Archive for the "Tech" Category

Couple tech things that pissed me off.

First starters. AVG, eat a bowl of dicks. Seriously, eat them up, and then when you are done, go fuck yourself.

there was a time a few years ago when AVG was the good shit, those of us that work in the IT industry would usually recommend them to people, those days are over. then have been getting shittier and shittier for a while. It started with them falling WAY behind other programs like Malwarebytes. then they started getting too involved. Adding all sorts of little add on programs, where now days if you have their entire suite of garbage you’re looking at the same price as most legit enterprise solutions.

A about a week ago, being the retard I am, just for good old fashion shits and giggles I downloaded the Trial of AVG PC Tuneup. I was just curious as to what the hell it did. The answer is not a fuck of a lot. Clear out your trash bin, temp files, and you can do it all yourself.

I ran it the one time and was like, what the fuck? That’s it? I could have done this myself in less time that it took to download this 60MB piece of shit.

I was going to uninstall it right then, but I got side track with something shiny or something. Then I totally forgot it was on there.

A couple days later, I’m sitting in bed watching TV, the laptop was on my desk doing it thing and then POOF. Automatic reboot.

Needless to say I was a little off guard by that. So I started it back up, nothing weird. I leave it alone, wake up in the morning, it’s rebooted again. Go to work, rebooted again.

So when I have time I start going through logs, and I see that it is that fucking thing having critical errors. The “trial” for it, was to just run it once. BUT when it likes to add it’s own scheduled task, and does so even though it is expired. So again even though it is expired, it keeps trying to launch. It would throw up little warnings like “Your computer is running slow” and then when you click on it, it would tell you that it is expired. Also year it was running slow cause that fucking thing was using up 1GB (not 1GB, a fucking GB) of memory to not run.

So finally I’m like, ok, I got 5 free minutes, lets uninstall this piece of shit.

I got to control panel, go to uninstall it. HELL NO. It won’t do it. Get the uninstall shield, and then boom, restart. I disabled the automatic restart so I’d actually get the Blue Screen of Death to see the error code. Yeah critical errors from that thing.

ok, so I’m like fuck it, I won’t do it through the control panel. Instead I’ll go install it from the actual install file. The uninstall file for this thing is called unis000.exe or something like that, doesn’t matter, cause it wasn’t there.

At this point I’m like fuck it, whatever, I’ll just kill the start up process and be done with it. So do the old msconfig kill the process on start up, reboot. 2 minutes later the fucker popped up again. Kill the task, right back. then I’m like, oh yeah, fucking scheduled task. So I kill that.

But at this point the thing was pissing me off, and I wanted to get rid of it. The thing wouldn’t uninstall on it’s own, so I thought, hmm, if I download it again, it will say it is already there and ask if I want to remove the previous version. i could do that, then just stop the install, delete the exe. Yeah, didn’t work, I got to the uninstall part and then boomshakalaka. Restart.

So when It was restarted I was like fuck this, safe mode it is. I boot into Safe mode, and I go went scorched earth on this thing. Deleted all the files, went into the registry, clean all of that out, and holy shit was this thing all over the registry.

So I do that, reboot to get out of safe mode, and log back in, so far so good. I think I got all of it, and that piece of shit is off my computer.

And just for good measure, I removed ALL AVG stuff. They can go burn in hell now for all I care.

Now for the second problem, this didn’t happen to me, but a friend of mine. His computer was all fucked up, I assumed it was due to all the Russian porn he downloads.

What was happening was every time he did a search in Google about every 3 searches or so, when he clicked on a link, the browser would reirect him to this LiveSearchNow garbage.

So when he asked me to look at it, my first thought was spyware. So I had him run a couple different scans with different stuff, there were a few things found, but nothing too exciting.

So I test it out, still getting redirects.

My next thought, root kit.

So I downloaded TDSSKiller, ran that, it did find 1 thing, killed that, tested it out, same thing.

So Now I’m like What the fuck, lets go old school style.

First I cleared his Cache and cookies ( I know that won’t do fuck all but I like to start with that. )

Then checked the LAN settings, made sure there wasn’t come sort of proxy in there, there wasn’t.

Next, checked his host file, that was fine.

