For people using VMware, the new Hardy kernel requires updates to the source module tarballs that live in /usr/lib/vmware/modules/source/
Grab the three updated tarballs from the “vmware-any-any” tar.gz here. Currently update115 works for me just fine.
© 2007, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
I’ve been using xterms forever. Whenever I try to switch to using a terminal with a true-type font, my eyes hurt after a few hours. I’ve tried changing the various font-rendering options, and gone through lots of monospaced fonts — nothing gives the same clarity as the fixed raster fonts. I suspect this is basically the same problem as Icon Scaling. Things don’t work correctly when trying to line up a vector image against hard pixel edges. I wish I could find a workable fix for this.
© 2007, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Breezy is now officially at end-of-life.
Looking back through my build logs, I can see that my desktop spent 18 hours, 49 minutes, and 4 seconds on 108 builds related to the roughly 64 breezy-security updates I was involved in publishing. So far, Dapper is at 132 builds totaling 19:59:40, and Edgy is at 142 builds totaling 23:32:28. These times obviously don’t include patch hunting/development, failed builds, testing, stuff done on my laptop or the PPC machine, etc. Even if it’s a bit incomplete, I think it’s fun to be able to point to some hard numbers about CPU time spent on Breezy updates. :)
Thank you Breezy! You have housed my MythTV installation very nicely, but now it’s time for some long over-due upgrades…
© 2007, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
I’ve been having fun fighting religious battles and confusing people with in-jokes at jyte.com. Other good claims:
Or just see what’s been claimed about linux in general. Yay for silly social networking sites! :)
© 2007, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
I spend a good bit of time reading CVEs but their entries are plain text, without links associated with their various recorded URLs. I’m annoyed at having to select/paste to load a URL, so I had to go code a work-around. :)
Since MozDev‘s “linkify.user.js” was a bit heavy-handed, I wrote up a quick hack based on similar code to only look at mitre.org’s LI tags: “cve-links.user.js“.
© 2007, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Linden Labs released their Second Life client under the GPL, so I figured I’d have a go at getting it compiled on Ubuntu. Three libraries weren’t already packaged, so I threw together some initial attempts at getting them usable (libelfio, libopenjpeg, and libxmlrpc-epi). I think the long-term approach will be trying to convince Linden Labs to use stuff that is being actively maintained.
One big hurdle is audio, since FMOD doesn’t have a Free license. I hope it can get replaced; I’d be curious to hear what Second Life needs from FMOD that some of the other Free stacks can’t do.
So, if you’re in a mood to play with getting the Second Life client running, hopefully my stab at packaging can help (I’ve solved a number of gotchas in the assumptions their build system made), and so far it built:
$ ls -lh secondlife-x86_64-bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 kees kees 34M 2007-01-10 05:33 secondlife-x86_64-bin*
$ ldd ./secondlife-x86_64-bin | wc -l
77
Unfortunately, it immediately crashes when I load it. :)
© 2007, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
It’s not quite the end of the year yet, but here are Kirsten’s top 6 books from 2006:
The Great Influenza
The Devil in the White City
Cloud Atlas
The Fortress of Solitude
It’s Superman!
Welcome to Our Hillbrow(Also, figured this would be a good test of the WP plugin for Amazon, which is very handy. I’m going to see if I can patch it to hook things to my blog roll “Reading” category.)
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
At UDS, I learned that I am a poor frozen-bubble player. After getting repeated trounced by pitti, I decided I had to find some way to level the playing field. I was my own worst enemy due to my bad aim, but all the malus (as in, the opposite of bonus) balls were clearly causing me greater pain. I wrote a patch that creates a new key binding “b” to toggle the blocking of malus balls. Using this made things a little more even, and after a week of practice, I was a much better player (and quit using my cheat).
Since frozen-bubble depends on a shared game state between all players, everyone will notice if you’re using a mod like that, since they will just queue up on your malus post:
So be sure you’re playing with people you know. :)
© 2006 – 2015, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Gib started a meme I think sounds like fun. If you’re one of the first 5 people who comment on this post, I’ll create an original piece of art for you, but only if you promise to offer the same deal in your own blog. (And I urge you to release it under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license while you’re at it.)
