Welcome to my blog!

This is an automated ebook conversion of Sam Trenholme's blog

Except where stated otherwise, contents are © Sam Trenholme

Webpage: https://www.samiam.org/
Resume: https://s.vk.tj

Blog index

2025

All blog entries written in 2025 through 2025-03-09

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Lua table iterator

March 9, 2015

Let’s look at an interator which lists all of the keys of a Lua table in sorted order. Both string and numeric keys are allowed, and all string keys will be listed before all of the numeric keys.

The code

function sortedKeys(inTable)
  local keyList = {}
  local index = 1
  for k,_ in pairs(inTable) do
    table.insert(keyList,k)
  end
  -- Allow numbers and strings;
  -- strings before numbers
  local sf = function(a,b)
    if(type(a) == 'number'
       and
       type(b) == 'string')
    then
      return false
    elseif (type(b) == 'number'
            and
           type(a) == 'string')
    then
      return true
    end
    return a < b
  end
  table.sort(keyList, sf)
  return function()
    rvalue = keyList[index]
    index = index + 1
    return rvalue
  end
end

To run:

a = {hi="there"}
a[1] = "one"
a["one"] = "1string"
a["999"] = "three9s"
a[2] = "two"
for k in sortedKeys(a) do
  print(k,a[k])
end

This will output the following:

999     three9s
hi      there
one     1string
1       one
2       two

Strings are lexically sorted and numbers are numerically sorted. All strings come before all numbers. Unlike Javascript objects, in Lua, the number 1 and the string "1" can both be in the same table and are separate table keys.

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2024

All blog entries written in 2024

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Free ebook

May 15, 2024

I have spent a month writing a free open content (public domain) e-book about programming in Lua. While Lua’s terse reference manual is open content, the official book for programming in Lua is proprietary. I wrote this book as a guide to programming in Lua that is open content, and that is geared towards Lua 5.1, the most commonly deployed version of Lua out there.

The book is not an introduction to programming; in particular, it assumes the reader is already familiar with other scripting languages such as AWK, Perl, or Python. The book concentrates more on the parts of Lua which can be difficult for people used to other scripting languages to understand, such as function closures, how Lua uses function factories to run for loops (and how one can have Lua iterate through items in a list using the right function in a for loop), metatables, and Lua’s prototypical class model.

This book uses a large number of code examples to illustrate how code is written in Lua, and to provide public domain “battery” code (such as a regular expression splitter and a function which makes regular expressions case insensitive) people can use in their own Lua scripts.

This book is not a Lua reference; a very terse reference manual is already included with Lua. This is a companion to the reference manual to have code examples and longer explanations of the concepts expressed in that manual.

The book can be read here:

https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​lunacy/​Sam​Discusses​Lunacy.​pdf

In addition to the PDF e-book, the Open Document source, as well as all fonts used in the book, is also available as part of my “Lunacy” fork of Lua 5.1:

https://github.com/samboy/lunacy

Look in the doc/ folder.

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2023

All blog entries written in 2023

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February 2023

February 28, 2023

Hello, everyone!

Just a minor update with my life. Right now, I haven’t been working on open source too much since I have been concentrating on enjoying the outdoors, physical fitness, and becoming healthy. I am making a lot of progress there — it’s amazing what one can accomplish when one goes to the effort to improve one’s body.

I am also concentrating on being the best father I can be for my beautiful daughter, and that means volunteering at her school and spending quality time with her.

The truth is this: The things going on in the Internet don’t really matter to me any more. I don’t care about engaging in yet another pointless political debate. I know that if I’m getting all worked up over politics, there’s something wrong in my personal life I need to work on. I know that Reddit is a fantasy world and does not reflect reality. I have better things to do than to get all angry about whatever it is that has gone viral on Twitter today. I only use Instagram and Facebook to keep in touch with real world friends.

Today, I live in the real world, not the Internet fantasy world.

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New music released

January 28, 2023

I have deleted these songs because sharing my music with the public is sharing a very private and vulnerable part of me. Since I only got limited positive feedback, I have decided to make the songs private.

I have released a new single of my music. This is a two sided single, where the “A side” is “Instagram Goddess”, and the “B side” is the song “Flying Far Away”.

Instagram Goddess

“Instagram Goddess”, the first song, represents the illusion of perfect beauty. It is an electronic dance song with a definite trance music vibe to it. The song clocks in at 131 BPM and is 5:31 long. It can be listened to on YouTube here:

https://youtu.be/sPLGcdqybKQ

It can also be purchased and downloaded here:

https://caulixtla.bandcamp.com/

Flying Far Away

The other song on this single is “Flying Far Away”, which is very different from “Instagram Goddess”. Instead of being a song to dance to, “Flying Far Away” is a song to relax and meditate to.

It can be purchased and downloaded here:

https://caulixtla.bandcamp.com/

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2022

All blog entries written in 2022

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MaraDNS 3.5.0035

December 28, 2022

To end 2022, I have released MaraDNS 3.5.0035. This release adds support for large block lists which use little memory.

Blocking hosts

For a couple of years now, MaraDNS has had support for block lists. For example, let us suppose we want to block some domains. We have been able to do it like this:

 ip4 = {} ip4["evil.example.com."] = "X" ip4["phish.foo."] = "X" ip4["privacy-violator.example.net."] = "X"

(As an aside, this will block both the IPv4 and IPv6 forms of these names)

Once this is set up, it will not be possible to resolve, say, evil.example.com using Deadwood.

This works, but there’s a problem: It uses too much memory per entry.

Over at https://​github.​com/​Steven​Black/​hosts there are a number of large block lists. One of which, the one for blocking pornographic content, has some 207,723 entries in it. Loading this in to Deadwood using the ip4 method uses some 237 megabytes or so of memory. In comparison, if we use a block hash (see below), the same list only takes up 9.5 megabytes of memory.

Block Hash support

In otder to be able to block a large number of hosts while using minimal memory, MaraDNS 3.5.0035 now has block hash support.

The process for adding a block hash to Deadwood is as follows:

We use a new program, blockHashMake, to create a “block hash file”:

 $ cat | blockHashMake badHosts.bin evil.example.com phish.foo privacy-violator.example.net ^D

(^D means to hit Ctrl + D at the same time to finish the list; note that this is for *NIX systems and Windows users will probably be better off with the Windows version which includes a pre-built block hash file)

We place the block hash file in the Deadwood home directory (usually, /etc/deadwood).

We then tell Deadwood to read the block hash file. Put this in /etc/dwood3rc:

 blocked_hosts_hash_file = "badHosts.bin"

Note that, for security reasons, every time a block hash file is made, a different file is generated. If, for some reason, it is desirable to have a block hash file be same for a given list of hosts every time, one can generate a block hash file as follows:

 $ cat | blockHashMake badHosts.bin 0 evil.example.com phish.foo privacy-violator.example.net ^D

And read it as follows:

 blocked_hosts_hash_file = "badHosts.bin" allow_block_hash_zero_key = 1

There is a security risk if we allow a blocked hosts file to have a 0 key: An attacker with access to a recursive instance of Deadwood could have Deadwood use more resources than necessary if they know the block hash file being used. Since the block hash file is read only, hash flooding attacks are not possible, but an attacker could form queries which use more resources to resolve as not being present in the block hash.

Deadwood should never be an open recursor and this attack is limited in scope. But be aware of the risks before setting this parameter to 1.

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MaraDNS updates

November 29, 2022

I have been making a lot of MaraDNS updates this last week. Let’s go over them.

Y2038

A couple of years ago, I removed maradns.exe from MaraDNS’s download files because it had some Y2038 issues. maradns.exe is back because I finally got a chance to go over the source code and clean up a few lingering Y2038 issues.

Some features which require underlying libraries to work past Y2038, such as localized timestamps for SOA serial numbers and timestamps, are simply disabled on systems with a 32-bit time_t. It’s better for stuff like that to be disabled than to have it do something broken at Y2038. Users with a 64-bit time_t are not affected by these changes.

I have made other code Y2038 compliant on systems which still use a 32-bit time_t by moving the 136-year long window from 1901 to 2038 to another range of dates. Current timestamps should be good until sometime in 2156; timestamps for when zone files have been changed (to generate synthetic SOA serial numbers) should be good until sometime in 2136. While localtime functions (log timestamps, localized time SOA serial numbers) are disabled in the 32-bit Windows maradns.exe build, it uses Y2038 compliant native Win32 calls to find a file timestamp to generate a synthetic SOA serial number.

There is only a 136-year long window on systems with a 32-bit time_t; the majority of current real-world systems which use a 64-bit time_t will not have timestamp issues comes 2136, 2156, or whatever. There is an issue with synthetic SOA serial numbers wrapping back to 0 come 2841, so anyone using MaraDNS in the 2800s should be sure that replica (“slave”) DNS servers do not expect a SOA serial to increment, only change.

I should note that synthetic SOA serial numbers are not used in zone files with a SOA record in them—that’s another solution come 2800 or so (mid-2136 if one insists on still having a 32-bit time_t).

These fixes are important enough that I have backported them to the 3.4 branch of MaraDNS.

RFC8482

While MaraDNS generally does not follow RFCs which came out after 2010, there is one very useful RFC from 2019 with security implications: RFC8482. DNS has supported for a long time ANY records, but they are a moderate pain to implement. I implemented ANY records back in 2001 since an RFC-compliant DNS server needed to support them.

The only real world use case for ANY records is from Qmail supporting them because of a bug in Bind 4.9.3, released back in 1996. RFC8482 has been carefully designed to handle the Qmail corner case, and there is no other real-world use case for ANY. On the other hand, ANY has been abused by bad actors in denial of service attacks.

While the security implications for ANY are limited with MaraDNS (which does not have large packet support), there are security issues so I now consider having RFC8482 support essential. Indeed, it’s important enough I have backported RFC8482 support to the 3.4 branch of MaraDNS.

Updating “make install”

The Debian port of MaraDNS has not been maintained for a while. That in mind, since I use MaraDNS in Ubuntu 22.04 (note: Ubuntu is derived from Debian), and since the RFC8482 issue is serious enough to merit updating MaraDNS, it’s time for me to maintain MaraDNS for modern Linux distributions again.

That in mind, I spent all weekend researching systemd and have updated MaraDNS to have a proper unit file for systemd. Systemd is a lot better than many other init systems because, not only does it have full daemonization support (it does what duende did back in the sysvinit days), it also allows old sysvinit scripts to run.

Now, when running make install in MaraDNS, it will do the right thing in Ubuntu 22.04: It will install systemd unit files and enable the services with systemd.

In addition, “make install” will now install coLunacyDNS (a new Lua-based DNS server which uses Lua scripts to make custom DNS replies) as well as Lunacy (my personal fork of Lua 5.1 which I use for MaraDNS testing and for converting MaraDNS’s documents in to HTML pages, man pages, and plain text files).

Since I am a Ubuntu 22.04 user, I can only guarantee that “make install” will work with Ubuntu 22.04. People using other distributions are on their own, but I will keep duende and the old sysvinit init files around. I have even hacked them to work with OpenRC—note I am not actively supporting OpenRC because I only use Alpine Linux for MaraDNS unit/regression testing.

While discussing distributions, a shout out to Tomasz Torcz who maintains a current port of MaraDNS for Fedora core; this is the only distro-specific port of MaraDNS I know of which is still actively maintained.

Getting MaraDNS

MaraDNS, as always, is available here:

https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download.​html

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The midterms

November 18, 2022

This blog is about the midterms. I also have made a new MaraDNS release.

The midterms: 2010 versus 2022

The Republicans got their butts kicked in the 2022 midterms. What happened?

The closest midterm to compare 2022 to is 2010. Back in 2010, we had a Democratic president, a Democratic senate, and a Democratic house. We also had a weak economy.

It was a very red bloodbath: Republicans gained 63 seats in the house, and six seats in the senate. They retained control of one or more legislative house throughout the 2010s.

Compare this to 2022: We have a Democratic president. A Democratic senate. A Democratic house. And a weak economy. Based on just the fundamentals, the Democrats should had lost both legislative houses.

That didn’t happen.

While votes are still being counted, it looks like the Republicans will have only a very small majority in the house.

Democrats are most likely going to gain a seat in the senate when all is said and done.

What happened?

While there are a lot of factors which affects how people will vote, If I had to pin the results down to one issue, it would be abortion.

In 2018 we had the blue wave giving the house back to the Democrats. The main issue which persuaded people was healthcare. At the time, Republicans got very close to taking away healthcare from millions of Americans. It was only the now-deceased John McCain who saved the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Republicans learned their lesson in 2018. They very quickly stopped talking about “repealing Obamacare” (their then-name for the ACA) once the 2018 results showed it didn’t resonate with voters.

I am not seeing the same kind of self-reflection the Republican party had after their 2018 defeat here in 2022. This may change come next year; we will see.

Abortion, of course, wasn’t the only issue. Republicans who did not support democracy almost all lost their elections in this midterm.

A MaraDNS update

I have released MaraDNS 3.5.0028 this week. The updates I have been making this month have been, by and large, to fix up a small number of Y2038 issues which were present in the code. MaraDNS has been Y2038 compliant for a while, but there were a couple of non-critical things which would had broken come Y2038 on systems with a 32-bit time_t.

Full details are over at the MaraDNS Y2038 statement page.

Appendix: I’m moving to Mastodon

With Twitter’s future so uncertain, I am moving my social media from Twitter to Mastodon. My new social media URL is:

https://mstdn.social/@Samboy

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MaraDNS 3.5.0025

November 2, 2022

I have released MaraDNS 3.5.0025

Scripting languages

MaraDNS is becoming a mature open source project, having been around for over 21 years, and with stable releases since mid-2002. That in mind, I am now thinking about how I can keep MaraDNS sustainable for as long as possible with a minimum of forced maintenance.

One moving part which can break some components of MaraDNS is any non-standard scripting language which MaraDNS uses. For example, MaraDNS has had a Python script for converting BIND zone files in to MaraDNS zone files which I wrote in 2006, ran fine in 2006, and which I had no reason to update because it was running fine. Then, in 2019, I got some annoying messages from the Debian team about having a Python2 script which would break in Python3.

I had made no changes to the script. It did not have any bugs. The only thing that changed is that the non-standard scripting language Python decided to change their syntax and stop supporting the older version of Python. So, much to my annoyance, I had to perform unpaid maintenance work for MaraDNS because I chose to include a Python script.

That in mind, I have removed bind2csv2.py from MaraDNS, placing it in a separate repository of unsupported programs.

Likewise, I have converted the Perl scripts MaraDNS has to handle MaraDNS’ documentation in to Lua5.1 scripts. While Lua5.1 isn’t standard per se, there are multiple independent implementations of it (PUC Lua, LuaJIT, etc.) including one in the MaraDNS source tree (lunacy, a fork of PUC Lua 5.1), and Lua5.1 will never change its syntax.

I understand that, right now, there are no plans to come out with a Python4 that breaks Python3 scripts, nor a Perl7 which breaks Perl5 scripts (there’s a reason Perl6 was renamed Raku, so that the Perl world would not have the same issues Python had with the Python3 update), but since both scripting languages are not included with MaraDNS and are not set in stone with a standard like POSIX, in the interests of long-term maintainability, MaraDNS now has no Perl nor Python scripts in it.

For people who still want the Python scripts or the outdated Perl versions of the the MaraDNS “EJ” (Easy Journal) documentation tools, they are available here:

https://​github.​com/​samboy/​Mara​DNS-​attic

They are completely unsupported.

Multiple implementations

MaraDNS 3.5.0025 can be built and tested using multiple implementations for each step of the process:

It can be built on top of a Linux kernel, or in Windows 10 with cygwin.

It can use the GNU utilities for the POSIX userspace (sh, awk, etc.), or it can use Busybox.

It can use either PUC Lua 5.1 or Lunacy, my Lua 5.1 fork, to run the Lua parts of the tests and the document-building Lua scripts.

No less than three make implementations can now run MaraDNS’ makefiles.

MaraDNS compiles with no less than three different C compilers: gcc, clang, and tcc.

Make

Make is a standard POSIX utility to determine dependencies and compile programs.

I have updated all of MaraDNS’ makefiles to work with an implementation of the “make” development utility which is mostly POSIX compliant. For real world use, the “make” utility needs to have an extension that POSIX permits: The ability to have the / character in makefile targets. This is supported by any real-world “make” implementation (GNU make, bmake, even pdpmake with non-POSIX extensions enabled) but does deviate from a strict reading of the POSIX standard for “make”.

If using a strictly POSIX version of make which has the extension of allowing / in target names, one needs to type in these commands to compile MaraDNS:

./configure
CC=cc # Change this to gcc/clang/tcc as desired
export CC
make

This deviates from the standard ./configure ; make build process.

While real-world implementations of “make” set CC to the cc command by default, the POSIX make spec actually says this should be c99 which won’t compile MaraDNS (since MaraDNS uses POSIX calls not part of the ISO spec).

That in mind, I have created a fork of pdpmake which is completely POSIX compliant with two exceptions:

/ character allowed in target names

Default C compiler is cc and not c99

It can be downloaded here:

https://maradns.samiam.org/maramake

Like pdpmake, this implementation is public domain.

Getting MaraDNS

MaraDNS, as always, can be downloaded here:

https://maradns.samiam.org/

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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Angela Lansbury

October 11, 2022

The great Angela Lansbury has died today.

Angela Lansbury R.I.P.

Angela Lansbury, after having lived a full life, has died at the age of 96. While well known for her role in Murder, She Wrote, my favorite role and song of hers is “Tale As Old As Time” from the 1991 animated version of Beauty and the Beast.

Angela was able to overcome the very unfortunate stereotype of a female performer supposedly no longer being viable once she ages. The role she is most famous for in my daughter’s world—the teapot in the animated Beauty and the Beast—was one that she performed when she was 60 years old.

While the song “Tale As Old As Time” was re-performed for the 2017 live action version of Beauty and the Beast, I always have preferred Lansbury’s version.

Rest in peace, Angela, and thank you for the wonderful acting and music.

MaraDNS update

There is a long standing bug where Deadwood would incorrectly resolve CNAMES under certain limited circumstances.

Deadwood has for a long time allowed out of bailiwick answers in a CNAME chain, since:

They are not a security threat

They sometimes allow answers to be solved more quickly

Let us suppose we have this:

 blog.foo. CNAME blog.new-isp.foo. blog.new-isp.foo. A 10.1.2.3

If the real answer is 10.1.2.3, this allows Deadwood to solve the query as soon as it sees this CNAME chain. It’s not a security hole because Deadwood only stores the entry as the answer for “blog.foo.”

But if the real answer for blog.new-isp.foo were something different, say 10.9.8.7, then Deadwood would had returned the wrong IP for the blog. This isn’t a security problem, but it’s an issue because most DNS servers would discard the CNAME glue while Deadwood accepted it.

This bug was filed in 2015. I said, at the time, that I could not fix it because I was a single parent working a full time job. Now that I am semi-retired since it’s hard to find an employer in the tech sector willing to work around the needs of a now full time single parent, I finally had time to fix this tonight.

I have also created a test to verify this bug is fixed. Indeed, I followed test driven development: I made the test, then updated the code so the test would pass.

The code can be downloaded from the Git tree for MaraDNS:

https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

Angela Lansbury photo by Alan Light obtained from the Wikimedia commons

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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MaraDNS work

October 9, 2022

This blog is a short summary of the work I have been doing on MaraDNS.

Working on another 3.4 release

While the legacy 3.4 release is mainly only updated with security updates, I have decided to backport the min_ttl parameter from the 3.5 to the 3.4 branch of MaraDNS/Deadwood, since this helps recursive resolvers be more responsive on the modern Internet.

While using Deadwood as a recursive resolver is generally deprecated—recursive DNS here in 2022 is something best left to large organizations which can pay programmers to maintain the DNS server full time—this is a fairly small change which will make things more bearable for people still using Deadwood 3.4 as a recursive resolver.

Since the 3.4 branch of MaraDNS uses a system of shell scripts and diff patches to update the code, I have made a script which will update Deadwood with this change when it is time to make the MaraDNS 3.4.04 release.

In the meantime, the code can be seen here:

https://​github.​com/​samboy/​Mara​DNS/​tree/​master/​deadwood-​github/​update/​3.​4.​04

int_fast32_t

As I was working on that code, I made this discovery that, on both 64-bit ARM and 64-bit x86 architectures, int32_t and int_fast32_t are the same datatype. Since there still exist some expensive mainframes out there which do not support 32-bit words (Unisys still has a mainframe which uses 36-bit words instead), C code should ideally not use int32_t, since someone may end up trying to compile the code on some exotic computer some day. Instead, one should use int_fast32_t, which is required to be supported if a compiler is C99 compliant (unlike int32_t), since this data type might be bigger than 32 bits.

I didn’t know this when I did the lion’s share of Deadwood development between 2007 and 2010; I used int32_t where most of the time int_fast32_t would had made more sense for integers which do not fit in 16 bits. The thinking when developing Deadwood is that int could be 16-bit (but is 32-bit or 64-bit on anything Deadwood compiles on), and to use exact lengths when more bits was needed in a number.

There are places where the integer must be precisely 32-bits (notably, the cryptographic random number generator), and since no one is loaning me a Unisys mainframe to develop things on something without 32-bit support, there is no way for me to meaningfully test things on a system, which has not even been confirmed to exist, which has stdint.h support but doesn’t have int32_t, uint32_t, or even int64_t.

Since I am aware of no one who has ever had an issue with this (and people have compiled Deadwood on lots of stuff like MIPS and what not), I will leave this bug, such as it is, open. If you want things to work on your Unisys mainframe, if you’re rich enough to buy a Unisys, you’re rich enough to pay me to refactor Deadwood to not need int32_t.

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A eulogy for djbdns

September 25, 2002

This blog is an example of how outspoken, confrontational people have a hard time doing actual productive work.

The rise and fall of djbdns

djbdns is (was, really, here in 2022) a DNS server which was very popular back in 2001, when I started developing MaraDNS. It has not been updated since 2001.

One of the things I find incredibly ironic is that, here, over 20 years after DJB’s final update to djbdns, I’m the only one who is updating its code. And, I am no djbdns advocate: I started MaraDNS simply because, until 2007, djbdns didn’t have an open source license, BIND had a lot of security issues, and there plain simply wasn’t any other DNS server out there. The djbdns crowd was not happy; one of my first emails I got after starting MaraDNS was a flame from a djbdns user criticizing me for making MaraDNS because djbdns was good enough, in his point of view.

And, indeed, there was a lot of noise 10-20 years ago about how djbdns was the one true DNS server, better than all others because it had no security holes. They made a lot of noise online, flooding online discussion boards whenever the subject of a DNS server came up. A few of them are still on ycombinator, still criticizing anything that’s not djbdns—the excellent KnotDNS got a cold reception from them there.

Despite all of the noise these loudmouths made about djbdns, very few stepped up to plate to actually maintain djbdns’s code. You would think, with the number of poster loudly proclaiming the virtues of djbdns, the number of people who made entire websites shrines to djbdns (not to mention qmail), and so on, at least one of them would still be up to plate, maintaining djbdns.

No. That didn’t happen. The only one still here, still maintaining djbdns is me, and I made a competitor to djbdns (which has been flamed by multiple djbdns “advocates”). Not one person who went to so much effort to troll and flame other DNS servers had the basic competence and persistence to actually make and maintain code.

Years after the BIND-and-djbdns flame wars have died out everywhere except with the aging crowd of Ycombinator desperately trying to recreate a rose-tinted vision of the past (and even here the djbdns advocates are slowly conceding djbdns isn’t really usable here in the 2020s), MaraDNS is still being maintained. I have given up on making her a general purpose recursive DNS server (use BIND, Unbound, or Knot Resolver for that), although it will still work as a recursor with over 99% of sites, as long as min_ttl is used so amazon.com is usable. However, MaraDNS is still a general-purpose authoritative nameserver, and it is (via Deadwood) a usable caching resolver (useful for pi-hole type stuff).

Point being, people who make a lot of noise and spread a lot of negative energy online seem to not be very good at actually creating and maintaining something tangible like a software project.

Edit: There may be other unpatched security holes in djbdns. Since they do not have a CVE number, I am ignoring them.

Chess update

I am taking a minor break from being actively involved in the online chess community. People should not be making unfounded negative accusations without evidence, and the current controversy, which I have discussed enough in the last two blog entries, has not died down in the least.

Hopefully things will get back to normal again; until then, I need some space from that kind of online negativity.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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Chess on 9/11

September 11, 2022

On the 21st anniversary of September 11, I look at how online discussion about Niemann is devolving.

September 11

I have discussed my memories of the September 11 attack in 2021, 2019, and 2012; I was in Mexico when it happened.

One additional memory that sticks out is that not only did all of the USA TV channels we could watch in Mexico have non-stop coverage of the 9/11 attacks, but in addition all of the Mexican TV channels stopped showing telenovelas (Spanish language soap operas) and other shows to give Mexico non-stop coverage of the attacks in the days immediately after the attack.

I remember going to a local coffee shop one afternoon a day or two after the attacks and seeing two television screens where Mexican news anchors were still discussing the attack in Spanish.

The Niemann conspiracy theories

I’m starting to see conspiracy theories about Hans Niemann, the player who defeated Magnus Carlsen a week ago, fester on Reddit and Youtube, so I will address what I have seen so far.

I’ve seen comparisons to Lance Armstrong’s story, where it took over a decade for the doping allegations to finally end his career. A Lance Armstrong comparison isn’t valid. Even back in 2004, there was a French book, L.A. Confidentiel, which presented strong circumstantial evidence of Armstrong’s doping. On the other hand, there have been no suspicions of Niemann cheating over the board until Magnus left the Sinquefield Cup.

People are bringing up a theory that Niemann does better in tournaments using DGT boards, but this data has not been replicated by others. See this tweet and this tweet.

To quote the Wall Street Journal, “game screening of Niemann’s play by one of the world’s leading chess detectives, the University at Buffalo’s Kenneth Regan, haven’t found anything untoward.” His win over Carlsen has been scrutinized by others, including apparently former world champion Karpov; no one has found evidence of computer play in Niemann’s victory.

Allegations of Niemann using computer assistance in other over the board tournaments have been made, but if Niemann is able to beat the reigning world champion as Black without cheating, he can beat many other players without having to resort to cheating.

Some claim maybe there’s an undetectable cheating technology out there. If such a technology exists, it makes every single super grandmaster, not just Niemann, suspect.

Now that Hans Niemann has been cleared of cheating by the people running security where he has been playing chess this last week, the accusations of him cheating are starting to go down a tin foil hat conspiracy theory rabbit hole. I expect better from chess players, who need to use logic and intelligence to play well.

I understand Niemann has cheated online, but he claims to have not done it since he was 16, and in our society, with the exception of the most egregious crimes, anything someone does when they are under 18 is forgiven and forgotten on their 18th birthday. While chess.com claims Niemann has cheated other times, they do not claim he cheated since becoming 18. Regardless, Niemann strongly denies ever engaging in over the board cheating.

I understand it can be very hard to accept that maybe Magnus Carlsen left a tournament without playing all of his games because he lost, which I believe is the most likely explanation of what happened. If true, this is not behavior a world champion should engage in. I feel a lot of compassion for Magnus Carlsen and his fans, but it does the chess world no favor to drag Niemann through the mud with baseless accusations.

Carlsen vs. Niemann, September 2022

Here is the historic game where Niemann defeated Carlsen as black in a very surprising upset a week ago today. I will simply leave the game here without comment.

1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 Bb4 4. g3 O-O 5. Bg2 d5 6. a3 Bxc3+ 7. bxc3 dxc4 8. Nf3 c5 9. O-O cxd4 10. Qxd4 Nc6 11. Qxc4 e5 12. Bg5 h6 13. Rfd1 Be6 14. Rxd8 Bxc4 15. Rxa8 Rxa8 16. Bxf6 gxf6 17. Kf1 Rd8 18. Ke1 Na5 19. Rd1 Rc8 20. Nd2 Be6 21. c4 Bxc4 22. Nxc4 Rxc4 23. Rd8+ Kg7 24. Bd5 Rc7 25. Ra8 a6 26. Rb8 f5 27. Re8 e4 28. g4 Rc5 29. Ba2 Nc4 30. a4 Nd6 31. Re7 fxg4 32. Rd7 e3 33. fxe3 Ne4 34. Kf1 Rc1+ 35. Kg2 Rc2 36. Bxf7 Rxe2+ 37. Kg1 Re1+ 38. Kg2 Re2+ 39. Kg1 Kf6 40. Bd5 Rd2 41. Rf7+ Kg6 42. Rd7 Ng5 43. Bf7+ Kf5 44. Rxd2 Nf3+ 45. Kg2 Nxd2 46. a5 Ke5 47. Kg3 Nf1+ 48. Kf2 Nxh2 49. e4 Kxe4 50. Be6 Kf4 51. Bc8 Nf3 52. Bxb7 Ne5 53. Bxa6 Nc6 54. Bb7 Nxa5 55. Bd5 h5 56. Bf7 h4 57. Bd5 Ke5 0-1

The picture of the twin towers burning on September 11 was taken by Michael Foran and obtained from the Wikimedia. The picture is available from Wikimedia under a CC-BY-2.0 license, and has been altered (resized and cropped) for this blog entry.

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Baseless accusations

September 6, 2022

This blog is about the unfounded serious accusations being made against super chess grandmaster Hans Niemann.

The Sinquefield Cup

Last week, the very prestigious Sinquefield cup was started. This is a tournament where 10 of the world’s best players, including reigning world chess champion Magnus Carlsen, sit down at the board and play each other chess for nine days, one game a day, until everyone has played everyone else in the tournament once. This kind of tournament is called a “round robin” tournament.

These kinds of tournaments are a lot of fun to watch. Some of the world’s most elite players play each other, some very strong grandmasters comment on the games, some beautiful chess is played, and I post to my blog some of the more interesting positions which come up in the games.

Hans Niemann: The chess speaks for itself

Hans Niemann is quite a character in the chess world. He made a big splash when, after winning a rapid game against Magnus Carlsen a month ago, when they interviewed him after the game, he got up to the mic, quickly said “The chess speaks for itself”, and walked off.

There are other similar incidents in interviews which, to me, give Hans a very entertaining and unfiltered personality. He would make a great comedian if he ever gave up chess.

On Sunday, Hans beat Magnus Carlsen again. After a fairly long game, Hand had a won endgame against Magnus and Magnus resigned.

People were extremely happy with this victory. Hans’s post-game tweet has well over 4,500 likes as I type this.

Magnus withdrawals from the tournament

The next day, as the tournament is starting and the players enter the hall after being scanned with a metal detector wand (a procedure the St. Louis chess club has had for a while), people start to wonder why Magnus hasn’t shown up for his game yet. Finally, Magnus, in a tweet heard around the world withdrew from the tournament without giving any reason why.

As someone who has been watching the tournament and has been enjoying Magnus’s presence there, this was incredibly disheartening for me. This is unheard of for Magnus; he has, as far as I know, never quit in the middle of a tournament.

The chess world was very surprised.

The accusations

At this point, a number of completely unfounded accusations that Hans somehow cheated were posted all over Twitter and Reddit.

I am not going to make any accusations whatsoever without clear and convincing evidence. I know the St. Louis Chess Club which has been hosting the Sinquefield Cup has strong security measures in place. I know that young chess players have risen quickly in ratings and ability before.

There are a number of possible reasons why Magnus left the tournament early:

Hans had a clean win against Magnus which maybe put him off balance. I know that Magnus has been pretty ambivalent about chess this last year, and it’s very possible Sunday’s loss was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Maybe Magnus had a family emergency.

Maybe Magnus found Hans’s comments in the post-game interview deeply offensive.

Maybe Magnus caught his girlfriend in bed with Hans—Hans, after all, does have a bad boy vibe to him that some girls find really sexy.

Quite bluntly, it’s more likely to have Magnus find Hans in bed with his girlfriend than Hans having some super James Bond technology whispering in his ear computer chess move suggestions while playing his games, since said technology would have to both be invisible to cameras and it would have had to get through St. Louis Chess Club’s very tight security.

A game

One of the accusations is that, the day after Hans beat Magnus, Hans got computer advice in his game against Alireza Firouzja, a game that Hans ultimately drew. Let’s go to the position where people accuse Hans of making a supercomputer non-human move:

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Nf6 4. d3 Bc5 5. c3 d6 6. O-O O-O 7. Re1 Bb6 8. a4 a5 9. h3 h6 10. Na3 Ne7 11. d4 Ng6 12. Bf1 c6 13. Nc4 Bc7 14. dxe5 Nxe5 15. Bf4 Nxf3+ 16. Qxf3 d5 17. Rad1 Be6 18. e5 Nd7

Position after 18...Nd7

The accusation being made here is that no grandmaster is going to play Qg3 after 17...Nd7, since only a computer can see the knight sacrifice is sound. Never mind that the sacrifice is not sound: According to Stockfish, Black’s best move is to simply take the knight and fight off the tactical complications to get a draw. This position does not come off as one where the knight sacrifice can only be seen by a strong computer; it’s the kind of sacrifice one will make to get a strong kingside attack. Indeed, Firouzja made a very similar knight sacrifice the day before and went on to win that game.

Point being, I haven’t seen any reliable evidence that Hans has been cheating. This position, as just one example, is certainly not evidence of foul play.

Edit Now that Hans has directly addressed the cheating accusations, I will quote his explanation for playing Qg3:

When I played the move queen to g3, I did not elaborate this during [i.e. in the interview immediately after] the game, but it was a purely psychological move. Clearly people don’t know anything about Firouzja, his style, how to beat him. The way to beat him is to attack him. He really really hates being attacked; the main way he loses is by being attacked.

Now we had a game, in Miami, where I got an attack, and he completely collapsed. I’ve studied previous games, knowing [how] to attack [him]. So, when I see this position, and I see queen g3, and I think to myself ‘OK, I highly doubt, based on my intuitive feeling, that I am losing here.’ I don’t feel the need to calculate every single variation because I’m confident that there’s no way, first [of all that] is going to take [the knight] and [second of all], if he takes, he’s going to be scared shitless. So that’s this game.

Edit 2 Grandmaster and FIDE director-general Emil Sutovsky says that Qg3 isn’t a computer move in a tweet:

Some of the accusations (like guessing opening line) are understandable, but claiming Qf3-g3 is a computer move??? Guys, but what else? Nd6? Ne5! Even if one can't calculate Qg3 dc Bh6, that is the only move to play.

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Democracy

September 2, 2022

This blog is about the importance of retaining America’s democracy. Also, I go over a recent blitz chess game between Hikaru Nakamura and Alireza Firouzja.

Kasparov’s Tweet

World Chess Champion #13 Kasparov tweeted the following:

I’m glad to hear Biden plainly address the need for Americans to wake up to the importance of institutions and the rule of law. Calling out Trump and his followers is politics too, but it’s democratic politics. Fomenting insurrection and denying elections is not.

Kasparov, of course, is referring to Biden’s speech where he warns that our democracy is in crisis.

A conspiracy theory

The people I interact with who support the January 6 insurrection online claim the election was “stolen”.

For the election to be faked by the “deep state” requires a large number of people to be in on the conspiracy. It requires every single judge, including Republican appointed and Trump appointed judges involved in the many lawsuits about the election to be part of the conspiracy. It requires thousands of election workers to be part of the conspiracy. It requires the auditors doing recounts to be part of the conspiracy.

A conspiracy this extensive would also have to be airtight: No one has come forward admitting they are part of the conspiracy. It’s a conspiracy so perfectly executed, it results in an election which is indistinguishable from an election where Biden legitimately won.

A conspiracy this big and with this many people involved would be so hard to pull off, it would had been far simpler to just get all of the people in on the conspiracy to vote for Biden, so that Biden would had won the election by an unquestionable margin.

It is no surprise to me that a president who never got an approval rating above 47% legitimately lost the election. But perhaps the people running presidential approval polls are part of this vast “deep state” conspiracy too.

There’s a point where we have to acknowledge that there is objective truth—and it’s an objective fact is that Biden beat Trump in 2020, fair and square.

Nakamura vs. Firouzja

On August 30, 2022, Nakamura as White played the following game against Firouzja, who was Black.

