cat slave diary

Author: Andrew van der Stock

  • Advogato – 16 Dec 2000

    16 Dec 2000 »

    hackery
    Not enough time. Need 30-40 hour days. I have nearly hacked WinVNC to use a far more secure API (LsaStorePrivateData() if you’re interested) rather than stashing passwords in the registry. But due to aforesaid lack of time, I don’t have time to finish this, and the patches I posted to the vnc- developer list got stripped by a bloody-minded automated de- MIME thingy.

    life

    off on annual leave for three weeks, but…

    work

    Not enough time. I still have 3 (largish) documents to finish, time sheets and an extensive expense claim to submit. All before Monday 9 am. Might get some sleep soon, but…

    cars

    helped a friend buy the right car today. Took two and a bit test drives. Got Adrian (who was just along for the ride) and Rebecca to sit in an Audi S3 (like my friend Luke’s) for a couple of ticks. Very nice. She bought a Subaru Forester. Faux off-road 4wd’s make my teeth ache, but compared to the real thing that are also never taken off the road, this is only a minor twinge compared to the complete fscking arseholes who believe the road is theirs to hog, add a pedestrian killing bull bar (which will never touch the sweet flesh of any of our bovine friends), and steal my average mass-based safety net via their superior mass (and thus momentum) when they plow right through my baby car.

    time

    Need more time.

  • Advogato – talking about XFree86 4.0.2

    14 Dec 2000 »

    hadess: Xfree86 on ppc
    4.0.2 is out soonish (like dec 15 is code build day). 4.0.2 fixes a number of known PPC-isms as well as introduces a bunch of new servers and features, whilst improving the stability of the 4.0.x code base.

    4.0.2 is not just a point release. I recommend this release for all of you who are still sticking to 3.3.x for whatever reason.

    I’ve said it before, but 4.0.2 will kick ass and take names.

  • Advogato – on resignation letters

    13 Dec 2000 »

    pjf: going, going, gone…
    Paul, just in case you’re stuck, the deal with those sort of letters is:

    be brief – one, maybe two paragraphs of a couple of sentences each maximum
    do not slag anyone off or burn bridges
    just say “You’ve been wonderful to work for, but I need to …”
    do not waste effort stating the reasons you’re moving or tell them what you’re doing next
    be factual; include the last date you are going to be there and be firm about it
    I like to tie my finish date to pay runs so there’s a _last_ pay which should contain all your accrued benefits and you never need to return once you’ve packed your desk.

    Two weeks is the minimal acceptable period, four is typical. They are legally required to send you a group tax certificate within a short time of you leaving. Make sure you get it. I didn’t a couple of times, and it’s never stopped giving me grief.

    If you have personal stuff that you really care about, take it home Thursday night (this includes data!), just in case your employer has a selectively enforced “escorted off the premises” termination policy. I’ve seen people go this way, and it’s never pretty. Bring any stuff you have at home they own back in on Friday morning. They usually give you like 5 minutes to pack your desk in these situations.

    Just remember, this letter is business, not personal – even though personal reasons are the reason everone does stuff.

    Good luck!

  • Advogato – got my Win2K MCSE

    12 Dec 2000 »

    life
    I’m a Win2K MCSE after passing my final MCP exam. Woohoo.

    That last exam was Designing Network Infrastructure, which funnily enough is what I do for a living. I do network security architecture on a first-world country scale. I am currently working on a project that will re-engineer how my telco client communicates internally and externally. Their network is larger than most third-world countries’ networks, and supports approximately 40% of Australia’s data and voice traffic. So you can see that I sort of know what I’m doing there. So when I sit down to do this MCP exam, I was fairly surprised to see that it SUCKED. I’m almost ashamed to have a MCSE out of this.

    The marchictecture was unavoidable, the “best” answer and all of the alternatives in several questions were just plain wrong. They gave marks for answering certain select and place questions that were fundamentally flawed, or ignored industry best practice with respect to security implementation. They ignored timing in several places, where the correct answer in some cases was not even possible to select. Sometimes the “correct” answer is lots of servers, when in fact, I know that capacity planning and hard earned knowledge of large data networks says that 2 or 3 is about right for most applications and then you add some when you need more, not just because you might have 12 sites that *might* need a particular type of server.

    I’m going to write to the MS traincert guys to get that exam pulled ASAP. It’s just not a credible test of networking infrastructure know-how, not even if you were doing smaller-scale work like a Uni campus rejig.

