mostly useless crap from me

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 cr4×0r?
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.

6 May 2000 »

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

geeky stuff

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

work

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

3 May 2000 »

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

* Tame Live In NetBSD Geek

work

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

email

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

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

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

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

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

30 Apr 2000 »

life
Back from Melbourne for my easter break. Had fun with many friends and visited heaps of people. Meebles’ tail had a chunk taken out of it by another cat. So it was off to the vet on Friday. He’s okay, but his tail has a gaping hole, and I have to give him a pill twice a day (oh fun!), and spray his tail with stingy stuff three times a day (he really hates that, so I surprise him with it).

On Saturday, I went to Wollongong to catch up with my friends Paul, Steven, Rory & Jane. They were there for an Apple University Consortium do, and were staying in the Nan Tien Buddhist Temple, which is very large and nice. We had lunch in the town. I pigged out on pancakes followed by more pancakes.

After lunch we went back to the temple and had fun looking around, then we took part in the chanting ceremony finishing the day off. Much genuflecting was done. Compared to other religions, Buddhism is cool.

21 Apr 2000 »

Still observer, must have someone with negative karma certifying me. Oh well. It’s not important.
Installed RH 6.2 and it installed a SMP kernel, and finally it was clear to me why my box never took one of my carefully handcrafted kernels on Caldera; my HP XU 6/200 DP has a funny IO-APIC settings, and Linux 2.2.14 does it wrong on my machine, whereas Linux 2.2.10 doesn’t. 2.3.99- pre5 (which is what I need to hack on for reiserfs) also does the wrong thing. So I have a choice: lose a processor, or become a temporary kernel hacker. I don’t have time for the latter, but it looks as if there’s approxmiately one of us on this planet using XU 6/200 DP’s and Linux together.

The cool thing is that through Dan Carosone, my tame NetBSD live in, it’s because my machine already maps the second processor at ID 16, whereas the OS’s expect only a 4 bit field here, and flake out. I might make it a modulus and see what happens.

2.3.99-pre5 freezes when I use X. Good thing: when I don’t use X, reiserfs-3.6.4++ works just fine.

17 Apr 2000 »

Working on adding extended attributes to reiserfs. Luckily the space for them is there already. 3.6.4 beta is out, and hopefully, that’ll more alpha friendly as well.
Need to get the utilities compiling, however. Way too x86 centric right now.

15 Apr 2000 »

It seems that I have somehow managed to lose Journeyer status (can’t post a reply to an article), but I checked my certs and they’re all consistently Journeyer. WTF?
hackery

Working on adding extended attributes to reiserfs. As usual, it’s likely someone else will beat me to the punch. I’m working on noatime at the moment (the default is atime, which is slow for news and other spools where you literally don’t care what the atime is).

work

Managed to get Win98 onto a corrupt CD-less libretto CT100 via using a NetBSD boot disk, mounting the cd via nfs, copying across the additional utility that I thought would work (newfs_msdos) but NetBSD is so creaky that newfs_msdos is no where near as advanced as the various tools on Linux (ie works with hard drive partitions). This is why NetBSD will never win However, tomsrtbt-current didn’t boot the Libretto, so NetBSD won in this case. The yukky OS is now installed, but can’t see the PC Card floppy because there’s no driver for it. yay.

12 Apr 2000 »

My bill paying life is being security architect, which is a fancy term for a prostitute(security+++). I hate it occasionally on days like today. Visited a nice startup located in the deepest darkest recesses of Sydney town (Bligh St) and went through them like a bowl of ripe prunes followed by a calming laxitive.
But the worst part is that they’re nice people, the product is way cool, but they can’t do security to save themselves. Tips of the week:

Program defensively; users will submit crap data to you from cookies, form and URL data, and anything else they can send your way
If you do not want the data from your app to appear on the front page of your morning paper, do not install the database on the web server, and do not have the dbms available to public facing networks
Even if you have packet filtering, ipchains or a firewall, you need to look after the remote services you offer in case the countermeasures fail, or the filter/firewall lets something through that kills you another way.
If you don’t have IDS tools (like tripwire/AIDE, etc) installed, your customers will tell you when you’ve been successfully attacked.
If you have static data, host it on a CD-ROM. It’s impossible to change this. It is possible to point the DNS entry, the web directory, and the web server somewhere else, so it’s not a panacea, but it can help. It’s all cached once read in the first time.
Dan and myself (mostly Dan) reorganised the home machine room to make the server stack much more cable friendly and moved my dual PPro back into the machine room. It’s going to get toasty in here. Three PPro’s, three Alphas, and my PII laptop should all contribute to the heat death of the universe.

