Hacking for fun and profit

This is one of my favorite (very) short stories:

Dwar Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe - ninety-six billion planets - into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment’s silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honour of asking the first questions is yours, Dwar Reyn.”

“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God ?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

“Yes, now there is a god.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch. A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

‘Answer’ by Fredric Brown.
©1954, Angels and Spaceships

Hi computer!

Previously.

People that know me personally know that I LOVE my keyboards.

No really, I love them.

I even wrote about them two years ago: IBM Model M - The One True Keyboard.

These keyboards are a triumph of technology. Future generations will talk about Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, the Great Pyramid of Gizah, and the IBM Model M Keyboard. These keyboards are the epitome of human civilization.

Really, they are that good.

I have more than 10 Model M keyboards now, and before you ask: NO, they are not for sale, and NO, I will not give you one. Some day I will die, and my son will inherit the keyboards. Since every single modern keyboard is a piece of utter crap, I want my son to hack with some style.

But now I see another advantage of using a Model-M, you can kill an attacker with it, and it will still work.

Two scientists, Paul Honig and Anne Jan Brouwer, made this discovery replacing an attacker’s head with, well, watermelons.

Not only that, they also discovered that you can defeat an attacker if he uses a lesser keyboard as a weapon.

The IBM Model-M IS mightier than the sword.

Read more in Keyboard Carnage (digg).

There has been some adoption of free software lately at my current job. I’m not talking about the servers running apache, postgresql, samba, postfix, squid, etc. I’m talking about free software in everybody’s computer. Note that everybody (but me) is still using Windows, but hopefully once they all use free software a migration to Linux will be painless, since people use applications and not operating systems.

The first free software application used around was the most obvious: Firefox. It started by word of mouth. It is faster, safer, smaller, it blocks popups. People love it. Not everybody is using it but still, it’s an spontaneous move, nobody is forcing them to do it (there was a squid rule for a couple of users with lots of spyware problems that forced them to use firefox, but it’s gone now).

Now the second move was an official one: OpenOffice.org. This is the BIG money saver. Microsoft Office costs A LOT of money, and most people just use Outlook and the most basic features of Word. Excel is used mostly to store lists of stuff, not as a spreadsheet.
Management gave me the freedom to prepare an OpenOffice migration. And it has been a success. Right now almost half of the people around here is using OpenOffice instead of Microsoft Office. Note that I installed the 2.0 beta. It has an excelent quality, is VERY stable, and the users love it (once they get used to the fact that it takes longer than MS Office to load). Disabling Java and tweaking the memory settings helps A LOT.
In the first days I gave a “migration talk”, I prepared some case uses and everybody noted that the way oo.org works is very similar to MS office. What I didn’t expect was a general concern: How to setup keyboard shorcut keys. I was in trouble, I didn’t know how to do that. So I was honest and I told them the truth, that I didn’t know how to do that but we can use the search feature in the help system and we immediatly found what we were looking. Props to the OpenOffice.org documentation project for this, it saved my day.
Real non-geek-final-users are using oo.org here. It is an excelent product.

But there is something that Microsoft Office has that OpenOffice.org doesn’t: Outlook. Final users love that buggy piece of crap. Sysadmins and helpdesk people hate it. I hate it. It’s buggy, sometimes it refuses to work and it has a lousy security record. I want it (and Internet “explorer”) outside my nework. But I just can’t say “don’t use outlook anymore”, I must come up with an alternative. At the time I was using Evolution to test the “linux-final-user experience” (I am a disciple of the mutt order). But evo has a serious problem: it doesn’t run on windows (at least not yet). So I had two choices, both from mozilla: Thunderbird and the Mozilla suite (codename seamonkey). I tested both in my debian workstation and allthough I really liked thunderbird, I fell in love (again) with the Mozilla suite. I loved the integration of his parts: a (mature) web browser, a (mature) mail/news client, an excelent html editor, and a calendar application. It is every sysadmin’s dream for his users. But I chose Thunderbird instead because:

• Mozilla is devoting all it’s efforts in the “birds-suite” : firefox, thunderbird, sunbird (firefox used to be a bird: phoenix/firebird). And now it is official, the mozilla suite won’t have a new release. The birds suite is the way to go.
• Outlook stores all it’s junk in .pst files. Both Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail can import .pst files, but only Thunderbird could import the attachments of the messages. We have a winner.

And of course, Thunderbird is the tool of choice if you have spam problems (and who doesn’t). It has a built-in bayesian filter that WORKS(tm).

On the server side, FreeBSD is taking over the server room. But this belongs to another post…

An extension for Mozilla Firefox to see the google pagerank of the active tab: pagerankstatus (install)

Finally. I am the proud owner of, not one, but two IBM Model-M keyboards.

I wanted one of these keyboards for years. It was the first keyboard I used, back when I was 7 years old and I was learning Basic in an institute (I think it was 1988), and since then I always wanted a Model M.

