Category Archives: rage

The worst day I’ve had in a while

Posted by on 2014/02/16 No comments

Otherwise known as the narrative of 15 Feb 2014. I don’t really know who’ll give a crap, but I just need to get this out of my system.

Having lived in South Africa all my life (thus far), the thing about crime has often come up. And, for the most part, I’ve been pretty damned fortunate to not have had to deal with it at all. Until last night, that is. Which is the worst time it could possibly have hit me at. I’ve been in a bit of a dark spell the last couple of weeks, due to a variety of factors, but things were finally starting to feel a bit better last night. I actually went as far as to comment to someone “I think I’m finally through it all!” around 10~11pm. But hey…apparently it wasn’t quite time yet.

Around 2am (which I guess is technically Sunday?), I left a friend’s house, going homewards via Andiccio 24 (which is a regular habit when I’ve been up all night). I’d been sick since last weekend, too, and was feeling pretty damn drained by this point. After getting my pizza and starting to drive home, somewhere along the route my scooter just failed on me. I don’t know why yet, haven’t exactly had the headspace to look. Sounds electrical-ish, but w/e. And to start the bad, my pizza had fallen onto the ground. This annoyed me, but was just a slight taste of what was to come. At this point, I phone the AA, who give me an estimate of 60 to 90 minutes as pickup time. Now I only live a couple of blocks from where I broke down (albeit uphill), so while I wait for their confirmatory call I start trying to push it as far as I can go. Which isn’t very far, because I’m exhausted as hell. As I got a little bit up the one hill, a white car with two occupants comes driving past, as best as I can tell seeming to be some kind of neighbourhood patrol. And as I mention my difficulties and issues there, the guy claims that he might be able to help me with getting the AA to hurry up. And, hell, I’m tired (had been awake since 05h40 on the Saturday), hungry, stuck in the middle of uselessville at 3am, and I decide to trust the guy. Why not? Not like I ever really do trust strangers. I can’t tell you why I did it.

But I phone the AA up, mention to the callcentre person that this other individual wants to speak to them, and hand my phone over to the guy in the car. After they speak for about 10~15 seconds, I hear the guy mention that he’s with SAPS (which I think is probably illegal to impersonate), and at this point they start driving off, go around the corner, and gone. Now I’ve got no comms. No ETA on getting home. No ability to confirm the pickup. I’m tired, I’m hungry, I’m stressed, and I snap. The last few weeks’ worth of bad just hit me like a ton of bricks dislodged from a cargo carrier, and I am /fucked/. I try to ring a few doorbells, don’t really get anywhere. Finally I see an actual Beagle Security (local patrol crowd) driving past, and after I literally begged the driver, I managed to get home. From where I then started trying to get Prey and such installed on my phone. Which doesn’t help, you need to do it in advance. So I try android remote wipe. Nope, that needs to be set up in advance too. And just a couple of days ago I’d turned off location reporting on my tablet, and forgotten to check if it was account wide. So I couldn’t trace the handset either.

I start pulling out whatever tricks I can try manage. I even try to get my FNB Connect voice thing back up. But I couldn’t find the details saved, and thus couldn’t get any calls done. I need to phone the police. I didn’t even have a plate number for the car. But fuckit, what do you do instead? I post on facebook, asking for help, which is something I do so rarely I don’t even know how to do it. It’s at this point that I ask around, see if anyone has some voip I could use. It’s at this point where some guys over at sonic.net helped me out, and I am extremely thankful for that. The teams who run that place I could solidly count as A+ people. Technically, and for reasons such as this. I manage to phone the police, I get as far as I can manage. I start changing account passwords, dissociating things from my phone, making it as useless as I could possibly hope (ie. no posts showing up when notifications come through, etc). It didn’t have much battery life left, either, so it would’ve died on the people soon afterwards anyway.

But at this point I’ve hit a low. Being without comms is a major hit, for multiple reasons, and being unable to contact (because of this) the one or two people who could’ve actually helped me through it…well, yeah. I hit a low I haven’t hit about since the time I realized I need to cut myself off from my family in totality. I’m not ashamed to say that I cried a bit. I was feeling so utterly helpless in the face of everything, and I just didn’t know what to do.

Positive things! A couple:

  • thank you very much to the person who helped me with the ability to call (I’m finding out if I can name them here)
  • thanks to Tristan for helping me get around in the morning, breakfast (to deal with the fact that I’m starved and getting a migraine), helping get to police, and sitting patiently through multiple stages of trying to get my handset blacklisted (the IMEI shown on the network HLR doesn’t match the IMEI on the box I have)
  • there were a fair handful of people who responded to my FB post (each of you have been noted, and I will make sure to pay you back whenever I can one day)
  • thank you to the people on Shadowfire who let me rage and rant and vent
  • fortunately I had handset insurance from my provider, so this should not make much of a knock on my finances (which was a related fear)

Speculation: maybe…just maaaaybe…the guys in the car were legit. As I said, the battery would’ve died soon. But I don’t feel so. I ran down to the traffic light after they bolted, and I couldn’t see the car by the time I’d gotten there (about 40~50m down the road).

