random neuron misfires

Not everybody hates the United States

I saw
this, and this, was simply blown away. Let all the pictures load, it’s staggering.

People may not like our president, people may not like our government, but I doubt very much that there is a single group of people who hates US citizens enough to smile at a time like this.

I’ve changed my company homepage to something more fitting for the time being. I’ve posted in several places that there are ways to fight back. Note that there are still even more things you can use than I’ve written in that post. As
my new page so eloquently explains, this type of “surprise” won’t happen twice.

I’m still collecting pictures from the tragedy. I’m over 1,200 of them now and growing.

If anyone else hasn’t caught this, Massood has been murdered. He was the leader of the people in the northern Takhar province of Afghanistan. In short, he was holding together the remaining 5% of the country that the Taliban hadn’t managed to overthrow. Now two suicide cameramen have taken him out. This spells planning.

Limbs of no body; World’s indifference to the Afghan tragedy

I’ve Pluckerized it for easy reading. You can grab that here. The original article can be found here

“Why was the World Trade Center attacked? Here are some answers” (from a post on craigslist)

Life Changes

Things are going to change soon. Plans are in place. I just need to muster up enough confidence to do what I have to. Today brought about many hours of deep thought with myself, going over all of the options. I now know what lies ahead.

pilot-link

Many people have been offering me some interesting suggestions and ideas for what they believe the next generation pilot-link should look like. I’m working on some of my own ideas as well that expand upon many of these suggestions. This should be fun, but I’m sure my timelines don’t map against what everyone else wants. I had an interesting architecture discussion on irc tonight with another fellow pilot-link user. Lots of great ideas came out of it. I’m somewhat recharged.

..but whatever happened to that promise of “Work on open source projects, and get paid for it!” that I was given before I threw my 5-year career at $PREVJOB away. I haven’t worked on a single open source project at
$CURJOB since I started. It’s depressing. I had more time to work on open source projects when I was working in a completely non-open source job.

Life

You know what’s really depressing, pouring out your heart, your health, your soul, and your dollars for everyone else but yourself. When you take one microsecond to think of yourself, you’re guilty. I can’t possibly give more than I’m giving to those who are bleeding me. How about giving back some. How about a “Thank you” once in awhile. I get nothing.

Giving my health, sleep time, spare time, weekends, and everything else I can give to people and still being told that I should be doing more, makes me… unhappy. I am certainly not being farily compensated for my work or my contributions, only persecuted. Everything I do goes unnoticed, and it’s never enough.

When do I get to take some time for me… for ME!. Everything is always taken away. To quote KoRN: “..somethings raped and taken from me, from me…“. My vacation to Greece is now tanked. I can’t even get away just to get away. My apartment isn’t far enough away to relax now.

I can’t even think right now, I’m so… damaged.

Away I go.

my 1993 Prediction Arrives

Back in 1993, after the WTC bombing in the basement/parking garage, I made a prediction about what the terrorists were trying to do to the two towers (domino them), which only now people are realizing. Thanks for irc logs. In any case, there was a manufactured attack to try to take out one of the corners of the WTC and topple it into
the other. Bold move, but failed… then.

This time it worked, though with a bit of a topside attack. Let’s break this down to dissuade the people who have questions:

• The WTC towers (North and South) were designed to withstand the impact equal to a 747 smashing into the side or corner of either of them at any height (this will
  become important in a moment).

• Each of the towers could lose up to 1/2 of two sides and still remain standing.
• The building was equipped with a fire suppression system which can stop fires from becoming bigger. A multi-floor fire requires the fire department to extinguish, not a sprinkler system.
• The framing of both towers was built in a “lattice framework”, which means that external floor to ceiling bracing was used in exchange for an internal open floor plan.
• Engineering spaces were placed at every 10 floors to halt or slow collapse of upper floors.

That being said, let’s go through why the towers collapsed. When Plane_1 hit the building flat on, it created a gaping hole which severed the internal sprinkler system and began to burn. This caused a breach in the “lattice” system previously mentioned. Ideally this would have been of no great impact to the integrity of the upper floors, and normally the building would have remained standing. Except… enter a nearly-full tank of highly flammable jet fuel to the mix. Internal sprinklers (i.e. water) were not designed to handle the extinguishing of a fuel fire. Steel melts and begins to soften under the heat of this fire. Once the top of the structure starts to “peel” away, the whole tower collapses under it’s own design, internally. If you saw the footage of the actual collapse, you would see the exact motion of the latticework cleanly “peeling” the building down.

The foundation of the building itself would have been another issue entirely, and had either of the two towers remained standing, their foundation would have been irreparably damaged anyway, but people would have survived, for the most part, and the tower(s) would have remained standing.

The second collision (Plane_2) was much more “caustic” in that they hit the corner of the building, and nearly punched a hole right into it. Again, the live footage shows the plane accellerating and pulling “into” the building (anyone who has raced cars on a track knows the feeling of coming off the wall into the “negative G” environment, where you actually accellerate as you pull inwards). They basically tore the plane in two, wing first, which ignited the fuel in a much more spectacular burst. Again, add highly flammable (steel-softening) burning jet fuel to the mix and you have the same effect that was in the first tower.

This day was tragic, and there are still people we know missing and unaccounted for. I spent a lot of time talking to a lot of people about nearly every single issue around this attack. Here’s some of the highlights and assumptions so far (and please don’t flame me here, take it into private email).

• These were professionals. This was not a one-off attack with a van in front of a Federal building. This was a well-executed, surgical attack on multiple sites, simultaneously.
• This took planning. Not days, not weeks, not months. This must have clearly been years in the making. Before you disagree, consider what it takes to:
  1. Train the hijackers/pilots in basic and probably
     advanced airline flight techniques, should it become necessary to divert/land/crash the plane if something goes wrong or right.

