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Category: Computers

Blowing the lid of voteforthemilf.com

Published by NiteMayr on October 3, 2008

Here’s where things get a great deal more interesting on this whole “Prank”

Usually, when you are going to perform a redirect as a prank, you use an A record to redirect the request, so domainnamenamevariant.com is redirected to someotherdomain.com via an A record. In this case the redirect is a highly disrecommended CNAME or Canonical Nam pointing to an IP address the record reads like this VOTEFORTHEMILF.COM IN CNAME 64.203.107.149.

This IP, whether you go to it via http:\\64.203.107.149 or voteforthemif.com (which now seems to redirect to google in some cases) goes to a special Palin greeting.

All of this is kind of known, but I’m providing a summation that makes the “It was a prank” angle seem like a stupid bit of misdirection.  How could the prankster have known that 64.203.107.149 led to a special palin message?  64.203.107.149 has no PTR record and is the A record of JOHNMCAIN.COM but NOT www.johnmcain.com.
The A Record for www.johnmcain.com points to an aliased address from his DNS hosting provider:

Name:    edgecastcdn.net
Address:  72.21.81.132
Aliases:  www.johnmccain.com

Johnmain.com does not

Non-authoritative answer:
Name:    johnmccain.com
Address:  64.203.107.149

Visiting the IP of www.johnmcain.com in your browser http://72.21.81.132/ connects you to nothing.

Visiting the IP of johnmcain.com in your browser http://64.203.107.149/ connects you to a website.

Why would the webmaster of John Mcain’s website link a site to one IP and not the other?  That’s more than odd.  Here’s why, it’s the same amount of work to set it up, you can copy and paste one configuration to another and make it active so that WEB recquests for IP one and IP two will go to the same place, but in this case reqeusts initially bound for 64.203.107.149 end up going to a special palin greeting. How could the prankster have pre-knowledge that the greeting would be there?  I mean, if voteforthemilf.com was a simple redirect to the IP, and the IP (in the case of the more popular www.johnmcain.com) does not connect to a configured website why would they imagine it would magically connect to a Palin related website?

This story is not over, not complete and the “prankster” isn’t giving up their secrets at all.

In the end, this is just a distraction, but it’s a fun tech mystery too, and what’s more fun on a Friday night than a fun tech mystery, right?

Cuil maybe useless, but Clusty shows promise

Published by NiteMayr on July 29, 2008

You will remember that yesterday cuil was released upon the world with as much fanfare as possible.  I was unimpressed.  I’ve had a few hits here since then, mostly variations on “Cuil” and “Useless” which express a great deal of the emotion that Cuil engendered.  Maybe because of the lack of Hubris that Cuil showed, maybe because they copped Flickr’s color scheme for their logo.  I don’t care; Cuil is just not that great.

That aside a commenter (John) pointed out Clusty which I promptly checked out; ego surf? Check.  Deep Search on my real info? Check.  Satisfaction?  Check.

Nice One John, I’ll have to keep Clusty on my mind when searching.

Cuil: Totally useless

Published by NiteMayr on July 28, 2008

I read about cuil this morning while looking through the posts on my iGoogle page.  Interested in new things and not willing to simply discount it out of hand, I fired up the ethernets and typed my name and interests into it’s waiting inputs.

And didn’t find the website you are reading this on.

Not at all.

Not even if I searched for things I knew were on this page.

So, yeah. Cuil sucks.

Sorry guys, you have a long way to go if someone can’t ego surf their own website from your engine.

HackinTosh Prime

Published by NiteMayr on July 26, 2008

HackinTosh Prime, originally uploaded by NiteMayr.

After a day of not working on my new front page (not really working on it) I have my (new) Ubuntu install set up to look like Leopard. I don’t wanna pay for Leopard (read I don’t want to pay for a Mac); so I faked it.

Yeah, I’m a poser.

Jealous?

Getting your iTunes Playlists into the Zune 2.0 Software

Published by NiteMayr on November 22, 2007

I upgraded to the Zune 2.0 software, which promptly killed all the useful playlists I had set up for playing in my Xbox when I wanted to listen to music.

I used to just drag and drop my playlist contents into Media player 11, but since Zune streams mp4s and I have a buttload of them, I made the transition.

I upgraded to 2.0 and liked the new interface, but the lack of any sort of smart playlists leaves me using Itunes to make playlists and no obvious way to get them into Zune.