Next checked the TCP/IP to make sure that it was getting the IP automatically

At this point I was sort of stumped, and really tired.

He uses Firefox, and just for the hell of it I fired up Internet Explorer. Farted around in there, nothing. It was fine, did like 20 searches, nothing.

So then I’m like, ok, this must be a FireFox issue.

Then I started to feel REALLY retarded. I went and I checked his firefox extensions. Which honestly should have been like the first thing I should have checked.

I went in there, and there was a Plugin for “CWA App by We-Care.com”

That was what was doing it. He had installed something else that bundled this into the installation (and didn’t actually tell you, I was all ready to be all READ THE FUCKING TERMS AND CONDITIONS WHEN YOU INSTALL SOMETHING) but then I reinstalled it just to make sure that was what caused it, and yeah, it was a silent install.

So yeah, fuck them too, they can share the bowl of dicks with AVG

Facebook for the LOLZ

Full disclosure, I do not have a Facebook account. I honest to god do not see the purpose of it. People with too much time on their hands. I don’t want to reconnect with people from High School, if I didn’t want to lose contact with them I wouldn’t have. I have plenty of friends from high School all over the country which I stay in touch with regularly. I don’t need some stupid fucking site cluttered with junk I don’t care about to do that. Also when I talk to those people, we talk about relevant things, not pictures of them getting wasted somewhere. Nor do I give 2 shits about what some person I don’t even know has to say about, well, anything.

But I digress.

So apparently Facebook had some sort of Democracy where users could vote on changes to the site. A few weeks ago, they announced that they would be making all sorts of changes to their privacy policies, and what they do with data they collect, and all sorts of other shit.

Keep in mind, Facebook is a publicly traded corporation, which has to answer to it’s share holders. What some 14 year old girl, 19 year old Community College student, and 45 year old single mother have to say, really means fuck all to them.

Needless to say the internet nerds got their panties in a bunch. You know, the Macbook using, horn-rimmed glasses, scare wearing, latte drinking douche bags who think everything on the internet is their right, and should be free, and should be exactly like they want it to be. but that is a rant for another time.

Anyhow so a few weeks ago Facebook said it would put it to a vote, they would let their users decide if they should keep playing nice the way they have, or turn into a Google/Microsoft type asshole, sitting in a dark room masturbating to all the data of yours it has mined.

The catch was, the majority of the vote had to be to reject the change, AND it required 30% of users to vote.

30%

When I read that I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. That is one of the emptiest promises I’d ever heard in my life, they might as well have pissed on your head and told you it was raining.

30% of their 1 billion users is 300 million people.

THERE IS NOT A MOTHERFUCKING CHANCE IN THE WORLD 300 MILLION PEOPLE WERE GOING TO VOTE FOR IT.

Seriously, that was one of the most ridiculous things I’d ever read.

I garunfuckingtee with 100% certainty that there are not even 300 million active users.

I’ve been doing this internet shit for a while, I work for a user based internet company, I know how you fuck with the numbers. Trust me, I’ve done my fair share of manipulating for advertisers.

The general industry standard for an active account means that the account owner has logged into the account at least once in the last 30 days.

But there are TONS of ways around that. You can adjust the time and say if they have logged into with in a year. Or if SOMEONE has accessed their page in a year. So you know, you set up a page in 2008, never touched it in the last 4 years, but you have 500 friends, and once every month or so someone does a daisy chain of friends and clicks on everyone. Even though YOU haven’t touched your page in years, some dipshit out there did.

From my experiences both personally, and professionally, I’ve found that for a user-based community that has been established for at least 3 years, the general amount of truly active users is around 12-15%

So Facebook wanted 300 million people to vote, but I highly doubt, that even being nice they even have a quarter of a billion active accounts.

So right off the bat, they probably don’t even have enough active users to make this vote count.

Now, on top of that, how many of the active accounts are for things like businesses and bands and shit like that. things that couldn’t give 2 shits about the privacy policy, all they care about getting people to the page.

Then as far as the active users go, how many care what the privacy policy is, what it means, what data mining is, or even KNOW what they are?

Very fucking few.