1.Nf3 d5 2.e3 Nf6 3.c4 e6 4.b3 c5 5.Bb2 Nc6 6.cxd5 exd5 7.Bb5 Bd6 8.O-O O-O 9.d4 cxd4 10.Nxd4 Bc7 11.Nd2 Nxd4 12.Bxd4 Qd6 13.g3 Ba5 14.a3 Bh3 15.Re1 Bxd2 16.Qxd2 Ne4 17.Qe2 Rac8 18.Bd3 Bf5 19.b4 Qg6 20.Red1 Ng5 21.f4 Bxd3 22.Qxd3 Nf3+ 23.Kg2

Black to move and win

In the position, Firouzja could had won on the spot by playing 23...Ne1+, winning the queen; if 24.Kf1 then 24...Nxd3 and if 24.Rxe1 then 24...Qxd3. Firouzja instead played 23...Rc2+ which still ultimately won:

23...Rc2+ 24.Qxc2 Qxc2+ 25.Kxf3 Rc8 26.Re1 Qxh2 27.Rac1 Rc2 28.Rxc2 Qxc2 29.Bxa7 f6 30.Bd4 Kf7 31.Re2 Qe4+ 32.Kf2 b5 33.Rd2 g5 34.fxg5 fxg5 35.Kg1 Kg6 36.Bc5 Qf3 37.Kh2 Qe4 38.Bd4 h5 39.Rf2 h4 40.gxh4 Qxh4+ 41.Kg2 Qe4+ 42.Kg1 Qb1+ 43.Kh2 Qd3 44.Kg3 Qe4 45.Kh2 Kh5 46.Kg3 Qg4+ 47.Kh2 Qd1 48.Rg2 Kg6 49.Bc5 Qh5+ 50.Kg1 Qd1+ 51.Kh2 Qh5+ 52.Kg1 Qf3 53.Bd4 Qd1+ 54.Kh2 Qd3 55.Bc5 Qxa3 56.Rd2 Qb3 57.Kg3 Qc4 58.Rd4 Qf1 59.Rd2 Qe1+ 60.Rf2 Kh5 61.Kg2 Kg4 62.Ra2 Qg3+ 63.Kh1 Kh3 0-1

Mate in three

Hikaru Nakmura resigned because he can not stop mate in three, e.g. 64.e4 Qe1+ 65.Bg1 Qxe4+ 66.Rg2 Qxg2#.

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Round-up

August 11, 2022

A round-up of various things in the second week of August, 2022.

Alex Jones

Alex Jones has been asked to pay just under $50 million in damages to one of the families who suffered the Sandy Hook tragedy.

This will hopefully be the final nail in the coffin for the “false flag operation” and “crisis actors” conspiracy theories being treated as anything besides the delusions of mentally ill people. It was vile to spread these falsehoods to further a political agenda.

The result of the abortion laws

With an number of stories making the rounds showing how women with non-viable fetuses are being held back from medical care because of the abortion laws now in force, conservatives are claiming that they did not intend to force 10-year-old rape victims to give birth or to inhibit medical care for women with miscarriages.

If the intention is to allow mothers whose lives are in danger to have abortions, that is how the laws should be written. The laws should have wording in them like “abortion is always legal in cases where the mother’s life and/or health is in danger, including but not limited to stillbirths, miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, or any other circumstance where there can possibly be any danger to the mother’s life or health”. Right now, they do not, and we get horror stories like Elizabeth Weller’s story: Her life was put in danger because of anti-abortion laws.

As the saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. If it is truly the intention of pro-life lawmakers to allow abortion to protect the mother’s health, or allow abortions in case of rape or incest (so 10-year-old girls don’t have to cross state lines to get an abortion; yes, that happened too), or to even allow abortions in the first 15 weeks, that is how the laws should be written.

I judge the intentions of pro-life lawmakers not on what they claim in speeches to try and win elections, but on what laws they actually put in the books.

Bwalya vs. Carlsen 2022

At the now-over 2022 Chess Olympiad, regining world champion Magnus Carlsen played one Gillan Bwalya. Bwalya was White, and Carlsen was Black:

1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 e6 3. Nc3 d5 4. Nf3 Bb4 5. e3 O-O 6. a3 Bxc3+ 7. bxc3 c5 8. Bd3 dxc4 9. Bxc4 Qc7 10. Nd2 Nc6 11. O-O Rd8 12. f4 Nd5 13. Bxd5 exd5 14. Qh5 cxd4 15. cxd4 Ne7 16. Nf3 Bf5 17. Bd2 f6 18. Nh4 Be4 19. f5 Rac8 20. Bb4 a5 21. Bxe7 Qxe7 22. Rf4 Rc3 23. Re1 Qxa3 24. Rg4 Rc1 25. Rxc1 Qxe3+ 26. Kf1

Black to move and mate

26...Bd3# 0-1

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MaraDNS security update

August 1, 2022

I have made a security update for a fairly minor security problem in MaraDNS. Also, a discussion of dark mode and a chess game from the currently running chess olympiad.

MaraDNS security update

Xiang Li from Network and Information Security Lab, Tsinghua University discovered a clever way to keep names in Deadwood’s cache after a rogue domain has been revoked. I have implemented measures to make this attack no longer feasible. The only impact is that sometimes a name can stay in the cache longer than desired. The issue only affects people using Deadwood as a fully recursive DNS server; if one uses upstream_servers and not root_servers, one will not be affected by this bug.

This issue was fixed in Deadwood 3.5.0022 released on May 7, 2022. To allow other DNS server developers ample time to fix and patch the issue, I kept a 90-day embargo. I made the issue public on August 1, 2022, after coordinating with other DNS implementors to ensure the issue has been addressed across the board before making it public.

The updated version of MaraDNS is available on the MaraDNS download page and at GitHub.

Dark mode

I have updated my web pages to have dark mode support in CSS. If one is seeing this page with a light text on a dark background, this means dark mode is enabled in the browser; people without dark mode enabled will see no change to the web sites.

As an aside, for people who want to view websites without dark mode support with light text and dark backgrounds, Dark Reader looks to do a really good job.

Shirov v. Toczek 2022

The international chess olympiad is ongoing, with well over 150 nations playing each other chess in India every day. With over 600 games being played every day, a number of interesting games have come up. Here’s an interesting game between Shirov (White) and Toczek (Black) from the second day of the olympiad.

This is how the game went:

1.e4 d6 2.d4 Nf6 3.Nc3 e5 4.Nf3 Nbd7 5.g4 Nxg4 6.Rg1 Ngf6 7.Bc4 h6 8.dxe5 dxe5 9.Be3 c6 10.Qd3 b5 11.Bb3 Qa5 12. O-O-O Ba6 13.Nd2 Rd8 14.Qf1 c5 15.Nd5 c4 16.Nxc4 bxc4 17.Bxc4 Bb7 18.Bd2 Qc5 19.Bb4 Qc8 20.Ba5 Nxd5 21.Bxd5 Ba6 22.Qh3 Nb6 23.Qh5 Rd7 24.Qxe5+ Re7 25.Qd4 Nxd5 26.Qa4+ Qd7?

While to move and win

28.Rxd5! 1-0

Black resigned because he could not save his queen. For example, if 28... Qxa4 then 29.Rd8# delivers checkmate.

The code and graphics to make the chess game diagram come from a variety of open source projects. There is a list of contributors and copyrights for the hard working people who made these chess diagrams possible. Also, the diagram code has a GitHub page.

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J. Polgar v. Carlsen 2022

July 15, 2022

This month, Judit Polgar played reigning World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen in a quick casual game of chess.

The interactive diagrams

The diagrams here, when viewed on the world wide web, are interactive diagrams. Click on “>” below the diagram to advance the position one move; click on “<” to go back one move. Click on “reset” to return to the position being discussed in the notes.

The Game

On July 2nd, 2022 during the candidate’s chess tournament in Spain, Grandmaster (and at one time world #8 player) Judit Polgar sees reigning World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen in the park and they play a casual (“Skittles”) game of chess as a crowd and camera crew watch and record the event. Polgar is White and Carlsen is Black in this game. Both players had only three minutes to make all of their moves.

1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 e6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nc6

Position after 4... Nc6

It’s unusual for Carlsen to play the Sicilian Taimanov (For people familiar with ECO codes: B48), but he has played it a couple of times in tournaments, both this year, one game as Black against Grandelius and another game, again as Black, against candidates winner Nepomniachtchi in a rapid game.

Judit Polgar is no stranger to the Sicilian Taimanov, having played it with the Black pieces in a famous 1994 game against Shirov in Argentina.

5. Nc3 Qc7 6. Be3 a6 7. Qd2 Nf6 8. f3 Be7 9. O-O-O b5 10. g4 Nxd4 11. Bxd4 Bb7 12. e5

Position after 12. e5

The usual moves to make here are Kb1 or g5, but Polgar played the novelty move e5 which has not been seen in master level play before.

12... Nxg4 13. Rg1 Nh6

Position after 13... Nh6

White could not play 13. fxg3 because then Black’s bishop would had taken the rook on h1.

While 13... Bxf3 is technically Black’s best move here, there were a number of tactical complications Black would had been exposed to, such as 14. Bg2 Bxg2? 15. Qxg2 and now both Black’s a8 rook and g4 knight are under attack, causing him to lose a piece.

14. Bd3 Bf8

Black is now forced to put his dark-squared bishop back on its home square. Other moves are worse. For example, if Black instead played 14... O-O?, Black would had been exposed to a mating attack:

14... O-O? would had exposed Black’s king

14... O-O? 15. Rxg7+ Kxg7 16. Rg1+ Ng4 17. Rxg4+ Kh8 18. Qh6 Bg5+ 19. Rxg5 Qxc3 20. Qg7#

Black can make other moves after 14... O-O?, but they all lead to checkmate.

Back to the game that was on the board, it continued as follows.

14... Bf8 15. Be4 Rc8?

Rc8 was a blunder; White can now move and win:

White to move and win

16. Bb6!

Black cannot save both his queen and king. For example, if Black now plays 16... Qxb6??, White can mate with Qxd7#:

Playing 16... Qxb6?? would had led to mate

Since there is no move which both puts his queen on a safe square and defends the d7 square, Magnus was forced to give up his queen. Magnus and Grandmaster Anish Giri immediately saw that the position was lost for Black and exclaimed “Oh my God!”; the crowd quickly caught on and cheered for Judit’s 16. Bd6! move.

Magnus could had resigned at this point, but, having a strong fighting spirit, Magnus decided to continue on for a few more moves:

Without his queen, Magnus resigns

16... Bxe4 17. Bxc7 Bc6 18. Bd6 Nf5 19. Ne4 1-0

And this is how Judit Polgar beat Magnus in only 19 moves.

See also

The game on chessgames.com

Computer analysis of game on Lichess

Chess Network’s Lichess blog on the game

Judit’s own video commentary on this game

Gotham Chess’s video commentary on this game

Agadmator’s video commentary

Chess Network video commentary

Reddit has two discussion threads about this game.

A one-page summary of this game is available as a PDF file

The code and graphics to make the chess game diagram come from a variety of open source projects. There is a list of contributors and copyrights for the hard working people who made these chess diagrams possible. Also, the diagram code has a GitHub page.

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Why I’m pro-choice

June 25, 2022

In this blog I explain that while I am, on a personal level, very deeply pro-life, I am pro-choice at a government level.

While I respect Marina’s privacy, and while Marina was a very private person, I believe she would not object to having these very private stories being made public in light of abortion being made illegal this week for 40% of US citizens.

Roe vs. Wade: Overturned

You probably already know that the Supreme Court of the United States has overturned Roe vs. Wade, which has, on the spot, made abortion illegal for about 40% of women in the US.

The miscarriage

Before we had our child, Marina had a miscarriage. As part of the procedure to handle the miscarriage, the doctor prescribed for Marina mifepristone and misoprostol. Marina took these medications so that the dead baby could leave her body and she could be back to no longer being pregnant.

Those pills are standard treatment for a woman who has had a miscarriage. Even though Marina was in Mexico, in a state where abortion was and still is illegal, the pharmacist didn’t even think twice about filling the prescription. There are many legitimate reasons to take those pills which do not involve performing an abortion, such as the miscarriage.

Today, as I write this, it is very difficult to get these pills to treat miscarriages in Texas. With today’s supreme court decision, this means that many women will no longer be able to get the care they need if they lose a baby in a miscarriage.

My daughter

A couple of years later, Marina, after being diagnosed with cancer, ended up pregnant again. While our oncologist strongly recommended that we terminate the child so Marina could resume her cancer treatments, Marina and I were very deeply pro-life, and felt that the child was a miracle and Marina’s only chance to bring a child in to the world. Marina would not perform assisted reproductive treatments because they went against her pro-life values.

We got a very good OB/GYN doctor who supported our decision to keep the baby, and excellent care who made sure the baby would come to term as a healthy, normal child.

After the baby was born, we found out that Marina’s cancer had spread. Her oncologist always felt the cancer would not had spread like that if she had aborted our child. Marina succumbed to the cancer within a year after having our child.

Despite this, Marina always made it clear to me that she completely supported a woman’s right to choose, even in her final days on this earth. She would had been—and perhaps is—mortified to see Roe vs. Wade be overthrown.

Sex: I’m very conservative

I am extremely conservative about sex and family. I do not, and have never had, sex outside of a lifetime monogamous commitment. I also feel, as a man, I should be responsible for any life created because of the sex act, and am very glad we kept the child and that I get to be a parent today.

But, there is a difference between my personal views and what I feel the government should make illegal.

Abortion is always a very difficult decision to make. It should be one that is the mother’s decision, not the decision of the government to make.

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Republicans are dying

June 24, 2022

In light of the nonsense passed by the Supreme Court today taking away a woman’s right to choose whether to remain pregnant, I will discuss why this Republican nonsense will not last much longer.

Republicans are getting older

Republican voters are getting older. To wit:

In 1984, voters of all ages voted red across the board.

Ditto in 1988

Clinton was more popular with voters over 60 than young voters in 1992

Bush and Gore were equally as popular among then 18-24 year old voters in 2000

In 2004, Kerry was more popular among 18-24 year old voters than Bush; all older voters preferred Bush.

In 2012, voters 39 and younger all preferred Obama over Romney. Voters 40 and older all preferred Romney over Obama.

In 2016, it was voters 40 and older who gave Trump the White house. Voters 39 and younger voted for Hillary.

By the 2020 election, those Republican voters have been getting even older: Only voters 50 and older preferred Trump to Biden.

Point being, in the mid-1980s, all age groups were red voters. In 2004, voters 24 and under were blue. By 2012, voters 39 and under were blue. Eight years later, voters 49 and younger are blue.

The Republican party only appeals to an aging demographic which is dying off. I will probably live to see the court get packed, and I might even live to see a national popular vote constitutional amendment.

In the short term

In the short term, I think abortion is going to be the new health care law: Now that passing laws have real world consequences, it’s going to be a lot harder for Republicans to pass those laws.

Today voting against abortion actually takes away a woman’s fundamental right, so my prediction is that a lot of Republicans at the state level are going to backpedal and pass laws making abortions legal in swing states and even red states. I remember when Todd Akin was shown the door in deep red Missouri because he said a woman could “shut down” a pregnancy from rape. The same women in deep red states who voted against Akin back in 2012 could very well now go to vote out Republicans who try to keep abortion illegal.

Why I am pro choice

The reasons why I am pro choice are based on some very personal stories. Now that abortion has become illegal in about half of the United States, I think those stories need to be told, but I need to get clearance from other people involved in the stories before I make them public.

I can tell you this much: On a personal level, I oppose adultery and I oppose sex outside of a lifetime monogamous commitment. But what I oppose on a personal level and what I think government should make illegal are two different things.

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Remembering Vangelis

May 19, 2022

The legendary electronic musician Vangelis has died. I honor his memory.

Vangelis

When my mother gave me rides when I was in high school, she had this blue Honda Accord with a then high tech cassette player, which allowed us to choose the music we listened to instead of merely choosing the radio station.

It was always a challenge to find music both my mother and myself could both enjoy listening to. One of the artists we found we both liked was the legendary Vangelis.

My father discovered Vangelis and bought a number of his albums after watching the movie “Chariots of Fire”, including “Albedo 0.39”, “Spiral”, “Heaven and Hell”, and “Chariots of Fire”. I had taken his vinyl albums and enjoyed the music so much that I made cassette tapes of them.

When I played one of those Vangelis tapes for my mother one day as she was driving me somewhere, she immediately fell in love with his music. We would listen to a music a lot, and talk about what an incredible genius Vangelis was.

Her favorite album of his was “Heaven and Hell”; her favorite part of that album was the movement which was very effectively used in the TV series Cosmos; my favorite album of his was “Spiral”, but I also really enjoyed “Albedo 0.39”, especially the ambient soundscape in the song “Alpha” off of that album. We also listened to and greatly enjoyed the soundtrack album for “Chariots of Fire”, which my mother ended up buying.

Years later, when I watched Blade Runner with my mother, she was still a big fan of Vangelis, and could not help but comment on how Vangelis’ music sounded really good in the movie.

My mother died years ago, but I still cherish those memories of us driving around in her car, listening to Vangelis.

R.I.P. Vangelis

The included picture of Vangelis is CC BY-SA 3.0 licensed. Attribution: Kapetan Nikolios

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Star Wars

May 4, 2022

May the 4th be with you! Also, I go over a short chess game.

May the 4th be with you!

Today is Star Wars day, because of the word play with the expression “May the 4th be with you”.

I have enjoyed all of the Star Wars movies, but my favorite remains Return of The Jedi, since it was the first movie I could fully understand when I saw it during its original release in the theaters. Of the prequel trilogy, I like Revenge of the Sith the most, and of the Disney batch of movies, I like Rogue One the most.

Legal’s mate

Legall de Kermeur was the best chess player in the world from around 1730 to 1755. Since records of the moves played in chess games (game scores) were not readily kept in that era, only one of his many games is still extant, a very short and famous game, which I will describe here.

All chess diagrams are interactive. Click on “>” to see the next move, “<” to go back a move. In the first diagram, it is also possible to click on “<<” to go to the beginning of a game, and “>>” to see how the game ends. “Reset” in the other diagrams will move the game back to the position being illustrated. Alegbraic notation is used to describe the chess moves made.

Let’s look at this game.

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Bc4 Bg4 4. Nc3 g6?

5. Nxe5! Bxd1

White can now deliver mate

6. Bxf7+ Ke6. 7. Nd5#

Checkmate

The code and graphics to make the chess game diagram come from a variety of open source projects. There is a list of contributors and copyrights for the hard working people who made these chess diagrams possible. Also, the diagram code has a GitHub page.

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Happy Easter!

April 17, 2022

Happy Easter! This blog is about my current thoughts on Chess variants, and about some free Chess diagram fonts I have made.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter! Lent has been very successful this year: I have been able to reduce my social media usage and am engaging in more live social gatherings again. With the COVID pandemic no longer a pressing concern I have been transitioning from online socialization to live person social gatherings.

As just one of many examples, I am now going back to live church services again.

Public domain chess diagram fonts

A chess diagram font is a font one uses to make a diagram of a chess position. These are used to illustrate positions in chess games, as well as for chess mating problems.

I have been annoyed that there isn’t an OFL licensed or public domain chess diagram font out there. I finally took the bull by the horns and both made my open public domain chess piece diagrams, as well as finding two sources for public domain vector chess piece diagrams, and now have three different public domain chess diagram fonts.

The fonts are available for download at the following locations:

https://​samiam.​org/​schoolbook/​fonts/

https://​github.​com/​samboy/​Chess​Graphics

Chess variants

It’s an exciting time for chess variant enthusiasts:

With Chess960 now played in official FIDE tournaments, and with millions of games of this variant played online, chess variants are finally mainstream. Bobby Fischer’s lasting legacy will be, as much as his chess, the increment chess clock and the Chess960 variant.

Fairy Stockfish is fully open source and can play many variants better than any human.

I have, 28 years later, fully implemented an idea I had for a chess variant back in 1994.

The idea I had in 1994 was to implement a chess variant on a particular demi-regular tiling of squares and triangles that Wikipedia calls a 33344-33434 tiling.

I have finally formalized the rules for this variant, and have even made a Zillions of Games rules file for it. While Zillions is closed source and proprietary, it is the only chess variant engine I know of that is flexible enough to be able to play chess on any arbitrary tiling.

The variant can be looked at and the Zillions rules downloaded here:

https://samiam.org/schoolbook/

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MaraDNS updates & more

March 29, 2022

I discuss the Ukraine invasion, some minor updates I have been making for MaraDNS, why I don’t like 5G, and Will Smith’s now world-famous slap at the Oscars last night.

The Ukraine invasion

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a brazen power grab trying to use blunt force to conquer a sovereign nation. I agree with Biden: It is a war crime. This inhuman invasion must stop.

I have been following World Chess Champion #13 Kasparov’s Twitter feed, because, as a Russian who lived under Soviet oppression, Kasparov has an excellent perspective of Putin’s actions:

https://twitter.com/Kasparov63

MaraDNS updates

I have been, based on user feedback, making some minor updates to MaraDNS:

An incomplete last line in the dwood3rc.txt file is no longer fatal if running Deadwood in Windows (still fatal in *NIX clones).

Document how to have CAA records in MaraDNS.

Fix a minor issue with example SPF records in MaraDNS’s documentation.

These changes are all pretty minor, and do not merit an updated release, but I have recompiled Deadwood for Windows with the incomplete last line change and updated the web page with MaraDNS documentation.

The snapshot of MaraDNS can be downloaded here:

https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

5G is harmful

I consider 5G harmful. Not because of the alleged health risks of 5G radio waves which I think is a bunch of bull. But because, in the name of upgrading to 5G, US cell carriers are in the process of decommissioning their 3G networks. I had multiple 3G cell phones, including one only four years old, which is now a paperweight because the cell phone carriers have decided they can make more profit selling the “new improved 5G experience” while forcing those of us who still have 3G cellphones to buy a new cellphone I didn’t want to buy just so that I can have the same functionality my previous cell phone had.

While it makes business sense to force people to buy phones they really do not need, it makes no sense for the environment to have a network upgrade convert perfectly good cell phones in to landfill.

Will Smith at the Oscars

For context, this is about Will Smith slapping Chris Rock last night at the Oscars. Since everyone is talking about it, I may as well chime in with my two cents.

I think the best moment in this entire Will Smith affair at the Oscars is how Denzel Washington and Tyler Perry walked up to Will Smith and defused the situation with Smith. I don’t think they were enabling bad behavior, but reacting to a very inappropriate action with empathy and compassion.

Then again, Tyler Perry starred in and directed my favorite movie: “Why did I get Married”. Yes, I love romcoms, especially realistic romcoms where the characters actually believe in God.

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Slackware 15

February 5, 2022

I discuss Slackware’s new release and finish up going over the top five 1980s songs on You Tube.

Slackware 15.0

Slackware, the very first version of Linux I ever installed, is still around. Indeed, they have, this week, just released Slackware 15.0, which keeps a lot of the feel of classic Slackware around while updating the distribution for the 2020s.

I set up a virtual machine and installed Slackware. It feels, in many ways, more like a “real *NIX” than the newer versions of mainstream distributions like CentOS and Ubuntu. There is no Systemd here. Heck, there is not even GRUB: Slackware still uses LILO to boot the operating system.

My biggest surprise is how much disk space a full Slackware takes up. The days of being able to fit Slackware on a stack of floppies are long gone; a full install of Slackware is well over 15 gigabytes in size, and installing all of just the base and networking packages for a web server or what not is well over two gigabytes in size. At home, in an era of under $30 240 gigabyte internal SSD drives, this is a drop in the bucket, but the reason why CentOS and Ubuntu have much smaller base installs is because, when renting a low-cost virtual machine in a datacenter, $20 a year only gives you 10 gigabytes of storage, so having the underlying operating system only take up a gigabyte or so of space is still useful.

There are probably ways to make Slackware take up less space. /lib/firmware takes up hundreds of megabytes, and we can probably safely remove this in a KVM virtual machine where none of the virtual hardware should need a binary firmware blob.

YouTube 1980s hits #1: Axel F

This concludes a series last covered a month ago.

The most popular 1980s song is actually a 2009 cover of Harold Faltermeyer’s Axel F theme, with some 3,052,616,747 views as I type this.

Of all of the songs from the 1980s, it’s somewhat unusual that this one is the overall most popular one. While the original 1980s song was a major hit, it did not hit #1 in the US (it only hit #3 here), nor the UK (#2), or even the composer’s own West Germany (#2).

While some incorrectly consider Harold Faltermeyer a one hit wonder, he has helped make a lot more hits than this one. He helped make the music for the movie Midnight Express (the first electronic score to win an Oscar), arranging its hit The Chase. He also arranged Laura Branigan’s hit Self Control, composed and produced the hit Square Rooms, produced the album Behavior by the Pet Shop Boys, which includes their hit (and my favorite Pet Shop Boys song) So Hard (as an aside, there was a note with the album that So Hard told a true story, a linear note one would not make today), among many other credits.

My daughter immediately recognized the Crazy Frog version of Axel F and feels it’s superior to Faltermeyer’s original; I prefer the original myself.

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Nexuiz: Beer and pretzels

January 29, 2022

While there are a number of free and open source first person shooter games out there, Nexuiz is still my favorite one.

Beer and Pretzels

A “beer and pretzels” game is a game which can be played and enjoyed by casual gamers without devoting too much time to learning the rules. An example “Beer and pretzels” game is Axis and Allies, whose rules were far simpler than most Avalon Hill or SSI games from the same era, and is one of the few board wargames still published today.

Other “beer and pretzels” games include Risk and Monopoly. Simple rules, not as deep as other games, but very fun casual games.

Contrast “beer and pretzels” games with games which have very complex rules, and significant cult followings. Back in the day, we bought both Wizard’s Quest and Magic Realm to play. We found Wizard’s Quest, a simple Risk-like game, a lot more fun than Magic Realm, whose rules are far too complex for a casual game. It is, however, Magic Realm which developed a devoted following: Magic Realm games go for hundreds of dollars on eBay, while Wizard’s Quest sets can be had for around $25.

First person shooters

A “first person shooter” game is a game using three dimensional graphics where one is the hero of a game with the goal of shooting as many enemies as possible.

Famous examples include Doom, Quake, and the Call of Duty series of games.

Open source first person shooters

There have been a number of open source first person shooters released over the years, including Warsow, Cube, Open Arena, Xonotic, a successor to Nexuiz, and Freedoom.

Some of these games come off as clones of other games: While both are excellent games, Open Arena is a poor man’s Quake3, and Freedoom is a poor man’s Doom. Other games are incredibly complicated games in the vein of Magic Realm: While all very good games for their devoted fans, Warsow and Xonotic are in this category, and Cube appears to be there too based on what I have read online.

Nexuiz

This leads us to Nexuiz, pronounced (Nex-ee-is). Nexuiz was released between 2005 and 2009 as a simple open-source first person shooter in the vein of Unreal Tournament. It is a simple enough game to learn and become good at, not having the complicated trick jumps and other complex moves Xonotic and Warsow have. With the bots, it’s fairly quick to become proficient at Nexuiz and have a fun casual game.

It’s a game simple enough to make for a fun LAN party game, where people who have never played the game before can still have a lot of fun playing it without having to overcome a steep learning curve.

Since the game is from the first 2000s decade, it plays well even on low end hardware; I have no problem getting over 100 frames per second on a $133 computer I got a couple of years ago.

The only issue with its game mechanics is that the rocket launcher was an overpowered weapon.

I have made a tiny 50-megabyte remix of Nexuiz with seven quality 1-on-1 (Duel) maps, including an Xonotic map converted back in to a fun Nexuiz map, a Nexuiz adaptation of the classic Hubster Remix II of Aerowalk, and five maps from Nexuiz 2.3. This version has a weaker rocket launcher, and each map has been updated to include all weapons.

It is available for download here:

https://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​nexuiz-​tiny

This is my favorite first person shooter; it’s open source, it has simple rules, and it’s a fun little game to play.

As an aside, I am not the only one to prefer Nexuiz over Xonotic.

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Variable optical size

January 9, 2022

I list some variable fonts, and discuss the second most popular 1980s song as per the number of YouTube views the song has.

Variable optical size fonts

This is a list of fonts which meet the following criteria:

The font is a variable font

The optical size of the font can be varied

The font is an OFL licensed open source font

Voto and Source Serif

https://​github.​com/​twardoch/​varfonts-​ofl

https://​github.​com/​adobe-​fonts/​source-​serif

These are the same general design, but Voto allows the width to be varied (both allow the weight and optical size to be varied)

Amstelvar

https://​github.​com/​Type​Network/​Amstelvar

One of the first variable fonts, with a large number of variable axes, including width, weight, and optical size.

Fraunces

https://​github.​com/​undercasetype/​fraunces

This font has four variable axes, including weight and optical size

NewsReader

https://​github.​com/​productiontype/​Newsreader

This font has weight and optical size as variable axes

Graduate Variable Font

https://​github.​com/​etunni/​Graduate-​Variable-​Font

While not suitable for body text, this open source variable font has a large number of axes, including optical size.

1980s song #2: Take On Me

This continues a series last seen in my previous blog entry

The second most popular 1980s song is A-Ha’s Take On Me, with 1,357,424,242 views as I type this.

Take on Me was a song which only hit #1 for one week in the US when it originally came out. While, in 1982, The Human League could keep a synth pop song on top of the charts for three weeks, by 1985 synth pop was going out of style, being relegated to “alternative rock” stations, and A-Ha was only able to stay on top of the charts for one week.

What made A-Ha notable was that, like Duran Duran, they were very attractive men who legions of teenage girls had crushes on. Long after A-Ha stopped making hits, their pictures would grace the cover of Bop magazine with stories about how cute the guys were filling the magazine’s pages.

Perhaps it’s those teenage girls who had crushes on an A-Ha band member who have propelled this song to #2 in terms of total You Tube views, remembering fondly the innocent crushes of their childhood.

This series on 1980s hits popular with YouTube is concluded in a future blog entry.

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2021

All blog entries written in 2021

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MaraDNS support update

December 19, 2021

I discuss a change in MaraDNS’s support policy in this blog. Also, I discuss another of the top 5 1980s songs on YouTube.

MaraDNS: Bug reports removed

Back in the mid-2010s, GitHub bug reports were a gold mine of clueful bug reports. The bug reports had full descriptions, sometimes scripts to reproduce the bugs, and were very helpful with improving MaraDNS. Something changed in 2019: Instead of getting useful bug reports, I started getting support requests disguised as bug reports. One user became so hostile with me after I made it clear bug reports are not for support, I had to delete the entire support thread.

All of this, despite me telling users not to use support requests for bug reports as a pinned bug report.

That in mind, since I haven’t gotten a useful bug report for nearly three years, I have removed the “issue” tab from MaraDNS’s GitHub repo. To file a bug report, go to the bug report thread on GitHub.

#3: Sweet Child O’ Mine

This continues my series on 1980s songs which are popular on YouTube. My last posting on this topic was a month ago.

The third most popular 1980s song is Guns N’ Roses’s song Sweet Child O’ Mine, with 1,304,342,951 YouTube views as I type this.

Guns N’ Roses was the first really popular act in the 1980s which bucked the trend of synth-heavy music which dominated the 1980s. The synth heavy trend even affected traditional rock bands: As just one example, after many years of floundering, the band Heart finally stopped making classic rock and instead made the synth heavy album Heart in 1985, which gave Heart their first #1 hit, “These Dreams”, and went 5x platinum. The sound of Heart differs from their classic hits to the point my daughter is convinced it is not the same band which gave us both their 1975 classic rock song “Magic Man” and their mid-1980s hits “These Dreams” and “Never”.

Guns N’ Roses, on the other hand, was convinced you could make a Rock and Roll hit again without relying on synthesizers. And, indeed, there is not a single synthesizer in this entire song, and yet it hit #1 back in 1988 and, to this day, is the third most popular 1980s song on YouTube.

This song paved the way for Nirvana to start having mainstream hits, followed by the entire 1990s “grunge” movement.

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1980s songs: Part two

November 7, 2021

I continue to talk about the five most popular 1980s songs on YouTube, and discuss changing the time on my car stereo.

#4: Billie Jean

This continues my series on 1980s YouTube hits

The fourth most popular 1980s song is Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, with 1,072,965,297 views as I type this.

Michael Jackson was, at his peak, at least as popular as The Beatles were in the 1960s. This resulted in a lot of jealousy and in petty people attacking him. During his heyday in the 1980s, bullies would make downright racist jokes about him, attacking him for his skin color.

These days, since racism is no longer socially acceptable, bullies instead attack him using unproven allegations of pedophilia. Just like the racism used against him in the 1980s, these kinds of allegations are usually made in bad faith. The right to presumption of innocence is a fundamental constitutional right and he was found not guilty by a jury of his peers.

DEH-X1900UB: Setting the time

This continues my series on my DEH-X1900UB car stereo which I previously discussed here and here.

Today in the United States, we do “fall back”: We set all of the clocks back one hour. I decided to reset the time on my DEH-X1900UB car stereo. The process is as follows:

Turn on the car stereo

Press in the big knob on the left

Turn the big knob until it says “System”

Press in the big knob again

Turn the big knob until it says “Clock set”

Press in the big knob once again

Turn and press the big knob to set the time

Winston Churchill

There have been meritless accusations that Churchill was somehow, by today’s standards, a racist or white supremacist. A man who was forward and progressive enough to state, in 1906, that “We will endeavour [...] to advance the principle of equal rights of civilized men irrespective of colour” is someone who can not reasonably be called a racist.

A more detailed discussion of this matter has been written up by Richard M. Langworth and is worth reading.

I am not saying Churchill was a saint when looked at with 2021’s lens; he died long before Jared Diamond’s book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” discredited many delusions of white superiority. But I am saying he was remarkably progressive for someone from the era of British colonialism.

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1980s songs: Part one

October 21, 2021

I talk about 1980s songs on YouTube. This is part one of a series of articles I will publish about the five most popular 1980s songs on YouTube.

Introduction

As I type this, there are five songs from the 1980s on YouTube’s “billion view” club: These songs have over a billion views.

Seven years ago, I made a list of my five favorite songs from the 1980s; this series of blog posts will instead cover the songs today’s COVID-19 era YouTube listeners like the most.

This is part one of what will be a multi-post series.

#5: Never Gonna Give You Up

The fifth most popular song on YouTube from the 1980s is Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up, with 1,071,836,072 views as I type this.

“Never Gonna Give You Up” was written by a very popular 1980s production team: Mike Stock, Matt Aitken, and Pete Waterman, more commonly known as SAW. SAW gave us a lot of really great 1980s dance bops, including Dead or Alive’s “You Spin me ’Round”, Bananarama’s version of “Venus”, the nicely done Funky Sisters mix of Erasure’s “O L’amour”, and Kylie Minogue’s version of “Locomotion”.

During the grunge movement of the 1990s, their sound went out of style and the trio moved on in life. Waterman, for example, became a collector of trains.

Their sound was so dated and out of style in the first 2000s decade, pranksters started tricking people to listen to one of their songs, Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”, as the punchline of a prank: You would tell someone they could, for example, get the preview video of a popular video game by clicking on a link; they click on the link and get the video for “Never Gonna Give You Up” instead. This joke, called Rickrolling, put SAW’s music on the map again.

By the 2010s, with 80s style music in vogue again, this very 80s song is appreciated for its merits and not just as a punchline of a joke.

While other SAW productions have come back in to public consciousness again, notably the revival of “You Spin Me ’Round” when Jimmy Fallon and Paul Rudd recreated the video scene for scene, it is with “Never Gonna Give You Up” that a new generation of music listeners become familiar with SAW’s iconic (and, if you ask me, excellent) sound.

To be continued

I will continue this series of posts looking at the fourth most popular 1980s YouTube video in my next blog post.

This series is continued in my next blog entry

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AIDS and COVID-19

September 26, 2021

I remember the AIDS pandemic, and compare it to the current COVID-19 pandemic.

The AIDS pandemic

I was there during the worst of the AIDS pandemic, and I remember reading the then AIDS denialism nonsense.

My sense was that it was a minority of the gay community and not mainstream thinking.

There weren’t entire online communities of AIDS deniers at the time and AIDS deniers weren’t spamming Usenet (the Internet’s primary form of online communication at the time) with that nonsense; getting online required enough intelligence that the kinds of people who would be AIDS deniers tended not to be online.

With AIDS, it took years for someone to get symptoms and die from it. Those people dying of AIDS in the mid-1980s had no idea that promiscuous unprotected sex in the 1970s would give them a deadly, incurable disease.

Even after people got aware, to protect oneself from AIDS, you either had to stop being promiscuous or you had to always wear a condom when having sex. This was a heck of a lot more of a lifestyle change than getting a jab with a needle in the shoulder two times (what people need to do here in 2021 to get the COVID-19 vaccine); despite this, it was only a small minority of people in the gay community who denied the reality of HIV and AIDS.

Even today, with antiretroviral drugs, getting HIV means that one will be a carrier for the rest of their life, and will need to constantly take expensive medicine. Maybe the technology which gave us a COVID-19 vaccine will finally give us a HIV vaccine, but we’re not there yet.

COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy

I take no joy in seeing people die from COVID-19, but it’s a very different rodeo. It’s really easy to get a vaccine, but a significant portion of people who lean right refuse to get it. With those people, it’s only the pig headed pride and stubbornness they have which is stopping them from being vaccinated.

It’s not a matter of winning. It’s a matter of wanting this wave of deaths, and COVID-19 has killed nearly as many people in the US in just two years as AIDS has killed in four decades, to end. Every person who dies of COVID-19 is a tragic loss, especially since it is now, most of the time, a preventable tragic loss.

This is an edited version of a posting I originally wrote on Reddit.

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Jerry Pournelle

September 14, 2021

This blog is written in honor of Jerry Pournelle’s legacy. While there was a lot I disagreed with Jerry Pournelle about, I enjoyed what he had to write.

