Recent Posts

2001

Official Announcements / Re: Preparing for a new master DonationCoder server

« Last post by f0dder on December 06, 2010, 01:26 PM »

My great fear with using a separate blog system (as we did early on in DC existence when we had regular "columnists") is that the different sources of content (forum posts, blogs) are pretty walled-off from one another and it creates a very weird schizophrenic situation where it's hard to know what should go where and who is seeing what.

-mouser (December 06, 2010, 10:27 AM)

Hear ye, hear ye! - as a regular, I find that those items work just fine as forum threads, and I'd hate to have it moved externally.

I can see the value of having it available in blog format, though, for people who aren't very interested in participating in the forums. The current homebrew pseudoblog interface is a beginning, but it's not perfect - "/blog" and "/technews" have the same RSS feed as the main page, and "/CodingSnacks" has no feed. IMHO, the "pseudoblog" parts of the site should have their own RSS links that only show items from the pseudoblog.

Other than that, I think it's relatively decent. We definitely don't want anonymous blog comments (it's trash, trash, trash and TRASH), so I don't see a problem in requiring a forum account and using the forum to handle comments. But perhaps it should be possible to at least view the entire posts in the pseudoblog format instead of being taken to the forum? Perhaps even to add quick comments too? It would still integrate with the forum model, it would just be a different view of the data...

2002

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2010, 09:58 AM »

View outside my window as of today:

2003

Living Room / Re: Five Reasons Why People Hate Apple

« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2010, 08:38 AM »

Instead of trying to (juggle chainsaws) do the download and the update at the same time (that's just flat stupid)]

-Stoic Joker (December 02, 2010, 05:01 PM)

In fairness, it probably did - but most firmware update apps I've come around warn pretty heavily that you must not disconnect the device at any time while update is in progres. My guess is that the update downloaded fine, device is put into "nuke yourself, bend over and accept the firmware load", and then she discoed it when it ran all usb-happy on her. When trying to restart the firmware update procedure, iTunes probably WANTS to be connected to the net to check if there's a new firmware available, even if it has just downloaded the most recent one.

All guesswork, of course, but thinking as a short-sigghted developer, it would seem likely

Lucki

ly she was able to borrow a lil' bit of internet connection love from a neighbor so she could update&unbrick the phone. Only to realize that all her settings and files had been wiped (this is of course pretty normal firmware update procedure, but apparently iTunes hadn't warned her enough about this).

-Stoic Joker (December 02, 2010, 05:01 PM)

...Normal for what? Or am I missing the sarcasm? Routers sure...

-f0dder (December 02, 2010, 09:01 AM)

Routers, and all FW-upgradable phones I've owned (S/E k500i, S/E k700, Nokia MusicExpress 5310 (was decent and even survived a week trapped in a snowman last winter!) and a S/E Elm (most recent, most bestest, lovin' it!). All user settings and user data stored in internal phone memory has been wiped.

2004

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft's dropped feature is Linux's gain

« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2010, 08:32 AM »

is DriveExtender basically RAID JBOD?

-f0dder (December 03, 2010, 06:52 AM)

No, it has built in redundancy and deduplication features so you can "safely" blow and replace a drive without losing any data. Granted to the end user it behaves like JBOD but it's much more under the hood.

-Stoic Joker (December 03, 2010, 07:06 AM)

Ah, OK - might be a loss after all, then

2005

General Software Discussion / Re: Microsoft's dropped feature is Linux's gain

« Last post by f0dder on December 03, 2010, 06:52 AM »

It's never good to see features go away, but is DriveExtender basically RAID JBOD? It sounds pretty alluring to just pop in a disk and have your pool extended, but ugh... JBOD is bad for your health. MS might actually be doing people a service here

2006

Living Room / Re: Five Reasons Why People Hate Apple

« Last post by f0dder on December 02, 2010, 09:28 AM »

fodder, I didn't realize that about using other people's itunes.  I think I may just jailbreak this thing.  I really don't care much for itunes.

-superboyac (December 02, 2010, 09:25 AM)

I'm not sure exactly what leads to it, but I'd assume it's connecting your iWhatever to a machine that's logged in to somebody elses iTunes account. I've stayed clear of iTunes and apple devices, so never happened to me - but I've had a couple of friends moaning because of it . And the renaming woes Darwin mentioned is one very good reason I'll never buy an iPod or whatever... give me something that shows up as removable storage, pzlkthxbai.

2007

Living Room / Re: Five Reasons Why People Hate Apple

« Last post by f0dder on December 02, 2010, 09:01 AM »

You definitely do have to be careful. My girlfriend just upgraded her iPhone4 firmware the other night, which was pretty much a disaster. The upgrading process didn't seem to start, making the Windows USB connect/disconnect sounds. So she unplugged the phone... which resulted in it half-bricking, just telling her to connect the phone to the computer to get the firmware updated. Problem being that she uses her iPhone for internet connection...

