After the almost-fiasco of upgrading my Ultra2 to Etch, I've ended up with a number of useful things to know and remember about Etch and/or this kind of setup. Share and Enjoy, I say, so here goes.
click here for the rest of the story...
Damn, how I hate those wobdesigner idiots that make you click on virtual keyboards to enter your passwords. Virginmoney/Westpac has such a thing, and a very crappy one, too, but we have a fix. All this involves EczemaScript, not nice but better than suffering.
Now I've got another set of suckers to deal with, Citibank AU. Their setup is less gnarly but still annoying. This time, I produced a fix myself: Citibank-Demouse is a Greasemonkey script that simply clears the hooks that invoke the virtual keyboard; and hey presto! keyboard-entry of your password works again.
Update (Sun 29.04.2007 18:53):
Federico Schwindt pointed out the appropriate Citibank UK url, and the script has been updated with this information.
Add two more reasons to the ever-growing list of why you must be completely stupid to want to {be in,go to} That Shrub Kingdom.
Now everybody sane knows that even keeping track of such reasons is futile as they pile up faster than you can read up on them, but these two were mad enough to deserve the mention: Satan, Satan and Thought Crime at Last.
Upgrading a sparc64 SMP box from 2.4.32 (solid but doesn't have a number of features the newer libc needs) to 2.6.20.7 has taken me since 18:00, Wednesday.
2.6 on UltraSparcs is...painful. The iptables recent module kernel oopses immediately on load, some other iptables mods are simply not available and still others have been buggy for years, the md subsystem doesn't properly deal with the older meta info, the LVM subsystem definitely fucks up the older lvm metainfo badly (in the end I had to nix one vg hard, via dd across its pvs, and restore it from backup), booting into a ripped-apart mirror doesn't work anymore unless lots of extra kernel params are given etc. etc.
fuck Fuck FUCK! damn all-the-world's-an-intel weenies.
sleep now.
Tim Kreider has a nasty kind of humour, and he's observant, politically-INcorrect and draws wicked weekly cartoons.
And of course there's the title of his mad angry tome: The Pain -- When Will It End?
The Archive and the Enemies section are especially recommended.
...because while debian's Sarge-to-Etch wasn't too ugly
a transition, it nevertheless isn't something I want to do too
often for all the boxes I'm responsible for.
(As a matter of fact there's a few I'll leave running Sarge.)
Here's all the notes I've made during the upgrade; maybe useful
to others, maybe not.
click here for the rest of the story...
Die BAWAG hat in den letzten Tagen ein paar hundert Kubanisch-stämmigen Kunden die Konten gekündigt. Grund: Arschkriecherei dem neuen zukünftigen Mehrheitsaktionär gegenüber, welcher leider in den USA sitzt (Home of the Fat, Land of the Dumb). Weil dorten mag man Kuba nicht. Weil Castro und sein Völkchen den Amis bislang nicht hinreichend in den Arsch gekrochen ist. Im Land der Bladen ist Kuba-Diskriminierung ein Gesetz (Helms-Burton Act).
Und die BAWAG kriecht fleissig im vorauseilenden Gehorsam. Was sie ja leider legalerweise dürfen; Kundschaft ablehnen ist nicht verboten. Hoffentlich ist aber die Erklärung warum diese Kundschaft abgelehnt wird, illegal: in Ö gibts sowas wie ein Diskriminierungsverbot in der Verfassung. Freilich, es ist eher unwahrscheinlich daß es das Papier wert wäre...
My life, boiled down to the minimum:
click here for the rest of the story...
Today I talked to my daughter on the phone. Conny complained about having read stuff on this here website, where I had put one of her recent photos and where I had said something about me hoping that she'd lose her extra weight so that she can enjoy her life (and adolescence) more.
She took exception to that (well-meant!) wish. :-) But, and that's the good news, she also got rid of some of the weight: $conny-=7kg;
Very well done, dear Conny! I'm proud of you (and hope you do enjoy your life...)
