Older blog entries for ajv (starting at number 106)

It's been an awful long time.

hackery

Been working on pbcs, a calendaring solution for work. It's cool to be paid to hack on free software.

Been working on a RFC draft for the VNC RFB 4.0 protocol. Almost done - just requires a little more attention to detail and then it's out in the open. The new features will knock your socks off, and includes stuff like SRP for authentication, complelety orthagonal, low overhead, low latency, completely optional features, including all the unofficial ones.

Been working on pnm2ppa NG for a bit, but I can't get back into it for some reason.

life

Not in order:

Bought a new Turbo Beetle - excellent! Bought land. Almost bought a house, and I'm working through a new one. Moved back to Melbourne (ahhhh).

Woohoo! My paper for blackhat was accepted. Now, all I need is for my company to agree to let me go.

life == depression

Douglas Adams is no more. Bugger. A suffusion of yellow.

My mum is trying to cut me off, and today is Mother's day. I don't know if I should even call.

Life is too short for this sort of shit.

I have to get up in three hours, and I haven't packed yet.

The cats don't yet know that they will be feeding themselves for the next few days. I hope they grow opposeable thumbs in the next few hours for the can opener (only kidding).

Need a recharge. I'm getting up progressively later, and soon I'll be getting up tomorrow. This is not good. I have a supposedly 8.30 - 5.30 pm job, so getting to work for 1 pm is not a good thing.

I'm going back to Melbourne for Easter. Hopefully, this will help with the ol' batteries.

As anyone from Brisbane will tell you, there is no life in Brisbane. :-)

However, it is a great place to work, and it's not far from Sydney (about one hour in zoo class), or two and a bit hours in Zoo Class for Melbourne.

Melbourne is fantastic; lots of 24x7 places (including all Coles, a major supermarket chain), zillions of restaurants spread evenly throughout the city (with vibrant Greek (Lonsdale St and elsewhere), Italian (Carlton and elsewhere), Vietnamese (Victoria St and elsewhere), Chinese (Lt Bourke St), vegetarian/alternative (Fitzroy) and many other specialized cuisine areas), good shopping, great cinema and arts life, a Comedy festival that rivals both the Glasgow and Montreal festivals, and by world standards, cheap(ish) housing. Melbourne is the third largest Greek(-speaking) city in the world, and as well as being home to people from all over the world.

Unfortunately, Melbourne is not Brisbane.

In Brisbane, most places shut early, Fortitude Valley is awful (it's like a really down at heel, cheap-ass version of a red light district). And it's warm and humid nearly all year around. Red necks infest most outer suburbs, and the inner suburbs aren't all that great. There is a particular style of Queensland politics that seems to blame everything that they don't like on Canberra, particularly once you're north of Ipswich. It is possible to get a decent feed and coffee in Brisbane, but only in certain suburbs.

The downside: being paid in the Australian peso. I'd suggest getting paid in the equivalent of US currency. You'll be extremely rich. To give you an example. A mid range US salary is about $70k (poverty rates in the valley). This is over $140k in Australia, and you are in the upper 5% of all tax payers. It's enough to afford pretty much any house you like in the Brisbane or Melbourne regions, minus the bloody expensive places.

But Brisbane has to beat Norway as a place to work. :-)

Cat flatuence

Is evil.

As anyone from Brisbane will tell you, thers is no life in Brisbane. :-)

However, it is a great place to work, and it's not far from Sydney (about an hour's flight), and two and a bit from Melbourne. Melbourne is fantastic; lots of 24x7 places (including all Coles, a major supermarket chain), zillions of restaurants spread evenly throughout the city (with vibrant Greek (Lonsdale St), Italian (Carlton), Vietnamese (Victoria St), Chinese (Lt Bourke St), vegetarian/alternative (Fitzroy) and many other specialized cuisine areas), good shopping, great cinema and arts life, a Comedy festival that rivals both the Glasgow and Montreal festivals, and by world standards, cheap(ish) housing. Melbourne is the third largest Greek(-speaking) city in the world, and peoples from all over the world.

Unfortunately, Melbourne is not Brisbane.

In Brisbane, most places shut early, Fortitude Valley is awful (it's like a really down at heel, cheap-ass version of a red light district). And it's warm and humid nearly all year around. Red necks infest most outer suburbs, and the inner suburbs aren't all that great. There is a particular style of Queensland politics that seems to blame everything that they don't like on Canberra, particularly once you're north of Ipswich. It is possible to get a decent feed and coffee in Brisbane, but only in certain suburbs.

