Fri. July 19, 2024 – another day, another dollar. Or three.

Hot again and humid. Maybe less so because of yesterday’s rain, but I think we’ll be back to swamp normal. It was cooler after the rain yesterday morning. 72F was shockingly cool. But it didn’t last once the sun came out. Brain scorch ensued.

Did my pickups and driving around. Spent far too long in the truck and not enough time doing stuff. So I still have stuff to do, and some more driving around too.

I did get a nice flexible 150W solar panel, and some other useful things for the BOL. I’ll pick up a couple more today.

World is getting wacky. The story of the assassination attempt has big holes and improbable gaps. I know we’re not supposed to attribute to malice what is explained by incompetence, but DANG. If it isn’t malice, it’s Uvalde level stupid.

I can’t help but believe that hard times are coming and they will come in a big fat hurry and out of the blue, so you better get stacked.

In retrospect it will look obvious.

nick

63 Comments and discussion on "Fri. July 19, 2024 – another day, another dollar. Or three."

  1. Denis says:

    German Radio news is reporting massive interruptions of IT services, causing cancellations of air and train transport, with worldwide effects.

    Is it Putin’s pals, or has SkyNet awakened?

  2. Geoff Powell says:

    @denis:

    Is it Putin’s pals, or has SkyNet awakened?

    I’m seeing reports that something broke at Crowdstrike. Did someone fat-finger an update?

    G.

  3. Greg Norton says:

    My cousin says that when the Tesla starts screaming at you that it will not make it to the next Supercharger, you had better listen.  When he was driving down to Mom and Dads, he skipped the Supercharger in Temple, TX thinking that he could make it to Victoria, TX.  Knowing him, he was flying which is an electric eater in the Teslas and screwed up the distance calc.  His Model 3 sent him across country to Sealy, TX and then back to Victoria to TX 87 down to Port Lavaca.

    That reminds me – I’m going to see Nolan Bushnell tomorrow at the Austin retro game show.

    One of Bushnell’s many business ventures after selling Atari and Chuck E. Cheese was ETAK.

    The map system hardware is long gone, but ETAK’s data is still around, providing the original basis of Google Maps among others.

    Bushnell has never stopped.

  4. Greg Norton says:

    You get a private key and the signed cert from the vendor?

    Is the cert file a standard PKCS12 container? The private key should be accessible with OpenSSL.

    Nope, no private key.  I cannot convert the .cer file into a .pfx file so I have to have the USB token loaded and SafeNet running. It is a pain in the buttocks.

    Install enough Cygwin to run OpenSSL and try the following with a backup copy of your *.cer file:

    openssl x509 -in cerfile.cer -noout -text

    You may have a PEM-encoded cert file. If that doesn’t work

    openssl x509 -inform pem -in cerfile.cer -noout -text

    I forget a lot of the openssl command line arguments, but it should be possible to extract the private key from the *.cer file using the utility. I think an argument has to be passed to tell the tool to prompt for and use a password.

  5. Greg Norton says:

    Yeah, once the batteries get fixed in the EVs then we need about 10X more chargers.  Ans some way to keep people from stealing the copper wires.  Of course, with Pete ButtRanger in charge, I figure that at a billion dollars each, he will get about 5 chargers built before he is kicked out of DC.

    Once the batteries get fixed. That’s funny.

    For those of you still trying, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

    Whether the nominee is Big Mike or Kamala, Buttgag (sp?) will be the VP nominee for the Dems this year at the insistence of the Deep State.

    Mayor Pete and the would-be future Second Gentleman … Chasten … ? … have already been out to measure for the drapes at One Observatory Circle.

    Unless, of course, he was involved in the planning at McKinsey for the assassination, coordinating with the CFR and the private equity who owns that building in Pennsylvania with documented connections …

    Buttplug (sp?) did unspecified things for McKinsey for a while in the Middle East from 2007 to 2010 so what’s an attempt on Trump’s life to a mind with that kind of “moral flexibility”.

  6. Greg Norton says:

    Is it Putin’s pals, or has SkyNet awakened?

    I’m seeing reports that something broke at Crowdstrike. Did someone fat-finger an update?

    Or did an unqualified Music Ed major from a Fancy Lad school get a job in “DevOps” on the basis of lung power?

    (I’ve seen it first hand.)

    The mind boggles.

  7. Greg Norton says:

    Or did an unqualified Music Ed major from a Fancy Lad school get a job in “DevOps” on the basis of lung power?

