Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

November 8, 2006

Interesting response to Vista’s licensing change

Filed under: Computer Related,Humor — Suramya @ 3:08 PM

Thats one way of looking at it:

uf009708.gif

– Suramya

November 3, 2006

Candidate says bulletproof books could save lives in school shootings

Filed under: Funny News,News/Articles — Suramya @ 3:46 PM

You have got to be freaking kidding me…

A retired veteran and candidate for Oklahoma State School Superintendent says he wants to make schools safer by creating bulletproof textbooks.

Bill Crozier says the books could give students and teachers a fighting chance if there’s a shooting at their school.

Thanks to Schneier on Security for the link.

Original Article: WBIR.COM – Candidate says bulletproof books could save lives in school shootings

– Suramya

Indian version of the Thriller Video

Filed under: Funny News,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 6:03 AM

Just when I thought that it couldn’t get any worse… I found this:

Indian version of Thriller

This is a pure rip off of the famous Thriller video by Michael Jackson in some south Indian movie. Thankfully the music sounds different but the dance looks the same, and it has the same ugly red jacket.

I don’t mind when some one copies a little bit of a song, or creates a parody of something, but this is just plain ridicules. A couple of years ago it wasn’t so evident when Hindi movies copied something from an english movie, but now with the increasing globalization its increasingly easier for people to identify what movie a particular concept was stolen from…

The sad part is that its not just Indian movie makers who do this, they are just the most ballant in creating the ripoffs and its not like we have a shortage of filmmakers with original idea’s in India, its just that some people find it easier to copy than to create original ideas…

– Suramya

October 23, 2006

Sorry Blockbuster, But I love P2P

Filed under: Funny News — Suramya @ 8:03 PM

Found this amusing: Sorry Blockbuster, But I love P2P

– Suramya

October 18, 2006

How I broke Windows XP Genuine Advantage test and then fixed it

Filed under: Computer Related,Computer Tips,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:50 PM

A couple of days ago I had a slight problem with my internet connection, basically what was happening was that I couldn’t access google.com and associated sites (Orkut, gmail etc) but I could access everything else with issues so I spoke to a Comcast representative and she told me to run the following command on my Windows XP laptop (I told her I was using XP because I didn’t want to get into an argument with her that the problem was because I was using Linux.):

regsvr32 softpub.dll

I ran the command and it didn’t fix the issue. So I decided to un-register the dll using the following command:

regsvr32 /u softpub.dll

as I wasn’t sure what this dll did and didn’t want to register random stuff on my system. I ran the command and everything was fine for a couple of days, I could browse the net without issues and everything seemed to work.

Then all of a sudden after a couple of days I get an error message stating that my version of windows could not be validated so I must be running a pirated version of XP. The funny part was that I had installed WGA two months ago on the laptop and it had validated the license and the license is valid. So I went to the Windows update site and tried to validate my copy but ActiveX refused to run. It told me to try a manual check where it downloaded the ActiveX and then tried to run it but that also failed… Finally I tried a check using an executable I downloaded but that validated my license as valid. Now I was confused and tried to force a validation test but every time the system would refuse to run ActiveX and the validation would fail.

After beating my head on the issue for a little while I finally remembered the dll that I had unregistered a while ago so I went through my command history and found the command to re-register it and went ahead and registered it. Then I had to reboot the box and when it came back up I was finally able to run the online validation tool which verified my version of windows was valid. After it verified it I had to reboot again and that fixed the issue.

Moral of the story: If you don’t know what a dll does then don’t uninstall it.
Second Moral of the story: Its a good habit to keep a log of all the commands you run, and any changes you make to the system. Having this will save you a lot of time an energy when something gets messed up.

This is all for now, will post more about my experiments with computers and the messes I caused later.

– Suramya

October 17, 2006

Microsoft Restricts Vista Transfers

Filed under: Computer Related,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 12:09 PM

As some of you know Vista is supposed to come out next year and its going to require a big upgrade for most of the users. Now in a move to alienate even more of its customers MS has changed its licensing terms, limiting the number of times that Windows Vista can be transfered to, to ONE. Thats right One, Uno. In the older versions of windows if you bought a new computer you could install your old version of windows on it provided you uninstalled it from the old computer. With the new licensing you can only do it once so if you upgrade your computer more than once you need a new Vista license.

Hows that for utter stupidity. It is supposed to restrict piracy but the only thing its going to do is annoy regular users. A lot of people upgrade their computers a lot and if MS thinks it can force people to buy a new license every time they upgrade its sadly mistaken. Its going to be a pain for everyone involved and the only people it won’t affect are the software pirates as the pirated version will probably have this check disabled.

I know I transfered my windows XP license from my original 350 Mhz system to a 1.1 ghz system to another system before it got its final home in the machine its on now (All the older systems are now running Linux).

If I had vista I would have had to spend additional money to install an OS that I have a license for on a system that I am going to be using. You know what, I think I will stick with Linux and XP for now. I wasn’t planning to upgrade anyways but with news like this I have even less incentive to try it out.

Original Article: Microsoft Restricts Vista Transfers

Update: Some more thoughts on the new MS Licensing: Lxer.com

– Suramya

October 13, 2006

Microsoft Vista feature presentation on a Mac

Filed under: Funny News,Tech Related — Suramya @ 12:31 PM

Somebody took the audio from a Microsoft Vista “we’re so brilliant, we’ve invented all this new stuff” shill session and overlaid it on a video of themselves doing it all on their OS/X desktop.

Pretty amusing stuff. The best part is that I can do most of it on my Linux box as well.

Check it out at: Here

Thanks to Ben Okopnik for the link.

– Suramya

August 15, 2006

Huge Firefox crop circle

Filed under: Funny News,Linux/Unix Related — Suramya @ 3:21 PM

I guess even aliens prefer using firefox… 🙂 Actually it was the work of OSU Linux Users Group in Oregon.

From project wiki:

“The Firefox Crop Circle project shows that we have so much passion for Firefox that we want it to be visible from space! Planned in under two weeks and completed in under 24 hours, the crop circle had a final diameter of 220 feet. We constructed the circle in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky.”

firefox-cropcircle-photo.jpg
FireFox Crop circle

More details: Linux Users Group – Oregon State University

Thanks to nixCraft for the link.

– Suramya

August 4, 2006

Upside-Down-Ternet

Filed under: Funny News,Tech Related — Suramya @ 4:12 PM

What do you do when you find someone else stealing bandwidth from your wireless network and you don’t like it? You Lock it down correct? This person didn’t do that, he decided to have a little fun at the expense of the unauthorized user…

So he ran squid with a trivial redirector that downloads images, uses mogrify to turn them upside down and serves them out of it’s local webserver. So the visitor gets websites that look something like:

Check out Upside-Down-Ternet for rest of the crazy things he did.

– Suramya

June 29, 2006

Template for News Stories on Government Data Gathering

Filed under: Funny News,Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 11:40 AM

Funny. The scary part is that most stories/news reports I have read about the US govt. data gathering read almost the same…

Check it out: Template for News Stories on Government Data Gathering

Thanks to Schneier on Security for the link.

– Suramya

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress