I may have been snorting too much cocaine, or something. It bleeds when I blow my nose. I worked from home today so that I would be near a toilet and a bed if needed.
I think I need to move my Palm pages from the mongers.org prototype to the Dominion URL space. I have not decided on the URL design yet, and I am finding it difficult as there would be a mixture of dynamic and static pages. Perhaps if I were not sick, I would be able to think straight.
Now that I got my Palm back, I went looking for a carrying case. I figure if I look after it well, it will last me another 2-3 years. However, my Palm model is already ancient in the PDA world, so finding a good case is difficult.
Consumed microwaved chicken soup from a carton, which was surprisingly delicious.
Ate large quantities of carrots courtesy of the Spirited One.
Stole a bag of M&M peanuts from one of the local newsagents. Sue me.
Went to bed at 7pm. Woke up at 2am. Hacked around until early in the morning.
I was starting to feel a lot better, so yesterday I decided to take today off so I could recover completely. Unfortunately, the colour of my snot has reverted back to "disgusting," which probably means another infection.
In other news, OpenBSD has imported Extended Attribute support and POSIX 1.e support from TrustedBSD. Nice. They are extensions of the UNIX security model and, when used correctly, gives greater flexibility and good assurance that the local security policy has not been violated.
My Palm was returned from repairs the other day. Prior to handing it in, I had taken a backup of all my data onto my Windows XP system, and then wiped it completely. A few hours before I went to pickup my Palm so I could load the data back on it, my XP machine decided to commit suicide.
So, seeing as how I kept my backup on a system that was not trust worthy, I have lost names, addresses and phonenumbers of pretty much everybody. If I am supposed to have your details, you will drop me a note, will you not?
Jacob Nielsen, web usability foghorn extraordinaire, sits on Google's Technical Advisory Counsil. He is part of the reason their webinterface is so clean and accessible. He has posted articles on his website, speaking of the quality behind Google. I wonder why his website on web usability uses Mondosearch as search engine, not Google.
Google now offers a search appliance which can be deployed behind the corporate firewall, giving internal users access to the same power searches as they are used to with internet material. I wonder how many ad hoc webservers with confidential information a crawler like this could expose in certain organisations.
The colour of my snot is somewhere between brown and yellow. I am sick, in case you had not guessed. When I told Dave the story of my snot, he said he really did not want to know. I am behind on responding to email, and a number of other things. I went into the office today, which turned out to be a mistake.
The Spirited One has been pampering me with health food and lemsip.
I recieved "Walking With Dinosaurs" from Amazon. I wonder how they managed to screw up 2 deliveries and then get one through. Still waiting for two large consignments with many books.
Uffe has shown total disregard for my feelings on the subject of Javascript for web navigation. A very old incarnation of my homepage had an infinite Javascript loop on the front page. It forced people to disable Javascript if they wanted to see my site. It appears a similar approach is needed again!
As mongers.org will not go "into production" for another while,
I reorganised certain things. Some of the OpenBSD documents which were held
in the mongers.org module are now part of the Dominion. As far
as I know, all the old URLs are redirected to the new ones.
I stripped a number of links from the index page and they have either been moved to "Get intimate with me", or to "Stuff by Alex". Again, no URLs were broken.
I patched the kernel on miracle, and rebooted. Then I built all
userland applications in 20% of the time it takes on my laptop.
miracle is still running, so I believe the kernel panics related
to heavy disk usage are a thing of the past. Nice.
