Latcarf's Locution

The Cost of Idiocy

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 23:21:11 -0700

So yeah, it's been a loooong time since I posted in this blog but I found something that gets my goat enough to write about it... It's this damned bailout business. I'll post more on my feelings about this when it's not so close to my bedtime but for now, I'll just leave with a link to a high-level analysis of the cost thanks to CNBC.

Yes, you as a tax payer are indentured to your share of this. Yes, you are now solidly a slave of the state. Yes, your unborn children already owe. Get working friends, it's gonna take alot of your sweat to pay this off. If you consider there's 300 million people in the US (from age 1 day to very old) and the cost of the bailout is roughly $4.3 trillion (that will go up), then you owe (right this minute - not counting inflation) just over $14,000! Remember, this amount is on top of your share of the national debt (and I won't even get into that).

Get cracking people, freedom is not free!

mod_rewrite errors on Mac OS X Server

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:14:05 -0600

I was a little concerned with the web service on my new Intel Xserve running Mac OS X Server 10.5 (Leopard) when I started seeing the following log entry in my Apache error log:

[crit] (2)No such file or directory: mod_rewrite: could not init rewrite log lock in child

I wasn't so much concerned that there was a critical error. I could see my Apache 2 based Subversion server (DAV svn) was performing just fine. My larger concern was that there was an error about mod_rewrite when I wasn't the one that turned it on in the first place. You see, I could believe it was my human error that might have caused the problem but I'd have a harder time believing it was a problem with the default install.

So, I looked at my config file: /etc/apache2/sites/0000_any_80_.conf and compared it to the default config file: /etc/apache2/sites/0000_any_80_.conf.default and found the <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> containers to be exactly the same. Annoying.

Iquickly gave up trying to point the finger and lay blame and decided to take the initiative to fix the problem. I fixed it by giving mod_rewrite an actual log to write to (make it happy - if for only a moment) and then told it to not to log anything to the file (mwahahaha). The change was simple.

From this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^TRACE
RewriteRule .* - [F]
</IfModule>

To this:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} ^TRACE
RewriteRule .* - [F]
RewriteLog /var/log/apache2/rewrite.log
RewriteLogLevel 0
</IfModule>

Problem solved it seems. Now why did I have to do this!?

Books Don't Die...

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:31:06 -0600

The Guardian had a great article about why eBooks and other reading "gizmos" (devices) won't beat printed books anytime soon.

The article was well written and pointed out some interesting facts about the longevity of books. This is exactly something I've been framing in my mind as to why I'd rather be writing books than writing software. If I could support myself as well doing the formers as I do doing the latter, I'd change my line of work in an instant!

Poor Little IRS...

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:54:49 -0600

Every once in a while you hear something that is so dumb it will give you an aneurysm. Fans of Lewis Black will know this as an "If it weren't for my horse..." situation. Well, I had a similar experience this morning. I was waking up to the radio as I am wont to do (the buzzer just isn't as appealing as I get older), and the news was on.

The anchor woman was talking about TurboTax. She spoke about how last year, Intuit had a bandwidth problem that brought down the TurboTax servers near tax day and caused a few thousand people a real headache. The newscaster asked an Intuit spokesperson about what had done this year to help keep that from happening. After talking with the Intuit PR woman, the newscaster talked to an IRS representative. The IRS agent explained how last year they were able to offer an extension of 48 hours to the people who were affected and how the IRS really appreciates e-filers.

Now, none of this talk could make blood shoot out of my nose. This is all very simple, straight forward, and reasonable. It's what the IRS guy went on to say next that got me. Actually, it wasn't just what he said... but how he said it that twisted a vein in my noodle.

As my memory surely can't recall a direct quote from this morning, I will do my best to paraphrase accurately. He (the IRS guy) said something to the effect of: E-filing is such a great thing. It used to be that we literally had trucks pull up to the office (IRS office that is), unload tons of forms, and we had to go through each one (whine, whine). It was sooo hard and there was sooo much to deal with!

That's the one that blew my gasket! I thought to myself: WTF!? Did he really expect me to think: "Poor IRS, they used to have so many forms to deal with. I mean it was literally tons of paper they were swimming in. Can you imagine the potential for papercuts!? I feel sorry for those guys. It must be so much easier for them if we e-file. We really do need to make their lives easier."

Ok... Look asshole, I'm sorry you had to work with all those forms, but seriously, you're the assholes who're telling us we have to do this crap. There isn't even a god damned law stipulating that we have to. It'll be a cold day in hell when I feel sorry for all the work you have to do when I file my taxes. I shouldn't have to do this crap work in the first place. As a matter of fact I shouldn't have to pay any taxes in the first place considering I don't a agree with a single thing my tax money is spent on (inflating the dollar - for instance).

