I just lost a good 30 minutes of my life reading these damn things. They're way too funny, and the fact that I find them funny prolly means I need to get out more. They're the 'secret diaries' of the fellowship of the ring, and they're arguably in bad taste, and arguably very old news... but I'm still way, way behind. I hope they're being mirrored for posterity.
An excerpt:
THE SECRET DIARY OF ARAGORN SON OF ARATHORN
Day One:
Ringwraiths killed: 4. V. good.
Met up with Hobbits. Walked forty miles. Skinned a squirrel and ate it.
Still not King.
Day Four:
Stuck on mountain with Hobbits. Boromir really annoying.
Not King yet.
Day Six:
Orcs killed: none. Disappointing. Stubble update: I look rugged and manly. Yes!
Keep wanting to drop-kick Gimli. Holding myself back.
Still not King.
Day Ten:
Sorry no entries lately. V. dark in Mines of Moria. Big Baelrog.
Not King today either.
Day Eleven:
Orcs killed: 7. V. good. Stubble update: Looking mangy.
Legolas may be hotter than me.
I wonder if he would like me if I was King?
Day 28:
Beginning to find Frodo disturbingly attractive. Have a feeling if I make a move, Sam would kill me. Also, hairy feet kind of a turn-off.
Still not King.
Day 30:
In Lothlorien. Think Galadriel was hitting on me. Saucy wench.
Nice chat with Boromir. He's not so bad.
Took a shower. Yay!
But still not King.
Day 32:
Orcs killed: none. Stubble update: subtly hairy.
Legolas told me that a shadow and a threat had been growing in his mind.
I think Legolas might be kinda gay.
Nope, not King.
Day 33:
Orcs killed: Countless thousands. V. good.
Boromir killed by Orcs. Bummer. Though he died bravely in my arms, am now quite sure that he was very definitely gay.
Not so sure about Gimli either.
RIP Boromir.
Still not King, but at least Boromir seemed to think I was. Might however have been blood loss.
Day 34:
Frodo went to Mordor. Said he was going alone, but took Sam with him. Why?
My God, is everyone in this movie gay but me?
Not so sure about me either.
Still not King, goddammit.
posted on March 31, 2004 at 10:38 PMFinally got around to checking out Arstechnica's portable headphone roundup, and well, I'm thinking their definition of portable might not add up with most people's. Even weird, they basically have old-walkman-sized headphones, or really pricey form-to-your-inner-ear style.
I was, I admit, really looking forward to their article because I happen to own an excellent pair of Grado SR60s, which are some of the best headphones you are pretty much going to find without having to use an amplifier, meaning they work great with a powerbook or other unamplified source. They have a nice warm tone that works great for the majority of music I listen to.
But they're not really portable at all, even though they're in the same size range as what ars is reviewing. Sure, you can take them places, but it's a drag and it's not going to be very convenient and is going to dominate whatever else you're carrying around. Portable to me means being able to slide them in and out of your bag and using them when you're out & about without looking like a total dork. You don't want to be pulling out a pair of Grado SR60's while you're on the plane, for example, or a train, or a coffee shop.
So, odd review, considering I have headphones of the same size they were reviewing and specifically checked it out because I wanted something that would be more... well, portable in my arsenal.
And again, another weird product passed on by the same person who shall remain anonymous. Clicky for larger.
The only place I could think that you could actually get away with using one of these would be at a LAN party, and even then you'd be in some danger of getting lynched now that more & more women are becoming geeks. Besides, I shudder to think about the mousepad the women would have to get to rest their wrists on to be equally offensive to the men...
Had this forwarded onto me this evening... click the picture to the right for a larger shot. Amusing. I'm not really sure what to make of it: the lousy picture doesn't help, nor does the model's expression... it kinda looks a lil like the things you'd find in the back of a comic book as a kid next to the sea monkees. I thought the model was a doll at first.
Apparently it's a $13,000 USD 'underwater motorcycle' for checking out the coral reefs, brought to you by your friendly neighborhood aussies. I have to admit, if this thing had some serious speed it could be pretty damn fun... but chances are it'll be more of a 'scooter' than a motorcycle.
The article says it has a speed of up to 2.5 knots, which my handy conversation calculator says is a bit less than 3 miles per hour. Wooooo. I'm not sure paying $13k for something stephen hawking can outrun on the boardwalk is the best investment...
But, check out this quote:
...Dawson dropped a hint of future developments with the scubadoo – “we’re already working on the next model and think we can improve it in a host of ways. For example, currently you need to put your head under the water when you get into it. The next model will have a hinged hood so you don’t need to get your head wet at all.”
Now, look at that picture again. Then look at that quote. Then look at that picture again. So... we have a fairly large, slow-moving, and brightly painted foreign object traveling underwater. Can you say shark bait? Wouldn't it make some kinda sense for one of the first 'improvements' in this thing to be a mesh wrap-around cage for the person?
Not as though you're gonna outrun the shark who happens to think you're a giant tasty angelfish, and if you even try you're just turning your exposed back to it...
I really have to start posting more, and about a broader range of subjects, simply because I'm so foul mouthed and acerbic in my rhetoric when I rant that apparently google is sending some real oddities my way. I keep meaning to finish up some more of my tutorials, but things on this site are generally the 1st to hit the back burner...
I'm assuming google has done another reindex, as towards the end of last week and on I've started to get some really, really weird emails. You know, the type that are odd enough you're sure you've somehow gotten CC'd by mistake. But nope, these people were sending them to me, they were just talking and asking about some really weird things.
In trying to track down what was going on, I decided I better grep the logs. I suck with regular expressions, but enough that I can do some grep+filtering to get an idea... although getting better with awk & regular expressions in general is on my todo list.
It wasn't too hard to start finding where some of the weirdness was coming from, and it's pretty much all google:
- Apparently this site comes up as the second link when you search for "asshat festival" due to this rant. Really now people, why someone would be searching for that is beyond me...
- Apparently when you search for 'asshat', my trackback ping on Pierre Igot's 'discussion' with Microsofts' Rick Schaut over Mac Office comes up on the first page. Welp, it's nice to be at the forefront of vernacular trendsetting I suppose...
