Wednesday, 25 February 2009 at 21:52
At first scratch, it would appear that respiratory troubles are fast becoming part and parcel of my winters in the DC metroplex. Two weeks ago I was fighting off a cold, and rather successfully, or so I thought. Last week I developed a persistant dry cough that now has has my cow-orkers wondering if I have tuberculosis, keeps Lyssa awake at night (even if I sleep on the couch), and busily ties knots in the muscles of my neck and stomach. It isn't one of those coughs that clear your lungs and sound disgusting, but at least mean that you can breathe normally for a few minutes. It's a dry, hacking cough that doubles you over involuntarily and makes you feel as if your ribs are about to break. I feel pretty sure that if
John Constantine heard one of those respiratory explosions he'd nod appreciatively, hand me a lit Silk Cut, and say "Good on ya, mate."
I called (well, e-mailed) off of work this morning at Lyssa's urging and got myself to Inova Urgent Care, a place where they have my paperwork on file, recognize my bedraggled ass on sight, and keep the heater in the waiting room turned up to eighty just for me. In truth I got there fifteen minutes before it opened, walked to Starbucks to get myself some coffee and a breakfast sandwich, walked back, signed in, and read the copy of
Learning Python
that I picked up last weekend until a nurse came to get me. After the usual battery of tests from both nurse and physician, it was determined that I have a mild case of bronchitis - not nearly as bad as last February, but enough to take the wind out of my sails. I walked out of the office with prescriptions for
azithromycin and what wound up being a daytime/night-time combo pack of decongestants to help break up whatever it is inside my lungs. It took two trips to two different CVS pharmacies because the one closer to Urgent Care didn't have one of the prescriptions, so I had to drive down to the on-ramp to the Beltway near my apartment complex to get the other scrip handed over.
In the intervening time between then and getting the rest of my medication, Lyssa and I went to lunch at P.F. Chang's with Hasufin, who happened to be working from home today. Because all of us had been running around at Mika's birthday party last Saturday we didn't have a whole lot of time to talk to each other, and spent a leisurely hour catching up on the latest events of our lives. Afterward, on the way back to CVS, I discovered that the Bank of America won't let you get cash back from a deposit unless you're the person whose name is on the bank account, even if they happen to share your surname. A curiously busy day when I should have been sitting on my ass, to be sure.
I don't have a whole lot else to say at the moment because life's been work and more work, save this:
remember a certain XKCD strip from last year?
It's less of a gag than I thought.
Monday, 23 February 2009 at 23:29
When you get right down to it, the best way for an attacker to get hold of your data is to shut the box down, pull the drive, and rip a sector-by-sector image to analyze offsite. It might not be quick (depending on the speed of the hard drive, speed of the storage drive, and a number of other factors) but if you're not there when it's done you might not know that it ever happened. However, if you encrypt data at the level of the drive, they can copy the drive all they want but they won't be able to pick apart the image without breaking the key. Having encrypted data but not knowing what algorithm it was encrypted with, the length of the key, or the key itself presents a non-trivial problem to the attacker best described thusly: "You're kidding, right?"
In a practical sense, anyway. Any cryptosystem will eventually be broken if you throw enough resources at it, which means compute cycles, talented brains, and calendar years. The whole purpose of cryptography, however, is to make the resources necessary to figure out the content of a message too prohibitive to be worthwhile. For example, if an encrypted file contains data which would be useful for only one month is encrypted with an algorithm that would require two centuries and the efforts of hundreds of thousands of CPUs to break, most attackers won't bother trying.
For Microsoft Windows and MacOS there is only one method of whole disk encryption that I personally know of where the source code is freely available for public scrutiny, and that's Truecrypt (v6.1a of which was released on 1 December 2008). Truecrypt makes it incredibly easy to encrypt your hard drive and as a bonus you don't have to rebuild everything to do it, though I strongly suggest that you make a backup just in case something terrible happens. The same Truecrypt software that you install to work with encrypted partitions and volumes also implements WDE (whole disk encryption) for free. Installing Truecrypt is straightforward: download the executable to your system from
the website, check the PGP signature to make sure it hasn't been tampered with (
you DO check the signatures, right??) and install it like any other Windows application. Read the end-user license, tick the "I accept and agree" radio button, and move on. The installer will give you two options, installation or extracting it to a directory. While you can extract Truecrypt to use it as a
portable app, leave "Install" selected and click Next. The default installation options are fine so you don't have to play with them, but if you're feeling particularly paranoid you might want to un-check the "Associate the .tc file extension with TrueCrypt" option because any .tc files on your system will be scrutinized by a savvy attacker. Click install, then click 'Finish' and let the installer reboot your machine.
