daves stuff

Haven’t had a chance to get blogolicious in a while (understatement), so here are my last 5 login articles (like you care):

June 2008: Admin, Root Thyself — An attempt to use SystemTap (like dtrace in Linux) to capture security-relevant changes to the file system.  The file system integrity problem is one that has plagued me for years.  There just isn’t a simple bullet-proof way to find out who changed what files and when in modern operating systems and that is a fact I find really annoying.  I’ve recently become aware of Dazuko, which promises to be a safer and more elegant solution. Fodder for a future article possibly.

August 2008: Hold the Pixles — One too many instances of watching otherwise brilliant admin re-invent RRDTool because they thought it was a graphing tool prompted this article on the finer points of using Round Robin Databases… AS DATABASES.

October 2008: YOU Should write an NEB Module! — My wordpress database lacks the space to hold the adverbs I would need to describe how tired I am of OPP (other peoples perl) in the context of Nagios add-ons.  A new metric prefix may need to be created to describe the heaping mounds of poorly-written, obfuscated, drivel that is to be found on NagiosExchange.  Not perhaps since the crusades have so many worked so diligently to screw up the lives of others from an earnest desire to help.  This article was written in the sincere hope that some small percentage of NagiosExchange posters would notice that those wily German hackers who gave us Nagios also gave us a means to extend it, and that means is the Nagios Event Broker.  Those who accidentally read further may even learn the basics of its use.

December 2008:  YOU should write an NEB module revisited — A follow up to the article above where I update my nagfs module to support Nagios 3.0 and fill in some blanks.

February 2009: Message in a Bottle — The current issue as I write this features an entertaining rant about the current state of email follwed by very specific information about replacing the email notifications of your Nagios box with SMS-based ones in the hope that you may actually recieve them. I even add asterisk voice alerts as a backup, it’s actually a pretty cool article you should read it (who knew?).  I feel pretty strongly that the email admins of the world have shot themselves in the foot with their war against spam, and as you may have noticed, I rarely miss an opportunity to wag my finger at them (us) for it.  I don’t do this because I’m angry inside, nor do I do it because I think they can be convinced to abandon their decade-long suicidal lost cause; I do it just in case there are a few admins in the next generation with a clue who might be convinced that the robustness principle isn’t a silly old 1950’s engineering fallacy.

Anyway there you go.

My G1 arrived two days ago, on the 20th. I’m in the dfw area and I’ve had about 24 hours of actual hands on experience.  I have to say that although it’s shiny and pretty and all that, I’m quickly becoming bitterly disappointed.

EMAIL:
1. The phone refuses to notify me of new incoming email messages. I have two spop accounts set up, and although the “notify” and “check every 5 minutes” boxes are checked, the phone neither checks every 5 minutes nor notifies me when it does check and finds mail. Based on my mail server logs it manages to check in once an hour on average, and it doesn’t do this on any predictable schedule.  To get my mail I need to open the mail app, and open my inbox, at which point it logs into the spop server and gets new messages. So far I have not been “notified” of a single email message

2. There appears to be a bug in the mail app whereby the phone decides it cannot connect to pop servers, while other network-using apps are working fine.  Rebooting the phone seems to help temporarily.
3. There is no way to manage more than one message at a time. I cannot select multiple messages for deletion or quickly perform any action on multiple emails.

4. I cannot copy text from one message into another.

5. I cannot select email addresses out of an email message and add them to my contacts.

The mail app needs serious usability work

Instant Messageing:
1. Four times in the last 24 hours I have gone to either YahooIM or AIM to find that the phone has logged me out. I’m reading on the forums that this may be because the phone evidently terminates apps at random when “too many” are open.  If the phone is in fact doing this, it’s not telling me that it’s happening. The IM apps just quit with no warning whatsoever.
2. Both the Yahoo and AIM apps aren’t synching with their respective servers. Users who are available appear as not available on the phone, AIM messages from the server that notify me for example, that I’m logged in multiple times do not appear on the phone.

3. The phone does not notify you when friends become available or log off. Other features that you’d find in any other IM program (pidgen, adium.. whatever) are absent here. I cannot, for example give my friends different notification sounds.

The reliability problems give the phone a kludgy feel when it comes to IM. I don’t know if people are getting my messages or vice versa, so I end up asking them if they got my message, sometimes they do sometimes they dont.

SMS:
Sms is much more reliable than the other communication options. The thread/chat interface is nice too.  Since I’ve been using the phone all of my SMS messages have been delivered, and only one message that was sent to me has yet to arrive (sent 12 hours ago). Perhaps this is because sms is using the traditional cell phone networks instead of 3g? The phone notifies you of incoming SMS, but I can’t give different friends different ringtones.

WIFI
I can’t seem to get the phone to work with any of my wifi sources, (home, office, sprint EVDO+cradlepoint). The phone will connect to the AP, and has negotiated everything from WPA2-PSK to open security, and has been configured statically and dynamically via dhcp. Once connected to an AP it seems to not have any connectivity at all.  Web pages give the built-in error page, the mail app throws connection errors etc..

Battery:
Real live battery time on the device is about 8 hours. If you are like me and need to have the device on your hip and operational at all times, plan ahead and keep a charger, or extra battery with you.

Overall:
It’s a pretty phone that isn’t working well. I think some of this has to do with tmo’s relatively new 3g network, and some of it has to do with the brand-new OS.  I’m not sure what to say about the UI oversights, it should be far more feature-full than it is, IMO the actual functionality is beyond spartan.  It’s great that it plays youtube and has a touch screen and all, but first and foremost the g1 is a communication tool for me, and right now my rock-solid sidekick is kicking it’s ass in terms of being able to talk to my co-workers and friends.

