freemode.net

Michael Savage's long, strange trip    [ Rants ]

Since I've been carpooling with my ultra-conservative boss for the past week or so, I've had the pleasure of listening to podcasts of Michael Savage, talk radio host extraordinaire. There's, um, lots to say about Mr Savage, but this Salon article from 2003 seems most interesting:

How a Jewish kid from the Bronx went from swimming naked with Allen Ginsberg to spewing the ugliest bile on talk radio.

I mean, the guy's entertaining in an angry-loud-drunk-sitting-at-the-end-of-the-bar way, but I can't imagine taking him seriously. Over the course of about 3 or 4 shows, I've heard him espouse protective tariffs for Ford and GM; launching pre-emptive attacks on "Islamo-Facists" and their countries before they strike against the United States and destroy our civilization; and rounding up all illegal immigrants to deport them south of the border. And that's not even getting into what he has to say about CNN, Fox News, the Bush administration or Nancy Pelosi.

He seems to be successful at selling the "I don't like anybody very much" persona.

Imminent Death of the 'Net, part MCLVIII    [ Rants ]

So I opened up Ye Olde Blogging Interface this afternoon to post a new article, and I see:

FREEMODE.NET
unix, security, news, rants and geekiness
Entries: 135 Comments: 6067 Authors: 1
New Entry | Manage Weblog | Delete Weblog

Errrgh!   I mean, I get email notifications when people post comments, so I knew there were more than a few comment-spams waiting in the submission queue, but ye gods, over six thousand?   Screw this, I'm turning comments off.   It's not worth the hassle, and I'm not going to sit here and hit "delete" on 6000-some comment spams, or spend the time to automate it.   The few people who actually want to contact me about the articles can email me. It's (username at domain), in case anyone needs a hint; I'm convinced from the volume of spam I get that everyone who wants to reach me already knows my email address, since I've had it for 5 years and it's plastered all over mailing list archives, USENET, website registrations I signed up for three and a half years ago which I can't even remember now and the whole rest of the 'Net.

Between crap like this, and spam in general, I'm convinced that the Internet is far less useful now in mid-2004 than it was 3 or 4 years ago.   Sure, I can still download game demos (more annoying now than then, thanks to "Please click through seventy ad-soaked pages to find out that the public FTP mirrors we have listed are overloaded, would you like to pay money to use the S00P3R 53CR37 3733LT authenticated mirrors we provide?" crap), read the news (once you filter out the pop-ups, pop-unders, inline ads and ignore the generally declining quality of news reporting), mess around on bulletin boards (which now require about fifteen steps to prove that you're really a human who wants to register on this board and validate your email address and then finally post your carefully researched wisdom on "omfg LOL gr8 p0st!" or whatever the hell you care about), experience the beauty of Internet Chat (still filled with the usual cadre of 12-year-old pyromaniacs, geeks who have not dated since the Reagan administration, fiercely emotional zealots who NEED TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS and distant AFK'ers who wield their away messages as finely honed weapons), buy stuff online (after searching through ninety-seven different merchants and figuring out from third-party review sites who's going to do me a favor by simply taking my money and disappearing, and who will turn my point-click-and-ship experience into another entertaining "Gee, I'd really like this widget that I paid for over a year ago" 120K worth of email soap opera and eventually receiving a busted out-of-warranty piece of crap after 5-hour phone calls with half of the state and Federal law enforcement agencies on this continent and being ignored via email by the other half) and actually program something useful to interface with it, except it now has to survive this whirling manic Darwinian maelstrom of maliciousness, calumny and evil intent if I don't want my PHP pages XSS'd, my database queries SQL injected, or my CGI scripts to auto-remotely-r00t my poor webhosting account and make it traipse through the shell-trading channels on IRC like a drunk hooker at 2am on Saturday night and then invite over 22GB worth of pr0n, w4r3z and spam traffic that gets billed to my account at the low low rate of only $10/MB over my monthly quota of half a gig.

And on top of this you've got spam-bot armies, DDoS attacks, virii/worm/trojan of the week, advertising and stupid crap everywhere and well, who really wants to use this shit anyway?

