I recieved email from Amazon saying that the reason I have two accounts is because I have one with amazon.com and one with amazon.co.uk. I was not aware the two systems shared backends.
I am still waiting for my 9 items package.
I met with Mick tonight for dinner and beer. The choice fell on an Indian meal which I was unable to finish due to uncomfortableness in my wisdom tooth. We finished chatting quite late, the latest in a long while actually. It was well past 1am when Mick went home. I tried sleeping but at 4am I am still awake and now out of bed. This is really bad.
I will be going out for dinner and comedy with a small crowd of people tomorrow evening.
I watch several minutes of television every day I visit Dave, and it really educates the masses. Do you remember 90's boyband Take That? I learned today that their management team was quite pleased about letting the band appeal to gay men as well as young girls. What would I do in a world without television?
Ross Anderson, the author of "Security Engineering" which I am currently reading, has posted some comments about terrorism that would be worthwhile reading for anyone who has heard nothing other than goverment and agency hype since the attacks.
On the other hand, if all you have heard since the attacks is me ranting, you will probably want to take a look in your local paper. Then think about why I am ranting on these issues.
Having stayed awake all night, I tried napping this morning but I was unable to fall asleep. I am hungry. Time to consume a Yop!
Spent a few hours in a meeting and then went back to Blanchardstown with Dave where we worked until 9pm. I went home and slept (badly). Strange. Even with 24 hours uptime I still cannot sleep properly. What is wrong with me?
Having gone to bed at 7am, I meant to get up at 11am but I failed. I slept til 6pm which means I am going to stay up all night and all of tomorrow in an effort to turn the tide again.
A new tooth has appeared in my mouth. I have been sore for a few days and looking in the mirror this evening I could see the skin in my mouth peeled halfway back over a new tooth. It looks silly that I have an extra tooth in the left side of my jaw.
I found another review of the security (and other) measures put in place in the US since the September attacks.
Slept late again. Returned the two videos and rented "Keeping the Faith" and "Finding Forrester" for two days. Tomorrow is a bank holiday and I will be off work.
Some of the devices in my home were intelligent enough to shift timezones from IST to GMT last night. My ISDN phone and my computers knew how. My alarm clock, VCR and mobile phone did not. How difficult would it have been to include a public time signal in the GSM protocol?
I think I have a hole in one of my teeth. When I inhale sharply the cold airflow makes it sting something awful.
Slept very late. Rented "Teaching Mrs. Tingle" and "The Tailor of Panama". I know the former movie sounds naughty, but it really is not. I watched neither of them to the end.
The patriotically named USA Act has been approved by Senate and will be signed by President Bush next week. US citizens need to understand what this means. An article in Wired explains some of the consequences.
Windows XP crashed twice in 15 minutes while doing nothing. I also sneezed a few times. There is nothing to indicate that the two events are related so spare me the insinuating email.
Lately I have seen some very bright and experienced computer-type people do some very stupid things, e.g. sharing critical data via NFS rather than using SSH with RSA key authentication. I wonder if it is something in the water.
Mr. Gooph E. R. Webhamster has given me reason to believe he will contribute a few modified pictures to my collection. His skills in this area far exceed mine.
Our nameservers were down for hours this evening. If I were a paying customer I would be very upset.
There is a bug in Dancer which is driving me nuts. Dancer is at version 4.16 and is generally considered mature, stable code. Unfortunately, due to the many individuals who have been project maintainer of Dancer, there are no CVS logs prior to when I imported 4.15b6.
The bug has probably been in the code for years and I cannot reproduce it at will, which makes it a nightmare to track down. Dancer simply crashes, often while doing nothing.