  2. Fly them into the U.S. and get them “anonymized” into our workplace, the airlines, the ground crew, etc.
  3. Forge paperwork and identification, including clearance badges, licensing, passports, etc.
  4. Infiltrate many facets of the airline industry from ground crew to flight attendants.
  5. Sneak weapons of the type which would have alerted security into the galley of the plane (assuming of course they didn’t go through the
     metal detectors with fellow conspirators waving them through). Eye-witness and cell phones recorded from the plane indicated blades not bullets.

  6. Have the schedules interleave to the point where two westbound planes would be in the air, at the same time, below cruising altitude, near the WTC, and not grounded, with both power and crew sufficiently “stacked” to
     perpetrate a hijack. At the same time, have hijackers already in the air on other flights, not grounded, which are also below cruising altitude within range of the Pentagon and
     Pittsburgh targets. Anyone who has tried to make connecting flights or arrange overlapping single-night stays in a rollover city knows how much of a nightmare this must be. Try doing this with 6 people on 6 separate flights in 3 states simultaneously.

  7. Communicate and coordinate this attack so effectively and covertly that our own “powerful” intelligence agency can’t even find or track you, even though we were warned several times by groups in the Middle East of an impending attack.
• This comes on the same exact day that 10 years ago,
  George Bush Sr. told Saddam that his actions would not be tolerated, September 11th, 1991.

This was not an “off-the-cuff” attack, this took training, resources, forgery, conspiracy
on many levels, financing, and lots and lots of planning. It was surgical. Not many groups can claim to have this level of organization, funding, and manpower.

We do not yet know who
perpetrated these crimes, and it is still very early to say that they were not of any particular group. lilo may have his own opinion, but that is what it is, an opinion.

Let’s break this down further in a political regard. When the news hit and the towers collapsed, hundreds of people were seen dancing in Palestine, celebrating” the “victory” over the “Satanic Americans”. Many people (U.S. citizens and the president himself) are still saying that this attack was unsuccessful, and I wholeheartedly d sagree. It was 100%
successful in it’s goal, and executed 75% flawlessly (the Pittsburgh flight was downed either intentionally by a heroic pilot, or by an escorting F16 American fighter). They successfully
infiltrated, hijacked, and destroyed the 4 airplanes they intended to board and destroy, and in the process, took out two of our very substantial buildings, and cut a hole in the Pentagon. And… they struck terror.

“Why not hit something more valuable?” you say…

What could be more valuable than hitting us in the two areas that “represent” us to the world, Capitalism and Defense. They see these two buildings as symbols of their own hatred. They could
have hit the Statue of Liberty, but they didn’t. They successfully put the whole country on sleep(n). As logic put it so well:

“…Terrorists of the world have just been sent a message: the same tactics used elsewhere in the world work even more effectively here, because we’re so completely unfamiliar with the concept, we don’t know how to react. Look at the country right now: we’ve effectively shut down for the day. Trading has stopped. Flights are landed. Borders are closed. People are hiding…”

The terrorists succeeded… in causing terror. This attack was incredibly smart, though short. Any war buffs would see some flaws, and try to
improve the design (second wave with bombs on grounded planes/buildings after airlines were ordered under lockdown, etc.). They stopped mail, UPS, most businesses, the U.S. stock exchange, and travellers from getting from point A to point B. That in my eyes is not a failure.

But we should not glorify or celebrate it!. This is what fuels them. They want us to make noise about it. It gives the terrorists purpose. When people are scared, they win. If everyone on a plane was allowed to carry a concealed weapon, would these things happen? (yes, allowing that has a host of other bad issues as baggage with it, but let’s stick to fear and terror for a moment). I suspect people would be stronger-willed if they knew they had a fighting chance
against this. Currently, we don’t. How do you know the person you’re sitting next to on your next flight isn’t a “plant” for some faction or extremist group? You don’t. Nor do I.

Back to celebrating for a moment… one message I’ve seen today captures some of my own feelings.

“Essentially, the people who are cheering about this have made it clear that they think it’s a great thing. If they think this is a great thing, we know that, while they might be *unable* to do it, they would if they could.

It’s hard to have any sympathy for them, given that. Does this justify Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in general? No, but it makes it a lot easier to understand.

Just think about it. Try to imagine someone whose first response
to ten thousand innocent bystanders being killed is to say “It’s like I’m dreaming, it’s so wonderful”. What possible grounds can we have for not shooting this rabid dog? He has gone beyond any possible redemption on this earth.

Israel has, so far as I can tell, *responded* to acts of violence. Maybe the violent people should stop for a while, and see if the retaliation stops, too.”

And another…

“…Maybe, just maybe, the people who are bombing innocents *aren’t* actually the victims in this picture. You can bet I
am less willing now than ever before to believe the palestinian people to be “victims” of anything but their own bloodlust. People who cheer and dance at the news that ten thousand
innocent people are dead are *sick*, and if those are the people being “repressed”, then it’s not such a bad thing…”

How can we feel “sympathy” towards a country of “repressed” people who celebrates the death of innocent thousands of people? I am enraged, and vengeance is on the tip of my tongue, but in this case, vengeance solves nothing. How can
you curtail a country or group of people (again, making assumptions about the terrorists and terrorism in this particular case being Middle East-driven) when they themselves don’t value
human life, their own or ours. Levying sanctions doesn’t help, nor does bombing their streets. What drives this hatred? How do you break down and shake hands with someone who wants to blow you up simply because you are not them?

