The expletive (in Austrian German) applies to the Linksys people, who managed to castrate the WAP11 access point in its version 2.8 but good:
(more...)

Some time ago I mentioned a big mess in debian's sudo regarding the environment cleanup. The mess is even worse: run sudo env and you'll either get a single PATH that is SECURE_PATH (and thus not yours) or you'll get two bad PATHes for the price of one! Hurry! This offer ends soon! *ahem*

Guess what is implied by the env_reset/env_keep fix for losing all your other variables... The problem affects all the 1.6.8's, that means sarge/security's p7-1.3 is as borked as sid's p12. p7-1.2 didn't force you to use env_reset so you didn't feel the problem as badly.

I'm a perfectionist. Not only do I now know exactly what is broken, I also have a fix. It requires recompiling sudo.

So what's happened in the last few weeks? Not exactly a lot, I think. The Killarney comp was quite good overall, except that the two days that I had to spend working were the best two...Thursday and Friday we spent at the village pool and one of the local water holes, and on Saturday we got one last task in which was cut short by a thunderstorm on track. I did just a short hop of 7km or so, as I didn't really feel "with it" on that day. The reception night was pretty good fun, and the cleanup the day after wasn't too bad.

So the net result of that week? Poorer by $375, richer by a pair of Crispi Airborne boots (as my old ones had desintegrated irreparably) and richer by a few flights. I now also have a problem, but one that I can easily blame Rhett Rockman for: he and the rest of the MacPara crew did their usual thing and gave away a Local Derby/Young Gun award. And I got it this time (but not exactly for my shiny performance during this comp): a $1000 off a new MacPara wing, good for the next 6 months.

Thanks! and Dammit! at the same time; my current wing is not due for replacement yet, but the new Eden III is really tempting: Tim gave me one for a bit of test flying which I did on the way back from Killarney; I liked it a lot...

Apart from that? the weather has been pretty lousy, I got just an hour of airtime last weekend (now at 129hrs) and the forecast for this weekend isn't promising either. The news all over the world are depressing and indicative of this world not exactly improving. I managed to forget ringing my mother on her birthday (but not my father, for no good reason; their birthdays are just 7 days apart), and nothing has changed regarding my lack of social life.

Apropos social life, flying friends of mine have invited me to a birthday party in Brisbane next weekend; unfortunately it requires dressing up and worse, dressing up following a theme: Dressed To Kill/007. Choices are a) literal interpretation: dress to Kill 007, so I find the crummiest-looking Bond villain and dress down, be grungy and feel out of place, or b) I buy clothes. Both options suck.

I hate buying clothes. I hate dressing up. Dammit.

Apart from that I've got a new wireless access point, which even works mostly (a story on its suckitude is forthcoming, however), and if I'm lucky then tomorrow will see the serverhousing box resurrected; the PSU of the Ultra2 blew, so &rw will plop the disk into a spare Ultra1 until I can scrounge up a PSU...the cheapest source (US$36) becomes painful after factoring in shipping so I'm looking for better options, maybe even a full U2 chassis...I've until the end of April, so no need to hurry just yet.

Goddam, it feels like the Endless September all over again: hordes of clueless, reckless, dumb twits invade a world. Again, the fools themselves are not the guiltiest party but rather the provider of the sucky service (who didn't bash them with the netiquette first) should rot in hell.

I'm a "mischievous webmaster"! (Thomas Scott says so, so it must be true.) As a matter of fact, I'm a non-compromising utter bastard. Therefore I do my best to make the experience of looking at (a number of) myspace user pages a...memorable one.
(naturally I don't discriminate against normal people: having no referrer header is fine by me. Copying images onto your own machine and serving it from there is fine by me as it's unavoidable.)

A short reminder from your friendly webmaster: DO NOT HOTLINK TO ANY OF MY IMAGES, OR ELSE. The "else" part can be seen at these places, brought to you by the magic of

perl -ne 's/&/&/g; m!"(http://[^.]+\.myspace.com/[^\"]*)"! || next;
$seen{$1}||=1 && print qq|<a href="$1">|.++$i.qq|</a>\n|;' </var/log/apache/access.log 

(Note that not all links work as I'm too lazy to strip the ephemeral gunk from the urls.)

