Older blog entries for carl (starting at number 5)

Oops, I forgot to mention in the previous entry that my site is currently down because I may kill off the domain (i.e., no longer use the server to host a site or anything of the sort). The odds are good I'll at least start the site again just because I need somewhere to put docs and things. I tried this once before -- turning the server into a fileserver/webserver for personal usage and the occasional link dropping on irc to something interesting I think I did or whatever. The site is never spectacular and it doesn't get many hits but I don't care because it's not supposed to. :)

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I am in a most unlovely mood. I am obsessing over people/things again in my highly incompatible with those people/things life. Ugh. I am so fucking bored. I am so fucking tired. I am so fucking drained. Yet I do nothing. Why? I am emotionally exhausted. My physical condition is not helping the matter. Soon we (my mother and I) will be moving into a house. I should be happy, right? No more apartments for me. No more worrying about playing my music too loud. No more worrying about whether or not the stupid land-lord (hah) is actually going to fix the leaky faucet this time. So I should be happy then because I'll have my own room once again with my little slice of privacy, right? HAH. I have just now decided to start liking this area. It's nice. The people are generally nice, though I very rarely actually interact with them, and the township acts like a community. That could be just as bad as it is good but it's nice to see people fucking get along for once. Although I doubt the sincerity of many of those people they still act it out well enough to make it liveable.

I am starting to really think about what the hell I am going to do with the rest of my life. I am not happy about the options because I don't even know what all my options are. I have considered writing because my past experiences with most (if not all) of my English teachers says that I am a pretty decent writer when it's about something I really care about. I feel so bad though because the things I say I care about I am not really sure I care about them at all or if I am just acting as though I care for some reason. It's very confusing and somewhat scary to feel like you don't have complete control over some of your thoughts and actions. The possibilities of such things scare me a lot. Confused is probably the closest term to match up with my emotions over the past five years or so. Things just don't make sense. I am hopelessly naive probably due to a lack of interaction with the "real world" and I can't seem to budge my way into it now that I'm older.

Speaking of older -- I will be nineteen years old in a month and three weeks (approximately) or alternatively on October 25th if you must know the exact date. I am not looking forward to yet another reminder that I have wasted a year and a half of my life accomplishing very little.

My mother and I are really not getting along well lately. I almost care but I try not to because I didn't really know her much when I was growing up -- I just sort of visited her every now and then. I don't think she really understands what happens to someone when they don't grow up with them even though they are their mother. I don't have that mother/son relationship that some people have. I don't have that caring I should probably have for her. She is not the most cherished thing in my life and never will be. I had a quick argument with her about buying things with cocoa in them a few nights ago. She came home from work at like 8:30PM (rather early compared to some days) and I noticed she got a few things from work (she works at a grocery store...). One of the items was a quart of chocolate soy milk. I should be thankful and happy that she's trying to help me out with my vegan lifestyle change but I'm not going to be happy when she buys things with cocoa. In case you don't know why -- I read in the local paper about a slavery problem with cocoa suppliers. Some of the suppliers are buying slaves and using them as laborers to get their cocoa. I do not support slavery and therefore I try to avoid things with cocoa in them which is fine anyway because usually things containing cocoa aren't that great for me. But with her it's like "ah who cares I just want to try it". She also accepted some fudge from my sister which was purchased at one of the fudge shops in Wildwood, NJ. I wasn't happy with that either but didn't really say anything about it.

So anyway -- she decides she's tired and goes to bed while I'm trying to talk to her about this issue. She normally does not go to bed until about 11PM -- it was 9PM. So I continued to ask her about it as she's getting ready for bed and all she does is ignore me. She never bothers telling me why she is supporting these people and/or why she is giving off the impression that she does not care about the problem. I go off into this little room and do my thing after a few minutes and she decides she's no longer tired and goes into the living room to watch tv and call some people (!!!). I just ignored the fact that she lied to me earlier when she said she was tired and wanted to go to sleep and went about my business as usual.

