A Geek's Thoughts

Thanksgiving weekend has been an interesting few days. We headed down to my parent's house for a family Thanksgiving. After the eating, my wife and I headed back to my parent's house from my aunt's since Logan was extremely worn out. He went to sleep, and I pulled out my laptop.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I hit the power button and the hard drive started clicking like mad. The laptop then decided to tell me that there were no bootable devices and to run the diagnostic tools. I did, and then it told me there was no hard drive detected. Not a good thing. I pull the drive out, reseat it, and the same thing. Horrible clicking followed by the same error.

I had a copy of Spinrite (which I highly recommend for anyone) in my laptop bag from work and booted off of that. I tried to select the drive, which it recognized, and it said that there appeared to be a problem. When I tried to actually start the Sprinrite process, it refused. My drive was in such bad shape that Sprinrite actually told me it wouldn't run. Not good at all.

This is the one machine I have that doesn't get backed up.

I grab my dad's laptop and head to Dell's website. I log on with the chat, give him the service tag. I explain my problem and what I've done. Without any other questions, he asks for my address and says that a drive will be at work by Monday. No hassle, no going through their magical checklist to reaffirm that my drive is dead. The chat lasted less than 10 minutes, most of it confirming address and contact information.

That still left me without a laptop to use until Monday. I had my external hard drive, an Ubuntu 7.10 CD, and a laptop that boots off of USB. Plugged in the first, stuck in the second, and told the laptop to boot from the third.

After a few moments, Ubuntu booted and recognized my external drive. I started the installer, told it to wipe my external drive clean, and after about 20 minutes it was finished. I rebooted... and had a desktop! Ubuntu had detected all my hardware just like it had the last time it was installed, and even playing OpenArena I can't tell that I'm running off of a USB drive.

Most of today has been installing little bits of software, but at least I have a laptop. The battery even lasts about two hours even with having to power the external drive. Tragedy averted? Not really, I lost a demo I had set up in VMWare and will get to figure out how to set it up and see how dead the internal drive is Monday, but at least I have a fully functional laptop.

At least it's working.

SNES and GameFear
A few weeks ago I got my hands on an old SNES with a few games to play. Playing the SNES really brings to surface a feeling that I've had for a while; while new video games are fun, they aren't the same as the old games that I grew up playing on SNES, NES, or Genesis.

My wife also bought for me a GameGear, but unfortunately I don't have a powercord or any games anymore. That's the next thing I need to buy.

Retro Game Podcasts
I listen to a lot of podcasts, and came across 1up.com's 'Retronauts' podcast.I don't normally like podcasts outside the TWiT.tv network, but this one is really good.

Code Monkeys
G4 has a new television show that uses 16-bit animation called Code Monkeys. For a G4 show, it's actually really, really good.

I've been thinking about getting back into GUI programming (all I've done for about the last year, barring one small VB.NET project) is all web and scripting. I've also been thinking about picking up a new language but with the plethora of choices available now I'm at a loss on what to pick. Maybe you guys out there can help.

I'm fairly decent with VB.NET, live in PHP, and can understand C#. I've got a little experience in C++ but it's been so long since I've done any actual coding (and never anything GUI with it) that it would be just like learning it again (I'm purposely leaving out that I know COBOL and RPG...... crap). I want to learn something that is multi-platform to boot.

If anyone has any ideas, let me know. I'm looking at Python, but honestly, I have no idea where to go.

One of the things that plagues any OS is an availability of software, and the ability to install said software. On Windows, it comes easily, and on MacOS X it's even easier to install. But those are primarily binary-based operating systems, so there isn't any need to compile. Everything is already there in nice, neat packages.

On *nix, the story is a lot different most of the time. Sure, there are binary installers like Google Earth or Java, but for the most part if you want to install something, that means downloading the source, './configure'ing, 'make'ing it, and 'make install'ing it. That's assuming you have all the dependencies, and the only way to know that is assuming that the package tells you what exact dependencies you need. In response to all this, RPM and .deb packages evolved.

