Category: books

Well, my struggle with the workplace continues.

My offer to resign effective Dec 31 is acceptable. But the Superior Professor ran the idea by the Human Resources Drone who reminded her that she can still keep the corrective action/dismissal process in force, putting me at continued risk of losing any chance of re-employment at the University. I’ve already offered to leave, three times since June: what’s the benefit to “corrective action” for someone who won’t be around?

Why anyone would persist in this is beyond me: three out of three co-workers who heard this story used the word “vindictive” so perhaps there’s something to it. A comment on the previous posting is far too charitable . . . . this isn’t just selective memory at work, it’s malice.

So much for my efforts to make the transition easier: rather than focus on the future, it’s considered a better use of their time to re-hash the past and mess up the present. My incentive to help them going forward is nil: if I stay, I run the risk of their discretionary power. If I leave, I lose income and benefits for my family.

Recently I have occasion to have a couple of people tell me why they “hate the Mac.”

1. “The mouse only has one button.”

This, from one of the tech support staff, the kind who might be expected to know about computers in general. So I showed him that a. the second mouse button works just fine, even in Apple’s applications (like the Finder) and b. that even the scroll wheel works. The real beef is that Apple only *sells* one button mice, not that they don’t support them. Mine is still in the shrinkwrap is came in.

Same guy told me he found UNIX/Linux limiting, but come to find out he’s never really used either. He also bragged that he had $3000 to spend on whatever system he wanted and was proud that he didn’t buy a PowerBook, choosing instead a Dell.

2. “You have to drag the CD icon to the Trash can to eject it.”

OK, fair enough. But not for about two and a half years, if you’re an OS X user. Same user tells me she can eject a mounted disk by pushing the button and ejecting the media: as far as I know, that’s a sure way to confuse *any* operating system. I didn’t bother to ask if it was equally annoying to remind Windows that you just shoved a floppy or CD into its guts and would it please now acknowledge the fact?

There are people who find Windows more productive, but I generally find their work is pretty narrowly defined. I never get jobs like that: even my current indenture is too broad for Windows to encompass. Essentially, a networked typing station would suffice for most people.

David Pogue’s column uncovers the Big Lie about why UNIX-based systems are less attractive to mischief-makers. Hint: it has nothing to do with marketshare and everything to do with “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

Evidently, I’m not the only columnist to have fallen for this old myth; read another writer’s more technical apology. But the conclusion is clear: Linux and Mac OS X aren’t just more secure because fewer people use them. They’re also much harder to crack right out of the box.

sunspot.net – plugged in

“Many orders of magnitude more people look over the source code for OS X and the related BSDs than have access to Windows source code,” said John Klos, a developer of NetBSD, a flavor of Unix closely related to OS X.

Thus, many of the obvious holes in OS X were closed years ago. That, some suggested, actually makes OS X a more attractive target.

“If I were a fame-driven cracker with solid technical skills, cracking a BSD-based system would be the fastest way to show off my capabilities,” said Rich Morin, a programmer and consultant based in San Bruno, Calif.

“My suspicion, therefore, is that many crackers have tried this challenge and failed,” Morin added. Still, he cautioned “nobody has any way to know for sure.”

It is hard to understand how no one has exploited anything in a massively disruptive way, like the various Outlook worms, given that any buffer overflows or other potential exploits are openly available, until you stop to think how many people how been in the source code and how likely they are to practice defensive programming as a matter of course.

At home with Hitler

Found this while flicking through a copy of Homes and Gardens from November 1938. Shows how not all corners of the UK were against the Fuhrer at that time.

I was struck by this: the prose of the article makes one think that Hitler is just another politician or captain of industry. The mention of a “Fun Fairs” where he hosted the local children is almost too much to believe, as is the fawning praise of his watercolors.

In my final year of university, I wrote a paper analyzing how Country Life magazine, the journal of England’s landed gentry, handled the First World War. It was interesting to read how little mention it got at all, until the summer of 1916, when bloodbaths like the Battle of the Somme were likely to be felt everywhere, in every class and community.

This seems consistent, that people at a certain status level think things can be worked out reasonably. I think that was a problem for George H W Bush and the former ruler of Iraq. He couldn’t really get his mind around the brutality, being fundamentally a genteel and well-bred fellow.

So I just checked out Country Life and found this posting. [text follows, in case the link goes away]

Well, I trust that they have decapitated the two runts of Hussain’s [sic] loins, this whole episode will now end. I remember fighting the last Gulf War and it was not exactly pretty- however if the Yanks had let us fininsh [sic] the job last time that Country would be a rich little oil well with some rather nice places to play a la the old Lebanon.

Oh well, such is life..anyone else think this whole thing is a ridiculous affair and has been organised rather like a village fate [sic] ..most vicar’s [sic] could have done a better job and at half the cost.

