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Tech: How to stay in IRC, or How I made TCP/IP not get timed out by a firewall
Sun, 31 Jul 2005

Changing core LAN components always leads to a time of discovery, though fortunately I've had very good luck and things have more or less 'just worked' (excepting new problems that showed up on their own, like machines failing etc. :) One thing thats been niggling me is that idle IRC sessions have been getting hung up on. This sort of thing usually screams 'bored firewall reaping its connection table' and I've experienced it numerous times at work and home -- a long lasting Oracle connection mid-query or an ssh session running a job that doesn't emit output until completion will spontaneously be killed. Most people just background a job and fire up 'iostat 1' or 'top' to keep things busy, but thats both 'userland' and dirty an approach..

(I wonder if these tips are useful to anyone? Really, I've been posting them as reminders to myself really, but also in hopes someone may stumble across these when in need :)

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Networking: Its all in teh name
Thu, 28 Jul 2005

Instead of wringing the neck of my various PCs around the place I've been trying to catch up on some reading (If Chins Could Kill). However, the whole time, my wifes connectivity has been shot and it drives me nuts to no end to have a problem lieing around unfixed (not to mention her being angry as hell at this new network ;) Now, shes had some spyware recently so I was smugly chiding her and blaming that nasty stuff the whole time -- she's a developer herself so getting caught with spyware is like working as a lawyer and being found with an inflatable date in your briefcase..)

It did seem odd that she couldn't ping out and I couldn't ping in - spyware often crashes machines or slows them down (you'd think it would spy without being so crippling but the authors are obviously not caring folks..) - but this didn't sound right. I'll cut to the chase for a lesson in humility and not jumping to conclusions -- the problem was in fact that the machine was actually connecting to another wireless access point (presumably a neighbours) - despite our own WAP having a much higher signal strength. It seems the old operating system installed there selected only by channel number and took publicly announcing networks over sneaky private ones like ours. This is the sort of bad design in network drivers that leads to man in the middle attacks -- imagine if you can just drop a WAP outside the window of an office building and suddenly scoop all the traffic from naive users, then redirect it back onto their own WAP.

A little frightening and pretty much what was going on here - though I assume our neighbour wasn't being malicious. Still, the lesson is to do your research carefully - even when the published network name sounds the same as your own. I think I'll seek out new drivers, since this must have been fixed as its a terrible security and usability flaw - thankfully my (now maybe deceased?) laptop and Windows XP / FreeBSD default to highest signal strength instead.

(This does ring of that issue that came up in the news a few weeks back where a man was accused of illegally using someone elses network, though he claimed that foreign network invited his laptop in to use it (by offering out DHCP details) and his laptop was designed to just accept. The trick is - this is quite normal and as witnessed above can happen easily. Thoughts that fall out are - if something illegal is found on your computers, just play the 'someone else was using my LAN' card. Further - tighter coupling is needed in these devices so they don't whore connectivity around the district...)

Addition: It would seem that this machine will swap connections every few seconds if you sit in the wrong place or lean over just-so. Pretty badly designed if it just gives up a valid connection for a slightly-better one just-like-that, while the network is busy. (ie: Mid-download, thus breaking the connection and losing the download!) So I'll have to go talk to the neighbours for now and get them to clamp down on security a bit, to keep us out -- amazing. I guess the software is just too trusting. Cracking must be easy..

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R.I.P. Michigan J. Frog, but go Discovery!
Tue, 26 Jul 2005

As we huddled around a cow-orkers desk watching a live feed of the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery, I saw on a news site that Michigan J. Frog has been axed by WB. I don't know about you guys, but when I was a wee tot I used to get quite the kick from hearing The Michigan Rag song from this guy (when no one was around) and the *CROAK* when other characters were nearby... ahh, Chuck Jones, you were the man. (Chuck Jones died early 2002 and was the voice of our youth -- Wile E. Coyote of course, but also Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig et al.)

And read the text carefully on this orange juice bottle - if its not O.J., what the heck is it? It says "pulp" on the top, and it contains O.J. in the ingredients, but surely from the verbiage its not O.J...

Ahright, got frogs, orange juice and space shuttles into one posting!

