11 Jul 2002 (updated 11 Jul 2002) »

It’s been a while between posts as I keep a journal on my own web site now, which I also neglect.
Noticed that const has an account, updated certification as necessary. He is too harsh on himself, but updates his diary even more infrequently than I do.

Currently neglecting a .NET assembly and front end to test VNC servers and clients. It’s, um, bloody dangerous. Once it’s a bit less rough and has a few more tests, I’ll release it to people like Const for their testing pleasure. There’s going to be a raft of updates. Luckily, the worst crashes are reserved for authenticated users.

It’s a shame that Gene Kan has taken his own life. Depression sucks (see my previous posts).

12 May 2001 (updated 12 May 2001) »

blackhat

Woohoo! My paper for blackhat was accepted. Now, all I need is for my company to agree to let me go.

life == depression

Douglas Adams is no more. Bugger. A suffusion of yellow.

My mum is trying to cut me off, and today is Mother’s day. I don’t know if I should even call.

Life is too short for this sort of shit.

12 Apr 2001 »

I am a karma whore.
I have to get up in three hours, and I haven’t packed yet.

The cats don’t yet know that they will be feeding themselves for the next few days. I hope they grow opposeable thumbs in the next few hours for the can opener (only kidding).

11 Apr 2001 »

life
Need a recharge. I’m getting up progressively later, and soon I’ll be getting up tomorrow. This is not good. I have a supposedly 8.30 – 5.30 pm job, so getting to work for 1 pm is not a good thing.

I’m going back to Melbourne for Easter. Hopefully, this will help with the ol’ batteries.

1 Apr 2001 (updated 1 Apr 2001) »

jschauma: life in Brisbane

As anyone from Brisbane will tell you, there is no life in Brisbane.

However, it is a great place to work, and it’s not far from Sydney (about one hour in zoo class), or two and a bit hours in Zoo Class for Melbourne.

Melbourne is fantastic; lots of 24×7 places (including all Coles, a major supermarket chain), zillions of restaurants spread evenly throughout the city (with vibrant Greek (Lonsdale St and elsewhere), Italian (Carlton and elsewhere), Vietnamese (Victoria St and elsewhere), Chinese (Lt Bourke St), vegetarian/alternative (Fitzroy) and many other specialized cuisine areas), good shopping, great cinema and arts life, a Comedy festival that rivals both the Glasgow and Montreal festivals, and by world standards, cheap(ish) housing. Melbourne is the third largest Greek(-speaking) city in the world, and as well as being home to people from all over the world.

Unfortunately, Melbourne is not Brisbane.

In Brisbane, most places shut early, Fortitude Valley is awful (it’s like a really down at heel, cheap-ass version of a red light district). And it’s warm and humid nearly all year around. Red necks infest most outer suburbs, and the inner suburbs aren’t all that great. There is a particular style of Queensland politics that seems to blame everything that they don’t like on Canberra, particularly once you’re north of Ipswich. It is possible to get a decent feed and coffee in Brisbane, but only in certain suburbs.

The downside: being paid in the Australian peso. I’d suggest getting paid in the equivalent of US currency. You’ll be extremely rich. To give you an example. A mid range US salary is about $70k (poverty rates in the valley). This is over $140k in Australia, and you are in the upper 5% of all tax payers. It’s enough to afford pretty much any house you like in the Brisbane or Melbourne regions, minus the bloody expensive places.

But Brisbane has to beat Norway as a place to work.

Cat flatuence

Is evil.

28 Mar 2001 (updated 1 Apr 2001) »

jschaum: life in Brisbane
As anyone from Brisbane will tell you, thers is no life in Brisbane.

However, it is a great place to work, and it’s not far from Sydney (about an hour’s flight), and two and a bit from Melbourne. Melbourne is fantastic; lots of 24×7 places (including all Coles, a major supermarket chain), zillions of restaurants spread evenly throughout the city (with vibrant Greek (Lonsdale St), Italian (Carlton), Vietnamese (Victoria St), Chinese (Lt Bourke St), vegetarian/alternative (Fitzroy) and many other specialized cuisine areas), good shopping, great cinema and arts life, a Comedy festival that rivals both the Glasgow and Montreal festivals, and by world standards, cheap(ish) housing. Melbourne is the third largest Greek(-speaking) city in the world, and peoples from all over the world.

Unfortunately, Melbourne is not Brisbane.

In Brisbane, most places shut early, Fortitude Valley is awful (it’s like a really down at heel, cheap-ass version of a red light district). And it’s warm and humid nearly all year around. Red necks infest most outer suburbs, and the inner suburbs aren’t all that great. There is a particular style of Queensland politics that seems to blame everything that they don’t like on Canberra, particularly once you’re north of Ipswich. It is possible to get a decent feed and coffee in Brisbane, but only in certain suburbs.

The downside: being paid in the Australian peso. I’d suggest getting paid in the equivalent of US currency. You’ll be extremely rich. To give you an example. A mid range US salary is about $70k (poverty rates in the valley). This is over $140k in Australia, and you are in the upper 5% of all tax payers. It’s enough to afford pretty much any house you like in the Brisbane or Melbourne regions, minus the bloody expensive places.

But Brisbane has to beat Norway as a place to work.

Cat flatuence

Is evil.

27 Mar 2001 (updated 28 Mar 2001) »

work
nearly got accosted by an overly amorous children’s charity logo on my way in. The person inside seems to prefer hugging cute women (of which there are many in my North Sydney client’s building lobby).

hackery

Got my dual PPro back on its feet last night and made it my DNS server. I’m sick of not having any entries for any of my machines in my own home network.

The machine room is getting fairly warm.

21 Mar 2001 (updated 27 Mar 2001) »

der diary
Please forgive me, for I have sinned. I haven’t posted for more nearly two weeks.

netbsd

Working on bugs. I’m sick of my Alpha not being as good as my dual PPro running NetBSD, so I’m installing -current and the latest Xfree86 cvs in an effort to bring it into line with my x86 unix.

Had fun trying to build -current as a non-privileged user. Apparently there is some work there to make that happen. It’s unacceptable to have to compile the lot as root.

Whilst make build was chugging away, I dug through my software testing sites, and re-found fuzz. I ported it into the 21st century (ansi C, strict compilation flags), and sure enough, it ran fine… which meant that a whole bunch of utilities crashed and hung.

In 1990, the guys who wrote fuzz found that about 25% of all utilities from commercial Unix vendors have basic input validation and memory allocation issues. In 2001, NetBSD still has about the same level of issues. Argl. Doesn’t anyone run regression tests around here?

beta 2: let microsoft spend enough time on something, they will get it right

Got beta 2 yesterday @ 110 kB/s. Not a bad rate, but much less than 650 kB/s I get when downloading stuff from mirror.aarnet.

beta 2 rocks. They fixed all my outstanding issues, and introduced a few. My CNET Pro 200 cheapass PCI ethernet card installed out of the box for the first time. The install was flawless and it was fast. WEP is back!

Dan and I played around with trying to control each other’s PC, and that worked very well. It seems that TermSrv is built into anything > Pro now. Excellent.

Problems still outstanding: Guest is on by default (!) Administrator level accounts are created by default on Pro without passwords (!) It’s nearly impossible to figure out how to log on as the local Administrator using the new funky login screen. You can’t easily script a number of the new features (ICF/ICS).

And then there were the usual set of compatibility bugs with programs that only I seem to use. Time to start bugging.

But overall, WinXP beta 2 is excellent. It’s just been promoted to my primary operating system.

14 Mar 2001 »

Skud: Darwin’s Radio
Is by Greg Bear. I recommend all of you go to your nearest bookshop and obtain said book. It’s more about social issues than evolution or mutation. Excellent use of the science as detective genre. Bear is my $DEITY, except when Mr Banks pops out another one. Then he is my $DEITY.

hackery

Working on lukemftp has all but stopped (as predicted).

Working on auDA stuff. Make a submission if you are interested in Australian DNS futures.

Posted a little collection of XFree86 exploits (no new ones, just collecting knowledge together) to the devel list for testing.

If you use any form of XFree86

Upgrade to 4.0.3 (due soon) as soon as you can. For those of you in the dark ages, 3.3.7 will be out shortly as well.

If you can’t go to 4.0.3 for the only valid reason (4.0.x doesn’t support your card), go to 3.3.7. All known serious security flaws are fixed for the first time in this new stability release.

9 Mar 2001 »

work
Got the new Dell laptop today. besides weird key placements (I’m hitting all sorts of keys), the thing is good. Learning why they bother with a battery LED is my first priority, and figuring out how I can disable the nipple and its two little nipple buttons in favor of the mush pad. Most people I know like nipples and hate mush pads. They are wrong. The mush pad is as fast as a mouse and very expressive. The nipples (which I have had to live with since moving to PC laptops) are awful. The first thing I did when I get my Tecra 8000 a few years ago was to get a USB mouse. I don’t need it now.

The C600 is fast, has a big beautiful screen, and runs a certain pre-beta 2 operating system IDW very well indeed, which as I’m a beta tester, is about as much as I can tell you without being hunted down by Redmond.

In fact, this build is very good. It’s stable, boots extremely fast, and is going to be my work horse for a little bit.

7 Mar 2001 »

hackery: Story of CRT suckage! Be amazed!
So here I am, sitting at my PC last night trying to port Luke’s ftp client to Win32. It uses a lot of Unixisms, including signals (to emulate overlapped I/O and to do basic threading), pipes (popen), fork, termios/termcap, lots of directory stuff, and arpa/* and inet/* and so on.

So here I am working with MS’s C runtime (CRT) which sucks just so bad. select() is essentially broken (64 file descriptors, anyone?), pipes don’t exist, signals don’t exist (and no way to really trap them), termios/termcap doesn’t exist, fork doesn’t work the way you’d expect, and unless it’s in the Standard C library, there’s no arpa/* or inet/*.

Coupled with that, the Visual C++ compiler ignores

#if 0

blah blah blah

#endif

and attempts to pre-process stuff it is supposed to ignore. So I’m basically hacking away code, so there’s no chance of keeping this from being anything but a complete fork.

I don’t want to use cygwin or gcc for win32 as I’m aiming for a high performance port.

So, I basically look at the guts of Luke’s program. It’s about 2000 lines of Crufty C code. I’m thinking that a new port, with just the guts of Luke’s code will the way forward.

