I have never been much of an encryption hacker. Crypto-geeks are a special breed of hacker that have an unrelenting love affair with mathematics.
Unfortunately, since I have a desire to write a piece of software (DIRT) that depends upon good encryption, I am going to have to become an expert. Because of this, I am up to my eyeballs in Schneier's book, Applied Cryptography. I have since stopped bleeding from the eyes, and I think that I will have a working encryption and signature scheme running in the next couple of days ;)
I LOVE EASYDNS. They provide the DNS service for this site, mostly because I am too lazy to do it myself.
I was surprised to find that none of my domains went down during the power outage that hit the east coast a week ago. The reason follows....
Dear easyDNS Member,
As most of your are aware, at about 4pm EST on Aug 14, 2003, many cities
in North America including Ottawa, Toronto, New York, and Detroit
experienced a major power outage.
Although we lost power to our office and were unable to provide
telephone support during the outage, we are happy to report that none of
our other systems were affected during the outage, and customer domains
continued to operate normally.
You may be wondering then, why we are sending this email now, when the
power outage happened a week ago. The answer is that with the increased
volume of spam, email viruses, and worms all vying for your attention we
felt it was better to wait. In short, we felt is was better to post
information on our web site's status page and wait until internet email
activity calmed down a bit before we sent you this update directly.
We would also like to remind you that you may check the status of our
systems at anytime by visiting:
http://support.easydns.com/status.php3
Thank you,
The easyDNS staff.
I move into my new condo in 13 days and counting. I can hardly wait. No more tripping over my parents (and from their perspective, over us). I moved out when I was 23 originally, which was kind of late, bu hey... I was in school. Living back at home has reminded me why.
My parents are great people, but it is their house, and we are messing with their daily routine just by being there.
Derek's law of inverse typographical representation:
Trojan viruses hit us repeatedly, and mainly due to user stupidity (exacerabated in some cases by operating systems that allow the default user to be administrator, or hide the file types from the user for "convenience").
I can understand a user getting hit by a virus once, or even twice, but some of my co-workers (used in the loosest sense of work here), never seem to get it. Occasionally somebody will find a free webmail server that I have not yet blocked at the firewall, and not a week later I am cleaning out dozens of different infectious vbScripts and screensaver executables.
Maybe I am going to have to move to using Norton Ghost and re-imaging any computer that invokes my wrath.
Derek's law of technological ennui:
The span of time that a technology remains "cool" is inversely proportional to it's initial coolness.
The "cooler" a piece of tech is, the faster it will get adopted, and the quicker it becomes commodity, and therefore unremarkable. I just read this phrase on sombody's blog:
Sci fi a few years back, and unremarkable the day after it was implemented.
DIRT has made some progress, and I have created a new Python HTTP socket handler in the process.
While Python comes with a plethora of great HTTP handlers, and there is no shortage of "aftermarket" ones (like Twisted), none of them really fit my needs. DIRT needs to connect to a stream, determine it's stream type, and then morph into the correct handler class on the fly. That is where my library comes in. Dirtnetlib determines the correct handler depending on the mime-type, or other metadata that is sent on just about any http compliant connection.
Dirtnetlib will be released as part of dirt within the next couple of weeks.
I am coding the network connection layer for DIRT. Listening to streams is done, but I also need to set up a system to eliminate duplicate packet capture. Just letting you know!
Over a week since I last updated my blog. A stressful week, but one which is drawing to a close.
Info about the DIRT (Deniable Internet Radio Transmitter) P2P radio project, and the eng_cvs engineering file management system follow...
It started with one of the best bike rides in memory on Sunday, but descended into a week of abortive starts, and failing electronics most of the work week. I have finally gotten most of the things I need into working condition by today.
One of my work projects is a Content Management system for an engineering department. We needed a way of sharing and organizing our files via the web, so I am writing the system in a combination of PHP, BASH, and PYTHON. I am using as many GPL libraries as possible, so that the whole thing will have to be released to the public when I am done. Sneaky no? I haven't talked about this very much with my bosses, but they didn't give me much of a lead time to code it either.
DIRT is progressing very nicely as well, and might see release by the end of the month. Some transmission stuff is working, and the interface has mostly come together. Python again. I am starting to really love python.
While I am hopelessly in love with my new (work supplied) Asus Laptop, I am also extremely annoyed by the bad manners exhibited by it's touch pad. I honestly think that these things were designed to only be used by people who hunt and peck. Anybody who tries to type properly inevitably smears their thumbs on the pad, changing/launching windows, and generally makes life hard for themselves.
