Older blog entries for hacker (starting at number 27)

bz-LAAAAG

    hoffman, bzflag and the much faster German updated version definately support an AI mode. Look into the -solo when running the client app. It will bring in as many robots as you want. You definately want to use the German version of bzflag until the new UDP code is rolled back into HEAD on SourceForge

$10.00 to break into your car, sir?: A True Story

    So there I was, driving in on Friday morning, all ready to go for a very long most-of-the-day meeting. I know I wasn't going to get a parking space anywhere near 650 Townsend for free, so I planned on parking at the lot right outside the main doors and paying for it. At least it's close, and attended.

    As anyone who has had the pleasure (pfft!) of seeing my truck knows, my entire passenger seat is generally occupied by a large boom box and a cd case full of cd's.

    I love my music. Can't drive a mile without it.

    So the routine is that you normally pull in, pull towards the little shack in the middle of the lot, and the attendant takes $10.00 from you (used to be cheaper a few months ago) and you have your pick of whatever spots are left open. I typically pick a spot right near the entrance, facing the bus stop there.

    And the day goes on, meetings go well, I get a lot of work done after the meetings, everybody leaves, and it's nice and quiet.

    Whew.

    Time to hunker down and get some work done. I strap on the headphones and begin cranking away.

    I managed to somehow blow up yet another Thinkpad hard drive, this time not even physically connected to any Thinkpad at all. So I'm reinstalling (yes, you guessed it, Windows) on the spare laptop drive to configure the Lucent wireless gateways (currently I had this particular wireless gateway locked in a 'Closed Wireless Network' configuration, so the only way to get to it was through a Windows-only configuration tool, and I had to have been broadcasting with my *REAL* Lucent MAC address to get to it, so VMWare was out of the question -- it uses that PCNET32 interface, and a virtual MAC, so that fails.. anyway... where was I....)

    So I get the laptop configured, all the drivers and goodies are loaded, and I pack up and begin to get ready to leave.

    Standing back, looking at my desk as if I'm a shepard on a tall hill watching my flock, I survey the things on my desk, to see if I'm going to need any of them for the weekend.

    "Ok, take this, no, leave that, and let's not forget this..."

    ...you know the routine. The mental inventory comes around once a day or more sometimes.

    Slowly I sling the backpack over one shoulder, grab some books and a legal pad, and walk out of 650 Townsend, up the escalators, over to the left, past the ATM, and straight into the parking lot for my truck.

    "La la la lalaaaa...."

    (thinking about what I'm going to do this weekend, so I can be ahead of whatever is about to bite into me on Monday). That Windows install went just too smoothly. Yes, 475 reboots, but it didn't break.

    "La la laaaa..."

    (opens passenger side truck door to drop backpack and books onto the only space that can hold them, the passenger footwell area).

    Hrm, this doesn't look right. My entire bench seat is... empty. It looks like the same long, empty expanse you see when looking down a set of railroad tracks. I stand back and think..

    "Hrm, did I bring my radio today? or did I take it to my apartment to listen to some tunes?"

    "No, I definately took the radio with me.."

    (mentally plays back getting in the truck that morning)

    My eyes slowly pan around the truck's interior in the darkness.

    "Hrm, every thing looks..."

    (cold, icy feeling comes over me as I see the driver's windows smashed, and all the glass in the darkness on the driver's carpet, none on the seat.)

    My radio is gone, because someone decided they needed it more than I did, and smashed my truck windows to get into the truck to get it.

    They had to open the door (this radio is *VERY* large by the way, and always covered, it's the one on the right in this picture) to get it out.

    My glovebox wasn't rifled through. My visors were not overturned. I even have a 120-volt to 12-volt invertor that plugs into the cigarette lighter to power the radio, and they UNPLUGGED THE RADIO from the invertor and took only the radio. I also have some pendants/necklaces and a "War Helmet" hanging from the rear-view mirror. Those were also left alone. I had a Jabra cell headset on the seat. They pulled the earcup off of it, and tossed them both on the seat. Gas tank wasn't syphoned. Tires weren't slashed. Nothing but a missing boom box.

