Oddities

YouTube have blocked my download tool!

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It’s less than 48 hours since I posted my last article “Free YouTube Video Downloader & Path To FLV Finder Tool” and today I noticed that the download tool has stopped working! At first I thought  it was a code glitch, but no I checked everything out and it was clean? then I tried uploading the same scripts to a second server and yes it worked, I even tried the same scripts on a third server and it worked…. and one last shot was to try the scripts on a different domain but same server “Bump!” no joy…. 🙁

Could it be that YouTube/Google tracked the script page because of the Adsense banner? (maybe)…  and the fact that a heap of trackback links from crap blog scrapers featured the article….. What to do now… Should I remove the scripts and links to it…. I’m not sure?

Who stole the bridge?

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Russian Bridge

This news makes me laugh …. how the hell did they do it?
The article came via Ananova image by current.com

Russian Bridge

Scrap metal thieves in Khabarovsk, Russia managed to steal a 200-tonne 38ft structured steel bridge without anyone noticing. The criminal scrap metal collectors most likely were interested in four steel pipes which served as the foundation for the bridge. They dismantled the bridge during the night of December 29 and vanished with its parts in an unknown direction.

It was part of the only road leading to a heating plant. Bosses at the company said the cost of replacing the bridge would be ten times the value of the scrap metal that had been stolen.

Local road service crews are currently reconstructing the bridge, they plan to replace the bridge with one made of concrete while police have launched a search for the criminals.

This incident became the third such case in 2007 – the two previous bridge thefts occurred in the Ryazan region and the Primorsky region.

World’s Best Resignation Letter?

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I’ve come across this letter on the internet and in emails many times over the years and it never fails to make me laugh. Its an oldie but a goodie and it comes via
“You’ve Got Laughs! The Big Book of Internet Humor” by Al Lowe

Dear Mr. Baker,

As an employee of an institution of higher education, I have few very basic expectations. Chief among these is that my direct superiors have an intellect that ranges above the common ground squirrel. After your consistent and annoying harassment of my co-workers and me during our commission of duties, I can only surmise that you are one of the few true genetic wastes of our time.

Asking me, a network administrator, to explain every nuance of everything I do each time you happen to stroll into my office is not only a waste of time, but also a waste of precious oxygen. I was hired because I know how to network computer systems, and you were apparently hired to provide amusement to your employees, who watch you vainly attempt to understand the concept of “cut and paste” as it is explained to you for the hundredth time.

You will never understand computers. Something as incredibly simple as binary still gives you too many options. You will also never understand why people hate you, but I am going to try and explain it to you, even though I am sure this will be just as effective as telling you what an IP is. Your shiny new iMac has more personality than you ever will.

You wander around the building all day, shiftlessly seeking fault in others. You have a sharp dressed, useless look about you that may have worked for your interview, but now that you actually have responsibility, you pawn it off on overworked staff, hoping their talent will cover for your glaring ineptitude. In a world of managerial evolution, you are the blue-green algae that everyone else eats and laughs at. Managers like you are a sad proof of the Dilbert principle.

Seeing as this situation is unlikely to change without you getting a full frontal lobotomy reversal, I am forced to tender my resignation; however, I have a few parting thoughts:

1. When someone calls you in reference to employment, it is illegal for you to give me a bad recommendation as I have consistently performed my duties and even more. The most you can say to hurt me is, “I prefer not to comment.” To keep you honest, I will have friends randomly call you over the next couple of years, because I know you would be unable to do it on your own.

2. I have all the passwords to every account on the system and I know every password you have used for the last five years. If you decide to get cute, I will publish your “Favorites,” which I conveniently saved when you made me “back up” your useless files. I do believe that terms like “Lolita” are not viewed favorably by the university administrations.

3. When you borrowed the digital camera to “take pictures of your mother’s b-day,” you neglected to mention that you were going to take nude pictures of yourself in the mirror. Then, like the techno-moron you are, you forgot to erase them. Suffice it to say, I have never seen such odd acts with a ketchup bottle. I assure you that those photos are being kept in safe places pending your authoring of a glowing letter of recommendation. (And, for once, would you please try to use spell check? I hate correcting your mistakes.)

I expect the letter of recommendation on my desk by 8:00 am tomorrow. One word of this to anybody and all of your twisted little repugnant obsessions will become public knowledge. Never f*ck with your systems administrator, Mr. Baker! They know what you do with all that free time!

Sincerely

David Blocker

Network Administrator

Update on Imagine/Gaelic Telecom Problems

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In my last post I mentioned about problems connecting to my own blog from my home broadband connection with Imagine/Gaelic Telecom. Although it is now fixed I am still having problems accessing my friend Robert’ Sweetnam’s Blog. I am accessing his blog through proxify.com its the only way at the moment – I rang Gaelic Telecom/Imagine support again last Friday night complaining about not been able to view his site.

I was asked if I have “Content Filtering” enabled which I said no and his reply was “Well I really haven’t got a clue why you cannot access http://blog.sweetnam.eu” he went on to say “I will send a ticket up to tech support and see what they say” he also asked me for my mobile number so a “techy” could ring me back within the hour, but as expected I was left still waiting on the call.

