dirtypotato.com^2.0

After the longest support call I have ever experienced, my three days of windows install hell has ended. I lost about 2 years worth of mail, and contacts which I'm not ready to accept yet and I'm considering a data recovery option. It's kind of ironic that the work I was doing when everything crashed was backing up my data.

The time spent on the phone wasn't completely wasted. I felt like I got to know Bejoy pretty well who was the support representative from a southern coast Indian support center. I got an e-mail from him thanking me for my patience, but he addressed the e-mail to Mark and the relevant support information had absoultely nothing to do with what we conversed about for the previous 2.5 hours.

I also learned a trick during the windows repair install that might be handy for someone out there. When installing XP Pro there is a point where there is a green status bar on the bottom left of the screen which says, "Installing devices". When that appears you can hit shift+f10 and a command prompt will appear in front of you which you can use to type various commands during the install. The command that Bejoy had me type was, "nusrmgr.cpl". This command brings up the user manager interface and allows you to perform all kinds of tasks like creating new users, deleting existing ones, changing the way users log on or log off, removing passwords. Handy no?

Well if you haven't noticed yet I have just described one of the largest security holes in the windows OS that I have ever heard of. With a simple windows install disk you can basically get administrative access to any XP Pro machine you have physical access to. Hacker's take note, just drop an install disk in the drive, reboot from the cd, perform a repair install, hit the shift+f10 combo and the nusrmgr.cpl command and you've got the skeleton key for any XP Pro machine.

As I am writing this I can't help think some evil thoughts about what I could do with this power, but I don't have any enemies, corporations that I want to steal secrets from etc. At least I don't want the repercussions of any of those actions.

So I'm going to be a good citizen and write to Microsoft about the knowledge that I have just aquired, and maybe a few other security organizations so that they can spackle up this hole right quick.

What this does remind me is how many of these types of holes must still exist, and how many holes Billy G's company has patched up in their history. It's a little unsettling; especially for a developer like myself who knows how software is built, and who uses and trusts the windows platform with so much. Maybe the hole that I fell upon tonight is a situation that has happened many times over, and the person holding the information just decided to keep it to themselves.

I'm currently writing this post on my G4 Titatnium Powerbook which I have fallen in love with, and in my frustration last night I threw Fedora on my additional hard drive in order to use the machine crippled by windows. I was debating making a full switch, and swearing off the winOS entirely. Unfortunately that is the platform of choice where I am currently employed, and I think for anyone in the professional software business there are times where you are just forced to use the win os.

Microsoft hater I am not, but I do feel some uncomfort especially after what I've experienced tonight. I just can't get the idea of driving a tank out of my head, and leaving the station wagon in the garage.

Posted by christopher andersson at 10:13 PM

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I just read this post about a situation where an "officer of the law" gave a citation to a driver in a questionable situation. I wouldn't usually search for this type of thing, or even write about it here, but the greatest part about the story is how the driver used google maps in traffic court to prove the police officer wrong (call out her lie) to have the ticket thrown out.

Being a driver in a similar situation a few years ago I got pulled over with three other people in the car (this guy, this chick, and another guy sans url we will call Z) who were all right there, and heard as the officer blatantly lied about my violation. Luckily I got out of the ticket as well in traffic court, but still to this day it amazes me that the officer did what he did in the thick of the east village in Manhattan on a Friday night. I didn't get to see the officer when the charge got thrown out because he didn't show, but I can just imagine what it must have been like to see the look on the cop's face when a laptop and quick thinking got the best of her.

Posted by christopher andersson at 8:10 PM

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Recently I helped out Habitat for Humanity up in Harlem on 129th and St. Nicholas. Not far from Sylvia's (which I hear has really taken a dive since the kids started running the show). If you don't know anything about Habitat it's a non-profit that builds affordable housing for those in need of it, and I really like their cause and the way they go about it. This particular event I didn't get to help out in the construction of the apartment building that Habitat was building out, but was put to work in St. Nicholas park mulching a nature trail.

It was hot as hell, and hard work, but I dig that kind of thing. It was hard to get myself up at 7am on a Saturday to do it though, especially when you have friends calling you from the LIE on the way to cocktails and the ocean. I got a text message from a friend when I was waking up to go that said:

104 hard labor in harlem - sell
80 southampton chillin - buy

The point of all this is that I just found out that I was selected to go on a trip to Sri Lanka to help building homes for people affected by the Tsunami. The trip sounds incredible.

Redfaced, and workin hard brah.

Posted by christopher andersson at 1:32 AM

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The stuffing pics had to come down after repeated requests from the victim. Being the nice guy that I am I decided to comply.

Note: ever notice the "cached" link at the bottom of every search result when using google?

Posted by christopher andersson at 1:38 AM

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In my current project I'm dealing with transforming XML data using XSLT. The source XML document has it's default namespace explicitly defined, example:

<beach xmlns="http://www.dirtypotato.com/beach">
  <breezy name="Vikki" dpstatus="nondp" />
  <breezy name="Emily" dpstatus="birddog">
    <friend name="Jackie" takedownfactor="positive" />
  </breezy>
</beach>

My XSLT was defined as:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0">
  <xsl:template match="/beach">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="breezy" />
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

When applying the stylesheet I received nothing in the output. This drove me crazy for a little while, and I knew that I could solve it with a nasty block of C# code that would add the appropriate namespaces, but I found the appropriate solution to the problem. Declare another prefix with the namespace from the source XML document. So now my XSLT looks like this:

<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:earl="http://www.dirtypotato.com/beach">
  <xsl:template match="/earl:beach">
    <xsl:apply-templates select="breezy" />
  </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Any XPath statements used to select something from the root need the earl: prefix.

Here is an article that helped me out: http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/05/02/trxml.html

Posted by christopher andersson at 11:12 AM

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