I am angry, many lives were lost, and we are going to feel this for years to come. What may be heading our way, whether we like it or not, is the entrance of technology which strips us of our freedoms. Facial scanners in airports, bus terminals, train stations. While I support the implementation of CCD cameras in the cockpit and cabin areas (I’ve said that for years now), I do not support the use of them for “tracking” or for “regulation. We have the black box, why not a black-and-white CCD camera to stream back (live) the events in the cabin to the ground for every flight. Storage is cheap, bandwidth is (mostly) cheap, and the benefits for this would be immense in a situation like this.

“Regulated” cryptography. Censorship, monitoring. All of this does absolutely nothing to stop or slow terrorism. To John Q. Public, who knows nothing, they’ll jump on this as a way to implement technology they don’t understand in a way they can’t manage properly.

This was a difficult, professional attack that took elite personnel; something entirely different from the regular street crime our police face every day. They successfully hijacked four commercial passenger aircraft in one day, without a single failed attempt. They bypassed some of the toughest security civilians are subject to. The calibre of terrorist that must have done this will be unfettered by attempts to control gun ownership, internet usage, cryptography or many other laws. Let’s hope this doesn’t “accidentally” force us into a police state.

We must move on, tomorrow is another day. The longer we dwell on this, the deeper the “wound” they’ve
created for us has time to fester and infect. We are Americans and we are resiliant (non-Americans, I am speaking specifically of the damage done on our soil, not of the citizenship, please pardon the metaphor here).

There’s so much more I could say, but you can catch me in email if you want to talk about this further. I have amassed 983 images from hundreds of sites and people of this incident, and will be making some sort of webpage public with them on it. Time to get familiar with phpics I suppose.

I purposely did not touch on the religion aspect of this, because that’s a discussion that will go on for decades. My belief, which is probably not shared by many, is that a religion is a
belief system, and one which does not have to include a “God” or “supreme being”. Some people do things for religion, some people do things for beliefs, and some do things for other reasons.
This could be any of those, and people have been persecuted for their beliefs, their religions, and for their choice in basketball sneakers. This is not about religion. Not now.

This is
tragic, but we will heal.

My girlfriend had a very weird dream on Sunday night, that she was in a plane and another plane took off and flew over her plane and one of the engines broke off the other plane and started flying back towards her plane. She said she “watched” the engine fall back and peel the top off of her plane, ripping it open like a can of sardines. She struggled to buckle her seatbelt to stay in, and then woke up. Ironically, I was in the dream, already belted, which is something I never ever do.

I wonder if she’s beginning to adopt my prophetic dreamstate now.

I will not dream tonight

Mon Jul 23 01:41:59 PDT 2001

ROT13 Super-Optimizations

It’s funny what a group of geeks with nothing to do sitting in an irc channel late nights can come up
with:

me: main(c){while(c=~getchar())putchar(~c-1/(~(a|32)/13*2-11)*13);}

me: perl -pi -e 'y/A-Za-z/N-ZA-Mn-za-m/;'

dave707:tr '[a-m][n-z]' '[n-z][a-m]'

anon: sed 'y/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz/nopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm/'

Some more tinkering has now produced an in-channel {en|de}coder for my hacky rot13 X-Chat plugin. Interesting puzzle problem solving skills come into play here.

One of the guys came up with the idea of using “compression” in the string, and randomizing the key used to encrypt the outgoing text. Has interesting possibilities, though we’re not in rot13-land if we go this route…

It’s fun to do “weekend crossword puzzles” like these. I need more of these kind of problem solving tests to get my neurons flowing.

Unable to sleep again. I hope this isn’t a trend.

jjshoe, that would be me, on irc. Welcome to advogato.

Lots of new things

Plucker

New Plucker release today. This one adds Gesture support. Good work Mike and Robert O’Connor.

We still need perl coders to pick up the perl parser and get it working again. Any takers?

ViewCVS

I managed to get ViewCVS’ annotation fixed so now the anchors work. You can see an example of it here. Note the line-by-line annotation and anchors. Nice. I hope gstein rolls the fix I emailed him into the upstream. I also changed the icons a bit and dressed up the layout and navigation a bit more. I’m moving them all into their own builds of ViewCVS now, so there’s no project-based dropdown. You can see two versions of it here and here or here.

NSI

NSI has finally decided to fix my domain after 52 emails, 11 phone calls, 4 faxes and 5 weeks of nagging.

Now I can move the domain off onto the other box, and unplug the hardware.

FINALLY!

Big 3-OH

Flying back east to spend my 30th birthday with my girlfriend. I’ll be on the clock, but it’ll be good to get away from this whitewalled prison for awhile and see her again (only $200 on a 1-week notice too for the tickets, not bad).

Statistics

Isn’t this purty!. The images are generated dynamically from the cgi.

I’m testing out a package called aWebVisit. It’s pretty nice for really getting into the guts of who is visiting your site. I’d like to take this codebase and modify it a bit to handle my cvs logs and history. Being able to visually see the progress of projects inside the CVS would be a great asset.