Pournelle’s life

Jerry Pournelle was a very prolific science fiction and science fact writer. I got introduced to his writing in his classic non-fiction work A Step Farther Out, where he discusses the possibility of man exploring space, and what it will take to get us out there.

After the September 11 attacks, my favorite place to go to for insight on the attack and how we should respond to it was Jerry Pournelle’s mail column, which culled out the more emotional responses and gave me a good summary of how we, as a nation, felt about the attack and how to respond to it.

After a long life of being a very prolific science fiction writer, Pournelle passed away on September 8, 2017. He never stopped writing, writing a long blog on the day before he died.

Afghanistan

In late October of 2001, Jerry Pournelle was right that nation building in Afghanistan (“Empire” as he called it) went over and beyond our responsibilities there:

I want people to realize that it costs to attack the US. Beyond that I want OUT of those areas. This is not likely to happen. We are not likely to choose Republic. We are likely to choose Empire.

He was right: Trying to build empire in Afghanistan did not work. When we left Afghanistan, it was pretty much the same nation that we entered in 2001, the only exception being that Bin Laden is no more.

I miss Pournelle

Pournelle was a very intelligent and kind man. While I did not agree with him on everything, he came from an age where we could disagree on political topics but still respect one another.

I enjoy his writing style and how he presented an alternate point of view. I especially enjoy the letter section on his blog, where a lot of people would send him email. He would cull the email, only publishing the most intelligent and insightful commentary, while leaving the more emotionally laden “flame bait” kinds of personal attacks unpublished.

I miss the days of greats like Jerry Pournelle.

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9/11 20 years later

September 11, 2021

20 years ago today, September 11 happened. I remember this tragedy. Also, some thoughts on the pandemic.

September 11

I was at a Spanish school in Puebla Mexico when 9/11 happened. One fellow student there was this lovely young New Yorker redhead (who was really embarrassed about her accent).

I remember the owner of the school allowed her to use the school’s phone to make a long distance call to New York to find out if her uncle was OK, and hearing from her family that he went in to one of the towers. Then, as we watched the towers fall live on CNN, she knew he was in one of those towers. Her uncle was one of 343 firefighters who died that day.

She couldn’t go home to be with her family or be at his funeral because all of the planes were grounded. So, she just finished up her class with the rest of us stuck in Mexico. Finally, at the end of the week, when her session ended, she went on a bus and had to road trip all the way back home.

I have previously posted in 2019 and 2012 my memories of this historic event.

God’s wrath

I’m looking at the current world, and I’m reading the ancient sacred writings, and I’m thinking this:

We need to not be arrogant and haughty; i.e. I do not know more than scientists just because I have done a single Google search.

We need to be loving towards all others, not just those in our “tribe”

We need to provide help and compassion to those less fortunate.

If we forget these things, and become too selfish and arrogant, really really bad things can happen, such as a pandemic which has killed over 4 million people so far.

The picture of the twin towers burning on September 11 was taken by Michael Foran and obtained from the Wikimedia. The picture is available from Wikimedia under a CC-BY-2.0 license, and has been altered (resized and cropped) for this blog entry.

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Afghanistan

August 17, 2021

In this blog, I briefly share my thoughts about Afghanistan, now that we are leaving there after 20 years, and announce a new MaraDNS release.

Afghanistan

I think we made the right decision intervening in 2001 to try and get rid of the Taliban. The Taliban has been a horrible theocratic government which has a history of hideously oppressing women, and based on the fact Afghanistan 25 years before our 2001 invasion was a free country adopting western values, it was reasonable to think we could do that again.

Additionally, the government in Afghanistan was supporting a militant group who flew planes in to buildings, causing massive destruction and the deaths of thousands of Americans. So we needed a toe hold in Afghanistan to ensure that those kinds of attacks would not happen again. Once we eliminated the mastermind of that 9/11 attack, that is when we should had left Afghanistan. Nation building works a lot better when the nation in question has had a long history of being a free and prosperous nation (e.g. Germany and Japan).

MaraDNS 3.5.0021

MaraDNS 3.5.0021 is a security update for MaraDNS. This issue only affects the relatively new coLunacyDNS server (and actually may not affect it); it does not affect MaraDNS and it does not affect Deadwood. The coLunacyDNS server is a separate server from MaraDNS that uses Lua for its configuration; the majority of MaraDNS users are not using this relatively new program, and there is no way to use coLunacyDNS just by using the MaraDNS authoritative or Deadwood recursive services.

In other words, unless you know that you are using coLunacyDNS, this security issue does not affect you.

I looked at the CVE database to see if there were any security issues with my fork of Lua (named “Lunacy”) that I use in coLunacyDNS; after some research, I determined that only one issue affects the version of Luancy in question. So, I applied a one-line patch to fix that issue, then made new releases of Lunacy and MaraDNS to update the relevant code.

As it turns out, the Lunacy code is compiled such that the exploit scripts which are supposed to crash the unpatched Lua code actually do not crash Lunacy. So, there is a significant chance this security issue could never be exploited. But since this issue does have a CVE number, and since there is a patch to fix the issue, I have made the update.

Download MaraDNS 3.5.0021 here:

https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download.​html

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Delta surge

July 31, 2021

This blog is about the Delta surge of COVID-19, and why it can be mitigated.

The COVID-19 Delta surge

The reason why COVID-19 cases are going up again is because a mutation of COVID-19, the “Delta” mutation, spreads more quickly than last year’s COVID-19 virus.

Being vaccinated helps

One thing I have been seeing in the news is some people getting really excited about a study in Massachusetts where Delta COVID-19 spread from person to person among fully vaccinated individuals. Some alarmist “the sky is falling” nonsense has resulted because of this study.

Relax, everyone.

Massachusetts has, as I type this, a 71.7% percent vaccination rate (one or more dose). This has resulted in COVID-19 growth (which, these days in the US, is by and large Delta COVID-19 growth) being low there: Only 9.5 new cases per 100,000 population per day. Compare this to, say, Florida, which has a 55.7% vaccination rate and nearly 74 cases/day/100k population (see attached image). Here in California, we’re in the middle: 63.3% vaccination rate, just over 21 cases/day/100k population.

Point being, while I haven’t made one of those graphs fivethirtyeight.com likes to make showing the correlation of COVID-19 new daily cases per capita to vaccination rates (much less calculate the standard deviation and P value, except to note these are numbers for the entire population, so we don’t have to worry about high P value sampling error very much they way we would if only looking at, say, 300 cases) there does seem to be a pretty strong correlation.

Jacob Sollum, writing for Reason, agrees with me: The Massachusetts outbreak does not mean vaccines don’t reduce COVID-19 transmission.

Get vaccinated

Simply put: The more people are vaccinated, the fewer COVID-19 new cases we have. So, I think it’s safe bet that, while we do have breakthrough infections (fully vaccinated people can still get COVID-19), and while we still have breakthrough spreading of COVID-19 (some fully vaccinated people can spread COVID-19 to others), getting vaccinated does reduce the chance one will get infected with Delta COVID-19, and it does appear to reduce the chance one will spread Delta COVID-19 to others.

I am a bit worried about the Beta COVID-19 variant (which some vaccines appear to be much less effective against), but that particular strain hasn’t spread as widely as the Delta variant dominating new COVID-19 cases.

Vaccine hesitancy and mutations

Since one trope I have read multiple times is that the vaccine hesitant may cause a new mutation of COVID-19 in the US, let me address that:

The main COVID-19 mutations of concern right now are happening in other countries where the vaccine is not widely available yet. The Delta variant was first seen in India, the Beta variant was first seen in South Africa, and the Gamma variant was first seen in Brazil.

We need to make sure the entire world is vaccinated to stop these mutations from coming out of the woodwork.

Vaccine hesitancy and freedom

I believe, when push comes to shove, vaccine hesitant people should have the freedom to not take the vaccine. I think it’s really dumb to not take the vaccine, but I also think it’s foolish to smoke weed, commit fortification or adultery, or do any of a number of silly things people have the legal freedom to do.

This means a certain percentage of people who refuse to take the vaccine will die. So be it. They are not children. They are adults. They have freedom, and with freedom comes responsibility. When some of them end up in the hospital and die from COVID-19, they will have no one but themselves to blame.

Likewise, I have the freedom to avoid contact with vaccine hesitant individuals or take other mitigation measures until the Delta surge of COVID-19 cases eases. That’s why I have gone back to wearing a mask when I go to indoor public places.

Is it a tragedy that these people needlessly die? Very much so. I have the utmost of empathy and compassion for the families of people who died from COVID-19 because they refused the vaccine. To avoid more needless deaths, I wish for everyone who can get vaccinated but hasn’t yet had the vaccine get vaccinated.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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MaraDNS and DKIM

July 16, 2021

I discuss a very technical issue for users of my MaraDNS server: How to have DKIM records in MaraDNS.

MaraDNS and DKIM: How it is done

DKIM is a format used to store e-mail authentication data via DNS.

I have now used DKIM keys with MaraDNS. Even with the 512-byte limit with classic DNS packers, MaraDNS can store a 2048-bit RSA DKIM key.

A DKIM record is a long “multi chunk” TXT record; DKIM records are stored in a special _domainkey.example.com record (in my case, x._domainkey.samiam.org). As per RFC6376 section 3.6.2.2, “Strings in a TXT RR MUST be concatenated together before use with no intervening whitespace”; in the MaraDNS man page on TXT records, it points out that a single TXT “chunk” can only be up to 255 bytes in length, but we need more than 255 bytes to store a 2048 bit RSA key (6 bits per character, so we need 342 characters to store just the key) and a little more overhead to store the other bits in our DKIM record. But, it doesn’t matter where we split the chunks as long as each individual chunk is under 256 bytes in size.

Here is a real-world DKIM key stored in my MaraDNS zone file:

 x._domainkey.% +600 TXT 'v=DKIM1; k=rsa; '\   'p=MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCg'\   'KCAQEAuhKjx2Aepa3rllxUEZLgF3x'\   '68SWvZ8pEgnjZvxtqp94Vkra3AUC4C8dRLKf5SvT'\   'xFtIl6pF27jn+M/w2MzYwPFjBgqVf'\   'p2lf7xuKsrus63m0T9Sq958nIt1yuUlLDr71bFs7'\   'ZuZyQid0ciCc2JF5lwHno10cAvuNJ';'y1Q'\   'tFJa+lRJI6/kzY20Hi/ZTzFzctqgqaRZnSoJlTZHf'\    'Oy0uwfmF5ejkJ8xvHbEJp6TEc'\   '30DwsqrjVWSFLnUWYBv7lrAPB9sAHN7fCayhEuORn'\   'Ap+YUhjjMPWyPla1pvTS9h/LTE7g'\   '2d+jR/zOkRpV2Ak/4KpeP9dpsRJEOsPEaWGG1pQXgPw'\  'IDAQAB'

The man page describes this record. The backslashes are used so that a single line is not over 80 columns in width; in the line which begins 'ZuZyQi (about halfway down), one can see this near the end: NJ';'y1Q'\. The ';' bit tells MaraDNS to separate the TXT record in to a separate chunk at this point in the record.

As we can see, MaraDNS can store and distribute 2048-bit RSA keys using the DKIM format.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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My Karen Story

June 6, 2021

Now that decades have passed, I can finally tell my Karen story and its aftermath.

My Karen story

Long long ago, I worked in the service industry for a well known chain of dine in restaurants as a host. My manager, who I will not name (so many years have passed, I have long since forgiven him—a real man does not hold on to grudges), was, to put it mildly, quite incompetent. None of the workers liked him. To give you an example of his incompetence: I asked, months ahead of time, to have two days off so I could go to a Chess tournament. He kept telling me he would get back to me, and finally told me I couldn’t take two days off, even though I had worked there for nearly six months.

Needless to say, dealing with the public put a large number of Karens in my path. One day, when we were crowded and understaffed—a day by day story at that restaurant—a Karen (complete with a stereotypical “Karen” haircut: Straight hair which ended above the shoulders) came in to the restaurant.

“Hello, I would like to have a booth right now.”

“I’m very sorry, no booths are available. If you would like to wait, we can give you a booth when one is available, or you may sit down at a table right now.”

“But I want a booth right now.”

It was a stressful day and I was losing patience with this Karen. I raised my voice and told her “Listen, I’m really sorry but there are no booths available right now. Would you like to sit at a table or wait for a booth?”

“I want to speak to the manager.”

Since this was a customer service job, and since my manager was incompetent, my manager had zero sympathy and was not about to hear my side of the story. After sending me home early that day, a couple of days later he had me come in. This was Christmas Eve, mind you, and my manager was too chickenshit to talk to me, so he had the assistant manager do the dirty work. I got fired, on Christmas Eve, was given the rest of my outstanding paycheck, and told I would not work there again.

The aftermath

A week later, after the new year had passed and I had used the free time to record a couple of songs, I went to the fast food restaurant across the street from where I used to work and filled out a job application, being honest and direct that I got fired because a Karen got mad at me.

I got a call from them the same day to come in.

I sat down at a table in the fast food place. The manager came down and sat across the table from me.

The interview went like this:

“When can you start work?”

“Tomorrow.”

“OK, come in and 9am and training will start. You have experience on your resume so I know you’ll do a good job.”

This was the first and only application I filled out after my encounter with Karen.

Months later, I got a job at a gas station, also across the street from the place where Karen got me fired, and was at this point making more money than I ever did at that restaurant. I remember, one day, half a year later, one of the district managers came in to the gas station.

I looked at him in the eyes and said “You guys fired me. On Christmas Eve. Because you guys were unwilling to stick up for me when a customer complained.”

He said nothing but the look in his eyes was priceless. He was angry at me because he knew I was right and that their restaurant completely dropped the ball. He knew the restaurant made a mistake because I was able to hold down a job at a nearby gas station.

That incompetent manager? I never talked to him again after he unjustly fired me, but heard from some co-workers what happened to him: They finally had enough of the high turnover and constant under-staffing his incompetent management was causing, and after a waitress pretended to be an upset Karen and complained to the regional manager, they demoted him with a reduction in pay to be only an assistant manager.

Me? I was only unemployed for a week and was making more money within six months. Within a year of getting fired because of that Karen, I got a job in Silicon Valley, making an order of magnitude more money and not having to deal with Karens in my face all day any more.

The restaurant where I got fired? It closed down years ago, and is now only an empty shell; the fast food place and the gas station where I subsequently worked are still there, all these years later.

The world slowly turns towards justice.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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Pride Month

June 2, 2021

In celebration of pride month, I talk about how watching the gay community struggling with AIDS, back before we had effective HIV treatments, caused me to ultimately become a Lady Gaga fan.

AIDS was a death sentence

I was there when AIDS was a death sentence; I lived near and in San Francisco, walking distance from the Castro (the gay district where most of that movie Milk takes place). Indeed, I have a family member who was there and saw Harvey Milk when he was still with us.

I was there hearing the stories of people who contacted HIV, who had homophobic families who completely rejected them, who thought “safe sex” was not getting caught by your family or a homophobic gang who would beat you up for being gay. I was there back when it would had been better to be caught in bed with a 15-year-old girl than a 21-year-old man.

I was there when a dear friend in San Francisco was dying of AIDS; I was there to comfort him and he was an incredible mentor to me, providing me invaluable advice which made my life better.

Lady Gaga

When I heard Lady Gaga for the first time, many years later when effective HIV treatments were finally becoming widely available, I was living in Mexico with my wife when her song “Bad Romance” came on the radio. My wife told me this was a very talented singer, so I intently listened to the song. Listening to Gaga’s singing brought me back to being in the Gay district back when people were dying from AIDS, when we didn’t have effective treatments for it and all you could do was pray it wouldn’t kill you when you caught it.

Listening to Lady Gaga, I was taken back in time to that gay district, in one of the gay record stores, listening to some incredible dance club music which were only available as expensive imports I could only buy a couple of at a time. I remember a man was hitting on me, but being really nice to me about it; we were talking about a then-new rare German track which I really loved, but the gay record store didn’t have it. He told me another store had it in stock, so I went across town and was able to get that really great song because of his advice.

Lady Gaga’s music took me there to San Francisco again, near the gay district, with my friend who could only eat a couple of foods because AIDS was killing him and he only had a little time left. I was there, around those gay clubs, seeing people try to find a moment of joy when the gay community was going through this incredible tragedy, and sharing that joy.

I don't think Gaga’s best moment is “Bad Romance” or “Born This Way” or a song from Chromatica. I think her best moment was when she was in New York, speaking at the 50th anniversary of Stonewall, telling Gays that the stars and planets are there supporting gay equality and gay rights.

https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​dniiy-​FPl​NM

This is why I stan for Lady Gaga and this is why I love what Lady Gaga represents. She stands for equality for gay people. She stands for love, not hate, not intolerance, and certainly not homophobia.

I am very proud to be a Lady Gaga fan because of the community we have over at GGD—I interact with a lot of people, by and large gay, there and we share music together and I share with them what it was like to see the gay community decimated by AIDS—and because of what Gaga and the BTWF represent.

I continue this series with a blog posting where I compare today’s COVID-19 denialism with the then AIDS denialism.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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The Drumhead

June 1, 2021

I review the Star Trek episode The Drumhead, and talk about why it’s important to watch here in 2021. Also, another MaraDNS release.

Star Trek

I was reading an article claiming that The Inner Light is the best Star Trek episode ever made. I disagree.

When my mother was still with us, one night we opened up Netflix and she asked me to choose some episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation to watch together. I chose three: Remember Me, The Inner Light, and The Drumhead.

Of the three episodes, the one which stood and which we both agreed was the best episode was The Drumhead.

In this day and age of runaway cancel culture, The Drumhead deserves to be looked at again.

What’s wrong with “cancel culture”

The problem with cancel culture is that there is no legal guard rails controlling the process. There is nothing stopping injustice from happening, and with little to no worker’s rights in the United States, there is little to no protection from people having their jobs lost when and if the “woke mob” comes after them.

Typical legal protections include:

Due process. We should make decisions of guilt based on hard facts, not wishy washy feelings.

Presumption of innocence. We should not decide someone is guilty of a crime without proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Statute of limitations. We should not drag people through the mud for things that happened years or decades ago.

No Ex Post Facto. In other words, we can not retroactively decide someone is guilty for doing something which was reasonable and acceptable at the time.

Adversarial system. Every story has two sides to it; we should hear both sides before rushing to judgment.

Cancel culture has none of these protections, yet its consequences are quite dire: Loss of job, loss of business, having a scarlet letter affecting one’s job search for years, to name just a few.

The Drumhead

This review is spoiler free

That in mind, this story, from over 30 years ago, did an amazing job of predicting today’s cancel culture. In the story, someone is falsely accused of a crime, and the forces of justice have to fight back against the cancel culture forces for fairness to prevail.

A number of typical cancel culture tropes come up in the story, notably “offense archeology”, where, after our hero is accused of a crime, Worf and his assistants look through their entire history, including finding out who their friends and family are, to find out what other misdeeds they can dig up, no matter how old or irrelevant they are.

As I have recently Tweeted, anyone who goes through someone’s posting history to find something then post it out of context to make someone look bad is someone who is not acting in good faith. Usually, the motive is to be a bully.

I feel very strongly in human rights and constitutional protections, and am disappointed that some proponents of today’s “cancel culture” often times do not honor these protections. As this classic Star Trek episode shows us, we need to be vigilant to make sure we remain a free society that respects human rights.

MaraDNS 3.5.0020 released

Sometimes, it is desirable to have MaraDNS control the source IP used when making upstream DNS queries. MaraDNS 3.5.0020 adds a new parameter, source_ip4, which implements this feature. Downloads are at the usual location.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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Dan Kaminsky

May 2, 2021

On April 23, Dan Kaminsky passed away. I write about how our lives crossed paths.

Making MaraDNS secure

In the process of writing MaraDNS, I did a lot of online research about DNS and how DNS worked, including reading Dan Bernstein’s then excellent notes about protecting DNS servers from spoofing attacks.

Indeed, I noted, back in 2001—the year I started implementing Mara—that MaraDNS used cryptography to protect her from a “spoofing attack”.

This spoofing attack was only theoretical back in 2001. It did not become a practical attack for over half a decade.

Dan Kaminsky

In 2008, Dan Kaminsky finally found a way to implement the spoofing attack I went to some effort to protect MaraDNS from back in 2001.

This attack got a lot of attention and press at the time. MaraDNS was not vulnerable to the attack, but other DNS servers were vulnerable.

This attack was very helpful in giving MaraDNS more press and attention in an era when getting a job in the tech industry was very difficult. Indeed, two years later, I was able to get two job offers in a very slow economy because of my work on MaraDNS.

Writing a DNS server and making it secure is a lot of work behind the scenes. The work I did protecting MaraDNS from the attack Kaminsky implemented required adding an entire cryptographic library to MaraDNS’s code so she would not be vulnerable to the attack. Since this code did not add any shiny features to MaraDNS, it was not visible to users of the software until Kaminsky’s attack.

I appreciate Kaminsky going to a lot of effort to make what was a theoretical attack practical.

Rest in peace, Dan Kaminsky, and prayers for his family and friends. He was a very good colleague and someone who I am honored to have interacted with. It has been a very deep honor to interact with Kaminsky while he was still with us.

MaraDNS 3.5.0019

Last month, I released MaraDNS 3.5.0019. This is MaraDNS 3.5.0018 with a one line patch added to allow the Zoneserver daemon to run better under systemd.

The picture is a self-portrait of Kaminsky that he released under a Creative Commons license. I have altered the work to make it a picutre I can include in my blog.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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The one true language

April 1, 2021

Lunacy is the one true programming language. April fools!

Lunacy

April fools, because the idea of the one true programming language is a foolish idea. The best programming language to use is the one your peers are using, or the one the project has already been written in. The best tool for the job.

That said, I have finally found a programming language which nicely fills the gap between Sed/AWK and the “big” languages like Python/Perl/PHP/Java: Lunacy, which is my personal “Lua with batteries” language. This is a fork of Lua 5.1 (to save some size) with a number of useful third party libraries built in to the code.

Lua: No batteries

Lua’s main issue is that it is a bare-bones language optimized to be as small as possible.

That in mind, things like dictionary sorting, copy.deepcopy, and even regular expression splitting take up more code. Let’s look at what an AWK-like script looks like in Lua:

 -- Code is public domain function pStrSplit(s, splitOn)   if not splitOn then splitOn = "," end   local place = true   local out = {}   local mark   local last = 1   while place do     place, mark = string.find(s, splitOn, last, false)     if place then       table.insert(out,string.sub(s, last, place - 1))       last = mark + 1     end   end   table.insert(out,string.sub(s, last, -1))   return out end  l = io.read() while l do   f = pStrSplit(l,"%s+") -- AWK-style split: f[1] is $1, etc.   -- process as needed   print(l)   l = io.read() end -- END public domain code

Here, we needed to add a Lua function which does regular expression string splitting, since while Lua has some regular expression support, it doesn’t have a split() operation.

Lunacy: Lua with batteries

Lunacy, my personal fork of Lua 5.1, does include a number of batteries:

Secure hash compression

Strong random number generation

A subset of Luafilesystem

Most of bit32 for bitwise operations

Desktop calculator support

Better sub-process support (two-way pipes)

LUAstuff folder with other batteries implemented in Lua: Sorted table iterators, regular expression splitting, copying files, etc.

Lunacy is available for download at GitHub and Sourcehut. It’s also possible to download the source code and Windows binary locally. Note that 7-zip is needed to unpack the Windows binary.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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Remembering Fry’s

March 8, 2021

Now that Fry’s is closed, I share some of my memories of this store.

Fry’s Electronics

Fry’s Electronics was a megastore that specialized in electronics and computer parts.

As a long time geek, Fry’s has been an integral part of the culture of Silicon Valley which gave us the mainstream Internet and smartphones. When I was working in Silicon Valley for an Internet company, it was an after-work bonding ritual for us to go to Fry’s after work and see what they had on sale.

One time, I was talking to a buddy about romantic troubles. It being Silicon Valley, he looked at me and said “Ouch! That’s harsh. Let’s go to Fry’s!” So we shopped at Fry’s so I could forget my problems.

It was the place that everyone loved to hate in Silicon Valley; complaining about the service there was a given, but that didn’t stop anyone from going there and waiting a long time in line to buy their goods.

Even after I moved out of Silicon Valley, going to Fry’s was something I would do when I lived in Georgia, and, yes, in San Diego. In the picture attached to this blog entry, my buddy Victor and I celebrating finding Fry’s in Georgia and being able to continue a ritual we shared in Silicon Valley and San Diego. Even Marina, when she was with us and my wife, loved going to Fry’s with me.

The last time I went to Fry’s was about three months ago. I was hoping they would be able to install an alarm in my car. Entering the store, I found myself in a poorly lit half-empty warehouse with few items on the shelves; the store was nearly deserted and they no longer performed any car installations at all.

Considering how Fry’s had been in this downward spiral for a long time, it was disappointing but not surprising to hear that they had finally gone out of business and closed all of their stores.

So, with a whimper, a piece of the culture which created today’s tech-obsessed world is has become just a memory.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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Online Chess

February 23, 2021

I list websites for playing Chess online. Also, MaraDNS 3.5.0018 was released a couple of months ago.

Online Chess

There are a number of places where one can play free online Chess or Chess variants. I will only list places which are free to play and support correspondence Chess:

https://lichess.org/ Geared towards normal Chess, but it has a few 8x8 variants. The site is fully free and open source, and includes a full featured opening explorer.

https://lishogi.org/ Like Lichess, but for Shogi. No Shogi variant support yet.

https://lidraughts.org/ While they do not support Chess, this site is like Lichess, but for a number of Checkers variants.

https://greenchess.net/ This website is not open source, but is free to play. It only supports variants of “normal” modern western Chess, but it has a number of variants, including ones which do not use a square board.

https://brainking.com/ Correspondence games; a number of Chess variants are supported (Embassy Chess, Grand Chess, Chinese Chess, etc.). Not open source, but free to play up to 20 games at once. Note that the web design is dated looking, and the text includes a lot of SEO links for online gambling sites.

http://www.gamerz.net/pbmserv/ Not open source, but a server which has been around for a long time which supports a number of Chess variants and other games. Games are played via email and use ASCII graphics (I suggest owning a real board). The text, like Brainking, has a lot of SEO links for online gaming; this might be needed to keep the site online.

For anyone who wishes to play me online, my Lichess handle is Goldrider. There currently is a queue before I will start a new game; send me a message there and I will gladly put you on my waiting list and play you once I finish a game.

MaraDNS 3.5.0018

I released MaraDNS 3.5.0018 a couple of months ago. The main update from 3.5.0017 is that this version is now using Ubuntu 20.04 instead of CentOS 8 for testing and development.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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Insurrection

January 16, 2021

What Trump did on January 6 was an insurrection attempt. Its goal was to overturn the democracy of the United States and replace it with a dictatorship.

On the January 6 coup attempt

This “protest” and storming of the capitol is not based on any reasonable, rational fact, but is instead based on baseless lies and conspiracy theories. They are protesting and attempting a coup based on facts which have no basis in objective reality. I never thought I would see a coup attempt in the US; I was wrong.

The famous quote “you’re entitled to your opinions, but not to your facts” comes to mind. The problem we have right now is that the right wing is living in a world of lies.

No, Obama is not a Muslim born in Kenya. Yes, we actually landed on the moon. No, there is not a pedophile ring going on at a pizza joint. Yes, a number of children my daughter’s age were senselessly killed by a madman at Sandy Hook. No, the election was not rigged. And so on.

This is not a policy debate about whether to lower taxes or the government’s role in society. This is a question of whether we accept and act on objective facts, or whether we choose to live in a world of lies and fantasy.

George Orwell’s novel 1984 is not, by and large, about universal surveillance. It is about fascists creating a world of lies so that they can get and stay in power. Winston Smith was tortured because he did not believe the lies of Big Brother. The world of 1984 would not had been possible if there were not so many people unquestionably accepting those lies as truth, even when they are self-contradictory.

Just like Orwell’s nightmare world, Trump’s attempts at fascism would not have been accepted by so many if they critically examined facts and learned to distinguish truth from fantasy.

The picture of Trump flags during the storming of the US Capitol was taken by Tyler Merbler and is available under an open license. The picture has been modified from the original.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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2020

All blog entries written in 2020

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Moving to Ubuntu

December 12, 2020

This blog is about why I am changing the Linux distribution I use from CentOS to Ubuntu LTS.

CentOS broke a pinky promise

I have been a RedHat user since 1996. While the RedHat → Fedora Core change was annoying, I was able to get back on track with CentOS. CentOS, in its community-operated days, had issues with taking a long time making new releases available, but was a good stable operating system which worked well for me: I had a number of OpenVZ nodes running CentOS 6 from the early 2010s which were in operation, and up to date with security patches, until I finally moved on from OpenVZ this year. The long-term support policy made it that much easier to keep running my own online servers while being both a single parent and working full-time jobs in offices.

This year, I went to a lot of effort to get CentOS 8 up and running on servers on my home network. After a lot of work, I got three machines running CentOS; while it was challenging to get the particular setup I like going, I figured it was something I could keep running until 2029, since, when I installed those servers, CentOS made a pinky promise that they would be updated with security patches until May 31, 2029.

However, CentOS went back on their pinky promise, and will only support CentOS 8 until December 31, 2021, breaking a promise they made with the open source community of CentOS users. I do not like broken promises; when Sourceforge started putting adware on some of their Windows downloads, I stopped using them to host MaraDNS releases for years, I only fairly recently forgave Sourceforge (long after they both apologized and changed management to one who promised to not ever do something like that again) and started hosting Mara there again.

Yes, Rocky Linux shows a lot of promise, and could very well become what CentOS was a decade ago, but the annoyances I had with delayed releases back when CentOS was a community operating system is an experience I would prefer to not go through again.

That in mind, I am moving over to Ubuntu. In my experience, most smaller companies prefer using Ubuntu over CentOS/RHEL. While it does not have the long-term support timelines CentOS has (five years instead of 10 years), there are a lot more packages for it and it’s easier to find and install something I want to use. With CentOS, I have to go to a lot of bother to compile and install packages from random places on the Internet to get a system which works for me. With Ubuntu, I should be able to spend a lot less time doing that, using apt-get instead (Debian has a huge repo of packages, including, yes, MaraDNS). I have been feeling like I am going against the grain using CentOS instead of Ubuntu for a while now.

Canonical has, as far as I know, never gone back on a promise for extended support the way Red Hat has. Unlike CentOS, there is an official Raspberry Pi version of Ubuntu (I can even choose between 32-bit and 64-bit), and a number of different versions for mainstream systems.

I am looking forward to being an Ubuntu user instead of a CentOS user.

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November round-up

November 28, 2020

In this blog, I look at how well I predicted the election, how the United States remains very conservative, and look at Big Finish’s Blake’s 7 audio plays.

How well I predicted the election

How well I predicted the election. Green means I always correctly predicted the state. Grey means I sometimes correctly predicted the state. Orange means I always incorrectly predicted the state.

I have made some five different election predictions this election season. My predictions varied, but were reasonably accurate:

While I initially predicted Arizona would remain red (i.e. they would vote for Trump), by my final two predictions, I correctly predicted that it would flip blue.

In one prediction, I had doubts that Wisconsin would flip back blue this election (i.e. they voted for Trump in 2016 and voted for Biden here in 2020), but Biden ultimately prevailed in Wisconsin by about 0.6%.

In one prediction, I said that Georgia, North Carolina, and Ohio might flip blue. Ultimately, only Georgia flipped blue, and only by 0.26%.

In all of my predictions, I thought that Florida would flip blue. In the end, Trump handily won Florida by 3.36%.

I wished Biden could had won Florida: It would had ended the election on Tuesday night, instead of having to be up all night watching states flip blue at 1am and 5am.

America remains very conservative

Despite Trump’s defeat, America remains a very conservative country. Voters voted very consistently Republican down-ballot. Indeed, it has been the best year California’s Republican party has had in a decade.

It comes down to this: While the United States ultimately decided Trump was a bridge too far, our electorate is not ready for truly progressive ideas such as universal healthcare yet. Maybe in a decade or two.

Blake’s 7: The audio series

This summary is spoiler free.

Blake’s 7 is a low-budget British science fiction TV programme which ran from 1978 until 1981, in four 13-episode seasons. The programme, which has been one of my favorite TV shows for a very long time, acquired a cult following, and discussions about reviving the series have happened over the years, but a comeback TV series never came to fruition.

The series was finally brought back in 2013, 32 years after it was canceled, but as an audio-only series using the very same actors the original series had in the late 1970s. The series has been produced by a radio show company called Big Finish productions, and they have a section for Blake’s 7 shows, not to mention bundle discounts if one buys an entire series of episodes.

Big Finish ultimately made 43 new full cast audio stories until critical actors passed away, making it no longer feasible to produce stories with the original cast.

As someone who would pass the time on long flights by listening to the audio of the original 1970s BBC TV production of Blake’s 7, it is nice they made a number of new stories for passing the time on road trips and long airplane flights. I also really appreciate that Big Finish made it possible for the original actors to get paid to revive this classic show while the leading actors were still with us.

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More predictions

November 2, 2020

Some more predictions for tomorrow’s election.

The approval ratings prediction

One way to see how likely an incumbent president will get re-elected is to look at their approval rating. Historically:

In 2012, Obama had a 52% approval rating and got 51% of the vote.

In 2004, Bush had 48% approval and 51% of the vote.

In 1996, Clinton had 54% approval and 49% of the vote.

In 1992, Bush had 34% approval and 37% of the vote.

In 1984, Reagan had 58% approval and 59% of the vote.

In 1980, Carter had 37% approval and 41% of the vote.

Trump currently has a 44% approval, which means he’s going to, at best got 48% of the vote. Then again, Bush beat Gore in 2000 with just under 48% of the vote, and Trump beat Clinton in 2016 with 46% of the vote. According to Nate Silver, a 2% popular vote victory for Biden means he only has a 41% chance of winning, a 3% popular vote victory gives him a 67% chance of winning, and a 4% popular vote victory gives Biden an 89% chance of winning.

So, while the approval ratings indicate that Biden will get a popular vote victory, it does not mean he will get the electoral vote victory he needs to win, but, based on 2004 and 1992 (the last two times a Republican incumbent has been up to reelection), it gives Biden about a 67% of winning.

Here in 2020, with things as polarized as they are—I did not see street picketing for candidates in previous elections like I have this year—there is a chance that Trump will energize enough voters to give him a vote closer to his approval rating. If Trump gets only 44% of the popular vote, Biden has a 97% chance of winning.

Polly Pollster the AI

Here’s another prediction: An AI, called “Polly Pollster”, has been observing social media and seeing how people vote based on social media postings. While I have not been able to verify it, Polly has supposedly predicted Clinton’s victory in 2016, some elections in Canada, and Bernie Sanders’s winning of Iowa in the primaries.

Her prediction is the same prediction I made yesterday, but with the states I marked “purple” (could go either way) blue: Biden gets 367 EVs compared to the 171 EVs it says Trump will get.

The Needle in 2020

This year, The New York Times will only have a “needle” for three states: Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. In order to translate how results from these states affect the election results, here is what 538 predicts based on how those three states go:

All three go to Trump: 50% chance Biden victory, 48% chance Trump victory, 2% chance tie.

FL, GA Trump NC Biden: 8% chance Trump, 92% chance Biden

FL, NC Trump, GA Biden: 22% Trump, 76% Biden, 2% tie

FL Trump, GA and NC Biden: 3% Trump, 97% Biden

FL Biden, GA and NC Trump: 3% Trump, 97% Biden

FL and NC Biden, GA Trump: < 1% Trump, > 99% Biden

FL and GA Biden, NC Trump: 1% Trump, 99% Biden

FL, GA, and NC Biden: < 1% Trump, > 99% Biden

FL Biden, GA/NC unknown: < 1% Trump, > 99% Biden

FL Trump, GA/NC unknown: 32% Trump, 66% Biden, 2% tie

GA Biden, FL/NC unknown: < 1% Trump, > 99% Biden

GA Trump, FL/NC unknown: 23% Trump, 76% Biden

NC Biden, FL/GA unknown: < 1% Trump, > 99% Biden

NC Trump, FL/GA unknown: 28% Trump, 71% Biden, 1% tie

NC and GA Trump, FL unknown: 33% Trump, 65% Biden, 2% tie

Point being, with these three states, we will be able to predict a Biden victory, but not a Trump victory, because Biden may still have the Rust Belt firewall.

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2020 election prediction #5

November 1, 2020

I make a final prediction for the 2020 election.

My prediction

My final prediction for the November 3 presidential election

In this prediction, I predict that Biden will get Florida, and that there’s a reasonable chance Biden will grab North Carolina, Georgia, and Ohio: There has been a surge of voters, these three states are swing states, and polls show things being either even or slightly favoring Biden in the states marked purple above.

I predict Trump will get states marked red (although there’s a reasonable, if not high, chance Biden will get Iowa or even Texas) and that Biden will get states marked blue. This gives Biden a 319 or higher electoral vote victory.