  • Advogato – nearly a Win2K MCSE

    6 Dec 2000 »

    hackery
    Need to work on my paper for http://linux.conf.au

    MCSE

    Almost finished. Soon I’ll be a win2k MCSE. Next week is my last exam. I might even study for that one.

    work

    Top class blocking going on by a major vendor preventing me from getting on site at the data centre. They made me sign an NDA in an effort to slow me down some more. I had it signed in record time. The delays make me very happy as it allows my schedule to settle to just “punishing”.

  • Advogato – 2 December 2000

    2 Dec 2000 (updated 2 Dec 2000) »

    deekayen: World AIDS day

    Deekayen, there is no point in classifying how you got a particular disease. In South Africa, 20% of the population has HIV/AIDS. They are all not gay or junkies (which you seem to have trouble with), and they have a terminal illness. For some sub- Saharan countries, this could be a end of country event in a few years. AIDS does not respect your immoral repugnancy.

    Unlike you, I have lost friends and acquaintances to AIDS and it is not a pleasant way to go.

    Personally, though, the people who came up with a no weblog day are missing the point. The thing you want to do on an international AIDS day is communicate. PRACTICE SAFER SEX! IF YOU MUST INJECT, DON’T REUSE NEEDLES! is what we should be shouting from the virtual rooftops!

  • Advogato – 1 December 2000

    1 Dec 2000 (updated 1 Dec 2000) »

    hackery

    I have to do the following things:

    study for the rest of my MCSE exams
    write my paper for linux.conf.au
    work on the gtkada program that this paper references
    write my slides for said paper
    work on miscellaneous SAGE-AU stuff, like the Code of Practice and a working web site

    Things I’d like to do

    Play tekken tag team tournament and ssx on my playstation2.

    Which will win?

    The religion thing

    A reference site for all these philosophy related things: Yale’s Philosophy Resources.

    Occam’s Razor says that the simplest explanation is most likely to be the correct one.

    Religion is about beliefs. Science is about observable facts which lead to theories (some which can be modified as new facts come in, and some that are invalidated if facts fail to back that theory either by direct or indir ect means) or they just remain facts until something can explain them.

    Many theories with models can make suggestions about observations, which can be then verified through repeatable experiment. Good examples of the latter would be gravitational lenses, or Higgs bosons, both essentially unprovable at the time that the associated theory was written.

    Some theories are too well backed by observation to be anything but, well, proven. Some theories have little edges that can be tinkered with (quantum mechanics and classical mechanics, for example), but all theories preclude a deity by the dint of Occam’s Razor. $DEITY is just not necessary.

    The problem I have is not that people have deeply held religious beliefs, but they try to push them onto others. The worst offenders are those pushing “creationist science” (an oxymoron, in my opinion). Most creationists working to promote creationism as a first-class cousin to evolution as we know it today use incredible sophistry, faulty logic and word games to “prove” their point.

    There are no observable facts* that back up the Christian creation myth. There are plenty of observations that fill our current understanding of evolution and biology (and RNA chemistry, which underpin gene therapy and …).

    Check out this paper as it could summarize this thread quite succinctly. It’s an interesting read and proves that people who are into philosophy more than us have already been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

    * observeable fact: a red ball is a round sphere that has a surface that reflects light in certain wavelengths that appears red to a human eye. This round ball, if dropped in a vacuum on the planet earth will fall towards the centre of the planet at the rate of 9.8 m/s/s. The elements of an observeable fact cannot be argued as they are reduced to their smallest elements.

  • Advogato – Bought a PlayStation 2

    29 Nov 2000 »

    One of the lucky 60,000 Australians to have bought a PlayStation 2. I’m going to have serious tekken thumb tomorrow. 🙂
    mrorganic: agreed. Check out talk.origins. It’s very useful if you’re into combatting silliness, whilst demonstrating that we are open to new ideas as they arise. That’s what shits me about creationists. They claim we are closed minded. Well, yes, about creationism I certainly am closed minded – there is NO evidence to back it up, and usally creationists are aiming to teach creationism alongside accepted theories. As new things come up in biology and related fields, as long as there is repeatable experiments with the scientific method being used, or hard evidence to back it up, I’ll take it on board. Creationism fails both measures.

    gstein: agreed. Unless I personally helped start or did a shitload of work, I always feel uncomfortable putting anything other than “contributor” or “developer” on my associations with projects.