I’m sure now that I’ve mentioned it, someone will try to steal it. Mine! You saw it here first!

echo $PS1

Well, since everyone else is in the prompt wars, here are two of my entries:

declare -x PS1="C:\\\\\W> "

(yes, it’s a joke, but imagine ssh’ing into a remote machine and getting this!)

or..

export PS1="[\[\033[11m\[\033[0;36m\t\d\[\033[11m\[\033[0;40m]\n[\[\033[11m\[\033[0;36m\#\[\033[11m\[\033[0;40m]
\h:\w\n$" 

ObCVSCompletionHack

This needs a few more minutes of care to read ~/.cvspass and $CVSROOT out of the environment, but you get the
idea (and yes, it’s for bash):

_cvs()
{
        local cur prev
        
        COMPREPLY=()
        cur=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}   
        prev=${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}
        
        if [ $COMP_CWORD -eq 1 ] || [[ "$prev" == -* ]];
                then
                COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -W 'add admin    \
                               checkout commit ci diff  \
                               export history import    \
                               log rdiff release remove \
                               rtag status              \
                               tag update' $cur ))
        else
                COMPREPLY=( $( compgen -f $cur ))
        fi      
        
        return 0
}
complete -F _cvs cvs

vi mode in bash really rocks. It’s forcing me to learn more about vi than I could using it strictly as an editor. Still fumbling a bit.

Life

Tired of my music. Tired of my 14.4k dialup bandwidth on a 56k modem and my ISP blocking every port except 22 and 80 (inbound and outbound are blocked). Tired of this prison cell in South San Francisco.

Just… tired.

But I think I’m getting better at things. That’s a plus. Just things in general. Headaches still abound, quite a few chest pains, but nothing as severe as “The First One(tm)” several weeks ago. I’m instructed to ingest Advil like M&M’s now though. Ugh.

This just needs to be mentioned, since over the past two days, I’ve been feeling my whole apartment “wiggle”. Today, so far, we’ve had 24 earthquakes in California and surrounding areas. You can keep up on the results at USGS.

Quite interesting to see that we’re getting more-frequent incidents of higher-magnitude earthquakes this week. We’ve had 17 quakes exceed the 3.0 Richter rating since 6/30/2001. That’s unusually high.

Sun Jul 1 01:01:14 PDT 2001

colorquiz.com

I can’t recall who had this linked in their diary recently, but the results for mine were somewhat scary.

“…Depleted vitality has created an intolerance for any further stimulation, or demands on his resources. This sense of powerlessness, combined with frustration that he cannot control events, subjects him to agitation, irritation, and acute distress. He tries to escape these by stubborn insistence on his own point of view, but the general condition of helplessness renders this often unsuccessful. Is therefore very sensitive to criticism and quick to take offense…”

I pointed it out to afew friends, and theirs were dead-on also. Scary how 8 colored blocks can determine so much about someone… if you believe such things.

Network Dissolutions
I highly recommend that anyone using href=”http://www.nsi.com”>Network Solutions get off of them as fast as possible. I’ve been trying for over 5 weeks to relocate the domains I own from a network in CT to a new network in CA. First, there is a bunch of incorrect information on my records, scattered all over the place.

One of my domains’ Administrative contact is DD989,while it’s supposed to be registered to my internic handle of DD989-ORG, (they dropped the -ORG from my entry).After three phone calls to them personally, I managed to get them to change my address and telephone number from the CT location to the CA location. I couldn’t do this via their “automated” email system after 52 failed emails (with NIC tracking numbers on each of them).

I then tried to remove this erroneous person from my record, and sent many more emails. I emailed Darin DeCuir at his given address (dead), and then did a Google search for his name, to find out if he had any other address I could use. I found one entry, and emailed him there. No response. I tried calling Kaiwan, and the numbers were turned off.

I then called Network Solutions back, and spent 75 minutes on the phone with one of their operators, who proceeded to do nothing more than send me a blank Service Template to fill out, which generated a volley of more failed “automated” emails. Another phone call the next day, 1:07 long, and the same results.

This operator was much more clueless than the first. I was irate. She insisted that I send a fax in, on “company letterhead” (which I have none, and do not intend to) and photocopies of my license. I asked to speak with a supervisor, since I had emails and phone calls going back 5 weeks, without a single change to any of my domains, accounts, or records. Unacceptable!. She proceeds to tell me that the supervisor is in a meeting.

I settle, frustrated, on that, and decide to comply and send them a fax. I faxed a new copy of the Service Template to them, signed, dated, with NIC tracking number on it, and included photocopies of my CT driver’s license and a photocopy of my passport. There was no doubting that the person whose name is all over the domain records, and the address of the registrar, my web company, is the same one which appears on both my passport and my license (and anyone who knows me personally knows how much I HATE having pictures of me floating around) I can literally count the number of pictures of me in existence on both of my hands.

I call them again to verify that changes I made to a domain in progress were indeed being made, and that my address on my own internic handle records was being updated. The (non-English-speaking) woman proceeds to tell me that I filled out all the wrong forms in my email requests. I explain to her that their staff needs more training, since the operator from the previous day was the one who showed me which forms to submit. I explain to her that I’m moving my domains from a network which has a DNS server, to a network without any local DNS. She proceeds to start talking to me in a condescending tone about how I can’t possibly have a website without having a dns, and how a host, website, and dns are all the same thing, and have to exist before I can have a domain.

Ahm, no. I explain to her again what I’m trying to achieve, and she comes back in her best 3rd-grade-schoolteacher voice telling me that I’m wrong, and I obviously don’t know how the internet works. “…the IP address is like a telephone number… ” After 2 full hours on the phone with her, frustrated, I simply hang up on her. (blood boiling)

The next day I call again to verify that they received the fax (this was Friday), and the operator (very helpful) indicates that they do, and proceeds to read off information ONLY shown on my passport. Great! He says it will take 24-48 hours to affect the changes. Perfect.

I then log into EasyDNS (thanks again go to rasmus for giving me the tip) and set up my domains to relocate to the new network. I pull all of the records, hosts, subdomains, etc. into there, and purchase a 25-domain block.