Attaching to program: /usr/home/a/bot/dancer, process 72557 Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libcrypt.so.2...done. Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libm.so.2...done. Reading symbols from /usr/lib/libc.so.4...done. Reading symbols from /usr/libexec/ld-elf.so.1...done. 0x2814f6dc in wait4 () from /usr/lib/libc.so.4 (gdb) #0 0x2814f6dc in wait4 () from /usr/lib/libc.so.4 #1 0x28140e03 in waitpid () from /usr/lib/libc.so.4 #2 0x804a35e in DumpStack (format=0x8088660 "gdb -q %s %d 2>/dev/null <<EOF\nset prompt\nwhere\ndetach\nshell kill -CONT %d\nquit\nEOF\n") at stacktrace.c:181 #3 0x804a556 in StackTrace () at stacktrace.c:248 #4 0x804a5d8 in SignalCrashHandler (sig=11) at dancer.c:392 #5 0xbfbfffac in ?? () #6 0x805fdc8 in OpenConnection (hostname=0x80d98e0 "flanders.be.eu.undernet.org", port=0x80d9860 "7000") at netstuff.c:334 #7 0x805fafb in OpenServerConnection (hostname=0x80d98e0 "flanders.be.eu.undernet.org", port=0x80d9860 "7000") at netstuff.c:269 #8 0x804a05d in Start (s=0x80e9680) at dancer.c:307 #9 0x804ab86 in main (argc=1, argv=0xbfbffd88) at dancer.c:628 #10 0x8049b25 in _start () Detaching from program: /usr/home/a/bot/dancer, process 72557
I am losing my mind.
Mutter. The amazon package only contained "Security Engineering: A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems" so I am missing 9 books. I also discovered that Amazon did not merge my two accounts so depending on which password I supply with my username, I am dropped into two different accounts.
I have no idea how I managed to create two accounts in the first place.
Mick called me just before noon with an urgent request. He wanted me to get some tickets for "Bottom 4" which is showing in two weeks. HMV sold all their tickets already. I may try Ticketmaster. Right now I need sleep.
I woke up just after midnight and could not fall asleep. I loaded Photoshop and started toying with its features. The result is below. Please ensure you are not chewing food or drinking when looking at the picture. I would not want you to choke.
The time is 6.30am and I have not slept at all tonight. I do not think 4 hours of sleep in 2 days is enough for me. I am getting old -- partly because I do not sleep properly.
When I was unable to sleep I got out of bed. Windows 98 managed to get me angry and I discovered a number of strange programs installed so I forced Windows XP on my playstation. It looks nice but because of the eye candy it runs quite slow. Most of the eye candy can be disabled and now it runs at pretty much the same speed Windows 98 did.
My ISDN adapter will not work in XP and nor will my DVD software. Games and audio playing works ok. It took me 5-6 hours of light usage to crash Windows 2000 on the first install. I wonder how long this will take.
Many tasks in XP result in a window appearing and telling you about what you just did. I do not know if it can be turned off. I really do not want an operatingsystem to interfere with my tasks. If I need something I will look in the help files, until then get the fuck out of my face.
XP has a handful of running remote services in the default install. Why? Having spent 10 minutes reading and looking I still cannot find the management console used to disable them. The help files has a section called "Secure your computer" which says:
If you want to protect data on your computer, you should secure individual files and folders and take steps to secure the physical computer itself. If the computer contains sensitive information, keep it in a safe location.
Great. How do I make the fucking thing compliant with my security policy? Who cares about the security policy when the mouse pointer has a neat drop shadow! Will you get your priorities straight, Alex.
I went back to bed wanting to sleep for an hour before I started my day. I looked at the time and it showed 7.30am or something. 10 seconds later it showed 3pm. Oops. I must have needed the sleep.
I do not eat at home on a regular basis. This means that often when I do go grocery shopping, I will end up throwing much of the food out when it is 5 days past it's "best before" date. It is unfortunate. The Cadbury Chocolate Mousse is also past it's "best before" date, but if you think I am going to throw chocolate away you are on drugs.
The mailman was here today to deliver my package from amazon but I was sleeping. It will be picked up first thing in the morning.
Got up just after 8am having only been able to sleep a few hours prior to this.
Mr. Skouenborg has revealed that he still reads my diary (I thought everyone had stopped) and countered with a copy of the note I sent when I left IBM. It is linked in Stuff as Suffer the Consequences.
Sleep seems to be in order to get me back on track with work related activities. I napped for two hours in the afternoon and expect an early night.
