10 May 2014
I've decided to have a go at building a proper package for Emacs; it's
going to be some Orgmode and RT integration stuff that I've hacked
together over the last few years. Mostly it's a learning experience,
but there's the chance it might be useful for someone else too...
I decided to use Cask to manage dependencies and, more importantly,
add tests. There are some things I've tripped over that I want to
record.
Start by running "cask init --dev". This gives you a file named
"Cask" that's ready for filling in. Here's mine:
(source gnu)
(source melpa)
(package "yogurty" "0.0.1" "Orgmode and RT integration.")
(package-file "yogurty.el")
(development
(depends-on "f")
(depends-on "ecukes")
(depends-on "ert-runner")
(depends-on "el-mock"))
Most of that is boilerplate, but the "package" and "package-file"
stanzas were mine. Then I moved over the functions I had into
yogurty.el, and ran "cask install --verbose". This gave me this
error:
Packages lacks a file header
I couldn't find much on the Cask website about this, but I eventually
tracked it down. First, the Emacs manual describes what's
required for a "simple package", and how it has to conform to the
Library Headers conventions. Second, there's a package named
header2, available from ELPA, that automagically creates the
headers you need. The EmacsWiki page shows an example of what
you'll get. Fill in the "Version" header, and now you can run "cask
install". Hurrah!
[3]: EmacsWiki page
Tags:
emacs
19 Apr 2014
Another night on the front porch; I'd have loved the chance to go
further afield, but the weather's not cooperating.
Mars was up and easily visible. I was able to pick out some features
("dark spots", I calls 'em), especially with the 12mm (166X), but even
after figuring out the central meridian (45 degrees) I'm still not
sure what I was looking at. Pretty, though. I showed it to a couple
of my neighbours, which they enjoyed, and we also watched the ISS
flyover. No sign of the Dragon that launched today.
After that, it was mainly a fruitless search for M40 and M87. The
usual: not having a good idea what I'm looking for, or what to expect,
a ridiculous target (Virgo galaxy from a light-polluted front porch
while staring at porch lights?). Oh well, Mars was nice.
Tags:
astronomy
17 Apr 2014
Getopt::Lucid is a Perl module for command-line handling that
seems to be as nice as anything I've come across. Must remember.
I've been listening to Handcream for a Generation by
Cornershop, and damn it's good.
Did not catch the eclipse on Monday: clouds. Long weekend weather
forecast: clouds. Weather during the 2012 transit of Venus, for
which I built a Sunfunnel: clouds. Dios no me amo. Trying to
decide whether to get excited about the latest clear sky prediction
for tomorrow night, which shows things crapping out around 11pm.
Right now, I'm thinking the local park (which is within walking
distance). But oh, I want a chance at the Virgo galaxies this year...
This Orgmode/Babel/Tangle/literate programming tutorial, found on
Reddit, is absolutely awesome. I've known for a while I need
to start using Babel/Tangle more, and this is just perfect.
I recently came across Phabricator, an code review/hosting/bug
tracking/all-in-one app open-sourced by Facebook. It looks
incredible, both aesthetically and in capabilities, and I love --
LOVE -- any documentation that includes things like:
Write business rules.
Everyone loves business rules.
Keep an eye on suspicious interns.
Warns you about plotting and scheming.
I've installed it in a VM, and holy cow there's a lot going on under
the hood. There are a lot of moving parts in this. I hope to
spend more time with it, get to know it a bit better, and maybe
start using it at $WORK.
- There is no better way to end the night than transitioning from a
whole lot of New Pornographers to a whole lot of Pixies.
Tags:
16 Apr 2014
I'm fairly happy with Neptune, the Meade LX10 I've got now. It's a
lot of things I knew wanted (pretty, a Schmidt-Cassegrain, got
digital setting circles), but it's also got a lot of things I didn't
know I wanted (clock drive...okay, just clock drive). But there are
some things I'm less happy with.
For one, it's been cloudy a LOT since I got it. What the hell, Meade?