When Facebook announced they were going to do this poll, after I got done laughing I told a person that if they got even a million people to vote, I would be SHOCKED.

Welp

668,872 votes.

over 299 million short.

NO SHIT

Facebook was just tickling your balls a little bit before they shoved it up your ass.

Dude, EA Sports: Fo Realz?

I can remember a time when in the gaming world when it came to sports game, EA sports was the proverbial shit. Everything they did was A+ #1 dynamite. But they they started to slip. Then the 2k series of stuff came out, and I guess I started to get spoiled by those, because the NBA 2k series in my mind is the best basketball game out there. But then the EA stuff started going down hill, and fast. And what the hell ever happened to the NBA Live series? NBA Live 95 was some good shit. NBA Live 10, well, that was just straight up shit. and they haven’t made another one since. Not that I’m really missing it since I got my 2k.

With the Madden series, I still think 2005 for the Playstation was the best one. Each year since that it got a little worse and worse. I wasn’t that much of a fan of Madden 12 on the PS3. On the Wii is was basically unplayable. But on the Ps3 it just felt…. off. It even though there were more features, it actually felt slimmed down.

And don’t even get me started on the Super Star mode. Another place where NBA2k blows it out of the water. In NBA 2k you start off as a bumb, you have to work your way up to even get playing time.

In Madden 12, I was a QB, got drafted by the Packers, and they benched Aaron Rodgers for me. I’d get eleventy billion skill points per game and by the end of the season I wad a 97 rating. Lame.

But anyhow, so I got Madden 13 just for shits and giggles. Figured it had to be an improvement over 12. I’ll say visually it’s more pleasing, looks sleeker, feels more substantial. the game play is a little better.

But some of the technical aspects are annoying as fuck, and some downright ridiculous.

I’ve been playing Franchise Mode with the Bills. Figured if I’m going to torture myself in real life being a Bills fan, might as well do it virtually as well.

For starters, just like every other Madden version, the commentary will make you want to kill yourself after a couple games. They keep repeating the same shit over and over, even in the same game.

Although I will say I like the combo of Jim Nantz and Phil Simms this year over Gus Johnson and Chris Collinsworth.

But worse than that, there are bugs in it that keep fucking up.

75% of the time when ever i sack a quarterback with Marcell Dareus the commentators say Marques Colston. that doesn’t even make sense.

There have been a few times I’ve run the ball with Fred Jackson, and after the run they will say “Well the coach can’t be happy with that fumble” even though there was no fumble.

I’ve had games where Kyle Williams somehow managed to lose tackles during the game. He’ll have 5 at half time, get a few more, and then at the end of the game have like 3.

On one play, it was 4th and 17 and I went for it, I ended up throwing an incomplete pass to Johnson. I hit pause, and the option to challenge the play was there. I used it, and it over turned the play, gave me 1st down like 30 yards down field. The incomplete pass I threw wasn’t something close to the line, it was 5 yards over his head.

Also I noticed when I rush the QB from the line, I can usually go about a half yard over the line before the ball is snapped and they never call offside.

I’ve only been called for holding once, actually that is the only penalty I ever got. I even went into the settings to make sure I wasn’t in some sort of arcade mode or something or that the sliders were really low.

Also I played an entire season, and only had 1 person injured all year. C.J Spiller. 4 times.

I’d say the game is a wee bit better than 12, but over all, I am not all that impressed

Dude, Mozilla. Settle the fuck down!

So I was sitting at work today, and one of our techs on the other side of the country asked in our OPS chatroom if anyone has seen any issues with Firefox 17.

I looked at the chat window for a second, then was like, what the fuck? Version 17? We’re still trying to fix compatibility bug with version 13.

Pretty much anyone who works for an Internet Based IT company will tell you, the worst thing you can hear is that some major 3rd party product which interfaces with your product has released a new version. Seriously, it’s about as enjoyable as a swift kick to the nuts. There are always, ALWAYS going to be conflicts somewhere. Always.

But Firefox is getting out of fucking hand. It always bothers me when someone puts out new official releases for stuff way too often. If these are to fix security and compatibility issues, why the hell don’t you alpha and beta test them longer? Why are you going to put something that you know there is a damn good chance is going to have problems.