More under the cut...
Friday, 20 February 2009 at 23:58
The pattern of light on the wall was made by a ray of early morning sunlight that bounced off of a fishbowl (out of frame). The shape of the pattern is what caught my eye...
Friday, 20 February 2009 at 23:18
While
upgrading Windbringer's systemware yesterday, I suddenly ran across a rather odd problem: all of the icons on my
Gnome desktop suddenly turned into the default Gnome "blank page with a corner folded down" icon, which meant that Gnome wasn't able to figure out what sort of file a launcher really was. Even more oddly, the names of the launchers themselves turned into (for example), "gtkpod.desktop" rather than "
GTKpod", which meant that double-clicking on anything resulted in the contents of the launcher being opened in a text editor. Everything inside of the Gnome application menu could still be executed normally; adding a launcher to the panel rather than the desktop worked normally, also.
Re-emerging various Gnome components didn't fix anything. Logging out and back in again didn't fix anything; rebooting didn't fix anything. Killing and manually restarting
Nautilus (which is the application that actually manages the desktop) didn't help, either. Logging out and erasing my
~/.gnome* directories so that they'd be recreated when I logged back in didn't work. I spent some time talking to the folks on the
Gentoo IRC channel, and while I got some good ideas none of them worked (thanks anyway, though).
What it wound up being was a bad directory of
MIME mappings, which are basically a set of rules that say "If you see a file that looks like
this, it's a file of type x-mime-foobar, so to make use of it you should do this-and-such.." In my case, the MIME mapping for .desktop files got messed up somehow, and Gnome forgot how to interpret each launcher (like a shortcut in Windows) properly. In addition to a set of MIME mappings that are considered canonical across the entire system (kept in the directory
/usr/share/mime on Windbringer), each user has a set of their own which are kept in
~/.local/share/mime, which can be updated whenever the system deems it necessary. In my case, running the command
/usr/bin/update-mime-database /usr/share/mime didn't work, which localized the trouble to my personal set of mappings.
What I wound up doing was logging out and erasing my
~/.local/share/mime directory. That fixed the problem but due to the fact that I had erased my
~/.gnome* directories earlier, I had to re-do a lot of my desktop (mostly moving icons around to put them in order).
This seems to be an uncommon but frustrating problem that follows Gnome upgrades from time to time, so by all means spread this info around where it'll do the most good.
Friday, 20 February 2009 at 18:15
After a surprisingly short period of time, I found out
what happened to my car when it broke down a couple of days ago.
As it turned out, the thermostat which regulates the cooling system went bad. What happened was that the thermostat erroneously decided to start reading MAXTEMP (which would mean that the engine block was about to melt down); it dutifully sent these messages to the microprocessor controlling the engine. The CPU erroneously decided that the cooling system had fouled up in some unspecified manner and commanded the water pump to start feeding coolant to an overflow bottle in an attempt to lower the amount of coolant circulating, thus relieving internal pressure (which didn't actually exist). When the coolant overflow bottle filled up an emergency valve began flapping open and closed, spraying water, coolant, and who knows what else all over the inside of the engine compartment. Due to the fact that a MAXTEMP situation wasn't actually happening, this only served to drain the cooling system, which impaired the engine's efficiency (because it started to overheat due to the lack of coolant) and caused a breakdown. The garage replaced a gasket and the thermostat, refilled the coolant, and so far as I can tell, all is operating normally.
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 23:16
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 at 22:18
A couple of weeks back I took my car in for 55,000 mile maintenance, during which
it was discovered that the water pump was starting to leak, which necessitated a couple of extra hours of work on the part of the car dealership to replace. I figured that everything was hunky-dory with my car, and indeed for a couple of weeks it was.
Earlier tonight after getting off from a whiz-bang day at work, I noticed that the 'check engine' light had blinked on somewhen after I got on the Beltway headed south to go home. I didn't think anything of it until exit 42 or therabouts, when I realized that my car's engine was idling much more roughly than usual. I chalked it up for the moment to stop-and-go traffic in cold weather, and didn't think too much of it. When I reached exit 43 or 44, I discovered that the heater had given out, and the AC was pumping nothing but cold air into the passenger compartment. I sighed and made a mental note to get the heater looked at. By the time I hit exit 45A I realized all in the same instant that a) I was losing speed rapidly, b) I had lost acceleration, which could have meant a sentence of death to be carried out immediately in rush hour traffic, and c) there was a curious fwap-fwap-fwapping sound coming from the engine compartment.