- Apparently, now when you search for "richard gere" and "hamsters" drunken batman shows up on the first page. I wish I was kidding. That's just lovely, thanks google.
- Apparently, when you search for "ass movie", or "ass+movie" or even weirder derivatives, drunkenblog was coming up on the second page of links due to this post. That's just beautiful. When I checked it today, it was only coming up on the 5th page... thanks, google, you've put me in some lovely company there.
I'm 99% sure most of the weird emails are coming from the last two, which is well, odder than I'm able to comprehend past midnight. The 1% of doubt is just there because I went a little slash & burn on some of the weird comments & emails I was getting... there were a lot for awhile. It's kinda like that old joke where you give the thumbs up to a show on your tivo, and it gets a really warped sense of the programming it thinks you'd enjoy.
Interestingly enough while looking at the logs I saw a lot of people coming in by searching for "osx" and "terminal", so a quick check shows this site comes up towards the top of the first page, but doesn't show up at all when searching for "os x" and "terminal". Well ok, it's not that interesting except as an example of just how wildly your searches can vary with one space missing.... and, well, that I seriously need to do the ones for MacOS 10.3, as, well, we're not that far from MacOS 10.4...
The rest of the people seemed to be annoyed about getting to my site from yahoo while searching on a virus they've become infected with, and being annoyed that I hadn't linked to something to disinfect them when I have in the past. Sorry peeps, I don't use windows as my primary platform, so it's just not a focus.
So since it's Monday, it was time to check in on how ClamAV was doing on catching these little buggers... plus it was an opportunity to clean up the script I'd used last time so the output was a little friendlier.
It's a fairly basic bash script, taking a list of words and using grep on a directory of files, counting the instances of occurrences and then sorting them from high to low. If someone wants it, lemme know and I'll post it... I felt pretty stupid with it, as I was offline and couldn't for the life of me remember how to get a tab to show up in echo's output.
So, without further ado:
Virus & Worm Count:
+++
948 Worm.SomeFool
518 Worm.SomeFool.Gen-1
253 Worm.SomeFool.P
116 Worm.SomeFool.Gen-2
58 Worm.SomeFool.I
36 Worm.Mydoom.F
18 Worm.Bagle.N
14 JS.Spam.Scramble.A
13 Worm.Gibe.F
9 Worm.Klez.H
8 Worm.Bagle.U
8 Worm.Bagle.Gen-1
5 Worm.SomeFool.O
3 Worm.Bagle.V
1 Worm.Sober.D
1 Worm.Mimail.Q
1 Worm.BugBear.B
+++
In looking at the results from last time, obviously the big loser is Worm.SCO.A, which has pretty much disappeared... with lots of variants taking its place. Worm.SomeFool.P is pretty much the big winner, as it has come on very very strongly over the last few days.
There are lots of things I could write about these variants, but they're really not all that worthy. Nothing really interesting has come about, except some minor variations, with one exception: the idea of encrypting the file and making the user actually enter the password was a pretty slick piece of social engineering.
As an aside, if you are coming here looking to get one of these removed, you're out of luck... others will have to recommend some good sites devoted to manual removal instructions, perhaps in the comments. Or, you could look at using a Mac or Linux. :)
Or, at the very least, start using a non-microsoft mail client such as Eudora or Thunderbird (big fan of thunderbird) and never opening an attachment unless you've expressly asked for it or are expecting it.
So I've been spending some time running batches of spams & hams through spamassassin, and whipped up some decent scripts to automate the whole remote sa-learn/archiving deal. Works like a charm so far.
I have to run spamassassin at a fairly... modest... trigger level, but it still does a decent job. What I've found to be amusing are some of the subjects of the spams that have actually gotten through. If you haven't followed this, most of the anti-spam tools out there are moving to teachable metric system for detecting spam. It has a basic set of weighted rules for trying to guess what is/isn't spam, but it often needs some fine tuning.
IE, you might be getting spam ezines for marketing your website, but someone else might actually be requesting iframe-laden ezines on how to market their website, but a general spam filter just knows what spam might look like, without the conditionals (ie, that it was subscribed to). So you can generally teach these filters by running through incorrectly identified spams (hams) and it looks at various characteristics of the message (headers, to/from, body, etc) and gets a better understanding of the type of mail you actually get.
Spam has gotten so bad that antispam tools are becoming increasingly commonplace both at the server level and the client. Most email clients either have or are planning on incorporating it. In all honesty though, lots of these never get fine tuned, and even then they're fallible... they just aren't very fallible as they've been building up their metrics for a long time.
So what's an enterprising spammer to do? Create a program to generate extremely weird subjects, often at random, often with odd characters... anything to throw off the spam filters metrics. They basically just sit there and run a million different variations of a message through the spam filters until they see what gets through on a default install. If something gets through... you've got yourself a golden message that has much better chance of getting through the filters. I know this is the idea, although I haven't really looked into what tools they're using to do it. I'd actually wonder if they couldn't use a form of evolutionary algorithm...
...but anyways. The really odd combinations of words that get produced can really help when you are having to visually fish out the spams that have gotten past the future. After seeing enough of them, your eyes start to kinda glaze over. It can be a real chore. So when some enjoyment does present itself, I'm all over it... in this case, I just started saving some of the really odd subject lines I've gotten through these before they get passed into the filter.
Before I'd save it, it had to pass two criteria: it had to amuse me, it had to get past spamassassin. There were some with some amusing message bodies, but those didn't count.
So far:
- optimum purine average
- cannot musicology dean bladder scramble
- oscilloscope dub apprehensive mend
- backwater avis quicklime
- bimodal chordate concave
- sacred pensacola dictatorial
- epithet cock
- cranberry complaisant
- carbuncle cession blackbird edgy domino
- ruminant administrate
- added crone churchgoer incur
- For women only newscast illogic dapple
- antarctica farewell banana
- societal bequeath ernest spectrum
- curd alexandra
- No, I am real confused.*
- caryatid diaper amply dragging
- mould dramaturgy plea quotient postmaster
- chive balloon hacksaw
- cucumber cavil bernardino
- angola have bucket
- bauhaus bivalve gates
- kava precipitable breakfast scabious
- Only DeerAntler+ Can Give Men Multiple 0rgasms! . . . . seizing**
- Deer Antler Plus:Multiple 0rgasms, Longer Harder Erect-ions! . .tutored**
*my favorite!