I’ll likely be using inkscape to get it done, since I need an excuse to play more with the tile cloner and tessellation filters.
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Thanks to Jon, I had to see what public transit systems I’ve been on. They didn’t have Portland’s TriMet, so I sent them their logo. :)
© 2006 – 2015, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Like I mentioned before, I’ll be in San Francisco at Linux World Expo next week. Besides presenting, I’ll also be at a Birds-of-a-Feather on “Network, Device, and Environment Monitoring” on Wed (8/16) at 6pm in Room 309, where I’ll be talking about Sendpage. I’ve been told this BoF is open to anyone with an “exhibits” pass which, prior to LWE starting, is free! So, if you’re in the area, come hang out. :)
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
I will be presenting! I’ve never been to LWE, so I’m really looking forward to the trip. It’s also another chance to hang out in the Bay area and visit with people. Whee!
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Every once in a while, I hear something in a movie and yell, “Hey! That’s in a Frontline song!” This time it was while catching a portion of the The Abyss, where a big chunk of gear misses falling on their habitat, and they kind of laugh nervously. Well, that nervous laugh was looped for about for about 30 seconds at the start of “Victim of a Criminal” from Millennium. I found it at about the same time I thought to put “Frontline Assembly samples” into Google, which gave me this page, which is a list of all the samples that they used. Robocop, Aliens, and the one that haunted me for a while before this Abyss incident: Stargate and “send in the probe”.
This is what my brain is filled with: sound effects. Great. :)
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
After getting about 40 moderation requests a day, I figured I should spend some time finding some anti-comment-spam plugins for WordPress. After digging around a while, I found one that doesn’t require JavaScript, doesn’t perform vision tests, but works just fine for the kind of comment-spam-bot that seemed to have taken a liking to my blog (even though no spam ever appeared in my comments ever…)
I found lr2Spam which has a great setup, but an incomplete final step. I merged it with ideas I saw in the RBL measures plugin, and got some good results. By replacing lr2Spam’s comment_post with pre_comment_content (see the WordPress Plugin API), I was able to redirect spammers away from from my site with PHP’s header("Location: [URL]") technique. (This is what I borrowed from the RBL plugin.) The patch is almost as big as lr2Spam itself (both are very small). Honestly, I’m surprised it works at all. Someone wrote a comment-spam bot that can’t correctly parse a totally valid HTML form, but does correctly handle a 302/Location redirect. Weird.
I thought briefly about redirecting all the spammers to http://fbi.gov/i-am-a-spammer/?ip=[IP] but then realized their requests’ referer header would show my URL still. On further thought, I realized that comment-spam is very different from email spam because the bot has to implement a much larger set of protocol elements. Since they must respect the 302/Location redirect, someone who is getting hit really hard with comment spam could effectively DDoS somone’s link by redirecting to somewhere with big files. Say, for example, instead of using fbi.gov above, I used http://mirrors.example.com/iso/DVD-distro-image.iso. Every spam bot in their network would start a giant-ass download from example.com after hitting my anti-spam system. Ewww.
Implemented early on May 20th, after 4 days, I’ve seen 250 comment spam attempts from 162 unique IP addresses (most in China — maybe they need to turn their firewall around). The volume of spam isn’t big when compared to my daily email spam statistics, but each one of those would have been an email in my inbox, asking for moderation. Interestingly, they all stopped on May 23rd. Maybe they got a clue.
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
I’ve been catching up on Stargate SG-1 ever since Bryce recommended it. I’d been resisting it, but with no more Firefly, Farscape, or StarTreks left to watch, it was inevitable.
At one point during my catch-up, I realized that I was watching 4 separate time-lines of the show. SciFi was showing new episodes on Fridays, a set of 3-in-a-row on Mondays, and a third chronology running Tue, Wed, Thu. On top of this, Fox(?) was playing re-runs on Fridays as well. About 30 episodes in, I totally lost it, and could not keep things straight. (“What? Where’d Daniel Jackson go? Who’s this guy?”)
To my rescue was my ever-faithful epguides.com to serve as a base check-list for which shows I’d seen already, and the fantastic Stargate Wiki Episode Guide to help me remember which I’d already seen. (They even have full transcripts of the episodes! That’s dedication!)
