May Contain Traces of Bolts

Dear Members of Congress

2012-01-11T22:18:00.000+01:00

The Internet's resilience and ability to heal itself and work around intentional or unintentional damage are the stuff of legends. As with most legends, however, it is only partly true. Key components of the Internet's technical infrastructure are still, to a large degree, and despite repeated efforts to decentralize them, concentrated in and controlled by the United States.

As a non-US resident who makes his living largely from the Internet, I am extremely pleased to see that the United States House of Representatives has recognized this weakness and is considering decisive measures to remedy the situation.

I am, of course, referring to SOPA. To summarize, SOPA is an incentive program designed for two purposes: first, to encourage organizations outside the US to replicate key parts of Internet infrastructure so that the Internet will be able to operate entirely outside US control; and second, to encourage US organizations to move their Internet operations overseas. If SOPA is passed into law, the Internet will soon become a truly global, independent, distributed and decentralized entity, able to operate completely outside the control of any single government or organization and organically work around any form of censorship or sabotage. The downside is that the United States will become a sort of Internet ghetto, fenced off from the rest of the world and strictly policed, much like Iran and China are today; but that is a small price to pay. The Internet, with a few regrettable exceptions, will finally be truly free.

So please, dear Members of Congress, I implore you: vote for SOPA. Not for yourself, not for your country, but for the world.

True Love

2011-12-23T21:20:00.000+01:00

Around one in the morning...

“This is blasphemous, you know.”

“Hmmm?”

“This colostrum-based cold medicine. They have a promotion where they've hidden images of golden calves in some of the boxes and you win a prize if you find one. It's blasphemous.”

“Huh?”

“You know, the golden calf? The false idol the Israelites made while Moses was up on the mountain and he got so angry when he saw it that he broke the tablets and had to go back and get a new set?”

“Yes?”

“It's blasphemous. I'm probably going to hell for taking this cold medicine.”

“...”

“If I go to hell, will you come with me?”

“Yes. Now go to sleep.”

Because you told me to

2011-12-18T04:49:00.003+01:00

I'm tired of Windows 7 complaining every time it boots about the Bluetooth radio not being discoverable. The irony is that the Bluetooth settings dialog recommends that you turn off discoverability (for obvious reasons), but when you do, it will bitch and bitch and bitch until you turn it back on. Does anyone know how to make it stop nagging?

ZFS-to-ZFS backups

2011-11-22T14:26:00.000+01:00

ZFS has a couple of very useful functions, zfs send and zfs receive, which allow you to serialize a complete ZFS dataset and recreate it in a different location. They can also be used to serialize a delta between two snapshots and apply that delta to a previously created copy of the dataset. You see where I'm going with this... That's right, incremental backups of a ZFS dataset or even an entire pool to a different ZFS dataset or pool.

Why would you want to perform incremental ZFS-to-ZFS backups instead of just adding redundancy to the pool, or cloning a snapshot? Because—provided the ZFS pool and filesystem versions match—it allows you to duplicate your dataset or pool on removable media (which you can store off-site), or even on a different machine across the network. This technique is far more efficient than rsync, because there is no need to compare the source and destination: ZFS already knows exactly what has changed. It also preserves the filesystem hierarchy and dataset properties.

In my case, I need to duplicate a pool onto removable media because I am replacing a server that only takes PATA disks with another that only takes SATA disks, which precludes just moving the disks over and progressively replacing them with new ones. Using this technique, when the time comes, I can slide the new server into the rack, hook up the backup disk, and restore just the parts I want to keep.

Of course, like a good little hacker, I wrote a script, which you can find here, to automate this.

The script takes two arguments: the source dataset and the destination dataset. Either of these can be the root of a ZFS pool or a dataset within a pool; they can even be datasets within the same pool, provided they do not overlap. The script selects the latest snapshot of the destination dataset (it uses a naming scheme which ensures that lexical order corresponds to chronological order), verifies that the source dataset has a snapshot with the same name, takes a new snapshot of the source dataset, and streams the difference between the old and new snapshots from the source dataset to the destination dataset. Finally, it deletes the old snapshot to allow ZFS to reclaim the space occupied by old data.

You can use this script with multiple backup disks, since it will only delete the snapshot that was actually used for the current disk. If you have one disk for each day of the week, for instance, it will delete last Monday's snapshot once it has completed this Monday's backup, but leave the other six in place. Likewise, if you decide to keep Sunday's disk for a month instead of reusing it next Sunday, the script will leave the snapshot in place until you run it again with the same disk.

The script does not currently support over-the-network backups, but it should be fairly easy to implement.

More Advanced Format drives: Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen and Seagate Barracuda Green

2011-09-29T22:30:00.001+02:00

I've acquired a couple more 2 TB Advanced Format drives: a Seagate Barracuda Green (ST2000DL003) and a Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen (HD204UI, no data sheet available online).

I was extremely impressed with the Samsung HD204UI. It's the first AF drive I've seen with decent performance. In fact, it's the fastest disk I've tested so far—its unaligned writes are faster than the non-AF Hitachi I used as a reference last time, and its aligned writes are twice as fast.

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps

  131072    1024       0    4096       43984    2979    2979
  131072    1024     512    4096      127047    1031    1031

   65536    2048       0    8192       14764    4438    8877
   65536    2048     512    8192       12453    5262   10524
   65536    2048    1024    8192       12460    5259   10518

   32768    4096       0   16384        4609    7109   28436
   32768    4096     512   16384        7829    4185   16740
   32768    4096    1024   16384        8413    3894   15579
   32768    4096    2048   16384        8211    3990   15961

   16384    8192       0   32768        3952    4145   33165
   16384    8192     512   32768        9050    1810   14481
   16384    8192    1024   32768        9317    1758   14067
   16384    8192    2048   32768        9315    1758   14069
   16384    8192    4096   32768        3996    4099   32793

The Seagate ST2000DL003, on the other hand, is so slow it's not even funny. It's actually the slowest of all the drives I've tested: its performance on aligned random writes is half that of the Western Digital WD20EARS. It's three times as fast on unaligned writes, but three times nothing (100 kBps) is still nothing (300 kBps) compared to the Samsung HD204UI (15 MBps). Here are the numbers:

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps

  131072    1024       0    4096     2419280      54      54
  131072    1024     512    4096     2199286      59      59

   65536    2048       0    8192     1283667      51     102
   65536    2048     512    8192      985184      66     133
   65536    2048    1024    8192      995423      65     131

   32768    4096       0   16384       45980     712    2850
   32768    4096     512   16384      345291      94     379
   32768    4096    1024   16384      432533      75     303
   32768    4096    2048   16384      429781      76     304

   16384    8192       0   32768       34192     479    3833
   16384    8192     512   32768      166440      98     787
   16384    8192    1024   32768      210147      77     623
   16384    8192    2048   32768      207356      79     632
   16384    8192    4096   32768       34221     478    3830

This time, I also ran sequential write tests—basically, dding eight gigabytes' worth of zeroes to the disk in 128 kB blocks, which is the optimal I/O size for FreeBSD. This time, the results are pretty close: the Samsung HD204UI gets slightly less than 90 MBps, and the Seagate ST2000DL003 gets slightly less than 80 MBps.

Stalkers

2011-07-27T02:13:00.000+02:00

I don't get Google+.

Much of it looks like a better facebook, with e.g. far better photo handling and a more nuanced relationship system—where facebook tried to patch the black-and-white “friend” concept by adding “pages” and “groups”, Google+ simply generalized it, eliminating the need for such hacks.

However, I don't understand why Google+ allows people I have never even heard of—including people hiding behind pseudonyms and whose identity even a Google search (hah!) can't reveal, so much for their controversial “real name” policy—to push updates into my “Incoming” stream. I thought the idea was to let me decide who I wanted to follow, not the other way around.

I almost feel like I'm being stalked, except it's a weird sort of reverse stalking where, instead of following me around and poking their noses into my private life, the stalkers follow me around and grind my nose into their private lives.

Who the hell are you people?

Unanimiter et constanter

2011-07-26T01:39:00.000+02:00

Today, there are no roses to be had in Oslo, for love nor money.

* * *

I am standing by the fountain outside the City Hall. With me around the fountain are hundreds of others. Around them are thousands more, and beyond those, tens of thousands. I do not know precisely how many, and to be honest, I do not think anyone does. A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? Three hundred thousand? Most of them with a rose in their hand, many with two or more.

This is our finest hour.

We are gathered to mourn, but more importantly, we are gathered to show Anders Behring Breivik, and the world, that we are not scared.

I expect that many outside Norway will not understand, especially in countries which, when faced with similar actions, have answered hate with hate and violence with violence. But that is not the Norwegian way. Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said on Friday that “we are a small nation, we are a proud nation”. He should have added “we are a stubborn nation”. Anders Behring Breivik wants us to be scared. Therefore, we will not be scared.

As I look around from my spot by the fountain, waiting for the speeches to start, I note that there are no snipers on the roofs of the surrounding buildings. No armored cars. No police in riot gear. A police helicopter buzzes high above me. Crowd control has been delegated to security guards who are working pro bono.

While we wait, the crowd sings, alternating between the national anthem and Nordahl Grieg's “Til Ungdommen”.

Their Royal Highnesses Crown Prince Haakon and Crown Princess Mette-Marit; Princess Märtha Louise; Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and his wife Ingrid Schulerud; around a third of the cabinet; Mayor Fabian Stang; leader of the Labor party's youth organization and Utøya survivor Eskil Pedersen; former Prime Minister and “mother of the people” Gro Harlem Brundtland: these are some of the dignitaries attending this rose rally. Their Royal Highnesses and the Prime Minister are accompanied, I presume, by the usual half-dozen smartly dressed and highly trained young men and women. The others have no security detail whatsoever. What they have instead is, to paraphrase the late King Olav V, a hundred thousand bodyguards.

* * *

A few hours later, the crowd is dispersing quietly through the streets of Oslo, depositing their flowers here and there, covering fountains, statues, trees, fences... Many gather outside the cathedral, where several hundred square meters of pavement are already covered in flowers and candles.

Spontaneous applause breaks out wherever police, paramedics or firefighters appear. Mounted police ride slowly up Karl Johan, their harnesses festooned with roses given them by passers-by. On Egertorget, a young woman in a Red Cross uniform is sitting on a bench, crying, a rose in her hand. I work my way to the central fire station, where I offer mine to the firefighters who were the first to respond to the explosion.

I have never been more proud of my country and my city.

Pi

2011-03-29T01:57:00.000+02:00

More-or-less aimless surfing brought me to an old blog post about math in movies, which mentions Pi and Contact. This mostly coincidental juxtaposition reminded me of the conclusion of the novel behind the latter.

When I first read the book, a zillion years ago, I thought the ending was pretty clever. Then I realized that it was incredibly dumb. It later occurred to me that it might actually be intentionally dumb, and therefore incredibly clever, because Carl Sagan really ought to have known better, but... I don't know. I think he either genuinely goofed or assumed (probably correctly, in most cases) that his readers wouldn't notice.

A short aside: if you haven't read the novel or seen the film, you haven't really missed anything. The novel is basically a not-bad-but-not-brilliant ripoff of Stanisław Lem's Głos Pana and Solaris. The film is... well, a film. It's OK, I guess, and stars several excellent actors, and is reasonably but not entirely true to the novel.

If you haven't read the novel but intend to, I should warn you that the rest of this post is a HONKIN' HUGE SPOILER.

Here goes: at the end of the film, the perceived failure of the project is more or less covered up and Ellie returns to her former job as head of the SETI program. In the novel, however, she is disgraced and (from my recollection—remember, it's been years since I read it) ends up as a glorified tour guide. She somehow manages to wrangle sufficient computer time to search for something that was hinted at earlier in the novel: a proof of a Universal Creator, embedded somewhere in the digits of π. And guess what... The computer discovers that if you print the digits of π with a specific number of digits per line, after billions and billions of digits you come across a pattern of zeroes that forms a circle on the page. There is a God. QED.

Here's the problem: π is transcendental. If you search long enough, no matter what you're looking for, you'll eventually find it.

Monkeys and typewriters, Ellie. Monkeys and typewriters.

Banana banana banana

2011-03-23T23:00:00.003+01:00

I stumbled upon the banana argument today. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. A bit of both, I guess.

Laugh: Pardon me for resorting to such crude humor, but nearly every argument Ray Comfort presents as “proof” that the banana was designed by God for human consumption can also be used to “prove” that the human penis was designed by God for fellatio. Even better, the penis and its wrapper are reusable!

Cry: Comfort quotes Darwin to bolster his argument that the eye cannot possibly have evolved. However, the quote he uses is merely the first sentence of an entire chapter devoted to explaining how Darwin thinks it evolved. Here is the complete first paragraph:

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

The rest is here (chapter 6, “Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication”)

Comfort also quotes Einstein as a further appeal to authority. The problem is that Einstein, notwithstanding his quip that “God does not play dice”, was an avowed atheist, although he used the term “agnostic” to distance himself from those he called “professional atheists”. In his own words:

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

Objectively subjective

2011-03-08T12:03:00.000+01:00

What is truth?

This question is being asked with increasingly frequency these days, and I'm sure some of you winced when you read it. However, it was very much on my mind when I stepped out of the shower this morning, owing to the fact that my 50 l water heater does not allow me to shower long enough to get warm after a night in a chilly room.

What does that have to do with epistemology? Well, it led me to reflect on the semantics of the following statements:

I am cold.
I feel cold.

Setting aside their truthfulness, which of these statements is objective, and which is subjective?

The conclusion I arrived at is the opposite of the obvious one, which is that the first statement is an objective statement, while the second is a subjective statement.

The first statement, “I am cold”, is based on the speaker's perception of his environment and of his body. It is entirely subjective. Although a thermometer may show that the speaker's core temperature is within the normal range, the speaker is still telling the truth as he or she perceives it. Therefore, both the speaker and the thermometer are correct, even though they disagree.

The second statement, “I feel cold”, is actually a meta-statement: it is akin to saying “although this may not actually be the case, I am currently experiencing sensations consistent with having a low core temperature”. It is an objective description of the speaker's subjective sensation (unless the speaker is lying) and may be corroborated by symptoms such as shivering, goosebumps, etc.

In fact, a person with a rising fever will feel cold despite having an abnormally high core temperature, and usually also a high skin temperature.

That said, I can easily see arguments in support of the opposite thesis.

Discuss.

Three things

2011-02-10T22:03:00.000+01:00

you need to watch now if you haven't seen them already. None of them are new, they just happen to speak strongly to me right now.

1. Easy A. The actual movie is at least as funny as and far more serious than the trailer.

After you've watched it, go rent (or buy) all the classics Olive references: Say Anything, Can't Buy Me Love, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller's Day Off (sorry, can't be bothered to add links). Did I miss any? Then put this on repeat on the stereo:

2. P!nk: Fuckin' perfect. The original version, not the “family-friendly” shit they show on VH1.

3. It Gets Better. There are hundreds of clips, but you can start with Barack Obama:

Compare and contrast with whoever that guy was that P!nk sings about here:

Don't read too much into this, I'm not coming out or anything.

Disambiguation

2011-02-10T01:40:00.000+01:00

In case you're feeling ambiguous:

Made my day.

OpenBSD IPSec backdoor allegations: update

2011-01-25T17:52:00.000+01:00

I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone what this is about...

The latest news: Theo now says that it is probable that NetSec was indeed contracted to insert backdoor code into OpenBSD, but after a month of review and changelog archeology, there is still no sign that they succeeded or even attempted to push tainted code into the tree.

The audit (which is still ongoing) did uncover one serious bug, but there is no reason to believe that it was planted deliberately. This relates to CBC mode, an encryption protocol in which each block of plaintext is combined with the ciphertext of the previous block before encryption to make it harder to attack ciphertext blocks individually.

If I understand Theo's message correctly,

It used to be common practice to use the last ciphertext block from one message as IV for the next message. This seemed like a good idea at the time, because the alternative is to generate a random IV for each new message, which requires a strong, fast PRNG, and strong, fast PRNGs didn't grow on trees back when this scheme was devised. By reusing the last ciphertext block from the previous message, a costly random IV was only required for the very first message.
This practice was discovered to be a bad idea because in n - 1 out of n cases (where n is the block size in bytes), the last plaintext block of any message encrypted with a block cipher contains somewhat predictable padding.
The flawed IV logic was replicated in several parts of the OpenBSD source tree, and the fix was implemented in some of them, but not all.
The person who implemented this flawed logic was at that time a NetSec employee, but he had been involved in the development of OpenBSD's IPSec stack for years before he was hired, and, as previously mentioned, he was only following common practice.
The same person implemented the obvious fix (generating a new, random IV for every message) once the attack was discovered.
The person responsible for those parts of the tree in which the fix was not implemented is one of the people fingered by Perry, but his tenure started after Perry had left and ended before the attack was discovered.
Anyone with any amount of experience in a large F/OSS project, or any large software development effort for that matter, can tell you that this kind of oversight is the rule rather than the exception. Although there is no evidence that he did not intentionally “forget” to fix his code, it is far more likely that he simply did not realize that the fix that had already been committed did not extend to his own code, or that he wasn't paying attention, and nobody else noticed.

My bounty still stands, and I will even relax the requirements a bit: you are not required to show that OpenBSD is still exploitable, only that it was exploitable on December 11, 2010 (the date of Perry's email to Theo).

Attack Magic Summon Item Run

2011-01-19T19:18:00.000+01:00

That's what Final Fantasy used to be about. And leveling. And more leveling. And chocobos. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt (and a couple of others for when I'm in a Konami or Nintendo mood).

Final Fantasy XIII, on the other hand, is mostly about pressing ⨉.

FFXIII's combat system is very different from that of the previous games. The most obvious difference is that it is no longer turn-based, which was a bit of a shock to me, and which has probably angered many fans. Unless you enjoy standing still while your adversary pummels you, you often have little choice other than to select “auto-battle” and let the game make all the decisions for you. When you face an adversary you know well (or one you've Libra'ed), this usually works out OK for Commandos and Ravagers, and to a certain degree also Medics, but not for Synergists and Saboteurs. Synergists, especially, seem to stick to a predefined sequence of buffs instead of prioritizing those which are appropriate for the current adversary. For instance, there is no point in casting Protect when fighting a monster that uses only magic attacks.

At the end of every battle, you get a rating and a score which are based mainly on how long the battle lasted compared to how long the game thinks it should have. This rewards players who use Haste or are good at sneaking up on enemies (which is not always possible). However... neither the rating nor the score have any effect on the game whatsoever except for how fast your TP bar replenishes. Getting a high rating or score, which can sometimes only be achieved by consuming hard-to-get Fortisol or Deceptisol potions, does not give you better drops or help you level faster. You level by spending Crystarium points, and the amount of CP you get for each battle seems to be based exclusively on either the number of enemies you fought or their total HP (I haven't quite figured it out), and you get enough CP from the fights you can't avoid to max out your Crystarium. Thus, there is no incentive to go looking for trouble and no incentive to fight well, and no character development. All you have to do is fight the enemies that show up in the storyline, make it out alive (and if you don't, the game just takes you back to a point shortly before the fight), and spend your CP.

So far, I've played to chapter 7 (about twenty hours), and only in the last chapter or so have the fights been sufficiently difficult to require some thought and to be enjoyable, and I suspect that that's only because I haven't leveled any of my weapons or accessories. That's right, I'm still fighting with level 1 everything, and I'm doing just fine.

The storyline, by the way, is just that: a storyline. You follow a narrow path, fight the monsters along it, and watch the many cutscenes. There are a few places where you can circle around a difficult enemy or take a small detour to pick up a treasure, but you always end up back where you would have been if you'd continued straight on.

Now, I've heard that the game opens up in chapter 10, which should be about ten hours from where I am. It is not uncommon for games to have some sort of “cold open”, to borrow from TV terminology, where your choices are restricted and the outcome has little or no effect on the rest of your game, as a sort of tutorial, but I've never played a game that had a thirty hour long tutorial, and I won't blame people who give up long before then. To be honest, I'm not sure why I haven't; I guess it's partly because the graphics are gorgeous (the game itself is in 720p, but the many, many cutscenes are in 1080p), partly because I'm starting to enjoy the combat system, or at least consider it a worthy challenge, and partly because I'm hoping it'll get better.

