cat slave diary

6 Dec 2000 »

hackery
Need to work on my paper for http://linux.conf.au

MCSE

Almost finished. Soon I’ll be a win2k MCSE. Next week is my last exam. I might even study for that one.

work

Top class blocking going on by a major vendor preventing me from getting on site at the data centre. They made me sign an NDA in an effort to slow me down some more. I had it signed in record time. The delays make me very happy as it allows my schedule to settle to just “punishing”.

2 Dec 2000 (updated 2 Dec 2000) »

deekayen: World AIDS day

Deekayen, there is no point in classifying how you got a particular disease. In South Africa, 20% of the population has HIV/AIDS. They are all not gay or junkies (which you seem to have trouble with), and they have a terminal illness. For some sub- Saharan countries, this could be a end of country event in a few years. AIDS does not respect your immoral repugnancy.

Unlike you, I have lost friends and acquaintances to AIDS and it is not a pleasant way to go.

Personally, though, the people who came up with a no weblog day are missing the point. The thing you want to do on an international AIDS day is communicate. PRACTICE SAFER SEX! IF YOU MUST INJECT, DON’T REUSE NEEDLES! is what we should be shouting from the virtual rooftops!

1 Dec 2000 (updated 1 Dec 2000) »

hackery

I have to do the following things:

study for the rest of my MCSE exams
write my paper for linux.conf.au
work on the gtkada program that this paper references
write my slides for said paper
work on miscellaneous SAGE-AU stuff, like the Code of Practice and a working web site

Things I’d like to do

Play tekken tag team tournament and ssx on my playstation2.

Which will win?

The religion thing

A reference site for all these philosophy related things: Yale’s Philosophy Resources.

Occam’s Razor says that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one.

Religion is about beliefs. Science is about observable facts which lead to theories (some which can be modified as new facts come in, and some that are invalidated if facts fail to back that theory either by direct or indir ect means) or they just remain facts until something can explain them.

Many theories with models can make suggestions about observations, which can be then verified through repeatable experiment. Good examples of the latter would be gravitational lenses, or Higgs bosons, both essentially unprovable at the time that the associated theory was written.

Some theories are too well backed by observation to be anything but, well, proven. Some theories have little edges that can be tinkered with (quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, for example), but all theories preclude a deity by the dint of Occam’s Razor. $DEITY is just not necessary.

The problem I have is not that people have deeply held religious beliefs, but they try to push them onto others. The worst offenders are those pushing “creationist science” (an oxymoron, in my opinion). Most creationists working to promote creationism as a first-class cousin to evolution as we know it today use incredible sophistry, faulty logic and word games to “prove” their point.

There are no observable facts* that back up the Christian creation myth. There are plenty of observations that fill our current understanding of evolution and biology (and RNA chemistry, which underpin gene therapy and …).

Check out this paper as it could summarize this thread quite succinctly. It’s an interesting read and proves that people who are into philosophy more than us have already been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

* observeable fact: a red ball is a round sphere that has a surface that reflects light in certain wavelengths that appears red to a human eye. This round ball, if dropped in a vacuum on the planet earth will fall towards the centre of the planet at the rate of 9.8 m/s/s. The elements of an observeable fact cannot be argued as they are reduced to their smallest elements.

29 Nov 2000 »

One of the lucky 60,000 Australians to have bought a PlayStation 2. I’m going to have serious tekken thumb tomorrow.
mrorganic: agreed. Check out talk.origins. It’s very useful if you’re into combatting silliness, whilst demonstrating that we are open to new ideas as they arise. That’s what shits me about creationists. They claim we are closed minded. Well, yes, about creationism I certainly am closed minded - there is NO evidence to back it up, and usally creationists are aiming to teach creationism alongside accepted theories. As new things come up in biology and related fields, as long as there is repeatable experiments with the scientific method being used, or hard evidence to back it up, I’ll take it on board. Creationism fails both measures.

gstein: agreed. Unless I personally helped start or did a shitload of work, I always feel uncomfortable putting anything other than “contributor” or “developer” on my associations with projects.