And now it’s Sunday evening. It took a day to get some stuff sorted (prepaid SIM, ability to phone, arranged transport to get to my Monday meeting), and I had the maximum indicated dose of Migril to try counteract my migraine. I still haven’t eaten properly, and don’t feel I can easily. re:hidrat it is, then, for getting myself feeling a slight bit better. My cat is sleeping next to me (she annexed a whole pillow on my couch), there’s good music playing, and I’m clutching my way back to feeling better. Slowly, bit by bit. But this one will hurt for a while.

edit: I know many of these things sound tiny. With perspective, they are. But they added up in just the right set of flavours. Here’s to getting some perspective again, though!

edit 2: did eventually get the scooter back home. The original call with AA had been closed, apparently the guys claimed that they’d done a pickup. I hope to open some kind of case and maybe get my hands on that recording. Or something. I don’t know. But did get home, and after a minor freakout for a while (of not being able to find the right keys to get the scooter movable (steering lock)), all roughly ended up “okay”

And another one

Posted by on 2013/09/09 No comments

Seriously loving my cellphone company right now.

vodacom billing engine excellence

PRERATE ALL THE THINGS

So, to whichever unfortunate person ends up with my support ticket for this, I wish you luck.

P.S. I was told there’s more context needed, so: look at the bundle type in the top bar, and then at the used/avaiable counts. What happened (my guess, but I’m pretty sure) is that when I bought it, their rating system preburned all the data I’ve already done this month (under previous rollover bundle).

Vodacom supply chain management adventure

Posted by on 2013/05/23 No comments

Or “two week’s later and I still don’t know when I’m getting my new phone”.

On the 8th of this month (May 2013), Vodacom announced they had the HTC One up for order, which I’ve been awaiting fairly eagerly. So I go through the order one, have the upgrade process initiated, and ….. well, I’d like to tell you what’s happening next, but apparently I’m in customer support limbo:

Time to wait some more, I guess.

A Lament

Posted by on 2013/03/18 No comments

This post will not mention anything new. It will not say anything someone else hasn’t before. It serves only as a landmark, a waypoint, a memory.

This post is about weev. In recent months he’s been found guilty on a bunch of bullshit charges, and today he’s been sentenced. I won’t go into the details. Other people already have (here’s the transcript, here’s the Wired search results for his name. Check around on twitter for #freeweev. Here’s another site about it. Have fun.)

I came to know him online/on IRC very briefly, but from the first supported his side of things. weev has often been described as unpleasant (to put it very mildly). I don’t much care for that. weev’s cool, and anyone who’s spent even a bit of time talking to him will tell you that. He’s also effectively the fallguy in this whole story. He went ahead and pissed on the shoes of AT&T, and now he’s being put away for 41 months (along with restitution). For making it known that people’s information (to whatever extent) was available on a public webserver, and all you needed to do was be able to look at/modify a URL, and do math (add 1 to the identifier at the end of it). There’s a number of things that work this way. Hell, twitter status updates are posted in numerical order. A few years ago they used to have the global firehose of all content available. Viewing that without permission could’ve been equated to breaking the law (under this ruling).

This probably sets quite a fucked precedent. There’s a lot to be said about it. But I say only this: it fucking sucks. Tons. And I hope that this situation can change. :(

P.S. for anyone who wants an idea of weev’s character, this is it: “No matter what the outcome, I will not be broken. I am antifragile.” — @rabite

Retardville

Posted by on 2013/01/24 No comments

Update: I’ve contacted Github support about this, and given them a suggestion about a default-on preference/setting to filter those for everyone but the repo owner, perhaps with a visual cue about it

Update 2: as of this update, the search for these sorts of files no longer appears to be working; I also got a mail back from github support about this earlier, but didn’t really read it yet

Or to give people the benefit of the doubt, perhaps they just didn’t know better. I don’t even understand how this comes to pass, it’s so different from what I’m typically used to.

github ssh keys

github bash history

github zsh history

 

The URLs for these are as follows:

  • https://github.com/search?q=path%3A.bash_history
  • https://github.com/search?q=path%3A.zsh_history
  • https://github.com/search?q=path%3A.ssh/id_rsa
There are some more, obviously. Use your imagination to find them. You can also filter for passwords and such:

  • https://github.com/search?q=path%3A.bash_history+password
  • https://github.com/search?q=path%3A.my.cnf

So, to all the people who have done this: don’t upload any of your history files, private ssh keys, etc, to something on the public internet.

 

Rage About Dinosaurs

Posted by on 2012/12/14 No comments

This text snippet from a colleague, although I’m fairly sure I’ll get my copy of the announcement soon as well:

“Up until now, Last.fm radio has been a subscription only feature in your country. However, unfortunately, from Tuesday 15 January 2013 we are no longer able to provide radio streaming to you due to licensing restrictions, and you will no longer be able to listen to Last.fm radio.”

I honestly wish all these dinosaur media companies and committees and agencies and whatever would just die already. Earlier today I was speaking to a friend of mine, one who also happens to be an artist. She’s currently raising money for her new album, and is just running it entirely by herself. Not that any of this is new to anyone sensible, of course. All of this licensing crap is just ridiculously frustrating, and at a guess I’m fairly sure it doesn’t actually end up helping all that many artists.