In other news, the weather sucks and timing sucks and all of that sucks (on my wallet): I had planned to go to Rainbow Beach from tomorrow until after Easter, for a bit of relaxing beach flying. The forecast says strong wind warnings, rain, and a completely wrong wind direction, so all my friends have bugged out, and I won't drive the 350km either. So far so good, but I'll lose the hefty deposit for the bloody apartment... it hurts to write off $300 in exchange for absolutely nothing. sigh
I've got a new toy: a Tektronix 2246 ModA, for about $500 (incl. shipping from the UK). It's really nice (100MHz, 4 channels, analog but microcontrollered, hence nice measurement and cursor features).
Current project: making a very obnoxious and loud doorbell with a PIC. I came up with the necessary microsecond-precision delay routines and the remaining frequency generation stuff, and a bit of perl took care of eating a MIDI file and barfing out suitable frequency and duration information in PIC assembler.
The last insanely horrible tune I've been trialling: "Innsbruck, ich muß dich lassen". Sounds perfectly ghastly when a cheap piezo is squarewave-squealing its guts out. I'm also thinking about using "Tirol isch lei oans" just to remind me why I'm here and not there.
Here's a pic of the latest test setup: I'm currently learning how to use an inductor to boost voltages (and how a common collector amplifier works). Messy but fun.
(Clearly not.) But nevertheless, this is a very interesting article about Fitts' Law and how interface design should be affected.
Some of the assertions seem...unfitting, though: for me, moving the mouse to
the bottom is the most annoying move, not the least: the mouse
has to travel beneath my palm and wrist (I tend to control the mouse with
my fingertips and a bend of my wrist and rarely ever lift my elbow
off the desk.) Moving to the top
I just extend my fingers, so that's faster.
But then I'm weird: I have the mouse on either side, with some bias to the left -- but I'm somewhere between righthanded and ambidextrous otherwise, I switch between two different keyboard layouts every day (german at home, english at work) and so on.
Brutish Airways recently had someone old kark it in the air. The cabin staff moved the ex-passenger to first class, propped her up in a seat and that's it. Move on, nothing to see.
The article in the Times is pretty hilarious, discussing the "disturbed" snobs in 1st. Come on, what else could they have done? Turn around just because of a stiff in cattle class? "Bomb's away"?
The part I liked best is this:
"After the plane landed, those in first class remained on board for
an hour before police and a coroner gave the all-clear."
Heavenly Justice rules! The rich snobs get to leave last for once!
hehe
As to BA, having body bags on board might have been a Good Idea. And I'd have plonked the dead in a toilet, and locked that, but of course 1st class is almost as good a place to dump a slowly rotting corpse in.
Link to the Times article
I complained about bank logins a number of times, the last one being citibank's mouse mess. Apart from that I have no major issues with their credit card service...except the insistence on a PDF plugin to read your statement. WTF?!
Well, now they can insist as much as they want because I wield the Greasy Monkey wrench...and I win! This greasemonkey script neuters the plugin-insisting code and also converts the EMBEDded (spit!) PDF into a normal plain link. Works for Citibank AU, maybe other incarnations. (BTW, userscripts.org sucks, I lost my password and can't reset it, thus this script will not end up there anytime soon.)
why are there days when nothing seems to work out? When you end up in the arvo/evening with a big fat zero on the day's tally? And why do I have oh so many of these days? I'm so sick of this...
...cupboard doors into desks, IBM Thinclients into music boxes and
all politicians everywhere into dead politicians. I'm all for it,
and I did my part for the doors and the music player. (And just for
the bloody record, let's get rid of all the governments, too. Yay for Anarchy!
I'm in a bad mood today, as you can surely tell.)
click here for the rest of the story...
...in addition to flying yourself.
I have a new toy, for the days when it's not nice (enough) to fly myself.
But like all the toys that I like, it requires loads of tinkering and
a little bit of skill.
It's a radio-controlled glider.
click here for the rest of the story...
