snafu.priv.at - Situation Normal, All Fucked Up

663 >> 13.

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:02:00 EST

663 is the number of the EU Parliamentary Porkers that voted against the ACTA mess yesterday. 13 little piggies toed the Content Cartel's line.

663 is an overwhelmingly larger number than 13, and the optimist in me (yes, I have my weak moments) would like to think "Good! Looks like some of the pollies have grown a spine - at least temporarily. They might even be worth their feed".

Then the realist in me sees that the 663 piggies might be all equal, but the 13 pigs could very well be More Equal: Our Helpful Friends in the Content Cartel will certainly do their best to make sure of that. Bastards.

From Sun Type 5 to PS/2 in under $15: my PIC-based converter

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:45:00 EST

Ever since I stopped using a Sun SparcStation as desktop (around 94 or so) I wanted a decent Type 4 or 5 on my pc - alas, the Type 4/5 are serial keyboards and hence not directly supported by normal pcs.

Getting the Type 5 to work under Linux wouldn't have been too hard (it's serial after all), but that isn't good enough: I wanted a decent solution that also work for BIOS interaction and in Windows (and even the Linux-only solution would have required soldering up a TTL inverter).

So why not build a converter?

Being lazy until recently I compromised (sort-of) by using an IBM Model M: my Model M was made in 84, weighs a ton and a half, and works beautifully...but it's very very noisy (a consequence of the buckling spring mechanism) and that finally got on my nerves.

About eight or nine years ago I saw this Sun to PS/2 converter project, which unfortunately is rather complex to build and uses very obsolete hardware to pull it off...too much of a hassle. And the few commercial converters that I could find were ridiculously expensive.

So finally I built my own converter which needs only two active and one passive component: one PIC16F628a microprocessor to do the heavy lifting, one 7404 TTL inverter and one capacitor. Together with a bit of prototyping board, a PS/2 cable with plug and a female minidin-8 socket I estimate the total cost to be no higher than AUD15.

Mine actually cost less: I bought some 16F628s in bulk some time ago, the 7404 was an ancient left-over (markings indicate it was made in the 80s...), the PS/2 cable and plug came from a dead donor keyboard and the minidin-8 socket I recycled out of a dead Sun.

And what about the software? That's my contribution. (Open Source, of course.)

More recently, after having decided to build my own PS/2-based converter I found out that Marijn Kentie has created a PIC-based one that does Sun-Type-4/5-to-USB, with a PIC18F. *silly hat on* But his is written in C and therefore less cool than my handcrafted PIC assembler code. *silly hat off*

Preliminaries: Sun

The Type 4 and 5 Sun keyboards are very simple beasts explained nicely in the SPARC Keyboard Specs: they communicate with the host using RS-232 at 1200 bps, 8N1 - but with inverted TTL logic levels (0V = 1, 5V = 0). +5V power is provided together with the signal. All keys have a one-byte code that is sent on "make" (key pressed) and code+0x80 is sent on "break" (key release). No typematic repeat, that is handled by the host. The keyboard has a few more keys than normal pc keyboards, and one more LED, on the compose key. The keyboard also has only a few trivially simple commands (reset, led setting, beeper on/off and click on/off). The pinout of the minidin-8 connector is straightforward. And that's all there is to it. Neat, simple, efficient.

Dealing with this stuff on a PIC is easy, especially when you use one with USART built-in, like the 16F628 - the only necessary extra is a 7404 inverter to translate the signal levels.

Preliminaries: PS/2

The electrical PS/2 protocol is ugly, to put it politely. The PS/2 keyboard protocol is fucking horrible, and that's still putting it politely!

The electrical part is described very well by Adam Chapweske over there, but his treatise lacks precise timing information - that I found in this application note.

It's a two-wire bidirectional protocol, with a "master" (the host) that isn't mastering anything but the art of interrupting progress at any time it feels like it: the only thing the master ever does is tell the slave to stop whatever it's doing or to start clocking. With PS/2 it's the slave that outputs the clock pulses.