Luckily she was able to borrow a lil' bit of internet connection love from a neighbor so she could update&unbrick the phone. Only to realize that all her settings and files had been wiped (this is of course pretty normal firmware update procedure, but apparently iTunes hadn't warned her enough about this).

Fortunately, and this is the one saving grace for that piece of crap system, iTunes had made a backup (without asking, of course) of the device at some earlier point in time, so she didn't lose much/anything in the end.

2008

Living Room / Re: Five Reasons Why People Hate Apple

« Last post by f0dder on December 02, 2010, 08:29 AM »

Speaking of iTunes, be very, very, VERY careful if you ever connect a device to another person's iTunes account - you risk ending up getting your content wiped because of the synchronization shizzle.

2009

Living Room / Re: is someone stealing my bandwidth?

« Last post by f0dder on December 02, 2010, 06:37 AM »

what about bandwidth monitor you can try use ProteMac Meter.It;s really nice prog)

-Timoth (December 02, 2010, 06:01 AM)

^^^ Spam^^^ Double posted and (way) off topic.

-Stoic Joker (December 02, 2010, 06:36 AM)

Already reported it... check the user's post history as well (oh, and you might want to edit out the URL from your quote-block; I'm pondering whether we should edit out product names as well).

2010

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux webserver du jour?

« Last post by f0dder on December 01, 2010, 04:11 PM »

Still haven't gotten into the MySQL EPIPE error, did some actual coding today, yay!

And bumped into a second .NET HttpWebRequest bug (well, perhaps it's technically following spec, but the behavior is fubar). The concentrated version: you get an exception if you get a 304 (cached) reply for an URL that didn't include a "Date:" header in the original 200 (OK) reply. In my case, it's caused by Phusion Passenger (and Thin, for that matter) not automatically adding the "Date:" header, which WEBrick does.

Damn I like fiddler! It has been invaluable in tracing down wtf was going on.

2011

Living Room / Re: It's NOT Vaporware!

« Last post by f0dder on December 01, 2010, 08:03 AM »

It's vapor until I have it in my hands...

-wraith808 (December 01, 2010, 07:59 AM)

That's what SHE said!

2012

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« Last post by f0dder on December 01, 2010, 06:46 AM »

Childrens view of a halo? Its good! - Needs santa tho!

-Stephen66515 (December 01, 2010, 06:41 AM)

Isn't a halo, like, one of those xbox games?

2013

Living Room / Re: The worm as a 'cyber missile'

« Last post by f0dder on December 01, 2010, 05:59 AM »

Even if a system isn't internet-facing, I view it as (indirectly) connected to the internet if it's available through the LAN, VPN connections, whatever. Really critical systems shouldn't be IP-exposed to anything that is, however indirectly, connected to the internet.

If you don't want to haul your ass to a dedicated control interface, you could have a machine that can access the control network and is reachable from other machines on the network - but without exposing the control interface directly. Let this machine be available through - AND ONLY THROUGH - (a secure version of) remote desktop. Yes, a dedicated hacker can still access the control network this way, but at least you won't be able to scan the control network directly once a machine has been compromised.

2014

Living Room / Re: The worm as a 'cyber missile'

« Last post by f0dder on December 01, 2010, 05:28 AM »

What's absolutely crazy is that systems controlling important infrastructure is
1) buggy as hell.
2) insecure.
3) CONNECTED TO THE INTERNET.

Most of the .us power grid could probably be taken offline because of SCADA insecurity - I'm amazed it hasn't happened yet.

2015

Living Room / Re: The SSL certificate industry is a messy business

« Last post by f0dder on December 01, 2010, 05:16 AM »

For really secure scenarios, I'd want to store the certificate fingerprint and verify it client-side, so I know nobody has tampered with the server I'm connecting to - but it's a bit impractical doing this for webbrowsing. And if you do that, you need an updating mechanism since certs eventually will need updating.

Bonus effect of doing cert fingerprint validation: you can verify that a certificate is good without depending on a CA, which means self-signed certs become a very real possibility.

2016

Living Room / Re: The SSL certificate industry is a messy business

« Last post by f0dder on December 01, 2010, 02:43 AM »

I've always wondered about certificates.  How are they useful?  What additional level of protection do they provide?  For me as an end user, it's been nothing but a nuisance.  But I don't know enough about them to criticize them.

-superboyac (November 30, 2010, 11:21 PM)

In addition to just enabling SSL/TLS encrypt, a certificate allows a site to verify to a user that it is who it says it is. For a cert to be automatically accepted by your browser, it has to be signed by one of the system-accepted top-level cert authorities (verisign or a bunch of others). A cert includes a fingerprint, and this can be used to detect whether the server has been compromised and had a new cert installed, if there's a man-in-the-middle snooping, etc.

The system is definitely not perfect, since false certificates can be made if just one of the cert authorities are rotten, or slacks on verification procedures - and there's been some cert attacks on certs made with MD5 hashes. But it's hard to do much better, really.

