» 2003 » December

Article posted on Dec 29

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 29, 2003, 11:59 am

I feel slightly ill. I just paid $66 for a 6-year-old trackball. But let me give you some history before I explain myself.

In 1998, Logitech created the world's most perfect trackball: the TrackMan Marble+. A thing of beauty... The layout was so natural, the optical contacts can go months without cleaning, there aren't 25 mouse buttons, the trackball is the perfect size, one finger is responsible for each of the buttons and trackball itself (which makes it great for FPS games, as far as trackballs go), and it's durable. Truly, this is the trackball God would use, if He weren't a Mac user.

But Logitech had a problem: since they just created the world's most perfect trackball, they have nowhere to go but down. So they only made 6 of them before discontinuing the line, and went on to create mediocre trackballs along with the rest of the world. I was lucky enough to purchase one, the other 5 were buried in Utah. In 2001, a farmer happened upon them and sold them. They appear on eBay from time to time since then.

Anyways, last night I was explaining the virtues of my TrackMan, when I made a grave realization: I've had this trackball for 5 years. It will probably die someday. What happens then? I'll have to suffer with an inferior piece of crap! So I hopped on ebay to try to find a backup.

Yes, it feels weird paying $74 after shipping for a trackball that retailed for $30 new. But when you love something more than life itself, it's a drop in the bucket.

Now excuse me while I finish my TrackMan Marble+ shrine.

• 2 Comments
• Posted in Uncategorized
• This post was imported from LiveJournal.

Article posted on Dec 26

Sysadmin blunder of the day

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 26, 2003, 11:12 pm

If you are doing authentication with ldap, never put ldap in your 'hosts' nsswitch.conf entry. Why? Because then gethostbyname() will call libldap to resolve a host, and libldap will call gethostbyname() to get the address of the ldap server.

Now, the documentation in nsswitch.conf even mentions this, but recommends putting ldap after files/dns (which I did). So as long as the ldap server is up, there shouldn't be a problem. But there's one tiny problem with that. Several services that run before network services are started (most notably sysklogd) call gethostbyname(). And since the ldap server is not available at the moment, libldap and libc get into a nice little infinite loop, eventually ending as a segfault.

On a related note, anybody want to see a gdb backtrace with >10,000 steps? :)

• Leave Comment
• Posted in Uncategorized
• This post was imported from LiveJournal.

Article posted on Dec 21

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 21, 2003, 11:41 pm

Every once in awhile I'm in the car, and I think of something that I want to write in my livejournal. But I never actually feel like writing it.

So rest assured, if I weren't so lazy, there would be something incredibly insightful here.

Oh, but I will say this.... Here's a date: 05/08/2003. Now, what month is that?

Please, everyone, stop using your back-ass numerical data formats, and switch to a format like 2003-01-02. That is clearly January 2, 2003. Why? Because no culture uses the format YYYY-DD-MM.

YYYY-MM-DD is the way of the future.

• 6 Comments
• Posted in Uncategorized
• This post was imported from LiveJournal.

Article posted on Dec 19

ARGH!

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 19, 2003, 4:08 pm

Not verbatim:

Damn liberals. Persecuting me just because my political views of killing orphans and robbing banks are "different"...

This is going to kill me. What movie is this from?

• Leave Comment
• Posted in Uncategorized
• This post was imported from LiveJournal.

Article posted on Dec 17

A perfect end to a perfect day

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 17, 2003, 2:13 am

Mind you, this is on a ramdisk:

cdimage root # dd if=/dev/urandom of=1 bs=1024k count=25
25+0 records in
25+0 records out
cdimage root # cp 1 2
cdimage root # cp 1 3
...
cdimage root # cp 1 17
cdimage root # md5sum *
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 1
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 10
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 11
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 12
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 13
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 14
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 15
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 16
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 17
415abce8a7600357ff423b3ee9830134 2
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 3
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 4
31a9d8f1fe734bd17b50ba1d70449a8c 5
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 6
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 7
9a15793e5796b4cd82a02d03d4b1e783 8
fd97a1710cdfce79600e4f651bf31273 9

• 2 Comments
• Posted in Uncategorized
• This post was imported from LiveJournal.

Article posted on Dec 14

No Title

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 14, 2003, 3:47 am

I've been sleeping off-and-on during the day, which has resulted in being wide awake at 4AM.

And coughing. A lot.

Saddam Husein seem to have been captured. Appearantly, he was in the middle of making a porn video when he was captured. Or maybe not.

• 3 Comments
• Posted in Uncategorized
• This post was imported from LiveJournal.

Article posted on Dec 11

bleh

• Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 11, 2003, 9:19 pm

I've been sick ever since the rlug christmas party on tuesday. You know that feeling when you've been up for 30 hours or so? I'm like that all the time.

About a half hour ago, I did my rounds, emptying about 20 gallons of sewage-grade liquid that has been leaking from the roof. Here's the normal routine for the past year:

1) It rains or snows. Granted, doesn't happen to often in nevada, but still...
2) About 18 hours later, water starts leaking from about half a dozen known locations throughout the house, both upstairs and downstairs (which signifies that the problem is pretty damn bad, seeping between the walls), though this time a new front broke through about 3 feet away from my computers.
3) I break out the tupperware tubs (believe me, pots and pans would last for an hour at maximum).
4) The next day, I bitch at the landlord. She sends a guy over that looks up and says "yeah, this is a problem".
5) Interestingly enough, nothing happens next. For some reason, I continue to give them $875 each month for this service.

But no more. It's been swell, but the swelling's gone down. Moving boxes have been dug out of the closet, and an apartment ad sheet shall soon be in my hands.

• 8 Comments
• Posted in Uncategorized
• This post was imported from LiveJournal.