(more...)

There are people who just don't deserve to be alive. Responding to spammers is stupid, but dragging thousands of other recipients into it makes it a capital offense. A recent email to the debian-security list supports my assertion:

Subject: Re: Sell Your Organs Online!
From: "kwd" <kwdowse@mts.net>
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 17:57:20 -0700 (Fri 10:57 EST)
To: <jkeon@rcn.com>
Cc: <debian-security@lists.debian.org>

so what's this all about? get back to me with a list of what's worth what.

"Brain: $0.1 (as yours is too small)
Fat and skin: $0.5/kg (let's make some soap, shall we?)
Eyes: $10/pair (please gouge them out with a clean teaspoon only and pack them in dry ice straight away before couriering them over.)"

(from the NonSequitur archive which offers only the last month)

This is from the Houston police chief, who wants surveillance cameras in apartment blocks and private homes:

"I know a lot of people are concerned about Big Brother, but my response to that is, if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?"

Hellooooo? Any brains left? Apparently not.

the weather these last few weeks sucked and continues to under-impress: rain, some storms, overcast on the weekends and drizzling. i'm feeling less than chirpy.

this morning my serverhousing box vanished off the net. as the setup with serial consoles will become active in a few days, i can't even find out what happened; let's see how long it takes the isp to power-toggle the thing.

i should do loads of extra work but mostly am too tired after coming home in the evenings with the usual sore throat (4 hours lecturing in freezing labs and lecture rooms). must go buy some clothes but don't want to...must do this and that but don't want to. february is halfway gone and i'm still mentally stuck somewhere in 2005.

i hate all this shit.

Horracle buys Sleepycat.

"In fact, 100% of Sleepycat's employees are expected to transition to Oracle, so we retain all our deep technical expertise and community relationships."

Yeah, right. R.I.P., dear cat.

A French court has recently decreed that using P2P systems is legal if it's for private use. This includes both up- and downloads. Sweeeet! French Freedom Fries! A nice result that doesn't make the Content Cartel happy.

Link to an article (in German) about this

Watched Krzysztof Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs trilogy recently; what great movies they are! My favourite is Bleu in part because of its music score that I just absolutely adore. Time to find a shop selling the soundtrack cd... Red I found not as interesting, while White is nasty and fun.

Westpac, one of the big banks here down under, recently added some "features" to their online banking to "provide added password protection". As both their IT and security people are brainless monkeys on crack, the "added protection" is reducing both security as well as usability in a major way. Quite an achievement to fuck up that grandly, I'd say.
(more...)

Today I helped Richard resurrect his dead computer: the connection to the memory modules must have gone bad (occasionally beepbeepbeep on boot, random crashes during the startup sequence). I had scrounged up some spares (old motherboard, some graphics cards, a known-good power supply) and on return home had to put the power supply back to its normal purpose which is to drive my wireless access point (in a somewhat messy setup).

Now I have a wireless non-access point. Because I plugged the fucker in with the polarity reversed, the silly thing is misdesigned to draw 2A at 5V, the leads can sustain that and there is no over-current or polarity protection. Beyond the components going frzzz*pop*, that is.

And now I have this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side...

Spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday in Killarney flying in the comp: the days wer blown-out, too strong for my liking, and good, respectively. Monday I managed to get a late thermal on a refly five minutes before the launch window closed at 1500 and did 32km (of a task of 75km). Had a big scare some 15 klicks out, with thermal bullets of 6+m/s up throwing me around, then a big full frontal collapse with a stomach-lifting plunge, reinflated fine but violently, and on I went getting chucked around a bit more in 4-5m/s up...I didn't enjoy that at all.

Then either the air got very squirrely overall or I lost my nerves totally, (still don't know which) and things felt going rough and rougher to me. After a screeching eagle close by, another few big whackers and wobbling around in rough crap for another 40 minutes I decided that it's enough and landed. Pretty scared I was...

Tuesday and today I worked. Bah. Planned to drive out to the comp for the remaining three days tonight but I'm too beat: will leave at 0530 tomorrow. Let's see if I enjoy the remaining days better (I very much hope so) and I'll try to give some update on life, the universe and everything when I come back on Sunday.