Month: May 2000

29 May 2000 »

Got my boxed copy of SuSE 6.4 x86. woohoo! Now I can figure out |x86| > |axp|, and try to bring them closer together.

28 May 2000 »

work
Debugging the OSF netscape image running on Suse, which apparently shipped with the 6.4 image. In 2.2.14, there’s two unimplemented osf syscalls + a poorly guessed osf syscall causing the hard wedges. Does anyone have good OSF (TruUnix) documentation of the syscalls? I’m interested in calls 0, 53 and set_program_attributes.

guns

Wow, most of my postings go unnoticed (because I lead a mostly dull life 😉 – but the gun thing got a few people going. Greets to samth, jdub, graydon, barryp, and apgarcia. It looks like I’m preaching to the choir here, which is good in my humble opinion. I was worried for a while when I read Cryptonomicon and the casual linking of geeks == guns for a portion of that book (especially the surreal scene where geeks with trench coats and long barrelled shotties are in a carpark whilst the police are present. In Australia, you’d be front page news, depicted in your last few minutes on the planet before the police “resolved” the incident; unfortunately here deadly force is met with deadly force far too often). I thought I was strange for not liking guns, but obviously not. I used to shoot rifles (.22 and .303’s) when I was a teenager as part of school “sports” (we had a small rifle range on site), but I’ve since put it behind me as I’ve come to realise how evil these things are.

I just wish Eric would respect the (needless) dead, and take into account the possible feelings of those affected by the waste of human life. I would prefer for him to not post the .sig on days that people die from firearm related deaths. This obviously means no more gun related .sigs, which would make me happy.

When the government of the day so clearly outguns its own citizenry, there’s no chance of – say, a bad patch of Minnesota rising up against the “tyranny” of the state. The framers of the second amendment might have thought it a good idea at the time, because the British could only ship so many people over, and in the civil war, everyone had roughly the same level of firepower in terms of range, deadliness and rounds per minute. These days, even if you can get a mini-gun, capable of mowing down crowds in seconds, it’s no match to the army, navy, or airforce, or even the ATF or the FBI, as Waco proved. If you want change, you have to do it at the ballot box, and not with guns.

Today, at least 250,000 and probably more than 500,000 Australians (including myself) marched in celebration of reconcilliation, and in plain defiance of our cowardly prime minister who refuses to apologise to the aboriginals and seriously talk reconcilliation for the past genocide and work on fixing up today’s ills (such as compensation for the stolen generations, third world health and sanitatary conditions in most of the outback, and very short lives – the average lifespan of aboriginals is only 56-64, whereas if you’re from *any* other background, it’s 75-81 depending on being male/female).

At the next election, he’s history – he wont need to go to pollsters on Monday to find this out – when more than 1/8th of your largest city marches against you, you are *so* gone. That’s how every civilised nation works. When there’s significant public sentiment against the policies of the day, they get sorted out through non-violent means at the ballot box. Guns are not part of the solution. See Fiji for a practical reason why this is so. Fiji will be a disaster zone for years to come until racist terrorists like George Speight learn the lesson the hard way. Fundamental change can only come from the people wishing to have a change, and they will do this through the ballot box.

27 May 2000 »

guns
Getting fairly offended and pissed off with esr’s continual stream of gun nut quotes in his .sig in lkml. I know he’s into guns, and realistically, everyone’s gotta have a hobby, but he takes it too far. The Wendy’s massacre and now a cold blood killing by a 13 year old says to me (and anyone else with a brain larger than a small peanut) that the Second Amendment needs amending or abolition. Small arms are a blight upon the planet, and no one needs a .38 semi auto pistol. Farmers don’t – I know because I have farmer friends, and the .22 single barrel does rabbits just fine.

It’s a shame I’m a steenking furriner sitting here in my comfortable Sydney abode rather than being able to do something about it. Just remember, the gun nuts are about as rational as the creationists, and much better armed. I’ve been to a few gun control and gun nut sites and basically, both sides take great liberties with statistics. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

work

Working on getting all my machines Suse’d. I s’pose as I’m going to work for them, better actually use the product 😉

26 May 2000 »

Win2K spontaneously reboots if I press eject in the cd player or on the little button on the front of my soon to be ex-work’s Toshiba laptop. I rang MS a few days ago to report it. I spent 40 minutes waiting to speak to a PSS drone. They made me get an support account on their system before I could continue the call. No big deal as long as I wasn’t charged for the call – it is a bug after all.
Eventually, 20 odd minutes later, I told the drone the details along the lines of, “I have a minidump, and I can repeat the bug check. It’s a two line BSOD caused by a bug check caused by me pressing eject. As you know bugchecks are caused by assertions in the kernel, and are generally easy to trace to a specific issue”. We spoke for a few minutes longer and he asked me to send in the event details. I managed to repeat the BSOD with a full dump, so I’m set – I thought.

I get an e-mail the next day saying along the lines that “they couldn’t replicate the problem, maybe you should increase the page file size, and oh by the way, if you want us to debug your problem, it’ll be $100 thanks.”

Well, MS, I’m going to say this once only – it’ll be a cold day in hell before I’m going to PAY you to debug assertions in YOUR code.

I don’t even know why I bothered to report the issue. Let some other poor Tecra owner with more money than sense find out the hard way that we have one of the 23,000 odd high priority bugs. It should be illegal, and I’m actually fairly certain in Australia it is illegal to not assist people who buy commodity products with faults.

soon to be work

proto-suse-6.4-axp-eval freezes hard using my forte media 801 sound card. I looked at the alsa sources, spoke to the guys, and it turns out that axp is not quite a supported platform. God help any poor unsuspecting axp owner out there. Hang in there fellas, there should be patches soon.