But seriously, folks...I'm finding it interesting how difficult it is
to be sure what I'm looking at. And by "interesting" I mean "damn
frustrating." When I read entries on, say, Rod Mollise's blog
that say things like "...and when I tested alignment, BAM! There was
M13, right in the centre!", I'm wondering why I don't see that. (NB:
the parts of his blog that say this inevitably come after a long and
involved tale of how he had to reboot the hand controller, or shoo
away magnet bats that screwed up the internal compass, or something.))
I can think of a few possible causes:
- Older controller/technology. I'm sure things have improved a lot.
- Half the times I've tried testing this, I've been on my front
porch. NO dark adaptation to speak of. I've had better luck with
brighter open clusters, but if I'm trying some 10th magnitude spiral?
Sure, I'll have problems.
- Poor alignment (cf: older technology). Can't see Polaris from my porch...
- Getting used to the upside-down, mirror-reversed, black-on-white
(for all I know) view in an SC. It's hard to map that to what I see
in my atlases.
- Not having a large-enough scale atlas. Typical FOV is, what, one
degree? On my atlases, that's about the size of my fingernail. The
one time I went out on the porch with my laptop was
interesting...being able to really zoom in helped me catch a faint
galaxy, and maybe that's what's needed.
Dunno...I've gotta bite the bullet and post on Cloudy Nights. This
just calls out for help from people who know what they're doing.
Tags:
astronomy
15 Apr 2014
So the other day I was asked to help get a bioinformatics tool
working. Tarball was up on Sourceforge, so it shouldn't be a problem,
right? Right. Download, skim the instructions, run "make" and we're
done. Case closed!
Only I had to look. Which was a mistake. Because inside the
tarball was another tarball. It was GNU coreutils, version
8.22. Which was dutifully compiled and built as part of the
toolchain. It was committed about 18 months ago because:
this will create a new sort that is used by chrysalis to run sort in
parallel speedup on hour system running a 13g dataset was from 46min
to 6min runtime
That is a significant speedup. Yes. And sure, it's newer than the
version in the last Ubuntu LTS (8.13), and 'way newer than the version
in CentOS 5 (5.97). But that is a tarball, even if it is only 8 MB,
in the subversion repo for a project that was published in Nature
Protocols. Why in hell wasn't it written up as a dependency in
the README? So yeah, I got angry: "I think I'm gonna submit a
patch with an Ubuntu ISO in it, see if they accept it."
I'm struggling with what to write here. This is bad practice, yes,
but what constructive, helpful alternative do I have to offer? The
scientists I work with are brilliant, smart people who do amazing
research, but their knowledge of proper (add scare quotes if you like)
development practice is sorely lacking. It's not their fault, and
folks like Software Carpentry are doing the angel's work to get
them up to speed. But riddle me this: if you're trying to get a tool
into the hands of a pretty new Linux user -- one who's going to base
the next 18 months of their work on how well your tool works -- how
do you handle this sort of thing?
Mark it in the README? That's great if they've got a sysadmin, and
Lord knows they should...but there are many that don't, or it's the
grad student in the corner doing the work and they're more focussed
on their thesis. (That's not a criticism.)
Throw an error? Maybe, or maybe a warning if it's less than version
umptysquat. That gets into all sorts of fun version parsing
problems.
Distribute a VM? Maybe -- but read C. Titus Brown's comments on
this. Plus, if we wince at the idea of telling a newbie "Just
go get it installed", imagine our faces when we tell them "just go
get the VM and run it." Ditto Docker, Vagrant or whatever new
hotness we cool kids are using these days.
Ports tree? Now we're getting somewhere. All we need to do is have
a portable, customizable, easily-extended ports tree that works for
lots of different Linux distros and maybe Unices. Hear that sound?
That's the NetBSD ports tree committer berzerkers coming for your
brains. Because that work is HARD, and they are damned
unappreciated.
We have no good alternative to offer. I can be snotty all I want
(confession: IT'S SO MUCH FUN) but the truth is this is a hard
problem, and people who just want to get shit done are doing it the
best they can because they just want to get shit done. We have -- are
-- failing them. And I don't know what to do.
