I wasted most of today. Again it was after 5pm when I got out of bed. Bad Alex. Did nothing until 10pm when I went to get pizza and a couple of movies.
(Are any of you starting to see a pattern in my sad, sad life?)
"Ghost Dog" is an interesting movie, but not great. "All assassins live beyond the law. Only one follows the code." Forest Whitaker plays this assassin; a samurai. For the most part the movie is poorly acted, has a strangely fragmented plot with the highlights being some interesting quotes from an old samurai book. The poor acting makes these quotes, and the life Ghost Dog is trying to live, appear terribly akward. If you want a really worthwhile movie about an assassin, go rent "Leon" instead.
The other movie I rented is called "Run Lola Run" which, on account of me being blind, I considered to be English. It is in fact a German movie with English subtitles. Whoever wrote the teaser on the back of the cover did not watch the movie, or has extremely poor command of the English language. The person also does not get out much, as he or she described the movie as "a high-octane thrill ride."
Please.
Another security hole was found in IE/Outlook recently. It allowed for yet another way of executing attachments without prompting the user. With this in mind I see absolutely no reason to use IE or Outlook except on dedicated test networks that have been seperated from live networks with an airgap.
The quality of Microsoft's implementations leave so much to be desired.
With the upcoming release of Windows XP they are trying to force hardware vendors into only supporting Windows. If this is successful, in a few years it will become very difficult to buy computer hardware that does not depend on a software function of Microsoft's products.
The minimum requirements will be 128MB RAM, and chances are it won't run on the machine you have today. With the recent usage of software as part of CPUs, this may evolve into Windows being the only operating system with the correct software that will allow your hardware to operate at all. You will have no choice but to pay Microsoft, if you want to use a computer. The idea of supply and demand will not exist.
Among other changes, Windows XP uses a slightly modified version of the NTFS filesystem which breaks current 3rd party filesystem utilities. Changes must be made in order for progress to occur, but no good reason appear to be behind this change, other than to break current filesystem utilities.
Take the time to learn a system other than Windows, and buy hardware that does not rely on Windows to run.
I hope the Department of Justice picks up on this, and nails Microsoft to the wall. A thrashing must be delivered.
Below you will find a partial list of free operatingsystems available for download via the net, or for a minimal fee on CD ROM. All of the following come with powerful tools such as web servers, development tools, email servers and clients, editors, web browsers and much more than you would otherwise have to pay large amounts of money for, if you used a commercial OS.
I left the most "popular" Linux distribution, Red Hat Linux, out of the above list because lately their practises and quality of code resemble Microsoft a little too much. I recommend against running Red Hat on anything other than test systems.
Those who might think me a fanatic are missing the point. *bzzzt* Sorry, you lose. I would welcome a widely used system, if this widespread usage steems from the product being hard and solid quality, rather than being forced down your throat, with a gun to your head and your dick in a snare.
Thanks for listening.
Went "early" into work; around 9am. Decided to go home early too, but this did not happen. Time flies when you don't know what you're doing. At 9pm, I found myself still in work, so I went with My Boys to a restaurant for dinner, and then for a pint. Caught the last bus home at 11.30pm, and on Manor Street we were greeted by a shower of rocks thrown by some kids. One rock hit the window behind me hard enough to crack it, turning it into crystals. The rock that followed made the window shatter, covering a number of late night bus passengers in glass.
That was the highlight of my day.
As I was riding into work on the bus this morning, I could feel my mood changing, and by the time I got off the bus, I was slightly annoyed for unknown reasons. Over the next couple of hours, my annoyance escalated into borderline rage as I was forced to deal with moronic and badly broken Windows 2000 software, web sites with documentation that I need being down, and more. I do not recall the last time I became this upset. My hands were shaking, and I expect I could have punched the first person who annoyed me in some manner.
I went for an hour long walk, rushing past people and bumping into them as they also hurried along. Having walked around for a while, I started to calm down, and I went to get some food before returning to the office. I struggled with Windows for another while longer, and then gave up.
I had problems sleeping the night before, so I went home before 5pm. What a shitty day. I suspect that when office workers in the US go mad with shotguns in a, possibly random, building, that is the kind of day they must have had.