The downside: being paid in the Australian peso. I'd suggest getting paid in the equivalent of US currency. You'll be extremely rich. To give you an example. A mid range US salary is about $70k (poverty rates in the valley). This is over $140k in Australia, and you are in the upper 5% of all tax payers. It's enough to afford pretty much any house you like in the Brisbane or Melbourne regions, minus the bloody expensive places.

But Brisbane has to beat Norway as a place to work. :-)

Cat flatuence

Is evil.

nearly got accosted by an overly amorous children's charity logo on my way in. The person inside seems to prefer hugging cute women (of which there are many in my North Sydney client's building lobby).

hackery

Got my dual PPro back on its feet last night and made it my DNS server. I'm sick of not having any entries for any of my machines in my own home network.

The machine room is getting fairly warm.

Please forgive me, for I have sinned. I haven't posted for more nearly two weeks.

netbsd

Working on bugs. I'm sick of my Alpha not being as good as my dual PPro running NetBSD, so I'm installing -current and the latest Xfree86 cvs in an effort to bring it into line with my x86 unix.

Had fun trying to build -current as a non-privileged user. Apparently there is some work there to make that happen. It's unacceptable to have to compile the lot as root.

Whilst make build was chugging away, I dug through my software testing sites, and re-found fuzz. I ported it into the 21st century (ansi C, strict compilation flags), and sure enough, it ran fine... which meant that a whole bunch of utilities crashed and hung.

In 1990, the guys who wrote fuzz found that about 25% of all utilities from commercial Unix vendors have basic input validation and memory allocation issues. In 2001, NetBSD still has about the same level of issues. Argl. Doesn't anyone run regression tests around here?

beta 2: let microsoft spend enough time on something, they will get it right

Got beta 2 yesterday @ 110 kB/s. Not a bad rate, but much less than 650 kB/s I get when downloading stuff from mirror.aarnet.

beta 2 rocks. They fixed all my outstanding issues, and introduced a few. My CNET Pro 200 cheapass PCI ethernet card installed out of the box for the first time. The install was flawless and it was fast. WEP is back!

Dan and I played around with trying to control each other's PC, and that worked very well. It seems that TermSrv is built into anything > Pro now. Excellent.

Problems still outstanding: Guest is on by default (!) Administrator level accounts are created by default on Pro without passwords (!) It's nearly impossible to figure out how to log on as the local Administrator using the new funky login screen. You can't easily script a number of the new features (ICF/ICS).

And then there were the usual set of compatibility bugs with programs that only I seem to use. Time to start bugging. :-)

But overall, WinXP beta 2 is excellent. It's just been promoted to my primary operating system.

Is by Greg Bear. I recommend all of you go to your nearest bookshop and obtain said book. It's more about social issues than evolution or mutation. Excellent use of the science as detective genre. Bear is my $DEITY, except when Mr Banks pops out another one. Then he is my $DEITY.

hackery

Working on lukemftp has all but stopped (as predicted).

Working on auDA stuff. Make a submission if you are interested in Australian DNS futures.

Posted a little collection of XFree86 exploits (no new ones, just collecting knowledge together) to the devel list for testing.

If you use any form of XFree86

Upgrade to 4.0.3 (due soon) as soon as you can. For those of you in the dark ages, 3.3.7 will be out shortly as well.

If you can't go to 4.0.3 for the only valid reason (4.0.x doesn't support your card), go to 3.3.7. All known serious security flaws are fixed for the first time in this new stability release.

Got the new Dell laptop today. besides weird key placements (I'm hitting all sorts of keys), the thing is good. Learning why they bother with a battery LED is my first priority, and figuring out how I can disable the nipple and its two little nipple buttons in favor of the mush pad. Most people I know like nipples and hate mush pads. They are wrong. The mush pad is as fast as a mouse and very expressive. The nipples (which I have had to live with since moving to PC laptops) are awful. The first thing I did when I get my Tecra 8000 a few years ago was to get a USB mouse. I don't need it now.

The C600 is fast, has a big beautiful screen, and runs a certain pre-beta 2 operating system IDW very well indeed, which as I'm a beta tester, is about as much as I can tell you without being hunted down by Redmond.

In fact, this build is very good. It's stable, boots extremely fast, and is going to be my work horse for a little bit.