Tags:
sysadmin
rant
14 Apr 2014
Yesterday was a full day:
Out to one of the 1.2 x 10e7 nearby parks with the kids at 8.30am for
a first-real-nice-day-of-spring bout of playing on everything. (One thing we
love about this neighbourhood? Not only do we get to walk through
the nearby rich neighbourhood without worrying about a tax bill,
there are a ton of parks nearby -- including one that's 128 years
old.) (Not that we went to that one -- that'd be too
relevant.) Swings, monkey bars and that roundabout thing on an
angle that Facebook invented four years ago.
And then out to Abbotsford for the BC Gem show. Arlo came away with
gold foil in a bottle and obsidian; Eli left with a ring and
something else I can't remember. I got lost sixteen times on my way
to and from, which ended up expanding the kids' vocabularies
wonderfully.
And then then to Eli's birthday party, a week in advance of his
actual birthday. (He's thrilled it's on Easter Monday, but we
decided not to push our luck with the scheduling.) Eleven kids,
including our own, at a local gym/activity centre where they are run
RAGGED. Clara pulled off an amazing birthday cake: cupcake cake
from the supermarket, okay yes but also zombie Minecraft figurine +
gummy bears == IRRESISTIBLY DELICIOUS SCENE OF MINECRAFT TERROR
THAT KIDS MUST EAT.
"Whoah, you did all that in one day?" This from the incredibly
organized mom who gave us a coupon for a local attraction we'll be
visiting in a week because she never goes anywhere without a coupon
book. I admit to being flattered.
It really was a fun day. Schedules have been busy lately, in a
oh-god-the-errands-never-end kind of way. It has been a long time
since I spent that much time with them, and I enjoyed it a lot.
Tags:
geekdad
13 Apr 2014
Jason Stanford is contemplating saying goodbye to his wife, Sonia
Van Meter, forever. She's a semi-finalist for Mars One, and if
she goes he'll stay behind. The odds are long -- but he writes about
contemplating saying goodbye to his wife forever, and supporting her
regardless. "We forget that our [wedding] vows are not lyrics to be
recited for public enjoyment but promises to be kept," he writes, and
I have enormous respect for that.
The attention Van Meter has got from the rest of the world has mostly
been shallow and harsh:
Rarely does anyone engage her as a space geek to talk about what she
hopes to find up there, but if someone did, he or she would open the
discussion to Sonia's innate curiosity and her enthusiasm about
humanity's drive to explore and expand our understanding of what is
possible. She honestly does not understand why everyone does not want
to go to Mars, though she knows I would last about half an hour before
getting bored up there.
But that's not what people talk about when they comment about her on
the Internet. No sooner had a story about my wife's astronautical
ambition aired in Austin than strangers took it upon themselves to
diagnose our obviously flawed marriage.
...which makes me think twice about writing about it here and joining
the chorus (of people talking about this, I mean; her decision, their
decisions, belong to them, and neither I nor anyone else have any
business condemning it). But despite my reservations about Mars One,
and for what little it's worth, I admire them both. Read the damn
link.
In other news: this article makes me want to get my scope out and
look at Mars. But the dark is coming on late these days thanks to
DST, and I've been getting over a cold and need my beauty rest. Which
is a damn shame, because it's been clear here for the first time in
weeks. Oh well...soon, along with a trip to Boundary Bay to finally
get the Virgo Messiers.
Today it's birthday party day for my youngest son; he's up already
(it's 6.20am!) stalking the halls, waiting impatiently for things to
get going. To keep him entertained until the party starts, we're
going to the BC Gem Show in Abbotsford. The kids have a
waxing-and-waning interest in rocks and minerals, and I suspect
this'll wake it up again. Does it measure up to a party with your
friends? No, it does not. But it'll keep the wolf from the door for
a couple of hours, at least.
Tags:
astronomy
geekdad
12 Apr 2014
This is an old, old bug that I just tripped over for the second
time. Hopefully this'll save someone else...
In September 2010, I had a problem with Ocsinventory, the
inventory software we use to track hour hardware: I kept getting 500
errors when running the OCS client on a machine. I filed a bug,
but I wanted to show how I tracked it down.