Must fly.

TTFN

Evidently, not everyone has gotten the news that the sun has set on the British Empire . . . . it’s obvious the education system isn’t what it was.

I have often wondered about reviving that paper and seeing where else it could lead.

Unix Sysadmin Aphorisms

Don’t rewrite cat -n

I had forgotten these aphorisms, until I saw that BBedit ships with some shell scripts, one of which is below:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
my $i = 0;
while(<>)
{
$i++;
print sprintf("%4d: ",$i), $_;
}


That’s what cat -n does.


[/home/paul]:: perl catdashn < catdashn 1: #!/usr/bin/perl -w 2: my $i = 0; 3: while(<>) 4: { 5: $i++; 6: print sprintf("%4d: ",$i), $_; 7: } (paul@green.paulbeard.org)-(09:44 PM / Thu Jul 24) [/home/paul]:: cat -n catdashn 1 #!/usr/bin/perl -w 2 my $i = 0; 3 while(<>) 4 { 5 $i++; 6 print sprintf("%4d: ",$i), $_; 7 }

Not a big deal, but surely a more meaty example could have been found, and of course, the argument that aphorism is making is not to build something for which a tool already exists.

These aphorisms should be hanging in every IT work area: we used them at my last tech job, especially "what did you do? who did you tell?" In a decentralized work environment, that's essential, and we found that it worked very well.

CNN.com – Welcome to the ‘new’ Web, same as the ‘old’ Web – Jul. 15, 2003

Professional news sites aren’t the only ones converting to RSS feeds. Hobbies and fan sites, blogs, and other special interest and community sites are going to feeds, as well.

Of course, not all news sites — like CNN.com itself — are publishing RSS feeds, either (why the writer thinks there’s a conversion process eludes me, but the whole article is just a tad breathless).

Empire Rising: A Satirical History, Part I

In the days of the consul Bilious Clintonius, the Roman Republic was at peace and awash in wealth from the Valley of Siliconia.

But not all were content.

The Bacchanalian revels of Clintonius appalled the high priests. Many senators were suspicious of his scheming wife, Hillaria, and disdainful of his chosen successor, Gorian the Stiff.

As the time approached for the Senate to choose a new consul, the foes of Clintonius searched for a man to oppose Gorian and recapture power for the wealthy families of Rome…

Funny stuff . . . .

Get the poster.

GNOME – GNOME press releases

“For us, software libre (open source software) was the only choice,” said Francisco A. Huertas Mendez, technical coordinator of GNU/LinuEx of the Junta de Extremadura. “We were able to stretch our budget very far and provide a powerful and easy-to-use environment with Linux and GNOME. We are also able to give the students all of the productivity programs they need.”

OK, it allows local governments to stretch their pesetas as far as they can. But there’s more to it than simple cost savings . . .

Said Miguel de Icaza, CTO of Ximian, Inc. and GNOME Foundation president, “This initiative not only gives computing ability to all of its students, it also has the potential to grow a local IT industry in Extremadura. This is an excellent example of the control and flexibility that Linux and open source give governments and public sector institutions.”

If this stuff were bought from an American company, the money leaves the country and the expertise to run the systems will need to be imported, to say nothing of perpetual license fees. This way, the locals own the system and can learn from and build it to suit themselves, not some foreign multinational’s quarterly revenue targets.

<update>
Sadly, this will be pitched as simply Linux activism or something like that. We haven’t yet reached the point where “anything that isn’t Microsoft” is seen as a viable alternative, but instead something you use until you outgrow it. It’s not the case, but that’s how the Conventional Wisdom goes.

This is really stupid: someone (some people?) keep stuffing my logfiles with bogus HTTP_REFERER values: here’s today’s gem and the number of times it’s appeared.

[/home/paul]:: grep -c http://www.blowjob-pics.info/ /usr/local/weblogs/httpd-access.log
887

The only way anyone is going to see this is if they look at my stats pages (and no, I’m not going to put a link to them: they’re not hard to find, but why make things worse?). What a waste of time and bandwidth, so say nothing of disk and logfile.
Continue reading “referer log spamming”

Fink – Home

2003-02-07: DO NOT INSTALL VIREX 7.2-

The Virex 7.2 package, currently being distributed free to all .Mac members, has a serious conflict with Fink. Fink users should not install Virex 7.2 under any circumstances. Installing it after Fink is installed will damage your Fink installation; installing it prior to Fink will make it impossible to install Fink without damaging Virex.

The details are available here. It seems the folks at McAfee used fink-managed tools to build Virex and in the process made a lot of idiotic assumptions.

Of course, I made my own idiotic assumption when I installed Virex yesterday, assuming they had tested this stuff before releasing it, or at least been on the fink mailing lists.