I was recently referred to as a 'web monkey' when I announced I was fixing someone's HTML. In the circles I move, most types of monkeys are clueless morons who do one task, mainly because they can do nothing else.
I do not really see myself as a clueless spastic.
I advocate correct programming, correct HTML and correct use of language for the exact same reason: if you violate the standards, the result is unpredictable. Poor programming leads to program failures, poor HTML may not generate as expected, and poor use of written or spoken languages leads to misunderstandings.
Awareness and understanding will certainly result in a smaller number of mistakes being made. While mistakes can rarely be eradicated, it is a step in the right direction.
(Due to the nature of today's diary entry, the Gods will prevent me from seeing an obvious grammar or spelling mistake. I am certain of it.)
One of my personality flaws is that I have a terrible time getting out of bed, when I can hear the rain pouring down outside. This is certainly true when I know I have to go out in the rain, once I am out of bed.
Watcom changed their web site, making one of my links to their programming references 404 compliant. l0pht.com is gone, of course, with the merger with @stake, which means that my link to the buffer overflow tutorial had to go.
"They call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday's just as bad."
Happy birthday, Jerry. 22 is a big step.
I crashed Windows 2000 today. It puked completely, showing me a blue screen with a progress indicator that updated while memory was being dumped to disk. So much for progress, Microsoft.
Spent the night awake for a number of reasons, and finally went to bed at 1pm. Woke up just past 5pm, in time for dinner. Lovely. Drank a lot of tea, started reading
I had meant to build release 4.16.1 of Dancer, and also complete my SSH article during the weekend, but this was not to happen. Questions on how to use my RSA key prompted me to create a page that describes the purpose of my SSH RSA and GnuPG public keys.
This gave me an excuse to mention Cygwin, which is an absolute must have application for UNIX type humans running Windows.
It is now 5am Monday morning, and another night has passed with no sleep. This has gone on for so long, it can not be healthy. I really need to get into a routine of spending an hour in Westpoint before going into work every morning. I have been unable to locate a suitable Kung Fu dojo within reasonable distance. My hopes of becoming re-engaged in martial arts are fading.
"I am three and twenty with little knowledge and middling intellect. It is true that in the height of enthusiasm I have been cheated into some fine passages, but that is nothing." -- John Keats
In the movie "Good Will Hunting", Will Hunting comments: "People surround themselves with books, and they are the wrong fucking books. [..] Read what ever blows your hair back."
I watched "Magnolia", and it blew my hair back. My sense of quality is, at best, different from most people. The movie requires patience and an appreciation of the exquisite. If you are not a patient person, do not bother.
If you have a thing for the darker sides of life, I trust you will also find "Permantly Midnight" worth your time. Reality bites.
Truly dedicated fans may remember The Green Period. My pages were green and vibrant. Those days may return. Right now, it is with an old friend, and I am happy with being back to basics.
Heart attack. Uffe updated his diary too. It has been 20 days. He lacks conviction, however. One fears he will lose interest completely. He does not understand the gift of being able to write, even if one can not tell every single detail of events, or have to leave certain work related or personal ones out entirely.
Woke up around 11am, and headed into work. I nuked Windows NT from my test machine (a Dell Optiplex), and installed Windows 2000 Advanced Server instead. As you may know, I do not agree with Microsoft's idea of quality, but W2K actually ran nicely for the few hours I used it. Granted, all I did was to play MP3s, and a quick game of Counter Strike.
I also helped someone wrap their brain around OpenBSD. More and more of #linux.dk are becoming interested in OpenBSD, which is nice.
On a related note to "OpenBSD for the common man", I want to say that doing security for someone else is much harder than doing security for yourself. It is easy to secure your own systems, if you know what you are doing. I could run a machine farm with hundreds of machines in it, and they would never get broken into. Why? Because I would never want to do stupid things that only non-security aware people want.
I have noticed the trend in #linux.dk is that, even with OpenBSD running, they want to run ProFTPd to share DivX movies or other type of warez, and they want to run MySQL and all sorts of fancy PHP based web front-ends.