Here's some recent projects/happenings. For my new RC plane I needed reasonable charging facilities, because most trickle chargers like the one I got with the RC gear are trash. So after some thinking about building my own charge controller (not too tricky but time-consuming) I bit the bullet and bought this SJ Propo Swallow Advance charger: a very nice bit of equipment, charges pretty much anything from Lead-Acid to Li-Po intelligently, and with nice options. $90, so not exactly breaking the bank.
But the Swallow is DC only, 11-15V, good for taking with you in the car, bad for at home. I hate wallwarts. So I need: DC, preferrably 12V at 3-5A. But I have: loads of lousy underpowered wallwarts (bad) and loads of old garbage (good). Because the old garbage contains the innards of a few Sun SCSI enclosures, some of which came with brilliant fanless Sony-made switching PSUs. APS-28: old, silent, solid, juicy and saucy :-)
Time for the tinker: it simply took a few galvanised nails, some foam and a bit of soldering to convert the Molex outlets to posts for crocodile clamps. (There is extra insulation behind the foam, but the sparkies wouldn't be too happy with the design. Screw 'em!)
That PSU now also replaces three wallwarts, which makes me really happy. I fabricated some custom charging leads from scrap (old wires, some computer connectors, crocodile clamps from rotten test leads etc.) next: one 12V lead for the Yaesu VX5R which has its own charge controller (Li-Ion) and a tiny plug, one 12V fat plug for the CDMA phone's charger-stand (with its own controller).
The fat plug also works with the cordless drill, now and only after I gutted the drill charger stand: first I connected the Swallow to that, but the stand actually contains a few resistors for trickle charging. The Swallow blasted a few Amps at about 19V across that, the resistor got a tiny little bit hot, the stand plastic started growing surrealistic in shape and I quickly stopped things before the Magic Smoke got out. Now: gutless stand, brains in the charger. Me happy.
Another recent successful tinkerproject was modding Guntis' radio: he wanted a remote PTT switch to connect to his small speaker-mike sitting on his shoulder, just like the setup I've used for the last two years. (My new in-helmet setup was tested on Sunday and works superbly.) So I hunted up parts, traced the wiring in his speakermike and Simply Dit It. First I rewired the speakermike to activate on the PTT switch, and then I built a new remote PTT switch from scratch.
Here's the switch I made for him: 100% recycled components! :-)
The switch is a leftover from a dead computer mouse that I desoldered, the cable with conveniently moulded-on mono plug comes from a first-crap-then-defunct $50 "stereo system", the button (for improved tactile feedback with gloves) is from the sewing kit my great-aunt left me, and the velcro was a leftover from some other project. Even the idea for the switch is recycled: this guy had it first :-) (Ok, solder, superglue and shrinktube were new. Sue me.)
And the next projects are already on the horizon: exploring the wonderful world of PIC microcontrollers. These things are cool! (I recently spent about $250 on a better multimeter and a bunch of chips, and may soon spend another up-to-$800 on an oscilloscope. Learning electronics is fun, but getting a reasonable set of tools is not -- for a money-concious person like me.)
Here's my first pic circuit: it toggles the led state on every switch activation, debounced in software. Looks like nothing, better stuff to follow soon because I've got shitloads of wacky ideas that I want to implement...
(This is clearly interesting to my Austrian readers only. tune in, turn off, drop out.)
Wolf Haas: empfehlenswert.
click here for the rest of the story...
I can't break eggs cleanly; always end up with some mess outside the pan and/or some eggshell shards in the food.
That's annoying, and maybe one day some genetics wiz might find a way to preprogram a break line into chicken eggs. Maybe. (BTW, the German Sollbruchstelle sounds better and more precise)
Why do I bother with undead not-even-proto-chickens? The last four weeks I've had loads of them, in a (successful) attempt at a low-carb diet (Quite easy in a country like this were meat is good and cheap). This is to get my waistline back in shape and the weight down by a few kilos.
