Category: Life, the universe, and everything…

24 Oct 2000 »

life
Turned 30. World didn’t end. My actual b’day party is this coming Saturday in Melbourne. So my friends in Sydney are playing poker at my place, and feeding the cats whilst I am away.

Went to our company conference at the Gold Coast, staying at the casino there. Had a great deal of fun (not gambling). Played poker with my workmates in the hotel room with monopoly money and didn’t lose too much ($3 Australian peso’s). After a long and emotional day, tossed cookies. Tossing cookies == bad, especially when a fine meal and even finer cognac is wasted. Woke up at 6.30 am on Sunday, which is just wrong. 🙂 At least I didn’t suffer for my excesses.

hackery

My Win2K security presentation at the company conference went well. The guys used our WaveLAN cards to hack at my box (which was being used for the presentation) in an effort to retrieve a file I had created for the purpose. They did manage to crash the FW/1 auth agent, but in the end, they used a social engineering attack to retrieve the winning condition (they needed the passcode in the file to get the M&M’s). I’m glad my limited lockdowns on my Win2K laptop survived a cumulative 6 hours of extensive attacks and DoS from our company’s most gifted, um, security architects and the CTO. I’m sure there are still bugs to be found in Win2K, but for the average user, it’s good enough.

Updated my web site. It needs more work so that css works properly (ie the color scheme and fonts sucks and requires fixing). I also need to find an acceptable open source documentation license for all my SAGE-AU and other writings. If you have suggestions mail me.

advogato

I’m glad that my friend Luke has finally progressed to being certified at Master level. I find it amusing that people I consider Journeyer at best (ie they are around my skill level and achievements) are classified Master if they use Linux (and remember, I used to as well; I almost was employed by SuSE to work on reiserfs). Luke is one of the NetBSD Core. Over the last nine-ten years Luke has done more for NetBSD than most Linux hackers have ever done for Linux. The certification system here, simply because of weight of numbers will always lead to easy (and possibly wrong) certification for people associated with the Linux in-crowd.

SAGE-AU, auDA

Off to Melbourne tomorrow for the second auDA Competition Policy panel meeting. Should be vibrant. I’m waiting to see who emerges with the biggest knives.

SAGE-AU, perception, and privacy

I can’t say too much about this, but let’s just say that if you help your local professional association, it helps to communicate the privacy concerns of your membership base to a potential sponsor before giving them any contact information. I now have the unenviable task of recruiting a poorly behaved potential sponsor, which may cause a back lash among the members, even though it is a positive outcome for the organisation as a whole.

15 Oct 2000 »

hackery
I got Simon’s XFree86 patches. I was so happy once I had them. I am still cutting new ground, as his alpha server (which works) is statically linked. The patches slot in nicely to the current CVS, with one minor tweak and a bit of work. The dynamic loader stuff I was working on is about 95% complete and this will mean once the two sets of patches have been combined, the new server will be a new supported platform for XFree86. Excellent. I hope 4.0.2 comes out soon.

birthday

I’m 30 on Tuesday. My goal of getting to 115 kg by my birthday has about 5 kg to go, but I’m still on track to make 110 kg by the end of the year, pending any eating- related disasters.

life

Bought Alien Legacy when I couldn’t get my hair cut. I’m trying to go short and blond as I’m sick of my current style.

Last night, went to a friend’s 28th birthday. He was having a 80’s evening. Dan (my housemate) had gone shopping at the op shop and had got a great Cyndi Lauper look for Ang, his girlfriend. He got a grandfather shirt and a tartan waist coat. I simply browsed through the clothes I used to wear during that time, and came up with a white brocaded grandfather shirt and beige waistcoat and beige trousers. Surprisingly, I still fit them. Dan was not impressed as he had been shopping, whilst I had merely delved.

When we got there, the party was everything I feared: dress check to get in; the hostess was a bit peeved that I didn’t come as someone famous. One day, I’ll be more famous than I am now, and hopefully in a good way. I got away with it when I told her that the clothes were from that era.