2017

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« Last post by f0dder on December 01, 2010, 02:38 AM »

kyrathaba: why does the wiseman have a lampshade on his head? And is camle some new dialect of CAML?

2018

General Software Discussion / Re: Small Linux kernal patch = big improvement in desktop experience

« Last post by f0dder on November 29, 2010, 04:16 PM »

Edvard: I can't see why kernel vs. usermode "cgrouping" should affect server vs. desktop loads - that's probably some urban legend. There might be some slight differences in how stuff is done, though; I've seen mentioned that the usermode script thingy gives a bit more visibility to what's going on, while the kernel patch is more like "silent magic".

I dunno if each X11 app gets it's own PTY, and I haven't looked into what cgroups exactly are - but if stuff in a cgroup is treated as "something that should be considered as a whole" for scheduling purposes, it makes sense that eg. a heavy make job is less disruptive to the system if each instance isn't treated as it's own little cpu-greedy entity.

It would definitely be interesting with some more info - in easy-to-follow-without-reading-a-zillion-different-documents-and-mailing-lists-and-browsing-kernel-source on what exactly happens and what the consequences exactly are

2019

DC Gamer Club / Re: The Ball - Portal-like game with a err.. ball

« Last post by f0dder on November 29, 2010, 06:01 AM »

hmm.. doesn't work in what way? you can't play the game or you find the game not interesting..

-lanux128 (November 29, 2010, 05:17 AM)

As in I find it kinda dull - it feels kinda "German" to me

2020

DC Gamer Club / Re: The Ball - Portal-like game with a err.. ball

« Last post by f0dder on November 29, 2010, 01:49 AM »

Game sucks, anyway - at least it really doesn't work for me. I find it kind of tragic that the Unreal Engine 3 looked amazing and stuff before it was released, but every game title I've seen using it has looked rather bland and uninteresting.

2021

Living Room / Re: Jeans pocket - the square-ish one on the right

« Last post by f0dder on November 28, 2010, 11:41 AM »

It eats the cake, or else it gets the hose again!

-f0dder (November 28, 2010, 11:09 AM)

Now THAT was one seriously creepy scene...

-40hz (November 28, 2010, 11:34 AM)

Oh yeah, from a pretty creepy movie.

Btw, ever seen/heard this song?

2022

Living Room / Re: Regular Expressions (Regex) - Your Thoughts?

« Last post by f0dder on November 28, 2010, 11:37 AM »

I use regex occasionally, and they've saved me a fair amount of time (even though I need a reference when doing some of the more funky stuff). Pretty useful for massaging text beyond what normal search/replace can do, and invaluable when doing some quick webscraping hackjob (if you've found a security flaw in a social networking site you don't want to spend hours coding a proper solution, but you do want people's private image galleries - or so I've heard).

But I also believe that regexes are over-used. It's way too easy cooking up something that's write-once-never-understand-again, it's utterly unusable for production-quality parsing of external data sources you don't have control over, and for really big input data with complicated regexes you're probably a lot better off writing some high-speed code.

If you're ever using regular expressions for user-supplied data, you should probably take a look at SDL Regex Fuzzer

2023

Living Room / Re: Jeans pocket - the square-ish one on the right

« Last post by f0dder on November 28, 2010, 11:09 AM »

@cranioscopical - Concerning cake, I know no such thing as an emergency ration. One eats all one has been given or one suffers the consequences.

-Edvard (November 26, 2010, 05:32 PM)

It eats the cake, or else it gets the hose again!

2024

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux webserver du jour?

« Last post by f0dder on November 28, 2010, 11:00 AM »

Yeah, I came across Unicorn, but figured it was a bit outside our needs.

The web is served by american indians riding unicorns across rainbows! - opensource project names are so fscked. I do think it's kinda funny that we've got Apache, Cherokee and Hiawatha though

nginx + Passenger seems to run fairly well, BUT! - something's retarded somewhere, I'm getting broken pipes to MySQL after the system has been running for a while. The most promising info I've found on the problem so far says it could have something to do with the MySQL adapter in use (and that it's causes by retardedness in Rails). Basically there's ruby/mysql and mysql/ruby (good thing those two have such distinct names to avoid confusion!) where one's written in Ruby (and is buggy), and the other in C (and requires a bunch of manual compilation and setup, but might work).

Once that's fixed, I think I'm pretty much done with the sysadmin part of the project (though I'd like some per-vhost traffic stats, preferably with some real-time rrdtool gathering, rather than lame slow log-file parsing). I'll leave database backups and log rotation to the guys we're handing over to when done

2025

General Software Discussion / Re: Small Linux kernal patch = big improvement in desktop experience

« Last post by f0dder on November 28, 2010, 10:52 AM »

To this day, I have not been able to successfully compile a kernel (this too I shall conquer, but not today)

-Edvard (November 27, 2010, 07:25 PM)

user@box /usr/src/linux # make menuconfig modules bzimage modules_install