It looks like very few of season 2 has aired, so I will have to turn to either the library or Netflix to fill the gaps. Once SG1 is gone, I will have to switch my daily exercise routine back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. :)
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
SourceForge migrated to their new CVS server infrastructure recently (due to a catastophic disk failure of the old system), and told everyone that they had to re-check-out all their trees:
Hostname for CVS service
Old: cvs.sourceforge.net
New: PROJECT_UNIX_NAME.cvs.sourceforge.netThis change will require new working copies to be checked out of all
repositories (so control files in the working copy will point to the
right place). We will be updating the instructions we supply, but
instructions that your team has written within documentation, etc. will
need to be updated.cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gaim co gaim
would be changed to
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@gaim.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/gaim co gaim
With 14 projects hosted there, with potentially multiple CVS modules in each, this wasn’t the best way for me to deal with the change. I had relocated several CVS trees at OSDL last year, so I went digging for my command line to do the updates. I was disappointed they didn’t suggest it in their email, so I offered my solution via their Tracker. Someone else (on Cygwin even) confirmed that it worked for them, and SourceF orge summarily closed the ticket (hence making it disappear from the Tracker where other people were seeking help). I can find no record of a change made to their documentation. In effect, they just eliminated my help (though they did thank me first).
It would be nice if SourceForge ran some kind of forum or Wiki on their site so people could help each other. I’ll have to remember this for the next Advisory Council.
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
While I can’t log into NetFlix or Amazon with OpenID (or other federated login systems), I still wanted to try it out. The goal is to easily write comments on people’s blogs, edit Wiki pages, etc, all without having to keep logging in every time. So far, so good.
First step was to decide between running my own OpenID server or not. I went with “not”, since there really isn’t an installable OpenID server yet (there are only support libraries, it seems). Since I was given a permanent account with LiveJournal for some XSS testing I did for them, I figured I’d just use their stuff. I wanted to use “outflux.net” as my login everywhere, so I just added two lines to my outflux.net HTML source:
<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml” />
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://keescook.livejournal.com/” />
Poof. Done. I used Videntity to verify that it was all working. Nifty stuff.
My only complaint is that it’s not clear how to get an end-to-end secure login. I can log into LiveJournal securely, but the OpenID server they run doesn’t seem to operate over HTTPS. Future study is needed. :)
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
On Wednesday I attended Bruce Schneier‘s short talk about the trends of online attacks. I figure I need to take his talk with at least a small grain of salt. While he has a reputation to maintain, he also works for a security outsourcing company. That in mind, I still like reading his blog, and I enjoyed hearing him talk.
The main take-away from his talk was that attackers are more rarely “hobbyists”, and more commonly criminals. (i.e. there is profit motive rather than an interest in boasting rights.) In the same vein, worms are becoming more sophisticated, quieter, and increasingly effective, while losing their cleverness. (Criminals don’t care if their worm is lame, they don’t care if they ripped off someone else’s worm, they care that their worm is staying undiscovered and is making them money. As a result, whole families of slightly different worms are appearing.)
One thing he said, that I have a hard time believing, and if true is pretty scary, is that cyber-crime profits are now exceeding drug profits. I would love to understand what the sources for that statistic are. Beyond just phishing, beyond worms waiting for you to authenticate to banks before emptying your wallet, there is even small-scale Denial-of-Service extortion. Generally, it’s against places that are themselves on tenuous legal ground, like offshore gambling sites. “If you don’t pay us $X, we’ll DoS you again!” It’s protection money online. Wild.
The market for blackhat exploits is growing. This is reducing the time between vulnerability announcement and exploit usage. Unfortunately, in the Microsoft world, an opposite trend is happening: patch speed is slowing due to their needing to test more and more configurations, staying infinitely backward compatible. At least this has an upside that their patches are generally better and corporations are learning to trust auto-update systems. (And I think this kind of brain-share is actually good for all OS vendors.)
The commoditization (and therefore homogenizing) of hardware and software means that everyone runs the same stuff. Even the criminals. Before, generally only the various corporations had old AS/400 machines and no one really wrote attacks against them. Now stuff runs on PCs.