This allows me to use overlapped I/O (which is a fancy way of saying “asynchronous” I/O). NT reads blocks < 8 kb in blocking mode regardless of overlapped or not, and that works out okay anyway as we want to chuff it down a (slower) network socket. So I only am considering overlapped I/O for the network side. This has a greater chance of being able to work on the 9x kernel (which I care about >< this much). On platforms that do not support overlapped I/O (most Unixes), this can be changed back to be blocking network I/O and just put back in the signal handlers to perform cleanups and rate limiting.

It also allows me to rejig the old code that is truly crufty, and if I keep presentation, MI transport and MD transport (ipv4/nt ipv4/unix ipv6/nt ipv6/unix) seperate, the result will be a portable, probably smaller, definitely more robust client.

shootings

How many more kids have to die before the US takes action on small arms in the community?

Two separate school shootings today so far, luckily the one in the US didn't kill the person shot in the head, but the one in Brazil did. But being shot in the head is not fun, and I bet that person will be scarred for life, both emotionally and physically.

This tragedy must stop NOW!

4 Mar 2001 (updated 4 Mar 2001) »

hackery, at last

My friend Luke, is the author of luk emftp, a portable ftp client based upon the original BSD ftp client, and is now used by default in Suse, NetBSD and a few other platforms. It is easily the best CLI-based ftp client, and I've used a lot of different clients. His client has Emacs or vi bindings, command completion, follows *all* the ftp RFC's, transparent passive/active, accurate time remaining and download speed, command line URL parsing for http and ftp targets, including complex redirects ... (de-akamai anyone), the list goes on and on and on.

The code, although well looked after and modified, is built upon years of cruft. I'm trying to port it to Win32 as I'm sick of having the predecessor of Luke's code, without all the fancy features.

My compiler (Visual C++ 6.0) is at times strict and bloody minded about what it will accept and where it will accept stuff from. What doesn't help is the extremely poorly written C library. It's probably just enough to make most strictly POSIX utilities work, and nothing more.

Expect this effort to fizzle out on Thursday at 6.46 pm as I find something else to do. (note to self: get a longer attention span).

I'm glad someone reads me...

I had a couple of days off computers from my last post, and might have missed any replies to my reply rant to deekayen's post. Since it was fairly offtopic (as was Deekayen's post), I don't mind too much :-)

Anyway, thanks Ankh!

2 Mar 2001 »

deekayen: Living in the past
Would the framers of the 1787 Constitution be looking back at the luminaries of the 1560's for inspiration for their country?

No. They were framing the constitution around new(ish) ideas that the eminent contemporary people (well, men) of the time liked, a sentiment that essentially can be distilled to : "English out!", a sort of Lutheran nailing 96 points of contention to the church door.

In Australia, we have a c onstitution that is 100 years old. We haven't changed it much, so it is irrelevant in many of its sections because we haven't changed it much. There are sections stating that the Governor General will get 10000 pounds a year. Since 1966, we have used dollars. And this is not the only example.

Our constitution, like yours, is getting crufty, and needs a good cleanout - by the people of our time, not the people of 1787 or the people of the late 1800's.

Living in the past is dangerous, and pointless. As soon as you do, you are history. Think Spain, think Holland, think England. These countries revelled in their past glories and are no longer world superpowers.

Conservative libertarians, such as this "ambassador" are bad for society, which is just the way they like it. In most cases, libertarians do not see the benefit of society and yet enjoy its beneficence.

Which bit of a "well regulated militia" do you not get? I don't count the NRA as a well regulated militia. I don't count the millions of gun owners who do not belong to gun clubs or actual militias as being a well regulated militia. Your right to bear arms is in context. As an individual, I am all for your *individual* so- called "right" to bear arms infringed, with extreme prejudice.

The ability of a militia to seriously check the power of any government (by force) ended when the machine gun and heavy weaponry (such as tanks) came out. Thus gun nuts have been clinging to the silly idea that their inviolable "right" to arms on the basis of keeping the government in check. In recent times, these same sort of anti-guvment idiots blew up a federal building in Oklahoma, killing many innocent people with a simple, but large bomb. What was the government's reaction? It will execute one of them shortly. Did it change anything? No. If anything, it hardened the hearts of the citizenry towards actually liking their guvment and hating the terrorists for their actions. So why keep guns? It's pointless. Self-defence? That's crap: you're more likely to get shot with your own piece by accident or by deliberate house-holder action. To go postal? Well, that's smart.

In Australia, we were aiming at one mass killing every year until 1996. Then we get half-assed gun control, and haven't had one since. The sooner we rid ourselves of the damn things, the safer we'll be.

Moving on to taxation...

If you agree that the society benefits when the government provides certain things, such as hospitals (well, in most civilized countries they do), education, defence, roads, infrastructure, and other services and these things have a certain cost, then the government needs to raise capital to fund these. How it does this is up for grabs, but it is better if everyone pays their share. Ridding yourselves of income tax will move the costs to other areas.

Income tax is a broad tax designed to reap a little from everyone, rather than a lot from a few. The problem with no income taxes is that the few have demonstrably shown that they can avoid nearly all taxes. If then the govt taxes as Keyes would like them to, through duties and tariffs, this is impossible to enforce when trans-national flows of information are far more valuable than goods. So the "gov'ment" would be forced to rely solely on the little people again through shocking sales and other taxes.

If on the other hand, you don't agree that you like roads, a country essentially free of bandits and any semblance of real threat to your national sovereignty, clean running water, schools, or accessable health care (most civilized countries have this), well ... don't use them. You'd be either dead or a cast member of "Lord of the flies" in two weeks.

If you don't like what I am saying, both Australia and the US use a form of democracy called "representative democracy". You elect (you did vote, didn't you?) the people that represent you (well, and any special interests that helped them get elected). Theoretically, they must listen to their constituents. Go see them. Make appointments. You'll need to have an agenda to get past screening, but it'll be worth it. Try to stick to a single point or issue; politicians aren't exactly Einstein, and this helps them. Join a political party (even the Libertarian party if you must), get active. However, if you didn't vote or if you don't want to spend your time getting active, then you don't count.

20 Feb 2001 (updated 20 Feb 2001) »

washing cats: like herding just more painful

dirtyrat, mixing Meebles and water forms an emulsion, albeit one that fights back with very sharp claws and teeth, and he doesn't take prisoners.

But from time to time, Meebles sleeps under Ang's (old) car, and gets oil on his fur. The choices are:

try to wash him
wait for him to lick the oil off then get sick
take to the vet, and let the vet wash him

Guess which option I use? :-)

sad, I'd forgotten about the loud purring. Kittens have precisely one purr volume setting: 11. Luckily, they seem to get a bit more control as they get older.

hackery

I'm getting another Alpha this Friday night: looking forward to that, so I can start porting XFree86 4.0.x to it. It comes with a 21" monitor. I hope it has enough RAM.

nooks: NDAs

NDAs aren't necessarily bad, they're just evil. However, it does get you nice toys and I get to fix things before you folks get to moan about it.

19 Feb 2001 »

sad: kittens
sad, your kitten will entertain you for months with the following behaviour:

Attacking the back of your hands and ankles (this one's a pain, suggest water pistol)
Kitty litter is optional to kittens for the first few weeks (a pain; suggest being home with kitty until they are reliable)
Early morning (4am - 6 am) wake up pounces (this one's a pain, suggest a door)
Outside/Inside/Different (this one's a pain, suggest ignoring them when they're outside)
Chase the phantom butterfly (this one's cute until the first thing is broken)
Paw on the nose whilst you sleep (this one's cute)
Chew through dangerous things (the clothes iron, suggest water pistol)
Look at you with the most innocent expression, climb half way up your leg (or #include other much loved item, such as the leather couch) and use you as a claw sharpner (suggest water pistol)
Of course, if you're like me (a complete cat slave), the above is cute and lovely behaviour and part of the rich tapestry of being your cat's food slave.

If you go the water pistol route, make sure your cat does not see you do it, otherwise they wise up and do it when you're not in the room.

If your kitten is really young, now is the time to hold and cuddle it (lots), let it sleep with you, get it used to being on your lap for fur stroking sessions, about once a week wash it in the bath, brush its fur with a good brush, and get it to meet a lot of people. If they get lots of human attention early on, it'll be really nice to people for the rest of its life. If you don't, you'll get psycho.cat who will attack ankles and hide when visitors come. And you'll lose all the skin on your arms when you *need* to give it a wash to rid of it whatever nasty substance is in its fur. I don't even try to mix Meebles and water - I'm not that stupid.

15 Feb 2001 »

bleep is nice, NDA's are bad
bleep is nice. Happy Shiny People obviously were distilled to make bleep. It goes to prove that if you leave bleep alone long enough, they get it right.

The bleep are almost bleep in nature, without much thought of what happens to people on smaller screens like me (my laptop is 800x600).

bleep is very damn trendy and useful: it makes text so readable on my LCD screen it's not funny. It's as the words are just sorta etched on the screen at 200 dpi. I can read Slashdot at the smallest size and read comfortably (not possible before).

There's some issues going down in terms of security; the bleep version will be dumbed down a great deal to cope with Mum'n'Dad'n'two-point-five-kids'n'dog'n'cat not knowing anything about security.

I hate NDA's.

Posted using bleep Mozilla 4.0 (compatible; bleep 6.0b; bleep 5.1) browser.

13 Feb 2001 »

rule of law
On CNN, I just saw an Israeli personage defending his country's helicopter gunship murder of a high ranking Palenstinian figure.

Israel for some time has basically been a terrorist rogue nation, every bit as bad as the people they are supposedly combating. It really pisses me off when basic human rights and the rule of law are swept away as they give rough "justice" to those they do not like. They mouth crapulence like they will not negotiate whilst the violence continues. And then they go and commit a few well placed atrocities which begets more violence.

I'm not anti-semitic*; I'm anti-violence. I'm anti- stupidity. I'm against terrorism. I'm for human rights. I'm for the rule of law.

I'm going to be trying to wean my clients away from Israeli gear, such as Checkpoint's Firewall-1. It's a real shame that economic sanctions are the only real way to bring a government around to the correct policies (as in South Africa). It'll take a long time. I doubt I'm ever going to see peace in that area.

hackery

not much happening.

* my wonderful second cousin, Sarah, is Jewish. Unlike most of my second cousins who I don't know and have never met, Sarah and her family are in regular contact with ours. I lived in Balaclava in Victoria, Australia and love the jewish lifestyle that area offers, such as freshly baked bagels and cookies after Shabbat. I would move back there in a trice.