It comes down to running software that one does not understand, or where no visible signs of security precautions have been taken during development. OpenBSD is secure by default, but as soon as muppets install various types of crap software, that feature goes right out the window.
Oh well. Went to Tim's Big Deal quite late, and made it home for 3am.
Thursday was not a bad day. "All" of SP&D were supposed to go out for dinner, a few pints and then to The Laugh. Because no one responded to the co-ordinator, she cancelled a few hours before. Does that stop CIRT? Hell no. Dave, Dave's girlfriend, Jerry and myself decided to go. We met up in the Porter House, and Dave's girlfriend commented how different I looked from the last time she saw me. I thanked her.
Then we went to Kingsland for a lovely dinner, and simply becase the food was so good, I will make no mention of how we had to ask for certain items a number of times before they were delivered to our table.
We arrived at The Laugh sometime past 10. I was surprised of how many people had show up. Generally, it does not get crowded but it was tonight. Oh well. The show was all right. Justin came down and asked us to fill out the sentences for a game, and I noticed he was very drunk.
I fell asleep on the bus home, and woke up after we had passed my stop. A lovely little walk for me in the cold of the night.
Unstole the sexy menu boxes, and put my own picture back in the gallery where it belongs. Back to basics.
Stayed in work all night. Re-fixed syncronization between two web repositories, after reloading the machine it was being served to the employees via, and some other stuff.
Meant to join Tim et al for lunch in a Japanse place to celebrate his big deal. (turning 30). That didn't happen. When it was brought up that nobody knew how old I am, and that guesses were between 25 and 32 or 40, depending on which music I listened to, Tim commented that I act 25 most of the time. Wasn't that nice of him?
Left work (dead tired) around 4.30pm, made it home for 5.20pm and slept. Woke up at 4am, and will probably go back to sleep again soon.
The world is full of muppets! Absolute fucking muppets. Muppets on the OpenBSD lists ask moronic questions without doing any sort of research on their own. When the occasional spam message gets through, the same muppets reply to the list, quoting the entire message and complain about spam.
MUPPETS!
We are talking the same class of mental capacity as dead cows.
I am reduced to only reading posts with a subject that interests me, and only if I know the poster to be a clueful person. The same goes for the dk.edb.* newsgroups.
Oh, a friend asked nicely that I make reference to MYF. So there.
I had a number of funny things happen to me today. Really. First I got out of bed really late. Then, as I started talking to people, I realised they had all been in work. I love days off. I kept thinking it was Sunday.
I am amazed there has not been even one message saying "dancer is broken!" I made tea and some food, and I managed to provide virtual support for Jerry:
<jerry> Your empathy enriches my being. <alexh> That's the kind of guy I am. <jerry> An empathic enrichment guy? I didn't know there were any left. <alexh> We hide well? <jerry> It's a lost art I guess. * alexh nods.
So, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking "That sex slave business is all in his head." -- Well, think what you like. I know it is real. Really. Stop looking at me like that. Stop it, I said!
I was also reminded that one of my pets, Theo de Raadt, does have a sense of humour:
CVSROOT: /cvs
Module name: src
Changes by: deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org 2001/03/18 16:30:55
Modified files:
usr.bin/ssh : compat.c compat.h sshd.c
Log message:
specifically version match on ssh scanners. do not log scan information
to the console, because clueless users freak out when people do completely
legal probes. instead, generate a detailed log file entry and use british
humour to relax their sphincters a little bit.
Stole sexy looking menu boxes from freebsd.org. Napped from 10am to noon, and again from 3pm to 7pm. Went shopping in between.
In virtual support of a guy I know who's going through some rough time with his girlfriend, I want to highlight the following:
Relationships are hard to maintain. Why are they so hard to maintain? Because at some point, you just stop talking. At some point you have heard every single thing this person has to say, and makes you sick to your stomach. When they open their mouth you want to stab them in the neck with a pencil! -- Chris Rock
(My life seems pathetic to you, hm? Actually, I lead a secret life that includes a wicked slave and sexual freedom, but you'll never know about it.)
