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...

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).

...which presently sucks big time.
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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 ;-)
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Already the 19th. sigh Some updates regarding what I've been doing lately: I've been tinkering a fair bit.
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The easter weekend was nice, but not too good for flying at Killarney.
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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...

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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...

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Let's see what happened in the last few weeks. Not very organised today; did too much code wrangling.
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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.

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....

January is gone, with little recollection of where the 31 days went. Bugger.
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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!

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.

'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.

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.

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.

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.)

...you wake up in the morning only to discover that your house has turned into an island overnight.
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Well, that sure fucked up this Saturday; it's still thunderstormy and raining.

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.

Tomorrow I'm off for a week of Killarney Comp Flying, hopefully a lot of fun. More info when I come back.

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.
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If you read this in a catalogue, what would you expect?
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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.

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.
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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 neon orange! silly cackle

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.

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.