mostly useless crap from me

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.