After some startup time it has worked fine, I'm down about 6 kgs (now at 83, 186cm and genetically not meant to look slim) and the flotation ring around the hips is mostly gone. That's the same weight I had a good 12 years ago, and I'm happy.
I've also changed my eating habits substantially, and that way the weight level should be ok to hold. My dad might be proud that his (then un-appreciated) admonitions work Just Fine -- with a delay of almost 30 years: when we were small, he tended to gruffly remind us to chew every bite 30+ times and to put the fork down between bites. My sisters and I were never badly wolfing down our food, but still he felt that he had to rebuke us gruffly. Didn't work then, works fine now.
That is, if you actually need more reasons for distrusting Verisign...
VeriSign ConfigChk ActiveX Control Buffer Overflow Vulnerability iDefense Security Advisory 02.22.07 http://labs.idefense.com/intelligence/vulnerabilities/ Feb 22, 2007 I. BACKGROUND The ConfigChk ActiveX Control is part of VeriSign Inc.'s MPKI, Secure Messaging for Microsoft Exchange and Go Secure! products. It looks for the Microsoft Enhanced Cryptographic Provider in order to support 1024-bit cryptography. II. DESCRIPTION Remote exploitation of a buffer overflow vulnerability in VeriSign Inc.'s ConfigChk ActiveX Control could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code within the security context of the victim. The ActiveX control in question, identified by CLSID 08F04139-8DFC-11D2-80E9-006008B066EE, is marked as being safe for scripting. The vulnerability specifically exists when processing lengthy parameters passed to the VerCompare() method. If either of the two parameters passed to this method are longer than 28 bytes, stack memory corruption will occur. This amounts to a trivially exploitable stack-based buffer overflow.
Original advisory here
Last week I wanted to show something on this site to my mother, who just recently got herself fast(ish) Internet access. And I couldn't find what I was looking for -- at least not as fast as I'd have liked.
Now there is a search function (the form is on the left below the links). Crude, ht://Dig-based but sufficient.
A useful maxim for computer stuff and Unix people.
But I can also apply this to wood and plastic! (Yes, I am that sick.)
The under-sink cabinet in my kitchen is cramped: a normal trashbin, a plastic bag dispenser and a bin for recyclables vie for space, not to speak of the water filters and all the other stuff in there.
I'm not just a packrat but also a perfectionist, and it annoys me greatly every time when I must move the recycling bin around so that neither the dispenser nor the other bin knock into it when the doors are closed.
But that's solved now: I've automated the bin adjustment process! And it's a super-low-tech solution too, no electronics required! hehe
This weekend was crap. Yesterday blown out, today early morning downpours, clouds, wind, some drizzle later on; in the late arvo it cleared but I don't think the wind speed was low enough to fly and it was too late anyway.
So what does one do when it's unflyable? Well, from next week onwards I will have a radio-controlled glider -- again, almost 20 years after the first one. No more unflyable days!
But what I did yesterday amongst other things, was to fix up my radio
setup -- nicely, I think.
click here for the rest of the story...
If you want to contact me, and you're not using the Internet Exploder or MS Outhouse, then simply clicking on the comment link at the lower right edge of any post will connect you to an email address that works.
Mind you, both the URL as well as the email are close to the edge of what the standards allow. So far none of the spammer scraping engines has had sufficient clue to use these links. The same is true for Outhouse, I'm being told by friends. Well, that's GOOD: get yourself a Real Mail Program if you need to communicate with me!
Ah, the profound smell of hot solder...the sweet feeling of your singed fingertips...the hotglue cobwebs everywhere...feels like home.
Yesterday I acquired a PIC+eeprom programmer kit (serial) for a number of upcoming projects, and decided that I must start building it... that was at about 2300.
At 0235 (no pics) all the solder joints looked sufficiently neat and the thing powers up without emitting smoke, so it Must Be Ok. FastForward to this evening.
After the late session yesterday, I had the solder station still set up, the work table was still a mess and I decided to Get More Magic Stuff done.