Okay so why did I bother typing all that out? Because I'm pissed off. Just two days later she wants "to talk to you for a few minutes". Oh my. NOW she wants to talk...two days later. What the fuck. I told her I wasn't interested and she got so pissed off at that. She starts yelling and saying "you expect me to care about these people when you don't care about anything I say"...uh okay. I just sat in the little room and ignored her. Now maybe I am wrong here but I really don't think I am -- she's telling me that because I give off the impression that I don't care about her means she can't care about slaves being used to harvest cocoa? Does -anyone- else see the problem with that? So because we have our problems means some other person has to suffer? Granted someone could just as well say that the person is likely to suffer anyway whether she buys things containing cocoa or not and that's just fine. I still won't think purchasing products from the companies that practice slavery is a good idea nor will I do it.

I have a shit load more I want to write about but this is getting very long. I am thinking of writing a script for a movie -- very seriously considering it. Or at least writing a book (going back quickly to my career prospects) about something...I can't say what just yet. I have what I think is a good idea for a book/movie/whatever but am not entirely sure. I am getting extremely frustrated with my inability to learn certain things and/or concentrate on certain things. I think perhaps if I can get in shape physically and mentally then maybe I can pursure more computer related things but until that happens (which should be a hell of a lot easier once we're in the house -- the primary reason I am doing no weight lifting or anything of the sort is a lack of room -- I don't like going outside to exercise so I'd like to confine it indoors as much as I can until I reach a certain goal -- then I will go outside and exercise) I wish to pursue other things and relax on the computer stuff for a while. I'd like to pursue music and writing and perhaps even some acting. I acted a very little tiny bit in fourth grade. It was a nightmare for me but didn't really turn out too bad. I was the lion in "Wizard of Oz" -- I had to sing and run around a little bit so there wasn't a whole lot of acting involved really but it was pretty neat. They had a great little outfit for me to wear and all and I might still have the picture of me wearing it.

Ah well...life really isn't as bad as I might make it out to be for me. I have a lot of ups and downs just like everyone else does. Some people are more level-headed than I am and some people are more wise than I am because they have more of that "real world" experience. So I want to write. Maybe journalism or something. Freelance journalism ... *cough* no money *cough* but what the fuck I'm not making any money sitting here on this chair either so why not? It just might work. If all else fails I fall back on music and then computers. I don't want to make computers a primary anymore because it's draining my life away in a hurry. I need the social interaction I didn't get when I was a kid or I will be hopeless for relationships...

Maybe I'll keep this thing up-to-date a little bit better. Sorry it's been so long.

WOOHOO. My mom bought me a new laptop a couple days ago. It's great. It's an HP Pavilion n5440...has a 850MHz P3, 128MB RAM (soon to be 256), 20GB hard drive, dvd-rom, builtin 10/100 card (3com mini-pci -- device dc), s3 savage/ix graphics chip w/ 8mb sgram (max 1024x768 on the lcd but 1280x1024 on a standard vga monitor and also has a s-video output for tvs :)), a modem (winmodem i think), an incompatible-with-freebsd sound card (ESS something...I'm working on this), touchpad, comes with WinME, etc.

Much as I cannot stand WinME I actually installed it over FreeBSD today. I cannot get X working and I can't get the sound to work. That just about renders it useless for my needs but I'd like to some day work on a driver for it. Some day :). Right now it has WinME and I just got Cunning Stunts on DVD to watch. So far the dvd is okay but it could be better I suppose (I'd really like to try it with the TV output but I need a TV that doesn't suck and an S-video cable).

Aside from all that I'll probably only use WinME for about a week to get some usage out of it. Then I think I'll put FreeBSD-CURRENT back on it and perhaps start trying to help out the xMach team a little bit (some code review and whatnot). I'd really love to learn how to get a sound card driver running on this but that'll be a while.