Device-to-host transmissions work different from host-to-device, adding to the fun for an implementor. At least all transmissions are done in bytes. Some of the borderline cases I didn't find any precise information on (e.g. the timing sequence of the host-to-device clocking request; the best I could find is 'host pulls clock low, then pulls data low, then releases clock'), but there seems to be a lot of leeway in the spec (e.g. pulse length can be anything between 25us and 50us).

And the electrical part is easy, compared to the backwards-compatible mess that the PS/2 keyboard protocol is: most of the crappy stuff dates back to 84-key PC/XT keyboards and contains lots of really lousy design decisions made by IBM.

IBM: It may be slow, but it's hard to use. -- Simon Cozens

The best explanation/material collection for the scan codes I found to be the one collected by John Savard.

In as few words as possible: keys send make and break codes ("scan codes" in PS/2 parlance), just like the Sun does - but the codes follow no useful scheme whatsoever and differ in size: anywhere from 1 to 8 bytes. One key sends no break code at all, and in theory there's three different set of codes for any single key (fortunately only Set 2 is required nowadays). And to make all this even more fun, the typematic repeat must be handled by the device, there's multiple repeat/delay rates as well, and there's a bunch of generally superfluous commands that a keyboard should understand as well. Lots of joy!

My students got a really good laugh out of it when I told them last week that I write code in assembler for fun (and indeed, the PS/2 part of this project was "lots" of fun, for masochistic values of lots).

My Converter

The PIC deals with the Sun using its built-in USART, with the 7404 inverter sitting inbetween. The PS/2 side is done "manually", bit-banging two ports of the PIC whose internal pullup resistors are enabled.

The mechanical layout of my converter is trivial: a small piece of prototyping board holds two sockets for the PIC and the 7404, and one 22uF electrolytic capacitor sits near the PIC. One end of the board holds a female minidin-8 socket for the Sun keyboard plug, and the PS/2 cable was soldered in at the other end. Power comes from the PS/2 connector, and powers everything: the PIC, the 7404 and the Sun keyboard.

Here is my prototype (with extra in-circuit programming sockets):

The electrical setup is about as trivial, and shown on this schema.

I've even cooked up a small PCB design (untested, though). These PNGs are 300dpi and if you use this for a toner transfer you'll have to mirror the silk side but not the solder side.

Limitations

My converter presents a somewhat dumb keyboard to the host: any and all PS/2 commands are acknowledged (in best "yes, minister!" tradition) - and most are then completely ignored. Implemented are: Reset, Get ID and Set LEDs. The keyboard also doesn't request resends from the host, nor does it act upon the hosts' resend requests - I haven't seen any need for those in practice.
Apparently all modern keyboard controllers (8042-clones embedded in the SuperIO chips) don't care about the extra commands and don't even pass them on to the keyboards.
The repeat rate is fixed at 250ms initial delay, then 30 keys per second.
The Compose LED on the Sun keyboard isn't known to PS/2, and the converter arbitarily associates it with bit 3 of the Set LEDs argument (bits 0 to 2 are num, caps and scroll lock). If you can convince your OS/hardware to pass the extra bit then your compose LED will be controllable; otherwise it'll stay off.
The keyboard's buzzer or the key click functions are not accessible via PS/2, so those are off.
The handling of the Print Screen key is simplified: while the standards say that it should be wrapped in the scancodes for shift (plus an extra annoyance byte), the converter doesn't do that. Neither does it create the sysreq scan code with alt held down.
I have found that all OS's I tried (linux and win) work fine with that - it looks like the keyboard controller fixes up the scancode as required.
Similarly, the numlock handling is simplified: According to this MS keyboard scan code specification, a keyboard should remember all modifiers held down while numlock is in use and modify the scancodes sent accordingly. This is a ridiculously crappy setup (what do we have the damn make/break codes for, except for the host to figure out which keys are currently down?) and it's also not necessary in practice.
The extra keys on the Sun keyboard were mapped to the nearest equivalents I could find in various sources.
The power key is mapped to ACPI Power, the brightness/volume and mute keys are mapped to the Windows Multimedia Keyboard scancodes and so is the Stop key.
The left and right Meta keys (Diamond on the Sun keyboard) are mapped to Left and Right Window key, respectively. The Compose key is mapped to the Windows Menu key.
For the non-obvious ones (Help, Undo/Again, Copy/Paste/Cut, Props, Front, Open, Find) I used scan codes from Savard's list.
On Unix systems the mapping of these is trivial (Linux: setkeycodes for a few, then Xmodmap to make them available under X). on Windows systems you'll have to use a remapper tool or frob the registry by hand. I've tried SharpKeys which works fine for the remapping, and Hoekeys for attaching actions to keys.

