Wed, 23 Feb 2005
WANTED: Billy B. Bilano. Just not wanted here.
If you are on some of the more useful security lists like full-disclosure
then there is a pretty good chance you've seen posts from Billy B. Bilano,
a very amusing writer who gets people that should know much better to
bite.
Have a look at the the Tao of doing it right thread or Possible First Crypto Virus Definitely Discovered!. While both of these emails are tragicly funny some of the responses are every bit as good. The results from a Billy B. Bilano Google Groups Search are every bit as funny as alt.rec.humour.
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Posted: 2005/02/23 10:17 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Mon, 21 Feb 2005
Getting Sick Sucks.
If you've either been waiting on something from me or you're surprised at
the sudden barrage of email's I've sent today (21st Feb) then I have a not
very amusing story to tell.
I've had a mild cold or flu, there are a couple of bugs gong around at the moment so it's not uncommon. I then spent a day working in a chilled server room. Not my smartest ever plan; and that's an achievement. I got home Thursday afternoon and during the evening managed to pass out while walking around and smash my head into a door frame. This was not in my plan for the weekend.
Skipping the boring bits I looked uncomfortably like TwoFace from Batman. I also still have a cold from hell. After sleeping for most of Friday, Saturday and Sunday (only on my left side as the right-side is sore as hell) I'm now back in a position where I know who the Prime Minister is. Wish I didn't but... ;)
I ended up cancelling my birthday meal, I'm already a day into my week off work with nothing to show for it and I have to go and see a dentist to get a couple of loose teeth looked at tomorrow. On the upside I'm pretty well rested, the bruising is going down quite nicely and I got to watch the whole of Angel Series 5 (again) and FireFly. And it's almost time for FOSDEM; which I hope to be well enough to attend now I've payed to go.
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Posted: 2005/02/21 18:35 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Perl Foundation Requests (more) Funding
Over at use.perl there is a short
call
for funding from TPF to help fund the development of Perl6 and Parrot.
I've long been a Perl 5 fan, it's flexible, powerful, CPAN rocks and there
are a number of smart, helpful people involved. As much as I like the
community the killer feature is letting me get things done quickly and
easily.
When it comes to Perl6 I've just not found anything that really interests me. I've read some of the lists, the RFCs and Larry and Damian's pieces on perl.com and while there are some neat ideas, a number of the features just won't have a massive impact on the kind of development (mostly sysadmin automation stuff and little side projects like those on this site) that I'm involved in. Add Ruby, a language that I like a lot, to that and I'm no longer concerned if it ever actually gets released.
Ahh yes, I knew there was a reason I started this post. Some of the comments, which you can see in an expanded comments view are from people that are even more cynical than me about Perl6. And that's always nice to see :) My (semi-rhetorical) question; is Perl6 actually an answer to the right question? Why is the Perl market so much smaller than C#, .NET or Java? And will a new release with shiny features make the slightest bit of difference?
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Posted: 2005/02/21 18:35 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 15 Feb 2005
Taking Advice
Tonight I was told, "learn to let things go, take a step back and
don't get involved in everything. Not everything has to be fixed by
you." There is one small problem, in general I'm shite at
listening to advice like this. If I see something that's broken I have
to try and fix it. While I've gotten damn good at suppressing my urge to
do this with live systems (always do a risk analysis first) I'm
remarkably bad at applying the same approach to dealing with people;
especially at work. If things ain't going well I step in and amble about
looking for a fix.
Well no more! I plan on taking this advice (I reckon I can last about a month) and getting back in to tech while avoiding the wet-ware issues. Fortunately I have a long list of things that need doing (both at work and at home) that I can focus on while I give things a chance to sort themselves out. Now lets see if this does make me "less of a miserable bastard".
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Posted: 2005/02/15 00:45 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Slashdot review of Pragmatic Subversion -- The Aftermath
I was pretty surprised when Slashdot
accepted my submission, a Pragmatic Version control Subversion
book review. I was even more surprised when it hit th front page and
for about twelve minutes my name was one of the first things on
slashdot!
After this short lapse into geek I logged into my bytemark machine and battened down the hatches. I shut down all unneeded daemons and prepared for the server to go down. The only thing that upset my plans was the absence of the Slashdot Effect.
In total I got the best part of 500 new readers when the article hit and then these dropped down by three hundred or so over the next few days. As my record for unixdaemon.net is over 1700 people in a day this isn't exactly a worrying amount. With hind-site (and after restarting a couple of daemons) it is pretty logical, the whole review was on slashdot, there wasn't much of a reason to follow the links back here. Everyone was interested in the review rather than me so the traffic wasn't going to spike as badly as I thought.
The article itself received a lot of interesting comments (which I'm thankful for) and only a couple of little niggles. One reader picked up a mistake in grammar which I'm annoyed I missed. A second one was curious as to how I had a review copy and was paranoid about any back handers I may have received to write the review. If only I was that predictable! All in all it was a pleasant experience that made the extra time spent on the review worth while. And to everyone who commented on the review; thank you.
