Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

Scary.

Hmm, spontaneous reboots on one of my boxes using the 2.4.17 kernel and the grsecurity patch. This is not cool, and caused a Web server outage of some 5 hours early this morning. The box is seeing quite a bit of traffic now, so maybe I’ll downgrade to 2.4.16 and see if that helps.

After a long, long time, I finally found a way to fix the bug that causes ssh completion to go awry when the string on which you’re completing contains a @ symbol. I fixed a man completion bug, too, while I was at it.

I expect to put up a new release on Saturday. Most of the known bugs are nailed now. There’s still at least one in the rpm completion function, but it’s very tricky to fix and doesn’t seem to be noticed by most people. No-one’s complaining about it, at least.

Sarah and I are off to Maui for a long weekend a week from now. That’ll be fun. I should start reading up on it a little bit to find out what kind of things there are to see and do.

At work this morning, I was having trouble reaching one of my servers at home. A little investigation revealed that my upstream DSL bandwidth was full to capacity.

What had happened? It turns out that Linux Today had put a link to my bash stuff on their front page. Instant Slashdot effect.

Anyway, the net effect was great. It put a lot of people in touch with bash completion who wouldn’t otherwise have known about it. Not everyone reads Freshmeat and few people visit my home page.

My Malata N996 DVD player turned up yesterday. This player is code-free (will play DVDs from any region), dual-standard (converts PAL to NTSC and vice versa), and operates at multiple voltages.

In other words, this player can be plugged in anywhere in the world, connected to any kind of TV, and used to play any DVD. It even handles RCE1 discs. (Hmm, I wonder what it does with SECAM TVs and DVDs.)

This really makes a mockery of the MPAA and their heinous region encoding scheme.

I can’t wait for my order of region 2 European DVDs to get here. All those old episodes of Minder and The Royale Family. No way they’ll ever see a region 1 release or even end up on American TV. (I wish we could get BBC America in our building, though. They show some great stuff on there.)

I’ve been playing with Ruby this week. It’s like a next-generation Perl, with most of Perl’s standard modules and functions converted to classes and methods, giving a truly object-oriented scripting language; much more true to the notion than Python.

It’s a little odd learning to think in terms of Ruby’s constructs, but I’m having fun and I like it a lot.

I got a copy of Kylix Professional for Christmas, too, so I should really start playing with that and reawaken my old love of Pascal and Modula-2.

Homesickness for Amsterdam is becoming acute. I’d love to get home for a while, even just a few days. Since the introduction of the Euro, I wouldn’t even recognise the money now.

The USA is starting to feel much like a job that I’ve outgrown and need to resign from. The sense of adventure and novelty value that were strong when I first came here have evaporated. What to do? Our immediate future is here (Sarah’s job is going very well), but I definitely want to start thinking about how I might engineer our smooth migration back to my homeland in the not too distant future.

Plans for the wedding are proceeding apace. I need to build an RSVP system out of CGI scripts and MySQL to take care of the invitations. So much to do, so much to think about.

Just got back from two weeks on the east coast, celebrating Christmas and New Year with Sarah and her folks. What bliss.

Our two nights out at Fire & Ice were fun, as were the positively stupendous desserts at Finale in Boston.

Anyway, I’ve just put up a new release of bash completion with which to kick off the new year.

I’m back at work tomorrow. Ugh. I very quickly get used to not working, so I can’t say I’m looking forward to getting back into the doldrums.

Anyone played with grsecurity, an excellent security patch for the Linux kernel? This thing is great and nails a system down very tightly indeed. The sysctl interface is particularly good, allowing you to fine-tune parameters to get the precise balance between security and usability that you want. Then you can lock down all the configured parameters by setting one final sysctl. Once that’s set, grsecurity parameters can no longer be redefined.

So, I’m at LISA 2001 in San Diego this week.

The downloads of my bash completion code have been very encouraging. Expect to see a new release at the weekend to fix a few silly bugs.

Highlights of LISA so far have been Jim Reid’s excellent advanced DNS tutorial and KC Claffy’s presentation on Internet traffic statistics, which debunked a surprising number of commonly held beliefs. Her Answer Lies in Measurement folk song was particularly entertaining.