Goddamn it, I'm taking my boxes and going home.

The horizon of coolness    [ Rants ]

Every so often, you come across something that makes you go "wow!" and appreciate an elegant design, really good coding, or a system that Works Properly.   When you spend upwards of 40 hours a week working on a government IT contract, you might not see that so often, so that makes Gmail all the more impressive.

I got an invite from a coworker who's been using Gmail for a few months now (he had an account on Orkut and got a free invite to Gmail) and has moved all his mail over.   I've read a fair bit about Gmail in the geek-news press, but I'm just blown away by it - It Just Works.   Spam filtering works really well (so far, knock on wood), you can use keyboard shortcuts (this is great, coming from mutt), the searching features are great... I've only been using this for a little bit now, but even for being in beta, this thing feels more solid than most other webmail services out there.   It doesn't suffer from the blind-your-eyes-with-adverts approach of Hotmail and Yahoo - the text ads are really pretty unobtrusive.

Google's nailed this on the head.   Microsoft's got a real competitor here, not just for Hotmail, but for Outlook - why deal with all the client-side virii/worm mess plus abysmal search capabilities (yes, I *do* want to search through my Inbox plus my archives for this - why do I have to open up 5 different search windows?) when you can just use Gmail?

Reading material    [ Rants ]

Good books that I've read over the past 6 months or so:

• 1421: The Year China Discovered America, by Gavin Menzies [site] [book]
  Fascinating book detailing the evidence for voyages of a vast Chinese naval armada across the globe starting in 1421, who may have discovered North America, South America, Australia and Antarctica plus methods for reckoning longitude decades and centuries before Europeans.   Historical non-fiction, it's a fascinating read for anyone interested in history.
• Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire, by Peter Hopkirk [book]
  
  Another great book from Peter Hopkirk on Central Asian/Middle Eastern history, this one covers the plots and people involved in German efforts to drive the British and Russians out of Central Asia during World War I.   Historical non-fiction, highly recommended.   Not quite as engrossing as Hopkirk's The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia, but well worth reading.
• Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson [site] [book]
  
  The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson [site] [book]
  
  Stephenson's first two books in the Baroque Cycle.   Follows the beginning of the Enlightenment in Europe through unforgettable characters both real and fictional including Newton, Leibnitz, Louis XIV of France (The Sun King) and William of Orange.   Historical fiction; absolutely brilliant, if you're a fan of science fiction or historical fiction or simply good writing, you should pick this up.   Stephenson stands in the company of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and Mark Twain with his writing, and if you enjoy any of their works, I'd recommend these books.
• The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945, by Michael Beschloss [book]
  
  Beschloss covers the inner plans and political maneuvers inside the White House and between the Big Three (US, Britain and the Soviet Union) during World War II regarding the fate of Germany.   Fascinating insights into FDR's and Truman's approaches to governance and politics, as well as the back-and-forth debates, conferences and arguments inside the US government and between the Allies over what should be done to Germany after Hitler's armies were defeated.   Historical non-fiction, a good read if you're interested in WWII or US Presidential history.

Who is Enoch Root?    [ Rants ]

Okay, so now I'm most of the way through The Confusion, the second novel in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and I've got Enoch Root on the brain.   Who is he?   Or, what is he?

I'm going to have to re-read Cryptonomicon now that I've stumbled on this site which goes into some depth on Enoch Root theories.   But, oddly enough, prior to stumbling on the site, I was thinking this morning:

What if Enoch simply doesn't *age* as fast as normal humans?   Completely apart from the whole angel-assuming-a-man's-body theory or sliding-through-time-a-la-Billy-Pilgrim, what if his trick is simply longevity?   As a mental exercise, say one lived a full year, then was able to roll back those physical aging effects to effectively only age, say, one day for every year lived.   Quick shower-stall math means you live 300-some times longer than a typical human, which works out to something on the order of 24K years (assuming a lifespan of 65 years).   Someone who could live that long would only age 16 physical years across 6000 chronological years of recorded history.

