Toward simple confusion
The internet is overflowing with information and people trying to publish themselves and interact with their friends. Decided to do a little searching, and i stumbled on a World Map of Social Networking.
Notables would be Facebook for the US and many other countries, Orkut for Brazil, and QQ for China.
Ahh. I try to abstain from mindless reposting and linking (which i do pathetic job at anyways), but this is a pretty witty read. Check out Bruce Sterling’s final prediction on Wired.
The bubble-era vision of a utopian Internet is dented and dirty. The Pew respondents seem to agree that personal privacy is a thing of the past, and they’re split nearly 50-50 on whether the costs will outweigh the benefits. Technophobic refuseniks are likely to carry out violent resistance, and they may have good reason: Out-of-control technology is a distinct risk. The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders.
This article on wired.com explores a few aspects of how games are unleashing the human imagination. Games have a greater possibility space- rather than following linear story telling they are interactive worlds. The article does not present a completely fair discussion of the non-digtal alternatives. It is possible to go into the physical world, interact with it and let your imagination go wild. For example, many kids make sand castles (or other objects) at the beach, play with sticks, toys etc. It is a smaller possibility space, but all worlds have rules, and the real world still provides individuals the opportunity to understand an environment, experiment , and use their imagination to test their bounds. Its definitely not as mental of a experience, but it does develop other skills, e.g. mechanical and coordination.
In an era of structured education and standardized testing, this generational difference might not yet be evident. But the gamers’ mindset – the fact that they are learning in a totally new way – means they’ll treat the world as a place for creation, not consumption. This is the true impact videogames will have on our culture.
This article discusses some aspects of modern spyware and virus evil-doers. The article calls them hackers, but in reality, hacking is not breaking into other peoples computers. The term ‘cracker’ is the appropriate name.
The article talks about point and click and drag and drop interfaces for maintaing evil empires of infected computers. Theres big money in stealing information. Normal people simply cant compete with a well organized and knowledgable group exploiting common security flaws. The crazy thing is that you can get a virus or trojan doing just about anything or nothing. You can get junk simply having a computer plugged in to the internet (without a firewall). On the other hand, you have legitimate sites using similiar tricks/techniques to provide a quality user experience. So if you trust everybody, you get screwed. If you trust nobody you get screwed. (e.g. if you block cookies, many websites start behaving funny). A well-informed user must keep up-to-date with the latest versions of their web browsers. Needless to say, update and update often.
I found an article in Times Online titled: Failing to teach them how to handle real life. New research has shown that today’s children are less “intelligent” than their counterparts 30 years ago. These new findings help us understand the effects of the current education trend focusing on standardized test scores as the primary marker for intellectual achievement (and imply that education today provides less congnitive stimulation for children).
In the easiest question, children are asked to watch as water is poured up to the brim of a tall, thin container. From there the water is tipped into a small fat glass. The tall vessel is refilled. Do both beakers now hold the same amount of water? “It’s frightening how many children now get this simple question wrong,†says scientist Denise Ginsburg, Shayer’s wife and another of the research team.
For the longest time I have been unable to decide between php4 and python as my preferred scripting language. Both languages are awesome, boast impressive libraries and user bases, and excellent documentation. While I am very fond of php4, for a while it was disappointing that php4 did not have a good CLI (command line interface). For a while I started moving all my sophisticated backend scripts to python. And then one day, I discovered that one of the php 4.3 releases contained a revamped ‘php4-cli’ with a distinct use different from ‘php4-cgi’. So needless to say, I am consolidating my efforts on php4.
Now my latest endeavor was porting a small python ‘curl’ like script. To port it over to php, I took advantage of the php curl libraries. At first I was executing the script under CLI and it worked fine. Later I tried to eexecute it via mod-php4 and it died miserably. The html output would just die at the curl_exec($ch);
After some looking I found this option:
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
And this generated the following nonsense in the apache error.log file:
* About to connect() to www.ups.com port 443
* Trying 153.2.228.50… * connected
* Connected to www.ups.com (153.2.228.50) port 443
* successfully set certificate verify locations:
* CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
CApath: none
[Sat Oct 29 02:32:39 2005] [notice] child pid 20202 exit signal Segmentation fault (11)
I searched on the internet and found some people with a similiar problem, but no clear cut resolutions. So I did the next most reasonable thing to do. I checked all my installed packages and then upgraded apache, php4, curl, and ssl. Yet still nothing. I’m sure the diehard unix people are immediately thinking its time for a stack trace, but I try to leave that as a last resort.
I read the php bug report 22213 and later this article on marc.thaimsgroup.com. What struck me as odd was that the guy recompiled openssl, and not curl. Later I checked the bug report again, and it just happened to be on the right spot:
[14 Feb 2003 8:41am CET] alan at pair dot com
Regarding notes/issues raised on bug #22112:
I made sure that apache is linking against only one copy of libssl and
libcrypto.
