I feel like I’ve been stuck in fast forward mode over the last couple of days and only now am I catching my breath albeit at the expense of a reading assignment that I need to have finished for tomorrow.

The show on Friday night was actually a lot more fun than I imagined it would be. The sound guy at the Climax Lounge has got to be one of the most clueful that I’ve ever dealt with. This means that he didn’t ask us to turn down which means, of course, that he actually understands the dynamics of tube amplifiers and that they sound awful turned down. That understanding alone eased my mind so much that I actually had a better show than usual. I’m usually excited when nothing breaks and songs don’t come crashing to a halt but everything was super swell excepting the heating vent that was blasting hot air directly on our drummer Matt and indirectly on me. The more interesting part of the evening really came after we played though. We’re talking about not putting out releases of any kind but just making recordings and releasing them via the IntarWeb (meaning that we’ll probably have to come up with some mirroring scheme in order to facilitate the downloading of entire albums) and selling/giving away burned CDs with minimal if any packaging at shows. What is surprising about this idea is that I wasn’t the one who proposed the commie “give shit away for free” idea. Again, I love my band.

There is a nicely reformatted explanation of the recent Debian server compromises if you’re tired of that looking at the bleak black and white wasteland of mailing list archives. It’s looking worse all the time with the likelihood of a new local root exploit loose in the wild. I’m probably not the only one who is really, really nervous about this. There haven’t been new packages in the archives yet although the old ones are at least reachable now. I had to reinstall AbiWord this weekend and I was very happy to be able to apt-get it. I didn’t realize how dependent I am on the Debian way until there were a couple of down days when I couldn’t. I have to admit that I’ve been thinking a lot about DebToo over the last couple of days and looking at Mepis a bit as well. Yes, they’re all Debian based but dpkg/apt is like crack…

I fucking hate myself when I discover sites like The Vintage Computer Marketplace. It cements my residence in fantasy land and I start thinking that I really might need an Apple ][ gs or maybe a Lisa board. Really? Only $650 for a piece of computer equipment that was obsolete when I was still in high school. Sounds like a bargain. Well, and then there’s the whole Amiga thing…

Scribbling down things I should be remembering although we have to go cheese a quick warm up/practice before the show tonight. I’m not sure how it’s going to go given that the headlining band George and Caplin is electronic as fuck but lauded pretty universally. Who knows. There was something important that I was supposed to remember but whatever that was will not be appearing in this space.

Damn. I had this idea a while back that like most of my dipshit and overly ambitious ideas came to absolutely nothing other than some notes scribbled on the back of some junk mail. Luckily the rest of the world is simply full of people who not only have the same dipshit ideas dawn on them but have some follow through behind it.

MyLink is a clone of the incredibly fun hacking game Uplink that is actually very well done for the amount of development work that’s done on it. It does require a couple of visits to CPAN for the odd Perl module but most of it was actually packaged for Debian so it was even less painless than it could’ve been. The one thing that immediately distinguishes MyLink from Uplink is the network play capability built in from the beginning. The downside to this is that you have to fire up a server even to play a local game and, in my case, fux0r your firewall configuration to play a local game but I imagine this will add whole new dimensions to the game in the future. How can you not love that a game about cracking remote machines will eventually allow you connect to real remote machines. Life. Art. Life. Art. I can forgive the difficulty in setting up a game because it’s eventual goal is pretty damned cool.

The real downside is that you need an Uplink CD to use the graphics and sound files for the game. This is problematic because so much of the actual gameplay is geared towards sound (the persistent beeping when you’re being traced is amazingly stressful) and I have a hard time picturing how it would work (although a visual bell would be helpful and more accommodating) without that element. If you’ve got an Uplink CD floating around (like I do) which is useless due to changes in glibc or whatever go grab a copy and try it out. I’m thinking that I should probably hack together some simplistic theme to submit to the project to spare one of the dependencies on the actual game. The developer is looking for help in quite a few areas so if you’re into geeking on game development in Perl/Tk this is probably something you’d want to get involved in. It’s playable right now but there’s a whole universe of possibilities for expansion.

Uh oh. Looks like another piece of the default Movable Type install is exploitable by spammers. The word is deleting mt-send-entry.cgi if it isn’t something that you use is a good idea since it’s easily exploited to send mail anonymously to anyone. Get rid of it. I just did.

If you do need the script for something then Ben Trott created a spam-resistant version that you can download from here.

I guess Google may indeed be the first target for SCO. This isn’t particularly surprising although tremendously stupid. Pissing off the Linux community is one thing but aggravating nearly everyone who uses the web for anything more than shopping and whatnot is another entirely. The article linked above hints at more MSFT conspiracy theory but I’m not entirely sure that even they are stupid enough to embark on such a pointlessly antagonistic endeavor. It’s going to get interesting. It has to — the pump and dump strategy depends on it.

Bleh day in general today after drinking way more than I should have last night. I just don’t have the capacity to metabolize quite as much alcohol as I did in the pre-diabetic days when the (malt) liquor flowed like, uh, wine. The sad part is that the same thing is probably going to happen tonight because mistakes are made to be repeated or something.

A couple people pointed site that will let you preview your site in Safari for those of us less inclined to the Macintosh. It’s a great idea but I think someone out there with the bandwidth and clock cycles to spare should implement another version of this because it’s going to get the stuffing knocked out of it once an A-lister mentions it. I’m pleased because my index looks pretty good although I’m running a much more vanilla version of Movable Type than I have in the past.

