Older blog entries for Stevey (starting at number 37)

Piercing/Tattooing

 It's good to know that there are more of us decorated people around ..

Advogato

 I'm find it mildly irritating that the 'Notes', as displayed upon my personal page on Advogato account has messed up formatting.

 I wanted to update my information to be more descriptive and found that it was stored with no linefeeds at all .. and lots of extra whitespace. Odd.

 I'll probably get round to updating it sometime soon - via pasting into Emacs ;)

MP3 Stuff

 I've been reading up on MP3 frame header information so that I can calculate the length of MP3's in HH:MM:SS. It seems like a simple operation - but I'm having difficulty with it at the moment.

 My current solution alternates between being correct or out by a factor of ~2. I suspect there is something obvious that I'm missing...

salmoni: What piercing did you get? I went back through your journal but I didn't notice it.

 I've been interested in piercing for a very long time now, my first piercing was my navel around 9 years ago. I was the first bloke the piercer had every pierced - which always amuses me when I think about it now.

 At my peak, (when working in a goth/metal nightclub), I had 24 piercings. Now I'm down to 11 including the Septum, the Tongue, and stretched ear lobes. (Not to mention 6 Tattoos.

 I'd love to see some statistics on programmer-types + piercing. I know that lots of programmers are young, and tend to have followed fashion wrt piercings - but what about the others?

Debian GNU/Linux

 My Debian membership application is progressing well, I'm having a fun time answering a very detailed questionnaire about the project at the moment. It's taking me a long time to fill it out - but that's because I want to be able to articulate myself adequately.

 On top of that I'm going to be creating a new package, it's for htmlpp a HTML preprocessor which I use on my GNU MP3 Streaming Server's webpages, and the NTEMacs FAQ.

Wordplay

 When sending out a company-wide email last week or so, I used to word 'suboptimal'. Almost instantly three or four people turned up to my desk to congratulate me upon my usage of the English language. To my shame this word doesn't exist. Still .. I believe it should.

Trolls

 Had a lot of catching up to do on comp.unix.admin. Recently there's been a lot of 'discussion' about the correct naming of Linux. I hearby create the term 'GNU/Troll' to describe a particular class of people who can't let it lie.

Advogato

 It's good to see that Advogato is back - I really missed my voyeuristic fix of reading other peoples diary entries.

 I've just discovered that my MP3/OGG streaming server is going to be included in future versions of SuSE GNU/Linux. That makes me very happy.

 It's nice to know that something you've created and nurtured is beginning to make it out into the real world.

 Probably as a result of the last release with it's plugin API I've recently received another gift from my wishlist - that's very nice too, especially as I noticed it on sysadmin appreciation day ;)

 I've recently discovered the popularity-contest package. This collects, anonymous, statistics on the packages installed upon your machine and is used to decide what goes on which CD-ROM in the binary releases.

 The results make interesting reading. (It looks like I've got 12 people with both gnump3d and popularity-contest installed.

 For the past few days I've been playing with Jabber the open chatserver.

 It's very good - so much so that I've switched our company from using ICQ to using Jabber clients. The main reason for doing this is to stop all our messages going out in the clear to the ICQ server + back again - instead our internal messages stay internal.

 As a side-benefit we get access to group chat. Which is very handy.

 Currently the jabber server doesn't allow message logging so I've knocked up a quick patch to log messages. I don't intend to use this after the next few days - but it's good that people think their conversations are being logged. It encourages them to behave.. ;)

 Thanks for the interesting mails - I've now decided to write a toy network logging program.

 The intentention is to log the length and type of network traffic with the expected output looking something like this:

Internal Host       Protocol       Duration
Itcy                SSH            00:02:01
Scratchy            SSH            03:27:03
Mordor              FTP            00:02:27
Beowulf             Telnet         00:07:22
Behemoth            NNTP           00:00:05

 It doesn't seem like a terribly difficult thing to do, and it might be interesting to see the different protocols which are in use across a large network... (I can do this by running it on the network's gateway).

 I've recently started looking at pcap, the packet capturing library for Unix/Windows, and thinking of writing something to use it.

