Obscure.org system compromise, password reset required
Oct. 5th, 2009 | 07:49 am
mood:
distressed
Oh boy has it been a difficult weekend.
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The Internet Mapping Project
Jun. 5th, 2009 | 10:51 am
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Obscure.org back up
Oct. 22nd, 2008 | 08:53 am
mood:
relieved
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Obscure.org is down for emergency maintenance (restoring from backup)
Oct. 21st, 2008 | 09:16 am
mood:
aggravated
I'm afraid that we're going to need some new hardware or a different hosting arrangement once the immediate crisis is resolved.
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One Laptop Per Child / Scratch Demo
May. 8th, 2008 | 04:52 pm
At the March 2008 meeting, I made a presentation about the class I've been teaching, Creative Computer Exploration with Scratch. Scratch is one of the activities available on the XO. After the presentation, Mike Lee took a short video of Patrick and I demonstrating a couple Scratch projects, including the Dragon Swirl project. Here's the video:
Mike Lee also wrote a summary of that meeting and the presentation.
At the April meeting, I announced that The Obscure Organization had made available a public Jabber server for the D.C. OLPC community.
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Gnomes infest Mount St. Helens observatory
Apr. 29th, 2008 | 09:50 pm
mood:
amused

The caption on the disc (paper plate?) to the right reads: I WILL GET THE SNOW.
Also, is that a snowboard in the gnome's hand, or what?
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Obscure.org is down for emergency maintenance
Apr. 20th, 2008 | 01:53 am
mood:
aggravated
Please expect that Obscure will probably be down until at least noon on Sunday.
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Norah's first steps
Mar. 13th, 2008 | 12:31 pm
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Password Pandemonium and Gigabit Ethernet
Feb. 11th, 2008 | 03:48 pm
mood:
satisfied
The password explosion problem most of us face is quite annoying. I'm landing more and more in Bruce Schneier's camp regarding what to do with the explosion of passwords, that is, write them down. Every now and then, I think about using a password generator (see this cool demo), but I haven't committed to using this yet. It looks like I can save the password generator page for local viewing and use on my Treo 680, though, so I'm going to ponder this some more.
A quick word about the DGS-1224T: this Gig-E switch hits the sweet spot for me in that it supports all the heavy-duty performance and security features I care about (jumbo frames, 802.1Q VLAN tagging, 802.3ad link aggregation) at a rock-bottom price for a smart switch. The pair of switches have been rock-solid so far.
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OLPC / XO Laptop DC Learning Club Meeting Hummed With Excitement
Feb. 3rd, 2008 | 12:40 pm
Another attendee, Jesse Thomas and his friend Leslie Bradshaw took some photos that include a few of Patrick and me. The last one in the set shows Patrick using Mike Lee's Lego-based optical viewfinder for the XO laptop.
I'm still figuring out how to use the XO laptop, as are Patrick and Audrey. My plan is to explore the applications that come with it, figure out how to use them, and to observe my kids using the applications, to see what they are doing with it. The built-in Journal logs what kids do with the laptop, and lets you resume activities that they started to see exactly what they were doing. I'm particularly interested to see how my 6-year-old son experiments with constructivist learning activities Etoys, Pippy, and Turtle Art, since he is already familiar with some programming and design concepts due to our many experiments with Scratch. I am very interested in the port in progress of Scratch to the XO, though I haven't seen it myself yet.
Patrick really enjoys the calculator, the camera, the music applications, and Micropolis, a GPL port of the original SimCity code, the first program we added to the base set of activities.
I announced the Obscure Organization's new Scratch class, and several people, including an Arlington high school teacher, contacted me afterwards inquiring about the program.
Clearly I need to get out more, and talk to more people about stuff I'm doing.
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Banishing winter malaise on my new bike
Jan. 24th, 2008 | 05:06 pm
I recently bought a Novara eXpress road bike at REI, a 2007 model similar to their 2008 model, but $200 less expensive due to a clearance sale. Bicycles have come a long way since I last pedaled around as a teenager. Push-button shifters! 27-speed gear sets! Carbon-fiber forks! Quick-release wheel assemblies! Toe clips!
The weather turned snowy and nasty right after I bought it, so today was the first chance I had to really ride it outside of the quick parking-lot demo I did at the store.
I was feeling down, but I keep hearing that exercise can help lift your mood, so despite the blahs I headed out. There are lots of good bike paths and less-traveled side streets in my neighborhood, we are lucky that way. I biked maybe a mile and a half total, figuring out how to best use the toe clips and the shifters. My wallet fell out of my coat onto the street once, fortunately I noticed. Some biking clothes and a fanny pack might help with that issue. I did not want to carry stuff in my pants pockets. It was about 45 degrees F out, so my ears were a bit chilly by the time I got home.
I do feel a bit better after having ridden around.
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XO Laptop ordered (One Laptop Per Child Project)
Nov. 13th, 2007 | 02:37 pm
http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.ph
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More sucking sounds coming from Windows Vista
Nov. 11th, 2007 | 10:22 am
mood:
aggravated

Nor will it allow printer driver installation:

