Occasional Rants from the Fearless Leader

Obscure.org system compromise, password reset required

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 11:52:19 GMT

Obscure.org users should contact me or Faisal Jawdat regarding a mandatory password reset following a system compromise. See http://www.obscure.org/ for more details. We're doing the resets via voice or authenticated and fully encrypted email / IM only.

Oh boy has it been a difficult weekend.

The Internet Mapping Project

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 14:55:55 GMT

I learned through BoingBoing recently about The Internet Mapping Project, a project Kevin Kelly is running to collect people's drawn maps of what the Internet looks like or means to them, with their home indicated on the map. This looks like a fun way of finding out about what people think of their relationship to the Internet.

Obscure.org back up

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 12:57:07 GMT

Obscure.org was down for about 4 hours yesterday morning. We lost the previous 6 hours of data due to a fatal failure of the disk array. I restored from backup onto borrowed hardware. We are still mulling our options regarding repair, replacement, or other choices regarding what hardware we will be able to use over the long term.

Obscure.org is down for emergency maintenance (restoring from backup)

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:18:43 GMT

The RAID array on Obscure's main server failed (again) this morning, so I'm restoring from last night's backup onto borrowed hardware. It may be this evening before the system is operational again.

I'm afraid that we're going to need some new hardware or a different hosting arrangement once the immediate crisis is resolved.

One Laptop Per Child / Scratch Demo

Thu, 08 May 2008 21:44:43 GMT

Recently I've been involved with the One Laptop Per Child Learning Club D.C.. I've met some interesting people there, including Mike Lee, Wayan Vota, Leslie Bradshaw, and ffm (Firefoxman).

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.

Gnomes infest Mount St. Helens observatory

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:58:55 GMT

The U.S. Forest Service operates a Mount St. Helens Observatory that has two web cams. Although they are located under a roof overhang 20 feet in the air, both have been at least partially blocked by snow for many weeks. I checked the cams today, and found this image, to my astonishment:

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?

Obscure.org is down for emergency maintenance

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 06:31:55 GMT

It looks like the main drive on the old obscure.org server is finally giving up the ghost. The good news is we have new hardware to replace it. The bad news is that to take advantage of it, I have to finish the operating system rebuild I started recently.

Please expect that Obscure will probably be down until at least noon on Sunday.

Norah's first steps

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 16:34:46 GMT

On Tuesday, Norah took her first unaided steps. Watch out, world!

Password Pandemonium and Gigabit Ethernet

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:18:29 GMT

About six months ago, I set up two D-Link DGS-1224T Gigabit Ethernet switches for work. However, I neglected to record the new password for one of the two switches. I spent an hour trying to remember the missing password a week ago before giving up. Today I tried again, and on the 12th or 13th guess, I finally got it.

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.

OLPC / XO Laptop DC Learning Club Meeting Hummed With Excitement

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 17:47:15 GMT

On Thursday, January 31^st 2008, I attended the OLPC DC Learning Club meeting at Greater DC Cares downtown. Over 50 people came, many with their XO laptops. A few parents, myself included, brought their children. Seeing so many people so excited about the potential of this technology made me happy.

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.

Banishing winter malaise on my new bike

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:42:12 GMT

tostita had the bright idea of getting bicycles for the whole family to help improve our odds of actually getting some exercise. I have a love/hate relationship with regular exercise. I've never been very athletic, but when I was younger, I liked biking and snow skiing.

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.

XO Laptop ordered (One Laptop Per Child Project)

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 19:42:24 GMT

I just ordered an XO laptop from the One Laptop Per Child Project. They have a deal where you donate $399, and they use $200 of your donation to fund a laptop for a child in the developing world, and you get one of the laptops, too.

http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php

More sucking sounds coming from Windows Vista

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 15:26:48 GMT

Now tostita's computer won't install new programs:

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.

tostita said, "It's as if the reliability of Microsoft operating systems took a ten-year trip backwards." I'm tending to agree.

Windows Vista annoyance

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:03:56 GMT

I recently bought tostita a new laptop, a Toshiba Satellite X205-SLi1, running Windows Vista Home Premium.

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.

Harry Potter shell script fan fiction, in celebration of my 35th birthday

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 15:08:55 GMT

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.

To use this, you may want to use this plain text-version. I'll keep that location updated with any changes.