Code! Code! Code!

The code is as simple and robust as I could make it, and pretty well documented - I think.

The keycode to scancode translation is done with two tables, one 128 byte one (for the one-byte scancodes) and one 27 byte one (for the two byte scancodes). The Pause key is handled separately. As the 16F628 has only 128 byte of EEPROM the two tables are done using the trusty old computed-goto method.

Sun input is handled via an interrupt handler which pushes key codes into a small (8 byte) inbound fifo. The main loop monitors the PS/2 bus for activity (remember, the PIC has to clock for the host on request) and otherwise processes key codes from the input fifo: it translates them into scan codes and pushes those into an output fifo (16 bytes deep).

The main loop also empties that fifo by sending out pending scancodes whenever the PS/2 bus allows it, and furthermore deals with the few PS/2 commands that are implemented. Sending to the Sun keyboard is done via the USART, and due to the PIC hardware that's a fire-and-forget operation (for up to two sequential bytes).

Another part of the interrupt handler deals with timeouts: a timer is armed whenever a make code is processed (and disarmed on break) and when the timer expires the interrupt handler inserts another copy of the held-down key code into the inbound fifo and rearms the timer (initial 250ms, then 33ms). And that's about it.

For those of you who like to tinker with the source: go for it! It is, as usual, GPL-licensed and as such freely available for your use.

Here is the list of files:

the main program code: sunkbd.asm
the fifo helper routines: fifo.inc
some delay helper routines: delay.inc
and for convenience here's the compiled code, ready for your PIC: sunkbd.hex

Enjoy!

It's all relative, dear Watson.

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 14:34:00 EST

No electronics project of mine ever ends without me rerouting and resoldering at least two connections.

Why? Because many if not most sources for connector pinout info do not deal well with the fact that there are at least four ways of describing every damn type of plug/jack: looking at the front of the male-ish half, looking at its back (or at the solder lugs) and ditto for the female-ish half.

Lots of info out there lacks any label stating which of the damn choices their description uses, and I seem to be a sucker for picking the wrong interpretation or orientation or both (I'm not dyslexic at all but still don't want to remember the number of DB9s I've had to redo because I mirrored the intended connections...).

And don't get me started on the definitions of TX and RX lines: without an explanation of who the transmitting party is, the info is worthless.

This time I'm building a Sun Type 4/5 keyboard to PS/2 converter/translator, which is fun on the Sun side (simple RS-232 with inverted TTL signal levels) but really ugly on the other end (the PS/2 protocol is an extremely hideous thing to implement, but then that's IBM for you).

Yesterday's resoldering exercise came from my misinterpreting the "Keyboard Out" label in the Sun pinout to mean "to the keyboard" which - surprise! - it ain't. Still, no big deal, and with the hardware complete (a 7404, a PIC16F628, one cap and two connectors) now it's "just" a question of finishing and debugging the microprocessor code to do what it is supposed to do.

So, what are the benefits...

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:38:00 EST

...of having extremely few friends, no girlfriend (and no hope of finding one), absolutely zero social life and of having an apparently abrasive personality?

I don't know. If you find any, please tell me.

I do not work here!

