Entries tagged
|
| Key | Value |
| INODE:1:NAME | The name of the file (e.g. "passwd"). |
| INODE:1:SIZE | The size of the file (e.g. "1661" ) |
| INODE:1:GID | The group ID of the file's owner (e.g. "0") |
| INODE:1:UID | The user ID of the file's owner (e.g. "0") |
| INODE:1:MODE | The mode of the file (e.g. 0755) |
To store these things I use a Redis "SET" which allows me to easily iterate over all the entries in each directory.
ObQuote: "They fuck up, they get beat. We fuck up, they give us pensions. " - The Wire
18 March 2011 21:50
A while back I was working on a mod_rewrite compatible proxy server written in C. The reason for this is that my current webhost uses Apache2 in front ofa number of thttpd processes, and I'd like to remove apache and use something smaller/faster/neater.
Dividing things up I'm running about ten domains, and only around half of them use mod_rewrite rules - small enough perhaps to port the rules, large enough to make it annoying.
Upon reflection I think the thing to do is to replace apache with javascript - via node.js. Writing proxies with node.js is almost ridiculously simple - in fact doing anything HTTP-like is very very simple thanks to the bundled libraries.
Time will tell whether this is a waste of time or not, but I'm confident I could listen upon *:80 and route requests to localhost:N for a few domains.
As a trivial toy I wrote a simple transforming proxy last night which performed simple rewrites as it passed traffic about.
Another fun, and possibly useful, thing I put together was a node.js port of the simple httpstat.us website. That server would have been easy to write in any number of languages, but in node it was almost too easy.
Update - here is my rewriting node.js-based reverse-proxy.
ObQuote: "I just need you to stop being nice to me unless you're gonna marry me. " - He's just not that into you.
8 April 2011 21:50
thttpd is a simple, small, portable, fast, and secure HTTP server which supports both IPv4 & IPv6.
However one noticable omission in the handling of requests for thttpd is support for the X-Forwarded-For header - which is even noted upo nthe thttpd wikipedia entry.
There is a simple patch floating around which claims to fix this; but as I belatedly noticed tonight it only works for IPv4.
If you look at libhttpd.h of the thttpd source you'll see this:
typedef union {
struct sockaddr sa;
struct sockaddr_in sa_in;
#ifdef USE_IPV6
struct sockaddr_in6 sa_in6;
struct sockaddr_storage sa_stor;
#endif /* USE_IPV6 */
} httpd_sockaddr;
As a quick hack I updated this structure to add the following member:
char real_ip[200];
Now I could update that member when a client connects and later update it as a result of any X-Forwarded-For: headers which might be present in incoming requests. Finally I updated the logging to use this field rather than anything else and the job was complete.
Without this work if you're running as a proxy and you receive an IPv6 connection you'll see it reported as 127.0.0.1.
I'm sure my approach isn't as clean as it could be - due to the extra member- but it will suffice for now.
ObQuote: "This gun you're holding belonged to your father; he could conduct a symphony orchestra with it. " - Wanted
Tags: random, thttpd 3 comments
20 April 2011 21:50
So I've succumbed and joined twitter. I'm pretending I'm a photographer, rather than a techie/geeky/random person, whether that persists is anybodys guess.
At the very least I don't feel any real need to write/post/ask about Linux, development, or similar. I can do that here or elsewhere. (Not least because length-restrictions are annoying; yes it is true. Size is important.)
So far I've been posting semi-random pictures, I guess that is one way to pass the time, while I play with my camera.
ObQuote: "Please, please, please drive faster!" - Wanted.
Tags: content-free, random, twitter 1 comment
10 May 2011 21:50
Almost a year ago I put together a simple picture sharing site, which was designed to accept uploaded images via OpenID logins and then share them. It was created because none of the existing image sharing sites allowed OpenID logins - and because frankly I rarely trust sites I don't control. (Especially when they're free sites, with no obvious revenue stream. We can reference recent compromises if we wish to be topical, but even without them it is all about trust.)
I opened up the site to allow others to use it, but assumed it would remain Steve-only - After all why would somebody choose to use my site rather than imgur, or similar?
Over the year I've spotted several minor problems with the site. The built-in support for comments was never used, primarily because I didn't have any other users, and some of the tagging aspects were hard to use.
Since I've started using twitter I again found myself wanting a picture-hosting site, one with "short links". I started using twitpic.com, but wasn't happy with it.
So the plan was formed; build another picture sharing site. But this time with short URLS. Sadly my first choice of http://picc.ie was denied to me - I couldn't register it as I don't live in Ireland. But my second choice http://linkti.me was free.
As a challenge to myself this site uses Redis for storing all user-details, all image details, and all session data. It hasn't been difficult to implemenet a multi-user site, with logins, file uploads, and tagging. I guess I cheated as a lot of the code is borrowed from the previous site, but this time it looks prettier and there have been many cleanups due to my previous experience.
This time round I was more focussed upon short links, so each image is allowed an incrementing number, which is then encoded using base 36 math - which is the alphabet you get if you use [0-9A-Z]. I designed three shareable links for each image to keep it simple:
Why "/r" for the thumbnail? Well because it is a random thumbnail. To cope with difference sizes, and allow the recent image display to look regular, I wanted each thumbnail to be 150x150 pixels. My thumbnail generation simply picks a random X,Y co-ordinate from the image and then cuts out a 150x150 square block starting at that offset.
The results of a random segment of an uploaded image are sometimes very cool, altough equally often they are misleading. If I upload naked people there is the possability that we'll just get a nipple or a cock - but I'm actually quite smug about the way it turned out. Simpler to code than to resize, scale, or similar and surprisingly random when you see 9x9 random images (as you do on the front page).
Anyway that's all for now. I was tempted to talk about implementation or migration, but I've written too much for an early morning already. Some other time?
ObQuote: "He's just trying to freak us out. " - 30 Days of Night.
Tags: linkti.me, picshare, random 4 comments
16 July 2011 21:50
Recently I was at a pub and there was an advert for pub tokens displayed on the window. Seemed like a cute idea:
Perfect for friends, family, remote hackers/developers & similar.
When I got home I checked out their site. Seemed simple and nice enough, with good coverage (in terms of local drinking establishments that would accept their tokens).
I decided to sign up, with the intention of gifting my sister with some delicious beer. Unfortunately that's where it all went wrong.
I tend to act the same on all new sites. Partly to amuse myself, partly to get a feel for how safe/secure/good the site is, I'll try to login with a few different values.
You know you're in trouble when you see responses like this:
SELECT * FROM cms_module_pubtokens_users where email = '"'' AND password =''"' LIMIT 1 Fatal error: Call to a member function FetchRow() on a non-object in /home/pubtokens/U79P18WQ/htdocs/includes/functions.php on line 291
Suffice it to say I sent them an email, then poked them on twitter, but to no avail.
In conclusion they don't get my money, and I couldn't recommend them to anybody else at this point either. As I'm not a customer at least I can rest easy knowing my details haven't been compromised at any point over the past few months.