I call NSI again (Saturday) to see if my information has been updated, so I can make the final moves, and the operator this time says that they never received my fax, and that none of my information was updated at all, because I used the wrong templates. I inhale slowly, trying not to reach into the phone, and have her go over the process with me, which I verified was the right process. She then tracks back three identical requests in 3 consecutive days with 3 individual NIC tracking numbers, that I requested, responded, and confirmed the domain changes with their automated system, but their system ate the final responses, and never made the changes. She then proceeds to tell me that they have a NEW fax number for “expedited” requests to change my info, and if I fax them again, but this time on “company letterhead”, they can make the change in 24-48 hours instead of 3-5 business days.

After about an hour on the phone, and frustration mounting, I begin to boil.

“This is unacceptable. I have NIC tracking numbers going back 5 weeks. You’ve already confirmed that your system is eating the responses. I’ve got over 50 emails here from your system, full of NIC tracking numbers, requesting changes, and NONE have been made. I’ve faxed you everything about me possible, to verify I am who I am. I want my domains moved, and I want this other person off my record, he is blocking my access to change my information on a domain I paid for. You are deliberately restricting my ability to run a business. I would like you to either change the information now, as I’ve requested, or give me a supervisor.”(puts me on hold for 7 minutes)

“Sir, I’m sorry, but the supervisor is in a meeting right now but if…”

(I cut her off)

“Unacceptable! I called on Tuesday with the same request, and he was in a meeting then. No supervisor is in a meeting at 10:00AM on a Saturday morning. Either you get me a supervisor now, or you get me his manager. Pull him out of the meeting. I don’t care. This is unacceptable. You gave me the same excuse on Tuesday. I don’t want excuses, I want answers!”

(automated voice)

“We’re sorry, the line has been cut. Please try your call again later…”

She hung up on me! (blood boiling)

I call back, get someone else after 37 minutes on hold waiting for someone to answer the line, and THIS person tells me she’s looking at the fax itself, and that it will take 3-5 business days to process. Why can she see the fax, but the previous operator 37 minutes previous, could not. Another volley of automated email, no changes made, and still I haven’t seen a single change to my domains, other than my contact information in my internic record has been updated.

The result is that I have less than one week to relocate my domains now, including the ones with incorrect information in them, and get a box built onto the new network. My current provider is cutting off the service. He emailed me asking me to call him, and specifically said not to email him back. I called him on his cell phone, left a message. I called him at home the next day, left a much longer message, describing the details of the changes I was making. No calls back yet. I’m getting very suspiscious.

h4xx0ring
This weekend has been quite busy, and it’s only 1/2 done. I’ve been hacking a ton of things. I was helping eriddle and another friend (separately) get cvs working, hack his sshd to function properly, get Sitescooper working for Brian (and give him the crash course in CPAN and building perl modules.

I managed to get annotation working with named anchors in ViewCVS. I’ve emailed gstein the patch I made. Simple 3-line patch, and now it looks like code2html‘s output, with numbered lines with links for each line. I can now email someone a direct link to a line in an annotated file. I’ve got quite a lot of customizations going into ViewCVS on my new site. Have to get ready for a huge launch. It’s going to be so much fun doing this!

I’m still muddling with getting my new apache build out the door for the new box. I need a server with mod_php, mod_perl, mod_python, mod_ssl (with certificates), and all the other goodies build as DSOs. Not an easy task. I’ve been tinkering a bit with ApacheToolbox, though the latest version is horribly broken. I spent more time patching bits and bobs here and there in the scripts and tarballs than I did letting this “automated” system build them for me. I did manage to get the following
working though:

[Sun Jul 1 00:35:27 2001] [notice] Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) mod_python/2.7.2 Python/2.0 PHP/4.0.6 mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a mod_perl/1.25 mod_ssl/2.8.4 OpenSSL/0.9.6a configured — resuming normal operations

There’s still a problem though. If I have mod_python loaded, the server segfaults. GAR! Still working on that one. Certificates are working, and all of the Rewrite rules are functional. I’ve been spending some time splitting off the larger chunks of httpd.conf into separate external files, so I can manage them easier (it also makes it easier when you have to disable ssl, for example, to comment out one include line, then to comment out 75 SSL defines and structures in the master httpd.conf file itself).

For those wanting manual instructions (HIGHLY recommended), there’s Apacompile.

I found this invaluable trying to figure out how to juggle the things that were always nearly impossible manually.

pilot-link.org is up.
{news|bugs|cvs|irc|www}.pilot-link.{org|com|net}
are all routed to the same box. Only the .org points to the old domain until we roll over to the new network. The same will go for all of the other sister and vanity domains held on the machine.No, the IRC services offered are not in any way going to be attached to, pointed to, or affiliated with the private services of OpenProjects, otherwise known as OPN. I will not confuse people by affiliating a
free, open, public service with a closed, private service such as OPN.

Lots of new stuff coming up for LWE. Surprises abound! Can’t say any more. My skills will be put to some of the ultimate tests with this design, development, and architecture and implementation. I like biting into stuff like this!

Went for my cardiologist-ordered chest Xray at Seton Medical Center on Friday afternoon. Will find out the results on Monday.

Ok, this isn’t hacking, but I haven’t had a haircut in over a year. Went from bald to… this… without a single cut. Stopped at the local (non-English-speaking) SuperCuts on Friday after my chest Xray, and got about an inch trimmed off. Much healthier now.

sshd, Sitescooper, CPAN, cvs

ViewCVS

Apache

Domain Hacking

Secret Project #209

Bones

Hair

Birthday’s coming up. I wonder if I can get this sleeve colored in before Mike kills himself on his bike.