One part of my brain thought that I'd run over something soft and it had gotten caught in the undercarriage, which the rest of my brain summed everything up and hit the "Oh, shit" button. My first priority was to get the hell out of traffic and park without getting smeared by a semi truck or a soccer mom late for yoga class in an SUV. I managed to limp into a mostly unused parking lot near Tyson's Corner and popped the hood. The steam dribbling from beneath the hood smelled strongly of burning synthetic rubber and a quick look-see with a flashlight revealed an engine compartment that had been liberally soaked with engine coolant. Either a feedline came loose or my car blew a hose; either of these scenarios would result in a crippled engine, the sound of something flapping around, and toxic fluid gushing all over the place. I placed a couple of phone calls and managed to get in touch with the dealership's preferred towing company to get my car hauled back to the garage for a look-see. As it turned out, I had to wait over an hour with no heat before the tow truck arrived, loaded my car onto the flatbed, and transported us back to the dealership. Thankfully, Laurelinde was in the area and drove me home after I filled out the requisite paperwork and handed my keys over.
I might be stranded for a couple of days until I get everything straightened out... and see if the garage had anything to do with this horse doctor's dose of WTF.
Monday, 16 February 2009 at 00:10
Lyssa and I started off our Valentine's Day by getting up far earlier than should be allowed by law on a Saturday morning to go to our local H&R Block office to finish getting our taxes done. That morning marked our second trip to get our finances straightened out in Uncle Sam's eyes. I'm sorry to say that our combined medical expenses for FY 2008 weren't enough to earn a deduction, though the repeated trips to the thrift store to get rid of stuff appear to have come in handy. There is a question these days over how many deductions may be taken on one's W-2 form to strike a balance between cashflow for the month and possibly having to pay more money in taxes at the end of the year, and that's a question that I unfortunately don't have any answers for. At this time I have three deductions listed on my W-2, and that appears to have screwed me in subtle ways this time around. If anyone has any information on this sort of thing, please leave a comment to this post.
Following our trip to the tax preparer's office we headed down the block to Uniquities, a knitters' specialty store that carries some hard to gets sorts of yarn, or so Lyssa tells me. When we were trying to figure out what to do for our first Valentine's Day as husband and wife, we decided that the ideal gift for her would be yarn, so after arriving I settled in to read for a while as Lyssa picked out yarn for her next couple of knitting projects. I keep telling myself that I'm going to learn to knit one of these days, even if it's just
finger knitting, but I find myself having to manage my time carefully right now. Lyssa picked out a couple of hanks of yarn suitable for knitting lace, which were wound into more useful balls later in the evening. After departing Uniquities we made a beeline (or as close as northern Virginia can approximate) for
Paint Your Own Pottery in Fairfax, at which we had reserved some time at the worktables. Painting pottery is one of those relaxing activities that Lyssa and I don't partake of very often but enjoy greatly when we actually get around to doing it. The tricky part, I've found, has always been picking out a piece to work on because their selection tends to run toward piggy banks, small figurines of animals, and stuff that kids like to paint. After a few minutes of digging I eventually found a small ceramic tile with an abstract four winds-like pattern on it that I quickly developed a color scheme for and set to work. For her part, Lyssa had a busy afternoon painting a small dish shaped like a lotus blossom, a butter dish to add to our arsenal of crockery (because the one thing we seem to not have right now is a butter dish), and a small ceramic egg that I didn't get a very good look at because I was absorbed in glazing all of the tiny curves and pockets in my own tile. When we get our stuff back (probably in a week or so) I'll post a couple of photographs of what we did.
I discovered later that afternoon that the SD card I keep in my smartphone appears to have gotten corrupted. I may have lost a significant amount of data, mostly photographs, but I'm going to take a shot at retrieving whatever files I can. I suspect that it happened when my phone ran out of power on Friday afternoon.
After we left Paint Your Own Pottery Lyssa and I realized that we hadn't had anything to eat since 1000 Saturday morning (just before our tax appointment), so we headed back toward Tyson's Corner to get dinner before everyone arrived. For fun we tried to see if we could get a table at P.F. Chang's at Tyson's-II, but unfortunately they were flush with reservations and were seating everyone else wherever they could. Legal Seafood not far away was full up with reservations only. Mind you that our original plans were to go to Konami for sushi on Saturday evening; going to Tyson's-II to see if we could get something else was one of those last minute "what the hell, it might work" ideas that wound up not panning out. In hindsight, while the Konami Special Roll is tasty (and if you're into sushi and find yourself at Konami I highly recommend that you try it) it's also far too much food if you also order a dinner or entree. I suspect that we paid for a couple of things in our order which the waitstaff wound up not bringing out to us.
More under the cut...