Ah well….hopefully time brings some useful change. At least the antiquated ITU seems to have been sent a decent message about how things should work.

.co.za domains considered harmful

Posted by on 2012/09/20 No comments

If anyone ever wants to register a .co.za domain, it looks like you’ll have three options going forward (from the near future):

  1. run away screaming
  2. commit suicide
  3. pay someone else to do it
That’s if we skip over the other practices they have, like refusing to allow you to register a domain if the NS records don’t exist on some servers yet (think about the workflow some DNS hosters take, this might at times be a perfectly normal scenario), or the weird whois setup that still seems to be the default server for most whois clients in the world.

Alongside my froztbyte.net domain, I also have a froztbyte.co.za from before I had a credit card. It’s useful for some stuff. But wow, dealing with coza is a trip. First, they only recently made an EPP interface available, and a quick scan-over of it looks like you need to be a registered/accredited registrar to use it, weighing in at R5000 (presently that’s just below 500eur). No matter, it’s not like I’m going to go find an EPP implementation now to do this. So the antiquated *email* interface it is.

Wander over to their website, grab the update form for my domain, edit it with the new NS info, submit. Wait.

mail:/var/log# tail -n 500 exim4/mainlog | grep 1TEc0u-0003kD-QC
2012-09-20 10:21:36 1TEc0u-0003kD-QC <= jp@domainiwanttoupdate.co.za H=(vandali.neology.co.za) [2001:43e8:8:1::x:x:x:x] P=esmtp S=8582 T="test Thu, 20 Sep 2012 10:21:16 +0200" from <jp@domainiwanttoupdate.co.za> for coza-admin@co.za
2012-09-20 10:21:38 1TEc0u-0003kD-QC == coza-admin@co.za R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (-44): SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<coza-admin@co.za>: host mx2.coza.net.za [82.103.142.199]: 450 4.2.0 <mail.neology.co.za[41.73.33.140]>: Client host rejected: Greylisted, see http://postgrey.schweikert.ch/help/co.za.html
2012-09-20 10:22:25 1TEc0u-0003kD-QC == coza-admin@co.za routing defer (-51): retry time not reached
2012-09-20 10:29:29 1TEc0u-0003kD-QC == coza-admin@co.za R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (-44): SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<coza-admin@co.za>: host mx2.coza.net.za [82.103.142.199]: 450 4.2.0 <mail.neology.co.za[41.73.33.140]>: Client host rejected: Greylisted, see http://postgrey.schweikert.ch/help/co.za.html
2012-09-20 10:32:05 1TEc0u-0003kD-QC == coza-admin@co.za R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (-44): SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<coza-admin@co.za>: host mx2.coza.net.za [82.103.142.199]: 450 4.2.0 <mail.neology.co.za[41.73.33.140]>: Client host rejected: Greylisted, see http://postgrey.schweikert.ch/help/co.za.html
2012-09-20 10:32:25 1TEc0u-0003kD-QC == coza-admin@co.za routing defer (-51): retry time not reached
2012-09-20 10:34:01 1TEc0u-0003kD-QC == coza-admin@co.za R=dnslookup T=remote_smtp defer (-44): SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<coza-admin@co.za>: host mx2.coza.net.za [82.103.142.199]: 450 4.2.0 <mail.neology.co.za[41.73.33.140]>: Client host rejected: Greylisted, see http://postgrey.schweikert.ch/help/co.za.html
So I end up actually phoning my domain registrar, in 2012, to find out how long I need to wait. “Up to 45 minutes”. A few exim queue flushes later, the mail went through. Now I should receive the mail that allows me to respond with the the auth cookie. Oh, wait, no:
COZA: ERROR: Invalid phone number format supplied for the registrant phone or fax numbers “froztbyte.co.za”.

I first have to have a validation failure, because the data THEY SUPPLIED doesn’t confirm to their validation schema. This is also not a new thing. They’ve had various schema updates over various points of the ccTLD lifetime, and it’s often just a case of “struggle with it until you get it working”.

Now, given, they seem to have acknowledged that they fail at life as a registrar, thus the new EPP setup and accredited registrars. But for crying out loud, make some reasonable interface for people who aren’t on that system yet. Maybe I’ll do the effort of finding a good registrar….or but I’ll just stop caring about .co.za domains forever and move my stuff elsewhere.

This is a rage post.

Posted by on 2012/06/01 No comments

Seriously, if you don’t care about rage (or politics, or beyond-fucked-in-the-head idiots, or …), don’t read this post.

Hey FPB, fuck you. Yes, I said fuck. That’s a swearword. Stick it up your ass.

Here’s a copy of Brett Murray’s ‘The Spear':

The Spear, Brett Murray

Here’s a copy of it when it became more expensive. You know, after some mouth-fuming idiots splashed more paint on it:

hey look, moar monies

And guess what, you can’t do shit. Censor it for age 16? Require measures barring underage people from accessing it? Fuck that. You people need your world adjusted, it’s a little bit closed off at the moment.