Last week my two mailservers collected these silly Sober.P/Q thingies by the hundreds. Not
that I need to care much: I don't do Microsoft crap.
Now, however, the bloody thing has started its operation on all those
subverted wankstations and blasts the world with bad German Nazi propaganda.
With addresses belonging to me as sender. Gee, thanks for all those bounces!
Death is too good for both Nazis and virus spreaders. And, of course, for the
idiots responsible for the lousy vulnerable software in the first place...
[ published on Wed 18.05.2005 12:21
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The recent troubles I had with my tape robot fall into the category
magic:
weird resets/lockups/recycles of the device in the Sun 411 case, which took
out heffalump
a few times as reported earlier.
So I switched it to a spare scsi bus (always mount a scratch monkey...), same
behaviour but sans lockup of the box. Next thing was to test it on a different
system: I dug out my trusty AHA-1460 PCMCIA scsi controller and blasted
the robot with data. Same lousy behaviour.
Finally I decided that the only thing that I had changed recently was the
case. So I moved the robot back into the (noisy) lynx case, without having
much hope for the thing, and....it works.
The only lame explanation that I have is that the 411's PSU is rated at
1.7A on the primary side (dunno secondary), while the tape robot wants
0.7A for the tape and up to 2.0A for the robot. (Not that the problems were
in any way associated with the robot moving; that worked fine and lockups
were never experienced with the robot moving. Still I have no better
"explanation". It works, that's currently good enough for me.)
Less magic but still good news is that the debian MyMess -> Sarge
upgrades I did today on the lapdog and the work desktop were mostly harmless
and a good excuse for cleaning up unused software on the go. I suppose after
Sarge is now frozen it's time to eat my own dogfood. This dogfood tastes good.
Not good news is the weather recently: it all sucks, big time. Rarely a day
in the last couple of weeks when it doesn't either drizzle or rain or blow
gale-force winds. I WANT TO FLY. I NEED TO FLY. bugger.
Related to lack of flying, my problems re licence levels and flying in .at
are also confirmed. We'll see if I manage to get the required Oz license in
time but I'm not very optimistic. Ah well, I'll go hiking with Cornelia then.
The next semester starts on Monday. I'm so thrilled.
Spent the last few days
fixing up years of gut-wrenchingly bad HTML excrements spattered across the
website for the Canungra Cup competition (as usual I didn't say "no" fast enough and am now
hosting/caring for/maintaining the thing...geeks are suckers). That hurt
so bad, even after various runs through tidy and friends...quite some curses
and beer later (my homebrew batch has worked out and is starting to get
drinkable) most of the pages are standards-compliant and looking at the
source doesn't
immediately introduce projective vomiting anymore (like the MS shite "let's make
a gratuitous table here to produce some indentation, and let's put all the
font settings everywhere" did).
[ published on Thu 12.05.2005 23:55
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...which presently sucks big time.
click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Fri 06.05.2005 00:53
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says the Definite Guide to Aussies. I'm going flying+camping to Killarney over the
weekend, and I'll bring salad and beer with me. Sausages, too -
a balanced feed, you know ;-)
click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Thu 28.04.2005 23:14
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Already the 19th. sigh
Some updates regarding what I've been doing lately: I've been tinkering
a fair bit.
click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Wed 20.04.2005 00:36
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The easter weekend was nice, but not too good for flying at Killarney.
click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Fri 01.04.2005 20:00
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Off to Killarney for some flying (hopefully) and some camping fun
(certainly) until Monday. Religious holidays are good for something I suppose...
[ published on Thu 24.03.2005 10:18
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click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Tue 15.03.2005 22:59
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This is what I had to look at while walking to work...such nice clouds,
very promising for flying. I had to go to work, hold an exam, do a
lab in the evening, wrangle with jigdo and sarge...
click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Thu 10.03.2005 00:19
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Let's see what happened in the last few weeks. Not very organised today;
did too much code wrangling.
click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Fri 25.02.2005 22:46
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I'm convinced of that. Aspirin is also the only medicament I use.
(Paracetamol OTOH doesn't seem to do much for me, weird.)
Had a molar extracted earlier today. It took a couple of oversized anaesthetic
injections until the jaw was sufficiently numb, and the doc had to cut
the tooth in halves to get it out, with the usual pulling, ripping and assorted
other jaw-wrenching niceties.
There is now a deep hole. The dentist had
suggested I get some serious painkiller into my system before the anaesthetic
wears off but as usual I'm too toug^Wstupid^Wstubborn to do that.
So the numbing anaesthetic wore off after
1hr45, and a few hours later I took 2x 250mg aspirin just to get rid of
the slightly annoying soreness of the jaw and (unrelated) headache.
That was 8 hours ago.
Then I made the mistake of eating salami: of course some of the tasty
dead meat had to lodge in the hole I shouldn't touch, shouldn't suck or
poke a toothpick into...aggrrr. Ah well, at least none of the
salty chips ended up in there, that might have hurt.
[ published on Thu 10.02.2005 22:21
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Gah, I hate heisenbugs. &rw is currently on a crusade...against poor old exmh. Not a single of the problems that pester him
are reproducible here, and I haven't seen anything resembling
that level of problems on the exmh-{users,workers} lists. ASS, AHS etc.
