Movie/story idea — All of the crazy conspiracy theories Trump parrots are actually true. The deep state looking to undermine him. The conspiracy to steal the election, twice. The QAnon idea that Democrats are secret pedophiles or cannibals or whatever looking to take over the country and Trump has been ordained by God himself to save us. Except, unlike mainstream stories where good triumphs over evil … the bad guys win and the savior lives out his life in exile.
We got the floor laid in the coop and added a roost … now we’re ready for the chicks to move in!
But this strange rainbow chicken showed up!
I wonder if the lesson from Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 election investments might be “dumping money into advertisements has limited benefit”. A hundred million dollars to fund groups driving people to polls. Or free public transport rides on election day. Or groups helping people navigate voter registration (possibly including fees and transportation to where-ever non-driver photo IDs are issued). Maybe those would have been more productive ways to blow a hundred mil.
SysInternals used to produce a suite of tools for working with Microsoft Windows systems — the company appears to have been acquired by Microsoft, and the tools continue to be developed. I used PSKill and PSExec to automate a lot of system administration tasks. ProcessMonitor is like truss/strace for Windows. Unlike the HFS standard, Windows files end up all over the place (plus info is stashed in the registry). Sometimes applications or services fall over for no reason. Process monitor reports out
When you open procmon, you can build filters to exclude uninteresting operations — there’s a default set of exclusions (no need to log out what procmon is doing!)
Adding exclusions for specific process names can eliminate a lot of I/O — I was looking to troubleshoot a problem on a Domain Controller that had nothing to do with AD specifically, so excluding activity by lsass.exe significantly reduced the amount of data being logged. If I’m using a browser to troubleshoot the problem, I’ll exclude the firefox.exe or chrome.exe binary too.
From the filter screen, click “OK” to begin grabbing data. The easiest thing I’ve found to do is stop capturing data when the program opens (use ctrl-a followed by ctrl-x to clear the already logged stuff). Stage whatever you want to log, use ctrl-e to start capturing. Perform the actions you want to log, return to procmon and use ctrl-e to stop again.
You’ll see reads (and writes) against the registry, including the specific keys. Network operations. File reads and writes. In the “Result” and “Detail” column, you can determine if the operation was successful. There are a lot of expected not found failures — I see these in truss/strace logs too, programs try a bunch of different things and one of them needs to work.
I’ve had programs using a specific, undocumented file for a critical operation — like the service would fail to start because the file didn’t exist. And seeing the path and file open failure allowed me to create that needed file and run my service. I’ve wanted to find out where a program stashes data, and procmon makes that easy to identify.
And it’s going to be counted 🙂
I’ve seen some stats on what’s been spent on political campaigning this year — and it made me wonder what if they didn’t put so much money into advertising and cross-country tours. What if each party selected something from their platform and put the money into “fixing” the problem. Maybe the Republicans could take three billion dollars and build a private organization that patrols the border. The Democrats could take five billion dollars and create a non-profit that pays for medical procedures. It would certainly be reported by the news — you’d hear about who was doing it and what they were doing. And, instead of ClearChannel and whomever making a load of money selling airtime … the campaigning would actually accomplish something the party thinks needs to get done.
The Medina County Board of Elections is located down the road to the North of the Hobby Lobby / Walmart plaza (Stonegate Drive). It’s on the south side of Stonegate Drive, in a little strip-mall looking plaza.
The mail-in ballot drop-box is located to the right of their door. There are two envelopes you need to use. One that you sign & put personal info on — that needs to go into the outer mailing envelope (aka privacy envelope) even if you’re not actually mailing the ballot. You can drop off your ballots any time — slide the envelope into the slot, so you don’t have to touch anything except your ballot.
We’ve got to upgrade some Javascript modules at work — JQuery, Bootstrap, etc. Problem is that changes between the versions mean there’s a lot of rewriting required before we can update. And we pull in these modules using a shared header file. While we could stage all of the changes and update the entire website at once … that means we’re all dedicated to updating our components & are delaying the update until we’re finished.
That’s not ideal — and has the potential to break a lot of things at once. I plan, instead, of putting a default version in the shared header file. And some mechanism to source in a newer version by setting a variable in the individual tool’s PHP code before the header is pulled in. So each tool within the site has a $strJQueryRev, $strBootstrapRev, etc variable. Then the shared header file looks for that variable — loads a newer version when requested or loads the currently used older version when no version is indicated.
if($strJQueryRev == "3.5.1"){
echo "<script src=\"https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.5.1.min.js\">\n";
}
elseif($strJQueryRev == "3.1.1"){
echo "<script src=\"https://code.jquery.com/jquery-3.1.1.min.js\">\n";
}
else{
echo "<script src=\"https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.2.4.min.js\">\n"; # Old, in use, version is default
}
Or even
if(!$strRevisionNumber){$strRevisionNumber="2.2.4";}
echo "<script src=\"https://code.jquery.com/jquery-$strRevisionNumber.min.js\">
Each developer can add a version number to a single tool, test it, push it up through production using the newest modules. Move on to the next tool. The site still isn’t done until we’re all done, but we can slowly roll out the update as people are able to test their tools.