mikeg's blog

Free LOLs courtesy of the media

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 23:09:59 -0400

Presented without further comment. Thanks to the WBAI Evening News (originally aired on August 20, 2010 - WBAI New York, 99.5FM)

Bring Forth My Amusement!

Dear Senator Schumer...

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:04:54 -0400

One of my dearly beloathed Senators (Charles Schumer) has apparently taken up the plight of the iPhone 4 victims as a righteous cause. While I agree that Apple screwed the pooch on their RF design here, I find it somewhat disconcerting that Sen. Schumer has chosen this to focus on. Please allow me to engage in a brief bit of snark:

Sen. Schumer's letter to Apple:

July 15, 2010

Dear Mr. Jobs,

I write to express concern regarding the reception problem with the Apple iPhone 4. While I commend Apple's innovative approach to mobile technology and appreciate its service to millions of iPhone users nationwide, I believe it is incumbent upon Apple to address this flaw in a transparent manner. According to Consumer Reports' review, released Monday on its website, the iPhone 4's signal-strength problem is a hardwire glitch triggered by gripping the device in a particular manner. This finding, according to Consumer Reports, "call[s] into question” Apple’s recent claim that the problem is “largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software." Consumer Reports declined to recommend the iPhone 4 because of this hardware design flaw.

Given the discrepancy between Consumer Reports' explanation of the reception problem and the explanation provided by Apple in its July 2 letter to customers, I am concerned that the nearly two million purchasers of the iPhone 4 may not have complete information about the quality of the product they have purchased. The burden for consumers caused by this glitch, combined with the confusion over its cause and how it will be fixed, has the potential to undermine the many benefits of this innovative device. To address this concern, I ask that Apple provide iPhone 4 customers with a clearly written explanation of the cause of the reception problem and make a public commitment to remedy it free-of-charge. The solutions offered to date by Apple for dealing with the so-called “death grip” malfunction—such as holding the device differently, or buying a cover for it—seem to be insufficient. These proposed solutions would unfairly place the burden on consumers for resolving a problem they were not aware of when they purchased their phones.

I also encourage Apple to keep its promise to provide free software updates so that bars displayed accurately reflect signal strength; I further urge Apple to issue a written explanation of the formula it uses to calculate bar strength, so that consumers can once again trust the product that they have invested in.

I look forward to Apple's swift action on this matter, and once again laud Apple for its innovative efforts and service to millions of Americans.

Sincerely,

Charles E. Schumer

Continue reading "Dear Senator Schumer..."

Inverse Coherence - An exploration of my brain from the inside out.

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:09:22 -0400

This is a fair warning: Everything below the break is unedited and incoherent, possibly repetitive, and really I don't know why I'm posting it.

This is a ride through my mind, stream of consciousness style - I could probably sell tickets, and very few have seen the whole show (most aren't around anymore). We're not going all the way on this tour - I think there was still some safety rope somewhere, but enjoy it for what it is - You may even see the boundaries of my mind, though I'm not even sure where they are myself.

For the sake of your sanity, anything written in (parentheses) can (and SHOULD) be skipped in evaluating a sentence. Come back to them later for insight, inanity, and [Insert: Something else beginning with "i"].

Feel free to comment on it, and don't let it upset you -- Remember, it's only my brain: You don't have to live with it.

Continue reading "Inverse Coherence - An exploration of my brain from the inside out."

Wikileaks, Lamo & Manning (Oh My!)

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 16:42:00 -0400

Wow, a blog post? Yeah, this one didn't fit in 140 characters...

So much hay has been made recently about Adrian Lamo (@6) "outing" SPC Manning for leaking the Collateral Murder tape & other somewhat embarrassing (you could even say downright shameful) activities that the US Government has been engaging in. Both sides are throwing their fits and I'm saddened to see that mud slinging has already begun, so here I stand in defense of... well... everyone.
For those who want my $0.02, here is is:

Don't crucify The Leaker for following his conscience.
Don't crucify Lamo for making a judgment call & doing the same.

For those interested in more, here's my $19.95 plus postage, handling and applicable taxes:

Continue reading "Wikileaks, Lamo & Manning (Oh My!)"