While polling is tight in Florida, I have put it in the blue column. Let’s look at some recent Florida polls from high-quality polling organizations:

New York Times: Biden 47%, Trump 44%, Other 3%, Undecided 6%

Washington Post: Biden 48%, Trump 50%, Other 1%, Undecided 1%

Monmouth: Biden 50%, Trump 45%, Other 2%, Undecided 3%

Marist: Biden 51%, Trump 47%, Undecided/other 2%

Averaging these polls, we get these numbers:

Biden 49.0%

Trump 46.5%

Other 1.75%

Undecided 2.75%

Here are the Clinton polling averages from 2016, again in Florida from high quality polling organizations (Quinnipiac, SurveyUSA, Siena, and Marist) compared to actual results:

Clinton 45.25% (Actual: 47.82%)

Trump 45.0% (Actual: 49.02%)

Other 3.25% (Actual: 3.15%)

Undecided 6.5%

Roughly two thirds of the “undecided” vote went to Trump, and one third of the “undecided” vote went to Clinton in 2016. Using those numbers in 2020, allocating 1.8% from 2020’s undecided voters to Trump, and .95% from 2020’s undecided voters to Biden, we get just under 50% vote for Biden, and somewhat over 48% of the vote for Trump. This is consistent with 538’s prediction for Florida, which currently is 48.6% Trump and 50.7% Biden.

While Biden is slipping with Latin@s compared to Clinton in 2016, he is making enough gains among older and college educated voters in Florida to make up for it. The New York Times has an excellent article which goes in to how voter demographics have changed in 2020 compared to 2016 for Florida.

Point being, it looks like Biden is going to get Florida. If Biden gets Florida this would mean that Trump has, for all intents and purposes, no chance of winning the 2020 election.

This will not be 2016 repeated

A lot has changed since 2016; people saw that Clinton was ahead in the polls, ignored all of the undecided voters, and stayed home (or voted third party) instead of voting for her in 2016. It wasn’t many, but it was just enough to let Trump get an upset win in a few key states.

2020 is different. Democrats are more motivated to vote than they were in 2016; things will be more like 2018, when both the polls were accurate and a blue wave of voters gave the House of Representatives back to Democrats.

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Grab bag: October 2020

October 25, 2020

I make another prediction of how the election will go, make an observation about Doctor Who, and mention another MaraDNS release. 402 words

My fourth election prediction

My fourth prediction for the November 3 presidential election

Now that Trump looks to be better, I will revise my prediction. I predict that Biden will get 319 electoral votes (EVs), and Trump only will get 219 EVs. I predict that Biden will get the sun belt (Arizona and Florida) and the rust belt (Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota).

It’s important that Biden get the sun belt because Florida will be counting its votes more quickly than key states in the rust belt. If Biden gets Florida, we will know who won the presidential race on election night; otherwise, it may take up to a week to know the winner.

Doctor Who: An observation

As a white cisgender male who was in an interracial marriage with a Latina until she passed away, an interaction we once had made me very aware of how white privilege is something that has been as invisible to me as water is to a fish.

We were watching this British TV series called Doctor Who on Netflix. First, we watched a mid-1970s story, Pyramids of Mars, then we watched an aughts (first 2000s decade) story, School Reunion. Her observation: The 1970s one did not have any Black people in it, but the 2000s one did.

I was shocked: This was something I never noticed, even as a long term Doctor Who fan. White privilege was invisible to me: I did not even notice when Black people were being excluded.

I do not think the BBC producers were consciously excluding Black people when making this episode. Pyramids of Mars was made in an era when the BBC was still openly homophobic (Pete Shelley’s 1981 song Homosapien was banned by the BBC for making references to homosexuality) and produced at least one show (It Ain’t Half Hot Mum) which is considered racist today.

Times have changed: The BBC plans on having the next incarnation of the lead character in Doctor Who be a Black woman.

MaraDNS 3.5.0017 released

I released MaraDNS 3.5.0017 earlier this month. The only program to be updated is the Lua-based coLunacyDNS server; that server now allows the Lua script to specify some flags (RA: Recursion available and AA: Authoritative answer) and the TTL (time to live) in the DNS response sent to the client.

Now that I am working again, this will probably be the last MaraDNS release for a while.

Comments for blog entries can be seen on the forum.

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Election prediction #3

October 4, 2020

I make another prediction of how the election will go. 424 words

What a week it has been!

Last week, we have had three breaking events which significantly affect the election:

Trump’s tax returns were given to The New York Times, and we learned he only paid $750 in taxes a year in 2016 and 2017.

Trump lost his first debate to Joe Biden.

Trump has been diagnosed with COVID-19.

The third one (his COVID-19 diagnosis) is the most significant, because there is a non-zero chance Trump will pass away before the election.

Since a number of people on the Internet have been acting very inappropriately, wishing for Trump’s death, let me make something clear: I wish Trump well. My daughter and I have been praying for Trump, wishing him a quick recovery. To wish for Trump’s death is no better than the blockheads who, during the worst of the AIDS pandemic, declared AIDS a punishment from God (it is not). In both cases, it is not appropriate to ask God for someone to die.

My new election prediction

My third prediction for the November 3 presidential election

In this map, I am actually making two predictions:

In the first prediction, where Trump survives COVID-19, I predict that Biden will get both the states colored blue and colored purple in the above map. In other words, in addition to all of the states Clinton got in 2016, I predict that in a Biden vs. Trump race, Biden will pick up Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Florida. This will result in Biden winning with 319 electoral votes (EVs).

In the second prediction, where Trump passes away, I predict that Pence will get both the red and purple states in this map, and that Biden will only get the blue states. This means that, compared to 2016, Biden only picks up the rust belt: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, having the Democrats win with 279 EVs.

See also

A couple of other notable predictions:

The New York Times has an interesting model, because one of the models they have is “What if the polls are as inaccurate as they were in 2016?” Currently, in that model, Biden wins by 280 EVs (picking up, compared to 2016, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona).

538, naturally, has a model currently predicting an 81% chance of a Biden victory. Compared to 2016, their model predicts that Biden will pick up Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, North Carolina, and Ohio. I think North Carolina and Ohio may be a bit of a stretch, but if we have 2012’s polling error, we’ll get both of them.

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Ginsburg’s passing

September 18, 2020

This blog is about Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s passing, and the political effects of it. 302 words

RBG

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, or RBG, was a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She has passed away today. Which means that she will need to be replaced.

The effect of her passing away

This can very well spell the end of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the closest thing the United States has to universal health care. There has been a case, California vs. Texas, which is attempting to repeal the entire Affordable Care Act ever since the Republican-controlled congress removed the individual mandate (well, made its penalty $0).

The last time we had a case go to the Supremes to try and repeal the ACA was in 2015 with King v. Burwell, when Roberts and Kennedy sided with the liberal wing of the Supreme court to keep the ACA the law of the land.

Oral arguments in the Supreme court for California v. Texas are set for November 10 this year (very conveniently after the election); I would not put it past the Republican party to quickly confirm someone who will vote to take away health care from millions of Americans in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis.

Just when I thought 2020 would get no worse, this happened.

How this affects the Senate

Before Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, it was flip of the coin whether the Democrats or Republicans would get the Senate. Depending on how the Senate handles selecting her replacement, this may tilt the balance towards the Democrats. Since, in 2016, the Republican controlled senate refused to even consider Obama’s pick for the Supreme Court, one Merrick Garland, it will look downright hypocritical for them to ram through a justice now, which can very well energize enough voters on the fence to vote Democrat for the Senate on November 3rd.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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Election prediction #2

September 2, 2020

I post a second prediction for the 2020 election, and mention a new MaraDNS release.

My second prediction

My second prediction for the November 3 presidential election

This prediction is very similar to the prediction I made two months ago, the only difference being that I have some doubt that Wisconsin will flip to Biden on November 3.

Let’s look at this prediction in more detail.

Florida

Without Florida, Trump will need to repeat his 2016 performance in the Northern Rust Belt (PA/WI/MI/MN) to win, which looks unlikely.

So, let’s look at Florida’s polling. Right now, 538 claims that Biden has a 60% chance of getting Florida. I think they are being too conservative; I claim Biden has about an 80% chance because:

The number of undecided voters is much lower in 2020 than it was with 2016 polls from this time; in late August of 2016, 13.1% of Florida voters were undecided, but right now, not only is Biden leading Trump by 3.7% in Florida, but also only 5.7% of voters are undecided.

Older voters in Florida have seen the results of Trump’s poor handling of the Coronavirus epidemic throughout the summer, and the resulting 11,000+ deaths.

Florida has just had, in a recent primary, the highest voter turnout seen in 18 years. Higher turnout usually benefits Democrats.

The Rust Belt

When I say “The Rust Belt”, I am talking about Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Biden, if he gets Florida, needs only Pennsylvania to win the election; if he can not get Pennsylvania, he can also win with Michigan and Minnesota.

Biden has a considerable advantage in the rust belt compared to Clinton in 2016: He does not have the problem with losing voters who were disappointed in Sanders’s defeat which Clinton had. 2016 Sanders voters are behind Biden here in 2020, which is enough to win the entire northern rust belt.

The only way Trump can get the rust belt is by trying to make Biden responsible for the unrest caused by far-left protesters; indeed, Biden polling numbers have been going down in the rust belt after the Kenosha unrest. There is a reason that Biden is making sure voters know he condemns the riots.

MaraDNS 3.5.0016

I have released MaraDNS 3.5.0016; in this release, coLunacyDNS now has 100% test coverage.* I have fixed a couple of minor bugs; there was some incorrect behavior if processQuery returned bad data which I found and corrected in my testing.

MaraDNS can be downloaded on the MaraDNS web page as well as over at Sourceforge.

*Some sanity tests which protect coLunacyDNS from security threats which can not be readily reproduced are disabled in testing mode.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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MaraDNS 3.5.0015

August 29, 2020

I have released MaraDNS 3.5.0015, with coLunacyDNS declared stable. 523 words

Making coLunacyDNS stable

To declare coLunacyDNS stable, I first had to declare it feature complete: I will add no more features to coLunacyDNS (for now). Instead, I tested coLunacyDNS to make it stable.

So, I began testing coLunacyDNS, with a handful of informal tests to make sure it ran correctly. It did. But, then, I asked myself this: How can I see how many of coLunacyDNS’s lines we are running to make sure we are testing all of the code?

gcov

The tool to use with C language programs to see which lines we are testing against is gcov. There was no need for me to find and install gcov; it was included when I installed GCC on my CentOS 8 development system.

Some points about gcov:

To run gcov, we need to add the flags -fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage when compiling our programs.

Only the files which we wish to measure test coverage for need to be compiled with these special flags. gcov will still happily measure test coverage, even if it uses libraries or routines not being measured.

We only need to run gcov once after running all of the tests, unless we wish to see a running tally of test coverage.

If a program is terminated abnormally (yes, SIGTERM is abnormal termination), then we will not get updated coverage results for the program. I had to alter the coLunacyDNS program to, when compiled in special test mode, have SIGALRM signal the coLunacyDNS service to break its main loop and terminate normally.

The files which gcov uses to tally results have the names (in CentOS 8) .gcda and .gcno. The process running the compiled program needs to be able to write to those files for test coverage to be updated.

Here’s a simple example of gcov in action:

$ cat > foo.c
#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
  puts("Hello, world!");
  return 0;
}
$ gcc -o foo foo.c -fprofile-arcs -ftest-coverage
$ ./foo
Hello, world!
$ gcov foo.c
File 'foo.c'
Lines executed:100.00% of 3
Creating 'foo.c.gcov'
$ cat foo.c.gcov
        -:    0:Source:foo.c
        -:    0:Graph:foo.gcno
        -:    0:Data:foo.gcda
        -:    0:Runs:1
        -:    0:Programs:1
        -:    1:#include <stdio.h>
        -:    2:
        1:    3:int main() {
        1:    4:  puts("Hello, world!");
        1:    5:  return 0;
        -:    6:}

If a line is not run, the .gcov file will have something that looks like this:

    #####:  123:  foo = bar;

coLunacyDNS’s test coverage

As of the MaraDNS 3.5.0015 release, coLunacyDNS has 92.73% test coverage. Some notes:

I compile coLunacyDNS in a special test mode when running the coverage tests.

Certain sanity and security tests which should be in the production code can not be readily run via a test (e.g. code which initializes the random number generator if not initialized, but the C code has already set it up), so I use #ifdef GCOV to hide those sanity tests in test mode.

#ifdef GCOV also adds the ability to run some code which can not be easily tested for (e.g. certain kinds of socket errors).

My goal is to get 100% test coverage, provided I #ifdef out code which can not be readily tested.

Getting MaraDNS

MaraDNS is available, as always, on its download page:

https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download.​html

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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PNY CS900 review

August 20, 2020

I review the low-cost PNY CS900 SATA SSD. I also have a new MaraDNS release. 452 words

The PNY CS900: Cheap Storage

The PNY CS900 is a low-cost SSD; the 240Gb (that’s decimal gigabytes, as I will detail later) model was only $26 last week and is $27 this week.

For $26, one should not expect a Samsung PRO series SSD. This particular SSD uses a Phison PS3111 (S11) controller, and it doesn’t have any DRAM storage on the SSD itself. This controller is the reason why the CS900 is only available up to 1Tb in size—that’s the PS3111’s limit.

The 240Gb PNY CS900 has, as claimed, over 240Gb of storage. From the output of fdisk -l:

Disk /dev/sda: 223.6 GiB, 240057409536 bytes, 468862128 sectors

One may observe it has a little over 240 decimal gigabytes, but it has only 223.6 binary gigabytes. If an operating system claims it only has 223 gigabytes of storage, this is simply because PNY is using a different definition of “gigabyte” than the OS uses.

There are anecdotal reports that the PS3111 is prone to failing. Phison themselves point out the chip has data reliability and data loss protection features; PNY has a three-year warranty for these drives. I personally, at $26, just got three of them for my two old laptops I wanted to install Linux on, and have made sure any important data is on both laptops. Should one of the drives fail, I can continue my work on the other laptop, while using my third spare drive to reinstall Linux. Regular backups are always a good idea, and it’s better to use a low-cost drive and have a robust backup schedule than to use an expensive drive and not perform any backups.

In terms of speed, since I use these drives with Linux, and since Linux filesystems (I am using XFS) have write caching, the drives feel really fast. Phoronix ran a bunch of benchmarks, and this drive performs really well for its price point.

This is a budget SSD which uses TLC NAND chips. It’s not the fastest, it’s not the biggest, it’s not the most reliable, but it’s pretty cheap and has been working quite nicely for me this last week.

MaraDNS 3.5.0013 and 3.5.0014

In MaraDNS 3.5.0013, I figured out how to have functioning IPv6 sockets in the toolchain I use to build Windows services. So, coLunacyDNS now can bind to IPv6 addresses; it can not contact DNS servers via IPv6, but DNS clients can contact coLunacyDNS via IPv6, both in Windows and Linux/*NIX.

In MaraDNS 3.5.0014, I have again updated coLunacyDNS. The example .lua files now all correctly return “not there” over DNS when we ask for a DNS record which does not exist; we also now handle all ANY queries by sending an RFC8482 response.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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MaraDNS 3.5.0012

August 12, 2020

I have released MaraDNS 3.5.0012 to address a minor security issue. I also discuss the end of BuyVM’s OpenVZ servers. 692 words

MaraDNS 3.5.0012

The mmLunacyDNS program did not use a secure hash compression scheme when hashing strings. As a result, it could had been, under some unusual circumstances, vulnerable to denial of service attacks.

To fix this issue, I have updated Lunacy (the MaraDNS-specific fork of Lua 5.1), mmLunacyDNS, and coLunacyDNS to use a secure hash compression function called HalfSipHash-1-3. The reason I am using this function is that it is secure enough for our uses, while being rather fast with both 32-bit and 64-bit code.

One reason why MaraDNS has had, over the years, a pretty stong NIH policy (Not invented here: Use MaraDNS with a minimum of external third party code) is because, once I incorporate third party code in to MaraDNS, I am responsible for any and all security issues that code may have. So, since Lua 5.1 has a security issue with string hash collisions, and since I use Lua 5.1 in MaraDNS, I am now the one who has fixed this bug.

This issue does not affect MaraDNS nor Deadwood. This issue only affects the new Lua-based nameservers, mmLunacyDNS and coLunacyDNS, which, while included with MaraDNS releases, are still undergoing active development and are currently not stable.

MaraDNS 3.5.0012 can be downloaded at SourceForge and MaraDNS’s download page.

The end of BuyVM OpenVZ

Frantech (BuyVM) no longer sells OpenVZ plans, and their current OpenVZ nodes will no longer be in service at the end of this year.

Back in the days of the housing mortgage crash recession of the early 2010s, FranTech revolutionized low-cost web hosting by providing OpenVZ virtual servers with root access for only $15 a year. Sure, they only had 128 megs of memory and 15 gigs of space, and they could only run Linux, but they could really nicely run a full web, DNS, and mail server if one was careful about the software they used (nginx instead of Apache, MaraDNS instead of Bind, etc.).

I was able to get one and use it for a few years as a server for my domains; I was able to even run my MaraDNS mailing list from there, where we had a small but vibrant community. As the years passed on, running a mailing list on a tiny 128 megabyte virtual machine was no longer viable—the number of spammers who send non-stop spam to any mailing list increased to the point that it was overloading my mailing server.

Finally, in late 2019, with the end of life for CentOS 6 looming, and with CentOS 8 being released, I looked into upgrading my BuyVM nodes to run CentOS 8. I asked BuyVM if they would provide CentOS 8 support for their OpenVZ nodes. They told me they didn’t think it would work; finally, after waiting a few months, with CentOS 6’s end of life coming closer, I gave up on BuyVM and moved my web sites over to Dreamhost, using a low cost unlimited shared hosting plan.

My timing was good; it was just earlier this week that Frantech said that they were ending OpenVZ hosting in December; fortunately, none of my Frantech plans extended past this year when I canceled them in May.

It is possible to have OpenVZ support CentOS 8, but it requires updating the servers to use a newer version of OpenVZ to pull it off. A step BuyVM was unwilling to do with their low cost $15/year nodes. Indeed, RamNode offers OpenVZ with CentOS 8 support, but they do not have any plans between a $15/year underpowered 128 megabyte plan (128 megabytes is no longer viable, now that CentOS is 64-bit) and a $42/year high end OpenVZ plan. So, I have moved on to shared hosting; I am at a place in my life where it’s a lot more convenient to let someone else keep the operating system up to date and secure, and where creating a new email address (with webmail support) only takes a minute and about half a dozen clicks.

Since my websites have always been static sites, moving to a new site was a simple matter of updating my script to rsync to a different destination.

Edit: Let me make it clear that BuyVM is not deadpool; they are still thriving, and continue to sell KVM virtual machines. But, their lowest cost offering is now $24 instead of $15.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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MaraDNS; SipHash

August 11, 2020

This blog is about my 3.5.0011 release of MaraDNS, and looks at patching Lua to add SipHash support. 687 words

MaraDNS 3.5.0011

I have released MaraDNS 3.5.0011. The biggest change is that the testing is more automated: I now have a cron tab which runs a Podman (Docker-compatible) container every night and performs a number of automated tests against MaraDNS and Deadwood.

Since this test battery takes nearly an hour to run, the tests would only be run when making a new MaraDNS release. By running them every night, this will make regressions easier to track down.

While it’s still quite unstable, I am in the process of making a Lua-based DNS server called coLunacyDNS. This code is an update to mmLunacyDNS; it adds IPv6 record support (IPv6 sockets aren’t present yet, but are being worked on), the ability to read data in from a file, the ability to send out “not there” replies, a strong random number generator, timestamp support, and the ability to ask for either A (IPv4 IP) or AAAA (IPv6 IP) records from other DNS servers.

I have fixed two serious bugs in coLunacyDNS over the last couple of weeks, so this code is still unstable. The nice thing about having a DNS server which can run Lua code while processing a DNS query is that it allows one to implement features MaraDNS does not have, such as split horizon DNS or the ability to load DNS records from a file without having to restart the server. Large block lists (lists of names we do not wish to resolve) take up much less memory when stored using Lua tables than as records in Deadwood’s speed optimized cache.

MaraDNS 3.5.0011 can be downloaded at the usual place.

Lua and SipHash

One issue Lua has which has security implications is that Lua’s hash compression algorithm is vulnerable to collisions, which can result in certain kinds of denial of service attacks.

The standard way to solve these kinds of problems is to use SipHash, which I last looked at back in 2013. So, the first thing I did, after realizing Lua had this issue, was to make patches for both Lua 5.1 and Lua 5.4 which add SipHash support:

https://github.com/samboy/LUAstuff

Look in the folder lua-patches/ for the SipHash patches. Note that the patches do not attempt to seed the key used by SipHash with random values, but do provide a Lua script which can create random keys on any *NIX system with /dev/urandom support. An example of seeding the SipHash key can be seen in the file src/lua.c in Lunacy, my personal fork of Lua 5.1:

https://github.com/samboy/lunacy

In my benchmarks, adding SipHash support slows down 64-bit compiles of Lua by about 3% in real world use, and by about 10-15% if using a 32-bit i386-based compile. I personally think this amount of slow down is worth having a nice security margin, but there may be ways to reduce this slow down without reducing security.

SipHash 1-3

The version of SipHash I looked at back in 2013 is called “SipHash 2-4”: 2-4 because it applies two rounds of SipHash’s “compression” function for every eight bytes in the input string, and four rounds of the “compression” function after it finishes receiving input. As it turns out, “SipHash 1-3”, while not an officially sanctioned version of SipHash, is noticeably faster: It only performs one round of the core compression function for each eight bytes in the input string, and three rounds of the compression function after the end of the string.

This is the version of SipHash used by Python, Ruby, and Rust:

https://​bugs.​ruby-​lang.​org/​issues/​13017

https://bugs.python.org/issue29410

HalfSipHash

Another option for 32-bit processors is HalfSipHash, which is similar to a idea I proposed back in 2013: Run SipHash against 32-bit, instead of 64-bit, words. The official proposal uses different rotation constants than the ones I proposed back in 2013; like my 2013 proposal, this SipHash variant has a key which is only 64 bits in size, which is small enough to be brute force cracked, but that is a non-issue in the typical use case where one can not see the numbers generated by HalfSipHash. HalfSipHash, along with the official SipHash reference code, can be viewed here:

https://github.com/veorq/SipHash/

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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MaraDNS 3.5.0008

July 25, 2020

I have released MaraDNS 3.5.0008. This release adds a new program: mmLunacyDNS. 767 words

MaraDNS now includes Lua support

Recently, someone expressed interest in having me compile microdns, a simple DNS server which always returns the same IP, regardless of the query sent to it, for Windows. While I did not do that—microdns does not run as a Windows service, and it handles EDNS packets poorly—I have been thinking about how to offer “always give out the same IP” for Windows users.

As part of my work becoming familiar with Lua, after making a Lua library which can be called from C, I thought of this request when thinking of a C program which I could interface with Lua. And that is how mmLunacyDNS was born.

The name is “mm” for “micro”; “Lunacy” is the name of my branch of Lua 5.1 used, and “DNS” is “domain name system”, the network protocol this program implements.

Fans of the Lua language are well aware that Lua 5.4 has recently come out, so why are we using an eight-year-old version of Lua? Lua 5.1 is the lingua franca of Lua versions; by forcing Lua 5.1 syntax in the scripts used, this gives me more flexibility to use other implementations of Lua.

Gopher Lua for the Go programming language implements Lua 5.1. Moonsharp, a C# implementation of Lua, implements Lua 5.2. So, sticking with an older Lua release allows one to implement this server in Go or C# without the scripts the server uses having to be rewritten.

More to the point, enterprise users who may find Lua too slow can use LuaJIT, which is almost as fast as native C code while allowing one to quickly implement features with Lua 5.1 code. If I were to move to LuaJIT, there would still be no need for users to rewrite their scripts.

What mmLunacyDNS can do

mmLunacyDNS is an IPv4 only DNS server which, after reading its Lua configuration file (the only configuration file it uses) to determine its IP to bind to, listens for DNS requests. Once mmLunacyDNS gets a DNS request, it calls a Lua function in the configuration file, giving the function the name requested (with hex escaping as needed to avoid injection type attacks), the IP the request came from, and what type of DNS request it is (IPv4 IP, email server, reverse DNS lookup request, IPv6 IP, etc.).

With this information, the Lua script can either tell mmLunacyDNS to ignore the request, or to return an IP specified by the Lua script.

To protect against malicious configuration files, Lua is sandboxed. While the math, string, and bit32 libraries are available, all other libraries and top level functions are not available to the script. To make up for print being gone, the Lua environment has mmDNS.log for logging information.

The Windows version of mmLunacyDNS can be started and stopped as a service. The Linux/UNIX/BSD version of mmLunacyDNS does not have daemonization support, but I have set up its interface to allow one to be implemented in the future.

And, that’s all mmLunacyDNS can do. It has no IPv6 support. It can only return a single IP per query. It can not set the TTL of replies (they always have a 0 TTL). It will not do your dishes for you either.

Other changes

The other change I have made is that Deadwood’s configuration file can now accept multiline comments:

_rem={}
_rem={ #_rem --[=[
"""
 We are now in a multi-line comment.
 This allows a long explanation to be
 in a Deadwood configuration file
""" # ]=]
}

The actual format is _rem={ at the start of a line, which begins a multi-line comment. The comment continues until a } is seen. The reason for this unusual format is that it allows a Deadwood configuration file to have multi-line comments in a form which are compatible with both Lua and Python, as can be seen in the above example.

If one is getting the impression that I’m thinking about maybe adding Lua support to Deadwood, there may be some truth to that. I will not promise anything I do not deliver, but there is a possibility that Lua would help with some use cases. For example, large block lists would take up less memory if implemented in Lua instead of the current method of placing them in Deadwood’s fast but memory inefficient DNS cache. And, Lua would solve the request I sometimes get to allow DNS names to match against regular expressions: Lua includes an entire regex library.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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COVID-19 Website

July 14, 2020

I have created an entire website showing COVID-19 growth rates. This website is being updated every day. 617 words

The website

The website is here:

https://www.samiam.org/COVID-19/

The dashboard first shows a heat map of the United States; it shows which states are experiencing the most COVID-19 growth, with red indicating high growth and green indicating low growth.

Below this, I link to a graph showing the growth rate (doubling time, actually) for the US as a whole. From that page, it is possible to go to a page for each state, such as California or Florida. In addition, we have a page for each and every county in the US, such as San Diego county or Miami-Dade county.

In addition, while county-level graphs are not available, it is possible to look at overall deaths in the US, as well as death rates for each state such as California or Texas.

Also included is case data for “Red states” (states where the governor is a Republican)¹ and “Blue states” (states where a Democrat occupies the governor’s mansion), as well as “Red state” mortality data and “Blue state” mortality data.

The page includes a list of the states and counties experiencing the most growth.

The entire site is very responsive (no Javascript is needed to load this site), is compatible with every mainstream browser since Internet Explorer 9, works on cell phones (just tap on a graph to view and zoom the data), and uses a minimum of bandwidth.

Making this site

The script used to make this site is open source and available on GitHub:

https://​github.​com/​samboy/​covid-​19-​html

The Lua language is used to generate this website; the Lua used is compatible with Lua 5.1 and also works with the current (5.4) version of Lua. I have a fork of Lua 5.1 whose binary is only 120k in size. Despite the binary being so small, the script generates the site in 90 seconds, including directions for Gnuplot to make each graph. Gnuplot makes the graphs in about five minutes.

The reason I am using Lua is because my daughter is obsessed with Roblox right now, which uses Lua as its scripting language for games. While I have been programming in Lua for 13 years, I finally bought the Lua book and read it through to fully understand Lua’s view of the world.

My thoughts on Lua

I am quite impressed with Lua. Not only is it tiny, but it is very fast and memory efficient. It has most of the ability of the much larger Python, with a big caveat: In order to make the scripting engine as small as possible, things often times require more code in Lua than Python. As one example, Lua does not include copy.deepcopy, but one can implement it in 17 lines of Lua code.

My workaround for Lua’s “batteries not included” design is making a public domain repository of LUA functions to cover common use cases Lua itself does not cover (sorted tables, deep table copying, printing a table’s contents, splitting a string, etc.)

Lua’s main advantage over Python is that it is an order of magnitude smaller than Python—my own personal fork of Lua is only 120,832 bytes in size—and it’s far easier to embed Lua in a C or C++ program than Python.

On a subjective level, its syntax is Pascal-style, a style which is not seen in many languages here in the 2020s. I prefer its syntax over Python’s syntax: Whitespace is not significant in Lua. There have been multiple forks to give Lua more C-like syntax over the years, including LJS, which is currently maintained.

Footnote

For the purposes of this data, Puerto Rico’s governor is considered a Republican, even though she was a Democrat until 2019.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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Harper’s Letter

July 9, 2020

This blog is about A Letter on Justice and Open Debate which was published this week in Harper’s Magazine. 334 words

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, which was published in Harper’s Magazine this week, is hopefully the “Have you no sense of decency” moment for the new McCarthyism that is “cancel culture”.

The right wing is using the threat of “cancel culture” to mobilize their base to try and get Trump re-elected. Trump talked about the horrors of cancel culture in his July 4th speech.¹ Republican Senator Judd Gregg rails against those who are “Searching out and destroying unbelievers” in a recent op-ed he wrote.²

The correct response to speech we do not like is more speech: Refute the points being made, to explain why they are wrong. The wrong response to speech we do not like is to engage in a rehash of McCarthyism and the cultural revolution, firing people without due process for—to use an example from just last week—something they wrote in 1987 and subsequently apologized for.³

For us to engage in this “cancel culture” is for us to descend in to the same level of hate that the right wing was able to use to get Trump elected in 2016.

I do not think anyone should ever be fired for posting the opinions of a US Senator in a newspaper.⁴ Adding notes showing the factual errors and racist dog whistles is OK; posting other opinion pieces refuting the op ed is OK. But threatening people’s jobs is censorship, plain and simple.

I find cancel culture reprehensible. It’s reprehensible because, say, if someone said or did something racist 25 years ago and admits to and apologizes for it, their job and livelihood is still at risk. Cancel culture shuts out the honest conversations about racism we need right now for our society to heal.

The cancel culture mob is out of control and dangerous. This is why I fully support this letter which will be published in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Footnotes

Donald Trump “Salute to America” Speech Transcript

“Judd Gregg: The coming Biden coup” by Senator Judd Gregg, published by The Hill.

“Boeing communications chief resigns over decades-old article on women in combat” by Eric M. Johnson, published by Reuters.

“James Bennet’s Resignation Proves the Woke Scolds Are Taking Over The New York Times” by Robby Soave, published by Reason.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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Crime, Police, and Chicago

July 6, 2020

This blog is about how someone in Chicago may see the police very differently than how I do, and also has a MaraDNS update. 429 words

Why someone in Chicago may see police differently

I posted this comment over at The New York Times today, in an article about out of control violence in Chicago. I am very honored it became a New York Times pick:

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, because of my spiritual and yes religious beliefs, I have been thinking a lot about what progressives refer to as my “white privilege” and how being born and raised white has resulted in my having a lot of implicit biases.

The world I live in and grew up in is one that the police are the good guys who are there to protect me and keep my neighborhood safe. I am coming to understand that many Black people see it differently, and feel that not only do the police harass them and are very confrontational with them, but also that the police fail to keep the streets safe in many Black neighborhoods, as illustrated in a recent article at The New York Times about Chicago’s violence.¹

Based on my experiences with police, when someone says “defund the police”, I think they’re being preposterous. However, I can also empathize that someone from a world where the police are not keeping neighborhoods safe and where interactions with police can be dangerous would entertain that notion.

I don’t think we should defund the police, and I also believe we should increase funding for Chicago’s “Project Safe Neighborhoods” program. Studies show it is quite effective at reducing this kind of violence.

Being in a safe neighborhood where the police are the good guys and where I can walk by myself at night is something I take for granted; I want more Black people to be able to have the same experience.

MaraDNS update: ip_blocklist

I have added a new parameter to Deadwood, MaraDNS’s recursive component: ip_blocklist. This parameter acts the same as ip_blacklist, but does not have the possible negative connotations “blacklist” can have.

I have no plans to break the older ip_blacklist name in existing dwood3rc files; while the newer ip_blocklist name is preferable, both names continue to work.

A look through my blog makes it clear I am no fan of what is called “cancel culture”. This is in no way an endorsement of cancel culture nor of out of control “political correctness”. This is about having compassion and empathy for people who have been born and raised in a very different world than the world I was born in to.

July 7 2020 update: I have now released MaraDNS 3.5.0007 with this change.

Footnote

“Chicago Gun Violence Spikes and Increasingly Finds the Youngest Victims” by Neil MacFarquhar and Robert Chiarito, published in The New York Times.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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COVID-19 growth by state

July 3, 2020

In the blog, I discuss COVID-19 growth across the US, and discuss why we should take down Confederate statues. 371 words

COVID-19 growth by state

COVID-19 growth over the last week. Red is high growth, blue is low growth.

Let’s take a look at COVID-19 growth in the United States over the last seven days. In this map, dark red indicates a high percentage of growth (as much as 5.8% per day); light blue indicates a low amount of growth.

In this map, Florida leads with a 5.8% daily growth of COVID-19 cases over the last week. On the heels of Florida, we have Arizona (4.7%), Idaho (4.6%), South Carolina (4.6%), Montana (4.4%), Nevada (4.2%), and Texas (4.2%).

As Senator Marco Rubio pointed out, wearing a mask in public is a simple public heath issue, not a political issue. It’s important to continue wearing a mask in public (especially if indoors), avoid large public gatherings, and to practice social distancing.

Confederate Statues

I support taking down Confederate statutes, mainly because they were by and large put up in the 20th century to support Jim Crow laws.¹ I do not support what extremists are doing, tearing down statues of people like George Washington in places like Portland just because he owned slaves.²

What these extremists fail to do is distinguish between someone being a product of their time (George Washington owning slaves in the late 1700s, back when that was still a normal acceptable practice) vs. someone being malicious as per the values of their era (Confederates fighting a war to continue owning slaves, and their statue being put up in the 20th century to bolster Jim Crow). I saw this with some of the extremes of #MeToo (e.g. Nolan Bushnell was attacked for being the president of a company with was more openly sexual at work in the 1970s than would be acceptable today),³ and I am now seeing it in the wake of the George Floyd Protests.

In terms of southern culture: I lived in Georgia for two years. I have a distinct southern drawl in my voice. I love southern culture and southern hospitality and the people there. Southern culture does not mean we need to celebrate the subjugation of Black people.

Notes

The COVID-19 Data comes from the New York Times over at https://​github.​com/​nytimes/​covid-​19-​data The SVG map template is public domain, obtained from https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​File:​Electoral​College​2020.​svg The code to take the New York Times data and convert it in to a visual map is open source, available at https://​github.​com/​samboy/​covid-​19-​html

I originally posted the COVID-19 data at DailyKOS.

Footnotes

See https://​www.​splcenter.​org/​sites/​default/​files/​com_​whose_​heritage.​pdf or https://​www.​theatlantic.​com/​ideas/​archive/​2020/​06/​ole-​misss-​monument-​white-​supremacy/​613255/ for discussion of the checkered history of Confederate statues

https://​thehill.​com/​changing-​america/​respect/​equality/​503559-​george-​washington-​statue-​vandalized-​and-​toppled-​by

“Sex, Pong, And Pioneers: What Atari Was Really Like, According To Women Who Were There” by Cecilia D'Anastasio, published by Kotaku

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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Election prediction

July 2, 2020

I make my first prediction for the presidential election this November. Also, a MaraDNS release. 314 words

My prediction

My first prediction for the November 3 presidential election

In this prediction, which I made over at 270towin.com, I predict that Biden will beat Trump with 308 electoral votes (270 electoral votes are needed to win). I predict that Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida will flip blue this year. This map is very similar to my 2016 prediction, the only difference being that I (correctly) predicted that Wisconsin would go to Trump.

The 2016 election, looking back, was bizarre. I think it is the first election where a candidate was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women but still won.

Comparing things to 2016, when Trump did briefly out-poll Hillary at the national level in late May of 2016,¹ Biden has been consistently out polling Trump.²

Looking at just Florida, a key battleground state, Hillary was 3.7 points ahead of Trump in polling four years ago today. Trump ultimately won the state by 1.2 points, because of voters who made up their mind in the final days before the election.³ Right now, Biden is 6.4 points ahead of Trump in Florida,⁴ a lead Clinton only had briefly in April of 2016.

As it turns out, Biden is polling even better in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin right now. For Trump to win come November, someone would need to come up with a COVID-19 vaccine within the next three months—a very long shot.⁵

MaraDNS 3.5.0006 released

I mentioned that MaraDNS 3.5.0006 was almost ready a few days ago. I have now released MaraDNS 3.5.0006; it is available at https://maradns.samiam.org or https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

This release mainly makes the Deadwood parser less strict with whitespace. This is one more step in my process of making MaraDNS a little easier to use with each release.