ObQuote: "It can't rain all the time" - The Crow
Tags: pubtokens, random, sql injection 4 comments
5 September 2011 21:50
This is just a quick post to remind myself in the morning, as soon as I've made it I intend to turn my computer off and leave it off until I can re-organize my office.
I've been using mutt for my email for the past few years. Nothing compares to the flexibility of procmail/sieve for organizing server-side mail, and then mutt is ideal for reading them.
With the addition of the mutt-patched sidebar mode you can even go for a few days before realizing you're not in a graphical environment. But one thing I do long for is the ability to execute scripts at various times.
Thus far I've not actually planned what I'd like to do, but as a starting point imagine being able to execute a hook when new mail arrives? Or when you send a message matching a pattern in some fashion?
There are some things out there, such as the various hacks which are designed to abort sending a message if you mention "See attachment" in a message body but fail to add one before sendign the message. These hacks generally abuse the sendmail configuration such that they're extremely ad-hoc and hard to chain/nest.
I've mellowed out over the years and I have no interest in attempting to write a mail-client (though at the same time how hard can it be? Just restrict yourself to using inotify on ~/Maildir and offload delivery to exim and you're almost done? I guess the hard part is the UI, though I do like the mutt + sidebar layout. Write the whole thing in some scripty language?)
I'll re-examine notmuch and gnus over the next week or two, but I suspect both will continue to disappoint in various ways.
Anyway, for the moment I'm just pondering. But threading is an obvious concern. Most current mutt hooks relate to the local folder, or the local message. If I were viewing a message in one directory and a new mail notification fired for a delivery to both ~/Maildir and ~/Maildir/.people.foo I'd need to either serialise them or thread them.
Ponder ponder.
In other news I've been doing more photography recently. Nothing cohesive except for my recent experiment with shooting a "street-girl" outdoors in falling light, but that was an interesting challenge and the results were sufficient to make me want to try shooting outdoors in an organized fashion again. (Some random images have been linked to from my wee twitter page.)
ObFilm: "She doesn't get eaten by the eels at this time " - The Princess Bride
Tags: lua, mutt, perl, random 5 comments
22 November 2011 21:50
Yesterday evening I updated my server to remove MySQL:
steve:~# dpkg --purge mysql-client-5.1 \
mysql-common \
mysql-server-5.1 \
mysql-server-core-5.1 \
python-mysqldb \
libdbd-mysql-perl \
libdatetime-format-mysql-perl
Until last month I had two database in use, one each for a pair of web-applications. As of now one is using redis - which I'm already using for my image hosting - and the other application is using SQLite.
Until recently I had a high opinion of SQLite, although that has now been downgraded a little, it is still a thoroughly excellent piece of software. I was just surprised at little things it was missing, to the extent I had to rewrite my applications SQL.
Still one less service is a good thing, and the migration wasn't so painful..
In more productive news I recently acquired a nice external flash - the Yongnuo YN-460 II is (very) cheap and cheerful, it can be fired remotely with my triggers so I've had a lot of fun with opportunistically taking pictures and experimenting with lighting.
Most of the results are NSFW, but there are some other examples lurking around including the first time I managed to successfully capture a falling water-drop. (Not the best picture, not the most explicit effect, but fun regardless. I both can and will do better next time!)
Somebody recently asked me to write about "camera stuff under linux" and happily I declined.
Why decline? Because there are so many good tools, applications, and utilities. (I use local tools for organisation and duplicate detection, rawtherapee for RAW conversion and GIMP for touchups). Having many available options is fantastic though, and something hard to appreciate for "newcomers" to Linux.
(Yeah I waited 90 seconds - if I remembered to add -nojava - for Netscape Navigator to start, under X10, with 8Mb of RAM. Happier days are here. Sure DRM is bad, secure boot .. an open question, but damn we have it good compared to almost any previous point in time!)
ObQuote: "Yeah, obviously it is only a tactical party. I'm only having a party to eventually get sex." - Peep Show
Tags: camera-toys, lighting, mysql, random, redis 2 comments
3 December 2011 21:50
Today I was idly performing some maintainence upon one of my hosts, and it crossed my mind to look beneath /etc in there I found:
/etc/python /etc/python2.4 /etc/python2.5 /etc/python2.6
That made me look more closely at the contents of /etc - the following command output was surprising:
steve@steve:~$ ls /etc | wc -l 187
Is that average? Heavy? Light? I have no idea, but I purged a hell of a lot of software today. Now I have only python v2.6 although for some reason I still have:
python python-apt python-apt-common python-central python-minimal python-support python2.6 python2.6-minimal
I suspect I could drop the pything2.6-minimal package, but for the moment I'm done. I have to make pretty people look exceptional with my magical camera.
Anyway as part of this cleanup I ran a quick sanity-check on which processes are running and I think, short of kernel processes, I'm as minimal as I can be. I understand the purpose and reason for every running service:
UID PID CMD root 1 init [2] pdnsd 14091 /usr/sbin/pdnsd --daemon -p /var/run/pdnsd.pid root 14199 /usr/sbin/monit -c /etc/monit/monitrc -s /var/lib/monit/monit.state root 14206 /usr/sbin/syslog-ng -p /var/run/syslog-ng.pid root 14234 /usr/sbin/cron 102 14595 /usr/sbin/exim4 -bd -q30m redis 14627 /usr/bin/redis-server /etc/redis/redis.conf root 14637 /usr/sbin/sshd
These are basic services; I use monit to ensure those essential daemons keep running. The only oddity there is probably the local DNS cache, but it is useful if you run any kind of DNS blacklist-using service, for example.
root 14794 /sbin/getty -L ttyS0 9600 vt100
I need a serial console login for emergencies.
root 14796 runsv node-reverse-proxy root 14797 /bin/sh ./run root 14799 /opt/node/bin/node node-reverse-proxy.js --config ./rewrites.js
These three processes combine to run my reverse proxy which routes incoming HTTP requests to a number of local thttpd instances.
qpsmtpd 27309 /usr/bin/perl -Tw /usr/bin/qpsmtpd-prefork --port 25 --user qpsmtpd --pid-file /var/run/qpsmtpd/qpsmtpd.pid --detach ..
The perl SMTP daemon which runs my incoming mail, passing it to exim4 which listens upon 127.0.0.1:2525. You can read about my setup in the out-of-date writeup Chris & I put together.
/usr/bin/memcached -m 64 -p 11211 -u root -l 127.0.0.1
Memory cache for transient items.
s-blog thttpd -C /etc/thttpd/sites.enabled/blog.steve.org.uk 1030 thttpd -C /etc/thttpd/sites.enabled/edinburgh-portraits.com s-hg thttpd -C /etc/thttpd/sites.enabled/hg.steve.org.uk s-ipv4 thttpd -C /etc/thttpd/sites.enabled/ipv4.steve.org.uk s-ipv6 thttpd -C /etc/thttpd/sites.enabled/ipv6.steve.org.uk s-kvm thttpd -C /etc/thttpd/sites.enabled/kvm-hosting.org ...