Overall, the attacks online are becoming increasingly more damaging financially (“criminals are good at what they do”). The volume of attacks come from the open Internet, but the more successful attacks come from inside a private network. More worms are simply waiting for opportunity instead of beating on a network.
While some of the crime organizations have been taken down, there are still large bot networks that are continuing to grow in size even though they have no controller any more. This is truly something out of dystopic sci-fi. I don’t know why, but while I find the idea of full AIs reasonable, and totally non-intelligent systems reasonable, I find half-AI systems really creepy. They just keep doing some semi-smart thing over and over waiting until mommy comes back to tell them to do something else now.
He wound down discussing his worries for the future. He wants people thinking about VoIP security now. (Worms sniff your typing and packets already, soon they can sniff your voice.) He hinted at Digital Restrictions Management without actually saying DRM. (“Who owns your computer?” To which I thought, “I do. This is why Free Software is so important.”)
In closing he talked about security being more about usability than technology. I took that to mean “the Art of security is more about usability than technology.” I can have infinite security by just unplugging something. But that’s not very artful. Towards the goal of successful (artful) security, he wants to see service providers be ultimately liable for the financial damage. He figures this puts the motivations in the right place. It seems like the right thing to me (if credit card companies want to avoid it, it must be good for me) but I suspect there is something hidden deeper that may cause greater harm. I can’t put my finger on it, so for now, I’ll agree. :)
At one point he gave a nice view into his own world, in which he has to go twice a year and disinfect his own mother’s computer of worms. The cobbler’s childrens’ feet…
The end of the session was a book signing (Counterpane gave out gratis copies of Schneier’s new book “Beyond Fear“). I showed my geek by having brought a copy of “Applied Cryptography” for him to sign too. For which he was geek-prepared, and tossed in a cryptogram. Even though he does this for lots of people (Google told me later), it was fun to see it in my book; I wasn’t expecting it.
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Since I’ve lost an hour to Daylight Savings Time, I thought I’d record a list of links to Alternate Star Wars Theories.
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Woohoo! I got accepted to present at OSCon again! I’m really excited about this one, too — I get to present about something non-work-related. The title of my presentation is “DVR Happiness: Gluing MythTV and TiVo together with Galleon“. Here is my proposed outline:
- Is your TiVo a tool or a toy?
- ToGo: move video from TiVo to PC
- GoBack: move video from PC to TiVo
- MP3s: streaming from anywhere
- Image Galleries: beyond just snapshots
- Format conversion
- Mounting a MythTV filesystem with FUSE
- Short-cuts with the Linux IR daemon
EDIT: WordPress pisses me off so very much when it comes to lists, indenting, and code snippets. Some day, I will switch to something that just lets me type in HTML and doesn’t try to “fix” it for me afterwards. *fume*
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
 |
You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.
Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) |
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
This has got to be the coolest use of an animated GIF ever:
Even crazier, in Firefox, if you right-click to “View Image”, the favicon shown in the tab is animated too! I smell code re-use! That kicks ass. I wonder what level of hell I’d burn in if I made the favicon for my site animated.
© 2006, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Technology is a beautiful thing. Right now, I’m on the passenger side of a vechile purchased in Pennsylvania, over EBay. The new owner is driving. This post is being made via a transparent proxy (via iptables) to Squid running locally on my laptop. Squid then forwards the proxy on to the SSH tunnel I’ve got up, which lands on a server in Texas, where another Squid is waiting for it, and handles the request. The SSH tunnel is set up over a PPP connection on top of Bluetooth to the driver’s cell phone, which is sending traffic via GPRS to his provider. I can hardly believe it works, but it’s actually rather quick.
Additionally, I’ve got my wireless card scanning for networks in kismet, with a USB-to-serial converter plugged into my GPS, with gpsd running, and gpsdrive telling us where we are. (And, of course, we’re downloading maps for gpsdrive via the previously mentioned abomination of a network connection.)
We just finished searching for hotels on the western edge of Nebraska that have free wireless Internet access.
Kick ass. I am such a geek.
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
I should admit first that I’m biased. I loved Firefly, but having seen the movie twice now, I think I can attempt to talk about the movie from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know the whole back-drop of the Firefly universe.