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Codejedi: A history of the first Shadow Plan CD
Sat, 23 Jul 2005

I suspect no one but my wife has ever seen this object, so its with great pride I present a photo of a CD burned probably 3 or more years ago - the very first Shadow Plan CD. (The 3rd and so one were sent out to various customers, but the first two were this one and a coaster :) (This reminds me, I should post photos of some of my obscure Atari artefacts, such as actual 'slides' from the Atari 2600 Battlezone commercial reel, and the insides of some custom chips from the Atari ST.. but I digress..) I've tried to avoid physical sales so I don't have to print up boxes and manuals or do packaging -- wrapping up hundreds of boxes for shipping is a total drag so I just go with burnt and labelled CDs as needed. Nearly all of my sales are done electronically, but when I hit up user groups and such I often carry a pile of CDs in to hand out since nothing beets swag, right?

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Tech: Anchovies, or "Don't you worry about Planet Express, let me worry about _blank_!"
Sat, 23 Jul 2005

When a machine goes and gives up the ghost, I sometimes refer to it as 'anchoving' - because you really wish you could just make it all go away. I originally thought about entitling this post "Stomp your hands and clap your feat", but in the end I decided no Quiet Riot reference is a good thing. Well, let me get to it and begin with the age old... the sea was angry my friends..

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R.I.P. Scotty, Rainbow Islands
Fri, 22 Jul 2005

(resisting 'beam me up' and 'final frontier' references)

Was ol' Scotty the reason so many people got into IT? Or was Mr. Doohan a poor actor who was typecast into oblivion? Well old chum, happy trails. (Anyone who brings up the obligatory "He's dead..." will be fed through the nearest 16-year-old anorexic.) After quickly reading a few obit's, I've found he was Canadian and one of the potential causes of his Parkinsons was exposure to chemical weapons on Juno Beach during World War 2. Man.

Aside: I need to find some old old game reviews - like the original reviews for Space Invaders and Pacman. They were new, and were The Shiznitz for their time, but really.. how much is there to say about gameplay in Space Invaders? (And trust me, I know all the cheats and hacks and inner workings ;) I was about to say, comparing to say, Halflife 2, that todays reviewers have it easy since theres a lot of gameplay to discuss. But then I realized about HL2 that like Space Invaders, theres a player and some bad guys to shoot. Still, I'd like to see those original reviews...

This came up since I've been tempted, as en exercise in shutting down the mind before bed, to write reviews for older games that I liked. Some new content for the web, and maybe a way to ease down the mind. But I already know - if thats how I ease my mind down someone might as well put a bullet in me now ;) (In case you're curious, I was thinking of reviewing the Bubble Bobble early games, like Rainbow Island..) (Normally I read for half an hour before hitting the sack. I'm a big fan of newspapers, but they're too grimy and full of sensationalist muck to fall asleep to.. so any good pocket novel will do.)

And yes, I'm very proud of the fact no one else alive would group those words together in a title.

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Literature: The Greenbacks of Shannara
Fri, 22 Jul 2005

Do I plead the fifth or actually make this post? I debated this for a week, but in the name of bloganistic integrity.. here goes, and to heck with my reputation as sensible human being. I'm not really a literary elitist, but life is too short to read a lot of the bad and cheesie stuff out there IMHO, so I traditionally stick to known good authors or new (to me) authors recommended by friends. I wish I had more time and budget for just picking up random books (which is how I cam across so many great authors in the past, such as Steven Brust) but alas I do not. Still, sometimes you need to turn off your cynic and jump into some Robert Jordan or David Eddings and be done with (though usually its safer to just hit up some Phillip Jose Farmer instead :)

Anyhoo, Terry Brooks' Shannara series is undeniably one of the most popular (and profitable) series around. I believe I read some of it as a kid, but a couple months back I found myself in the mood for some so-called high fantasy (which I usually refer to as wank fantasy) - a term that seems to imply a high density of Tolkien-esque elements such as tall whispy elves who are friends to the forest and great in AD&D, short sturdy dwarves, a single world-saving artefact to be chased down and a great evil slowly sweeping across the playfield. Of course, Tolkien pretty much invented the modern fantasy genre and needs no description here, Terry Brooks series is essentially a formulaic knock-off. But thats okay, I knew that going in and so did manage to enjoy the first two volumes so far. (A note to my friends -- please keep talking to me ;)

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Literature: Bruce Campbell, If Chins Could Kill
Fri, 22 Jul 2005

Alright, I'll say it -- I'll out myself -- I'm a Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess fan. And not just the Callisto (Hudson Leick) kind of fan, but a fan of hammed up acting and mythos-mixing goofy plot television.