This month, Manuel got me my first Model M keyboard. The problem is, he lives in New Orleans, and I live in Lima. But since Benji was in the States, and he visited Manuel, he would bring the keyboard to me. Sadly, the model-m is damn heavy (2kg), and Benji had to leave it in his house.

Today I went to a street called Paruro with Nestor. Paruro is the place where all the old and useless hardware in Lima goes. And I mean really old hardware, XTs, VESA bus stuff, really old hard drives, incredibly old SCSI controllers, etc. It is possibly the only place where I could find a Model M. I found TWO. And I bougth them both, for only $3!

Right now I’m using this one:

And the other is the one true version of the happy hacking keyboard, this one:

Sadly, the second keyboard is missing the cable, I’ll have to get it somewhere, but the black one is in perfect conditions.

If you want to identify a real model-m, read this page.

Ahhh, the sound of the keys when I press them is just beautiful!

Another post after a loooong time. I’m back from Ilo where I gave a talk. This week I’ll be in the UNMSM where I’ll have talks almost daily (actually daily), so I’ll be quite busy.

On the userland side, I am no longer a gmail user. At least not for what I used it for: mailing lists. It sucks at that. I’m back with my good ole mutt (the one true mail reader) and Evolution for my job’s intermal email. (Yes Rudy, you were RIGHT).

Here is a pic of me with Rudy in Ilo, SuperDebian and the next DD debianizing the evangelizers :-)

In my previous post I forgot to mention the Linux Networking Day. It was a nice event with some interesting presentations (pics).

Also, this tuesday we celebrated breno’s birthday, with most of the members of PlanetChicha you can see the pics here and the funny comments here.

I scanned my interview in PCWorld Peru. You can see it here, and a preview:

BTW, I don’t work in Americatel anymore. But I would like to thank them for the nice experience.

I’m happy to announce that I got a new job at the Lima Chamber of Commerce (Camara de Comercio de Lima). So, again, the motto of this blog (trapped in the NOC) must change (again). Suggestions are welcome.

Also, I’m now a (happy?) gnome user. I still miss some things from fluxbox like EXTREME key-binding to launch apps and shells and do everything, and silly things like using the mouse scroll in the desktop to switch workspaces. If I can’t find a way to do that, I’ll have to hack gnome :-) (I switched to gnome because I want to be a gnome hacker anyway).

OTOH, my migration to GNU/Emacs was a total failure. I am one with vim. Maybe I’ll try again in the future.

And something unexpected, I’m using Evolution instead of mutt for the Chamber’s corporate email. It’s something very, very different but it is very useful, even for minimalistic freaks like myself.

oh, and I got a haircut <o/

I had an interview today for PCWorld Peru. They are preparing a special about developers in free software platforms and I was interviewed for my work in Americatel Peru. It was a very nice interview, but my secret identity was discovered, SuperDebian:

Thanks Christian for the interview, and thanks Victor for allowing this to happen :-)

(and yes, I need a haircut)

Yesterday, Marcelo Branco closed CONEIS with an excelent talk about Free Software and his experiences in Brazil. It is amazing how everything is going in Brazil, I hope someday we can do the same in Peru. I think this was the best talk of the entire event and the students loved it, EVERYBODY wanted a pic with Marcelo.

After that, we went to the backstage and we had a nice conversation with Marcelo and Enrique Chaparro about free software and its use in the government and in the military, and of course about debian :-). Marcelo was quite impressed by the amount of people in CONEIS, he said that it was the second biggest free software event he has ever seen. Note that CONEIS wasn’t officially a free software event, but we turned it into one ;-)

Then we moved back to the auditorium for the final ceremony and the election of the university that will host the next Coneis. The next Coneis will be in the city of Tarapoto, in the middle of the peruvian jungle. I said to Marcelo that next year we’ll meet again in the jungle, and he said “I hope they call me”. What a great guy :-)

Overall it was a very good congress. It had some disorganization but mainly because the students of San Marcos were completly alone in the organization of this BIG event. I would like to thank Jorge and Katia for their great support, and for working so hard.

Se you at the next Coneis :-)

I heard a great talk from Enrique Chaparro about security (he recommended python as a first language) and Lluis Sanchez about mono and monodevelop. Later I had a nice conversation with Lluis about the future of mono and gnome.

Later in the night I heard Richard Stallman’s conference about copyrights.

Today I finally gave my python talk with a nice audience>. Now I’m waiting for the meeting with the students that want to form free software groups or LUGs in their universities :-)

CONEIS stands for National Congress of System Engineer Students in Peru. I’ll give a Python talk this friday and I am also one of the hosts in the stand of the Peruvian Association of Free Software. Yesterday I met Alvaro Lopez, he gave a presentation about cherokee, a light and fast web server. I was very impressed and I’ll give it a look as soon as I can. In the night I met Rodolfo Pilas from Linux Uruguay, and later Diego Saravia from SOLAR. Later, Ernesto, Rudy and I had a nice dinner with Diego, and we talked about the possibility of working together as associations (APESOL and SOLAR).

