Some of these seem like it was just someone who needed something to do and decided to write documentation.  Others seem like it was some developer doing the writing, and not some QA person. 

Microsoft KB172653 - “Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on His Own”
“This occurs because Barney’s eyes are light-sensitive and adjust to changes in lighting.”

Microsoft KB161129 - “Kitchen: Known Content Errors”
“When you make a drink that contains only dry ingredients and then save it, if you remake it, the last prompt tells you to “Pour drink in glass and enjoy!” You can’t click on the glass or feed the drink to Taste Test.”

Compaq FAQ2859 - “Where do I find the ‘Any’ key on my keyboard?”
No comment on this one…

Apple 301920 - “Stay away from the SyncServices folder”
“As if it were a swarm of bees, you should stay away from the SyncServices folder in Mac OS X 10.4.”

Microsoft KB178748 - “Security Administrator Tool causes high memory use in WUSER32″
“SATAN will attempt to access many UDP and TCP ports across the network in a very short space of time.”

Tags: funny, knowledgebase

During startup of a Linux machine under VMware, you might receive the following error:

vmnics device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization.

To fix this, you will need the VMware tools installed.  You can do this by selecting ‘Install VMware Tools’ from the Tools menu.  This will mount a virtual CD in /media/cdrom (or wherever your CD mountpoint is).  There are RPM and tarball packages, install whichever one best fits your distro.  Then run the command vmware-config-tools.pl.  This will scan your system and update some config files to point to the proper drivers for the hardware & kernel. 

After the config tool has run, it will have a list of commands that you need to type in for the changes to take effect (some rmmod and depmod basically).  Run these commands, then reboot.

On rebooting, I ran into a kernel panic about a faulty APIC timer.  If you run into this, restart the guest OS, and edit the kernel command line (press A at the GRUB screen), and append noapic to the end.  Boot the system, and after it has finished rebooting, reboot once more.  This seems to have fixed it, at least for me.

Tags: Linux, vmware

Experts Exchange recently fixed the Google loophole that allowed you to view any answer on their site as long as your referral was Google.  Now, if you are not a member, you can pull up the site but all the answers are fuzzed out, and it says you need to signup to get the answer.

There is a way around this.  If you View Source on the page, you can see all the answers.  “But they’re all garbled!” I hear you say.  Simple enough to fix.

All of the garbled answers in Experts Exchange HTML source are stored via ROT13 , which can be decoded pretty much anywhere with a quick search . 

Tags: encryption, fail, free, rot13

From The Pirate Bay Blog -  

“They have got a copy of the user database. That is, your username and passwords. But, the passwords are stored encrypted, so it’s not a big deal, but it’s still very sad that it’s out there. All e-mails are for instance encrypted as well, they will most likely not be able to decrypt them either (they are _very_ encrypted).”

So, if you have ever used TPB, and you were stupid enough to actually create an account on there, I’d reccomend changing your passwords ASAP.  And then take another look at how smart it is to be using public trackers like TPB.

Tags: bittorrent, hacking

Recently, the Copyright Royalty Board voted to adjust rates for online broadcasters of streaming radio.  The new rate would be equivalent to 7.5% of yearly revenues for a station.  This fee will be retroactive to January 1, 2006, and will come into effect on July 15th this year.  On this day, thousands of web stations will be required to pay huge sums of money for these retroactive fees, and many won’t be able to afford it and will shut down.

HR 2060 has been introduced in the House with bipartisan support, by Congressman Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Don Manzullo (R-IL).  A companion bill has been introduced in the Senate by Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sam Brownback (R-KA).

These bills would adjust the standards by which rates are decided, correct the retroactive licensing fees, and add a seperate set of royalty rules for non-commercial radio such as NPR.

You can help save net radio by calling your Representatives and Congressmen.  Spread the word.

Tags: mp3, petition, radio

From WZZM -

Michigan is facing a $900 million shortage in the upcoming budget.  What is the best solution to this?  Obviously, we should send a bunch of people to Hawaii on the taxpayer’s dime to discuss how to invest pension money!

“Nearly 80 officials across Michigan - more than twice the number of any other state - plan to fly off to Hawaii this month for a weeklong conference on public pension issues. And taxpayer-backed pension funds will pay the tab.”

Now, using the numbers in that article, and assuming that taxpayer money will fund airfare, the hotel stay, conference fees, etc, and that all 80 delegates stay for the full week, that comes out to just over $460,000.

Why am I not surprised that Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is going on this trip?

Update - 3 officials have decided not to go on the trip at all.  16 members of the delegation will now be paying out of their own pocket for the trip, including Kilpatrick.  Michigan is still sending the largest delegation of any state in the country.

Tags: fail, michigan, spending

Joost is nearing release, and as a has granted all current beta users with unlimited invitations.  If you missed out on the old invite post , you may be able to get in on this one.

Tags: beta, invite, joost