Remember, the measure of a man is not the value of his zipped ebook collection (ebooks do not collectibles make), but the weight of his paperback and hard cover collection -- and my collection now includes two vitally important volumes: If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a "B" Movie Actor and Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way

(I had other posting titles in mind, but really.. how can you top that actual book name?)

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Tech: Burning a DVD from the FreeBSD command-line
Mon, 18 Jul 2005

Over time, IT folks are virtually guaranteed to complicate everything with a series of nasty acronyms (largely as a form of job security) despite their job description stating something to the effect of "Your job is to reduce complexity of a system." In general, things (be it IT, or automotive, or whatever) tend not to be complex once you catch the lingo, or at least get a feel for whats going on. (A car looked at as a whole is complicated, but a schematic of how the invididual components of a car connect is not, nor is the inner workings of each part.) Likewise with cellphones -- when trying to get your first phone I can guarantee the plethora of terms will throw you for a loop, as it did me -- GPRS, GSM, CDMA, 1xRTT, etc etc -- yet people use cellphones every day. Well, with my new little server having a DVD burner, I figured I'd fire it up and see how many coasters I could make..

(If you're not an IT guy (programmer, sysadmin, etc) or a home Unix hobbyist, you should probably just skip entries I label with things like "FreeBSD" :)

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Music: Sick of self-serve?
Sat, 16 Jul 2005

Just as voice-over-IP could made telephone-companies irrelevent (they're all scrambling like mad to find new markets, or become data pipe companies, or survive via legislation), mp3s and iPods have pretty much made record stores redundant. I know I've gone over it before - how I will buy a CD, rip it to mp3 files, and only then listen to it while on my way somewhere (leaving a graveyard of jewel cases in the basement.) At this point, if everyone has an mp3 player (be it dedicated like the iPod, or as part of a PDA or cellphone, like the upcoming iTunes cellphones) all we need is simpler delivery for this consumable society. iTunes Music Store does pretty well, but as my wife adds -- it won't really happen until you can buy from a selection of tracks right on your phone and have the track delivered then and there (or perhaps never have the track and just pay pennies to listen each time, piping it from the carrier?)

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Comics: Sweaty men and thin plots
Fri, 15 Jul 2005

Comics are cool, and then not cool - like skateboards and Def Leppard. (pause for applause) (ducking thrown tomatos) Thankfully with movies like Spiderman, X-Men and Batman making inroads to the public ethermind, comics and graphic novels are cool again. (And with Lord of the Rings being enormously popular, maybe a few people will learn to read again. Books I mean, and not just magazines with hot goth artwork girls by Neil Gaiman :) Regardless of what was cool or not back in the day, I collected a ragged assortment of comic books when I was a kid -- some nifty ones (since I was the sort of punk who liked things no one else did), and some uncool books (just because they were the kind a kid liked -- by which I mean inexpensive!) The result - my little library included some great to not-so-great stuff, like the original black and white packaged-in-baggies-with-cardboard-backing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles issue #1. And the infamous Dr. Fate sex-change issues.

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Eight-tracks: In Hong Kong you can buy talking welcome mats.
Thu, 14 Jul 2005

I'd be ashamed of the few 8-tracks we have, except they're in an alligator-skin case with velvet interior. Theres some cassettes in there, but the ones I remember are '2112' by Rush, and the 'Flash Gordon Soundtrack'.

Ultra cool or ultra nerdy? I know I'm damaged, since I can nolonger tell.

Well, I can tell a little since I know this is crossing the line: Given the cassette form factor, I bet I could stuff PDA's into that alligator skin case for cold storage.

