I don't know why, but I went looking for a WAV file of that buzzing phone in the movie Brazil. I know this might sound shocking, but I couldn't find one. That's a tragedy what needs rectifying.
I popped in the DVD and recorded the phone noise on the downstairs laptop. It's right here. It's only about 4 seconds long, but you could loop it easy enough. I bet it'd work swell on a cell phone. Better than, say Sir Mix-A-Lot not lying about big butts.
On a somewhat related note, I recently installed Eudora. I guess I wanted to see what it was like two years later. Not that different, but I wound up using it for a couple days. During that time, I changed my incoming mail alert sound to Morse code. I got the morse from a site called WWW Morse Code Generator. That particular snippet of Morse means "new mail". Clever, I know.
I went and got myself a new side project. I know I need another not-for-profit project like I need a hole in the head, but I really like Synergy. And its author, Chris Schoeneman, is a nice guy.
So what does Synergy do? It's basically like a software KWM (keyboard video mouse) switch. Normally KVMs are these boxes that you run sets of cables to from other computers and then you can select which computer you want to use on the box. But they are pretty expensive and the cables are a real pain. Synergy solves that by using client and server software components.
You set up the server (the machine with the actual, real keyboard and mouse and monitor) software to lay out where you want the screens for the clients to go, and then you tell the clients what server to connect to. They all talk over the network, and when you want to switch over to another computer, you move the mouse in that direction. For example, if I have my linux fileserver client set in the server to display at "the top" of my Win2K server screen, then moving the mouse off the top edge of my Win2K desktop switches over to the Linux fileserver screen. It sounds weird but it's actually quite intuitive. If you have more than one machine that is normally always running, then it's real handy.
Anyway, I happened to see an article inb Linux Journal about the software, went and looked at it, liked it and then noticed that in his to-do list, Chris listed a windows installer as something he needed. I was bored at the time (late one night), so I went and found my copy of InstallShield and built an installer.
It's nice to be able to give back, in whatever small way, and I hope it helps someone.
If you want to use a MySQL database to authenticate people with Basic Authentication on an Apache web server (as opposed to using .htaccess files or whatever), don't bother googling for a module name "mod_auth_mysql". You might think that's the right thing to do, but it isn't. There are a bunch of modules that were called "mod_auth_mysql". Seems like everyone who wrote an Apache module wrote one called mod_auth_mysql at one point. There are a lot of dead projects out there.
Instead, just go here and get the one by Vivek Khera. It works with Apache 1.3.x and 2.x. It works as a DSO. It actually compiles, which is nice. And it's brutally simple to use.
Why couldn't I ever be truly successful in business? Because this kind of nonsense makes my head hurt:
"BPM is a new programming paradigm for the enterprise that leverages browser-based applications, e-mail, global connectivity and enterprise application integration (EAI) infrastructure to deliver a powerful, business-focused programming solution."
Bingo!
I got the quote from this story on news.com.com.com.com. The story is chock full of similarly incomprehensible business babble. I think he's saying that you need a plan in order to succeed. Or you need software. Or cars have brakes like businesses have problems. Or something. I'm sure it's revolutionary whatever it is. I wonder if it involves group calisthenics?
This is probably old hat for some people, but I thought I'd post it anyway: Star Wars in ASCII. It's only about half the movie, but I got a kick out of it anyway. I especially dug princess Leia's hair buns, R2-D2 was pretty good, and the bad motivator actually made me laugh out loud.
My sis-in-law Suzi sent me this via email. I thought it was hilarious. I'm a sucker for the "members of disparate groups get on a plane together..." jokes. Anyway, here's the joke:
Two Arabs boarded a flight out of Boston. One took a window seat and the other sat next to him in the middle seat. Just before takeoff, an American sat down in the aisle seat. After takeoff, the American kicked his shoes off, wiggled his toes and was settling in when the Arab in the window seat said, "I need to get up and get a beer."
"Don't get up," said the American, "I'm in the aisle seat. I'll get it for you." As soon as he left, one of the Arabs picked up the American's shoe and spat in it.
When he returned with the beer, the other Arab said, "That looks good, I'd really like one, too." Again, the American obligingly went to fetch it. While he was gone the other Arab picked up his other shoe and spat in it. When the American returned, they all sat back and enjoyed the flight.
As the plane was landing, the American slipped his feet into his shoes and knew immediately what had happened. "Why does it have to be this way?" he asked. "How long must this go on? This fighting between our nations? This hatred? This animosity? This spitting in shoes... pissing in beers?"
A book review I wrote Tuesday night was posted on Slashdot. Except for my misspelling of "foreword" I thought it was pretty good.
I learned something too. Turns out that lots of people don't know that the word pejorative can be a noun as well as an adjective.