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 11:29:00 EST

Of course I don't work (for|with) incompetents like these.

And 2 + 2 = 5, FSVO 5.

If I was king...

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:32:00 EST

...first, I'd get a muzzle for the damn howler monkey neighbours' dog. Not because of the barking, but because of the dog being one of the root causes for the everlasting bloody aggravation: see, he's got some Doberman in the mix, and his owners are total assholes, so he's decent-sized, frisky and badly educated. That makes him pinch the damn kids when they yell and scream too much, eliciting more screaming and howling, which generates more pinching and screaming and tantrums...Oh Joy.

Next, I'd cut all the howler monkeys' vocal cords, and thus earn the everlasting gratitude from the other neighbours around - who are all fairly quiet denizens.

And finally, I'd shoot all the monkey neighbours for good measure - 'it's the only way to be sure'.

No, I'm not angry, not at all. Why do you think so?

From the bottom of my heart I wish the plague and a quick, quiet death on these neighbours.

TORorrist!

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:33:00 EST

This human universe is a mess, what with the authoritarian assholes always lusting after (& usually getting) control, and I for one am quite sick of it.

Therefore Tor appeals to me, a lot: no logs. decent crypto. grass-roots. hard to subvert completely. Good.

So in an attack of unwarranted altruism I'm doing my tiny bit to improve this bloody place. (mind you, with limited bandwidth and not as an exit router just yet, cause I want to monitor that experiment a bit longer before I extend the service)

Lovely. Not.

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:08:00 EST

The first day of the trimester at work, and I've got an 0800 lecture... for the one (inherited) subject I dislike teaching the most. Bah. And the projector in the room is squirrely. Aaaaaargh! And the room is generallylousy. Double-bah. And my brain is fogged up enough so that I'm quite sure I'm making more of a hash of the subject material than necessary. Sorry dear students! My best efforts at 0800 today weren't really quite good enough.

What a lovely way to begin the week!

Eric Rohmer is dead. Gy�rgy Palfi is not.

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 15:49:00 EST

Yesterday Eric Rohmer died. A pity, I liked his films a lot (especially the contes des quatre saisons and the comedies et proverbes sets).

However, Gy�rgy Palfi is Not Dead - and I heartily endorse his film Hukkle to anybody who likes subtle films. It's really, really nice. His second film, Taxidermia, is pretty cool as well but quite a bit further into the odd realms of the universe.

No pillaging!

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:57:00 EST

Samizdata makes my day.

Spamassassin turned into a *-assassin on 1.1.2010.

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:06:00 EST

If you are using spamassassin without sa-update you will not like to hear that as of 5 days ago spamassassin has pretty much declared open season on all your mails:

Due to an incredibly gross and dirty bit of rule all properly dated mails get an extra 3.6 added to their score. *kablam*!

Botch/Fix: edit /usr/share/spamassassin/72_active.cf, and change the regexp for FH_DATE_PAST_20XX to something that doesn't fire in the near future (like 20[2-9][0-9]). Don't forget to sa-compile if you use compiled spamassassin rules.

Here is my Uninteresting Fact Of The Day:

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 16:05:00 EST

*drumroll*
A Sanyo DCX-8000K contains 65 electrolytic capacitors.

I know this because I love my DCX (as pointed out earlier): it's 70s-vintage and recently suffered from an occasionally crackly left channel, and thus it was due for some tender love and care.

So I replaced all 65 electrolytic caps yesterday, and also rigged the long-planned white LED dial lighting. The light stuff was trivial (the original bulb format is unobtainium nowadays and they get too hot for my liking anyway). The cap replacement was simple-but-not-easy: the DCX is all discrete hardware (except for just one 14-pin IC, the stereo decoder), lovingly distributed over a number of boards with wire-wrapped connections that I really truly didn't want to undo.

And of course, being me, I overdid it: I really should have done just the caps on the equalizer, preamp and amp boards. (Indeed there was one badly bulging cap on the left channel amplifier board. Even Rubycon caps are allowed to expire after almost forty years.)

