Blog Archive: August 2015
Good Zombie Fluff
Zombie, as in shambling brain-eating undead. Fluff, as in a book thats an evenings worth of page-turning. Good, as in way better than it needs to be and will leave you smiling. Im talking bout Warm Bodies by Isaac Marion, which I recommend. Its hardly an obscure book; was quite popular and then theres a reasonably well-reviewed movie version. Over on GoodReads I found people who liked the movie better, and the trailer looks amusing. Tl;dr: The story is mostly told in a zombies inner dialogue (who knew they had em?) He meets The Right Girl and eats The Right Brain and big changes start to happen.
GPS navigators: violation of POLA
It's been over five years since I bought my first GPS navigator. Since then I have bought two more, not counting the Android tablet that can also run GPS navigation apps. After that time, I still have serious issues with them. What do I want from a navigator? Here's a start: At the very least, I need a substitute for paper maps, for whatever purpose I want to use them. I want to be able to plan trips. Start here, go there.
More GPS navigator fun
How do you get from Dereel to Warrandyte? Let me count the ways. Warrandyte is on the other side of Melbourne from Dereel, and we have the choice of fighting our way through the west of the city (thanks, State Government, for spending hundreds of millions of dollars to cancel the freeway extension that would have made it bearable), or drive round to the north-east end of the ring road and then fight our way across country for another excruciating 20 km from Watsonia North to Warrandyte. Today we travelled via Watsonia North with two different GPS navigators, each of which wanted to go a different way once we left the freeway.
Advice for people that teach system administration?
I've been asked to write an article that will be read by people that teach system administration (and people that research how to best teach system administration). Sadly I'm having writers block. I have too much to say, so I don't know where to start, or how to narrow it down to 1-2 main points. My solution is to crowdsource this a bit. So... What would you tell professors that are studying how to best teach system administration? Or, more importantly: If there is one thing such teachers/researchers should be told, what would it be? Tell in this Google Form (or in the commments, but I'd prefer the form) Thanks!
Usenix LISA Conversations: Episode 2 is up!
Ben Rockwood was the guest of Episode 2. He gave a great talk at LISA'14 and we invited him to discuss it, the reaction it got, and what's new in his thinking since. Ben's a funny guy and had a lot of insightful new things to say. I wasn't able to attend, so Lee Damon cohosted with a great substitute David N. Blank-Edelman. I'll be back next month when Dan Klein will be our guest. More info about ULC including links to past and present videos is available at the homepage: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa15/lisa-conversations
Mid-life Stark
This is a quick note on Killing Pretty by Richard Kadrey, latest instalment in the excellent Sandman Slim series. KP holds its own, better than some other Sandman entries. Theres plenty of wisecracking, LA noir, colorful violence, cool steampunk magic, and disgusting villains. And explosions of imagination thatll make you smile. But also something new: Kadrey is working on a larger story arc here. I dont mean the series ridiculous-albeit-fun cartoon theology and whats happening with Hell-n-Heaven. I mean, Our Hero has grey hairs and a job and a boss and a girlfriend with a career, and on several occasions passes up booze for coffee.
Distributed Hardness
The other day this, from Mathias Verraes, got thousands of retweets. There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: 2. Exactly-once delivery 1. Guaranteed order of messages 2. Exactly-once delivery. Thats really funny, but it dawns on me that it might not be obvious why. (Well, except to cloud infrastructure geeks.) Its like this: In the cloud, youd like to operate at large scale with high reliability. (Take me out and shoot me if Im ever heard uttering the phrase infinite scale unironically.) Lists Heres a list of the ways that you can munch data at a scale that is, for the purposes of most apps, unbounded: Sharding.
NBN charter and reality
A surprising number of people in Dereel can't get NBN access. Some, like Stewart Summersby, are in a dip and have no adequate visibility (line of sight) to the tower. But it seems that a large proportion of the problems are due to trees, which are up to 25 m high. But wait. Before building the tower, people came out here and took a look. They saw the trees. They saw the lie of the land. And they decided on a location for the tower, along with a coverage map, which currently looks like this: The map keeps changing, and is wildly inaccurate, as I've commented in the past, but the updates don't show the reality of the areas with demonstrated lack of coverage.
