Peter’s Soapbox

So Long, Wild Blue

Several months ago, Wild Blue, my satellite Internet provider, stopped working at my house. After repeated, 1 hour or longer phone calls to technical support and customer service, it was revealed that they had the wrong credit card information on file. However, despite repeated 1 hour or longer calls to resolve this, they didn’t re-enable our account. The effect was, we were without service for approximately a month from March to April. Continue reading So Long, Wild Blue…

Thank you for calling Microsoft, my name is Manju

Actual phone conversation I just had:

MS: “Thank you for calling Microsoft, my name is Manju, may I have the first six numbers in the activation window?” Continue reading Thank you for calling Microsoft, my name is Manju…

Fake JetBlue Tickets Too

As reported this morning, apparently I wasn’t the only one who got malware delivered by a fake email from an airline.

SANSFire 2008, Audit 507, Day 6 – Unix

Day 6, auditing Unix. By this time, most of the class was pretty wiped. With a few exceptions, (myself included) the bulk of the class had little or no Unix experience, so having to do stuff on the Unix command line was… well, eye-opening. Continue reading SANSFire 2008, Audit 507, Day 6 – Unix…

How I Fixed Firefox 3’s Annoying Crashing Problem on Windows

It took a while, but I finally decided to read the error reports. When I did so, I found that nearly every one of Firefox’s crashes that I experienced was related to a specific extension. I dug around in the registry and the extensions folder, and found that it was none other than the Java plugin.

Living on the edge, I decided to just remove it. I uninstalled Java, then deleted references to the plugin in the registry and filesystem. Voila. Everything works and Firefox hasn’t crashed on me in over a week.