    Lung power and Daddy’s Nordstrom’s charge card.

    Probably a Bad Daddy.

  8. paul says:
    Ans some way to keep people from stealing the copper wires. 

    That’s easy.  The charging cord is part of the car.  

  9. Nick Flandrey says:

    I got that first message from MS Azure services, but the errors I was getting in my browser were from cloudflare…

    —————————

    MS blamed a team and an update.   We’ll see what today brings.  Perhaps staffing your teams with cheaters, liars, slackers, and third worlders from low trust societies is a bad idea.

    ————————–

    I’m up.  Need bean broth…

    n

  10. MrAtoz says:

    LOL “Microsoft crashes the World

    Too many eggs in one basket. Hello, Skynet.

  11. Nick Flandrey says:

    Microsoft meltdown sparks mayhem: Huge hospital group is forced to cancel surgeries as thousands of flights are grounded and New York Subway control room loses track of its own trains 

    The cloud is just other people’s computers.

    n

    Crowdstrike CEO issues apology for ‘mother of all outages’ – but admits it could be HOURS before systems are back online

    NEW Crowdstrike has issued an apology after it caused worldwide chaos Friday after it deployed a faulty update to its software that caused a Microsoft outage.

  12. Nick Flandrey says:

    anyone have a recommendation for a certificate authority?  Something straightforward, and cheap?

    n

  13. Greg Norton says:

    anyone have a recommendation for a certificate authority?  Something straightforward, and cheap?

    Let’s Encrypt won’t work?

  14. Nick Flandrey says:

    Horrific and avoidable cause of 2022 Oklahoma crash that killed six teenage girls when their car was ripped apart by semi is revealed 

    – anyone reading that headline would think the trucker was at fault.   Not so much.

    A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the incident found Robertson slowed down for an intersection and then accelerated past a stop sign because she was likely impaired by recent marijuana use.

    n

  15. EdH says:

    For those who are fans, Michael J. Flynn’s (RIP) last novel was delivered to my Kindle last night, In the Belly of the Whale.

    https://www.amazon.com/Belly-Whale-Michael-Flynn/dp/1647101018?tag=ttgnet-20

    If you have kids (or are interested in history and it’s distortions) his essays on the Library of Alexandria and Hypatia: “ The Mean Streets of Old Alexandria” and on the Heliocentric theory: “The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown ”should be printed out given to them as an example of what we know, and what don’t know, and what we know that isn’t so (lies and mistakes, ancient & modern)…

    —–

    I finished Connie Willis’s The Road to Roswell the other day, enjoyable fluff by a master.

    —–

    I kind of bounced a couple of chapters into the Ilona Andrews first book, Magic Bites, it basically felt like our gritty heroine with a dark backstory  was setting up a reverse harem … not really my thing.

  16. Nick Flandrey says:

    Let’s Encrypt won’t work?  

    no idea what that is

    n

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  17. ITGuy1998 says:

    anyone have a recommendation for a certificate authority?  Something straightforward, and cheap?

    I’ve been using namecheap.com for several years for my exchange server certificate. Cheap enough and validation usually works the first time.

  18. MrAtoz says:

    It looks like MicroSkynetSoft is even affecting Wells Fargo. I get a lot of “systems not available” banners when I log in.

  19. brad says:

    Too many eggs in one basket.

    Yup. Too many companies depending on the big three (AWS, Azure, and whatever Google’s is called).

    Let’s Encrypt won’t work? 

    To create an SSL certificate for your website, Let’s Encrypt is free and works a charm. I haven’t needed to create a certificate in a few years, so I’m not the one to give step-by-step instructions, but I remember the documentation as being pretty good.

    However: Let’s Encrypt only creates certificates good for six months. They believe that frequent certificate changes add to security. Which may be true, but you really need to set a reminder. Even if you somehow automate the process (I never did), it needs checked on.

  20. PaultheManc says:

    My hosting provider provides Let’s Encrypt certification for my domains transparent to me.

  21. Greg Norton says:

    – anyone reading that headline would think the trucker was at fault.   Not so much.
     

    Corn Pop will, on occasion, falsely blame the trucker being impaired for the accident which killed his first wife and daughter.

  22. EdH says:

    Crowdstrike CEO issues apology for ‘mother of all outages’ – but admits it could be HOURS before systems are back online

    I am reminded of an old A.E. van Vogt novel, where a bit of the backstory was ‘The Day the Machines Stopped’.  