What a Saturday! I wonder what’s in store for me tomorrow!

Wed Jun 6 01:30:10 PDT 2001

oops!, that could have been ugly right before a release. Thanks n9mtb for spotting it so quickly and to my 120+ wpm fingers for being able to patch the roughly 113 files required to fix it within the hour.

irc is such a great collaborative tool, I wish more people would embrace it.

Long time no post.

Girlfriends and Barbeques

Flying my girlfriend in for the weekend. I managed to get on priceline at 5:00pm on a Friday, bid on a round-trip ticket for a next-day departure (Saturday), and get it… for $300.00. I saved $1903.85 on this bid. Not bad for 1/2 day’s notice.

I haven’t yet broken my promise of never paying more than $300.00 for a flight.

I’ll bet she didn’t expect me to follow through with that one. I called her at lunch and said “Hey, you want to come over for the weekend? rasmus is having a barbecue.” She said “Sure!” (thinking I was kidding). BwAHAHaHA!

Slurp!

Finished a new web page to slurp other Palm-formatted sites through. Took me awhile to figure out the rewriting of the links as they come across, so that relative links are converted to absolute, and all relevant HREF links are pushed back through my script, so I can re-slurp them when a user clicks on them. I’ll launch this soon. It’s all part of PODS I have to publicly thank dave0 for the help with the callback on this one. It’s still using a lot of hacky code, but it works, so I can begin tweaking more and more now.

${$response->content_ref} =~ s/Q$relE/$script?site_selection=$uris{$rel}/g;

PODS

Did some more work on PODS, and added some more links to it. This thing is going to be huge. Between this, palmliography, and the new Slurp thing I whipped up tonight, this could be quite the useful sack-o-tools for Palm users. rasmus was helping me convert the Catalog
CPAN module code (ugly, bloated, slow, and disgusting) over to a hand-rolled php script. I’m so impressed with the speed and level of compactness of the code.

CLIQ

Well, a debacle of connected events once again stops me from doing what I wanted to. I missed my talk at CLIQ by missing my flight out (a flight I paid for out of pocket, I might add). My truck was completely DOA, and wouldn’t even turn over. I called the three taxi companies in town. One of them had a circuit error (fast busy signal), the second rolled into some weight-watcher’s clinic, and the third no longer covers my area. Ugh. I was stuck. I spend two weeks on slides, and even lost a bunch at the last minute (sorry dsifry).

“I need to stop these dominoes from falling” -hacker

bratsche, I hope all is well with Chris. I hope our talk the other day on irc was at least somewhat uplifting. I feel your pain (literally in some cases). Things will go well. It’s important to understand what these things are, and to make sure to seek highly qualified help. I’m saddened that I didn’t have enough money or knowledge back when I had “issues”, but now I’ve learned.

Post-It Mirror

I’ve now begun sticking Post-It notes with my tasks on them on my closet mirror doors. Hopefully this will get me a bit more aware of what’s going on in my life, and work to get them all taken down. I don’t have my dry-erase board here, so I’m a bit limited with tools. The more I take away, the more of “me” I can see again in the mirror. So far, it’s working well.

Plucker 1.1 Released

Well, we’ve finally released Plucker 1.1, and the website is holding up (yes, I’m surprised). We went from ~5k hits to >31k hits a day now. That’s not bad for a little Palm project. It’s doing well, I just wish more people would jump aboard and help us out. There’s a lot of things to be done yet, and that damn python parser needs to DIE. It’s so damn slow!!

We have a Freshmeat Plucker Entry, one on PalmGear, one on Freeware Palm

I seem to be doing good on badger‘s external advogato stats page. I don’t have as many projects as wsanchez nor do I want that many. 20? Come on… I only have 13 at the moment, not including internal projects at $JOB[0].

So much to do, so much going on. I have to find new housing, I have to help my girlfriend find a good job out here and relocate her, I have to knock all these side projects off of my plate, deal with my truck, my health, and getting back into my training.

Enough for now…

Linuxworld Expo 2001

Well, it’s that time again. Time to rack my brains at the last minute to come up with something so incredibly outstanding that people will say “Huh? What did he just say?”. My talk is on the Linuxcare
Bootable Business Card this year.

A lot has changed, and a lot will be mutating into this behemoth. It’s a good thing. Come see the show. We updated a ton of things, but also ended up breaking a lot of other things. D’OH! We’ve already fixed a major number of items, and will be providing a fixed ISO location at LWE.

Long Time No Post

Well, $PROJECT[1] is tailing off, and finally I’m feeling a sense of accomplishment. I still have a TON of overdue tasks to deal with, but one bite at a time, I’ll get them done. The new Plucker Portal is coming along nicely. You can see some of the progress here:

• newpluckersite-builder.gif
• history-of-plucker.gif
• newplucker_site_design.gif
• newplucker_site_viewcvs.gif
• newplucker_site_changelog.gif

I’ve changed the way the Plucker Configuration Builder looks:

Screenshot Un and
Screenshot Deux

I’ve been thinking about sprinkling some Javascript into it to make it more Wizard-like, but I hate Javascript, and it’s unpredictability on various browsers. Only as a last resort.

Too many community responsibilities have been laid by the wayside. I can’t let this happen. Just as much as I have a responsibility to our clients, I also have a responsibility to the community.

Linkthrough

We’re now linked from Michael Holve’s Linux Portal site in various capacities. He linked to Plucker from his links frame also. Thanks Michael. I emailed him about a feature-add I wanted to put on this portal page so we could bring it into Plucker without images. I asked for the implementation of ALT tags on the page, and within an hour, he had emailed me back, and added them. Now that’s the internet at work!