So then I see this passage from the Book of Enoch later today on elharo's site:   "And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years."   Hmm, that's not altogether too far off from the age-one-day-for-a-year, but who knows how that got translated from the Hebrew.

Anyway, I'd highly recommend any of Stephenson's books as good reads.

I want my Internet back    [ Rants ]

goddammit.

(Time for a rant.)

I just spent over half an hour deleting over a hundred comment spams on this site before installing a comment queuing system to prevent spammers from using my site as a free linkfarm.   I spend probably 3-5 minutes per day deleting spam emails that make it past my mail filters.   I go to some amount of effort to use browsers like Mozilla Firebird that include pop-up blocking by default, and install blocking software like the Google Toolbar or PanicWare's Pop-Up Stopper with IE to ameloriate its terminal b0rk3d-ness.   I've tried running web proxy software like JunkBuster and SquidGuard with Squid to stop pop-ups.

But it only goes so far.   This is a fair selection of what's out there, and it STILL doesn't completely work.

I mean, here I am - I've been using computers for 20-odd years, I've been connected to the 'net for nearly a decade and seen three major ages of its lifetime, I'm computer-savvy enough to get a job fixing security, networking and systems problems for corporations and government organizations, and it frustrates the hell out of me!   This is my hobby, my work, and my play, and there's times when I just want to get up and LEAVE to find a world where this shit doesn't go on and doesn't suck up my time.

What on earth would a brand new user, who's never browsed the web or used email before, think of this cretinous mass of garbage that's thrown in their face?   If you went down to Wal-Mart, put down $450 of your hard-earned money for a bargain PC with a monitor, and forked out $30 or $40 per month for high-speed access from the local telco or cable joint, would you even WANT to use it after dealing with this crap?

There's something seriously wrong here.   When I first started poking around on BBS's and at my school library into this shiny ethereal concept, it was beautiful, exciting, raw around the edges, but new and filled with possibility and wonder.   That's not there anymore.   I still get a thrill from finding cool new technical tools and tricks to use, seeing well-engineered designs in action, building systems and networks and fixing problems, but it's not centered on the Internet itself anymore.

You have to go out of your way to find these experiences.   That's true of any good thing, and one can argue that the changing face of the 'net reflects that.   Once people realize it's useful or attractive or interesting, more people come.   Once more people come and use something, it's not as special.   And that makes it worth going out of your way to find new and interesting things.

But the 'net held such promise, such hope - gigabytes and then terabytes and petabytes of data at your fingers, search engines and indexes to seek out and guide you to new places, history and art and sport and literature and programming, all there for the taking.   Sure, there were commercial areas, there always were, but they embraced the 'net as a means of better communication.   And there were always those who would abuse the commons, but they were held in check by the rest of the population.

None of that complaint is new, I suppose.   But there's a real tragedy when a communications medium with such promise is completely raped and pillaged and rendered close to useless (minus defensive measures) by pop-ups, spam, virii, worms and filth raining down like dark hail from the heavens.

I don't have a solution beyond the incremental arms-race I've tried so far.   Maybe something will emerge - IPv6 buddy lists? Internet3? Strong SMTP authentication? Hardended out-of-the-box operating systems and applications? Encrypted-protocol-over-IP networks like Gnutella? - but it's an exhausting battle to fight.

It's not PowerPoint    [ Rants ]

Was reading through the latest RISKS digest and saw a mention of NASA's shuttle crash investigation, and a New York Times article claiming that "PowerPoint Makes You Dumb".   Horseshit.

I'm no Microsoft weenie, and I certainly don't care for their marketing tactics, but blaming a piece of slideshow software for an engineering and oversight failure is simply ludicrous.   One of the arguments mentioned in the RISKS digest piece is that "only about 40 words fit on each slide".   Just for fun, I created the following 326-word slide in my copy of PowerPoint.

Perfectly readable, no problem.   PowerPoint is a tool, and you can use it however you want.   The real issue here is an organizational culture where engineers aren't able to bring up critical issues and have them acted upon, not the presentation software they're using.

I do like Edward Tufte's cover art for his rant against PowerPoint, though.