And now I know.
In other news, it turns out that dhows have a raised poop.
Two more mysteries put to rest.
So makes me immoderately pleased. When I saw that it was listed on libpng.org I actually chuckled. And then I was amazed.
Some little (and probably marginally useful, given the plethora of similar tools out there) thing I wrote one day to help get images off Tess' SmartMedia cards has found its way around the world. People (about 12, I figure) have gotten use out of it and used it to do some stuff for them.
The Internet is cool.
I installed Red Hat 8.0.94 (8.1 Beta) just now. So far it looks OK. The install is very slick. I like it better than Windows' installer. First time I've ever said that. Really. (NT doesn't count)
It has a fairly new kernel (2.4.20-2.48), that's nice. It has KDE 3.1 and gcc 3.2.1. OpenOffice and all that is also included.
The /etc/sudoers file has more examples in it that previous releases. They give you a sample line which shows how to give all regular users on localhost only shutdown privileges, for example. That's welcome. Way better than giving everyone ALL:ALL.
The slocate database will now by default only show you files for which you have read permissions. Used to be you could see anything with 'locate'. This is good.
They don't ask you to create a non-root account during the install. I think that is simply a beta-only deal though (I've never installed a recent Red Hat beta, so I wouldn't know).
My GeForce4 Ti4200 and Compaq P110 were detected during install. I haven't installed and tested nVidia's 3D drivers yet. I suspect they'll work fine. nVidia is pretty good about that.
The desktop is way smoother than 8.0. I mean, it's sparse. Naturally, I was given GNOME when I started X (I never use a graphical login; I owned a Voodoo card for too many years to fall into that habit). It had nearly nothing on the desktop or taskbar. I switched to KDE and Kandalf's tips showed up, but it looked pretty much the same otherwise. KDE had a pager and a couple more icons, that's about it. Have a look.
When you hit alt+F2 to get the "Run command" dialog, you also get options to shutdown, reboot, etc, right from there. I'm logged in as root, so that may be why. I don't think I've ever logged in as root and then run X on my other Red Hat 8 boxes, so if those options are there then nothing has changed.
Konqueror is looking fine. Real fine. I might even start using it. I need to try out the kio_fish remote file management feature yet (you can ssh from within Konq to some other machine and get to files as if they were local; this works with any KDE app). Konsole crashes when you try to start a new term window. Bug report time.
I didn't try Mozilla but I will soon.
You don't have to register to get up2date working. Seems like it's got an account that doesn't require any authentication. This may be for beta purposes. It said I have no updates, but sendmail version 8.12.7-7 is installed, and it's the one with the holes. Version 8.12.8 is available on Red Hat's web site (and via up2date), but up2date must not allow updates from "previous" releases, and they probably don't make errata packages for beta releases.
Sendmail is running. It's enabled as a service by default. I guess they figure that if you want to install it, you want to run it. Whatever. I would have hoped they'd figure this out by now. The installer ought to have a post-configuration dialog which presents a list of all the daemons you installed and gives you the option to start them at boot. I might file a bug report on that one.
I had to stop sendmail, pcmcia and apmd. I also changed all these to not start at my runlevel. What's odd is that I explicitly installed Apache (it's version 2.0.40-20; Red Hat 8.0 comes with version 2.0.40-11 so they've done some work to it) yet it's not listed in my initscripts. You'd think this would be there.
FINALLY! KDE has all the xscreensaver options GNOME has. It's about time. I've been jonesing for xjack at work. Although I'll probably go back to 'Virtual Machine' like I always do. I love that screensaver. Spheremonics is one I hadn't seen. It's cool looking. 'Course there's always BSOD. Or Bouboule. Swarm. The classics. Heh heh.
I somehow missed installing GKrellM. I dpn't know if it was included in the package list or not. XMMS is. It just doesn't have an MP3 plugin. GKrellM was included. I just installed it. I must have missed it the first time around.
The up2date applet is gone. It just disappeared, heh heh.
I have to say that the coolest part is the integrated kio_fish stuff. From within Konqueror, or Quanta, or any other KDE app, you can just use 'fish://hostname/path/to/files/' and suddenly you're ssh'ed on over to the other machine looking at stuff. You can drag and drop a file (I just copied 864 MB of ISO images, including a directory creation, without even having to think about it), edit a file in place, whatever. This is a feature I don't think I'll be able ot live without once I start using it. I may even have to install kio_fish at work.
I have to say that I was ready to quit Red Hat. But it's looking pretty nice.
If you want to buy duck meat from Trader Joe's, you had better hurry. They've apparently got this policy thing going on. Once it's gone, it's gone. Until it's certified to be dolphin-safe, that is.