**tied for second place
I've been trying to pin down exactly what bothers me so much about how when I'm living off of my todo list. Lots of people live that way, their palm is their oracle. I just generally don't. I'm an obsessive note taker, but often never refer to them... for the most part writing/typing the things down in some form helps to store them in my brain better. Go figure.
Either way, it's kinda been bugging me... and after some thought I've come up with the percolation aspect. Prolly because I've been staring at many a pot of coffee lately. One's going right now, actually (we're not going to get started on how everyone knows I like coffee, so gets me coffee, but it's always french roast, because well, everyone just seems to get french roast when they aren't sure what to get... but I hate french roast).
When I'm waking up and not exactly sure where I am and what needs to be done and turning to calendar oracle for where I need to focus my brain, I've entered mental whack-a-mole. It means I didn't go to sleep that night mulling over a problem. My brain can't percolate a solution, hence I'm not going to feel completely comfortable with anything I produce.
Most of the time I'd do the same thing after a snap judgment as compared to letting the problem have it's percolation period in the back of the brain. But there's always those times you remember, where you've gotten a bit down a certain path (technical, personal, anything) and go "Well, duh" or have some other bit of inspiration and it all falls into place, and you say to yourself "Damn, that would have sucked if I hadn't thought of that".
I hate the idea of going down the wrong mental path by missing a bit of inspiration. I especially hate the idea of the KISS answer staring me in the face once I'm down that road, taunting me. In psychology & decision-making terms, IIRC this would make me a "maximizer" instead of a "good enough". Not that being a "maximizer" doesn't have it's benefits, but I highly doubt a "good enough" type would be wasting their time writing out something like this.
It really does get to me though, but perhaps it shouldn't. Just not having that percolation time. It's like having some really important files on your drive that you haven't backed up and you know you need to even if the odds of something striking your laptop dead in between now and the next few days when you'll be running a full backup... or you're typing your commands on a 'live' file.
Mmmm. Coffee's done.
It's always fun to log into your IM and get 100 "Hey! Where you been?" messages right off the bat. There are times when I really, really wish AIM had an invisible mode. I honestly don't know why they don't, considering well, ICQ has one. And Yahoo has one. And MSN has one... I got curious enough that I did a quick google, but just came up with really odd stuff.
I'm starting to get worried about the net culture... if you aren't on IM, you're off the planet. If you haven't been on IM in awhile, chances are you're dead. If it's been a decently long while, chances are you've been buried and its an utter shock if you pop online during diurnal or crepuscular hours... there's still email, people. Even when bouncing from hotspot to hotspot I have the train time to kill.
Things have just been kicking my ass. I've had a really large load going on... work & personal. Really haven't known whether I'm coming or going again over the last few weeks. Wish I was kidding. I really hate having to get up, see what day it is, and see what my calendar is telling me to do. I should just know, damnit. Pretty sure sign I'm overloaded.
But I'm determined to make them ease up, and impose some more sane structure. This whack-a-mole thing isn't doing it for me. I'm great at giving myself a few specific focuses at a time, and multi-tasking within those. When it goes beyond that, exception errors abound.
But you can prolly expect a flurry soon. Like I said, I have some train time to kill.
It's 4am on friday, which means there are only 20 more hours to get through and this awful, awful few weeks will be over. I feel like I'm going to be sleeping for a week. There's the old conversation about what superpower you would choose, if, well, you could have superpowers.
Some want to fly, some want to turn invisible... I've decided I want the ability to close my eyes and wink someone out of existence i-dream-of-genie-style. Not just pluck them out of existence, but pull their entire history of existence out of the temporal food chain.
Nada. Nothing. Gone.
Apple's discussion boards are down again, and I really need to look something up. Unamused. It's amazing how you stop keeping information when you just assume it will be available when you need it.
I came across this article the other day and it's kinda been gnawing at me. The actual article is about Sun adopting and really pushing RSS, but that wasn't what really tickled my brain. Moreso was the "How do you invest in RSS?" question.
Excerpt:
Schwartz: I definitely think it will. Rich Green (Vice President of Sun Developer Tools and Java Software) really gets developers, and his point is: You have to understand. Developers don't buy things, they join things. That's the epitome of our developer strategy. Give them a community to join.
The bottom line seems to be that Sun (like many others) is realizing just how big RSS is becoming, and is shooting to be the first to really push it through its Java Desktop linux distro. Unfortunately, like most people, Sun has no idea exactly how to really capitalize on RSS, they just know its spreading like crazy.
They're not the only ones... Apple has started to tiptoe into it, offering RSS feeds for its knowledge base, support & news articles. But again, it's a very measured and obvious step, nothing huge. RSS is just at a very nascent stage, where everyone can see there is some large potential but no one really knows where/how. At least not that I've heard...
There's a decent 2-page interview with the guy behind DragonFlyBSD (Matthew Dillon) over at OSNews. DragonFly is something I've been trying to keep an eye on for awhile, and seems to hold a lot of promise.
If you haven't followed, the BSDs (freeBSD, netBSD, and kinda/sorta Apples' Darwin) have had serious scalability and threading issues for a long while and a lot of effort lately has been going into fixing it (The same has gone on in Linux, but earlier). IE, traditionally the BSDs haven't been very efficient with heavily threaded code and weren't the best at scaling with dual-CPU systems, let alone quad+.
The direction freeBSD went in v5 didn't jive well with Dillon, so he forked the code at v4.x and is trying to go in a very different direction. freeBSD 5 is using a hardcore fine-grained mutex model, which adds a lot of complexity and can be difficult to keep sane... so theoretically, the DragonFly implementation should be much cleaner (IE, easier to debug & build upon). Theoretically. I think.