  • Advogato – AOSS 2

    28 Nov 2000 »

    Diary of Releasing OSDA at AOSS2
    This is a long one. It covers my weekend just past.

    Friday

    After a hectic week, I made my way from home to the airport with my frantically packed carry-on and laptop, and thus to the Qantas Club with unseemly haste. I had a couple in the Club before boarding my flight to Adelaide.

    Once in Adelaide, I zoomed to the cafe where people from the conference were having dinner. I should have caught an earlier flight – I do like my food, but good company is so much more. Adelaide didn’t disappoint on the cake and coffee front, and the company was fine. I met up again with my friend Skud and met Sarah, one of the organisers, and a few of the other speakers for the first time.

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Friday%20night.jpg http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/sarah1.jpg

    Saturday

    Got up a little too early; dang that half-hour time zone difference! Breakfast being delivered is the nicest part about staying away from home, and this was no exception.

    I was dropped off by the cab almost at the conference venue, but since I needed to make a booking for a hire car for the next day, I didn’t mind too much. I was a little early, and managed to organise a car and still be the first person to register for the day. Conference attendees received these nifty packs with stuff in them, like Caldera’s Linux Technology Preview. I thought I had every RedHat publication under the sun, so I avoided one of their folders, and so missed out on Red Hat 7.0 CD’s. Not a great loss.

    The conference kicked off well, with pretty good attendance for a smaller city like Adelaide. We had a quick pep talk from one of the local IT boosters, and then onto the main program.

    Dan Shearer: Open Source, Opening Doors

    A good talk aimed at increasing OSS usage in companies. The entry by stealth model is falling away as the desired mechanism and how you can make money doing open source.

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/dan%20shearer.JPG

    Richard Sharpe: Cutting code in Qantas Club

    Richard is probably best known for his Samba work, but this talk was more about Ethereal, which I use extensively. Richard didn’t have time to discuss how he codes at the Qantas Club, but I imagine with the free booze and other distractions available there… 🙂

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Richard%20Sharpe.JPG

    Greg Lehey: Revamping the FreeBSD SMP implementation

    Excellent talk given by a master of the trade. Greg detailed how the new SMP implementation differed from previous efforts, and the benefits of the new implementation.

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Greg%20Lehey.JPG

    Michael Still: Panda

    Michael gave us a talk about his PDF enabled graphics library. Panda allows programs to directly output to PDF at the highest quality available to them. It’s still a work in progress, but it seemed to work nicely.

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Michael%20Still%201.jpg

    Jay Schulist: Implementing Network Device Drivers in the Linux kernel

    Jay knew his stuff and he gave an excellent presentation, showing us how easy it is to make a working network driver. Of course, it was one that he had prepared earlier, but he did run make. 🙂

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Jay%20Schulze.jpg

    Lunch was nice, and I had a good chat with various people.

    Geoffrey D. Bennett: The Katie revision control system

    Katie is a clearcase filesystem revision control system. It worked very nicely and with a bit of polishing will be an excellent tool for developers sick of CVS.

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Geoff%20Bennett.jpg

    Kirrily “Skud” Robert: Perl 6

    A good talk, certainly one of the more interesting to me as they seem to be applying large scale software engineering to the open source model. I will be very interested to see how this turns out. Skud used Mr Laptop who runs Win2K. She still used a HTML presentation, though 🙂

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/skud.jpg

    Presentations, AUUG and SAGE-AU (and ISOC-AU)

    This one was a surprise for me as I didn’t expect to have to do this one. So I winged it. ISOC-AU were probably unaware of it as well, as no one was there who was a member (unusual) or from the exec. I presented first and got the message across as to what SAGE-AU does for its members (which is quite a lot, but not everyone sees that).

    Afternoon tea

    I was pleasantly surprised to be hunted down by Phil Kernick. Phil is one of our SAGE-SA members, but SAGE-SA doesn’t exist yet, and I’d like it to. Phil basically demanded to be let run it, so by the time you read this SAGE-SA should be off the ground. Yeehah! Who says conferences are a waste of time?