One thttpd instance is launched for each distinct HTTP site my server runs. Each site runs under its own UID, with its own chrooted directory tree. This is important for security.
Each local instance listens upon 127.0.0.1 - and the reverse proxy previously mentioned rewrites connections to the appropriate one.
1016 28812 /usr/bin/perl -I./lib/ -I./ /usr/local/bin/blogspam
My anti-spam filter for blog comments.
Here is my christmas challenge. Can you identify each service upon your host? Do you know why you're running what you're running?
Me? I had no idea I had a dbus deamon running. Now I've purged it. Ha!
ObQuote - "I owe everything to George Bailey. Help him, dear Father." - It's a wonderful life.
Tags: random, sysadmin 6 comments
4 March 2012 21:50
Symbiosis
Symbiosis is the collective name given to a group of Debian GNU/Linux packages which implement simple virtual hosting. It is developed by my employers Bytemark.
Symbiosis is basically a collection of configuration snippets, code, and libraries which works to offer virtual hosting in a reliable consistent and easy to understand fashion.
You implement hosting for a new domain by merely creating a directory tree. So for example you might configure the hosting for the domain example.com by running:
mkdir -p /srv/example.com/public/htdocs echo "hello, world" >> /srv/example.com/public/htdocs/index.html mkdir -p /srv/example.com/mailboxes/webmaster echo "super-secret" > /srv/example.com/mailboxes/webmaster/password mkdir -p /srv/example.com/config echo "3l33t" > /srv/example.com/mailboxes/config/ftp-passwordThere you are, now http://www.example.com/ and http://example.com/ will work, and you may login to check mail with the email address [email protected] via POP3, IMAP, IMAPS, or POP3S. Finally you can FTP with username example.com and be dropped into the public directory.
The mail handling is very flexible, and the webhosting supports wonderful things.
I don't generally talk about work-stuff explicitly, but we've just made a major new release of the Symbiosis system such that it works upon Squeeze and has lots of IPv6 support out of the box. (Email, DNS, HTTP, Firewalling, FTP etc.)
All in all it is simple, well-documented, and open-source with a reasonably large user-base. More external testers, users, and developers would be a wonderful thing..
Mutt Mailboxes & Idle Hooks?
Mutt is wonderful but I'm starting to get annoyed by its lack of auto-mailbox discovery.
Assuming you use procmail you might deliver mail to ~/Maildir/.foo/ and mutt won't notice that if the directory is created once it starts.
(This is because generally mailboxes are defined via "mailboxes =one =two ..", even if you use a shell snippet it won't get updated unless you re-read configuration, or re-exec mutt).
I wish it were possible to use inotify/dnotify/something magic such that everything beneath ~/Maildir would just work.
(Re-reading mailboxes manually is one solution but it is .. nasty?)
I'm thinking that of all the possible solutions one of the most potentially interesting would be to define a new hook: "idle-hook command .."
That way "command" would be executed every time the client is idle. (This is a distinct state unrelated to IMAP IDLE times.)
Nopte: There is already "mail_check" & "timeout" options. Even running a defined command immediately following the code for mail_check would be reasonable.
Reverse Proxy
I continue to use, love, and enjoy my node.js-based reverse HTTP proxy, and pub discussions seemed to suggest it is a great idea (due to flexibility) but it will never take on because people don't trust node.
I'm almost tempted to re-code it in LUA & C. But I can't help but think that would be a waste of time which would not increase adoption - after all most people use "simple" reverse proxies, and they are well suited by Apache, nginx, or even varnish.
Still no rush I suppose.
In more personal news after living in this flat for 7 years, or so, I'm getting a new bathroom designed and deployed. Good times.
In the meantime I've been steadily watching Stargate SG-1 having recently purchased a box-set of series 1-10. I've just started series six this evening, and I'm enjoying it a lot.
ObQuote: "You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada. " - The Last Starfighter (1984). First film I ever saw at a cinema as a child.
10 March 2012 21:50
Recently I accidentally flooded Planet Debian with my blog feed. This was an accident caused by some of my older blog entries not having valid "Date:" headers. (I use chronicle which parses simple text files to build a blog, and if there is no Date: header present in entries it uses the CTIME of the file(s).)
So why did my CTIMEs get lost? Short version I had a drive failure and a PSU failure which lead to me rebuilding a few things and cloning a fresh copy of my blog to ~/hg/blog/.
My host is now once again OK, but during the pain the on-board sound started to die. Horribly crackly and sounding bad. I figure the PSU might have caused some collateral damage, but so far thats the only sign I see.
I disabled the on-board sound and ordered a cheap USB sound device which now provides me with perfect sound under the Squeeze release of Debian GNU/Linux.
In the past I've ranted about GNU/Linux sound. So I think it is only fair to say this time things worked perfectly - I plugged in the device, it was visible in the output of dmesg, and /proc/asound/cards and suddenly everything just worked. Playing music (mpd + sonata) worked immediately, and when I decided to try playing a movie with xine just for fun sound was mixed appropriately - such that I could hear both "song" + "movie" at the same time. Woo.
(I'm not sure if I should try using pulse-audio, or similar black magic. Right now I've just got ALSA running.)
Anyway as part of the re-deployment of my desktop I generated and pass-phrased a new SSH key, and then deployed that with my slaughter tool. My various websites all run under their own UID on my remote host, and a reverse-proxy redirects connections. So far example I have a Unix "s-stolen" user for the site stolen-souls.com, a s-tasteful user for the site tasteful.xxx, etc. (Right now I cannot remember why I gave each "webserver user" an "s-" prefix, but it made sense at the time!)
Anyway once I'd fixed up SSH keys I went on a spree of tidying up and built a bunch of meta-packages to make it a little more straightforward to re-deploy hosts in the future. I'm quite pleased with the way those turned out to be useful.
Finally I decided to do something radical. I installed the bluetile window manager, which allows you to toggle between "tiling" and "normal" modes. This is my first foray into tiling window managers, but it seems to be going well. I've got the hang of resizing via the keyboard and tweaked a couple of virtual desktops so I can work well both at home and on my work machine. (I suspect I will eventually migrate to awesome, or similar, this is very much a deliberate "ease myself into it" step.)
ObQuote: "Being Swedish, the walk from the bathroom to her room didn't need to be a modest one. " - Cashback.
Tags: alsa, chronicle, random, slaughter, squeeze, usb 4 comments
25 March 2012 21:50
Until recently I've had a Canon EOS 1000D, my starter-camera, and a Canon EOS 40D which is my real-camera.
The 40D is older, but it probably counts as a "semi-pro" body, albeit an old mid-range one. From an image size point of view there isn't too much to tell them apart - both produce 10MP images. But from a hardware and ease of use sense the 40D has several key features which made it a compelling upgrade:
Anyway both these cameras have been my friends for the past year or two, although I did buy a toy camera for those times when I didn't want to carry the DLSR around.