It's a little confusing, as it doesn't seem to necessarily deal with userland threads... A lot of the sweetness of the deal seems to be a way of lessening the impact of CPU-hopping. I'm pretty sure most systems have a form of CPU-affinity: if possible, the OS tries to keep a thread on the same processor, and doesn't bounce it between them. At the same time, it's trying to keep the load spread out evenly over the CPUs, so threads can get bounced between them.
IE, there is a thread that is playing the MP3s that you are listening to. Because it is a preemptive-multitasking OS, at the end of that threads time slice the OS pulls it off the CPU, and gives another thread some time to run. Then when it goes to give your MP3 thread more time on the CPU, if you have a dual-CPU system it has to decide which one to throw it onto... ideally, it gets thrown onto the CPU it was just on, and ideally that CPU still has some of what it needs to work with in its cache. If it got thrown onto the 2nd CPU, whatever data held in the 1st CPUs' cache is worthless and you have just potentially lost some performance.
DragonFly is supposed to be much better at this, as well as some other nifty things like working on a heavily threaded network stack which then gets replicated across the CPUs and never get bounced, etc. There's also some cool stuff at the filesystem level that should make package management a lot easier and avoid versioning problems (variant symlinks). Theoretically. I think.
There's a really nifty page over at the University of Utah, about how they're using Apple's Xgrid technology to distribute their POV-ray rendering load out over labs of macs. Normally I wouldn't really care, as well, Xgrid is cool but is sort of tweener technology at the moment.
But along with the eye candy they have a really slick writeup on setting it up and their experiences with it. Worth a look, even if you're just interested in some of the pros and cons of this kind of technology.
I need to spend some time looking into ClamAV logging. Right now I have it set to just forward a report an account when something is caught, which is fine, but hard to keep an eye on just what the exact numbers.
Right now I'm using a sort of hackneyed bash script I whipped up that gives me a report like so for the week so I can see what's going on:
Virus & Worm Count:
+++
1 Trojan.Dropper.C
9 W32.Magistr.A
1 Worm.Bagle.E
3 Worm.Bagle.F-zippwd-3
11 Worm.Bagle.Gen-1
1 Worm.Bagle.J
1 Worm.BugBear.B
2 Worm.Cjdra.A
4 Worm.Cidra.D
8 Worm.Gibe.F
4 Worm.Klez.H
1 Worm.Mimail.J
727 Worm.SCO.A
4 Worm.Sober.D
552 Worm.SomeFool
53 Worm.SomeFool.B
48 Worm.SomeFool.B-petite
15 Worm.SomeFool.I
28 Worm.SomeFool.D
331 Worm.SomeFool.Gen-1
102 Worm.SomeFool.Gen-2
+++
Yeah, I know, I need to cleanup the output a little but it works for now. The problem is that it's only reasonably efficient, and most of the efficiency is due to it only taking me a few minutes. It's basically just sucking in a list of virus signatures and using grep to comb the files and output a number. But I'm going to have to keep updating that list as new viruses come out, which would be a drag, so I'm going to have to spend some time seeing if ClamAV offers anything, or if a 3rd party tool exists.
And yeah, that's about what I've gotten this week. I can't quite believe the original SCO.A is still out there as much as it is.
I got most of my comp problems figured out (no, it wasn't bad RAM) by wiping every single disk. OSX voodoo. Overall, big Yay.
One of the big problems I was having with lockups during file transfers ended up being traced to some files with foreign unicode characters in them. I know they're valid characters, they would display just fine... but displaying was slow as hell, and it'd bomb the finder when copying, and then the whole machine. cp could handle it, if escaped. Why a unicode file character can take down a whole machine during a copy is beyond me.
The other was my mouse- it wasn't registering clicks correctly. I tried everything, but it seemed to come down to it registering a double-click way too fast. You'd click a url, and end up with 3 letters of it selected. The fix? Rip out MS's Intellimouse 5.0 drivers. With those gone, it works perfectly and I'm not registering double clicks half the time.
It also means most of the buttons on it are worthless, so I'm going to have to try USB Overdrive. In talking with someone I know at MS, it came out that they basically just license USB Overdrive for OSX, rip out a bunch of functionality and throw their own brand on it... they just don't update it.
Moral of the story? The mouse thing was just an annoyance, I just didn't uninstall MS's mouse drivers because I'm fairly addicted to some of the buttons in various apps. But OSX is supposed to be a kick-ass unicode beast, and more stable than jesus walking on the water, but a stupid thing like a unicode file name can send it into a tailspin. I really, really detest the OSX finder. Apple just has got to do better, I shouldn't be wishing I was using gnome or konquerer when I'm using OSX.
I have had my serious tiffs with some Microsoft employees, especially over a specific Mail & Calender app they put out for OSX and it's downright scary database problems, and a particular product manager of an OSX client I won't mention *cough* Entourage *cough* who didn't even understand how the current vulnerabilities in Outlook were being exploited (convo can be found via a determined google). I'm no MS fanboy...
Ah, but I said there was embarrassing stuff... Essentially, Rick Schaut has a blog where he talks about various things he's involved with, like the MacBU, MS Word for the mac, etc. Pierre Igot also has a blog, and did a little rant on what he thinks MS should be doing. Um, essentially condemning them to the fires of hell and uncoolness for not using Apple's global spell checker and Address Book.
I'm all for rants, I partake in them at least daily. But this one was just stupid to start- it's obvious to anyone that it would be a decent chunk of work to just 'adopt' Apple's tech in this case. Which is fine, and really only two things went through my mind while reading his entry:
- This guy has never worked on a project of sizable scope successfully
- This guy doesn't seem to be in a field of work that has milestones, deadlines, and finite resources
- This guy really doesn't understand usability, but loves throwing around the buzzword, because honestly most people know that usability is very much like porn to most: hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it. So it's an easy word to regurgitate when you're reasonably sure the person you're throwing your puke at will be insecure enough about the ability recognize puke that they won't call your bluff
No worries. Normally one would just think the above, do the whole 'to each their own" mantra and move on. And that's that. But neu, it's just starting to get entertaining.
