I thoroughly detest udev: large, ugly, inflexible, disgusting, recently started to insist on DEVTMPFS and /usr being on / (or having an initramdisk, neither of which I accept) and so on.

For the few situations where there are dynamic changes on my boxes (e.g. usb sticks, radio killswitch and so on) I've made do with hotplug until now, but that set of shell scripts has simply grown too annoying to maintain. But recently I found out about mdev, a small component of busybox, and I took to it instantly.

Mdev was designed to be a micro-udev for all kinds of embedded systems where busybox is playing the vital role of providing most (if not all) classic unix tools. To me mdev is the embodiment of the unix mindset: do one thing, and do it well.

And that's what it does: if given the -s switch, it trawls /sys for things that look like devices and creates them in /dev. When run without args as hotplug helper, it creates the device the kernel tells it about, or loads firmware if that's asked for, or removes a device if the kernel says it is going away. These operations are adjustable via a straightforward, simple configuration file which also lets you tell it to run commands of your choice (and load modules), and that's all there is to it. mdev consists of about 650 lines of C, and it works very well.

What it is/was lacking, is support for kernel uevents with action=change, which some subsystems use (e.g. the rfkill subsystem signals changes to any radio kill switches that way). So I wrote this tiny patch to add that capability (I hope upstream includes it in the next version of busybox), and mdev now runs *-tagged commands on add, remove and change.

The other lacking thing is documentation - in the debian packages, that is. mdev is decently explained in docs/mdev.txt and examples/mdev*.conf in the source tarball, but the debian maintainer chose not to ship any of that. I'd recommend getting and reading those documents first if you ponder playing with mdev.

So, to help others along a bit, here is my own setup as an example:

• my commented mdev config file,
• my auto mounter for removable devices,
• and a small renaming helper that puts usb devices into a hierarchy in /dev/bus/usb/NNN/MMM.

I do have a few extra bits and pieces (e.g. startup scripts, small rfkill and bluetooth agents), but they're somewhat idiosyncratic and likely not very useful to others (but just ask if you do want them).

Socialism:

You have 2 cows. You give one to your neighbour.

Communism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both and gives you some milk.

Fascism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both and sells you some milk.

Nazism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both and shoots you.

Bureaucratism:

You have 2 cows. The state takes both, shoots one, milks the other and then throws the milk away.

Traditional Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You sell one and buy a bull. Your herd multiples and the economy grows. You sell them and retire on the income.

American Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows. Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

Enron Venture Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You sell 3 of them to your publicly listed company using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with tax exemption for five cows. The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company. The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows. No balance sheet provided with the release. The public then buys your bull.

Accenture Model Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You shred them.

French Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You go on strike, organise a riot and block the roads because you want 3 cows.

Japanese Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You redesign them so they are 1/10 the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk. You then create a clever cow cartoon image called "Cowkimon" and market it worldwide.

German Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month and milk themselves.

Italian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows, but you don't know where they are. You decide to have lunch.

Russian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You count them and learn that you have 5 cows. You count again and learn you have 42 cows. You count again and learn you have 2 cows. You open another bottle of vodka.

Swiss Capitalism:

You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you. You charge the owners for storing them.

Chinese Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You have 300 people milking them. You claim that you have a full employment and and high bovine productivity. You arrest the journalist who reports otherwise.

Indian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. You worship them.

British Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. Both are mad.

Iraqi Capitalism:

Everyone thinks you have many cows. You tell them you have none but they don't believe you and bomb the shit out of your farm. You still have no cows, but at least you are part of a democracy.

New Zealand Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. The one on the left is looking pretty sexy...

Australian Capitalism:

You have 2 cows. Business seems good. You close the office and go for a few celebratory beers.

And here we go again: behind closed doors They are negotiating the rules of TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership=next-generation ACTA.

Then there is, of course, the new CISPA bill (=SOPA/PIPA regurgitated and made worse).

And there is Austri^WAbsurdistan's VDS (= preemptive wholesale surveillance of the whole population).

Repeat ad nauseam.

Looks like humanity needs more Tor relays (and bridges), more services like Tor Mail, DDG (with its Tor hidden service), and ideas like the Telex Project - oh, and would somebody please cook up some gene-engineered plague that takes out politicians? Those pests are really annoying...

possibly educated but precisely zero practical relevance. i'm serious - which of the above would you consider to be practically useful bits of knowledge and which not? ('impact the course of history'?!?....*bwuahahaa*)

source: pleated-jeans

There are people who pull off pretty amazing stunts, like getting lost for three days/four nights in a fairly small national park just inland from the Gold Coast.

Somehow I can see only one explanation: she must have been wearing her bikini over her eyes :-)

that's the way i read this company name: 'your health and safety is unintentional and purely accidental, as you wouldn't need to buy our services if you were safe and healthy.'

