Blog

9 Jul 2000 »

fun
Just got another orifice opened by Rebecca playing Total Annilihation. I suffered the old “knock-knock, who’s-there, 10-krogoths and 100 cans” problem. I had three krogoths just hanging around with a bunch of cans and other sundry units, covered 360 with all sorts of advanced defense on the perimeter (including a buzzsaw and three intimidators + radar targeting), and it wasn’t good enough. Blaaaam!

I sent over 300 cans and four krogoths her way about two hours before but it wasn’t enough. This is the problem with five hour, 500 unit per side games – need more units. At least I whipped her arse good and proper in the first game. With planes, and plenty of them.

Committees

Still haven’t committed the SAGE-AU conference to diary yet. But now, as pres, I’m getting some serious grief from professional committee dwellers. You know the sort: they whine and moan, do a bit here and there (and the person involved has done a lot for SAGE over the years), and when you try to show some sort of vision for the future, or even better just do something, they make it out to the new members as if you’re some sort of dictator. ARGGGHH! Donna – if you read this, my intentions are good, I just want to get something, anything done this year. Last year we had no vision and no drive, and it shows. I’m not going to make that mistake again.

7 Jul 2000 »

Just come back from the SAGE-AU conference, held at the Gold Coast. I’m president of SAGE-AU now, so I’m biased. We had a dinner at the Seaworld Nara, and I saw two pengiuns going at it hammer and tong. True missionary style if such a thing is possible for pengiuns.
Excellent security content. Met Bill Cheswick and David LeBlanc and many others. When I recover from my flight, I’ll do a proper writeup.

2 Jul 2000 »

Mozilla M16 is a little dodgy, and prefers seg faulting on CNN’s space page (argh!) but it’s better than what Helix Gnome did to my Suse-provided Netscrape: bus faults as soon as I launch the sucker. oh well. There’s always IE on my laptop 🙂
Mozilla is getting usuable at last. Still way too slow compared to native implementations (IE on the same hardware with only one of the processors churning rather than two is substantially faster than Mozilla under Linux).

Reinventing the wheel

rconover discusses how he “discovered” a way to do RTTI, but in C. That’s been standard fare for a while, I’m afraid, and it’s how many C stackguard checkers like electric fence work, but using hardware assistance rather than just a simple “canary” value alone (which can be overwritten with possibly the “correct” value ID for another type you’re happy to deal with.

As a person involved in XFree86, I don’t want to descend into “C++ is better than C” but it aggravates me to see things like vtables, subclassing and RTTI reinvented to make up for clear deficiencies with a language like C. If you look at XAA and the new metro loader, XFree86 is extending C to places it can barely go (I dare new C programmers to make significant additions to either technology without breaking ABI compatibility).

XAA in particular could probably be sped up for both compiling, running and speed of writing new modules if it were re-written in C++. Good C++ compilers get the gist of what you’re trying to do when you subclass and fill in non- overloaded methods, and can optimize it out so there’s little or (in most cases) no speed penalty if not a little speed boost due to the lack of a vtable lookup compared to a function pointer lookup. C doesn’t get a chance to do that and you lose type protection when you cast to void * and do all the funky stuff required to provide oblique data references and function pointers.

If you want to see my C++ is faster than C example, see BeOS. It’s the fastest booting OS I’ve ever used that’s not ROM based (such as N64 or BBC Basic). A Linux kernel with just enough drivers to run my machine takes a good 1.15 to boot into gdm (compared to BeOS’s 10-15 seconds), and Windows 2000 takes over 2 minutes.

that’s my rant for the day. Right tool – right job.

2 Jul 2000 »

The hassles of PCMCIA desktop adapters. The one that Dan C bought to host our gateway’s Wavelan is a PC Card -> ISA device and is PNP. I’ve spent most of this weekend trying to get Linux’s PC Card drivers (pcmcia-cs-3.1.17) to work with it. The problem is that pcmcia-cs requires the cards to be at IRQ 10,11 or else it can’t find it, plus much additional magic to detect my card. Due to IRQ sharing and my PCI bios, I have two devices at IRQ 10 (matrox, tulip) after interrupt sharing and one device (eepro100) at irq 11. Intel Standard Architecture is just so braindead at times.
The reason for stuffing around is that the host box has 6 gig of disk space, and I want it to be the gateway and server for my home network rather than Dan’s alpha. It was running NetBSD-current boot floppy (!) and working as a gateway, but I wanted nfs, dhcp, dns, router, and ip filter on that box.