Pregnancy and Grapefruit    [ Rants ]

Jessica went for her doctor's appointment yesterday, all looks well and she's already dilated to 1cm!   The doctor said that she looked good for 36 weeks, so we'll have to get our delivery bag (snacks, clothes, pillows, etc.) packed soon.

However, this is causing some issues with breakfast in the morning.   My dear lovely wife, despite graduating with a math degree and having taught math at the high school level, still retains a deep fundamental distrust of geometry.   This wasn't as much of an issue before she was pregnant, but some combination of this geometric disaffection and pregnancy hormones have rendered her unable to cut a grapefruit cleanly in half.

The last two attempts have been the worst - both times, we've ended up not with two halves, but with a fourth and three-fourths, or a third and two-thirds.   I've tried to cut the grapefruit myself, but she persists in her stubbornness and so someone ends up with the scalped grapefruit and the other with the scalp in the morning.

It's cute, really, but I hope that this can return to normal once we have the kid. :)

The Sum of All Votes    [ Rants ]

Was reading through my (month-old) mail from the cryptography@metzdowd.com list, saw this post below.   Interesting idea, to throw a concept like electronic voting into the collective consciousness as a warning - there's a lot of geeks who are worried about this, but Joe and Jane Average Voter aren't concerned (yet).

Redskins = Stink    [ Rants ]

There's really no nice way to put this, so I won't.   The Redskins stunk on Sunday against the Bills.   And the Bills, the worst-ranked offense (well, before this last game) in the league, ran up 24 points on the scoreboard.   Mike Wilbon has a good column this morning on the problems they have, no need to enumerate them any further.

This is not the same team who came up from the dregs of last season to go 3-1 against some hard teams in the first four weeks.   This is last year's team, at its worst, when players from Philly and Dallas and everywhere else relished the chance to run up their stats and be able to get an easy win out of their schedule.   Well, minus the Rams.

Meter ghouls    [ Rants ]

I parked in a public garage next to work today - couldn't carpool since I'm leaving early - and got to see the Montgomery County meter ghouls walking 'round and picking up the change deposited in the meters.   Why meter ghouls?   They're outfitted in drab gray outfits, carry conical bags to deposit the change in, and generally look somewhere between unhappy with their job and dead to the world.

Seems that Montgomery County could at least do something to make the uniforms less... well, less like they're showing up for a shift of grave-digging duty.   It's probably nowhere on anyone's top 10 jobs list, but most other government employees I've met seem much happier.

NY 24, Washington 21    [ Rants ]

Game went into overtime after Patrick Ramsey put together a real decent drive and set up a field goal at the end of the 4th quarter after making a 2-point conversion and actually making touchdowns in the second half, but the Giants went back in OT and smashed through the Redskins defense to score first.   The Post has some more detailed coverage.   Close game, and Washington played like a completely different team (NFL instead of AA-division NCAA ball) in the second half, but the Redskins need to play that way in BOTH halves if they want to win consistently.

Halftime, 21-3    [ Rants ]

Garrrgh, the Redskins have nearly lost as much yardage from penalties as they've gained this first half against the Giants.   9 penalties, and all they have to show for it is a lousy field goal.   Tiki Barber's having a great game for New York, the 'Skins defense can barely stop him either running or receiving.

"One of the worst halves of football that I've seen!" - Sonny, Sam and Frank.   Hope they can come back in the second half.

high tech heroin    [ Rants ]

Politech has a post from Richard Forno on high tech heroin - the vicious circle of media, software and suppliers that keep the IT industry and users going.   El Reg also has a copy of the article up.

RC5-72    [ Rants ]

Didn't even notice over the past eight months, but distributed.net has started a new RC5 project.   Time to fire up those little cows!

Never too late for Slashdot    [ Rants ]

You know it's waaaay too late into your unscheduled maintenance window (approximately 3 hours, 8 minutes) when you move three cubicles down from the speakerphone that's dialed into the conference bridge in order to giggle at a Slashdot poll.   Zarking piece of smeg network architecture.

Anyway, back to pinging between Cisco boxen to see where the static routes / interfaces are b0rk3d for no obvious reason.