 I've written clients + servers before, and I've designed protocols which assume insecure networks - but I've never actually written any kind of sniffing tool and I can't help thinking it would be interesting.

 So having wardv point out NGrep + Ettercap has me a little miffed. I had heard of dsniff before - but not those other two tools

 I'm a little lost now, I was thinking of writing something like ngrep; a grep-like tool which could search through current network traffic. (I'm not really interested in sniffing passwords, etc, it's of limitted real life non-blackhat use).

 So if anybody has any interesting ideas of network capture/sniffing tools they'd like written drop me a line...

 I guess I should mention that I've heard of 'snort' already - and I use netcat on an almost daily basis..

 After a busy weekend I finally made the first release of GNUMP3d to support external plugins.

 It's been out for a couple of days now and I've had a few mails from people asking about the plugin API which I regard as promising. (A few people asked whether it would let them do really bizarre things; so it's gonna be interesting to see whether the API is open enough for them to pull it off).

 Randomly looking around Freshmeat I see that my project is more popular than Samba, Portabl OpenSSH, Webmin, GCC, Debian, XMMS, Links, and Gaim!

 That's very flattering but clearly bogus.

 My previous entry contained my dilemna about forking a project - after a night at the pub last night I decided that I'd make my changes publically available, and I've now done so. I thought natural selection would ensure that the better version survives, either that or the original author would be spurred to do more work on his project that my version is no longer necessary.

 That's the first time I've been in this situation and it was slightly strange. I mailed the author another bug report yesterday and ironically received a reply this morning. Maybe I should take down my copy of his code.. I'll wait and see what he says.

 In a previous entry I mentioned that I thought I'd found a bug in the advogato code but that I wasn't sure.

 The bug was that it was possible for a user to rate their own diary. At the time I called it malicious because it allows the rating to be subverted. Which potentially undermines it's usefullness.

 Now that I've thought about it I guess that the net effect is very slight and it's probably not worth worrying about, especially given that it's possible to certify yourself...

 Hmmm, maybe it's about time I certified myself ;)

 When I first joined Advogato I didn't because I know what I think of myself and was more interested to see how other people would rate me.

 GNUMP3d now handles user generated playlists. Huzzah!

 When I fix the syslog support there'll be a new release. Today? Probably not - I've just been out to buy some cat food for Tigger and it's a beautiful day. I didn't want to come home - but he looked so folorn this morning, standing in front of his mostly empty food bowl that I really had no choice...

 Recently I've been using a small tool which puts transparent icons upon my desktop.

 This compliments the simple window manager I use IceWm and gives me a nice working environment.

 However the program has some buggy behaviour, (like crashing with >10 icons - or when dragging icons off the screen). I've fixed these bugs, tidied up the code a lot, and added an Autoconf/Automake build system.

 Like a good user I mailled the author about each of the problems and described my fixes. No response. No updates to the code - which has only had one public release.

 So, what do I do? I'd like to package up his code + my changes/enhancements and make it publically available. Is this the right thing to do, or not? Intuitively I feel that it is, as it lets other users take advantage of the bugfixes, but it feels almost like I'm hijacking an existing project. So I'm torn.

 My streaming MP3 server now has support for plugins which I've used to reorganise a lot of the existing code. I'm hoping that people will contribute plugins - but I expect this won't happen...

 I made a new upload for the Debian project and happily there have been no new bug reports. I'm strangely disappointed. I'm not daft enough to believe it's bug free and I rely upon other people pushing the code to make them visible; either through misconfiguration or running the code in interesting ways.

 I believe I may have found a bug in the current advogato site. It's potentially malicious, but I'm not sure if I'm seeing a real bug, or bogus output - I need somebody who understands the current setup to confirm this for me.

 Who do should I contact to get this confirmed? I'm assuming that Raph is the person to ask - but if he's anything like me he'll get lots of mail a day and I don't want to disturb him unless it really is a bug I'm seeing..

 I've downoaded the source to 'mod_virgule' but this doesn't seem to be where the bug lies.

 (I'm deliberately not posting details here...)