Category: English

chkdsk considered harmful

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. Continue reading “chkdsk considered harmful”

Toys

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: Continue reading “Toys”

Haystack II

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!

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.