What's it all about, Alfie?

Each day I have an 80 min commute from my house to my cube, and it's not bad. Don't get me wrong, I can remember walking to my office in Grad School in 5 mins - but given that I work in Downtown Chicago and would not want to live within 5 mins of where I work, it's a decent compromise.

Each day I have an 80 min commute from my cube to my house, and it's horrible. It's the same streets, the same train, the same car, the same roads - but different people, and as Robert Frost might have said that has made all the difference.

It's the commuters in the evening that make the trip nasty. In the morning, it's early - and I mean really early, yet most everyone takes their turn, waits in line, doesn't push, and we all get on the train quickly and get to work. In the evening it's pushing and shoving... angry faces... loud talkers on the train - and then we get to the traffic.

In the morning, I almost have the road to myself. Nice and quick, no problems. But in the evening it's a traffic jam from the word go. First, it's all the people that think a Stop Sign is really a way to get the jump on honest saps. They fly right through 4-way stops like the know the rest of us are going to stop. Then there are the busses... at one specific intersection near the train station one bus will play blocker for as many busses that don't have the right-of-way as necessary. I've repeatedly watched one Pace block the road for eight other of it's ilk - and then not allow one car to go after the last bus. It's like a little club - Here you go, my buddies... all of you can go - but not you, car!. It's something that I know they aren't going to change... they don't care. But if the drivers of the busses were in their cars, they would not do the same thing - Oh, I like these Jeeps, they can go - but not you Fords!

The problem is that people seem to think that they are special. They deserve to get home 30 sec. faster than the rest of us. We must not have any place to go, which is why they don't feel bad about cutting you off, sitting in the middle of an intersection, and in general doing such poor driving they'd never get a license if it depended on their daily driving habits.

I know this is just ranting... aggressive drivers in Naperville are nothing in comparison to Detroit or Downtown Chicago, but it's funny that these same people don't see themselves as being aggressive on the road. They probably think of themselves as nice, kind, caring - even sharing, people. But don't you believe it. They're not that far removed from the lower species.

Even since blender was a commercial product, with a free version for SGI machines, I've played with blender. I say played because while I wish I were a graphic artist, I'm not. Not even close.

Oh, I can appreciate good work, and I can do a decent job of things when I have to, but I'm no real artist. I know I haven't really put forth the effort to be a good artist - hours and hours of study and practice, but it's as much the inspiration and native ability that I'm lacking. I'm not a doodler, and that is probably a key element in what makes a person put the effort into the study. So I guess I'm a graphics hacker and leave it at that.

Still... a new version of blender is out, and it runs well on Mac OS X, so I picked up a copy, and should that inspiration finally strike, I know I'll be ready for it.

I have been keeping a blog long before it was ever even called that. I called it my online Journal, and this morning I've been spending a little time putting in all the old entries - well... at least a good chunk of them, into MarsEdit and WordPress on my new site. It's just the more main-stream blogging software.

When I get time I'm going to put in all the entries - all the way back to 2001.

UPDATE: I loaded everything back to early Feb 2001 - which is as far back as my database journal goes. The HTML version probably goes back another year, but that's on some backup tape, and if I really get an itching to go back that far, I'll have to get the files off the tar tape and then import them by hand.

This weekend I finally got to move back into my office after the construction work sent me packing more than two weeks ago. Needless to say, I was very happy about getting things started again and having all the services I use day-to-day back and on-line.

I had moved the cable modem and broadband router to the bedroom and hooked up them in a minimal configuration with the wireless access point in the bedroom - so I've had access to email, etc. but not really access to my office. All covered in plastic and turned off. It was a very profound silence to me.

But it's back and thankfully everything came back. I'm still planning on retiring opus this summer - he's just as old as he can be, and to count on him for CVS and database is just pushing my luck these days. I can get a cheap little machine that will do a much better job for next to nothing.

Anyway... it's great to be back!

I got a new iMac this weekend and wanted to get sshd running on both the standard port 22 and port 2224 that I'll use in my firewall to redirect requests from outside. Common practice, really. I want to have the machine act normally within the network of my house, but I also want to be able to directly get to it from outside as well. The problem is that sshd is not run as a daemon on Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), it's run from launchd more like telnet.

There are configuration files - plists, that take the place if the xinetd conf files indicating what to run when a message comes in on a certain port. However, in this case, I needed to add an extra port to the configuration. If you look in the file /System/Library/LaunchDaemons directory you'll find a file called ssh.plist. In it's original form it looks something like this:

    <key>Sockets</key>
        <dict>
            <key>Listeners</key>
            <dict>
                 <key>Bonjour</key>
                 <array>
                     <string>ssh</string>
                     <string>sftp-ssh</string>
                 </array>
                 <key>SockServiceName</key>
                 <string>ssh</string>
            </dict>
        </dict>

It needs to be modified to look like this:

    <key>Sockets</key>
        <dict>
            <key>Listeners</key>
            <array>
                <dict>
                    <key>Bonjour</key>
                    <array>
                        <string>ssh</string>
                        <string>sftp-ssh</string>
                    </array>
                    <key>SockServiceName</key>
                        <string>ssh</string>
                </dict>
                <dict>
                    <key>SockServiceName</key>
                        <string>sshalt</string>
                </dict>
            </array>
        </dict>

The key is that for launchd the value for Listeners can be a dictionary or an array of dictionaries. It was in the man page for launchd and that's what lead me to the breakthrough. You also need to add a line to /etc/services for the new service 'sshalt' (ssh-alternative) which references the port number that you want to monitor as well.

