I totally read it on Some Guy’s Blog

An incident with Megan last night and a link this morning reminded me about how hard it can be for a regular person to be fooled by phishing attacks

Phishing is the practice of a spammer pretending that they are from a legitimate company, such as Bank Of America, Capital One, or PayPal. The spammer will then include a link in an HTML e-mail claiming “Someone else is using your account!” or “Claim your free prize!” or something of that nature. The link in the e-mail will be to some other domain, that has nothing to do with the legitimate company. Then, when you enter your username and password, that third party has all the information they need to begin taking over your account.

Megan received a particularly conniving one last night where the phishers used a domain that began with paypal.com. It only matters what the domain ends with, not what the domain begins with.

Whenever you get an e-mail like this, it’s best to bring up the regular homepage for Bank Of America, Capital One or PayPal and login via the mechanism to which you are accustomed.

Just trying to do my part, today. Take care of yourselves out there.

I’ve added a new feature to the site, via FeedBurner and FeedBlitz. You can now subscribe to this blog via e-mail, meaning that you’ll receive a notification every time I post a new entry.

I’d prefer that you went the RSS route, but I understand if you don’t want to complicate things. Anyway, you now have the option. If you try it, comment here to let me know how it works.

We hosted Thanksgiving yesterday for the families. Megan’s folks came down early, since Megan’s mom had volunteered for the cooking. My sister and parents came later, bringing a cheese plate and the wine.

It was a great meal, and I had a great time. Everybody seemed comfortable and enjoyed each other’s company. That was a great feeling.

I’m thankful for all the gifts that God has given me, and I continue to hope that I am worthy of them.

Also, thanks everybody for reading my blog. You should never hesitate to leave comments about anything.

While working on retooling my sister’s old laptop so that Dad can use it, I also managed to update my Amazon wishlist so that interested parties would know exactly what I was after. I had to delete quite a few things since I had actually already purchased them. Good times.

The Clientele is what happens when you mix Slowdive with the Olivia Tremor Control. Very nice.

The Wolf Parade appears to be The Arcade Fire plus synthesizers, which I also like.

I just don’t like the record from The Hold Steady. Or the LCD Soundsystem. So sue me.

I am really digging the new Dangerdoom album. You know my rappin’ is the #$^#$! I also like The Game’s Documentary album, despite what you might have suspected.

This is my first post from KDE on FreeBSD 6.0. I am very much liking it so far… Now if Java will just compile!

Preparation is key in this effort. The first step is to go to the Windows Device Manager and copy down all the devices that Windows registers on your system. If you make a mistake, you’ll be very glad that you had this in dead-tree format. Here’s my version

ATI Radeon X300 SE 128MB HyperMemory
Philips DVD+-RW DVD8701
Intel 8280 1GB Serial ATA Storage Controller - 27C0
Intel 82801GB Ultra ATA Storage Controllers - 27DF
Intel 537EP V9x DF PCI Modem
Intel PRO/100 VE Network Connection
Intel Pentium 4 3Ghz

The second step is becoming familiar with the contents of your hard drive. On my computer, Dell shipped three primary partitions on the machine. One is about 55k and is involved with the Dell System Recover utility. I understand from some of the other postings I’ve read that Dell has replaced the familiar “System Restore CD” with this, uh, feature? The second is the primary Windows partition. The last is something I haven’t really taken care to fully identify. You’ll see some hints here shortly, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

The most important detail is that your partition(s) fill the hard drive. There’s no space to install another operating system. Sure, you can buy something like Partition Magic to do the resizing for you. I’ve used it in the past with success. I’m also cost sensitive though, so I wanted to see if I could do this for free. Turns out, it was not a problem. Err, well, it did take awhile, but not for the reasons you might think.

Resizing your XP Partition with RIP and ntfsresize

Fortunately for my wallet, there is an open-source tool to resize NTFS partitions: ntfsresize. The Ntfsresize FAQ lists a host of potential distributions with which you can use ntfsresize to do the partition resizing. My most successful experiments to date have been with FreeBSD. However, since FreeBSD chooses to ignore the problem of resizing one’s partitions, my OSOS journey begins with Linux.

Kubuntu, Ubuntu, and Knoppix all lead to TMDER in various ways. (Also interesting to note was that not a single one of the Linux flavors I’ve tried thus far worked with a DVI connection to the monitor; I had to break out the analog cable.)

The technique that did work was to use RIP, which seems like a really useful tool regardless of your circumstances. I am glad that I found it. Odds of it ending up on a flash drive with me at all times is high.

The RIP readme has an excellent walkthrough of the steps necessary to perform the resizing.