RPMs and .deb packages do not clear up this dependency hell. You need some sort of manager. Thus comes 'yum' and 'apt'. These programs are supposed to find out what dependencies you want, install them, and then install the software that you want. yum is, unfortunately, incredibly slow for my tastes. apt is very quick and efficient, and handles .deb and RPM packages just fine. The downside is that these two tools rely on a source for their information, generally internet sites called 'repos.' These repos have all the dependencies that one would need to install software, and almost always have a ton of software for you to choose from.

What happens when you want to install, say, OpenXchange? Well, the paid version includes a script to install itself and download all the packages that one might need... assuming that you are running RHEL 4 or SUSE Enterprise Server 9. Say you don't want to put down money for RHEL to try out software you don't want, but at this point SUSE Server is at version 10. What do you do? Not install it on 10, that's for sure.

Invariably, on any RPM-based distro that I attempt to use, I quickly run into dependency hell. In the case of OpenXchange, the packages needed are not on the install DVD for SUSE 10. So I went looking around the internet. You download the RPM package you need (package 123), try to install it. ERROR - This package needs XYZ package before it can be installed. Search for package XYZ, download, install, ERROR - You need package ABC for this package to install.

Search, download, install ABC, then XYZ, then 123. Try to install 456, search for DEF, install DEF, then 456. Install 789... see where this is going? The best part about this is that you have to find RPM packages for SUSE. You want this specific package? Oh, I'm sorry, the newest one is only built for RHEL. There is an older one for SUSE 9.x if you want to try that.

With the knowledge that OpenXchange is near impossible to install on SUSE 10, I'm forced to an outdated server edition of 9. Download all 6 CDs for 9, install 9, install OpenXchange, and everything works fine. Why? SUSE Enterprise Server 9 contains all of the packages you need right on the CDs. No external repos or downloads needed.

What happened to all those packages that I needed between SUSE 9 and SUSE 10? They were never built, and by the looks of it no one wants to take the time to update the packages.

Why must this be such a pain, you might ask? Because even though RPM follows a specific format on how the package itself is created, each distro that uses RPM needs files in different places. That package that you downloaded for SUSE 9 may not work right on SUSE 10, and even may not work right on RHEL. Each distro may have files in different locations, and SUSE might expect something in /etc/program, but on RHEL it might actually be in /opt/program, or /usr/local/program.

RPM suffers from a splintering of the distros that support it. By contrast, I haven't run into an issue on Ubuntu wherein I download the Debian-only package. Why? Most Debian offshoots stay fairly close to their roots, so that means an Ubunutu package has a fairly high chance of working fine on Debian itself, or SimplyMepis, or any another Debian offshoot.

Hopefully RPMs will one day be less distro specific so that it makes life easier. Until then, if I can't find it in yum, I'm hesitant to try to download an RPM I install off of the internet.

I'm in the process of moving our work website from externally hosted to in house. Being as security conscious of a company as we are, I opted to go with OpenBSD 4.1 since it is very, very secure out of the box. With only two security holes in the last 10 years in the default install, it was the best choice.

OpenBSD is definately for the server and admin crowd. There is no gui; in fact, OpenBSD has the leanest install program I have seen in a long time. My first task was to figure out how OpenBSD wanted to be partitioned. Tutorials on the internet were of differing standards as to how one does this, but after attempting to install it three times I finally figured it out.

After the install comes updating. OpenBSD does its updating by downloading the source for the kernel and the userland binaries and then compiling them. So, I did that about three times before I finally got the CVS to download everything and then compile. Overall, OpenBSD took over eight hours to install by the time I figured everything out.

The best thing about OpenBSD is, though, that since I'm following -stable, I can take that machine that I went through hell to install and make an install image from it. I made my own release of -stable, copied the files to my Ubuntu box at work, and made an installation ISO out of it.

Now I can install OpenBSD 4.1-stable on my new servers at work, and be safe in the knowledge that they are that much safter.

A great thing happened on the internet yesterday - the digg community retaliated against censorship, and in effect against the MPAA.