I have figured out the steps to make this happen:

  1. Open up itunes and shrink the window to a point where it is still usefull, but not maximized at all.
  2. Open up WMP 11 and maximize it.
  3. Click on the the Now Playing button and then ensure the “List Pane” is displayed.  If the List Pane is not displayed, click the down arrow under “Now Playing” and click “Show List Pane” (I searched for ages to find this when I decided I wanted it)  It also appears on the Library screen if you do not want to use it on the “Now Playing” screen.
  4. Now, select the contents of your playlist in iTunes and then Drag and Drop the contents to the List Pane in Windows Media player.
  5. Once your songs appear in Windows Media Player, Click the down arrow next to “Untitled Playlist” and then click “Save Playlist As…”
  6. Click the Down Arrow beside the file format and choose “M3U” as your format and save your playlist.
  7. As long as you are saving your playlist in the default C:\Documents\username\My documents\My Music\My Playlists location, it will appear automatically in the Zune Software.
  8. Once the new playlist appears in the Zune software you may choose delete the m3u file as the Zune software appears to keep it’s own copy.

If you do not save the file in the default location or simply wish a more manual method, save the playlist in m3u format and drag and drop the new m3u into a waiting playlist in the Zune Software.

Have fun with your new software!

Originally posted on nitemayr.vox.com

You know you've done wrong by your customer when

Published by NiteMayr on September 17, 2007

Starting immediately, we will be upping the activation count to a 5 by 5 plan. We will be raising the maximum amount of computers a user can have BioShock installed on simultaneously from 2 to 5, and allowing a user to reinstall BioShock on each of those computers from 3 times to 5 times

Oh, something is wrong with your install?  Reinstall.  Hmm, still not working, reinstall.

Have these people even seen the inside of a software support center?

Reinstall is step 2 in the four-step customer blow-off plan for bad techs.

For those at home, the four-step plan is this:

1.   Did you reboot?  Will that take a long time?  Go ahead and call back if that doesn’t help!

2.   Did you reinstall?  That will take a long time!  Go ahead and call back if that doesn’t help!

3.   Did you install Patch X+1, [where x is the version the customer has and +1 is a cosmetic update]?  The download will take a long time.  Go ahead and call back if that doesn’t help!

4.   I’m sorry, I don’t support that operating system, let me direct you to the correct agents, thanks for calling!

At least twice in any long-term support issue, a customer is going to be forced to reinstall.  If they have done so on their own they are already buttressing against these imaginary limits.

Let customers who have physical media or downloaded “unlocked” media reinstall as they want, if you are trying to lock stuff down to prevent piracy, REWARD paying customers with content that is only available through online activation of keys, make the enhanced content online only and activated only through an SSL encrypted keying system.

Ta Daaaa!

Revenue stream saved

Setting up SMS SMTP 5.X and a Mail Server on CentOS 5

Published by NiteMayr on June 22, 2007

I apologize the the lack of detail in the post, I created it to prompt myself along when I performed installs at future dates, but never got around to filling it out.

  1. Perform a custom server only install of CentOS
  2. Do not install Mysql, dovecot or any other mail related software
  3. Install Sendmail via yum.
  4. Install Legacy software development, install Legacy software support. Install the basic development tools
  5. Once the install is complete; update and reboot
  6. Configure the users that SMS SMTP wants (create the users manually establishing their group memberships ahead of time)
  7. Install SMS SMTP using the smssmtp install binary and NOT “installer”
  8. Perform a typical install
  9. Reboot
  10. license and configure SMS SMTP to deliver local mail to 127.0.0.1 port 25
  11. Download and compile sendmail, install using Build install, this will overwrite the sendmail “fake” that SMSSMTP put into place.
  12. Modify the sendmail configuration to accept mail for your domain
  13. use chkconfig to configure sendmail to start at level 3
  14. reboot
  15. install dovecot, allow it to install mysql
  16. reboot
  17. You may have to configure dovecot to use Maildir correctly
  18. Done.

Late Night Hacking

Published by NiteMayr on February 10, 2007

Well, not really hacking.  I decided to try and use my PDA/Phone to trigger my new Rebel VIA IR.  After numerous false starts and misses, I found these magic codes:

> > Immediate trigger:
> > 0000 007d 0001 0001 000f 00f2 000f 0cdb
> > 2-second delay
> > 0000 007f 0001 0001 000f 00b0 000f 0cbe
These are the HEX codes for the IR commands needed t o perform the remote trigger.

Here are two of the first few pictures I took.  I’m still working it out, but it totally worked!

Now I just need a remote wire trigger and I’m set!