"Why are we at war?"    [ Rants ]

Picked up a copy of "Why are we at war?" by Norman Mailer from Borders yesterday.   It's a thin volume, reads a lot like a political leaflet distributed during periods of upheaval, like during the American Revolution or the fights between the Fascists and Communists in Europe during the early part of last century.   That is, there's a lot of wild-ass speculation and rumor-mongering without a whole lot of evidence or reasoning to back up the theories that he's spouting.   What you end up with by the time you're 2/3 through the book is a theory that happens to fit the facts, which doesn't really prove anything but makes for 30-60 minutes worth of politically-oriented diversion.

Long strange week    [ Rants ]

What a long strange week it's been...

Been busy at work and at home.   War's going, it's very odd to listen to the daily War in Iraq updates on WAMU in the morning and evenings.   Having this level of press coverage with embedded reporters, daily news conferences and almost hourly PR battles between the Pentagon, CENTCOM, the White House and Tony Blair on one side and the UN, Iraq, Jacques Chirac and the global anti-war protesters on the other makes for something more resembling a dark satire than a war.   Will the Dixie Chicks apologize?   What's the latest civilian casualties from Iraq?   Do the Academy Awards winners care any more about Donald Rumsfeld's opinion on their movies than he cares about their opinions on the war?   Are we "bogged down", "running out of steam", or even better, "in a quagmire" after less than 10 days of warfare?

You get sick of listening to this self-feeding news cycle of rumor and leaks and conferences and allegations and plain old horse shit flying over the airwaves and RF bands after a while.   I mean, here I am, former Socialist and child of the Brave New World of the Nineties, siding more with the guys giving briefings from Camp Doha.   They seem far more connected with reality than anyone else.

Vernal equinox    [ Rants ]

It's the vernal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, and time to take the Christmas lights down and invade Iraq.   Good time of year for cleaning up the house and sending cruise missiles + F-117A stealth fighter-bombers to attack "targets of opportunity" in Middle Eastern dictatorships.

Weather report: rainy in Washington DC, expected to clear up by this weekend.   Very snowy around Colorado and Wyoming.   Residents around Basra in southern Iraq should expect intermittent artillery bombardment with a high probability of mobile infantry and armor rolling into the area.

novus ordo seclorum    [ Rants ]

Between the warbloggers and the news coverage and the President himself, this seems like an odd way to go to war.

The eves of conflict aren't usually calm happy places, but this is decidedly different.   Is this what our society will be like from now on?   A constant state of emergency and fear, international crises turned into armed conflict, and privacy exchanged for a small dose of security against waves of paranoia?   An economy too weakened by fear to recover, and citizens told not to stand tall, not to make our nation the shining example of freedom and equality and democracy that it can be, but instead to merely buy our way out of our problems.

What if this is the way society will be?

The original HP    [ Rants ]

Not Hewlett-Packard, but Howard Phillips Lovecraft.   If you've been around the 'net or gaming or alternative subculture for any length of time, you've probably seen lots of references to his fiction.   I had read some excerpts and short stories of his a long time ago, but hadn't read that much of his work until I was at home over the past two days and stumbled across a great collection of his writing in HTML and PDF format.

Some of them are rather short, less coherent and read like he was writing on deadline (Nyarlathotep), but others (The Music of Erich Zann, The Call of Cthulhu) are simply wonderful in eerieness, foreboding and varying degrees of subtle and not-so-subtle horror.   A mountain walked or stumbled, and all that.

And all of this from the comfort of my laptop with an 802.11b wireless card - this is what the Internet is all about, being able to find information and great works and enjoy them from anywhere, on any device.   "hp invent", indeed.

Lotes    [ Rants ]

I've been working from home today, thanks to a rather unpleasant stomach virus.   But thanks to the Linksys WAP11 in the basement + a WPC11 adapter, I can sit in bed and check my email, edit documents and send 'em back and forth to work.

So now that I'm spending some amount of time using Lotus Notes, I'm getting familiar with its ups and downs.   It's far better than MS Outlook + Exchange for doing forms, databases and implementing business processes, but the email bits almost seem like an afterthought. It's like AIX : imagine that IBM had written a great workflow product, and then decided to add mail functionality to it around version 3, but had gotten the requirements translated from Hungarian to Mandarin to English.

