My employer is doing me a favor. They are keeping me from doing my job. All in the name of computer "security."

They've installed McAfee Virus Scan and ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO). Both good ideas, in theory. Ya don't want virii getting into those corporate computers and ePO lets them enforce a consistent policy across all of the computers. Then they lockout the end user from changing the Virus Scan settings.

The problem comes from one seemingly innocuous tab in those Virus Scan settings. "Detect unwanted programs." Then try to clean those or if McAfee can't clean up the "unwanted" programs, move them to a quarantine location.

What's an "unwanted" program? "Tools-pskill," a utility that brings an equivalent to the Unix kill(1) command to Win32. It's part of the PSTools package from Sysinternals.

Want to know what else is considered "unwanted?" Ever heard of a little utility called NMap?

Sure I can kill tasks with Task Manager and everyone and their sister who wants to write security software writes a port scanner. But it's a hell of a lot easier when I can use the best tools out there for the job. When I'm out on the road at a customer, I don't want to be fumbling with understanding yet another horrible GUI or screwed up command line. I want to reach into my bag of tricks and pull out the tools I know.

I've got less and less time on site every time I get sent out. I don't want to be making a second trip to Parhump, NV if I can help it. So why should I waste time trying to figure out how to connect to that new commerial catch server?

Because pskill and NMap are "unwanted." That's why.

Accessibility isn't one of "my" issues in television or computing. Where it is convenient, I do my part to help things out. I'll admit I don't go out of my way, but I don't do things that will hinder accessibility. Certainly, at work I do my part to help with closed captioning and video description.

But I disavow all responsibility for the little D))) looking icon that is being used for video description. Broadcasters key it at the start of a program right along with the advisory rating and the closed captioning symbol. If you don't know about it, according to the FCC Consumer & Government Affairs web site,

Video descriptions are a way to let people who are blind or have low vision know what is happening on screen. Video description is the insertion of verbal descriptions about the setting and/or action in a program when information about these visual elements is not contained in the audio portion of the program.

How is a person with vision impairment supposed to see that little icon?

C:\>ping -t XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX

.
.
.

Ping statistics for XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX:
Packets: Sent = 25, Received = 18, Lost = 7 (28% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 100ms, Maximum = 121ms, Average = 76ms

Ummm. Am I missing something here?

Everybody these days seems to be adding X-headers to their messages when the process it checking for spam. Even SourceForge does it for the listservs it handles.

Sometimes the headers duplicates most or even all of the message.

Sometimes the headers are longer than the message.

I thought the point of spam filtering was supposed to be to reduce bandwidth and reduce the junk a person has to read?

I sometimes find it's helpful to see X-headers. But I guess I need to more agressively filter them out.

I guess it's really my own fault. I didn't read. And I know I should do that.

Acutally, it all started because I wanted to read. I checked out Learning Java from my local public library. Unfortunately, I got it on inter-library loan and that meant it was non-renewable. I doubt I could learn a programming language in two months, let alone in 28 short days.

I read what I could of the library's copy, but that didn't get me very far. I was still in the middle of the language basics. No where near being able to write a useful program. It was time to get a longer term copy.

I've been quite happy with my Safari subscription. But this was just too big conceptually and number of pages wise to read online. So it was off to Amazon.

So I figured while I was there, I may as well pick up a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I hadn't read it yet and I really wanted to. I already knew the answer is 42. Who knew I had it so right? I actually ended up with The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide. (I'm on the Restaurant now.)

And while I was at it spending money, I wanted a new computer game. I wanted something good to take my frustrations out. That meant killing things. Now I'm not the fastest adopter of video games. And I'm not much for online play. So I was o.k. with a not necessarily the most recent game.

I settled on Battlefield 1942.

And I bought it without reading the specs.

Turns out my graphics card isn't beefy enough to really handle the game. Now I've been meaning to pick up a new AGP graphics card for a while. A couple of years ago I bought a PCI graphics card so I could go dual monitor. Now my AGP card was due for a replacement.