There is plenty more to dislike about FFXIII. The story is frankly uninteresting and does not really progress; most of the cutscenes so far in the games are either about things that happened before the game started, or about the characters being emo and acting completely irrationally. Everything that happens in the cutscenes in summarized in your Datalog, which is an interesting read, and not in a good way. Not only is the prose as purple as the back cover of a pulp fantasy novel, but the emotions and inner dialog described in the text rarely bear any resemblance to what the characters actually say in the cutscenes. Let me give you an example: according to the Datalog, Hope is seething with rage and working up the strength, skills and courage to confront and kill Snow, whom he blames for his mother's death. If you only watched the cutscenes, though, you'd think he was actually working up the courage to declare his undying love to Snow—until chapter 5, where he discusses the issue openly with Lightning. However, while he does voice these thoughts and feelings in chapter 5 (and 7), they are never reflected in his intonation or body language.

Now Vanille... Vanille really gets on my nerves. I can't decide whether she is an overendowed young girl in very inappropriate dress, or an emotionally retarded young woman in very inappropriate dress. She has the body shape of a grown woman but the body language of a ten-year-old girl. She also giggles and moans a lot. In fact, she giggles and moans so much that I sometimes worry the neighbors might think I'm watching porn. Vanille is voiced by Australian actress Georgia van Cuylenburg, who stated in an interview that “[i]t was important for me to keep my Aussie accent to show that Vanille is from somewhere different”, but she doesn't sound Australian at all; to my ears, she sounds like an American voice actress who occasionally remembers that she was asked to speak with a British accent. Fang, who is from the same “somewhere different” as Vanille, is voiced by American actress Rachel Robinson; ironically, her Australian accent, while obviously fake, is far more convincing than Vanille's.

So, we've covered Hope, Vanille and (very briefly) Fang. Who's left? Snow is a conceited ass. Sazh is emo as hell in cutscenes, and jittery as hell in combat. Lightning... Lightning's OK, I guess, except for the way she treats Snow (and Serah, for that matter). She is also the most proficient fighter; Sazh would be a close second if his combat animations weren't so bloody annoying. There isn't really that much more to say about the characters; they're nicely rendered but completely unconvincing. The NPCs aren't much better; I liked Sazh's son and Hope's mother, but Snow's buddies are as annoying as he is, or worse.

BTW, where are the chocobos? I want chocobos! No, the chick is Sazh's 'fro doesn't count.

Looking forward to chapter 10...

4k drive update

2011-01-12T17:52:00.000+01:00

Just to let you know what the current status is wrt. 4k drives:

It looks like the consensus in the industry (meaning everyone except Western Digital) is to announce dual sector sizes, i.e. 512-byte logical sectors on top of 4096-byte physical sectors.

Ivan Voras has taken the initiative to organize a 4k BoF at BSDCan, although judging from the (private) email exchange on the subject, it's quite possible that a decision will be made before then. Currently, it looks like we're moving towards having the low-level driver report a 512-byte sector size and 4096-byte stripe width (and, if necessary, an appropriate offset) to GEOM. This preserves backward compatibility, but announces to GEOM consumers that it is a good idea to do I/O in 4096-byte blocks and align data structures on 4096-byte boundaries. All that remains is then to make sure that those GEOM consumers we care about (particularly ZFS) take advantage of this information.

The situation for WD “Advanced Format” drives is a bit more complex, because they announce 512-byte logical sectors. The only solution I can see is to add a quirk system to the ada driver (and possibly to ata as well, if we still care about it) similar to the ones we have for SCSI and USB devices, and match the model number. I believe /WD\d+[A-Z]+RS/ should match all existing Advanced Format drives with no false positives.

OpenBSD IPSec backdoor allegations: triple $100 bounty

2010-12-15T17:05:00.001+01:00

In case you hadn't heard: Gregory Perry alleges that the FBI paid OpenBSD contributors to insert backdoors into OpenBSD's IPSec stack, with his (Perry's) knowledge and collaboration.

If that were true, it would also be a concern for FreeBSD, since some of our IPSec code comes from OpenBSD.

I'm having a hard time swallowing this story, though. In fact, I think it's preposterous. Rather than go into further detail, I'll refer you to Jason Dixon's summary, which links to other opinions, and add only one additional objection: if this were true, there would be no “recently expired NDA”; it would be a matter of national security.

I'll put my money where my mouth is, and post a triple bounty:

I pledge USD 100 to the first person to present convincing evidence showing:
- that the OpenBSD Crypto Framework contains vulnerabilities which can be exploited by an eavesdropper to recover plaintext from an IPSec stream,
- that these vulnerabilities can be traced directly to code submitted by Jason Wright and / or other developers linked to Perry, and
- that the nature of these vulnerabilities is such that there is reason to suspect, independently of Perry's allegations, that they were inserted intentionally—for instance, if the surrounding code is unnecessarily awkward or obfuscated and the obvious and straightforward alternative would either not be vulnerable or be immediately recognizable as vulnerable.
I pledge an additional USD 100 to the first person to present convincing evidence showing that the same vulnerability exists in FreeBSD.
Finally, I pledge USD 100 to the first person to present convincing evidence showing that a government agency successfully planted a backdoor in a security-critical portion of the Linux kernel.

Additional conditions:

In all three cases, the vulnerability must still be present and exploitable when the evidence is assembled and presented to the affected parties. Allowances will be made for the responsible disclosure process.
Exploitability must be demonstrated, not theorized.
I will not evaluate the evidence myself, but rely on the consensus of the OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Linux and / or infosec communities.
Primacy will be determined in a similar manner.
The evidence must be presented, and the bounty claimed, no later than 2012-12-31 23:59:59 UTC—a little more than two years from today.
The bounty will, at the claimant's discretion, either be transferred to the claimant by PayPal—no cash, checks, direct deposits or wire transfers—or donated directly to a non-profit of his or her choice.

[2010-12-16 fixed link]

Tidenes mest overvurderte skiløper

2010-12-12T00:07:00.001+01:00

Nå er jeg faen meg drit lei av å høre om Petter Northug.

Hovedsaken i Norgesnyhetene på Radio Norge i ettermiddag var Northugs «fantastiske comeback». Han kom nemlig på 13. plass i 15 km i verdenscupen i dag. Marit Bjørgens gullmedalje i 10 km ble nevnt i en bisetning. At det er hennes sjette seier så langt i verdenscupen, eller at hun leder sammenlagt med nesten 40% flere poeng enn nummer to, fikk vi ikke høre noe om.

Jeg skulle tro de fleste ville være enige i at seks førsteplasser og 540 poeng er hakket mer imponerende enn én trettendeplass og 20 poeng.

Vi fikk heller ikke høre noe om at de norske kvinnene har mer enn dobbelt så mange poeng som mennene og at Norge leder cupen (med knapp margin foran Sverige) ene og alene takket være kvinnenes innsats.

Avisene er ikke spesielt bedre: Northug havner i full bredde på toppen av nettsidene, mens Marit Bjørgen og Tora Berger (som reddet skiskytterstafetten, riktignok godt hjulpet av at Frankrikes Marie Laure Brunet skjøt seg bort på siste stående) får mindre saker langt nede. Aftenposten vier Tora Berger tre avsnitt med ren avskrift fra NTB.

NRK-sporten begynner på sin side kveldssendingen med en sak om at skiskyttermennene ønsker seg mer av oppmerksomhet. Marit Bjørgens sjette verdenscupgull får andreplass, før de går videre til ~~gulvvask~~ curling og engelsk seriefoppall. Skiskytterkvinnene nevnes ikke med ett ord.

Nei, mediene vil heller snakke om en bortskjemt trønder med divanykker som han overhodet ikke har gjort seg fortjent til, og som er totalt blottet for sportsånd og respekt for lagkamerater, motstandere, presse og publikum. En skiløper som sjelden leverer når det gjelder, men som vi blir fortalt er blitt bedt om å holde igjen på trening for ikke å demoralisere lagkameratene. Et par uker senere er han på alle avisforsider – fordi han har tatt gull? Nei, fordi han visstnok er overtrent og muligens må stå over flere løp. Det gir ham i hvertfall en god unnskyldning for å gjøre det dårlig i 2010-2011-sesongen.

Jeg husker så altfor godt 30 km skibytte fra Vancouver tidligere i år, der Northug kom på 11. plass. NRKs kommentatorer brukte stort sett hele løpet på å fortelle seerne at Northug gikk taktisk, at han sparte på kreftene for å sette inn støtet mot slutten og ta gull... mens resten av verden hadde skjønt allerede halvveis i klassisken at han rett og slett ikke hadde en sjanse. Jeg har sjelden opplevd noe så pinlig.

Vær så snill, folkens: la oss få høre mer om de som faktisk presterer, og mindre om de som bare poserer. La oss få høre mer om Marit Bjørgen og resten av kvinnelandslaget! La oss få høre mer om kvinnehåndball, om Katrine Lunde Haraldsens fantastiske prestasjon i Lillehammer denne uken! Og vær så snill, la oss få slippe å høre mer om Northug. I hvertfall til han kommer seg opp på pallen igjen.

[2010-12-15 rettet en stavefeil]

I'm so indie, only I can understand my art

2010-12-08T20:36:00.027+01:00

I have to stop buying those indie games that get rave reviews from “New Games Journalism” sites and are promoted on the front page of Steam and included in “mid-week madness” packages. I mean, I like indie games, and I like the idea of a cottage industry of game designers who risk everything on a crazy idea that no major studio (except Valve) would touch with a ten-foot pole simply because they have nothing to lose anyway, but seriously, you may think of yourself as the next Peter Molyneux or John Romero or Gabe Newell or David Cage, but you see, Molyneux, Romero, Newell and Cage know something you still haven't learned: it doesn't matter how innovative your game is, it still has to be playable.

Random list of “innovative” indie games that are actually complete crap:

Can't-remember-the-title that was heralded as the indie game that would revolutionize the game industry: tried the demo. I got a scrolling blue screen that was supposed to evoke the idea of sinking further and further into the deep blue sea and a thingy in the middle of it that I could move around with the mouse. The thingy sank further and further into the deep blue sea. Nothing happened. I failed to suspend my disbelief in the sanity of gaming journalists. Last I heard, it was slated to be reworked into a full-blown PlayStation game.
Brainpipe: huh? It only qualifies as innovative if you've never played any of a zillion games, including early 1980s arcade games, that are exactly the same except the thingy you move around with your mouse is a spaceship instead of an iris. I got to level 5 (out of 10) on my first and only try, even though the screen went black for most of level 3 and I was too busy trying to apparate the task manager to even move the mouse.
ProtoGalaxy: pretty graphics, annoying physics and crappy controls. So bad that I played it for only ten minutes including the tutorial before uninstalling it. Basically a botched clone of PixelJunk Shooter, which itself is a fantastic remake of Fort Apocalypse). If you want PixelJunk Shooter, you know where to find it.
Galcon Fusion: OK, doesn't actually pretend to be cutting edge, just a new and extended take on an old theme. Reasonably good-looking with simple mechanics that are easy to learn. The trouble is that I played for less than an hour (57 minutes, to be exact), and in that time, I figured out how to beat two of the game modes in less than half a minute per round, nine times out of ten, at “Grand Admiral” level (maximum difficulty). I got to “Admiral” in a third mode and “Commander” in a fourth before I decided that I had better things to do with my time. Still, not bad if your only other options are Freecell, Minesweeper and watching paint dry. Actually, this is the only game on the list that ranks higher than watching paint dry. Except maybe Brainpipe.

Just so you won't think I hate all indie games, here are a couple that I do enjoy:

Oasis: the first indie game I ever bought. A bit like minesweeper except with more varied gameplay, an actual story, progression and an element of strategy. All in all a great casual game. Not quite sure it qualifies as independent, though.
Mole Control: childish—in a good way—but not as simple as it appears at first glance, especially if you're gunning for perfect on every level. It's basically minesweeper, except you can only uncover tiles that are adjacent to already-uncovered tiles, and you have a few extra tricks up your sleeve.
Chime: need I say more? If you don't have it already, buy it. Now. A tip, though: Chime is not Tetris. Chime is Chime. It'll confuse the hell out of you until you stop trying to play Tetris.

Yes, all three are casual games—but most indie games are either casual or arcade games, with a few notable exceptions such as Darwinia. With a little talent, imagination and perseverance, two guys and a dog can write a game engine, but it takes a lot of resources to create assets (script, levels, graphics, music, sound effects etc.) for a decent adventure, RPG or RTS game.

I'd also like to list some non-indie games which were nonetheless marketed as indie and which, despite (I assume) multi-million-dollar development budgets and rave reviews were, in my humble opinion, fundamentally crap:

Psychonauts: the graphics and mechanics hurt my brain. The story was so far out it could have been written by Neil Gaiman if Neil Gaiman wrote for the love of money and not for the love of a good story and he was on crack. The characters were either wet rags or total assholes. The gameplay was a mish-mash of various been-there-done-thats. I gave up after two levels because I simply couldn't suspend my disbelief or identify with any of the characters. Strangely, Psychonauts was the brainchild of Tim Schafer, author or co-author of such classics as the Monkey Island series, Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle and, more recently, Brütal Legend.
Lucidity: ummm... it's a platformer... except the controls are crap and so are the physics. Yeah, the story is cute and the graphics are pretty. So what? It's still unplayable.

One indie-except-not-really game (or, to be precise, game series) that most definitely does not suck is the Sam & Max series. By the way, how did they manage to make a third series after Sam & Max basically destroyed the world in the final episode of the second series? Oh, and I guess I should also mention the Penny Arcade games.

¹ I use the term “indie” in the sense of a small game developer, possibly even just one or two people, who design, develop, publish and market their games with little or no assistance. By some definitions, studios like Funcom (300+ employees) are also independent developers, but I call bullshit on that; they are independent simply because they have the resources to do for themselves what publishers do for other developers. Besides, Funcom made plenty of games for big-name publishers such as Sony, Sega and Disney in their infancy, including the infamous Pocahontas.

Mind the Gap

2010-11-30T00:38:00.008+01:00

I don't get it.

I've started reading Stephen Donaldson's Gap cycle, and I don't get what's so great about it.

I don't mind that the characters are dicks. That's Donaldson's thing, and I knew it before I started reading.

I do mind his writing style, which I find flat and unengaging, but I guess it's a matter of taste.

There are two things, however, that really bother me: plot holes and bad science.

A significant part of the plot in the second book, Forbidden Knowledge, revolves around a computer virus that has been planted in a ship's computer system. This is a big deal, because the virus might wipe the system's memory, and they don't have any form of removable media on which they can store a copy of the most important files (navigation data, communication codes, etc.). The possibility of an offline backup is not even mentioned. In the end, they are rescued by the fact that, by law, the ship is equipped with an append-only flight recorder-like write-once-read-many storage device, which for some unfathomable reason also keeps a copy of the ship computer's software and data. The possibility of restoring their systems from that copy does not even occur to any of the crew until the protagonist, who happens to be a police officer, mentions it. The mind boggles.

I laughed when I read that it would take several days to copy “thousands of gigabytes”, but that's excusable; the book was written in an age where personal computers only had a few tens of megabytes of secondary storage and a terabyte was inconceivably large.

I did not laugh, however, when Donaldson spent an entire chapter explaining how this device (called a datacore) works. It would have been perfectly fine if he had just handwaved it, but instead, he provides a detailed but nonsensical explanation, based on an extrapolation of his incorrect notions about contemporary (i.e. 1991) technology. He starts off by screwing up the description of conventional, real-world CMOS, claiming that they “drew power only when they changed state” and could therefore “store data in a physically permanent form, without a sustained energy supply”. Next, he claims that silicon-on-sapphire (as opposed to conventional silicon-on-silicon-dioxide) CMOS is “a step in the direction of real permanence”. Finally, he postulates a silicon-on-diamond variant of CMOS technology which “never changed state at all”.

Note that programmable read-only memory, which exhibits those exact properties, was invented in the 1950s.

His understanding of astrodynamics is even worse. He seems to have heard of Newton's first law of motion and of rotational gravity, but he's a bit fuzzy on the details, to put it mildly:

The ship has a terminal velocity—in vacuum!—beyond which its engines (referred to as thrusters, so I'm going to assume they're reaction engines) can not accelerate further (he speaks of “diminishing returns”).
The ship's captain very cleverly deceives the authorities by departing a space station in a direction almost opposite from that of his intended destination and accelerating to the ship's maximum velocity, after which he cuts the engines and applies a “steady and delicate lateral thrust which curved [the ship] toward her eventual heading”.
The ship's bridge is a cylindrical room—its exact dimensions are not stated, but probably no more than ten meters in diameter—concentric with the pressure hull's axis of rotation, with workstations positioned around its inner circumference so the crew members seated at each station will experience artificial gravity when the hull is spinning. However, they do not experience the Coriolis effect or tidal forces or any other side effects, which should be very noticeable and very unpleasant that close to the hub.
The ship is large enough to have several (presumably concentric) decks connected by elevators, but no mention is made of any variation in centrifugal force from one deck to the other.
When the ship briefly loses power due to the virus, artificial gravity immediately disappears. What, no rotational momentum? When power is restored after “less than a minute”, the main protagonist, who at that point is floating but still holding on to the captain's chair, immediately slams into the deck with enough force to almost damage her knee.

Again, I wouldn't have minded the least if he had just handwaved the matter of artificial gravity. After all, gravity generators and acceleration compensators are common science-fiction tropes. However, Donaldson apparently fancies himself a hard science-fiction author, so he has to make it scientifically plausible—to himself, that is, and possibly to uneducated or oblivious readers, since he clearly hasn't done more than superficial research.

And in a couple of chapters, he's going to start messing with genetics...

chkdsk considered harmful

2010-11-25T21:47:00.001+01:00

This list of sysadmin horror stories reminded me of a story of my own:

A long, long time ago, possibly as much as fifteen years ago, I wrote a boot loader of which I'm still quite proud, even though I've long since lost the code. I also wrote an installer for it, naturally. The binary was very small (a few kilobytes), even though it included a command-line interface, a partitioning tool, a screen saver and a game, so instead of installing it in a separate partition, I simply installed it in the space between the MBR and the first partition, which on a DOS system in those days was on the order of 30 kB for completely idiotic reasons.

At some point during the development, inevitably, either due to a bug in the installer or incorrect command-line parameters, I managed to install the loader on top of the FAT on one of my DOS partitions.

OK, DES, don't panic. DOS keeps a second copy of the FAT immediately after the first, and since the FAT on that partition is much larger than the boot loader, it should be undamaged. Just run chkdsk to restore it and...

Primary and secondary FAT inconsistent.
Update secondary FAT? (y/n)

(not verbatim, my memory isn't that good)

Yep, chkdsk's proposed solution was to overwrite the backup.

I ended up doing the math on a piece of paper and using debug.com to restore the primary FAT from the backup.

I still maintain that debug.com is the best piece of software Microsoft's ever published. Or possibly second best, after edlin.com.

Winter

2010-11-12T10:38:00.001+01:00

Now is the winter of my discontent with having to park outside four nights out of seven.

On the bright side... quattro :-)

Toys

2010-11-11T18:21:00.002+01:00

I am currently contracting for a company that makes lots of nifty toys. It has several siblings which make even niftier toys—the kind that go “boom”. They're having a show-and-tell today for a lot of people with nice suits and fat wallets, and they've pulled all the stops (short of actually demonstrating the equipment) to impress them. Here is some of the stuff they were showing off:

2010-11-17: WTF? Where did all the pictures go? Darn Blogspot to heck! I'll reinsert them when I get around to it.

CV9030N IFV with Kongsberg Protech Systems
PROTECTOR Medium Caliber RWS

Kongsberg Defence Systems NASAMS launcher

IVECO LMV with Kongsberg Protech Systems
PROTECTOR CROWS

Kongsberg Protech Systems M151 PROTECTOR
mounted on a Dodge Ram pickup truck

Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II, parts of
which are to be built by Kongsberg Defence Systems

Full-scale mock-up of the Kongsberg Defence Systems
Joint Strike Missile, designed specifically for the F-35

Kongsberg Maritime HUGIN 1000 AUV

Hydroid REMUS 100 AUV

Two Kongsberg Maritime K-Master workstations
in an offshore supply vessel simulator

Haystack II

2010-11-11T17:26:00.000+01:00

According to this story in Fast Company, it seems Iranian authorities were well aware of Haystack and exploited its numerous flaws to monitor the (alleged) dissidents who had swallowed Heap's snake oil.

I told you so.

The author of the piece, Niel Ungerleider, asks: “Can someone make a Haystack that works?” My answer remains unchanged: an unconditional, resounding “no”. Haystack is profoundly, fundamentally, conceptually flawed, because of a little thing called traffic analysis. In the words of Jacob Appelbaum, quoted in the Fast Company piece: Haystack “effectively alerts authorities that you are trying to use it.”