I've made sure I only bought "posh" lens, including the fabulous and horrifically expensive 70-200 f/2.8 MK 2 lens (Just short of £2000) and I'd been wanting to use those on a full-frame camera.
Now it is upgrade time once more and I've just bought the EOS 5D MK II - a full-frame camera which means I don't have to worry about crop-factors any more.
So far I've only had it a couple of days but I'm in love. The output images are 21MP so I get far fewer to a (CF) card. But the detail is sublime.
Future portraits and photos of people will be wonderful - although I hope they already are to a large degree!
This upgrade was a hard choice. The 5D is a full-frame, but a little slow. (Faster than my 40D by a hairs-bredth) The alternative would have been a 7D which is fast, and wonderful, but still uses a cropped sensor. Given that I have fast lenses and don't do sports (often) the 5D seemed like the sanest approach.
For my reference - my Canon serial numbers:
| EOS 1000D | 1780312242 |
| EOS 40D | 1230734041 |
| EOS 5D MK II | 4131916951 |
ObQuote: "Courage is only required when facing that which you fear. " -Stargate: The Ark Of Truth
Tags: canon, photography, random, serial numbers No comments
16 June 2012 21:50
Usually in life we focus upon the things we do, and not the things we don't do, or avoid.
I don't have many "rules" for the way I behave, the things I do, but there are some.
I could go on, but the "rules" are surprisingly hard to remember, having been in place for many years, they're just part of the way that I do (or do not do) things!
Finally: As of this year I've now lived in Edinburgh for over half my life.
ObQuote: "I don't know. We should go and like, stalk him or something. " - Megan Is Missing
Tags: random 7 comments
4 October 2012 21:50
Facebook Like-Inflation
If you have a website, with a "Facebook Like" box on it, it probably shows something like this:
- 400 People Like this
Did you know that number is not just the total number of people who clicked "Like" on your page? Did you know you can artificially inflate that number?
Interesting stuff.
Send a message to yourself with the URL in the body, such that it becomes an "attachment". Watch as the like-counter increases by 1 or even 2. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Sending messages to other people probably does the same thing. But sending to yourself is sufficient.
13 April 2013 21:50
As previously mentioned I was looking to package pwsafe for Wheezy, as this is one of the few tools that I rely upon which isn't present.
There are now packages available, with the source on github.
I've also been doing some minor scripting because I've run into a few common problems recently:
run-parts is a simple utility which will run every executable in a directory, more or less.
In Debian-land run-parts is the mechanism for /etc/cron.daily and /etc/cron.hourly - and that is where I've had problems recently.
Imagine you run a backup via cron.daily. Further imagine that you run a post-backup rsync and that this might take many many hours. If your backup takes >=24 hours you're screwed.
To that end I've patched my run-parts tool to alert and exit if a prior invocation is still running.
I think everybody has this script - hide all output when running a command, unless the command fails. Looking today I see chronic from Joey's excellent moreutils does this. D'oh.
I think I've done more, but I cannot remember. In conclusion software is both easy and hard - easy because these two trivial changes were within my reach, but hard because years after encountering GNU/Linux we still have to add in the missing pieces.
Still could be worse, I spent four/five hours yesterday evening fighting with MS-SQL server, and that is time I'm never going to get back.
Tags: pwsafe, random, software 8 comments
5 June 2013 21:50
As part of writing a new mail client I'm wondering about how to change my email-life, and how other people process/handle their incoming email.
I sort my incoming email into folders at delivery-time using procmail. Mail is generally filtered into mailboxes on the basis of the company that sent it, the person that sent it, or the machine which generated it.
Because I manage a lot of machines personally I've split things up so that I have a folder per host. So on a morning I might have unread mail in the following folders:
machines.steve.org.uk/ machines.da-db1/ machines.da-db2/ machines.da-web1/ machines.da-web2/ machines.da-web3/ machines.da-web4/
The per-machine mailboxes usually contain a single mail every day from LogWatch, along with output from any cron-jobs. For example today I received the mail:
From: Cron Daemon To: [email protected] Subject: Cron [email protected] /home/steve/bin/download-check URL http://nodejs.org/ - no longer matches v0.10.9
Generally speaking I don't need to read the per-machine messages. I'll keep the most recent 100 for reference, but only need to look if something seems "off" on a machine. But if I don't look I'd not see the node upgrade notice, so find that I do read them after all.
This suggest to me that email isn't the right way to handle this kind of thing. Instead I should use a notification system - at work we have a central service called MauveAlert (yes, Red Dwarf reference). Mauve receives "alerts" of various kinds, via UDP. The alerts are then fanned out to appropriate people via XMPP, Email, or SMSs.
I have a similarly-inspired system I use on my Debian Administration cluster. A (node) service runs non-stop collecting UDP messages and showing them on a dashboard. I look at it throughout the day to see when slaughter runs, etc.
Anyway in conslusion I get a lot of mail. Some of it is related to random projects, and all ends up in the steve.org.uk/ mailbox, some of it relates to machines, and gets filed away, and I have regular conversions with folk so I have a .people.kirsi/ folder which receives a lot of attention, for example.
ObRandom:daily() - Mark ~/Maildir/.machines.*, etc, read.
Tags: email, lumail, random 8 comments
26 June 2013 21:50
So my partner and I spent last week in Helsinki, visiting for Midsummer.
The place was lovely, albeit "too damn hot"tm. (Despite my regularly shaved head I'm a pale-skinned redhead covered in freckles. In sustained sun I can be burned in the space of 10-20 minutes. Ouch.)
I ate cake, went to a sauna, and all the usual things. I also had personal interviews with all the mosquitos.
The only downside to the holiday was the timing:
I'm a sysadmin and sometimes that involves out of hours work, so you can shuffle virtual machines around, upgrade processors, and do all the kind of "disruptive" work outside core business hours.
Yesterday I was awake for 22 hours and I was working for 14 of them. Today I'm doing nothing that involves a computer other than a token check-in or three to make sure everything is fine.
99% of the time I don't mind working late, starting early, or scheduling an event outside working hours (e.g. last night I worked from 10PM-3AM ). But with the holiday I've definitely been feeling burned. My sleeping is screwed up, and I'm just getting grumpy and stupid.
Still there were some highlights and I took some nice photos, met some good people, and learned some more Finnish.
I actually tried to find some Finnish instructor(s) here in Edinburgh, upon my return, and was amused to discover that there is an Edinburgh-based Finnish Society. Amused? They cancelled their midsummer event due to poor weather.
For the rest of the week I'm going to be very careful to count working hours and do nothing excessive. I've also got to get back into my gym-routine.
Still there is good news on the horizon. I get a new computer next Monday.
The new machine will run Wheezy, and Awesome. With 8GB RAM I'll stop hitting OOM conditions once I process many photographs, and I'm going to be very dedicated in using revision control for everything.