(pic snarfed from the demotivator company)

Researchers have found that going to meetings makes people stupid. (The whole paper can be found here - a candidate for an IG Nobel Price?)

If only the apparatchiks in my place of ork knew that - or even better, read this Harvard Business review article...

One of the nasty coercive laws of the last few years has just taken a beating:

A Yank federal appeals court has ruled that being forced to decrypt your stuff is unconstitutional. Good for the J. Doe in question, who relied on TrueCrypt which is a pretty nice tool (open-source - but badly licenced, multi-platform, and it does plausible deniability).

The actual text of the ruling is also pretty interesting in its argumentation.

Now if only the powers that be in this place would scrap the Cybercrime Act 2001 No. 161, items 12 and 28...

Last week Aldi OZ had an especially odd item on special: blood stain removers, 8 units per pack. Just how did I survive for 39 years without such highly crucial, essential stuff that you need every single day?

(Maybe it's because I have a spade. Then, maybe not.)

Nope - I'm in the wrong movie...or more likely: I work for the wrong gang. Maybe they 'award' us these things so as to properly weigh us down here in the trenches, to make sure that no dreams or hopes escape and fly away.

Well then, back to work in my usual 'first week of the semester' work clothing...

The current wanking draft for HTML5, section 8.2.2.2 translates into the W3C saying 'standards are a good thing, but we are clairvoyant and know better than all of you, so fuck them standards and all the people actually relying on standards compliance!'

Dear W3C, when I label material as being encoded in iso-8859-1 then I MEAN ISO-8859-1 and not smart-shite-infested windows-1252, thank you very much.

Your oh-so-helpful labelling of this mess a 'willful violation, motivated by a desire for compatibility' motivates me to shoot you all on sight.

I've got these Ikea spice racks in my kitchen, and the way I installed them they needed to be fastened to the wall for stability. I didn't want to drill the tiles, however.

Once again my answer is "recycling": I habitually salvage the magnets from dead hard drives. The spice rack is coated steel, the magnets are pretty strong and so I simply glued a bunch of them onto the tiles. Silicone sealant makes a decent glue for operations like that, and it's removable if need be. Problem solved.

...doesn't have to be high tech. I've got a new toy that I really like: It's a Aristo 868 slide rule, and I find it pretty amazing how much you can do with it. Best of all: no batteries :-)

I'm obviously not against high tech, for example:

That's my trusty HP 28S, which I got in 1988 - RPN forever! But still there is a certain minimalistic appeal to the simple magic of sliding log scales...

I like gumtree quite a bit: it's free for private ads, no registration required, simple email-based access and best of all it works. When my nephew visited we needed a car seat for him, and the second ad I responded to worked out. Now that Emil is back in Vienna the seat is surplus. I posted an ad two days ago, had four responses within 24 hours and sold the seat today (for the same amount as I paid two months ago). Very nice.

I just hope ebay (who own gumtree via some subsidiary nowadays) don't stuff this service up...

From the aptly named 'strange but true' category (in the Sydney Morning Herald news) here's a story about ridiculously gullible people.

(with apologies to any non-Austrian readers for the utterly untranslatable title...)

Today we turned this:

into this: and here's the story.
(more...)

The laundry and the water heater are renewed and I'm declaring the renovation work in this place done, finished, over. (I know, I know, famous last words and all that - but at least I don't plan any further biggies). Here are some photos of the exercise.
(more...)

Not bad: since the new meter went in, I consumed electricity worth $81 - and received $43 credit for the energy my solar panels created.

but then that's maybe a good thing? Because Tron = pretty cool for 1982, but Tron Guy = doubleplusuncool, anytime.

Recently I bought some pretty cheap LED strips (5050-type, 60 LEDs/meter, flexible, waterproof and self-adhesive, can be cut every 5cm, cost $72 for ten meters) for overhauling the under-cabinet lighting in the kitchen. One old laptop PSU went into the range hood casing (displacing the trashy light sockets that thing had) and the left side is powered by a low-profile LED transformer. Mounting the stuff is a breeze: cut to size, cut and peel back a little of the silicon waterproofing, solder on wires, then peel off the backing paper and stick it in place, done.

I think it looks great - I'm pretty sure my sisters will say it looks like an abattoir... It's certainly very nice for working and it's also pretty frugal for the amount of light (about 2A at 12V on the left side, a bit less on the right).

Look, a leak - quick, get a plumber!

IMNSHO the cablegate-gate serves assange right, after dribbling out just some of the cables and in homeopathetic amounts over a year.

Information wants to be free after all:-)

That's a screenshot from a recent TV advertisment where Dolly Parton threatens she'll visit Oz real soon, after leaving us in peace for the previous 28 years.