OpenBSD 3.0-current (MIRACLE) #0: Wed Feb 13 05:06:47 GMT 2002
$ uname -a
OpenBSD miracle.mongers.org 3.0 MIRACLE#0 i386
$ top -b
load averages: 0.13, 0.10, 0.08 07:50:31
13 processes: 1 running, 11 idle, 1 zombie
Memory: Real: 4224K/31M act/tot Free: 216M Swap: 0K/256M used/tot
PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE WAIT TIME CPU COMMAND
2014 root 2 0 328K 800K idle select 0:00 0.00% sshd
23125 root 10 0 224K 456K idle nanosl 0:00 0.00% cron
2726 root 2 0 104K 368K sleep select 0:00 0.00% syslogd
18467 root 2 0 376K 1176K sleep select 0:00 0.00% sshd
19145 a 18 0 376K 288K sleep pause 0:00 0.00% ksh
1 root 10 0 332K 200K idle wait 0:00 0.00% init
23095 root 3 0 44K 424K idle ttyin 0:00 0.00% getty
17731 root 3 0 44K 424K idle ttyin 0:00 0.00% getty
1164 root 3 0 44K 424K idle ttyin 0:00 0.00% getty
1429 root 3 0 44K 424K idle ttyin 0:00 0.00% getty
3569 root 3 0 44K 424K idle ttyin 0:00 0.00% getty
17961 a 28 0 84K 456K run - 0:00 0.00% top
Mail and homepages will stay offline until the system has been placed in a hosting environment where it can stay for a long time. I think that in the future, I will never bring my personal machines near my employer again. It is easier to pay for hosting in a neutral site. For now, I will use the system for IRC and stress testing of Subversion.
Grr. My Amazon orders, dispatched from the UK on the 6th and the 9th respectively, have yet to arrive. All the while a letter posted from Denmark on the 13th arrived in my mailbox today.
Madness. Woke up at 4am drenched in sweat. I dreamt I had found multiple security vulnerabilities in Subversion, and that it had consequences for the project.
That is the second time in 3 years I have had a security related dream. Last time I dreamt I was doing a penetration test for my employer, however, the paper work fell through so when I successfully penetrated a system, I was arrested and convicted of unauthorised access and criminal damage. Nasty dream. Talk about taking work home with you.
Note to self: must keep larger quantities of milk and juice in the house.
I wrote up a small piece on buying laptops. Find it with my other stuff.
Went for a walk with Dave to the shopping centre around 6pm. While we were walking around all power in Dunnes Stores went, but returned a few seconds later. Having exited Dunnes Stores we realised that the entire shopping centre had been hit, but that Dunne Stores had backup generators. All of Westend Village was without power, and a call to ESB confirmed that Blanchardstown, Castleknock, and most parts of Dublin 15 were without power due to "a major fault."
The outage was 2 hours and it killed the 134 day uptime on
oldasdirt.
I woke up very late with a head full of snot. I must have caught the bug that Dave has been subject to the last few days.
80 kilo precisely. Ate a chicken and bacon tripledecker because I am doing so well, and have not had my weekly allowance of chocolate since I started my diet.
I backed up my Palm pilot, nuked all my information from memory (doublechecking with pdd of course) and handed it in for repairs. I should be getting it back in 2 weeks.
While I was out walking I purchased Swordfish on DVD. It is an interesting movie, especially if you can look past the utter tech babble crap spewed at length. The movie is really about consequences, but I expect most people to not get that. If you are looking to kill time, this movie is suitable.
You will note my new colours. What do you think? I like them, but the default font is driving me mad. I am in search of a more professionally looking font.
Uffe is still using JavaScript for navigation on some parts of his site. Shame on him. He also did not show up when I met up with the gang in Denmark. Shame on him even more.
Arsing around I found a security problem in someones PHP-based menu system.
If I had a Euro for every poorly validated include() call I have
"exploited" I would have a learjet in the airport on 24 hour standby.
I noticed Gigasoft is getting ready to release another version of PC Finder. I must really complete the snake oil report soon. Looking through the security section of a Danish search engine, I found Gigasoft listed with a few other dubious looking companies and products. One was offering to totally secure Win98 systems. Unless the kernel has been completely reimplemented, I think not.
The problem that caused miracle to panic seems to have been
solved in -current so I will build a new kernel soon, and give the machine
another go. The situation with my employer is a bit unstable at the moment.
Every other day I am this close to handing in my resignation. I am not sure how
much longer I can stand the environment. Even if the machine is functioning, I
will not change email and homepage until the hardware is hosted somewhere
reliable.
My Amazon packages are still in orbit around Earth. Having been dispatched on the 6th and 9th respectively, they should both have been here by now. It only takes a day or two for mail to travel from the UK to Ireland. I have no idea what is going on.