Woke up very late, and did absolutely nothing. Started to get tired around midnight, so hoped for a full nights rest. Unable to sleep, I got out of bed in the middle of the night, and built the release tarballs for Dancer 4.16.
The first time you are building a release of a piece of software you did not build from the ground up, try to not do it at 4am. Just a bit of friendly advice.
Things that still frustrate me: ssh connections that are killed due to low timeouts on firewalls. Moronic userinterfaces that are in no way intuitive. Having to work, or fix problems via a slow link.
Holy barrel of monkey spunk! I looked out the window a few minutes ago, to determine from where the sound of a very loud house alarm was coming. It's across the yard. I walk from the window, and back to the couch and sit down. Outside I hear what seems to be a rattling noise. I sit still for a few seconds. It goes away. I hear it again! I backflip over the couch, and rip the curtains aside. Outside everything is covered in large, white hail. The sound I heard was the hail shattering against the ground. Everything went white in less than 90 seconds. I'm in shock. I can't believe it. I have to go lay down with my feet up in the air, before I pass out and hurt myself.
I used to hate Sandra Bullock. Really hate her. Her performance in "The Net" and "Speed" were so sad. So pathetic. (I never actually watched Speed. You may call me omnipotent). However, she has changed. No longer are the movies she takes part in a tribute to her breasts and subzero IQ. The most recent ones have been very different.
I rented "28 Days" tonight. It is quite sobering (no pun intended), and shows her transformation. The same goes for "Practical Magic" which I had the pleasure of watching a while ago. They are both very viewable.
I also rented "Witness Protection." Don't bother.
I have noticed with myself lately that I am changing. I may be getting old. I have become more mild tempered lately. I am still outspoken, but I have noticed that I no longer leap forward to rip the throats of the pityful mortals that cross my path. When I do strike, it is no longer with the same venom. One might say I am more at peace. One might even say that U2 are wrong. I may very well have found what I was looking for.
Of course, this does not mean you should try to cross me, simply to test me. I may just have to make an example of you. *polite smile*
I went through the web server logs for a.area51.dk today. Turns out I get anywhere from 22 to 386 hits per day. I was shocked. I had expected 10 on a mad busy day.
Some of the hits are search engines I never heard of. Some are IP addresses I recognise, and others are strange visitors.
The HTTP protocol support something called referrer tags. These tags tell a web server which page you viewed prior to asking for the one you are asking for. If you are browsing www.clever.com, and click on a link that points to www.cnn.com, the web server running cnn.com will know which page you were just looking at.
This feature has allowed me to present you with the following, honest to god, facts: If you search for one of the following terms on Google, one of the first links presented points to a.area51.dk. The number in brackets indicate the location of the link to my page, on the results page.
I get around, hm? Can you fucking believe it?
Opened my eyes in time to catch my alarm clock switching 8:59 to 9:00am. Can you beat the timing? Rolled out of bed and into work. Pleased to announce that the CVS machine has been configured to the most fanatic security guidelines I can possibly think of.
I commenced work on the user documentation for CVS, but had not finished when 7pm rolled around. Got out of my chair and headed for Porter House. Bumped into Kenneth 20 past. He was also here for Kristin' birthday gig. Nobody else had showed up.
The birthday girl showed up with Per (her boyfriend) at 20 minutes to 8. A sound thrashing was delivered for being late. Chatted about old days. When I failed to recall a person she brought up, Kristin commented to a friend that it takes an effort to make an impression with me. She said something to the effect of "A bulldozer might do it." -- Went to Da Pino for dinner with her and Per. Arrived home at midnight, and retired at 1am.
May meet with Kenneth this weekend for a session, if he remembers to call with details of where the pints will be consumed.
Uffe's diary has been suffering silently since the 4th.
Oops. Suddenly it is morning, and I am still in work. Yet another night spent hacking away at making the world a better place. Ha. Attended a few meetings and managed to not fall asleep.
Recieved email from my brother of all people! He finally has Internet access. Now all that remains is teaching him to phrase a comprehensible sentence in writing (commas, full stops, spelling, etc).
Went home at 9pm and feel asleep just after 11pm.