I have one of these Gadmei Tuner boxes. Why? because I prefer to watch DVDs via the VGA out of my player, which works better (read: at all) if you have a monitor rather than a TV. Thus the need for something that eats HF deviltry and spits out VGA. Hence the Gadmei box. Which is great: it works, was cheap at <60$ and the picture quality is better than my old TV could wring from my very bad roof antenna. The 15" monitor was a castoff from Richard and the combination produces solid 1280x1024x60Hz TV.
But the Gadmei looks crap, has a plastic case (with only a minimum amount of internal shielding for the HF parts), and it drives me mad with its maniacally blinking red LED...in standby! (Must be the advertising industry subtly pushing you to watch more crap TV) When on, the LED is stable on. It also uses a wall wart, 5V 1A (although the thin wires provided would start glowing if it really drew that much current...) and I dislike wall warts, especially the ones (like this one) which come with the wrong prongs and need a converter stack.
However, Dr. Hackall has no fear! (and a soldering station, and a recently installed RCD for the whole house...) So I created the KingstonTV: an old gutted Kingston 10Mbit ethernet hub (ex-EUnet mid-90s vintage) which sports a solid steel case and is oversize for the Gadmei box. This required open-heart surgery, as the Gadmei has IR sensors (and spit LED) in front and connectors in the back, but the Kingston is almost twice as deep. Looking at the power problem, I decided to gut the smallest 5V/1A+ wallwart that I had lying around, which fortunately is just low enough to fit into the Kingston...if one leaves off this wussy 'isolation' stuff.
(haha, only kidding! three solid layers of plastic. I know my RCD works but I prefer not being woken by the fire alarm.)
This is the unisolated test version. The pliers were needed there so that plugging in the fat cable wouldn't move the unisolated power supply guts around to some suitable conducting tools...
The case was too small to put a socket in, so I soldered a 3-strand cable straight in, nicely fixed with cable ties. I even connected a solid case earth, and the net result is safer than the shite originally was!
So the IR sensor needed to be desoldered (I thought that I had fried it, so hard was it to get the desolder braid to work) and put on an extended cable bit. The juice plug in the back was removed, too, and direct wiring (higher-diameter stuff that should survive 5V/1A) was put in.
The kingston case acquired a number of new holes for standoffs to mount the Gadmei Guts, minus the builtin speaker (audio is connected to the Yamaha below anyway) and without access to the command buttons on the box (but that's what remote controls are for).
Visor in place, you can only see the blinking LED if you search for it from the right angle etc. Case closed. I'm happy.
Its now Dr. Nice Guy (just like Dr. Jekyll complements Mr. Hyde): Finally I have the certificate in hands, and that's such a relief.
But I must confess that I think my 1996 TU Wien diploma looks better :-)
Friends of mine recently asked my whether there's any changes now, and if I'll use the Dr. title anywhere; both of which I answered in the negative: why should anything change? Has anything, honestly, changed? I'm no more (in)competent at what I'm doing, I certainly am no better person because of having outstubborned the Processes and Procedures, and I'm not overly proud of the achievement (instead I'm relieved and moderately happy that this exercise is over). My friends told me that I should be proud :-)
For the second time in the last 5 years I've been given the Teaching Excellence award of our faculty. Doesn't have any special effects; while the last time it was a framed cert, recently they've changed to handing out "sculptures" -- or "headstones" as one of my colleagues put it.
...can indeed be odd. Very odd.
I mean John Scalzi on Being Poor, and it's recommended (but heavy) fare.
Kudos to him (whose Old Man's War is certainly on my to-read list), and to all the people who put in their two or three extra points. A "Cathartic" exercise, as one of them said. Indeed.
And gratitude + all good karma to my parents, who worked hard so that my two sisters and I never experienced more than a select few of the hardships on that list.
But one remembers, just like lots of the "having {been|grown up} poor" contributors to John's post have remembered.
The sign lay around left over from the abandoned reception office nearby. The bin is positioned strategically so that everybody entering my office can see it once they're close enough to communicate with me.