No half jobs for me: I replaced the electrolytic caps everywhere, and the fiddly receiver board gave me loads of headache (lots of wires in the way, lots of caps in hard-to-reach places).

Alas, initial success was partial only: silence on the right channel when listening to FM radio (except when set to mono). *sigh* But I have the DSX service manual (complete with full schematics), and a Tektronix 2246 and I'm not afraid to use them :-)

...some *poke* *ponder* *headscratch* *peek* *wonder*...

In the end it didn't take too long to figure out what was wrong: I had soldered one cap with the polarity reversed, and all the stereo stuff needed readjustment (19 and 38KHz coils and FM channel separation).

Woheee!

A New Toy for This Boy

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 11:40:00 EST

I've got a new toy, and I love it. It's an Advance Epsilon 6/28.

Some other pics taken last Friday and Sunday:

So that's Vienna?

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:38:00 EST

This gem I found in a toilet at VIE airport when I visited Europe once again (22.10.-10.11.). The primary reason for the trip was a small conference in Sofia, but in the spirit of combining the necessary with the nice I decided to spend some extra vacation time in Vienna.

My single Sofia photo:

Obviously somebody at Sofia University liked the Jargon File's Story about Magic. (As the switch was on an ugly panel in a basement full of other ugly cabling I didn't flip it.)

The vacation part of the trip was nice. Vienna in November was mostly as I expected it: cold, gloomy, wet. Here's the "standard" view from the ex kids' room of my parents' flat.

But I didn't let the weather get me down at all and had quite some fun visiting friends, my sisters and parents.

De Pingitzer san ja so a nettes Ehepaar!

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:08:00 EST

(STR for Austrians.) I have marvellous neighbors at the moment (on the southern side, outside the complex).

I named them the Howler Monkey family: Mr. Monkey loses it, big time, every single bloody weekend without fail and shouts and screams at his family. It's always something simple that drives him into a door-slamming screaming rage, like the kids not filling the dish washer or leaving some of their toys on the lawn or the like.

Mr. Monkey is a great specimen. In his rage he completely loses command of all human language: his vocabulary gets reduced to precisely four items: "fuck", "shit", "mate" and a fourth word which rotates depending on what enraged him this time (toys, dishwasher, money, whatever). (You might say he's a prime Australian specimen; he never loses his focus on mateship.)

How he manages to make do with just those four during his five to ten minutes of outrage is beyond me, but he does. True to his name he's loud enough for everybody around to participate passively. Oh joy!

Mrs. Monkey isn't much better - but more petite, hence less volume.

And the little Monkeys (three of them) - well, let's say they follow their parental guidance well. The Big Monkey (fem about 11) is loud, brash and talks back to her parents - it's no surprise that she seems to be the trigger of these parental shitstorms quite often.

The Middle Monkey (fem about 5) is an absolutely horrible brat. A prickly, take-no-prisoners egotist, throws a screaming tantrum whenever the universe doesn't rotate around her (=very often).

The Little Monkey (male under 2) isn't totally spoilt - yet. But he is catching up, learning that throwing tantrums and screaming at the top of one's voice is an accepted means of social exchange (and I don't blame him; in that family it'd take a retarded saint to stay quiet).

It's said that parents get exactly the children they deserve, and the Howler Monkeys seem to reinforce that. (Which is quite unfortunate for these kids, as they can't pick their parents.)

De Br�lloffn san ja so a nettes Ehepaar!

R/C Four-Wheel-steering controller for sale

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 13:54:00 EST

The last of my 4WS controllers is on sale, here.

Cette potion...

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:49:00 EST

I'm not very vain (I think). That said I'd very much like a decent amount of hair cover on my head. Nature has denied me that wish, big time: that's me, August 5 2009.

But just like in Asterix there's certain interesting magical potions. One of those contains Minoxidil, which was intended as a high blood pressure medication but happens to cause hair (re)growth for certain people.