10 Apr 2000 »

Beer and Babes. Enough said.

Not a lot on the work front – crappy day. Managed to SQL stuff with the best of them. Commercial developers of the world – please take this free Clue(tm) *THWOK* and damn well get with the program! Not doing argument validation because the SQL view user is non-privileged is crap. Not doing form validation with SQL update users is criminal.

Not a lot on the OSS front – downloaded and installed Redhat 6.2 and it just worked. Rebuilt the SRPM for alpha, and have been too slack to upload it to SourceForge.

E-mailed Raph about DHTML for diary, but realistically, I’m going to be busy, and it’s likely someone will beat me to a much better solution. That’s the good bit about OSS – you don’t have to wait for me.

5 Apr 2000 »

Sick as a doooooooog. There’s something floating around. Had an abortive attempt to go to work. Got there and nearly hurled on one of the managers. Got myself some anti-vomiting syrup from the chemist, and gagged some down. I’ll spare you the gory details, but let’s just say – it didn’t help. Went home, rode the porcelain bus for some time before retiring to bed for the rest of the day. The nice cleaners I have came today, so the place is nice and tidy again.
rant du jour: weather

It rained again. Sydney is so wet. Sydney-siders smirk when they talk about Melbourne’s weather, but it’s due to rain in Sydney for the rest of the week, and then Monday and Tuesday next week. In Melbourne, it may be cold, warm, hot, wet, freezing, sunny, overcast, a little hard precipitation (hail all in one day, but it does it in small doses. It never really gets mean. The rain is currently pummelling my poor Echo out there. If the sunroof seals ever get loose, I’m going to have to actually put it away in the garage that this house has. I’m usually too slack to do that.

rant du jour deux: open fireplaces

To top it all off, the neighbors next door have started buring wood in their open fireplace. I hate people who burn stuff to make a room “cosy” (or to appeal to their own upper middle class pretensions) when an open fire adds little or no heat value and pollutes my air. In Victoria, my parents do the same thing – they burn some logs a few times a year (which requires them to get the chimney swept) and it smokes out the front of their house and for what? The central heating does a far better job and uses far less gas than the equivalent mass of wood being burnt in the lounge room. Call me unromantic, but I think it’s stupid. If you’re going to burn wood, get a proper wood stove that does the job properly, uses a lot less wood, puts out fewer particulates, and most of all does not let cold air in. Most winter smog is due to polluting open fire places.

hackery

I’ve been distracted by reiserfs, work, SAGE-Au duties, and a small amount of social life (and today obviously was a write off).

Duncan’s a busy lad. He’s making a run for pnm2ppa 1.0 all by himself, and that’s cool! He’s fixed all the known bugs, made bi-directional printing the default, added pgm[raw]/pbm [raw], and ppm support in, plugged in some good figures for all the printers. We just have to test them, and see how they fly. It’s good to see a project finally getting close to being finished. The next stage after this is to chop all the support functions out and plonk it inside gs itself. That’ll boost performance again, but not everyone will have that latest version of gs for a while.

4 Apr 2000 »

Woa! The diaries are getting out of control. Decided that coding the solution was the correct course of action. Defeated by the far too obvious solution that the GNOME anon cvs details are in the general FAQ and not in the developer area. Maybe tomorrow night – no dang, that’s SAGE- Au National Exec IRC meeting.
Ordinary day at work. Started way too early at 8.15 am. Finished with Burger King. Damn Ian (he of newly minted schoolsnet fame) for getting me hooked on the better burgers there. It is all his fault. See pfb’s diary for more Ian related news.

Loved the caffiene quote (see well below in the diary list), from a fellow 24×7 poisoner.

Signed up a friend for Friend Finder because she’s not ready to make that sort of committment to do it herself. If you are a) in Melbourne Australia b) can deal with A-grade Catholic Guilt(tm) c) don’t mind window shopping in Chapel St on the weekends (but not the two weekends the various Grand Prix’s are on) d) can handle interacting serially with her (she’s can be a bit monopolistic on your time), then you too can have a weird girlfriend. Mail me today if you’re still interested. She’s not as bad (most of the time) as I’ve described, but hey, if you’re taller than her, older than her, and have bizarre extreme sports fetishes (the more dangerous the better), you have a very good chance of landing a long term partner.

Meebles has tried killing my screensaver for like 20 minutes now. The Alpha is really churning out the lissajous figures, and they don’t act like anything Meebles has seen before, and boy is he pissed! Don’t let anyone tell you that a cat’s attention span is about this >< long.