Footnotes

RealClear Politics, General Election: Trump vs. Clinton

RealClear Politics, General Election: Trump vs. Biden

RealClear Politics, Florida: Trump vs. Clinton

RealClear Politics, Florida: Trump vs. Biden

“Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker”, by Jonathan Corum, Denise Grady, Sui-Lee Wee and Carl Zimmer, published by The New York Times

The election map is public domain, obtained from the Wikipedia. Its SVG vector form is also available.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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COVID-19 growth

June 30, 2020

COVID-19 is undergoing exponential growth again. 362 words

COVID-19’s growth is going up

COVID-19’s doubling time in San Diego. Lower numbers mean faster growth.

The number of COVID-19 cases in San Diego is surging. More worrying, the growth rate is surging, decreasing the doubling time.

At the current growth rate, we will have COVID-19 herd immunity (i.e. pretty much everyone will be exposed to COVID-19) by mid-October.

It does not appear to be the George Floyd protests which have caused growth to go up again; it looks like our re-opening of the economy is causing growth to go up.

Bars are already starting to close in other parts of California. The county with the most COVID-19 growth right now is Marin county, just north of San Francisco; my data shows that they are projected to have herd immunity in a month.

I am doing my best to stay at home, only leaving for a socially distanced walk, to buy groceries, or to take my daughter to and from school. I wear a mask if in an indoor public space; I maintain a distance of six feet from other people when going on my daily walks.

I have decided that it’s worth the increased possible exposure to the COVID-19 virus for my daughter to be back in school and able to socialize with her peers. They are taking a lot of measures to reduce spread at the school.

The New York Times recently published an opinion piece on why it is important for kids to go back to school.¹

MaraDNS update

I am in the process of getting MaraDNS 3.5.0006 out the door. I have updated the Deadwood parser to no longer always be Python 2 compatible; leading whitespace is now allowed in Deadwood configuration files. The reason for this change is because Python 2 is no longer supported by the Python Software Foundation. Since Deadwood’s configuration files are not always Python 3 compatible, I no longer see a need for its configuration file be a full subset of Python 2 syntax.

I should have the 3.5.0006 release out later this week.

Footnotes

The COVID-19 data comes from The New York Times, over at https://​github.​com/​nytimes/​covid-​19-​data I process the data to get doubling time figures, both actual and predicted; that code can be seen at https://​github.​com/​samboy/​covid-​19-​html While facts can not be copyrighted, The New York Times claims copyright on their COVID-19 data.

For a discussion on why it’s important for kids to be in school, see “Remote School Is a Nightmare. Few in Power Care.” by Michelle Goldberg, published by The New York Times.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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Grab bag

June 23, 2020

This blog has an update on CHAZ, and discusses Stephen Hsu, Trump’s failed rally, and Slate Star Codex being down. 333 words

CHAZ: 11 days before lethal violence

Larry Niven, in “Cloak of Anarchy”, predicted it would take nine hours from a place being police free until we had deadly violence.¹ The CHAZ, make that CHOP, police-free zone in Seattle which I blogged about on June 13 needed 11 days before its first murder.²

To say that police are horrible and should be abolished is easy. To actually keep violence down in a neighborhood takes real work.

Stephen Hsu resigned but is still a tenured professor

As a follow-up to my June 16 blog, Stephen Hsu has been forced to resign from his position as president of research and innovation at Michigan State University. He still has his position as a tenured professor.³

Trump’s failed rally

Not many people attended Trump’s rally in Tulsa Oklahoma;⁴ the days of Trump being able to pack a stadium may be done with. There are a number of possible reasons for this; I like to think it’s because even former Trump voters are tired of blaming immigrants and, via thinly veiled “dog whistle” language, minorities for the nation’s problems.

To say that immigrants and minorities (make that “thugs”) are horrible is easy. To actually run a country, especially in wake of a pandemic and the resulting economic collapse, takes real work.

Slate Star Codex is down

As I type this, Slate Star Codex is down.⁵ The reason is because The New York Times apparently is threatening to reveal Scott Alexander’s real identity, i.e. “doxx” him. Scott has a legitimate reason to feel his job and livelihood is at stake if he is doxxed; I hope the reporters have the decency to ultimately respect Scott’s privacy.

Considering that an otherwise unknown woman was fired last week because The Washington Post decided a Halloween costume she wore back in 2018 was not politically correct,⁶ Scott Alexander has good reason to want to remain anonymous.⁷

Footnotes

“Cloak of Anarchy” by Larry Niven. Originally published in the March 1972 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

“Shootings Test Viability of Seattle’s Protest ‘Autonomous Zone’” by Mike Baker, published by The New York Times.

“MSU Vice President of research and innovation Stephen Hsu resigns” by News 10, published by WILX.

“The President’s Shock at the Rows of Empty Seats in Tulsa” by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni, published by The New York Times.

Slate Star Codex’s website as of 2020-06-23 shows the site replaced by a request not to be doxxed.

“The Washington Post's Halloween Costume Hit Job Is a New Low for Cancel Culture” by Robby Soave, published by Reason.

There is a long discussion about Scott Alexander possibly being doxxed over at “Hacker News”

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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Juneteenth

June 19, 2020

In light of the George Floyd protests, I am celebrating Juneteenth for the first time this year. 635 words

What is Juneteenth?

Juneteenth is the celebration of the final freeing of slaves in a Confederate state during the US Civil War. On June 19, 1865, one General Gordon Granger proclaimed all slaves in Texas free, ending Confederate slavery once and for all.¹

How I am celebrating Juneteenth this year

Because of the history of oppression against Black people by white people, and because of the number of right wing “dog whistles” used by racists to signal their racism while sounding perfectly innocent,² as a white person I have to have some care in how I celebrate this holiday.

Why Did I Get Married?

That in mind, I am watching one of my favorite movies, Tyler Perry’s excellent Why Did I Get Married which arrived by coincidence early enough for me to watch it this evening (it was supposed to arrive Sunday, but arrived yesterday instead).

Also, by coincidence, as I was in the grocery store this afternoon, I saw a magazine with Tyler Perry’s photo on the cover and an article from him about George Floyd’s death and what it means for him as a Black person.

The movie is an excellent movie, one of my favorites. It starts off a little slow—with some eight main characters, we need some time to meet and get to know these people before we get to the meat of the story.

It’s a story about the struggles of marriage. But, it’s about so much more. It brings to light the kinds of rationalizations men make when they decide to commit adultery, and lets us see up close the consequences. It’s a story about overcoming adversity.

And, it’s a story of faith. Unlike many movies, we see characters openly proclaim their faith in God and we see people pray and talk about praying. This is a movie where God is openly at work, helping our characters in unexpected ways.

It ends with a beautiful scene where Janet Jackson says “love God, yourself, and others”—which is a summary of my faith in God and how I try to follow God.

Tyler Perry on George Floyd

Tyler Perry says he is “exhausted from all of the hate and the division”. I feel the same way. I’m not happy with the way George Floyd died. I am not happy that, for all the progress our society has made in reducing racism, it is still a big part of our world.

And, yes, I am tired of all the cancel culture going on, trying to get people fired who did things which were not intentionally, much less maliciously, racist. That just results in more division, less reconciliation.

In finding a solution, I reach for my faith in God. My solution is this: Don’t blame anyone or look at anyone else’s sin except my own. My solution is to look in the mirror and ask God to find a way to have me be part of the solution, to be part of making a color blind world.

Perry talks about his five year old child. In reply to that, I am very proud to say that, when my daughter, at four, noticed one of her friends had “brown” skin, she told me that she wished she had brown skin like her. Whatever institutional racism I may have, my daughter learned none of it; she just thought her Black friend had a beautiful color of skin.

Seeing all of the young people protesting George Floyd’s tragic death gives me hope. It gives me hope that Perry’s son and my daughter’s Black friend will grow up in a world more color blind than the world I grew up in, the world Perry grew up in.

With God, all things are possible.

Footnotes

See, for example, Juneteenth as described by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission

It would seem that eating fried chicken and watermelon can be considered racist against Black people

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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Cancel Culture

June 16, 2020

One unfortunate side effect of the George Floyd protests is that the “cancel culture” mob is out in force. 325 words

David Shor has been fired

One David Shor has been fired for linking, in a calm non-inflammatory manner, to some academic research on how violence in protests makes voters oppose the protests.¹

David Shor did not advocate for anything that Martin Luther King would not had supported under the same circumstances. Indeed, he made the same point MLK’s daughter made in response to the George Floyd riots: “The only way to get constructive change is through nonviolent means”.²

Steve Hsu is being attached

One professor Steve Hsu is being attacked by a Twitter cancel culture mob for, among other things, discussing peer-reviewed science.³ The accusations being made against him appear to be baseless.⁴,⁵

To quote a letter written by four professors opposing this attempt at cancel culture:⁶

The principles of free inquiry and free expression are the cornerstones of enlightenment philosophy and the basis of a fully democratic society. Without them, what is left is authoritarianism, ideological tribalism, or mere traditionalism.

Objective facts are facts, and attacking or firing people who state facts that make one uncomfortable do not change the facts, any more than the Roman Catholic church threatening to torture Galileo because he said the earth rotates around the sun made the sun decide to rotate around the earth instead.

“Defund the Police” redux

I recently found someone who said we should literally abolish the police in a somewhat fringe “pulp magazine” website. We now have a piece in the opinion section of The New York Times advocating the same thing.⁷

Fortunately, there is some sanity left in the world: The comments section by and large explains why removing the police would be quite foolish, something I blogged about earlier this month.

I can see why some people see the police as a hostile occupying force, but eliminating them would be throwing out the baby (public safety) with the bathwater (police brutality).

Footnotes

“The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age” by Jonathan Chait, published by New York magazine.

“Martin Luther King’s Daughter Says ‘Only Way to Get Constructive Change Is Through Nonviolent Means’” by Claudia Harmata, published by MSN

“Open Thread 156.25 + Signal Boost For Steve Hsu” by an anonymous writer, posted at the Slate Star Codex blog.

From a letter written by Matt McGue, Regents Professor of Psychology, University of Minnesota. The letter states that “the charges against Professor Hsu are baseless”.

“Hundreds of MSU professors, GEU call to remove VP of research Stephen Hsu” by Wendy Guzman, writing for “The State News”, Michigan State University’s student newspaper. Quoting Hsu: “The accusations are entirely false — I am neither racist or sexist”

From a letter written by Corey Washington, Joseph Cesario, Wei Liao, and John (Xuefeng) Jiang.

“Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police” by Mariame Kaba, published in the opinion section of The New York Times.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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COVID-19 and CHAZ

June 13, 2020

I discuss COVID-19 growth in San Diego and Seattle’s “CHAZ” experiment to have an area downtown with no police. 396 words

COVID-19: Update for 2020-06-13

COVID-19’s doubling time in San Diego

Right now with the COVID-19 illness, we continue to not have exponential growth of cases here in San Diego country, as shown in this graph,¹ but the protests appear to have had an effect.

Here, the higher the lines are, the better we are doing (the slower COVID-19 is spreading). The blue (darker) line is “if we maintain the growth we had on a given day (7-day average), how long would doubling take?” and the orange (lighter) line is “how many days ago did we have half the number of cases we had on this day?”.

As we can see, last week the blue line went down: Most likely, those George Floyd protests did increase COVID-19 growth. However, with the protests dying down the blue line is going up again.

Hair cut places are open again. School daycare is opening up again next week. We will see how that affects growth.

There is a police free area in Seattle

There is now, in the heart of downtown Seattle, an area with no police intervention being done. It’s called the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” or CHAZ.² While the area has been police-free for a few days, the place seems fairly peaceful and free of violence.³

The right wing has been claiming there have been attempts to extort businesses in the police-free zone for money,⁴ but those claims appear to be false;⁵ we know that the right wing media has been manipulating evidence to make the area look worse than it actually is.⁶

I can tell you this much: This police-free zone is doing a lot better than Science Fiction authors predicted it would. Larry Niven’s classic 1972 story “Cloak of Anarchy” had things descend in to senseless violence within nine hours after police presence was removed.⁷ The movie “Class of 1999”, which predicted a police-free zone in Seattle back in 1990, also has overwhelming violence.⁸

If this area were to remain police-free, my guess is that would eventually end up like a third world country, with houses and businesses needing to be barricaded with high fences to protect themselves. When I lived in Mexico, each house was like a little fortress, with a high wall surrounding it, and doors to the outside that locked whenever you closed them. I am sure police will return to this CHAZ area long before that would happen.

Footnotes

The COVID-19 data comes from The New York Times, over at https://​github.​com/​nytimes/​covid-​19-​data I process the data to get doubling time figures, both actual and predicted; that code can be seen at https://​github.​com/​samboy/​covid-​19-​html While facts can not be copyrighted, The New York Times claims copyright on their COVID-19 data.

“Free Food, Free Speech and Free of Police: Inside Seattle’s ‘Autonomous Zone’” by Mike Baker, published by The New York Times

“CHAZ, a ‘no Cop Co-op’: Here’s what Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone looks like” by Ryan W. Miller, published by USA Today

“Seattle ‘autonomous zone’ has armed guards, local businesses being threatened with extortion, police say” by Vandana Rambaran, published by Fox News

“No Evidence of Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) Businesses Being Extorted” published by heavy.com

“Fox News removes manipulated images from coverage of Seattle protests” by Isaac Stanley-Becker published by The Washington Post

“Cloak of Anarchy” by Larry Niven. Originally published in the March 1972 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.

“Class of 1999” movie review by Richard Harrington, published by Washington Post

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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Empathy

June 12, 2020

This blog is about empathy, in light of current events. 348 words.

Defund the police: Another perspective

One Pincess Weekes says that she actually would like to see the police abolished.¹ While I disagree with her, based on my experience living in a place without an effective police force, I also have empathy for her point of view.

She writes that “When I see the police come onto the subway I am more afraid of what they might do to someone than a crime”; while I do not wish to put words in her mouth, I would surmise that she sees the police as a hostile occupying force, and she wants to see them gone, just as France wanted to see the Gestapo gone during World War II.

Yes, she comes to a different conclusion I have come to, but, based on her experience of reality, I can have empathy for her point of view and see why she feels that way.

Empathy: Two other examples

I have recently mentioned two other articles which look at empathy. In a blog entry from earlier this month, I look at Arnold Schwarzenegger and how he is a true man, not for his excellent body work out program, but for his empathy and compassion for a black colleague, one Erroll Southers, who is afraid a police officer may kill a relative of his.

Another example of a lack of empathy are both the self-centered “Red Pill” cultists, as well as “feminists” who have no empathy for men who do not know how to get a date; I blogged about both a few days ago.

It is telling that both the “Red Pill” groups are no where near as prominent as they were just five years ago, and almost all of the articles from “feminists” lacking empathy for men that Scott Alexander linked to in his essay Radicalizing the Romanceless² are no longer online.

Footnotes

“Yes, Some of Us Actually Want to Abolish/Defund the Police” by Princess Weekes, published by “The Mary Sue”.

“Radicalizing the Romanceless” by Scott Alexander, self-published on his blog.

Did you know that all of my blog entries are available in a free to download eBook at https://www.samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html.

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Let’s keep the Police

June 10, 2020

This blog is about the importance of having a police department to reduce crime.

“Defund the Police”?

There has been a call among some hard-left protesters that we need to “defund the police”¹. This call is quite controversial; the right wing is having a field day with this slogan²,³ and the left wing finds itself backpedaling from this position.⁴

I am no fan of “defund the police”, based on my experience living in a third world country without an effective police force.

One night, back when Marina was still with us and was my wife, before she got her visa to be able to enter the US, we were watching a movie, in an era when getting a movie to watch was an entire ritual of going to Blockbuster to get the movie to rent, making the movie play on our old half-broken DVD player, and taking the movie back to Blockbuster after watching it. As we were watching the movie, suddenly we heard a very loud sound, like someone slamming a metal wall with a battering ram. After about a minute of this horrible sound, we then heard gun shots in the street in front of our house. Fortunately, whoever they were, they were not interested in our place that evening, and the sounds soon subsided.

One of the reasons I moved back to the US is because I like living in a country with an effective police force, allowing me to be in a neighborhood where I can take a walk at night without worrying that someone will assault me.

Yes, the George Floyd protests have brought to light many much needed police reforms.⁵ But we do not need to throw out the baby with the bathwater; we can reduce police brutality without having to compromise public safety.

This is not the only silly slogan which does not stand up to close scrutiny. The “Believe all women” slogan was also problematic.⁶

Fortunately, here in San Diego, the city council will have none of this “defund the police” nonsense.⁷

Footnotes

“When protesters demand ‘defund the police’ at George Floyd demonstrations, what does it mean?” by Michael Balsamo

“Andrew McCarthy: Defund the police? Here's what Dems, BLM ignoring about crime” by Andrew McCarthy posted over at Fox News.

“Trump seeks to tie Biden to ‘defund the police’ demands even though former vice president rejects idea” by Courtney Subramanian and David Jackson, published by USA Today

“Activists’ call to ‘defund the police’ is a confusing message that could backfire” by Eric Zorn, published by the Chicago Tribune

“Opinion: Good Riddance to One of America’s Strongest Police Secrecy Laws” by Mara Gay, published in The New York Times opinion section.

“Opinion: ‘Believe All Women’ Is a Right-Wing Trap” by Susan Faludi, published in The New York Times opinion section.

“San Diego defies calls to ‘defund the police,’ but it ‘won’t be business as usual’ in California’s second largest city” Jessica Flores, published by USA Today

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Monday grab bag

June 8, 2020

I discuss Tim Cotton some more, and look at a mid-2010s article claiming feminists discourage socially awkward men from dating.

Tom Cotton redux

Saturday, I criticized an op-ed Senator Tom Cotton posted at The New York Times. I was not the only one to criticize this piece; The New York Times’s opinion editor resigned because that op-ed was published.

Tom Cotton says that he never said military should be used against protesters, only rioters; to which I respond: Once we bring in the tanks because there are some rioters at a largely peaceful protest, it’s pretty easy to end up with a massacre like what happened in 1968 in Mexico.

While I did and still do strongly disagree with what Tom Cotton wrote, I also feel having the chief editor of The New York Times being forced to resign over it being published is an over reaction. I don’t think a reputable journalistic outfit should give every crank a soapbox, but I also think publishing a US Senator’s opinion on a current event should not ever be grounds for termination.

Radicalizing the Romanceless: A 2020 perspective

Six years ago, well-known blogger Scott Alexander published an essay called Radicalizing the Romanceless. In this long-winded nearly 7,500 word long essay, Scott Alexander argues that feminists mock socially awkward men trying to get dates with women, and that those socially awkward men will, as a result, go to the then-prominent right-wing “Red Pill” online dating communities.

To support his arguments, he found a few pieces from “feminists” which he used to claim feminists have no empathy for and mock men who have a hard time getting a date. This is an example of what I consider to be an important corollary of Poe’s law: It’s trivial to find an idiot somewhere on the Internet who espouses an otherwise straw man argument we then tear down. For example, it’s possible to find a good number of openly racist Republican voters on Twitter, but finding such racists does not mean that supporting Republican positions makes one a racist.

Likewise, just because Scott Alexander was able to, in 2014, find four examples of “feminists” mocking socially awkward men does not mean this is a position mainstream feminists espouse.

Let’s look at the four examples Scott used:

Two of the examples are from a website called Feminspire. Feminspire has been offline for over four years.

One of the examples is from XOJane. XOJane is now a redirect, and all of its articles have been offline since 2017.

Finally, there was an article Scott linked to over at Jezebel written by one Hugo Schwyzer, a college professor who was forced to resign after they discovered he had sexual relations with female students he taught.

Point being, the articles Scott Alexander used to argue that feminists lack empathy for sexually frustrated men were either published by sites which are now offline or written by someone who engaged in sexually inappropriate conduct that got him fired. They do not represent the attitudes of most feminists, even if it looked that way a few years ago.

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Masculinity, etc.

June 6, 2020

I discuss masculinity in light of Tom Cotton’s recent op-ed, announce a new MaraDNS release, and now have “free beer” eBook versions of all of my blog entries available to download.

Tom Cotton: Toxic masculinity

Tom Cotton recently wrote an op-ed published in The New York Times saying, in so many words, that we should have our own military attack US citizens:

One thing above all else will restore order to our streets: an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers.

This is toxic masculinity at its worst. The idea of using an “overwhelming show of force” to handle “lawbreakers” is the language used by despots to silence opposition.

It is the method that, when taken to its inevitable conclusion, ends up with the 1968 massacre in Mexico of by and large peaceful protesters as well as the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. Indeed, the former world chess champion Kasparov has made a similar comparison.

This kind of toxic masculinity is not limited to Tom Cotton; a similar kind of toxic masculinity can be seen with the harmful “Red Pill” movement, which sought to exploit women for men’s selfish sexual satisfaction. This movement was very popular in the mid-2010s, but is fortunately waning here in the 2020s.

76 years ago today, our brave troops landed at Normandy on D-Day to counter the inevitable results of the out of control toxic masculine thinking which dominated the Nazi movement. To not let that kind of fascist “masculine” thinking take control of our society requires constant vigilance.

Healthy masculinity, as practiced by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and others, is about compassion and care, about empathy. It is not about using force to oppress and silence voices nor is it about exploiting others for our selfish desires.

MaraDNS 3.5.0005 released

I have released MaraDNS 3.5.0005:

MaraDNS is now fully supported in Cygwin

Windows port of MaraDNS no longer includes maradns.exe; we instead tell people how to compile MaraDNS in Cygwin. Note: We continue to fully support Deadwood for Windows, which is a proper Windows service (unlike the old maradns.exe).

Dockerfile now creates Docker image with working instance of MaraDNS. This is still a work in progress; one currently needs to enter the Docker container to change MaraDNS configuration files.

Version number fixed when compiling a MaraDNS release.

My plan now for MaraDNS 3.5.0006 is to flush out the Docker support.

My blog is now available as a free eBook

It is now possible to download all of my blog entries as a free eBook, either in Kindle (mobi) or ePub format. I have an automated process for updating the eBook with the new entry every time I publish to my blog, so this eBook will remain up to date.

It can be downloaded here:

https://samiam.org/blog/ebooks.html

While one is free to download and read this eBook without charge, I remain its copyright owner.

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June round-up

June 1, 2020

For June, I post an update on the COVID-19 virus, discuss CentOS 8 support for OpenVZ, touch on the protests we are having, and have a minor MaraDNS update.

COVID-19 update

COVID-19’s doubling time in San Diego

We have finally stopped having exponential growth with COVID-19 cases in San Diego. Indeed, society is starting to open up again; I can get my hair cut again (as long as I wear a mask and observe social distancing) and childcare at my daughter’s school is scheduled to open up again in a little over two weeks.

While there are still some shortages at stores, essential items are readily available again. I may have to buy a different brand of toilet paper, for example, but I can buy it again.

The important thing is to maintain social distance to keep the spread of the virus down, as well as keeping one’s hands clean and wearing a mask when shopping or otherwise interacting closely with strangers.

Large public gatherings should still be avoided. Which leads me to the next topic.

The George Floyd protests

Arnold Schwarzenegger has done a far better job describing the reason for the George Floyd protests than I could had.

When I think to myself “who are the most macho people out there”, I think of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bill Phillips.

So, I made a point to read closely what they have to write, because they, to me, define what it means to be a real man.

There is a notion out there that being “Macho” means oppressing the weak. Which is why reading this article from Arnie was so enjoyable; it is the peak of masculinity: Having compassion for the oppressed and desiring to overcome oppression.

I do not feel comfortable going in to the streets to protest because of the COVID-19 crisis, but I do feel comfortable lifting some dumbbells I am blessed to have at home as a sign of solidarity of those who have been oppressed by our country’s prejudices and petty hatreds.

OpenVZ: Yes, there is CentOS 8 support

The OpenVZ nodes available at RamNode, as it turns out, fully support CentOS 8. However, since CentOS 8 is 64-bit, it requires more memory to run processes than 32-bit CentOS 6, which means it really needs a larger node than a 128 megabyte one. While RamNode still offers $15/year 128 megabyte nodes, their next step up is a $42/year 1 gigabyte node. It would be nice if they offered something in between for $25 a year, such as a 256mb or 512mb node.

Since I have already moved everything over to Dreamhost, I will leave it to Dreamhost to make sure the underlying operating system is up to date with security patches, and that things run smoothly.

MaraDNS: Mailing list archive update

As I was moving files to the new node, I was able to find the archives for the third and final iteration of the MaraDNS mailing list. They are available here:

https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​2010​s-​mailing-​list/

The mailing list is down, and it’s more bother than it’s worth to bring it up again one last time to send a “goodbye mailing list” message to its subscribers.

I continue to work on MaraDNS; my current project is to make MaraDNS supported in Cygwin so that Windows users without access to Hyper-V can run both the authoritative and recursive parts of MaraDNS (not to mention MicroDNS).

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Goodbye, OpenVZ

May 29, 2020

I discuss updating my severs from OpenVZ.

Time to move on from OpenVZ

OpenVZ is the technology I have been using to host my websites starting in 2011. It allowed me to be root in my own virtual container running a full version of CentOS Linux for only $15 a year. At that price, I got three of them.

While the technology has worked fairly well over the years, for me to update to a new technology requires my hosting provider to have a “template” for the OS in question. My hosting provider did not have a template for CentOS 8, even though one appears to exist.

When I asked them for CentOS 8 support, they said there might be issues with the template. They never added CentOS 8 support.

For me to continue using OpenVZ, I need to use an OS which will continue to be updated with security updates for the foreseeable future. Since my OpenVZ providers are not adding CentOS 8 support, that meant I needed to look elsewhere for hosting.

I decided to get Dreamhost, simply because a family member chose Dreamhost for their hosting and it looked to be compatible with my workflow (UNIX-compatible shell, rsync for file transfer). That in mind, I finally pulled the trigger and ordered Dreamhost yesterday, and spent a couple of hours moving everything over to my new hosting provider.

While Dreamhost is perceived as a “Wordpress” site, they work fine for hosting (mostly) static files which are copied from a local Linux “master” server via rsync.

The transition was very smooth, with very few issues. I started off moving over a small domain, then moved over the rest of my domains.

Dreamhost has been around since the dot-com boom of the 1990s and are still around today; it looks like I will be able to use them for hosting for the foreseeable future.

Minor MaraDNS update

I have discovered that Docker is not a real viable solution for telling Windows uses “just run Docker” when they ask they I expand the Windows port:

Docker requires a high end version of Windows 10 to run, since it uses Hyper-V for the virtualization.

Docker and VMware do not play together very well on Windows 10, unless one has both the latest version of Windows 10 and the latest version of VMware player.

This in mind, I plan to add “star record” support for Deadwood’s bogus IPs.

Note that the Windows port of the MaraDNS authoritative server is being deprecated (it was never a real Windows port: it does not run as a standalone service and has Y2038 issues); I will no longer update the Windows 32-bit binary of the authoritative half of MaraDNS for Windows (unless a security issue with a CVE number is discovered). The recursive server (Deadwood) is still fully supported as a Windows service and I have not plans to change that at this time.

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May update

May 11, 2020

Some updates for May of 2020.

COVID-19 in San Diego

COVID-19’s doubling time in San Diego

In San Diego, the lockdown has been fairly effective: We have decreased the doubling time (the number of days it takes for the number of COVID-19 cases to double) from four days to 20 days. However, we still have exponential growth in San Diego: The virus is still spreading, and current growth figures means it will take between three to five months for pretty much everyone in San Diego to be exposed to the virus.

In the above chart, blue is calculated doubling time, based on the average growth over the previous seven days (since there are weekly fluctuations in growth, we need a seven-day average to show accurate growth). Orange is the actual doubling time, based on how many days ago we had half the current number of cases.

As we can see, the calculated and actual doubling time agree that we’re seeing the number of cases double in just under 20 days.

Since we still don’t really know how many people actually have COVID-19, we don’t know how long it will take for the number of cases to saturate. We know, based on entire populations which have been tested (the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt and what not), that there is a high number of asymptomatic cases: Cases where someone does not develop any symptoms at all, and is not even aware they have the virus which cases COVID-19.

I estimate, based on antibody studies, that about 1.5% of the population of San Diego already have the COVID-19 virus, so we will have full exposure after six doublings, or in four months. I estimate that about 10,000 people will end up dying from COVID-19 in San Diego.

What the social isolation has given us is a little time to prepare hospitals for the coming storm. A cure will take over a year; this just lets us reduce fatalities by not overwhelming our medical facilities.

Since COVID-19 is such a new disease, the amount of scientific information we have about it is small, so these figures are very rough guesses, and are probably quite inaccurate.

Speaking of the virus, toilet paper has finally come back to store shelves down here in San Diego last weekend. Life is nowhere near back to normal—there are still lines to enter stores, wearing a mask is mandatory, and other social distancing measures are in place—but almost all essential supplies are available again. And, yes, since I buy TP in bulk at CostCo when it’s on sale, I was never close to running out.

Nexuiz Tiny updated

I have been working on Nexuiz Tiny. This is a small version of an open source Unreal Tournament / Quake III Areana clone. In this game, one is in an arena (there are thousands of different arenas of various sizes out there that are compatible with or can be converted in to an arena for this game), fighting one or more opponents to the death with various weapons. Every time an opponent is killed, the killer scores a “frag” and the vanquished player is resurrected. After a few minutes (traditionally, 10 minutes, but I prefer a quick 3-minute match), the player with the most “frags” wins.

The game can be played over the network with other people, but the game also includes bots which make for a satisfying single player game.

This game is a minimalist version of an old open source game called “Nexuiz”; this version only includes seven small arena maps which run well on pretty much anything. The seven maps have even been tested on a 2007 business laptop with very basic Intel graphics acceleration. Nexuiz is no longer developed, but its direct successor, Xonotic, is still actively updated.

Indeed, my fork of Nexuiz includes a conversion of a popular third party map made for Xonotic, as well as the corresponding textures and music.

Nexuiz Tiny can be downloaded from Sourceforge.

MaraDNS update

Right now, I am working on making a proper Docker container for MaraDNS, so people can download and use MaraDNS without needing to set up an operating system that can support it. While I have no plans to stop making my Windows binary of MaraDNS, this will allow people to more easily download and use this program.

2020-05-13 update: I have made an ASCII version of this graph for Lynx users

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MaraDNS updates

April 27, 2020

I am going over some recent MaraDNS releases in this blog.

MaraDNS 3.5.0002

In this release, I finally added a feature someone wanted a number of years ago: The Windows port of MaraDNS no longer needs a “secret.txt” file to start up. Instead, the Windows service directly calls “CryptGenRandom()” to get entropy. This makes the Windows port of Deadwood easier to install and use.

This release was made on February 3, 2020.

MaraDNS 3.5.0003

In this release, I added support for large blacklists (up to 500,000 entries). While I went to some effort to reduce memory usage of large blacklists, in order to keep the code simple and fast, each black list entry takes about a kilobyte of memory. Typical “Pi Hole” anti spam blacklists have about 60,000 entries, so we need about 60 megabytes of memory to run a blacklist of this size.

I personally find the black lists useful for keeping me away from “time sink” websites like Twitter.

This release was made on April 16, 2020.

MaraDNS 3.5.0004

In this release, I made MaraDNS easier to use by no longer forcing the use to change the value of “maximum_cache_elements”, and have made some progress updating the documentation.

This release was made on April 18, 2020.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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COVID-19: Update

April 11, 2020

The doubling rate in San Diego is now over ten days long. This means the social isolation, as unpleasant as it is, has been very effective at controlling the spread of the virus.

San Diego’s growth rate

COVID-19’s growth in San Diego

In this chart, we can see that, while the number of cases are still going up, they are going up more slowly. In mid-March, before the lockdown started, San Diego was doubling the number of COVID-19 cases every day. Right now, it takes over 10 days for the number of cases to double.

Since San Diego county has around 3,000,000 people, and since we currently have 1,696 known cases (which means we probably have around 15,000 cases total), we need seven or eight doublings before everyone gets infected, which means we currently have about 75 days to expand testing and treatment.

How to end the stay-at-home order

We can not end the stay-at-home order and restart the economy without there being more widespread testing. Right now, we are flying blind: We do not know the full spread of the virus, and we really do not know who has and who does not have the virus. This is why, right now, everyone has to stay at home except to get essential supplies, and why everyone should be wearing a mask in public. Because we have to act as if everyone has the virus.

Once we have widespread testing, the only people who will need to stay at home will be people who test positive for the virus. Once that is in place, we will be able to re-open schools and non-essential businesses.

Where to get current information

Current numbers for the number of COVID-19 cases are available from The New York Times.

Stay Safe!

I know it’s hard to stay at home all day, day after day, but that is what we need to do to save millions of lives and give us enough time to treat everyone who will need COVID-19 treatment, and to find better treatments and more widespread testing.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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COVID-19: Good news

March 22, 2020

Some good news in San Diego: We are making progress controlling the spread of the virus, and the full lockdown now in effect should control its spread even more.

COVID-19’s growth rate

COVID-19’s growth in San Diego

The amount of growth we are currently seeing (which should go down) would saturate San Diego’s population in about eight weeks. Previous growth, before the quarantine was in effect, would had saturated our population in five weeks.

The thing to keep in mind is that we can stop saturation with less economic impact once we ramp up testing: We test large numbers of people and only quarantine those who test positive. This way, we can hang out with our friends and open up schools again, without the virus spreading unchecked. But we need wide scale testing to pull it off.

If we can get the growth factor to be small enough, the virus will burn out; I don’t think that’s achievable without testing, but, then again, I’m a computer software developer, not an epidemiologist.

Updates

As of the afternoon of March 22, San Diego now has 205 cases, which is a 29% increase over the previous day. This is a higher increase than the one we had the previous day (21%), so is hopefully just a blip and we will see the increase go down again.

March 23, 2020 update: San Diego now has 230 cases, which is only a 12% increase from yesterday. Taking in to account yesterday’s blip, we are seeing the same 21% increase we saw two days ago; saturation (everyone in San Diego being infected) remains about seven or eight weeks away. If this 12% increase can be sustained, saturation will take 12 weeks, probably longer.

March 24, 2020 update: San Diego has 242 cases, only a 5% growth from yesterday. The quarantine is working! It would take over six months to saturate at this point; we may have effective medicines and possibly even a vaccine before then.

Final update: San Diego has 1696 cases and a doubling time of over 11 days on April 11, 2020.

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Stay home!

March 16, 2020

The COVID-19 virus is real. Stay at home as much as possible. This includes not going to the gym; I will explain how in this blog.

The COVID-19 virus is real

With great shock, I discovered that Bill Phillips, whose Body for Life program I am following, went through a bout of what must had been COVID-19 this January. In his new “Stay Strong” Facebook group, he described it as starting off with pain all over, followed by a fever and a chronic cough which bruised his ribs.

There are, of course, idiots on social media who still claim COVID-19 is a conspiracy theory. The one I saw in my feed was one implying the media makes up a virus every election year, but that, with all due respect, is bullshit.

The best way to handle this disease is to wash one’s hands for 30 seconds (the trick I use to time my hand washing is to say the Lord’s Prayer while washing my hands) and to engage in social isolation. This means, obviously, not going to the gym.

Working out at home

My work out set up at home is quite modest: I have an old elliptical machine my buddy and I bought at CostCo a few years ago ($400) for cardio, and a pair of adjustable weight dumbbells I use for all other workouts.

Since I am used to using machines at the gym, it has been an adjustment using dumbbells. As it turns out Bill Phillips has an excellent lower body workout and upper body workout which can be done at home with just dumbbells. Instead of doing the incline dumbbell bench press, the one workout which requires a bench (which I do not have), Bill Phillips told me on Facebook that I can substitute this with a floor press or push ups.

This workout is actually harder than the one I have been doing at the gym; I am using a pair of 27 pound dumbbells for the lower body workout on Mondays and Thursdays; I will reduce the dumbbells down to 22 pounds for my upper body work on Tuesdays and Fridays. I perform cardio on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

For people without a cardio machine, options include jump roping or a no equipment cardio workout.

One challenge is not reacting to the anxiety caused by the COVID-19 virus by eating unhealthy food; I have been struggling with this and know I need to stop this to reach my fitness goals.

Home schooling resources

Since my daughter is out of school, I am in the position of needing to provide her learning resources and be her teacher. Here is a list of a couple of learning at home resources I have bookmarked:

https://​kidsactivitiesblog.​com/​135609/​list-​of-​education-​companies-​offering-​free-​subscriptions/

https://​classroommagazines.​scholastic.​com/​support/​learnathome.​html

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Sanders should quit

March 11, 2020

In this blog, I explain why Sanders should had dropped out earlier today.

Bernie made a mistake

I watched the end of Sander’s live speech where he very foolishly did not concede. At the end of the speech, he stated that Donald Trump must be defeated. I agree with him.

If Sanders is devoted to defeating Trump, he needs to step down and do everything he can to make sure Biden is elected on November 3. The sooner he lets go of his doomed primary run and the sooner he concentrates on defeating Trump by aligning with Biden, the better chances we have for a democratic win in the general.

Winning an election requires building up a coalition. Progressive voices matter, but they need to stop discouraging people from voting for the Democratic candidate and they need to compromise if we are going to defeat Trump.