Sunday, 15 February 2009 at 22:02
I've finally gotten around to putting the pictures from the
RepRap build-a-thon online. If you want more information, I also have a writeup
here.
Sunday, 08 February 2009 at 23:20
It's been six hours since I got back from
Shmoocon, and I'm still readjusting to a low information density environment. Shmoocon is DC's premiere hacker con, held early every February by a security research outfit called the Shmoo Group, which seems to have an odd interest in moose (judging by the repeating moose motif all over the place, from the free stickers to the laser cut acrylic convention badges). I've wanted to go for a couple of years but various and sundry things kept me from attending, so when I finally was able to score a ticket I jumped at the opportunity.
Taking the day off from work on Friday made it possible to hop the Metro downtown to the Woodley Park station, which is within a block of the Marriott Hotel that the con was held at this year. I stopped at the front desk to check in, hauled my kit upstairs to drop it off and work the kinks out of my back a little, and then headed back down to the mezzanine level to get my badge and figure out what to do.
I can't speak for the other years of the con, but this year if you were fortunate enough to purchase a ticket you were e-mailed a barcode as a .png graphics file, which you were then to print out and bring to registration to get your badge. It appears to have become something of a tradition to see how far you can push your barcode's representation before it's no longer readable by the scanner - at this con alone, I've seen a medical x-ray containing a registration barcode, a lifecast of someone's head which had the barcode printed on the back of the neck, a fifth anniversary cake for Shmoocon with the barcode printed across the icing, a replica of Leeloo's multipass from
The Fifth Element (the handiwork of one
Rob T. Firefly), and even a piece of toilet paper. I didn't even bother trying to come up with anything this year, lacking the spare compute cycles and time in which to do so.
More under the cut...
Monday, 02 February 2009 at 16:39
Winter in DC is a funny thing; it's rare to actually get anything other than bitter cold temperatures and the odd gust of wind. Every once in a while we'll get some rain out of the deal. It wasn't until last week that we actually saw any snowfall, so I had to
take a few pictures for novelty's sake.
Sunday, 01 February 2009 at 16:30
A couple of weeks ago at
HacDC Dave Monachello, an electronic artist and frequenter of the infamous gather known as
Burning Man presented one of his latest works,
an animated electroluminescent wire sculpture depicting Martin Luther King, Jr. Multiple layers of
EL wire were attached to a translucent backing material depicting parts of different facial expressions associated with the act of speaking. The EL wire was rigged up to a bank of microcontrollers which triggered the different layers as a frame animation in time with a recording of King's
I Have A Dream speech.
You can view the photo album
here.
Sunday, 01 February 2009 at 00:19
I spent a good ten minutes marshalling my thoughts to write at least a semi-interesting post about the past couple of days but every time I start typing I can't seem to string six words together into a coherent sentence. To put it simply, sometime Wednesday morning the sick-to-my-head feeling turned into a full-blown cold that's had me running at reduced capacity all week. When you factor in running around to multiple sites for multiple meetings for work, I haven't had much energy left after the fact. Since then my days were fueled with Sudafed PE and espresso and my nights spent sniffling, blowing my nose, and sleeping. Consequently, I haven't been getting a whole lot of anything accomplished lately.
A couple of dozen pictures have piled up on my digital cemera which I'll probably get around to posting tomorrow.
This morning I got up early enough to get my car to the dealership for 55k mile maintenance (only 5k left on the warranty - is four years of driving around about right?); the couple of hours of downtime I had were spent working on a project for work. Around noon I realized that a breakfast sandwich (say what you want about Starbucks, their breakfasts are pretty tasty) and a couple of cups of coffee weren't going to get me through the entire day because repairs were taking longer than expected (brakes, fuel system, and replacement of the water pump) so I made a couple of phone calls. Hasufin and Lyssa, who were out running errands, picked me up at the car dealership and we headed into Fairfax to pick up a couple of pieces of pottery that Lyssa and Laurelinde had painted for her bachelorette's party and then we met up with Jade for lunch at a Thai place the name of which I don't recall off the top of my head.
I'll get around to writing a review of it later. I've got a takeout menu in one of my pockets.
Hasufin had to head home early but Jade was kind enough to drop me off at the bank to get a couple of cheques deposited and then drove Lyssa and I to the dealership so that I could pick my car up. After that we ran to Whole Paycheque to pick up a couple of things for dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow. I started to slow down shortly after we got to the store, and once we got back home I fell asleep on the couch for a couple of hours. At one point I got up and went to bed for a while, only to get up shortly before 2000 local time.
Good sense says that I should go to bed soon. I might get around to listening.