Old computers, the third
I built my third computer in 1980. It was also an S-100 bus machine, this time with an Intel 8086 processor. This was very much cutting-edge technology at the time, and there wasn't even an operating system for it. For whatever reason, Gary Kildall of Digital Research wasn't overly keen on releasing CP/M-86, and so the offer I had, from a small company called Seattle Computer Products, was a two board set with their own operating system called 86-DOS. I was a little dubious about that, and some time round October 1980 I called the company and spoke with Tim Paterson.
LISA Schedule published!
This year's committee has done a bang-up job! See the entire schedule! Register today!
Old computers: Number 2
As I mentioned yesterday, it proved impractical to expand my Kontron kit computer, I only had 1.25 kB of memory, and expanding it would have been really expensive. Then I saw an advertisement in Byte: 32 kB of memory on four boards for only $790! The problem was that it was for the S-100 bus. But that was so much cheaper that I decided to migrate. It wasn't all progress: in those days the S-100 bus was so flaky that it was difficult to run a Z80 faster than 2 MHzand that where my Kontron CPU managed 4 MHz! But in the course of time I built up a reasonable system.
Don't invent email addresses!
A few years back I had a rather interesting exchange of views with Mark Teel, the author of the wview weather station software. It was remarkable enough that I published the mail exchange. Of course, I changed the email addresses. Mine is easy: [email protected], which also serves as a honeypot. But I changed his to a fictive gmail address. Bad idea. It wasn't that fictive after all, and the real owner contacted me today, justifiably complaining about the fact that he was made to look like an idiot, but also that he was getting spammed as a result. Why did I do that?
1970s personal computers
Unpacking the removal cartons in the music room (or should we call it library?) is progressing, and in the process I keep finding old stuff. Today there was a collection of old computer boards representing most of my first three computers. I must have got the first machine some time in April 1977. It was made by Kontron and designated kit. It was a 4 MHz Z-80 based single board computer with 256 bytes each of RAM and ROM, and also serial and parallel interfaces, all on a Eurocard board 10×16 cm in size: The CPU and ROM are missing on this board.
Coming to Renos Grassroots Books this Friday!
I’m doing a Q&A and signing at Reno’s Grassroots Books — a local, indie store with an emphasis on affordable reading for all — this Friday, Aug 28 at 6:30PM — just a quick stop on the way to That Thing in the Desert. I hope you’ll come by and say hello!
Guardian column: Ulysses pacts and spying hacks: warrant canaries and binary transparency
As the world’s governments exercise exciting new gag-order snooping warrants that companies can never, ever talk about, companies are trying out a variety of “Ulysses pacts” that automatically disclose secret spying orders, putting them out of business. A “Ulysses pact” is a negotiating tactic in which one party voluntarily surrenders some freedom of action, named... more
Titan Graph Database Integration with DynamoDB: World-class Performance, Availability, and Scale for New Workloads
Today, we are releasing a plugin that allows customers to use the Titan graph engine with Amazon DynamoDB as the backend storage layer. It opens up the possibility to enjoy the value that graph databases bring to relationship-centric use cases, without worrying about managing the underlying storage. The importance of relationships Relationships are a fundamental aspect of both the physical and virtual worlds. Modern applications need to quickly navigate connections in the physical world of people, cities, and public transit stations as well as the virtual world of search terms, social posts, and genetic code, for example. Developers need efficient methods to store, traverse, and query these relationships.
Titan Graph Database Integration with DynamoDB: World-class Performance, Availability, and Scale for New Workloads
Today, we are releasing a plugin that allows customers to use the Titan graph engine with Amazon DynamoDB as the backend storage layer. It opens up the possibility to enjoy the value that graph databases bring to relationship-centric use cases, without worrying about managing the underlying storage. The importance of relationships
Next week's LISA Conversations guest: Ben Rockwood
We'll be recording Episode 2 of Usenix LISA Conversations on Tuesday (6 days from today). Our next conversation will be with Ben Rockwood who presented "I Am SysAdmin (And So Can You!)" at LISA14. Watch his talk beforehand, and then join us at 3:30 pm PDT/6:30 pm EDT on Tuesday, August 25, 2015, at the Google Hangout On Air. If you miss the live session, you can view the recording on the USENIX YouTube channel. This month's host will be Lee Damon and David Blank-Edelman (substituting for me; I'll return next month).