(I've noticed I've gotten lazy and have started storing bookmarks locally again, instead of under revision control which is a bad sign.)
Rambling. I woke up early (10:30AM) because "Microsoft Technical Support" called me and told me my computer had a virus ..
22 September 2013 21:50
Today I finally pushed out a new binary release of my slaughter server-automation tool. (Think "CFEngine-lite", with perl. full documetnation is available. Though nobody ever reads it.)
Otherwise the weekend is being quiet; we spent last night mostly drinking vodka, until midnight rolled over, and along with some messing around with a camera ("Wow, your arms are getting bigger!")
Today has consisted of a Turkish breakfast, an Indonesian dinner, and an ice-cream based tea.
I could write more, but I'm hung-over. A rare thing for me.
Tags: life, random 2 comments
23 November 2013 21:50
I've now completed all my KVM migrations. Moving my personal virtual machines from one host to another.
There were a few niggles, for example I didn't have a working IPv6 allocation at the time I moved things so I had to set that up post-migration.
I've also joined each of the hosts into a VPN which makes cross-guest communication secure and simple.
Finally I've overhauled my firewalls and service lists.
I installed a couple of extra guests, using libvirt and booting from the Debian ISO. The Debian installer continues to impress, though it did make me think I should overhaul my PXE setup at home.
It wouldn't be hard to have a Raspberry PI running as a TFTP + DHCP server. You could plug it into a network, reboot your desktop, and then have it boot into the imager. At the moment I run DHCP + TFTPD + etc on my main desktop, and that allows me to reimage any of the hosts in the flat easily, except itself obviously.
The last time I reinstalled this system I had to reconfigure DHCP + PXE + TFTP on another host. I think the next time I need to reinstall any system I'll "waste" an SD-card on an image-server host.
Finally I've recently read the Rick Cook Wizardy Series:
Fun idea. Horrible puns. Some of the books were too long, or left plot elements dangling, but on average they were more good than bad. Albeit a little predictable and "simple".
6 December 2013 21:50
I just realised a lot of my projects are deployed in the same way:
This includes both Apache-based projects, and node.js projects.
I'm sure I could generalize this, and do clever things with git-hooks. Right now for example I have run-scripts which look like this:
#!/bin/sh # # /etc/service/blogspam.js/run - Runs the blogspam.net API. # # update the repository. git pull --update --quiet # install dependencies, if appropriate. npm install # launche exec node server.js
It seems the only thing that differs is the name of the directory and the remote git clone URL.
With a bit of scripting magic I'm sure you could push applications to a virgin Debian installation and have it do the right thing.
I think the only obvious thing I'm missing is a list of Debian dependencies. Perhaps adding soemthing like the packages.json file I could add an extra step:
apt-get update -qq apt-get install --yes --force-yes $(cat packages.apt)
Making deployments easy is a good thing, and consistency helps..
Tags: github, node, pass, random 2 comments
29 December 2013 21:50
This week my small collection of sysadmin tools received a lot of attention; I've no idea what triggered it, but it ended up on the front-page of github as a "trending repository".
Otherwise I've recently spent some time "playing about" with some security stuff. My first recent report wasn't deemed worthy of a security update, but it was still a fun one. From the package description rush is described as:
GNU Rush is a restricted shell designed for sites providing only limited access to resources for remote users. The main binary executable is configurable as a user login shell, intended for users that only are allowed remote login to the system at hand.
As the description says this is primarily intended for use by remote users, but if it is installed locally you can read "any file" on the local system.
How? Well the program is setuid(root) and allows you to specify an arbitrary configuration file as input. The very very first thing I tried to do with this program was feed it an invalid and unreadable-to-me configuration file.
Helpfully there is a debugging option you can add --lint to help you setup the software. Using it is as simple as:
shelob ~ $ rush --lint /etc/shadow rush: Info: /etc/shadow:1: unknown statement: root:$6$zwJQWKVo$ofoV2xwfsff...Mxo/:15884:0:99999:7::: rush: Info: /etc/shadow:2: unknown statement: daemon:*:15884:0:99999:7::: rush: Info: /etc/shadow:3: unknown statement: bin:*:15884:0:99999:7::: rush: Info: /etc/shadow:4: unknown statement: sys:*:15884:0:99999:7::: ..
How nice?
The only mitigating factor here is that only the first token on the line is reported - In this case we've exposed /etc/shadow which doesn't contain whitespace for the interesting users, so it's enough to start cracking those password hashes.
If you maintain a setuid binary you must be trying things like this.
If you maintain a setuid binary you must be confident in the codebase.
People will be happy to stress-test, audit, examine, and help you - just ask.
Simple security issues like this are frankly embarassing.
Anyway that's enough: #733505 / CVE-2013-6889.
17 January 2014 21:50
Just to recap my life since December:
I had worked with Bytemark for seven years and left for reasons which made sense. I started working for "big corp" with a job that on-paper sounded good, but ultimately turned out to be a poor fit for my tastes.
I spent a month trying to decide "Is this bad, or is this just not what I'm used to?", because I was aware that there would obviously be big differences as well as little ones.
At the point I realized some of the niggles could be fixed but most couldn't then I resigned, rather than prolong the initial probationary training period - because I knew I wouldn't stay, and it seemed unfair and misleading to stay for the full duration of the probationary period knowing full well I'd leave the moment it concluded - and the notice period switched from seven days to one month.
A couple of people were kind enough to get in touch and discuss potential offers, both locally, remotely in the UK, and from abroad (the latter surprised me, but pleased me too).
I spent a couple of days "contracting", by which I really mean doing a few favours for friends, some of whom paid me in Amazon vouchers, and some of whom paid me in beer.
e.g. I tweaked the upcoming death Knight site to handle 3000 simultaneous HTTP connections, then I upgraded some servers from Squeeze to Wheezy for some other folk.
That aside I've largely been idle for about 10 days and have now picked the company to work for - so I'm going to be a contractor with a day-rate for an American firm for the next couple of months. If that goes well then I'll become a full-time employee, hopefully.
Tags: life, random, work 2 comments
16 February 2014 21:50
Today I setup a new website:
Something I want, something I'll use, and something that might be useful to others?
Tags: markdown, pastebin, random 4 comments
17 February 2014 21:50
I've updated my markdown-pastebin site, to be a little cleaner, and to avoid spidering issues.
Previously every piece of uploaded text received an incrementing integer to describe it - which meant it was trivially easy for others to see how many pieces of text had been uploaded, and to spider all past uploads (unless the user deleted them).
Now each fresh paste receives a random UUID to describe it, and this means spidering is no longer feasible.
I've also posted the source code to Gitub so folk can report bugs, fork, etc:
That source code now includes a Dockerfile which allows you to quickly and easily build your own container running this wonderful service, and launch it without worrying about trashing your server ;)
Anyway other than the user-interface overhaul it is still as functional, or not, as it used to be!