Shiny!

2010-11-03T18:39:00.002+01:00

Brakes are generally considered a good thing to have on a car.

Just short of three hours of work—closer to two if you subtract the time spent before (changing clothes, laying out the tools and parts) and after (cleaning my tools and putting them away, tidying the workshop, washing, changing clothes).

I don't have a micrometer, so I didn't measure the pads and disks I replaced, but judging by eye, the outboard pads were fine, but the inboard pads were close to or at the legal limit, and the disks were well below it.

Correct numbers for EARS and Deskstar

2010-10-27T22:05:00.000+02:00

Western Digital WD10EARS:

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps

  131072    1024       0    4096      143839     911     911
  131072    1024     512    4096      145876     898     898

   65536    2048       0    8192       96727     677    1355
   65536    2048     512    8192       88182     743    1486
   65536    2048    1024    8192       89126     735    1470

   32768    4096       0   16384       23063    1420    5683
   32768    4096     512   16384       76939     425    1703
   32768    4096    1024   16384       75719     432    1731
   32768    4096    2048   16384       76007     431    1724

   16384    8192       0   32768       16567     988    7911
   16384    8192     512   32768       67676     242    1936
   16384    8192    1024   32768       68772     238    1905
   16384    8192    2048   32768       68422     239    1915
   16384    8192    4096   32768       15728    1041    8333

Western Digital WD20EARS:

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps

  131072    1024       0    4096     1963003      66      66
  131072    1024     512    4096     1964781      66      66

   65536    2048       0    8192      897269      73     146
   65536    2048     512    8192      898143      72     145
   65536    2048    1024    8192      897456      73     146

   32768    4096       0   16384       18923    1731    6926
   32768    4096     512   16384     1216071      26     107
   32768    4096    1024   16384     1212785      27     108
   32768    4096    2048   16384     1213512      27     108

   16384    8192       0   32768       13645    1200    9605
   16384    8192     512   32768      804264      20     162
   16384    8192    1024   32768      802154      20     163
   16384    8192    2048   32768      802877      20     163
   16384    8192    4096   32768       13960    1173    9388

Hitach HDS722020ALA330:

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps

  131072    1024       0    4096       34849    3761    3761
  131072    1024     512    4096       34807    3765    3765

   65536    2048       0    8192       19341    3388    6776
   65536    2048     512    8192       19332    3389    6779
   65536    2048    1024    8192       19352    3386    6772

   32768    4096       0   16384        8756    3741   14967
   32768    4096     512   16384        8803    3722   14888
   32768    4096    1024   16384        8782    3731   14924
   32768    4096    2048   16384        8744    3747   14989

   16384    8192       0   32768        5036    3253   26025
   16384    8192     512   32768        5035    3253   26029
   16384    8192    1024   32768        4997    3278   26227
   16384    8192    2048   32768        5042    3249   25994
   16384    8192    4096   32768        5039    3251   26010

Slightly different numbers, same conclusion: stay away from WD's Green Series.

Correct numbers for EADS

2010-10-27T12:31:00.000+02:00

As Pieter de Goeje kindly pointed out, due to an overflow bug, phybs reported incorrect tps numbers. I've corrected the bug and started re-running the benchmarks, but so far, I've only had time to test the WD20EADS. Here are the results:

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps

  131072    1024       0    4096       55121    2377    2377
  131072    1024     512    4096      102522    1278    1278

   65536    2048       0    8192       47447    1381    2762
   65536    2048     512    8192       36531    1793    3587
   65536    2048    1024    8192       64753    1012    2024

   32768    4096       0   16384       37204     880    3522
   32768    4096     512   16384       28833    1136    4545
   32768    4096    1024   16384       43464     753    3015
   32768    4096    2048   16384       37968     863    3452

   16384    8192       0   32768       19079     858    6869
   16384    8192     512   32768       25722     636    5095
   16384    8192    1024   32768       27485     596    4768
   16384    8192    2048   32768       21333     768    6144
   16384    8192    4096   32768       27655     592    4739

Remember, this is not an Advanced Format drive, but it's still surprisingly slow and surprisingly inconsistent.

Skilled programming

2010-10-18T16:12:00.000+02:00

From the VxWorks Kernel Programmer's Guide:

Prior to VxWorks 6.0, the operating system provided a single memory space with no segregation of the operating system from user applications. All tasks ran in supervisor mode. Although this model afforded performance and flexibility when developing applications, only skilled programming could ensure that kernel facilities and applications coexisted in the same memory space without interfering with one another.

...whereas now, I guess, any idiot and his dog can write a well-behaved VxWorks application...

Haystack

2010-09-28T19:10:00.004+02:00

This is actually old news; Haystack was shut down permanently about two weeks ago, shortly after I read about it. However, this has been nagging me ever since, so I'll write it down anyway, just to get it out of my head.

The thing that struck me the most about the articles I read about Haystack is that, although some people have questioned the strength of its crypto, no-one pointed out what seems obvious to me:

Haystack cannot possibly work, for reasons which have little to do with cryptography.

I am not an expert, and my knowledge of Haystack is limited to what Jillian York, Evgeny Morozov and a few others have written. I would have been interested to see what Bruce Schneier made of it, but all he's said is basically “I don't know enough about it to comment, but go read what Jillian York and Evgeny Morozov have to say about it”. Still, here is a brief summary of my thoughts about Haystack.

[If you're not already familiar with the basics of cryptography and infosec, I recommend reading Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon, which is a highly entertaining way to learn about them. If you have a copy of Dan Brown's Digital Fortress, or any novels by Tom Clancy, John Grisham etc. that mention the use of cryptography, burn them; they're not just inaccurate, they're pure fantasy and describe systems which are either trivially breakable or provably impossible.]

First, my personal opinion of Heap et al. is that they are essentially clueless. Although I can't find a direct quote, I recall that Bruce Schneier once said that he regretted writing his seminal work, Applied Cryptography because it gave people who do not understand information security the idea that it was just a small matter of programming. That's exactly what I think of Heap. Perhaps he's even read Applied Cryptography.

Haystack is supposedly based on steganography. Steganography works just fine under the right circumstances, but it is a very low-bandwidth communication channel. To successfully hide a message, you need a lot of covertext; or, to put it in other terms, to successfully hide a needle, you need a haystack. That's fine when the message you're transmitting is short (e.g. “BEGIN ATTACK ON PEARL HARBOR AT 06:00 TOMORROW” or a tweet), but not when it is, say, a Skype conversation. Let's use the photo on Jillian York's blog as a unit of measure; call it a jill. A single second of compressed audio might require two or three jills, at the very least. A copy of this blog post, with all the HTML and CSS frills: around ten or twenty jills. A copy of Haystack: several kilojills (I'm guessing, since I don't have a copy of Haystack, but my guess is in the low end of the range for a program of that complexity).

Think about it: a typical residential broadband connection in the US or Western Europe can transfer about one jill per second. What kind of bandwidth do these Iranian dissidents have available? I don't know, but my guess is: a lot less. If Haystack's steganography is effective, it can not handle a Skype conversation, even a voice-only one.

Furthermore, a Skype client transmits about as much as it receives, while a typical web session transmits very little data and receives a lot. A typical web browser will transmit about two millijills to request a copy of your photo; that's a 1:500 ratio. Even if a Haystack user has enough bandwidth to carry on a Skype conversation, it would stick out like a sore thumb.

(How the hell did they expect to generate all that innocuous traffic, by the way? I won't even speculate.)

This brings me to my next argument. Haystack seems to be based on the assumption that Iranian censors aren't looking for it, or anything else like it. This is infosec fallacy #1: that security is a product, something you can buy and install and you're good. It's not. Security is a process, and a continuous process at that. The opposition will adapt, so you must too.

Heap allegedly had a copy of the operating manual for Iran's internet filter; if so, Haystack was presumably designed to circumvent what that document described. I wonder if it ever occurred to them to question the document's authenticity, accuracy and completeness.

Haystack has been so widely publicized that if it had gone into production, so to speak, Iranian authorities would most definitely have started looking for it. Actually, if their techs and spooks are any good, they're already looking—not for Haystack in particular, not even for that type of tool in general, but for suspicious-looking communication patterns. This is called traffic analysis. It doesn't matter if they can't figure out what's being said; I get the impression that they're not hampered by western notions of due process of law, so anyone who generates suspicious traffic patterns might just disappear, and reappear a few days later with a lot of bruises and a few teeth missing, or simply never reappear at all.

Finally, and most importantly... For Haystack to work, it needs to talk to a proxy server outside Iran that handles encryption and decryption. If Iranian authorities did decide to go after Haystack users in particular, they could simply obtain a copy of the software, pass bogus traffic through it so as to identify Haystack servers, and look for Iranian IPs talking to the same servers. It doesn't matter if Haystack keeps jumping from one server to another; they have a copy of the exact same software, so they can collect a complete list.

The authors of Haystack should have realized this within five minutes of dreaming it up.

Haystack never had a snowball's chance in hell.

Dereliction of duty

2010-08-23T13:17:00.000+02:00

I started on Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga this weekend. Quite a good read; unlike many other books in the genre—say, David Weber's Honorverse—the societies she describes and their politics are not too far-fetched or caricatured, nor is the heroine too much of a Mary Sue.

One thing that did make me groan, though, was that the entire plot of the first four chapters of the first book hinges on no fewer than three starship commanders leaving their ships to lead what Trekkies would call the away team¹. In any real military organization, this is the gravest sin a commander can commit and would be grounds for court-martial; heck, that almost happened to John Kerry when he jumped ashore for a few minutes in the heat of combat to save his ship and crew (they ended up giving him a Silver Star instead).

To add insult to injury, a few chapters later, in what is probably the linchpin of the entire novel, one of those very same commanders accuses a superior officer of dereliction of duty for doing the exact same thing.

Oh, and there are several instances of characters using a light pen to control a computer, or fiddling with it while thinking or talking. In the author's defense, unlike light pens, touch screens weren't all that common in 1986 :)

¹ Most of TOS and a large percentage of TNG is about the Enterprise's entire wardroom leaving the ship to lead the away team, then returning sans about half of it.

Pot, kettle, black

2010-08-19T13:00:00.001+02:00

The key to being a religious zealot is to criticize (real or made-up) characteristics of other religions while ignoring the very same characteristics in your own:

The earliest writings that are known to exist about the Prophet Mohammad were recorded 120 years after his death. All of the Islamic writings (the Koran and the Hadith, the biographies, the traditions and histories) are confused, contradictory and inconsistent. Maybe Mohammad never existed. We have no conclusive account about what he said or did. Yet Moslems follow the destructive teachings of Islam without question.

You could say the exact same thing about Jesus of Nazareth and the gospels. Muhammad's existence is corroborated by contemporary non-Muslim sources and is just as much a historical fact as that of Jesus of Nazareth.

Islamic Law is totalitarian in nature. There is no separation of church and state. It is irrational. It is supposedly immutable and cannot be changed. It must be accepted without criticism.

The separation of church and state is a modern concept that dates back to the late eighteenth century. As for totalitarianism, irrationality and immutability: Have you actually read Exodus and Leviticus?

A Muslim does not have the right to change his religion. Apostasy is punishable by death.

Christianity is not known for its kind treatment of apostates and heretics.

Off by one

2010-08-14T18:01:00.001+02:00

I made a small modification to phybs to verify the function of jumpers 7-8 on the WD Advanced Format drives (see here and here). It is supposed to cause the disk to internally shift every write by one sector, so that a write to sector 63 (where the first partition on a PC normally starts) actually goes to sector 64, which coincides with the beginning of a physical 4,096-byte sector. These numbers confirm this:

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps
   32768    4096       0   16384       78631      34    1666
   32768    4096     512   16384       79880      33    1640
   32768    4096    1024   16384       73164      36    1791
   32768    4096    1536   16384       77727      34    1686
   32768    4096    2048   16384       76975      35    1702
   32768    4096    2560   16384       74970      36    1748
   32768    4096    3072   16384       79379      34    1651
   32768    4096    3584   16384       28094      96    4665

The firmware on the disk shifts everything forward by 512 bytes, so all these passes are unaligned except the last one, because 3,584 + 512 = 4,096.

Why, yes, I do have a 42U rack in my basement, thank you for asking.

2010-08-13T11:04:00.002+02:00

Doesn't everyone?

I'm ashamed to say mine is not even half full, and two of the computers in it aren't in rack-mount enclosures.

Also shown are some of disks I've benchmarked. The one in the dock is a Western Digital WD20EARS, the other three are (from front to back) a WD10EARS, a WD20EADS and a Hitachi HDS722020ALA330.

Disks and equipment

2010-08-13T04:17:00.000+02:00

Here is a quick overview of the disks used in my tests:

Brand	Model	Capacity	Speed	Interface	Notes
Western Digital	WD4000AAKS	400 GB	7,200 rpm	SATA 3 Gbps
Western Digital	WD10EARS	1 TB	> 5,400 rpm	SATA 3 Gbps	¹
Western Digital	WD20EARS	2 TB	> 5,400 rpm	SATA 3 Gbps	²
Western Digital	WD20EADS	2 TB	> 5,400 rpm	SATA 3 Gbps	³
Hitachi	HDS722020ALA330	2 TB	7,200 rpm	SATA 3 Gbps	³

The computer runs FreeBSD 9 on an Intel E6600 with an ICH9 chipset and 4 GB RAM. For convenience, the disks were tested in an Akasa Duo Dock connected by eSATA cable to one of the ICH9 SATA ports.

¹ Kindly provided by Alastair Hogge

² Kindly provided by GetOnline Ltd.

³ Kindly provided by Dansk Scanning AS

Benchmarking Advanced Format drives

2010-08-13T03:28:00.004+02:00

Important: due to a bug in my benchmark program, the tps numbers in this post are incorrect. See here for the correct numbers.

In the previous post, I discussed Western Digital's “Advanced Format” drives and the problems caused by their misreporting their real, physical sector size.

I wrote a benchmark utility to demonstrate the performance penalty of unaligned accesses and uncover a drive's physical sector size. What it does is write blocks of zeroes varying size at regular intervals. For each block size, it writes a total of 128 MB at intervals of four times the block size, and at an offset that varies from 512 bytes up to half of the block size.

With the default settings, the first pass will write 131,072 1,024-byte blocks at n × 4,096, and the second pass will do the same at n × 4,096 + 512. The third, fourth and fifth passes will write 65,536 2,048-byte blocks each at n × 8,192, n × 8,192 + 512 and n × 8,192 + 1,024. It will make four more passes with 4,096-byte blocks and five with 8,192-byte blocks.

Here's the idea: most passes will be very slow (up to half an hour per pass), but when we hit the right block size and alignment, performance will skyrocket; so on—let's say—a WD20EARS with factory settings, passes 6 (4,096 bytes at offset 0), 10 (8,192 bytes at offset 0) and 14 (8192 bytes at offset 4,096) should stand out from the crowd. In fact, here are the results for passes 6 through 9:

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps
   32768    4096       0   16384       19503     138    6720
   32768    4096     512   16384     1216537       2     107
   32768    4096    1024   16384     1213479       2     108
   32768    4096    2048   16384     1214623       2     107

Pass 6 takes 20 seconds, while passes 7, 8 and 9 take 20 minutes.

Let me rephrase that: properly aligned non-sequential writes are faster than misaligned ones by a factor of sixty.

Sixty. Six zero.

We really, really need to get that fixed somehow.

That's not the whole story, though. Let's see how it compares to a 7,200 rpm, 2 TB Hitachi Deskstar (HDS722020ALA330) with 512-byte physical sectors:

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps
   32768    4096       0   16384        8803     307   14889
   32768    4096     512   16384        8701     310   15063
   32768    4096    1024   16384        8735     309   15004
   32768    4096    2048   16384        8705     310   15056

The Hitachi blows through the test so fast you don't even have time to make yourself a cup of coffee, let alone drink it.

This is a 7,200 rpm, 400 GB Caviar SE16 (WD4000AAKS)—more than three years old, so don't expect too much:

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps
   32768    4096       0   16384       21348     126    6139
   32768    4096     512   16384       21674     124    6047
   32768    4096    1024   16384       20799     129    6301
   32768    4096    2048   16384       21031     128    6232

So, about the same as we get from the WD20EARS with aligned writes.

Now, here's the kicker. The last drive in my test lineup is a WD20EADS—almost the same as the WD20EARS, but with 512-byte sectors and only 32 MB cache (although cache doesn't mean anything here—I made sure my test program writes enough data to blow through the cache on every pass).

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps
   32768    4096       0   16384       22811     118    5745
   32768    4096     512   16384       19552     138    6703
   32768    4096    1024   16384       36945      73    3547
   32768    4096    2048   16384       50102      53    2616

Ouch. It's not just slow, it's also very inconsistent. I have no idea what to make of that.

Note 1: I did not mention rotational speed for the WD Green disks, because Western Digital themselves do not specify one; the spec sheet just says “IntelliPower”. Not sure what to make of that, either. Tom's Hardware contradict themselves, saying in one review that it means 5,400, and in another that it means it varies. Meanwhile, my supplier claim the WD20EARS rotates at 7,200 rpm. Go figure.

Note 2: I also have a 1 TB WD10EARS, but I haven't tested it yet. I expect it to perform pretty much as well (or as poorly, depending on your perspective) as the WD20EARS.

Update: the results for the WD10EARS are in. Strangely, it is much faster at unaligned writes than the WD20EARS, although it's a little slower at aligned writes.

   count    size  offset    step        msec     tps    kBps
   32768    4096       0   16384       23105     116    5672
   32768    4096     512   16384       79285      34    1653
   32768    4096    1024   16384       75814      35    1728
   32768    4096    2048   16384       79920      33    1640

A naïve sequential-write benchmark (diskinfo -t) suggests that it's about 20% slower overall. It is possible that both disks use a striped layout internally, so the WD20EARS gets better results because it has more platters. If that is the case, it should be possible to modify phybs to detect the stripe size.

Exploring WD Advanced Format drives

2010-08-13T03:12:00.004+02:00

I've been playing with WD Green disks, trying to solve the 4,096-byte sector problem. To summarize, Western Digital have started to move from 512-byte sectors to 4,096-byte sectors in order to reduce overhead and thereby increase the amount of data that can be stored on the same amount of platters with the same density. These disks (specifically, the EARS and AARS series) emulate 512-byte sectors for compatibility with older BIOSes and operating systems, but the problem is that they report 512-byte logical and physical sectors instead of 512/4,096.

If the length of a write operation is not a multiple of 4,096, or it does not begin at an address divisible by 4,096, either the beginning or the end of the operation, or both, will cover only part of a sector. This requires the disk to do a read-modify-write operation, meaning that it has to read a complete 4,096-byte sector, update parts of it, and write it back. This is extremely inefficient, as I will demonstrate later.

The reason why this matters so much is subtle. For efficiency reasons, most modern filesystems use on-disk structures of 4,096 bytes or more, so it shouldn't matter, right? But on PCs, for legacy reasons, the first filesystem on a disk (or rather, the first partition) usually starts at sector 63, and 63 × 512 is not a multiple of 4,096. This means that every write operation will be misaligned.

In most cases, you can work around this by making sure, when you partition a new disk, that the first partition starts on a 4,096-byte boundary - say, sector 64 instead of 63. In addition to that, the WD EARS and AARS disks have a jumper setting that makes the disk offset every read or write operation by exactly one logical sector, so what the computer thinks is logical sector 0 is actually logical sector 1, and what the computer thinks is logical sector 63 is actually logical sector 64. Unfortunately, this means that systems that use the whole disk, starting at address 0, or that already take care to align their writes on 4096-byte boundaries, are screwed.

There is another problem: ZFS. ZFS operates on variable-sized blocks of any power of two between 512 bytes and 128 kilobytes. The only way to prevent ZFS from using block sizes smaller than 4,096 bytes is to build your vdevs from devices which advertise 4,096-byte sectors.

The ideal solution is to either a) force the disk to advertise its true physical sector size, or b) hack FreeBSD so it recognizes disks with 4,096-byte sectors.

Regarding the first option, it might be possible to lobby Western Digital to release a firmware upgrade like they did for the auto-idle issue.

As for the second solution, there is an important question: should we do this unconditionally? If we do, then misaligned filesystems on existing disks will become inaccessible. However, one could argue that those filesystems are already essentially unusable due to atrocious performance.

Inception

2010-08-12T17:27:00.001+02:00

Wow. I mean... Wow.

Homeopathy

2010-07-26T18:30:00.001+02:00

Sums it up rather nicely.