First off, Apache logs for Ocs can be found at
/var/log/httpd/access_log and /var/log/httpd/error_log. Ocs itself
logs at /var/log/ocsinventory-server (-client too, but that's not as
interesting). However, by default Ocs doesn't log very much -- so
let's change that. Logging can be twiddled by editing the Ocs/Apache
config file at /etc/httpd/conf.d/ocsinventory-server.conf. Pay
attention to this setting: PerlSetEnv OCS_OPT_DBI_PRINT_ERROR. It's
set to 0 by default, so set it to 1 to turn it on. Also, note that
you have to fully restart Apache in order to make changes to this
file take effect
After that, I see this error in /var/log/httpd/error_log:
DBD::mysql::db do failed: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '|CHECKSUM|1),
NAME='server23',
WORKGROUP='example.com',
USERDOMAIN=NU' at line 4 at/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8/Apache/Ocsinventory/Server/Inventory/Update/Hardware.pm line 35.
So the fix? Edit Hardware.pm and look for these lines at the top:
package Apache::Ocsinventory::Server::Inventory::Update::Hardware;
use strict;
require Exporter;
our @ISA = qw /Exporter/;
our @EXPORT = qw / _hardware /;
use Apache::Ocsinventory::Server::Constants;
use Apache::Ocsinventory::Server::System qw / :server /;
Add this line right afterward:
use constant CHECKSUM_MAX_VALUE => 262143;
and restart Apache. After that, I see this in httpd/error_log:
Constant subroutine Apache::Ocsinventory::Server::Inventory::Update::Hardware::CHECKSUM_MAX_VALUE redefined at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.8/constant.pm line 103.
However, it doesn't appear to affect things, and I can now run the
client on the machine. Bletcherous hack, but it gets the job done.
Tags:
ocsng
sysadmin
11 Apr 2014
So, Heartbleed. Straight-up dodged a bullet on this one at $WORK: we
use CentOS 5 for nearly everything, and it does not come with a
vulnerable version of OpenSSL -- it's stuck at 0.9.8something. As for
home servers, I'm using Debian 7; IMAP was affected, and so was the
HTTPS I run on my own site. I need to change the certs for those, but
it's a low priority. I've been reading lots of assurances from my
banks that they weren't affected, so there's that. I haven't dug into
my wireless router yet, but the news cannot possibly be good.
The reading about this has been really, really interesting. First,
hot off the presses, XKCD has a truly awesome explanation of the bug:
I am in awe of someone who can explain things this clearly.
Next, there's this from @Indy_Griffiths on Twitter
But enough with the funny. My new favourite blogger, Patrick
McKenzie, writes about "What Heartbleed Can Teach The OSS
Community About Marketing". You really need to read the whole
thing, but here are just a few choice bits:
There exists a huge cultural undercurrent in the OSS community which
suggests that marketing is something that vaguely disreputable Other
People do which is opposed to all that is Good And Right With The
World, like say open source software. Marketing is just a tool, and
it can be used in the cause of truth and justice, too.
As technologists, the Heartbleed vulnerability posed an instant
coordination problem. We literally had to convince hundreds of
thousands of people to take action immediately. The consequences
for not taking action immediately were going to be disastrous.
[...]
Given the importance of this, we owe the world as responsible
professionals to not just produce the engineering artifacts which
will correct the problem, but to advocate for their immediate
adoption successfully. If we get an A for Good Effort but do not
actually achieve adoption because we stick to our usual "Put up an
obtuse notice on a server in the middle of nowhere" game plan, the
adversaries win. [...]
This makes marketing an engineering discipline. We have to get good
at it, or we will fail ourselves, our stakeholders, our community,
and the wider world.
"This makes marketing an engineering discipline." That stopped the
coffee cup halfway to my mouth, I tell you what.
Then, awaking from a yearlong hibernation, Dan Kaminsky wrote about
the failure of, like, everything that led to Heartbleed. Quote:
The larger takeaway actually isn't "This wouldn't have happened if
we didn't add Ping”, the takeaway is "We can't even add Ping, how
the heck are we going to fix everything else?".
The Wall Street Journal wrote two days ago:
Matthew Green, an encryption expert at Johns Hopkins University,
said OpenSSL Project is relatively neglected, given how critical of
a role it plays in the Internet. Last year, the foundation took in
less than $1 million from donations and consulting contracts.
Donations have picked up since Monday, Mr. Marquess said. This week,
it had raised $841.70 as of Wednesday afternoon.