    The Darkness on Diamondia, I think.

    Rather forgettable, I don’t recall anything else about the plot ( tho in general VV liked secret alien invasions).   I think at one point the protagonist talks to a computer and is very surprised by its uptime reliability. 

    Very 50-ish stuff.

    But maybe he was on to something.

    I mean, about computers, not the invasion (though that would explain the vast number of seemingly psychotic tech ‘leaders’).

  23. Greg Norton says:

    A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation into the incident found Robertson slowed down for an intersection and then accelerated past a stop sign because she was likely impaired by recent marijuana use.
     

    It is a harmless drug which any adult should be free to enjoy. 

    Legalization in Florida has been a pet political project of one of the state’s most prominent ambulance chasing attorneys, John Morgan of Morgan & Morgan Law.

    Now, I can’t inagine why …

  24. Nick Flandrey says:

    @EdH,  I told my wife that you kind of have to power thru the first book in the series.   She’s read all 10 now.    The things that don’t “gel” get better.   Like “is she a badass”?  WHY is she what she is?   

    It’s a “hidden prince” story where the prince isn’t hidden from himself, but is in hiding…

    n

  25. Nick Flandrey says:

    You heard it here first.

    PA Trump Rally Shooter Building Reportedly Owned by BlackRock, Managed by Frmr Executives from Pfizer

    Benjamin Wetmore 

    – of course the real question is “how many of the buildings in the area are owned by black rock?”   I’d bet you can’t swing a cat these days without hitting a commercial building owned by  the big funds.

    n

  26. Greg Norton says:

    Too many eggs in one basket.

    Yup. Too many companies depending on the big three (AWS, Azure, and whatever Google’s is called).
     

    CloudStrike is a big Blackrock investment. DEI hiring is most likely at the root of the problem.

    Blackrock is very aggressive about pursuing AI so the fun is just beginning.

  27. Greg Norton says:

    You heard it here first.

    PA Trump Rally Shooter Building Reportedly Owned by BlackRock, Managed by Frmr Executives
     

    Private equity with CFR ties owns the building, not Blackrock.

    Go back and find my post on Sunday for the names.

  28. EdH says:

    @Nick:   I told my wife that you kind of have to power thru the first book in the series.  

    OK, I will endeavour to persevere…

  29. Nick Flandrey says:

    @EdH, I think it’s worth it.   The series has satisfying arcs and endings for each book, and the lead character develops as more is revealed. 

    It’s paranormal romance at its root, which I wouldn’t normally read, but I usually bought the next book immediately after finishing one… and I’ve read the books that fill in gaps, and the short stories.   I’d have liked to do that thru kindle unlimited, but this way the wife was able to read them too.

    n

  30. Nick Flandrey says:

    Ok, solved one hobby site issue.   Between subdomain redirection and moving one of the domains to bluehost, I think  I ended up with a circular redirection for some links.   and it is because of the www  redirection at the original host.

    I changed the redirection at the original host and it seems to have fixed it.

    I hate just poking at this stuff.

    n

  31. EdH says:

    Re:Crowdstrike:   

    Can the OS on the affected machines simply be rolled back to a previous version w/o the bad file?   i’m seeing a lot of procedures that involve booting into safe mode and manually removing files. Which seems odd.

    Bad (new) drivers is what I generally roll things back for, though it has been a couple of years since I do not use Windows much.

  32. Greg Norton says:

    CloudStrike is a big Blackrock investment. DEI hiring is most likely at the root of the problem.

    Austin. Definitely DEI, but I doubt any development happens here.

    Shot Girl/Bottle Girl marketing involving Pappy Van Winkle Reserve in large quantities during SxSW and Austin City Limits.

  33. Greg Norton says:

    Surprisingly, our stock is up today as the other.tech stocks tank, but Crowdstrike could run on our systems just as easily as it does on Azure hardware..

  34. Lynn says:

    You get a private key and the signed cert from the vendor?

    Is the cert file a standard PKCS12 container? The private key should be accessible with OpenSSL.

    Nope, no private key.  I cannot convert the .cer file into a .pfx file so I have to have the USB token loaded and SafeNet running. It is a pain in the buttocks.

    Install enough Cygwin to run OpenSSL and try the following with a backup copy of your *.cer file:

    openssl x509 -in cerfile.cer -noout -text

    You may have a PEM-encoded cert file. If that doesn’t work

    openssl x509 -inform pem -in cerfile.cer -noout -text

    I forget a lot of the openssl command line arguments, but it should be possible to extract the private key from the *.cer file using the utility. I think an argument has to be passed to tell the tool to prompt for and use a password.