12 Feb 2001 (updated 12 Feb 2001) »

cilux: reading diaries, licensing

Yes, people read the diaries here. I don't know about anyone else, but I prefer to do stuff than worry about licensing advocacy. Considering the content of today's (where today is an arbitary point in time), I'd say that most of the Advogato writers also don't give a rat's arse about licensing issues.

They just do.

ATL wizardry

My foray into developing a new thumbnail generator hit a bit of a chord. I'm downloading the new Platform SDK to get the headers and stuff I need to develop my next piece of abandonware.

ATL seems to me like incanting to weird $DEITIES, and I'm not terribly sure if the recent lunar maxima meant that I should have sacrificed my house mate to the dark forces.

Maybe I still should. ;-)

life

Made Telsa happy. I found her the images she was looking for, and posted them to her. Monday wasn't wasted.

11 Feb 2001 (updated 11 Feb 2001) »

hackery

Can't get near my machine at the moment; Dan is going through major geekiness phase, and it's sort of aggravating. I need to free up my Dell for me.

Programmers == HCI morons

Tried to do what I thought was a very simple thing: find a program to thumbnail a set of images in a folder which has sub-folders. All the programs I've looked at suck, and have truly, monumentally fucked up interfaces. If there's any doubt that programmers as a rule should never be let anywhere near a program's HCI bits, it's HTML thumbnail generators. The dudes who wrote thortor, thumb, and VikarPlus Photo Gallery should be ashamed. Not only did they not work, they couldn't seemingly do the simple things, like add a folder and its contents. Vikar PG had the temerity to generate a set of files for the thumbnails that was significantly larger than the original images, which sort of defeats the purpose of thumbnails, no?

So I'm going to write my own. Expect this to be abandoned at 5.36 pm on Tuesday.

Highlander III: the apology

This is one sad movie. No wonder it's on at 11 pm on a Sunday night. Awful. And I though #2 was bad...

The alternatives were to drive back the way I came, or via Canberra. Went via Canberra. Excellent fang. I think it's out of me now. Drove around inner city Canberra for twenty minutes trying to find a petrol station (Echo's have to be filled occasionally, and mine was approaching 500 km). None really, so pottered off to the Hume highway. Got petrol at Goulbourn, 630 km from my starting point, whilst still having about 10 litres left (about 140 km to spare). I love fuel efficiency.

Drove home from Goulbourn, eventually crawling into my driveway at 3 am to share my bed with two damp and hungry little felines.

Sunday was a complete waste. I was going to spend some time working with Reiserfs and my secret project for it on my Alpha, but since I slept in until 3 pm old time (2 pm non-DST time), I decided to rip through Crytonomicon instead. Good choice. Tried seeing the Insider but not on any more. Bad. Went to Burger King to make up for the loss.

4 Feb 2001 »

cancer of the neck, update
According to the doc, it’s a sebacious cyst, one that is in a bunch of nerves that’ll need very careful surgery to remove the next time it really gets inflamed.

However, since the antibiotics really didn’t make much of a dent on the sucker, I’m going to keep a very close eye on this one.

hackery

My laptop’s hard drive has just about expired. I’ve lost my PST to the god of missing sectors.

I received patches from Jeff Dike for the Win32 version of User Mode Linux, but until I can get my hd problem sorted, I can’t really work on it.

I’m working on trying to get a bunch of security fixes out for XFree86. If David or Matthieu are reading this, my mind is back on the job.

I still need to find the advisory I wrote up for it, but I have this sinking feeling it’s in the PST that was.

4 Feb 2001 »

oooooaf, turn off the sun
Woke up this morning, still drunk. Had a shower, and considered but didn’t do the ol’ technicolor yawn. Went back to bed to sleep it off more.

robey: crap medicine

echin acea is crap and is for soft-minded idiots who also tend to believe in crystals and the wonders of “natural” supplements. Cyanide is “natural” as is tetrodotoxin. Echinacea, like most of the staple homeopath rubbish, doesn’t work. What works is stuff with symptom suppressors, like Codral Cold and Flu Day/Night. These wonderous little babies have pseudo-ephedrine in them, which is like speed but legal. I had the flu two weeks ago, and with the blue pills I was able to work, present a talk at LCA, fly to Melbourne and back, with some pain go for a short bush walk with Matthew Wilcox in the Blue Mountains, host a BBQ for 30, and finally spread the flu to at least three others (my brother’s fiancee, Skud, and my flatmate’s girlfriend). With the red pills I was able to sleep all through the night and I only used about 3/4 of a box of tissues for the entire two weeks.

Don’t waste time with medically unproven crap, go for decent, medically tested suppressors. If you must take ze ‘erbal remedies, I suggest scotch on ice with a dash of lemon juice.

3 Feb 2001 (updated 3 Feb 2001) »

mp3nb tbnedede to follpow

I w2iolll translate ater

fuck i’mk oiusssed

pleraser ajvread me lkatrer

3 Feb 2001 »

so pisdsed,
I’m writing this ompletely outy of my mind. Much talisker adn aberlour have been dreunk, as well as rtteee bottyles of wine.

Fanstiashoigc

Lidytnrennh yo Suaan Vego, washer name the one with tue rape song, fuck.

sgtytt

Ipnm pissed

31 Jan 2001 (updated 31 Jan 2001) »

life

I’ve resigned as SAGE-AU President and I’m going to free myself up for things I actually enjoy.

A couple of years ago, my uncle died when he was the grand old age of 49 from cancer. At that time, he did a lot of stuff that came off as being terribly self-centred.

Now I understand.

30 Jan 2001 »

cancer of the neck
It’s official: I have a cyst the size of a marble in one of my lymph thingies in my neck.

I see a specialist next Monday, who will probably use a needle the length and diameter of a drinking straw.

Take that, Terrence and Philip!

28 Jan 2001 »

hackery
Working towards an XFree86 patch kit for 3.3.6 and 4.0.2 to address the recently re-released LWN moans.

life

Have a cyst or some other awful lump turn up in the last couple of weeks. Going to the doctor to get that sorted out.

Also visiting the dentist today to get temporary fillings replaced with real fillings.

What fun.

25 Jan 2001 »

hackery
not much happening. Laptop is getting better.

mirwin:

Keep up the drugs, good buddy. I’m not sure what you’re on, but I want a couple of kg sent my way.

22 Jan 2001 (updated 22 Jan 2001) »

life
jerry! jerry! jerrrrrrry!

work

Trying out RH 7.0 on Mr laptop. Work provides me with a Citrix session, so basically I’ll install the Citrix client on Linux and see where we go from there.

Problems noted so far:

I have a USB mouse. RH has a screenblanker that’s set offensively low (it’s like 20 seconds or similar) that blanks the screen if I’m just using a mouse (like when I’m browsing). Using xset s off doesn’t help, so it’s something else doing it.

I’m going to install KDE 2.1 beta 1 and see how that works.

21 Jan 2001 (updated 21 Jan 2001) »

LCA speaker’s BBQ

Had a great time organising this, managed to get a goodly percentage of the open source mavens in one place eating all the same food under a huge tree in my back yard which might blow down one day. You can tell I’m in security because I wondered if it was a good idea to have so many really talented people in the one spot at one time.

I missed skud not coming, but we had a good time nonetheless. Skud sounded crap on voicemail, so it was probably better that she tried to recover before flying anywhere. Flying with a cold is like torture; I hate it with a vengenace. I’ve just got over a really nasty bout of flu, and I think I might have passed it along to Skud and Ang, my flatmate’s girlfriend, who now has a sore throat.

We had fun getting our guests working on WaveLAN as Linux seemed real finicky about ad-hoc mode. FreeBSD didn’t have any problems and Greg Lehey got it working shortly after powering up. Luckily, Tridge had his Apple basestation with him, and that made the Linux guys work fine. Dan wired up his 8 port 10/100 MB switch, daisy chaining off my identical switch. Very geek-studly today.

Managed to keep up with Raph, and showed him pnm2ppa actually working on my Alpha, something I hadn’t seen for a while. Talked to him about Ghostscript features PPA printers (and all inkjets) need. We agreed that further talking on this issue is necessary. I’m going to try and import the ppa portion of the driver into GS 7.0 as a dynamically loaded module, but due to the worse CMYK and dithering algorithms in GS, the output will be worse than pnm2ppa does at the moment.

The bizarre moment du jour pour moi is watching Alan Cox playing SSX (snowboarding game) on Mr Playstation 2. Folks, Alan is a human, and a nice one at that.

Last note for the Australians: we didn’t run out of beer, and we didn’t run out of food. I qualify this BBQ as a success.

LCA
Having a ball. Finally met a few people who I had e-mailed over the years, and someone whom I respect believed I was a Linux guru. A little bit wrong on that one.

Finally met Alan and Telsa. Unbelievably nice people. It must be frustrating going to places where everyone sorta worships you, knows your name, but you have no clue what their name or their stuff is.

My talk on adding software engineering to the open source mix went reasonably well, and tonight’s Mom&Pop(tm) talk by maddog backed my views on world domination to the hilt. I’m so glad that one of the grey beards of our community is saying these things to the young ‘uns, for they so desperately need to hear the message, and I feel that I didn’t really get the message through.

Rusty Russell is one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard, and I’m not just saying that because I am now in the cult of Rusty. If you have a conference and need a keynote, bribe or kidnap Rusty. IMNSHO, his is the best talk so far.

Tonight’s dinner was excellent for the company and the auction at the end. maddog won the first round bidding war on a t-shirt that all the speakers had signed, and then he immediately gave it back to be re-auctioned. Extraordinarily generous!

hackery

Went to the QT/Embedded talk. Bulb went off. Immediately wanted to design secret project for NetBSD, but couldn’t cos I was the next speaker. Later that afternoon, did brain dump to my friend Luke.

Jeff Dike has patches to try and make User Mode Linux work on NT. I’ve just core’d patch several times under cygwin. Apparently, once the patching has completed, it barfs and needs much attention to complete the port.

I met Raph (the guy who made this place, cool dude), and he and I are going to have an e-mail conversation very soon about GS 7.0 print drivers for ink jets. So is maddog so I can get him via LI to pump HP once more for PPA info.

Too much to do, not enough hours in a day.

13 Jan 2001 »

the blue pill or the red pill?
Have a cold. It’s the middle of quite a balmy summer. This is wrong. I have pills that help suppress all but the most determined coughs and sniffles. But the question remains, which color to take?

lca: drinking update #1

Only a few of the fresh victims^W^Winternational speakers have arrived, and already we Australians are drinking too much, saying “strewth”, or “oath” for no apparent reason.

