I listened to random folks prattling downloaded some Podcasts for the first time tonight. About the only thing I could find interesting was some interviews with Phil Lesh and Nick Mason. I’m still waiting for a lowdrag.org podcast.

So, this guy downloads an rar file from a torrent, unpacks the rar, executes the resultant exe, and it’s Bittorrent’s fault? I’d blame the network card or electricity, personally.

After having to deal with AFS for the past 5 years, I’m getting fairly fed-up with several annoyances. First off, if I ssh into a machine, then why in the world won’t PubkeyAuthentication work? Oh, you can ssh to the machine just fine using a public key, but when your ~ directory is on afs, login won’t source your .login, .kshrc, etc because you don’t have a token, and as far as I know, there’s no way to get one. There’s an option called “AFSTokenPassing” for the OpenSSH server, but even that doesn’t even seem to work here. Second, when afs tokens expire, it completely borks Gnu Screen, most notably, backspace stops working, and regardless of stty setting, or even klogging to get a new token for the parent process with -a, :exec, it’s impossible to get it back. Gnu Screen seems to go into some bizarre limbo state and refuses to recover. I’ve even gone so far as trying to cron a token renewing shell script, but that’s dangerous, because you could lock your machine once every six months when you change your password. Finally, my shell history is constantly getting lost because a machine will go down when I don’t have a token, or bash will straight out crash when ~ is no longer available. Multiply this by five different AFSs across the US and Europe that I have to deal with, and you’re talking a major productivity hit, and a major annoyance.

It seems that Fedora Core 4 has gone gold, and is available if you know where to look. I just burned off a DVD iso, and plan on installing it this weekend as a staging server. I may end-up putting this at the involution.com colo for backup and redundancy once I figure everything out. Also on the agenda for this weekend, I’m going to see The Brothers Chap (creators of Homestar Runner) at the Alamo Draft House downtown on Saturday night with The Bart

I added a subject field into my rss feed at one point, but it didn’t work with the dtd for rss 1.0. So, I commented it out with a #, apparently that is bad xml foo or something, and it wasn’t parsing with Firefox Deer Park Alpha 1 (it did parse under Firefox 1.0x). It’s working now. Nothing to see here. Move along now, move along.

People keep hammering my sshd with false login requests. I wrote this script which I call nunar_reaper.pl that retaliates against the stupidity in favor of a tarpit. The infamous Dave Dellanave helped out with this one. I still need to fend off imaginary user name attacks, but that’s a little harder.

#!/usr/bin/perl
open(TAIL, "tail -f /var/log/secure|");
while() {
  if(/Failed password for root/) {
  ($ip) = $_ =~ /(\d+\.\d+\.\d+\.\d+)/;
   system "iptables -A INPUT -i eth0 -s $ip  -j DROP"
  }
}

I manage to read a few books every year, but rarely do I ever read an entire book in one day. The only books that I have ever read, cover-to-cover, in less than 24-hours are the following. Richard Feynman’s What Do You Care What Other People Think?, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Book I, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, and as of last Wednesday, Joel Spolsky’s Joel on Software. This book is a great survey of the current software landscape, and provides a ton of insight into how to effectively manage software engineers and produce high quality applications. One of the most valuable things that I learned from this book was how he deals with people who have found a “bug” in his software: He fixes them all, regardless of whether they’re important to him or not. I think this is a stark contrast to what happens in the open sauce community a lot of the time.

Take my transcode experience for example. I wanted to take videos off my Canon SD500 Elph digital camera, DivX them, then upload them to my web server automagically on the lunix command-line. Transcode would not do this with a single command, so I had to hack a script up to do this. If the developers would fix it, it would save a lot of people a lot of time, but they didn’t and won’t. Which is why transcode is never going to be used beyond the extreme geek community. Fixing your bugs (or percieved bugs and usability issues) with your code saves others time, and the purpose of computers is to make us all more productive. Let’s not forget that.

I was thinking a little more about the usability of some of the programs that I’ve settled into _not_ hating. One of those programs is the awesome terminal application program, PuTTY. It really sets the bar for terminal applications on Windows, and it’s free! It can even do things that the Linux terminal applications like “gnome-terminal” can’t do like copying rectangles. The main problem I have with it is the counter-intuitive configuration window. Basically, you type hostnames into a text box, and the default is _not_ to save them. Also, I’ve never quite understood the “Default Settings”, If I load it, then save it, it doesn’t save! This does work for any other saved session except the default. If you type “Default Settings” into the “Saved Sessions” text bar, edit the settings, then “Save”, it will save. Another thing that bothers me is that it makes me hit “OK” when I close a disconnected terminal. Why? Is there anything else I can do with a disconnected terminal at this point? How about displaying a timed dialog that says, “Hey, buddy, I just disconnected from the host, I’m closing down in 3…2…1…blip!”. It seems inane for me to have to keep clicking on the same useless dialogs over and OVER again.