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Posted: 2005/02/15 00:21 | /meta | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Ideal Environments: Where Would You Like To Work Today?
I heard about a job a couple of days ago that I'd have taken a pretty
big pay cut to get, I won't mention details as the position isn't
formally open yet, but it got me to thinking. While I've been pretty
lucky with my employment over the years (Hi Boss!) there are a couple of
places that I'd pretty much consider my dream job (and that I'd crawl
over most peoples bodies to work), anything in the security, Linux or
Open Source departments in IBM for example.
Imagine a company THAT big that is one of the few places left that actually does innovation and research. I've heard all about the old IBM attitudes back in the mainframe days but the new, gentler, kinder Big Blue is a friend of the penguin. Take a step back and think about where you'd kill to work, and why ain't you there yet?
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Posted: 2005/02/15 00:19 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wanted: 3VIL L33T hat
Over at MegaTokyo they have an Evil
Leet T-shirt that I think is excellent on a number of levels. I know
it's sad but so what.
I'm not really a T-shirt person (plus I'm not really allowed to wear them in the office) but I do have an OpenBSD baseball cap I've very fond of... So why not combine the two? I now want an Evil Leet baseball cap and after looking around the custom cap printing companies it doesn't look that expensive to do.
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Posted: 2005/02/15 00:17 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
David Black in London
David Black is in London and the London Ruby people (both of them :)) are
planning a meet-up. It's happening on Monday, February 28, 7:00 PM at the
Holiday
Inn near Russell Square
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Posted: 2005/02/15 00:16 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Sun, 13 Feb 2005
PHP Symphony: PHP Talks by Gurus Over the Net
There's an interesting article over at the Tucows Farm on a series
of talks titled php|symphony. It's a live, payed for, talk that allows
two way communication with the speaker on some pretty low end machines with
very little bandwidth required.
So what's my interest in this PHP stuff? Over the last couple of months I've had a couple of conversations with some friends about doing this kind of thing now that VoIP (Skype for communication) is here, virtual machines (UML for interactive sessions) are pretty easy to use and bandwidth is becoming cheaper. I'm mostly annoyed at myself for not pushing the idea along but I'm also interested in how this works out for them. The cost of entry is pretty low and it'd be interesting to do a couple on different subjects.
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Posted: 2005/02/13 21:40 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
FarScape on BBC3
I've already ranted about FarScape
returning to our screens so I'll try and keep this a little less
enthusiastic!
Over on BBC3 (Digital TV) they seem to be showing a FarScape episode pretty much every week night at 00:10 (midnight plus ten) and it's started from episode one (and it's still on the first series). If you've never seen it before then it's well worth watching.
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Posted: 2005/02/13 21:33 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 10 Feb 2005
Slashdot review of Pragmatic Subversion
Hello Slashdot people! I've just had a review published on slashdot and
I'm sort of expecting this server to have some problems so please bear with
me...
Also a small disclaimer, I did get a free review copy of the book early (thanks to the very nice Pragmatic Programmers) but this didn't earn any favouritism. In my defence I point to Building Linux Clusters. Most of my reviews are positive because I simply can't be bothered to read and review bad books. Anyway thanks for reading the review and visiting.
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Posted: 2005/02/10 23:15 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wed, 09 Feb 2005
WOW; People!
When I moved from my shared server to the small UML box that this site now calls home I copied a lot of my
logs over. I've never really done any in-depth viewing of my log files but
after finding a new toy to play with (more about that in a separate post) I
decided to have a little nose around.
It seems that in between October 1st 2004 and December 31st 2004 (a total of 92 days including Christmas Day and New Years Eve) www.unixdaemon.net, the main page, not the blog, was visited by 50,974 'unique visitors'. Multiple hits with the same IP, user agent and access day, are considered a single visit so it's not exactly that many people as (hopefully people come back occasionally) but even so I was pretty blown away.
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Posted: 2005/02/09 23:02 | /unixdaemon | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Large File Check
I've had a findbig
files script up on my miniprojects page for a while now, it's not
exactly a difficult script to write but it deals with a couple of less
obvious cases (exclude lists) that most of the similar scripts on line
don't cater for.
While the script is something thats easily down-loaded and run, if you have anything beyond a handful of machines you need to actually think about how to incorporate it into your checks and how you should run it to get the most return from the least effort.
How not to do this is to kick the script off with a file size of something like 50MB. This'll do nothing but raise huge numbers of false positives and start to make people both fear it's running and numb to the results. This happens way too often.
A better way (IMHO) is to start with a large number, 2GB is good as most older Linux machines had problems with files over this size, and slowly work down; clearing each stage as you go. This way you never overload people with information.
Before making lowering the file size thresh-hold you should get have at least a single empty run, whether you remove the files, change the rotation schedule or even just add them to the ignore list. This both gives people a feeling of actually getting somewhere and ensures that you've not done anything odd. If changing the thresh-hold on a semi-periodic basis is too difficult then simply change tools.
