Journal of Omnifarious

23:59 - To all of my friends

Could you also please friend hopper [omnifarious.org] by clicking here: and put that user (who is also me) in all the same groups you put me. If LJ ever lets you use your OpenID identity to log into an existing journal, this may be moot. but I'm not counting on that feature ever happening.

As an aside, if you click on the icon in hopper [omnifarious.org], it takes you someplace different than clicking on the hopper [omnifarious.org] does. The takes you to the LJ user info page, and the hopper [omnifarious.org] part takes you to the homepage for the ID.

Current Mood: working

08:21 - Paying attention to LiveJournal

I have hardly paid any attention to LiveJournal in at least a week. My work, houseguests and other stuff are just sucking up too much time.

Current Mood: busy

20:56 - Gaia consort is playing this Friday

tazfrog and I are going to try to go. I'm pretty sure we can get there, but I'm not so sure about getting back. Are any of you going and willing to take us? :-)

Current Mood: hopeful

10:19 - More LVM love

I must say again that I love LVM. I attached my new hard-drives to my fileserver while it was running, then I had to reboot it because the 3ware 9650SE-4LPML card seems to require that I use the 3ware BIOS setup utility to configure my RAID and doesn't seem to have a Linux utility to do it. But, being able to add the drives while the server was on still saved me about 45 minutes of downtime.

After the reboot, I started using LVM in earnest. I added the new array to the volume group, used pvmove to move all the filesystems to the new volume group (while they were in active use mind you) and then removed the old RAID array from the volume group. Standard LVM stuff. But I was able to do it all while the system was up and running.

Also, I had been using 64MiB allocation chunks, but with 3.18TiB of storage, that gets to be an unwieldy number of chunks. But LVM now has a feature that allows you to change the size of the allocation chunks. In my case, all of my physical volumes had an even number of chunks, and all the filesystems also consisted of a contiguous region with an even number of chunks (at least after I moved them they did) and so I was able to move to a more manageable 128MiB chunk size.

All this change only required about 15 minutes of server downtime. I'll likely have another 45 minutes or so as I switch the old array to RAID 0 (to make sure the wipe works thoroughly) wipe it and then remove all the disks and the card. Most of that will likely be taken up by getting the new disks into cages. That makes a total of about 50-60 minutes of downtime.

If 3ware had a RAID management utility that worked in Linux I could've done all this with 0 downtime so far, and likely only about 30 minutes of downtime in the future for physically moving the drives into cages.

If I had 8 hot-swap cages (4 for the old drives, 4 for the new), I could do it with no downtime.

Current Mood: accomplished

14:08 - Killing bacteria - antibiotics and disease prevention

Killing bacteria wholesale is all the wrong approach.

First, bacteria aren't inherently bad. There are 2-9 pounds of bacteria in the human body living there perfectly harmlessly, and in fact often symbiotically. We don't want to kill them all off.

Secondly, bacteria evolve resistance. The basic formula is if the cost of the resistance is less than the amount of energy or material needed for the bacteria to flourish, it will evolve resistance.

So, IMHO, the goal should be to reduce the survivability of bacteria that are harmful. This will cause evolution to work for us rather than against us. One example would be somehow targeting specific gene sequences that produce toxins.

I was thinking about this after seeing this article on anti-bacterial paint and thinking that most strains of e. coli are actually perfectly harmless. It would be nice to just get rid of the ones that weren't, and if we could target just them it would likely allow the ones that were benign to easily out-compete the harmful ones.

Current Mood: contemplative

14:48 - Why the iPhone is evil

I think the iPhone is evil, and doubly so because it is so nice and pretty. The reason I think it is evil is because it is laden with DRM. Apple controls it completely. By putting your life into your iPhone, you've basically sold your soul to Apple.

Apple must approve any application that runs on the iPhone. Any application must be signed by Apple in order to run. So, as an example, Apple is refusing to allow an iTunes competitor to run on the iPhone. Why anybody would want to pay money for a device that basically isn't really their's is beyond me.

I think the iPhone is especially evil because it is such a neat and pretty device. Many people would be tempted to think that really they do actually get the value they pay money for and ignore the fact that really, the device exists only to benefit Apple and any benefit it provides to them is like the lure of a angler fish. The iPhone is basically a trojan horse, and the fact that you are tricked into paying for it only adds insult to injury.