Anathem

2010-07-11T16:38:00.000+02:00

I just finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem—highly recommended! Like most of Neal Stephenson's novels, it is full of little gems. There were none that stood out as much as the passage in The Confusion where Stephenson manages to place his protagonists in a situation where it is completely natural for one of them to say “I certainly did not expect the Spanish Inquisition”, but here are a couple I just had to share.

On why people stopped building particle accelerators:

Erasmas: “I always tend to assume there's an infinite amount of money out there.”

Arsibalt: “There might as well be, but most of it is spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.”

On the balance of power between the protagonists' civilization and their ostensibly extrasolar and probably hostile visitors:

Cord: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?”

Erasmas: “Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor.”

Cord: “Okay, I'll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”

My cod's compiling

2010-07-02T13:06:00.002+02:00

My wife is a researcher at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis. She is currently involved in a project to sequence and annotate the Gadus morhua genome. In case you didn't know, sequencing a genome requires breaking it into tiny little bits, sequencing the little bits, and assembling the results into a complete genome. This takes time. Lots of time. On Wednesday, K and I were both wearing the same T-shirt, and one of K's cow-orkers made the obvious pun. I just couldn't resist running with it:

The original is here.

Life's difficult choices

2010-07-02T10:08:00.000+02:00

10:04 <@EvilDES> geez
10:04 <@EvilDES> parking's a bitch
10:04 <@EvilDES> every morning
10:04 <@EvilDES> I arrive at work
10:04 <@EvilDES> and I turn into the parking lot
10:04 <@EvilDES> and I'm like
10:04 <@EvilDES> shit
10:05 <@EvilDES> between which of these Audis do I want to park my Audi today?
10:05 <@EvilDES> I swear, there are so many rings on that lot it's like Sauron held
                 a convention for Nazgul and the dwarves and elves crashed the party
10:06 <@EvilDES> annnnyway
10:06 <@EvilDES> meeting
10:07  * EvilDES &

S'il vous plais Donné moi, tout vautre argent

2010-06-27T23:34:00.001+02:00

Ils sont marrants quand même ces hameçonneurs...

Bonjour client de Visa Card

Votre Carte Bancaire est suspendue , Car Nous avons remarquer un probleme sur votre Carte.

Nous avons determiner que quelqu'un a peut-etre utiliser Votre Carte sans votre autorisation. Pour votre protection, nous avons suspendue votre Carte de credit. Pour lever cette suspention, Cliquez ici et suivez la procedure indiquer pour Mettre a jour de votre Carte Credit.

Note: Si ce n'est pas achever le 28 Juin 2010, nous serons contraints de suspendre votre carte indfiniment, car il peut tre utiliser pour frauduleuses

Nous vous remercions de votre cooperation dans le cadre de ce dossier.

Merci,

Support Clients Service.

Je compte vingt fautes de grammaires, sept fautes d'orthographe, quatre erreurs typographiques et plusieurs erreurs de vocabulaire et de style. Le correcteur orthographique de Firefox s'est tapé un anévrisme quand il a vu ça...

Spot(t) og spe

2010-06-25T13:25:00.001+02:00

Mens vi er inne på språk – to gullkorn fra dagens (nett)aviser. Først ut er Aftenposten, som skriver om snusk i finansnæringen:

Riktig ord for «en latterlig lav pris» er «spottpris». «Spotpris» derimot er prisen en råvare til enhver tid koster om man skal ha den levert umiddelbart, i motsetning til «futures-pris», som er prisen for levering på et senere tidspunkt.

Dagbladet serverer på sin side følgende billedtekst i en artikkel om SOS Rasismes triksing med regnskapet:

Dagbladet tydeligvis innimellom har tydeligvis svarte problemer korrekturlesing.

Orddeling

2010-06-24T15:51:00.000+02:00

«Er det så farlig, da?»

I går så jeg et perfekt (det vil si ikke oppkonstruert) eksempel på at det er så farlig: jeg kjørte forbi et vogntog som fraktet et par enorme stålbjelker. Bak vogntoget var det en følgebil med blinkenlights og et skilt der det stod «LANG TRANSPORT».

Helt riktig. Det var en lang transport (selv om det kanskje strengt tatt skulle stått «langt vogntog»). Og det er noe helt annet enn langtransport.

VirtualFix

2010-06-10T11:34:00.000+02:00

It seems that over the last few months, ~~Sun~~Oracle have finally fixed some of the most annoying bugs in VirtualBox:

Stale DNS info: fixed in 3.2.2, which was released a few days ago.
Keyboard: fixed, but I don't know when. I just suddenly realized I hadn't encountered that bug in a long time. Possibly related to this bug, which was fixed in 3.1.8.
Clock: fixed; not sure when, but probably in 3.1.4. There is a changelog entry that sounds about right, but no ticket.

Unix is everywhere

2010-06-04T11:10:00.001+02:00

Is “baidu” Japanese for “WTF”?

2010-05-27T12:14:00.003+02:00

Several months ago, I virtualized most of the services running on tim.des.no, so www.des.no now runs in a jail and has its own IP.

This morning, I discovered that I had forgotten to stop the Varnish instance that ran on tim.des.no, and that it was still getting traffic. I looked at the logs, and most of it was what you'd expect (attack bots looking for known vulnerabilities in various web servers or apps which I don't run), but I certainly did not expect this:

119.63.193.56 - - [17/May/2010:17:30:08 +0000] "GET http://tinderbox.des.no/robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 280 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.jp/spider/)"
119.63.193.56 - - [18/May/2010:17:31:31 +0000] "GET http://tinderbox.des.no/robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 280 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.jp/spider/)"
119.63.193.56 - - [19/May/2010:17:34:23 +0000] "GET http://tinderbox.des.no/robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 280 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.jp/spider/)"
119.63.193.56 - - [20/May/2010:17:33:54 +0000] "GET http://tinderbox.des.no/robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 280 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.jp/spider/)"
119.63.193.56 - - [21/May/2010:17:33:43 +0000] "GET http://tinderbox.des.no/robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 280 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.jp/spider/)"
119.63.193.56 - - [22/May/2010:17:34:41 +0000] "GET http://tinderbox.des.no/robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 280 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.jp/spider/)"
119.63.193.56 - - [23/May/2010:17:34:46 +0000] "GET http://tinderbox.des.no/robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 280 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.jp/spider/)"
119.63.193.56 - - [24/May/2010:17:33:39 +0000] "GET http://tinderbox.des.no/robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 280 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.jp/spider/)"
119.63.193.56 - - [25/May/2010:17:34:31 +0000] "GET http://tinderbox.des.no/robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 280 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.jp/spider/)"
119.63.193.56 - - [26/May/2010:17:34:50 +0000] "GET http://tinderbox.des.no/robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 280 "-" "Baiduspider+(+http://www.baidu.jp/spider/)"

Not only does tinderbox.des.no no longer point to that machine, it no longer exists. There is no such DNS entry, and there hasn't been for months, maybe half a year. Apparently, Baidu has its own caching DNS server which is months, if not years, out of date...

Whither the weather?

2010-05-05T15:23:00.008+02:00

Top left: “10-day forecast: come May, beautiful and cold”

Right: “The last spasms of winter are over—At last!—Here comes the sun”

En helt alminnelig dag i Bergen

2010-04-28T21:50:00.003+02:00

Dagbladet er opptatt av at Google Street View-bilene kjører på rådyr og fotograferer kløften til passerende kvinner. Her er en litt mer positiv Google Street View-opplevelse:

Finn fram til Markeveien 4C i Bergen på Google Maps.
Klikk «more» og velg Street View.
Vend deg mot øst (i retning Torgallmenningen).
Juster kameravinkelen slik at du ser mot den gule bygning merket «Suitell Ole Bull».
Klikk deg videre mot Torgallmenningen, og følg med på den lille hverdagshistorien som utfolder seg på fortauet foran 4B og 4A. Du vil etterhvert måtte snu kameraet til siden og bakover for å få med deg hele handlingen.

Windows Update and Automatic Reboots

2010-04-28T19:36:00.004+02:00

Glad to see I'm not the only one pissed off by this. I found a useful article on this topic on the Microsoft Update Product Team's blog. The article was written back in the Vista days, but the procedure is the same in Windows 7, except that it's much quicker to type “Edit Group Policy” in the Start menu search box than to try to find it in the Control Panel.

This has gone too far

2010-04-21T10:30:00.002+02:00

You know the little bits of transparent (and sometimes but usually not colored) cling film they put on glossy surfaces on electronic gadgets so they don't get scratched during packaging or shipping, so your technologically challenged parental units complain that the display on their new CD player is blurry because they didn't realize they were supposed to remove it?

I just unpacked a brand new HP 22″ monitor. The stand has a tiny HP logo embossed on the head—the swiveling bit where you actually attach the panel. A normal user will see that logo for about 30 seconds between unpacking the monitor and assembling it. She might not even notice it... if it weren't for the fact that it has a tiny square of cling film stuck to it.

By the way, HP is the company that markets its products with the slogan “The Computer is Personal Again” in a Nightmare-Before-Christmas-ish font, yet the power supply for an HP laptop weighs more than my wife's MacBook Air. And I'm only exaggerating a little.

Brave new world that has such software in it

2010-04-06T23:04:00.005+02:00

First impressions of my new Dell Studio XPS 16 with Windows 7:

The Good

It's fast.
The screen is really, really nice.
Aero is pretty.
Face recognition is neat.

The Bad

The screen is a veritable dust & lint magnet
No clit, so I'll have to get used to the trackpad (although 99% of the time I have an external mouse hooked up)
I have a strange feeling that the keys are larger than on a regular keyboard, although it only takes five seconds with a ruler to verify that they aren't.
F'ed up keyboard layout. Not MacBook-f'ed up, and not so f'ed up I won't get used to it, but sufficiently f'ed up that when I do get used to it, I'll have trouble adjusting when I use other machines / keyboards.
Had to resort to Google to figure out where the disk activity indicator is (on the front edge, hidden where you can't see it without picking up the machine)

The Ugly

~~The camera activity indicator is also hidden where you can't see it without picking up the machine.~~ Actually, it's about 1 cm to the left of the lens, right where it's supposed to be.
The exhaust port is located on the rear edge of the machine so the bottom of the screen covers it when the lid is open.
Bluetooth didn't work out of the box. I'm pretty sure I didn't order the machine without Bluetooth. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can't even get the machine without Bluetooth even if you wanted to. In fact, I checked.
When I rebooted to check that there actually is a Bluetooth radio in the machine (there is) and that it is enabled in BIOS (it is), 7 blue-screened.
After rebooting, the Bluetooth radio still doesn't show up in the device manager, and the driver fails to install.
When I rebooted a second time to check the BIOS again, I got a BSoD again. Two for two. Wheee!

Update: three for three; I suspect it may have something to do with my phone, which I have to connect using USB since Bluetooth doesn't work.

Toppen av patriotisme

2010-04-03T13:49:00.002+02:00

Dagbladet, 2010-04-03:

Hun er søt, da, men jeg kan ikke si at det funker for meg...

25 blå

2010-02-24T12:00:00.005+01:00

Etter en overnatting på eksotiske & idylliske Stensby Sykehus (se bildet) går jeg ut for å sette meg i bilen. Det er litt kjølig, men jeg er godt kledd (to lag med ull – hold kjeft, Leisha). Jeg ser andre pasienter stå og skrape sine respektive frontruter og er glad for at jeg tok meg tid til å legge på presenningen i går; jeg har bare noen froststjerner på sidevinduene og på speilene (som forøvrig er oppvarmet, så det er ingen sak).

Etter å ha skrapt siderutene setter jeg meg i bilen, og merker at det damper godt av pusten min. For å være helt ærlig så ble jeg litt kald mens jeg stod der og skrapte, og det blir ikke bedre av at jeg nå sitter stille i en kald bil. Jeg setter inn nøkkelen og vrir den om, og følgende skjer i løpet av noen brøkdeler av et sekund:

Nøkkelen passerer «acc», instrumentlysene tenner, og jeg registrerer at LCD-displayet til autochecken ser helt sprøtt ut, som en kalkulator med flatt batteri.
Nøkkelen treffer «start», og jeg hører den umiskjennelige lyden av en startmotor som får for lite strøm.
Jeg rekker såvidt å tenke «å faen».
Motoren tenner på første omdreining.

WTF? Jeg har hatt denne bilen i tre år, og den har aldri tent på første omdreining når den var kald.

Aldri.

Bare i dag.

I fem og tyve blå.

Jepp, det står vitterlig «-25°» på instrumentpanelet. Det forklarer hvorfor jeg syntes det var «litt kjølig». Men jeg har aldri hørt om en bil som starter lettere i -25° enn i +15°.

Den eneste forklaringen jeg kommer på er at tettere luft gir mer oksygen i innsuget, og at en magrere blanding tenner lettere, men for å være helt ærlig så tror jeg ikke så mye på den.

Stensby er i Gokk (bedre kjent som Minnesund), så jeg har ca. en kilometer fylkesvei, to rundkjøringer, og syv mil motorvei foran meg. Solen står opp mens jeg kjører sørover, og den formelig gnistrer, bortsett fra forbi Gardermoen – der er det tett tåke.

I bunnen av Groruddalen viser termometeret -22°, på Romsås er det -15° og fint skiføre. Snøskavlene rekker meg et sted mellom hoften og brystet. En helt vanlig norsk vinter på Østlandet... for andre gang på noen og tyve år.

Og nå blir det snart ny bil på oss – stay tuned!

Dette er for din oppmerksomhet

2010-02-20T18:04:00.004+01:00

Av og til får jeg spam som er så hysterisk morsom at jeg bare må dele den med omverdenen...

From: "Patrick.K.W Chan"<mrchankwpatrick@gmail.com>
Subject: Dette er for din oppmerksomhet. 
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:54:20 +0800
Reply-To: <patrick_kwwchan@yahoo.com.hk>

Dette er for din oppmerksomhet. 
(Executive Director og Chief Financial Officer) 
Hang Seng Bank Limited 
83 Des Voeux Road, Central 
Hong Kong SAR 
Epost: patrick_kwwchan@yahoo.com.hk 

Dette er for din oppmerksomhet 

Det er forståelig at du kan bli litt redd fordi du ikke kjenner meg, men jeg har en
lukrativ forretning forslaget av gjensidig interesse å dele med deg. Jeg fikk
referanse i mitt søk etter noen som passer mine foreslåtte forretningssamarbeid. 

Jeg er Mr. Patrick KW Chan direktør og finansdirektør i Hang Seng Bank Ltd Jeg har
en tåkela virksomheten forslag for deg. Jeg trenger deg til å hjelpe meg i
gjennomføring av en virksomhet prosjektet fra Hong Kong til landet ditt. Det
innebærer overføring av en stor pengesum. Alt om denne transaksjonen skal være
lovlig gjøres uten vanskelighet. Vennligst forsøke å observere ytterste skjønn i
alle saker vedrørende dette problemet. 

Når midlene har blitt overført til kontoen din, skal vi dele i forhold til å være
enige med oss begge. Jeg foretrekker du når meg på min private e-postadresse
nedenfor (E-post: patrick_kwwchan@yahoo.com.hk) og til slutt etter at jeg skal gi
deg mer informasjon om denne operasjonen.

Vær hvis du ikke er interessert slette denne e-posten og ikke jakte på meg fordi jeg
setter min karriere og liv for min familie på spill med dette arbeidet. Selv om
intet våger er ingenting vunnet. 

Ditt tidligst svar på dette brevet vil bli verdsatt. 

Vennlig hilsen 

Mr. Patrick K. W. Chan

Har du sluttet å slå din kone, Nedkvitne?

2010-02-08T17:08:00.006+01:00

Ikke så veldig saklig, nei. Men så er ikke Nedkvitne eller hans støttespillere så veldig saklige heller.

Professor i biologi Kristian Gundersen, for eksempel, mener at dommen truer ytringsfriheten, fordi man ikke alltid «klart kan skille mellom trakassering og faglige argumenter». Det er skivebom. Saken har nemlig ingenting med ytringsfrihet å gjøre; de eneste som mener det er Nedkvitne selv og hans advokat. Saken dreier seg om en ansatt som gjentatte ganger nekter å stille opp i møter der han er innkalt, som bevisst velger konfrontasjon framfor kompromiss, og tyr til grov sjikane mot sine medarbeidere og overordnede i stedet for å forsøke å imøtekomme deres argumenter.

Nei, Det er nok ingen andre enn Nedkvitne selv som er overrasket over dommen.

Nedkvitne påstår at han har vært utsatt for et komplott fordi han kommer fra et lavere sosialt lag enn sine medarbeidere og overordnede. Han illustrerer dette med at alle hans antagonister er vestkantfolk – sosser som har vokst opp, med hans egne ord innenfor 20 kilometer fra Blindern.

Si meg, Nedkvitne, ville du ha likt disse menneskene bedre om de kom fra, la oss si, Romsås? Stovner? Bøler? Holmlia? Eller kanskje de skulle de ha vokst opp utenfor Oslo: Lørenskog, kanskje? Eller Finstadrabben, som Tonna Brix beskriver som «et lite høl i utkant av Oslo »?

Jeg skal fortelle deg en hemmelighet, Nedkvitne. Alle disse stedene er innenfor 20 km i rett linje fra Blindern. De er til og med innenfor 20 kilometers kjøreavstand fra Blindern.

Tror du meg ikke? Se selv – siden du tydeligvis aldri har sett et kart over Oslo har jeg laget et kart som viser avstandene fra Aer (statuen på Frederikkeplassen) til hvert av stedene jeg har nevnt over.

Hvis du ser nøye på kartet vil du kanskje oppdage at hele Oslo, inkludert Nordmarka, er innenfor 20 km fra Blindern. Du mener altså at hele Oslos befolkning – 600 000 mennesker – 15% av Norges befolkning – forsøker systematisk å undertrykke deg? Da har jeg ikke en gang regnet med befolkningen i Asker, Bærum, Lørenskog og Skedsmo (ca. 250 000 tilsammen) som også bor innen 20 km fra Blindern.

Jeg bor på Romsås og jobber på Blindern. Det tar meg et kvarter med bil, litt over en halvtime med T-bane. Men jeg vokste opp såvidt over 1 km fra Blindern (huset der jeg bodde er markert på kartet). Er jeg en drittsekk for det? Eller fordi jeg ser gjennom dine vikarierende argumenter?

Kanskje du skal se litt dypere i deg selv, Nedkvitne?

Avansert sporingsutstyr

2010-01-13T13:50:00.007+01:00

«Den kriminelle gjengen stjal og plyndret 23 billettautomater i Oslo. Her blir banden avslørt av avansert sporingsutstyr i automatene.»

Dette kan man lese i ingressen til en artikkel i Dagbladet om en rekke tyverier av og innbrudd i ~~Oslo Sporveiers~~ Ruters billettautomater. Artikkelen ledsages av et bilde som viser bilen tyvene brukte, samt utstyret Securitas brukte for å spore automatene.

Avansert my ass! Jeg kjente umiddelbart igjen apparatet, for jeg har maken liggende hjemme. Det er en helt vanlig analog peilemottager som brukes blant annet til å spore dyr (for eksempel jakthunder). Den dertil hørende senderen er omtrent på størrelse med fire femkroninger stablet oppå hverandre, pluss en fleksibel antenne på rundt 20-30 cm, og er, i den utgaven jeg har, montert på et halsbånd.

Prinsippet er såre enkelt, og har vært i bruk like lenge som man har kunnet lage følsomme nok mottagere små nok til å få plass i et kjøretøy. Det ble f.eks. mye brukt under andre verdenskrig: av tyskerne for å lete etter skjulte radiosendere i okkuperte land, og av de allierte for å lokalisere tyske ubåter. Det er endog blitt en sport.

Systemet fungerer slik: senderen festes til gjenstanden man ønsker å spore, og sender ut et periodisk radiosignal på en bestemt frekvens. Mottageren lytter på samme frekvens og indikerer om det er aktivitet på denne frekvensen. Antennen er retningsfølsom, slik at signalet blir sterkere når mottageren er vendt rett mot eller rett vekk fra senderen. Man avgjør riktig retning ved å bevege seg sidelengs i forhold til denne linjen, og har man to eller flere mottagere med tilstrekkelig avstand i mellom kan man beregne senderens omtrentlige posisjon (skjæringspunktet mellom linjene fra de forskjellige mottagerne). Ellers beveger man seg bare i den retningen mottageren peker, og ser om signalet blir sterkere eller svakere.