What protocol?
Peter Jeremy is currently messing around with arcane net configurations. I haven't been following carefully, but he mentioned that he is happy that his ISP doesn't block IP protocol 41. That's a leading question, of course. What's protocol 41? Took a look in /etc/protocols and discovered that it's IPV6. OK, why not? But then something else caught my eye: # $FreeBSD: src/etc/protocols,v 1.22 2007/05/20 03:55:22 grog Exp $ That's my login. I can't recall ever having done anything with /etc/protocols. OK, we have a date. What did I do on 20 May 2007?
Interview with OReilly Radar podcast
I did an interview (MP3) with the O’Reilly Radar podcast at the Solid conference last month; we talked about the Apollo 1201 project I’m doing with EFF. In the absence of any other confounding factors, obnoxious stuff that vendors do tends to self-correct, but theres an important confounding factor, which is that in 1998, Congress... more
Inside Amazon
Gosh, it seems that my employers at-work culture is the talk of the Internet. Dont know if I should share on the topic, but I feel the urge and bloggers with the urge gotta blog. Tl;dr First: I havent seen that stuff Kantor and Streitfeld write about. Not saying that never did happen, or isnt happening somewhere, just that I havent seen it. Second: The similarities between Amazon and Google vastly outweigh the differences. Disclosures Long-ish; Sorry about this but its essential. I am an employee of Amazon. I am not a shareholder, but will be if I go on working here.
Unix-based mallet
One of the weirder entries in the BSD calendar files regards yesterday: Aug 14 First Unix-based mallet created, 1954 We've puzzled about it in the past. The FreeBSD project has a member called Juli Mallett, but she was born over 30 years later, and she doesn't understand the entry either. But Google keeps growing, and finally I found this page, reaped by archive.org, via this page. Finally the mystery has been uncovered, but like so many, the result is less than exciting. ACM only downloads articles once.
Update on the Pattern-Welded Spear
Why are logs called logs?
Q: Why are logs called logs? A: The name refers to the fact that they are like entries in ship's logbook. Q: Why is it called a logbook? A: Because of an amazing bit of nautical history uncovered by Jeff Reffell of the Designcult blog: The secret origin of "log in" Totally worth the read.
More VoIP debugging
A call from Farnaz of MyNetFone this afternoon, wanting to speak to CJ regarding his fault. I explained that he wasn't here, so she wanted his phone number. I explained that his phone didn't accept incoming calls, so she read the ticket (finally) and told me that the reason he couldn't make any calls was because his ATA wasn't registered. I asked her to read the rest of the ticket and note that he can place outgoing phone calls. Finally she agreed to send him email and get him to call them. About the only sensible thing she said was that my suspicion that the change of port from sip to sip-tls was not the cause of the problem.
More VoIP debugging
CJ Ellis has a strange problem with his VoIP connection: it works normally for outgoing calls, but incoming calls are rejected. I took a look at his ATA and found nothing wrong. So called up MyNetFone support, who told me that the line wasn't registered. That's clearly wrong, since CJ can call out with it. My guess at this stage is a misconfiguration at the server end, possibly related to the port number: he had been receiving spam calls on port sip (5060), so he had changed to 5061 (ostensibly sip-tls, but without TLS). It's almost exactly a year since he got the service; is that a coincidence?
CL XXXIV: The Great Grey Room
Its been long and hot, this summer, so its easy to like Cottage-Life days that are less bright and high and blue and green. On a deck overlooking Howe Sound, the structure of the view is all curvy mountains and towering evergreens and then the separate blues of sky and sea. I love it, but recently we hosted a relative Im fond of whos been struggling with mental-health issues, who after a few hours couldnt take it and asked to leave: Too much light and space. And yeah, theres as much as anyone could take. But grey days are different. Looking over the Sound, youre in a room: Grey sea floor, grey-green mountain walls, grey cloud ceiling.