InterMapper & RT: You two play nice now…

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 15:30:00 -0400

This is going to be one of my rambling sysadmin-y entries talking about stuff that's probably of little general interest. Fair warning given.

There are two components that I would consider essential to proper system administration: GOOD Monitoring and Issue/Incident Tracking. It is imperative that you know when a problem arises (preferably before anyone else notices) and that you keep track of the problems you have encountered in order to spot troublesome systems and redesign them to stop bugging you.
Those of you who have worked with me know I have my prejudices in both of these areas, and that for the last few years I've settled on two pieces of software to fill these roles: InterMapper for monitoring and RT for issue tracking.

The major caveat of this pairing is that the two have no formal integration: InterMapper will happily send emails, and RT will happily accept emails and turn them into tickets, but RT doesn't know when InterMapper is telling it about the same problem twice, or that a previous issue has been cleared. The end result of this lack of integration is that you have a bunch of RT tickets for the same issue which need to be manually merged and resolved, and this manual bit bugged me enough that I actually took the time to fix it!

Continue reading "InterMapper & RT: You two play nice now…"

F the CC - Joe Biden's F-Bomb

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 01:00:00 -0400

So the Vice President of the United States of America said "Fuck". On the air. Twice.
Big fucking deal.

I've been prodded by a few people about this, so here's my 90 second commentary:
Joey-B dropped the F-Bomb twice during daytime programming hours (well outside the 10pm - 6am "Safe Harbor" for cussing up a storm on the air).
The last time I checked the FCC was to levy a fine of $7000 for each violation (i.e. every time a word slips out over the air), scalable up to $32500 based on other factors, like a history of prior infringements (and we clearly have at least two violations here).

So I have a few quetions.

Is the FCC going to fine all the broadcasters who carried this speech live-live (no delay) and/or those who carried it with a net & failed to hit the bleep button fast enough?
Is the FCC going to fine either Joe Biden (personally) or the US Government (as an entity) for producing/distributing profane material?
Will we ever get rid of our nation's irrational fear of the word FUCK and the sight of breasts?

... seriously folks, it's just a word. Get over it and move on.

Interesting (impractial) OpenSSL attack

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:31:23 -0500

While I usually read El Reg for teh lulz occasionally they come up with an interesting nugget, like their article on a "severe" OpenSSL vulnerability (quotes theirs). This vulnerability comes to us courtesy of the University of Michigan, and is tied to a simple oversight in the OpenSSL code: It doesn't perform a verification pass on signatures before sending them to a client.
So all you crypto-nerds, how many of you do a verify on your signatures before you send them? Hands please? Nobody? Not even me? -- Yeah, we all tend to trust that our math Just Works. I mean it's a computer, you put in fixed input through a deterministic algorithm and you get the same output ever time. Right? Nope.

in their paper

That is all well and good, except it relies on errors in the system generating the signatures. These errors are rare (and pretty random) in the real world, so no problem, right? Wrong again Sparky! These clever folks came up with something I wouldn't ever have thought of.

Those of you who have worked on old Commodore computers probably know one of the first symptoms of a power supply going wonky is that the system starts acting up: Lots of random crashes, video corruption, etc. Why does that happen? Because the voltage being supplied to the system is fluctuating. Fluctuating voltages (specifically down-swings) cause all the magical voltage regulation hardware to go out of regulation, which feeds out-of-spec voltages to the chips, which in turn start making mistakes in their math.
The bottom line for this attack is an extension of that well-known Commodore problem: By putting controlled voltage fluctuations into the power supply of real computers (SPARC boxen running Linux) the UMichigan folks were able to induce errors in the math used by the real-world OpenSSL code and recover an actual key.

Continue reading "Interesting (impractial) OpenSSL attack"

Born Trilogy (@rob_t_firefly takes the blame for this)

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:11:48 -0500

So the point of this whole thing is trivial enough that I went ahead and did it: Go to Wikipedia and type in your birthday (month and day). Then you write down 3 events, 3 births, 3 deaths and 3 holidays.
December 29

Events

1778 – American Revolutionary War: 3,500 British soldiers under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell capture Savannah, Georgia without firing a shot.
Way to go Georgia, just roll over and take it. Bitches.
1890 – United States soldiers kill more than 200 Oglala Lakota people with four Hotchkiss guns in the Wounded Knee Massacre.
120 years later we're still treating the natives like shit & using the treaties to wipe our national ass -- Progress, we no can has
2003 – The last known speaker of Akkala Sami dies, rendering the language extinct.
Interesting tidbit in honor of all those linguistics courses I took.