I was disappointed to find out that X/Linux does not automagically turn of the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in. Lame. The solution? Mouse detection and configuration mangling when X starts.
First thing you have to do is get your XF86Config on. If you already have X working with either mouse,then skip this step, otherwise, change the XF86 lines below...
InputDevice "USB Mouse" "CorePointer"
and then add these lines below the keyboard input device:
#Touchpad
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Touchpad Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "Auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
EndSection
# USB-Mouse
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "USB Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
#Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
#Option "Protocol" "Auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mouse0"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Resolution" "1200"
EndSection
Copy this file to XF86Config.nopad in the /etc/X11/ dir.
InputDevice "USB Mouse" "CorePointer"
to read instead:
InputDevice "Touchpad Mouse" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "USB Mouse" "SendCoreEvents"
Save this file as XF86Config.both in the same directory. Now open your favourite editor and paste in the following script, and save it in your /usr/bin directory...
#!/bin/bash
if [ -e "/dev/input/mouse0" ]; then
echo "Found USB mouse. Deactivating pad."
cp /etc/X11/XF86Config.nopad /etc/X11/XF86Config
else
echo "No USB mouse. Pad and USB mouse both active."
echo "Restart X to use mouse only."
cp /etc/X11/XF86Config.both /etc/X11/XF86Config
fi
gdm
I know, I know. Ugly hack, but it took all of five minutes, and it works. X will disable the trackpad if you have a USB mouse installed. This does NOT work if you have a second PS/2 mouse. You must also make sure that USB mouse support, and either UHCI or OHCI is active on your computer (already done on RedHat, easy to change in Gentoo).
Note: You may find that your scroll wheel mapping sucks ass. Check this big ass scroll mouse site for more details.
I have now installed alsa, and a USB secondary mouse on my Gentoo custom kernel system. These seem like simple things, but keep in mind that no RedHat boot could keep this laptop up for more than 5 minutes without some kind of heat related crash (and yes I tried turning ACPI off).
I think that Mark had it kind of right when he said that there is a niche market for everything, including the most user-hostile distro in history (I think).
The upside is that this computer SCREAMS, and does absolutely everything that i want it to. I configured it, learned TONS about the Linux OS, and can make it dance how I want to.
I am not going to switch back.
Finally got Gentoo up and stable on my new laptop. Installed the new beta (just days before it went release), and went through the whole isntall procedure. The documentation is lengthy, but EXTREMELY thorough (happy day)!
I have everything that I want up and running flawlessly, including a custom low latency kernel, and some wireless hacking tools (love airsnort).
Some tips and tricks follow...
First of all, to get a laptop running with PCMCIA using gentoo (helpful for people having errors with insmod ds or ds.o and if you can't get orinoco working with pcmcia_cs)...
DO NOT ENABLE PCMCIA IN THE KERNEL!
Instead, recompile your kernel with pcmcia disabled, and wireless networking enabled, but with no adapters compiled in or as modules. Back up your config file FIRST though, so that if you screw up the make menuconfig changes, you can get back to at least where you left off. Now make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install .
Copy the new bzImage to your boot dir (mount it first eh?) and then add the new settings to your /boot/grub/grub.conf file. Be sure to not copy over your original bzImage, since this kernel may not be stable yet (sometimes these things happen). Also, copy the .config file in /usr/src/linux/ to config.custom.whatever in your home dir. Next, emerge pcmcia_cs (and force a rebuild if you have to).
If you have a wireless orinoco card (if you see orinoco when you plug in your wireless card and type lsmod), copy /etc/init.d/net.eth0 to /etc/init.d/net.eth1 and edit the settings as appropriate. Also udpate your settings in /etc/conf.d/net to match this card.
Reboot! You should have no ds or pcmcia related errors this time around. You may timeout after 30 seconds when searching for a network to connect to on the wireless card if you set up dhcp.
For some extra fun, I suggest emerge airsnort.
Had a HELL of a time repairing the dead hard drive on the server this weekend. All kinds of obscure problems popped up. Finnaly narrowed it down to a combo of a flaky mount process for the boot partition, and a poor Init script system due to leftover cruft from the Mandrake install.
Everything should be up and happy as of RIGHT NOW.
I ahve also noticed a speed-up of about 10x for most server tasks, due to fewer hard drive timeouts. Who'da thunk!