28 Nov 2000 »

Diary of Releasing OSDA at AOSS2
This is a long one. It covers my weekend just past.

Friday

After a hectic week, I made my way from home to the airport with my frantically packed carry-on and laptop, and thus to the Qantas Club with unseemly haste. I had a couple in the Club before boarding my flight to Adelaide.

Once in Adelaide, I zoomed to the cafe where people from the conference were having dinner. I should have caught an earlier flight - I do like my food, but good company is so much more. Adelaide didn’t disappoint on the cake and coffee front, and the company was fine. I met up again with my friend Skud and met Sarah, one of the organisers, and a few of the other speakers for the first time.

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Friday%20night.jpg http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/sarah1.jpg

Saturday

Got up a little too early; dang that half-hour time zone difference! Breakfast being delivered is the nicest part about staying away from home, and this was no exception.

I was dropped off by the cab almost at the conference venue, but since I needed to make a booking for a hire car for the next day, I didn’t mind too much. I was a little early, and managed to organise a car and still be the first person to register for the day. Conference attendees received these nifty packs with stuff in them, like Caldera’s Linux Technology Preview. I thought I had every RedHat publication under the sun, so I avoided one of their folders, and so missed out on Red Hat 7.0 CD’s. Not a great loss.

The conference kicked off well, with pretty good attendance for a smaller city like Adelaide. We had a quick pep talk from one of the local IT boosters, and then onto the main program.

Dan Shearer: Open Source, Opening Doors

A good talk aimed at increasing OSS usage in companies. The entry by stealth model is falling away as the desired mechanism and how you can make money doing open source.

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/dan%20shearer.JPG

Richard Sharpe: Cutting code in Qantas Club

Richard is probably best known for his Samba work, but this talk was more about Ethereal, which I use extensively. Richard didn’t have time to discuss how he codes at the Qantas Club, but I imagine with the free booze and other distractions available there…

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Richard%20Sharpe.JPG

Greg Lehey: Revamping the FreeBSD SMP implementation

Excellent talk given by a master of the trade. Greg detailed how the new SMP implementation differed from previous efforts, and the benefits of the new implementation.

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Greg%20Lehey.JPG

Michael Still: Panda

Michael gave us a talk about his PDF enabled graphics library. Panda allows programs to directly output to PDF at the highest quality available to them. It’s still a work in progress, but it seemed to work nicely.

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Michael%20Still%201.jpg

Jay Schulist: Implementing Network Device Drivers in the Linux kernel

Jay knew his stuff and he gave an excellent presentation, showing us how easy it is to make a working network driver. Of course, it was one that he had prepared earlier, but he did run make.

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Jay%20Schulze.jpg

Lunch was nice, and I had a good chat with various people.

Geoffrey D. Bennett: The Katie revision control system

Katie is a clearcase filesystem revision control system. It worked very nicely and with a bit of polishing will be an excellent tool for developers sick of CVS.

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Geoff%20Bennett.jpg

Kirrily “Skud” Robert: Perl 6

A good talk, certainly one of the more interesting to me as they seem to be applying large scale software engineering to the open source model. I will be very interested to see how this turns out. Skud used Mr Laptop who runs Win2K. She still used a HTML presentation, though

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/skud.jpg

Presentations, AUUG and SAGE-AU (and ISOC-AU)

This one was a surprise for me as I didn’t expect to have to do this one. So I winged it. ISOC-AU were probably unaware of it as well, as no one was there who was a member (unusual) or from the exec. I presented first and got the message across as to what SAGE-AU does for its members (which is quite a lot, but not everyone sees that).

Afternoon tea

I was pleasantly surprised to be hunted down by Phil Kernick. Phil is one of our SAGE-SA members, but SAGE-SA doesn’t exist yet, and I’d like it to. Phil basically demanded to be let run it, so by the time you read this SAGE-SA should be off the ground. Yeehah! Who says conferences are a waste of time?