Nobody knows why, how and for whom it works, but for me it does.

That's me today, after three months of rubbing in some of the potion twice daily (and just after mowing my pate).

Still thin (of course) but instead of hard-to-see fine hair there's more and properly sized stuff. Not bad, says my vanity.

But (just like in Asterix) there are downsides: never before have I had to shave my earlobes regularly, shaving just below/outside of the eyes is now an annoying necessity as well, and I really didn't need any hair on my back above the shoulder blades.

Of course begga^Wbaldies can't be choosers!

But will they elect him again?

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 19:48:00 EST

The Tweed Shire deputy mayor publicly calls (some of) his constituents morons.

The comments on that post are also quite fun to read (ranging from 'politically correct', dimbulb outrage to realistic cynicism).

If Bill Watterson was a British subject...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:10:00 EST

...he'd have spent 6+ months in jail for "conspiracy to cause explosions":

You don't think so? Reconsider: two British kids have just been jailed for 6+ months for fantasizing about blowing up their school. They've been acquitted in court now, but only after half a year in jail: if that doesn't count as having your future destroyed then I don't know what does.

The interesting thing about the story: There never was any evidence of anything nasty beyond them having written down fantasies; there were no threats, nothing.

Orwell called that "thoughtcrime", and so would I. Yet another reason why I'm not about to visit the UK anytime soon.

Prettily burning villages and more...

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:02:00 EST

A few films I've seen recently that made more of an impression than usual:

"Lepa sela, lepo gore" feels like the Serbian version of Catch-22. Very nasty, humorous, unflinchingly direct and I liked it a lot (as far as one can 'like' war-themed films that weren't shot through a pink matte filter and with the regisseur on tranquilizers). It's been criticized as being overly pro-Serbian, but I think that as far as its story goes it shows all the combatants simply similarly mad (and what multi-ethnicity civil war isn't mad...).

Another film from that unhappy corner of the world just outside of home is "Grbavica" which I think is at least as good - but lots darker. It covers life in post-war Sarajevo. No gore - nevertheless not an easy film to watch but really, really worth it.

Less strong (and more mainstream), but still quite good was "Savior". The storyline is a bit odd, starts slightly superhero-esque but that doesn't last too long and fortunately the american financiers didn't insist on some kind of cotton candy happy end - which would have ruined the film.

Then of course there's "No Man's Land", which feels like Catch-22 played out in three rooms: a trench, a bunker and the outside. More nasty humour, not as bleak as the previous films. Personally I found it more long-winded than the previous but still very good. (But the Dutch movie about them sitting on their hands during one of the major massacres was better.)

"Welcome to Sarajevo" is great, but I think it could have been darker and then would have been even better. I don't think it showed the horrors of the siege clearly enough, or maybe not well enough for me: I prefer a film that's hard to watch but powerful over an "easy listening" happy film. For example, in my book "Lilya 4-ever" wins over "Come and See", which in turn wins over "Saints and Soldiers".

Finally, the recent film with the most impact for me was "Vengo". A very lean, clean, beautiful film about Andalusia. The story is very Spanish, a deadly feud among families and their men, and it's beautifully filmed. But the music is what makes it extra-special (it won a Cesar) and includes beauties like a mix of sufi and flamenco (complete with some whirling dervish dances). Of course everything ends pretty tragic, but that's certainly part of the magic. Very much recommended, if you are (like me) allergic to hollywood garbage.

10 is 8 if you happen to think in base 8 (which is 10, if you...)

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:51:00 EST

Two days ago was the eigth anniversary of my arrival in Australia. Sometimes that feels like yesterday, sometimes more like three lives ago.

Today is also the sixth anniversary of moving into this house. For lots of Australians six years in one place is three lives ago; many deal with houses like crab shells: too small, ugly, whatever? then let's molt^Wmove and forget the old carcass. The housing industry obliges by mainly offering shoddily built disposables. *sigh*.