25 February 2014 21:50
There are times when I consider launching my own company again, most often when it is late at night and the inpetitude of so many other companies gets me too worked up. Then I sit back and think about details and write it off.
I've worked for myself in the past a couple of times, and each time it was both more fun and more difficult than expected. Getting a couple of clients is usually easy, getting a ten more is common, but getting "many" is hard and getting "lots" is something I've never done - lots of users for free sites though, along with the associated support burdon!
So the though dies away once I sit down and work out the net profit I'd need to live. My expenses are low, so let us pretend I can easily live on £1000 a month. So the "company" has to make more than that, to cover costs, but perhaps not much.
Pretend you were offering DNS hosting you'd probably be able to implement that easily on, say 10, virtual machines, net of £150 a month. Imagine clients pay £5 for an unlimited number of domains that means you need to have 1000+150/5 = 230 clients. Not impossible, but also not easy.
Pretend instead you're offering backup space, and the numbers get bigger because disk is expensive. Again getting some users would be easy, but getting lots would be hard because your competition is dropbox, skydrive, etc, etc.
Once you start thinking of "ideas" they come easily, but the hard part is being realistic about what people would pay for. As always the idea is the easy part, the execution is the hardest part. Realistically if I were to be desperate to work for myself at short notic I'd do the obvious thing - I'd buy a pair of ladders, a bucket, and clean windows. Low overheads, reasonable demand, and I'd be both "fit" and "outdoors".
When it comes to paying for online services off the top of my head I personally pay for maybe two things, both of them niche (although profitable for their providers I'm sure), and I know many people who live on the internet but pay for nothing.
For example I'm a VIP member of an online modeling community, which in theory allows me a higher chance of persuading interesting people to pose for me.
In practice the turnover on those sites is immense. Lots of cute boys and girls hear constantly "You're so pretty, you should be a model", which is true in perhaps 1% of cases, and the net result is you have a few hard working people who do good things day in day out, and many flighty teenagers who'll pose for two-three people, and then never do it again because they realise it is neither glamourous nor easy money.
Two things I've semi-serously considered recently where hosted "status pages", and hosted "domain parking", but both have many competitors and both I can see a) some people would pay for but b) not very many.
I suspect there is no universal "I'd pay for this" online service hwich is both competition free and genuinely trivial to setup, but I'd be curious to see what people are missing, and even more curious to see what people do pay for.
Tags: random 5 comments
27 February 2014 21:50
It seems that several people replied to the effect that they would pay people to take care of applying security updates, or even configuring adhoc things such as wikis, graphite, and MySQL.
Not enough people to rely upon, but perhaps there is scope for remote stuff being done in exchange for folding-money. (Of course some of those that replied are in foreign countries which makes receiving payment an annoyance, that's a separate problem though.)
Food for thought.
In the meantime I've settled into my use of lighttpd, which I've recently migrated to.
One interesting thing is that you can set your own "Server Name" directive:
# Set server name/version server.tag = "lighttpd/(steve)"
This value is used by mod_dirlisting, so for example if you examine a directory which doesn't contain an index.html file you see the server-name. Cute.
Well cute unless, or until, somebody sets:
# Set server name/version server.tag = "<script>alert(3)</script>"
That does indeed show javascript to all your visitors. Not a security problem itself, as you need to be root on the remote site. If you're root in the remote server you could just modify the actual HTML pages being served to include your javascript. That said it's a little icky.
The following patch avoids the issue:
--- mod_dirlisting.c.org 2014-02-26 00:14:43.296373275 +0000
+++ mod_dirlisting.c 2014-02-26 00:16:28.332371547 +0000
@@ -618,7 +618,7 @@
} else if (buffer_is_empty(con->conf.server_tag)) {
buffer_append_string_len(out, CONST_STR_LEN(PACKAGE_DESC));
} else {
- buffer_append_string_buffer(out, con->conf.server_tag);
+ buffer_append_string_encoded(out, CONST_BUF_LEN(con->conf.server_tag), ENCODING_HTML);
}
buffer_append_string_len(out, CONST_STR_LEN(
Tags: lighttpd, random, work 2 comments
6 March 2014 21:50
This week I received a logitech squeezebox radio, which is basically an expensive toy that allows you to listen to either "internet radio", or music streamed from your own PC via a portable device that accesses the network wirelessly.
The main goal of this purchase was to allow us to listen to media stored on a local computer in the bedroom, or living-room.
The hardware scans your network looking for a media server, so the first step is to install that:
The media-server has a couple of open ports; one for streaming the media, and one for a user-browsable HTML interface. Interestingly the radio-device shows up in the web-interface, so you can mess around with the currently loaded playlist from your office, while your wife is casually listening to music in the bedroom. (I'm not sure if that's a feature or not yet ;)
Although I didn't find any alternative server-implementations I did find a software-client which you can use to play music from the central server - slimp3slave - and again you can push playlists, media, etc, to this.
My impressions are pretty positive; the device was too expensive, certainly I wouldn't buy two, but it is functional. The user-interface is decent, and the software being available and open is a big win.
Downsides? No remote-control for the player, because paying an additional £70 is never going to happen, but otherwise I can't think of anything.
(Shame the squeezebox product line seems to have been cancelled (?))
Procmail Alternatives?Although I did start hacking a C & Lua alternative, it looks like there are enough implementations out there that I don't feel so strongly any more.
I'm working in a different way to most people, rather than sort mails at delivery time I'm going to write a trivial daemon that will just watch ~/Maildir/.Incoming, and move mails out of there. That means that no errors will cause mail to be lost at SMTP/delivery time.
I'm going to base my work on Email::Filter since it offers 90% of the primitives I want. The only missing thing is the ability to filter mails via external commands which has now been reported as a bug/omission.
Tags: audio, github, perl, procmail, random, squeezebox, streaming 10 comments
25 July 2014 21:50
Once upon a time I wrote a piece of software for scheduling the classes available to a college.
There was a bug in the scheduler: Students who happened to be named 'Steve Kemp' had a significantly higher chance (>=80% IIRC) of being placed in lessons where the class makeup was more than 50% female.
This bug was never fixed. Which was nice, because I spent several hours both implementing and disguising this feature.
I'm was a bad coder when I was a teenager.
These days I'm still a bad coder, but in different ways.
Tags: history, random 5 comments
5 August 2014 21:50
In the past I used to pay for an email->SMS gateway, which was used to alert me about some urgent things. That was nice because it was bi-directional, and at one point I could restart particular services via sending SMS messages.
These days I get it for free, and for my own reference here is how you get to receive free SMS alerts via Orange, which is my mobile phone company. If you don't use Orange/EE this will probably not help you.
The first step is to register an Orange email-account, which can be done here:
Once you've done that you'll have an email address of the form [email protected], which is kinda-sorta linked to your mobile number. You'll sign in and be shown something that looks like webmail from the early 90s.
