ProperBlog

Big Time Charlie Potatoes

Blogkeep — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 22:34:10 +0000

Some 15 or so years ago I used to regularly watch bands at the Castle on Oldham street Manchester. Bands such as Pagans Chemistry Set, The Hot Bananas and Charlie Potatoes amongst others. All that I have from that time are wonderful memories and some tunes.

Here are some of Charlie Potatoes tunes.

“The recording and performance quality is generally pretty poor by professional standards, but I believe they are mostly all good or great songs. Maybe one day a real band will record some of Charlie’s stuff properly and make him a happy man.” – Naughty Nathan: Naughty Nathans Charlie page

Big Time Charlie are
Naughty Nathan – Bass guitar
Johnny Smokes – Drums and backing vocals
Charlie Potatoes – Rhythm/lead guitar and vocals

Enjoy…

All music and lyrics are copyright W. J. Cooke 2000/2008.

If anyone reading this has recordings of The Hot Bananas, Pagans Chemistry set or indeed any bands that played the Castle on Oldham street Manchester in the mid to late ’90′s please drop me a line.

Driver problems shared printers Win7 to XP

Blogkeep — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 11:46:13 +0000

Trying to share a Canon IP3600 from a Windows 7 PC to a Windows XP PC over Ethernet I found that the XP PC would not install the drivers for the shared printer. XP claiming that a suitable driver could not be found. It seems the issue was with the way the printer was named. In Windows 7 Devices and printers the printer name was “Canon Inkjet iP3600″ whilst in the .inf file for the Windows XP driver the printer was called “Canon iP3600 series” as below.

[Manufacturer] "Canon" = Canon,NTx86.5.1,NTx86.6.0 ; ; Model sections. ; ; Each section here corresponds with an entry listed in the ; [Manufacturer] section, above. The models will be displayed in the order ; that they appear in the INF file. ; ;WindowsXP [Canon.NTx86.5.1] "Canon iP3600 series" = CNM_0333XP, LPTENUM\CanoniP3600_seriesEABF, CanoniP3600_series "Canon iP3600 series" = CNM_0333XP, USBPRINT\CanoniP3600_seriesEABF, CanoniP3600_series

So Windows XP when connecting to the Windows 7 share for this printer was actually looking for a “Canon inkjet iP3600 series” as named in Windows 7, driver. As the printer name in the Windows XP driver .inf file is “Canon iP3600 series” Windows XP presumed that this was not the correct driver.

A simple edit of the Windows XP driver .inf file changing the name from “Canon iP3600 series” to “Canon inkjet iP3600 series” fixed the problem and I was able to install the driver and thus connect to the shared printer. This information probably applies to other printers where the name of the printer displayed in the Windows 7 devices and printer settings differs from the name present in the driver .inf file for the Windows XP driver.

Thunderbird 6 Blurry fonts in Windows 7

Blogkeep — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 16:54:11 +0000

In Thunderbird, go to: tools>options>advanced>general>Config Editor

Find: gfx.direct2d.disabled

Right click on it, and set it to true.

SEO Spam

Blogkeep — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:54:13 +0000

It seems my site has been noticed by commercial entities wishing to sell me their SEO products (I guess that’s what they were, I didn’t click the contained links). Well, I don’t allow posts without first checking them out, so please do not waste your time. In addition to such posts being deleted without ever being shown, I will never click on a link contained in such posts.

I would urge others who receive such posts to their blog or similar email spam to just delete them without clicking any contained links no matter how enticing. Every click on such spam only encourages them to post more.

Site updates

Blogkeep — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:01:58 +0000

Like buttons have been added for posts and a follow button has been added for Twitter. I have also added a couple of advertisements. I so despise loud flashy animated ads so these are subtle and unobtrusive. Any advertisements that are here on propergander are for products that I use or have used in the past. Products I trust and recommend.

Facial recognition identifies your social security number

Blogkeep — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:19:23 +0000

Here’s an interesting article I came across on New Scientist:

facial-recognition-identifies

There was an old wartime saying that “careless talk costs lives”. Perhaps there should be a new saying for the social networking age something along the lines of “careless postings cost identities”.