I saw an article on Fark about a guy getting flak from some idiot at Taco Bell who thought there was no such thing as a $2 bill. That's fairly amusing. It reminded me of a story.
My first work-study job in college was working at the print shop. We had offset presses, mimeo machines, big copies, a humungous paper cutter (which was my favorite; it took both hands to operate), everything. It was a good job, and I got to see all the tests before they came out. This was in the mid-late 80's, well before our money had anything real fancy in it to discourage counterfeiting. It was just a couple years after To Live and Die in L.A. came out.
One day I asked my boss, in a very offhanded way, what sort of paper was used for money. My boss (a big swarthy Italian guy who swore like a sailor) said "Oh, shit, it's special and everything. But it feels just like that 80# invitation parchment we have over there -- after it's been all crumbled up." I maybe looked a little more than amused, and he said, "Heh heh.... yeah. I knew the question was coming. Everybody asks sooner or later. And every printer in the whole world history of printers has made fake money at one point or another. And those that say they haven't are lying." Hmmm. Tacit approval. Interesting. He then added a couple minutes later, his finger stabbing out at me with each comma, "You are, in no way, allowed to print any money, of any kind, of any size, in any way, with any supplies here, and if you do your ass is fired and kicked out of school and I'll make sure of it and that you talk to the Secret Service, too. Or else. Got it?"
Naturally, the first time my boss left early I made a $20 bill.
It was brutally easy. The only problem: the ink we had already loaded in the press was red, like a scarlet color. And the press was a nightmare to clean, and I hated cleaning it. I was not up for cleaning the red ink out, then putting in green, and then printing one piece of money and then cleaning it again. I also didn't take a picture of both sides of the money. So I wound up with a one-sided, red $20 bill.
I never tried to spend it or anything. How could I? It was red for cryin' out loud. And it only had one side. I actually kept it for a while, but eventually tore it up. The ink was coming off and fading anyway.
Oh yeah: If any government types are reading this, I plead "Not Guilty by Reason of Being a Dumbass Teenager".
I just did a web-based authentication system at work. We have a new web site structure, and we wanted to protect an area for faculty and staff only (I work at a university, in the CS department). I wrote up some scripts and a small database that lets people choose (and reset) their own passwords. In so doing, I had to come up with a scheme to "force" good passwords for use with the web site (since there will be stuff in that private area that students should never be able to see). It's harder to do than you might think. There's a very fine line between pissing people off with strong passwords and letting them slide by using things like "qwerty".
In the end, I came up with this:
That's it. Pretty easy going, right? Not really. I've had a couple people complain already (it's been two days since we went live). I even removed the "Cannot be based on a dictionary word" requirement. We also removed the "Cannot be the same as your Unix system password" requirement (over my loud protestations). I did get to add a blurb on the initial form "strongly encouraging" people to use different passwords.
I actually had a professor (a computer science professor, mind you) ask that I make it more lenient. He lamented to me that because he had to choose a "strange" password (since his "normal" password didn't pass my tests), he had already forgotten what he had chosen. He then asked me to email him and let him know what his password is. After I got done laughing, I prepared a carefully-worded LARTish email explaining to him what a one-way hash is and why I wasn't able to tell him what his word was, even if I wanted to send it to him in email. I also threw in a little bit of "weak passwords are the #1 security hole" boilerplate (although it's actually number 8 in the top ten list) and explained that I was glad that his normal system password wasn't able to be used on the web site. That I (me!) have to explain any of this to a full-on computer science professor is astounding.
I haven't sent the email yet; I thought it might be too harsh so I decided to sit on it overnight. I think on one hand that anyone clueless enough to use a password that can't pass even my lame scheme deserves to be cut down a notch or two. Then I think that he's a tenured prefessor, and I should be more respectful. Then I think that he's a tenured professor, and yet is a complete idiot, and I go back to the first thought.
Besides, I've always wanted to give a prof what-for.
Check out this Wired article. Apparently people have been using Google to find common search terms as a vulnerability indicator. No big deal, right? We've all done some grey hat googling. Well, try .
The first result link you get is for a Cumberland County Tax Assessment Database. Now click on the database to view. Then in the "House_Number" field, select "greater than or equals" and put the number 1 in the box next to it. You get a database search that matches 80017 of 89070 records. The database has people's names, addresses, what they paid for their house, what tax they paid, etc.
That's very scary. I'm going to write them a letter and let them know that their laundry has been out in the wind a little too long. I guess it's public info, but still a spammer's gold mine.
Apparently the guys over at FreshRPMs offer a version of apt that works with RPM packages. What with Red Hat's asinine End-of-Life announcement, this might be the solution I need. It may be better than switching to KRUD even.