Evolving

It seems as though Evolution is shaping up. I managed to fix some of my bugs and slowdowns with it, and it’s aaaaaaalmost usable for me. Until I can successfully sync any of my Palms to it, I can’t use it full time. There’s still some small buglets with gnome-pilot. I’ll see jpr and ettore at LWE, so I’ll chat with them about it. It seems to barf on every conduit except Calendar. Not good.

The Only One

Vacation in Keystone Colorado was somewhat relaxing, although I didn’t really get into the swing of things until Wednesday. I’m going to have to claim off 3 days of my vacation time to work, and expense out those horridly expensive phone calls to retrieve my email. We’ll just bill it off anyway, since it’s project related. Came off the vacation little sore from some pretty hard falls on the mountain (3.7 mile runs), but it was fun. I can’t wait to get back on the snow again, and get back into snowboarding more often.

Erika is finally moved out of the house. Well, moved a second time, that is. Manipulative landlords needed to be dealt with. Now she has her own place in town, and is settling in. Happiness will follow.

My lease is up in May, so I’m hoping to be out of here into a new place with her in San Francisco very soon. I want a nice, large, spacious flat or studio. Something to grow into, and out of. We both need time to cool off right now. Stabilize. I hope the stress of “certain events” doesn’t rip us apart. I have to be the strength for both of us when we’re both feeling weak. She is me, and I am her.

Merginating

Well, as many have heard, we’re being acquired. I am optomistic about it’s possibilities. It’s like taking on an orphaned child. We have the power to shape and mold the combined company into something very powerful. We’ve been slinged through enough mud, let’s get some sunshine into our cubes now (literally and figuratively). Too many good people have been slain by the sword. No more.

I’m still not on the guru
page. DAMNIT!

Packet Loss

I’m still getting 70% or more packet loss to gnu-designs, and I’ve proven that the problem exists upstream of us, at a providers router. I’ve emailed him, and he shrugged it off, since it’s not directly affecting him. ARG! It’s affecting about 30 domains I host, as well as my production work, my cvs, and my development projects.

FIX YOUR DAMN ROUTER!!!

The [I] in ISP Must Mean Inept

My ISP has now reached the last straw. They have been slowly blocking ports through their network now, so that I can no longer use ports 21, 22, 25, 53 or 6667. This means no ftp, ssh, smtp, or irc without intricate tunneling. I’ve emailed them without a single response. Since they bought out my last ISP’s dialup accounts, and transparently moved them over, I was never told of this, and certainly would not have agreed to this change. I basically told them to correct their “errors”, or I would simply cancel my account, and deny all previous charges as fraudulent on my credit card. Again, no response.

I can’t think of anything else, but there’s a lot more to write. More later, I suppose. Until then, for users of Plucker, I’ve been cooking up some test content and little ebook-style samples to try in Plucker. Go here and here to grab them and test them out. They’re all compressed with SysZLib, so you’ll need that and the viewer application to make it work, but it’s well worth it.

I’m hoping to release pilot-link at Linuxworld Expo, as well as get my “Secure CVS” slides started.

“Slowly I’ll whittle this tree into a toothpick…”

Hunger takes me.

Hey look! I was in USA Today! Note to self: Never talk to anyone at PalmSource. He never presented himself as a reporter when he was at the booth talking small-talk to me.

dhd: I feel your pain wrt telecommunications companies. I can make long-distance calls, but not local calls, because my “local long distance” charges exceeded 75% of some threshold I was never told about. Even to this day, they can’t tell me what that threshold is.

ianmacd: I think something “odd” has happened to my access at the Palm Pavilion. I now no longer have access to anything with my login that I can’t get publicly through the normal seeding pages. It would appear as though I now have less access than before. johnm Did I piss someone off?

jpr: I saw your abstract. If I can finagle it from work, I’ll try to make it to OLS to catch your talk. I promise I won’t heckle like I did over there. I have way too much on my plate right now, so I don’t think I’ll be submitting any papers this year for that.

New Years

Boring.

I coded my butt off.

The results of the new Plucker Portal will be live soon. The Perl major hurdles are done. I might start playing with Text::Template soon too. Looks promising. I hope they’re not just shrouding eval in a module though.

Some of my slurped ViewCVS redirection:

  my $redirect = substr $path, 5; # drop "/cvs/";
  my $cvs_info;
  my $loop = 5; # nuke the redirect loop

do {
 local $ENV{SCRIPT_NAME} = "$script/cvs"; 
 local $ENV{PATH_INFO} = $redirect || '/';
 $cvs_info = $CVS_PATH 2>/dev/null;
 ($redirect) = $cvs_info =~ m{  
    ^Status:s+301s+Moved

    Location:s+Q$ENV{SCRIPT_NAME}E/(.*)
    }x;
 } while (defined $redirect and $loop--);

  for ($cvs_info) {
 if (m#^Content-Type: text/plain#) {
    $_ = (split / /, $_, 2)[1];
    s/&/&/g;
    s/</</g;
    s/>/>/g;


 $_ = "<pre>$_</pre>";
 } else {
    s#.*<body[^>]*>##is;
    s#</body>.*##is;
    s#"$script/cvs/~checkout~/#"$CVS_URL/~checkout~/#g;
 } 
 }
 print $cvs_info;

Airlines

Looks like these are my plans for January:

• 1-13-2001 to 1-22-2001: Fly from SF to Colorado for vacation with Erika
• 1-22-2001 to 1-29-2001: Fly from Colorado back to SF for training at Linuxcare SF facility
• 1-29-2001 to 2-3-2001: Fly from SF to New York for Linuxworld Expo

“How Do You Eat An Elephant?”

