Demilitarized zone

Monday, November 12, 2001

The past few days I've been reconfiguring my firewall/proxy server here at home and I must certainly say that it's not quite as easy as I thought it was; and that supporting FTP is singularly annoying.

Prior to my mucking about I had allowed all TCP connections through, and then excluded the ones I didn't want, which meant that my rules (and I'm using ipfwadm here) looked like:


ipfwadm -I -a reject -P tcp -W eth1 -D $IP 1:19
ipfwadm -I -a reject -P tcp -W eth1 -D $IP 23:24
ipfwadm -I -a reject -P tcp -W eth1 -D $IP 26:79

And so on. Made it hard to see what ports I did support (and I stopped at 1022 because it seems that Linux 2.0 starts handing out ports at 1023 even though it's supposed to start at 1024 but that's anothe story) and I had to make sure I blocked services on high ports like Squid and I wanted to block ports that stuff like Back Oriface use (not that I'm really worried it'll attack me, but it's always nice to see attempts).

So I started mucking around.

And I'm still fine tuning everything. As Rob pointed out, I'm turning into a paranoid sysadmin.

Sigh.

But it is easier to see what I'm letting through.

Friday, November 12, 2004

All is almost right with the (working) world

Windows XP has been reinstalled on my computer, I figured out how to create that sub-site and the cubicle still has that neat Zen like emptiness to it.

Only now I have to figure out why this module of an open source commerce site isn't working, and of course it's written in PHP …

100,000 digits of e

In case you were wondering about the title to my little PHP rant the other day, it's e, the mathematical constant dealing with natural logarithms, out to 20 decimal places. I felt that was a good place to break it as any.

I got the value from a program I wrote, oh, it looks to be around 1995 or so, and was based upon a program written by Steve Wozniak for the Apple ][ computer, and documented in a Byte Magazine article from December 1980 (I think—the copy of the article is buried somewhere around here, but the timeframe is close enough to track down the article if you are truely interested). Written in 6502 Assembly and it calculated e out to 100,000 digits (no more since there was no more memory in the Apple ][ to hold the result). By following the article and the 6502 Assembly code, I was able to rewrite it in C.

Now, when Steve Wozniak first wrote it, it took the Apple ][ a week to calculate the result—a modern machine (okay, a 1.6GHz AMD Athalon) took only 2½ minutes to calculate e to 100,000 digits (the output give the amount of memory used, the number of digits produced (and in this case, 50,000 bytes gives 120,412 digits) and the magnitude of the result and the resultant number itself, but without the leading 2).

Amazing the speed advances that 24 years can bring.

As for how the program works, you'll have to dig up the article and find out; I don't recall the math behind it anymore.

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Addiction

I know that as of this day, I've hooked two more people on Dicewars. Muahahahahahahahaha!

Now … if I could only kick myself of the habit …

Son of a Witch

I just finished reading Son of a Witch, the sequel to Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, and overall I found it lacking.

The book follows Liir, who may or may not be the son of Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West, from moments after Dorothy kills the Witch (quite by accident) for the next ten years. At the start, he's unsure of everything—unsure if he's the son of the Witch, unsure what to do, uncertain about what he can do. And after following him for ten years in the aftermath of Dorothy's visit and the poltical upheavel it brings upon Oz, he's still unsure if he's the son of the Witch, unsure what to do, and unsure of what he can do.

I think what made Wicked work was the recasting of the Wicked Witch of the West as the heroine; we get to see her side of the story in a politicized Oz. And while Son of a Witch carries on that story after Elphaba dies, it doesn't feel as tied into the Oz mythos as the first one. It's too far from any characters we know from Oz.

It just didn't work for me.

Monday, November 12, 2007

This metablogging entry brought to you by the letter B. And by the number 13.

It was a quiet weekend (more like comatoast since I didn't bother to post anything) and even today was rather quiet (well, other than moving websites). I started to write something about string concatenation in Ruby and that if one method is frowned upon, why does it even exist, but I just wasn't in the mood to even bother.

Heck, I havn't been in the mood to post in the past few days.

In other news, I got another testimonial about X-Grey:

From

kelly@XXXXXXX

To

Sean Conner <sean@conman.org>

Subject

Re: Greylist daemon …

Date

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:06:12 -0500 (EST)

So far, NOTHING (spamwise). I don't know what I'm going to do with all this free time not deleting spam! (pause 1.5 hours for work interruption)

heh … Thanks …

plus some other feedback (some small bugs, omissions from the installation documentation). So far, everybody who's used X-Grey has been happy with it.

What next? That the Mona Lisa is really a self portrait?