    They only took the radio.

    Now I was left with a 12-mile drive home, in the dark, with absolutely nothing for sound but the whistling of the air going through the smashed remains of my driver's side windows at 65 miles-per-hour.

    "I love my music. Can't drive a mile without it..."

    I've lived my whole life in CT, growing up in Hartford, Willimantic, Norwich, and briefly in Brooklyn. I've never had any car that I've ever owned broken into (and some of them were quite worthy of it). Now that I live here, and drive a 13-year-old truck, my vehicle has been vandalized a total of 4 times in the past year alone.

    I guess what bothers me the most, besides the inconvenience of being out of transportation for the next week or more, is that the truck was no more than 50' from the front door of 650 Townsend, in an attended parking lot, and nobody saw this assailant smash my windows (3/8's inch 4x4-package tempered glass, not easy to just smash with an elbow or even a rock), take out a nearly 3' long, 14" diameter radio, and walk away?

    Not happy. Not happy at all.

    "$10.00 to break into your car, sir?"

johnm, you know I don't want to bicker about things like this, especially here. I don't have the time, patience, or resolve to argue with you about the issues regarding pilot-link. In short, the reason I said it's a mandatory upgrade is that the sync code that was in 0.9.3 is "questionable" and was removed because of potential GPL concerns. It was completely rewritten from the ground up by jpr, and those concerns have been alleviated. We've talked about this on the list already.

Also, 0.9.3 will not work with most of the supporting applications that might continue to use it, such as Evolution, gnome-pilot, and possibly others such as PilotManager, JPilot, etc. If people want to continue to use 0.9.3, and ignore some of the licensing issues, and an occasional corrupted record here or there, that's fine. I'm not forcing anyone to upgrade, just that compatibility will break if they choose to use 0.9.3 with some of the newer GUI-based apps.

Maybe "mandatory" was bad phrasing. Let's call it "necessary", or "critical" or something else then.

As for the layout at tool launch time, that silly splash, reminder: It does say -pre5 on it, no? Any code can be added removed for a final release. It's my intention to move all of the argument parsing out (probably using popt or getopt() in a proper lib), and make it uniform between binaries. Until I do, some will act different than others.

Speaking of patches... the only message I've received from you directly or on the list regarding pilot-link referencing patches (not general webpage or SourceForge banter) was on Thu, 19 Oct 2000 15:31:55 -0700 (PDT), referencing the PILOT_LINK_PATCH stuff. I've already fixed that (and screwed up the branch, which jpr had to resurrect).

If there are other patches I haven't received, if you could email them to me, I will include them. Other than that, I haven't seen anything, and you already know that I've been / including / patches, so you're not being ignored.

I await your patches and suggestions to improve the package.

Time

    It's time to get out of the cube and into the Big Blue Room and go biking, camping, snowboarding, running, whatever. Next weekend will definately be fun.

    There are rougly three aspects to my life:

  • Work
  • Play
  • Family (except that I'm not married and have no children, and "girlfriend" might be somewhere between "Play" and "Family"

Her birthday is coming up. We've missed too many holidays apart, so I'll try to do what I can to make this one special, given unbelievably constrained funds at the present time. At least my round-trip tickets from one coast to the other on 10 days notice (3,051 miles) were $200.00, saving $1206.25 on the full fare. Thanks to Priceline, of course.

Project Roundup

    Well, it looks like the new Plucker website is a success so far. Still some small minor tweaks to do, but overall, it's been doing well. 11,997 hits on it's first night, nearly 13,000 the next day, and pretty stable on the third day.

    Don't forget to help out with the Plucker Artwork Contest. We need some T-Shirt ideas. Templates are available on the site, and I'll be putting up everyone's ideas there for everyone to see.

    Oh, and go play in the Plucker Samples Section. I need some more ideas, content, stories, HOWTOs, etc. Just send them to me directly.

    I also managed to squeak out a few more patches into pilot-link, and get a release of pre5 on the website. Download it if you're using 0.9.3 and use this for now until the final version is released. Just a few more additions to the code, and I'm going to cut it, if there's no major breakage. It fixes a lot of problems people have had, and it's going to be a mandatory upgrade when it's released.