Current Mood: annoyed

23:10 - Fun evening

I saw s00j in concert this evening with tazfrog. I was quite happy I did. I'd been missing out. :-)

Current Mood: pleased

21:39 - tazfrog's birthday is soon

tazfrog's birthday is on Tuesday, September 23rd and we're thinking of doing a few fun things that evening. We haven't decided exactly what yet though. If you would like to come, please post something saying what limitations you have and maybe some ideas for things to do. :-)

You might know tazfrog from wolfieboy's gaming night. :-)

Comments will be screened since exactly what's going to transpire and who will be there is meant to be a bit of a surprise. :-)

Current Mood: hopeful

20:54 - attachmate is looking for testers

The place I work is looking to hire people for testing positions. They make a security sensitive product and they are well aware of this, so I have the impression that testing is pretty important to them. OTOH, they only hire testers on contract and then sometimes give offers to the ones they really like.

If any of you reading this would be interested, I may be willing to recommend you for a position there. I'm thinking, in particular, of cooncat, but I might be willing to recommend other people too.

Current Mood: hopeful

08:07 - My first day at my new job

I'm headed off to the first day of my new job at attachmate! :-)

Current Mood: excited

14:20 - Particle physics is loopy

Now, I can see the word 'bino' (pronounced like neutrino) and the word 'wino' might be associated somehow. But I never thought that the means by which this happened was particle physics.

Current Mood: amused

01:22 - Random thought on SQLite

SQLite is the Unixey equivalent of Microsoft Access. A cheap, simple database for random use. Of course, it has no fancy GUI or integration with Visual Basic to make fancy forms or anything like that. It just does SQL, and does it reliably and well within its problem domain.

So, now I have an answer for some people who want to use Microsoft Access. It would be nice if someone built a VB like tool to sit on top of SQLite, then it would be a complete replacement. SQLite is certainly a great way to play with SQL without having to go through the administrative pain of setting up a database with a normal piece of database software designed for a much heavier load.

Edit 08:56 PDT: I didn't do the research I ought to have. There are apparently a whole bunch of SQLite GUIs. I don't know if any of them do as much as MS Access does, but I suspect at least one of them will actually be nicer to use for a beginner than the command line is.

The SQLite website has a list of SQLite GUI and/or management tools.

As a random aside, my stupid desktop system locked when I tried to send the new xcode I'd downloaded from Apple over to my laptop. It has a hardware/firmware issue on the motherboard that causes it to lock up when disk access occurs during heavy network usage, heavy usually meaning high speed transfers within my gigabit network. This is a probabilistic problem though, so if I use bittorrent or gnutella on that system it will likely eventually freeze, though it will take hours.

Current Mood: tired

03:20 - The RNC in Minnesota

Minneapolis, MN is doing the same thing to it's population that NYC did, except a little worse. This is totally unacceptable. Among other things, they are targeting random gatherings of pagans as if they were potential terrorists who must be closely observed in the most intimidating way possible.

Current Mood: angry

17:59 - Mythbuster's censored

This is an interesting Slashdot article: CC Companies Scotch Mythbusters Show On RFID Security.

It's basically about how incredibly insecure RFID chips are from a whole host of different perspectives, and why you should never, ever let anybody give you something with an RFID chip in it that is supposed to have some sort of legal meaning of some sort, like a credit card, or a passport, though you don't have much choice nowadays with passports. Of course, this information is just too scary for the public to know, so the credit card companies all got together and pressured the Discovery channel into censoring the Mythbuster's episode in which they demonstrate this.

Nobody should be afraid of what Mythbuster's does. Anybody who is definitely has something to hide.

Current Mood: cynically amused

14:49 - Weird mood

I don't know what's up. It feels like a good portion of my brain is currently not available for my conscious use. It started yesterday. I would like to know what those bits of my brain that aren't around for me to use are doing. I suppose I shall find out eventually. :-)

Current Mood: ditzy

19:55 - Old TV spot with a modern relevant message

This TV documentary type spot from 1987 is a really excellent review of various aspects of how our government has come to function. It has a lot of things that are very relevant today, and it's really interesting to see the evolution of our government over the past 20 years, and it's also interesting to see some current politicians (like John Kerry) saying interesting things 20 years ago.

• The secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis, by Bill Moyers

I must say that 20 years ago, I remember it being on. I did not fully appreciate it then. I was 16 at the time this was aired, and had been raised Republican. I had a strong selection bias going then, a bias I am now missing.

On an even more personal note, one of the people in my life who I greatly appreciate is svairini. I feel that she frequently disagrees with my opinions, especially some of my more libertarian inspired ones. But, she never overtly expresses that disagreement unless she gives me a real, worthwhile and thoughtful question to consider.

When talking to others, I try hard to emulate this. People, no matter what their opinions, are people, not sheep or fundies, or Ayn Randians or whatever other pejorative you might choose to label them with today. Making them the 'other' is never helpful.