This time I wasn't going to be foiled. I started reading the specs for the graphics cards that are out there. I'm looking in the

I guess I waited too long to buy a new card. All of them require a P4 and I've got a lowly P3 that mostly works fine, but really shouldn't be overburdened with a too powerful graphics card. So the new graphics card option is out.

I guess it's time to start seriously thinking about a new computer. Unfortunately, a decent computer costs as much as month's rent.

Sigh.

Sport Utility Vehicles have been bothering me for a while. The recent car related /. polls reminded me that I should start my Ban the SUV campaign.

It's not like I'm an environmental nut. I don't hug trees. I bathe. I don't have 12 vDC running to power appliances so I can eliminate unnecessary draw from wall warts. I just don't like SUVs.

You can't tell me Soccer Mom needs to guzzle gasoline, obstruct my view and roar down the highway just to get a few groceries. It can't be easy for the kids to get into an SUV. I fit groceries just fine in my car, thank you. Heck, I fit about a quarter of the things in my sister's apartment in my car.

I drive a smallish car. It's not a hybrid. It's not some tiny experimental thing. But it's reasonable. I can't afford to pay astronomical prices to commute to work. Thirty gallon fuel tanks and engines that use that up in a round trip just crank those gas prices higher. Ban SUVs and watch gas prices stabilize.

The Discovery Channel recently featured the Hummer in their new "Tactical to Practical" series. Tell me exactly what is practical about driving a Hummer to work? It takes up two parking spaces. I can't see if any cars are coming down the aisle in the parking lot if I've got one of those things parked next to me. The headlights blind me since they are right at my eye level. Ban SUVs and watch accident rates drop.

I can't count how many times I've been cut off by some moron driving an SUV on my way to work. On Long Island, we have the luxury of having parkways to drive on. Just cars, no trucks. No hassle of a freeway. Until the SUVs showed up. I can't see far down the road. I can't judge how good or bad traffic is. Ban SUVs and make my morning commute easier.

I need to vent, so what better time for my first /. journal entry?

My boss scheduled a 5 hour meeting yesterday from 10am-3pm with a computer storage vendor who shall remain nameless. It only lasted two hours. Phew. Oh, by the way, I had/have to go to a day and a half "workshop" with the same vendor today and tomorrow. They spent the first 4 hours repeating themselves on stuff I already knew. We finally break for lunch at 1:45pm and have to go work with another vendor I had scheduled the previous week. Someone who actually had something useful to tell me. Someone who I would have liked to deal with. Bye, bye lunch hour. They finally get to new material in the afternoon. I don't know why they couldn't spend 20 minutes reviewing the crap they spent the morning on and then done the stuff for the rest of the morning. Instead, I need to waste tomorrow morning on this also?

It only gets better.... They say their system is transparent to the controlling system. In our case, its a television station automation system. So when I click "Send to archive" it goes to the magic archive and doesn't matter whether the its destined for near-line disk storage or off-line tape storage. Problem. The archive needs to know what "group" the material belongs to. They say the automation system should tell the archive system what the group is. Well thats not transparent. Your making the automation system aware of archive specific information. Oh, and they won't change their software to accomodate our requested workflow.

Plus, groups can't be members of groups. Ok, there are pros and cons there. But then they went on to give examples of how things should be divided in to sub-categories that would fit perfectly into a heirarchy of groups. They won't consider that as a feature request either.

There's a third lack-of-feature that pissed me off. We have several distinct tape libraries at the moment. They are all going to be brought into a centralized management when this project is done. Can I say, "stick my material in any old tape library"? No. It won't load balance for me. I have to configure it to pseudo-load balance. Which of course means it won't load balance. Is that going into the hopper as a feature request? You guessed it. It's not.

I hate sales and "consulting" people.

There was more stuff pissing me off today. But I'm sure that stuff will crop up again. It never hurts to vent more than once, right?