I'm gonna give this a couple weeks to calm down, then I'm sending them
a hundred dollars. It's not much, and Lord knows it's way short of
the sustainable funding they should really have, but it's something.
(Incidentally, if you aren't following Runa A. Sandvik, Colin
Percival, Matthew Green, and Matt Blaze on Twitter,
you're missing out on some really interesting conversations by people
who know what they're talking about.)
And now it's time to post.
Tags:
sysadmin
10 Apr 2014
Years ago, when I got into Linux, I somehow managed to persuade my
father that he should run Linux too. I was surprised, but I shouldn't
have been; he had a better Internet connection than I did for many
years, we'd talk about which 286 system we'd buy (WordPerfect 4eva!),
and he had a Blackberry long before I had anything remotely
comparable.
Yesterday, I helped him get Tor going. He downloaded the
browser bundle (64-bit Linux, natch), and I talked him through
unpacking it, starting it up, and setting up a menu launcher for it.
It was all done over the phone, which took me back to my days on the help
desk: anticipating what the other person will see, telling them what
to do and remembering to be explicit at all times. Three's so much
you can skip over when you're familiar with the process; there's so
much you realize is entrusted to muscle memory, never actually rising
to consciousness anymore.
But it worked -- he got connected, he got a feel for how slow things
can be, he logged into Facebook (and knew not to click on the "Enable
Flash plugin" button), he logged into his bank (!) and even GMail. We
discussed what Tor would bring (increased privacy) and wouldn't bring
(security). (Complicated; my feeling is that, although NoScript and
not having Flash does a lot, it's not their primary concern. If
security was my main focus, I'd probably start looking at SELinux or
Qubes.) And we talked about what using Tor would do for others:
provide cover, camouflage, for some who really need it.
Of course, he's probably the only Tor user within a 50km radius. (No,
really -- he lives outside a small town.) So he sticks out like a
sore thumb now. We joked about a pixel lighting up on a map in
Maryland, analysts scratching their heads and wondering "Is that in
the US?" But still: little, tiny, worthwhile things.
Tags:
privacy
security
politics
geekdad
09 Apr 2014
So a while back I wrote about how it feels, sometimes, to have so
much on the go that there's no possible way to do it all. One of the
things I mentioned was an idea for a program to mirror your Github
repos: all the things you've ever starred, or forked, or watched, or
whatever. That was a serious project (though not necessarily a
serious goal), and in the grand tradition of missing the point
entirely I started writing it. It's now good enough for me to use from
cron (though it's not without its bugs and missing features), so here
it is: landle, a Small but Useful(tm) utility to mirror your
Github repos. You can grab it from Github (natch) or my own
repo (double-natch).
I imagine two use cases. First, someone wants an up-to-date copy of
their Github stuff on their laptop, available for hacking when
offline. Second, maintaining an up-to-date copy of their stuff in
case of takeover by Oracle (the Githubpocalypse).
To be clear: this is a straight-up ripoff/rewrite of ghsync
(right down to the directory layout). ghsync is elegant and wonderful,
but I was unable to get its dependencies to work for me. I had the
choice of persevering and learning Python better, or rewriting it in
Perl and learning development a bit better. I chose the latter.
(Side note: not an easy choice! I hate leaving problems unsolved, for
one, and I really do want to do more with Python. But this was also a
good chance to start a real, though bite-sized, project, and to try
hard to do the Right Thing.)
In the grand tradition of all ambitious rewrites, I would not have
called the current release "1.3", but instead "0.99pluralZalpha-rc1" or
some such. But modulo the TODO list, it's pretty good as it
is...a good, solid beta.
Tags:
software
01 Apr 2014
Tonight I sat out on my front porch with Neptune, the 8" Meade, to see
what I could see. I brought out my laptop to see how much that would
help. I had a fairly ambitious observing list, but in the end spent
most of the night tracking down NGC 3115 (Caldwell 53, woot!),
based on nothing more than Stellarium suggesting it to me.
It took me an hour, but I finally tracked it down. It's interesting
to see how much Stellarium and SkyChart help. The Magellan handset
lets me point to things as needed, but verifying that there's
something there is another challenge entirely. Being able to see
where I am, verify what I'm looking at by starhopping, helps a lot.