It also wedges hard for me with netscape. I’m going to build a serial console-enabled kernel and strace that bugger. It’s harder because NS is a TruUnix version, and we’re emulating TU syscalls. Should be fun, but I think it’s to do with the resolver. Again, fun, fun, fun.

24 May 2000 »

Everything is done. I’m now a Suse contractor, working on alpha specific stuff. I’ve resigned from e-Secure, my current employer, and they’re a little disappointed, but that’s to be expected.
I’m moving back to Melbourne as it is truly a more liveable city than Sydney. I get to work from home, excellent.

I’m going to learn German as I feel so embarrased sending off my messages to guys who speak English nearly as well I do.

18 May 2000 »

work
The basics are done. I need to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Then I can spill beans.

hackery

Downloading a big iso image for Blossom, my alpha at a massively unimpressive 10.37 kB/s. ftp.suse.com is too far away. Thinking of becoming a tempoary kernel hacker to ensure that I can use both of my processors on 2.4 before 2.3.99-pre is declared it. Also, since no one seems to be picking them up, I might have a go at fixing the outstanding security issues on Alan’s TODO list.

12 May 2000 »

work
Fellow master procrastinators, I paid big time today. My fingers are mucho sore from doing much typing. Good thing I don’t have bad wrists (yet!).

work morphs into hackery or vice versa

But joy! A wonderful thing has happened! More on this issue once the paperwork has been done. There’s a delicious irony due at the SAGE-Au conference, which I’ll let everyone know about once the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed (Chris/Markus if you’re reading this, don’t worry, it’s funny!).

security and punks like you!

decklin wrote:

More importantly, how do I get someone to do something about it without looking like some l33t cr4x0r?
Decklin, my advice is to write a review of your findings with recommendations required to address the issues by applying whatever set of patches or configurations required, and do some research and cut-n-pastes with references.

Now, the tricky bit. Go to the sysadmins. As long as they are not already out for your blood and have their handy LART at the ready, talk to them mano a geek. Help them understand the problem and present your review. They should fix the problem(s) you have found. If they don’t help, find their boss and present a business reason for her/him to get his/her staff to fix the problem. That’s as high as you need go. If they bite your head off, send em to me, whilst I make them aware of the SAGE-Au’s Code of Ethics, which sort of prohibits sys admins biting user’s heads off.

Now, the problem remains: if you did the equivalent of testing a bunch of locked doors by using a security scanner like nessus, nmap, or just read something interesting on bugtraq and tried it out on the school machine, I don’t blame the school for going after you. I would in their place. Do it on your own machine and learn.

If you need to repair bridges, try a packet of Tim Tams. They’ve always worked for me. If you’ve been a bad entity, double coated or bust.

(This is a re-post from Advogato, which I no longer use.)

11 May 2000 »

Procrastinating is fun. I’m doing it now. I’m going to pay for it tomorrow.

(This is a re-post from Advogato, which I no longer use.)

6 May 2000 »

life
mazeone: Sad to hear about your FOAF. One of my friends is suicidal from time to time, and I get the 2 am calls asking for help. I know I don’t know you, but mail me if you want to talk.

geeky stuff

Getting closer to reiserfs 3.6.5+ utils from working under Linux 2.3.99pre6/alpha. There’s much cruft in there. The actual module compiles and runs okay, but without a filesystem to work with, it’s all moot.

work

A client of a client is causing one of my workmates to put in zillions of hours of work per week. He only gets paid for 40. He is still there at 10.15 pm on a Saturday night. This is just wrong. This is the same client that caused me to start work at 5 am two days in a row and expected the document describing it all, including statistical analysis available approximately 30 minutes after we had finished measuring our test runs. They go live Monday. Good luck.

(This is a re-post from Advogato, which I no longer use.)

3 May 2000 »

life
Working on getting my machine stack back in working order after an abortive attempt by Dan, my TLINetBSDG* to install a PC Card adapter into his Alpha desktop, which happens to be my cable modem’s gateway (long story). The adapter is PnP, and NetBSD’s PnP support is limited to x86, and so it’s looking grim unless he does some kernel hacking.

* Tame Live In NetBSD Geek

work

Working at A Big Client(sm) can be rewarding and fun occasionally. Tomorrow is no different: I get to wake up at 4 am for a 5 am start, because they go live on Monday, and are currently scheduling all the contractors out of hours so the market research people can work between midday and 5 pm before the contractors go back to work in an effort to make a stupid made-up deadline (see Death March, E. Yourdon, for reasons why this stuff is moronic). It’s a good thing that the work is really cool and Resume Enhancing ™.

email

E-mail was a mixed bag today. I don’t normally write about correspondance, but it was an interesting day. I got e- mails from my company saying that the possible US trip was off (bad), and another asking when my house lease was up (bad – they pay about 60% of the rent after they relocated me). Then I got another e-mail asking if I’d like to join another organisation. I think this may actually be ironic. Or it could just be karma. Buggered if I know. If you’re ever in the position of having to look after geek employees, here’s Andrew’s really easy method to look after them and make them happy:

Don’t fuck them around on the little things. Saving a few thousand per annum versus finding qualified new staff is not a saving. Penny wise, pound foolish.

Toys, big monitors, decent amounts of RAM and disk space are cheap. Good people aren’t.

Interesting and varied work with realistic and reachable deadlines is more important than pay

Pay them what they are worth in the market – but don’t be surprised if pay means little or nothing to geeks except as a method of keeping score with their peers. If you say you’re going to pay $x in bonuses, pay $x or more.