The music was too loud, and I can’t hear very well in those conditions. My hearing is not what it used to be, and music and crowded rooms confounds me more often than almost everything else. I was very uncomfortable.

At one point, Jan, the birthday boy, asked me if I wanted a shiela (ocker for woman). I thought this was very generous, but at little bizarre as most of the women there did not know me.

I ummed and ahhhed for a bit and asked “Sheila?” and looked confused. Jan didn’t understand me due to the noise. He shouts,

“Do ya want a sheila?” I just looked surprised. There are plenty of nice girls there, but this may be a little presumptious of me as I am still a fat bastard, and most people are put off by the extra tyres before they get to meet me.

“Sheila?”, I said again, with even more confusion on my face. He looked at me funny, and laughed. It turns out he was offering me a “shooter”. Ooops.

There was this nice Canadian lass that a friend had brought along. Unfortunately, due to the loud noise purporting to be music, I didn’t get to talk to her as much as I’d liked.

I still don’t like what passes as popular 80’s music. The really original stuff, like Jean-Michel Jarre’s Zoolook, the stuff that Prince did towards the end of the decade (still as Prince, then, remember?) or some of the nascent techno that I have just doesn’t mean anything to these proto-old farts. Yello doesn’t get a mention, either. The genres I mentioned as being progressive are still with us and influence today’s music. Banarama and Rick Astley do not.

work

I Shipped.

189 pages of documentation representing 4 months of my life I cannot get back. If my security architecture is followed, customers using our next generation Internet (fscking big pipes) will be the safest from tomfoolery on the planet.

Security architecture is a wonderful thing. (Note: not risk free, not absolutely secure, but the equivalent of a hefty safe rating (check out the burglary classification area towards the bottom).

Went for drinkies afterwards in slightly damp (read: it was raining) mid-spring twilight conditions at the pub near work in North Sydney.

The pub was a converted Church. Whilst I was getting my Boag’s at the bar where once rows of wooden pews lay, I thought this is the true Church for Australians. Worshipping the mighty beer god. There were a lot of worshippers in attendance that night, and most of them very cute indeed. I’ll have to go again.

11 Oct 2000 (updated 11 Oct 2000) »

stupidity, Network Solutions-style

Say hello to “der Stock, Andrew van”. Network Solutions have plenty to answer for. I just want to update my NIC handle and put in the address I actually live at in my record, and whilst I’m at it, change my e-mail address to refer to the domain I bought *TWO YEARS AGO* instead of the originating account and maybe even sort out the fact I have three words in my surname, not two.

Is it too hard to have a human look at these things? I’m sure if NSI charged money for updating details, it would be actually possible to do so.

hackery

Still no XFree86 patches. I know they exist, but… sigh

committees

Working through an issue. Hopefully will have something decent to report soon after November 25 on Advogato.

work

Is outrageous – have arbitary Friday deadline. Hate crunch mode.

coffeeeeeee

Buzzing along nicely. New toy is just fine! 🙂

7 Oct 2000 »

I have paid homage to the espresso gods. I pumped my first short black on my own machine (I’ve used other people’s including my brother’s baby Gaggia), and it tastes fine! 🙂 The Novo comes with a frother, which will not get much use, I’d imagine. The only aggravating thing is to make it fill to the top of the cup, you need to set a memory, which is actually pretty bloody trendy as it remembers for the next time.
I’ll have to go to a nice homewares store and get some nice espresso cups – my little teacups are not snobby enough for me.

hackery

I’m getting a set of patches from a Wasabi person to patch XFree86 into a working static server. Doesn’t help with the dynamic stuff I’m working on, but it removes the uncertainty from whether my patches are helping in any way. 4.0.2 is going to be a block buster point release – many new features, really 64 bit clean (and fast). It’s going to kick butt and take names. If I were XFree86, I’d tag it 4.1.0.