The thing that makes this interesting is that you can look in the left-hand menu and see a link called "SMS Alerts". Visit it. That will let you do things like set the number of SMSs you wish to receive a month (I chose "1000"), and the hours during which delivery will be made (I chose "All the time").
Anyway if you go through this dance you'll end up with an email address [email protected], and when an email arrives at that destination an SMS will be sent to your phone.
The content of the SMS will be the subject of the mail, truncated if necessary, so you can send a hello message to yourself like this:
echo "nop" | mail -s "Hello, urgent message is present" [email protected]
Delivery seems pretty reliable, and I've scheduled the mailbox to be purged every week, to avoid it getting full:
| Hostname | pop.orange.net |
| Username | Your mobile number |
| Password | Your password |
If you wished to send mail from this you can use smtp.orange.net, but I pity the fool who used their mobile phone company for their primary email address.
Tags: orange, random, sms 8 comments
15 August 2014 21:50
This is a random post inspired by recent purchases. Some things we buy are practical, others are a little arbitrary.
I tend to avoid buying things for the sake of it, and have explicitly started decluttering our house over the past few years. That said sometimes things just seem sufficiently "cool" that they get bought without too much thought.
This entry is about two things.
A couple of years ago my bathroom was ripped apart and refitted. Gone was the old and nasty room, and in its place was a glorious space. There was only one downside to the new bathroom - you turn on the light and the fan comes on too.
When your wife works funny shifts at the hospital you can find that the (quiet) fan sounds very loud in the middle of the night and wakes you up..
So I figured we could buy a couple of LED lights and scatter them around the place - when it is dark the movement sensors turn on the lights.
These things are amazing. We have one sat on a shelf, one velcroed to the bottom of the sink, and one on the floor, just hidden underneath the toilet.
Due to the shiny-white walls of the room they're all you need in the dark.
By contrast my second purchase was a mistake - The Logitech Harmony 650 Universal Remote Control should be great. It clearly has the features I want - Able to power:
The problem is solely due to the horrific software. You program the device via an application/website which works only under Windows.
I had to resort to installing Windows in a virtual machine to make it run:
# Get the Bus/ID for the USB device
bus=$(lsusb |grep -i Harmony | awk '{print $2}' | tr -d 0)
id=$(lsusb |grep -i Harmony | awk '{print $4}' | tr -d 0:)
# pass to kvm
kvm -localtime .. -usb -device usb-host,hostbus=$bus,hostaddr=$id ..
That allows the device to be passed through to windows, though you'll later have to jump onto the Qemu console to re-add the device as the software disconnects and reconnects it at random times, and the bus changes. Sigh.
I guess I can pretend it works, and has cut down on the number of remotes sat on our table, but .. The overwhelmingly negative setup and configuration process has really soured me on it.
There is a linux application which will take a configuration file and squirt it onto the device, when attached via a USB cable. This software, which I found during research prior to buying it, is useful but not as much as I'd expected. Why? Well the software lets you upload the config file, but to get a config file you must fully complete the setup on Windows. It is impossible to configure/use this device solely using GNU/Linux.
(Apparently there is MacOS software too, I don't use macs. *shrugs*)
In conclusion - Motion-activated LED lights, more useful than expected, but Harmony causes Discord.
Tags: random 3 comments
31 August 2014 21:50
Today we have a little diversion to talk about the National Health Service. The NHS is the publicly funded healthcare system in the UK.
Actually there are four such services in the UK, only one of which has this name:
- The national health service (England)
- Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland.
- NHS Scotland.
- NHS Wales.
In theory this doesn't matter, if you're in the UK and you break your leg you get carried to a hospital and you get treated. There are differences in policies because different rules apply, but the basic stuff "free health care" applies to all locations.
(Differences? In Scotland you get eye-tests for free, in England you pay.)
My wife works as an accident & emergency doctor, and has recently changed jobs. Hearing her talk about her work is fascinating.
The hospitals she's worked in (Dundee, Perth, Kirkcaldy, Edinburgh, Livingstone) are interesting places. During the week things are usually reasonably quiet, and during the weekend things get significantly more busy. (This might mean there are 20 doctors to hand, versus three at quieter times.)
Weekends are busy largely because people fall down hills, get drunk and fight, and are at home rather than at work - where 90% of accidents occur.
Of course even a "quiet" week can be busy, because folk will have heart-attacks round the clock, and somebody somewhere will always be playing with a power tool, a ladder, or both!
So what was the point of this post? Well she's recently transferred to working for a childrens hospital (still in A&E) and the patiences are so very different.
I expected the injuries/patients she'd see to differ. Few 10 year olds will arrive drunk (though it does happen), and few adults fall out of trees, or eat washing machine detergent, but talking to her about her day when she returns home is fascinating how many things are completely different from how I expected.
Adults come to hospital mostly because they're sick, injured, or drunk.
Children come to hospital mostly because their parents are paranoid.
A child has a rash? Doctors are closed? Lets go to the emergency ward!
A child has fallen out of a tree and has a bruise, a lump, or complains of pain? Doctors are closed? Lets go to the emergency ward!
I've not kept statistics, though I wish I could, but it seems that she can go 3-5 days between seeing an actually injured or chronicly-sick child. It's the first-time-parents who bring kids in when they don't need to.
Understandable, completely understandable, but at the same time I'm sure it is more than a little frustrating for all involved.
Finally one thing I've learned, which seems completely stupid, is the NHS-Scotland approach to recruitment. You apply for a role, such as "A&E doctor" and after an interview, etc, you get told "You've been accepted - you will now work in Glasgow".
In short you apply for a post, and then get told where it will be based afterward. There's no ability to say "I'd like to be a Doctor in city X - where I live", you apply, and get told where it is post-acceptance. If it is 100+ miles away you either choose to commute, or decline and go through the process again.
This has lead to Kirsi working in hospitals with a radius of about 100km from the city we live in, and has meant she's had to turn down several posts.
And that is all I have to say about the NHS for the moment, except for the implicit pity for people who have to pay (inflated and life-changing) prices for things in other countries.
Tags: children, doctors, nhs, random 3 comments
4 September 2014 21:50
I'm in the process of rejoining the Debian project. When I was previously a member I had a 1024-bit key, which is considered to be a poor size these days.
Happily I've already generated a new key, which is much bigger.
If you've signed my old key, and thus trust my identity was confirmed at some point in time, then please do consider repeating the process with the new one.
As I've signed the new with the old there should be no concern that it is random/spurious/malicious.
Obviously the ideal scenario is that I meet local-people to perform signing rites, in exchange for cake, beer, or other bribery.
Old key:
pub 1024D/CD4C0D9D 2002-05-29
Key fingerprint = DB1F F3FB 1D08 FC01 ED22 2243 C0CF C6B3 CD4C 0D9D
uid Steve Kemp <[email protected]>
sub 2048g/AC995563 2002-05-29
New key:
pub 4096R/0C626242 2014-03-24
Key fingerprint = D516 C42B 1D0E 3F85 4CAB 9723 1909 D408 0C62 6242
uid Steve Kemp (Edinburgh, Scotland) <[email protected]>
sub 4096R/229A4066 2014-03-24
Tags: gpg, random 3 comments
5 October 2014 21:50
Before I forget I had meant to write about a toy virtual machine which I'ce been playing with.