As it turns out, Mr. Schaut called his bluff. And then Pierre Igot begins to systematically turn himself into one of the biggest ass-hats in the entire OSX community, which is saying quite a bit when you consider the amount of asshats one encounters on a daily basis on various mac lists...
The "Moses down from the mountain with playdo tablets" types. Throw a tiny bit of water on their knowledge written in stone and they're screwed. And Mr. Schaut apparently brought buckets whereas Ingot brought a thimble. Oh, I'm sure Mr Ingot is chatting with his zealot pals and they're slapping each other on the back at a job well done. But handicapped kids do the same thing after winning the gold at the special olympics- they don't really know any better. But it's always entertaining watching the zealots hump one anothers legs in spasms of righteous one-button back-slapping...
Bygones. At this point Pierre Ingot is just one of the pack of the zealot asshats slithering around the mac world... not even a front runner. He'd just posted silly and ignorant things so far, no real personal attacks against the guy... although a slight insinuation was made. But neu, there are some people who are natural overachievers when it comes to being asshats, and Pierre Ingot really comes into his own as the comment thread keeps going. And going. And going.
And more zealots pop up. As Pooka would say, "Bitches, bitches, everywhere, and not a one to slap". Congratulations, Pierre Ingot- you've graduated from asshat, shot past arrogant dilettante asshat, and moved hardcore into whiny-asshat-elitist-bitch territory.
So, just to recap, in case you haven't been clicking above, here are the relevant links, in order:
Egh, I feel like I have to buy a copy of crappy MS Office 2004 just to help counterbalance some of the asshat karma.
If you use movabletype, sometime log into the web interface of your blog and check out the activity log. Besides just telling you when you've updated and such, it also shows you what people have searched for on your blog.
I'd never really noticed it before, so I spent some time scrolling through them. Here's a sampling from mine:
Alright people, you're wigging me out.
Speaking of kinda wiggy, I had the picture to the right forwarded to me today. I have no clue where it comes from, possibly some movie or reenactment... but it cracks me up.
I really wish I had a higher-res version I could use as a desktop. If you come across it, please lemme know.
I got turned onto a new project called Cooperative Linux, which allows you to run a linux environment on a windows machine as another application... point and click. Currently only runs Knoppix from what I can see, but still, what a great idea.
Cringleys newest column is good again, which seems to boil down to hedging your bets, and not sitting on your stash/skills/capital for want of fear. Lots of food for thought just for daily life. He seemed to be really misfiring there for awhile, so hopefully he'll continue putting out interesting stuff.
All back and settled in from the road trip. Still recovering a tad, as the trip back was a little crazy. We were supposed to leave at 8a-9am, depending on when we actually got up, but didn't leave until late afternoon which was pretty much my fault as some work stuff came up... which meant we didn't get back until the wee hours of the morning. Very wee hours. We went up through Michigan, through Sarnia... you can see a shot of the bridge through the windshield to the right.
"Road trip" and my name aren't something you generally hear mentioned in the same breath. I don't like cars. I don't enjoy being around them, I most certainly don't enjoy riding in them, especially at high speeds. I've made some decent progress with them. My nails aren't ruining whoever is unlucky enough to have me in their car with them, but I just can't relax. The whole thing just isn't my cup of tea, and I try to avoid being in places where they're necessary.
So, road trips just aren't things I do. Jaunts are doable. I used to love quick trips out to red rock at dusk when I was living in vegas. But nothing time-intensive. The longest car ride I've been in over the last 10 years has prolly been 4 hours, and that was a must-do thing for a wedding of a friend where it wouldn't have been a cool thing to miss, for a lot of reasons.
So, why on earth would I end up going to Toronto of all places via a car? One part is I had to go for work anyways. The other part was that I sort of lost a bet and her winnings were due. Unamused, but a bet's a bet.
Work aspect:
I'm still not sure how this went. Everything went well, but was a bit odd. I'm going to have to think about the oddness, as I think I may be reaching a professional crossroads with this teaching thing. Anyways, the first two days were the things I do day in, day out. My pal wasn't happy about me not getting back to the hote until 9pm and having a late dinner, but every day after that was much less time intensive (giving classes) and I was free from 5:30pm on, and one of the days was completely free. Since my pal had a big paper to work on, this worked out pretty well.
Most of the grunge that was going on with these guys has worked itself out, there's a new project manager in play which is going to do wonders. So far, she seems to be a huge step up. Her first week is pretty much going to be nothing but damage control, so its too early to tell, but the fact that she realized she needed to do some serious damage control is a big step in the right direction.
It was actually fun to see those developers again face to face. I think their morale had taken some seriously hard hits: in addition to the project manager being moved out, the two teams were restructured in big ways. The indians just crack me the hell up. They again brought me the slag they consider to be coffee, which I assume means they either think I'm "one of them" enough to offer, or are playing a cruel joke. This time, when "Yes, like Turkish" was brought up, I had to do a google:
Turkey - A Turkish proverb calls coffee "Black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love." Turkish coffee is very finely ground (finer than espresso) and is brewed in little pots called ibriks or cezves. Turkish coffee is often spiced with cardamom, chicory or coriander.
I'm reasonably assured now that they don't completely hate me and aren't just giving me the 8 day old grounds left in the filter.
Other aspects:
Toronto is one cool as hell town. I just really dig that city... the people, mix of cultures, its vibe. Montreal is beautiful, but les francais asshats make you want to look at pictures of it but not actually go there. Toronto is much more of a Chicago-style city, or "very, very big town". I grouse about having to come here so much lately, but that doesn't really have anything to do with the city, just the feeling that I'm always going somewhere when a lot times I'm not sure its necessary.
It's also a lot more fun when you're there for more than 2-3 days max and not having to back to the hotel in the evening after dinner and then get more work done. If you ever have a chance to go, do so. The exchange rate really sucks right now, but even with the big jump you're talking 25%+ more bang for your buck.
Road trip aspect:
What can I say? Kinda surreal. It took a hair over 14 hours to get from Chicago to downtown Toronto, which is, well, insane. Mapquest said it should have taken 8, but due to a whole lot of factors that just wasn't realistic. :) I saw lots of cows and pastures, something I'm not used to seeing. Some of the small towns where we stopped to get gas were a little scary. Some odd looks. I saw one of the worst bathrooms I've ever seen in a little gas station.