    I have openssl on my pc.  I’ve been playing the certs game for a two decades.  The big corps wanted signed installables from day one.

    I tried both those steps yesterday, neither one worked.

    I guess that I am going to have to insert the USB token and input the password manually each time I sign something.

  35. Lynn says:

    If anyone wants to move into my neighborhood, here is a house for you, 5811 Muskogee Ln, Richmond, TX 77469:

       https://www.har.com/homedetail/5811-muskogee-ln-richmond-tx-77469/2401530?lid=8796205

    Only $1,249,000.

    I have the cheapest house in our neighborhood.  Literally, I paid $450K for it in 2019.

    Somebody is trying to build a 15,000 ft2 house in my neighborhood across the street from me.  The POA (property owner’s association) is fighting them for some weird reason.

  36. Nick Flandrey says:

    People don’t want the comps in the neighborhood to go up because they don’t want their property tax to go up.  

    n

  37. Lynn says:

    Headed out to my BOL in Port Lavaca, TX via the Cinemark Movie theatre in Victoria.  Dad and I are going to see Kevin Kostner’s new movie that he wrote, directed, and acted in, “Horizon: An American Saga”.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYsReoZMj1k

  38. Nick Flandrey says:

    There are people asking $650k-750k for houses in the “nicer” section of my subdivision.   We paid $200k.   Those houses usually have some upgrades, slightly more sqft, and maybe a second floor…   but yeah iirc we paid $87 a foot…

    n

  39. Lynn says:

    People don’t want the comps in the neighborhood to go up because they don’t want their property tax to go up.  

    75% of the people in my neighborhood are 65 or older and have their property taxes frozen.  Including all of the POA.

    We already have 3 or 4 houses over 10,000 ft2.  We have several four generation family homes and there is a rumor of a 5 generation family home.  Many of the people here are immigrant families bringing everyone from the old country.

  40. Lynn says:

    There are people asking $650k-750k for houses in the “nicer” section of my subdivision.   We paid $200k.   Those houses usually have some upgrades, slightly more sqft, and maybe a second floor…   but yeah iirc we paid $87 a foot…

    Our house is a 3,300 ft2 one story 4/3.5/3 built in 1998 on 1.2 acres with a 1,200 ft2 garage.  I paid $130/ft2 for it. I have put over $100K into it since we bought it: new triple pane windows, paint inside and outside, lawn sprinkler, new carpet, new cooktop, new 1/3rd of driveway (1200 ft2), zoned a/c units, etc.  If I were to sell it, I would ask $700K.  Needs kitchen rebuilt and master bath rebuilt.

    Can I say master bath ?  My bad.

  41. Nick Flandrey says:

    ‘F**k your baby, b***h’ and walked away.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13651639/philadelphia-baby-shot-leg-gunfire-parents.html 

    They are not like us.

    Mom and dad both had warrants so they fled, leaving their injured baby with a stranger.

    Parents of the year material.

    And I’m sure it will be listed as a “gun crime”.

    n

  42. Greg Norton says:

    Somebody is trying to build a 15,000 ft2 house in my neighborhood across the street from me.  The POA (property owner’s association) is fighting them for some weird reason.
     

    Colonists.

    The sky is the linit when the wife’s dowry goes into the financing mix. Then a mandatory in-law suite or two gets added to the square footage.

  43. Greg Norton says:

    Can I say master bath ?  My bad.
     

    The term is “owner suite bath” based on what I saw in my neighbor’s flyer.

    Then again, “owner” might be a problem in the Klaus Schwab age of “You’ll own nothing, eat ze bugs, und be happy.”

  44. Ray Thompson says:

    Can I say master bath ?  My bad.

    As opposed to slave bath? I think you’re good

  45. Alan says:

    “Primary” is common, at least from what I hear when the wife has HGTV on in the background.

  46. Gavin says:

    I’m not much for posting daily weather or conditions, but it’s getting a little thick here. The weather radar shows no clouds within about 300 miles, but the sun is not visible. The wildfires to the north and west of my location are generating that much smoke. I’m glad I stopped smoking a few years ago; this must be nearly pack-a-day smoke levels.