So in the end? A faint fuzzy; slightly elongated, maybe some hint
of a core. Not much, but what do you expect from a light-polluted
front porch? This sketch matched what I saw nicely, while this
page just left me aghast that I'd missed so much.
Tags:
astronomy
22 Mar 2014
The forecast looked good; the forecast lied. But that didn't stop me
and Arlo from having a good time. We were both bagged: him from a day
with his brother at a day camp, me from insomnia. But when I got home
from work at 7pm, we both ran around the house gathering things to go
out astronomizing (as my wife calls it).
We got out the door at 8pm, only having to come back for one thing
(dew shield, dammit!), and got out to Boundary Bay at 8.40. Arlo was
asleep by that point. There were a couple of other observers out
there; I talked to them briefly about the weather, then they packed up
and left. But I stayed, set up the scope, and woke up Arlo to show
him a few things in the maybe-quarter of the sky left uncovered.
It wasn't about the astronomizing for Arlo, and that's fine; it's
exciting to be up late, to be out without your brother ("I spent a lot
of time with him today, and it's good to take a break"), and (maybe)
to spend a bit of time with your dad. But I flatter myself that he
was interested: M42, of course; M35 for a star cluster; Jupiter, with
Io read to transit across its face; and Sirius, the star whose light
had travelled for 8 years to reach him -- just a little older than he
is.
After that he settled in the back of the car with a lantern and a
Geronimo Stilton book. I looked for a while, but the battery on the
hand controller had died (next time: spare batteries, dammit!) and the
slop was moving in further. I gave up, packed up, and we came home.
He slept, I drove...the natural order of things; though I broke that a
bit when I could only carry him partway up from the car when we got
home. Li'l dude's heavy, yo.
In any event: a good dry run; a test of my checklists, and of the
emergency father-son system. We both did well.
Tags:
astronomy
geekdad
07 Mar 2014
This info comes from the Codeweavers page for MS Office 2010, but
it didn't come up when I searched for it...
To activate MS Office 2010, running in Crossover Linux, against a KMS:
Start the "Manage Bottle" dialog from your CX installation, select
your Office 2010 bottle, click on Run Command and type "regedit".
Navigate to HKEYLOCALMACHINE\Software\Microsoft\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform
Create the following 2 keys via Edit -> New -> Key: String Value:
- KeyManagementServiceName: (license server hostname)
- KeyManagementServicePort: (license server port -- 1688 is the default)
Keep regedit open and start any MS Office application
(i.e. Word).
Go to HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-20\Software\Microsoft\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform
Insert the following key via Edit -> New -> Key: Binary Value
- VLRenewalSchedule: (any value at all -- I just inserted "1")
Restart the office application; it should now be activated. You can
check that by going to File -> Help.
Tags:
sysadmin
microsoft
04 Mar 2014
I like computers; I like them a lot. I jump between hobbies all the
time, but computers have been a long, long-standing passion of mine.
One of the reasons is that there is just so much to learn; "worlds
within worlds", I like to say when I'm in an expansive mood. (Or
mode.) (And really, when am I not?) Networking. Programming.
Automation. Electronics. System administration, which covers all of
these and so much more, has been a wonderful career for me. My varied
interests have turned out to be a good skillset: curiosity nearly
unbounded.
But that can backfire on me, too. I tend to be a packrat. I think
it's complimentary, the flip side to being broadly curious: I dive
deep into new interests and want to inhale everything. In my closet
I've got a milk crate full of weird screeds and pamphlets from my days
of collecting psychoceramics. I go to the library and come out with
eight books on the same subject. I discover a new podcast and
download all 57 extant episodes so I can catch up. I flit between
trying to write a script that'll make an EPUB file from forty random
URLs (Devops Weekly on my Kobo!), and trying to fix an old, broken
utility to make mirrors of all the Github repos you've ever created or
starred or forked or watched. And if I'm not careful I'll be up all
night, head whirling, unable to get to sleep; anxious the next day at
the thought of all the things I have yet to do.