Biden has better chances than Bernie

The evidence we have is that Biden has a better chance of defeating Trump than Sanders ever had. Both were doing well in head-to-head-vs-Trump polls, but Biden has consistently had an edge over Sanders. Here are some snapshots from Real Clear Politics showing Biden being stronger than Sanders in the general:

December 16 2019: Biden +8.5 vs. Sanders +7

January 14 2020: Biden +4.0 vs. Sanders +3.0

February 17 2020: Biden +5.6 vs. Sanders +4.3

Moving on from resentment

I know there’s a lot of anger and there’s still a lot of denial among Sanders’s supporters. I know a lot of Sanders supporters are saying hateful things about Biden as part of their process of grieving Sanders not winning the primary again. I know that most Sanders supporters will vote for Biden in the general, just as they (mostly) voted for Hillary in the general in 2016.

There’s some things which I really don’t like about Biden myself; I will not get in to the specifics in the interests of party unity.

It’s time to forgive people saying those hateful things and it’s time for us to unify against Trump getting another four years. Biden is our best chance to do that.

The picture here was taken by Gage Skidmore and was obtained from the Wikipedia commons under an open license. I thank Skidmore for making this picture freely available for reuse.

I originally posted this to DailyKOS earlier today.

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Bernie Bro myths

March 5, 2020

In this blog, I address some myths which vocal Bernie Sanders supporters have been spreading online.

Bernie Sanders won the Democratic Popular vote in 2016

From a comment I recently saw in The New York Times:

Last time Bernie won the popular vote but the Democratic establishment aided, abetted and chose Hillary instead.

False

In the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary, Hillary got 16,914,722 votes, and Bernie only got 13,206,428 votes.

Source: http://www.thegreenpapers.com/P16/D

Bernie is stronger than Biden in the general election

Another comment recently seen in The New York Times:

Poll after poll has Bernie beating Trump in match ups where Biden and every other candidate was losing.

False

As I type this, the Real Clear Politics shows Biden with a 5.5% lead, compared to the 4.7% lead Sanders shows.

Both Sanders and Biden are beating Trump in Real Clear Politics’s summary of head to head polls, but Biden has an edge over Sanders.

There have been only been two polls which show both Trump beating Biden and Sanders beating Trump, both run by Emerson College. One was run in mid-February; the other is from last November.

As a point of comparison, there have been three polls showing Trump beating Sanders but show Biden beating Trump.

Sanders supporters voted for Hillary in the General Election

From another comment in The New York Times:

Bernie supporters voted Hillary to give her the popular vote

Yes and no

According to a very large survey of around 50,000 people, 12% of people who voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary voted for Trump in the general election.

In addition, in the key swing states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, if every voter who voted for Jill Stein (the left-wing third party candidate) voted for Hillary instead, Trump would had lost the 2016 election.

It is true that many Sanders voters in the 2016 primary voted for Hillary in the general, but not enough to stop Trump from winning.

I do not mean to discount the help Sanders provided Hillary at the end, but it’s an open question whether Sanders’s 2016 campaign helped Trump win that general election.

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Body for Life

February 1, 2020

In this blog, I review the book Body for Life by Bill Phillips.

How I discovered this book

Once upon a time, back when men were men, women were women, and MySpace was the social media platform, I was rather young and foolish. I fell in love with a girl who ultimately married someone else. In a futile attempt to win her heart, I asked a friend what program I should follow to become more fit and muscular. He told me to use Bill Phillips’s Body for Life program.

The program: An Overview

The program consists of two parts:

A very strict diet of six small meals to eat every day.

A fairly intense regimen at the gym.

The diet

The diet, which is summarized on page 83 of my copy of the book, has one eat six small meals every day. The meals consist of:

A portion of protein

A portion of carbohydrate

A portion of high-fiber vegetables, to be eaten in two or more meals a day

The protein consists of one of: a lean meat, such as turkey or chicken, some kinds of fish (tuna and salmon, among others), lean beef, egg whites, or cottage cheese (which Phillips feels is the best source of protein).

The carbohydrate can consist of one of: Some kinds of high-carb vegetables, such as potatoes, squash, beans, or corn. Some kinds of fruit, such as melons, apples, or an orange. Fat-free yogurt is considered a “carb” in this diet. Brown rice and plain oatmeal are allowed. Pasta, which may come as a surprise to many people, is allowed, but the pasta must have no sauce on it.

The vegetable has to be low-carb, high-fiber, such as carrots, lettuce, green beans, peas, or spinach.

On pages 90 and 91 of the book, Phillips recommends using his then-existing meal substitute, a brand that was called Myoplex. Since Myoplex no longer exists, and since this was Phillips hawking his own house brand, I take this part of the book as saying one could use protein supplements readily available at CostCo inexpensively as the “protein” part of the diet. I currently use either a “Premier Protein” chocolate shake or a portion of Optimum Nutrition’s “Performance Whey Isolate” as one of the allowed protein portions in my meals.

One only engages in this diet six days a week; every week one has a “free day” where they can eat anything they want to (it doesn’t matter when the free day is, but it’s one day out of the week). The first time I used this diet, I would sometimes go to the 24-hour convenience store at midnight on my free day to get some peanuts to eat. These days, I use my free day to have socially acceptable meals with family or friends, or to use up my CostCo stock of foods and juices which are not compatible with the Body for Life diet. For example, I got a lot of orange juice, which I use up on my free days since it’s not compatible with the Body for Life diet.

The point of the free day is to make the diet sustainable over the long term. It’s a good idea to not get carried away on this day.

The exercise program

The exercise program consists of:

Lifting weights at the gym for up to 45 minutes a day, three times a week

Doing 20 minutes of cardio exercise three times a week

One day a week every week is a day off from exercise

The weight and cardio exercises are on alternate days: If someone lifts weights Monday, they will be performing cardio Tuesday.

The book has an entire exercise guide which shows how to do things like develop triceps using just dumbbells (this is an exercise which I find a lot easier to do using a machine where I pull down a bar which pulls up some weights), along with a small handful of exercises which need weight machines at a gym to perform. I do the majority of my exercises using machines at the local gym, with only a small number of exercises (such as bicep curls) done with free weights.

What experts say

The general consensus among experts is that the program works, but is not an easy program to follow. People should consult a doctor before starting the program (especially if one has kidney problems), and vitamin supplements are essential.

The program only has 60 minutes a week of aerobic activity. The American Heart Assosciation recommends more: 150 minutes.

The results

The first time I did this program, even though my program was not exactly like the one in the book, I lost a lot of weight; at the top of this blog is a picture of how I looked on the diet. I did not get that girl, of course. There is nothing a man can do to win one particular girl’s heart, but there is a lot a man can do to become more attractive to girls: I was able to date other cute girls, one of whom is still my friend today.

One fear I had was going to the gym as a “geek” and not as an obvious “jock”. There was absolutely no basis for my fears: Everyone at the gym was very supportive of me working out, and I became good friends with a “jock” whose popularity with girls made me jealous. He, in turn, was jealous of the amount of attention Bill Phillips must get from girls.

The second time I did this program was when I was in Mexico. I did not lose quite as much weight, but I was in fit, good condition, which made me more confident. I even met the woman who became my wife and mother of my child; my working Body for Life undoubtedly made me more attractive to her.

The advantage of this program for me is that, not only do I know it works, but since Body for Life has been around a while, used books in like-new condition describing the program are available for only a few dollars.

My young daughter enjoys looking at the before and after pictures in the book, which I hope help inspire her to have a lifetime habit of healthy eating and exercise.

I am now on the program for a third time. I have gained enough wisdom to not do this program to attract women per se, but to become the best person and father that I can be.

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MaraDNS 3.5.0001

January 25, 2020

I have released MaraDNS 3.5.0001. This is a stable update to MaraDNS.

One Source of Truth

For a few years, we had multiple “sources of truth” for MaraDNS’s files:

The Deadwood source code tarball

The Deadwood Windows zipfile

The MaraDNS source code tarball

The MaraDNS Windows zipfile

The Git tree of MaraDNS

It used to be, when I made a new release of MaraDNS, I had to change one of the sources of truth (make a Git check in, or make a patch by hand) the apply the change to the other sources of truth. There was also a disconnect between the files in the Windows zipfiles and the same files in the tarballs and Git tree.

That came from the fact that the MaraDNS code base was over 13 years old before I added it to GitHub, and I used to use both Git and the pre-Git way of updating files with MaraDNS’s releases.

This release has a more “continuous integration” approach to MaraDNS.

All of the files now come directly from the Git tree. I have made three scripts to convert a given version of the Git tree in to a release of MaraDNS:

I have one script which pulls MaraDNS from GitHub and runs a large number of automated tests to reduce the chance a new release has introduced a new bug.

I have another script which pulls MaraDNS from GitHub, allows me to compile the code for Windows, then uploads to GitHub the updated Windows binaries.

I have a third script which pulls MaraDNS from GitHub and makes both the source code tarball (which now has the entire Git history going back to 2014) and the Windows zipfile.

This process automates most of the process of making a new release of MaraDNS, allowing me to more quickly test and release new MaraDNS versions.

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MaraDNS 3.4.02 released

January 17, 2020

I have released MaraDNS 3.4.02.

What has been updated

MaraDNS 3.4.02 is a stable update. No security updates have been done in this release; the last security issue was fixed in MaraDNS 2.0.16 from August of 2018.

The following updates have been done:

Tests updated to run and pass in CentOS 7

Fix typo in asktest.c

Deadwood: Issue building Deadwood from the GitHub tree in CentOS8 fixed

Deadwood: Issue building Deadwood from the GitHub tree in CentOS8 fixed

MaraDNS 3.4.02 can be downloaded from the MaraDNS download page.

What is next for MaraDNS

My plan now is to update MaraDNS’s build process for the 2020s. Instead of using the old first-2000s-decade process of using a shell script which applies all patches and updates, I plan on applying continuous integration to MaraDNS’s build process. I plan to have the Git version of MaraDNS be the “one source of truth” for MaraDNS’s source code, and have scripts which convert a Git checkout in to release tarballs and zipfiles (we use zipfiles for the Windows binary release).

The version number will be determined from the most recent tag in the master branch.

Since MaraDNS is open source and I am not getting paid for this work, I have no timeline for when this update will be done.

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2020s: Looking forward

January 9, 2020

I am looking forward to the 2020s.

My personal resolution

My personal resolution for the 2020s is pretty standard: To be more fit. I already took my brother to my local gym and we had a good workout there earlier this week, and I have been taking walks every day, as well as improving my diet.

Camera technology

With a huge decline in sales of traditional interchangeable lens digital cameras throughout the 2010s, camera makers have been eliminating or stopping development on their lower-cost cameras and concentrating on higher end, larger cameras. Samsung completely exited the camera market (except for their smart phone cameras).

Nikon proposed a small inexpensive mirror-less interchangeable lens format in the early 2010s (the Nikon 1 mount); Nikon 1 cameras and lenses were even available at CostCo in 2012. Pentax had their even smaller Q mount.

Here in the early 2020s, the Nikon 1 mount and the Pentax Q mount are no more. Nikon has made a new expensive large sensor Z mount, Canon now has their RF big mount format, and Panasonic is making large sensor Leica L mount cameras and lenses. Fuji has released their even bigger and even more expensive GFX100 camera.

The only smaller interchangeable lens format to survive the bloodbath of the 2010s is Micro Four Thirds. It would appear that Panasonic is putting this format on the back burner; most of their new releases have been for the bigger, more expensive full frame Leica L format, and Panasonic has been giving their existing Micro Four Thirds cameras and lenses pretty heavy discounts during the holiday season.

The only company who is 100% behind the Micro Four Thirds format is Olympus. It is an open question whether this will remain an economically sustainable business model in the 2020s.

One bit of good news for small camera users is that Sony has a 47 megapixel Micro Four Thirds sensor with over double the resolution (and four times the video resolution) of current Micro Four Thirds cameras. It’s a pretty safe bet that Olympus and probably Panasonic will make updated cameras using this higher resolution sensor.

Computers

I predict that AI will become mainstream in the 2020s. Intel is already starting to make chips with dedicated AI functionality, and GPUs are concentrating more on AI-style computation and less on making even higher resolution video game graphics.

The long standing trend of offering more per-core performance every year is tapering off; improvements year to year in single core performance are modest. What is changing is that chips are putting more and more cores in to the same sized chip die with the same power usage for portable computer chip-sets.

Laptops are being used mainly for business purposes; most recreational Internet usage is being done with smartphones. Personally, I can not understand how someone would rather experience the Internet on a tiny phone screen instead of a full sized laptop, but that has been the trend in the 2010s and should continue to be a trend in the 2020s.

In 2010, making a web page render in Internet Explorer 6 was still a thing. This soon changed; these days, most web pages won’t even open in Internet Explorer 6, Microsoft is no longer making their own web page rendering engine, and making a web page render both as a desktop sized page and phone screen sized page is standard practice. By the mid-2010s, even my MaraDNS page was updated to look good on a tiny phone screen. New web page technologies get adopted by most browsers pretty quickly; just as clueless web developers made Internet Explorer-only webpages in the first 2000s decade, clueless web developers now make Chrome-only webpages here in the 2020s.

As for myself, my web page renders even in early 2010s versions of Internet Explorer, and renders nicely on desktop computers, cell phones, and the web fonts have been carefully tuned to look nice across low resolution displays (which, yes, are still around), high resolution displays, phones, and across all mainstream web browsers.

Society

By and large, our society’s values are changing, becoming more secular and ironically more tolerant (Biblical Christianity is a religion of love and tolerence). I predict that, by the end of the 2020s, the Republican party will no longer be a political force at the national level in the US. Ever since the 2004 presidential election, young voters have been voting for Democrats. As baby boomers die off during the 2020s and young people are vote more regularly, Republicans are losing voters every year.

While there is a backlash against the witch-hunting extremists, #MeToo will become a positive force, putting men in a position where they will respect women as human beings more than was standard in previous decades.

I remember, in the mid-1990s, when a rather promiscuous lady I knew about got a new job. Stories of her sexual escapades instantly became office gossip, and she was quickly fired. None of the men who slept with her suffered any consequences for their actions. With #MeToo, those days are hopefully behind us.

I think the world my daughter will grow up in will be a better place for women than the world that existed when I was growing up. I am looking forward to the 2020s.

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2019

All blog entries written in 2019

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The 2010s: A retrospective

December 12, 2019

I look back at the 2010s.

The 2010s

There have been a number of technological and cultural changes in the 2010s:

Video got a lot better. At the beginning of 2010, higher end still cameras would have 720p video, with only a couple of under $10,000 models with full HD video (notably, the Canon EOS 5D Mark II). At the end of 2019, under $10,000 (and even under $1,000) 4K is commonplace (starting with 2014’s Panasonic GH4), and 6K with stills is now $4000 (The Panasonic S1H).

Mirrorless cameras, which are a good deal more compact than the DSLRs they are replacing, have gotten a foothold. Before the 2010s decade ended, even Nikon and Canon starting making mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras.

The small portable low-cost digital camera is (for all intents and purposes) no more, being replaced by cell phone cameras. When the 2010s started, cell phones either had no camera, or if it was a medium to high end cell phone, a 2 megapixel basic camera. As the 2010s end, cell phones cameras have zoom lenses (actually, multiple fixed distance lenses) and between 12 and 24 megapixels of resolution. Like dedicated cameras, most high end cell phones now have 4k video.

For electronic musicians, analog is back big time. Korg now has multiple analog synthesizers in their line up; everything from $150 Volca analog synths to the $1500 16-voice Prologue. Dave Smith has been making high-end analog synths throughout the decade; Arturia has multiple analog synths in their lineup; Behringer has entered the fray, making multiple small monophonic synths (TD-3, etc.) as well as the polyphonic Deep Mind 12. Even Roland made two different synths with analog in the 2010s: The JD-Xi and the JD-Xa.

Internet culture got a lot worse. We went from Obama being president to Trump being president, because people without good critical thinking skills finally got Internet access in the 2010s. This lead to nonsense like “gamergate”, the “Bernie Bro” phenomenon (which caused Hillary to lose: You can’t win fighting both right wing and left wing disinformation, with left wing people saying the same right-wing anti-Hillary bullshit Fox News was spewing for years), the whole misogynist “Red Pill” manosphere (Just because someone claims they are sleeping with a lot of women on the Internet does not make the claim true), etc. Don’t get me started on how toxic the “cancel culture” of the 2010s is. In 2010, the big online argument was whether one should use Windows or Linux as a desktop computer. In 2020, the big online argument is over whether or not the Earth is flat.

Smart phones have become ubiquitous, with teenage girls out there who spend all their time on a smart phone. Just as our society got addicted to alcohol and drugs in the mid-20th century, we now have to cope with a smart phone addiction.

Speaking of drug addiction, addictions to strong opiates has become more prevalent. Opiate overdoses are now a leading cause of death, with over 1% of deaths directly caused by opioid drug abuse.

Income inequality continues to get worse in the United States. In 2009, the Gini index for the US was 45.6; in 2017 (the most recent year we have data available), it is 48.5, which is about the same as Mexico’s level of income inequality.

AI got a lot better. We finally got a computer which defeated the world Go champion in the 2010s. Using something called “GTA-2”, I am able to play, as the 2010s come to a close, a text adventure where, while a bit incoherent with plot details, was one where I could say or do anything and the parser would play along.

In terms of my personal life, I lost both my wife and my mother to cancer.

On the other hand, I became a parent in the 2010s, with a very smart, kind, and friendly now six-year-old girl in my life. I have gone from working mornings as a professional English teacher and translator for a company in Mexico, getting paid in pesos, to being a remote worker in the United States, then becoming a full time cubicle worker (getting paid in dollars). Now, I am back to being a remote worker, getting paid in Yen.

I continue to work on MaraDNS, but slowly, since there is no money on the table for my hard work. I have also released two albums of my music, and have gotten a mirrorless interchangeable camera system to take better pictures than I was able to take with the two-megapixel phone camera that I had at the beginning of the 2010s.

Mostly, I am caring for my daughter when I am not working. This will continue through the 2020s, but as she (knock on wood) gets older, she will take less of my time to care for, and will probably end the 2020s as a teenager who wants little to do with me. My girlfriends assure me she will come back to love me after her rebellious teenage years as long as I treat her well, and there’s even a chance she will skip over her teenage rebellion altogether.

The 2010s had some sad losses for me, but it has been all in all a good decade. I am looking forward to what the 2020s have to offer.

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Richard Feynman

November 16, 2019

I discuss Richard Feynman and his legacy.

Richard Feynman’s legacy

I was reading a recent article in The New York Times about what swing voters think. One sentence came to mind: “[Key swing] voters like these would say that political correctness has gone too far”. When it comes to what some people on the far left have to say about Richard Feynman, I am forced to agree.

For people who are familiar with the great scientists of the 20th century, Richard Feynman needs no introduction. He has been ranked as one of the 10 greatest physicists of all time. He also suffered a profound tragedy, losing his first love and wife, one Arline Greenbaum, when he was only 27 years old.

One year later, he ended up picking up girls at a nightclub. While I myself have not reacted to the loss of my wife the same way, having experienced the same grief myself, I can understand why he went that route. The story of how he learned to seduce women at that bar is one of over three dozen stories in his national bestseller, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”

Feynman learns seduction

Feynman’s seduction lessons began when he met a husband-and-wife team, Gloria and her husband who Feynman simply calls “the master”. This husband taught him how to get women: He told Feynman to ask a woman if she would sleep with him before buying her anything.

After learning this, Feynman tried changing his attitude towards women at the bar. He spends a day thinking of women as “bitches” in his internal dialog, and convinces himself to no longer buy ladies drinks at the bar. That evening, he meets a pretty lady named Ann at the nightclub. While Ann was being very gracious with Feynman, he pretty much ignored her throughout the evening.

As Ann was leaving the bar, she announced to everyone that she wanted someone to walk with her, which Feynman decided to do. After they walked out of the bar together, Ann convinced Feynman to buy some sandwiches and coffee for her, saying that they would eat them at her place. After he bought her the sandwiches and coffee, for $1.10 (approximately $14 in 2019 dollars), Ann told him that they wouldn’t be able to eat the sandwiches together after all because another man was going to arrive at her place to visit her. Feynman, angry and frustrated at Ann’s deception, flat out says “You are worse than a whore!” Ann respected Feynman for his blunt honesty: Not only does she pays back Feynman for the sandwiches, but also, later on that same evening, Ann returned to the bar to take Feynman to her place.

After finding out he could bed girls by not buying them anything before directly asking them if they wanted sex, Feynman decided he didn’t like that approach, writing that “But no matter how effective the lesson was, I never really used it after that. I didn’t enjoy doing it that way.”

Reactions

There are, as far as I can tell, no contempoary reviews of the book that considered Feynman a “misogynist” or “sexist” for this chapter in the book; the chapter on his seduction of women at bars was, at the time, described as being “off-key”, which was my general impression of that chapter when I read the book cover to cover many years ago; I felt back then (and still feel now) that the book would had been better if it had omitted the entire chapter.

The radical left, decades after the fact, finally discovered this chapter and decided that Feynman was a horrible misogynist for writing this story. These hateful people are either unable to understand the context of the story or wish to discard the truth, implying that Feynman called women “bitches” without clarifying he only did so in his thinking without saying that word out loud, or that he called a woman a “whore” without pointing out that said woman in fact ended up spending the night with Feynman.

I will not dignify these kinds of resentful people trying to tarnish the legacy of a great scientist by linking directly to their dishonest and hateful screeds. I will instead link to a post from an online discussion a couple years ago where a woman defends Feynman’s actions that evening, as well as a blog post defending Feynman’s legacy.

I should clarify here, for the kinds of radicals who would quote me out of context, that I, like Feynman, have no problem with equality for women. But I have no place for the kind of radical “feminism” which wishes to slander a great man who has been dead for over three decades.

Ann’s story

The issue Feynman had with this lady, Ann, was not that she didn’t “put out” (which was, by the time the evening was over, a non-issue), but that she was dishonest with him: She manipulated him to buy her sandwiches by telling him they would eat them together when she had no intention of eating the sandwiches with Feynman.

I wish we could know more about Ann. What kind of relationship did she have with her father? Did she ever have any children and did she ever get married? What did she do with her life after this encounter with Feynman? Did she want to continue the relationship with Feynman, or was she content with a one-night fling? Did she remember Feynman fondly, or did she later on regret their encounter?

We will never know any of these things. Feynman went to a lot of effort to respect Ann’s anonymity. He describes nothing about her except her first name (a common name) and a note that she is “pretty”. Knowing that the events happened in an era when young women were locked up for being pregnant outside of wedlock, and keeping in mind it was an era when a gentleman would never “kiss and tell”, Feynman was right in keeping Ann anonymous.

Considering how much time has passed, it is unlikely that Ann is even alive today.

I believe that Ann was a good woman. She did pay Feynman back for the sandwiches when confronted about her behavior, and she was friendly to Feynman throughout the evening.

Addendum

As I was researching this essay, I went to the trouble of finding out when Feynman’s night with Ann occurred. A careful reading of the chapter and looking over Feynman’s biography places these events in the summer of 1946.

These events happened after his wife died but before Feynman wrote the letter to his deceased wife saying he still loved her.

Point being, while Feynman slept with other women he met at that nightclub a year after Arlene died, it did not take away the pain he had from losing his wife.

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November round up

November 4, 2019

I discuss my MaraDNS plans, getting good service at the local DMV, politics, and debunk some “facts” about female sexuality making the rounds in some places on the Internet.

MaraDNS plans

I have released MaraDNS 3.4.01. This is my planned final release for the 2010s; I plan on releasing MaraDNS 3.4.02 in early 2020:

Update Windows documentation in Deadwood source tarball.

Add Russian translation to MaraDNS tarball release.

Fix regression tests in MaraDNS 3.4.02. Some tests failed; I released MaraDNS 3.4.01 after confirming the issues were with the tests and not MaraDNS’s code.

Fix the unused asktest.c file so that it correctly closes the comment on line 63.

After that, I will consider MaraDNS 3.5.01. I am thinking I may have time to make a proper Docker container for MaraDNS, have it so there is only one source of truth for MaraDNS’s files, and make the officially supported platforms for MaraDNS Windows 10 and a CentOS 8 Docker container.

California DMV: Good service

Last night, I was telling a friend that I need to get my driver’s license updated with one of the new “Real ID” licenses which can be used to board airplanes. She told me she had to wait six hours at the local DMV to get her Real ID license.

Last night I carefully prepared all of my paperwork as directed on California’s Real ID web page, and made sure to bring my computer with an extra battery as well as a lunch to eat while waiting to be serviced. I arrived as early as I could in the morning, getting there just before 8am.

As it turned out, I only had to wait about 10 minutes, and was out of the DMV within 30 minutes of coming in the office with all of the paperwork done.

I was so pleased with the service, I even gave the DMV a tip.

Politics

The New York Times has been quite negative about Warren lately. They doubt we can pay for Medicare for all, feel Democrats have a better chance of winning by being more moderate, and even have a survey showing that Biden, but not Warren nor Sanders, can beat Trump.

Personally, I support Warren and I support her policies. Income inequality has been going up, and the moderate policies of Clinton and Obama have not stopped that increasing disparity. But I would rather have Biden than Trump in the White House, so would vote for him in the primary if I am convinced he has a better shot at the White House than Warren.

While I think Nate Cohn does pretty good surveys for The New York Times, he also felt Trump only had a 16% chance of winning. I want to see what Nate Silver thinks of Biden’s chances vs. Warren’s chances before making a decision.

Speaking of politics, I have recently been in touch with a couple of college buddies from three decades ago. I was pretty fanatical about Jesus at the time, and these people were believers. However, their conversations were about who were “real” Christians and who were members of “cults” (Read: Any other religion or belief system). When I mentioned I was interested in the Catholic church, one of them gave me a pamphlet about how Catholics commit idolatry by “worshiping Mary”.

I found out that they are, in this day and age, Trump supporters. I was not surprised, but I also unfriended them.

The “hypergamy” lie

“Hypergamy” has a special meaning among the misogynistic manosphere part of the Internet. It’s this belief that women don’t want long term commitment; instead women want to only have sex with the most “Alpha” man they can find, and don’t care if they have to share that man with other women. If a woman marries a “beta” (a man who is not “alpha” and not desirable to women)—keep in mind, in the delusions of the “red pill” guys, women only marry “beta”s once they are in their 30s and are losing their beauty—she really only wants to have sex with “alpha” men, especially when she is fertile.

The manosphere even had a little bit of science to back this up: There was a paper published a while ago showing that women preferred to have sex with “alpha” men instead of their “beta” husbands when they were ovulating. The misogynists took this one study and instantly concluded all married women are secretly sleeping with “alpha” men on the side (even though the study said no such thing). However, the science was tenuous and was just refuted last year (they couldn’t replicate the results).

Another data point is a New York Times article from 2016, which shows that women cheating on their husbands and making the raise another father’s kids is essentially a fiction. However, it’s interesting, looking at the comments of that NYT story, the number of men who want to believe this lie.

It comes down to this: It is a common sexual fantasy among men to have a large number of women at their sexual beck and call. Because of this fantasy, men have created an imaginary world where this is what women want, forget about facts.

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October roundup #2

October 24, 2019

I have released MaraDNS 3.4.01, discuss the updated search boxes, remember Flash websites not-so-fondly, and go over issues with buying some products on Amazon.

MaraDNS 3.4.01 released

I have released MaraDNS 3.4.01. This is just MaraDNS 3.3.03 declared “stable”. Compared to the last stable release of MaraDNS, I have added the ability to specify which IP a given host name has to Deadwood, MaraDNS’s recursive nameserver, and have updated the recursive nameserver to use, by default, the Quad9 recursive nameservers.

It can be downloaded on MaraDNS’s download page.

Using Quad9 is me throwing in the towel with trying to get Deadwood to resolve every single misconfigured domain on the Internet bug-for-bug the same way Bind does. While Deadwood resolves a correctly configured RFC-1034/1035 compliant domain name without problem (probably about 99.9% of the names out there), there are a number of corner cases which Deadwood resolves slowly or not at all (Amazon is a big offender here).

There was a time when even the smallest office connected to the Internet had their own recursive DNS server. Those days are over; recursive DNS is now handled by big companies with deep pockets who can afford expensive servers and server space in highly connected Internet hubs. While it still is possible to do recursive DNS from a computer on a home Internet connection, and indeed still possible to use Deadwood as a fully recursive DNS server, it’s sometimes slow and doesn’t always work.

Google: Do lots of evil

About a decade ago, I added some Google search boxes to help people find content on my web pages. Those search boxes stopped working a couple of years ago, and I have finally gotten around to updating the HTML/Javascript to work with Google’s current search boxes.

The old search boxes were a lot better: They just added HTML where I put the search box. The new search boxes overlay the entire page, and the ads often time hide all of the legitimate search results: One needs to scroll down to see the search results.

I removed ads from my site back in 2015 when Google made them too obtrusive; this is part of Google’s pattern of becoming less and less ethical in the interests of getting more ad revenue. See also: Google is making it harder to disable ads with their browser Chrome.

I do not miss Flash

It amazes me the number of people who actually miss Flash. Flash was a one-vendor proprietary solution with questionable Linux support and countless serious security holes. Back in the first 2000s decade, a site which needed Flash for basic navigation was the sign of a site of a small company or a company which did not care too much about its web presence. Flash was used by obnoxious websites with poor user design and obnoxious ads. Its only reasonable use was by sites for things the cross browser HTML of the time could not handle: Web fonts, in-browser games, and video.

I was, at the time, able to block all obnoxious ads by simply disabling looping animated GIFs and use a “click to Flash” plugin in Firefox.

Beware of grey market cameras on Amazon

Grey market cameras are cameras that are from outside the United States for foreign markets being sold in the United States. They are somewhat cheaper, but do not have a warranty in the US. The buyer usually knows this: Somewhere in the copy the words “import model” or words to that effect appear.

I recently found a grey market camera being solid on Amazon without the usual warnings that the camera is an import model. The reason I know it is an import model is because it is sold by 6ave, which is a known grey market seller (as can be seen in their eBay listings). I have reported the issue to Amazon but my report was ignored.

The price for the USA version of cameras is fixed by the manufacturer, and if a camera is significantly cheaper, make sure it is not a grey market model. This information is usually available if one carefully checks the product description; with Amazon, if one wants to avoid a grey market (or even counterfeit) item, buy only products being sold directly by Amazon or a reputable seller like Adorama.

I do not buy food online

When I want to get food, I go to the local grocery store.

I do not buy food on Amazon. There is too much risk of the food being expired.

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October round-up

October 5, 2019

I discuss a new MaraDNS release, RMS being fired, and installing CentOS 8 inside a VMware virtual machine.

MaraDNS 3.3.03 released

I have released MaraDNS 3.3.03. This is an unstable beta release of MaraDNS; compared to MaraDNS 2.0.17:

Updated numbering system to give MaraDNS the same version number as Deadwood.

Deadwood updated to 3.3.03. Deadwood 3.3 adds “ip4” and “ip6”: The ability to specify an IP for a given name (both IPv4 and IPv6). Deadwood 3.3 now uses the Quad9 upstream DNS servers. Deadwood 3.3 has a compile time flag to use RadioGatún[64] instead of RadioGatún[32].

Document how star records work.

It can be downloaded at the usual place.

Note that this release only has source code and does not have a Windows binary. For Windows users who want to try out the new features, there is a download of Deadwood 3.3.03 available.

On RMS being fired

RMS, a.k.a. Richard Stallman, who created the entire framework of free UNIX software which made Linux possible in the 1990s, has been forced to resign from his position at MIT and the Free Software Foundation he created. He was forced to resign because of some incorrect allegations that he supported Jeffrey Epstein.

The thing that upsets me about RMS’s forced resignation is that the #MeToo witch hunt, which started off as something noble, is expanding its reach to attacking people who have unusual opinions.

Note this: RMS has not been credibly accused of sexually harassing anyone since 1985, when he told a woman that he would kill himself if she didn’t go out with him. The issue is not his behavior, but his opinions, which are being quoted out of context by people who appear to have more interest in destroying a good person than in a rational objective look at facts.

Note also that RMS does not have racist or bigoted opinions. He does not believe in marginalizing someone because of the race, sexual orientation, nor gender.

He is quite left wing, from a culture a lot of young people these days have never seen and can not understand. He has some opinions about sexuality which seem shocking to young people, but which were within the realm of acceptable among geeks in the 1970s or 1980s. I emphatically do not agree with all of his opinions (I, for the record, believe sex should only be done inside of a lifetime monogamous commitment, but that’s neither here nor there). But I don’t think having had those opinions many years ago (the postings from his blog which everyone is up in arms about are from at least a decade ago) is grounds for termination either.

RMS is the father of Linux and open source software which keeps the internet (and, yes, this web site) running. It’s very ironic that the very technology he made widely available is being used to ruin him with accusations which are, at best, exaggerated.

See this: https://​sterling-​archermedes.​github.​io/ No, I did not write that page, but I agree with its content. Clickbait journalists more interested in generating outrage than in looking at objective facts have ruined a good man.

I should also mention https://​twitter.​com/​thomas_​lord/​status/​1174433656024092672 where Thomas Lord, who worked very closely with RMS, says that RMS was always seeking to be inclusive of women in technology, long before it became socially acceptable to do so.

Edit: I have observed, after writing the above, that MIT has a “F” grade for how they handle due process. Considering how they treated RMS, I am not surprised.

CentOS 8 in VMware

I managed to get CentOS 8 to work in VMware player.

I had to install the vm X11 driver to get resize to work. As root, I did this in the guest:

yum install xorg-x11-drv-vmware

To get suspend to work, I had to find the secret recipe online.

Shut down the guest

On the host, go in to the folder with the virtual machine and edit the relevant .vmx file

Make sure the line controlling how suspend works looks like this:

powerType.Suspend = "hard"

Suspend only works by clicking on the pause button and selecting suspend.

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September 11

September 12, 2019

Some thoughts on September 11

The technology of the time

Wired magazine has a good piece on the technology we had on September 11, 2001. To summarize, video cameras were more rare, cell phones were uncommon, and the Internet was not as widespread as it is today.

I would say that we were in the modern era when it happened. Sure, HDTV was not a mainstream reality yet, TVs were still big CRT boxes, but the Internet was around, digital cameras were starting to become common, and there were even handheld PDA computers which could access the Internet. Indeed, I was emailing family and updating my web page (from a desktop computer, mind you) as the attacks were happening; I was in the middle of writing an email when the North Tower collapsed.

Jerry Pournelle

One focal point where a lot of people discussed the attacks was Jerry Pournelle’s mail column, where Dr. Pournelle would publish letters sent to him. It gives a pretty good sense of how people were reacting to the September 11 attacks as they were happening.

Jerry Pournelle passed away in 2017; while I did not see eye to eye with him on a number of issues, he was a very intelligent and articulate writer who was a key focal point in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks.

Father James Martin

Father James Martin posted his memory of that day and how it affected him, saying that it felt that he “was in hell” when he arrived at ground zero, and that “Working at the World Trade Center was one of the most profound experiences of the Holy Spirit I've ever had”.

The aftermath for me

I was in Mexico at an immersion Spanish language school when the attack happened. I was in an extended four-month program, and did not have to leave yet, but I remember the graduation dinner we had together a few days after the attacks, where a number of other students were figuring out how they would get back home with all of the flights grounded; a number of fellow students who were ending their classes had to take buses to get back home.

I remember a couple of fellow students decided to go to New York to help any way they could in the aftermath of the disaster.

Since I did not have to go back home until December, I was able to fly back, as planned, but with an increased military presence in the airports.

See also

My September 11 experience, where I wrote in 2012 about what September 11 was like for me.

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August round-up

August 20, 2019

This blog is a collection of thoughts I have had in August of 2019.

HJSON: Better JSON

I always felt Yaml is far too complicated of a format for storing hierarchical data. JSON is too simple (no comments; hard to store multi-line strings).

HCL, the hierarchical data storage language used by Terraform, is one possible happy medium between JSON and Yaml.

Another option, if the string values are not multi-line, is CommentJSON (use the Python module or write 10 lines of code that strips out comments from JSON if using another language).

If multi-line strings are needed, the best format is probably HJSON (human-readable JSON). This is JSON with comments and multi-line strings. It also allows the final element of an object to have a trailing comma, and for strings to not be quoted. Several languages are supported: Javascript, .NET, Go, Java, PHP, Python, C++, and Rust. If I were writing MaraDNS’s parser today (I have no plans to), it would use the HJSON format for configuration and zone files.

Another option is JSON5, but that JSON superset appears to only have Javascript support.

Paying off student loans

Let’s look at a student loan of $100,000. This is a reasonable amount to pay to get a four-year degree at a private college; $50,000 for four years of tuition and fees, and $50,000 for four years of living expenses.

Here is how a student loan works. The loan has two parts: The part the bankers get which you will never see again, and the part which actually pays off the loan. The money the bankers get is “interest”, and the monthly interest is calculated by calculating “loanAmount * (loanPercent / 12)”, so for a $100,000 loan with 6% interest, take 6%, divide it by 12 (1/2 of a percent), then multiply that by $100,000 (the amount owed in the loan), to get $500.