I tried for two days to get Suse 6.4 + latest pcmcia working and it just doesn’t work, even after extensive tweaking. I download the latest NetBSD 1.5 snapshot, and the boot floppies make wi0 just turn up. I configured the interface and it works! ARRRGH this is a case why separate userland utilities and externally delivered pcmcia modules will never beat an integrated approach. I wondered why Linus doesn’t like these big updates, and now I understand completely.

In addition, the bus stuff on NetBSD is a delight to use and configure. If only Linux had this sort of forethought put into it.

30 Jun 2000 »

I was talked into going skiing this weekend. Then I worked out what I have to do to get to the conference next week (the SAGE-Au conf on the Gold Coast) and the doco I’ve promised work, and skiing became too difficult.

Don’t mind the cold white stuff, as I have quite ample heat shielding (coming off at the rate of ~ 1 kg a week). But given a choice of skiing and apres ski, apres ski wins big time. I actually prefer doing winery tours and staying in bed and breakfasts – preferably run by people like my Mum. Skiing in Australia is winter surfing for the tennis crowd. Expensive. New Zealand has much better skiing, but right now Perisher had a huge dump of new fresh snow, so I’m sure my friends will have a hoot.

hackery

Still no sign of the Suse contract papers. Oh well. They’ll come.

Had fun with an EMC SAN store. Tried to get them to let me create a 4 TB reiserfs volume from my laptop, but testing schedule is tight, and connecting a laptop via a fibrechannel is not possible right now. Might try again when we get the Alteon fibre card working under Linux for the SOE we are preparing. That’d be nifty to do a df on.

Talking to a new group that I wasn’t aware of who are working on XDSM. Hopefully, I can help them get HSM into reiserfs natively, so the last vestiges of “not enterprise ready” go away.

furniture

Eskil, Ikea is good as long as you like screwing stuff together, but when it comes to couches, have a look around. I looked at a Ikea couch, and it was okay and a little flat and hard. I then went to a local manufacturer (you may be able to get them) called “Moran” who hail from Melbourne Australia. They make the most beautiful furniture for surprisingly small amounts. I priced a three seater recliner couch and two massively overstuffed recliner arm chairs for $4500 AUD (Australian peso’s 🙂 with leather. Ikea could sell me that hard self assembled couch for $1100. Chuck in two nearby arm chairs, and the price went to about $2300. But the Moran stuff was sooooo much better. 10 year guarantee and they make it for you in any covering that they offer in the style of chair/lounge you go for.

Even if you don’t go for a Moran, all I’m suggesting is that Ikea are not that cheap when it comes to the big things, and couches and arm chairs are with you for 10+ years. Make a wise choice now – go visit a speciality store.

21 Jun 2000 »

depression
There’s so much macho crap about being your average beer swilling Aussie male that it’s really hard to grasp the concept of being on a drug for more than a course of anti- biotics (about 2 weeks). I might be depressed from time to time, thinking about my family’s tragic past, or upon my own failures as a human (slackness (sigh), singleness (sigh), being a big fat bastard (I’m on Jenny Craig, 9 kg gone), bills (which I can afford, but hate nonetheless), the usual crop of angst), but then I cheer up, usually by getting on the phone to some of my mates or just spending some quality time with my two cats. Total Annilihation also works.

I have a friend who would truly benefit from such a constant supply of something that would smooth out the troughs and peaks. I dread these calls, but being a Chinese- Taiwanese-Australian, the taboo of taking legal mind altering drugs and seeing a shrink is too much for her and what she claims is her culture (which is basically Australian from age 4, with Taiwanese parents, obviously). I just hope she can get over this thing before she does what I think she will, so she will have a chance of seeing her 30th birthday.

Of course, I have other friends and acquantainces who say “ditch the bitch”, but I think they do not understand.

work

Cool – I am at a single client for the rest of my stay at my current employer, and the new contract is in the mail. I’m happy for both reasons! 🙂

hackery

Sad to see Suse go from the laptop, as I was just getting it to be useful, but it’s basically a tool for me to do my primary work, which is doco (and lots of it), e-mail and interoperability with clients. One day, Suse’ll do me, but not yet.

I’ll have to get the FM801 card under alsa working and get the IO-APIC SMP stuff sorted before Suse freeze 7.0 on me.

18 Jun 2000 »

laptops and Suse
I’ve had a horror week, not least caused by Partition Magic ripping the guts out of my laptop when I moved and resized my Win2K partition to make room for a fullish install of Suse 6.4. Luckily I don’t trust PM or any partitioner, and so I had a backup.