I can't believe how much crap you consume on a trip like this. Lots of snackie treats. The weather was sunny, but I think it would have been a lot more fun if it had been warmer and you could have cracked the windows and stuff. It's also kind of fun to spend that much time with a person alone, it gets "comfortable" even after you run out of stuff to talk about. I learned I'm a decent road trip partner, in that I don't just conk out and sleep half the trip, but she was prolly just being polite.
I was also conscious of just how much time you waste now at airports. I'm not a big fan of having to deal with airport security. Having to get your boarding pass, horrific security... I took off my shoes for part of the trip, but it was voluntary and not because I was passing through a metal detector.
Going through customs was a bit of a trip on the way there, I guess we were kind of shady looking, so we got pulled over and had drug sniffing dogs going all over the place. I was glad we didn't take any drugs, and it turns out its not something mounties really want to talk about (I was bored, we were standing outside while dogs ran through the car, so I figured why not make conversation), so I didn't learn if drug-sniffing dogs are more sensitive to different kinds: IE, are they less sensitive to shrooms.
For some reason Hydra SubEthaEdit is just not playing nice. Machine goes to sleep, SubEthaEdit is gonna be crashed when I get back. And now I'm uploading files, and they're not running correctly because of ?????'s being thrown in the files. I just spent 20 minutes double checking encodings and crap, and no, somehow they got introduced into the files instead of tabs in some places. Wtf. These files have never been touched outside of this editor, except for pico -w, and that doesn't count. :)
I'm using 1.1.4, and it's at 1.1.5... and one of the fixes is supposed to involve the crashing... but when its 6am and I'm trying to wind up a deadline before I crash the last thing I want to do is be installing new software. Egh. On the bright side, I saw they have an rss feed for their news & update page (yay!), so all is forgiven.
And yes, I'm back from Toronto. I've just been perpetually annoyed since. What was done to the bathroom and (possibly worse) my coffee supply in my absence is nearly unthinkable.
...because I'm still really, really pissed. I'm just not sure at who or what yet, and it's all such a blur of wasted time & productivity.
I've been trying in vain to get Evolution working on OSX on top of gnome using Apple's X11, using fink, for more than a week and I'm better now about learning when a side project has taken on a life of its own and its time to throw in the towel.
It started because I've become somewhat enamored of Ximian's Evolution on my linux boxes. Bigtime. What is Evolution? It's an integrated mail/calendar/notes client, compatible with Microsofts Exchange Server if you buy the connector. If you're using OSX, think Entourage but without any of the stability, speed, or database corruption problems. If you're using windows, think Outlook but without any of the virus/worm/exploit problems.
It's not perfect, but any squibbles I have with it would be in small areas. Nothing major, and most of those would be tied to the platform evolution runs on more than anything. The interface is standard enough that just about anyone can jump into using it without any hassles. I gotta give it mad props, and have found myself using it more and more. And even, dare I say it, slipping into trusting-it-to-work-without-thinking-about-it-mode.
Enter MacOS 10.3. In contrast to Evolution, Apple really has four base offerings:
- Apples Mail + iCal
I'm not a big fan of Apples mail client. Some are. I just had too many problems with it to slip into trust-it mode, although 10.3 is a lot better in regards to things like attachments and not being able to tell it to insert my damn cursor after the text I quote, not above it. But for a lot of users, 10.3 Mail is just fine and even good. But iCal? iCal is a blight on Apples software offerings. It's just really, really bad. Double-whammy bad, in that both the UI & the performance just suck. I can't help but imagine the project meeting: "We sorta gotta have something in this space, but we don't want to devote more than one developer more than 1 month out of the year, and we don't really have developers who use calendaring apps so you, yes you, lowly coding applescript intern, are being asked to throw together a calendar package after you spend a month learning to write cocoa apps." It's that poorly implemented. Not to bash the original coder or team, as apps this incomplete generally don't get released if the programmer has anything to say about it. - Microsofts Entourage
I actually own this one, as I own Office X, and I don't use Entourage. Trust me, considering that I paid $500 for the office suite, I'd like to if for no other reason than to maximize my investment... but it's out of the running. Which is sad, because it has the best interface & functionality out of all of them. Performance is lackluster to say the least, but that can be dealt with. The killer is their decrepit database format which is prone to corruption. Its not uncommon to want/need to be able to store all your mail/notes/calendar in a single database. Its possible to not do that and have the same functionality via different ways, but the single database can be forgiven. What can't be forgiven is that the database is extremely prone to corruption. Extremely prone to corruption. MS reps (or MVPs) on lists think its normal to have to rebuild your database every week or risk losing everything. Uncool. - 3rd party mail app + iCal
I happen to use Gyazmail (for now, although I'm getting worried about it, but I have decent chunks of time invested) for my mail on OSX, so no worries there. Others could use Eudora, etc. But again, iCal is just a POS and doesn't deserve to be used as it just encourages Apple to think they can release anything and get away with it. - 3rd party mail app + Now Up-To-Date & Contact
I just could never get into Now Up-To-Date. I didn't mind it too much under OS9, but they don't seem to have made the transition to OSX very well. I had real stability problems when I was checking it out, and the interface is extremely long in the tooth. And at $129, the damn thing better give me a bath while its telling me about my schedule. It doesn't give baths. I called and made sure.
I actually gave up on all of those, and all the staggeringly bad shareware that might fill the pinch (question: wtf about making a to-do-list or calendaring app makes it so difficult for mac shareware authors?) and am using a browser-based solution: phpgroupware. It's the best I can do for right now, even though its not really what I was looking for. It does the job, and its not too much of an ordeal to have mysql & a browser running.
So, at any rate, since my calendaring solution is a bit of a hack, I figured it wouldn't be too bad if I was forced to use X11 in order to use Evolution under OSX. Or at least I got antsy to see if it would feel doable, and considering I had fink and everything I thought that would be needed, figured I'd give it a shot. I failed, miserably, and was really looking forward to at least being able to say I had Evolution running on Darwin.