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/afternoon%20tea.jpg

Glen Turner: Writing programs for future networks

Glen’s talk was excellent and I managed to talk to him later about IPv6, a major pet project of mine. AARnet are likely to be an excellent test bunny for my subversive ideas.

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Glen%20Turner.jpg http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Glen%20Turner%202.JPG

Conrad Parker: Sweep

About the only end user application presented at the conference, which made a pleasant change. Conrad showed off Sweep, a sound program that does for sound what Gimp does for graphics. Very nice. He gave out handouts with the Sweep plugin SDK.

http://www.greebo.net/Conrad%20Parker.jpg

Andrew van der Stock: OSDA

I did the only PowerPoint presentation of the entire conference! I couldn’t contact my ISP due to my modem dialling too fast for the hotel’s poor excuse for a PABX, so Luke’s magicpoint HTML simply didn’t come through in time. OSDA details can be found at

http://www.sage-au.org.au/osda/ http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/crowd.jpg

Michael Neuling: Linux packet filtering

Michael, one of the authors of IP chains, gave an overview of the more flexible NetFilter which is due to appear in 2.4 when it finally finishes baking. As a security freak, I enjoyed the talk.

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Michael%20Neuling.jpg

After the conference had finished, we headed off to the pub, and had a few drinkies. North Terrace is where the Hyundai Excel Rice Boy Car Club has their unofficial 20 km/h drag races, so we saw a wide range of tricked up Excels. Very amusing.

http://www.riceboypage.com

After the pub, we walked clear across town to a Japanese restaurant. They took a long time to serve us, which detracted from an otherwise excellent feed. Again, the company was excellent. I had turned into major pumpkin and decided to call it a night after that. The others pottered off with the change to another pub.

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/at%20the%20restaurant% 20afterwards.jpg

Sunday

Had a late breakfast and picked up the car and then Skud before driving out to Greg Lehey’s place. Skud doesn’t have a license I found out, and surprisingly enough for a SCA person, her navigational skills with a map were fairly rusty. Since I’m of the Dirk Gently school of thought when it comes to going places, we missed our turn off and drove a little further than we expected to.

Once we arrived a little after the 11 am start time, we found that we were the first lot of people to turn up there that day, with Luigi seemingly staying at Greg’s. Greg and his family live on acreage out in the country. It made a nice change. It’s only 35 minutes out of Adelaide, but it really is the country.

They have a lovely rambling house, horses and whippets. Unfortunately, whilst we were waiting for the others to arrive, one of the family’s two cats was found dead on the highway outside the property. Luigi and Greg gave it a proper burial. I felt so bad, and I thank Greg and his family for continuing on the BBQ. If Greebo or Meebles died, I would have sent everyone home whilst I had a good blubber.

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/skud-n-dog.jpg

Despite this tragedy, we had a good lunch with mostly everyone turning up after getting lost in various ways. Greg gave us good directions, but unfortunately, no one had a GPS receiver and metropolitan maps do not detail every little C road, and signage in South Australia could be better.

Greg showed off his computer rooms. He has a wide variety of equipment in various stages of disrepair or working order. His guestrooms even have their own terminals.

http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Greg’s%20office%20and% 20friends.jpg

After a long day, Skud and I departed for the airport. Skud is off to the wide white land of Canada soon. I wish her well; she’ll do great at e-Smith.

22 Nov 2000 »

Skud: AOSS2
I’m going to AOSS2 to do the SAGE-AU presentation. Mail me your presentation as a backup mechanism - it can come across on mr laptop. Also, I’m reasonably certain that Michael Paddon et al (ie the organisers) will look after it for you as well.

work: Win2K security tute

I gave my Win2K security tute another run today. A Microsoft dude was in the crowd. Low attendance - about 10 people fewer than RSVPs I had managed to get. The people there were probably taught to suck eggs, which is not always that pleasant - particularly as it’s a three+ hour tute.