A very long day in work. Much, much too long.
Just after 4am I heard a blip from one of my other machines. New personal mail. At 4am? Email from my long lost female pal, Kristin. I thought she had moved to Mexico.
I am cordially invited to her birthday celebration on Wednesday in the Porter House. It will be good seeing her again.
I went through a very traumatic experience today. I have decided to share it with you in an attempt of releasing my pain. In addition it is in tune with the "personal" touch that seems to be craved in this journal.
I rose from my bed early. It must have been just after 11am. This in itself is extraordinary. I can not explain it. I lifted my duvet from my resting place and carried it to the living room. Once comfortable on the couch, I settled under my duvet to watch the movie.
Are you still with me? The horrible pain is just around the corner.
I am uncertain of the exact time, but I dozed off, and feel into a heavy sleep. It was more than an hour and a half later that I woke up. I can see that you appear puzzled. Allow me to explain: I have never before fallen asleep on the couch, and certainly not while the TV was on. I do not have cable, so when I do sit down in front of my TV it is out of respect for the masterpiece I have carefully chosen to watch.
As you can well imagine, the whole experience has left me in quite a turmoil with myself. Will I ever again venture into the living room with my duvet when the possible consequences are so fresh in my memory? It remains to be seen.
Thanks for listening.
Remember what I said yesterday about SSH2? This is what I found in my mail box this "morning":
From: Theo de Raadt <deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org>
To: source-changes@cvs.openbsd.org
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2001 05:53:52 -0700 (MST)
Subject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src
Reply-To: Theo de Raadt <deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org>
Message-Id: <200103101253.f2ACrqu08763@cvs.openbsd.org>
CVSROOT: /cvs
Module name: src
Changes by: deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org 2001/03/10 05:53:52
Modified files:
usr.bin/ssh : ssh_config readconf.c
Log message:
default to SSH2, now that m68k runs fast
How's that for predicting the future? I watched the copy of "I Kina spiser de hunde" that Dorthe brought for me. I recommend it. It is excellent.
Dancer now supports the new channel service on Undernet, so I hope to release a new version in the next few days. It does not compile cleanly on Linux, for some reason, and I need to find out why.
Slept until late in the day, blissfully unaware of my alarm clock and my telephone. Woke up past 4pm, feeling hungry. I satisfied my hunger, and spent most of the evening working on CVS. I hope to have it completely ready by Monday.
Added a few links to the righthand side menu on my index page, including a link to a Danish online dictionary, and a local search page that utilises Google to search only my site.
Some of you are using (old) browsers that do not understand CSS. If my picture on the index page is left aligned with the text underneath, your browser inhales vigorously. Below is a simple test:
Left aligned.
From the looks of OpenBSD CVS change logs, I will say there is a good chance 2.9 is going to ship with OpenSSH protocol 2 support enabled and preferred by default.
Only got a few hours sleep before having to scramble into work. Wrote about CVS policies and answered silly email. Left work early to bring Dorthe to the airport. I fell asleep on the bus while heading home, and in the cab on my way to the airport. I should have listened to my body.
I jumped on the AirLink bus which dropped me off in O'Connell Street. I fell asleep on the way in, of course. I met with co-workers from SP&D at 6.30pm in The Porter House. We had a few drinks and some food. At 9pm we went down to see The Ha'Penny Laugh. The Laugh was funny as always, and when it ended at 11pm, I suggested we return to Porter House, to hear Woodsy play. Everyone were in agreement, so we stayed there until 1am.
We left Porter House, and went downstairs in Turk's Head where we danced around for an hour. I could feel my body starting to really complain, so I said my goodnights, and took a cab home. Uncertain of when I got home.
I have recieved a complaint that my diary contains very little personal information, so I will try to share part of my life with you, ordinary mortals. Dorthe has informed me that a number of individuals suffer from the misconception that she and I are engaging in various sexual acts, during her stay with me. We had a good laugh, thanks to these people.
I also noted that none of these individuals have approached me with these thoughts. I am not entirely sure what that means, but the words "shallow" and "chicken" are probably part of the mindset. You know who you are. Allow me to broaden your horison.