    The CVS Seminar I am going to be giving at the offices seems to have grown in interest, and now it may be turned into a University Course to deliver to partners. Doesn't matter either way to me, since I'll be retaining the rights to the material, so it comes with me. This also means I can turn it into a book. There's really no good in-depth books out there on CVS, including this one and this one. Depressing. I'm going to try to fix that.

    Looks like there are some other new projects coming my way. I just hope I'm given the time and flexibility to dig into them. Lots of new chewy ideas, just need to start coding away and implementing them.

    "How do you eat an elephant?"

More Public Speaking

    Looks like I'm going to be flying around again speaking at CLIQ, the Colorado Linux Info Quest. I've never been on a panel before, so this should be interesting. I'll be on the panel with Havoc Pennington, Andy Hertzfeld of Eazel, and others.

    Sounds like fun.

    Of course I'm terrified.

    I've never done slides or a presentation on pilot-link before. Time to get cracking!

    At least I can use my iPAQ now to remotely control my MagicPoint presentation on my laptop over 802.11 wireless. Whee! The joys of geek toys!

    Why do people even use Microsoft products anymore, really. I mean with all the instability, patches, and blatently open security holes in it. Even PowerPoint has security holes now... How did that even get past QA?

    We need a "VBA Viruses For Dummies" or "Writing Successful Microsoft Viruses in 24 Hours" book on the open market. Any takers?

    I have to laugh though, I was in my local CompUSA recently, and someone was commenting on my iPAQ running linux, and my ThinkGeek ultra-spiffy perl t-shirt, and this guy says:

    (him) "Why don't you run Windows, it's so much better than that Linux stuff"

    (me) "Why do I need Windows, I already have a Playstation..."

    (him) <blank stare>

    (me) "In a few years, when their OS gets to the point where it actually becomes useful, though highly unlikely, I might consider it, but that's probably 5-10 years off, and I have work to do now. I can do exponentially more things with Linux as it existed a year ago than I can with Windows today."

    (me) <walks away>

    Picture seeing this tall, ominous-looking person covered in tattoos saying this to "Joe User(tm)" in a CompUSA. It's always funny when it happens.

Ok, that's enough for now.

2:11AM PST

Time to get some food, and get some more code cranked out before I have to roll back into the cube at 7:00AM PST.

I hate driving.

I hate my truck.

25 Feb 2001 (updated 25 Feb 2001 at 13:42 UTC) »

5:40 am PST

    WHEW!

3:12 am

    This diary entry intentionally left blank.

    More to come in a few hours.

No time for posting diaries

    3:04am

    I don't have much time tonight to post, but...

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

    dirtyrat, I just emailed this to you as well, but for the rest, I've converted it into Plucker format (took 10 seconds to spider and convert). Now everyone can enjoy it!

    The Cathedral and the Bazaar in Plucker format!

    The viewer (you need one of these)

The compression lib (I compressed the text, so you'll need this also)

I built it with one command:

plucker-build -f /tmp/catb -H " http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/" --zlib-compression --bpp=4 --stayonhost --maxdepth=3
thrase, you might want to grab plucker-1.1beta1.tar.gz if you want the latest build of Plucker, or hit the cvs.

cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.gnu-designs.com:/cvs/palm -z3 co plucker

(password is nothing, just hit ENTER)

Welcome aboard!

LUG, BOF, Seminars and Talks

    Held my first-ever BOF on Group/Shared Calendaring under linux and the State of Affairs. Looks like there's a lot of really neat stuff to work on here. We're in the beginning stages of stitching it all together (as is everyone else). My not-even-complete slides are here (there are only 4 of them for now). I'll be updating them as the weeks roll by. The next BOF we have will be externally open to the public and we'll provide a Sprint dial-in line for those who want to join in.

    I have several more talks to give, both internal and externally. I'm still working out the hundreds of slides for my CVS talk at the main Linuxcare offices. It was going to be a full 8-hour session, but now I think I'm going to split it into two days of four hours each, perhaps with some 'homework' on the first day for those in attendance.

