Older blog entries for ianmacd (starting at number 70)

Maui was great. There's something about whale watching, standing atop a volcano, beautiful beaches, crystal clear seas, lush vegetation, great food, the company of a beautiful woman and not having to work that somehow brings out the best in me.

I don't know if I could live there for more than a year or so without going crazy, but I would really like to find out.

Meanwhile, the homesickness continues unabated.

I seem to have got my main server to stop spontaneously rebooting. What was the problem? It appears to be temperature related. If I close the window in the server room at night, all is well. If I leave it open and it's a particularly cold night, the machine stands a good chance of rebooting or hanging.

As strange as this sounds, there's strong evidence to suggest that this is, in fact, the case.

The hits on bash completion continue, which is very pleasing. It looks like this stuff is going to make it into the next releases of Red Hat and Debian Linux, which is very gratifying.

Damn, the machine rebooted again last night with 2.4.17. Half an hour later, it hung for 2.5 hours until I could power cycle it.

I brought it back up with 2.4.16 and grsecurity. It ran fine on that for a while, so it'll be interesting to see whether this stops the spontaneous reboots and hangs.

The machine is logging nothing strange at all prior to the reboot. There seems to be no weird network probing activity going on, the machine isn't under load. It's very strange.

I should give a quick plug for Bookpool here. Those guys really provide a cool service at much cheaper prices than Amazon. Give them a try.

Hmm, spontaneous reboots on one of my boxes using the 2.4.17 kernel and the grsecurity patch. This is not cool, and caused a Web server outage of some 5 hours early this morning. The box is seeing quite a bit of traffic now, so maybe I'll downgrade to 2.4.16 and see if that helps.

After a long, long time, I finally found a way to fix the bug that causes ssh completion to go awry when the string on which you're completing contains a @ symbol. I fixed a man completion bug, too, while I was at it.

I expect to put up a new release on Saturday. Most of the known bugs are nailed now. There's still at least one in the rpm completion function, but it's very tricky to fix and doesn't seem to be noticed by most people. No-one's complaining about it, at least.

Sarah and I are off to Maui for a long weekend a week from now. That'll be fun. I should start reading up on it a little bit to find out what kind of things there are to see and do.

At work this morning, I was having trouble reaching one of my servers at home. A little investigation revealed that my upstream DSL bandwidth was full to capacity.

What had happened? It turns out that Linux Today had put a link to my bash stuff on their front page. Instant Slashdot effect.

Anyway, the net effect was great. It put a lot of people in touch with bash completion who wouldn't otherwise have known about it. Not everyone reads Freshmeat and few people visit my home page.

My Malata N996 DVD player turned up yesterday. This player is code-free (will play DVDs from any region), dual-standard (converts PAL to NTSC and vice versa), and operates at multiple voltages.

In other words, this player can be plugged in anywhere in the world, connected to any kind of TV, and used to play any DVD. It even handles RCE1 discs. (Hmm, I wonder what it does with SECAM TVs and DVDs.)

This really makes a mockery of the MPAA and their heinous region encoding scheme.

I can't wait for my order of region 2 European DVDs to get here. All those old episodes of Minder and The Royale Family. No way they'll ever see a region 1 release or even end up on American TV. (I wish we could get BBC America in our building, though. They show some great stuff on there.)

I've been playing with Ruby this week. It's like a next-generation Perl, with most of Perl's standard modules and functions converted to classes and methods, giving a truly object-oriented scripting language; much more true to the notion than Python.

It's a little odd learning to think in terms of Ruby's constructs, but I'm having fun and I like it a lot.

I got a copy of Kylix Professional for Christmas, too, so I should really start playing with that and reawaken my old love of Pascal and Modula-2.

Homesickness for Amsterdam is becoming acute. I'd love to get home for a while, even just a few days. Since the introduction of the Euro, I wouldn't even recognise the money now.

The USA is starting to feel much like a job that I've outgrown and need to resign from. The sense of adventure and novelty value that were strong when I first came here have evaporated. What to do? Our immediate future is here (Sarah's job is going very well), but I definitely want to start thinking about how I might engineer our smooth migration back to my homeland in the not too distant future.

Plans for the wedding are proceeding apace. I need to build an RSVP system out of CGI scripts and MySQL to take care of the invitations. So much to do, so much to think about.

Just got back from two weeks on the east coast, celebrating Christmas and New Year with Sarah and her folks. What bliss.

Our two nights out at Fire & Ice were fun, as were the positively stupendous desserts at Finale in Boston.

Anyway, I've just put up a new release of bash completion with which to kick off the new year.

I'm back at work tomorrow. Ugh. I very quickly get used to not working, so I can't say I'm looking forward to getting back into the doldrums.

Anyone played with grsecurity, an excellent security patch for the Linux kernel? This thing is great and nails a system down very tightly indeed. The sysctl interface is particularly good, allowing you to fine-tune parameters to get the precise balance between security and usability that you want. Then you can lock down all the configured parameters by setting one final sysctl. Once that's set, grsecurity parameters can no longer be redefined.

So, I won an Xbox last night in a raffle at the Disaster Recovery BoF. A few hours prior to that, I hadn't even heard of the Xbox.

Walking through the vendor exhibition hall with a colleague earlier that afternoon, he remarked how cool the Xbox was. "What's an Xbox?" I asked. "A game console", he replied.

I told him how glad I was that I didn't have one, because I didn't have enough time for my interests and hobbies as it was. My life would be over if I had such a device.

Now I own one.

Hmm...

So, I'm at LISA 2001 in San Diego this week.

The downloads of my bash completion code have been very encouraging. Expect to see a new release at the weekend to fix a few silly bugs.

Highlights of LISA so far have been Jim Reid's excellent advanced DNS tutorial and KC Claffy's presentation on Internet traffic statistics, which debunked a surprising number of commonly held beliefs. Her Answer Lies in Measurement folk song was particularly entertaining.

I've finally put up a page for my bash completion and other cool bash stuff.

We spent Thanksgiving in the Santa Barbara area, in Carpenteria to be specific, staying at Prufrock's Garden Inn.

Saturday evening, I'm flying down to San Diego for the LISA 2001 conference. That should be fun. I just hope they have a wireless LAN for my laptop so that I can still do stuff.

On Sunday evening, we'll probably head down to tacky Tijuana, just over the Mexican border.

Flight prices are still ridiculously cheap right now, so Sarah and I have decided to go for a long weekend on Maui in January. So it's the rainiest month of the year in Hawaii, but who cares?

Spent some time hacking on Junkbuster today. It's rare that I get to hack on C code in my day job (or even outside of my day job).

Basically, Google needs to be able to strip out the Referer header from HTTP requests when said URL refers to an internal Google document, just in case the file name compromises confidentiality.

We now have a trio of Junkbuster proxies running on a single machine. Port 8000 filters out Referer and User Agent headers, port 8001 filters out both of those headers as well as ads, and port 8002 filters out those headers, ads, and cookies.

All in all, a decent step in the direction of anonymous browsing. It's just unfortunate that Referer and User Agent information can also be retrieved via JavaScript. Nothing is infallible.

Looks like tomorrow is going to be taken up with documenting the proxy implementation and putting together an LDAP design document.

On the home network front, I now have monitoring, thanks to mon. I've also replaced wu-ftpd with vsftpd and syslogd with syslog-ng, which is a vastly superior piece of code. CVS is one of the next things I'll need to set up, but that's pretty simple.