Today in the morning I heard Rodolfo’s excelent talk about the Free Software’s Business Model. You can see some of his talks and conferences here.

I always try to do the Right Thing ™, specially when the thing in question is job related. That is why I can’t understand how some people can take their work so lightly.
I’ve had a very, very bad time because a postgresql database collapsed, the reason being that the SCSI drive where the data resides had 0 bytes free left. I must admit that I didn’t know the internals of the custom-made-tomcat+postgresql-based-system in that server, so my approach was rather cautious. On closer examination of the box and after reading the “documentation” of the system in mention and the shell scripts written by the same author (those systems were deployed long before my arrival), I could notice that:

• The database had no VACUUMs in 2 years (broken scripts)
• The “cleaning up” of old unused data didn’t work (broken DELETEs)
• The backup procedure was idiotic: backup everything to a file, then copy that file to tape
• Since the database was HUGE (70GB), even a compressed backup would be a lot larger than the 2GB ext3 file size limit for files (see previous point). In fact, I could see the previous backups stored in /backup, and all were of the same size (2147483647 bytes). All the backups were broken and useless.
• Worst of everything, the design of the tables in the database was completly childish. There was one HUGE table with everything stored in there. There was no normalization (there should be death penalty for people that do that in a production server). Because of this, the application is very SLOW.

I also noticed that the custom-system is very poorly written. For example, after a Java procedure to insert data to the database, the user must READ THE LOG FILES and search for Java exceptions to MANUALLY insert the missing data in another table. This guy didn’t even know how to catch exceptions. I’ve seen his code in C, PHP, Java and shell, and it amazes me how somebody can be a bad coder in so many languages. I’m not talking about style here, but doing the Wrong Thing all the time.

At least the system in mention looks pretty, and that’s what managers will look at anyway. That guy, as a programmer, is an excelent graphic designer.

Oh, and the server is up and running again, I rewrote the backup procedures and I’ll replace that crappy system as soon as I can.

I just upgraded to fluxbox 0.9 (it’s now in debian unstable) and sadly it’s kinda bloated and slow, at least compared with fluxbox 0.1 (the current “stable” version of fluxbox).
I’ll give it some time, but I’ll probably move back to good old fvwm.

I updated my fluxbox keys file so it works with fluxbox 0.9. Try it.

You can see a screenshot here.

It was two weeks ago and it has been already covered by APESOL SlayerX and jgwong. It was a nice experience and all. I was kinda sad the day I left Lima because it was father’s day, my _first_ father’s day, at least Rita (my wife) and Alex (my son) were with me at the bus station.

I gave a Python talk and an improvised two hours talk about linux use in business and in the desktop. Here is a pic of my python talk:

I also gave a demonstration of a great patch for redhat, it’s called debian:

You can find more pics in apesol. \o/

In the line of bloat-free linux enviroments, here is my ~./fluxbox/keys file.

Enjoy.

I’ve been very busy the last few weeks in a big project in Americatel. There is a new phone switching system and I wrote all the billing software (the software that calculates how much money the company will get), in Python. I already used python extensively in hell week (an ISP migration project), but this is a lot bigger, and everything is working perfectly so far. I’ll also be rewriting the (slow) internal systems here, that are a wacky mixture of php and (ugh, slow!) jsp, into python. This will mean a lot of work, so I’ll be busy for a few months :-)

There has been a lot of things going on since I updated the blog for the last time.

I don’t work in the bank anymore. My friends made a goodbye toast for me. It was a very nice moment and I’ll miss them all a lot. In the night we went out for some drinks.

March 23th was my first day in Americatel Peru. I started in a win98 box (argh), but now I’m in a Debian/Unstable box in a Pentium4 with a 21″ screen. I named it elysium (my home box is valhalla).

On the community side, I made some hacks to Planetchicha and It will be soon out of beta. I’m also the new coordinator of the technical group that will implement a peruvian national encyclopedia for the Plan Huascaran project. More info about this in the Peruvian Association of Free Software.

It’s bzflag time, more posts soon :-)

This is one of those days when everything in the IT industry changes. Neowin is reporting (mirror) that the source code of Windows NT4 and Windows 2000 has leaked to the internet. You can find a list of the files in the w2k source tree here.

There is a big discussion about this in slashdot. I’ll post updates if I find something more.

Update: Windowsbeta is also covering this story.

Update2: internetnews, eweek and iblnews(sp).

Update: Statement from Microsoft Regarding Illegal Posting of Windows Source Code.

Update: Betanews is reporting that the leak originated in Mainsoft:

Clues to the source code’s origin lie in a “core dump” file, which is left by the Linux operating system to record the memory a program is using when it crashes. Further investigation by BetaNews revealed the machine was likely used by Mainsoft’s Director of Technology, Eyal Alaluf.

Since it seems that people liked bufman, I’m posting my .vimrc file. I edited it to be “portable” (enabling settings only if they are available) and commenting everything, so you can edit it easily. You can download it here.

Update: wasn’t enabling syntax coloring in gvim@win32. Fixed.