Long ago, I realized that I will go to my grave with things left
undone: books and PDFs unread, Emacs techniques unmastered, wonderful
music unheard. It's frustrating, sure, but it's also wonderful to
have this strategic reserve of curiosities. I get tired and bored
from time to time, but it never lasts long. How could it, when
there's so much?
I'm losing weight right now by using the techniques in The Hacker's
Diet. They're pretty simple: eat less, go hungry, weigh yourself
daily but pay attention to the 30-day moving average. One of the side
effects of going hungry is that I've learned to feel uncomfortable
when I eat too much. It's a novelty: I'm full sooner, after much,
much less food than before, and I recognize the feeling in advance of
the discomfort. The mechanism isn't perfect, but it's better. I'm
hoping to learn the same lesson with knowledge: to limit, and to savour.
Tags:
11 Feb 2014
Today, on my 42nd birthday, I found out that a misconfigured firewall
at $WORK had been participating in a DDOS attack. It was running an
NTP server that was open to all, and the firewall rules I'd thought
were set to default-deny were not. It's a crappy way to start your
workday.
I'm trying to take more from it than just "Oh shit, I fucked up."
Complexity of setup, proper use of nmap, trust-but-verify, distributed
monitoring, etc. But I'm still working my way through that sinking
feeling right now.
Tags:
sysadmin
05 Feb 2014
Yesterday I realized that, for the nth time, I'd sent emails to my
local Request Tracker with the wrong subject line -- and thus they
were attached to the wrong ticket. Fixing this turned out to be
relatively easy (though not necessarily convenient).
First off, get the attachment number for the email you're trying to
move; you can do this by viewing the ticket in your browser and
hovering over the "show full" link. Second, fire up your MySQL client
and run:
update Transactions set ObjectId=(new ticket number) where id=(attachment number) limit 1;
So if the attachment number was 30043, and it should be attached to
ticket 4090, you'd run:
update Transactions set ObjectId=4090 where id=30043 limit 1;
Sorted!
Tags:
toptip
03 Feb 2014
This NPR Tiny Desk Concert by Mohammad Reza Shajarian is one of
the most incredible performances I've ever seen. Enjoy.
Tags:
musicmonday
02 Feb 2014
Last night I attended a meeting of the local RASC chapter to hear
a talk by William Borucki, the PI of the Kepler Space
Telescope. It was utterly fascinating, and he's a great speaker
-- engaging and funny. I got to ask him about the proposed successor
mission ("K2"), now that Kepler only has two working reaction wheels,
and why they picked the patch of sky they did for Kepler to stare at.
(Answer: you need a lot of stars, so the galactic plane is the obvious
answer; you can't stare right at the plane, though, because there are
too many giant stars, so you go a bit above. Why the northern
hemisphere? Because ESA has their scopes in the southern hemisphere,
and NASA has theirs in the northern. "There's a lot of cooperation,
but there's a lot of competetion too.") I got a couple bits that the
kids'll like: the sapphire lenses covering the CCD detectors on Kepler
(thank Minecraft for their blossoming interest in geology), and the
molten iron planet with an eight hour year. (Random other cool
thing: I came across a pack of coyotes in the parking lot when I went
home.)
All in all, it made me reconsider my non-membership in the RASC. I've
joined twice now: once when I was 13, and again three years ago. both
times I gave it up because I could not see the point: it's a lot of
money ($73 currently), and frankly there are not a lot of benefits
that I find worthwhile. Yes, the local chapter does amazing work --
absolutely incredible amounts of really, really great public
engagement -- but they only see $26 of that membership fee. So I sent
them a cheque one year as a donation, because I think it's worth
supporting that. But...I really want another RASC Handbook; that's
$28, plus tax and shipping. I really want to continue supporting the
local chapter. So I might as well hold my nose and just get the
damned membership.
Another time, I will write up my objections to national membership in
more detail. For now: like I said, the local chapter does amazing
work, and they deserve every penny they get (and more).
Tags:
astronomy
01 Feb 2014
And if the idea of RMS and ESR cooperating to subvert Emacs's
decades-old culture from within strikes you as both entertaining and
bizarrely funny...yeah, it is. Ours has always been a more complex
relationship than most people understand.
Tags:
reading
security
politics
emacs
backups
astronomy
geekdad