I have ended my relationship with the Spirited One after having known her almost a year. I did not mean to hurt her. I would quote a song here but it seems inappropriate. A look at how I have gone through relationships over the past few years should make it clear that I am the one with the problems.
Trotted over to Dave's place and worked at less than 100% effeciency. $EMPLOYER
are still not following through on promises made and it is having consequences
on motivation and productivity. Last time I was in an unrewarding job I
promised myself I would never allow that to happen again. I voiced my
frustration in a note when I left IBM. If you happen to have a copy, please
send it to me.
Mick dropped by later for a beer and we went into town for Italian dinner.
Would you believe I slept until 6pm? I chilled and probably went to bed at an hour relative to when I got out of bed. I cannot remember.
I feel like I am fading away at times. It has been a long time since I last spent the majority of my time learning new (complex) things and I miss it. I guess that is part of the reason I started writing the FAQ for the Danish security group. I just wanted to engage my brain for more than 10 minutes at a time and your brain needs to be engaged while writing.
I also mentioned the idea of writing a security scanner like the one you will find on Steve Gibson's site. Unlike Steve I do not intend to use the project as a penis enlarger, and I will strive for high quality. A few people showed interest, most notably xi. I will write a specifications documents and a simple prototype. The indicators on hosting for a web-based security scanner are negative. I may have to get around to putting mongers.org online just to have a safe place for this project.
So I managed to get Kylie's song out of my head. Unfortunately it has been replaced by Britney Spears singing "I'm a slave for you" while wiggling her sweaty body in front of a camera. She is supposedly still a virgin and plans to wait until her wedding night. She can talk the talk, but she cannot walk the walk so keep dreaming boys.
I would offer to make her scream and whimper -- purely to show her what sex is all about. She would have to ask me nicely of course.
It rained hard today. I do enjoy watching the rain, especially when I am not required to go out into the soaking weather.
Work related activities kept me occupied longer than anticipated so rather than going into town for dinner and entertainment we decided to stay local.
We had dinner and then went to see "Moulin Rouge" which it turns out Jerry recommended to me earlier. Had I known it is a musical I would not have gone. Had I known it is based partly what appears to be a bad acid trip I would not have gone. But I did and so now I have to live with my mistake. What a piece of absolute shit.
The auld diary is going through a difficult time at the moment which results in few updates.
I am having major problems sleeping again. Lately I have been laying awake until 7am and then falling asleep for 2-5 hours which makes it difficult for me to concentrate on work. Regular readers of my diary will know that I carry significant experience in the field of sleep problems and I have decided to use my powers for good, not evil. You may call me SuperAlex. Ahem.
Earlier today I was unable to get Kylie's new single (appropriately named "Can't get you out of my head") out of my head. Eventually it got so bad I had to download a copy to get peace. It helped a little but I do not know what is happening to my sense of quality these days. The song is shit. I blame my lack of sleep.
My outstanding sleep issues has resulted in a lot of 4am Usenet reading sessions. The number of humans who want nothing more than to be spoon-fed with knowledge is overwhelming at times.
A woman in the US found "white powder" on her computer keyboard. She called it in as a possible anthrax find which seems to be a big deal these days. Further investigation showed that her horrible discovery was sugar from a doughnut she had been eating earlier while working on her computer. Some people do not deserve to live. I can only imagine how therapeutic it must be to yield to the temptation..
Cue humming of a random R.E.M song (e.g. "It's the end of the world").
I will be taking the Spirited One out for dinner and entertainment tomorrow evening. Mick may join us later on.
The stores are flaunting christmas decorations. I want to throw up.
Spent a load of cash on the Sopranos complete series 1. Also brought a sexy new shirt and jacket.
Amazon.co.uk sent me email saying my bank declined payment which means I made a typo in the credit card information in the order. Unfortunately, the order in question is the unlisted order (due to the previously mentioned bug) so I am unable to fix it until they get back to me. Sniff.
Discovered that Boots had recieved a new shipment of Dr. Pepper and invested in 8 bottles. The clerk said how popular Dr. Pepper is but they do not get many in stock. I plan to use this newfound knowledge in getting my local Spar to stock Dr. Pepper. I must ask Dave if he wants to be part of the plan.