Suse took a long time to install, and after which I didn’t have any PC Card (pcmcia to the sticklers who haven’t been to pcmcia.org in about five years) stuff because I have a Toshiba and Suse ship an unbelieably ancient pcmcia-cs, and my USB mouse didn’t work because they had failed to test it with the kernel they boot by default (usbdevfs or something like that didn’t mount, so no USB). I love my USB mouse, and I compiled my way into submission. I finally managed to get a network connection some four days after installing Suse as my only OS. I must point out that I’ve been very busy working for my current client, and it’s not me being very slack or crap at Linux. It only took about 30 minutes to locate and download the relevant bits (a newer pcmcia-cs and alsa for sound, didn’t manage that) and recompile a couple of times. But in real time, it took four days due to the incredibly hectic schedule I kept whilst in Melbourne.

It’s interesting to note that I was able to work for a week with just Linux, doing word processing (on StarOffice, which feels like a bad Word 6) et al, but now that I have over 900 messages streaming into Outlook, I am so happy I was able to recover all my messages. I can’t live without e- mail, and until there’s an Outlook 2000 class e-mail package for Linux, I can’t make the final switch. Don’t give me any of the ” is better than Outlook” or “urgh, how can you use MS crap?” type of things, because I firmly believe that Outlook is living proof of the maxim that if you let MS improve something until it’s right, they’ll eventually do so. MS don’t manage perfection with all their products (Win3.x & Win9x are perfect examples of crap at work), but Outlook is e-mail ambrosia. It’s fast, clever, functional, deals with the 190 MB of mail I have on there at the moment with aplomb, and can handle POP3 and IMAP servers like nothing else. In short, I’d sleep with it if I could.

Work

just returned from a week in Melbourne when I had just returned from a week in Brisbane. I have documentation due from the project I sort of completed in Sydney the week before that. In addition, I have my SAGE-Au paper to finish (due two weeks ago), and finally, a 16-20 page edition of SAGE Advice, the SAGE-Au journal. busy. I need the 36 hour day.

Home & Work situation

Went house hunting and mortgage enquiring on the weekend whilst I was in Melbourne (my original & preferred home town – I live in Sydney at the moment, and it’s awful). The problem is that the banks and mortgage brokers will not talk to you if you don’t have like four months worth of savings, even though I earn more than most two income families. And if I become self-employed, as I do want to (to work for Suse, see previous entries), I’ll need two *years* worth of company tax returns before I can borrow a maximum of 75% of the total cost of the house. If I hold off moving jobs, I can do the four month thing, and get a loan and then transfer to my own company, but that’s giving me the total willies in case cash flow becomes a problem. I want my own place, dammit I can afford my own place. Every time I use a home loan calculator, I can easily afford nearly all the townhouses, houses and occasionally even small mansions in the suburbs I want to live in. With the cats, apartment/units are out.

29 May 2000 »

Got my boxed copy of SuSE 6.4 x86. woohoo! Now I can figure out |x86| > |axp|, and try to bring them closer together.

28 May 2000 »

work
Debugging the OSF netscape image running on Suse, which apparently shipped with the 6.4 image. In 2.2.14, there’s two unimplemented osf syscalls + a poorly guessed osf syscall causing the hard wedges. Does anyone have good OSF (TruUnix) documentation of the syscalls? I’m interested in calls 0, 53 and set_program_attributes.

guns

Wow, most of my postings go unnoticed (because I lead a mostly dull life 😉 – but the gun thing got a few people going. Greets to samth, jdub, graydon, barryp, and apgarcia. It looks like I’m preaching to the choir here, which is good in my humble opinion. I was worried for a while when I read Cryptonomicon and the casual linking of geeks == guns for a portion of that book (especially the surreal scene where geeks with trench coats and long barrelled shotties are in a carpark whilst the police are present. In Australia, you’d be front page news, depicted in your last few minutes on the planet before the police “resolved” the incident; unfortunately here deadly force is met with deadly force far too often). I thought I was strange for not liking guns, but obviously not. I used to shoot rifles (.22 and .303’s) when I was a teenager as part of school “sports” (we had a small rifle range on site), but I’ve since put it behind me as I’ve come to realise how evil these things are.

I just wish Eric would respect the (needless) dead, and take into account the possible feelings of those affected by the waste of human life. I would prefer for him to not post the .sig on days that people die from firearm related deaths. This obviously means no more gun related .sigs, which would make me happy.