I did manage to get across the idea that NT/Win2K security is about using the integrated form of authentication, which is key. Every single time people go away from it, they suck at it. I have some other examples as well, but this is just one of the more recent and visible ones.

hackery

Working on getting the VNC thing fixed (as well as is possible). I’m going to kerberize VNC into the current developvnc.org CVS code and also work on revamping the current authentication scheme to something that’s a little bit more secure from Applied Cryptography. Too much effort, and we have a kerberos like scheme. I’m thinking Wide Mouth Frog at this stage. It’s about the same complexity as NTLM. Trent will be the VNC server.

A possible nice thing is that VNC includes 3des C++ class helpers. I’m going to look into extending that implementation to 3des-cbc and encrypting the stream. Avoids the use of SSL or ssh entirely for relatively low cost. Trick is that the initial setup can be done quite badly.

21 Nov 2000 »

gstein: basic digest authentication is evil and is first against the wall when the revolution comes
As far as security people like me are concerned, basic digest is in the clear. It’s base64 encoded ASCII text. Therefore it’s in the clear, as the amount of transformation that is required is not high, certainly about the same as ROT13 or XOR. Most GUI snooping programs automatically decode it for you, so you don’t even need to feed it to your friendly perl demunger.

IETF draft Kerberos- enabled HTTP authentication. It’s also implemented in NCSA’s httpd, and in Apache.

NTLM-enabled HTTP authentication method. mod_ ntlm is the Apache module you’re probably interested in, or mod_auth_smb or Tim’s later effort mod_auth_sspi. But I’d suggest sticking with Kerberos. It’s more secure and works today.

Even with the proprietary crap, challenge/response is better than clear text (in this case, basic digest) as you cannot easily recover the password. Kerberos is the way forward. I’d like to see that.

20 Nov 2000 »

Don’t try this at home
I passed my Win2K MCP upgrade exam (070-240) this morning. I thought it was a one hour exam. It turned out to be four one hour exams. Whoops

Don’t try this exam without the same level of preparedness as myself: I’ve been using NT 5.0 since October 1997 (and Win2K since they renamed it in late 1998), and NT since the 3.5 days. It was a tough exam for those who have never touched a box, and I was glad they tossed in some curly questions that required you to have actually done the stuff rather than just read it in a book.

I liked the new style exams: there’s situational exams that require you to drag and drop the answers to make the correct solution. It was all too easy to stuff up if you’ve never seen it before, whereas the old multiple choice questions you had a pretty good chance of eliminating half the answers on logic alone, and then using the balance of probabilities to pass on the remaining two.

The MS Press self-study book for this exam doesn’t exist yet (it’s coming out later this month or early next), so I had to self study. I read the encompassing exams’ objectives and just played on my box at home for the last two days with stuff I’ve not touched before: RIS, Backup, state backup/restore, and the recovery console (which some of you linux bigots will find hard to believe - I’ve never needed to use the recovery console because Win2K has been stable for me). I also gave myself a little study time on site replication stuff, but as that’s a descendant of the Exchange site replication stuff, I felt I was okay. And I was.

I didn’t like the questions that rely entirely on English semantics for the correct answer. They test your parsing ability not your product knowledge. I left a rather nasty comment for them to translate the question into another language and get someone who speaks that language to answer the question. The only correct answer is the one that contains the word “seize”, which is in English and in the ntdsutil utility. The other three alternatives contain English synonyms of seize. Bad question.

I also felt the preponderance of IPX / Netware questions in one of the exams to be a pointless waste of space. I’ve never used NW Gateway in production, and I used to be in Netware-first networks when Netware was the primary NOS for desktops. One of the questions had only one “correct” answer that would be wrong if a Netware savvy Cisco engineer had designed and implemented IPX/SPX correctly in a routed environment.

I’ve got three more exams to finish my MCSE upgrade. Again, the MS Press books for these topics don’t exist yet, but since I’ve completed 4/8 of my exams without using one yet, I’ll continue to try and just do self study.