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Tech: Voodoo networking, or How I got sendmail to like me.
Thu, 14 Jul 2005

<skeezix>Deep code is where we want to live; shallow code is where we make a living

This is another one of those posts only a few people will read, I know. I'm going to talk about 'sendmail' (a system for receiving and transmitting email on the Internet, for those who host domains. Normal people just use an email program to suck down mail, but the guys who host the email use sendmail or postfix or other tools) and LinkSys. If you're still reading, cool - its been a busy week of hacking around on our LAN and new machine to get things working, but I finally made The Big Switchover where I killed the old machine and started using the new one -- pretty successfully too, with only a few gotchas! making me swear like a sailor for a few minutes each :) The telnet BBS is still hosed and no idea why (and I bet no one notices ;), but otherwise things are up and snappy as heck. I even added a new photo gallery script since the old machine wasn't fast enough to load images. But for now I'll rant about the torture Linksys and Eric Allman put me through..

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Tech: Rebuilding the LAN, Migrating between FreeBSD's
Sun, 10 Jul 2005

You'll have to forgive my transgression into being overly specific to a topic few will care about, but its been a slow-post week and this might be handy for me to remember sometime :) (On the entertainmeny front, my wife has grown her Katamari to some 15 or so metre's in size and is enjoying picking up cars, houses and trees..)

Some of you will know that my oldest server (really just an old Compaq desktop I picked up used some 6 years ago) has been slowly eating itself lately -- some bad sectors or lost files here, some hanging at random times through the day/night there -- just slowly becoming too unfriendly. It could be just overheating, or clogging up of the fan intakes, or the hard drive going, a combination thereof or any number of things. Though this machine has worked hard (24-7 for 6 years, plus whatever time it did before I got it.. already a few years old and with broken ports then!) its way past retirement. I personify equipment, so this stoic machine will be missed... anyone want to buy some old RAM? :)

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Tech: Microsoft making (more) spyware?
Thu, 07 Jul 2005

For purposes of this post, lets gloss over the fact that Windows Updater passes details about your machine hardware and installed software up to Microsoft (you can debate until the end of time if they will abuse it or not, noting that the EULA permits them to silently uninstall anything they like..) and cut to todays chase. Relatively recently, Microsoft started working on buying Claria, a 'direct internet marketing company' -- a company you likely know better by the name of Gator (recently renamed) who makes pop-up ads and software to track which websites you go to. Gator have been a pretty disreputable bunch, with such wonderful tactics as tricking Internet Explorer (a very wide open browser.. try Firefox instead!) into silently downloading and installing software that does all sorts of terrible things, and is pretty hard to remove (generally needing commercial anti-spyware software to remove it.)

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Tech: Ideas are cheap; work is not.
Wed, 06 Jul 2005

Every once in awhile, someone will come up to me and say such-and-such a feature is easy to implement so why isn't it there already, or why won't it be there next week -- so I have to inform them of how their idea may be incredible, but is actually an enormous amount of work, or perhaps that its only a good idea for them and not many others would care (few have any idea how other people actually use a tool :), or how running a business and answering support mail eat up a tonne of time. As you all know I'm chatty and friendly and encourage folks to write me with good ideas, but sometimes they get rude and suggest "some Russian 12 year old will just whip it up and put you out of business if you don't implement my pet idea and have it on my desk by Monday" -- to which I can only respond with "they're welcome to try." You see my friends, I known a secret - ideas are great, but take seconds to come up with - actually building and proving a concept takes a lot work, and supporting the results for the long haul is the serious heavy lifting and where the respect comes in.

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Tech: Whats the case for ebooks?
Tue, 05 Jul 2005

People ask me about ebooks a lot since I've been so close to mobile technology over the last decade, so I thought I'd post with some of the pros and cons and then confuse the issue some more. For now, lets just refer to ebooks as electronic-books regardless of medium -- a PDF on a PC is an ebook, just like an iSilo or Plucker file is. Perhaps the web is an ebook that isn't always available quickly -- you can't argue with the value of wikipedia.

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Politics: Heroic or Arrogant?
Tue, 05 Jul 2005

Open mouth, insert foot :) But the perfect thing to say right after Independence Day in the US perhaps ...