No one really started using Firefox till version 1.6. Even then it wasn’t anything that was super highly used. that was released Feb 9, 2004.

Firefox 1.5 and 2 were sort of a Joke, the first REAL update they had was Firefox 3. which was released June 17, 2008. Nearly 4 years after 1.6. their next real (and in my mind best) release was with 3.6 which was released Jan 21, 2010.

So as you can see, there is a pretty big gap between the releases, In between they did all sorts of testing with alpha and beta versions before launching a full release.

In the first 6 years they really only had like 4 MAJOR releases.

Fast forward to now days.

Every time you turn around, there is a new one.

And here is what the biggest pain in the ass is. They release these, and inevitably there are not going to be comparable with something. On the backend for our things there is xml, and pearl, and cgi, and asp, and php, and .net, and java, and flash, and basically fucking everything. It takes a long fucking time to get stuff built that will be backwards compatible with industry standards.

But with Firefox lately it makes the browser nearly unsupportable. Granted, I say that as I sit here writing this in Firefox. But from an engineering stand point, there is no way to keep up.

Like I said, we’re still trying to work on compatibility bugs with version 13 which was released June 5th 2012. Now we’re not a company the size of Google who can have a team of people that are solely dedicated to making things compatible with Firefox. We have other things that are more important, like versions of Windows, Office Products, Macs, mobile devices. and quite frankly, we conform to industry standards, so really it should be up to them to make them compatible with us, not the other way around.

But when ever we have a client who updates to the latest version, and they have issues, it is always our fault. Never mind the fact that everything worked fine until they upgraded to some new release of a browser that came out 5 hours earlier and isn’t even remotely close to being a supported product on our end. But to make matter worse, with browsers and all their fucking plugins now days, that is just an added layer of crap to sift through. You know how often we run up against people whit problems, and the problem is because they installed some dumbass plugin that was written by some 14 year old in his bedroom that really had no idea what he is doing?

Very often.

Firefox 13 came out June 5th

14 came out June 26, 2012

Seriously, there is NO FUCKING EXCUSE to have a new stable release version released after 3 weeks. All that means if that the previous version was NOT stable.

15 came out August 28, 2012

16 came out October 9, 2012

17 came out November 20, 2012

That is just goddamn ridiculous. I should also point out that Firefox 18.0 Beta 1 is already out.

So Mozilla, buddy, how about you guys slow the fuck down. How about leaving the newest version in the testing stages a while longer to make sure they are actually good. Put out a new release like every 6 months like a normal company. Stop trying to just churn out as much shit as humanly possible.

It’s just going to end up causing problems.

I’m so sick of liars

I hate fucking liars.

For those of you who have been around here for years, you know what I work in the IT industry.

First off, for any of you kids looking to go to college for something, avoid IT like it has super herpes. They will tell you about the awesome jobs you can get, and great pay, but let me tell you, they do not exist. For the first few years you are going to work Level 1 help desk shit dealing with grandma who can’t figure out how to use her Dell, and even when you start to work your way up the company, if the day comes when you’re an admin, you will never get vacation, you will be on call 24 hours a day, and you will still have to deal with grandma who can’t figure out her Dell

I’ve worked in the IT industry for 12 years. I’m actually extremely good at what I do. Being good is not good. That means every trouble ticket that needs an escalation is going to end up in front of you. It also means every Level 1 person who has no idea what they are doing is going to end up standing at your desk asking you questions all day long.

It’s a pain in the ass. Trying to get your own stuff done, but then have to spend half your day answering questions for people who work under you.

But one of the things that has been pissing me off lately, is how often the end users or customers lie. I don’t know if I either never noticed it till the last few months, of if this is a new thing. But it is fucking killing me

The job I do right now, I do support for email stuff. I don’t want to sound like a dick, but when it comes to email delivery, I am an expert on it. I know the ins and outs, and have been doing it for years. You are not going to slip something by me. If you lie, I’m going to catch it.