If one pays $501 a given month, the amount given to bankers is $500, and $1 is used to make the amount owed in the loan (the principle) lower. So, when paying $501, the loan is now for $99,999. If paying $1000, the loan is now $99,500. If one only pays $400, the loan is now $100,100 which means one is going in to a hole.

The more one pays over and above the interest, the more quickly the loan gets paid off. If one pays $1,000 a month to pay off a $100,000 loan at 6% interest, they will be debt free within 12 years.

The “getting $1000 a month just to pay off the loan” requires, if someone is in California, having a cheap $1500/month apartment (or a house in the middle of nowhere), not eating out or going to Lady Gaga concerts to reduce monthly other expenses to $500/month (and we’ll add another $500/month for their car they have to keep running), means they have to make $3500/month after taxes, which is about $5250 a month before taxes or a $63,000/year job ($70,000/year because they also have to deduct medical from the paycheck).

Point being, if one has $100,000 in student loan debt and lives in California, one needs to make about $70,000 a year to pay it off in a reasonable amount of time while paying all the other expenses.

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July round-up

July 27, 2019

Some thoughts I have posted in July of 2019.

Why is there less sex?

One question that is coming up is why are young people having less sex than previous generations?

My answer is that it’s the economy.

Desmond Morris, best known for “The Naked Ape”, in his 1978 book “Manwatching”, made an observation that women skirt lengths were affected by the economy: The more prosperous the economy was, the shorter the skirts women wore. In other words, if women felt the economy was strong, they would show off their sexuality more and felt more comfortable having sex and making children.

A teacher once told me that David Buss’s book “The Evolution of Desire” mentions that women in Scandinavian countries are more likely to be promiscuous because that society pays for more child care expenses.

The point being, women are more likely to have sex if they feel any resulting children will be well taken care of. Today’s shrinking middle class means that women feel more insecure about their economic future; less sex is the inevitable result.

After the moon landing

After we landed on the moon in July of 1969, 50 years ago this month, we had very ambitious plans for expanding our presence in space.

I remember, when I worked in Silicon Valley, during the first dot-com boom, talking to an older man who remembered the Silicon Valley of the early 1970s, before it became the technology hub of the world. He told me that the government was planning on making this really fancy orbital space station that was going to make Skylab look like a tiny rock. He said Nixon canceled it; that people would come to Silicon Valley, buy a house, move in, and be told on their first day of work to pack up and go home because the project was canceled. He said the entire technology explosion happened because there were all these really smart people who suddenly found themselves without work.

It was Kennedy who got us to the moon. It was Nixon and Reagan who killed the space program.

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June 2019 roundup

June 27, 2019

This blog is various thoughts I have had in June of 2019.

Installing Node is a pain

So, I needed to install Node in CentOS 7 at work. No problem, just go over to NodeJS.org, download the 64-bit Linux binary, open up the package, and install.

Nope. First of all, they do not have anything handy like a RPM or what not. No problem, there should be a README in the binary package describing exactly how to download the package.

Except, there wasn't. There was a README, but the README had absolutely no directions on how to install Node.

No problem. Just copy the binaries and libraries over to /usr/local. No, that didn't work either. "Node" worked, but npm did not work.

The problem is that you actually use a different npm binary if you want one that actually works. I kid you not; the working npm binary is lib/node_modules/npm/bin/npm-cli.js. It took reading Stackoverflow to do an install of Node and NPM.

Can you say docmentation failure?

A one-line UNIX calculator

While Python makes a decent calculator, I prefer this calculator:

while echo -n '] ' ; do read a ; awk 'BEGIN{print '"$a"'}' ; done

This calculator has the advantage of working with Busybox or older MSYS based systems, and it also does not make floating point rounding errors visible to you.

You Need to Calm Down

“You Need to Calm Down” is a new song by Taylor Swift which is making news. I like the song a lot; it’s not up tempo, but it’s a good fun mid-tempo song. My daughter doesn’t care for the song as much, but she does like a lot of music on Swift’s album “1989”. The song is currently #2 on the Billboard Hot 100.

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New album coming out

May 30, 2019

This blog is about my new album which is coming out.

Wind and Spirit

Wind and Spirit is the name of a new album which I have been working on for over two years in my (little bit of) spare time. I have finished recording all of the music on the album; the tracks are being sent to the mastering engineer and the album should be out sometime this summer.

The music is similar to the music on my previous album; it is, as one friend described it, a combination of electro and ambient. In other words, it is instrumental electronic music which is suitable to listen to while one is working.

Like the last album, there are eight tracks on the album and about 35 minutes of music total (the last album had an 18-minute bonus track, which will not be on this album). While some consider this an “EP”, this is about how long a full length LP was back in the heyday of vinyl.

Like the last album, the first four tracks have a beat and can be danced to; the second four tracks are more relaxing.

I hope people enjoy listening to this album.

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Deadwood 3.3.03 released

April 30, 2019

This is just a note that I released Deadwood 3.3.03 earlier this month.

Download

Deadwood 3.3.03 (both source code and Windows binaries) is available at https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

Changelog

Deadwood default changed to use quad9.net upstream servers instead of ICANN root servers.

Compile-time option to use RadioGatun[64] instead of RadioGatun[32] added

Tests for the ip4 and ip6 parameters added

Valgrind-found issues fixed

The biggest change is that Deadwood 3.3.03 is updated to use the https://quad9.net upstream DNS servers as the default. If the old behavior of using the ICANN name servers as root servers is desired, add the following lines to one's dwoodrc file:

root_servers = {}
root_servers["."]="198.41.0.4, 199.9.14.201, 192.33.4.12, 199.7.91.13,"
root_servers["."]+="192.203.230.10, 192.5.5.241, 192.112.36.4, "
root_servers["."]+="198.97.190.53, 192.36.148.17, 192.58.128.30, "
root_servers["."]+="193.0.14.129, 199.7.83.42, 202.12.27.33"

PLEASE NOTE: The above list of IPs is current as of 2019-04-07, and was last changed in October of 2017.

Please go to https://root-servers.org to get an up-to-date list of root servers.

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March 2019 round up

March 23, 2009

In this blog, I discuss DNS security and my open source work this month (both with MaraDNS and with my Prosperity 7 Puzzles).

DNS security thoughts

There have been a few high-profile attacks which have been somewhat incorrectly called “DNS” attacks. The problem is not with DNS; the problem is with how some organizations handle their DNS.

The majority of attacks are not a weakness with DNS per se as much as they are an attack against whatever web control panel controls DNS records. For institutions that still know how to edit a zone file [1] by hand, and who run their DNS from their own well protected servers (ideally, only port 53—that’s the DNS port—visible to the internet, and only port 22—that’s the SSH port—available behind the firewall), this is not a problem.

As long as companies do not use GoDaddy or some other web control panel to manage their DNS, they should be fine.

Now, in terms of the DNS server to use, if security is important, I would use either Knot DNS or NlLab’s NSD server.[2] They both support DNSsec and they both have good security histories.[3] While the majority of these “DNS” attacks would not had been helped by DNSsec, it does protect against the unusual case of a rogue router rewriting DNS answers for people not using HTTPS to connect to a web page.[4]

If a big institution has to use a web control panel for DNS record handling, please use non-SMS two factor authentication.[5]

Footnotes

[1] “zone file” is the file used by DNS servers to determine which IPs are associated with names. Here’s how one looks when using my particular DNS server: https://​github.​com/​samboy/​Mara​DNS/​issues/​55 )

[2] Note that I did not list my own MaraDNS here; MaraDNS does not have DNSsec. Nor does DjbDNS, although there are patches which add DNSsec support. Personally, instead of using patches from multiple third parties, it makes more sense to just use a DNS server with built-in DNSsec support.

[3] There is not a single DNS server out there without at least one security hole which has needed to be patched, but these two do not require constant updates.

[4] HTTPS, which the majority of internet traffic uses, has the same protections which DNSsec offers.

[5] SMS based two-factor authentication can be defeated with forged documents and a visit to one’s cell phone provider.

My open source work this month

I have made an update to MaraDNS’s documentation based on a support request which I couldn’t answer with a simple “RTFM; here’s the relevant documentation”.

I am also updating how I number MaraDNS. Back in the 1990s, software companies would update the version number of their program to look as mature and stable as competitors. Microsoft Word for Windows jumped from version 2.0 to version 6.0; Slackware Linux jumped from version 4 to version 7.

This is not why I am jumping MaraDNS’s version number. MaraDNS has two components, MaraDNS and Deadwood, with different version numbers. MaraDNS is currently at 2.0.17; Deadwood is at 3.3.02. I will make the next MaraDNS 3.3.03 so that both MaraDNS and Deadwood have the same version number.

In addition to MaraDNS, I have gone back to my Prosperity 7 Puzzles which I have not looked at since 2011. I have taken the code I used to make these puzzles (both the original 2007 GPL Java applet and my HTML and CSS to display the puzzle on a web page) and updated it to include scripts for automatically generating puzzles (requiring me to modify the old 2007 Java to be able to run in batch mode) and making PDFs from those generated puzzles. The code is available on GitHub as well as locally.

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Deadwood 3.3.02

February 23, 2019

I have released Deadwood 3.3.02, a new development unstable update to MaraDNS’s recursive resolver.

Bogus IPv6 addresses

Just as Deadwood 3.3.01 added ip4, Deadwood 3.3.01 adds ip6: The ability to set the IPv6 IPs for a given domain name.

We don't use standard notation for IPv6 addresses. Instead, we we use 32-character hex addresses (case insensitive); to make it easier to count long strings of "0"s, the "_" acts like a 0:

ip6 = {}
ip6["maradns.foo."] = "fd4d617261444e530000000000001234"
ip6["kabah.foo."] = "FD4D617261444E53__00__00__002345"

With these lines, whenever we ask Deadwood for the IP for “maradns.foo”, we get the ipv6 answer fd4d:6172:6144:4e53::1234, regardless of the IP this domain may actually have. Likewise, when we ask for “kabah.foo”, we get the ipv6 answer fd4d:6172:6144:4e53::2345.

Limitations

There are a number of limitations with this feature:

A given hostname can only have a single IP.

Since Deadwood uses a fairly large amount of memory to store these entries, we can only store 20,000 entries.

The feature is currently unstable: I have not thoroughly tested this code.

Getting Deadwood 3.3.02

Both the source code and Windows binaries of Deadwood 3.3.02 are available:

https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

https://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​maradns/​files/​Deadwood/​3.​3.​02/

As always, MaraDNS is a free open-source download, and I was not compensated for developing this feature (but donations are always welcome).

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MaraDNS update

February 11, 2019

I have released Deadwood 3.3.01, which implements a feature users have wanted for years.

In more detail

Deadwood 3.3.01 adds a new feature: The ability to set the IPs for a given domain name. For example, let’s add these lines to a dwood3rc Deadwood configuration file:

ip4 = {}
ip4["maradns.foo."] = "10.10.10.10"
ip4["kabah.foo."] = "10.11.11.11"

With these lines, whenever we ask Deadwood for the IP for “maradns.foo”, we get the ip 10.10.10.10, regardless of the IP this domain may actually have. Likewise, when we ask for “kabah.foo”, we get the IP 10.11.11.11.

Limitations

There are a number of limitations with this feature:

Only IPv4, not IPv6 is currently supported.

A given hostname can only have a single IP.

Since Deadwood uses a fairly large amount of memory to store these entries, we can only store 20,000 entries. This is not enough to use this feature for DNS blacklists.

The feature is currently unstable: I have not thoroughly tested this code.

Getting Deadwood 3.3.01

Both the source code and Windows binaries of Deadwood 3.3.01 are available:

https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

https://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​maradns/​files/​Deadwood/​3.​3.​01/

As always, MaraDNS is a free open-source download, and I was not compensated for developing this feature (but donations are always welcome).

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MaraDNS 2.0.17 released

January 20, 2019

I have updated both MaraDNS and Deadwood in today’s release of MaraDNS. This is a bugfix-only release; no security updates were made.

Details

Deadwood has been updated to 3.2.14 as described in yesterday’s blog entry. MaraDNS has been updated to double the default amount of memory allowed to be used while MaraDNS is running. More information is in the GitHub ticket.

Getting the updated version

https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download/​2.​0/​2.​0.​17/

https://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​maradns/​files/​Mara​DNS/​2.​0.​17/

Next

Now that I have fixed a couple of bugs, I will work on adding features.

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Hello 2019!

January 19, 2019

I have released Deadwood 3.2.14, discuss working on MaraDNS again, and explain why Lenovo is not releasing a Thinkpad T490 laptop right now.

I’m working on MaraDNS again

There have been been some changes in my personal life which make it possible for me to work on MaraDNS and Deadwood again for a couple of hours each week.

I have released Deadwood 3.2.14. This is a five-line patch which took about four hours of work to release: I have an extensive set of “smoke tests” to make sure any change to the Deadwood code base does not introduce regressions. In addition, I need to both prepare the Deadwood source code release tarball and the Deadwood Windows binary zipfile.

In Deadwood 3.2.14, I have fixed a bug where, in the Windows version of Deadwood, it would sometimes not read all of the bytes in the binary “secret.txt” file. The issue is that the Windows open() system call is not 100% compatible with UNIX API; It needs to have non-UNIX O_BINARY flag set to act the same way.

More discussion about this update is here:

https://​github.​com/​samboy/​Mara​DNS/​issues/​51

Download links:

https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​stable/

https://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​maradns/​files/​Deadwood/​3.​2.​14/

My plans for MaraDNS in 2019 is to fix at least one other open bug, and to add at least one new feature to MaraDNS. While I now have a little more time to look at non-critical bugs and to add small features, I do not have enough free time for MaraDNS to do significant overhauls (e.g. DNSSEC).

Why the Thinkpad T490 is delayed

The reason why Lenovo is not releasing a Thinkpad T490 laptop right now is because there isn’t anything really new Lenovo can put in this computer. The cycle has been, so far:

In the fall, Intel announces some new update to their mobile x86 chips

In the spring, Lenovo announces a new T4X0 computer using that new Intel chipset

However, this year, Ice Lake has been delayed, so there is nothing new Lenovo can put in the T490 to distinguish it from the T480—so we will get another few months of the T480 until Intel has their Ice Lake chips ready for Lenovo to put in the T490.

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2018

All blog entries written in 2018

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ACA ruled unconstitutional

December 14, 2018

The ACA (Obamacare) has been ruled unconstitutional. Keep in mind that the law is still valid; there is still one day of open enrollment left as I type this.

What this means

There are two likely outcomes, and one unlikely outcome:

This gets struck down by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, and the supreme court refuses to hear the case, keeping the ACA as the law of the land.

This gets struck down (or held up) by the 5th circuit, and the supreme court hears the case and decides yet again that the ACA is constitutional (like they did in 2012 and 2015).

And the unlikely outcome:

This gets struck down by the supreme court and people go back to the bad old days of losing health coverage when they lose their job.

I find it very unlikely the ACA will be killed in the courts because I do not think Roberts will allow thousands of Americans to die from not having health care, especially since not even a Republican-run senate and house was able to repeal the law.

Even if the ACA was killed in the courts, Republicans would be very foolish to not reinstate the individual mandate and/or make whatever changes are needed to make sure people with pre-existing conditions remain covered; to not do so would be political suicide (even deep red voters want pre-existing coverage protections here in late 2018).

More coverage:

https://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2018/​12/​14/​health/​obamacare-​unconstitutional-​texas-​judge.​html

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Remembering the first Bush

December 1, 2018

Yesterday, the first George Bush president died. I share my memories of that time in my life.

The first Golf war

One very significant memory from Bush being president is the first golf war. When we were getting ready to invade Iraq, everyone in my circle of friends did not want us going to war to stop Saddam Hussein. We were worried it would become another Vietnam: Young people dying in an endless war which could not be won. People I knew who were Vietnam Vets were re-living the trauma of that unwinnable war as we were preparing to invade Iraq.

As we started invading Iraq, everyone I knew was glued to their TV, listening to Peter Arnett describing the air strikes against Iraq as it was happening.

I remember Bush, in a live presidential address, saying that Iraq would not become another Vietnam, since our soldiers would not “be asked to fight with one hand tied behind their back”. I did not believe him.

I wrote a song linking the invasion of Iraq to the Vietnam vets still suffering from what would later be called post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as well as Agent Orange exposure.

Bush was able to stem the opposition to the war by ending things quickly; within two months, Kuwait was no longer under Iraqi control and the war was over.

Read my lips: No new taxes

Bush famously raised taxes after promising, during his campaign, that he would not raise taxes, with the famous line “Read my lips: No new taxes”. After raising taxes, Arsenio Hall made a joke about it, pointing the camera at the audience and telling people who just paid their “no new taxes” to wave.

The raising of taxes by Bush after explicitly promising not to do so made me feel that politicians always break their campaign promises after being elected.

Buchanan

While Bush himself was a moderate, willing to compromise for the greater good of the nation (e.g. raising taxes), what would become the Tea Party and the modern Republican party was already forming.

Pat Buchanan, a candidate who threatened to defeat Bush in the primaries, was given a national audience by Republicans at the 1992 convention. He ranted about “the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women.”

I remember his speech, and the Republicans giving him a soapbox to make it, infuriated me. Someone who was listening to the speech with me, flat out called Buchanan a Nazi; Molly Ivins famously quipped that Buchanan’s speech “probably sounded better in the original German”.

Losing to Clinton

His loss to Clinton was mainly because we had a struggling economy at the time. To me, I was glad to see Clinton won, because I did not want to see the kind of hateful rhetoric espoused by Buchanan (which, to me, Bush endorsed) become part of our national dialog. He did not lose because of the blatant homophobia (and, yes, thinly veiled racism) the GOP espoused at the time; he lost because people were losing their jobs and were frustrated with a president who they felt was not more sympathetic.

Looking back

With the first Bush president passing away yesterday, an entire part of my life from long ago has been firmly placed in to the past.

The culture war issues which upset me so much in 1992 resulted in the Republicans losing California in the 2000s, after passing Proposition 187 and espousing anti-Hispanic prejudice; and finally in this year’s wave election, with Democrats gaining some 40 seats in the house, even though the economy is strong, because of voter frustration that the Republican party is now run by the same kind of prejudice and extremism that Buchanan espoused in 1992.

Bush was the last really moderate president; someone willing to compromise like he did when raising taxes is sadly a quaint outdated notion in today’s hyperpartisan environment.

There is a lot I did not agree with him on, but I honor his memory.

The picture (if visible) shows how I looked during the first Bush presidency.

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Deadwood 3.2.13 released

November 11, 2018

I have released Deadwood 3.2.13. Nothing in the server has changed; only the testing framework has been updated

Deadwood 3.2.13

In Deadwood 3.2.13, I have updated the SQA suite to run again. The main issue is that Dig, when used to run DNS-over-TCP has changed and no longer works with Deadwood; that in mind, I have updated the tests to no longer use Dig, but use a tool I wrote myself instead for the DNS-over-TCP tests.

Only the SQA tests have been updated; no code changes to the Deadwood daemon have been made.

That in mind, I am only releasing the source code to Deadwood 3.2.13, and will not update MaraDNS to use the new version of Deadwood. The Windows binaries will remain at 3.2.12.

The code is available here:

https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​stable/

I have also updated the GitHub version of the code:

https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

MaraDNS: Now under the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct

For too long, I have been a grousy old-school *NIX graybeard. I strive to improve myself as a person; that means the days of replying to support requests with dismissive RTFMs are over. In more detail, I now strive to have all of my public interactions, especially with regards to my open source development, follow the Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct.

It’s pretty simple: I will respect others as human beings. I will be kind and considerate. I will be empathetic towards others.

I think this change will make me a more happy person, and make my online interactions more pleasant.

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Healthcare is here to stay

November 7, 2018

Yesterday’s election firmly establishes that politicians can no longer try to take away health care in the USA.

Obamacare will stay the law of the land

This election is the final nail in the coffin of the 2010s mantra to “Repeal Obamacare!” Democrats campaigned strongly on “the Republicans tried to take you health care away in 2017”, and even Republicans campaigned on “We never meant to take away insurance from people with pre-existing conditions.”

It means that, as a contractor paying for insurance out of pocket, even if my boss can’t get my contractor position converted in to a full hire with benefits, I can still pay out of pocket for comprehensive health insurance after my Cobra runs out next year. I don’t have to worry about the company I get Cobra from going under. If the economy were to go south and I were to lose my job, and was (heaven forbid) unable to get a new one, because of the ACA (the proper name for “Obamacare”), I would still be eligible for health insurance through Medicaid.

Even in deep red Utah (not to mention Idaho and Nebraska), voters overwhelmingly voted to expand Medicaid health insurance for the poor and unemployed.

There are only 14 states without the Medicaid expansion. That number was 18 this spring, and it keeps going down. The days of “I have to hold on to this job to have healthcare” is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

It means that my daughter will never have to worry about becoming sick and having her health insurance taken away from her. And that is a very good thing.

Minor MaraDNS update

For some reason, I have been unable to recently run the automated regression tests for MaraDNS and Deadwood. Hopefully I will have time to get a setup to automatically test things again.

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The 5 best 1990s songs

October 7, 2018

Here are my favorite five songs from the 1990s.

This is a continuation of my list of my favorite 1980s songs. There is no Seattle grunge on this list; the upbeat happy songs we had in the 1980s are far more positive than the very dark 1990s grunge music.

#5: La Calle de las Sirenas

In 1996, the before-unknown Mexican band Kabah became famous across the Spanish-speaking world with their hit La Calle de las Sirenas.

This song, which talks about mermaids, giants, gnomes, and all other kinds of mythical creatures, is a fun-loving mid-tempo piece of music.

I praised the song nearly two decades ago, and my opinion of the song has not changed.

I had the pleasure of meeting Maria Jose, the Kabah band member who I have always had a crush on, back in 2012 when she was signing her CD at a local record store when I lived in Mexico; she was a very nice and down to earth lady (fluent in English, to boot).

#4: The Ancient of Days

Jonn Serrie, in 1993, released the album Midsummer Century. My favorite track is The Ancient of Days, especially its first four minutes.

This song starts off with an amazing ambient texture, and then an epic sounding slow melody comes in, which ends around the four minute mark. A very nice intro to a good song.

#3: Children

Robert Miles is a musician who died far too young. When writing my obituary for him, I discussed how his 1996 up tempo dance club classic Children brought me a lot of joy in a very dark time in my life.

Robert Miles may no longer be with us, but his music lives on.

#2: Colour the World

Colour the World by Sash from 1999 has a very positive and upbeat message in a very happy uptempo dance song. This song, about love, tolerance, and joy is a very good message and mindset to have. The song explicitly is about loving people of all skin colors, but the gay community adopted the song to be a message about tolerance towards gay people long before gay marriage became legal in the 2010s.

#1: Closer

In contrast to Colour the World, this 1994 song, Closer by Nine Inch Nails, is a very dark song about a very primitive sexual attraction towards someone. Its chorus describes someone wanting sex in the most explicit way possible, without there being any pretense of desiring romance or a relationship.

Not to say this song encourages promiscuity. It doesn’t. The verses of the song make it clear that the singer is unhappy being in this dysfunctional purely sexual relationship.

Honorable mentions

A few great 1990s songs which did not make my top five list:

Shamen: Boss Drum

Haddaway: What is Love

Alice DJ: Better off Alone

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Landing on the moon

September 22, 2018

This blog is about why we landed on the moon in 1969, and why it is many people who remember it are upset that the new Ryan Gosling movie doesn’t show the US Flag on the moon.

What motivated US to go to the moon

I am writing this to give some historical context about how the United States got on the moon (and, yes, how the Internet got invented), and the attitudes we had as a country at the time.

In the 1950s, there was a very genuine and justified fear that the world would stop being a free place and descend in to tyranny. While we were able to stop the Nazis and the Imperialistic Japanese from taking over the world, Russia became a empire called the USSR, and started taking over adjacent countries, spreading like a cancer.

In the middle of this “cold war”, the USSR was able to, in 1957, launch the world’s very first orbital satellite, the Sputnik. This launch shocked us in the United States; here was an oppressive dictatorship that was beating us in outer space. They quickly followed up by launching the first animal then the first person in to space ahead of us. We were, at the same time, having a heck of a time getting a rocket to even take off.

We had to, in the name of defending freedom, catch up with the Soviet Union (USSR). This started the space race. We established NASA and started work getting in to space. It took us a few years (and, yes, the tragic death of three astronauts on Apollo 1—this was an era when people were willing to take risks and make sacrifices for the greater good), but we ended up winning the space race by launching the moon mission and bringing the first man to the moon. While this was done for the betterment of humanity, this was also done so we could win the space race and show the world that American values (Freedom, open elections, open markets) were more effective at accomplishing things than controlled economies without freedom.

We put a US flag on the moon to bring this point home.

Oh, the Internet? That was created by a US Government “advanced research” agency which we formed in response to the Sputnik launch.

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MaraDNS 2.0.16 released

August 16, 2018

I have released MaraDNS 2.0.16. This is a very minor security update.

The issue

Security fix: There was a theoretical issue with the cryptographic code in Deadwood, where a standards-compliant compiler might not generate correct secure random numbers (used for the query ID and query source port). I can not find a compiler which actually generates insecure code (I tested against gcc 3.2.3, gcc 4.8.5, gcc 7.3.0, clang 3.4.2, and clang 5.0.1), but in the interest of caution, I am making a security update, and have added tests to make sure this bug does not manifest itself when run against multiple compilers and compile flags (it's only an issue with -O2 and -O3 in clang using a different implementation of RadioGatún[32]).

Getting the update

Lots of places to get the update:

https://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download.​html

https://github.com/​samboy/MaraDNS

https://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​maradns/

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Password security

August 4, 2018

This blog is about making secure password for websites.

The problem with website passwords

Let me start up with a well-known webcomic about password security: https://xkcd.com/936/

Making people have mixed case or punctuation in their password does not increase password security that much. However, it makes password management a pain. For example: While most sites accept the underscore (_ symbol) as a “punctuation” character, allowing a suffix like _Aa9 to work with most password site rules, some do not. Southwest, for example, does not even allow a _ in a password, so we need special “for Southwest, use : instead of _ for punctuation” rule.

The password hlrehcv5kn4o545v has (or had, until I posted this) a good deal more security than Password1! (the first has 80 bits of entropy; the largest attacks I have seen, requiring entire datacenters filled with computers, can crack 64 bits; the second has at best 28 bits of security), but many sites consider the first password insecure and the second password secure.

My solution: PassGen

My solution to the issue of countless sites, each with their own password rules, is to have a single password manager. This password manager uses a secure hash and stream cipher to, based on the contents of a secret master password, generate a unique password for each site one has to log in to.

I have a GitHub repo of the code, available for either browsing online or downloading. The entire system, including the small (obfuscated) C program that runs the underlying cryptographic algorithm, is in a single two page shell script.

I have been using a form of this tool for well over a decade and it has protected me from having my password compromised on one site (Hello, LinkedIn!) affecting passwords on other sites.

The main problem with this system is that one needs to know how to write a UNIX Shell script (Bash script, as it’s commonly called these days) to edit the code to work with arbitrary password rules. But, for shell script coders, it’s an simple standalone tool for password management.

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Mango Naked Juice

July 7, 2018

I sometimes enjoy a Naked Juice Mango Smoothie. This particular juice has a strong memory for me.

2014

The year was 2014. Marina, my wife, was sent, a day before, to the hospital by the doctor who examined her. It was late at night and I was sitting beside her bed; a TV was on playing a late night news or talk show. Marina and I talked, and she asked me for a Mango Naked Juice.

I got in my car and proceeded to look for a place that sold Naked Juice. It was late at night, so most places were already closed, and there was not that much close to the hospital anyway. Finally, after over an hour of looking, a 24-hour gas station only had a couple of flavors of Naked Juice, but Mango was one of them. Delighted, I bought the juice and proudly delivered it to my wife before retiring for the night.

The next day, when I went to the hospital again, my wife told me that, while she enjoyed the juice, it left her feeling sick later on. Her body was falling apart; she would die within two weeks. That Mango Naked Juice was the last drink she was able to enjoy in her final days.

O’Reilly Media

In my years of working in the tech industry, my experience has been that O’Reilly Media makes the best books. I learned Bash and Perl using O’Reilly, and just got a lot of dev ops related books on Chef, Terraform, Kubernetes, among other technologies, to keep my skills up to date in my current job.

Their website no longer has a catalog of their books, so it took me a few clicks on Amazon to find the correct link to the books they have available.

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On Résumés

June 2, 2018

I discuss the format to have a résumé in, and the fonts to use.

Use Word

For résumés, I use Microsoft Word 2016, which cost me well over $200, and which I use only for résumés.

The reason for this investment is because most recruiters want to get a résumé in .docx format, so, for working with recruiters, one pretty much needs to use a recent version of Office. I got my last three jobs with a Word résumé.

Which fonts to use

A résumé sent to an average recruiter, of course, is going to need to use Windows system fonts (in theory, it’s possible to include fonts in Word documents, but in practice this often times does not work). I personally use Cambria (serif) for the body and Calibri (sans-serif) for headings in my Word doc résumé. These fonts, while included in Windows, are not as available for other operating systems.

Core fonts for the web

Windows does not include any of the excellent open-source fonts out there. However, it still has all of the 1990s Core fonts, which also come with MacOS, and can be legally downloaded for Linux: http://corefonts.sourceforge.net/

The Wikipedia has an excellent overview of the fonts and how they look: https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Core_​fonts_​for_​the_​Web Note that Andalé Mono is not included with Windows 10 (but is included with MacOS).

For résumés, if using only Core fonts, I would use Arial or maybe Trebuchet MS for sans-serif headings and Georgia for the serif body text.

If I were still using Linux

If I were working with a recruiter and still using Linux on the desktop, I would use Open office, Core fonts, and send the résumé to them in .docx or .rtf format, along with a PDF.

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Configuration files

May 5, 2018

This blog is about some ways of formatting configuration files.

The MaraDNS way

The MaraDNS way to format a configuration file is a syntax based on a subset of Python. It looks like this:

foo = 1
bar = "String"
# This is a comment
bar += ", and some more text"
# bar is now "String, and some more text"
bax = {}
bax["something"] = "Something else"

Here, the name of a parameter at the top level is a bare string (and, yes, MaraDNS and Deadwood will exit with a fatal error if the name is not one that they recognize).

I designed this syntax back in 2000 and used it in both MaraDNS (2001) and in Deadwood (2007)—I felt no need to change the syntax for the MaraDNS 2.0 recursive resolver.

If I were designing something like MaraDNS today, I would do it differently, since there is more standardization on how to convert hierarchical data in to a text file.

In the mid-2000s, the trend was to use XML, which could look like this:

<foo>1</foo>
<bar>String, and some more text</bar>
<!-- This is a comment -->
<bax><something>Something else</something></bax>

Or like this:

<foo value=1 />
<bar text="String, and some more text" />
<bax><something data="Something else" /></bax>

Or even a combination of the above two:

<foo value=1 />
<bar>String, and some more text</bar>
<bax somethingData="Something else" />

Needless to say, except in domains where people wanted marked up text (web pages, word processing documents, etc.), XML was not the best choice. So the next format which came out was JSON:

{"foo": 1,
 "bar": "String, and some more text",
 "REM": "Since JSON doesn't have comments, let's fake them",
 "bax": {
         "something": "Something else"
        }
}

Simple, direct, easy to parse. This is probably the lingua franca of transferring hierarchical data between programs right now.

However, JSON, while great for machines to read and write, is less suitable for text files edited by humans. There are a couple of formats which try to be a "JSON for humans".

One simple solution is to just have comments in JSON. There are proposals to allow both "//" and "#" to specify a comment; I have written simple Comment JSON parsers which strip a file of all lines beginning with the character "#" before processing the file with a conventional JSON parser. The format is similar to the JSON example above:

{"foo": 1,
 "bar": "String, and some more text",
# This is a simple way to have comments in JSON
 "bax": {
         "something": "Something else"
        }
}

The inventor of JSON wrote that a good way to have comments in JSON is to run a JSON-with-comments file through his JSMin processor, which strips out '//' and '/* */' comments from a file. For example:

{"foo": 1,
 "bar": "String, and some more text",
// This is another simple way to have comments in JSON
 "bax": { /* We can have comments which
             span multiple lines, if
             desired */
         "something": "Something else"
        }
}

If something with more features than JSON with comments is desired, one popular option (used by, for example, Docker and Ansible), is YAML:

foo: 1
bar: String, and some more text
# YAML, naturally, supports comments
bax:
    something: Something else

YAML can also parse JSON files; it is a superset of JSON and even a superset of JSON with comments.

Some feel that while JSON is too simple, YAML is too complex. One attempt at a middle ground between JSON and YAML is the language Terraform uses, HCL (HashiCorp configuration language):

foo = 1
bar = "String, and some more text"
# Comments are supported
bax = { "something": "Something else" }

I’m sure there are other mini-languages for representing hierarchical data, but this covers the ones I have seen working in the software industry.

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My new job

April 10, 2018

I have a new job. I also look at how my old MaraDNS code is still notable.

My new job

While I have been very happy at Midigator, and have indeed not been looking for a job, another company contacted me and gave me an offer I could not refuse. While Midigator required two phone screenings and a in-person interview (albeit, the second to easiest in person interview I have ever done), this job required only a single video conference screening before they extended an offer to me, where I mainly talked about my need for work-life balance because I am a single parent.

Because of the amount of toxic hatred on the Internet, I am keeping my current employer secret; just like I did with Midigator, I will make this employer known once I am no longer working for them. If some nutcase were to call up Midigator and tell them I should be fired because, say, I no longer think Linux is a viable end-user desktop, they will politely explain to them that I am already leaving and that Friday is my last day there (yes, for the record, I gave them a full two week notice).

MaraDNS: Still notable after all these years

MaraDNS is still getting mentioned in notable scholarly journals.

In 2017, MaraDNS was extensively discussed in the paper Making DNS Servers Resistant to Cyber Attacks: An Empirical Study on Formal Methods and Performance which was published in IEEE Xplore. There is also a discussion about how MaraDNS handles bailiwick processing in the 2016 paper The Availability and Security Implications of Glue in the Domain Name System (my comment: MaraDNS’ bailiwick design, which is the same in both MaraDNS 1 and in Deadwood/MaraDNS 2, is based on an outdated 2001 view of the internet and DNS).

Point being: While I have not actively added new features to MaraDNS since 2010, and while I now only fix security and other critical bugs (including, yes, root server changes, though I will probably stop doing those in a few years), MaraDNS is still considered a viable DNS server and is still getting notable coverage.

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Phasing out email

March 10, 2018

I no longer have a link to my email address on my web page.

Phasing out email

For a very long time, I have had a link to my email address on my web page. No more.

A lot has changed since I first had an email on my web page. Email is no longer used the way it used to be; at my current job, email is not even used for corporate communication: We use either Slack or Skype. The majority of email I get these days is robot generated email.

I have not gotten an email from someone using my web page email address that was worth receiving for years.

That in mind, the email link on my web pages has now been replaced with a link to my resume. People who wish to contact me can become part of my LinkedIn network:

https://​www.​linkedin.​com/​in/​sam-​trenholme/

Font update

I have updated the font on my web page to use Charis SIL for the non-italic body text instead of Bitstream Charter. Charis SIL is a Bitstream Charter variant which has a slightly darker weight than the original Charter; it looks a little nicer, especially on “retina” displays and in Google Chrome.

I have been a fan of this font for a while; I used this very same font for my English lessons back when I was a professional ESL teacher.

The spacing between letters for Charis SIL italic is a little too tight; I am still using Bitstream Charter for italic text. This results in the italic being somewhat lighter than the non-italic text, but that’s normal for an italic.

The updated font can be downloaded here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​Caulixtla​008.​zip

Edit: Yes, it looks a little splotchy on low resolution displays when using Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Edge in Windows; but it’s still perfectly readable, and it looks better on high resolution displays than the older font. It also looks better on Chrome, both at low and high resolutions, both in Windows and on Android smart phones.

The number of users in 2018 using a low resolution PC display is decreasing, while the number of users with retina displays, Macintoshes (even on a low resolution display, the new font looks better in MacOS), and even Linux (yes, I checked, and the new font is an improvement on a Linux desktop), or smart phone is increasing, so the technology has advanced to the point that a nice-looking printing font that looked bad on the screen in 2009 now looks really nice.

Edit #2: I was able to fix the splotchy problem on low resolution displays by using ttfautohint 1.8.1; I had to set the maximum size to apply hinting to a small value (24 PPEM) so that it both looks good on low resolution Windows displays (it now looks like it looks in Linux when in Windows, since ttfautohint uses Linux’s hinting) while looking the same as it did before on anything with more than 75dpi or so.

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Nolan Bushnell; MaraDNS

February 10, 2018

This blog is about Nolan Bushnell and a new MaraDNS release.

