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2005.04.07 ~05 another suspiciously scammish phone call
Got another suspicious phone call, this time offering $200 in coupons
for a shopping spree, mentioning enough department store names to
trigger Carnivore. Also, I was told this month was Consumer
Appreciation Month... but that it was really in March. When I pressed
about the previous "Consumer Appreciation Month" call from January, the
caller sidestepped the question quite overtly, trying to rush through a
script. Quite obviously a script, since he didn't seem to want to
sidetrack from his side of the conversation. The repeated words were
also a giveaway of a script; I kept interrupted and he'd keep trying to
resume with the exact same words. I don't know about other people, but
reading off a script gives me the impression of an ulterior motive in
play. The clincher was when he mentioned free movie passes in addition
to the coupons, good for ANY MOVIE (no exceptions!). When pressed for
names of which theaters, he listed so many theater chains, even those I
know aren't even remotely close to California, that all I could do was
just retort "That's bullshit!" and hung up right there.
Note: free movie passes, espeically those given to the unwashed masses
(me), have close to 0% chance of being honored for Super Duper Ultra
Premiere Specials, such as Day 1 of the next Star Wars movie. That, and
no way in hell every movie theater in the nation/world will
simultaneously decide to honor a blanket movie pass, franchising
notwithstanding.
TANSTAAFL -- Economics 101.
2005.01.18 ~08 Content-free ads of "Million Dollar Baby"
The ads for the movie "Million Dollar Baby" are fast approaching
spammish. First of all, I'm hearing it all over the place (radio in car
during commute). Secondly, there's nothing substantiative in the ads.
It's all "this person said...", "that group nominated us for...", "these
editors proclaim...", "look at how many thumbs up we got", and so on.
Not even a slight hint at the plot of the movie. The closest thing to a
plot hint was a comparison of its powerfulness(?) to "Mystic River".
But otherwise completely content-free and based on what someone else is
saying or doing. The movie makers aren't saying squat about it.
All this makes me seriously doubt the value of the movie. What the hell
is the movie about? No one's saying. Hrm... maybe it's a pointless movie.
2005.01.05 ~04 Gasoline vouchers?
So this is the second time I got a call offering vouchers for $200 worth
of gasoline. This time claiming to come from Shell Oil Company.
The first time I got such a call was a few months ago, and I got really
suspicious over it. I forget the details of that call, aside from that
the conversation somehow degenerated into a "what? I can't hear you!"
shouting match, then cussing the other end out as I hung up the phone.
This time, since it was the second of such calls, I decided to make a
note of it somewhere. As it only happened minutes before I started
writing this entry, the details ought to be mre recallable.
So, the call comes in, I answer it. First hint something was amiss,
there was a lot of noise/chatter in the background. In fact, I thought
the call was coming from an analog cell phone. The second thing was
that the caller, unlike the more legitimate telemarketers, did not open
with "is such-and-such there", but instead goes off with "Hi, my name is
Charles, and I'm calling from Shell Oil Company." For some reason, the
fact the guy gave his name (if that's his real name) right at the start
raised a red flag as well.
Thirdly, the caller mentions my phone number was selected to receive
$200 in vouchers for gasoline at any Shell station. The mention of
"number" rang in my head. Phone number, as opposed to name, address,
or a frickin' lottery ticket. It's a really strange way of selecting a
"winner", using a phone number.
Most of all was the material being pushed. USD 200 of gasoline is a lot
of money, a lot of gasoline, to be given away for free. With the price
of gasoline around here, that represents approximately 90 gallons; for
my car alone approximates to 2250 miles (um... 3500-ish km) of driving,
which I think is enough to drive to the nearest Canadian border crossing
and back. The sheer amount of money being given away for nothing was
just staggeringly ridiculous.
The other thing that got me thinking was the notion that my phone number
was chosen more or less at random. If that were the case, they (the
purported gasoline company) may as well just hand out gasoline lottery
at the pumps (station ownership issues notwithstanding). But even that,
being as random as it is, may as well be just a general price reduction
of all gasoline products. In other words, there something bizarre about
handing out vouchers/discounts to random people when that wouldn't be
much different from just an across-the-board price reduction.