I didn’t take an evil picture of Sarah (caution 460 kb image). She promised much pain if I did. If I had known she was there tonight, I would have bought her present for my indescretion the last time I took the last shocker.

hackery

Xfree86 has made it onto another platform today with Simon finishing the merge of my set of patches of his original patches to XFree86 4.0.2 + some stuff that needed animal sacrifice and a waning moon to achieve. NetBSD-current and 1.5.1 will now have XFree86 on the Alpha platform. Still more work needed, but it’s nice.

4 Jan 2001 »

life
Just got back from a midnight drive to the Great Ocean Road and back, mostly to charge my mobile phone, partially to see my friend Margaret for the last time and partially as a method of politely disentangling myself from a set of friends I had been with all day*.

It was exhilerating to see all the lightening strike the earth in a huge panorama through the car windows and sunroof, great big rolling strikes everywhere followed almost immediately by crashing thunder. It was dark and light at the same time. Fun.

I’ve had a great few days, seeing most of my Melbourne based friends and plenty of films. It’s my last day today before driving back to Sydney on Saturday.

Films

Most disturbing film: Dancer in the dark. Extraordinary.

Most entertaining film: Meet the parents. Which isn’t saying much. Where’s the fine art of fart jokes gone? The single pathetic dream sequence in the Klumps doesn’t count.

Film I enjoyed the most: O Brother, Where art thou? I thought George Clooney to be a lightweight doctor-wannabe. This film changed my mind, and not just because he was in a Coen brothers film.

hackery of a different kind

In a few hours, I’m off to the doc to see if any of my moles (the dark things, sorta like big freckles) need hacking out of my body. The downside of being Australian with fair skin.

disclaimer

* I am on a tight schedule. I’m not getting rid of them, I just have many friends who don’t see me often, and I needed to see Margaret as she doesn’t see me all that often.

1 Jan 2001 (updated 1 Jan 2001) »

life

It’s great not using computers for days at a time. I’ve managed to log on and check my mail so irregularly, that it’s started to annoy some of my friends who seem to expect near instant response.

house cleaning

I’ve archived 140 MB of e-mail from the last six months and cleaned out all my folders. Then to top it off, I defragmented my hard drive.

I’m sure you’re all impressed with that.

new year’s

Had a great time at lukem and his wife Inger’s last night. Got totally wasted on evil “champagne cocktails”, which, okay, involved sparkling white wine but also involved vodka and cranberry juice, and a later more evil one involved alcholic raspberry cassis. This inebriation saw me trying to make Inger the world’s smallest G&T, as she gave me a shot glass. It dawned upon us both that she wanted a shot of gin to add to the tonic, not a 30 ml G&T.

Domain Chandon, the Australian outpost of Moet and Chandon produce excellent sparkling white wines. I’ve been a fan since going there for vintage in 1995 or 1996 (memory’s a bit fuzzy . They have excellent tours and have great grounds for a little picnic or staying in their buildings for totally hedonistic afternoons. Bring a designated driver.

These last two days, I bought and helped drink three bottles of their 1997 Vintage, and quite frankly for $AUD26.95 (about $US13) it was damn close to the 1993 Moet and Chandon which set me back $80 (about $US40) we had for dinner tonight with my family. If you’re ever in this part of the world, you owe it to yourself to get some and savor it. Excellent, and even better if not pissed.

26 Dec 2000 (updated 26 Dec 2000) »

schoen: HHGTG

Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in Java.

Enjoy poetry only works in certain places.

family

I think my mum is losing it. People shouldn’t retire unless they have something to do.

Not good.

hackery

Paper is being worked upon. Very late, 6 pages and counting, and I still don’t like it.

cats

My cats are both outside and being fed by various people. I wonder what my little furry ones will think of me when I get back.

sleep

I’ve been affected by insomnia since my uni days (about 12 years now). I need about 3-4 hours sleep every night and I feel crap when I manage this amount. Mostly I sleep 4-6 hours most nights, getting to sleep around 2 or 3 am and arising at 8 for 8.30 am. I’m doing this cycle as I type, and haven’t had more than 5 hours of sleep per day since Saturday (it’s now Wednesday morning).

Occasionally, I sleep 10+ hours when my body can’t take it anymore. This is usually on the weekends, but recently I slept in for the first time in a very long time on a work day. I got up at 10.45 am, and went directly to the Christmas party. Not good.

That wasn’t the first time that I thought of getting some drugs to manage sleep, but bugger that. I’ve tried all the tricks: various alcohol “nightcaps”, exercise before bed, chamomile tea, setting the alarm for 5.30 am (through to 7 am), going to bed only when I am tired, getting out of it as soon as I wake. You name it – if it didn’t involve prescription drugs, I’ve done it. Getting up as soon as I arise for the first time (if you have cats, you know that the little buggers love to wake about anywhere from 4 am til 6 am and nudge you or put a paw on your nose or crawl under the bedsheets; to me that wake up nudge is not a real wake up) doesn’t work either – I just end up being real tired the entire day through.

After turning 30, I decided to forget all about the sleep issue. I don’t really miss that extra 2-3 hours, and I get to read a whole lot more, I usually recuperate on the weekends. I’ll manage.

21 Dec 2000 »

unhappy families
Last Sunday, my cousin’s wife of five weeks, Sang, was riding her motorbike around a double bend, and didn’t make it around the second one. Gordon, my cousin, and the other rider did, but it was too late.

That tragedy was compounded by the fact that I didn’t even know my cousin had been married, let alone been engaged for over two years.

My cousin, his parents and my parents

It’s the first time all of them have been in the same room, or even spoken to each other in real time in over six years.

My parents and his parents had a petty argument about six years ago (the details of which are long, tedious, and intrinsically snobby), which resulted in the family not speaking to each other.

My message to you all in this frivilous season is life is too short for this sort of shit. If you’re in the same boat as me, go and see your family now before it’s too late.

16 Dec 2000 »

hackery
Not enough time. Need 30-40 hour days. I have nearly hacked WinVNC to use a far more secure API (LsaStorePrivateData() if you’re interested) rather than stashing passwords in the registry. But due to aforesaid lack of time, I don’t have time to finish this, and the patches I posted to the vnc- developer list got stripped by a bloody-minded automated de- MIME thingy.

life

off on annual leave for three weeks, but…

work

Not enough time. I still have 3 (largish) documents to finish, time sheets and an extensive expense claim to submit. All before Monday 9 am. Might get some sleep soon, but…

cars

helped a friend buy the right car today. Took two and a bit test drives. Got Adrian (who was just along for the ride) and Rebecca to sit in an Audi S3 (like my friend Luke’s) for a couple of ticks. Very nice. She bought a Subaru Forester. Faux off-road 4wd’s make my teeth ache, but compared to the real thing that are also never taken off the road, this is only a minor twinge compared to the complete fscking arseholes who believe the road is theirs to hog, add a pedestrian killing bull bar (which will never touch the sweet flesh of any of our bovine friends), and steal my average mass-based safety net via their superior mass (and thus momentum) when they plow right through my baby car.

time

Need more time.

14 Dec 2000 »

hadess: Xfree86 on ppc
4.0.2 is out soonish (like dec 15 is code build day). 4.0.2 fixes a number of known PPC-isms as well as introduces a bunch of new servers and features, whilst improving the stability of the 4.0.x code base.

4.0.2 is not just a point release. I recommend this release for all of you who are still sticking to 3.3.x for whatever reason.

I’ve said it before, but 4.0.2 will kick ass and take names.

13 Dec 2000 »

pjf: going, going, gone…
Paul, just in case you’re stuck, the deal with those sort of letters is:

be brief – one, maybe two paragraphs of a couple of sentences each maximum
do not slag anyone off or burn bridges
just say “You’ve been wonderful to work for, but I need to …”
do not waste effort stating the reasons you’re moving or tell them what you’re doing next
be factual; include the last date you are going to be there and be firm about it
I like to tie my finish date to pay runs so there’s a _last_ pay which should contain all your accrued benefits and you never need to return once you’ve packed your desk.

Two weeks is the minimal acceptable period, four is typical. They are legally required to send you a group tax certificate within a short time of you leaving. Make sure you get it. I didn’t a couple of times, and it’s never stopped giving me grief.

If you have personal stuff that you really care about, take it home Thursday night (this includes data!), just in case your employer has a selectively enforced “escorted off the premises” termination policy. I’ve seen people go this way, and it’s never pretty. Bring any stuff you have at home they own back in on Friday morning. They usually give you like 5 minutes to pack your desk in these situations.

Just remember, this letter is business, not personal – even though personal reasons are the reason everone does stuff.

Good luck!

12 Dec 2000 »

life
I’m a Win2K MCSE after passing my final MCP exam. Woohoo.

That last exam was Designing Network Infrastructure, which funnily enough is what I do for a living. I do network security architecture on a first-world country scale. I am currently working on a project that will re-engineer how my telco client communicates internally and externally. Their network is larger than most third-world countries’ networks, and supports approximately 40% of Australia’s data and voice traffic. So you can see that I sort of know what I’m doing there. So when I sit down to do this MCP exam, I was fairly surprised to see that it SUCKED. I’m almost ashamed to have a MCSE out of this.

The marchictecture was unavoidable, the “best” answer and all of the alternatives in several questions were just plain wrong. They gave marks for answering certain select and place questions that were fundamentally flawed, or ignored industry best practice with respect to security implementation. They ignored timing in several places, where the correct answer in some cases was not even possible to select. Sometimes the “correct” answer is lots of servers, when in fact, I know that capacity planning and hard earned knowledge of large data networks says that 2 or 3 is about right for most applications and then you add some when you need more, not just because you might have 12 sites that *might* need a particular type of server.

I’m going to write to the MS traincert guys to get that exam pulled ASAP. It’s just not a credible test of networking infrastructure know-how, not even if you were doing smaller-scale work like a Uni campus rejig.

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.

9 Nov 2000 »

work
Hint to business types negotiating contracts to get someone else to do your IT work: security is important. Get advice, talk to lawyer types, include it in the contract or you will get attacked, and you will lose money.

hackery

Submitted a late entry for linux.conf.au. I’ll see if I’m accepted soon. I have some ideas I want to present to the crowd. They won’t like it much, and it should be controversial. Basically, it goes like this:

Cathedral and the bazaar is as an apt a description of the OSS process as any I’ve read. It’s also fairly cogent (particularly for esr and is backed up by many of the smaller projects I’ve been involved with.