#!/bin/sh
#
# patronus
#
# Dispel ghost logins that suck the joy out of your active terminal session
#
# Copyright (C) 2007 Richard Bullington-McGuire
# Many thanks (and aplologies) to J.K. Rowling
#
# DISCLAIMER
#   This is a parody of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels.
#   Lawyers: please don't sue this poor house-elf who is only trying to help.
#
# LICENSE
#
#   This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
#   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
#   the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or
#   (at your option) any later version.
#
#   This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
#   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
#   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
#   GNU General Public License for more details.
#
#   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
#   along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
#
# Release History:
#
# 1.0 (September 6, 2007)
#  First public release

retval=1
MAGICAL_CREATURES=`mktemp -t patronus.XXXXXXXXXX` && {
        FLOO_NETWORK=`mktemp -t patronus.XXXXXXXXXX` && {

                echo "Lumos!"
                echo ""

                ps x > $MAGICAL_CREATURES

                FLOO_EXITS=`egrep " *$$" $MAGICAL_CREATURES | \
                         awk '{print $2}'`
                awk '!/ PID/{print $2}' < $MAGICAL_CREATURES | \
                        sort -u |
                        egrep -v "^\?|$FLOO_EXITS" > $FLOO_NETWORK
                DEMENTORS=`cat $FLOO_NETWORK`
                if [ -z "$DEMENTORS" ] ; then
                        echo "No dementors spotted nearby."
                        retval=0
                else
                        DEMENTOR_KISSES=`grep -f $FLOO_NETWORK < $MAGICAL_CREATURES | \
                                awk '{print $1}'`
                        DEMENTOR_DESCRIPTION=`ps u $DEMENTOR_KISSES`

                        cat << EOT
Traversing floo network at $FLOO_EXITS, dementors spotted at:
$DEMENTORS

Specialis Revelio!

Dementors found:
$DEMENTOR_DESCRIPTION

EXPECTO PATRONUM!

EOT
                        kill -HUP $DEMENTOR_KISSES 2>/dev/null
                        retval=$?
                fi
                rm -f $FLOO_NETWORK
        }
        rm -f $MAGICAL_CREATURES
}
exit $retval

(mad props to Oleg Parashchenko's fabulous http://tohtml.com/ for color syntax highlighting)

I wonder if this is the first published example of Harry Potter fan fiction in Bourne shell script…

A Shining moment

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 18:15:20 GMT

tostita saw me typing this, and said, "What are you doing, dear? That's a bit creepy, reminds me of The Shining."

[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah' | cut -c1-255
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah' | cut -c1-254
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah' | cut -c1-253
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah bla
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah' | cut -c1-255
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah' | cut -c1-255
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah' | cut -c1-255
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah' | cut -c1-254
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah' | cut -c1-255
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah abcdefghij' | cut -c1-255
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah abcdefghij' | cut -c1-255
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah abcdefghij' | cut -c1-255
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blaabcdefghij' | cut -c1-255
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah asdfasdfasdfasdfasdf | cut -c1-255
>
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah asdfasdfasdfasdfasdf' | cut -c1-255
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah asdfasdfasdfasdfasdf' | cut -c1-255
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ x=abcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ x=abcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo $x | cut -c1-255
abcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ x=abcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo $x | cut -c1-255
abcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefgjihijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabc
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$ echo 'blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah' | cut -c1-255 blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
[rbulling@tiamat:~]$

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.

Adventures in configuring Mac OS X

Mon, 27 Aug 2007 07:07:36 GMT

Initial setup went smoothly, except that I have yet to get the Mac Mini to use DVI directly to connect to my ViewSonic VP2130b LCD monitor. I had to use the DVI-VGA adapter to get it to display at all. Then again, I've had trouble getting my ThinkPad Z61p to use that input consistently, too.

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.

Drinking the Cupertino Kool-Aid

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 03:45:50 GMT

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.

Sighting of a Ninja, a Monkey, a Pirate, and a Robot

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 20:50:02 GMT

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.

Social networking update: feedback sought

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 19:34:05 GMT

I have been using LinkedIn for about a year now, and I'm impressed with the breadth of people I know who now have LinkedIn accounts. I wonder what other social networks people I know participate in.

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?

Scotty, we need more power!

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:28:08 GMT

The lightning storm has knocked out the power here. The UPS has about 4 more minutes of power left before the network goes down.

Norah with Kitties

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 15:17:50 GMT

So cute...

Linux Journal publishes another one of my articles

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 14:38:19 GMT

Linux Journal just published an article I wrote, Mambo Exploit Blocked By SELinux
in their July 2007 issue. This is my second professional sale as an author. You need to be a subscriber to see the article on the web today, but in a couple months, they will probably open the article to the public.

[Edit: see the freely available version.]

Serious fun and games

Sat, 02 Jun 2007 18:33:20 GMT

Ralph Koster's A Theory Of Fun For Game Design offers many insights on game design and how people interact with games. Although the core audience for the book is video game designers, a much wider circle of people could benefit from reading this, including educators, parents, software developers, and artists.

The author makes an abbreviated version of the illustrations in the book available for free.

Baby macro fun with Norah

Tue, 08 May 2007 17:04:50 GMT

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.