I’ll space them out a bit now, no more daily pictures.
Years ago Jon Wright (a well known bearded OS/2 programmer) told me that after you get past a week of growth it stops being annoying, I think I’m getting to that stage now.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
day 4 of the beard and the Crypto museum
The day 2 picture had an NSA coffee mug in the background. I purchased it from the gift shop of the National Cryptologic museum at Ft Meade, Maryland. I highly recommend that museum, it has free entrance, hardly any visitors (I’ve never seen more than 5 people in there) lots of interesting displays, and some really intelligent and well-informed tour-guides. If you are interested in technology then you should visit the Cryptologic museum and the Smithsonian every time you visit Washington DC.
Last time I visited the Crypto museum they had a new display about fingerprint scanning. It displayed what the machine read and indicated whether the fingerprint was regarded as a match or not. I learned that I could get a false negative by changing the angle of my finger by about 20 degrees, but apart from that it seemed more accurate than I had expected.
Here is a picture of me touching an Enigma at the Crypto museum! There is also a picture of me sitting on a Cray with some Japanese friends, but I haven’t got a copy of that one.
In regard to Shintaro’s comment about thinking I had a beard after reading backup.te, I was a little surprised, I would have thought that mta.te (which is fairly complex) or chroot.te (one of the most complex and least used policy modules I ever wrote) would have inspired such a comment. backup.te seemed rather mundane by comparison.
day 3 of beard, and the gimp
Right now I’m just starting to break new personal records for hairyness.
I’ve been surprised that the GIMP isn’t as difficult to use as I had previously thought. I particularly like the preview feature for saving JPEGs. I can use a slider to set the quality of the image and see a preview of viewing the file before saving. In the past with less capable software I used to go through a laborious process of saving a JPEG, viewing it in a separate program, and then repeating until I achieved an acceptable balance of file size and quality. Now I can adjust the slider and see what the result would be in terms of both quality and file size.
Recently I was doing sys-admin work for a company where Windows was the desktop standard. Often we had to send around screen-shots of various problems and the way of doing this was to use CTRL-PrtSc to copy an image of the window in question and then paste it into a MS-Word document because the Windows image had no other program that was capable of dealing with image data. One significant problem with MS-Word is that it doesn’t allow expanding the image or modifying it, so you see it at about half the original resolution. It seems that what I should have been doing is pasting the image data into the GIMP and then saving it as a PNG file (PNG is loss-less compression which avoids the ripples you get from JPEG compression of text and it’s also very efficient at compressing the regular data that is typical in a screen-capture). PNG files would take much less space than MS-Word documents and allow efficient viewing by many programs (including web browsers which are on all machines).
Another beard pic
I’ve attached another pic, titled this one day2, which I guess means that day0 (not photographed) was one day without shaving and day-1 (also not photographed) was the last time I shaved.
So far I’m still in the range of “too busy/lazy to shave”.
Blogger beta is living up to it’s name and the functionality I had yesterday for uploading an image and having a small version generated is not working now.
started growing a beard
At LCA in January this year there was an auction at the end (an LCA tradition), and most people were feeling very relaxed and happy after plenty of good food and drink and bid with reckless abandon (another LCA tradition).
To help things along a few of us volunteered to do various things if various amounts of money were reached. The full list is here.
Anyway my contribution is to grow a beard for the next LCA. Recently I had been thinking that it was about time to start, and this morning I discovered that I had misplaced my shaver, so I start today. I had wanted to get a clean-shaven picture for the first blog entry, but things didn’t work out for that. The above picture is two days of growth (members of my local LUG are probably used to seeing me look like this).
I will strart by blogging a picture every day, and then start to space them out as it grows. The apparent results of beard growth should exponentially decrease over time so the rate of pictures would best be based on the log of the time.
quotes
At http://www.infodrom.org/Infodrom/fortunes/download/infodrom-linux there are a heap of quotes from Debian people, and more than a few from me. It’s strange reading my own writing in someone else’s quote file. Some things seem so removed from context that there is little point to them. For some things I couldn’t even remember writing them and had to ask google. There were some things which seemed wrong, but google showed list aschives proving the quote file to be correct.
Also when googling my quotes I found that I had written an amusing and apparently quotable flame to someone who was far from the top of the list of deserving recipients of flames.
For anyone who reads the quotes, the Double Woody refers to Balvenie Double-Wood Scotch whisky. When Debian Woody was first released I would regularly bring a bottle of the Double Wood to Debian meetings.
siteminder – what you expect from CA
Recently I’ve been unfortunate enough to be the sys-admin of some systems running CA software, the specific horror in this case is Siteminder.