It is register-based with ten registers, each of which can hold either a string or int, and there are enough instructions to make it fun to use.
I didn't go overboard and write a complete grammer, or a real compiler, but I did do enough that you can compile and execute obvious programs.
First compile from the source to the bytecodes:
$ ./compiler examples/loop.in
Mmm bytecodes are fun:
$ xxd ./examples/loop.raw 0000000: 3001 1943 6f75 6e74 696e 6720 6672 6f6d 0..Counting from 0000010: 2074 656e 2074 6f20 7a65 726f 3101 0101 ten to zero1... 0000020: 0a00 0102 0100 2201 0102 0201 1226 0030 ......"......&.0 0000030: 0104 446f 6e65 3101 00 ..Done1..
Now the compiled program can be executed:
$ ./simple-vm ./examples/loop.raw [stdout] register R01 = Counting from ten to zero [stdout] register R01 = 9 [Hex:0009] [stdout] register R01 = 8 [Hex:0008] [stdout] register R01 = 7 [Hex:0007] [stdout] register R01 = 6 [Hex:0006] [stdout] register R01 = 5 [Hex:0005] [stdout] register R01 = 4 [Hex:0004] [stdout] register R01 = 3 [Hex:0003] [stdout] register R01 = 2 [Hex:0002] [stdout] register R01 = 1 [Hex:0001] [stdout] register R01 = 0 [Hex:0000] [stdout] register R01 = Done
There could be more operations added, but I'm pleased with the general behaviour, and embedding is trivial. The only two things that make this even remotely interesting are:
Anyway that concludes todays computer-fun.
Tags: random, simple-vm 4 comments
8 October 2014 21:50
Before our recent trip to Poland I took the time to create my own e-book, containing the names/addresses of people to whom we wanted to send postcards.
Authoring ebooks is simple, and this was a useful use. (Ordinarily I'd have my contacts on my phone, but I deliberately left it at home ..)
I did mean to copy and paste some notes from wikipedia about transport, tourist destinations, etc, into a brief guide. But I forgot.
In other news the toy virtual machine I hacked together got a decent series of updates, allowing you to embed it and add your own custom opcode(s) easily. That was neat, and fell out naturely from the switch to using function-pointers for the opcode implementation.
Tags: kindle, random, simple-vm, travel 3 comments
18 October 2014 21:50
Yesterday I received a small rush of SPAM mails, all of which were 419 scams, and all of them sent by "Mrs Elizabeth PETERSEN".
It struck me that I can't think of ever receiving a legitimate mail from a "Mrs XXX [YYY]", but I was too busy to check.
Today I've done so. Of the 38,553 emails I've received during the month of October 2014 I've got a hell of a lot of mails with a From address including a "Mrs" prefix:
"Mrs.Clanzo Amaki" <[email protected]> "Mrs Sarah Mamadou"<[email protected]> "Mrs Abia Abrahim" <[email protected]> "Mrs. Josie Wilson" <[email protected]> "Mrs. Theresa Luis"<[email protected]>
There are thousands more. Not a single one of them was legitimate.
I have one false-positive when repeating the search for a Mr-prefix. I have one friend who has set his sender-address to "Mr Bob Smith", which always reads weirdly to me, but every single other email with a Mr-prefix was SPAM.
I'm not going to use this in any way, since I'm happy with my mail-filtering setup, but it was interesting observation.
Names are funny. My wife changed her surname post-marriage, but that was done largely on the basis that introducing herself as "Doctor Kemp" was simpler than "Doctor Foreign-Name", she'd certainly never introduce herself ever as Mrs Kemp.
Trivia: In Finnish the word for "Man" and "Husband" is the same (mies), but the word for "Woman" (nainen) is different than the word for "Wife" (vaimo).
Tags: email, names, random, spam 3 comments
30 December 2014 21:50
This is the time of year when there are lots of adverts shown on TV solicating donations for charities, which frequently end with the two words "thank you".
I've always felt there were too many charities in the world, and that it was hard to half-heartedly give money to one charity this month, one the next, and still another next year. On that basis I decided long ago to give my money solely to three charities. If I had money that was spare, or I felt generous that month, I would give it to one of "my" charities. Any other appeals I just ignored (with minor exceptions for one-off events like tsunamis, etc).
I won't claim credit for this idea, it came directly from my mom who does the same thing. I've given money to the same three charities for twenty years now. Maybe not thousands, but hopefully enough to be useful. Certainly more than I'd have given if my donation were split between more recipients.
Now I'm changing. As of next year only one charitable organization will get my pennies. The other two haven't done anything bad, wrong, or failed/succeeded (sadly), but it feels better for me to stick to a single recipient.
Happy Christmas.
(Details shouldn't matter, but to answer the obvious question the charity I've kept is the RNLI.)
Tags: charity, random 2 comments
28 December 2022 10:00
This year had a lot of things happen in it, world-wide, as is always the case.
Being more selfish here are the things I remember, in brief unless there are comments/questions:
On the topic of Finnish I'm getting pretty damn good at understanding, albeit less good in speaking. Finnish is all about the suffixes, so:
Most of this is regular, so you can be childless via the "ton" suffix - lapsiton is "lapsi" (child) "ton" (less). The hard part in communication is thus twofold:
Our child turned six recently, and most of the year was spent doing things with him, for him, and to him. He's on the verge of learning to read (English and Finnish), he's interested in maths and completes little puzzles freely and happily. He likes to help with Sodoku, for example and not just the child-versions.
In the past couple of weeks I let him play Super Mario & Super Mario Bros 3, on a NES Classic, and he dies constantly, with a smile on his face. But he does love to tell me what to do when he watches me play!
He's learned to ice-skate, and ski, and almost learned to swim. (I'll say he can swim 3m inside a pool, without aid, but then he starts to sink.) We've got a couple of regular rituals with each other - including going to sauna every week or two, and other similar things.
He's gotten more interested in helping me cook, and his mother too. (My wife and I live in separate houses..)
I guess the next big milestone will be him walking to school by himself, which will start next year. As things stand I wake up early, go over to his house, and do all the morning-things, before I take him there. I expect I'll still want to go there, give him his breakfast, his medicine, and help him get dressed. After that I guess I kick him out, and he makes his own way there.
Happily the walk to school is a few hundred meters, and doesn't involve crossing any roads. But of course it does bring other complications: if he's not collected, and walks home himself, then he needs a key to one/other house, and there's the potential need for a phone to say "I'm late", "I'm lost", or us to say "Where are you?".
Anyway .. interesting year .. good year. Despite everything else.
Tags: 2022, family, personal, random 2 comments