I’d better blog while I can

Posted by rae in web site
at 12:16 pm on Tuesday, 30 September 2003

Well Sympatico has turned into a nightmare. The IP address is changing at *least* once a day. I’m going to move over to istop as soon as I can. Now that PhotoSuite is pretty much all done, I hope I will have time.

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Things that piss me off in OS X

Posted by rae in software
at 10:22 am on Thursday, 25 September 2003

I’ve been using Mac OS X on a day-to-day basis for a couple of years now, and there are things about it that still piss me off.

Cocoa text fields: they don’t handle click+vertical_drag properly. Down should always go to the end, up should always go to the beginning. Instead, Cocoa decides based on your horizontal movement. Now if you click and drag straight down, our horizontal movement will be negligible. In effect this means that which way the selection goes is random.
Under Carbon this is handled correctly. Open Internet Explorer, type some text into the location bar and try clicking in the centre and ragging straight down. Now wiggle left and right a bit. You will find that the selection is rock steady. Unlike Safari’s location bar, where I notice this problem the most — removing the end bits off URLs is a common workflow.

Drag-down-selection for single-line text fields in Carbon is also better because it has the same behaviour as for multi-line text fields. Not so in Cocoa, where (of neccessity) dragging down selects to the end of the line and beyond.

What else? Safari’s key bindings drive me batty!

I often edit text in Safari, especially when I’m entering text into my blog, like I am now. There are certain key bindings for editing text on a Mac that have been there for over a decade. To select text to the left of your insertion point, for example, is shift+left-arrow. it’s pretty straightforward, and most of these bindings have made their way to Windows and Linux because they are so sensible and needed.

Now, how do you select text from the insertion point to the end of the line? shift+command+right-arrow. How does Safari move to the next tab? shift+command+right-arrow. Do you see the problem here?

I think I will add more things here as I think of them. Feel free to add comments with your pet peeves!

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Luisa’s away..

Posted by rae in family
at 12:20 am on Wednesday, 24 September 2003

This afternoon Luisa left for a week-and-half trip to Argentina. She’s going to a cousin’s wedding, along with her brother Tony and her Mother.

The timing is somewhat fortuitous, as I will be spending almost all my waking hours on finishing off PhotoSuite for the end of the month. Afterwards I plan on rewarding myself (and Ronnie and Michael) by buying a couple of games. I’m hoping to get Half-Life 2, but recent rumours suggest that it might not be out on Sep 30 as expected. Oh well, I will just hope that the other game I want to get, Halo will ship on time.

It’s awfully quiet around here without Luisa. But I must say that the kitchen is a lot cleaner. :-) Luisa tends to toss everything this way and that when she is cooking. Dishes are precariously balanced in the sink with goop all over them.

For some reason, when I cook, I tend to clean-as-I-go. I rinse out bowls, silverware, etc and stack thenm neatly on the counter to the right of the sink, ready to be zipped into the dishwasher,. I can hear Andrew laughing his heart out right now. I wasn’t so meticulous when I was sharing a house with him and one other person. I’m not sure how this happened. I suspect it was because I never really cooked when I lived with Andrew. Later, when I shared a condo with Eric it didn’t really come up since we both almost always had supper at Alias (which paid for it in return for overtime — pretty cheap labour costs there!).

Ah well. Time to go upstairs and watch “interesting” movies on digital cable. :-)

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Our Pool Party pics are up at last

Posted by rae in friends
at 12:41 pm on Tuesday, 23 September 2003

Well, we finally got our pics back from Henry’s (after almost 3 weeks, but that’s another story). Below is a selection of favorite pics. You can also browse all of our pictures, and don’t forget about Debbie’s pictures.

Enjoy!

The calm before the storm (and ain’t she cute?)
 
The party begins! (& Karin likes bald guys)
 
Hi Jenny! Andy relaxing, the Suzuki Cook clan, and Mister Tom the Advisor!
 
Iain with a camera, Debbie with a camera, Debbie with a camera, Debbie with a camera, Debbie with a camera, … Debbie *without* a camera
 

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Knoppix and Movix

Posted by rae in software
at 11:25 am on Tuesday, 23 September 2003

There are a class of Linux distributions that are very useful as standalone tools. They are designed to be run off of a CD. Knoppix has been getting a lot of exposure recently (note that most of the main site has been taken down for a while in political protest). You can get a copy of it from the Knoppix downloads page, which includes a torrent download.

Morphix is another CD-based Linux, which centres on media tools that let you play movies, mp3s, etc. You can get it from the Morphix downloads page.

Apparently, you can order a CD of Knoppix or Morphix for $3 Canadian online at Nattor.

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Hardware circa 2023

Posted by rae in hardware
at 3:21 pm on Sunday, 21 September 2003

This is a table I doodled one night on a scrap of paper I was about to throw out. Sort of a thought experiment. See what you think.

Hardware Extrapolation
Name Year CPU Bus Disk Power RAM
 Apple IIe  1983  1 MHz  ?  400k?  ?  128k
 Quadra 840AV  1993  40 MHz (x40)  40 MHz  230 M (x500)  200 W  16M (x128)
 G5  2003  2 GHz (x50)  1 GHz (x25)  120 G (x500)  400 W (x2)  1G (x128)
 ?  2013  100 GHz (x50)  25 GHz (x25)  60 T (x500)  800 W (x2)  128G (x128)
 ??  2023  5 THz (x50)  625 GHz (x25)  30 P (x500)  1600 W (x2)  16T (x128)
Fun, huh?