On a more positive note: I'm a sucker for obscure technical documentation,
like the SR-71 Flight Manual or this collection of car (service/owners) manuals. I must have wasted at least a day reading the SR-71
book (what for? pure technical curiosity) and yesterday spent a few hours
reading this 41 chevrolet shop manual: the amount of marketing-speak about the company's
"new, improved, better" manufacture was hilarious. What was also pretty
much fun was the amount of pictures of people using heavy hammers on
delicate gear. I suppose you can get away with things like that when
a 4.1 liter engine is expected to produce a stunning 29hp....
[ published on Tue 08.02.2005 22:54
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January is gone, with little recollection of where the 31 days went. Bugger.
click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Tue 01.02.2005 21:16
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Yesterday the new semester started, with me teaching Computer Security.
As always in the first lecture I wore my special shirt, see below.
Got the usual appreciating grins from people, fellow staff congratulating
me on my wacky collection of shirts etc.
The lecture went well, didn't scare off too many students & may have
even kept them interested a bit.
But today the first lab was way less than shiny. I had
prepared nicely, exercises for them to try ready and so forth, but
just about everything went pear-shaped. The main proxy didn't want to spit
out one of the texts I wanted to use mainly, had to invent a storyline
from scratch and lost my thread of thought a bit at times.
Which is very bad for this particular lab as it's supposed to be
a Unix survival session for those students without prior experience in Unixy
matters...and $deity knows there's more than enough
Unixish stuff I could tell them if we had time, but instead I have to cram
exactly the items of utmost vital importance in this single 2hr session.
Likely concentrating on working on a paper submission related to my PhD
project in the hours before the lab wasn't that good an idea...got me on
a totally different track and captured me quite a bit (especially as work
was flowing, which is rare for me when cobbling together academic paper
things...doing stuff I like, bug braggi^Wwriting papers about it...).
And this paper must be submitted by friday (and I should do a
second related one also by friday - learned of the submission deadline for this
conference on monday....). This Sucks.
So I was less than lucid in that lab. I hate it when I don't
deliver quality. Bugger!
[ published on Wed 19.01.2005 21:58
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Finally, after quite a lot of to-and-fro I've managed to
get a grip and book an appointment with a dentist next week. I'm sure
it'll hurt - naturally more than now, which is about not at all.
Contrary to common belief, this is not a blessing: my second-to-last dentist
expressed some incredulity when he quickly did a root canal treatment
without anaestethic: it didn't hurt very badly. Which was good there and then,
but:
if I actually felt my teeth developing problems, I wouldn't
have needed that treatment.
So I'm as anxious and scared of all them butchers as usual, but I'm certain
that as before my usual stoicism in
the face of inevitables will resurface.
I'm also certain that after the body manglers are done things will stop
hurting again.
Apropos new year. Oz is weird: fireworks are verboten, as in totally absolutely
off-limits to the average person. Except in Canberra, home of the big
gutter swi^W^Wpoliticians - where consumer fireworks are still allowed but only on
the queen's birthday weekend (not that this makes any sense).
The Aussies must harbour a semi-suppressed wish for somebody to blow up all the pollies in one big bang, I think.
[ published on Thu 06.01.2005 21:38
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'Twas the night before Christmas
and all 'round my belt,
Not an item was squarking
or beeping for help.
The pager was silent,
the cellphone as well.
The email was empty,
the situation was swell.
The lusers were happy,
and due to my hack,
The PHB was currently
detained in Iraq.
The servers were humming,
the errorlogs clear,
The building was locked,
I'm full of good cheer.
I with my Guiness,
from a pint glass I sucked,
if a luser wanted a password reset,
they can go get fscked,
Murphey be damned,
The Iron's been sated.
The goat has been slaughtered
And the pr0n-feed's gold plated.
Ma's dressed in a kerchief,
A bow on her neck,
Something nice to unwrap
For this tired old tech.
So I sip on my brandy
While server fans whine.
Her lips taste of candy
The machines will be fine.
Mike Raeder, the Magrathean Jim and AJS of the monastery are responsible
for this beauty.
[ published on Fri 24.12.2004 19:04
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First shower was a normal warm one, to get the body started and ready for
work (yawn). At the moment I'm often super-tired and depressed. The wet weather
of the last few days doesn't help and keeps me from flying.
Then the weather got worse. The second shower was a cold one, dancing
around in the pouring rain to remove the leaves and all the other crap
from the storm drains again. The one down the footpath
is blocked fully right now, which means my most important one (at the
corner of the house closest to the hill) is also stuffed.
Terrific! How I love that.
Classifying the situation not overly problematic, I got my third shower.
Warm again, because I was soaked and cold. At least the temperature
here is high enough so that one can go out into the rain
with a short, shirt and birkenstocks/thongs and not freeze immediately.
Then I went to work, around noon.
In the evening the rain radar showed again "heavy" rains, and boy did
it pour the last two hours.