Got up at 7am. Went to bed very late. Can you handle the excitement?
Mike Tyson defended his title against Danish cuddletoy Brian Nielsen. I know fuck-all about boxing, but I know Brian should know better than think he can take Mike down. Mike is a fucking muppet but he can throw a serious punch.
The Onion is not happy with the response of lawmakers to the September 11 attacks, and it shows.
I saw this quote today:
And Jesus said unto them, "And whom do you say that I am?" They replied, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of our being, the ontological foundation of the context of our very selfhood revealed." And Jesus replied, "What?"
I discovered a bug in amazon.co.uk's ordering system. It is possible to have two sessions running that are completely different, even though you signed on with the same email address. I found that my basket and order history kept changing between two different points in the past. One minute orders were missing from my order history even though they were delivered weeks ago, and items in my basket got replaced with what I used to have there months ago. I sent a nice bugreport.
I have been looking at Subversion, the next generation version control system. The commandline interface is mostly the same as CVS but the backend is a complete rewrite. It is not finished yet, but as the authors, who all know CVS really well by the way, refer to it, it is "a compelling replacement for CVS". It uses WebDAV over (of course) HTTP. A number of concerns spring to mind at this point:
Subversion is released under a BSD license so eventually I can imagine the BSD teams picking it up and throwing away CVS. This will take care of the trust issue as I am certain the OpenBSD crowd is going to tear through everything that runs on cvs.openbsd.org.
WebDAV is being pushed as an industry-wide standard so this may push the need for strong authentication and as more people need authentication against 100 different webservers we will see the price and availability of smartcards change for the benefit of consumers.
Jerry is happy now that various parts of the software industry is slowly realising they need to try harder at improving software quality. That is his area. I need people to realise that strong and easy to use authentication methods are required for everyday use. Passwords are no longer sufficient.
I have been having tummy problems lately. It is not a nice experience. It makes my arse sore.
I listened to Garbage's new album. It is interesting. It is slightly more abstract than the two previous ones so I need to listen to it some more. I did not get a chance to listen to Tori more than the once.
I slept much too late today so I decided to work at home. I entered into a discussion in email with one of the OpenBSD committers about the cf-engine port. He has done a bit of work on a port submitted by a user and hopefully we can get it working in an acceptable manner. It will not make it in time for 3.0 release.
"Strange Little Girls" had not been shipped from amazon.co.uk so I cancelled the order and went to HMV where I bought a copy plus a copy of Garbage's "Beautiful".
I am wondering what type of drugs Tori has been on lately. "Strange Little Girls" is her least accessible album, to the point of perversion, even. I have absolutely no idea what she was thinking while she was recording these songs, and what is the point of listening to music if you cannot relate? How is it possible to make a CD full of cover songs totally inaccessible?
I am going to listen to it a few more times and if it does not grow on me Tori is going to be spending a lot of time on her knees to make me happy again. She is going to swallow too, the silly little girl.
I am too upset about Tori's album to talk about Garbage's. Perhaps tomorrow.
It took me a while to get out of bed this morning. I wonder why I bother sometimes.
Even with my substantially sized IRC ignorelist I was still adding 2 or 3 people to it every day. I decided it is not worth the effort either so I have left #linux.dk due to excessive amounts of muppets. The channel owners are not around to handle the channel and rather than listning to their channel opers they listen to bitchy users. What is the point of making someone an channel operator if you do not trust him?
OpenBSD ports have been frozen for 3.0 release. Snapshots of both base and ports went out for testing recently. If you care about OpenBSD grab a copy for yourself and put it through the paces.
Woke up around 9.30 and after Dave configured IP forwarding on his laptop, I started working a little.
A plane belonging to Scandinavian Airlines crashed in Italy and 100 people or so are dead. The plane was heading for Copenhagen so I expect a large number of Danes being among the dead.
Farted some more. Red wine has the strangest effects on me lately.
I played a few games of Quake 3 against Jerry. He kicked my ass even though I was ahead by over 10 points when the first game started. I suck.