C&B also describes the general size, architectural thrust and relative duration of a project’s size, scope and vision. Cathedrals are huge, typically planned to some degree, and take years (and occasionally centuries) to construct. Bazaars, on the other hand, tend not to be very large (one or two streets in a village or filling a marketplace) have no architecture per se, and spring up overnight and disappear just as quickly. Booch (et al) in UML: a user’s guide refer to this as the difference between a kennel and a house. It’s possible for a single person to make both, but the two take different levels of planning and different mindsets.

The old Unix mindset of many small flexible tools (awk, grep, fetchmail, nm, tar, etc) doesn’t work when you want a word processor and a project management tool to be able to interact in rich flavors with each other. Not only are each of the two previous examples difficult to write and finish with a capital D, the architecture that allows them to interact is also similarly hard, with a capital H. To give you good examples, check out AbiWord and KOffice. These are good tools, and will be even better once they are finished, but they are multi-year, multi-person projects even before 1.0 is out and about.

My thrust is that OSS could do with the idea that software architecture is essential to not only getting to 1.0 quicker, but also allowing 2.0 and 3.0 to occur in the future. Getting 1.0 finished with the help of others coming in cold to your project is an essential portion of a large- scale OSS project. Try this: pick a large scale OSS project that you are unfamiliar with, like mozilla, XFree86 or KOffice and add a single feature from the TODO list or fix a critical long standing bug. How long did it take you to discover where that feature should exist in the tree and understand how the code hangs together. This is the warm up time. My premise is that architecture shortens this time, and can make all bugs that much more shallow.

With a clear architecture, anyone can say “I’ll do X” and go away and write X, test X, and integrate X into your source tree and it’ll work. Without it, features get grafted onto the side, ill-fitting, and require a fair amount of code rejigging, wasting valuable developer time.

I’m planning in presenting a paper on this concept, and how to successfully add software engineering constructs and architecture (conceptual integrity) to OSS projects without diminishing the best parts of “release early, release often” methodology.

The trick is to make it sound fun, and not like a trip to the grown up’s room or the dentist.

7 Nov 2000 (updated 7 Nov 2000) »

rachel: Australia

One of the reasons I’ll probably never bother going overseas to work is that I have an unbelievably good lifestyle that is appreciably better than some of my friends who live in San Francisco (or the wider Bay area) and earn at least twice as much as me (even given the parlous state of the Australian peso) using normalized USD.

I live in a beautiful city, with great weather (except when it rains, which is frequently) (and except during summer when the humidity sucks It’s cheap to fly back to my home city, Melbourne, which is everything Sydney is not: cosmopolitan, 24×7, great cinemas, fantastic shopping, easy to live in, much cheaper housing, traffic jams that last about an hour, and so on…

darsal: human rights and your right to work on open source

IANAL, but…

If you’ve signed a contract prohibiting your labor on any other activity, that contract is in contravention of

The universal declaration of human rights
Labor laws in your country
Competition laws or Trade Practices acts usually bar this type of contract (non-compete clauses are illegal in Australia under the TPA, and in the US, contracts with long (more than a few weeks) non-compete have already been struck down
Any laws in your area allowing you freedom of association

It’s like saying that a company owns you, and they have access to you 24×7, which is clearly not true. This is clearly not allowed, and most countries have provisions to protect their citizens from exploitative contracts such as this.

The ridiculous analogy is this: if the company claims that you cannot work on OSS projects on your hardware at your house in your time, then they can stop employees being scout masters or providing services to volunteer organisations like Amnesty International on Candle Day. They can’t do that, so fuck them.

Short answer: as long as you are sensible, this will never come up. I work in security architecture. As long as I do not work in their time for anyone else or for myself in this field in my time, my company will never win any court case they bring against me. I don’t blab about stuff I see in my day to day work, I honor my NDA’s, and I do my work well (sometimes impinging on my time). But my open source and out of hours activity is MINE. I own those copyrights as my employer has NO right to them.

Stick up for your rights. Never be led to believe that you don’t possess any in a contract situation. Contracts that violate laws of your country or seek to override your rights or obligations to the country in which the contract is framed are illegal, and always will be. For example, it’s illegal to contract someone to commit murder. It’s illegal to contract someone to be present at a site when they are required to do jury service in Australia.

The problem is that court cases cost $$$$$$ and often it’s simpler to give in, which is the wrong thing to do.

SAGE-AU have finished working on something for this, and will be announced at AOSS2 late this month. See you there.

6 Nov 2000 »

hackery
Fired up an Archimedes emulator. Ah, the joys of * commands and Elite for the Archimedes. Such a cute OS.

eliot: weather in Australia

The weather in Australia is different depending where you go. For example, in Sydney at the moment, it’s a glorious spring day, the late afternoon sun shining on my front porch, warming the furry belly of my cat Meebles.

Check out Bureau of Meterology, or one of the more pleb friendly sites, like ninemsn.

work

Due to a horse race, it was impossible for me to organise several meetings or get people to go over stuff for tomorrow’s status meetings. I’ll have words to say about that at tomorrow’s meetings.

Wednesdays are looking more and more like “do nothing” days. I have a 1 hr meeting at 0900. Another 3 hr meeting at 0900. A 1hr status meeting in another part of Sydney at 1300. A 1.5 hr vendor presentation in Sydney city at 1430. And butting up hard against that, I need to be back in North Sydney for 1600 for our group’s status update meeting. In Debugging the Development Process, Steve Maguire states unequivocally that these sort of meetings are counterproductive, useless and should be eliminated or simply do not attend them. I cannot agree more. But I am a contractor, and I don’t have enough power to cancel these things. Oh well.

5 Nov 2000 »

schoen: IPv6
There are various IPv6 only services that provide a 6-to-4 gateway at their edge. This is how me and my flatmate intend to run our internal network once IPv6 routing is in place on his WaveLAN to 100BaseT gateway is in place.

IPv6 is about transition and seamless co-existance. If that story doesn’t get out soon, it’ll be harder for IPv6 transitions.

It’ll be a long time (10 years or more) before the old protocol will die (if ever). Whistler for example doesn’t support DLC, NetBEUI, or Appletalk. But I still see IPX and Appletalk today, so these protocols are anything but dead. IPv4 will take as long or longer to get rid of than these other “legacy” protocols.

I’m just glad I’m in a position to do my bit to make it happen in a modern first-world economy like Australia.

hackery

Installed Whistler Pro. Worked on auDA report and SAGE-AU sponsorship kit. Fun, fun, fun.

life

Bought Red Alert 2 Collector’s Edition. Awesome, cute little doco on the DVD. Titillating even. Bought Combat Flight Sim 2. Beautiful; the translucency and water effects are stunning. Win2K is the best games platform out there right now – all my games just work, and they work well. I can see a lot of hours going down the tubes, when coupled with Baldurs Gate II that I bought a few weeks ago and Flight Sim 2000 Professional that I bought earlier this year.

3 Nov 2000 (updated 3 Nov 2000) »

Making firewall and networking vendors nervous is fun.

I have been demanding IPv6 consistently from them for the last few months. I work at one of Australia’s largest telcos, and through them, we’re in a position to break the chicken/egg IPv6 cycle.

Cycle:

Networking vendors have no IPv6 products of any description because they believe there’s no demand
OS vendors have IPv6 available -> customers want IPv6 native links
Telco’s and ISPs require carrier class equipment (but can’t get it (see 1))
Breaking the cycle:
Telcos and ISPs everywhere ask vendors for IPv6.
Vendors get nervous and cite “no demand” (which is rubbish)
Telcos and ISPs promise to abandon vendor like the sack of rubbish they are if they do not have a IPv6 story this sales cycle
Vendors get very nervous and go away…
Vendors produce IPv6 capable devices
telcos and ISPs are delighted and offer IPv6 services to customers
customers can use IPv6 …
Internet is saved to allow another zillion billion pr0n sites to work on a web enabled toaster

So, soon you’ll see IPv6 offerings from major players. Start practising now.

Hint 1: Always use 3DES ESP and AH, not just unencrypted sessions (makes government sanctioned eavesdropping so much harder to look at your puny, worthless life)

Hint 2: Demand from your ISP for an native IPv6 link (just in case they believe they have no demand, which would be strange)

Hint 3: Start practicing at home with IPv6; you’ll find things that don’t work, so help make things work so that when the links are available, you’ll be right.

24 Oct 2000 »

life
Turned 30. World didn’t end. My actual b’day party is this coming Saturday in Melbourne. So my friends in Sydney are playing poker at my place, and feeding the cats whilst I am away.

Went to our company conference at the Gold Coast, staying at the casino there. Had a great deal of fun (not gambling). Played poker with my workmates in the hotel room with monopoly money and didn’t lose too much ($3 Australian peso’s). After a long and emotional day, tossed cookies. Tossing cookies == bad, especially when a fine meal and even finer cognac is wasted. Woke up at 6.30 am on Sunday, which is just wrong. At least I didn’t suffer for my excesses.

hackery

My Win2K security presentation at the company conference went well. The guys used our WaveLAN cards to hack at my box (which was being used for the presentation) in an effort to retrieve a file I had created for the purpose. They did manage to crash the FW/1 auth agent, but in the end, they used a social engineering attack to retrieve the winning condition (they needed the passcode in the file to get the M&M’s). I’m glad my limited lockdowns on my Win2K laptop survived a cumulative 6 hours of extensive attacks and DoS from our company’s most gifted, um, security architects and the CTO. I’m sure there are still bugs to be found in Win2K, but for the average user, it’s good enough.

Updated my web site. It needs more work so that css works properly (ie the color scheme and fonts sucks and requires fixing). I also need to find an acceptable open source documentation license for all my SAGE-AU and other writings. If you have suggestions mail me.

advogato

I’m glad that my friend Luke has finally progressed to being certified at Master level. I find it amusing that people I consider Journeyer at best (ie they are around my skill level and achievements) are classified Master if they use Linux (and remember, I used to as well; I almost was employed by SuSE to work on reiserfs). Luke is one of the NetBSD Core. Over the last nine-ten years Luke has done more for NetBSD than most Linux hackers have ever done for Linux. The certification system here, simply because of weight of numbers will always lead to easy (and possibly wrong) certification for people associated with the Linux in-crowd.

SAGE-AU, auDA

Off to Melbourne tomorrow for the second auDA Competition Policy panel meeting. Should be vibrant. I’m waiting to see who emerges with the biggest knives.