Partlejuice indeed: looks like she spent those umpteen years well interred and/or hitting the botox clinics.

dear wikileaks webhamsters, would you *please* stop inflating every single damn cable with all the navigational fluff? it's all empty carbs, you know, and makes mirroring you a FPITA.

if you downloaded the latest cablegate snapshot via bittorrent you might be surprised that it's only about 300 megabytes (for 150k cables) - but you WILL be unpleasantly surprised when you unpack that archive: it expands (like kudzu) to a whopping 30+ gigabytes.

the reason: every single cable page is infested with links everywhere else and then some, so that the actual content is just about 3%.

take this cable for example: after ripping out all the gunk between <div class='pane small'> (might have called the css class 'pain, big') and the closing </div> after 'courage is contagious', the page shrinks from a whopping 168k to just 6k. the cleaned page thus consumes only 3.6% of the disk space and network bandwidth of the fugly original beast (and don't forget there's 150 thousand such occurrences right now).

nobody, dear leakers, is going to mirror 30+g of you strutting your fluff on a daily basis - but a decent, still navigatable 7g would be a very different story.

include, amongst others, that they're patronizing little FPOS.

Some time ago I wrote up my experiences with running gpg remotely. This post documents the most recent changes I've made to my setup, which finally make my gpg (and ssh) keys fully mobile and 'migratory'.

Like before I use the kernel key storage system to cache passphrases (and that won't change until I switch to gnupg2 with the agent). But now my keys are all stored on a usb stick, in an encrypted filesystem.

When I login the first time any day, I load the keys from the encrypted storage into a RAM disk. (A simple symlink in ~/.gnupg is sufficient to convince gnupg to find the secret ring.) When I leave for/from work I nuke the RAM disk - that way the keys are always only present where I physically am.

The big new change from the previous setup is that now I use sshfs when I need to use gpg for anything on a remote box: I ssh into the target box with a remote port forwarded back to a listening instance of sftp-server on the local box (which has the keys in RAM). With agent forwarding on, the sshfs connection doesn't require entering passwords, and the mount point is of course set to be the same as the RAM disk location for locally loaded keys, so to gpg it's totally transparent. (I'd never do any of this if not all machines in question were under my exclusive full control.)

sshfs is no speed daemon, but then the secret ring file isn't large. sshfs with -o directport on the forwarded port reuses the existing outbound ssh connection, so one single outbound ssh connection does it all - and another benefit of that setup is that the keys vanish from the remote machine as soon as the outbound ssh connection is shut down.

The one simple shell script doing all this setup is less than 60 lines long: simple, neat, sufficient.

What do you do with dead hard disks? I usually salvage the magnets; the larger ones make perfect holders for things like tools, knifes or mobiles.

Here's my ghetto mobile mount, mk.2: a 3x3cm piece of thin sheet metal sellotaped to the back of the phone and two fat ex-disk magnets screwed to the dashboard. Plenty strong, vibration-proof and completely invisible under the silicone phone cover. And, of course, zero cost.

zeit wars, und gut is: der letzte von den 'adligen' gfriesern, ein gewisser otto, ist jetzt endlich abgebankelt. zeit hat er sich gelassen - wie mit allem anderen, wie zb. dem herrschafts-ansprüche aufgeben (das hat bis 1961 gedauert...na hallo?!?).

aber sogar einen widerling wie den da erwischt es irgendwann - und jetzt kriechen ihm, wie in ö ja so üblich und komplett erwartet - posthum die ganzen schwarzen und sonstwie ewiggestrigen deppen in den modrigen arsch.

..of those high-energy photons, please! Ahem. On Monday the sparkies performed the solar installation on my roof (6 big panels for a nominal 1.5kW of lovely solar electricity).

We'll see how much of my energy needs that will take care of (it won't be all for sure; I usually need about 11kW/day and a 1.5kW installation won't provide more than 60% of that) - but the feed in tariffs for exporting energy to the grid are good (so far): you get quite a bit more for your exported kW than you pay for consumption.

Now I just need to wire up the inverter's serial port and start logging performance with rrdtool...

Making the news today: QLD coppers have arrested a journalist - for attending the AusCERT conference and publishing articles about the conference. Hello, WTF?!?

Right now it seems the coppers are backpedalling quite furiously, but they certainly deprived him of his freedom (temporarily) and seized his ipad (not so temporarily).

Well, if I was a letter I'd also feel like being abandoned after having those two parasitic muppets pasted on me. (for my few colonial readers, Karl Kraus said "In Austria, sending a letter means to abandon it". He was obviously not enamoured with the ÖPTV's services, and used the nuances of German to the limit: "Aufgeben" means both posting a letter and abandoning something (as in: all hope), and "heissen" is good for both expressing "is called" and "has the meaning of"...)