The willingness of Obama to get up and make a speech in which he avoids this labeling, even for people who clearly hold racist opinions, formed a significant basis for my respect for him as a leader.

Current Mood: contemplative

17:39 - The effects of authority gone wrong

merchanta recently came back from Canada and has interesting (though not public) reports of just how bad the border crossing actually is. She references two interesting stories:

• Citizens' U.S. Border Crossings Tracked - basically the US government is tracking anything and everything it can about every single person crossing the border, US citizen or not, and freely sharing that data with random entities even for such purposes as mundane as that entity making a hiring decision.
• Ill and in Pain, Detainee Dies in U.S. Hands - Because of a combination of bad legal advice and a stupid bureaucratic foulup, a 34 yr old Chinese immigrant, a US citizen by marriage is detained for several months, denied medical treatment for various serious complaints and eventually dies of cancer and a fractured spine.
• And then merchanta talks about a critical massive bicyclist who is assaulted by a police officer who then lies about it. A video of the event accompanies her post.

Totally broken. Authority out of control. Will you do something about it? Do you have any ideas for what can be done?

Current Mood: angry

15:22 - Another small milestone in PersonalJournal project

Now my PersonalJournal project allows people to register. It automatically brings them to a registration page if they log in with an unknown OpenID. It also uses the OpenID SReg (Simple Registration) extension to try to fetch registration information for a new OpenID to auto-fill in many of the form fields when registering them.

I think I'm going to work on a simple posting interface now. I'm going to allow a given PersonalJournal instance to host posts by multiple users, but I'm going to require that they be given permission to post by a site administrator.

One interesting case is mentioning someone in a post using their OpenID when the OpenID's owner hasn't registered at the site yet. I think I will give that OpenID a stub registration that the owner can change if the OpenID owner registers with that OpenID.

Another interesting case is when a posting user believes that several different OpenIDs refer to the same owner. That's tricky. Right now I allow several different OpenIDs to be tied to the same 'user'. And then all access control is on the basis of 'user', ot OpenID.

I think that what I will do is only allow the owner of an OpenID to tie that OpenID to any others. And the user can 'take over' an OpenID from a different user if they can prove they are the id's owner. This will only work if the OpenID being taken over is associate with a 'user' that has one and only one OpenID associated with it. Then the user will be deleted and all other references to the taken over user will be changed to refer to the taking over user.

It is tempting to only allow automatically created user's who have never registered and turned into 'real' users to be taken over, but someone might log in and register using one of their alternate OpenIDs once without realizing what they're doing and then need to suck that OpenID into the main user they are reigistered under. It would be nice to be able to do that without admin intervention.

Current Mood: accomplished

13:05 - Weirdness level meme

This thing has atrocious HTML. It's not hard to write well formed XML, and if you're righting a program that produces it you should have a clear idea how to do it. I don't understand why all these quiz and LJ-meme sites, especially more intelligent ones like this one, have such badly formed XML/HTML.

So, omnifarious, your LiveJournal reveals...

You are... 2% unique (blame, for example, your interest in unrealized externalities) and 5% herdlike (partly because you, like everyone else, enjoy science). When it comes to friends you are a total whore. In terms of the way you relate to people, you are keen to please. Your writing style (based on a recent public entry) is conventional.

Your overall weirdness is: 35

(The average level of weirdness is: 27.
You are weirder than 76% of other LJers.)

Find out what your weirdness level is!

Current Mood: bemused

17:07 - Small milestone in PersonalJournal project

I managed to put together a TurboGears application that allows logging in via OpenID. Well, OK, not completely, but the hard part of setting up the two step process of verifying an OpenID someone enters is done.

This was one of the small hurdles to putting together my PersonalJournal project.

Some parts of this like the oid_store and a few other components should be split out into a general package so other people can make TurboGears programs that support OpenID as a client. I would like to know how to make TurboGears extensions that can be used when you're starting a TurboGears application to add new model classes, like the identity extension. OpenID needs some model classes for the OpenID store.

I also stuck in a framework for putting mini-sessions around certain tasks within a session. This is so that my site will be resistant to cross-site scripting attacks based on POSTing to a random URL. I intend to make most POST URLs include a sub-session identifier as part of the URL or a required part of the data posted.

I also added secret data to the session object in the database. This is because I needed to have an HMAC key. I wanted to hand the client some data and wanted to make sure that when it handed it back to me that it was exactly the data I gave it. So the data includes an HMAC of itself using the secret as a key. I imagine this secret data will be more widely useful in other parts of the system.

A better name than 'PersonalJournal' might be in order. The WSJ appears to have used this in the past (or possibly even currently) for some feature of theirs. I'm actually OK with colliding with that though.

Current Mood: accomplished