SAGE-AU, perception, and privacy

I can’t say too much about this, but let’s just say that if you help your local professional association, it helps to communicate the privacy concerns of your membership base to a potential sponsor before giving them any contact information. I now have the unenviable task of recruiting a poorly behaved potential sponsor, which may cause a back lash among the members, even though it is a positive outcome for the organisation as a whole.

15 Oct 2000 »

hackery
I got Simon’s XFree86 patches. I was so happy once I had them. I am still cutting new ground, as his alpha server (which works) is statically linked. The patches slot in nicely to the current CVS, with one minor tweak and a bit of work. The dynamic loader stuff I was working on is about 95% complete and this will mean once the two sets of patches have been combined, the new server will be a new supported platform for XFree86. Excellent. I hope 4.0.2 comes out soon.

birthday

I’m 30 on Tuesday. My goal of getting to 115 kg by my birthday has about 5 kg to go, but I’m still on track to make 110 kg by the end of the year, pending any eating- related disasters.

life

Bought Alien Legacy when I couldn’t get my hair cut. I’m trying to go short and blond as I’m sick of my current style.

Last night, went to a friend’s 28th birthday. He was having a 80′s evening. Dan (my housemate) had gone shopping at the op shop and had got a great Cyndi Lauper look for Ang, his girlfriend. He got a grandfather shirt and a tartan waist coat. I simply browsed through the clothes I used to wear during that time, and came up with a white brocaded grandfather shirt and beige waistcoat and beige trousers. Surprisingly, I still fit them. Dan was not impressed as he had been shopping, whilst I had merely delved.

When we got there, the party was everything I feared: dress check to get in; the hostess was a bit peeved that I didn’t come as someone famous. One day, I’ll be more famous than I am now, and hopefully in a good way. I got away with it when I told her that the clothes were from that era.

The music was too loud, and I can’t hear very well in those conditions. My hearing is not what it used to be, and music and crowded rooms confounds me more often than almost everything else. I was very uncomfortable.

At one point, Jan, the birthday boy, asked me if I wanted a shiela (ocker for woman). I thought this was very generous, but at little bizarre as most of the women there did not know me.

I ummed and ahhhed for a bit and asked “Sheila?” and looked confused. Jan didn’t understand me due to the noise. He shouts,

“Do ya want a sheila?” I just looked surprised. There are plenty of nice girls there, but this may be a little presumptious of me as I am still a fat bastard, and most people are put off by the extra tyres before they get to meet me.

“Sheila?”, I said again, with even more confusion on my face. He looked at me funny, and laughed. It turns out he was offering me a “shooter”. Ooops.

There was this nice Canadian lass that a friend had brought along. Unfortunately, due to the loud noise purporting to be music, I didn’t get to talk to her as much as I’d liked.

I still don’t like what passes as popular 80′s music. The really original stuff, like Jean-Michel Jarre’s Zoolook, the stuff that Prince did towards the end of the decade (still as Prince, then, remember?) or some of the nascent techno that I have just doesn’t mean anything to these proto-old farts. Yello doesn’t get a mention, either. The genres I mentioned as being progressive are still with us and influence today’s music. Banarama and Rick Astley do not.

work

I Shipped.

189 pages of documentation representing 4 months of my life I cannot get back. If my security architecture is followed, customers using our next generation Internet (fscking big pipes) will be the safest from tomfoolery on the planet.

Security architecture is a wonderful thing. (Note: not risk free, not absolutely secure, but the equivalent of a hefty safe rating (check out the burglary classification area towards the bottom).

Went for drinkies afterwards in slightly damp (read: it was raining) mid-spring twilight conditions at the pub near work in North Sydney.

The pub was a converted Church. Whilst I was getting my Boag’s at the bar where once rows of wooden pews lay, I thought this is the true Church for Australians. Worshipping the mighty beer god. There were a lot of worshippers in attendance that night, and most of them very cute indeed. I’ll have to go again.

11 Oct 2000 (updated 11 Oct 2000) »

stupidity, Network Solutions-style

Say hello to “der Stock, Andrew van”. Network Solutions have plenty to answer for. I just want to update my NIC handle and put in the address I actually live at in my record, and whilst I’m at it, change my e-mail address to refer to the domain I bought *TWO YEARS AGO* instead of the originating account and maybe even sort out the fact I have three words in my surname, not two.

Is it too hard to have a human look at these things? I’m sure if NSI charged money for updating details, it would be actually possible to do so.

hackery

Still no XFree86 patches. I know they exist, but… sigh

committees

Working through an issue. Hopefully will have something decent to report soon after November 25 on Advogato.

work

Is outrageous – have arbitary Friday deadline. Hate crunch mode.

coffeeeeeee

Buzzing along nicely. New toy is just fine!

7 Oct 2000 »

I have paid homage to the espresso gods. I pumped my first short black on my own machine (I’ve used other people’s including my brother’s baby Gaggia), and it tastes fine! The Novo comes with a frother, which will not get much use, I’d imagine. The only aggravating thing is to make it fill to the top of the cup, you need to set a memory, which is actually pretty bloody trendy as it remembers for the next time.
I’ll have to go to a nice homewares store and get some nice espresso cups – my little teacups are not snobby enough for me.

hackery

I’m getting a set of patches from a Wasabi person to patch XFree86 into a working static server. Doesn’t help with the dynamic stuff I’m working on, but it removes the uncertainty from whether my patches are helping in any way. 4.0.2 is going to be a block buster point release – many new features, really 64 bit clean (and fast). It’s going to kick butt and take names. If I were XFree86, I’d tag it 4.1.0.

6 Oct 2000 »

life
Bought Baldurs Gate II. There goes what remained of my spare time.

auDA continues to soak time. eu* is remarkably monopolistic.

SAGE-AU is giving me connipitions. However, we’re finally kicking goals! The bad news is that I need to get my friend Luke to recommit to being a board member.

hackery

Working on porting cvsup to NetBSD/alpha so I can keep up with the tree now that I need to keep on eye on my total download usage. Modula-3 is a nice enough language, but I wish it were properly integrated into the gcc backend so I didn’t have to port it.

Getting XFree86 4.0.1++ real close to working on NetBSD/alpha as modular server. Linking everything is getting closer, and there’s fewer compilation warnings.

25 Sep 2000 »

Netizen

I feel sad for Kirrily (Skud) to have her company go down the gurglers. That’s pretty damn shitty. I remember when Kirrily was running rainbow.net.au (IIRC) out of her garage in a northern Melbourne suburb. Well, at least it sounds as she’s going to have some fun somewhere else.

cla’s cats

Cats love keyboards. They are terrible typists, however. My advice is buy keyboards you can rip the keys off and suck out with a vacuum cleaner and put back in. My flatmate’s laptop went into a spin after Meebles slept on it yesterday. The fake numeric keypad had kicked in and wouldn’t go away. A reboot was required.

Hackery

Working on porting XFree86 4.0.1c to the NetBSD/alpha 1.5ALPHA2 snapshot. This has already occurred once, but I believe as a static server. I’m working on ensuring that 4.0.2 will have a decent X server for NetBSD/alpha where 99% of the things in x86 are present in the alpha port. DRI will take a bit longer; DRI is not ported to NetBSD yet.

14 Sep 2000 »

Today I conducted the largest single transaction I’ve ever done over the net – buying a new Dell Inspiron 4100 via the Dell web site.
So in a few weeks, I’ll have a nice shiny Dell sitting at home to replace my aging HP XU 6/200 dual PPro 200 and its busted 17″ monitor. The new box is fast with all the right bells and whistles – 800 MHz PIII, 32 MB GeForce2 GTS DDR, 12x DVD (I’m hoping its a model that is firmware upgradable), 128 MB of RAM, and a 40 GB 7200 RPM UltraATA 100 drive of some description. I chose not to get a wasted copy of Windows Me and instead went for Win2K as there was no Linux choice. Ripped off. Well, at least it didn’t cost the earth. In fact, it cost 27% of my HP’s cost (without cost adjustments for four years of CPI) for more than twice the processor speed. I had to get in before the Australian peso got much worse.

At least this time, the box is mostly standard. The HP has a HUGE motherboard which is probably as custom as you can get them.

I’m going to install a few operating systems on this new baby; RedHat and NetBSD and Win2K. It should be fun, especially as not every single device is yet supported.

14 Sep 2000 »

My Win2K box had conniptions this morning. Something had been in and munged a system file or two, and System File Protection was not having a bar of it (SFP is like tripwire on steroids). Frantic tearing around the house looking for 2195 installation media didn’t turn up my original holographic CD. I did find the 120 day limited trialware CD. SFP was happy with that and things worked okay… until I used Outlook, which quickly barfed.
ARGHHHHHH

I thought it might be a virus, but I’m one of the most cautious people I know. So I tried offloading all my files to Dan’s alpha, which already had Samba running on it. But softdep has this annoying habit of not immediately freeing space until the inode has been reused. So the disk was full when it wasn’t. I installed Samba onto blossom via pkgsrc (gee, it’s so hard doing this stuff: make install). The toughest part was getting a workable smb.conf in a hurry. So after a few run-ins with swat, I scp’d Dan’s and modified it to protect the guilty.

Bought a copy of NAV 2001 over the net from Symantec and installed it from their site. They get it – for a commercial vendor. Media is not needed in this day and age of fast cable connections.

Not a (known) virus.

The laptop is still a little flakey, and I don’t know what’s causing it. It’s probably up for its 3 mth re- install.

11 Sep 2000 »

Been meaning to post. Honest.
Been very very busy.

Went to Hobart to present the Win2K Security tutorial to what might have been a very hostile audience (it was run by the Australian Unix User’s Group- Tasmania and SAGE-Tas coordinator.) However, 33 people turned out, and they were cool. I’ll put the pictures up soon.

Did I mention that I bought myself a Canon Digital Ixus (aka Powershot S100 Elph in the US)? V. v. cool. So small and cute! It’s about 170 gms, and about the size and weight of 50 business cards sitting in a neat rectangular pile. Still 2.1 million pixels (1600×1200). V. impressive color and options. The supplied Windows 2000 software is way cool too – the USB just kicks ass!

Trying to get through the SAGE-AU exec stuff is a major drain on time. I have sponsors to look after, a newsletter to put out, etc, etc.