The Internet is a vast searchable database of personal information, be careful what you post online.

PDF to JPG Automation

Blogkeep — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 11:18:20 +0000

I need to download a PDF document and convert each page to a jpg and upload the results to a web server on a regular basis. I thought I would automate the task and share my code. This is a quick and dirty method (very quick and very dirty). There is no sanity checking and the code is very insecure, a perfect example of how *NOT* to write code for deployment on a website. I use this code from a command line and it is not accessible from the Internet. Imagemagick is a pre-requisite as this is what does the actual pdf to jpg conversion.

$htmlPage=<<



HTMLHEAD;

$htmlEnd="

";

if ($argc > 0) {

  for ($i=1;$i < $argc;$i++) {

    parse_str($argv[$i],$tmp);

    $_REQUEST = array_merge($_REQUEST, $tmp);

  }

}

$filename=$_REQUEST['fn'];

$sourceserver=$_REQUEST['ss'];

$sourcefilename=urlencode($_REQUEST['sf']);

$localfilename=$_REQUEST['sf'];

$sourceuser=$_REQUEST['suser'];

$sourcepass=$_REQUEST['spass'];

$cmd="wget --user=".$sourceuser." --password=".$sourcepass." ".$sourceserver."/".$sourcefilename;

exec($cmd);

echo "Download complete... Converting\n\n";

$Ccmd="convert ./'".$localfilename."' -resize 570x800\! -quality 80 -density 72 -depth 16 -strip ./jpgs/page%d.jpg";

exec($Ccmd);

echo "conversion complete\n\nCreating html\n\n";

$dir = opendir ("jpgs");

$files=array();

while (false !== ($file = readdir($dir))) {

  if (strpos($file, '.jpg',1)) {

    $files[]=$file;

  }

}

natsort($files);

foreach($files as $Ifilename) {

  $htmlPage.="\n";

}

$htmlPage.=$htmlEnd;

$htmlFile=fopen("webpage.html",'w') or die("cannot create file");

fwrite($htmlFile,$htmlPage);

fclose($htmlFile);

echo "starting upload...\n\n";

$destserver=$_REQUEST['ds'];

$ftpUser =$_REQUEST['duser'];

$ftpPass =$_REQUEST['dpass'];

$conn_id = ftp_connect($destserver) or die("Error connecting to $destserver");

if(ftp_login($conn_id, $ftpUser, $ftpPass)) {

  echo "login to ".$destserver." sucessful";

  ftp_chdir($conn_id, "/public/www");

  ftp_put($conn_id, basename("webpage.html"), "webpage.html", FTP_ASCII);

  ftp_chdir($conn_id, "/public/www/jpgs");

  foreach (glob("./jpgs/*.*") as $filename) {

    ftp_put($conn_id, basename($filename), $filename, FTP_BINARY);

  }

ftp_close($conn_id);

} else {

  echo "login failure\n\n";

  exit();

}

echo "Upload complete";

exit();

?>

Presuming the php code above has been saved as doit.php.

php doit.php sf=pdf_source_filename ss=ftp://domain.com/path_to_source_pdf suser=source_server_username spass=source_server_password $ds=destinationserver.com duser=destination_user_name dpass=destination_password

I don’t actually run it with command line options, I have hard coded the variables including user names and passwords into the script itself. This is bad practice even though the I have saved the script so that only root can read and run it.

This is the line that does the actual conversion for those who don’t need to download the pdf and upload the resulting images. Substituting png for jpg at the end of this command will save the pdf pages as a lossless png. You can play with the quality setting in order to compromise between quality and file size for jpg images.

convert pdf_file.pdf -resize width_in_pixelsxheight_in_pixels -quality 80 page%d.jpg

Ubuntu – Remove old kernels

Blogkeep — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 12:01:42 +0000

Overtime the number of old Kernels on an Ubuntu install grows. On this server the /boot partition is almost full because of them. So it’s time to do a bit of house keeping. This server does not have a UI installed so there’s no easy point and click package manager option.