ROME, Italy (AP)—It's a new Da Vinci code, but this time it could be for real.

An Italian musician and computer technician claims to have uncovered musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's “Last Supper,” raising the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a somber composition to accompany the scene depicted in the 15th-century wall painting.

Via Instapundit, Italian musician uncovers hidden music in Da Vinci's ‘Last Supper’

For Bunny, who likes both music and The Da Vinci Code.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

You do realize my Twitter feed is entirely automated, right?

BOSTON—Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday.

Guerrero drove in two Angels runners. He went 2-4 at the plate.

“When it comes down to honoring Nick Adenhart, and what happened in April in Anaheim, yes, it probably was the biggest hit (of my career),” Guerrero said. “Because I'm dedicating that to a former teammate, a guy that passed away.”

Guerrero has been good at the plate all season, especially in day games. During day games Guerrero has a .794 OPS. He has hit five home runs and driven in 13 runners in 26 games in day games.

After Chone Figgins walked, Bobby Abreu doubled and Torii Hunter was intentionally walked, the Angels were leading by one when Guerrero came to the plate against Jonathan Papelbon with two outs and the bases loaded in the ninth inning. He singled scoring Abreu from second and Figgins from third, which gave Angels the lead for good.

The Angels clinched the AL Division Series 3-0.

Via Hacker News, Is Software Set to Replace Sports Journalists? | Singularity Hub

The above article is about the October 11^th playoff game between the Angels and the Red Sox, and I quote it here not because I'm a fan of baseball (I'm not), but because Bunny is, and because it relates to the current topic of the month: tool, or crutch? In this case, the story above was written entirely by software.

I guess that's one way to cut costs in a dying industry.

Thursday, November 12, 2015

Taking the train

The Coast Starlight would take us from Los Angeles to Seattle in 35 hours, at $763 for a Superliner Roomette. Food and entertainment were included. Free wine and cheese, I kept noting, as if the promise of a few glasses of wine would be enough to offset the cost of the trip.

Not that the cost was really the deciding factor. After all, $763 total is really $381.50 per head, about the same as it would cost to either fly or to take a long weekend and drive the Pacific Coast Highway. It was more the thing of the thing, a vague phrase that in this case meant: This trip isn’t about moving. It’s about something else.

We both figured out what it was really about at the same time, and Mike was already dumping our names and birthdates into Amtrak’s interface by the time I sent over the words “XXXX IT BOOK TRAIN.”

“We are going to have an adventure,” I wrote. Then I sent Mike a Facebook sticker of a sailor and a mermaid sharing a bottle of Champagne.

Via Instapundit, What it's like to take a 36-hour sleeper train from LA to Seattle / Boing Boing

While it's not in the same class as a private railcar, it is way cheaper and doesn't appear to be that bad. And unlike modern airtravel, you actually get real food.

Too bad the destinations are limited.

Monday, November 12, 2018

Some Gordian Knots are easy, others, not so easy

Bunny is busy replacing the toilet in the master bathroom. Why am I not doing such work? Bunny has experience in home renovations—I just get called in for the really heavy work like hauling the heavy debris away. Eventually, the call comes.

“Sean! Come here!”

“What's up?”

“I'm trying to separate the tank from the bowl, but this one screw is too tight to remove. Can you help?”

“Sure.” I try futzing with it for a few moments. “Why do you want the tank separated?”

“Because it'll make it easier to carry down to the street as trash.

“Oh,” I said, picking up a nearby hammer, “this—”

WHACK!

“Oh! Wait—”

WHACK!

“—until I can—”

WHACK!

“—get away!”

SMASH!

“—will be easy,” I said. “There you go. Gordian Knot untied.”

“Thanks, I think.”

Then more futzing around getting the old toilet scraps scooped up, and the new toilet set down and the tank installed. I'm screwing in the last of the bolts on the tank when Bunny walks up.

“Make sure the tank is level,” she said, placing a level across the tank.

“Hmm,” I said. “Looks like I need to loosen the right side here … oomph. Ooommmmmph! Errrrrrrrrrrrrarrg! It's not budging. Let me see what tools you have …”

Two hours later …

“Bunny!”

“Yes?”

“I've tried the nut driver. I've tried the ratchet. I've tried the nut driver with vice grips (sorry about the handle there). I can't get the screw loose on the right side. That's about as level as the tank is going to get.”

“Is the nut cross-threaded?”

“Cross-threaded. Too tight. Not enough space to get leverage. All the above. It ain't moving.”

She looked at the toilet for a few moments. “Good enough. Now let me get the hose hooked up and … oh bother!”

“What's wrong?”

“The connector to the water valve is too small!”