Somewhere in here, I have to find time to get the BBC cvs up and working for public development, prepare my slides for LWE, release pilot-link 0.9.5, get my Sony Clie kernel module finished, complete two lingering HOWTOs (perhaps I can do these on the airplanes?), shim in JogDial and MemoryStick support into Plucker, and lots more.

And that work thing. Lots of projects there too. Have to get the final report out for $PROJECT[1], the $PROJECT[2] serial alarm daemon, and $PROJECT[3] for the Wine stuff. Can’t say any more at this point.

Dysfunctional Family Life

I managed to find my dad on the net.

That’s oddly surreal. He left me when I was 3 years old. I wonder if he even knows I exist. Or does he even care. I was talking to a guy in #perl on irc, and he said my last name seemed familiar, and that his stepfather’s last name was the same as mine. After some digging, I realized that this guy’s stepfather was my father’s brother. Weeeeeird.

I have a brother and a mother somewhere too. I wonder where they are.

Pilot Goo

If anyone has any ideas for conduits for pilot-link or gnome-pilot, let me know. I’ve posted my wish list here. Consider it an ad-hoc TODO list.

Weekends

• Well, another weekend gone and passed. This one was rife with boredom projects. I have pretty much given up on driving now. I hate my truck. It hates me. Normally driving is great “thinking time”, but not with the fear of the local LEO‘s and my CT plates still on my truck.

Diversions

• Been hooked on bzflag lately. If you haven’t played it, go. Use the server at themis.eng.buffalo.edu. #bzflag at openprojects

No, I’m not hungry…

• I’ve been doing an experiment on my body over the past 7 days or so. I’ve been starving myself, to try to verify what I think is true. Basically under extreme hunger (and I mean hours upon hours of stomach growling), my mind becomes more… focused.

  It’s hard to explain, but it’s very apparent. I seem to have much more motivation to get things done and answers seem to come faster to more complex problems. It’s very hard on me mentally, to fight the biological urge to eat, and the mental need not to.

  Definitely need to find out more on this. I guess it’s called Caloric Restriction, and there’s a lot of studies on it’s affects on aging and memory retention.

  “I wish I could dream a life that was real”

Jiggle the Cable

• My 21″ Hitachi monitor died last week. That was a $1400.00 investment. Not good. It was only a year old. I have to get the warantee information out of storage in Fremont, 31 miles away. I wonder if there’s a local Hitachi repair center.

Palm Programming

• I started hacking on a quick program to do advogato diaries from the Palm©. Tentatively called palmvogato. Initial cut of the code will just allow you to compose the diary with the html shorcuts being buttonized. I suppose the second build should include a sync of the diaries back down, so you could read them, but you can already do that with Plucker. The desktop conduit will execute the POST.

  Gotta kick myself in the butt and get pilot-link.0.9.5 out. At least I managed to fix the SourceForge mess and clean up the pilot-link page there.

  Spent some time this weekend working on POSE around the NetLibSend and NetLibRecv guts in Platform_NetLib_Sck.cpp.

  Managed to get a patch out of it, but now there’s a weird NetLibClose() problem I can’t seem to nail down. I was working with the author of PalmIRC on irc #palmchat (openprojects).

  We managed to patch it through (30a7 and 30a8), but there’s lingering bugs.

  At least I got a fully registered copy of his application for helping him. I’m going to use it for screenshots in my PPP + Palm HOWTO. We managed to get some more feature ideas added into his code.

  Collaboration like this makes me happy. Complete somehow.

  Have to remember to diff POSE 30a8 into my cvs with the previous releases.

  I wonder how hard it would be to write an app for the Palm© to do the equivalent of Pocket Mapblast. Perhaps PalmBlast? I use it enough, I should approach them with the idea.

Holidays

• I have no idea what I’m doing for Christmas or New Years this year. All of my friends are back in CT, and I know nobody here. For the past 6 or 7 years, I’ve spent New Years in NYC, never missing a year, but it looks like I’m not doing that this year. I’m not sure how I feel about that yet. Erika wants to do something. Now we try to figure out who flies to see whom. I really wish we could just solve this distance problem.

The Prison I Call Home

• This penitentiary I call my apartment has reached it’s last bit of usefulness. I’m dying here in this place. I have to get out. I can’t grow here. Need to get a bigger, cheaper place closer to the city. Maybe a place that allows cats. I miss my cat.

Projects

• Lots of projects on my plate. Began the conversion of the Plucker site into phpNUKE format. I have to tighten up MySQL on the box first. Can’t open a hole that wasn’t there before. Sek-yoor-a-tee.

gnu-designs

• Lots of upgrades happening on the server 3051
  miles away. Apache 1.3.14, cvs, ssh, a new kernel, MySQL, sendmail, ProFTPD, and some other things. It needed it.

  Blocked AvantGo again from the server. It seems they tried to get around my server ban with some external hosts. Do they really think I don’t read my logs?

Painted Man

• I sit every day looking at this arm. Before Mike kills himself on his bike, I want us to get this thing colored, and finished up. Probably another 20-30 hours of work. Flying back and forth from CA to CT for it is going to suck.

Us

• Are we drifting apart? Did I do something wrong? I’m so wrapped up in survival, I don’t see sometimes how other people are spiraling down in my vortex. I’m sorry.

  Building this diary, and reading those of others somehow motivates me further to continue to top previous days events. That’ll die off soon, I’m sure.

All in all, a pretty laid-back weekend. Lots to do when I get back to work tomorrow. I hope I can focus, without interruptions.