But that seems to be the trend recently. Almost every customer I deal with just gives me a bunch of bullshit

I don’t understand thing

When someone is giving you support, why are you going to lie? First off, I’m going to catch you, but more than that, your lies are just going to delay the support process. I cannot support you without accurate information. If you give me bullshit, I’m going to spend hours picking apart that bullshit, in order to find the root cause. So why fucking lie? Tell me the truth from the start, and we can cut the time down exponentially. Because in the long run,. I’m going to catch the lie anyhow. There is no way to diagnose the issue the issue UNLESS I identify the lie!

Being an email host, one of the biggest things I have to deal with is people who come to us and say “All my mail is missing!”

Like most hosts, we have a webmail, then we allow people POP and IMAP access.

Most of you don’t understand thing. But in the world of email, for incoming mail there are 2 protocols POP3 and IMAP.

There are some major differences between the 2. The biggest thing, is that POP by default is going to download your messages OFF the mail server. If you have something like Outlook, and have that set up for POP, when ever you click send/receive you are going to download the messages which are on the mail server OFF the server, and they are going to get stored locally in your PST file.

IMAP on the other hand, that is a live connection to the server, so what ever you do in Outlook is going to be mirrored on the server. Also, none of the messages are going to be removed from the server. In this day in age, it’s the best protocol to use.

There is an option in Outlook to leave copies on the server. Go to the more settings button, then the advanced tab, and there is a check box to leave a copy on the server.

But the biggest problem I run up against is people who set up POP accounts in multiple location. Again, unless you tell Outlook to leave a copy, the messages are going to be downloaded OFF the server into that client.

It’s basically every day that we get people who are like, I tried to go to my webmail (or local outlook) and there are no messages there, I had 5000 messages where did they go!

So, we are always like, well did you access from another location, or if you use webmail did you set up a pop account somewhere?

Nearly 100% of the time, these people say no.

It’s fucking ridiculous. It’s not something they might forget. 99% of the people come back and tell us they use webmail 100% of the time and have no emailclients set up anywhere

We can run log checks, it takes about 2 seconds. And pretty much 100% of the time when a person tells us the ONLY use the webmail, no email clients or mobile devices set up, we run the logs and see they have 58,000 POP connections.

Why fucking lie?

When you lie, we have to chase out tail, and we might be able to find where the messages went, although if we have to go back and forth enough times, the logs might not even be there. If you tell us right off the bat “Yeah I set up outlook express” we would be able to recover the messages for you.

Probable 95% of the customers who tell us they lost messages we can’t recover them because they lie to us. If we know the truth off the bat, it’s possible. Dick us around, the logs fall off.

The other thing is with error messages

Look, if you send an email, and you get a bounce back, or you get a Windows error, if you are 100% honest, your tech support can identify the issue within about 10 seconds

But people love to fucking lie. Instead they are like “Well when I try to send to xxx.com it gets rejected”………. Or “xxx.com tried to send me a message and they said it was blocked for spam”

Shit like that is useless. And again, if you are 100% honest, the problem can be resolved in literally seconds. If you lie, it can be weeks or even never

Being a legitimate enterprise email provider, we do not allow for authenticated mail to be sent off our server. Never. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to track spammers.

If you set up outlook, there is a check box in the outgoing servers tab, under more settings that says “my outgoing server requires authentication”. Basically EVERY mail host requires that.

If you go to try to send a message and you don’t have that check, you’re going to end up with an error message saying “550 permanent failure: relay not allowed”

The error is SUPER specific. something that support would identify in about 2 seconds.

But people love to fucking lie. Instead they will tell you there are 150 on the domain, and all of them are getting errors when trying to send to some random person.

The same thing goes with bounce back messages. 9 times out of 10 the bounce back is going to tell you EXACLY why the messages was rejected. But people love to play dumb. Every day we get people who say “I never got a bounce back” But then we go into their account, and find a shitload of bounce backs which they deleted.

Why fucking lie? It’s stupid

Oh yeah, one other thing. Don’t ever think your email is secure. Your provider can read every single messages you sent/received. We have 100% access to your webmail, archive, and anything that is on the server. People seem to be shocked by this, but we have to. without it we can’t support anything. Even if you delete it, we can see it for like at least 7 days.

So don’t try telling us you didn’t send that 16 year old an email asking to see her tits, and don’t pretend you never got the email from your boss about a project that needs to be done.

Cause we can see it all