Porting again
The current version of Hugin in the FreeBSD Ports Collection is 2013.0.0, two years old. It's always a pain to update the port, because of the dependencies. Tried today and discovered that it didn't like the current version of libpano13. OK, no worries, let's update it. ===> An older version of png is already installed (png-1.6.17) You may wish to ``make deinstall' and install this port again by ``make reinstall' to upgrade it properly. If you really wish to overwrite the old port of png without deleting it first, set the variable "FORCE_PKG_REGISTER" in your environment or the "make install" command line.
Arranging events via Facebook
Chris Bahlo arranged a seminar on (horse) saddles and saddle fitting for today. Margaret Swan (who lives about 450 km away) is here this weekend, and Nele Kömle also braved the over 100 km from Garvoc to attend. In addition, Chris had advertised on Facebook and had a further 8 registrations from people round here. Who came? Margaret and Nele. Not a single local person showed up. No apologies, just no show. Is this typical of the Facebook mentality? ACM only downloads articles once.
Ethical Obligations in Internet Operations - Questionnaire
[Guest post by Jan Schaumann) Actually, it's about Ethics in Internet Operations. No, seriously, it actually is. As mentioned earlier, somehow Velocity NY accepted my talk on 'Ethical Obligations in Internet Operations'. In order to help me better understand our profession(s) and to prepare a better talk, I've put together a short, anonymous questionnaire for everybody involved in "Internet Operations". " Internet Operations" is the term I use here to combine the various ill- or loosely defined job descriptions relating to the general "tech industry" beyond the job of "Programmer". If you write infrastructure code, you are working in "Internet Operations".
CAV complaints: the pain
So it's time to file formal complaints about JG King's lack of problem resolution. Went to the CAV Building disputes, defects and delays page, where they asked me to fill out a Domestic building complaintin Microsoft Word format! OK, I have a Microsoft box now, so loaded it there. What did I get? That's what Microsoft does with its own formats! Not only that, but it seems that it then corrupted the file, so I couldn't process it with other programs either. In the end I downloaded it to eureka and processed it with OpenOffice. That's still painful, and for some reason the form insists on mutilating my correct dates: 20 July 2014 gets truncated to 20/07/14, although the former is the preferred format for use by Australian Government Agencies.
Spam traps
In this diary, I change my real mail addresses to [email protected]. On my home page I mention the mail address [email protected]. Both, of course, don't exist. And how about that, my caution was warranted: Aug 5 04:31:35 www postfix/smtpd[62315]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[124.73.159.164]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [124.73.159.164]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<wotja.com> Aug 5 04:33:16 www postfix/smtpd[62360]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[124.73.153.162]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [124.73.153.162]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<gmtmk.com> Aug 5 04:37:37 www postfix/smtpd[62315]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[219.157.200.18]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [219.157.200.18]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=SMTP helo=<hn.kd.ny.adsl> Aug 5 05:29:58 www postfix/smtpd[63373]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[123.88.166.217]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [123.88.166.217]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<uid.com> Aug 5 06:27:46 www postfix/smtpd[64083]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[204.151.195.161]: 450 ...
Spam traps
In this diary, I change my real mail addresses to [email protected]. On my home page I mention the mail address [email protected]. Both, of course, don't exist. And how about that, my caution was warranted: Aug 5 04:31:35 www postfix/smtpd[62315]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[124.73.159.164]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [124.73.159.164]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<wotja.com> Aug 5 04:33:16 www postfix/smtpd[62360]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[124.73.153.162]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [124.73.153.162]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<gmtmk.com> Aug 5 04:37:37 www postfix/smtpd[62315]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[219.157.200.18]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [219.157.200.18]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=SMTP helo=<hn.kd.ny.adsl> Aug 5 05:29:58 www postfix/smtpd[63373]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[123.88.166.217]: 450 4.7.1 Client host rejected: cannot find your hostname, [123.88.166.217]; from=<[email protected]> to=<[email protected]> proto=ESMTP helo=<uid.com> Aug 5 06:27:46 www postfix/smtpd[64083]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from unknown[204.151.195.161]: 450 ...