3 Apr 2000 »

Well, I got my new HFC cable modem installed today by fibbing extensively. I had to lie about the following things: I owned the place, that I was going to use NT 4.0 (as if on Intel*, with their crappy SMC ethernet card, and I wasn’t going to run any servers and it was a stand alone installation.

The guy came at 7.45 am, and started work. As soon as he saw all the computers, he knew I was going to be running Linux on it straight after he left, and so he rather nicely gave me a few tips on finding the resources I needed to get Linux working.

So here I am at 11.33 pm, running RedHat 6.1 on my Alpha after having to download and compile Mozilla using the cable modem (which took like 2 mins, god I lurrrve the speed) because Netscape is not available on the glibc/Alpha platform. It’s hooked through Dan’s NetBSD alpha hackbox at the moment, but that’s only temporary. I want a dedicated gateway as he has this nasty habit of a) running simultaneous CVS pulls b) running multiple NetBSD kernel builds on rather busy disks c) doesn’t think a loadavg of 4 is a bad thing. I want a gw that sits at about 0.00 and maybe now and again thinks about a named query. The only bit that I didn’t have to lie about is that we wouldn’t run any servers. Since we have extensive ipfilters in place, it’s unlikely that they will find any. We’re more off the air than the poor WinNT people who leave their NetBT ports open to abuse. I feel for them, I really do.

We also got WAVELan wireless peer to peer running on our laptops. We are officially the geekiest house on the block. I’m like a pig in shit right now. Honest. I lurrrve cable.

I only saw one fashion victim today. Shared with Dan and Ange an excellent bottle of St Hallett’s 1996 Shiraz over dinner at the ever reliably unreliable Pino’s. Fantastic – the bottle not the meal, in which the service was at really bad French restaurant bad levels. Not snooty just incompetent.

The most recently nightly snapshot of Mozilla M15 (pre I think) is rather dodgy on the Alpha. I’ll have to fix some bugs by the look of things. Bugger. I have plenty on my plate already. But I need a good browser. Also, green is a real sucky selection color.

* if the worst came to the worst, I have an actual Win2K license. The installer had seen this work, too. But luckily, all it takes is one extra argument to dhclient, and we’re off!

1 Apr 2000 »

Went to breakfast this afternoon, and saw a Very Weird Thing. The table next to me was occupied by what I thought was a guy and his teenage daughter. Nothing remarkable about that until they started holding hands about 10 minutes before they left. She couldn’t have been a day older than 16, he in his forties. If I were jwz, I’d have something profound to say, but I’m not, so I don’t.

Working on porting the reiserfs/utils to my Alpha. Getting sentimentally attached the uptime figure. 28 days and growing. Soon I’ll have to disable it booting into runtime level 5, and start testing reiserfs as I’ll have no excuse not to reboot.

Have to agree with schoen’s assertion that if you don’t know what you’re doing (or in my case) your parents are pressuring you to go to uni directly from high school – don’t do it. Take a year off and evaluate what you want to do. I still don’t have my degree 11 years after starting, and four years after giving up. I should never have bothered with my CS degree, and spent a year really thinking about what I want to do and how to get there from here. Now, I need a degree (eventually), and it basically has to be management focused (an MBA would be good, but need to get past the lack of undergraduate qualifications) as I’m being paid extremely well – at the top of the CS profession tree without being management. The only way for me to progress is up the slimely management ladder, and I do not have the necessary bits of paper that would help there.

1 Apr 2000 »

Bad flame war going on between BSD and GPL bigots/trolls on the reiserfs mail list. Get over it guys.

The Queen of England left Australia today, and our disgusting government leaks a report that claims there was no stolen generation. This is like a right wing party in Germany declaring that there was no holocaust. The Liberal Party must get serious about reconcilliation. This was a day after they started in on the UN about “interfering with the internal affairs of a nation”. Australia is not China, Burma, Iraq – the Libs are losing it. I hope the Queen enjoyed her stay and that by the next time she comes by, we’ll be a republic. She’s even obliquely said that she doesn’t care what we do, so basically that’ll take the wind out of the wings out of the misguided monarchists.

I read about Jason Haas’s bad car accident at linuxppc.org. Get well soon, Dude, and Cassie is an example of strength to us all.

30 Mar 2000 »

I managed to get reiserfs 3.6.3 to compile out of the box last night on Mr Alpha. Good work, fellas There’s a small number of problems, and I’m expecting some oops’s once I load the sucker, but it’s compiled, and that’s good. Some changes to the CVS today by Chris Mason from Suse should allow me to recompile and not fret.
Meebles spent the night outside, and his tail is getting better. The rats he has killed in the last week are putrifying in the rubbish bin in a plastic bag. It’s really smelly. Bad cat.

