when it comes to friends and such. Though I have some friends in Boston, that is a bit of a drive. So yeah. There you go. You are up to date on my life.

Well, my last post was laced with a bit of angst as I am sure my 3 readers could tell. Actually on that subject, I am up to 11 readers now. Return readers, not just come once and leave types. Regardless, my last post was rather pissy. I am now jobless as of the 30th of this month. I put in my two week notice yesterday, and began working on replacing my current workplace with something more tuned to my IT career goals. I think it is a great move.

I have mentioned in the past that I have been working on my LPIC-1 as well as my CEH and CHFI. I have made some significant strides forward in studying for my LPIC-1, and expect to take both the 101 and 102 exams next week. It will be a grand occasion when I pass them. My education has been lacking recently due to a downturn in my job duties, and I have decided that I won’t be allowing that of myself anymore. Once my LPIC-1 is finished, I will move on to my CEH to finish that and turn around to finish my CHFI directly after. I could probably finish my CEH sooner, but the LPI certifications have been a goal for a while, and I intend to complete that goal before setting any others.

I have applied for more than a dozen jobs in the last day or two all over the world. Most of them have been either in Dallas or Salt Lake City. There are a few in California and spread all over the world at various United States Air Force bases. I feel that working for the government might not be as great as it should be, so I have put those ones on the back burner unless a real spectacular offer comes across. I want to stay in the private sector and keep getting my name out there. I feel that name recognition is more valuable than any job experience will ever be. It is quite hard to get in this industry, but marketing myself correctly will help that.

If anyone is in need of a System Administrator or Technical Requirements Analyst, please let me know. I am looking actively right now, and will be accepting an offer in the very near future if all goes well.

Microsoft claimed that Windows Vista would be the most security operating system on the planet. Moving forward, they integrated a load of bad ideas into a barely usable chunk of “software” that looks more like a load of rancid bloatware every day. Regardless of the overall hatred of Vista that has taken hold over the last 18 months or so, Microsoft still claims that Vista is a secure operating system.

The question is though, why the hell is it that you would need additional security for the operating system if it is the most secure operating system ever? Most secure ever makes me think that I won’t have to worry about viruses anymore. It makes me think that I won’t need to go out and pay Kaspersky or AVG $50 for them to protect me further. It seems that my way of thinking doesn’t jive with the Microsoft method.

On top of everything else that has been problematic in Vista, they have made programming for it extremely difficult. Drivers were the first big issue. When Vista released, it seemed that getting your printer or camera to work with it was a mess. Vendors were having serious issues with making their hardware work with this new mess that Microsoft released.

Now it seems that these problems have advanced to the Antivirus and Security markets. Vista has been proven time and again to be one of the less secure operating systems, so we are all forced into getting a security suite to keep ourselves safe. Well, we might not be the right word. The right way to say that is, all of you that have not had the foresight to move to Linux.

Regardless, the security companies can’t program for this abomination of an operating system either it appears. Many of the big players in the Antivirus market failed the VB100% tests at the start of April. These are all companies that could pass the same tests on Windows XP without a thought. So what changed between XP and Vista? Everything. Security was dropped on its head. In changing everything they did in a certain way before, they opened more holes. Considering XP looked like a block of Swiss, Vista makes XP look like a religious experience (super sharp cheddar?). 

The fact is, Microsoft tried to get their security right, and in doing so, made the problem worse. It is sad to think that a company that commands so much of the OS market can be so instrumental in the spread of Malware. In fact, while we know that a Mac got the first PC designed virus, I would have to say that Microsoft is nearly single handedly responsible for the spread of modern viruses because they refuse to secure their products and stick to the established standard. Just another reason to switch to a real operating system.

I have never been one to slam any sort of Linux. Hell, I seldom slam anything that works; one of the reason I am still a fan of Windows XP. I do however have a problem with Ubuntu. Again.

There is a bit of a buzz because someone decided to put Ubuntu on a Sharp Zaurus. A PDA that is widely known in the *NIX community because it was one of the first to actually come with Linux installed. On top of the fact that it came with a decent OS, it also sported some pretty good hardware. Double win for anyone lucky enough to have gotten one.

The problem I have with the recent buzz though is that it is Ubuntu that was ported. They couldn’t have used clean operating system. They went to the jumble of hacks that makes up Ubuntu. They decided that instead of starting from the ground up and making something that is REALLY ported for the specific hardware you are running, they would go ahead and just grab some vanilla version of Ubuntu and hope for the best…

I am not trying to take away the fact that they put Linux on a box that came pre-installed with Linux. It does take some smarts and some tweaking to get that to happen without failure. Good for them. I am however stating that regardless of how great that little goal turns out to be, it will still be Ubuntu. A sub par OS that is barely good for Grandma, and certainly isn’t good for much else.

In closing, I guess this is really a rant against all the Ubuntu people out there that think that Ubuntu is the end all be all of Linux when it is just an epic failure for anything requiring more than pretty menus and overly simple operation.

Oh, and another thing, I can build a Fedora or BSD box that works just as well for running Thunderbird and Firefox for Grandma. And I can assure you that I won’t be quite so pissed off when I am done with either of those.

The link to the article I read about this is: http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/08/ubuntu-gets-ported-to-sharp-zaurus-pdas/

Permissions… Simple permissions were enough to get me angry at this godforsaken program. The beauty of this whole dilemma is that it had NOTHING to do with Rosetta Stone this time. It was all Wine/Ubuntu’s fault. I feel so dignified in saying that while Ubuntu is easy to use and comes with some cool stuff, it still isn’t the perfect operating system that all its little zealot pricks think it is. Get off your high horse and fix my damn Wine install. It works just fine in Fedora 8. WITHOUT CONFIGURATION OR TROUBLESHOOTING!