The final straw was when the caller said, basically, that he needed to
verify my phone number, and read back my phone number. Or the number he
dialed. Something deep inside me felt very insulted by this reading
back. Perhaps because he, the very caller, said this, my, phone number
was selected, then asking if the number is correct. Couldn't he ask if
the number was correct *first*, then start the spiel? Asking later felt
like he was insulting my intelliegence (which he probably was, a google
search later). My response was silence. Utter silence. The guy
eventually hung up; when I hit the 'off' button, the display showed 1:05
of talk time; even if it's of minimal consolation, at least the caller's
phone bill got rounded up to two minutes (or is that even a good thing
in retrospect...).
Now for the google result. I googled for "Shell Oil Company gasoline
voucher". Lo and behold, the only hit that had all the terms in a
meaningful position was a warning about an identity theft scam:
http://www.wate.com/global/story.asp?s=2666657&ClientType=PrintableBasically the whole spiel about gasoline and vouchers is a ruse to
grease up the victim to start handing out personal information.
Detailed personal information, along the lines of every damned digit on
their personal check -- routing, account, everything.
Now, if this caller is part of a scam ring, then someone else's money
and life was used to pay his phone bill. Either directly (ID-theft
phone purchase) or indirectly, such as, oh, draining someone's checking
account down to, and perhaps even past ("overdraft protection"), the
last penny. Which is why now I'm now wondering if it was such a good
thing to deliberately crank up "his" phone bill to the next billed
minute.
Overall, though, my cynicism/pessimism, paranoia, and wandering thoughts
had stopped a dumb, and potentially dangerous, phone call early. Now if
only ATT would permit me to "reach out and strangle someone."
2004.11.27 ~08 How times change (inet).
Via random perusals, I found this joke page with an mdate of 1996 Feb:
http://users.vnet.net/matjohns/humor/10.ways.internet.worse.html("Top ten ways the internet could get worse")
Relevant Google searches peg a date predating mid-1995. Around this
time, Microsoft Windows 95 started, Intel Pentium CPUs were clocking in
at around 100 MHz and still stinging from the FDIV bug, and WWW was just
starting to bloom with Mosaic and Netscape Navigator.
What's scary is how much of the joke's content has come to pass.
> 8. Home shopping "network".
Online shopping (e.g. amazon, e-bay). 'nuff said.
> 6. Sun internet servers replaced with pentiums.
It's pretty clear the pentiums referred to are the original series
pentium, the i586-equivalent, and not Pentium IV, but still, a good
number of online servers these days are running x86-family CPUs (e.g.
Xeon, Opteron, ... Celeron...). And let's not forget the vast sea of
wintel machines ripe for zombification.
> 5. Dan Quayle appointed head of "bandwidth expansion tiger team".
I think President G.W. Bush (#43) is pushing for more spread of
high-speed net connections in homes across the US. But then, so had
Pres. Clinton (#42), but Quayle was VP under Pres. G.H.W. Bush (#41),
which sort of compounds the eerie-ness factor.
> 4. Free netcom account with purchase of big mac.
I get a weird deja-vu-ish feeling that something very similar had come
to pass. The following come to mind: juno, netzero, gmail, hotmail. I
can't think of any in particular associated with purchase of fast food,
though. On another note, the significance/meaning of "netcom" has faded
with time as well; I have no idea what "netcom" is supposed to mean in
this context, and a naive lookup of www.netcom.com redirects to
www.earthlink.com; www.netcom.org is beyond my comprehension.
> 3. Gameboy web browsers.
As with the pentium bit, the referenced device is clearly the
Z80-powered original Gameboy, and not the contemporary StrongARM-powered
Gameboy Advance. Regardless, we now have Gameboy [Advance] web
*servers*:
http://www.fivemouse.com/gba/> 1. Two words: "Microsoft Network".
Indeed. www.msn.net. ph33r.
2004.11.23 ~06 my e-mailbox
My mailbox has been overflowing with mostly virus payloads, and a slowly
growing number of spam. Also, recently I have received a sudden flow of
mail regarding the various programming projects I worked/am working on. As
a result, I have determined obfuscating my e-mail address on my web pages is
no longer productive, and have changed as many as I could bother to change
to transparent mailto: URIs.
2004.10.25 ~16 Fujitsu Lifebook S7010 notes
I'm keeping notes of my progress on my notebook at
http://www.icculus.org/~phaethon/notebook/lifebooks7010.htmlThe target audience is people seeking to get GNU/Linux running on the
notebook, so I aim to minimize historical notes and journal-like rambles
as I am wont to do.