Greebo has decided that inside my bed is warmer than outside it – something she hasn’t done since spring last year. I hope that I’m not squishing her in the middle of the night. It’s also probably quieter than on top of the doona due to my snoring being muffled.

On the work front, it’s my last day at my current client. That’s sad, as they have mucho bandwidth, which I will miss. They’re also a great bunch of people. It’s not everyday that you get a good client.

29 Mar 2000 »

Went home about 21.00 last night and downloaded and compiled 2.3.99pre3 on my Alpha. Eventually, I managed to find a set of config options that compiles with minimal warnings, and better yet links. If I cared enough about kernel development, I’d do something more. Submitting patches to lk seems so haphazard as well.

Now the trick is to see if the latest CVS sources of reiserfs is willing to patch cleanly against pre3. I am going to hack that sucker until it works on the Alpha. The guys are busy cleaning up Intel-isms in the code, but there’s still a lot of work to do. Once it works on two architectures, I think Linus will accept the code as an experimental filesystem for 2.5. Once the Alpha is done, we need a sparc or PPC port to fill out the trifecta.

We’ve had our first report of pnm2ppa causing a box to hang whilst printing. This is a first. I think it might be a hardware issue, but I don’t have the first clue right now.

The cats spent the night outside since they didn’t come when called. Meebles’ tail is getting better – this morning he was able to swish it and react when I tried tickling the tip. So no tail amputation for Meebles! YAY! (I hate my Cat Slave’s Big Book of Cat Hypochrondria for suggesting that a tail amputation might be necessary. That really freaked me out).

Off home now to go hack 2.3.99pre3 with the latest reiserfs CVS patches and see if I can bring up a reiserfs module under the Alpha. Should be a fun night. I’ve downloaded Alan Cox’s latest bunch of patches, but I couldn’t find the pre4-1 patch. I need to pay more attention to the secret places they stash stuff. Why can’t l.k. use a CVS tree like everyone else? But from the mail list for the last day or so, pre4-1 is looking decidedly dodgy, and I already have pre3 compiled and ready to test.

28 Mar 2000 »

Worked until 23.30 last night. Too buggered to even look at the Alpha. Trying to figure out which of my PC’s will have the Wavelan card fitted. Solution: the quietest one so it stay in my bedroom.
Adding mucho paper sizes is harder than first thought. I tried doing auto-detection, but gs provides ppm images only as big as they need to be, so autodetection is off the agenda.

Duncan gave me some good ideas on robust paper handling (that wont result in das blinking lights (a HP PPA owner in-joke)), and it looks as 0.9.0 is going to become a reality soon.

Reading through the responses to my post about enums on reiserfs@devlinux.com, I have the C system programmer weenie brigade ignoring the real problems with #define vs typedef enum. They believe (and in the kernel, I can grant them) that enums don’t work in an assembly environment. But in programs, I totally disagree with these maintainance nightmares. #define is Evil(tm), and that’s the end of the discussion.

27 Mar 2000 »

Working on adding all sorts of nifty paper sizes into pnm2ppa in auto-detect papersize and DPI stuff. Should be cool and allow us to silently drop support for paper size switches. Once that’s in, maybe I’ll convince the other guys that we need to move closer to 0.92 or similar.

The stuff that pays the bills is getting long too. Documentation, documentation, documentation.

The weekend is getting busy. I’ll have to learn how to program Mr Video Recorder again. Organised cat care for Easter.

Did I mention that everyone’s at IETF in Adelaide, and I’m bored because there’s no one home to play CivCTP or Alpha Centauri with? At least Dan’s getting me a 11 mb/s wireless LAN card so we can geek without cables. It’s bad when a single house and its inhabitants (Population 2 Cats 2 People 7 computers) needs more than a 8 port hub. I’m thinking the next piece of comms gear after the Wavelan stuff is a 10/100 Mb/s Netgear 16 port switch. Either that or I’ll end up getting myself a 80 cm TV as the 34 cm TV is a joke.

26 Mar 2000 »

Decided to have a weekend to myself for once. Had a big Friday night, involving much Guiness. Had breakfast early on Saturday for once, and then drove to Bondi for lunch with Dan and Ange. Bondi was as superficial as ever and had the customary annoying Mor(m)on.
Drove Dan and Ange to Ange’s place, and since it was part of the way to Wollongong, drove to Wollongong. Didn’t get the fang out of me there, so continued on. Stopped eventually in Batesman’s Bay, some 200 km south of Sydney and 150 km east of Canberra. Had a cheap vietnamese meal there and saw Hanging up. Sad movie – take a tissue or two.

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.