Ebay: you can have that sort button, when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:14:00 EST

ebay au has sort-of recently switched to a horribly ECZEMAscript-infested "experience" - which sucks heaps. NoScript makes sure my browser doesn't develop any unexpected rashes.

ebay without JS works fine as i need none of the "advanced features" (read: time-wasting blinking gadgetry that make thing less usable).

"works", that is, with one major exception: sorting search results. Selecting sort criteria now officially requires that you allow all of ebay to run JS (and advanced search doesn't expose most of the more useful sort criteria, like "price + postage"). obviously i can't have that!

oddly enough it's "JS to the rescue!" (ebay javascript = evil bloat, greasemonkey javascript = pocket tool bliss)

my greasemonkey script here restores non-js search criteria: find the unrelated search option and popup trigger elements in the page and add the search option links as normal list back to the trigger. then make it look good: the final extra gimmick uses the fact that gecko-based browsers honor the CSS class ":hover" for anything, not just anchors, so my script then makes sure the sort option list only shows up when you hover over the current sort criterion.

share and enjoy!

Bottlbuam!

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:45:00 EST

Bremst er sich ganz furchtbar zsamm,
hau ich mir den plutzer an.

*ahem*

and now for something...completely...different.

(ahoy, captain bligh! more moronic politics, *pleeeeease*!)

QLD versus .AT

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:29:00 EST

Queensland, with a reputation for having an overlarge share of rednecks and toughs, manages to properly jail a corrupt politician.

Austria, on the other hand, always manages to find new excuses for not even prosecuting the lying bastards.

So which place is more sophisticated, cultured, decent?

Oh spammer, where art thou? (or: Wo bleibt mein Taktischer Kleinbus!?!)

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:55:00 EST

It looks like some spammers have decided that snafu.priv.at is worthy of a bit of hurt: sending out spam with the From: header set to <randomglibberish>@snafu.priv.at has the "nice" side-effect of directing all the bouncy crap my way.

As you can see in the stats graph above, since May/June there are on average a thousand attempts each hour, all around the clock, to send me such crap. The usual spikes are a lot worse, about 3300 to 4500 attempts per hour, lasting half a day. That's more than one piece of crap per second...

And these are only the ones that I can toss early in the SMTP conversation: MAIL FROM: without domain or with known-bad address (e.g. nonexistent@my.domain), RCPT TO: nonexistent on my side. (The ones that make it through this phase still have to make it further through my fairly stringent spamassassin, which issues days-long IP blocks against elegible purveyors of refuse.)

But the really annoying bit is that most spammer assholes seem to have cottoned up to the fact that any self-respecting, standards-compliant mail receiver mustn't block mail with MAIL FROM: <> - which is meant for transporting legitimate bounces.

So guess where I get most refuse from? Right, disguised as bounce mail, and that way I don't even get a chance of blacklisting the parties sending me the stuff...

Short of having access to any effective retaliatory equipment I've now started throttling my mailservers not just via milter, sendmail's rate and connection rate controls but also with the kernel firewall: the sendmail rate control is nice but way too polite as it only refuses commands with 4xx but doesn't actually shut down TCP connections.

So now I run two iptable recent matches before sendmail even gets a sniff. The first is one that restricts new SMTP connections to one per minute (per source IP), and currently that's not a sliding window (i.e. the other side doesn't have to shut up for 60s before being let through but rather gets a guaranteed chance 60s from the previous successful SYN packet).

This seems to help a lot and doesn't seem to affect legit mail delivery any, as queue runs should be 10-15 min apart. Since I added that feature a few days ago the spikes have been a lot better (and I see lots of packets being denied, hehe).