Some Background
A cease-and-desist letter was sent to a website that dealt with the cracking of the AACS encryption used on HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks. Nothing big in that regard, except that the C&D letter contained the actual key used in the infringing material. As is the case with anything on the internet, the key was out, and there was no way to stop it from being spread (DeCSS, I'm looking at you!). In this age of social networking, such information would undoubtly make its way to sites such as Reddit and Digg. Of course, Diggnation, the podcast associated with Digg.com, is sponsored by HD-DVD.

The Fallout
As the key spread, articles were submitted to Digg like normal. The only odd thing was that posts relating to the magical hex number started to get deleted. Then users began to get banned. In an social circle were almost everyone is against censorship (not necessarily for piracy, just for fair use and against being censored), the digg community rebelled. Comments and stories containing the hex key flooded the site, and were being deleted by moderators in record time.

At one point, the entire front page of digg was nothing but stories about the number.This had gone far beyond just a number that the MPAA would like to have kept quiet, it had turned into a situation where people were being censored in a venue where there was normally nothing to stop them. Digg runs on the fact that the users decide what is a good story, what is a bad story, not the moderators (who, incidently, only step in to delete posts against their ToS). The C&D letter contained the key itself, and since legal documents are public domain, the number would never be completely locked away again.

Domain names were registered, cups, hats, and all sorts of materials ended up being host to the magical hex number. Because of digg, the key that the MPAA wanted kept quiet was everywhere now. In true internet fashion, like its predecesor DeCSS, the magical hex key has become an staple of the internet. Hell, the number even has it's own song now!

Digg Gives In
Last night, Kevin Rose made a post on his blog saying that digg will stop deleting posts and comments regarding the number. Digg may go down in flames or be buried under huge legal bills, or it may turn out just fine. Today, most of the posts are no longer about the number, but about how digg was deleting the posts and ultimately how the user community won.

So, Sunday night my wife and I went to go see George Carlin. I have to say, he is one of my favorite stand up comics of all time. Not only was the show hilarious (he dumped his previous act and had started a new one that night), but we were able to exchange our tickets at the box office for tickets two rows away from the stage. I was literally no more than 30 feet away from George Carlin while he was on stage all night long. It was great.

I also snagged a shirt containing the 2000 dirty words that Carlin has categorized. It was a kick-ass night.

Life is starting to finally wind down after the last few weeks. We just finished a run of 'The Scarlet Pimpernel' after a month of rehearsals (for me anyway, I just do help with sound). Now I have some time in the evenings to actually sit down and do something other than spend all my waking hours at work and then at the stage.

The Baby
Well, we had to get some extra tests done, but the baby is coming along just fine according to the doctors. Tuesday we found out that we are having a boy. Now we're in the process of revising our baby registry to be more male-oriented instead of gender neutral. As soon as we found out what we were having, we went to the store and purchased some clothes in celebration.

Work
Work is going great. I opted to head to SANSFire 2007 in Washington, DC instead of going to SANS in Las Vegas later in the year so that I could be home after the baby is born. Six days in the capital of the US learning Web Application Security should be pretty nice. DC isn't Vegas, but hey, I'm getting the same training and get to take time off of work after the baby is born. Speaking of work...

New Laptop
Work decided to give me a laptop. The network admin just got a new one as well, so we ordered a bunch of Dell Latitude D820's and they were gracious enough to give me one of the lot. I am enjoying it a lot thus far. Mine has the standard 1280x800 widescreen, 1.66ghz Core 2 Duo, 2 gigabytes of RAM, and a 120 gig hard drive. It initially shipped with Windows XP, but I loaded Vista on it to test for work.

So far, much better performance than my Compaq Presario C504US when it comes to Vista (the Compaq runs XP like a champ though). I plan on writing a more formal review after I've had it for a while.

Reading
I just finished The Firstborn by Paul Thompson and Tonya Cook. Its been too long since I've read a proper book, and I'm glad to get back into Dragonlance as well. Look for a more in-depth review down the road, its on my list of things to write about.

Show us your favorite sunset picture.
Submitted by B. Mag.

Monkeys in Tree

1 comment