19 Nov 2000 »

certify me
Have Win2K upgrade 070-240 MCSE exam Tuesday morning first thing. Have beer-n-babes tonight. Study or beer. Beeeeeeeeeeeeeer. Baaabes. Study. I think you can see which will win.

work

Have too much work on at work. I’m presenting a Win2K security tutorial on Wednesday morning and I need to install Win2K Server on something so I can do demos during the tute. Microsoft dudes are coming, so I can’t suck.

hackery

Need to finish off our presentation et al to go to the Australian Open Source Symposium and get press for our secret project (OSDA) which we are announcing there.

At least I get to see Skud again before she potters off to Canada.

See you there.

12 Nov 2000 (updated 12 Nov 2000) »

life

Flew to Melbourne for a wedding. Travelled lightly - no baggage whatsoever. Mum freaked out about that.

Went shopping, bought a new suit and overcoat. Nice overcoat. Shame I live in Sydney where I will be able to wear it due to cold weather conditions about two or three times a year. Went to Mikasa and bought a nice wedding gift for Shaun & Rosemary.

Caught the garter. Parents don’t know yet, as I’ll never hear the end of it. The depressing thing about my last couple of weddings is the diminishing number of single women competing for the posey.

work

Work had a small geek rod-length check with a trivial maths problem. The trick is to write the smallest completely calculating and functional program to come up with the answer. Using simple algebra, it falls out in less than a few lines on a page, so that’s not an acceptable solution. It must calculate the answer.

What is the five-digit number in which the sum of the first two digits is one less than the third, the third double the fourth, the fourth double the last, the third the product of the fourth and fifth, the second five more than the first, and the first one-eighth the third and also one- fourth of the fourth?

Here’s my solution in JavaScript. The other guys got down and dirty with perl line noise and even a shell example:

% 16842
16482: Command not found

But that’s cheating, as they precalculated it.

flying

I hate getting up early to fly. I’m sleep deprived. I love flying. I like 747’s - they land just like a 400 tonne bricks shouldn’t. I don’t like 737’s - the Cessna 172 of the airline world.

My secret shame: I don’t like landings. They make me nervous and my heart goes afluttering during them, even in nice conditions. I’ve been flying all my life, at least two or three flights every year, and at the moment, it’s about 20-30 flights a year, which shits me as I don’t spend many weekends in my own bed. But I still get nervous during landings. I don’t know why. I fly FlightSim 2000 on my PC, and I’ve got landings down pat there, and I know what a good landing looks like in real life. I know all about fishing for the ground, and appreciate the true skills of the computers or pilots plonking those big babies on the ground in weather that gives me the willies, but I still find landing distressing. Oh well.

reading: Iain M Banks is a legend

Wooohoooo! mbp has the new Iain M. Banks book. That means that I have a chance of getting it as well! Excellent.

driving: mbp’s fang

The Sydney -> Batemans Bay -> Canberra -> Federal Highway - > M31 -> Sydney drive is an excellent little fang (it’s about 700 km all up from my place, and I’ve done it twice now). This drive can only be improved via going through the Royal National Park: 30 km twisty bits instead of the boring direct way. The mountain twisty bits on the road from Bateman’s Bay to Canberra is nearly as much fun as the best coast road in the world, the Great Ocean Road in Victoria (sorry, but the Pacific Coast Highway doesn’t cut it. It’s a very nice road, but the Great Ocean Road has views, is a fantastic drive in the right (sports*) car, and best of all, you can occasionally be the only driver around if you drive early or late.

* sports car == one that turns as directed and brakes that work because there are hundreds of bends and it’s over 130 km of (very) twisty bits. Bonus: acceleration. Coming out of a 25 km/h hairpin and opening the throttle before slamming on the brakes for the next 35 km/h decreasing radius sweeper is the most fun. US floaty mobiles like Probe et al or muscle cars (forward direction only don’t cut it in this type of drive. Something nice and light, fast, responsive. A friend of mine’s Audi A4 quattro was the most hairraising drive I’ve ever done on the Great Ocean drive. He kept on taking 35 km/h corners at 70-80 km/h. It’s amazing how adhesive Geoff’s car was. I was bruised from that drive. Russ Cooper shared this particular hoon, so if you ever meet Russ, ask him about it.