I’m getting to more snobbish than I like to admit about hacking Perl these days since it’s so easy to slap together soething with a lot of functionality in a short period of time but so hellish to try to remember what everything does if you’re not in the habit of commenting the hell out of a hundred line script. Python has really spoiled me. I come back to a project that I’ve been working on in smidgens and pieces since last summer and it only takes me a few minutes to get reacquainted with the code even when I haven’t touched it in months and uses a whole lot of functions from libraries.

I bumped into L4Ka project somewhere during the course of looking for something else and promptly forgot my original objective. L4Ka is another microkernel project that looks promising. I’m still not drinking the micro-KoolAid quite yet but it’s exciting to see so many active projects doing innovative stuff with the concept. It’ll definitely be on my list of things to check into a couple of months from now to see what kind of progress they’ve made.

I’m still grinding my way through a term paper so today was another day of reading through piles of articles in a relatively vain search for a suitable thesis. Fortunately the paper is half finished without and there is no turning back at this point given the distribution of work I need to finish within the next two weeks.

I did rip MP3s of the final mix of the Midcentury stuff which sounds a whole lot better to me than the first batch. I’m not ashamed to admit that at least part of it is because my guitar was really far down in the mix on the first go round. I’ll have Oggs of all of it as soon as the Debian servers are back up so I can download a few things to make sure they come out all right. If the logs are accurate (and they so seldom are) then we have quite a following in Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. I guess post-math isn’t as popular with the kids over here. Go figure.

I’m also working on getting the Linux CD stuff up to date again. I haven’t quite got the new Debian release yet mainly because most of the FTP servers haven’t synched yet and I’m still getting 3.0r1 as current straight from the horse’s mouth. It doesn’t help that there is a new Knoppix release every other day…I did manage to snag the new Mandrake release so at least that’s there with the damned internationalization CD included this time.

Oh, and go listen to some of the archived Creaking Door. It’s hilarious and a lot less grim than much of what you should be doing.

I took a break from everything but school work for the last couple of days because I started to just stress out and do everything badly. It’s been one of those semesters and it isn’t quite over yet. I still have two novels to read and three papers to write in the next two weeks without even considering final exams which will be right behind that lump. I’m really, really tired of reading reams of Faulkner criticism and starting to rethink my obsession with him. This will probably change when I’m not required to read and understand one of his novels every week but getting engaged in someone else’s obsessive compulsive behavior can tire you out, no?

The death of the catbox was a misdiagnosis of the most stupid kind. I’m typing on it right now after doing some very scientific work on the power cord with needlenose pliers and a bread knife. The little bastard is tougher than I thought. It is still weird to have all of the Debian sites down and see an empty result for apt-get update. Speaking of which I didn’t see much press coverage at all for the break in. Granted, the mailing list server was taken down which is sort of the mouthpiece for the distribution. I am getting several hundred less pieces of legitimate email a day. That works well with the “taking a break” theme since I’m not emailing a dozen copies of my X configuration file to strangers a day. It startles me how many people will reinstall an entire operating system because they selected the wrong thing during the initial install. dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 will save you a whole lot of time. We use Debian because we’re lazy, remember?

I know I’ve mentioned Microblogger before but I don’t recall mention that the entire thing was just a bash script. Yup, no Perl at all in the equation or any of that icky PHP crap. The official word:

MicroBlogger, as the name implies, is a small, simple, flexible, reliable weblog engine written entirely in bash script. It has absolutely no dependencies on any other programs–No PHP, no SQL, no CGI, no Perl, nothing. Basically, if you have a Unix shell account, you can blog with the best of ‘em. MicroBlogger is self-regulating, self-maintaining, and ready to fly straight out of the box. Just unpack the archive in your web directory, add a greeting, and whammo, you’re all set!

Sounds tempting but since time is somewhat limited right now I’m not messing with anything other than fixing things that are broken. That and fucking snow shovelling…

Oops. A number of Debian servers were compromised and later taken down for close scrutiny by project folks. Before anyone gets all hysterical (as is happening over at Slashdot) about security and whatnot keep in mind that this was a compromised password not an intrinsic security flaw within the distribution.

This does delay the release of the next stable revision although none of the archives were affected by the break in. This is a great lesson in account maintenance — watch those passwords and keys kids! I was wondering why non-us and security were down last night but I was distracted by the last pathetic gasps from my dying laptop.

The little laptop finally died. I say finally because it was pretty much ancient when I bought it but after a year or so of keeping me away from my tiny desk it looks like it’s the end of the line. Too bad that a good chunk of a ten page paer I have to hand in after the holiday is stranded on the drive. I’m thinking of knocking over a liquor store to replace it. Ack.

A tip of the hat to Rafe Colburn for pointing out this article about TechCentralStation. It pretty much confirms in spilled ink what I’ve thought about the site for a while: it’s lobbyist money that pays the bills over there. TCS has long been on my list of sites to avoid following links back to since the “science” over there is most definitely in sarcastic quotation marks. From the article:

But TCS doesn’t just act like a lobbying shop. It’s actually published by one–the DCI Group, a prominent Washington “public affairs” firm specializing in P.R., lobbying, and so-called “Astroturf” organizing, generally on behalf of corporations, GOP politicians, and the occasional Third-World despot. The two organizations share most of the same owners, some staff, and even the same suite of offices in downtown Washington, a block off K Street. As it happens, many of DCI’s clients are also “sponsors” of the site it houses. TCS not only runs the sponsors’ banner ads; its contributors aggressively defend those firms’ policy positions, on TCS and elsewhere.

Think about how accurate a source like this might be the next time one of the B-minus list right wingers cites an article from over there as evidence for the nonexistence of global warming for example.

Addition
Ars Technica has an excellent posting on this article as well. This will also serve as a reminder to myself to visit AT more often. Every time I’ve popped over (usually because someone linked one of their articles) I’m always impressed.