And then it struck me. I checked dpkg
ii libnet-ssleay- 1.22-1 Perl module for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
ii libssl-dev 0.9.8a-2 SSL development libraries, header files and
ii libssl0.9.6 0.9.6j-1 SSL shared libraries (old version)
ii libssl0.9.7 0.9.7g-5 SSL shared libraries
ii libssl0.9.8 0.9.8a-2 SSL shared libraries
ii openssl 0.9.8a-2 Secure Socket Layer (SSL) binary and related
and decided to try to remove the older versions of libssl. While only the 0.9.6 was freely removed, it did the trick. Now my log files show:
* About to connect() to www.ups.com port 443
* Trying 153.2.228.50… * connected
* Connected to www.ups.com (153.2.228.50) port 443
* successfully set certificate verify locations:
* CAfile: /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt
CApath: none
* SSL connection using DES-CBC3-MD5
* Server certificate:
* subject: /C=US/ST=New Jersey/L=Mahwah/O=United Parcel Service/OU=Internet System/OU=Terms of use at www.verisign.com/rpa (c)05/CN=www.ups.com
* start date: 2005-06-24 00:00:00 GMT
* expire date: 2006-07-24 23:59:59 GMT
* common name: www.ups.com (matched)
* issuer: /C=US/O=RSA Data Security, Inc./OU=Secure Server Certification Authority
* SSL certificate verify ok.
> POST /ups.app/xml/Rate HTTP/1.1
Host: www.ups.com
Accept: */*
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 1431
Expect: 100-continue
< HTTP/1.1 100 Continue
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Server: Netscape-Enterprise/6.0
< Date: Sat, 29 Oct 2005 08:05:22 GMT
< Content-length: 6820
< Pragma: no-cache
< Content-Type: application/xml
* Connection #0 to host www.ups.com left intact
* Closing connection #0
Problem solved.
Is surpising how many comments I get on my original post about how I lost my AIM buddy list. Unfortuantely, once its gone, its gone. The hopeful solution is that all your good friends will IM you again. If you do log all your conversations, it is possible to filter through your log files fetching out all the distinct buddies. The only guaranteed way is to actually backup your AIM buddy list. I believe its the “Save Buddy List” in the file menu. However, like all things in life precautions just take time and are a nuisance. Its far better to have some type of failsafe. Perhaps the AIM creators can have backup your buddy list automatically.
On the bright side, loosing my buddy list was actually kinda nice. It cleared up the clutter of names. Some of the people were old friends or acquatences that I did not talk to much anymore. With a clear buddy list I was able to “move on” so to speak. And now a days, sometimes I stay off AIM all together. IM is cool and convient, but sometimes it can feel like a chain that fixes me to the computer. Socializing with people via phone or in person is a far more humanly experience. Dont get me wrong, I still use AIM to kill some time at work, fill in idle periods on the computer, and to coordinate outings.
I’ve had a few brief encounters with CVS, but it never really got my interest. I’ve been neglecting the issue of revision control for a while. Recently I’ve been having to maintain 2-3 different sets of tools in maybe 5 disjoint machines. So I’ve decided to try to consolidate my efforts and minimize repetition. For now, I have opted to use subversion
To setup up svn on the server:
$ svnadmin create –fs-type fsfs /path/to/repos
Originally I created the svn as a berkley db, but changed it b/c the db requires a posix compliant file system. So it won’t work over nfs. Here is some propaganda for fsfs. To convert the db type after the fact:
svnadmin dump /path/to/old/repos > repos.dmp
svnadmin load /path/to/new/repos < repos.dmp
Other commands I used to get started using svn over ssh:
#check out the new repository
svn checkout svn+ssh://me@myserver.com/path/to/repos/trunk .
#import local files into the repository
svn import /local/path svn+ssh://me@myserver.com/path/to/repos/trunk
#directly create a directory on the svn server
svn mkdir svn+ssh://me@myserver.com/path/to/repos/trunk/new_directory
svn does solve a number of short comming of cvs. However, it still follows the same centralized server model and thus is hard to manage on networks with poor network connectivity. Currently I am waiting to see what direction Linus takes the Linux kernal development (which inherenttly involves distributed repository client model).
A second concern of mine is how subversion supports binaries. By their very nature, binary files are not easily monitored into revision control. Typically though, binary files are not changed very often. If they are, I probably would not care for the older versions. For these files, I have been looking for more of a file repository than a revision control source.
Another useful tool is the distributed file synchronization tool Unison.
Wow, a new study that saysPollution is bad and can cause a premature death. The asthma and childhood sickness are old news. Also another article that groups languages by structure. Its kinda interesting. Usually people go by the vocabularies of the languages. This article reminds me of my Sanskrit professor Douglas Mitchell at Rice. He is a heafty lingustic guru. He knows 32 languages (if i remember correctly). All indo-european. It is a commendable achievement. The scary part is that he said he taught himself. He says when he learns a language, he focus on the grammer and the phonetics. I reflect on his advice now and again, and I find it to be the Way.