    Next talk is on the migration of Windows Applications and Data Interchange to Linux. It should get some people stuck in the mud at work to think about running a proper OS. Windows users are propagating, and it has to stop.

    My LWE proposal is in for August's Linuxworld Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It'll be a shortened version of my Secure CVS for Distributed Development Projects talk that I'm giving at work

Struggles

    My life is rife with uncertainty...
    ...and I do not like it.

    I'd like to know what's going on with [CENSORED]

    I will not lose her, and everything else in my life, most of all my sanity, for this.

BBC

    schoen, not to worry. The BBC will survive, and we will manage through these resource-constrained times. We just need some more time to focus. I seem to be so distracted with a million things, I'm whittling them down one by one.
    "Nibbled to death by ducks..."
I need a sense of accomplishment.

Depression crawls closer .

I must be strong.
2:14:53AM PST

Distracting Hacking

    Tonight I managed to get a quick and dirty hack out to get the JPilot Backup Plugin working with the latest JPilot version. I'll work on a much cleaner version later on this week if I get some spare cycles. There's still some minor GUI tweaks I'd like to do to it. I'm not sure I like the little status window at the bottom. I'll monkey with a status bar hack or some progress bar stuff later.

      You can find the small hacky patch here.

    I managed to get my external serial modem working over the Keyspan Serial->USB adapter, so now I can use my Palm on the serial port. Just some more testing. I need to figure out why the kernel module for it is locked at 9600. Perhaps some mods to modprobe a new speed into it would be in order. hugh, any ideas?

    So far, I've been able to get three consecutive mouses working under X (at the *SAME* time, USB, PS/2, Trackstick), my modem or any other device on the Keyspan adapter reliably, sound, IrDA, USB, and some other small goodies consectutively on this laptop. Now it's time to get some of this Thinkpad Hackery documented, so others can take advantage of it and play with devfs, reiser, and some of the kernel level crypto stuff.

    ianmacd has this all down pat now, apparently, so I'll trade him some CVS knowledge for his FreeS/WAN tricks.

Pain Comes In Many Forms

    ..and I hope this is the end of mine...

BBC Development

    I've now taken a stand and stepped up to the plate to lead the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card project. Now that Duncan Mackinnon can no longer help us from the inside, I hope he will continue to help us in the community. It will continue onward, no matter what we are called, or who we are maintained by. Between schoen, ianmacd and myself, we will ensure the success of this.

    Believe in that.

Seminar'ige (CVS, Group Calendaring, Windows Migration)

    Well, it seems that I'm going to have to persue some SGML expertise to get my presentation done up for people to follow on my CVS talk internally. Once again, a wrench in the works, since Ancilla was one of the unfortunate ones to go on Friday. She was the one who tirelessly set up these internal talks, gathered the respondees, and tended to the projector, keys, and all of the organization. I'm trying to find someone to help me with this before my talk. I'm going to have to split the talk into two separate days, four hours each, instead of one grueling day on a weekend of 8 hours. Maybe I'll have some 'homework' for the people who attend on Day One.

    Two more seminars have come to mind recently, which I'll have to begin working on soon:
    1. Migrating From Windows (replete with full conversion examples, multiple options for Word docs, Excel, mail, etc. like the migration from Word to Abiword or StarOffice/OpenOffice, Excel to Gnumeric, yadda yadda.)
    2. How To Use Your Equipment (hardware hackery, centering on our "Standard Builds" and Thinkpads for the moment)
    3. I've scheduled a BOF this week which I'll be chairing on "The State of Group Calendaring". I'd like to get some other outside people to dial in to help us with this. Maybe I can do a LUG on it at FourSeas.

Advogato Wishlist #247

  1. Why is there no search option on Advogato?
  2. Why do we not have <project>foo</project> tags?
  3. Why does the Login page not give me a 'Post Diary' option on the success page? I have to strike the success portion of the URI and reload. Ugly.
  4. No <code> #include <foo.h> </code> tags? <pre> </pre> isn't good enough.
  5. Can someone say <a name=#foo> tags to reference a specific day's entry?
  6. Why does this happen?