It started out alright. I'm running fink 6.2 & a fairly fresh 10.3 install. Fink is working well, I use it for pulling in some *nix games I'm partial to (you can see one of them by clicking the image at top right), as well as mysql, lynx, gnome, mozilla & some other stuff.
And just as a quick primer to anyone who cares, fink is a debian-style tool for installing/compiling *nix tools and their dependancies. If there is a binary package available of what you're after it'll download it & install it. If there's only source, it will look at what the application depends on for operation and download and compile that also. It runs in a cli terminal, but there is an add-on GUI-based controller for it.
The alternative would be trying to compile some software, and getting an error that it needs your system to also have some library. So you go get that and try to install it, and then find out it also is dependent on something else. *wash, rinse, repeat* In short, fink is hardcore-cool for this sorta thing. So I browsed fink for an Evolution package, no dice, but the source was listed as available in the unstable tree when I browsed their site. Woo hoo!
I'd only pulled one thing from fink unstable before (hfstar) and that went well, as it's generally just called unstable because the packages haven't been tested as rigorously as the stable branch... but by and large its not that big of a deal. You can pull stuff manually in from unstable, change some headers, compile them yourself, put them where they need to go, & you're good to go. It can be a bit of a drag tho for larger projects: pulling in the source via cvs, moving files around, remembering what you did for next time, etc.
Conundrum. Evolution only has source in the unstable tree, and I wasn't really looking forward to dealing with pulling in the source via CVS & such, and the unstable tree had the added appeal of being able to do a simple:
$ sudo fink update-all
...to bring everything up to date via rsync, including things like hfstar which I'd had to install manually. Butter. Add a couple of lines to fink.conf to tell it to check the unstable main & unstable crypto trees, tell it to update its listings, and I should be gold. I go for it:
$ sudo fink selfupdate
Holy hell, I should have paid attention to whatever it asked. I thought I had told it to just download the listings for the unstable trees after editing the fink.conf file to tell it where else to look. Do to the hours & hours it spent downloading, I was actually worried I'd told it to download the entire unstable tree and start building or something. After a double check, things were fine, it was just gonna take a lot longer than I expected.
Come back, and everything seems to be gold. Do check, and sure enough, hfstar is showing up as available in the experimental tree, so I decided that was a good test case. Installed fine. Butter. Time to get a bit more adventurous. I saw that there was an updated gnome in the experimental tree. I saw that there was a KDE binary, and I've never had that running on OSX. Tempting, but no, gnome is a known variable right now and plus I'd like to check out gnome-office. So what the hell, if things go really bad I can always remove it and just do a:
$ sudo fink apt-get install bundle-gnome
...or use apt-get & I'll be right back to where I was. Since I was using binaries the first time around, I had a very skewed impression of how long this was going to take. I've built gnome on an x86 box before, and I know it didn't take this damn long. I can't imagine how long it would have taken using gcc 2.95, considering Apple made some big progress on compile times in the more recent version. Kudos for that, Apple. But keep them coming. A lot of them. This just took way longer than it should have.
But wait! Problem. I get the error message to the right, warning me that I have an existing X11 installation, that I should remove it, or install one of the options in fink. Not good, considering I've never installed one and just been using Apples X11, and I thought fink 6.2 was supposed to auto-detect it. I was pretty sure #3 was safe, and would just make a pointer to Apples install, but it wasn't sitting right. I don't like making decisions without information. So I canceled out, and turned to google.
It turns out you get that message if you didn't install the X11 SDK on the developer CD. I was positive I had. More googling. Turns out, the installer can bork and doesn't put things where it should be, and sometimes needs multiple installs. I had a direction, at least.
Reinstalled the X11 SDK. Tried to build, which went a lot faster, as it didn't just restart the process, just checked its progress and tried again. Yay for that, but no luck. Reinstalled X11 SDK for a 3rd time, on a lark, even though I really didn't think it'd do it, but sure enough it starts chugging along. I then get asked a question I'm not of the answer to: what uri-pm do I want to use? Egh. A google shows I want ur-pm581 for panther. No sweat.
It worked! At this point I was sorta kicking myself for not comparing the before & after /usr/X11R6/ directories to see what had magically changed to cause fink to recognize it, but my mind just wasn't there, as I had other things going on and you kinda lose the details when jumping between mental thoughts, especially when a box is just doing a damn install. Changed my .xinitrc file to reflect the some of the new stuff in gnome, and sure enough its up and running. Lots faster, prettier fontage... butter. I'm feeling better. Accomplished, even.
My eye turns back to KDE (it's a cool desktop) but no, must remain focused. Metacity goes in smooth. The euphoria of the last two experiences is already blotting out just how annoyed I was getting earlier. I'm figuring Evolution is next up, and shouldn't be too hard, right? Do the command, jelly through the install questions... all pretty standard, wanting to know whether or not to use crypto vs plain packages, etc. Except for one of the last ones, asking about python.
That one through me, and I was back to google time, except I didn't have a net connection and wouldn't' for awhile. So it all goes to the back-burner. I'm unamused. But really, I suppose I could have searched for everything related to installing Evolution on MacOS Punter before I got started... bygones. So I just suspended the session and put things on hold until I could get online to check it out, which was a good day.
Day and some extra later, I find my answer about the python question, and everything is going good, if hazy. Might as well just set it running while I'm asleep, and check it out the next day, so I give it the go-ahead, set the terminal to unlimited buffer so I can see what's gone on, and join the bed. The next morning, I come in to see parts of this:
And yes, check out the scroll bar on the right. Craziness. It showed me the dependancies, which I should have paid much, much, much better attention to. They are large. Mozilla? What the hell? Mozilla is a huge compile by itself, let alone everything else it needs. I already have Mozilla in my /sw tree, and yes I saw that it needed Mozilla, but assumed it would reference my install. Stupid assumption, but it was really late.
I had to suspend and resume this (control-z + fg, I love you) prolly 8 times over the course of the next two days, because I had other things I needed to use my computer for, and it would be a little odd to explain that I was building some software in the background while I was giving a power point presentation.