ILUG is the Irish crowd of Linux muppets. We do not like them.
<doggie> dont know what came over me, must've sat next to an ilug'er
on the bus or something
<doggie> explains why i've had fantasies about linus
<doggie> i bet there's at least 10 people on ilug who've got a poster
of linus in their bedroom
<doggie> and i bet 8 of them have themselves photoshopped into the picture
<doggie> and i bet at least 4 of them are naked in the picture
<doggie> the other 4 still live with their parents
My Amazon package did not arrive today :(
Consumed 8 bananas.
I recently talked Gorm into letting me set up a configuration management system on the area51.dk systems and it has started to slowly go ahead. It would be a good topic for a paper, I guess. Another todo item. Oh dear.
I was chatting to someone on IRC the other day and realised that my Danish paper on SSH could do with some elaboration on many areas. I hope to have the next edition ready sometime this week.
Just over 80 kilo. It looks like gravity is on my side. The Spirited One does not trust my scale. She thinks it is impossible to lose that much weight in 2 weeks.
Chatting away on #svn, one of the lads found a "Learn Danish" how-to. I find it amusing that the Danish grammar is correct save a few typos; some of the English examples are horribly wrong, however.
<ben_> you're checking out HEAD? <parks> yes <ben_> 250,000 lines of code. * holsta thinks about fault rates in software and gets scared. <holsta> Now I won't be able to sleep. <Slarti> heh <ben_> sorry. <ben_> the world needs people like holsta. <ben_> people who actually think about security. <holsta> Oh, is that what Gates was going on about recently? <holsta> Right. Security. <holsta> Well, let's see. <holsta> Can't we just buy a firewall? * fitz points the death star at holsta <fitz> ;-) <holsta> HEY! Watch where you point that thing. <holsta> There's no telling where it's been.
Security people and skilled programmers can be kids sometimes :-)
The Open Relay Database AGM was held today, and the security policy I wrote for the project was approved by a majority vote. Most of the developers have met up this weekend and are spewing out code like mad, so I will be spending most of the weekend identifying security bounderies and reviewing code.
I had a minor shock when I stepped onto my scale today. It showed me as almost having returned to my original weight. I hurriedly jumped off and troubleshooted the situation. It turned out the soft floor in my bathroom effects the scale, so I have moved the scale to my kitchen where the concrete floor stops scales (and heads) from moving further towards middle-earth. My weight is still on track, thankfully.
Sometimes it is really great working for an ISP. Downloading 60MB src.tar.gz from an Irish OpenBSD mirror:
69406957 bytes received in 32.35 seconds (2.05 MB/s)
I also bought a scale today. Having been on my diet for a week and a half, I have lost almost 5 kilo (10 pounds). I have no idea why dieting is supposed to be such a big deal.
Oops. Jerry pointed me to a post in sci.crypt: An
attack against the SSH2 protocol has been discovered. Only a few hours ago
I decided to drop usage of SSH1 for personal usage. Typical.
I am liking my hours in the office these days. Just enough to touch base, and then complete various tasks at home.
Published a security advisory for Dancer. Elho@ committed a work-around but I need to implement proper input validation. Right now, however, I am simply too tired. Going to bed.
The world is going down the drain. Trying to load IBM's ThinkPad site, I was directed to a different page:
We apologise, but our web site makes extensive use of Javascript and Cookies, and will not function correctly if these features are switched off. Please either enable these features in your browser, or alternatively you can contact a member of the IBM Help Center on the numbers listed below.
How hard can it be to make an interactive e-commerce site with no client-side dependencies other than HTML and possibly session cookies? Will someone please explain what is so great about JavaScript?
It rained heavily today. Large parts of Dublin were shut down for hours. The south-side quays from Westmoreland Street up past Parliment Street was closed due to flooding. The DART was out of service for hours, and had to be put back in service for the 4pm rush hour even though the tracks were still flooded. The cab ride home took almost 90 minutes, compared to 30 minutes when there is no or little traffic. The fare was 24 Euros compared to 13 Euros on a normal day.