Palm Stuff

    Lots of goodies coming around the horizon. Anyone who can lend some cycles, either in coding expertise, documentation, or anything (even pointers to some HOWTO documents) would be greatly appreciated. Here's what I've got planned:
    1. pilot-link 0.9.5 release
      1. Various other conduits
      2. XML outputs for pilot-link, pxd (pilot-xfer daemon)
    2. New conduit to sync your Palm to a cvs server (local or networked)
    3. Malsync updates (should help fix the Vindigo problems).
    4. gnome-pilot updates for Calendar, Categories, and some other goodies. jpr and ettore are working on this one. Teaming up on this is crucial to it's success.
    5. Plucker Portal...
      1. Work on the perl spider for Plucker
      2. Plucker Desktop Buddy
    6. Palmvogato. Yes, a way for you to enter your daily diary in your Palm, sync, and have it posted to the server. Makes sense if you're on the road and want to still keep a record of your daily activities.
    7. gnutrition conduit for the Palm. merge with on-Palm shopping lists.
    8. Finish my Palm PPP HOWTO.
    9. Strip gnome-pilot conduit fixed. It exists, just in a broken state.
    10. Finish my Sony Clie USB kernel module.

The Writing Was On The....Web?

    I've decided to begin putting my writings online for people to enjoy. Maybe I'll do some sort of "page-a-day" story site or something, and let people jump onboard and read what I have. I'll be fun, I promise. I still have lots of ideas in this space.. Celiac Times, some sort of Linux/Palm column, maybe some short fiction stories, and of course, the much-sought-for autobiography. I've got so much crazy things that have happened in my life, more than a dozen people have asked me to put them to paper, they're so insanely unbelievable. Anyone who has spent more than a day with me knows that they're all valid. Time to start penning my memoirs.

    EEK! I'm turning 30 in less than 5 months!!

Miscellaneous

    Lots more new stuff on the horizon. I hope I can devote some spare cycles to getting it all done in time. At some point, I have to deal with moving my whole life again to another location closer to San Francisco, moving Erika here with me (yes?), and putting myself through school, fixing my health and my teeth, blah blah... it's all boring and I'll spare you this time. This year is going to be a huge, productive year of reinvention, and churning out so much code it'll be coming out of my ears.

    If I have time...

Phone Rape

    I just received my January phone bill from PacBell. Total amount: $1294.18!!!! Apparently they believe that I spent 8588.0 minutes on the phone last month. That's sort of odd, considering I was in New York at LinuxWorld for about 8 or 9 of those days.

    There will be a very loud session between myself and them. Last month, they 'suspended' my service because my bill had exceeded $174.00, but now they seem to think it's ok to let me continue to happily dial along with a $1294.18 balance.

    I need to find a local ISP in the Bay Area. Seems nobody has 650 dialups, and anything outside of about a mile radius of me is a "local long distance" call, so I get nailed with 0.15/minute during the nights and evenings and .30 during the day.

    Anyone know any ISPs I could look into (that accept dialup, since DSL is not available here). I'm not that close to my COs (Central Office).

    California is definately the worst place I've ever seen for bandwidth. WAY to spotty and random, and with these microscopic calling areas, it's worse.

Eating is unhealthy

    It seems that my 'Caloric Restriction' tests on myself were overwhelmingly successful, however now I've put myself into a very dangerous position of anemia. I'm seeing some aftereffects of that 'experiment'. Fatigue, frustration, short temper, headaches, cloudy head. All of these are directly related to an extreme iron deficiency.

    We'll see what the doctor thinks.

    I'm going to approach this much more scientifically soon. I need to get Gnutrition working on my box again. I think I broke MySQL on my box. Ack!

    It would be nice if I could also sync Gnutrition with my Palm-side shopping list, so I could keep track of what goes where. Maybe a version for Celiacs too?

Yes, I read my logs...

    I'm seeing some interesting SYN attacks hit my server lately. Time to tighten netfilter on the box.

I'm too furious to think of anything more at this point. Too much work to do today.

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