Watched a Billy Connolly with Dorthe. It was more than she could handle. She started laughing so hard she couldn't breathe. While she was struggling with her air ways, I started making faces at her which didn't help at all. She was shattered. Totally annihilated. I am so cruel.
There's talk of me going to London again. I don't really have the time to go play nice cop with the London crowd. Besides, I'm not very good at playing nice cop. I'm permanently configured to be bastard.
Discovered WinCVS doesn't handle RSA keys that have passphrases. I was not pleased. Spent hours trying to figure out why. Tomorrow, I will have to see if ssh-agent works under NT.
Good thing the source is available. I do not really feel like programming for NT. At all. Home around 11pm.
Uffe has not updated his diary since the 4. I suspect he is trying to fool people into thinking he has a life. HA!
Decided to stay up all night. Dragged myself into work. Wrote some more about CVS; it's almost ready now. Went to a quick meeting. Left work around 6pm, home around 7.20pm. Went to bed after dinner. I was shattered.
Uffe does not know the difference between giving excuses and giving a reason for not having something done. "excuses" indicate that you are sorry you did not meet with expectations. When people say "Sorry I am late," the only valid response I can think of is "Don't be sorry. Be on time." -- if they really were sorry, they would not be late.
A reason is something else entirely. Most people have priorities both in their work and private life. They have reasons for putting one task aside because more pressing matters needed attention. One should never be sorry for prioritising according to one's beliefs.
Wim is one of the Belgian OpenBSD developers. In his own time, he sells CD sets and shirts in order to support the European developers of OpenBSD. He has been plagued by problems with deliveries, and I have yet to recieve the two CD sets of 2.8 and a green "Because Security Matters" polo shirt I ordered in November. Poor Wim.
I changed the splash page of my homepage very slightly and updated the projects page. It came as a suprise to a number of individuals that I am a developer for Dancer the IRC bot. Before you send email suggesting that I put my efforts into Triacle instead, take a look at the project page.
Uffe does not iron his clothes, by the way. Someone tell me I am not the only one, please.
The power problems that prevented me from getting mongers.org online are slowly but surely being adressed, so I will begin to merge my current skeleton homepage with the "green" prototype.
All my HTML pages are now compliant with HTML 4.01 Strict.
Woke up late again. Cooked a full Irish breakfast, only to watch Dorthe wipe the sausages and bacon in a napkin before she would eat it. One can only roll his eyes.
Wrote a patch for an application called MRBS. It is a web based meeting room booking system, freely available under GPL. We are using it internally now, and going through the code we discovered the author was passing user input directly into an SQL statement. I sent him a note informing him of our discovery, and what consequences his error could have on the security of a system.
I recieved no response.
We went to see the 9pm showing of 'Proof of Life'. The talented Russel Crowe, and the beautiful Meg Ryan star in an action drama of an engineer who is kidnapped by rebel forces and held for ransom. Reviews on imdb.com used the word "epic," but I am reluctant to agree. It is the story of a lone soldier (Crowe) with a heart. It is good entertainment but it will not change your life.
Will need to stay awake until Sunday evening, to turn my days and nights around the correct way. Yay. Uffe's diary remains neglected.
I sent an SMS birthday greeting to my brother. Technology has the most delightful influences on humans, do you not agree?
I had problems sleeping last night. I did not fall asleep until 7am or so, and as a result I woke up late in the afternoon. I worked on CVS, and the restricted access is now configured. I will be able to sleep soundly, knowing no matter how silly my users (employees) behave, they will not be able to harm our CVS production environment.
Someone (I will not mention names) were shocked/suprised that I iron my clothes. I thought everyone did.
Uffe hasn't updated his diary since 27 February. Ask him for access.
Some of you will notice that the look of my diary has changed. I have coded a snippet of PHP that will automatically show the current month, or the previous one if no entries exist for the current month. In addition, there is now a navigation bar at the top and bottom of each entry.
I ate a £9 breakfast in Dublin Airport while waiting for the delayed flight of my friend. The breakfast was not worth £9 at all. Stay away from Noel's Bistro I tell ye!