I found this article on wired.com about the amish and techology. The article is very insightful about the role of technology in the life of the amish. Does it bring people together or keep them apart?
Tired of always going out to buy books? Check out The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection. For a mere $8189.99 + S&H you can have the entire collection of 1,082 books. Now if onlu I had the shelf space….
The funniest thing that one can do when googling (translates searching for help/info using google) is to find your own website. In the last 3 weeks I have hit my own website 3 times seearching for info on setting up various programs on linux. The most recent was because my brother was having troubles connecting to our smtp server using his Treo. My own post talked about problems with ident. Sure enough, Cingular has a blanket firewall that blocks most everything. So the mail server could not send ident requests to the Treo. Turning off ident still didnt solve the problem. I tried also setting
rfc1413_query_timeout = 0s
smtp_enforce_sync = false
but that still did not solve the problem. According to the exim logs the client just disconnects. So I guess some client side debugging may be in order. In the future, I need to add more info on my posts so that if i do come back to them, i can actually understand the problem and the solution I found.
Check out this Wired article Why the World is Flat. Its an interview with Thomas L. Friedman, foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times and author of the new book The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. His main point is that globalization is here and that the world is a very small place now.
In any market/industry with low geographical boundaries, a few small players can dominate the field because of the massive economies of scale. Competition is everywhere. No more big fish in a small pond… We are now small fish in a big pond. (except the rich and famous.. they are big fish in a big pond)
Yay! IQs are going up eventhough “learning” has been going down. But the tests arent accurate. And the “alternative” tests are going up too. People arent sure whats going on. The conjecture is that the information age and the internet is forcing people to develop their problem solving and pattern matching skills.
See the Wired.com article.
Turns out that using computers makes people dumb. First the tv, now this. Whats next?
I just finished setting up my smtp auth support in exim4. Originally, I was going to perform authentication over the courier authdaemon as describe here, but i didnt quite understand the socket situation, so I opted for a more simplicitic route (since authdaemon uses a mysql backend). I also found a simple static password setup here. It did detail some good info about configuring exim3 correctly. Exim4 has a few different options.
To translate these options to exim4, I followed this email.
So I have the following in my exim4.conf
auth_advertise_hosts = ${if eq{$tls_cipher}{}{}{*}}
tls_certificate = CONFDIR/exim.crt
tls_privatekey = CONFDIR/exim.key
tls_advertise_hosts = *
To get the mysql query right in my authenticator, I followed the
manual. While I dislike going to the exim4 manual, its actually very verbose and informative. I have to start going there instead of google searching all day. I found some examples of authenticators here, here, and here. They were basically good, except that I realized they didnt do any query santization. So i changed references to $n to ${quote_mysql:$2}. Its also important not to have any extraneous white space after a query string – it can cause the condition to fail.
A reminder, if you are using mysql, you have to add the server in exim4
hide mysql_servers = localhost/db/user/password
I had alot of stumbling on the way, and found the best way to debug my configuration was to send mail:
$echo –ne ‘\0me\0pass’ | base64-encode
AG1lAHBhc3M=
$telnet localhost 25
> EHLO foo
> auth plain AG1lAHBhc3M
To increase debugging, I ran exim4 in debug mode:
$exim4 -C config -d+all -bs #where config is my new config file
Check out http://amaztype.tha.jp/. This is a really cool app for searching books in amazon. it spells out your search with the books that match it.
Just got off the phone with a SBC technician. Nice guy at their call center in Saint Louis. Very knowledgable. He said he works from 1pm to 10pm at night. I was pretty suprised to get a call at 9pm for my dsl. I was getting about 250kb up and 260kb down. Technically I should be getting 384down, and 128up. really weird. I realized this a couple weeks ago when I was uploading some images and was getting better upstream than down stream. So in anycase, the dropped the upstream bandwidth, and now i got 311down, 108up. The important thing though, is that the latency is more consistent. Anywhere from 60-100ms. This sure beats the intermittent 3000ms i was getting before.
I’ve had adsl as long as they have offered it in my area. The funny thing is that i’m at 23,000 ft from the CO. The technical limit of adsl is supposed to be 21,000 ft. I think they refuse customers now if they are on that limit. I was complaining one time, and the rep actually said something along the lines of if i didnt like the service, they’ll cancel it (b/c im on the fringe)…
way to go cool guy from St. louis. keep kicking people off the phone!
Gee. Excessive use of computers may cause glaucoma. Who would have thougth starring at a flat surface for 9hrs a day would cause long-term vision problems.. i hope they dont link computer junkie “behavior” to “problems” like obesity, blood toxicity, diabetes, kidney stones, etc.