When the government of the day so clearly outguns its own citizenry, there’s no chance of – say, a bad patch of Minnesota rising up against the “tyranny” of the state. The framers of the second amendment might have thought it a good idea at the time, because the British could only ship so many people over, and in the civil war, everyone had roughly the same level of firepower in terms of range, deadliness and rounds per minute. These days, even if you can get a mini-gun, capable of mowing down crowds in seconds, it’s no match to the army, navy, or airforce, or even the ATF or the FBI, as Waco proved. If you want change, you have to do it at the ballot box, and not with guns.

Today, at least 250,000 and probably more than 500,000 Australians (including myself) marched in celebration of reconcilliation, and in plain defiance of our cowardly prime minister who refuses to apologise to the aboriginals and seriously talk reconcilliation for the past genocide and work on fixing up today’s ills (such as compensation for the stolen generations, third world health and sanitatary conditions in most of the outback, and very short lives – the average lifespan of aboriginals is only 56-64, whereas if you’re from *any* other background, it’s 75-81 depending on being male/female).

At the next election, he’s history – he wont need to go to pollsters on Monday to find this out – when more than 1/8th of your largest city marches against you, you are *so* gone. That’s how every civilised nation works. When there’s significant public sentiment against the policies of the day, they get sorted out through non-violent means at the ballot box. Guns are not part of the solution. See Fiji for a practical reason why this is so. Fiji will be a disaster zone for years to come until racist terrorists like George Speight learn the lesson the hard way. Fundamental change can only come from the people wishing to have a change, and they will do this through the ballot box.

27 May 2000 »

guns
Getting fairly offended and pissed off with esr’s continual stream of gun nut quotes in his .sig in lkml. I know he’s into guns, and realistically, everyone’s gotta have a hobby, but he takes it too far. The Wendy’s massacre and now a cold blood killing by a 13 year old says to me (and anyone else with a brain larger than a small peanut) that the Second Amendment needs amending or abolition. Small arms are a blight upon the planet, and no one needs a .38 semi auto pistol. Farmers don’t – I know because I have farmer friends, and the .22 single barrel does rabbits just fine.

It’s a shame I’m a steenking furriner sitting here in my comfortable Sydney abode rather than being able to do something about it. Just remember, the gun nuts are about as rational as the creationists, and much better armed. I’ve been to a few gun control and gun nut sites and basically, both sides take great liberties with statistics. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

work

Working on getting all my machines Suse’d. I s’pose as I’m going to work for them, better actually use the product 😉

26 May 2000 »

Win2K spontaneously reboots if I press eject in the cd player or on the little button on the front of my soon to be ex-work’s Toshiba laptop. I rang MS a few days ago to report it. I spent 40 minutes waiting to speak to a PSS drone. They made me get an support account on their system before I could continue the call. No big deal as long as I wasn’t charged for the call – it is a bug after all.
Eventually, 20 odd minutes later, I told the drone the details along the lines of, “I have a minidump, and I can repeat the bug check. It’s a two line BSOD caused by a bug check caused by me pressing eject. As you know bugchecks are caused by assertions in the kernel, and are generally easy to trace to a specific issue”. We spoke for a few minutes longer and he asked me to send in the event details. I managed to repeat the BSOD with a full dump, so I’m set – I thought.

I get an e-mail the next day saying along the lines that “they couldn’t replicate the problem, maybe you should increase the page file size, and oh by the way, if you want us to debug your problem, it’ll be $100 thanks.”

Well, MS, I’m going to say this once only – it’ll be a cold day in hell before I’m going to PAY you to debug assertions in YOUR code.

I don’t even know why I bothered to report the issue. Let some other poor Tecra owner with more money than sense find out the hard way that we have one of the 23,000 odd high priority bugs. It should be illegal, and I’m actually fairly certain in Australia it is illegal to not assist people who buy commodity products with faults.

soon to be work

proto-suse-6.4-axp-eval freezes hard using my forte media 801 sound card. I looked at the alsa sources, spoke to the guys, and it turns out that axp is not quite a supported platform. God help any poor unsuspecting axp owner out there. Hang in there fellas, there should be patches soon.

It also wedges hard for me with netscape. I’m going to build a serial console-enabled kernel and strace that bugger. It’s harder because NS is a TruUnix version, and we’re emulating TU syscalls. Should be fun, but I think it’s to do with the resolver. Again, fun, fun, fun.