6 Oct 2000 »

life
Bought Baldurs Gate II. There goes what remained of my spare time.

auDA continues to soak time. eu* is remarkably monopolistic.

SAGE-AU is giving me connipitions. However, we’re finally kicking goals! The bad news is that I need to get my friend Luke to recommit to being a board member.

hackery

Working on porting cvsup to NetBSD/alpha so I can keep up with the tree now that I need to keep on eye on my total download usage. Modula-3 is a nice enough language, but I wish it were properly integrated into the gcc backend so I didn’t have to port it.

Getting XFree86 4.0.1++ real close to working on NetBSD/alpha as modular server. Linking everything is getting closer, and there’s fewer compilation warnings.

25 Sep 2000 »

Netizen

I feel sad for Kirrily (Skud) to have her company go down the gurglers. That’s pretty damn shitty. I remember when Kirrily was running rainbow.net.au (IIRC) out of her garage in a northern Melbourne suburb. Well, at least it sounds as she’s going to have some fun somewhere else.

cla’s cats

Cats love keyboards. They are terrible typists, however. My advice is buy keyboards you can rip the keys off and suck out with a vacuum cleaner and put back in. My flatmate’s laptop went into a spin after Meebles slept on it yesterday. The fake numeric keypad had kicked in and wouldn’t go away. A reboot was required.

Hackery

Working on porting XFree86 4.0.1c to the NetBSD/alpha 1.5ALPHA2 snapshot. This has already occurred once, but I believe as a static server. I’m working on ensuring that 4.0.2 will have a decent X server for NetBSD/alpha where 99% of the things in x86 are present in the alpha port. DRI will take a bit longer; DRI is not ported to NetBSD yet.

14 Sep 2000 »

Today I conducted the largest single transaction I’ve ever done over the net – buying a new Dell Inspiron 4100 via the Dell web site.
So in a few weeks, I’ll have a nice shiny Dell sitting at home to replace my aging HP XU 6/200 dual PPro 200 and its busted 17″ monitor. The new box is fast with all the right bells and whistles – 800 MHz PIII, 32 MB GeForce2 GTS DDR, 12x DVD (I’m hoping its a model that is firmware upgradable), 128 MB of RAM, and a 40 GB 7200 RPM UltraATA 100 drive of some description. I chose not to get a wasted copy of Windows Me and instead went for Win2K as there was no Linux choice. Ripped off. Well, at least it didn’t cost the earth. In fact, it cost 27% of my HP’s cost (without cost adjustments for four years of CPI) for more than twice the processor speed. I had to get in before the Australian peso got much worse.

At least this time, the box is mostly standard. The HP has a HUGE motherboard which is probably as custom as you can get them.

I’m going to install a few operating systems on this new baby; RedHat and NetBSD and Win2K. It should be fun, especially as not every single device is yet supported.

14 Sep 2000 »

My Win2K box had conniptions this morning. Something had been in and munged a system file or two, and System File Protection was not having a bar of it (SFP is like tripwire on steroids). Frantic tearing around the house looking for 2195 installation media didn’t turn up my original holographic CD. I did find the 120 day limited trialware CD. SFP was happy with that and things worked okay… until I used Outlook, which quickly barfed.
ARGHHHHHH

I thought it might be a virus, but I’m one of the most cautious people I know. So I tried offloading all my files to Dan’s alpha, which already had Samba running on it. But softdep has this annoying habit of not immediately freeing space until the inode has been reused. So the disk was full when it wasn’t. I installed Samba onto blossom via pkgsrc (gee, it’s so hard doing this stuff: make install). The toughest part was getting a workable smb.conf in a hurry. So after a few run-ins with swat, I scp’d Dan’s and modified it to protect the guilty.

Bought a copy of NAV 2001 over the net from Symantec and installed it from their site. They get it – for a commercial vendor. Media is not needed in this day and age of fast cable connections.