Når jeg sier «analog» mener jeg forøvrig ikke at selve apparatet er analogt, men at kommunikasjonen mellom sender og mottager er analog. LCD-displayet og knappene man ser på bildet brukes kun til å stille inn frekvensen. Modellen som er vist på bildet kan forhåndsprogrammeres med et visst antall frekvenser, men man kan også legge inn frekvensen manuelt, på samme måte som med en bilstereo. Hvis jeg husker riktig (jeg har ikke brukt den på over et år) har den en lysdiode som lyser når mottageren oppfatter et signal over en viss styrke, samt en kontakt for hodetelefoner. Følsomheten justeres med hjulet over displayet.

Til Dagbladets forsvar er teknologien nyere enn avishuset, men avansert er den uansett ikke, etter dagens målestokk – ikke på langt nær.

Katzenjammer på Sentrum Scene

2009-12-13T02:09:00.005+01:00

Fantastisk!

Klokken har passert to på morgenen, så jeg orker ikke skrive noe særlig mer. Konserten var fantastisk fra ende til annen. Bildet over er tatt under «A Bar in Amsterdam», som kom relativt sent i konserten.

For en gangs skyld hadde de dessuten klart å finne et oppvarmingsband som både låt bra og var passe crazy: Polka-Bjørn og Kleine Heine. De hadde med seg en tenor som innimellom all jodlingen fremførte en helt streit versjon av «O helga natt»; jeg vet ikke helt om han var vant med at publikum trampet, klappet og sang med på refrenget, men det så ikke ut til å plage ham nevneverdig.

PS til Frk. Vanilje: Katzenjammer spilte i Bergen på fredag...

Unimpressed: Drake's Fortune

2009-11-30T22:34:00.005+01:00

Finally got myself a PlayStation 3 (I'd link to the official site, but it's totally retarded), and bought a bunch of “pre-played” (i.e. what you and I would call “used”) games along with it. One of the games I picked up was Resistance: Fall of Man, but the guy at the store claimed that it wasn't really all that good, and that if I really wanted to “experience the PS3” I should get Uncharted: Drake's Fortune instead, and I vaguely recalled reading about it after seeing a Penny Arcade strip about the sequel, so I did.

As you can tell from the title, I was not impressed.

Basically, the game breaks down into two parts: jump-and-climb and run-and-shoot. In terms of game mechanics and level design, the jump-and-climb part looks a lot like Prince of Persia, except not as good. In fact, it resembles PoP so much that I'd call anyone who told me it was not inspired by it a liar. Even some of the sounds—particularly the stone-on-stone sound you get when pushing a rock or opening a hidden door, the rattle of chains, and the “whoah” sound the protagonist makes when the ledge he's hanging from starts to crumble—are so similar you'd almost think Naughty Dog had copied them outright from PoP.

Likewise, in terms of game mechanics, and somewhat in terms of level design, the run-and-shoot bits bear a strong similarity to The Getaway—once again, not as good, although they did add a reticle, which The Getaway lacks.

The most frustrating aspect is that motion is fairly limited. You can't run, roll, duck or crouch (except against a low wall), and the controls aren't nearly as fluid as in PoP. Then again, very few games have controls that can match PoP.

Next, the game is just too damn easy. I played through the entire game on “normal” in two sittings, or about twelve hours. I got a little more than half the treasures and a little less than half the medals. There were only two places in the main sequence where I had any trouble figuring out how to move on: the passage to the upper gallery in the church (an exterior staircase that I hadn't noticed as I ran past it) and the statues in the library (it took me a while to realize that what mattered was their orientation, not their position). Only once did I resort to a FAQ: at the very end of the game (and by “the very end”, I mean the last twenty playable seconds), when I was getting tired and didn't notice that Navarro reloaded every two shots.

Now a bit of the good: U:DF is highly realistic, in the sense that there are no skiffy gadgets, no superpowers, nothing that couldn't conceivably exist in our world, except of course for the main protagonist's improbable (but not impossible) strength, dexterity and stamina, and the fact that characters (protagonists, antagonists and grunts) recover from their wounds within seconds once you stop shooting at them. To be fair, the game wouldn't be much fun if it ended as soon as you got shot, and finding medkits strewn around in pre-Columbian ruins would be more distracting, not less.

The sets and models are as realistic as one can expect in a video game, and some of the visuals—such as the view over the jungle from the waterfall early in the game—are gorgeous, though no more impressive than what you see in other contemporary games such as Oblivion or Half-Life 2: Episode Two.

One thing I particularly appreciated was that the main protagonist's sidekick Elena Fisher looks and acts like a real woman. She's anatomically correct (quoth K: “her boobs are smaller than mine!”) and dressed in sensible clothes (Bermuda shorts and a tank top over a T-back shirt) that get visibly dirty and sweat-stained as the game progresses. She's believable in a way that Lara Croft will never be. Perhaps the game industry will learn something from characters like her and Alyx Vance, namely that a woman doesn't need triple-D jugs and a chain-mail bikini to be sexy and engaging.

But all that realism I mentioned earlier went right down the toilet approximately 85% into the game. That's when the zombies came out.

I'm not kidding. I'm making my way out of a vault where El Dorado is supposed to have been kept at some point when suddenly the zombies from I am Legend come crawling out of, well, pretty much everywhere, and I'm running around like a maniac blowing them away with a pump-action shotgun.

For the next hour, what was until then a straight action adventure turns into survival horror. Did I mention that I hate survival horror?

Later on, I'm running through a Nazi submarine base (pretty common trope in the genre, cf. Indiana Jones) trying to find the electrical generators. Uh, the place has been abandoned for sixty years yet the generators still work and there is still fuel in the tanks? Gimme a break...

On the other hand, if I'm going to complain about the generators, I might as well point out how completely unlikely it is that Nathan Drake would be able to locate a coffin on the bottom of the Pacific with nothing more to go on than a set of coordinates that were inscribed on a ring at a time where precise navigation was impossible because a reliable chronometer had not yet been invented, and would not be invented for another two hundred years...

VirtualSummary

2009-11-11T16:23:00.001+01:00

[I started writing this entry months ago, but never got around to finishing it.]

After a few months of running Ubuntu as a VirtualBox on a Windows host, I've got most of the kinks ironed out. To summarize:

Screen resolution: see previous post.
Mouse: see previous post. Once you've install the correct driver, it works beautifully. The mouse pointer is synchronized between the host and the guest, so it doesn't jump when you switch back and forth, and if your guest runs in a window rather than full-screen, you can move smoothly and seamlessly from the guest to the host without having to click or press anything.
Clock: ouch. No matter what you do, it will get out of synch, and ntpd will eventually give up on it. The only solution I can think of is to replace ntpd with something else that can be coerced into accepting large deltas. Luckily, the clock will always be late, never early.
Network: whoa boy...

Networking is not VirtualBox's strong point. It has a built-in DHCP server, so in theory, it's just plug and play, but in practice, it works like shit—especially if, like me, your host is a laptop. VirtualBox reads the host's DNS settings just once, at startup, and so when you move from one network to another, it will still serve you the old DNS setup.

The solution I found is to disable roaming in the guest and configure a static IP address (10.0.2.15/24) and gateway (10.0.2.2). These are the settings VirtualBox uses for NATed guests; the IP address and gateway will be the same at all times in every guest. Finally, install unbound and point resolv.conf at 127.0.0.1.

I use the following unbound.conf:

server:
        verbosity: 1
        interface: 127.0.0.1
        access-control: 127.0.0.0/8 allow
        do-ip6: no

However, the defaults are just fine; in Ubuntu, you can simply do:

# apt-get install unbound
# echo "nameserver 127.0.0.1" >/etc/resolv.conf

and forget about it.

Now, if only they could fix the keyboard issues... it seems VirtualBox sometimes drops or reorders key events: sometimes a key will start repeating, or a mode key (Ctrl, Alt etc.) will get “stuck” until you press it again. My guess is that VirtualBox either sends the “key up” event before the “key down” event, or just drops it altogether. There have been three or four dot releases since I first started using VirtualBox, and I keep hoping the next one will fix this bug, but no luck so far...

I can has ignorance and neglect?

2009-11-04T17:32:00.004+01:00

I won't say “I love cats, therefore I love ICHC”, but I can say “I love cats, and ICHC brightens my day”.

Except when it doesn't.

There's the little things, like the sheer inanity of reader comments, which I've stopped reading entirely, or referring to tortoiseshell cats using male pronouns, or the videos. Lolpics are funny because they take a single shot out of its context and make it out to be something it isn't. Videos may be cute, but they aren't funny, because they just show cats doing what cats do.

Then there's pictures like this one. Yeah, yeah, the cat ate the pumpkin, very funny, except the gag only works because the cat is morbidly obese, and that's not funny at all. We're not talking “a little extra weight around the waist” we're talking “will die an early death due to a series of complications which may culminate in major heart or liver failure”. For insert your favorite deity's sake, people, get a fucking clue. If you're too thick to understand something unless it's on YouTube, watch this video, and put your cat on a diet.

I discovered a star

2009-11-04T13:37:00.003+01:00

Statoil har fått ny logo. Nå er jeg plutselig usikker på om de driver med oljeutvinning, mobiltelefoni eller kunsthåndverk...

[edited 2009-11-06 to add a title; spot the reference...]

You do not own me

2009-09-19T01:14:00.007+02:00

Just because I live in the same country as you do, and speak the same language as you, does not give you a lien on me. It does not give you the right to walk up to me while I'm on the phone with my wife, poke me in the chest, and ask me where I got my badge—which you're not going to get anyway, because you're not at the same fucking conference as I am, so figure it out for yourselves, assholes, you're standing right in front of the fucking registration desk. It does not absolve you from such civil niceties as introducing yourselves. Norway may be a small country, but it still has four point five fucking million inhabitants, and I don't know a fraction of them, and I certainly don't know you, even if you know me, fanboys. I don't give a shit if you're FreeBSD users, I mean, bully for you, really, but I'm not your fucking indentured servant. I'm here to meet and work with my friends and colleagues, and you're neither, so learn some manners or leave me the fuck alone, OK?

64-bit quotas

2009-09-18T14:10:00.002+02:00

Bonus feature: mostly readable shot of the whiteboard Kirk and I used while reviewing the state of 64-bit quotas:

FreeBSD 9.0 Wishlist

2009-09-18T14:01:00.009+02:00

Mostly readable shots of the whiteboards used during the 9.0 brainstorming session.

Dude, where's my torque?

2009-09-13T00:45:00.013+02:00

There are many reasons for a car engine to take longer to start and deliver less torque than it used to, but here are some of the most common ones:

Fuel filter: replaced not too long ago, should be fine for another 10' or 20' km.
Air filter: replaced a couple of months after the fuel filter.
Fuel pump: replaced (with an original part) after the last one failed a year ago.
Oil and oil filter: replaced twice a year and topped up as needed.
Spark plugs: replaced... wait a minute... replaced when? I think I remember buying new spark plugs twice, but I can only remember replacing them once, around the same time as the fuel filter.

Adding insult to injury, the engine has been running hot due to cooling issues that were only recently resolved (I ended up replacing the radiator and expansion tank).

The plugs I used the last time (Bosch Super 4) are now unobtainium, so I got a set of NGK V-Line 24 plugs instead, and installed them earlier today. The photos on the right are of the old plugs, and confirm at least part of my hypothesis, viz. that they needed replacing.

The plugs on the top photo are from the left cylinder bank. From that angle, they look normal except for two things: first, the oil on the third plug, which is of no big import, as it is on the outside end of the plug; and second, the difference in color between the leftmost plug and the other two, which shows that it hasn't been firing properly (if at all) recently; the spark plug wire was loose.

The plugs on the middle photo are from the right cylinder bank. The one on the left (from the rearmost cylinder) has a certain amount of soot on the ground electrode, but not as much as it looks like on the photo.

The third photo clearly shows excessive ash buildup on the tip of the center electrode and insulators and uneven wear of the ground electrode. As far as I can tell from various online spark plug reading charts, including this one from NGK's US website, this is consistent with what one would expect under the circumstances.

Old plugs out, new plugs in, start the engine, and it chokes and stalls almost immediately; ask K to listen for unexpected noises and try again; K confirms that there is a strange wheezing sound coming from the area where I have forgotten to reconnect the air inlet hose which was in the way of the rearmost right-hand-side plug. A few minutes later, I'm putting way too much load on a cold engine and tearing up some freshly-laid stimulus-plan asphalt.

Next up: the serpentine belt tensioner—but that's a story for another day.

Nilges v. the World

2009-09-11T21:47:00.005+02:00

Herbert Schildt is the author of a series of books on computer programming, including about a dozen about C, which are widely considered by the C community to be, to put it bluntly, shit. Two of them, C: A Complete Reference and The Annotated C Standard have been roundly criticized by Peter Seebach and Clive Feather, respectively, and inspired a number of scathing reviews on the Association of C and C++ Users website. Even Steve Summit's C FAQ includes a warning about The Annotated C Standard.

Recently, a certain Edward Nilges has been waging a highly entertaining crusade against Schildt's critics on comp.lang.c (C as a Platonic pathology) and comp.lang.c.moderated (Statement on Schildt submitted to wikipedia today)).

The whole point of this entry is to share with you some exquisite gems from the latter thread:

In <clcm-20090910-0010@plethora.net>:

Seebach: I am mystified by these criticisms. I don't see how you find any “religious fundamentalism” in my views of programming.

Nilges: That's because complementarily to your mathematical and scientific intelligence, you have failed to see a textual isomorphism between religious fundamentalism and your technical fundamentalism.

In <clcm-20090911-0002@plethora.net>:

Nilges: You’re here worse than student “Otto” who sits in the back of the class with twenty years of assembler and no health insurance, soured (in CS Lewis’ words) by true miseries, and maddened by false promises, and decries C as a Communist plot.

You’re the plainclothes cop in the back of the class who in a police state objects to the prof’s narrative because it didn’t mention the leading role of the Party, or here, the holy, phallic register as opposed to the stack.

I’m dead serious, Peter. The difficulty of programming creates psychosexual noise even in the best brain, and the stack just bothered people, being flexible and soft: whereas the registers are always “there”, crystalline and hard.

Further down in the same message:

Nilges: Having left programming, in no little disgust at the personalities of programming, after thirty years, I teach English and creative writing in addition to intro computer science. I have learned that intolerant students, who believe words are things, make the slowest progress.

He's certainly qualified for the “creative writing” part. Not so sure about the “intro computer science”. I wonder what his students think of him.

In <clcm-20090911-0003@plethora.net>:

Nilges: My favorite “theory” is that Schildt showed up at an early meeting and took your girlfriend away. I have no other way of explaining your unprofessional conduct [...]

In <clcm-20090911-0005@plethora.net>:

Seebach: If you and [Jacob] Navia [author of lcc-win32; see Zero overhead overflow checking on comp.std.c] are saying I'm doing something wrong, I think I'm going to have to take that as complimentary.

This links in nicely with Francis Glassborow's complaint in <clcm-20090910-0007@plethora.net>:

Glassborow: I am deeply insulted that you have not added my name to the above 2 [meaning Feather and Seebach].

I wonder what Schildt thinks of all this—if he's even aware of it. In his place, even if I wasn't embarrassed about having my books torn apart in this fashion, I'd certainly be embarrassed by Nilge's defense.

Coincidentally, the moderation delay on comp.lang.c.moderated has gone down to almost zero since this thread began. The moderators must be having the time of their lives seeing this play out...

VirtualWoes

2009-08-26T18:17:00.006+02:00

I find myself in a position where I have to run Windows on my laptop, and use it on a daily basis. This does not make me a happy moggie, as I have run Ubuntu exclusively (except for gaming) for several years. I finally decided that the best solution would be to run Ubuntu in VirtualBox on top of Windows.

(Yes, I still run Hardy, as I still haven't recovered from trying out the unmitigated disaster that was Intrepid. I may give Jaunty a spin some day; VirtualBox makes this so much easier... but in the meantime, Hardy it is. Besides, it's an LTS release.)

Why not the other way around? Three reasons: Windows is a PITA to virtualize (not least from a licensing POV); I never do anything really performance-sensitive in Linux, but I do in Windows; and doing it this way around means I can suspend and hibernate, something Linux still can't do. (Cue angry comments from Linux fanboys insisting that suspend and hibernate work just fine and I'm an idiot; sorry, but no, it has never worked for me on any of the laptops I have owned or managed—even those manufactured by companies that spend millions of dollars every year on Linux development.)

Running Ubuntu in VirtualBox is not as easy as it sounds, though. You can't just create a new VM, pop in the CD, and install. There are several issues that took me quite a while to resolve, and the VirtualBox web forum was no help at all: the moderators arrogantly shut down any thread touching on issues covered by the FAQ, even when the answer given in the FAQ is incorrect and / or insufficient.

The first thing you do after installing, of course, is install the “guest additions”: various bits and pieces of useful software, such as support for mounting shared folders from the host OS. With a default setup, you simply press RightCtrl+D while logged in; VirtualBox will mount an ISO image containing the software, and Ubuntu will ask you to confirm that you want the autorun script to run. If you accept, the script will install two kernel modules, two X.org drivers, and some init.d scripts and other miscellanea.

Here's the first gotcha. If you apt-get dist-upgrade after installing the guest additions, and the upgrade includes a new kernel, you will have to reinstall them, because you need new modules to go with the new kernel. Otherwise, you will get obscure error messages (either “no such file or directory” or “device not found”) when trying to mount shared folders. I can't remember that ever being an issue with VMWare; Linux is generally pretty good at maintaining binary compatibility for kernel modules, so it should simply be a matter of installing it somewhere else than in the current kernel's module directory. I guess Sun prefers the inconvenient-I-know-but-at-least-we-won't-have-to-worry-about-KBI-changes approach.

The second gotcha is the X configuration. Out of the box, X will have a lot of trouble determining available screen resolutions and using the right one. Actually, “a lot of trouble” is an understatement: it will fail miserably. In addition, the mouse will behave strangely, randomly refusing to move past a certain row or column. All in all, X will be pretty much unusable.

These are, inarguably, bugs in VirtualBox—these things should work out of the box. I'm willing to accept a restricted choice of display resolutions, but the mouse issue is unforgivable. Both issues are fixable, but still—like the kernel module issue, you shouldn't need to fix them manually.

The solution to both X issues is to use the display driver (vboxvideo) and the mouse driver (vboxmouse) included in the VirtualBox guest additions. Forget about displayconfig-gtk, though; all I got when I tried to use it was a mangled xorg.conf with duplicate sections.

The thing is, with VirtualBox, you don't need much of an X configuration. There is only one display, which uses a simple driver which does not require any special options. There is only one monitor, which—being virtual—does not require any frequency ranges or mode lines to be specified. There is only one pointing device, which uses a simple driver which does not require any special options. There is only one keyboard, which uses the same keyboard driver as in any other X setup, with the same options. There is only one screen, which combines the aforementioned display and monitor, and supports any resolution(s) you fancy. Finally, there is only one server, which associates said screen to the the aforementioned mouse (the keyboard is implicit).

In other words, all you need is this:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
        Driver          "kbd"
        Option          "XkbRules"      "xorg"
        Option          "XkbModel"      "pc105"
        Option          "XkbLayout"     "us"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "VBox Mouse"
        Driver          "vboxmouse"
        Option          "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "VBox Video"
        Driver          "vboxvideo"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "VBox Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "VBox Video"
        Monitor         "VBox Monitor"
        SubSection "Display"
                Modes           "1024x768" "1400x1050"
        EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "Default Layout"
        Screen          "Default Screen"
        InputDevice     "VBox Mouse"
EndSection

You should of course adjust the keyboard layout and the screen resolution(s) to fit your needs. I use Norwegian keyboards (because that's what's available in Norway, and I prefer the European placement of the Enter key) with the US layout (because programming in C-like languages using anything but the US layout is torture); in most of Western Europe (all except the Netherlands, I believe), you should use the “pc105” model with the appropriate layout for your country, while in the US, you should use the “pc101” model with the “us” layout. As for screen resolution, I use 1400×1050 so I can run in full screen on my laptop, and 1024×768 in case I want to run in a window for more than a few minutes.

That's it. It's really not that hard. It's just not documented properly anywhere that I could find.

Dagbladets lemfeldige omgang med fakta

2009-08-05T17:38:00.006+02:00

Andre august i år kunne Dagbladet ved Jonas Sverrisson Rasch melde, under overskriften «Nye iPhone på billigsalg i Sverige», at iPhone 3GS var mer enn dobbelt så dyr i Norge som i Sverige.