Births

1800 – Charles Goodyear, American inventor (d. 1860)
A subtle reminder from the universe to check your tire inflation and wear pattern
1921 – Robert C. Baker, Inventor of the chicken nugget (d. 2006)
Cue ironic chorus of "Nugget Man"
1967 – Andy Wachowski, American director
I still won't forgive him for the Matrix sequels. Filthy humans ruinsed a good thing.

Deaths (Excluding the "event" death)

1731 – Brook Taylor, English mathematician (b. 1685)
1737 – Joseph Saurin, French mathematician (b. 1659)
1891 – Leopold Kronecker, German mathematician (b. 1823)

Apparently not a good day to be a mathematician… Do I get any bonus points for a trifecta?

Holidays
Only 2 and nothing relevant: The 5th day of Christmas (but nobody cares aside from the song) and apparently St. Becket's day (patron saint of secular clergy, so I suppose that's appropriate with me being an ordained minister and all)

The Wheel: Let me reinvent it for you! (update-notifier redux)

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:57:51 -0500

OK, for the record: I DESPISE Linux. I Hate, Loathe, Abhor and Revile it. I am a BSD-Bigot and proud of it, and if all the BSDs suddenly evaporated I would eschew Linux in favor of a commercial Unix (probably AIX).

Why do I hate Linux so much? Simply put, it's shoddy code written by shoddy coders. In my experience shit mysteriously breaks for no reason, standards and conventions are arbitrarily ignored, critical components of the system are perpetually at version zero-dot-something, regression testing seems to be a myth, and the average Linux developer seems to make no effort to ensure their code will work on anything except their particular favorite distribution (to say nothing about porting it to <GASP> a BSD system, or <HORRORS> Commercial Unix).

This particular tirade was kicked off by the Ubuntu update-notifier program suddenly and mysteriously no longer popping up update notification balloons. As some of you know my company ships a Linux-based appliance (built around a very stripped-down Ubuntu plus our commercial packages), and one of the things that made me go with Ubuntu was that they had gotten the update-notifier thing working beautifully and it had been stable for several versions.
Lo and Behold about a month ago our support guys came to visit me and asked "Hey, is the update notifier bubble broken?" I looked upon it and saw that it indeed appeared to be non-functional, but as all good (lazy) admins are wont to do I demanded they test and verify the breakage.

The breakage came back to me verified earlier this week, and as I really couldn't be assed to figure out why the update-notifier is happy to display the "you must reboot!" dialog box but refuses to display the "Yo, bitch! You have updates!" notifier icon & bubble I took the easy way out and re-implemented update-notifier in Python.

Continue reading "The Wheel: Let me reinvent it for you! (update-notifier redux)"

Trigonometric Programming: The tangent function & Software Development

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:17:45 -0500

Blocked waiting for my either the software development group to give me new code to test or my FreeBSD build VM to give me a new OS build to test, so how about some random thoughts on programming?

I've reached the inescapable conclusion that all software development cycles can be expressed as a single equation: y=tan(x+(π/2))

X represents time (on a totally non-linear scale) with each interval of width π being the development of a software release and the zero point where the function crosses the X axis representing the release of the X/π^th version. The Y axis represents the state of the code - how "bug free" it is. I'll call the Y value within a version the "completeness" of the code for simplicity.

This functional model actually works surprisingly well:

During pre-0.0 release (X|0...π/2) the software is riddled with bugs and brokenness ("completeness" is negative - that shit don't work!).
- At some point (X=(π+ε)/2) the software becomes at least functional (miniscule positive completeness), and is released to the unsuspecting public.
- The initial release is buggy as shit, and massive patching and bug fixing happens
  (This is roughly from X|(π+ε)/2...3π/2 -- For the sake of argument let's call the 3π/2 mark the .1 release, or in MS parlance, "Service Pack 1")
- The software continues asymptotically approaching infinite completeness -- that nirvana state of having no bugs...
...At which point Marketing comes along and says the users want new features -- On our graph this corresponds to one of the vertical asymptote at multiples of π.
- Development begins on the next (N/π)-dot-zero release, starting al over again from negative completeness.