The number of characters seems like it would be overwhelming, but I think their unique aspects quickly become clear. Simon’s transition from escape artist to ship’s doctor seems a little jarring, but I think it’s easily overlooked. The interactions between the rest of the characters are quickly developed with strong dialog. I’ve seen other reviews that say the characters are “too thin”, but I’d argue that they’re much better than that because they follow classic stereotypes without common interactions. For example, the First In Command is married to The Pilot, The Captain can barely control his crew, The Doctor and The Mechanic are endlessly avoiding their shared sexual tension, etc. The relationships may be stereotyped, but the matching of relationship to the specific character type, I think, is novel.
The story is quick, and develops in easy-to-understand steps, picking up a smooth speed right through the end of the movie. It was kind of like falling, with a “wheee” turning into “whoaaa” turning into “oooh shiiiit”. But at the same time, all the tension was always marked with humor to bring you back and make you enjoy the characters. After the first intense confrontation and edge-of-your-seat high-speed escape from certain death, the crew is trying to catch their breath and someone says, “Is everyone okay?” River responds, “I swallowed a bug.”
I will see this movie over and over. I love it, the score made me nearly cry, and I got shivers at least 4 separate times. If I reviewed a lot of movies, I would rate things in “shivers” not “stars”. A scene so good that it gives me the creeps, or fills me with awe. That’s why I go see movies, and Serenity gave me plenty of good shivers.
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Looks like I’ve been given a chance to screen the final cut of Serenity on Monday! In exchange, I’m posting the synopsis they’re using:
Joss Whedon, the Oscar® – and Emmy – nominated writer/director
responsible for the worldwide television phenomena of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE,
ANGEL and FIREFLY, now applies his trademark compassion and wit to a
small band of galactic outcasts 500 years in the future in his feature
film directorial debut, Serenity. The film centers around Captain
Malcolm Reynolds, a hardened veteran (on the losing side) of a galactic
civil war, who now ekes out a living pulling off small crimes and
transport-for-hire aboard his ship, Serenity. He leads a small, eclectic
crew who are the closest thing he has left to family — squabbling,
insubordinate and undyingly loyal.
I think a much better synopsis would simply be:
Oh my god! Go see this movie! Don’t walk, run!
To help blogviewers write up stuff on Serenity, we’ve been given access to a TON of images too. There’s some great stuff in here. Half of it is in .sit files, the other half in giant .psd files. Here’s some cool snaps of Summer I’d never seen before, and an early logo design. Nothing beats my backgrounds [1920×1200, 1600×1200], though.
I’m going to have to dig through all this stuff. There are movie posters for bus shelters, LCD panel screens, Dark Horse comics logos, all kinds of stuff. Even mechanical drawings, I think. Too bad there aren’t any native .sit expanders for Linux that handle the modern .sit formats. I’d love to see what’s in the mechanicals directory.
On Saturday, I’m headed to the PDX Browncoat’s Firefly Episodes Benefit. Monday is the Serenity screening, and then Friday the full release! Yay! :)
© 2005 – 2015, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
If it hasn’t already got a name, I’m going to coin the phrase “Scene Diving”, because that’s the best way I can describe it. By “scene“, I don’t mean an arrangement of furniture and people on a stage. I mean a group of people interested in a certain common idea, and all the things associated with their communication and productivity. By “diving”, I mean “information diving”, which was probably best outlined in Neuromancer. This is just another “involvement” analogy that uses water (“get your feet wet”, “in over your head”, “jump in at the deep end”, etc). I like this because it makes information a tactile thing that you have to navigate. With all the cyberpunk I’ve read, “diving” into information has such a romantic feel to it. Also, the idea that you’re out of your natural element, and that you’ll have to return to the surface at some point is very apt. It sets this apart from joining a scene.
Scene diving is something I’ve noticed I do a lot of, since there are so many subcultures in the online world. It may just be stating the obvious, but I think it feels like a specific skill. I’ve had people ask me in the past to find things for them, and I tried to show them how I’d go about it, but they weren’t interested in it, or didn’t have the patience. At it’s core, scene diving is just research. It’s really a form a applied research, but it isn’t something that could be done very easily prior to the Internet because of one critical element: communication.
