blog.sarlok.com

Am currently resisting the urge to install Sacrifice. A buddy of mine laughed when I said it was probably my favourite game of all time, dethroning the previous favourite of Anacreon.
I believe the conversation went something along the lines of... "I thought your favourite games only had text graphics!".
Come to think of it, George Moromisoto released Anacron 2.0 on his website a couple years back.
His other game Transcendence is also pretty epic actually. Think Nethack meets Star Control. A free play type world where you pilot a little ship, shoot pirates, raid wrecks and asteroids for better guns / armor, etc.
That said - Ignoring the fact that Anacreon, Nethack, and Dwarf Fortress all have ASCII graphics, Not all the games in my top 5 favourites are text/ASCII graphics only...
...Just most of them.

Hmm... spent 15 minutes with my tablet tonight. Grabbed Pixelmator last night to see what all the hubbub was about, and I have to say it is quite a good graphics editor.
Compared to my experience with Photochop, the tools seem to cater to my tablet extremely well. Now, if only I could get some skills to produce something that looks decent.
Oh-well. Side note, that sketch is slightly related to some crazy D&D idea I have in my head.

Have you ever had to deal with something so insanely stupid, that you just know it's going to ruin your week?
Then as time goes on, you realize that your previously-thought-to-be-over-apathetic assumptions were actually fairly conservative?
Thanks Alvarion, thanks a #$%*^)$ bunch. January 24th, and I'm already considering the year ruined.

It occurred to me today, that there has to be a better way of doing port ranges on non-asa, or non-pix type routers.
Ie;

And, here's what I came up with after a bit of screwing around:

So ssh'ing to a BSD qemu host on 172.16.0.21 with sshd listening on a few dozen ports, and whammo - seems to work just fine, and that config looks so much nicer.
I don't see why UDP wouldn't work either, and you could presumably just add more fine-grained stuff to the ACL instead of a hojillion separate ip nat translation inside source static tcp <host> <port> interface <foobar> statements.
AND, you get to put remarks in an ACL. Joy of Joys!

In doing this, I also learned that enabling NAT on a 3725 in GNS is a bad plan when your router only has 128 megs of Ram. Though the fireworks display is impressive, it's not pleasant at the same time.

Horosho!

Lightning trip to Prince George and back today.
<RANT>
In my mind, it seems that waiting for snow and ice to melt off the highway, or hoping it will go away by driving over it with snow-plows with their blades up are not the most effective approaches.
Though in most cases, I did prefer the 6 and a half-some centimetres of snow over the 20km of polished ice sheet-come-washboard.
Naturally, there were retards everywhere, paying no heed to the travel advisory. I suppose I should be one to talk... I was out there among them, though I refrained from passing someone on a 2-lane bridge, in a construction zone, in said road conditions.
I've also learned that the Tilden National bumper-sticker is not actually an advertisement for some rent-a-car service. Oh, heavens no.
It's actually a warning to others that implies:

"Holy crap! Lookout! The occupants of this vehicle are morons! They will pull out in front of you and proceed to do 30km in a 100km zone in the middle of both lanes!"

Oh-well. I'm not annoyed. And I certainly wasn't hoping the person that passed me on that bridge would crash horribly through the barrier between him and the Fraser River below.
Grrrrrr.....
</RANT>

So, for some reason I haven't quite worked I'm re-taking Math 10, 11, and probably after, 12. It's strangely comforting to spend a few hours doing maths. I figure it must have something to do with the fact that the numbers don't lie. A flawless logic that can't be argued with.
I must say, It has taught me that my mind has immense difficulty comprehending the frigging mertic system of all things. It seems I think in Kilometers, meters, inches, and feet, and there's no real in-between.

I managed to track down some revision of my assorted programs of old. On one of the many old hard-drives I jammed into a box, in a box, under some boxes long ago.
Funny, I seem to recall the programs were larger than 200-ish lines, though they may have been before I got frustrated with passing a couple-hundred variables and pointers between functions, and re-wrote everything from scratch using a data:class.
Heheh.... rioting ascii peasants. Awesome.
Rambling aside, this find sent me on the search for a somewhat decent C/C++ IDE. It seems the one I used to use from bloodshed doesn't have a port for OSX, so naturally - that was out.
For some reason, I nabbed Coda, which is actually not in any way shape or form, an IDE for C or C++.
It seems to be nothing short of amazing for web authoring though. It's the first thing I've seen with all the nifty element inspection, timeline, profiling, resource information, et al; that you get with google chrome, except - you can edit it, turn on/off chunks of CSS to view differences in real-time pre-edit... the list does go on.
I fixed up the main page templates, and Image Gallery in very short order while taking it for a test drive.
All a fixed width now, and there's 3 columns for the images on the gallery now - which are also more evenly centred.
I must say, I am suitably impressed... though strangely, I still prefer Espresso for what little Java I have to deal with. I guess that's what you get for specializing at something.

Incidentally, I figure this song would be friggin' awesome to play in Rock Band.

No posts for a while. Just felt like doing this one out of no-where.