The link for it is already listed on
http://www.linux-laptop.net/2004.09.28 ~22 New notebook, Fujitsu S7010, installing Linux
Got a new notebook computer yesterday, a Fujitsu S7010. It's actually a
refurbished machine, which may explain some of the variations from the
posted specs. Intel Penium M 1.7GHz, 512M RAM, 80G HDD. WLAN is an Atheros
adapter of some sort (PCI ID 168c:0013); the built-in ethernet is a
Broadcomm gigabit adapter (PCI ID 14d4:165e). This machine apparently also
has built-in bluetooth, a nice bonus. There's a hardware kill switch for
the wireless stuff on the front bevel.
I first booted this machine with Knoppix 3.2 EN, but nothing was usable, not
even network. After waiting for Knoppix 3.6 EN to download and burn, I
booted that. Suddenly just about everything worked: wireless, wired
ethernet, bluetooth, infrared... dunno about modem. Also that SpeedStep
thingy kicked in under Knoppix 3.6, whereas the CPU always went full-tilt
under 3.2 (read: very very hot).
First order of business was to image the hard drive. This took close to
three hours, shoveling 80G through gzip then 100baseT onto a remote machine
on the LAN. I want to image the hard drive so that I have a known starting
point in the event of total hosing. The final archive weighed in at 4.9G,
quite a bit more than a DVD+R's capacity. I may either split it into a DVD
and CD pair, or just keep it on the desktop's hard drive.
Next I resized the NTFS partition until it barely had enough room to
breathe. It was something like 9.43G used, so I use qtparted to resize it
from 77.8G down to 9.6G. There was already some sort of recovery partition
on the drive as well (FAT32 labelled "DISE_BACKUP", apparently for "Disk
Image Special Edition"... imo, I don't know what's so "special" about
something that could be accomplished with dd(1) and bzip2(1)).
After resizing the NTFS, I fell back to familiar grounds and ran cfdisk to
partition the drive to my liking. I carved out a 9.6G /, 2 of 4.2G swap (one
for suspend, the other for regular swapping), and another 9.6G for /home.
Then I formatted them, using Knoppix.
Next came about five hours trying to get from a running Knoppix system to a
Debian installation. To distill it, it basically come down to this:
Installing Debian sarge (testing) from a running Knoppix session.
Under Knoppix, mounted what would be /home as /mnt/hda6. Downloaded debian
initrd, vmlinuz, and sarge-i386-businesscard.iso to it. Then I set up grub
to use this partition: "grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/hda6 /dev/hda".
Rebooted off HDD.
At the grub prompt, "root (hd0.5)" (which is linux's /dev/hda6), then
"kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0", then "initrd /initrd", then "boot".
This booted into the Debian installer, which found the relevant .iso image,
then things went off from there. In the installer, I then selected the
originally to-be "/" to be Debian's "/", since the installer insists on
being able to mount / during the install process. At the end of
installation, Debian pointed GRUB at proper new root partition.
On reboot, the rest of Debian installation went smoothly. Now to pick and
choose packages...
Life: No Life found.
Project:
1. Project FI, Quake 3 mod (
http://www.icculus.org/fi/)
a. provide an extensible environment for a Q3 mod. The intended notion is that of "mutators" in Unreal Tournament.
b. FI:WFC, a more faithful reproduction of Q2WF for Q3 than WFA.
2. QuakeScheme
* Extensible language for Project FI.
* Builds on TinySCHEME (
http://tinyscheme.sourceforge.net/)
* Deal with idiosyncrasies of Q3VM not handled by most other Scheme impls.
3. Q3VM libc
* Implementation of Standard C Library for Q3VM bytecode.
* Implementation of a subset of Single Unix Specification v2 (SUS v2).
* Help import third-party library into Q3VM.
4. QS GUI/widget set
a. Need to research advanced OO and GUI of Scheme derivatives and Common Lisp.
b. Replication/extension of boxy widgets in Q3TA (Q3 PR 1.27+).
c. Pie menus -- just to annoy theoddone33.
5. Q3 compilation toolchain
[X] q3lcc sources (official version out with Q3A SDK 1.32)
[X] q3asm - get static to work, dammit.
[ ] q3as - assemble-only (.asm to .o).
[ ] q3ld - link-only (.o/.a to .qvm).
5. PalmOS stuff
a. PiNGer (gfx viewer)
* generalize interface to a "any-gfx" viewer (libpnm?)
b. ZBoxZ (file manager)
* beef up its appness: menus, dialogs, pen actions
6. Blender development (
http://www.blender.org)