The communication (or rather, language) of a scene is very specific. For example, it’s not immediately obvious to the average person what “BSG” stands for. But if you’re researching the backstory differences between the original and new Battlestar Galactica television series, you’ll find this acronym a lot, and the meaning becomes obvious. If your subculture isn’t online, there is no way for an outsider to observe your language without joining the subculture. This kind of communications research is much more voyeuristic.
Continuing the example, I really like a lot of Science Fiction. I’m a big fan of Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, BSG, etc. However, I don’t really have a lot of time (or, honestly, interest) to dedicate to these individual subcultures. I’ll watch Star Trek religiously, but I can’t tell you any of the character’s middle names, and I don’t know starship registry numbers off the top of my head. I used to think that meant I didn’t like these shows as much as other people, and that somehow meant I was missing something. It took a while for me to realize that I’m not missing anything, for the very reason that I’m not interested in that level of involvement.
However, there are some things I want to get out of a scene. I have always been fascinated by Star Wars Stormtroopers. Several years ago, I scene-dove and found out how to get myself some white armor. It’s very cool. Recently, I got it into my head that I wanted my very own TARDIS, and scene-dove until I had measurements, parts lists, etc. I still don’t have a TARDIS, but I think that’s because I can’t foresee having the time to build one. I really wanted to see the new Serenity movie from the Firefly series. Again, I scene-dove, and came away with the tickets I needed. My level of involvement in any of these subcultures is rather low, but this kind of diving doesn’t seem to be something a lot of people do. Other people tend to join just a few scenes and maintain a very high level of dedication and time investment. Perhaps I’m just too scattered to stay interested in one thing. Whatever the case, it seems that there is a skill to scene diving, and I enjoy using it. I’ve also met some extremely cool people as a result.
For me, the basic outline for successful scene diving is:
Research the top layer via Google
– “Public information” sites
– Discussion forums
Learn the language
– Abbreviations
– Build your own FAQ — answer any questions you have on your own
Find stuff not out in the open
– Share resources
– Be a useful to other members of the scene
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
I got invited to talk about Device::SerialPort on the weekly PerlCast. I discuss a little bit about the purpose and history of Device::SerialPort, as well as some cool things I know it’s been used for. I get to tell my favorite (short) story about the person in the furthest geographical location from me I’ve ever been in contact with. I had a lot of fun making my 4 minute talk. :) It kind of gives me some practice with what I’m going to be doing for OSCON. Except that OSCON will be several orders of magnitude longer, and I won’t be able to edit out my glaring mistakes.
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
I am so excited! I’m going to be a speaker at OSCon this year. I’ve never been a speaker anywhere! I’m gonna be so nervous it’s insane. I really hope it all goes well, but I still think it’s intimidating to be surrounded by so many experts in so many fields. I know I have a lot of email/spam/filtering experience (and a little Python), but there are plenty of other people who have more. I just happen to be talking about it. I hope they don’t beat me up during my talks. :) If I teach one thing to one person, I’ll see it as a success. I’d suspect I’m going to learn a lot too. “Why didn’t you do it this way?” “Uh, because I didn’t think of it! Thanks!”
Oh, so nervous. Yeow.
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
Well, I think I’m officially an RSS junkie. I had ignored RSS for so long, I nearly forgot about it, but when I was shown planet.openclipart.org, I was reminded how powerful RSS is. Figured it was once again time to look around for an aggregator I could use. (Although I still think polling is a bad design for event management.)
Most of the reason I had ignored RSS was because every aggregator I had tried was buggy or had a frustrating interface. I guess enough time has passed, and when I tried straw a few days ago, it worked perfectly well. So, I started collecting all the RSS feeds from all the websites I’d been collecting on my firefox tab bar. It was getting pretty big, and I hated having to reload every tab each morning.
I realize I’m way late to the party on this, but I still think it’s great fun. I even hunted down a little RSS writer for my Photo Blog and got it built in so I could aggregate it too. :) (And it’s really cool to add Creative Commons tags to each and every thing in the RSS feed.)
© 2005, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.
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