The highlights in brief are the following:

Seeing what you’ve got

Use the fdisk command to determine the size and nature of your partitions. For me, the output looked like this.

# fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19412 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16025 * 512 = 822528 bytes

   Device Boot     Start       End       Blocks    Id   System
/dev/sda1              1         7        56196    de   Dell Utility
/dev/sda2 *            8     18845    151316235     7   HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3          18847     19452      4867695    db   CP/M / CTOS / ...

Measure…

ntfsresize has a very nice manual on the RIP CD which you can actually gunzip and read. Feel free to either supplement the README, or to refer solely to the one provided on disc. Either would tell me to issue the command to test resizing the partition to approximately 120GB.

ntfsresize -n -s 120000M /dev/sda2

… then cut.

Having ntfsresize do the actual work is not too much different. After issuing this command, you’ll be prompted to pass the point of no return, as it were.

ntfsresize -s 120000M /dev/sda2

fdisk revisited.

We now have to use fdisk to adjust the partition table in earnest. This involves (brace yourself) deleting the primary partition on your machine. For those going straight to running only the nix/BSD operating system, that’s not much of a concern. For my purposes, though, that’s a bit scary.

At any rate, you shouldn’t be scared, because the change is only in memory until you write it to the partition table. The process is essentially:

1. Delete the primary partition
2. Recreate the primary partition with the same attributes, only smaller
3. Create a partition on which the new OS can reside.

Rebooting

Reboot into Windows by removing the CD and calling (wait for it) reboot

Windows will sense your philandering; “Your disk is dirty” it will report. That’s right, Windows! I’m going around behind your back! You tried to lock me down, but I won’t be beaten that easily.

Beginning the install process comes next.

So, I want to run different operating systems on the new Dell I just got. I am a technical person who hasn’t done so much installing of Linux or FreeBSD that I can just fly through it. I’m sure people like that exist, judging on messages I see on the forums, but one has to start somewhere.

My goal with this series is to write a guide for the new Dell owner to get started running other operating systems and to document my own progress with this effort. Since my choice of FreeBSD entails several steps where a lot of waiting is involved, I thought it might also be a good way to spend some of the downtime.

Before We Get Started

I’m installing alternative, open-source operating systems. I’m prepared to do some research, and to try different things in an effort to solve my own problems. At times, however, I find the breadth of two areas staggering: the domain of potential problems that can be encountered when either installing or using an open-source OS, and the set of choices one can make once an open-source OS is chosen. There are almost limitless configurations of a single OS, without mention of choosing between several different ones.

With the size of these sets in mind, in conjunction with the other demands on my time, I am hereby instituting what I’ll call the Ten Minute Dead End Rule, or TMDER for short. I am not really sensitive to the length of time required to solve a problem. I’ll compile source all week until I get it right if I feel confident that I’m learning something. What I am sensitive to is the feeling that I’m doing a lot of reading, but getting nowhere, or jabbing at configuration files and having no discernable effect whatsoever.

If I invoke TMDER, I may return to a dead end if I find no other alternative.

My post about the first step is almost ready, stay tuned!

Erin bought me Fevers and Mirrors on a trip to an independent CD store in downtown Knoxville to which I never returned. I thought it was an OK record with a bit too much screaming for my tastes. I recall enjoying one or two songs on the record though, and that’s sometimes enough to make my radar.

During my live music trading binge, I happened upon a Conor Oberst show at the Showbox in Seattle, and that was quite enough to download it. Sometime during the next few months, I actually listened to the version of Waste of Paint on that record, and I was really intrigued.

Shortly after that, I downloaded the album Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground and shortly after that, I bought it. It still has a good amount of screaming, of which I’m not generally a fan (although some notable exceptions exist), and is on one level a confusing album.

Lover I Don’t Have To Love is sort of a self-loathing treatment of indie rocker love, and it’s followed by Bowl Of Oranges, one of the most straightforwardly positive songs imaginable. While, unlike some, I don’t believe that his lyrics deal directly with his bi-polar nature, the diagnosis after listening to this album is pretty natural. That would explain some of his ass-hat behavior since becoming famous, probably.

When I started writing the draft of this post, I initially thought that I had put this album somewhere in the 20’s. Sometimes albums end up defining an era of your life; for me, this album defines the fall of 2003, my first in Richmond. I was still dealing with a lot of grief from Erin’s death, and really making the first attempts at opening myself to dealing with new people again. Jesse passed away that December. And yet I could sense that the seeds of my new life had already been sown, and that I would very much enjoy the future, if I could just find the strength to get there.