So my brain nearly burst when I thought about how this IRS agent had hoped his comment would spark pity in me for what he has to go through. The only thing that got me calmed down what when I thought about the slim chance that the TurboTax servers might go down again this year. Oh goodness, I really hope it doesn't happen again. I couldn't bear the thought of the IRS having more heartache and headache on tax. Those poor guys!

Fink on Leopard With Blocked CVS Port

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:05:47 -0700

Recently I wanted to use Fink on my Leopard machine at work. This sounds simple but there are a few complicating factors. First, there are no Fink binaries for Leopard as of this writing. Ok, so that's not a big deal, I can compile it easy enough, Fink made an easy to use bootstrap script for that purpose. Secondly, as far as I know, as of this writing, we can't use rsync mode during Fink's self update on Leopard. So, the solution is to use fink selfupdate-cvs. This leads to the third problem which comes from the fact that my company is strict about blocking ports. Unfortunately the cvs port 2401 is blocked. Fortunately however, SSH (port 22) is not. So my solution is to temporarily port-forward cvs through ssh to my home server so I can run fink selfupdate-cvs to pull down all the great package descriptions I need for my fink install.

Here's are my notes on what I did:

# I needed to find where the cvs urls were set so I grepped in /sw
cd /sw
grep -R fink.cvs.sourceforge.net *

# That eventually turned up the following potential places to make changes:
lib/fink/URL/anonymous-cvs:fink.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fink
lib/fink/URL/cvs-repository:fink.cvs.sourceforge.net
lib/fink/URL/developer-cvs:fink.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fink
lib/perl5/Fink/SelfUpdate/CVS.pm: my $cvsrepository = "fink.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fink";

# Since I only needed to get package descriptions I figured /sw/lib/fink/URL/anonymous-cvs
# was the file I wanted change to handle my port-forward solution.
cd /sw/lib/fink/URL/
sudo cp anonymous-cvs anonymous-cvs.orig
nano -wz anonymous-cvs

# Here I changed: fink.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/fink to: localhost:/cvsroot/fink

# Then it was a simple matter to create an ssh tunnel to an external server where I have
# the ability to login and its port 2401 is not blocked.
ssh login@domian.example -L 2401:fink.cvs.sourceforge.net:2401

# Finally, I ran the fink update command:
fink selfupdate-cvs

# Hooray. Now everything works as expected and I probaly don't need to use it again unless I need
# to update package descriptions sometime in the future. So, I changed things back:
cd /sw/lib/fink/URL/
sudo mv anonymous-cvs anonymous-cvs.custom
sudo mv anonymous-cvs.orig anonymous-cvs

# Probably I should create a shell alias like: finkselfupdatecvs to handle it all when I
# I find I want to update package descriptions again. But I'm too lazy and besides, that's
# why I've put it in my blog.

Fractal Wrongness

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:15:14 -0700

Definition:

fractal wrongness

    The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. That is, from a distance, a fractally wrong person's worldview is incorrect; and furthermore, if you zoom in on any small part of that person's worldview, that part is just as wrong as the whole worldview.

    Debating with a person who is fractally wrong leads to infinite regress, as every refutation you make of that person's opinions will lead to a rejoinder, full of half-truths, leaps of logic, and outright lies, that requires just as much refutation to debunk as the first one. It is as impossible to convince a fractally wrong person of anything as it is to walk around the edge of the Mandelbrot set in finite time.

    If you ever get embroiled in a discussion with a fractally wrong person on the Internet--in mailing lists, newsgroups, or website forums--your best bet is to say your piece once and ignore any replies, thus saving yourself time.

Taken from Keunwoo Lee : Lexicon 2

Idiot's Guide

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:00:23 -0700

I saw this in the grocery store checkout line the other day... It struck me funny.

Infotrip

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 21:44:41 -0700

I coined a new term the other day to describe what happens while browsing the internet and following links to various places. Sometimes, you set out to look for some information on something and end up learning about something entirely different than what you set out to research.

This phenomenon happens alot on Wikipedia but it spans the cyberspace in general just by it's very nature of "hyperlinked" information.

So my new word is "infotrip." This the perfect name for the birdwalk that so often accompanies internet research.

So, have fun "infotripping!"

New Xserve Build Machines

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:47:30 -0700

I just got two brand new Xserve build machines and the first thing I did was wipe out the default Tiger OSX Server install and install Leopard OSX Server instead. That wasn't too bad except for the fact that I had to go through the setup assistant first in Tiger before being able to boot off the Leopard disk, wipe the drive and install.

After I got Leopard OS X Server up and running on the Xserve, I tried to ssh out from a user account to another machine (my source repository server) that's running 10.4. While establishing communication, ssh had this huge delay (more than a minute - I think). I had to figure out what was going on so I ran ssh -v to get the verbose output from ssh while it was connecting.