TODO: Make the find big files script accept regexs of files to ignore.
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Posted: 2005/02/09 22:46 | /misctech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
February 2005 Events -- A Yah and a Nay!
Every February there are two excellent tech events, the UKUUG LISA/Winter
Conference and FOSDEM;
my event of the year.
Due to prior commitments I'm not going to able to make it to the Winter Con this year which means I'm all the more excited about FOSDEM. I'm heading over on the 25th and returning on the 27th with a bunch of the London Perl/Linux people, so if you're about come and say "hello". I'll be the lost looking Londoner wearing an OpenBSD cap and speaking about eight words of broken French.
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Posted: 2005/02/09 22:45 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Carly Fiorina Steps down From HPaQ
Carly Fiorina was (oh how I like the sound of that) the CEO of Hewlett
Packard, she was the woman that ushered in the Compaq merger (of which most
techs mocked and laughed at), sold off their best assets, allegedly
undertook some pretty shoddy deals to get it all going and then, while
laying off thousands of staff bought herself and her upper echelons cohorts
half an air force.
And now she's been asked to step down and get the hell out of the way while the company still has a chance in hell of getting out in the market and actually making some money. Now this may sound like just me ranting but it's worth looking at the markets response; HPs stock has risen by 11%, almost 7 BILLION dollars. Thats what you call a bad hiring decision!
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Posted: 2005/02/09 21:42 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion -- Book Review
I've finished reading Pragmatic
Version Control Using Subversion and it's a blinder. Whether you're new
to version control in general or just Subversion itself this book is highly
recommended. Clear, concise and crammed full of useful, important and dare
I say, pragmatic, advice and information. An excellent book in it's own
right and a worthy addition to the Starter Kit Series.
My full Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion book review is also now online both here and over at London.pm
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Posted: 2005/02/09 18:23 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Fri, 04 Feb 2005
Implicit Association Tests
I've recently read Blink by Malcolm
Gladwell and I found the section on Implicit Association Tests (IAT's)
to be really interesting.
The short version is that the tests display a number of words that you have to put into one of two or four categories, depending on how long you take to assign them the test can make some guesses as to your implicit associations.
It's well worth having a play with some online implicit association tests.
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Posted: 2005/02/04 00:07 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Thu, 03 Feb 2005
dpkg-statoverride -- Debian Delvings (1)
While I've spent a fair amount of time running around on Linux it's
typically been in a mixed Unix environment (Linux, Solaris and HPUX
mostly) so my tool-set was comprised of portable applications and
scripts. In my current job I'm working with an almost entirely Debian
server environment, the few Redhat machines are living on
borrowed time as the bosses want them gone.
While this may put a crimp on my cross-platform skills it does give me the chance to delve deeper into the "Debian way", and to be fair it looks like it's got a lot of neat tools.
The first of these is dpkg-statoverride, this simple little script allows you to modify the permissions and ownership of files as they are installed via the package system. At the back-end the /var/lib/dpkg/statoverride file contains a set of mappings, each one has <user> <group> <mode> and <file>. When the given file is installed the permissions are changed as per the line. You can add and remove the entries either through the dpkg-statoverride command or by editing the file by hand (not recommended).
To get the maximum benefits from this you'd want to keep a centralised list of files you want changed and then distribute it to all the machines, I'll be covering some of the details on the hows and whys to do this in future posts about cfengine and pkgsync. All I need to do now is work out how to run the command against already existing files that don't live in the packaging system...
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Posted: 2005/02/03 22:57 | /operatingsystems/linux/debian | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Wanting vs Having -- Being Debugged
"Sometimes it's better to want something that to have it."
Some of my friends are slightly too observant for my liking and have been mocking some of my phrases of choice. It's been pointed out to me recently that I use the above as an excuse phrase, think of a shoulder shrug, in order to let myself off things I'm either not sure I can attain or I'm not willing to invest the required time and effort into.
I've done some thinking about this and, unfortunately for me, they're right; damn them. I occasionally use this as an easy way out. Now I know this the question becomes what to do about it...
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Posted: 2005/02/03 22:54 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Tue, 01 Feb 2005
LinkShot -- 2005/02/01
The day time job is eating up a little bit too much time at the moment so
I'm just going to post a couple of links that look interesting and would
typically be gifted with my witty rantings :)
Ward Cunningham (now an MSoftie) is probably involved in PatternShare, a site that lets you look through a number of patterns from different authors. It's probably worth keeping an eye on this and seeing how it develops
gmane provides a very neat mailing list to news group service. Now they've branched out a bit and are offering a pretty neat service; the ability to view a mailing list as a blog.
The idea is actually really simple (and well executed), each post to the list is a new blog entry. Each reply is a comment to that entry. If you subscribe to an RSS feed then you only get the initial posting, you don't get flooded by the replies. Here are the Perl and Ruby directories.
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Posted: 2005/02/01 23:48 | /linkshot | Permanent link to this entry | This entry + same date
Copyright © 2000-2005 Dean Wilson