I just unblocked the drains the umpteenth time today (wearing
headlamp, goretex and a short) and the next fucking storm front is already
on the radar. And the important drain is still down, and will stay so
until at least tomorrow arvo. Bugger.
[ published on Tue 07.12.2004 21:46
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Last week my last grandma and Cornelia's hamster died. Both were fairly
old, grandma at 90+, and the hamster was an Elder Hamster, too.
Grandma surely didn't mind finally dying; the last few years she
didn't really enjoy herself very much anymore - eyesight pretty much gone,
too frail to do anything, breaking bones every couple of months and so on -
but she still was lucid and happy about my (infrequent) postcards and even
more infrequent calls.
The hamster never received any phonecalls from me, but I'm sure it
had a good life in Cornelia's care nevertheless.
I wish both of them a happy next life, or happy sansara or whatever
they may feel appropriate.
[ published on Mon 29.11.2004 20:18
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The weather today was mostly lousy, so I didn't go flying. didn't do anything
useful as a matter of fact, just went looking for tiles for the kitchen
splashbacks (unsuccessfully) and picked up four new used sf books in
Coolangatta.
There's days like this one when about everything sucks.
I feel like Gestra Ishmethit,
the place is a mess but I don't feel like cleaning up (beyond the bare
necessities), the laundry is waiting but I don't switch on the washing machine,
a lot of code is waiting to
be developed but I don't like to code and so on. I'd like to sublime away now.
(But I'm 350 pages into John Varley's Demon.)
[ published on Sat 20.11.2004 22:19
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...you wake up in the morning only to discover that your house has
turned into an island overnight.
click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Mon 08.11.2004 22:50
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Well, that sure fucked up this Saturday; it's still thunderstormy and raining.
[ published on Sat 06.11.2004 22:44
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At the moment reality is in overdrive, blog-writeups lag behind.
I have discovered truly marvelous things but they don't fit into the margin
of this website. So stay tuned.
[ published on Tue 19.10.2004 13:03
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Tomorrow I'm off for a week of Killarney Comp Flying, hopefully a lot of fun. More info when I come back.
[ published on Thu 30.09.2004 23:33
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still-not-king
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This is something of a bulk update; I've accumulated some stuff in the
last ten days but never got around to write it up properly and didn't
post anything.
click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Thu 23.09.2004 12:56
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still-not-king
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]
If you read this in a
catalogue, what would you expect?
click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Mon 20.09.2004 22:31
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The last two days it's been raining here. Lousy for flying, lousy for
my mood but good for the land. The grass in the backyard is growing nicely.
Still, for me it's a good thing that those grey days are very rare here.
[ published on Thu 09.09.2004 12:45
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I am. However, I've been a wee bit busy and stuff has been piling up
that was of way higher importance than doing blog posts...
So, on to a quick recap.
click here for the rest of the story...
[ published on Thu 09.09.2004 12:35
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today i went shopping - after work. the weather was lousy, and i had to
check kitchen appliance prices anyway. but i didn't buy any new kitchen
gear - yet: i've been in dire need of new chucks for months, both old pairs
having gaping holes by now, and the mainstream shops hereabouts wanted $80
for a pair.
so i drove to the harbour town shopping centre, a conglomerate of mostly
factory outlet type shops, to visit 'authentic - converse'.
the name is the program, and they sell. converse. only. good.
and they had a sale on, with 20% off everything. even better!
i paid $79 alltogether and now i have two new pairs
of high chucks, and Life is Good again.
...
why the silly title, then? you might ask.
well, one of the pairs is sky blue (not navy, much lighter), and
the other is a really flash ! silly cackle
[ published on Tue 31.08.2004 21:39
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a big "boo-boo" to all those suckers trying to portscan my
systems. the tarpit flypaper
works perfectly well, as can be seen on these graphs of packets
going to the tarpit.
currently i've got no packet logging on as that does produce a nasty
amount of logs, but for simple test purposes tcpdump is fully sufficient:
tcpdump -n "tcp[14:2] = 0"
shows exactly the
zero-window-tarpitted stuff.
the next thing i'm doing just now ist to add the
random patch to make these
boxes look a little less well connected so that the intake of crap goes down
a bit.
[ published on Tue 31.08.2004 00:18
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The weekend was a long one (by me taking monday off work), and was spent
at Killarney, cleaning up one new launch and cutting another. Good work,
lotsa blisters though. Sunday we had one flight, not too bad but very much
too short at about 35 minutes. I got to 1600m (from 900 or so), but then
hit sink so bad that I couldn't even make it into town (only Andrew did) and
landed just on the outskirts of Killarney.
Tuesday was the big disappointment; work was horrible with me spending
all day long beating a recalcitrant FAI installation to work with the new linux lab machines
(new Dulls with bleeding-edge lousy hardware that require a mixture of
Debian stable and testing to run at all...gah), without full success so far.
I went home at 2130.
Just before that I had to learn that Paul flew from Tamborine over
the Border Ranges into NSW to Tyalgum, a good 40km...I'm soooo envious,
especially given the fact that today I'm stuck at work, too, and tomorrow
I'll have the annual Pest control visit....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.
Talk about missed opportunities.
[ published on Wed 25.08.2004 10:17
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