Over lunch, within the sphere of people I know, we tend to get into a lot of debates -- bickering over culture or history or politics or movies or operating systems or philosophy or whoknowswhat .. but once in awhile a debate will come up that eventually meanders around to being a discussion about inter-country intrigue. (For the record I'm two kilos liberal, half a pound old fashioned, and a bucket of mixed altruism, pragmatism and intelligism. Clear as mud-pie? :)

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Events: Happy Independence Day, U.S. of A.!
Mon, 04 Jul 2005

Time is tight but I still wanted to extend a warm one to our friends down stairs (though I'll try not to turn this blog into a Happy-<blank>-day site any more than it has been the last few days.. when are UK and Russia up? :) I've been busting my chops of late to get a new Shadow Plan public beta out the door, so I figured today was as good as any day .. wave the flag and pop out a new public release. Not bad for a mornings work :)

Checking the news sites, I'm reminded of a very cool thing I completely forgot about -- NASA's project to smack a probe into an asteroid and see what falls out. This has to be the first deliberate collision, and probably the first photos of an explosion-on-another-body we've got. CNN has a story here

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Events: Niagara Falls, the Ribfest, and assorted shameful hedonism while the world seeks help for Africa via Live8
Sun, 03 Jul 2005

We took a day trip out to Niagara Falls to enjoy some time away from chores, enjoy Canada Day and taste some really excellent pizza. The city, once the so-called honeymoon capitol of Canada, is really Ontario's private little imitation of Las Vegas - including the casinos and dorky souvenir shops but excluding the sin :) And yeah, it has The Falls of course! I must admit that although everyone I know has seen the falls dozens of times, the falls (there are multiple clustered together) really are spectacular to see each round and the surrounding area is gorgeous for biking, wandering around, wine tasting or eating fudge while attending wax museums highlighting well known murderers.

(The Ribfest we encountered back in Toronto, though they're popping up all over the place; theres another in Mississauga in a few weeks so we may have to attend there too.. see if you can find one in your location :)

(And since tomorrow is my brother's birthday .. Happy Birthday Punk!)

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Coding: Like lego out of thin air ...
Sun, 03 Jul 2005

The point of this post is just to remark on a couple of thoughts we developers have always had, and how they're coming to pass earlier than we thought. I always said that good developers put themselves out of business, by which I mean that they do a good solid maintainable job and then move on, leaving the resulting application to be supported by sysadmins or runtime staff. Likewise, another old tenet is that developers are like traditional tradesmen - we can make our own tools once given the basics - development tools get better through investment of developer time and every developer hacks out his own helper tools for his toolbox. These two ideas when coupled together always produced a dream where someday developers would create such powerful and easy to use development tools that just about anyone could create new applications - that end users could wave their arms and pop out any old application they needed, provide the components were already available or derivable.

Aside: But first, some quick stories about companies having heart: A neighbour was telling me a story about a cousin of his who worked for one of the Japanese auto-makers here in Canada; after he'd risen up a few ranks they shipped him to Japan for a course, though when he arived a number of shop floor employees were ill. The company president was filling in, since the job had to be done rather than let productivity suffer. I'd like to see the CEO of General Motors pulling his weight on the floors :) I'd like to say that companies these days need to have heart (and/or intelligence - which would prevent things like outsourcing to the point our own children have nowhere to work..) but then you think back to Confenderation Life, one of the original great Canadian companies that went under a decade back -- they had Christmas parties for their employees every year, and it evidently didn't help them compete .. Anyway.

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Events: Happy Birthday Canada!
Sat, 02 Jul 2005

July 1st is Canada Day, our national holiday (where everyone finally gets a day off work to shoot off fireworks) We managed to run around a bit in Niagara (the Canadian side) and I've some rediculous photos, but I'll blog those events separately :) Instead, I thought I'd dig through my history memories a little -- I've always been a big fan of learning some history but never had the time to read up too much beyond what was gleaned back in school. (A priority problem perhaps .. but after work its tough to curl up with a history textbook over some fast moving fiction, don't you think?)

Photo: A barn in northern Alberta shows off its Canadian colours. (Photo by Peter McCluskey/CBC.CA). Not used with permission, but swiped from here

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