My new years resolution is 1440 x 900!
*ba-dum, psssssh*

It had to be done. Now I can never do it again. Hoorah!

In other news, got to waste a half-hour on Dwarf Fortress today.
I simply cannot believe how much money the developers get from the community of players and such to work on it full time. Not that is by any means a bad thing, just leaves my jaw agape.
Happy new year Tarn & Zach!

That said, I am often tempted to dust off my long-lost programming skills and make something cool.
I even had an ideas scratchpad somewhere. It was close to 8 pages long with close to two-dozen projects some of which were even started - the code for which, long since formatted away or lost.
Much like the scratchpad actually... I wonder where on earth that wound up.
But then, this is a subtle reminder of why I probably stopped.
Mind you, I'm constantly muttering about how irritating it is that snmpd(8) won't take something from stdin or some such and bind it to an oid... hmm... maybe... just maybe...

Threw together a diagram to illustrate the experiment I got to put together a while back.
Though, I'm not sure it really helps, but it may make it easier for some to visualize what's going on, especially those whom I've tried to explain it in person to previously.
Though, I doubt any of the afore-mentioned visit my blog, so in that case, OOO!!!! PRETTY COLOURS!

I'm pretty sure I'm missing something in the MSS, and MTU calculations, but meh... close enough for the sake of the point I was trying to make.

Ran into a really interesting problem with qmail today. Really interesting in that it's absolutely random, and I've not seen it happen with either of my previous builds.
Even more interesting in that it's still outstanding, and doesn't make a lot of sense currently.

Checking to see if qmail-queue is just on drugs, or if it is indeed having permission problems...

My head implodes about 5 lines after the output of /var/log/qmail/current. Wonder what on earth is going on there...
rebuilding the queue, q-mail binaries, qmail users/groups and or configs from scratch doesn't seem to help either. *boggle*

<edit>
HA! found my qmail problem.

nosuid, you silly, silly thing you. Who put you there? I can only wonder...
</edit>

Oh, and awesome song is awesome.

You know, I was just thinking 'It's about time Bethesda did something about The Elder Scrolls V', and then found this was announced yesterday.

<edit>Deleted busted external video link for Skyrim.</edit>

I'm almost as excited as I was when I realized Fallout wouldn't disappear in a puff of logic when Interplay announced they were going under.
11/11/11 is an awesome release date, except that's as near as makes no difference another year away. Curse you Bethesda! Curse you!

That's all I have to say currently... bigger / more interesting post in the works.

Actually, one more quick thing... Safri Duo has a new album out. About frigging time.
Their tradition of weird videos seems to continue though.

Enthusiasm for work is at an all time low... Just in time for the holiday season!

Had some time to experiment with Drupal6. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see that it's infinitely better than 5, and the code's even easier to follow than before (not that 5 was all that tricky to begin with).
I may get around to doing that upgrade.

Hmm...

So, google offered me a job a couple of weeks back. I was kinda surprised to see them come out of no-where with a 'Hey, wanna work for us?'.
Nice folks, their recruiter seemed like a particularly nice lady.
Not too sure what to make of it at this stage... but I don't really feel like moving to Europe or America, so I declined politely for the time being.

Other than that, there's very little to report on since my last post.

Oh, I suppose there is one thing;
I've watched this, like, three times start to finish. I think it re-defines 'on the fly'. And for some reason I don't quite understand, I find it funnier than I probably should.

It's been one of those weeks.

I was completely and utterly floored by a problem at work today.
To summarize very quickly, the northbound of two routers was proxying it's MAC for that of our dhcp server, killing the effective relay of packets.
This wouldn't seem so weird, except the north & south-bound interfaces on said border routers weren't in the subnet of the dhcp server. But there it was, clear as day, an incorrect arp entry where they should have been none in the first place.
Come to think of it, it's quite difficult to explain without talking in circles. Ahwell, I may give it another try later when it's not half-past midnight.
New 4.8 flashboot in the works. A few minor compiling issues encountered so far... this will probably wind up being the funnest build yet.
Thinking of re-installing the comment module with some captcha goodness. Having used drupal 6 on another project, I've pretty much convinced myself to upgrade to that as well.
Ho-hum. Another page of content in the works. Probably have it linked up in the next few days - depending on how creative I'm feeling between now and then. Another one of those 'of little, to no sense' to most, but oh-well. We'll just have to see I suppose.

PUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDI
PUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDIPUDDI
Disclaimer: May be the most irritating thing you hear this year.
Fortunately, it's almost over. :P

This, however, may be the least irritating thing you hear this year.

Got back into town from Tabor yesterday by 5:15pm.
We blew an hour and a half chaining the van, and then shovelling 25 yards of snow with 2-gallon tupper-ware containers. I was genuinely thankful to have had access said containers - the last time I was stuck in the middle of no-where with no shovel, my best candidate for improvisation was a 1" pipe bender. Fun!

