Just finished watching Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing. Dark. Superb. Bleak. Precise. Heavy. Brilliant.

Polish winters must have a hell of a suicide rate.

[ published on Sat 25.03.2006 01:24 | filed in still-not-king | ]

I've been planning to buy a small dishwasher for my kitchen for some time. Here in Australia most washing mashines come with hot and cold connections to use the main house heater which is more efficient than lots of small heaters everywhere. Makes sense.
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Thu 23.03.2006 21:05 | filed in interests/au | ]

...you see an ad on your Coke bottle that says "5 HUGE GIGS" and you think nah, 5 gigs is nothing special today but I remember when it was not just huge but UNIMAGINABLE only to blink and realize that they were talking about music...

[ published on Thu 23.03.2006 15:51 | filed in interests/comp | ]

Last Sunday (12.3. - the 19th still counts as this Sunday) I was pretty lucky and very close to ending up in the hospital or worse. The dangerous phases of any flying are the beginning and the end, because if there's trouble you've got little to no time to deal with it. Botched launches and landings are what kills you, with the likelihood of terminal problems flying high a lot lower (e.g. thunderstorms, freezing, oxygen-deprivation).
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Mon 20.03.2006 17:16 | filed in interests/flying | ]

The iptables recent match module is pretty cool; things like keeping the sodding ssh brute force guessers at bay are trivial: accept only X new connections to the ssh port within a minute, if not coming from a trusted known network. Two iptables-lines.

Unfortunately, the module isn't overly stable internally and there's some rollover bugs like this one. I'd still give it some extra coolness points for allowing me to implement Port Knocking without any userland tools in 5 minutes:
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Mon 20.03.2006 15:33 | filed in interests/comp | ]

These guys have no clue, and I hope Phil Zimmermann is not involved anymore.
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Mon 13.03.2006 13:25 | filed in interests/crypto | ]

One up, one down, one up, one down. The weather cleared up by about 1530, but I was too busy then to rush to the hills.

Drove to the shops for some more wood, woodworking tools and beer and vodka; I noted some odd piece of bent broken metal lying on the car floor near the pedals. On further inspection it looks like a piece of spring steel belonging to a large-diameter bushing or something like that....Ha, I'm pretty sure that's the reason why the steering doesn't lock up anymore, very good...guess I drove about 2000km with the occasional Hhhummmph!-moment when you suddenly needed all your upper arm strenght to turn the fucking wheel, so knowing that the problem is...well, gone - counts as an up. (it's not just my car that's slightly bent.)

One the way back I noted that the odometer is frozen; must have been so at least since yesterday when I reset it after refuelling. Sweet! No more need for services and oil changes as it'll always be at 258504km! giggle (it's not just my car that's slightly bent.)

[ published on Sat 11.03.2006 18:02 | filed in brainfarts | ]

Time: Saturday. Weather: some drizzle, clouds, occasional patches of sun which have increased over the last half an hour. I didn't go flying; Rob and others had a quick wet sleddie last I heard. Instead I rediscovered how sweet sounding (and full of grace) ancient analog audio gear can be.
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Sat 11.03.2006 15:41 | filed in brainfarts | ]

How to make perfectionists like me happy: I found a sharpening stone in a thrift shop today ($2), and already happily honed all my dull kitchen knives to new sharp splendor.

[ published on Fri 10.03.2006 22:45 | filed in brainfarts | ]

Friday, Saturday and Sunday: rain and storms. The fence behind my house blew over. Monday morning: clear sunny weather.

Bah.

[ published on Mon 06.03.2006 10:40 | filed in still-not-king | ]

Somehow the current copyright wars remind me quite a bit of the European dark middle ages, where the Roman-Catholic inquisition tried to weed out the "heretics" - many of which had only tried to keep the church out of secular politics:

They said then that the church is supposed to be poor and should not have a say in earthly matters. We say now that the Content Cartel is rich enough and shouldn't have any more control over how we use data and that information wants to be free.

They were burned at the stake by the greedy church functionaries who wanted to control everything and make money. We're prosecuted by the Content Cartel's henchmen who want to control all the data in the world and make money.

They were not successful initially, but today the RC church is no longer of importance as far as secular matters are concerned (unless you're foolish enough to live in fundamentalist places like the USA). ... We have encryption. And deniability. And steganography. And Guerilla tactics. And networks. And a thick skin. We'll win.