Now I can control SSH with the standard tools, it won't run until a user comes to the box and it's all in-line with the Mac OS X way of doing things.

A few days ago, I noticed that sparky was dead. I don't like this kind of surprise, but there's not a lot I can do about it other than to try and find out the problem and fix it.

The last time I had a hardware fault it turned out to be a dead hard drive. This time, I took one of the internal drives out and placed is in a simple 911 case, so as to reduce the load on the power supply and remove one of the heat generating devices in the case. This didn't help. But I was happy to see that the drives booted. That's something.

The next thing was a Google search for Watchdog resets. Interestingly, the first hit was from the Ross page talking about the possibility that there might be a fault in one of the CPUs. Thankfully, I had the SuperSPARC processors that I had originally used in the box, and so I swapped out the CPU modules - going from four HyperSPARCs to two SuperSPARCs. Bummer of a downgrade. But it seems to be stable.

Since I really only use sparky as a server, and don't really need the speed as much as I need the stability, it's a decent trade. I really didn't want to put a lot of money into this box, but I need to keep it running for a while longer.

OK, I'm the first to admit I'm a workaholic... but I like that as it gives me something to do each day. But I've just come off a vacation and am so ready to go back to work it's wonderful. I'm feeling refreshed, happy and excited about the same old problems that I've been dealing with for the last several months at work - but at least now, they don't seem bad. It's all about the recharge.

OK... I've complained enough about not having enough to do, so it's nice to have a lot to do - maybe even a little too much. I've been very busy these last few days keeping up on the coding I wanted to get done as well as keeping the production and UAT systems happy. It's a lot to keep going, but it's a goof kind of tired.

One of the interesting things I've been working on is the data model of a general grouping structure - a tree, and operations on that tree. It's all in C++ which is the preferred language for this application due to it's computations and multi-threaded nature. I have a lot of control with the pthreads as well as complete memory control which is really going to help as things scale up to very large datasets. It's another component of CKit and it's coming together quite nicely. I still have to do some work on a concrete subclass that populates itself with data, but that's not too bad, really.

Other than that, I'm waiting for updates to Desktop Manager for Mac OS X as well as Unison and a few others that I'm hoping improve quickly. Also, I've got my eye on the 1GB modules for my 17-inch PowerBook which would take it to 2GB RAM. When they get to be $250 each, I'll probably pick up a pair. Wild how the desktop of not so long ago is the laptop of today.

OK, it's probably not clear to the general populace that hackers are crooks. But they are. I've had problems of my own with them on my boxes, but today it's been a real problem for the web site I did for my cousin's business. The web hosting company that we put the site on is shutting off the SSH and FTP, including SFTP, until they get their servers locked down. While this is nice, I never went to their hosts via telnet or ftp - always SSH or SFTP.

Yet, I can hardly blame the good folks at the hosting company for if it were my business to host web servers, I'd be very very careful about access and make sure that I didn't have unauthorized access as that could put me in a world of hurt.

So I'm left wondering if we'll ever get the type of hosting we need. I'm concerned that I haven't been able to contact someone at the company, and hope that it's all just a matter of a little configuration on my part that won't take more than an hour or so and I can get my cousin back on the air.

They steal time, resources, money, and a sense of goodwill. Hackers are trash.

I started using networked computers in college in the Fall of 1981. OK, it's been 20+ years, and I'm still using them, but hey... I've got experience. 🙂

As I was saying, back at Purdue I used the amazing tools - ftp and rn. Yes, this is when the Internet was called the ARPAnet and ftp was considered safe because there weren't script kiddies and most of the users had their own systems to admin, and they all existed on a mutual trust system. Alas, that's not possible anymore. Anyway... I would get files from remote ftp drops without a search engine, without the web. But the newsgroups functioned as message boards as well as places to find things organized by category. It wasn't perfect, but it was wonderful at the time.

It was always true that certain newsgroups had higher signla-to-noise ratios than others, and when AOL came online with the newsgroups a lot of folks ban lists included AOL. But there were still folks that preferred the groups to the newly created web-based message boards like Slashdot, etc.

I liked to keep up with the groups, and recently I've gotten tired of the crummy newsgroup service from Comcast and decided to try something different. The guys at Panic created Unison a next generation news reader and provides a news service for it as well. Since I was tired of bugs in the code I was using and liked the things I've used from Panic in the past, I decided to give it a whirl.

I'll say that it isn't perfect, but for a 1.0.2 product it's pretty darn nice. I like the basics, and while there are a few things in the UI related to navigation that I'd like to see - or at least know were there if they were already in the application, it's nice and solid. Also, one of the things I know of Panic is that they update their software when they find things to fix/add. This means to me that it's only going to get better.

Everything old is new again... gotta smile at that.