More AusPost online fun
I've already noted that Australia Post has an option to send you tracking information on parcels. A couple of weeks ago I tried it with some parcels I had send. No response. Today I got one, though: a parcel delivered to me. So it seems that this tracking information only works for parcels sent to me. What good is it to tell me I have received a parcel? ACM only downloads articles once.
Communication, Government style
A message in my inbox this morning. It's worth including the entire text: To: <[email protected]> From:<[email protected]> Reply-To: [email protected] Subject: New Centrelink letter available online Date: Wed, 5 Aug 2015 13:13:49 +1000 Please DO NOT REPLY by email as this mailbox is not monitored. This is a message from the Department of Human Services. You have a new Centrelink letter available online. You should view your letter as soon as possible. You may view your letter by going to: - the Inbox in your myGov account. If you do not have a myGov account, you will need to create one first by going to the myGov website and then linking it to Centrelink - one of our Express Plus mobile apps.
Parenting and the Internet: the smarter, missing third way
My new Guardian column, What is missing from the kids internet? discusses three different approaches to teaching kids information literacy: firewall-based abstinence education; trust/relationship-based education, and a third way, which is the proven champion of the offline world. That third way is making media for kids and grownups to use/enjoy/experience together. It’s what made the... more
Off the net again!
Zhivago wasn't the only problem this morning. After we had looked at him, Yvonne told me we were off the net. Again! How do I even contact Aussie Broadband to tell them? It proved that I did have adequate mobile phone coverage in the garden (out towards Wendy's house), and I left a message. Of course network connectivity came back before anybody seemed to have looked at it again, but it was still nearly 70 minutes without coverage. What was the cause? I've had (a very few) cases where the NTD status indicators showed some connectivity problem with the tower, but here there were no problems.
Episode 1 of LISA Conversations
Episode 1 of "LISA Conversations" is up. In our first episode, we spoke with Todd Underwood about his LISA'13 talk about a Post-Ops World. What's next? The next episode will be with Ben Rockwood, where we'll discuss his LISA'14 talk, "I Am SysAdmin (And So Can You!)". You can join the recording live via Google Hangouts On Air on August 25, 2015 at 3:30pm. For more information about the LISA Conversations series, visit the web page: https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa15/lisa-conversations
Google Music
I use iTunes at home, and otherwise Google Play music, which really isnt terrible. Since the Net is echoing with screams about Apples cloud-music problems, now might be a good time for a few words on the subject. But first, I should say that GMusic is probably only interesting if youre the kind of person who buys music sometimes; there are loads of options for people whove migrated to an all-streaming life, and I have no idea if Googles is competitive. Buy music you say?! I strongly approve of it. First, more money goes to the artist. Second, there are times when I really want to hear that particular non-mainstream track from 99 or 77 or 55, or all the tracks on that non-mainstream album.
Understanding Hydroplane Races for the New Seattleite
It’s Seafair weekend in Seattle. As always, the centerpiece is the H1 Unlimited hydroplane races on Lake Washington. In my social circle, I’m nearly the only person I know who grew up in area. None of the newcomers I know had heard of hydroplane racing before moving to Seattle. Even after I explain it to … Continue reading Understanding Hydroplane Races for the New Seattleite
CppCon program online
The CppCon 2015 program is up! If anything this is an even stronger program than last year, which is saying something. My name isn’t on it yet, but yes, I am giving a talk at CppCon. It should be announced this week.Filed under: Uncategorized
CppCon program online
The CppCon 2015 program is up! If anything this is an even stronger program than last year, which is saying something. My name isn’t on it yet, but yes, I am giving a talk at CppCon. It should be announced this week.
Connecting the fire-fighting tank
Craig Mayor along today and connected up the fire-fighting tank. Now the high-pressure side of the irrigation system is complete, so we started filling it up. The bore produces quite a bit of water, 0.5 l/s, or 1800 l/h. But the tank holds 10,000 l, so it took over 5 hours to fill up. One of the questions I had was: was there a float valve inside? It's sealed, so the only way to find out was to fill it up and see what happened. There is either no float valve, or it's incorrectly adjusted: OK, I was expecting that.