Still, its just a huge compile, so not much you can do except wish there had been a binary and wish that gcc was faster for PPC. So, a few days after I started I woke up in the morning to find another error.
Sigh. It's a "librep"dependancy error. Never seen that one before, so I note it, and head back to google a few hours later when I had the time. Sao's excellent fink faqs helped me find the answer to this one. It said it was due to me installing Open Office, which could have some truth to it although I never remember doing such. The fix worked, tho, so I restart the build.
Again, still taking forever and a day. At this point I'm starting to wish I'd figured out a way to do it through Apple's Xcode, so I could distribute the build among my machines. Or just done it on a machine 5 times as fast, except they don't make a laptop 5 times faster. :( So I'm just gonna have to deal.
Finally, a day later and after leaving it to do its thing while I was sleeping, I wake up to this:
Failed: Problem resolving dependencies. Check for circular dependencies.
Seriously unamused by this point. I know what a circular dependancy is, but not a clue in hell as to how I'm going to set about trying to resolve it. A google shows that it may be a bug in fink, which can be worked around by building everything manually, in order.
No chance in hell am I going there. I know when I've reached the edge of the cliff on my skillset, and am starting to dangle over the edge. I do know its possible, it unfortunately just doesn't seem possible for me. I hate that. And unfortunately, 90% of the stuff above is prolly out of order due to the haze of the last week, and the fact that I wrote it all down in a rant after the fact.
Moral of the story?
There is no damn moral to the story. I'm just annoyed. And, as it stands, have no Evolution on OSX. I give up for now.
*sigh* I'm so far behind in my emails. Heading back tomorrow from Toronto. Toronto is such a damn cool city. I'd seriously consider moving here if it wasn't, well, you know, in Canada.
Lets say someone happened to be checking out /etc/pam.d/sudo in MacOS 10.3 in order to play around with the security server a little, and the file looked like this:
# login: auth account password session
auth sufficient pam_securityserver.so
auth sufficient pam_unix.so
auth required pam_deny.so
account required pam_permit.so
password required pam_deny.so
session required pam_permit.so
Lets then say that in their haste, instead of doing this:
# login: auth account password session
## 03.03.2004 check ss for speed
auth sufficient pam_securityserver.so
auth sufficient pam_unix.so
auth required pam_deny.so
account required pam_permit.so
password required pam_deny.so
session required pam_permit.so
They did this:
# login: auth account password session
## 03.03.2004 check ss for speed auth sufficient pam_securityserver.so
auth sufficient pam_unix.so
auth required pam_deny.so
account required pam_permit.so
password required pam_deny.so
session required pam_permit.so
If such a situation were to arise, like say, oh, say, last night, and the user found himself unable to use sudo, he would be grateful that in this case Apple has made it very easy to start an OSX machine as root, mount the main disk as read/write, and then uncomment that line.
Don't microwave newer money. Due to the new tags in the 20's, it isn't going to go well. I got a kick out of hearing how they set off theft detectors at various stores, which isn't far fetched but I really didn't think many places were using RFID for products yet... thought this was all in the trial stages.
More disturbing is the idea of tracking cash purchases. This wouldn't have the best accuracy for people at the moment, but drawing lines between people wouldn't be that hard via software, and tracking the cash itself wouldn't be that hard... tracking it between people would be harder, but doable, you'd just have to use interviewing when it was worth it to you.
IE, person A is issued a $20 bill from bank of america with RFID serial #1024768. That person pays for their gas and a candy bar the next week in a different state. If you want to know if it was that person and the money hadn't changed hands- check the surveillance tapes of the gas station to see how made the purchase as that exact moment.
Or, say the money was used in conjunction with a crime. Start tracking back every single place it was used throughout its issued life, looking for patterns in locale and holding (ie, how long someone held onto it before they used it, if it just "appeared" or if it had been issued via an establishment, like say change at a gas station). Start back tracking until you get a knock on your door saying "We need to know every place & person you have had fiscal dealings with over the last 20 days because bills you had in your possession were either traced to a criminal or received from a criminal or terrorist. If you can't account for your dealings, you'll be accused of obstructing an investigation, etc, etc".
The idea of having to know what I'd spent, when, from whom, etc would be a nightmare to most people, so they'd prolly be for any sort of way to take that responsibility off of themselves, which could lead to more insidious things: passive RFID monitoring devices picking up RFID tags everywhere. Want to know what someone was up to? Track their money, looking for patterns in usage.
More disturbing would be walking down the street with a couple thousand bucks in your wallet of tagged money, and evil doers™ using a small device essentially allowing them to know who has the most cash in their pocket to rob as they go down the street or exit a club. Or bank. Or grocery store. Etc.
Egh, I'm gonna stop now and go find some puppies to play with or something to brighten my world, as I hate sounding like a conspiracy nut. People just shouldn't forward this kinda stuff to me, it wigs me out for days due to my natural paranoia.
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Update
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No offense people, but sending me links like this is not gonna help my paranoia.
I'm enamored. I got pointed to a nifty idea called port knocking several weeks ago and have spent a decent chunk of time going through it. It's a really clever idea, and they seem to have a perl-based prototype up.
Port knocking is slick: a service only accepts requests which have knocked the ports in a predetermined pattern. IE, normally sshd is listening for requests on port 22, but with port knocking it wouldn't even acknowledge its existence to a ping or request unless you had hit port 1048, 1037, 2059, 1950, 4050, 40, 1048, and then port 22 within a specific amount of time.
It's gotten ragged on as a "security through obscurity" feature, but that's missing its intent, which is just another line of defense. All it does is augment existing security measures (passwords, etc) by not even acknowledging a service is even running on that box until you hit the sequence, so port scanning becomes fairly useless, and it puts the hurt on dictionary-style attacks big time.
And its extremely simple & elegant- no hard to understand protocols. One of the more interesting examples I've heard would be for use in NAT'd environments: knock the correct ports, and your traffic gets routed to port 22 on the inside network, etc. Or as another layer of security for IPV6 environments which hopefully will do away with NAT.