Wine seemed to install just fine. I used “apt-get” to get it installed and life was good for about 30 seconds. I was thinking that I would be all decked out in some major amounts of language learning on my shiny new Ubuntu 8.04 install. I tried to execute the setup file for Rosetta Stone though, and all hell broke loose. Memory addressing errors. File permissions errors. Everything that should not have been happening. I stopped for a moment and figured I would try while using “su” in case there was some odd snafu that I was not aware of. Yeah, on top of that being just plain stupid, it didn’t work either. In fact, that seemed to make it worse since for some ungodly reason, while using “su”, I didn’t have permissions to create either files or directories in my own home directory. Which was owned by my user and group and had 755 permissions. I am getting mad about this time in my push to make this work.

After fixing some of the easier errors by creating directories that Wine was unable to create, though I saw exactly no reason why, I started getting to the root of the problem. Wanna know what that problem is? Nobody tested the damn software. There seems to be some sort of quality issue where the Wine software package and Ubuntu come together. I understand that it is not supported software, but come on! I thought Ubuntu was so well liked because it “just works!”

My experimentation program was Rosetta Stone 2.0.8.1, though I never got to use it with Ubuntu 8.04. Want to know what I got for my trouble? 30 minutes of my day I will never get back.

I can hear everyone out there yelling at me to fix the issue and submit a patch. Perhaps even submit a bug report. Well, you know what I say to that? Hell no! I am not going to spend my time working on a system that claims to “Just Work!” according to every kiddie adopter out there. I will stick with Fedora on the stuff that actually requires some balls, thanks. It may not look as pretty in some places, but it gets the job done for me and doesn’t require me to troubleshoot permissions when there are no permissions issues that I can find.

God, I hate it when I get so angry with something that I can’t even speak in an informative way. Look at this mess of a post… *sigh*

So I am working on this series of articles about the history of the computer virus. I knew it was going to be a big project, but I had no clue how big. I wanted to limit my articles to between 2 and 3 pages per and have a series of 5 or 6. It has grown considerably larger.

Just my research on virus groups and automation tools alone has turned up a books worth of material. I have decided that I am going to highlight some of the big names in the community as well. They may not be current, but they still have importance to the scene. It would be curious if I could interview a current undergroup writer though. I may have to see if IRC can be of help in finding one or two. Or even better, if any of you are coders, please let me know. I would be quite happy to get a good interview from you.

Either way, another part I am doing is different payloads of various types of malware. It is going to be rather interesting to see what new stuff has come about since I stopped keeping up with the scene. That has been about 6 years, and I think things will have changed in a major way.

I will be putting the articles up here as well as the TopTenREVIEWS Antivirus site. Keep your eye out for them as I finish them in the near future.

So yeah. I got the gallery started. There are a grand total of 2 pictures uploaded at this point but I will start to get more done as I have time. I would like to have it all finished by tomorrow, but I just don’t have the bandwidth. Well, maybe. Who the hell knows anymore. Either way, check out http://gallery.alienspeed.com and let me know what you think of it when there are more images and such.

Maybe give me till Monday to get them all uploaded. Then I get to start on all of the old party pics. *sigh*

OH! One more thing… Hit me up on Twitter… I have it slowly building up. We will see where I am at later this month. I get the feeling that I will have an assload of people just based on the few I looked at today…

After a little work to get around the issues I was having with Twitter, things are going much better. I added Matt and Nat from BSGCast.com and removed a follow whore that attacked me like 30 minutes after I started. Good times. Oh, and suddenly my web updates showed up. Just odd.

Either way though, it is up and I am happy. Hell, you can’t slam a free service. That is just mean.

I just set up a twitter account today and got it added to the site. Notice it on the right. The problem is, I can only update from my phone. Web updates are not working. Bug #1. Though it seems to be system wide, so maybe it will change soon.

I would LOVE to be able to resize my badge without killing the text size on it as well.  I understand there are ways around this, but I want it to gen the correct code for me to match it to my toolbar. I can’t change the aspect ratio on it or I would shrink it myself. It is something in the flash I think.

The option to change the color within the badge is buggy too. It doesn’t update the code. I made a good guess to get it to match a bit better than the pink it was before, but I am still bugged. (Pun intended.)

With a little bit more work, I think this could be cool, but I am worried about it right now. We will see…

*EDIT*

I just remembered that I am using a beta version of Firefox. This might be the issue. I get the odd feeling based on forum posts though that some of these problems are site wide and need to still be resolved either way.

My laptop screen is kindof broken. The little area of plastic between the joint and the screen has a small crack. I am not happy. I am going to get as much use out of it as I can, but I am sure I will pick it up sometime in the near future and it will just die a horrible death. I am going to try to superglue it as well, but I am not sure if that is going to work. Worth a try though. If nothing better to just extend the life of the laptop. Especially since I have another gig of RAM on the way. *sigh*

In other news, I hate my job and really don’t want to continue working there. I am just barely able to keep my brain functioning during the day. Boredom is not even a word for it all. More like dundrum. What a shame too. I figured that it would be kindof cool, but I was SO wrong. Well, I take that back. It really isn’t a bad job. I just don’t DO enough. I am smarter than this. I don’t want to write reviews on software for the rest of my life. I am an administrator damnit.