My mom is really pissed off because I bought the Cunning Stunts dvd. I told her what was on it and she was mad. I was laughing so hard at Lars picking his nose and eating it and I was like saying what he did. She didn't think it was so funny. Oh well. =(

I really think she's upset that she can't watch what I'm doing anymore. She has such a huge lack of trust in me. She thinks I'm an evil hacker (I'm being serious) and I'm out to do harm and watch porn all the time. I really haven't been watching too much porn lately but I have plenty to watch if need be. Life sucks when you're fat and ugly and are good at not much else but typing. Oh well. There she goes, off to work...one of these days I'll have a job that isn't trying to rip me off for minimum wage even though I'm doing $20/hour work. I know $20/hour isn't a whole lot but it'd be great for me. I need a job. Time to go job hunting...again. My resume is here.

Later folks. I'm tired. =/

Wheee. This is fun. I started working on a secure logging machine paper. It's probably way overkill considering my lack of experience in the area but I am going to try some of the ideas when I get another machine (which could be quite a while from now). My naivity would be readily apparent to any experienced systems administrator if he/she were to read my beginning of the paper but it's fun because I'm getting down a few ideas. They're my ideas that are largely unaffected by the outside world. We shall see how much work I have to do yet.

I'm really starting to gain an interest in security. I am trying so hard to learn C past printf(). ;) It's not easy for me because I have a hard time remembering what I read. I used to be so good at reading/comprehension...something went wrong a long time ago and it just isn't so anymore. =(

But anyway, I just want to audit code for a while and see what I can pick up on just by reading full (not just partial clippings) code examples of bad and good code side by side. I am finally beginning my security approaches on my server because I think it's time I start using some of the things I keep talking about to other people or I just think about.

Oh and since it's pretty much a dead issue now I figure I'll go ahead and paste my codered scan count. =)

[carl@carbon]$ grep default.ida access_log.* | wc -l
    1903

[carl@carbon]$ grep default.ida access_log.* | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u | wc -l
    1247

They're both from the same IP.

Har har. It's been a while since I've done anything here.

So what's new?

Let's see....I'm writing a preliminary paper on system administration security. It'll be my first ever paper related to administration. I don't expect it to be perfect and I certainly don't expect it all to be right. However I do expect it'll be a nice place to start from.

This isn't going to be anything really serious or high-tech or anything of that sort. It's just my first try at writing a somewhat technical paper. There's a reason for writing it and that is to get my ideas down somewhere so I don't forget them. The information is almost pure because I've only had a minimal amount of outside impact on my administration habits. I've been mostly a loner for a while now but recently I'm starting to read more papers so I want to get down the unadulterated ideas before I become biased from any one paper.

An example of what I'm writing about is useless binaries being installed on the system. Checking what all system binaries do and what they depend on. Figure out why they're dependent/depended on and if their security does not meet your standards (coding security) figure out if they're really necessary. If not then see if it's possible to hack the programs that depend on them. Stuff like that and perhaps a little bit about network security. Mostly it'll just be local security though because networking isn't my strong point just yet. Hopefully I'll have some tangible (sp?) work done soon and I'll put it on my website and update this to point to it.

Bah. After watching CSPAN coinciding with a irc channel chat I must say I am thoroughly embarassed with myself and the way I handled myself. I spent about five minutes trying to get through to CSPAN so I could comment on the proposed amendment to the constitution of the U.S.A. I got through and completely lost any amount of control I might have had intially. I was so scared I was shaking. I got on the air (live, no less) and mentioned that I could not believe I had to pay taxes for these people to argue such a dead topic. I also (seemingly as an afterthought) dropped in the part about freedom of expression/speech I believe we are supposed to have in this country as well as the ability to address the government with grievances (which the first amendment does not prescribe any particular method which has to be performed to do such things). I made such an ass out of myself because of the way I spoke and the lack of thought before speaking. It would have helped to write it down but I just wasn't thinking. And so I repeat that it is almost always best to think before you speak and I must try harder to say before I go ahead and make an ass out of myself on national television. (This was seriously one of my most embarassing moments in life to date.)