I bought a Sharp Zaurus and put OpenBSD on it with the intention of making a lap timer for my car. I tried to use this timer on my Treo in my R32, but it's so buggy and would crash the phone all the time, and trying to reboot a phone while racing around a track is not something I'd recommend.
There are of course some commercial timers but they are expensive and usually require a laptop running windows to be able to see the gps-acquired data. What's the fun in that?
The other day I thought about whether it would be possible to legally change my name to all lowercase letters. I did some research and found out a few things.
In the United States, changing one's name can be as easy as simply using the new name consistently in practice. It doesn't necessarily need to be done in court, and using a different name is not illegal as long as it's not being used for fraudulent purposes, or inconsistently (which would then be considered an "alias"). The most common reason to have it done in court is to have a formal record of the name change showing the new name for proof to other government agencies, companies, and universities that may require proof of that new name.
While doing some research for something, I came across a website still hosting a shareware windows application that I wrote a long time ago in Visual Basic. It was a stupid little utility that sat in the system tray by the clock and sent out data to a specified TCP/IP host at a specified interval to keep a dialup connection alive (I think I wrote it for someone to keep their ISDN line up).
Carl woke me up early this morning by jumping around on my chest. I got ready and drove back down to Chicago for day two of RailsConf.
The first session of the day for me was Obie Fernandez's Thoughtworks on Rails which was a broad overview of the rails projects that Thoughtworks has done for its customers after introducing it into their development environment. Nothing too technical, but useful to see the lifecycle for a rails app from the point of meeting with the customer to creating "stories" as they put it, to coding individual pieces, to quality assurance testing, to final deployment. I couldn't help but think about how many people are involved in these "normal" development processes versus things at DLS where one developer has to take a request from another staff member and develop, code, test, and deploy an entire app himself.
I woke up at the crack of dawn and drove to the Wyndham in Rosemont for railsconf 2006. I registered and got some free crap, grabbed some food and found a seat in the ballroom. Dave Thomas gave a keynote presentation about the big three things that he thinks Rails needs to become better.
For my first session I opted for Introduction to Capistrano by Mike Clark, just because the other two didn't really look very interesting. Mike's presentation was pretty good and I picked up a few ideas for using cap that I hadn't thought of before (namely for basic system administration tasks not related to Rails).
Some time in March, DLS was served with a subpoena for information about one of the IP addresses assigned to my co-located server, namely the one I have specifically setup for a Tor exit node. They of course complied, and I didn't think much of it. I've personally processed quite a few subpoenas in my time while in charge of the abuse department at DLS.
In early April, I was contacted by one of the lawyers for the case asking me about the subpoena. I told him I hadn't personally received one yet, but I explained what Tor was, how it worked, and that I didn't have any logs to give them for whatever they were asking for.
We're coming out with a managed firewall product at work that is basically an OpenBSD machine running pf that supports VPNs and all the usual malarkey.
An issue we run into a lot with our hosted PBX service is that some customers have networks with firewalls that cause problems with TFTP, SIP, latency, etc. It makes diagnosing problems harder and often the customers think the problems are with our phone system when they're really with their firewall. So if they get our firewall, we know everything will work and we'll have the ability to change things if something doesn't work.
My new 12" PowerBook arrived yesterday. I've been wanting to switch (back) to a PowerBook for a while to have working niceities such as Bluetooth, Firewire, iMovie, Automator, etc. The 15" PowerBook i had before was too big for me to carry around everywhere, so I figured a 12" would be somewhat comparable to my X40.
The first thing I did when it arrived was re-partition it to make a 6GB
partition for OpenBSD and reinstall Mac OS on the large partition.
I played around in Mac OS and got everything setup, but when I tried to install
OpenBSD in its partition, the disklabel was occupying the entire drive space
(even though the OpenBSD partition was only 6GB in fdisk) and it decided to
format the entire drive.
By the time I realized what it was doing it had already screwed everything up.
While poking around in /tmp on one of our shared-customer web servers the
other day, I noticed a /tmp/... directory owned by www.
Seemed a bit odd, so I looked inside and found such gems as hide.c,
psybnc, and bleh2.pid.
As I was busy at the time, I killed the IRC bot that was being run and cleaned
up the directory and moved on.
Today, however, I noticed the same set of files had been put back, with timestamps of yesterday. I looked into it some more and it appears to be a root-kit-of-sorts (that doesn't actually get root, and its only purpose is to run an IRC bot/bouncer).
Finally
committed
my nvram driver.
I have my
tpb
port ready but since i made the /dev/nvram device owned by group kmem and
mode 440, tpb has to run setgid kmem which might not fly so well.
I looked at the code and I don't see any easy way to drop privileges since it
has to open /dev/nvram, read it, and close it every time it polls.
I'll post it to ports@ and see what people have to say.
tpb makes no mention of how the permissions should be handled and Linux's NVRAM
driver is 640, owned by root.root.
Maybe tpb needs privsep.
Ugh.
Since I've gotten my X40, I've been conversing with
markus@
about OpenBSD support since he also owns one.
I've since
ported
a driver for the TCPA/TPM security chip and one thing I always wanted to do was
hook into the blue "Access IBM" button to run
xautolock -locknow for one-touch locking.
The
tpb
program can hook into this button on Linux, but all of the work is handled by an
NVRAM driver in the Linux kernel.
Apparently the X40's BIOS toggles various bits in the CMOS RAM (NVRAM)
when certain buttons are pushed, like the volume buttons, ThinkLight, and of
course, the blue "Access IBM" button.
Last night I started looking into making an NVRAM driver for OpenBSD, which
turned out to be relatively easy, since the i386's clock code already has
functions for reading and writing to the NVRAM.
I put together a simple driver to provide user-land read-only access to the
NVRAM through a /dev/nvram device:
I got a new Cisco T1 router with enough flash memory to run an IOS version that supports IPv6. I reconfigured my network a tad and now the Cisco does the freenet tunnel and passes traffic for the rest of the machines.
Apparently the neteng group at DLS is supposed to start working on IPv6 soon. Hopefully I can get native IPv6 routed here and rt.fm can support it as well.
This morning, I woke up early and stumbled over to the computer. My VT510 was blank, which is never good. It either means I lost power or rt.fm is down. I hit a key and see this scrolled over and over:
Which all stop at around 5:30.
sd1 is the new /mirror drive which I just upgraded to a month or so ago.
After a shower I went to DLS with the old /mirror drive to bring the server
back up, but my keycard wouldn't open any of the doors at the NOC.
Maybe i'm being fired…
I gave up on making the kernel emulate right-clicking from the keyboard since
X11 already has all of this built in.
Someone on the ppc@ list hinted at binding PointerButton2 and
Pointer_Button3 with xmodmap.
This is basically what I'm using now, to have middle and right mouse buttons through the Apple/flower key and the square 'Enter' key, respectively:
Someone on the ppc@ list posted about a
CVS tree
containing drivers for a lot of macppc hardware that hasn't been committed to
NetBSD yet.
I took his snapper and i2s drivers and whacked them into shape to link into
OpenBSD.
The snapper0 and audio0 drivers attach, but the kernel panics in the DMA
code when trying to play audio.
My iMic finally arrived, so I kind of stopped working on making the internal snapper work. With functioning sound, I've been able to boot into OpenBSD at work. konq-e sucks, though, but Mozilla doesn't work so I'm stuck with it for now.