A couple of recent voices:

A BBC producer on the fact that file sharing is not theft.
The MPAA can't convince anybody to let themselves be violated by their A(ss)hole proposals.
Here on Oz, not just the usual voices of Reason v1.0 but also government-backed committees say that copyright control powers should be scaled back extensively.

[ published on Fri 03.03.2006 13:28 | filed in interests | ]

The Australian Copyright Agency (an extortionist gang with official backing who fleeces schools for "photocopying fees") now claims to own the web. All of the web. And they want some MONEY!

Eh? Now what copyright do they have to my ramblings, for example?

Link to the story

[ published on Fri 03.03.2006 13:00 | filed in interests/anti | ]
calvin-tuesdays

My last few weeks have been pretty much all like this.
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Wed 01.03.2006 14:34 | filed in still-not-king | ]

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:
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Mon 27.02.2006 15:44 | filed in interests/comp | ]

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.

[ published on Sun 26.02.2006 19:28 | filed in interests/debian | ]

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.

character

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.

[ published on Fri 24.02.2006 23:14 | filed in still-not-king | ]

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.)


click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Fri 24.02.2006 16:12 | filed in interests/humour | ]

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.)"

[ published on Fri 24.02.2006 11:57 | filed in interests/humour | ]
NonSequitur-2006.02.18

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

[ published on Mon 20.02.2006 12:45 | filed in interests/humour | ]

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.

[ published on Mon 20.02.2006 12:13 | filed in interests/anti | ]

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.

[ published on Thu 16.02.2006 14:45 | filed in still-not-king | ]

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.

[ published on Wed 15.02.2006 11:56 | filed in brainfarts | ]

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

[ published on Thu 09.02.2006 15:39 | filed in interests/comp | ]

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.

[ published on Thu 09.02.2006 14:58 | filed in still-not-king | ]

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.
click here for the rest of the story...

[ published on Thu 09.02.2006 14:26 | filed in interests/anti | ]

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 frzzzpop, that is.

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

[ published on Mon 06.02.2006 20:51 | filed in still-not-king | ]

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.

[ published on Wed 01.02.2006 22:43 | filed in still-not-king | ]

Quote from the windows helldesk droids today at work, in response to my complaint about the "preferred browser" registry entry being locked:

"Firefox should not have been installed onto your citrix session. Unfortunately for various reasons we do not support any other browser other than IE within the citrix environment."

Well, thanks for nothing fellows. Massive brain atrophy is clearly involved here...like with the guy at the supermarket yesterday, who needed about 2-3 seconds per item to scan and bag; I was wondering whether his brain had actually died from lack of oxygen between his very...slow...and.....slower.....breaths.

In other painful news, my luck currently sucks somewhat: somebody cheated me on ebay (for the first time ever), took my $50 and vanished; one of my xmas presents seems to have been lost by the Austrian or the Australian postal services and another xmas present seems to have been lost by the American or the Australian post.

[ published on Tue 24.01.2006 12:35 | filed in still-not-king | ]

The first week of the teaching semester is over, without major gotchas. 2x2 hours of lecturing on Tuesday left me somewhat stunned (and with a throat getting sore) as usual. The weather sucks, rain and/or storms almost every day in the last week or so. My recent switch to wired ethernet at home still produces some TV/FM antenna trouble (unshielded TP), my hiking boots are about to give in (the foam/rubber sole is desintegrating) just before the Killarney comp, my car is about to die as well and I should do a lot of things I've got absolutely no impetus for.

On the positive side I've managed to shed almost three kilos which gets me back closer to the preferred weight level that I left sometime around the trip to .at last September.

[ published on Sat 21.01.2006 14:09 | filed in still-not-king | ]

This recent advisory suggests that one updates his sudo installation. With the subsequent result of being trapped in a mess of obscure, badly documented env_something options, a suggestion of env_check which doesn't work and no way of passing environment variables to the sudo'd process. Great.

Much cursing later it turns out that only this makes sudo tick again: Defaults env_reset, env_keep="XAUTHORITY DISPLAY" or, more to my liking in the case of unrestricted sudo, env_keep=*

[ published on Sat 21.01.2006 13:35 | filed in interests/debian | ]

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