myTrevor.com

I received an email last night from the security team at UW informing me that one of my servers had been compromised and that they would be blocking the traffic and that I should rebuild it ASAP. It freaking takes an entire day to backup all the data, reformat the system, install all the patches, send the kerberos ticket to UW, reinstall all the ‘other’ software and services, etc etc..

And all because of what? Some stupid person has nothing better to do then sit in their room and write worms. It just pisses me off – like I had nothing better to do today than rebuild a server. And then I get asked to write a procedural manual on how to fix something like that, so that when I leave “someone” can do that — as well as how to do everything else I do. Right. I’ll try to fit that into my 19.5 hours.

So yeah. I’ve done remote deployment across all machines… I used to only have a single Organizational Unit on our domain — since for the most part, everyone is equal with policies. What I’ve noticed more and more is the specific need of certain applications for Mentors. Anyways, so I decided to create a new OU called “Mentors” and setup a group policy with Assigned software for their systems (or actually, any system they login to).

It’s so sweet. I got a request today for a new crossword program to be installed for the mentors. Luckily this program is free and also has an option to install from a MSI file. Double sweet. Within seconds I had it installed on all their machines. Yeah yeah.. I know, not that impressive.. but still.. I was all happy. Now I wish I had a bunch of computers to manage.. it’d definately make that part of my job a little more interesting.

With my change over to a real host, so too comes back the ability to RSS feed the comments. Go add it, those who complained before, you know you want to.

For the last few days I’ve been looking at adding a TV Tuner card to my new computer. I had one in my old computer, an ATI All-In-Wonder, and miss not being able to watch/record TV on my desktop.

So I was looking around pricewatch and Google’s Froogle for the tuners and found that ATI made a HDTV — the ATI HDTV Wonder Remote Control Edition. I instantly think — oh shit, this would be awesome — and at $170ish bucks (retails for $199), I could own an HDTV! Well – after I do some quick research and find a great price, I order it. I then do more research (I’m such an impulse buyer) and realize… no, not quite… it doesn’t support QAM, even though it does, it’s been disabled in the chip. What does this mean? It means you can’t hook it up to cable and it requires OTA HDTV reception. So even though I pay my cable bill, it’s basically for people who, well.. I guess don’t have cable?

It’s still a great card, it supports analog and much the stuff other tuners support, but I guess because of licensing with all the cable providers, QAM cards are far from the market (although I did find one available). I’ve still been debating over whether or not to buy the card, but with my crappy cell-phone reception in my apartment and barely-audible radio reception… I wasn’t too confident about getting the 13 free-to-air channels available in this part of Seattle.

I read up some more and realized that the FCC requires that cable providers provide cable boxes with IEEE-1394, or Firewire, built in.

Why does this matter?
Well, you can hook this up to your computer and not need a tuner card at all. So for about a dollar more a month, I can exchange my current set top box (currently $5.10 a month… I’m a sucker the the programming guide) with an HDTV compatible box and run a cable to my computer. But now I’m thinking this will be lame. I’m almost sure that this means I’d have to dedicate this to my computer and not utlize TV Guide, on-demand and such on my TV. Now the debate. Do I just get a cheap analog TV tuner for $40? Do I hookup to the box for $1 a month and possibly lose the box for my TV? Do I get the HDTV tuner and risk just getting analog and out $170?

Well.. I decided I’d try out the $1 a month deal.. since I’m not at much a risk and see how that goes. I asked if I could just come in and pick it up. But of course, Comcast told me they require someone to bring it to my home.. because I’ve never had HD cable, and they have to “make sure it works” — and with a $15 service charge. Right.

So the Sunday, the 26th of September I’ll potentially have HDTV on my computer. I think realistically, I’ll have a monitor hooked up to a cable box (whew hoo). But we’ll see.