In practical terms software development is not a true function: Each development window is independent and shifted toward X=0, with some overlap between the currently released version and the version under development.

Lions and Tigers and Unscheduled Outages, Oh My!

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:38:46 -0500

For those of you wondering where bsd-box.net went this weekend, here's the scoop:

A while back I stopped being a data protection douche and implemented backups. I didn't blog about the implementation, but it was bacula writing to rsync.net over sshfs (fuse for the win).

These backups worked fine for a good while, but on Friday (my first full backup since upgrading to 8.0) the damn thing blew up and took the server down with it. Near as I can tell without being on the console something caused the FUSE kernel module to go insane - The system goes unresponsive, starts taking forever to respond to pings and eventually falls over entirely.

Troubleshooting that mess is on my list as soon as I can reproduce the problem in a test lab, but until then bsd-box.net is running a ghetto-ass tar-then-SCP backup routine (so I'm not a data protection douche since I've still got backups, but my backups are decidedly more ghetto).

Those of you who sent me emails, panic not: I have a very fine secondary MX which will eventually despool whatever you sent me. If it's urgent go ahead and resend.

What got me where I am today (the "3 things" blog meme)

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:16:11 -0500

Sure, OK... why not.

Paul Randal started this mess: He wrote a blog post about 3 events that brought him to the current point in his career, and invited the rest of the interwebs to do the same. I decided I would and promptly forgot about it, then @zippy1981 did and I felt guilty, So here, with a decidedly carreer-and-IT slant because y'all just DO NOT WANT to know about my personal proclivities, are my three events:

Continue reading "What got me where I am today (the "3 things" blog meme)"

WBAI Gone Country

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:54:15 -0400

On April 1, 2009 the Off the Hook crew staged a mock-takeover of WBAI/99.5FM (NY), rebranding the station as "Country 99.5".
They revived the takeover as part of the Fall 2009 fund drive, opening their October 21, 2009 show with the same clips. Since I was listening on my iPhone I managed to capture one of the "Station ID" breaks for your listening pleasure.

The original program can be found here, at the 2600/OTH archives. Much hilarity was had by all.

Obligatory Beg: If you're a WBAI listener please donate, volunteer, or both. The station is still trying to unwind years of financial mismanagement, and without help its continued existence is far from certain.

Obligatory Notice: This is not the place to bitch and moan about why your favorite faction is best suited to run WBAI, or for the various factions to snipe at eachother.
If you think you can do better than the current regime: Run for the LSB next year.
If you have ideas about how to help the station: Show up to LSB meetings & talk about them.
If you start shit here: Your comments will be screened and your IP blocked.

I feel stupid posting this notice on such a low-traffic blog, but some of the infighting going on around WBAI makes me wonder if we as a community are mature enough to have a station like this.

The Open-Source Environment (List)

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:37:19 -0400

It occurs to me that aside from a few exceptions I've managed to get Premier Heart to a nearly 100% open-source / free(-as-in-beer) footing.

As 2009 is pretty much over I think it only makes sense to take stock of the software we're using for posterity - 5 years from now we can look back at this list and laugh the same way people laugh now when they remember FoxPro or COBOL...

Continue reading "The Open-Source Environment (List)"

I'm in my server, upgradin my blogz

mikeg@bsd-box.net (mikeg) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 20:26:58 -0400

Well, it looks like s9y and PHP 5.3.0 are not the best of friends -- lots of deprecated crap that was scrolling many Deprecated: messages at the bottom of my blog. (Stupid software. Stupid deprecation. Stupid...STUPID!)

Upgraded to s9y 1.5 prerelease, replaced a few wayward split() calls (now deprecated) with explode() (still permissible and technically "better" since it's split()-ing on a plain string and not a regex), and now I don't have to look at that shit anymore.

All of this because I'm preparing to launch another N-part series on Bacula, rsync.net & remote VTLs. Stay tuned.