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IP change

Posted by rae in web site
at 9:48 am on Friday, 19 September 2003

tnir’s IP changed again this morning. But that’s a lot better than before. I am keeping logs in the iplogs directory and it seems the last ip (64.229.233.153) lasted from 10:40pm Monday through to 9:20 this morning. I check the IP every ten minutes, but only update the logs if (a) the IP has changed, or (b) this is the tenth time the check has run. You can check it out yourself if you like. It’s turgid, uncommented Perl though. :-)

Btw, not sure if I mentioned this, but as an emergency backup system, tnir automatically maintains my bare-bones website on samurai with links to the current IP address. [That's what all that stuff about "/Documents/emerg" in the script is about — it's a directory of HTML templates that get scp'ed somewhere; in my case, home.samurai.com, which is hard-coded into the script. Hey, I said it was turgid, didn't I?]

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lj.samurai.com archives and PHP

Posted by rae in Reid
at 12:08 am on Friday, 19 September 2003

A small project I’ve been working on is a way to access the old lj.samurai.com LiveJournal archives. I’ve been learning PHP recently, along with David, and am getting almost to the point where I should be able to transfer all my old entries to Movable Type. The thing is, I’m not sure I want to. I think I’ve almost had enough of Movable Type and its static-page design. In this age of multi-gigaherz processors and Serial ATA drives, I don’t think it’s too taxing to have a completely dynamic personal web site.

LiveJournal was pretty good at that, but its design centres around One Big Server that everyone has an account on. Movable Type has a better philosophy where everyone can have their own “server”, but still have links amongst them (TrackBack).

Now if we could have the dynamics of LiveJournal, scaled down and combined with Movable Type’s Trackback… hmmm…

Oh, if you had an lj.samurai.com account, you can watch my progress by trying things out at rae.tnir.org/samurai (you need a valid username and password to access your archives).

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Mac OS 9 pain

Posted by rae in development
at 12:03 am on Friday, 19 September 2003

Tried to boot into Mac OS 9 tonight to fix some PhotoSuite stuff. It seems now that whenever I boot into OS 9, my OS X volume is not mountable. I get the bad old “I don’t recognize this disk, do you want to format it?” dialog. Makes it a real pain, since my development IDE (Code Warrior) is on that disk. I think I need to do a clean install of OS 9 somewhere so I can debug things.

Oh well.

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tnir seems to be running smoothly..

Posted by rae in web site
at 11:34 am on Wednesday, 17 September 2003

Well, my IP address seems a lot more stable now, and tnir is al nice and happy. But lo and behold, today there was a CERT advisory about an OpenSSH exploit making the rounds.

Being somewhat cautious about security (having been “r00ted” a few times), I’m trying to see what I need, since I am running openssh-clients-3.4p1-3mdk and openssh-server-3.4p1-3mdk. Nothing on MandrakeUpdate yet (which I was able to run using my Mac at work under X windows over ssh — that is still so cool), so I downloaded openssh-3.7.1p1, but it can’t find ZLib for some reason. :-P

Checking the logs I see someone trying to do something nasty, which may be the CERT exploit, I’m not sure: 


Sep 17 10:13:39 tnir xinetd[31797]: Bad line received from identity server at 66.46.23.11:
			62034 , 110 : ERROR : UNKNOWN-ERROR
Sep 17 10:15:39 tnir xinetd[31915]: Bad line received from identity server at 66.46.23.11:
			62230 , 110 : ERROR : UNKNOWN-ERROR
Sep 17 10:18:40 tnir xinetd[32033]: Bad line received from identity server at 66.46.23.11:
			62555 , 110 : ERROR : UNKNOWN-ERROR
Sep 17 10:23:38 tnir xinetd[32182]: Bad line received from identity server at 66.46.23.11:
			63119 , 110 : ERROR : UNKNOWN-ERROR
Sep 17 10:28:39 tnir xinetd[32201]: Bad line received from identity server at 66.46.23.11:
			63549 , 110 : ERROR : UNKNOWN-ERROR
Well, this isn’t good. So I manually zapped them with an iptables -A INPUT -s 66.46.23.11 -j DROP; however, I don’t want to do this myself all the time, so it’s time for portsentry — a security app that looks for this sort of evil activity and nukes the source.

Unfortunately, psionic.com, the former home of portsentry now points to Cisco’s site, and searching there yields zero results. Augh. After a series of googles and reading people’s blogs etc, I find out that the tools formerly hosted on psionic.com are now “SentryTools” on SourceForge. Excellent.

Well, I now have portsentry running (yay). But I still need to do something about ssh. Apparently, many people are recommending a move over to lsh, the GNU replacement for ssh (version 2 ssh that is). I’m not sure. I think I’d rather update to the new version of openssh if I can figure out the zlib problem.

Well, what the heck, I downloaded lsh and tried to build it. Rats, I’m getting “configure: error: gmp.h not found“. i have no clue what this is. Someting to do with Gnome or maybe the Gimp? But there is no UI for this thing. *sigh.

I thinkk that’s enough security stuff for now.

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