I typically rip any CDs I buy immediately and copy them to my MP3 player.  I'm an avid music fan, and I have hundreds of CDs, all of which I've ripped.

I have one, however, that is baffling me.

I have occasionally encountered a CD which will not rip correctly on my laptop's optical drive.  Whenever that happens, it goes in this odd seeking mode where it's stuck in the middle of a track and it keeps spinning the disc up and stopping it, almost like it's trying to find where it left off or something.

I've encountered only a couple of CDs like that, and in every case, I chalked it up to the optical drive on my laptop being hypersensitive to some discs, because when I try ripping those same CDs in one of the desktop machines I have, they rip just fine, using the same OS (Slackware Linux) and software (Grip, using cdparanoia for ripping and LAME for encoding).

Well today I ran into one that has stopped me cold.

It is an older CD from circa 1997 and is not copy protected in any way that I can note -- besides, most copy protection schemes for musical CDs really only apply to Windows.  In Linux the software music labels have had developed simply doesn't run, so I'm able to read the raw CDDA data straight off the disc without any hindrance whatsoever.  The CD plays just fine in my car stereo, an ancient boombox I have in the house, and my home stereo system.

However, when I put the disc into a computer -- any computer, even my wife's Mac and my Windows b0xx0r -- it won't play.  It skips around and eventually just hangs forever, stuck, no matter what track I try to play.  Not like it's scratched, that's a different kind of skipping.  Like the format is invalid or something.  Visual examination of the data surface shows a flawless CD... no scratches, scuffs, or even smudges that I can see, even with a magnifying glass.

When I try to mount it in Linux it tells me that it's an invalid disc.

Has anybody ever encountered anything like this?

I'd better make sure the RIAA doesn't get ahold of it to reverse engineer whatever the problem with this disc might be.  It seems like a pretty rip-proof album.  I've never encountered an audio CD that I couldn't eventually find a way to rip clean tracks off of, at least, not one that would still play in a normal CD player.

But this one plays flawlessly in any CD player I've tried, but it stops cold in any computer I've tried, over three operating systems, no less.

If it weren't from 1997 I'd say it was some sort of intentional copy protection scheme built into the formatting of the disc itself, but nobody was doing anything like that back then, and if that's the case, I am truly shocked that it would play in all the CD players I've tried, some of which are pretty sensitive to modern copy protected discs (I have two that simply won't play a copy-protected music CD, period, and both of them play this disc just fine).

I was tempted to see if I could get the raw data off of it and try burning that to a new CD, just to see if there was something physically wrong with the formatting, but I can't even mount it to do that.

Any suggestions, guys?

Okay, so he's illogical (while claiming to be logical), proudly mysogynistic, occasionally rather trollish, and clearly antagonistic to some regulars.

But the sheer fact that he has stuck around despite getting flak from all of us at one time or another says something to me about him.

I don't think he's a thunder3davis, who was just too stupid to realize he was the butt of all of our jokes.  He isn't a standard script kiddie who comes, demands help, flames when scorned, and vanishes.  He isn't a typical troll who just posts to see his own posts.  He has made some attempts at joining this community and is (in my opinion anyway) doing his damndest to fit in, no matter how much we tend to shred his posts and disagree with him.

For that persistence, I for one think that Evonus deserves to be treated like a regular.

A regular what is still up for discussion. 

In case anyone with a Slack box is wondering, good info here on fixing the Daylight Savings Time glitch on machines running anything older than Slackware 11:  http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=516681&

If you're running Slackware 11 you should be good to go.

HN II: Now With 100% Less thunder3davis

FYI

http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2006-2369


I have to wonder how a virus could really exploit something like VNC.  So you script a virus that bypasses VNC's authentication.  Great.  What then?  It's not like it can script mouse movements or access the file system.

 

About the only use I could see in something like this for a black hat would be to gain access to a machine one at a time, with a human.  A "virus" wouldn't be able to do anything, and therefore wouldn't be able to replicate.

http://www.whattorent.com


I got some interesting suggestions from it, some of which I had never heard of, but others that were movies that I either have seen and definitely liked, or ones that I've been meaning to see.

It's worth a look.

Coworker: Weird Tingly Feeling!? Who changed the SQL admin password for $client?

Me: I recently reset the password for it.

Coworker:  WHY DID YOU DO THAT? Were you going to TELL anybody?

Me: Considering all I did was make it match the password we have documented for it, no.   I didn't think it necessary to inform everyone about what is essentially a non-change.

Coworker: You need to let people know when you make a system-affecting change like that.

Me: I didn't make a system-affecting change.  Someone had changed the password and didn't document what it was, I was working with $developer at $client and they needed to update their licensing for a plugin, I couldn't get in to make the requested licensing update because the password didn't match, so I made it match.

Coworker: THAT IS A SYSTEM-AFFECTING CHANGE.

Me: No.  Check the documentation.  The documentation has not been modified in months and the password that I set matches that documentation.  As far as I'm concerned, there was no change.

Coworker: You just admitted to changing the password!

Me: No, I SET THE PASSWORD TO WHAT WAS DOCUMENTED FOR IT.

Coworker: That's a change!

Me: Tell me something.  What did you think the admin password for this client's SQL database was?

Coworker: $something

Me: And how would you know that?  It's not documented anywhere.

Coworker: Because I'm the one who set that password.  WEEKS ago.

Me: I see.  And you didn't let anyone know that you made a system-affecting change then.  Didn't even update the documentation for it.

Coworker: 

Me: Don't ever raise your voice to me again about something like this.  I've had enough of your "everyone has to do things my way" attitude, particularly since you don't even follow your own fucking rules.

Coworker: I--

Me: Shut.  The.  Fuck.  Up.




Somehow I don't think this coworker is very fond of me anymore. 

Hits the nail squarely on the head.  This ends up looking exactly like a Microsoft product.   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0&search=microsoft%20ipod

Rented and watched Red Eye over the weekend. 

The movie was reasonably well-acted, and pretty fast-paced and suspenseful... but the writing was pretty dumb and the plot was filled with holes.... well, holes big enough to drive a 747 through.

However, Rachel McAdams is fricking hot.  'Nuff said.

So I have this USB drive I got as a gift.  It's a 512mb Sandisk U3 "Cruzer Micro" drive.

The first thing I noticed when I started using it was that it had multiple partitions on it, one of which I could do nothing with, either in Linux nor in Windows.

As it turns out, this "system" partition fools Windows into thinking it's a CD-ROM device, so you can't format it, delete the partition, write to or delete files from it.

And if autorun is enabled, it runs some fairly obnoxious in-your-face "U3 Launcher".  You can stop this by holding down the shift key while you plug the drive into your USB port, or just by going into your device manager and disabling the "Cruzer Micro System" drive that will show up under CD Drives.

In Linux it doesn't do any of that, but the partition is still untouchable because of its filesystem.  Linux gets confused and ends up calling it "/dev/sdb1" instead of the usual "/dev/sda1" most normal USB storage devices ennumerate as.

After much farking around with this thing, I ran across a utility that can fix this intentional defect.  I have uploaded it in case any of you folks might have one of these rather frustrating devices and would like to make it a "normal" USB drive.

U3_Uninstaller.exe

I just used it and it worked perfectly.

Anyway, just thought I'd share the wealth.

Okay, what theme are you using in Firefox right now? Assuming you use Firefox at all, that is.

My current favourite theme: Fusion Alternative 2