Not a (known) virus.

The laptop is still a little flakey, and I don’t know what’s causing it. It’s probably up for its 3 mth re- install.

11 Sep 2000 »

Been meaning to post. Honest.
Been very very busy.

Went to Hobart to present the Win2K Security tutorial to what might have been a very hostile audience (it was run by the Australian Unix User’s Group- Tasmania and SAGE-Tas coordinator.) However, 33 people turned out, and they were cool. I’ll put the pictures up soon.

Did I mention that I bought myself a Canon Digital Ixus (aka Powershot S100 Elph in the US)? V. v. cool. So small and cute! It’s about 170 gms, and about the size and weight of 50 business cards sitting in a neat rectangular pile. Still 2.1 million pixels (1600×1200). V. impressive color and options. The supplied Windows 2000 software is way cool too – the USB just kicks ass!

Trying to get through the SAGE-AU exec stuff is a major drain on time. I have sponsors to look after, a newsletter to put out, etc, etc.

I have just been appointed as one of the technical geeks on the auDA DNS Competition Policy Panel (see http://www.auda.org.au for more info). This will drain even more of my spare time away. I have to fly to Canberra on September 27 for the kick off meeting. Should be fun at any rate.

hackery

Installed NetBSD-1.5/alpha ALPHA2 on my pc164. Sick of Linus and his stupid idiotic unbelievable mediocre software engineering (NOT!) decisions. No kernel debugger. No CVS tree. No proper integration of new and useful busses (such as PCMCIA or proper tie in for USB in a standard way). No modularization of code that is shared between different busses. Two distinct sound subsystems, with the superior one not integrated. Code freeze – heard of it, but doesn’t apply to some people. Regression testing? Happens to other operating systems. I’m sick of all that crap. I’m sure 2.4 will be enjoyed by many, but I think the 2.4 event horizon is showing Linus’s inadequacies more than ever before.

And now my cheapy FM801 sound card works just fine as the sound works without freezing the dang box. However, XFree86 doesn’t work as NetBSD treats 64 bit platforms as proper workstations, not just as a 8 bit PC grown up. So we have to add the 8 bit stuff back in (carefully) to allow inb() and outb() to initialize the card into MMIO mode so we can use 64 bit operations once more.

Just wish there were more *BSD developers and more sharing between the three major forks.

18 Aug 2000 »

Not much happening.
My 17″ monitor is still dead. Long live the 17″ monitor.

11 Aug 2000 »

hackery
Not much happening – I want to work on a project management tool for KDE (I can’t wait for C++ wrappers for Gnome and/or much better IDL support that hides the C braindeath that passes for emulating C++ (badly)).

However, we got infected by a Java zealot as developer #3. Developer #1 wants to project manage. I’m developer #2. I don’t have time for this. Unfortunately, the Java Zealot is correct – most PM’s use Win32 and coding something for KDE or Gnome will knock them out of contention. However, my argument to that is very simple: MS Project 2000 is Very Very Very Good(tm) – it’s like version 10 and they’ve had over 10 years to get it right, and they did. If your daily rate is >$800 why skimp on a $400 tool?

life

Been invited to research, write, and present an in-depth Windows NT/2000 security tutorial for the Tasmanian Australian Unix User’s Group (AUUG), whose members missed out when the AusCERT-supplied speaker didn’t mention anything about NT when he was there in April.

This should be interesting. Most unix users take a very contrary view to Win32 security – you’ll be a rare Advogato reader if you are aware of the Win32 security model and actually like it. The audience will either be administrators resigned to working with NT/2000 or people interested in validating their (mostly wrong) views on NT/2000 security. A tough crowd in both cases. I hope that people will be able to take something away with them, even it is simply a greater appreciation for NT’s security model, which is actually quite decent when you get down and dirty with it. Very deep and fine grained once you accept the security model’s basic thrust, which is VMS-like and not Unix like.