バカな火星人 – Page 7

Death of the Dragon

My pet bearded dragon died this morning. :(

I called him Chow Yun Fat-Boy; Karen called him Spike.

Yesterday he was looking happy and peaceful, sitting on top of a log. He would changed colour depending on his mood, and yesterday evening he was more yellow than usual. I thought that was a good sign.

This morning I noticed that his beard and tail tip were black but his middle was yellow, and that was a combination I had never seen before. His mouth was open, and when I looked more closely I could see that he wasn’t breathing.

I think I’ll go and shed some tears now.

TCP window size scaling problem

I encountered a strange problem earlier when I tried to visit a website: the TCP connection would just hang. I ran Wireshark to see what was happening and noticed a pair of strange acks that made no sense to me.

I tried to access the same website from two other machines, and ran tcpdump to capture the traffic. Both the other machines were able to complete the request.

I loaded the tcpdump output into Wireshark to compare with the failing connection. The only significant difference was the TCP window size. The failing connection had a window size of 5888, while both working connections had window sizes of 5840. But it wasn’t quite that simple. The failing connectian and one of the working connections were using window scaling, so I had the following three situations:

working?	TCP win	scale	window size
no	0x002e	7	5888
yes	0x05b4	2	5840
yes	0x16d0	0	5840

I switched window scaling off using sysctl net/ipv4/tcpwindowscaling=0 and I could access the website!

Now that I know what the problem is I am happy to switch window scaling back on and not visit that website until they fix their buggy router or firewall.

What is a Cultural Creative?

I don’t know why I did the test, and I don’t know what the result means, but:

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

Cultural Creative	81%
Postmodernist	63%
Fundamentalist	56%
Existentialist	44%
Modernist	31%
Romanticist	31%
Materialist	25%
Idealist	25%

Planning a YAPC::Europe talk

Karen has already mentioned our joint YAPC::Europe talk called “My First CPAN Module“. We probably should rehearse it, or at least talk about it when I’m not watching South Park. I did read the outline she wrote, and I’m sure I could easily talk for at least an hour by following her plan.

We decided to do this talk together because we have different viewpoints. I’ve uploaded modules to CPAN so it makes sense to me. Karen was able to investigate the upload process from a first time perspective and so could spot the confusing parts. We hope that the combined perspective will make the talk useful.

Axe Wielding Maniac

I bought a small axe yesterday. It’s great! And it was fun using it to chop the branches off a small tree. But the fun stopped when I sliced through the top of my thumb half way into my thumbnail.

This story would sound more dramatic and impressive if I finished it here, letting you believe that I injured myself with the axe. But it wasn’t the axe that hurt me. I was very accurate with the axe, and survived the branch removal with only three thorn stabs. It was the cheese sandwich making that hurt me. I’m blaming the deceptively dangerous cheese slicer. Maybe I’ll chop it up with my new axe.

Smartcard reader on Debian GNU/Linux

In April 2005 I joined the Free Software Foundation Europe and received my membership smartcard. The card looked impressive but wasn’t very interesting without a smartcard reader. So (at last) I have bought a reader (SCM Microsystems SCR335) so I can use the card with GnuPG.

To get the reader working I started to follow the mail GnuPG smartcard howto, but I soon noticed that the udev rules provided in that document were ugly: the rules called a script that changed group ownership and permissions on the device file; udev can do that without a script. So I made up my own rule that looked like this:

BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="SCR33x USB Smart Card Reader", GROUP="staff"

That changes the group ownership of the device to “staff”, which is one of the groups I’m in. After stopping and starting udev I was able to use gpg to check the card status.

Non-free software is evil, but that’s good.

Following a suggestion from Richard Stallman, today I met Niibe Yutaka (新部裕) from The Free Software Initiative of Japan at his office in Akihabara.

During our conversations Niibe-san mentioned something that I had almost forgotten: Debian has a non-free section in their distribution. A lot of people don’t like that, or they are at least surprised to see what looks like a compromise from such devoted Free Software advocates.

But Niibe-san had a different perspective inspired by his Buddist faith: he can accept the existance of evil, and it can be used to highlight goodness. Evil (or non-free software) exists to remind us that more good needs to be done. If we didn’t have a non-free section we would not notice the programs that need to be liberated.