Monday morning came and lo and behold I got a call back from Gareth “the techy guy” at Imagine Telecom Support. He said they were still looking into the problem and that he would call me back before the end of working day. He also suggested that they change my IP address as that would surely fix the problem, I said no to the IP change and left them to it but hence to say I got no call back.

Left it stew for Tuesday….

This morning Wednesday I called back support went through the whole “rigga’ ma’ roll” (procedure) again with general support and demanded some answers by today. An hour later Gareth called back with the solution of changing my IP and I quote what he said…

“It appears that you turned off “Content Filtering” back in June 2006 (which I did) but it seems it didn’t go through properly. You were going through a proxy server where your content was been cached, to help speed an stuff.”

So Robert was right as mentioned here  “they” could track my where abouts if they wanted to!

Back to the solution… I caved to the IP change in the end and was supplied with a new IP address over the phone. I went home reset my router, flushed the dns, cleared my cache etc. re-booted and opened up Firefox typed in http://blog.sweetnam.eu and guess what?

No F**king joy!

Back to the idiots again tomorrow to tell ’em to shove their solution up the highest part of their holes.

Connection Problem On My Own Website – Imagine / Gaelic Telecom

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Gaelic TelecomI haven’t been able to connect to my own website with over 2 weeks, I could ftp or use a proxy server and that was fine but no browser connection with either FireFox or Internet Explorer.

By the way my broadband connection is with Gaelic Telecom who are a white label for Imagine so on Friday night last I called support and ran through the usual things with them but no luck, the following night still no feedback from support so I decided to try a different route. I used the ip address to access my site with a forward slash tilde /~ and username and it worked this is what I used: http://64.191.9.37/~kmcgrap this auto redirected me to http://lonestar.kjbserve.com/~kmcgraph/ and I was able to view the website.

The strange thing is that when I tried the url http://www.kmcgraphics.com everything worked. Its like it updated DNS or something.

I don’t know if this was the solution or just coincidence but it worked for me.

Anyway if your interested below this is the email I sent to support@imagine.ie followed by the reply I received this morning. I’m hoping this post might help others out there if they have stumbled upon the same problem.

Email sent to Imagine/Gaelic Telecom Support

Hello,

My Internet Connection is fine but I’m just having problems connecting to ONE site http://www.kmcgraphics.com

I’m running Windows XP Professional SP2. with browsers IE7 & Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8

Measures I have taken so far:

1. Cleared Internet Cache and Cookies.
2. Rebooted router and computer.
3. Tried accessing it in different browsers. (IE7 & Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8)

Some Observations:
1. I can access the site through a proxy server fine.

Other steps taken:

Command prompt:

ipconfig /flushdns

Windows IP Configuration

Successfully flushed the DNS Resolver Cache.

I have done a Tracert from command prompt as follws with the results below:

tracert www.kmcgraphics.com

Tracing route to www.kmcgraphics.com [64.191.9.37]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 192.168.1.254
2 26 ms 25 ms 27 ms lns2.net.imagine.ie [87.232.0.25]
3 22 ms 63 ms 24 ms ve5.core.net.imagine.ie [87.232.0.129]
4 22 ms 23 ms 22 ms ge0-0.border2.net.imagine.ie [87.232.0.2]
5 26 ms 29 ms 25 ms ge-1-0-0.32.mpr2.dub1.ie.gvnx.net [217.112.145.1
1]
6 26 ms 24 ms 24 ms 67.17.193.45
7 106 ms 106 ms 108 ms 67.17.108.58
8 106 ms 105 ms 105 ms hostnoc.demarc.gblx.net [64.214.106.38]
9 1050 ms 113 ms 112 ms ge2-oc48-1-0-ctsi.rtr0.scr1.hostnoc.net [66.197.
191.34]
10 112 ms 111 ms 113 ms www.kmcgraphics.com [64.191.9.37]

Trace complete.

Also tried to ping:

ping www.kmcgraphics.com
Ping request could not find host www.kmcgraphics.com. Please check the name and
try again.

And finally the usual error response from the browser window:

The requested URL could not be retrieved

——————————————————————————–

While trying to retrieve the URL: http://www.kmcgraphics.com/

The following error was encountered:

Unable to determine IP address from host name for www.kmcgraphics.com
The dnsserver returned:

Server Failure: The name server was unable to process this query.
This means that:

The cache was not able to resolve the hostname presented in the URL.
Check if the address is correct.

Your cache administrator is support@imagine.ie.

——————————————————————————–

Generated Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:55:01 GMT by filter6.int.imagine.ie (squid/2.6.STABLE13)

Can you please advise on what to do here, I can access www.kmcgraphics.com from any other computer not from my home connection with no problem.
Is there possibly a dns cache problem with my connection and filter6.int.imagine.ie ?

Hope to hear soon,

Kieran McCarthy

Response back from Imagine/Gaelic Telecom Support

Hi Kieran

All of the filter servers now have the IP address for this host, but it seems that filter6 did not have it at the time you had the problem. We’ve no known problem with DNS at the moment.

This could have been a once-off problem, or it may happen again; if it does, then email us again and we’ll look into it again as quickly as possible.

We would suspect this to have been something to do with the DNS for that domain, rather than being a filtering problem here or being a imagine dns problem.

Imagine Support

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