The verbose output showed this.

debug1: Unspecified GSS failure.  Minor code may provide more information
Server not found in Kerberos database

debug1: Unspecified GSS failure.  Minor code may provide more information
Server not found in Kerberos database

debug1: Unspecified GSS failure.  Minor code may provide more information

So, I went spelunking in and ended up comparing the /etc/sshd_config files on both the local (Leopard Xserve) and remote (Tiger source repository) machines. I found on the remote machine (Tiger source repos) that Kerberos authentication was turned off by default but commented out.

So, I changed this:

# Kerberos options

# GSSAPI options
#GSSAPIAuthentication no

to this:

# Kerberos options
KerberosAuthentication no

# GSSAPI options
GSSAPIAuthentication no

in the /etc/sshd_config file on the remote (Tiger OS X server) and reconnected via ssh without a problem. Then it was on to more work setting up my new xserve build systems.

Real Change

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 13:42:38 -0700

Fix for Tor on Leopard

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 01:07:44 -0700

After installing Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) fresh (I won't go into details ), I needed to reinstall Tor. I found the Tor expert installer didn't quite do what it was supposed to as far as creating the _tor user the daemon runs as (the user ends up a little mangled - check it out after install with dscl . -read /Users/tor) Since Leopard doesn't use NetInfo (niutil) anymore, I had to manually create the user with DirectoryServices (dscl). Here's the quick-and-dirty on what I did...

# Create Tor Group and User:
sudo dscl . -create /Groups/_tor
sudo dscl . -create /Groups/_tor PrimaryGroupID 100
sudo dscl . -create /Groups/_tor RealName "Tor Group"
sudo dscl . -create /Groups/_tor Password '*'

sudo dscl . -create /Users/_tor
sudo dscl . -create /Users/_tor UserShell /usr/bin/false
sudo dscl . -create /Users/_tor RealName "Tor Server"
sudo dscl . -create /Users/_tor UniqueID 100
sudo dscl . -create /Users/_tor PrimaryGroupID 100
sudo dscl . -create /Users/_tor NFSHomeDirectory /Library/Tor/var/lib/tor
sudo dscl . -create /Users/_tor Password '*'
sudo dscl . -append /Groups/_tor GroupMembership _tor

After that, there was still a little more to do to get Tor to run. I needed to create a place for the logs and fix the StartupItems script. Here's what I did for that...

# Create the logs directory
cd /var/log
sudo mkdir tor
sudo touch tor/tor.log
sudo chown -R _tor:_tor tor

# Fix perms on the "home" directory
cd /Library/Tor/var/lib
sudo chown -R _tor:_tor tor

# In /Library/StartupItems/Tor/Tor change TORGROUP from TORGROUP=daemon to:
TORGROUP=_tor

# Start the Tor server
sudo /Library/StartupItems/Tor/Tor start

Cool. That fixed it. Still not sure whether I want logging in /var/log/tor or /Library/Tor/var/log/tor though... Also, I guess I probably should submit all this to the Tor folks too. I'm so damn lazy.

When Blogs Go Stale...

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:38:09 -0700

You really need to post a new entry. So here it is:

Hello world! I'm a new entry.

Niggy Tardust!

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 14:15:42 -0700

Algebra

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 13:54:16 -0600

I've never really been good at math. In high school I only went as far as algebra and in college did the same. Lately, I've been thinking about going back to school and along those lines of thinking I've decided it would probably be a good idea to take the SAT again.

I will do superbly well on the English and logic part but the math area has always been a little tougher for me. So, with the help of my girlfriend, I am re-teaching myself algebra. I've got one of those "teach yourself" books and I'm basically plodding through it to see how far I can get. I'm only in the first chapter now and the stuff is pretty basic. I'm remembering alot of it and it certainly doesn't seem as hard as it used to. I'm sure years of programming has helped refine some of the pathways in my brain to make mathematical thinking a little more natural.

I'm going to try very hard to be successful with this. I fell enthusiastic about learning algebra but, like all things I do, my enthusiasm often ebbs and flows. Hopefully it will keep flowing as far as this is concerned.

Software I Use

nospam@example.com (Latcarf) — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 13:58:01 -0600

I often get people asking me what Mac software I use alot and if there's anything I can recommend to them. I recently put together a list of stuff I use at work (this doesn't include the *NIX stuff) for a colleague and figured others might benefit from it.

Adium - AIM, MSN, Yahoo, .Mac, Jabber, Gadu-Gadu, ICQ, etc... IM client. (open source)
Cyberduck - FTP client (open source)
ClamXav - Virus Checker (not like you'll need it) (open source)
Firefox - Web browser (open source)
iTerm - Terminal Emulator (open source)
Microsoft Remote Desktop Client - RDC to connect to Windows on Mac (free)
VLC - Media Player (open source)
Yojimbo - Password/etc DB (commercial)