Next up: roll back to factory installation image, apply all fixes again, shut down cleanly, apply more fixes, install printers, then install programs.
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Windows Vista annoyance
Oct. 31st, 2007 | 09:58 pm
mood:
annoyed
This afternoon, it started giving us a lovely error message on restart saying that it could not boot the operating system.
The procedure that screen gave (boot operating system disk, use System Recovery to fix things) did not work. However, doing a "chkdsk /f c:" from the recovery disk did work, thankfully.
This is just not the sort of error diagnostic you want to see:
From C:\Temp\SrtTrail.txt:
... Startup repair diagnosis and repair log ---- Number of repair attemts: 1 ---- Root cause found: -------------------- No OS files found on disk. Repair action: Partition table repair result: Failed. Error code= 0x490 Time taken = 3136 ms
This is the first computer running Vista we've had in the house. So far, I'm not terribly impressed.
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Harry Potter shell script fan fiction, in celebration of my 35th birthday
Sep. 6th, 2007 | 10:33 am
mood: geeky
When I have started multiple terminal sessions to server computers via SSH, I often run into problems when I forget that I have started a program in a different login session. Running pine multiple times is the worst, because of the little locking dance it does with the other pine sessions. Just thinking about it makes me unbearably sad, as if all the joy had drained out of the world. So, to defend myself against these ghostly login sessions, I now invoke the Patronus Charm:
[rbulling@tiamat:~/public_html/linux]$ patronus Lumos! Traversing floo network at pts/2, dementors spotted at: pts/11 pts/5 Specialis Revelio! Dementors found: USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND rbulling 18987 0.0 0.1 7000 2164 ? S 10:45 0:00 sshd: rbulling@pts/5 rbulling 18993 0.2 0.0 5328 1372 pts/5 S 10:45 0:00 -bash rbulling 19051 0.1 0.1 8048 2432 pts/5 S 10:45 0:00 elinks http://www.jkrowling.com/textonly/en/ rbulling 19105 0.0 0.1 7000 2148 ? S 10:45 0:00 sshd: rbulling@pts/11 rbulling 19110 0.2 0.0 5332 1372 pts/11 S 10:45 0:00 -bash rbulling 19173 3.2 0.1 12528 3472 pts/11 S 10:45 0:00 pine -i EXPECTO PATRONUM! [rbulling@tiamat:~/public_html/linux]$
After running this, all the processes associated with the other terminal sessions die, so you are left with one and only one working login session. Unlike issuing kill -HUP -1, the traditional way to deal with this problem, the patronus script will not harm processes associated with your current terminal session, or any daemon processes you may own. So, you can even run it safely as root.
I wonder if this is the first published example of Harry Potter fan fiction in Bourne shell script…
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A Shining moment
Aug. 29th, 2007 | 02:09 pm
( All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy )
I was generating variations on some test data for an application that might use up to 255 characters. I can see how it must have looked like I was losing my mind, though.
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Adventures in configuring Mac OS X
Aug. 27th, 2007 | 12:30 am
mood: accomplished
This computer came shipped with Mac OS X 10.4.10.
Thanks to the help and advice I've received, I now have these applications installed:
- X11 (from the OS installation disk)
- iTerm (thanks
colinmac) - Xcode (thanks
oddlystrange and
kernelpanic) - MacPorts (thanks
kernelpanic) - Adium(thanks
kernelpanic) - Quicksilver (thanks
kernelpanic) - VideoLAN (thanks
kernelpanic). - xPad (thanks
kernelpanic)
I was able to get to some of the shared files on our private network, but not the Samba home directory shares. I got the system to authenticate versus our corporate LDAP server without a big fuss (through Utilities...Directory Access).
The ports system is now happily building the prerequisites for Bacula so that I can get a good backup of this puppy.
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Drinking the Cupertino Kool-Aid
Aug. 25th, 2007 | 11:41 pm
I bought a Mac Mini tonight. 
Calling All Mac Addicts:
Tell me all the cool things I should do with this box.
I'm hoping to use it for cross-platform software development and experimentation.
Nitty Gritty Details
The glowing screens inside the Apple store at Pentagon City Mall drew me in. My big kids played video games while I got the baby to fall asleep. Finally the lure of returning to the mother ship became too much for me. I spent 9 years as an Apple ][ fan in the 1980s. I walked out with the Mini (the higher-end version with the 2GHz processor, the 120GB hard drive, and the SuperDrive), a Bluetooth keyboard and mighty mouse, and a Canon Pixma MP600 color printer.
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Sighting of a Ninja, a Monkey, a Pirate, and a Robot
Aug. 20th, 2007 | 04:43 pm

I saw this illustration and immediately thought of Atomic Sock Monkey's well-reviewed Monkey, Ninja, Pirate, Robot: the Roleplaying Game.
The illustration is for the band New Rock Church of Fire, who are playing the Velvet Lounge at 8 PM on August 23 , 2007.
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Social networking update: feedback sought
Jun. 27th, 2007 | 03:27 pm
Does anyone I know participate in Facebook? How about MySpace (other than my youngest sister and the professional musicians I know)?
Are there other social networks that are gaining momentum with my peers?