There is a simple one line command that will do the job:

sudo aptitude purge '~ilinux-image-[0-9].* !'`uname -r`

This command will remove all but the current in use kernel from the system without removing any other package.

If you want to see what will be removed without actually removing anything the command is:

sudo aptitude search '~ilinux-image-[0-9].* !'`uname -r`

PC Support Phone Scam

Blogkeep — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 09:47:53 +0000

On the 20th of July my telephone rang at 12:31pm the callers number was witheld. The caller informed me that my PC was infected with viruses and that it has sent messages over the Internet to the company he worked for, he said the company was called Internet Control. Out of curiosity I played dumb and went along with him, the guy had a heavy Indian accent.

He guided me through the opening of the windows inf and prefetch folders and told me that all the files within those folders were viruses. (These are infact windows system files that Windows needs to function correctly) He then guided me to open Windows event viewer and told me that all the Warnings in the application events log were evidence of infection. Playing dumb I asked him what I could do about it.

He passed me on to another person whom he said was his supervisor. This “supervisor” had an Eastern European accent. This supervisor asked me to download a program from the Internet to help him diagnose and fix the problem. The program he asked me to download was ammyy admin from ammyy.com this is a remote desktop server. I am unaware if Ammyy are complicit in anyway with this scam, I have no evidence to support such a claim. However the Whois for Ammyy.com reports that the registrant is protected by WhoisGuard. A company that hides the true owners of a domian from a whois lookup. I would advise the looking up of ammyy and ammyy.com in a search engine and you to drawn your own conclusions. Just because one has nothing to fear doesn’t mean one cannot choose to hide anyway.

I quickly fired up a VM of XP pro and downloaded the Ammyy software. After running the software it connected to an IP address owned by plusserver.de. This supervisor then ran through exactly what I had been asked to do previously, showing me the contents of Windows inf and prefetch folders and telling me that all the files in those folders were viruses.

Whilst remotely connected to my VM XP he didn’t notice the shortcuts to Immunity and IDA, nor the folder marked analysis tools or the Virtual box tool icon in the icon tray.

I asked him what I could do about all the “viruses” on my PC. He opened notepad and pasted a price list into it. I was told I could purchase a support contract that would rid my PC of viruses and keep it clean for a year. He then asked for an email address to which he could send information on how to pay. Under pressure to provide him with an email address quickly I made the mistake of giving him a propergander.org.uk email address. He was expecting me to use the VM XP install he was connected to to retrieve my email, as I use this VM to analyse malware I don’t have email set up on it. When I told him I use a different machine for my email he began to get suspicious and opened the propergander (this) website in a browser. Well game up, I never got the email. He was very angry that I had strung him along and asked why. I told him I was investigating how the scam he was running worked and that this little episode would make an ideal entry in my blog. He protested that he was not running a scam, I replied that I had recorded the conversation and had evidence of the lies and deception used to convince me my PC was infected. He then immediately hung up the phone.

I reported the abuse of this IP address to abuse@plusserver.de who replied “Our staff has investigated your complaint and checked your data. There are several indications that your complaint is well-grounded.”

Overall this was very amusing, but not so for ordinary users with no clue as to how operating systems work. This is a nasty scam. One that all computer users should be aware of.

Not so smooth WordPress update

Blogkeep — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:05:36 +0000

I made a stupid error updating WordPress to 3.1.3. I deleted my theme and had to restore from back up.

Something very strange happened though, when I brought the site back up the blog did not work. Clicking on the link to the blog made my browser attempt to connect to the IP of a Verizon address pool! Instead of propergander.org.uk, all the WordPress links were pointing to this address. Confused, I checked the source code for the site and discovered that this address was coming from the WordPress database. After further investigation I discovered that somehow the content of the WordPress database table wp_options had changed during my update. I quickly did some manual SQL updates on this table and corrected the option_values for a couple of records, namely option_id=1 and option_id=39.

All is fine now, but I am completely at a loss as to how this 70.105.xxx.xxx address got into my WordPress tables.