I følge Dagbladet er minimumsprisen det første året for en iPhone 3GS 16 GB med ubegrenset datatrafikk SEK 5 554 (ca. NOK 4 700) i Sverige, og NOK 13 189 i Norge. Etter to år (svenskene har nemlig 24 måneders bindingstid, mot 12 måneder i Norge) blir regnestykket hhv. SEK 11 108 (ca. NOK 9 400) i Sverige og NOK 23 137 i Norge.

Dette ledsages av intervjuer med beklemte pressetalsmenn som forklarer at prisnivået er jo høyere i Norge, skjønner du, og da kan man jo ta mer betalt enn i Sverige, skjønner du, samt bilder av lettkledde smårips på Jernbanetorget som synes det er så urettferdig, asså, mens de på fotografens oppfordring later som om de snakker i mobilen.

I tillegg har de snakket med «teleanalytiker Tore Aarønæs, daglig leder i Norsk Telekom» (Dagbladet har selvfølgelig klart å stave navnet feil – det heter Norsk Telecom), som forteller at «prisen kommer til å falle, men ikke så langt ned som i Sverige» fordi Norge har «i praksis to operatører» og «priskrigen utvikler seg relativt tregt».

Saken er at det er løgn fra ende til annen.

At avisene ikke alltid er så nøye med faktasjekking er så sin sak, men et analyseselskap som spesialiserer seg på telekommunikasjon burde da vite bedre?

Det stemmer at det norske telekom-markedet i praksis er et duopol, men det betyr ikke at det ikke finnes prisforskjeller. Det gjør det nemlig. Til gagns.

Sannheten er at en iPhone 3GS 16 GB med NetCom iConnect (ubegrenset dataoverføring) koster NOK 6 087 det første året, deretter NOK 2 988 i året, altså NOK 9 075 tilsammen for de to første årene. For en drøy tusenlapp ekstra får man 32 GB-utgaven i stedet.

Det er ikke bare under halvparten av det Telenor tar i Norge, men det er til og med billigere enn det Telenor tar i Sverige!

Telenor er imidlertid ikke billigst i Sverige heller. Hos Telia koster en iPhone 3GS 16 GB med Prata På + Mobilsurf Extra SEK 9 073 (ca. NOK 7 700) over to år. Det slår Netcom, men ikke med så stor margin som Dagbladet prøver å gi inntrykk av.

Dette finner ikke Dagbladet formålstjenlig å nevne. Hvorfor? De kan ikke skylde på at de ikke vet bedre: de er blitt behørig informert (av meg og andre) om hvor feil de tar, men allikevel er det ikke kommet en eneste rettelse (de har heller ikke rettet de mange skrivefeilene i artikkelen, men jeg skal ikke være kravstor).

Jeg skjønner det virkelig ikke. Er formålet å skade Telenors omdømme? Hvorfor skulle Dagbladet ønske det? Dessuten klarer Telenor den jobben helt fint alene.

Man kan også spørre seg hva som motiverte Dagbladet, eller journalisten, til å skrive artikkelen. Var det bare et plutselig innfall? Var det et tips? Var det Norsk Telecom som ønsket litt eksponering? I så fall har det virket mot sin hensikt, for ingen i bransjen (dvs. i deres målgruppe) vil være særlig imponert over Aarønæs' innsats.

Hvorfor, Dagbladet?

The brave ones

2009-08-03T09:15:00.010+02:00

K is away, so I stave off the loneliness and boredom^* by playing Morrowind and spending some quality time with the idiot box. Yesterday was Madagascar 2 (not as good as the first one), today was The Brave One.

I didn't expect much of a film I found in the DVD discount bin barely more than a year after its release, but I thought it was pretty good, although I agree with the critics that its artistic pretensions came off as, well, pretentious, and did more harm than good. The rolling camera angles in some of the scenes (such as immediately before the attack where David is killed) made me seasick, and the sitting-in-the-diner-talking-not-looking-at-each-other-except-they-are-actually-looking-at-each-other-in-the-mirror-behind-the-bar trick passed me (and probably 99% of the audience) by until it was pointed out in the behind-the-scenes featurette, and even then it just seemed... lame.

Still, I'm never one to turn down a Jodie Foster flick. She's one of my favorite “strong woman” actors, along with Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton.

High point of Jodie Foster's career so far, apart from actually winning two Best Actress awards, out of four nominations (one for Best Supporting Actress and three for Best Actress):

Tallulah: So this is show business?

That was from Bugsy Malone, the greatest movie you've never seen. Pop in the DVD and fast-forward to 1:24:05, where Jodie gets creamed (literally) and utters that unforgettable line. I wonder if it was ad-libbed; it just feels different, like the conversation between Dustin Hoffman and Samuel Jackson at the beginning of The Sphere, or the “bathroom scene” with Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman in Runaway Jury—which was the first time Hoffman and Hackman played in the same film, despite being long-time friends (all the way back to the Pasadena Playhouse), just like Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, who were practically made for each other, never met on the silver screen until Heat (one of my all-time favorites).

Another high point is The Silence of the Lambs, of course:

Hannibal Lecter: Well, Clarice - have the lambs stopped screaming?

You really have to see the French and Saunders parody, where Jennifer Saunders plays a BBC trainee who is sent to ask a sociopathic script doctor (played by Dawn French) for help when (if memory serves) the writers of a BBC sitcom hit a dry spell. I really have to get it on DVD so I can quote from it.

Then there's always Taxi Driver. Goes without saying.

Low point: La vie c'est chouette. What were you thinking, Jodie?

Off on a tangent again, Jodie Foster was considered for (but did not get) the part of Viola de Lesseps in Shakespeare in Love, an absolutely amazing film that won seven—count 'em—Academy Awards, including a Best Supporting Actress for Dame Judi Dench, who was on screen for only a few minutes!

High point of Sigourney Weaver's career so far:

Ripley: I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

She actually got a Best Actress nomination for that one. Does that lady kick ass, or what?

The following exchange from Alien: Resurrection is a good second:

Johner: Hey, Ripley. I heard you, like, ran into these things before?
Ripley: That's right.
Johner: Wow, man. So, like, what did you do?
Ripley: I died.

She was great in Galaxy Quest, too:

Gwen: Fred, you had a part people loved. I mean, my TV Guide interview was six paragraphs about my boobs and how they fit into my suit. No one bothered to ask me what I do on the show.
Fred: You were... umm, wait...
Gwen: I repeated the computer, Fred.

...and in Ghostbusters (“There is no Dana, only Zuul!”), and in Dave, and in Copycat, and in Heartbreakers, and, oh!, we mustn't forget The Ice Storm (Sigourney Weaver, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood, Tobey Maguire: what's not to like?), and probably a ton of others I haven't seen, including the other two (beside Aliens) that got her Academy Award nominations.

Low point: I haven't seen a Sigourney Weaver film I didn't like, but she turned down the lead in The Accused, which went to Jodie Foster, who got a Best Actress for it. Bummer.

Linda Hamilton is kind of a one-trick pony—she's done Sarah Connor and... uhm... Sarah Connor? Still, props for “coming out” as bipolar; perhaps that explains why she hasn't done anything notable outside of the Terminator franchise.

High point of Linda Hamilton's career so far: the escape from the hospital in Judgment Day.

Low point: the clothes she's wearing at the beginning of The Terminator...

_____
^*Husbandspeak for “for a few days, I can do whatever the hell I want!”

My calendar wall, August 2009

2009-08-02T23:19:00.005+02:00

Picture of the month:

No prize for guessing what the picture shows or where it was taken.

This time, I decided to walk the extra mile, and used Gimp to correct the perspective. The lower right corner still won't stay flat, though.

My calendar wall, July 2009

2009-07-02T19:47:00.002+02:00

Ha! I beat Leisha!

At the 2008 24 Heures du Mans, car #2 (an Audi R10 TDI run by Champion Racing under the Audi Sport North America brand) passes a screen that displays real-time video from a camera placed in its unoccupied right seat. I'm not positive, but from the helmet colors (silver with red stripes and yellow highlights), I think the driver is living legend Tom Kristensen. This car went on to win the race, while their #1 car ranked sixth and Audi Sport Team Joest's #3 car finished fourth.

The lighting was difficult—despite the flash, you can see patches of light from the window shining onto the calendar, which is printed on very shiny cardboard.

Sharpened rooms / Chambres affutées

2009-06-30T14:58:00.009+02:00

For your convenience, this blog entry is bilingual. Pour mieux vous accomoder, cet article est bilingue.

Missed the plane back from Paris (Depeche Mode were awesome; more about that later—as soon as I take delivery of a new batch of round tuits), and had to stay overnight at the Ibis Orly hotel, which for your information does not have a Tex-Mex restaurant. What it does have is a typical French grill restaurant (think Hippopotamus but double the prices).

Ayant raté l'avion au retour de Paris (Depeche Mode étaient épatants ; j'en vous rendrai compte à l'occasion), nous avons du passer la nuit à l'hôtel Ibis Orly, qui, je vous signale, n'a pas de restaurant Tex-Mex, mais simplement un restaurant grill typiquement français (genre Hippopotamus mais deux fois plus cher).

When we arrived in our room, I glanced at the usual hotel information card and immediately cracked up. I took the following picture for your enjoyment:

Une fois arrivé dans notre chambre, j'ai jeté un coup d'œuil sur l'habituelle carte d'infos pratiques, et je me suis écroulé de rire. J'ai pris cette photo afin que vous puissiez partager mon hilarité :

In case you were wondering, the original French text says «ironing room on the second floor.»

Pour les anglophobes parmi vous, la traduction anglaise signifie, retenez-vous bien, « affûtage de la chambre avec la deuxième étape ».

My calendar wall, June 2009

2009-06-20T13:20:00.003+02:00

Sorry, Leisha, I just couldn't resist.

That's the only wall calendar I have. The reason why the corner curves out from the wall is that there are three large computers just off to the right, with powerful fans blowing hot air towards the wall.

The photo is of an Audi R10 TDI Le Mans prototype—specifically, Audi Sport Team Joest's #3 car that finished fourth at the 2008 24 Heures du Mans (the #1 and #2 cars placed 6th and 1st respectively)—taken during a night-time pit stop. One driver is unbuckling to get out of the car as the other rushes to replace him; meanwhile, a mechanic is refueling the car.

More car porn here.

Går det an å være så blond?

2009-06-19T00:55:00.002+02:00

Går det virkelig an å være så blond som disse bortskjemte pappajentene?

Eller så rosa?

Eller så selvopptatt?

Eller så naiv?

GPG insecure memory

2009-06-09T18:25:00.001+02:00

Just a quick note to record the answer to a question that's been bugging me for quite a while:

% gpg --list-keys 64EBE220  
gpg: WARNING: using insecure memory!
gpg: please see http://www.gnupg.org/faq.html for more information
pub   1024D/64EBE220 2006-11-11 [expires: 2009-11-10]
uid                  Dag-Erling Smørgrav 
uid                  Dag-Erling Smørgrav 
uid                  [jpeg image of size 3315]

The textbook solution is to chmod u+s =gpg, but this doesn't always work on FreeBSD (especially on amd64). The reason is that the default limit on wired pages (which includes the unified buffer cache) is too low. It is initialized at boot time to approximately one-third of system memory. Increasing it to, say, half your system memory should fix the GnuPG issue:

% sudo sysctl vm.max_wired=524288
vm.max_wired: 333091 -> 524288

Remember that vm.max_wired is in pages, not in bytes. On i386 and amd64, a page is 4096 bytes, so the above allows for up to 2 GB of wired memory.

Lokal oppvarming er en bløff

2009-06-07T13:57:00.003+02:00

Meteorologene vil ha oss til å tro at middeltemperaturen kommer til å stige over de neste ukene, og at det i verste fall kan bli så varmt at vi må gå i shorts. De har til og med satt et navn på fenomenet: de kaller det «sommer».

Dette er selvfølgelig rent vås. Meteorologenes teori lar seg rett og slett ikke forene med fakta. De tre siste dagene har temperaturen her på Romsås knapt vært oppe i 16 °C. Hvis vi ser hele uken under ett, ser vi at temperaturen faktisk er på vei ned.

Hva får meteorologer til å finne på slike absurde teorier? Hva får pressen til å bite på og presentere dem som fakta? Hvorfor slipper ikke de som ikke tror på dette «sommer»-tullet til i media?

Det som verre er, er at myndighetene har kastet seg helt ukritisk på dette sirkuset. Det er nå snakk om å gi store deler av befolkningen fri i juli, som følge av dette «sommer»-fenomenet. Hva vil dette gjøre for landets økonomi? Var det ikke ille nok med finanskrisen?

Jeg er redd for at det vil bli en hard kamp å komme til bunns i denne saken. Det er for mange som har interesse av at sannheten ikke kommer for en dag. Men jeg gir ikke opp håpet. Hvis vi bare finner en eller annen med doktorgrad i ett eller annet (akkurat hva er ikke så nøye) som kan holde et seminar for FrP om sannheten bak den store «sommer»-bløffen, er jeg sikker på at Siv vil kaste seg på saken, og hun vil ikke gi seg før ca. en uke etter at hun kommer til makten.

Sannheten må fram!

Tre tips til Synnøve Svabø

2009-05-19T13:06:00.007+02:00

Synnøve Svabø er ikke så fryktelig populær for tiden. Jeg er ikke helt enig med kritikken; hun er en kjærkommen avveksling fra kommentatorer som tar ESC like alvorlig som vinter-OL, selv om hun ikke helt kan måle seg mot Sir Terry Wogan. Jeg vil allikevel gi henne følgende tre tips:

Bruk innestemme.
Hold kjeft når andre snakker.
Prøv å ikke sammenligne folk med Hitler – spesielt ikke folk det er meningen at vi skal like.

Lykke til videre!

Coherent Light

2009-05-13T23:04:00.005+02:00

Back to Spektrum, but far better seats this time, and far better sound. We were seated about fifteen meters from the stage, close to the center, and had an unobstructed view of Jean-Michel Jarre and his band.

This was not my first Jarre concert, but it's my first in a long while. Last time was the Oxygène 7-13 tour in 1997, which (I believe) was the first time Jarre dropped the outdoor format in favor of smaller, indoor concerts. Obviously, he focused on the newly released album, and played several of the tracks in sync with dizzying animations which played on huge screens over the stage.

This time was different. This tour was not linked to an album release, and if I'm not mistaken, everything he played tonight, with one exception, was pre-2000. Most of it was from Oxygène (both the original and Oxygène 7-13), Équinoxe and Rendez-vous, with some Chants Magnétiques, Révolutions and Chronologie thrown in, and one track (Souvenir de Chine) from Concerts en Chine. He actually played Rendez-vous 2 and Rendez-vous 3 twice—but, to my great disappointment, not Rendez-vous 4.

The stage show was also different. There were no videos, just spotlights, circular LED arrays, and... lasers. Lots of lasers. He must have cleaned out every single laser fab in Asia, and made Shuji Nakamura a very rich man. Unlike Sweden, apparently, Norwegian health authorities don't give a rat's ass about our eyes (eyecare is not covered by social security), so Jarre was able to point the lasers straight at the audience. I'm still seeing spots, but I'm not complaining; the show was fantastic. Phenomenal. Stunning. I kept trying to grab the laser beams and thinking about how our cats would react :-)

The LED arrays I mentioned earlier were pretty cool too. While Jarre played (if memory serves) Équinoxe 4, for instance, they showed stylized faces with goggles, or rather field glasses, and while he played a track from Chronologie (I don't remember which), they showed clock faces with the hands racing around.

The audience was very appreciative; Jarre was called back not once, but twice. I'm pretty sure the first encore was planned, but I don't think the second was.

I satisfied my need for Rendez-vous 4 by listening to it on K's iPod on the way out. Then I listened through most of Oxygène 7-13 on the tube, doing my best to ignore two atrociously clad women (think inner-city white trash and multiply by ten) who had both recorded the entire show on their camera phones and absolutely had to watch both recordings on the tube, simultaneously, comparing notes, with the volume all the way up.

Plugging a leaky radiator

2009-05-03T15:43:00.004+02:00

My sooper-s3kr1t procedure for repairing a hairline crack in the radiator of an early 1990s Audi:

Notice the coolant warning light. Buy a one-liter bottle and top up.
Notice the coolant warning light again about a week later. Also notice the small puddle on the garage floor.
Panic.
Calm down a little. Breathe. Call a friend for advice.
Buy a stick of “chemical steel” (a two-part resin or putty that adheres to most metals and turns hard as steel in a matter of minutes) and a small jar or bottle of radiator sealant.
Audi radiators (at least from that era) don't have filler caps. You top up the expansion tank instead. You should not pour radiator sealant in the expansion tank, though. This is very important. Coolant does not circulate through the expansion tank; it flows in when the pressure in the coolant system increases, and drains out when the pressure sinks. If you pour sealant into the expansion tank, it will sink to the bottom of the tank and stay there, and likely as not seal the outlet.
Think through the previous item, and decide not to use the sealant you bought.
Slap some chemical steel on the crack. This won't work very well, because coolant is still seeping through the crack. Your fingers will smell very bad from kneading the putty, though.
Your radiator will still leak, but (at least to begin with) not quite so much.
Ignore the problem for as long as possible, until you're spending almost as much on coolant as on gas.
You now have three choices: welding, chemical steel again, or the sealant.
Welding is the best option, but it's complicated and expensive, not least because Audi radiators are made of aluminum, not steel.
Chemical steel didn't work the first time; it's not likely to work the second time either, but just in case, you can try again with a dry radiator. This means you need to drain at least enough coolant so the level in the radiator is lower than the crack. This is a good occasion to drain and flush the system and replace all the coolant.
The cooling system works as follows: coolant is pumped through the engine block and the sump by a coolant pump, which is driven by the timing belt. When the engine reaches its ideal working temperature, a valve opens and the coolant starts to circulate through the radiator as well. It enters the radiator at the top, makes its way through a long, winding pipe and exits from the bottom. The total capacity of the cooling system is about four liters.
I'm assuming you've removed the sound deadener under the engine. I leave mine off, it just gets in the way.
There is a drain tap in the bottom right corner of the radiator. Find some sort of container that will hold four liters and fit under the car. Place it under the tap and unscrew the plug (easily done by hand, especially if you remove the right fog light first). Nothing will happen.
Unscrew the filler cap on the expansion tank, letting air into the system. Coolant will now come gushing out of the drain tap, missing your container entirely.
Replace the filler cap, adjust the position of your container, and re-open the cap.
You have now drained the radiator, but there is still coolant in the engine. There is a drain plug somewhere, but it's far easier to just disconnect the inlet or outlet hose for the oil cooling circuit.
Close everything, fill the system with water, and re-open. Repeat until the water comes out clear.
Reconnect all hoses and close the drain plug.
You can now try to slap some chemical steel on the crack again. It won't help, but it'll make you feel better for a day or two.
Give the chemical steel time to cure, then fill up with coolant.
The next day, go for a long drive. Notice the coolant warning light again. Swear profusely.
Decide to try the sealant instead.
In addition to the radiator sealant, you will need a meter or two of regular half-inch garden hose, a funnel with a stem that fits snugly inside the hose, and a three-liter watering can. You can do without the funnel, and you can replace the watering can with any sufficiently large recipient that is easy to pour from, but it's easier with a watering can. In any case, make sure everything is clean.
Park the car outdoors and well away from any open door or window or ventilation inlet. Let the engine cool until you can touch the block and radiator without burning yourself. It helps if you let it stand with the hood open, since the hood is insulated.
Attach one end of the garden hose to the spout behind the drain plug (where the coolant comes out when you unscrew the plug). Stick the other end into the watering can.
Open the drain plug and the filler cap, and let the coolant run until the radiator is empty or the can is full, whichever comes first. You don't have to drain the entire system, just the radiator.
Close the drain plug, but leave the filler cap open.
While the radiator is empty, you may want to remove the chemical steel. A single blow of a rubber mallet on a strategically applied chisel should do the job.
Unclamp the radiator inlet hose (in the top left corner of the radiator). Use a small socket wrench with an 8 mm socket rather than a screwdriver.
Remove the inlet hose. This isn't easy, it's a tight fit and there's a rib behind the clamp, so make sure the clamp is wide open before you try.
Stick one end of the garden hose into the inlet. Wiggle the hose so the end points downward and get it as far into the radiator as you can (which probably won't be more than around five centimeters, but try anyway).
Attach the funnel to the other end of the hose.
Radiator sealant comes in two types: liquid and solid (granules). If you bought the liquid type, shake the bottle thoroughly. If you bought granules, mix them with coolant (from the watering can) in a clean plastic bottle and shake until they are completely dissolved.
Hold the hose as high as you can and slowly pour the sealant into the funnel. Keep the hose as close to vertical as you can, and make sure it doesn't loop.
Pour in some more coolant to flush any sealant that might be left in the hose into the radiator. You can rinse out the sealant bottle too if you want.
Reattach the inlet hose. Make sure that the clamp is in front of the rib and that everything is sealed tightly.
Pour the rest of the coolant you removed into the expansion tank—but don't overfill it.
Start the engine and let it idle for ten to fifteen minutes. It needs to run long enough to reach working temperature so the thermostat will open and coolant will circulate through the radiator.
To begin with, the radiator will still leak. You will notice when the thermostat opens, because coolant will start to leak faster as pressure increases. After a while, it will slow down, and hopefully stop entirely. Use a clean rag or a piece of tissue paper to wipe away some of the leaked coolant. If you succeeded, the spot you wiped dry should stay dry.