  47. EdH says:

    I’m not much for posting daily weather or conditions, but it’s getting a little thick here. The weather radar shows no clouds within about 300 miles, but the sun is not visible. The wildfires to the north and west of my location are generating that much smoke. I’m glad I stopped smoking a few years ago; this must be nearly pack-a-day smoke levels.

    I feel your pain.

    That was California a couple of years ago.  And Canada.  Poor forestry management over the last few decades from what I can tell.

    Sadly it went on for weeks.

  48. Gavin says:

    Still Canada… Hoping for rain.

  49. Ken Mitchell says:

    San Antonio weather reports include thick “saharan dust clouds” that have crossed the Atlantic.  I don’t know how far, or which direction, they have spread. 

  50. Greg Norton says:

    I have openssl on my pc.  I’ve been playing the certs game for a two decades.  The big corps wanted signed installables from day one.

    I tried both those steps yesterday, neither one worked.

    I guess that I am going to have to insert the USB token and input the password manually each time I sign something.

    So you have a hardware token. Yeah, the private key is permanently embedded into those, and Microsoft provides an API to marshall data out to the token for a signature.

    It makes sense that Microsoft would handle it that way.

  51. paul says:

    Well.  I learn things.  I tried to call a friend of the recently departed to let him know.  Both numbers go to voicemail.  Ok, he was making noises about taking another Viking Cruise.  To Venice and Greece, I think.  So full VM boxes, yeah. His e-mail bounces.  A Yahoo address.

    Yahoo shuts you off after a year of non-use. 

    I assume he’s died.  There isn’t anything recent on his FB page.  The latest e-mail I can find on any PC here is from December ‘22.  He didn’t send a Christmas card last year (for 2023) but the one I sent wasn’t returned…. 

    I guess the phone companies are set up for direct draft from the bank.  But no-one has told the bank he’s dead.  Like anyone would know where he banked.

    I’ll send a card this Christmas.  Just in case.    Shrug. 

  52. Alan says:

    So now the LSM are trotting out the “why hasn’t anyone seen OFB’s medical reports?” themes.

    Yeah, he used leg braces to stand behind that podium for 93 minutes?! 

  53. Alan says:

    And on MSDNC there’s Joy (please fire her) Reid saying that if/when FJB recovers from Covid that would indicate that he’s “healthy!” 

  54. Greg Norton says:

    Yeah, he used leg braces to stand behind that podium for 93 minutes?! 

    Biden?

    Corn Pop’s White House doctor is a regular on the medical conference circuit. I don’t know if he’s allowed to roam off the Prog reservation for a reason, but my wife said that he’s remarkably frank in speeches that Biden was not physically capable of running for President when he made the decision in 2019.

    Of course, Beau … Beau … Beau was the reason the doctor heard when he asked “Why?”

  55. EdH says:

    So, the Crowdstrike thing was apparently a C++ NULL pointer.

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1814376668095754753.html

    Someone once called C++ “the programmers software footgun of choice for the 21st century”.

  56. Nick Flandrey says:

    Massive Fire Engulfs Dallas Area Church Led by Trump Supporter Pastor Robert Jeffress (VIDEO)

    https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/07/breaking-massive-fire-engulfs-dallas-area-church-led/

    Culture war heating up?   Seems pretty unlikely that a church would just burst into flame.  A white church anyway.   Black churches have been catching fire for a while now…

    n

  57. lpdbw says:

    Someone once called C++ “the programmers software footgun of choice for the 21st century”.

    Maybe I should reconsider my selection of C++ for refreshing my programming skills…

  58. Greg Norton says:

    So, the Crowdstrike thing was apparently a C++ NULL pointer.

    Windows device driver. C/C++ is the only option.

    On newer versions of Windows, the drivers must be submitted for testing.

    My guess is that they were doing a shim driver like we used to use to implement the VPN at the Death Star.

  59. Greg Norton says:

    So, the Crowdstrike thing was apparently a C++ NULL pointer.

    The C++ could have been an interpreter for another domain-specific language for intrusion detection.

    The goal with IDS is to have the code and data sections running entirely within CPU cache. You won’t get that from Rust bloatware like the author of the article suggested.

  60. Nick Flandrey says:

    Most of Texas and half of Houston breathes a sigh of relief…

    May she get her just reward.

    n

  61. lpdbw says:

    May she get her just reward.

    ISWYDT

  62. Alan says:

    >>Maybe I should reconsider my selection of C++ for refreshing my programming skills… 

    COBOL rules. 

    Still plenty of mission critical code out there and fewer and fewer people left to maintain it. 

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