The latest excitement was when an important machine stopped working abruptly and gave the error “ff ff ff ff” in the Apache error log. I have been familiar with the error message “ff ff ff” which means that the Siteminder policy server can not be contacted. But it took me a while to discover a message in the policy server logs indicating that a client was connecting to it with an invalid shared secret. It seems that the policy server had suddenly changed it’s shared secret for no reason I could determine.
A google search for this issue turned up a single blog entry about it, which reports the “ff ff ff ff” error message as appearing in the case where the “ff ff ff” error occurs on the machines I run. Maybe I’m running a newer version, or maybe drax0r wrote the wrong error message by mistake. My colleagues have seen the error message “ff ff“, we are still unsure of what that means.
For people who haven’t used Siteminder I’ll briefly describe how it works. There is a 2MB Apache module (larger than httpd and all the modules shipped in the RHEL package) that implements the access control and content management (compiled with -g, presumably because it will SEGV if compiled with -O2). This module spawns a daemon from Apache. Unfortunately the daemon code drops the root UID but does not drop the root GID (fun for security), I wrote a patch to the runuser program that can be used to address this by changing GID before running Apache. Then all communication between Apache and the policy server goes via the daemon process via sys-v IPC. Of course if the daemon crashes then the IPC resources are not freed and then it won’t restart unless the system is rebooted or the semaphores are manually removed.
the next feature for a spy movie
I have noticed that motion sensors on burglar alarms don’t detect small movements. Presumably they are also less effective at detecting small objects that move (otherwise they couldn’t be used if there were mice).
For an adult to move slowly enough to avoid detection by the typical cheap burglar alarms is quite difficult, and probably almost impossible to do reliably. For a small machine to move slowly enough that it’s combination of size and speed doesn’t get detected would be much easier.
So it should be possible to design a burglary robot that can open doors and crawl across the floor slowly enough that the alarms are not tripped. Such a robot could step over laser beams (which you always have in movies) much more easily than Catherine Zeta-Jones and then crawl up the wall to the motion sensor and disable it.
In a movie such a robot would probably be autonomous, but for constructing one in real-life 802.11 control would be the way to go.
If someone from Hollywood is reading my blog, please feel free to offer me an obscene amount of money for this idea. ;)
C – the suit and tie of programming
I was watching some music videos recently and was amazed by how badly dressed most performers were by today’s standards. As far as I can recall the only musician from the 80’s who still looks good in their videos is Robert Palmer, a suit and tie doesn’t go out of fashion.
I started thinking about what the computer equivalent to the suit and tie is. It’s something that never goes out of fashion and that is generally used for work. I came to the conclusion that C is the best fit. Think of languages such as VB and the .Net environment as being skivvies and high-waisted jeans.
C is not a perfect language, it is often difficult to manage text in C and LDAP programming is particularly painful (compared to Perl where it’s trivial). But then it’s quite inconvenient to wear a suit sometimes, you can sit on grass while wearing jeans but not in a suit.
Pictures of you wearing a suit will not look daggy by the standards of next decade, and C code that you write now will be better regarded than VB or whatever other fad language might be used.
communism and ticket “scalping”
In the USSR the government fixed prices on all commodities, how desirable an item was merely determined the length of the queue not the price. Today in the same manner when purchasing tickets for concerts and sporting events the desirability of a ticket determines the length of the queue not the price.
It seems to me that the solution to the “scalping” problem that has recently been described in many newspapers is to have the companies that sell the tickets run a public auction. The current situation is denying fans the option of paying more money to guarantee a ticket, denying the musicians the best payment for their services, and not serving the best interests of anyone except the scalpers!
Internet auctions are easy to setup, ebay even has online store facilities that any merchant can use – it would be easy for any company that is running a concert to sell all the tickets at auction through ebay. People who don’t have the ability to access the Internet could pay an agent to bid for them so no-one would be excluded.
A well run ticket auction system would maximise revenue for the company selling the tickets and guarantee that fans can get tickets if they are prepared to pay enough. It would be best for everyone!
Some people with weird communist tendencies (the ones who want to emulate the least effective and useful aspects of the USSR) claim that the current ticket sales system (where all tickets are sold in 10 minutes to whoever queued for the longest time or phoned in at the right moment) allows poor people to purchase tickets at lower prices than an auction might deliver. What they fail to realise is that rich people pay others to queue for them, whether that is by paying scalpers who buy tickets in bulk or by paying one person to sit in a queue for them. There are people who are happy to sit in a queue for a few dollars per hour and people who pay them to stand in line.