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/afternoon%20tea.jpg

    Glen Turner: Writing programs for future networks

    Glen’s talk was excellent and I managed to talk to him later about IPv6, a major pet project of mine. AARnet are likely to be an excellent test bunny for my subversive ideas. 🙂

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Glen%20Turner.jpg http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Glen%20Turner%202.JPG

    Conrad Parker: Sweep

    About the only end user application presented at the conference, which made a pleasant change. Conrad showed off Sweep, a sound program that does for sound what Gimp does for graphics. Very nice. He gave out handouts with the Sweep plugin SDK.

    http://www.greebo.net/Conrad%20Parker.jpg

    Andrew van der Stock: OSDA

    I did the only PowerPoint presentation of the entire conference! 🙂 I couldn’t contact my ISP due to my modem dialling too fast for the hotel’s poor excuse for a PABX, so Luke’s magicpoint HTML simply didn’t come through in time. OSDA details can be found at

    http://www.sage-au.org.au/osda/ http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/crowd.jpg

    Michael Neuling: Linux packet filtering

    Michael, one of the authors of IP chains, gave an overview of the more flexible NetFilter which is due to appear in 2.4 when it finally finishes baking. As a security freak, I enjoyed the talk.

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Michael%20Neuling.jpg

    After the conference had finished, we headed off to the pub, and had a few drinkies. North Terrace is where the Hyundai Excel Rice Boy Car Club has their unofficial 20 km/h drag races, so we saw a wide range of tricked up Excels. Very amusing.

    http://www.riceboypage.com

    After the pub, we walked clear across town to a Japanese restaurant. They took a long time to serve us, which detracted from an otherwise excellent feed. Again, the company was excellent. I had turned into major pumpkin and decided to call it a night after that. The others pottered off with the change to another pub.

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/at%20the%20restaurant% 20afterwards.jpg

    Sunday

    Had a late breakfast and picked up the car and then Skud before driving out to Greg Lehey’s place. Skud doesn’t have a license I found out, and surprisingly enough for a SCA person, her navigational skills with a map were fairly rusty. Since I’m of the Dirk Gently school of thought when it comes to going places, we missed our turn off and drove a little further than we expected to.

    Once we arrived a little after the 11 am start time, we found that we were the first lot of people to turn up there that day, with Luigi seemingly staying at Greg’s. Greg and his family live on acreage out in the country. It made a nice change. It’s only 35 minutes out of Adelaide, but it really is the country.

    They have a lovely rambling house, horses and whippets. Unfortunately, whilst we were waiting for the others to arrive, one of the family’s two cats was found dead on the highway outside the property. Luigi and Greg gave it a proper burial. I felt so bad, and I thank Greg and his family for continuing on the BBQ. If Greebo or Meebles died, I would have sent everyone home whilst I had a good blubber.

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/skud-n-dog.jpg

    Despite this tragedy, we had a good lunch with mostly everyone turning up after getting lost in various ways. Greg gave us good directions, but unfortunately, no one had a GPS receiver and metropolitan maps do not detail every little C road, and signage in South Australia could be better.

    Greg showed off his computer rooms. He has a wide variety of equipment in various stages of disrepair or working order. His guestrooms even have their own terminals.

    http://www.greebo.net/aoss2/Greg’s%20office%20and% 20friends.jpg

    After a long day, Skud and I departed for the airport. Skud is off to the wide white land of Canada soon. I wish her well; she’ll do great at e-Smith.

  • Advogato – 22 November 2000

    22 Nov 2000 »

    Skud: AOSS2
    I’m going to AOSS2 to do the SAGE-AU presentation. Mail me your presentation as a backup mechanism – it can come across on mr laptop. Also, I’m reasonably certain that Michael Paddon et al (ie the organisers) will look after it for you as well.

    work: Win2K security tute

    I gave my Win2K security tute another run today. A Microsoft dude was in the crowd. Low attendance – about 10 people fewer than RSVPs I had managed to get. The people there were probably taught to suck eggs, which is not always that pleasant – particularly as it’s a three+ hour tute.

    I did manage to get across the idea that NT/Win2K security is about using the integrated form of authentication, which is key. Every single time people go away from it, they suck at it. I have some other examples as well, but this is just one of the more recent and visible ones.

    hackery

    Working on getting the VNC thing fixed (as well as is possible). I’m going to kerberize VNC into the current developvnc.org CVS code and also work on revamping the current authentication scheme to something that’s a little bit more secure from Applied Cryptography. Too much effort, and we have a kerberos like scheme. I’m thinking Wide Mouth Frog at this stage. It’s about the same complexity as NTLM. Trent will be the VNC server.

    A possible nice thing is that VNC includes 3des C++ class helpers. I’m going to look into extending that implementation to 3des-cbc and encrypting the stream. Avoids the use of SSL or ssh entirely for relatively low cost. Trick is that the initial setup can be done quite badly.