The second recent match refuses new connections for four days, and is only acted out by the firewall but not controlled by it. IPs are added to that recent table from userland, by my mimedefang milter which simply writes "+1.2.3.4" into /proc/net/xt_recent/SMTP (a very nifty feature of the recent stuff). And IPs are added when we see a spammer who is obviously not just an unwitting creator of backscatter:

when they send us email that predends to be from nonexistent@my domains,
when they send email that pretends to be from an external address that does not exist (we check by talking SMTP back to the relevant servers; if they refuse accepting a bounce to this addy then it's faked or fucked, and I don't care for it either way),
if they feed us viruses (not that i care but my users might),
or if they feed us crap that goes to nonexistent@my domains (but not if it's from <>, because that can be a legit bounce or an SMTP verification just like I do myself).

This (regrettably) prickly and fastidious behaviour is the best that I've come up with so far which keeps my servers from blowing up from the garbage deluge but which doesn't violate the standards itself. (And don't tell me I should use SPF, because it's a lousy idea that causes extra breakage instead of solving any problems.)

Looking at me, it's quite amazing...

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 13:00:00 EST

...how beautiful Conny looks.

(the other two are her cousins.) But I'm way more proud of her being a good and capable person.

""The young children were nearby and unfortunately this crocodile took this dog..."

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 18:37:00 EST

Sounds like a veritable gourmet, this croc. The wording of the copper's statement is a gem; very "unfortunate" that the croc didn't reduce the human genepool a little, eh?

No, this is not how things are supposed to be...

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:12:00 EST

To round out a fairly crappy weekend, this afternoon my washing machine decided to eat its drive belt - of course while spinning at full speed, so as to maximize the damage. Picture me sitting peacefully in the toilet (which is adjacent to the laundry), *bang* and lotsa thumping and crashing and the lights are out.

Suppose I'm sorta lucky, the wiring loom is ripped apart but not totally wrecked, and the motor bearings seem to have survived their chewing exercise without damage.

wie wiad des weidagehn...

Mon, 25 May 2009 13:09:00 EST

ich bin mir nicht so sicher ob's gesund ist da� mir in letzter zeit die meisten W.Ambros-alben zwischen 72 und 81 thematisch passend vorkommen und gefallen...

Added Value

Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 EST

I'm not "normal" - and I like it that way!

A few days ago I used one of Wirth's algorithm books from the 70's for bedtime reading; it was pretty good, gave me a brief period of high brain activity before a good night's sleep. Yesterday I did the same thing with the Blue Book (Postscript Language Tutorial and Cookbook) - ah, the joy of stack-based languages!

Would a "normal", mainstream kind of person do and/or enjoy that? I don't think so.

Apropos enjoyment, apparently Aussie blokes rarely enjoy sewing: I did get a few odd looks today, being the only male person at Spotlight (homewares and fabrics shop) when I bought a pack of machine bobbins, buttons and 1.5 m^2 of navy twill. I Smell Discrimination! ;-)

Since moving to Australia I didn't have any access to a sewing machine (except once briefly), and so numerous small fix-it jobs accumulated. A week ago I finally bought me an early 80s Elna Elnita 150 - fully mechanical, heavy metal body, useful selection of stitches (15 or so, 4-step buttonhole). It cost me $100, and it was well worth it. I fondly remember my mum's Elna Lotus on which I learned the little sewing that I know, and this one is just a tad younger.

Since this acquisition I've already fixed four curtains (hemmed them up a tad), added buttonholes and buttons to a number of quilt covers that always lost the quilts, and today I repaired my trusty old Mammut jacket.

This purple fleece jacket, already a good 14 years old or so, caught a few sparks too many last time when Conny, Rob and I were camping (remember: Nylon = spun petroleum. Fleece = spun petroleum but with Even More Surface). Obviously I don't want to wear a jacket with burn holes - I'm not normal, but I'm not a complete slob!

So I decided to create a reinforcement/patch over the shoulders, front and back. I have never before sewn anything more complicated than curtains or small rectangular stuff bags for hiking.

Still I think I did it mostly right: made a pattern from paper, didn't forget allowances for hemming, measure-twice-cut-once, pinned it up with gazillions of pins and apart from one minor slip-up it ended all symmetrical without ruffles or other problems. I like the result and that I managed to create the reinforcement from one piece despite the odd round shapes everywhere.