Brettspill, startmotor og fotball

2009-04-30T01:20:00.000+02:00

Marius spør hva folk har gjort i helgen...

På lørdag ryddet jeg leiligheten og spilte brettspill. På søndag lå jeg fire timer under en bil. På veien hjem snakket jeg med en god venn på telefonen, så kjørte jeg forbi et sted hvor en gjeng med idioter med gule skjerf og en gjeng med idioter med sorte og hvite skjerf banket hverandre opp. Det var en del blålys og sånt. Så dro jeg hjem, dusjet av meg møkken fra bilen, skiftet sengetøy og la meg.

Lefty loosey

2009-04-29T23:21:00.001+02:00

After dropping K off at the airport on Friday morning, I decided to drop by Leisha to pick up some tools. She gave me a tour of the new store, then left me to my own devices. I picked up what I needed (plus some stuff I didn't), paid, and got in the car.

The car wouldn't start.

Battery voltage fine, fuel pump fine (it should be—it's brand new), relay says click, starter doesn't run.

A couple of phone calls and two hours later, money changed hands and I had a replacement starter motor.

Fast forward to Sunday. Having perfected the art of parking on a downhill slope and push-starting, I drive out to K's mother; I keep all my heavy equipment in her garage. I got the front wheels up on ramps, put blocks behind the rear wheels, spread a couple of old bed sheets on the floor and started laying out the tools I thought I'd need. I'm not always that neat and organized, but I felt inspired.

I took a couple of photos, like the one on the left, which shows the starter motor in the center (the big cylinder is the motor itself, the small one is the solenoid), with the gear box to the left, the right downpipe in the upper right corner, and a support beam across the bottom. There's one shot I didn't take that I wish I had, though. The car is fairly long (4892 mm plus the tow hitch), and when you're lying there with your head only a few centimeters below the sump, looking back... It's like the opening shot from Alien, looking down the length of the Nostromo.

But I digress. The motor is attached to the bell housing by two long bolts; when the motor is in place, they are arranged nearly vertically. It took me about an hour to figure out which parts I needed to remove to get to the starter motor, to disconnect the wires (one little one for the solenoid, one huge motherf***er for the motor; the little one really didn't want to go), and to unscrew the bottom bolt. It “came quietly”, as they say in cop shows.

Things were going pretty well. At some point, I spoke to K on the phone. I called her or she called me, I don't remember; it doesn't matter. I have a Bluetooth earpiece, which means I didn't have to stop working to talk on the phone (these things are extremely addictive). I told K it wasn't too bad, that in fact it wasn't all that different from replacing the alternator, which I did two years ago, although I have a lot more experience now than I did then.

Digressing again! The top bolt is located at about two o'clock on the bell housing (looking forward), and there is about a metric ton of steel and plastic in the way. From the bottom, there is a support beam, the right exhaust downpipe, half the gearbox, and the starter motor itself. From the top, there's the alarm siren (easily removable), a tie rod, the right cylinder bank, the air filter, the intake hose and sound damper, etc. The nut is toward the front, and you can get to it from underneath, but there's no room there for a socket wrench; there's barely room for a box-end wrench to keep it still while turning the bolt. The bolt head is toward the rear, and you can get a socket wrench in there, but only a short one, mostly because of the tie rod, which crosses the plane of the bolt head diagonally. The tight quarters mean you can only turn the wrench about 30° before you have to turn back (or reposition the wrench, if not using a ratchet).

I spent about an hour trying to get the b****rd out, with absolutely no success. I tried everything I could think of to get more leverage, from every possible angle: universal joint, extenders of various lengths, the works. I took a break for dinner, then went back at it. After about five minutes, I got it to move about 15°—then nothing. That was it.

That's when it struck me.

I was leaning over the engine bay, facing toward the rear of the car, trying to unscrew a bolt that was pointing toward the front of the car.

I had spent more than an hour trying to turn it the wrong way.

I got under the car, put a wrench with a short handle in place, and pushed up. After only a few seconds, it gave, and I got it all the way out with a ratchet.

I wasn't out of the woods yet. I still had to extricate the starter motor from its nest of beams and pipes and rods and wires, and sneak the new one in. I had an oh-shit moment when the motor wouldn't come free of the bell housing, and I thought there must be a bolt or screw somewhere that I had missed; but I was just holding it at the wrong angle, so the other end butted against something. Then... remember when I mentioned talking to K on the phone? You see, there was a point to my digression. The point was that I realized there was no way I could get the old starter out, or the new one in... without removing the alternator.

Luckily, I'd been there and done that. Use a 10 mm right-angle hex key with a cheater bar to hold the tensioning damper in place while removing the serpentine belt, remove two bolts—a long one with a nut at the other end, and a shorter one that screws into the engine block—, and finally, disconnect the wires (although they're long enough that you can lower the alternator to the ground without damaging them). Easier said than done, but not by much.

It was smooth flying from there on out. With the alternator out of the way, I got the old motor out and the new one in in a matter of minutes. The only tricky part was reinstalling the alternator. The short bolt goes through a spacer sleeve a few centimeters in length, which is hard to align properly, especially since you have to do it more or less by touch. Once you have it in place, though, the short bolt functions as a sort of hinge, which makes it fairly easy to align and insert the long bolt. Getting the nut on the other end was a bit of a struggle, though; I had to remove my gloves.

You can tell from the photo on the right that I was wearing protective clothing. I even a spot on the bridge of my nose where the goggles rubbed the skin raw.

Hop in the car, ignition on, starter runs, engine roars. A job well done. Engine off, scrub yourself semi-clean (where the hell is my Fast Orange when I need it?), then clean and stow your tools. That last bit took quite a while; I hate putting dirty tools back in the tool box (or bag), especially those that come in sets with their own box. Back inside, hug mom-in-law, drive home. Arrive exhausted. Hop in the shower, scrub scrub scrub. Go to sleep with the feeling that today, at least, you achieved something.

Emmerdeurs de première classe

2009-04-29T13:44:00.010+02:00

Je reçois depuis quelque temps un déluge incessant de pourriel d'une boutique en ligne française qui se nomme la STCE. L'expéditeur de ces pourriels est bien entendu du genre « noreply ». La page de contact dont l'adresse est indiquée au bas des cochonneries dont ils me bombardent n'existe pas, et cette société à la con ne donne aucune adresse, ni postale ni électronique, sur leur site web. Difficile, donc, de se plaindre si l'on n'a pas suffisamment de connaissances techniques pour effectuer une recherche « whois » et en interpréter le résultat.

Il y a un lien vers un « formulaire de désabonnement » au bas du pourriel, et le formulaire existe bien, mais ce n'est pas une excuse. Je n'ai jamais rien demandé à ces ordures, je ne me suis jamais inscrit nulle part, je n'ai jamais rien acheté d'eux. Ce comportement est inacceptable, et pour surcroît illégal depuis de nombreuses années dans toute l'Union européenne (directive 2002/58/CE du Parlement européen et du Conseil, transposée en France par la loi nº 2004-575 du 21 juin 2004 pour la confiance dans l’économie numérique) et punissable en France de 5 ans de prison et 300 000 euros d'amende.

Quoi faire ? En fait, rien. Mon seul recours, à moins de jouer leur jeu, est de porter plainte à leur fournisseur d'accès, qui fera suivre au responsable du domaine, qui leur assurera qu'ils n'ont rien fait, que je me trompe, que je suis un client fidèle qui a oublié qu'il s'est inscrit sur leur liste, etc., et ça ne servira absolument à rien. Même d'écrire ce que j'écris ici ne sert à rien, au delà de ma propre satisfaction. Tant que la majorité des réceptionnaires de ce pourriel l'ignorent, l'effacent ou se contentent de se désinscrire, la STCE ne court aucun risque, et tant qu'un certain nombre d'entre eux, même si ce n'est qu'un pour cent ou un pour mille, se laisse arnaquer, la STCE y a tout à gagner. C'est malheureux, mais c'est la vie. Vive l'Internet!

Fritt ord

2009-04-27T19:14:00.003+02:00

Bravo! Jeg regner med at neste års Fritt Ord-pris går til Vigrid og Tore Tvedt for deres «modige ytringer» mot innvandring.

Sistelørdagbrettspillaftenreferat

2009-04-25T23:28:00.007+02:00

Siste lørdag i måneden betyr brettspill klokken tre. K er bortreist, men jeg holder fortet. Bruker et par timer på å rydde leiligheten først, det føles befriende. Handler mat og setter over pasta. S sender SMS om at hun blir to timer forsinket, og dukker deretter opp fem på tre. B er like punktlig som hun pleier. E dukker opp rundt fire med datteren, som får en tre måneder forsinket ettårsgave (byggeklosser i tre). S og B hjelper til med middagen mens E leker med datteren. Vi prater om alt og ingenting.

Rundt fem setter vi oss ned med Ticket to Ride, vi pakker ut og velger hver vår farge. Jeg finner fram Cola-glass, alle får et i samme farge som brikkene sine. E ber om at vi venter litt med å starte, da hans kone er på vei. Når hun kommer begynner vi å diskutere hvorvidt E med frue skal spille på lag, av hensyn til datteren, eller hver for seg. A og C ankommer. Vi er nå for mange til å spille Ticket to Ride, men for få til å dele oss i to grupper. Vi finner ut at vi heller skal spille Citadels, og rydder vekk Ticket to Ride. Fru E drar hjem med unge frøken E.

Vi begynner å spille Citadels rundt seks. Reglene sier at eldste spiller begynner. Det starter en diskusjon om hvor gammel man er vs. hvor gammel man føler seg. Jeg tror B er yngst, men det viser seg at S er tre dager yngre enn henne. Ingen ser ut til å huske at det er den eldste som skal begynne. Vi gir kronen til S. Det står på esken at et parti skal ta 20 til 60 minutter; vi blir først ferdig rundt ni. Det er uavgjort mellom B og E, men B har mest gull, og vinner.

Vi rydder bort Citadels og finner fram Munchkin, et spill jeg liker veldig godt men ikke har spilt på godt over et år. B må hjem, så vi fortsetter med fem spillere. E tar fort ledelsen, og jeg begynner å sabotere for ham. Han svarer med samme mynt. A tar igjen E, og vi hopper på ham. A, E og jeg blir så opptatt av å sabotere for hverandre at vi ikke oppdager at S, som har ligget langt etter, har tatt oss igjen. Plutselig har hun vunnet, og vi sitter der og føler oss temmelig dumme.

Klokken er elleve. Vi har brukt åtte timer på ett parti Citadels og ett parti Munchkin. Folk drar hjem. Det har vært en god dag.

Best. Spam. Ever.

2009-04-20T00:56:00.005+02:00

This showed up on an internal FreeBSD mailing list:

Hello my the surprised friend!
My name Nadejda and I wish to take away from you at all a lot of time
and to penetrate in my letter! My trade the doctor the dentist. I had
an ingenious idea to try to find love not in that place where I live
namely not in Russia! In me there were such emotions since recent
time! I would like to tell to you about it my new friend. On my former
work in the Stomotologichesky Polyclinic I had a chance that I will go
on an exchange for practice to other city for me it it was good and
not much not on myself because to go to other city on practice! I do
not have there friends or even I am simple girlfriends with which I
can to spend time and speak cheerfully about problems in mine to a new
life. But all has exchanged and on an exchange there has gone my
colleague which only not for a long time has come to us for work after
the termination of Medical university. But the desire to find the
acquaintance from other country at me remains on former. I thought of
a step as acquaintance to the person from other country much. Once
after work I have gone on foot because weather was fine and saw as
enamoured steams follow a hand and exchange gentle kisses. I do not
have not enough tenderness and the favourite person in the lives and
it to me became very clear after this walk. I like to walk sometimes
one alone with myself and to think about the lives. I could not find
the happiness in my city and till now is lonely. For myself I have
resolved to search for the love in other country. Especially I heard
much about that that people from other countries are more romantic and
are careful concerning relations with women, so to say they have a
spark in eyes! I am ready completely to this step and have bought
yours e-mail in International Dating Agency. To me have told that you
my friend very good lonely person with kind and open heart. I wish to
tell about myself directly that to me 28 years and my growth 168 see I
live to Russia, city Novochebocksarsk. In connection with that that in the
world financial crisis and few workplaces goes reduction. I have got
to reduction and I had to finish the work in hospital. Now I work in
Cafe-Bar. I wish to be happy life in the and I have serious sights at
this world. At me the big age and is a lot of experience behind
shoulders. I am confident that we can to find with you the general a
theme of conversation and to learn each other more. I hope to see
yours the letter my friend about your life. As I to place my foto with
the letter and some resume in a file. I very much would like to see
yours the letter and to have with you acquaintance. I would like to
see that we became good friends and not only.

If you are serious and interested in me please reply ONLY to my personal e-mail: nadejdakitten@gmail.com

P.S. My letter to you was sent by manager International Dating Agency
therefore write on my personals e-mail: nadejdakitten@gmail.com
Yours new friend
Nadejda.

There were even a photo and a resumé attached. The sad thing is, I have a strange feeling that the letter might actually be real—but I find it hard to believe that a “manager International Dating Agency” would be so clueless. Whatever the poor girl paid, she sure didn't get her money's worth.

A voice like sand and glue

2009-03-25T22:09:00.008+01:00

Well, that was a waste of money.

K and I went to see Bob Dylan play at Oslo Spektrum tonight. In one word: atrocious.

Let's start with the venue. I've had good and bad experiences with Oslo Spektrum, but mostly bad. I think the only times I really enjoyed being there were the opening show in 1990, and Jean-Michel Jarre (twice) in 1997. On the former occasion, I was small enough that the cramped seating didn't bother me; on the latter, I was too busy enjoying the music (except during the second concert, when I sat next to a guy who kept trying to talk to me).

Where was I? Oh yes, cramped seating. I came out of there with a limp and a pulled latissimus. Mind you, Oslo Spektrum is not the only venue I've walked out from with a limp—the front rows of Colosseum Kino, the world's largest and most uncomfortable THX cinema, are particularly bad.

Next on my list are the idiots who kept taking flash photos with their camera phones. Listen up, morons, it's not going to come out right. All you'll get is a really good shot of the back of the heads of the people in front of you, and the stage as a white blur in the background. You will also piss off everybody else in the audience (except for the other morons taking photos) and risk having your phone confiscated by the venue's security guards.

That wasn't the worst part, though. The worst part was the sound rig. Oh, and the music.

It is possible to get good sound in Oslo Spektrum. I had no complaints in that respect at Jarre's concerts. On the other hand, on both occasions (that I know of) where it was used as a movie theatre (Independence Day and the re-release of the original Star Wars trilogy), the sound was awful. Tonight was hardly better.

As far as I could tell, there were only two stacks, both suspended from the ceiling in front of the stage and sligtly angled away from the center. As bad as it was for me, I can't imagine what it must have been like for those seated on the sides of the hall.

How bad was it? Well, the bass was fine, but the mid-range was muddy, and the treble was, for lack of a better word, screeching. It was practically impossible to make out what Dylan was singing (or saying, when he introduced the band). Of the entire concert, the only words I heard properly were the last four words of the main set (“like a rolling stone”) and four words from the chorus of the last encore (“blowing in the wind”). Oh, and I think at one point he was saying “keep on raining” over and over again, but I'm not sure.

It reminded me a bit of the AC/DC concert last month (I was going to blog about that, but I got distracted), where I walked in while the warmup band was playing, and my immediate reaction was “oh, shit”. Luckily, AC/DC had a far better sound technician (and / or far better equipment), and the concert turned out great. I had no trouble at all making out the lyrics.

Anyway, back to Dylan. I haven't heard much of his recent work. In fact, I'm not sure I've heard anything he's done after he “went electric”. Still, Dylan is Dylan, and I was pretty sure I would enjoy the music. Boy, was I wrong. I didn't quite know what to expect, but I certainly didn't expect what I actually got: a loud honky-tonk band playing bad covers of classic Dylan songs. How bad? Well, I didn't even recognize Like a Rolling Stone or Blowing in the Wind until I caught those eight words. The latter was excruciating; imagine William Shatner's infamous cover of Rocket Man, but with a really loud backing band.

The rest of the audience (K included) seemed to enjoy themselves. There's no accounting for taste.

Oh, and Dylan managed to play through the entire concert, apart from the two or three songs where he came forward to play the guitar instead of the keyboard (which sounded like Casio's take on the Hammond organ), with his back to half the audience. I don't care if he's a living legend—that's just not right.

The evening wasn't a complete write-off, though—the restaurant we ate at before the concert was really good (and cheap, unlike the concert), parking was much cheaper than I expected, and as soon as I'm done typing this, I get to crawl into bed with my wife and four cats. Could be worse.

Weather &c

2009-02-10T00:32:00.006+01:00

It's been an interesting week. Quick replay of the last eight days:

Sunday

Off-road driving on a frozen field. Spent over an hour getting there because the directions I was given were out of date by about three years. Got to practice winter driving at unsafe speeds in borrowed RWD and FWD cars and my own AWD. Lot of fun, until something tore my left rear brake line. Got to ride home in tow truck.

Monday

Nothing to report.

Tuesday

Nothing to report.

Wednesday

Picked up the car at the shop. Tow truck driver told me it was within walking distance of the train station. Turns out “walking distance” means 3 km. In -8 °C.

Happy to be back at the wheel. Went to pick K up at work, ended up working there for a couple of hours, waiting for rush hour to pass.

Thursday

Consultation with otolaryngology specialist at newly-built regional hospital about constricted airways. CT scan showed nothing except slight septum deviation. Referring physician suggested conchaplasty. Visual inspection by specialist revealed conchahypertrophy. Was offered conchadiathermy instead of conchaplasty.

Hospital administration & assorted politicians claim hospital is the most modern in Europe. Meanwhile, doctors take notes on paper because computers don't work, & pneumatic tubes are constantly on the fritz.

Got a little too eager on the way home and slammed sideways into a snowbank. No damage except to snow.

Started snowing in the evening.

Friday

Still snowing.

Rear brakes froze overnight. Memo to self: do not set parking brake when parking in unheated garage during the winter.

Vibration at speeds over ~50 km/h. Stopped at gas station to clear snow from inside wheels. Vibration went away.

Usual Friday evening shift at the cat shelter. Pretty quiet for once, unlike last week.

Drove home. Forgot to not set parking brake.

Saturday

Still snowing.

Rear brakes frozen.

Went to IKEA with K. Parking lot not yet cleared; parked in deep snow. Had breakfast at the cafeteria. Picked up what we needed and made a clean getaway.

Drove home. Vibration at speeds over ~50 km/h. Made a long detour to heat up wheels and brakes. Vibration gradually faded. Weather made detour interesting, but not in a good way.

Back home, decided to clear accumulated snow off the car before it had a chance to turn to ice. While doing so, observed neighbors in assorted RWD and FWD vehicles fail to climb the slope up to the parking garage. Offered to tow them. Too proud to accept towing (“no, really, we're fine”), but not too proud to accept my directions & an occasional push.

Forgot to not set parking brake.

Walked over to some friends on the other side of the hill to play Runebound. Met snowplow on the way over. No use; snow falls faster than they can clear it.

Airport closed. Worried about K's forthcoming trip to Denmark.

Sunday

Still snowing.

Installed shelves in new cupboard. Sorted tools and assorted car parts and stowed them in said cupboard. K very happy about this.

Estimate average depth of snow in garden at ~1 m.

Groundskeepers break out snow blowers to clear snowbanks created by plows.

Monday

No longer snowing.

Airport open. K off to Denmark.

Rear brakes frozen. Noticed a bump backing out of the garage; driveway covered with ~20 cm of packed snow and ice, creating a curb across the exit from the garage.

