Graduate sues college because she can't find a job

From MSNBC's weird news

Trina Thompson filed a lawsuit last week against Monroe College in Bronx Supreme Court. The 27-year-old is seeking the $70,000 she spent on tuition.

Thompson says she's been unable to find gainful employment since she received her information technology degree in April.

I would support her getting her money back, *if* she relinquishes the degree. Please, take some responsibility for your life and stop whining.

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A few ideas regarding affordable health insurance

I don't want to be one of those opposed to health care..insurance..evil company..whatever reform without bringing something to the table, and I think few argue that we should keep the system the way it is. Here are just a few ideas, from my perspective and limited experience, on improving our health care system without nationalizing the system.

1. Tort reform

Voting without reading

Has anyone else seen this video of House Judiciary Chairman Congressman John Conyers saying:

“I love these members, they get up and say, ‘Read the bill,’” said Conyers.

“What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?”

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SQL Server and OLE DB

I just ran into a less-than-documented issue with OLE DB and SQL Server 2008 64 bit Enterprise. The particular error message was:

OLE DB provider 'HP3KProvider' for linked server 'HP3000' returned data that does not match expected data length for column '[HP3KProvider].sid'. The (maximum) expected data length is 28, while the returned data length
is 18.

So what if the data is smaller than what was expected? Well, SQL Server cares and errors out. To get it to stop doing this, a trace flag is needed.

Protect your password

You should always protect your passwords. Most people know that, but do you know that you should have a complex password?

I was reminded of this when a client of mine was hacked. I'm not sure how it happened, but someone accessed his account, changed the password, and began sending emails requesting money.

Your password should have a number, an upper case letter, and be at least 8 characters. You should also include a special character, if the account holder will let you.

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Recovering deleted files from NTFS image

Sometimes, it becomes necessary to recover deleted files from an NTFS image. Using linux, a free utility called ntfsundelete can be used.

If the image is still mounted, you will need to unmount it:

$ sudo umount tmpmount

Then, you will want to use the losetup utility to associate a loop with a regular file (our image):

$ sudo losetup -o 15443968 /dev/loop0 /media/2Big/hd.img

The -o is the offset calculated from the last post (the start of the partition listed in fdisk * 512). The ntfsundelete utility can then be used:

$ ntfsundelete -s /dev/loop0

Examining an image

You can either copy the image to a hard drive, or mount it in Linux and examine it. To mount an image of an entire drive, first examine the partitions using fdisk:

$ sudo fdisk -u -l /media/2Big/hd.img

In this example, hd.img is an image file created earlier on a USB drive named 2Big.

You should see something similar to this:

Disk /dev/sdc: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0004034f

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

Imaging a drive

It is very important when investigating a security incident to work with a copy of the hard drive, and not the original. It is equally important to work with an unaltered copy of the drive. All that is needed is a place to store the image, a USB or system drive, and a working Linux setup. This can be an Ubuntu live CD.

First, you must see where your drives are:

$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x0008558e

Groupwise 8 and java time zone problem

The GroupWise 8 client runs great under Ubuntu, but there is a slight problem with the time zone. Because the GroupWise client is a Java based client, a slight adjustment may need to be made.

Java, for some reason, expects a symbolic link at /etc/localtime. When it doesn't get it, it defaults to, usually, the wrong time zone. This caused issues like the calendar in GroupWise to be off.

To fix this:

sudo cp /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.bak