We love you Dell    [ Rants ]

Joel on Software has an interesting article on Dell's supply-chain philosophy.   Having had my fair share of issues with Dell's enterprise support, it's enlightening to see someone else's comments on the company.

New job and back to school    [ Rants ]

It's the new year, and time for change.   I had been looking around for a different job to get away from my unix-admin-in-a-microsoft-bodyshop position, and managed to come across a neat gig doing VPN and security engineering with another company.   Woo-hoo!   So I'm saying goodbye to the folks at $OLD_GOVT_CONTRACTOR and saying hello to new folks at $NEW_GOVT_CONTRACTOR.   I'll miss the people there, but not the position or all of the particular attributes of that environment.

So I have five business days left at the current job now, and I'm feeling like a short-timer.   Everyone's been really nice at $OLD_GOVT_CONTRACTOR, and I'd like to keep in touch with them - it's a small world, and it's interesting to see what folks end up doing six months or a year down the road.

And I've decided to bite the bullet and finish up the classes I need for a degree.   I'll only need four classes or so to get my associate's degree in CS at NOVA community college.   Then maybe I can finish up my bachelor's degree at Mason, or maybe not.   At least getting the associate's degree would give me something, which would be far preferable to the nothing I have right now in the college diploma department.

A slow burning death    [ Rants ]

Garggh, my HP CDRW/DVDROM drive is dying. I bought it less than a year ago, and it's always been a little flaky - burning coasters every now and then, locking up intermittently - but nothing too critical. Now Win2K is spewing device errors on the CDROM0 device and the machine's rebooting itself every 2 to 4 hours.

Should've just bought a Plextor to begin with. Ah well, I can try to RMA or trash the HP 9900 drive and use my once-and-future-video-card money from Christmas to get a Plextor PX-320A instead.

6 shopping days left!    [ Rants ]

Six days of shopping left before Christmas, and my total number of presents purchased is dangerously close to zero.   Blearg, I've never been this bad about getting my shopping done - normally there's a few things left to get, but this year, I'm looking at either lots o' shipping fees or lots o' trudging through the local malls.   Happy Holidays!

Snow snow snow    [ Rants ]

Got about 4 inches of snow in Manassas from the big storm on Thursday, schools were closed, and since I had put in about 9 extra hours of work in on Tuesday and Wednesday nights (wheee, pager duty) I definitely enjoyed having the day off.   Jessica got Friday off as well, but the Prince William County site wasn't terribly accurate in its "All employees must report to work" statement - turns out it was only 12-month employees who had to show up on Friday, not teachers.

The snow made for pleasant scenery, we don't normally get storms this early in the season.

The Weekend After in PA    [ Rants ]

Drove up to Pennsylvania this weekend after Thanksgiving to visit Jessica's family up there - her mom and her dad are from the same small town in the middle of Pennsylvania.   It's a bit quieter than Northern Virginia, but there's other differences too.

WACFL II    [ Rants ]

Took three kids from Forest Park HS to the second WACFL Lincoln-Douglas debate tournament on Saturday, and they did fairly well.   Jessica found out that Forest Park had a debate team earlier this year, and was scheduling team meetings when the sniper attacks shut down all after-school activities.   So we ended up having about 3 weeks to get the kids prepared for the tournament, with two meetings and practice rounds on Tuesday and Wednesday last week.

Washington beats St Louis 20-17    [ Rants ]

The Redskins beat the Rams in front of nearly 80 thousand fans on Sunday - woohoo!   It was a hell of a game, I nearly yelled myself hoarse at FedEx field.   Jessica was lucky enough to buy tickets to the game from her former boss, who has season tickets in section 112, row 21.

Looks like Danny Wuerfful's a pretty good QB after all, he got the fan's respect after pushing through against the Rams' defense to set up 3 TD's from Stephen Davis and scrambling for a critical first down in one drive.   The 'Skins kicking game, for lack of a better term, absolutely sucked.