I have just been appointed as one of the technical geeks on the auDA DNS Competition Policy Panel (see http://www.auda.org.au for more info). This will drain even more of my spare time away. I have to fly to Canberra on September 27 for the kick off meeting. Should be fun at any rate.

hackery

Installed NetBSD-1.5/alpha ALPHA2 on my pc164. Sick of Linus and his stupid idiotic unbelievable mediocre software engineering (NOT!) decisions. No kernel debugger. No CVS tree. No proper integration of new and useful busses (such as PCMCIA or proper tie in for USB in a standard way). No modularization of code that is shared between different busses. Two distinct sound subsystems, with the superior one not integrated. Code freeze – heard of it, but doesn’t apply to some people. Regression testing? Happens to other operating systems. I’m sick of all that crap. I’m sure 2.4 will be enjoyed by many, but I think the 2.4 event horizon is showing Linus’s inadequacies more than ever before.

And now my cheapy FM801 sound card works just fine as the sound works without freezing the dang box. However, XFree86 doesn’t work as NetBSD treats 64 bit platforms as proper workstations, not just as a 8 bit PC grown up. So we have to add the 8 bit stuff back in (carefully) to allow inb() and outb() to initialize the card into MMIO mode so we can use 64 bit operations once more.

Just wish there were more *BSD developers and more sharing between the three major forks.

18 Aug 2000 »

Not much happening.
My 17″ monitor is still dead. Long live the 17″ monitor.

11 Aug 2000 »

hackery
Not much happening – I want to work on a project management tool for KDE (I can’t wait for C++ wrappers for Gnome and/or much better IDL support that hides the C braindeath that passes for emulating C++ (badly)).

However, we got infected by a Java zealot as developer #3. Developer #1 wants to project manage. I’m developer #2. I don’t have time for this. Unfortunately, the Java Zealot is correct – most PM’s use Win32 and coding something for KDE or Gnome will knock them out of contention. However, my argument to that is very simple: MS Project 2000 is Very Very Very Good(tm) – it’s like version 10 and they’ve had over 10 years to get it right, and they did. If your daily rate is >$800 why skimp on a $400 tool?

life

Been invited to research, write, and present an in-depth Windows NT/2000 security tutorial for the Tasmanian Australian Unix User’s Group (AUUG), whose members missed out when the AusCERT-supplied speaker didn’t mention anything about NT when he was there in April.

This should be interesting. Most unix users take a very contrary view to Win32 security – you’ll be a rare Advogato reader if you are aware of the Win32 security model and actually like it. The audience will either be administrators resigned to working with NT/2000 or people interested in validating their (mostly wrong) views on NT/2000 security. A tough crowd in both cases. I hope that people will be able to take something away with them, even it is simply a greater appreciation for NT’s security model, which is actually quite decent when you get down and dirty with it. Very deep and fine grained once you accept the security model’s basic thrust, which is VMS-like and not Unix like.

27 Jul 2000 »

Opened my second SourceForge project today. I’m working on the secret project architecture. As soon as I have the High Level Architecture and Overview done, and as soon as the fantastic SF people approve my new project (pretty please!), I’ll post more details.
I’m going to undertake a social experiment with this project. The primary aim of the project is a bug free, high quality, CMM level 3 or 4 open-source project to replace an ancient but beloved tool on many Linux-like and Linux platforms. It will be architected to the nth degree before vi is opened or make invoked. By necessity, this requires a small or single person team to finish this part of the process before getting like-minded developers on to the job of actually cutting code. However, the process of developing the entire thing (besides the initial HLA) will be completely and utterly open in true bazaar style. I want to see if open source can produce a better tool when well known and well used software engineering practices are dolloped on top.

Software engineering best practice will be applied from woe to go to see if the defects in this tool, the MTBF and uptake are better than (say) fetchmail, which will be the reference project. I’ll write the experiment up for Linux Journal once 0.1 is released as source code to judge if it is a success. I’ll call the article “Post-bazaar software engineering” or something lame like that.

20 Jul 2000 »

Went to the Compaq GS series launch today. Big Iron. mmmm. 1-32 processors today, 1-48 processors soon. Kicks ass.
Made contact with Compaq Australia to try and get some eval kit to test multiple bus alpha boxes.

life

Watching Springer. A guy just grotted a nose booger on the show – without a hanky or anything. The audience don’t like him. Of course, he’s sleeping with his girlfriend’s roomy and some guy. Lots of bare breasts and beatings tonight too.

What a classy show. I love it. BLEEEEEP.

18 Jul 2000 »

Received some hate mail from lkml weenies after another of my semi-infamous I18N outbursts. What’s the problem with I18N that sends certain types scurrying for the lowest form of flamage?
To all those who sent me hate mail: FUCK YOU and grow up.

I’d like to see you grapple with your ASCII-only code and blinkered mindset if you spoke and wrote only Hindi or Arabic.

The fans are still annoyingly loud.

17 Jul 2000 »

This room is like being next to a small jet engine. Does anyone have a supply of ATX DC connectors and a 5 or 8 port 48 VDC output somewhere in Australia? I’m sick of all the damn fans. I have (count em!) 12 fans in four active PC’s. CPU fans, case fans. Back end fans because the case fans suck and cause the dang thing to overheat.

I need quiet fans, ones with low friction and noise bearings or preferably no fans. Fans fans fans ARRRRRGH

I need to lie down.

15 Jul 2000 »

After a typical day of waiting for delivery people (“It’ll be there between 7 am and midday” – the lady confirming my delivery the night before), my shiny new Sony Wega 68 cm TV arrived – at 1.10 pm. This delayed breakfast somewhat We eventually got our eggs benedict avec salmon, mushies and tomato about 1.45 pm.
We watched the Matrix, of course (it’s my reference DVD), and then LA Confidential as a friend hadn’t seen it before. After dinner at Kentucky Fried Dog, we hired two movies, The Right Stuff (it’s sooo long), and US Marshalls (oldie but a goodie).

Hackery

I have a funny feeling that Linux’s “generals” do not use non-Intel platforms. They pumped out 2.4.0-test4 without testing on alpha again, even though there was a patch to fix the problem. I’ll chase it down again.

The 60′s show

I’m watching my new shiny TV set, and there’s a song by “Titan” or some similar bogus name, that could be straight out of the late 60′s or early 70′s. Don’t they realise that this time period, both musically and fashion wise sucked big time? The band even went to the ends of going low-tech and compressing the sound and it feels mono to me. What’s wrong with the idea of Saturday night being left to modern* techno/dance music?

* if it’s more than two weeks old, it’s passe.

13 Jul 2000 »

Bryce: please consider ISA and PCI pcmcia bridges for the Alpha. I have a ISA pcmcia bridge and if I can get my wavelan card working under the Alpha, that’d be great.
Geeking from the garden is the best!

Apparently the poll.h breakage was easily fixed by someone with a clue about osf_sys.c. After reading the real fix, it was “why didn’t I think of that?” with the immediate answer of “it was 1.30 am in the morning after being up for over 18 hours”.

13 Jul 2000 »

Working on being a temporary kernel hacker. Somebody ripped stuff out of poll.h without doing a full grep against the entire tree. A few compiles later, and my alpha is still not running 2.4.0-test4-pre6. Dunno. Might try a kernel without reiserfs support to see how that flies.
Spent a bit of time with Sun this morning whilst they went through their storage offerings. I want a FCAL card so I can beg borrow or steal a A3500 or A5200 or a T3 and make it work with reiserfs on my Alpha.

It’s 1.40 am and time for bed.

11 Jul 2000 »

(just a quickie)
Sergeant:

If I had Mr Brain engaged, and seen that Japanese (and the other locales) was selected as a package choice rather than just install everything in sight, it still wouldn’t have been a problem. I love doing that stuff and seeing how close I18N efforts have been. To a dedicated unilingualist, this might have been a re-install showstopper, but to me, it’s a great way to spend an afternoon. I’d like to see all of Linux kernel and all the packages that make up your typical distro to be translated to as many languages as possible.

I have all available languages configured on my Windows 2000 laptop, and I install them when I can on my Linux installs. I like to see what a native speaker will see when I view native language web sites and e-mail. I can’t read or write them, but it’s pretty hoopy.

Continuing my G4 story, I stumbled across the correct “fix” by happy co-incidence. I changed the locale back to C or something like that in a config file in /etc somewhere, and lo and behold, the next “su -” worked just fine. This was about a week ago, so no problems since then. The G4 kicks arse. It seriously feels fast doing stuff – certainly faster than my 500 MHz Alpha, even though the G4 is 50 MHz slower.

10 Jul 2000 »

Internationalization

,í,½,µ,íAndrew,Å,·B

If you can read that (and if Advogato’s HTML filtering lets it through), then you’re doing remarkably well. If you can’t see the hiragana or Advogato filters it out (which it does), then it’s situation normal(afu) folks. When 70% of the planet does not speak English and over 50% would use non-roman character sets if they were able to read and write (a major problem in and of itself), ASCII is about as dead as last week’s undies.

Update: After posting it was obvious that Advogato is itself not I18N clean. I’ll work with Raph on an update (in my copious spare time!). As I’ve seen Danish and a couple of other languages on here, we should not discriminate against the double character set crowd.

I installed LinuxPPC on the Mac G4 at work (it wasn’t doing anything else) and accidentally went nuts installing everything. It installed Gnome with all the locales, and Japanese was the default system locale. It’s amazing how close some distributions are to localizing pretty much everywhere.

Detecting NT/2000

A previous diarist asked the question, how do I detect NT? If you’re writing in Perl (it looked like it), and you have access to the local environment variables (and I believe you do), then use the variable called “OS”. NT sets it to “Windows_NT”.

C:\>set

…

OS=Windows_NT

…

9 Jul 2000 »

fun
Just got another orifice opened by Rebecca playing Total Annilihation. I suffered the old “knock-knock, who’s-there, 10-krogoths and 100 cans” problem. I had three krogoths just hanging around with a bunch of cans and other sundry units, covered 360 with all sorts of advanced defense on the perimeter (including a buzzsaw and three intimidators + radar targeting), and it wasn’t good enough. Blaaaam!

I sent over 300 cans and four krogoths her way about two hours before but it wasn’t enough. This is the problem with five hour, 500 unit per side games – need more units. At least I whipped her arse good and proper in the first game. With planes, and plenty of them.

Committees

Still haven’t committed the SAGE-AU conference to diary yet. But now, as pres, I’m getting some serious grief from professional committee dwellers. You know the sort: they whine and moan, do a bit here and there (and the person involved has done a lot for SAGE over the years), and when you try to show some sort of vision for the future, or even better just do something, they make it out to the new members as if you’re some sort of dictator. ARGGGHH! Donna – if you read this, my intentions are good, I just want to get something, anything done this year. Last year we had no vision and no drive, and it shows. I’m not going to make that mistake again.