I went to meet Mick around 8pm. We had dinner in Ming Court and talked about various things. We were both tired so we each went home right after dinner. I crashed in bed before 10pm.
The US started bombing in the afternoon GMT time.
Dave invited Jerry and I to dinner at his place. I brought wine, Jerry brought snacks and we chatted for hours. I also brought movies, but we never got around to watching those. Subjects included eircom, women, drugs, various movies, education, information security and more.
Dave managed to snap the corkscrew so I marched for 20 minutes in heavy rain to go buy a new one. I got soaked.
Spent the night on Dave's couch. Farted a lot.
I changed IRC nick. GamleAlex is dead. Long live holsta. Close to 400 million people asked me why I changed nick so I will put the reason here. I started hanging out amongst non-Danish people on IRC and they kept calling me "Gamle" or "ga" -- holsta is my UNIX user name, and the name I go by in UGC.
I had an early meeting in Eastpoint. It was a very good meeting, and for the
first time in many months I am not 100% annoyed with $EMPLOYER.
I went to see "The Score" with Robert De Niro, Edward Norton, Marlon Brando and Angela Basset. Angela is a fine looking woman, and the gentlemen are all spectacular actors, but it really does not make up for the simple plot. This story has been told a hundred times and for kicks it includes a lame depiction of a script kiddie (aka computer criminal). Rather than going to see this movie, I recommend that you have your partner go down on you.
Slept until 9.30am so I did not go to the gym. I do not like where this is going, gym-wise or sleeping-wise.
Today was a little exciting. At 4.52pm a power failure took out the greater Westend area, including the entire shopping centre. There is very little to do without power. There was not even enough light to read.
OpenBSD imported Sendmail release 8.12.1 a few days ago, again due to security problems. Sendmail may not have had a serious remote security problem in three years but it is broken by design. I wish qmail had a license which permitted modification and distribution.
Windows 98 caused me more headaches. Not only was the spectacular uptime of 5 days ruined by the power outage, but it also refused to boot afterwards, citing "Windows protection error" as enough reason.
I am getting really sick of shit software.
I woke up at 7am, rolled over and slept until 9am. Got up and waited for Dave who was going to look at an apartment near here. Talked work for a bit.
The ISP hosting area51.dk is having issues:
5 ge1-0.1000M.linxnxg1.ip.tele.dk (195.66.224.64) 53.41 ms 58.206 ms 53.79 ms 6 pos0-0.155M.albnxg1.ip.tele.dk (195.249.1.242) 1261.842 ms 1303.822 ms 1306.275 ms
An old friend was looking for security information on the web and found my name. Let me give you some advice if you ever stumble upon an old friend by accident. If you are going to send email, make sure you send the email from an address your friend can respond to. My old friend did not make sure of this, and hence no real contact has been established. My only advice is that you try again and this time send from a valid email address.
I meant to go to the gym again today. I was so sore when I woke that I decided against it. Jumped in a cab into work and started feeling strange in my tummy about halfway. I was dropped off in the city centre and 5 seconds after the cab took off I threw up on the side walk.
Spoke to Mick and we agreed to meet up in the local pub and then head to dinner somewhere. I met his new girlfriend for the first time. She seems like a very nice girl. She has trouble sleeping at night so I gave some free advice.
I made it home around 10.30pm.
Today I recieved the second piece of spam mail to my area51 account. I fear that the flood gates will open soon and I will drown in spam. It is a good thing I started that UCE proof-reading service! I am considering raising the price to $2000 per message. After all, it is a valuable service I am offering.
Around 9.30am I packed my sportsbag and went to the gym. I am really in bad shape. I managed to jog for 20 minutes at 8km/hour, 10 minutes on a treadmill, do 5 x 20 crunches, and a few shoulder and chest weights. When I emerged from the changing room , the place was packed. Tomorrow I will head down before 8am.
My arrogance in dealing with people (especially online) makes me a target for a lot of nasty things, most of which do not bother me in the least. I discovered that someone posted pictures of me naked to the web. Eventually, someone will probably try to use them for "blackmail" against me, so I figured I might as well point you to them myself.
Thanks for understanding.