Spent some time today cleaning up the rules and stuff on my server's firewall. Not sure why, I would have been better spent building a 4.8 flashboot image. Oh-well...
This may be of interest to someone I know, as I was feeling particularly lazy after editing a few files.
Clearly, I'm abusing the fact that I know my template's fstab mounts /flash automagically. Remember I said I was feeling lazy?

In other news, you're now seeing things served up from memnarch rather than scrollrack.
The htdocs and such have been shuffled over to manacrypt, the nfs store now that I'm done benching and testing it.
That said, new images in the gallery. A whopping four for now, but they were closest to the open path I had in my shell.

An upgrade for scrollrack from 4.7 to 4.8's on the horizon, shutdown httpd, et al and then we'll see what kind of state things are in.
Probably setup some sql database replication next, as well as move the database process to manacrypt also.

It's a shame that you can't get omnigraffle for windows machines. If I could use it at work instead of Visio, I would otherwise be elated.
That said, I love, and hate Omnigraffle. Simply because it's giving me a bad case of mac-itis, where none of the visio shortcuts hard-wired into my mind work. That aside, it's infinitely better.

Coming at you loud and clear from atop Tabor Mountain.
Not exactly how I planned spending my day off, but meh... This should come as no surprise to those that know me.
For 4/5th's of the drive up, the problem I was sent off to fix persisted. 30 minutes from the top of the mountain however, It's fixed.
The difference? -16°c (less wind-chill), instead of -23°c. Great.
So, staring at the base station humming away. Threw some better strain-relief on the IF cables for kicks.
Oh-well, I'm not the one that has to climb the tower (this time anyway...), so swap hardware we must.
Cheaper in the long run to assume tower hardware failure than come back assuming 'It'll probably be okay...' only to drive up a second time.
Also considering it's a miracle we were able to drive up in the first place. Bad winter mountain roads are bad.

Hmm. I was secretly hoping that the problem would come back for me to diagnose while I was writing up to this point. No such luck.

While I'm thinking about it, sitrep for fluctuator after blowing that 5v rail.

DVD-Drive, works.
USB Ports, though devices look to be powered somewhat, are toast.

I do believe I hear mine co-worker returning with the tower gear.
That's my queue to depart for now.

Toodles

My cat's sleeping on my desk next to me right now, using my spindle of driver CD's as a pillow.
It looks to be one of the most un-comfortable positions he could have possibly adopted given the number of nearby, infinitely-more-squishy-than-CD-like objects he could otherwise have used.
Not surprisingly, he doesn't seem to mind at all.

Ho-hum.
Thursday... Yeah. Not really sure what to make of this week.

Was doing some work in the town where all our Carrier-WAN services terminate, and then hop onto the internet at large.
Figured seeing as I was there, I'd swap the NPE in one of our 7200 routers which was over-due for an upgrade, save our other sysadmin some time.
Wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting it to be. Since migrating all the OSPF areas into one gigantic area 0 backbone (for various amusing reasons, chief among which were non-contiguous areas), the resulting outage of 15 seconds was hardly painful. Was kinda neat to see paths re-converge on the already balancing alternate router.
Naturally, the day following, my 'What did I miss?'-o-meter was nagging me. Waiting... patiently... to strike at the opportune moment. Fortunately, it's moment never came.

However, there was a minor power failure in the co-lo from where fluctuator spends it's days serving up it's vast bounty of useless information to literally tens of users.
Amidst the chaos, what I initially assumed to a PSU failure alarm in the chassis, is actually an alarm for the 5v on the system board.
Well, balls... Guess I'm calling Dell tomorrow... What was briefly 'Redundant PSU's, no problem!' is suddenly a little more irritating.
Oh-well, that's just how it goes I guess. Maybe they can tell me where those rack rails I asked for got to while I'm at it.

Hmm. I forgot how much I enjoy driving at night during the winter.
Clear sky, almost completely full moon, fresh snowfall, music just loud enough to drown out the sound of the studded tyre-roar.
The cataclysmic state of the roads also ensured a quiet drive - only a half-dozen or so vehicles the whole way.

Tired sarlok, is tired. In many more ways than one.
Not sure why, but think I finally came to this realization sometime tonight.

Toodles.

Fast nfs is fast.

~270mbit/sec should do just nicely.

VMware ESXi continues to amaze me. Nevermind I've probably thrown a lot of my security boons out the window by using it as a base for my OpenBSD guest machines, but I suppose it is just a sandbox.

Anyhoo... OpenBSD 4.8's full of good stuff. NFS is miles better (though a pain in the arse to setup if you're last attempt was at around 4.4).
Reminder: setup: mountd, portmap, and then nfsd.
I shoulda just read the frigging FAQ sooner... heh. That'll teach me.

So, need to re-build memnarch, setup php-gd and all that other goodness to get my image import working again.
Maybe upgrade to Drupal 6 from 5, though I doubt it.
Play with ubercart once that's done.

dspam is officially trained enough to be working. Small problem when you're testing it on an account that typically only gets 2-3 spam's /week, tends to take a while to get it happy.

It's too bad I didn't get some time to do a halloween costume.
I so would have gone as Hello Kitty in an Elmo suit, because it's so deliciously random.