7 Jul 2000 »

Just come back from the SAGE-AU conference, held at the Gold Coast. I’m president of SAGE-AU now, so I’m biased. We had a dinner at the Seaworld Nara, and I saw two pengiuns going at it hammer and tong. True missionary style if such a thing is possible for pengiuns.
Excellent security content. Met Bill Cheswick and David LeBlanc and many others. When I recover from my flight, I’ll do a proper writeup.

2 Jul 2000 »

Mozilla M16 is a little dodgy, and prefers seg faulting on CNN’s space page (argh!) but it’s better than what Helix Gnome did to my Suse-provided Netscrape: bus faults as soon as I launch the sucker. oh well. There’s always IE on my laptop
Mozilla is getting usuable at last. Still way too slow compared to native implementations (IE on the same hardware with only one of the processors churning rather than two is substantially faster than Mozilla under Linux).

Reinventing the wheel

rconover discusses how he “discovered” a way to do RTTI, but in C. That’s been standard fare for a while, I’m afraid, and it’s how many C stackguard checkers like electric fence work, but using hardware assistance rather than just a simple “canary” value alone (which can be overwritten with possibly the “correct” value ID for another type you’re happy to deal with.

As a person involved in XFree86, I don’t want to descend into “C++ is better than C” but it aggravates me to see things like vtables, subclassing and RTTI reinvented to make up for clear deficiencies with a language like C. If you look at XAA and the new metro loader, XFree86 is extending C to places it can barely go (I dare new C programmers to make significant additions to either technology without breaking ABI compatibility).

XAA in particular could probably be sped up for both compiling, running and speed of writing new modules if it were re-written in C++. Good C++ compilers get the gist of what you’re trying to do when you subclass and fill in non- overloaded methods, and can optimize it out so there’s little or (in most cases) no speed penalty if not a little speed boost due to the lack of a vtable lookup compared to a function pointer lookup. C doesn’t get a chance to do that and you lose type protection when you cast to void * and do all the funky stuff required to provide oblique data references and function pointers.

If you want to see my C++ is faster than C example, see BeOS. It’s the fastest booting OS I’ve ever used that’s not ROM based (such as N64 or BBC Basic). A Linux kernel with just enough drivers to run my machine takes a good 1.15 to boot into gdm (compared to BeOS’s 10-15 seconds), and Windows 2000 takes over 2 minutes.

that’s my rant for the day. Right tool – right job.

2 Jul 2000 »

The hassles of PCMCIA desktop adapters. The one that Dan C bought to host our gateway’s Wavelan is a PC Card -> ISA device and is PNP. I’ve spent most of this weekend trying to get Linux’s PC Card drivers (pcmcia-cs-3.1.17) to work with it. The problem is that pcmcia-cs requires the cards to be at IRQ 10,11 or else it can’t find it, plus much additional magic to detect my card. Due to IRQ sharing and my PCI bios, I have two devices at IRQ 10 (matrox, tulip) after interrupt sharing and one device (eepro100) at irq 11. Intel Standard Architecture is just so braindead at times.
The reason for stuffing around is that the host box has 6 gig of disk space, and I want it to be the gateway and server for my home network rather than Dan’s alpha. It was running NetBSD-current boot floppy (!) and working as a gateway, but I wanted nfs, dhcp, dns, router, and ip filter on that box.

I tried for two days to get Suse 6.4 + latest pcmcia working and it just doesn’t work, even after extensive tweaking. I download the latest NetBSD 1.5 snapshot, and the boot floppies make wi0 just turn up. I configured the interface and it works! ARRRGH this is a case why separate userland utilities and externally delivered pcmcia modules will never beat an integrated approach. I wondered why Linus doesn’t like these big updates, and now I understand completely.

In addition, the bus stuff on NetBSD is a delight to use and configure. If only Linux had this sort of forethought put into it.

30 Jun 2000 »

I was talked into going skiing this weekend. Then I worked out what I have to do to get to the conference next week (the SAGE-Au conf on the Gold Coast) and the doco I’ve promised work, and skiing became too difficult.

Don’t mind the cold white stuff, as I have quite ample heat shielding (coming off at the rate of ~ 1 kg a week). But given a choice of skiing and apres ski, apres ski wins big time. I actually prefer doing winery tours and staying in bed and breakfasts – preferably run by people like my Mum. Skiing in Australia is winter surfing for the tennis crowd. Expensive. New Zealand has much better skiing, but right now Perisher had a huge dump of new fresh snow, so I’m sure my friends will have a hoot.

hackery

Still no sign of the Suse contract papers. Oh well. They’ll come.

Had fun with an EMC SAN store. Tried to get them to let me create a 4 TB reiserfs volume from my laptop, but testing schedule is tight, and connecting a laptop via a fibrechannel is not possible right now. Might try again when we get the Alteon fibre card working under Linux for the SOE we are preparing. That’d be nifty to do a df on.

Talking to a new group that I wasn’t aware of who are working on XDSM. Hopefully, I can help them get HSM into reiserfs natively, so the last vestiges of “not enterprise ready” go away.

furniture

Eskil, Ikea is good as long as you like screwing stuff together, but when it comes to couches, have a look around. I looked at a Ikea couch, and it was okay and a little flat and hard. I then went to a local manufacturer (you may be able to get them) called “Moran” who hail from Melbourne Australia. They make the most beautiful furniture for surprisingly small amounts. I priced a three seater recliner couch and two massively overstuffed recliner arm chairs for $4500 AUD (Australian peso’s with leather. Ikea could sell me that hard self assembled couch for $1100. Chuck in two nearby arm chairs, and the price went to about $2300. But the Moran stuff was sooooo much better. 10 year guarantee and they make it for you in any covering that they offer in the style of chair/lounge you go for.

Even if you don’t go for a Moran, all I’m suggesting is that Ikea are not that cheap when it comes to the big things, and couches and arm chairs are with you for 10+ years. Make a wise choice now – go visit a speciality store.

21 Jun 2000 »

depression
There’s so much macho crap about being your average beer swilling Aussie male that it’s really hard to grasp the concept of being on a drug for more than a course of anti- biotics (about 2 weeks). I might be depressed from time to time, thinking about my family’s tragic past, or upon my own failures as a human (slackness (sigh), singleness (sigh), being a big fat bastard (I’m on Jenny Craig, 9 kg gone), bills (which I can afford, but hate nonetheless), the usual crop of angst), but then I cheer up, usually by getting on the phone to some of my mates or just spending some quality time with my two cats. Total Annilihation also works.

I have a friend who would truly benefit from such a constant supply of something that would smooth out the troughs and peaks. I dread these calls, but being a Chinese- Taiwanese-Australian, the taboo of taking legal mind altering drugs and seeing a shrink is too much for her and what she claims is her culture (which is basically Australian from age 4, with Taiwanese parents, obviously). I just hope she can get over this thing before she does what I think she will, so she will have a chance of seeing her 30th birthday.

Of course, I have other friends and acquantainces who say “ditch the bitch”, but I think they do not understand.

work

Cool – I am at a single client for the rest of my stay at my current employer, and the new contract is in the mail. I’m happy for both reasons!

hackery

Sad to see Suse go from the laptop, as I was just getting it to be useful, but it’s basically a tool for me to do my primary work, which is doco (and lots of it), e-mail and interoperability with clients. One day, Suse’ll do me, but not yet.

I’ll have to get the FM801 card under alsa working and get the IO-APIC SMP stuff sorted before Suse freeze 7.0 on me.

18 Jun 2000 »

laptops and Suse
I’ve had a horror week, not least caused by Partition Magic ripping the guts out of my laptop when I moved and resized my Win2K partition to make room for a fullish install of Suse 6.4. Luckily I don’t trust PM or any partitioner, and so I had a backup.

Suse took a long time to install, and after which I didn’t have any PC Card (pcmcia to the sticklers who haven’t been to pcmcia.org in about five years) stuff because I have a Toshiba and Suse ship an unbelieably ancient pcmcia-cs, and my USB mouse didn’t work because they had failed to test it with the kernel they boot by default (usbdevfs or something like that didn’t mount, so no USB). I love my USB mouse, and I compiled my way into submission. I finally managed to get a network connection some four days after installing Suse as my only OS. I must point out that I’ve been very busy working for my current client, and it’s not me being very slack or crap at Linux. It only took about 30 minutes to locate and download the relevant bits (a newer pcmcia-cs and alsa for sound, didn’t manage that) and recompile a couple of times. But in real time, it took four days due to the incredibly hectic schedule I kept whilst in Melbourne.

It’s interesting to note that I was able to work for a week with just Linux, doing word processing (on StarOffice, which feels like a bad Word 6) et al, but now that I have over 900 messages streaming into Outlook, I am so happy I was able to recover all my messages. I can’t live without e- mail, and until there’s an Outlook 2000 class e-mail package for Linux, I can’t make the final switch. Don’t give me any of the “ is better than Outlook” or “urgh, how can you use MS crap?” type of things, because I firmly believe that Outlook is living proof of the maxim that if you let MS improve something until it’s right, they’ll eventually do so. MS don’t manage perfection with all their products (Win3.x & Win9x are perfect examples of crap at work), but Outlook is e-mail ambrosia. It’s fast, clever, functional, deals with the 190 MB of mail I have on there at the moment with aplomb, and can handle POP3 and IMAP servers like nothing else. In short, I’d sleep with it if I could.

Work

just returned from a week in Melbourne when I had just returned from a week in Brisbane. I have documentation due from the project I sort of completed in Sydney the week before that. In addition, I have my SAGE-Au paper to finish (due two weeks ago), and finally, a 16-20 page edition of SAGE Advice, the SAGE-Au journal. busy. I need the 36 hour day.

Home & Work situation

Went house hunting and mortgage enquiring on the weekend whilst I was in Melbourne (my original & preferred home town – I live in Sydney at the moment, and it’s awful). The problem is that the banks and mortgage brokers will not talk to you if you don’t have like four months worth of savings, even though I earn more than most two income families. And if I become self-employed, as I do want to (to work for Suse, see previous entries), I’ll need two *years* worth of company tax returns before I can borrow a maximum of 75% of the total cost of the house. If I hold off moving jobs, I can do the four month thing, and get a loan and then transfer to my own company, but that’s giving me the total willies in case cash flow becomes a problem. I want my own place, dammit I can afford my own place. Every time I use a home loan calculator, I can easily afford nearly all the townhouses, houses and occasionally even small mansions in the suburbs I want to live in. With the cats, apartment/units are out.

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.

11 May 2000 »

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