Off to the hospital for conchadiathermy. Vibration at speeds over ~70 km/h (see, it's getting better). Road clear, so solved problem by alternately accelerating to ~80 km/h and braking hard down to ~40 km/h. Noticeable difference in traction between R163 and R159. Low sun in clear skies makes driving eastward very uncomfortable.

Surgery was quick but very unpleasant. The less said the better.

Drove home. Remembered to not set the parking brake. Watched neighbor in FWD car fail to get over curb and onto the driveway. Finally got out after much wheelspin. Should have approached at an angle.

Spent the rest of the day on the couch. Watched the entire first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ate chocolate chip ice cream.

The days of yore...

2009-01-30T13:04:00.003+01:00

...before September:

What really caught me up in stitches, though, was the bit from 5:03 to 5:10.

Why Scientists Shun the Media

2009-01-28T03:51:00.002+01:00

I picked this up from Ben Goldacre's Bad Science blog:

Coffee gives your children cancer, doctors didn't say today after not carrying out exhaustive research into the link that doesn't exist between caffeine and babies.

Read the full article; it's a deliciously spot-on parody of mass media's approach to science. Unfortunately, it's also based on a real newspaper article...

Om villedende reklame

2009-01-27T22:59:00.007+01:00

Etter å ha lest Gunnar Tjomlids omtale av Joralf Gjerstad, som jeg refererte til i forrige innlegg, forvillet jeg meg dypere inn i bloggen hans. Jeg leste med stor fornøyelse hans gjentatte angrep på villedende, endog ulovlig, markedsføring av kosttilskudd og alternativ medisin, herunder NuShape, Dermativo og VitaePro. Bra jobbet! Jeg har selv irritert meg over reklame for disse og lignende produkter, og ikke minst over hvor ofte slik reklame – som regel for geriatriske preparater – forekommer i Motor. De blir nok ikke kvitt herre-med-hatt-stempelet med det aller første.

Men det er ikke dette jeg skulle skrive om her. Det jeg skulle skrive om – inspirert av Tjomlids skriverier om den allstedsnærværende Dr Erling Thom – var disse TV-reklamene der en pen, ung, ulastelig antrukket kvinnelig tannlege eller sykepleier eller hva det måtte være, hvis navn og stillingsbeskrivelse oppgis nederst på skjermen, poserer i et lyst og smakfullt innredet tannlege- eller legekontor mens hun forteller om hvor fortreffelig det nyeste mirakelpreparatet er, og hvor viktig det er at du umiddelbart kaster deg over telefonen (eller PCen) og bestiller en hel pall.

Saken er den at jeg ved flere anledninger har forsøkt å finne disse personene ved hjelp av Google, Gule Sider, Telefonkatalogen og lignende oppslagsverk. Resultatet har alltid vært det samme: personen eksisterer ikke.

OK, jeg var kanskje litt rask. Jeg kan ikke med sikkerhet slutte at personen ikke eksisterer, men det jeg kan slutte, med rimelig stor sikkerhet, er at det i hele Norges rike ikke finnes noen, for eksempel, tannlege ved navn Kristine Stolpåmegnå. Du får meg ikke til å tro at det finnes praktiserende tannleger som hverken står oppført i Gule Sider eller lar seg oppspore på Google.

(selv det bittelille tannlegekontoret K og jeg bruker har egen nettside og kommer øverst i et Google-søk på “tannlege Etternavn”)

Og dersom det viser seg at hun eksisterer, og er tannlege, men ikke praktiserende, er det da ikke uredelig å fremstille henne som sådan i en reklamefilm? Og med hvilken autoritet kan en ikke-praktiserende tannlege uttale seg om et nytt mirakelpreparat?

For den saks skyld – med hvilken autoritet kan en hvilken som helst tannlege, praktiserende eller ei, uttale seg om et hvilket som helst preparat? Er vedkommende forsker? Har vedkommende gjennomført, eller deltatt i, en vitenskapelig studie av preparatet? Har vedkommende publisert en fagfellevurdert artikkel om denne studien i et anerkjent fagtidsskrift?

Uansett: hvis noen som leser dette kjenner en som har vært med i en slik reklame, og kan dokumentere at vedkommende virkelig er det hun utgis for å være og er kompetent til å uttale seg om det omtalte produktet, nøl for all del ikke med å ta kontakt.

Jeg venter med stor spenning.

Om selvbedrag og formidling

2009-01-27T21:03:00.006+01:00

[Jeg skrev dette som et leserbrev til Morgenbladet, som valgte å ikke trykke det. De syntes kanskje det var i overkant inflammatorisk. Uken etter trykket de derimot et innlegg av Per Brandtzæg (professor ved Laboratoriet for immunohistokjemi og immunopatologi, Institutt for patologi, Medisinsk fakultet, Universitetet i Oslo), Jo C. Bruusgaard (forsker ved Institutt for molekylær biovitenskap, Medisinsk fakultet, Universitetet i Oslo) og Kristian Gundersen (professor ved Institutt for molekylær biovitenskap, Medisinsk fakultet, Universitetet i Oslo) med stort sett samme budskap, minus koblingen til formidlingsproblematikken, og langt bedre skrevet.]

Dersom advokat Schiøtz' kunnskapsnivå og argumentasjonsevner er representative for advokatstanden forøvrig, er det er dårlig stelt med rettssikkerhet her i landet. Schiøtz spiller fallitt når han i den ene setningen viser til "et tresifret antall troverdige vitner", og i den neste hevder at Gjerstads evner ikke er vitenskapelig etterprøvbare. Sistnevnte må nødvendigvis forstås slik at Gjerstads håndspåleggelse ikke har noen observerbar effekt utover det hvem som helst kan oppnå med en rolig prat og litt medmenneskelighet, og da skulle det vel ikke være noe mer å snakke om?

Realiteten er at Gjerstad og hans tilhengere og forkjempere er bedragere. Det gjør ikke saken bedre om de bedrar seg selv like mye som de bedrar andre; de er like fullt bedragere, på lik linje med alskens spåkoner, astrologer, åndemedier, healere, homøopater og engleskolelærere, som også kan vise til "et tresifret antall troverdige vitner", deriblant minst én stortingsrepresentant (og hvem er vel mer troverdig enn en politiker?)

Man må allikevel le litt - om enn bittert og oppgitt - når det ellers så etterrettelige Morgenbladet vier en slik sjarlatan så mye spalteplass, samtidig som det i en tidligere utgave spør hvorfor norske forskere viser så liten vilje til formidling. Her er svaret i et nøtteskall: mediene er ikke interessert i vitenskap. Mediene er interessert i sensasjon. Det er her Gjerstads virkelige evner ligger: i å selge aviser.

[Forøvrig vil jeg anbefale Gunnar Tjomlids blogg der han skriver mye og bra om Gjerstad (Snåsamannen vil ikke testes, Snåsamannen - En koselig løgner) og annet paranormalt rask.]

Harsh!

2009-01-20T19:00:00.001+01:00

I wonder if Dubya realized he was being dissed.

Entropa

2009-01-19T12:10:00.005+01:00

Absolutely brilliant.

My favorite part is the following quote from Bulgarian journalist Georgi Gotev:

It is one thing portraying, say, France as a country on strike, but quite another to show my homeland as a toilet. That is downright wrong.

I can't wait for a French journalist to come out and say:

It is one thing portraying, say, Bulgaria as a toilet, but quite another to show my homeland as a country on strike. That is downright wrong.

Hook, line and sinker, Mr. Gotev!

(By the way, squat toilets are common in France as well)

Fire!

2009-01-18T13:46:00.004+01:00

The silver lining of influenza is that you get to lie on the couch and watch TV a lot, at least when your head is neither throbbing nor stuck in a bucket. K and I took this to heart and re-watched the entire extended edition of LotR, playing spot-the-Jackson-kids, say-the-lines-before-the-actors ("Fly, you fools!" is a perennial favorite), and many other fun games along the way.

I was somewhat disappointed when I saw the theatrical version, because it was, to put it simply, cut to pieces. It felt disconnected and slightly incoherent. The extended edition is much, much better. I am well aware of the many departures from the novel (having read it about five times in three different languages), but I also understand the reasons for them. Still, there are a few things that bother me, such as the use of Gimli and Pippin for comic relief. There are also some parts I wish they hadn't left out, such as the Scouring of the Shire (which obviously would have greatly increased both costs and running time) and the scene where Elrond's sons Elladan and Elrohir hand Aragorn the black banner Arwen made for him (which wouldn't; they could have let Haldir carry it). Finally, I think Jackson's love of monsters sometimes goes too far, especially in the Paths of the Dead sequence.

What really ticks me off, though, are the serious factual errors in the films' depiction of archery: the repeated use of the word “fire” instead of “loose”, and the fact that every single archer in the films, including Legolas and Aragorn, carry their bows strung at every time, instead of carrying the bow unstrung (to preserve its elasticity) and the string neatly rolled up, along with spares, in a waxed pouch (to keep them dry; wet bowstrings stretch, and break more easily). I don't get it—I'm sure they had plenty of archery experts on set who could, and should, have taught them better.

Nock! Draw! Aim! Loose!

No, really

2009-01-14T02:43:00.004+01:00

In support of my earlier claim that Java enums are subclassable, here is an example inspired by McGraw-Hill's SCJP 6 study guide:

public enum CoffeeSize {
    REGULAR(4), BIG(8), HUGE(12), OVERWHELMING(16) {
        public void drink() { super.drink(); System.out.println("barf"); } };
    private int oz;
    CoffeeSize(int oz) { this.oz = oz; }
    public void drink() { for (int n = 0; n < oz; ++n) System.out.println("glug"); }
    public static void main(String[] args) { CoffeeSize.OVERWHELMING.drink(); }
}

No, silly! It's an enum!

2009-01-13T16:55:00.002+01:00

Ah, to have been a fly on the wall when they designed Java 5. Imagine a meeting between three unnamed Java language designers:

JLD#1: OK, so, new language features for 5, what's next on our list? Anyone?
JLD#2: There's always enums.
JLD#3: Not enums again!
JLD#2: Well, they keep asking for it. It's getting pretty tiresome. Why don't we just give them enums, and be done with it? How hard can it be?
JLD#1: OK, let's consider enums for a minute. How do we do that?
JLD#3: How about we don't? We've already got public static final int.
JLD#1: Just let him talk, OK? We can argue about it later.
JLD#3: All right, whatever.
JLD#2: It's pretty simple, really. It's just syntactic sugar. Internally, we implement them as series of public static final ints, but we add code to the compiler that prevents you from assigning or comparing an enum instance with anything else than another instance of the same enum.
JLD#1: Well, that doesn't sound too bad to me. Any other ideas? Objections?
JLD#3: I really don't see what it buys us, but if it really is that simple...
JLD#1: OK, we have enough for today. I'll shop these around, and we meet again next week.
JLD#3: Any donuts left?

JLD#1: All right, picking up from last week. I've run our suggestions by management, and they're OK with most of them, except enums.
JLD#3: Told you...
JLD#2: Shut up and have a donut.
JLD#1: Good idea.
(munching)
JLD#2: Mmm, jelly.
JLD#1: Anyway, enums. Management feels they're too... simple. Not enough ROI.
JLD#3: I sure didn't see that one coming.
JLD#2: What do you mean not enough ROI? They're just enums! They'll take a week, max!
JLD#1: They won't consider a non-trivial language change unless it's good for at least a couple of pages in the manual and a dozen or so SCJP exam questions. Apparently, it helps sell books and recertifications.
JLD#2: So we scratch enums?
JLD#1: Well, it's either that, or make them more complicated.
JLD#2: More complicated?
JLD#3: They're enums for crying out loud!
JLD#2: OK...
JLD#1: Any suggestions?
(brief silence)
JLD#2: How about... we make an enum a non-instantiable, memberless, final class instead, and each possible value a static instance?
JLD#3: I don't see how that changes much.
JLD#1: I agree. If anything, it's actually easier to implement and use. I don't think management will buy it.
JLD#2: Hmm...
JLD#3: Pass me another donut.
JLD#1: Chocolate or strawberry?
JLD#3: You know me.
JLD#1: Strawberry it is, then. Mind if I have the last one?
JLD#3: By all means.
JLD#2: Pass me a brownie, will you?
(munching)
JLD#2: So how about... I mean... What if we let them have methods?
JLD#3: Methods?
JLD#1: Methods?
JLD#2: You know, methods. Say you have a Colors enum, and someone wants to know what PURPLE smells like?
JLD#3: (eyes brownies suspiciously) Uh-huh...
JLD#2: You'd need a Colors.getSmell() method, right?
JLD#1: I like it.
JLD#3: So an enum is a non-instantiable, memberless, final class with methods and instances...
JLD#2: And variables! There's not much point in having methods if you don't have instance variables. They'd all be the same.
JLD#1: Not necessarily. You could subclass them.
JLD#2: That'd be a little weird, having an enum that extends another enum...
JLD#1: Yeah, but you could just have anonymous inner subclasses.
JLD#2: That would really be overkill in simple cases.
JLD#1: So let's have both!
JLD#3: (stares in disbelief) Both?
JLD#2: Yes! Don't you see?
JLD#3: So an enum is... a non-instantiable, memberless, final class with subclasses, members and instances?
JLD#2: Yes!
JLD#1: Precisely!
JLD#3: But that's just a plain old class!
JLD#1: No, silly! It's an enum!
JLD#2: (giggles)

A rose by any other name

2008-12-11T20:35:00.009+01:00

K and I subscribe to Morgenbladet, a Norwegian weekly newspaper. The following is my translation of an excerpt from an article in the November 7 issue about political correctness and whether (and how) it hinders open debate.

We went out to the countryside. It snowed that day, and photographer and journalist waded through the snow to catch the first train out of town. It turned out to be the Gjøvik Line. We wanted to find out what words people really use [to describe people of color], and planned random samples on the way out. The first place we got off was Nittedal [actually the first stop outside Oslo on that line].

We stop a lady outside the store.

She says she “keeps mostly to herself”, and has no idea which words prevail in Nittedal.

“We use normal words, as if they were normal people. No slang. We don't call them anything.”

“If you were to tell someone that there's a guy over there, and he's dark-skinned, what would you say?”

“I can usually tell the difference between Pakistani and Somali and the like. In the beginning, I couldn't tell the difference, but I learned a lot from a Pakistani at work. But I don't use epithets, you know.”

“So what do you use?”

“Foreigner. Foreign extraction. Not svarting [derogatory form of svart, black] or sotrør [sooty, literally soot pipe] or the like. I've heard those words and I know about them, but I don't use them.”

“Sooty?”

“Sooty... There aren't that many of them here, but they're starting to come. But I don't really have a word for that. I try to concentrate on where they're from, and make the right guess. And perhaps talk to them a little. Once you get to know them, they're not so bad. But I just go to work, and then I go home, and then I watch TV, and then I go to bed. I'm not the kind of person who pays attention to what people say.”

We soon gave up on our research and waded back to the station, where we caught the train back to town. To summarize, no one in Nittedal uses derogatory terms themselves, but everybody's heard others use those words.

I swear I'm not making this up.

This charming lady is not named in the article, but there is a photo at the top of the page with the caption “[name withheld] says she's not the kind of person who pays attention to what people say”.

Katzenjammer

2008-11-24T13:44:00.007+01:00

Not exactly fresh, but I guess I needed a week or so to recover.

Saturday before last, K and I did something extremely out of character—not only did we go out (which rarely happens), not only did we go to a concert (I think the last time was Suzanne Vega in August of last year), but we went to see a band we'd never even heard of: Katzenjammer.

These four young women play an amazing variety of music, including such diverse genres as Western (Hey Ho, On The Devil's Back) and J-pop (Le Pop), on an amazing variety of instruments ranging from a plain old acoustic guitar through kazoos and biscuit tins to an awesome Cheshire-cat-themed bass balalaika (far left on the photo above). You can get a taste of their work on their MySpace page. They have a CD out, which you can buy on ITMS if you're not in Norway; unfortunately, it doesn't quite capture the crazy energy they display on stage.

Not sure how K liked them. They're not Depeche Mode. K is very into Depeche Mode.

Oh, and Leisha: thanks for dragging us there, but if my head explodes “while I listen to Le Pop”, I will come back and haunt you.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go sell tickets to a funeral so I can buy tickets to Katzenjammer.

2,600 years of progress

2008-11-11T12:53:00.011+01:00

I just finished The Dreaming Void, the first book in Peter F. Hamilton's Void Trilogy. Overall an excellent book, but I do have a nit to pick... a rather big one, in fact.

To provide some background: the Void Trilogy is set in the same continuity as Misspent Youth and the Commonwealth Saga, about 2,500 years after the former, 1,200 years after the latter, and close to 2,600 years after our time.

In this continuity, a person's mind and memories is continuously recorded in an implanted memory cell, which can be transplanted into a force-grown clone to either rejuvenate or resuscitate that person; as a consequence, some characters from the Commonwealth Saga are still alive at the time of the Void Trilogy. In addition, it is possible for a person to download the contents of their memory cell into a sort of digital hive mind called ANA. ANA is not homogeneous, however: it is split into a number of factions, the most important being the Accelerators and the Conservatives, and is led by a group called ANA:Governance.

One of the principal characters in The Dreaming Void is a physicist and amateur historian named Troblum. In the latter capacity, he is obsessed with the Starflyer War depicted in the Commonwealth Saga. In the former capacity, he is working on a personal project to recreate an incredibly powerful starship engine once used by an ancient alien race involved in the Starflyer War. He finances this (clearly very expensive) project by working on shady projects for the Accelerator faction.

Just short of completion, Troblum's project suffers a serious setback. Only hours later, an Accelerator agent arrives and promises Troblum sufficient funds to get the project back on its feet in exchange for Troblum's participation in a new Accelerator project. Troblum smells a rat and stalls for time. He discovers that his manufacturing plant was in fact sabotaged, and that the only person who had the opportunity to do so was an engineer he hired on the recommendation of the Accelerator faction. He manages to repair the damage and complete the project in record time. Shortly afterward, he discovers that the Accelerators' new project has crossed the line between “shady” and “completely illegal and immoral”. He decides to skip town and warn ANA:Governance.

Here's where Hamilton makes a complete ass of himself. Obviously, Troblum needs a secure link to ANA:Governance. The problem, Hamilton tells us, is that in order to set up an encrypted channel, you have to send a copy of the encryption key to the other party. If you can't meet them in person, the only way to do that is to split the key into fragments, send each fragment by a different route, and hope that nobody has sufficient resources to track them all down.

Needless to say, the Accelerators do have the resources, and are thus able to eavesdrop on Troblum's conversation with ANA:Governance. On the bright side, ANA:Governance are somehow able to detect that the Accelerator faction has obtained a copy of the key. As the book comes to a close, the Accelerators race to prevent Troblum from escaping from their base, only to discover that he has already done so.

I know that most (if not all) of the technology described in the book is completely improbable and in flagrant violation of the known laws of physics. I'm willing to overlook that because it's also incredibly cool, and that's what space opera is all about. What I can't overlook, however, is that over the course of 2,600 years, this incredibly advanced civilization, endowed with technology that is essentially indistinguishable from magic, has not only failed to develop equally advanced cryptographic mechanisms, but actually managed to forget everything we know today about cryptography, including such basic concepts as asymmetric cryptography and key-agreement protocols.

If only Troblum had been obsessed with the twentieth century instead of the twenty-fourth! He could have powered up his antique nineteen-nineties-era computer and sent ANA:Governance a PGP-encrypted email, instead of betting his life on security through obscurity.

New history

2008-10-09T05:20:00.002+02:00

I had my last day at Linpro last Tuesday (October 1st), and my first day at Systek last Wednesday.

Leaving Linpro was not an easy decision. On the one hand, I had some pretty good times at Linpro over the (almost) four years I worked there. On the other hand, almost all the people I joined Linpro to work with in the first place are long gone.

When you work on-site like I do, you don't get to meet your coworkers (or should I say co-employees) very often. You show up at a social function and find out that half the people there are complete strangers—and half the people who were there the last time have left—well... it gives you pause. Suddenly, switching employers doesn't seem like such a big change after all: you're surrounded by strangers either way.

So you go for the option that gives you more freedom and more responsibility (the inseparable twins). You go for the option where you won't have to suffer through the growing pains of a company that has doubled or tripled in size (you've lost track) since you started. You go for the option that puts you near the bottom, with a lot to learn, rather than near the top, with a lot to teach.

And you get ready to work your shiny metal ass off to climb back up that ladder.