Update:

I’m not the only one having these problems

All photos taken with my beloved nikon d40

Starting with the ones I can identify:

Lapotia Morgani (green spore lapotia), ultra common around here. These grow in my front yard and the yards of my neighbors. It’s difficult to see the stem ring in the photo but it’s there just benieth the caps.  These supposidly grow in farie rings sometimes, but I haven’t seen them doing it around here.
Lemon-Yellow Lapotia, less common around here, but they seem to like my mother-in-laws terra-cotta pots.

Netted stinkhorn. These are really cool mushrooms. The stalks are spongy and hollow, and man do they stink. These sprout in the late spring after nearly every rain down near the creek where I live. They are edible but my guides tell me they are “not recommended” heh, I can’t imagine wanting to eat one either.
Fawn Mushroom, growing out of a partially buried tree-stump that isn’t quite visible in the photo. These are edible and supposedly quite tasty but I haven’t gone there yet.

When I first spotted these, I thought they might be chanterelle, but a quick glance at the gills shows them to be some species of little brown mushroom I haven’t been able to identify. I haven’t taken a spore print yet (edit: these are Panaeolus foenisecii (lawnmower mushroom) duh).

This might be some species of amanita, or (because of the ribs on the edge of it’s cap) a white lapotia. I don’t really know, and didn’t get a spore print for this one either.

No earthly idea what this is (although I suspect it might be a more mature version of the mushroom above). None of my identification guides has anything resembling this guy. I didn’t take spore prints of him either, I decided to take a few photos and come back later to see how it matured and get a spore print. When I got back it was gone. Eaten.. trampled.. whatever. Any idea?

Events have occurred, the details of which I won’t bore you with, which have convinced me of the presence of a probabilistic law of nature.  My extensive research (4 google searches) seems to indicate that this law has not been previously published, so although the details are still sketchy, and hypothesis remain to be tested, it seemed important that the community be made aware of it as quickly as possible.  Chop chop people, there’s science to be done.
Closely related to Murphy’s law; the law of ironic potential states that the probability of a given negative outcome occurring increases linearly with it’s ironic potential.  I will give you an example:

Assume the owner of a 19 year-old dog happens upon a dog-food sale at a local pet store.  The law of ironic potential predicts that the probability of the dog being dead upon the owners return home varies directly with the amount of dog food the owner buys.  If the owner were to buy an infinite amount of food (a “life time supply for $1200″ for example) the probability of the dog already being dead approaches 1.

If you use RBL’s, you make the battle about IP space.

If you make the battle about IP space, they’ll attack the freaking IP space.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Social networks in general are gay. This is merely a statement of fact. On the gay continuum they’re nearly as gay as blogs, or maybe even more so. If I had an online poll thingy I might take a poll about which had a higher coefficient of gayness except that these things are not subjective, and anyway online polls are utterly gay.
Anyway, for reasons unknown to myself, I’m completely fascinated by linkedin. I just can’t get enough. Someone will send me an invite and three hours later I’ll still be clicking around the infernal site reading the profile of someone in Argentina or answering questions I would LART people for asking in any other venue. It’s SO gay, yet somehow strongly compelling, and like I mentioned 3 sentences ago, I have no idea why.

Anyway here’s 3 months worth of articles since I can’t be bothered to update my blog.

Mystical Flows from December

Permission to parse from February
Comply from this months issue in April

No I’m not talking about Decemberween, I’m talking about LISA of course! They’ve invited me to give the Homeless Vikings talk this year which makes me — drumroll please — a LISA Invited Speaker. Now all I have to do is learn Spanish and hike the CDT and I can pretty much die happy. I’m changing things up a bit because I don’t think I quite got my point across at Defcon. Hopefully I can refine my delivery as well, I still find public speaking to be pretty much terrifying, and at this point it looks like my entire “LISA crowd” is going to be there this year (except Clarence (what’s up dude?! Per is coming and he lives in DENMARK!)), so I’ll have plenty of people to laugh at me when I start stuttering like a schoolgirl.

They’ve made pdf’s of the papers available already to registered attendees which is a first (and very cool). As usual the papers track looks fantastic (glancing around NetADHICT, ATLANTIDES, and Usher all look promising (lots of tools papers this year)). Lots of Nagios-related stuff going on (none of which I’m directly involved in but odds are good I’ll show up ), and I’m also looking forward to the panel on configuration management (I’m hopefully awaiting the day someone smarter than I am stands up and asks why the heck the CM people are all so in love with XML (yeah yeah, I’ve read the Burgess stuff)). There’s even an early BOF on digital SLR Photography which I’ve recently taken an interest in. Too cool.

See you there?

Work, as usual, is kicking my butt, so I’m just now getting the October ;login article up. In a sentence it’s about monitoring Java Virtual machines. They can be challenging because they abstract the application’s inner workings behind their own thread model and memory management. Anyway.. here ya go: Opaque_Brews

If you haven’t seen/heard of the guy.. just go to youtube and search on his name, or better yet, go read some of the speeches he’s made in congress. Forget your party affiliation for a second and just listen to the guy.

Electing him equates to a net-gain in freedom, which benifits you more than having your way on any given combination of “the issues” possibly could regardless of what party you feel obligated to vote for.

If you think he’s ‘too wierd’, do me a favor and read this