Nolan Bushnell: Family man

Nolan Bushnell recently had an award taken away from him because of unproven allegations that Bushnell sexually harassed women in the 1970s, including an allegation he sexually harassed a female employee by inviting her to a hot tub party Atari was having.

As a family man, every time I take my daughter to Chuck E Cheese, I remind her that it was Nolan Bushnell who created that restaurant where she has so much fun. Being very young, my daughter can not say Bushnell’s name correctly yet, but her heart is in the right place.

The fact that Bushnell create Chuck E Cheese is evidence he is a family man with strong morals. Even better evidence is the fact that he, just last year, celebrated 40 years of marriage:

https://​twitter.​com/​Nolan​Bushnell/​status/​935357692385878016/​photo/​1

I do not see in Bushnell a man who objectified women nor a man who would encourage a culture where women were objectified. It is telling that no one has been able to find a woman who worked in Atari while Bushnell was president who said it was a hostile workplace. Keep in mind, what people consider disrespectful of women in 2018 is not what women thought was disrespectful in 1978. The closest is an interview with Dona Bailey (MOS 6502 programmer for the classic “Centipede”), who says she felt the culture was “rough” and that she “grew a thicker skin”, but until she comes forward to clarify, we don’t know if that was because of sexual harassment or because guys burped and farted more than she would have liked. Note that this is not Bushnell’s Atari: Dona Bailey joined Atari two years after he left.

https://archive.is/Zz69K

For the record, I would be offended if a company did a hot tub party and made a secretary deliver documents in a bikini here in 2018; but it was a different culture in 1975. My issues with this witch hunt is that I see a lack of cultural sensitivity among people who are more interested in generating outrage than in respecting other people’s cultures and traditions. Liberalism is supposed to be about respecting people’s differences; I’m not seeing that among people trying to demonize Nolan Bushnell.

Edit Kotaku has published a more truthful article about how Atari treated women when Bushnell was in charge.

MaraDNS 2.0.15 release

I have released MaraDNS 2.0.15 this week.

The only thing that has been updated in this release is the IP for b.root-servers.net has been changed. Please read my blog entry from November 11, 2017 for details on this change.

MaraDNS 2.0.15 can be downloaded here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download/​2.​0/​2.​0.​15/

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The ThinkPad T480

January 4, 2018

I look at the new Lenovo ThinkPad T480 laptop computer.

Lenovo’s new ThinkPads: An overview

Before the opening of CES, Lenovo announced a number of ThinkPad laptops this year:

They have completely revamped the small “X” series of ThinkPads; the new X280 is a good deal thinner and lighter than the X270. To get this, Lenovo had to make it less user-serviceable and have the battery not last as long. I think this is a wise decision on Lenovo’s part; this adds another very small and light computer to their lineup. They have also added an X380 Yoga to the lineup.

The E series of lower cost laptops have already been updated late last year, with the E480 and E580 already available in some markets.

The L series, another low-cost lineup from Lenovo, has a number of models for 2018: L380, L380 Yoga, L480, and L580

Finally, Lenovo has introduced three new T series laptops: The T480, the thinner T480s, and the T580. There will be no T480p; now that Intel’s 15-watt chips have four cores, Lenovo does not feel the need to have a separate line with 4-core chips.

Since I am typing this on a T470, I will go over its successor, the T480.

Comparing the T470 and T480

The 2017 T470 I currently own is not a computer for gamers: There are no graphics acceleration options; the only GPU option is the limited one included in Intel’s 2017 Kaby Lake line of microprocessors (Intel HD Graphics 620). Only really good for older games. While the GeForce 940MX was an option for the T470 in some markets, the only T470 with that chipset available here in the United States was the T25.

The T480 has the option to have a NVIDIA GeForce MX150, which can play most 2017 games, albeit at lower resolution (1280x720 or 1920x1080) and in-game graphics settings. While not a dedicated gaming computer, this allows users to play recent games in a pinch.

Speaking of video, the T480 has more display options than the older T470; the maximum resolution available for the T470 is 1920x1080; the T480 has the option for a 2560x1440 display. It remains to be seen if the T480 display will be brighter and have better colors than the T470 display.

The ports on the right hand side are the same on both models: We have a SD card slot in the back; in front of that is an RJ45 ethernet port (very useful when I bring my computer to the office), then a USB3 A port, an HDMI port, another USB3 A port, and finally a 1/8 inch headphone (or microphone) port.

On the left hand side, the ports have changed. The T470 has a square Lenovo “Slim Tip” power socket; in front of that is another USB3 A port; and finally there is a combined USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 port, which can also power the laptop. The T480 only has two left-hand ports: A USB-C port which can power the machine, as well as a combination Thunderbolt 3/USB-C/Docker port. The T470 has its docking bay port on the bottom; the T480 has no ports on the bottom. Neither laptop has ports in the front or back.

The T470’s Thunderbolt 3 port has only two “PCI Lanes”, which means it is only half as fast as a four-lane full speed Thunderbolt 3 port; I do not know whether the T480’s Thunderbolt 3 port will be a 2-lane or 4-lane port.

The new T480 is using Intel’s newer four-core “Kaby Lake R” 15-watt processors, which, at the high end, can have almost twice the performance as the older “Kaby Lake” CPU offerings available for the T470 line of computers, while offering the same 15W TDP (average power used) as the older, slower chips. Note that single threaded performance has not significantly changed between the two models.

More information

More information about the new ThinkPad computers from Lenovo is available here:

https://​www.​notebookcheck.​net/​Think​Pad-​T​480​s-​Think​Pad-​T​480-​Think​Pad-​T​580-​Quad-​Core-​CPUs-​and-​the-​Ge​Force-​MX​150-​are-​coming-​to-​the-​traditional-​T-​series.​273172.​0.​html

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2017

All blog entries written in 2017

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Font Update

December 1, 2017

I have updated the font on my websites.

Caulixtla2017: Bug fix

I have replaced the fonts on my websites with Caulixtla2017. This is a bugfix update to Caulixtla007 (the 2016 version of the website font fix, which is itself a minor update to the 2014 version of this font mix); the changes are:

I have re-hinted the bold version of the font with TTFautohint 1.1 instead of TTFautohint 1.5. There is a bug with the newer TTFautohint, where a page using the 1.5-hinted font will look bad (the letters distort to the point of being almost unreadable) when put in a PDF file and printed with an HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M277dw. By using the older 2014 version of TTFautohint, while the fonts may look slightly worse on the screen in Windows, they look a lot better with at least one embedded PDF rendering engine.

I have added one character to the fonts: → (right arrow), because this is quite useful in technical docs (e.g. “Go to Start → Control Panel → Network → Adapter settings”).

Caulixtla2017 is a unified name for a combination for Source Sans Pro Semibold (for the bold font), Bitstream Charter (for the regular and italic fonts), and even a bit of Source Serif Pro (for the infinity symbol in all three fonts). I have been using this as my webpage font since 2014, and have updated it in 2016 (updated hinting; using same font name for all three fonts to make it easier to convert documents to use this font set in word processors; making sure all three fonts were subsetted the exact same way). I have now updated it in 2017; I plan on using this font at least until mid-2020, and probably longer than that.

The fonts can be downloaded here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​Caulixtla​2017.​zip

EOT, WOFF, WOFF2

There are three primary formats for web fonts:

EOT, for old versions of Internet Explorer (Internet Explorer 4-8)

WOFF, for slightly older modern browsers (Firefox and Chrome until a couple years ago; Safari until this year; Internet Explorer 9-11; Opera 12 for people who like the Presto engine)

WOFF2, for current browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Microsoft Edge)

There is, of course, a good chart showing browser WOFF support and browser WOFF2 support.

(The was also briefly SVG webfonts in the late oughts, but that, for good reason, never caught on)

Yes, the zip file has EOT versions of the fonts. While I no longer try to give Internet Explorer 8 users a full CSS experience with my web page, and while Microsoft Edge no longer supports EOT fonts, the number of people out there in who still use Windows XP online is shocking; two people in an extended group of friends still do this (and I told both of them to not use Windows XP online unless you want to get hacked).

Since making the 2016 version of my font, there’s a lot less reason to have a WOFF (instead of WOFF2) version of the fonts; Safari has finally added WOFF2 support so the only browsers which support WOFF but not WOFF2 are ones which have not been updated. The only reason to use WOFF these days is for Internet Explorer 11 users who have not moved on to Microsoft Edge or another modern browser.

That said, I made both WOFF and WOFF2 web versions of the fonts.

Here are some links to EOT, WOFF, and WOFF2 conversion programs (no, I do not use an online service):

https://​github.​com/​bramstein/​sfnt​2​woff-​zopfli

https://github.com/google/woff2

http://eotfast.com (Windows only; compresses fonts) and https://www.w3.org/Tools/eot-utils/ (POSIX; does not compress)

Since there’s a bug in Fontforge where it moves the underline location when I import from a TTF file, I have also made the Fontforge source to the fonts available.

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November 2017 round up

November 11, 2017

I discuss a MaraDNS update and Roy Moore.

MaraDNS update

On October 24, 2017, the IPv4 IP for b.root-servers.net was changed. I have updated Deadwood with the new IP. In addition, for anyone using a dwood3rc file with the root servers set in it, the IP 192.228.79.201 needs to be replaced with 199.9.14.201.

A dwood3rc file for Deadwood sometimes has a section looking like this:

root_servers = {}
root_servers["."]="198.41.0.4, 199.9.14.201, 192.33.4.12, 199.7.91.13,"
root_servers["."]+="192.203.230.10, 192.5.5.241, 192.112.36.4, "
root_servers["."]+="198.97.190.53, 192.36.148.17, 192.58.128.30, "
root_servers["."]+="193.0.14.129, 199.7.83.42, 202.12.27.33"

If so, make sure the out of date 192.228.79.201 IP is replaced, like it is above.

The deadwood configuration file is usually located at /etc/dwood3rc

I have updated the Deadwood source to use the updated IP, and have updated the list of root servers everywhere the out of date IP was in the documentation.

I plan on making a release of MaraDNS in 2018 with this update. Until then, both the GitHub repo at https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS and the Deadwood snapshot at http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap have this change.

Roy Moore

Now that The Washington Post has brought to light multiple verified allegations of child molestation against Alabama Senator candidate Ray Moore (to be technical, the youngest one was 14 at the time of the allegations, but that’s child molestation in my book, since Moore was in his 30s at the time), it remains an open question whether Alabama voters would rather elect a child molester or a Democrat to the US Senate come December 12. It’s a lose-lose for the Republicans either way; they either lose one critical seat in a very closely held Senate, or they have to deal with the political fallout of one of their own being a child molester.

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Round up: October 2017

October 26, 2017

This blog is about unemployment and California’s political landscape.

California: Why the Democrats won

The Republicans in California have no political power at the state level, so whether or not they want to deny climate change will not affect how things are run here (I should point out that the final Republican governor in California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, does very must support slowing down or stopping climate change).

It wasn't always this way; back in 1994, the Republicans had control of the California state assembly. It was the agenda of Proposition 187, which was in a large part driven by racism, that changed things. This measure — which went so far as trying to deny undocumented children school services, among many other things — mobilized before unenthusiastic Latino voters to vote, and to vote Democrat. It took over a decade, but with the landslide victory for Governor "Moonbeam" (Jerry Brown) in 2010, the Republicans lost all statewide political power.

California has one of the most thriving economies in the United States. If California was a nation, it would have the world’s fifth largest gross domestic product (GDP). This, while implementing some of the most progressive policies in the Unites States — which leads me to doubt that many of the regressive policies the Republicans support are really needed to promote jobs nor are they needed to build the economy.

First increase in unemployment since 2011

Now that Trump is president and we have congress in control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate, unemployment went up in September of 2017. This is the first time unemployment has increased since February of 2011, when the country finally started pulling out of the great crash of 2008.

Some blame the slowdown on the hurricanes, but we had hurricane Sandy in 2012, but no increase in unemployment. We had a strong tornado in Oklahoma in 2013, but no corresponding job loss.

Other factors may be in play here. To name just two: The uncertainty of war because of our horrible diplomacy with North Korea and Iran; the uncertainty of medical insurance because congress keeps trying to repeal key provisions of the ACA. Both of these negatively impact the job market, and are best resolved by voters changing who's in congress come the 2018 elections.

“It’s the economy, stupid” — and, if Republicans want to stay in power, they better stop being dysfunctional to the point of hurting the economy.

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The night I found love

September 12, 2017

I remember my first date with Marina, my wife who died of breast cancer three years ago today. It was one of the best nights in my entire life.

Meeting Marina

The night of our first date

I was actively dating in Mexico while working as a professional English teacher and translator. I found most of my dates using an online service called “Tagged”. Tinder did not exist, but Tagged worked the same: You looked at the person’s photo, you decided whether to click “yes”, or “no”, and if there was a “yes” match, Tagged let you contact the person.

This was how I met Marina. After a couple months of online flirting, I finally had a chance to see Marina. She texted me one day and said she wanted to get together with me; we made plans to meet up at a Dennys-style restaurant called “Vips” in downtown Puebla, just a block from its Zócalo.

The date

When I saw Marina in real life for the first time, what attracted me most about her was her smile. She was just as beautiful as she looked in all of her photos. She had an easygoing and fun-loving manner about her and I immediately knew I could love her.

Our original plan was to have dinner at Vips, but Marina told me she wanted to do something different. I suggested a movie; she told me would like to do something where we could get to know each other. We ended up going to an Italian Coffee (This is Mexico’s version of Starbuck’s, and while the chain is in Mexico, its name is the English phrase The Italian Coffee Company) besides Puebla’s Zócalo and talking there. I bought us beverages for 50 pesos — about five dollars at the time.

Falling in love

We were entranced by each other. No distraction could stop us. I grabbed her arms and looked in to her face. Everything about her demeanor made it clear that she was falling in love with me. She was gorgeous — I could not resist her.

After paying for our beverages at that Italian Coffee, we were walking and went past an alley. I knew it was time. Taking advantage of the fact that Mexican culture allows kissing in public, I grabbed Marina, pushed her against the wall, and started French kissing her. She melted in my arms as I kissed her passionately.

The start of something great

I found true love that evening of Saturday, December 6, 2008. Marina was my girlfriend two days later, and my wife a little over a year later.

We had our ups and downs, but the passion and love we had for each other sparked on the night of our first date never went away. Something magical happened between us that night, something that lasted until her untimely death from breast cancer less than six years later.

Yes, I have shed a lot of tears losing Marina, but even in my sadness I cherish the life I had with her. It made me a better person, more able to love. Even if I had known how short our time together would be, I would not have done anything different that first night we met.

Thank you Marina, for all of the beautiful memories, and thank you, Marina, for our beautiful child. There will always be a place in my heart for you.

2020 update: I should point out I was using the Body for Life program to be in shape at the time of our first date.

2020 update #2: I have used an app/service called “Remini” to improve the quality of the original blurry phone camera picture. The original can be seen here.

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August 2017 round-up

August 12, 2017

This blog is about snopes.com, and about when to follow up if a company with a potential job does not contact a candidate.

Snopes is accurate

This is my response to a friend of mine who asked about Snopes:

Snopes is a site that has been on the Internet longer than Facebook, Twitter, or even MySpace. What they have been doing for a very long time is investigating urban legends. They started with the kinds of stores which get passed around by word of mouth — the vanishing hitchhiker kind of story. Then they investigated the kinds of stories which spread from one fax machine to the next, then from email to email to email, then finally spread via social networks, to see if the stories are true or not.

Since the site is not afraid to call out BS, the kinds of people who like to pass around BS don’t like the site.

In the two decades I have been reading Snopes, I have only known them to be wrong once: They thought no one said “up the butt” for unusual places to make whoopee in “The Newlyweds”, since the host never remembered that happening, until someone dug up a video tape with the clip in question — which had different dialog than the urban legends which spread around.

Job hunting etiquette: The follow-up

When should a job candidate follow-up with a potential job (contact with recruiter, post-interview contact, etc.)?

My etiquette is this: Two weeks after the most recent correspondence with someone offering a potential job, I will send a follow-up email asking what the status of the job is. Usually it’s a version of “we got another candidate with more experience”, or “we’re interviewing some other people”, or, if the hiring manager is hunting for a Unicorn, “we haven’t heard from the company.”

I have frequently not gotten feedback if I don’t take the initiative, but I have always gotten feedback after sending a two-week follow up email. It’s rare for a company to give an interview after ghosting for two weeks, but it has happened — I once got an interview from a large company out of the blue a month after my previous correspondence with the recruiter; I literally laughed when the recruiter called me and said they wanted to talk to me.

The other side of the coin is that, if I accept an offer, I make a point to contact any recruiter or company I have been in communication with in the last few months, letting them know I have accepted a job offer; I even sometimes communicate with companies which interviewed me but decided not to move forward with an offer, so they can know that I did OK.

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My job search

July 8, 2017

This blog is about what my most recent job search was like, and some of what I had to put up with to get my new job.

The Unicorn hunter

Now hiring! Must have ten years of React experience! (Note: React has only existed for a little over four years as I type this) Ever since my 2005 job search, I have seen a whole bunch of recruiters post a bunch of jobs where some start-up, having secured its first round of funding, is looking for someone who is unrealistically senior to develop the actual technology the start-up is supposed to have.

Since there is nobody who can fill the position, the company starts contacting more and more recruiters to see if there really is someone out there with ten years of React experience. They haven’t gotten this position filled yet, so positions like these end up being the first listings one sees when they begin their job search.

A variant of this is the company who appears to have fairly reasonable requirements in their job description, but decides any resume they get is an underqualified candidate.

The cash strapped visionary

I’ve experienced this a few times over the years. You talk to someone. They have the perfect vision. You will become incredibly rich if you take a chance with them. They are, however, having a very temporary cashflow problem and can’t pay you, but you’re really talented and they’ll pay you as soon as the money comes in.

Once, when I was a lot younger and more foolish, I worked for one of these. After working at the guy’s house and not seeing a penny for nearly half a year, I left the “company” in disgust. (I actually remember this part of my life fondly: It was a time of very positive personal and spiritual growth, and an important coming of age event of my life.)

One variant of this is someone who finds you on the Internet, flatters you, but then asks you do a lot of work for a small amount of money.

The other variant I have seen in third world countries is the scammer: They claim they have a big company, that they are hiring you for $X a month, but the actual “office” is their mother’s living room, they put a lot of pressure on you to complete the project before the first paycheck is due, and they never actually pay you. This is so egregious I will name names: Alexandre D’Lara, whose website went down for non-payment about two months after he pulled this scam on me. I haven’t seen him anywhere online since 2013.

(Edit: Just when I thought I would be spared seeing this during my 2017 job hunt, someone on LinkedIn emailed me with an “equity only” offer. Ugh.)

The flaky recruiter

One recruiter was so flaky, they didn’t call me when they said they would. When I call them up after waiting for 20 minutes or so, they were at a company lunch. They told me to give them my resume, even though they already had a copy. After I gave them my resume a second time, I never heard about any job offers from them.

The spammer

My inbox constantly gets filled with potential job offers from people who send out email to everyone and their sister. Replies to their spam email are usually ignored. When someone offered me a .NET job position — even though I, at the time, never wrote a C# program (I have since written one) — I wrote them back with a “please at least read my resume” message. They replied with a bulk email telling me to fill out some online form to see if I would qualify for the position.

To be fair, while CyberCoders can be pretty bad about sending out a bunch of emails, I did have a positive experience with one of their recruiters who took time out of her busy day to talk to me for about thirty minutes about the job and the position. While we felt I was qualified for the role, the hiring manager ultimately felt I didn’t have enough experience on my resume — he was looking for a Unicorn.

The cool recruiter

Now that I’ve shared some of the more negative experiences I have had, time to share a positive experience: Sayva Solutions. A recruiter there, after looking at my resume, took me out to have lunch with them to discuss positions.

Wonderful lunch and wonderful people. I will remember to say a good word about them whenever the topic of recruiters comes up.

The offer

I ended up getting hired at a company which I directly contacted on LinkedIn; no middleman recruiter means I get more salary and a direct W-2 hire position. The interview was the second or third easiest interview I have ever had for any position; after three phone conversations, I went in to the office and the manager spent about an hour describing what I will do once I start working for them; I got the offer eight days later.

Why I am keeping my current boss secret

The Internet is not the same place it was ten years ago. These days, with the amount of toxic hatred around, I need to keep my current employer secret from the kinds of nutcases who would blow a gasket because I, say, disagreed with them about politics or whether Linux is a viable end user desktop OS.

For reliable recruiters who know me, I have no problem sharing my personal information such as my current employer, but that’s not information a random Internet troll is privy to.

I’m excited!

Wednesday will be my last day at Synthetic Genomics. It has been a pleasure working with a great team there, but it’s time for me to move on to bigger and better things. And, yes, despite the positive experiences, I’m glad my job search has come to an end.

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MaraDNS 2.0.14 release

June 10, 2017

MaraDNS 2.0.14 has been released today. This is a non-security bugfix release.

What changed

The only thing I have changed in the maradns binary is to update its version number to 2.0.14. However, I have updated Deadwood, the recursive server, to version 3.2.10, and that has a few updates:

h.root-servers.net IP updated

Slow down issue with mixed case queries fixed

We allow names to start with an underscore

Documentation updates

I have also verified that MaraDNS and Deadwood run in Windows 10.

It can be downloaded at the usual place.

Learning React

Google Trends shows that the React Javascript framework is gaining in popularity. Not only are there a lot of excellent articles about React at Medium, but also it is gaining in popularity according to Google trends:

In this image, the blue line is React JS, which is very popular and gaining. The yellow line is AngularJS, which is still quite popular but starting to wane. The red line barely visible at the bottom of the graph is Ember.js, a Javascript framework which never caught on; what little popularity it had is declining.

I believe the reason why Ember never caught on is because:

It has too steep of a learning curve. Many shops can not afford a month of downtime while their development team learns Ember’s quirks.

It never had a stable API, but constantly changed. You had to either constantly update your code or use an outdated version of Ember.

Likewise, since the API was not stable, people looking for answers to Ember problems on Stack Overflow would find outdated answers.

React, on the other hand, looks to be easier to learn and more flexible to boot. I am going through Facebook’s excellent React tutorial and am pleased React can work with non-Javascript sites (think accessibility for visually disabled people) using the Gatsby framework.

The screenshot from Google Trends is provided here for commentary; While Google may be the copyright owner of this screenshot, its use falls under fair use.

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RIP Robert Miles

May 10, 2017

This is a story of how the musician Robert Miles, who just passed away, brought me joy in a very dark time in my life.

It was a shock tonight to find out Robert Miles, legendary trance musician best known for “Children”, has passed away. He was only 47; far too young to go. His reasons for going so young are mysterious, but I do not need to ask — he can have his privacy.

I will share my memory of his music and how it improved my life:

The year was 1997. It was near the beginning of the dot-com party; I had moved to San Jose from the East Bay to get closer to my job and to the then quickly expanding internet economy. While my finances were doing OK, the rest of my life was not: I had moved away from my friends to a very bad part of town; I fell in love with a girl who decided to marry someone else; I was alone, isolated, and in a very dark painful part of my life.

It was during this time I had a Panasonic SV-3700 DAT player in a run down room in a shared living house I was renting. One of the songs I listened to over and over on that player, in that run down house, was Robert Miles’ “Children.” Even though my life was very dark, that song would bring me a moment of joy, make me feel a happiness that made my life worth living. I would play the song then rewind it back to the beginning so I could listen to it over and over.

Despite how dark my life was, it is still a warm memory how a song could make things feel much better.

Things slowly improved. I ended up going up to San Francisco one night and meeting Victor there; he helped carry me though that part of my life and is a very wonderful friend to this day. I eventually moved out of the country, fell in love, married, and had a kid.

But I will always remember that dark point in my life and how Robert Miles’ music made it a little better for me.

RIP Robert; you will never be forgotten.

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Trumpcare’s defeat

April 3 2017

This blog is about “Trumpcare”, the fact that CDs give perfect sound, and more about my DEH-X1900UB car stereo.

The defeat of Trumpcare

I do not consider the defeat of Trumpcare a defeat of conservative values. I consider the defeat of Trumpcare and the continuation of Obamacare a victory for conservative family values. It was, after all, Republicans who had the power to abolish Obamacare, and conservative Republicans who ultimately decided that a bill that would have killed 24,000 people a year was not a good idea.

Hopefully, this debacle will help the Republican party return to truly conservative values.

CD: Perfect sound forever

Here is one good article showing that CDs sound perfect and here is another article making the same point.

Now, every now and there there appears a paper that claims people can hear the difference between CD quality and high resolution audio in a blind listening test. Every time one of those comes up, I get skeptical; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and there are a lot of ways sound can vary if a test is not properly calibrated. For example:

Was the volume level between the CD quality audio and the high resolution audio calibrated to be exactly the same?

Was the process of converting the high resolution audio to CD quality audio done the same way it would be done in the real world, or was it intentionally crippled? (The second paper I link to from 2014, the “Meridian paper” crippled the CD audio by using “rectangular dither.”)

Does the amplifier, speakers, or headphones suffer from inter-modulation distortion, where frequencies too high for humans to hear are converted in to lower frequency sounds?

Was the study a true double blind study, where neither the listener nor the person conducting the study knew which sound was the high resolution sound?

DEH-X1900UB redux

Now that I have had my DEH-X1900UB car stereo for over a couple of months, some more thoughts:

“Random”, by default, will randomly play any song anywhere on the mp3 CD/USB stick, which makes little sense to me. It’s possible to shuffle a single album by selecting both “Repeat folder” and “random” at the same time, but this is buggy: When the folder is changed, repeat is disabled but random is not disabled, causing the next track to be from any folder unless I remember to either turn on “repeat folder” or turn off “random” when changing albums.

It’s possible to attach a 128 gigabyte USB memory to the unit, as long as the unit is formatted with the FAT32 filesystem (I need to point out here that Windows can format arbitrarily large filesystems as FAT32 without any third party utilities). The issue is that it’s difficult to navigate more than 50 folders or so because the DEH-X1900UB only has two buttons to change folders.

I next disucss the DEH-X1900UB car stereo in a 2021 blog entry.

Comments for blog entries can be seen in the forum.

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Cakewalk Sonar

March 11, 2017

I have purchased Cakewalk Sonar and will slowly make the transition away from hardware and towards software. However, a note about Sonar’s copy protection.

Sonar: Now copy protected

Cakewalk Sonar is one of many computer programs people can use to make music. Just as word processors have made typewriters by and large obsolete, this kind of “Digital Audio Workstation” (DAW) software is making traditional tape-based music production obsolete.

I chose Cakewalk Sonar as the DAW I will learn how to use. While the Cakewalk vs. Ableton vs. Pro Tools vs. Cubase vs. Reason vs. Studio One vs. Ardour vs. Reaper vs. etc. debate is one which will never have a definitive answer, I chose Sonar because it only had serial number copy protection.

“Had” being the operative word here. Starting in 2015, Cakewalk Sonar started using basic challenge-response copy protection. The key word here is basic — Cakewalk didn’t actually try to make the challenge response algorithm hard to crack, and, indeed, there are programs which, given only a challenge, generate a response.

It’s unfortunate that Cakewalk has made installing their software on new computers reliant on their key generation servers remaining online, or using programs that are in a legal gray area to generate a response code. While Cakewalk has promised that the key generation servers are in escrow and will not go offline, I doubt I would be able to generate a response code 30 years from now — and, yes, I do have gear I have owned for more than 30 years in my studio which I still actively use in my music.

Looking back, Reaper, which does not have copy protection at all, might have been a better choice. But, unlike Reaper, Cakewalk includes a selection of nice instruments, and it is probably easier to use.

Hopefully, I will have time to learn how to use Sonar (I also need to update my audio interface to one with MIDI). Until then, I am comfortable with the old school tape based (these days, “tape” is a Tascam DP-32SD Portastudio, which uses a SD card but acts like an old school multitrack tape recorder) and hardware way of making electronic music.

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Jobs

February 23, 2017

It’s the economy, stupid. Let me explain.

A retired pilot

The year was 2012. I was flying to Mexico to be with my wife. Next to me on the plane, there was a guy reading the operations manual for an Airbus A320 plane. I asked if he was a pilot. He was. But, he, along with all of his pilot buddies, was forced to retire at 60 — the airline was cutting expenses.

He was getting a one-time gig taking an A320 airplane which belonged to the defunct Mexicana airline and delivering it to an airline in Egypt by flying it there. He said that he was lucky to get one-off gigs like this; a lot of his fellow flying buddies were unable to get even that kind of work.

He was a bitter man — having his job and livelihood taken away from him by corporate America when he still wanted to work and contribute to society left him upset at life and the world.

I just looked it up, and while hard working pilots are being discarded like trash, airline CEOs are getting millions of dollars when they leave, regardless if how good of a job they actually did.

What most people want are good jobs where they contribute to society and earn a good living wage. Politicians who forget this and concentrate on other issues risk losing elections. The phrase “It’s the economy, stupid” mattered in 1992 and matters just as much today.

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Pioneer DEH-X1900UB

January 17, 2017

I review my new Pioneer DEH-X1900UB car stereo, and give a 2017 roadmap for MaraDNS.

The Pioneer DEH-X1900UB

When I originally bought my new Prius, they had replaced whatever radio/CD player Toyota puts in their models with a cheap Myron and Davis NV7PR1 navigator/DVD player/MP3 player thingy. To say this device was cheap is an understatement. The navigator always had problems finding the GPS satellites; I would often have to wait 10 or 20 minutes after starting to drive before it would figure out where the car was; sometimes it would just not work at all.

Within a year, its volume knob had stopped working, forcing me to use the steering wheel controls. I took it to the dealership to have it fixed or replaced; even though my car was still under warranty, they told me, since it was a third party unit, it was not covered and would not be replaced (it remains an open question whether the dealer I bought the Prius from would have given me better service, since I moved out of state after buying my car).

That unit degenerated more and more as the years passed. The touch screen stopped working, making the unit worthless for GPS use, and forcing me to use the push buttons to change songs. It was still a usable MP3 player, albeit one that didn’t remember where it was in the song when I turned off the car, and albeit one which did not have shuffle or repeat, until it recently start developing an issue where it would randomly skip backward or forwards.

I finally had enough, so I went to Crutchfield to look for the cheapest new car stereo with a CD player, a front panel AUX, and USB input that would fit my car. That stereo was the Pioneer DEH-X1900UB: 50 watts per channel, five band EQ, both a CD and USB player with RedBook, WAV, MP3, plus limited WMA support (no support for WMA lossless), an AM/FM radio, and an aux input on the front panel for easily connecting other devices.

Crutchfield makes it as easy as they can for someone to install their own stereo. They have a tech support line, and suggest all of the things you need to buy to install the stereo while you shop there. In fact, they gave me all of the things needed to mount the stereo in my car for free, even though the stereo was only $70, and then sold me about $30 worth of tools to install the stereo (wire stripper, wire crimps, etc.).

The only tool Crutchfield did not provide was a 10mm hex wrench; however they made it clear it had to be a hex wrench 10mm in size. I was able to find a wrench set at the local Home Depot for $20.

As I started pulling out the old broken stereo, I realized the extender on my wrench was not long enough; returning to Home Depot, a helpful employee showed me where the extenders were, which cost another $15. With the longest extender, I was able to take the old stereo out.

One annoying thing about car stereos is that they don’t have standard connectors on the back. The connector on the back of my stereo had bare wires; I had to strip the wires, connect them to the corresponding wires on the adapter, and use these wire crimps Crutchfield helpfully provided to keep the wires connected without soldering.

Once I did that, installation was straightforward; most everything, nicely enough, worked on the first try. In terms of sound, its default settings hypes the bass a bit, which is great for dance or classical music but a little off sounding if playing relaxing music. Fortunately, I was able to make an EQ preset to give it a more clear sound without the bass over emphasized. This stereo has a noticeably nicer sound than my old broken stereo; classical music sounds a lot clearer — I can hear instruments in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake that I did not hear with my older stereo; the bass does not distort and everything can be clearly heard, albeit with a slight digital sheen. The stereo can play high energy dance music quite loudly. Changing EQ presets is done with a handy dedicated button on the front panel.

Navigating files and folders is straightforward, as long as a CD or USB doesn’t have too many. There are two buttons for selecting the folder; the selected folder name appears and one simply hits a folder select button until the desired folder is active. The player has shuffle and repeat; one can repeat a single song, all the songs in a folder, or all of the songs on the CD/USB drive. It’s possible to pause a song with another button on the front panel.

In terms of look, this has a very Darth Vader look to it, with the majority of the front panel in a deep red, and the display showing the folder name or song title in white. If nothing else, the color scheme is easy on the eyes — I much prefer having red on black than blue on black, which would have been harder on my eyes. More expensive stereos allow custom colors. While there is a brightness setting, the default setting (brightest) is both readable in daylight and not too bright at night.

The stereo only has two preamp outputs — this is not a stereo for people who want to attach multiple external amplifiers. With 50 watts per channel, it can get loud enough to cause hearing damage, so I see no need for extra amplification.

One weakness with the DEH-X1900UB is its radio. Compared to my older unit, reception is poorer, especially on the AM band. I was only able to get a handful of AM stations, and the signal was weak enough that I had to tune the radio by hand to find most of them instead of using the auto seek feature; talk was understandable, albeit with a lot of static, as long as I was not driving under a bridge. On the FM band, reception was better but still a bit weaker than with my previous radio; I am able to listen to the local NPR station most of the time without problem. The unit does have the ability to put the six strongest stations in the memory buttons, but doing so requires menu diving and selecting the cryptic “BSM” item. The DEH-X7800BHS, which costs nearly twice as much, has an improved tuner (as well as bluetooth, better iDevice connectivity, and custom colors).

In terms of interface, I find the interface intuitive, but some reviewers feel it can be a bit complicated. The volume knob, when pushed in, activates various menu options; hitting the volume knob again selects a menu item; hitting the “band select” button (which nicely looks like an arrow going in a U-turn) returns to the previous menu.

This stereo does not have bluetooth for connecting a phone; to get that, I would have needed to get the $90 DEH-X3910BT, or the $100 DEH-X4900BT (the $10 gives you lights that can change color). Instead, I got a $3 app to tell people I’m driving if they call or text me while I’m behind the wheel.

For people who want to use their iPhones with a Pioneer stereo, the DEH-X2900UI is available for $15 more with better Apple phone connectivity.

While a very inexpensive unit, this stereo covers all of the basics that a stereo in the 2010s needs. It’s amazing how good even the most inexpensive stereos are these days.

I continue my discussion of the DEH-X1900UB in another 2017 blog entry and a 2021 blog entry.

MaraDNS update

Back in 2012, I promised to update MaraDNS to be compatible with a newer version of Linux in 2017, but now that five years have passed, I have decided to not do that. MaraDNS is, first and foremost, a DNS server for 32-bit systems; while it can run on 64-bit systems, it is optimized to be a lightweight 32-bit server.

Since CentOS7 is not available as a 32-bit system (unless you use an unofficial port, which OpenVZ does not support), it makes little sense for me to update MaraDNS to be fully supported on this 64-bit system. My plan, instead, is to make CentOS6 be the supported Linux distribution until 2019 or so, at which point I will say that MaraDNS does not have distribution-specific support.

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2016

All blog entries written in 2016

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“Ocean Path” album released

December 6, 2016

I have released my “Ocean Path” CD on Bandcamp and as a physical replicated CD. Also, some minor MaraDNS updates.

“Ocean Path”

Ocean Path is the name of the CD of music I have released this year. This album is nearly two years in the making; I started it near the beginning of 2015 and uploaded the master CD to Bandcamp a couple of weeks ago. It has over 50 minutes of music in nine different songs and is available to listen to or purchase here:

http://caulixtla.com/music

MaraDNS updates

Last month, a security bug in MaraDNS was supposedly found. After investigating the issue, I discovered that the issue actually isn’t a security issue in MaraDNS:

https://​github.​com/​samboy/​Mara​DNS/​issues/​33

The original reporter has verified that the report was a false alarm, as can be seen in this thread:

https://​bugs.​debian.​org/​cgi-​bin/​bugreport.​cgi?​bug=​844121

What is an issue, however, is that h.root-servers.net moved last year. I have finally updated the development snapshot of Deadwood, as well as the MaraDNS Git repo, with the new root server IP:

https://​github.​com/​samboy/​Mara​DNS/​issues/​34

The updated tarball is here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

And the patch can be seen here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​browse-​source/​head/​update/​3.​2.​10/​deadwood-​3.​2.​09-​root​Servers.​patch

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Why the polls were wrong

November 14, 2016

Why did the polls get the 2016 presidential election results so wrong?

Let’s look at some figures, which, since this is a blog post and not a school paper, I got from the Wikipedia [1]

2004 Bush votes: 62,040,610
2004 Kerry votes: 59,028,444

2008 McCain votes: 59,948,323
2008 Obama votes: 69,498,516

2012 Romney votes: 60,933,504
2012 Obama votes: 65,915,795

2016 Trump votes: 60,350,241
2016 Clinton votes: 60,981,118 [2]

(Since there’s a right-wing theory floating around that Trump got more popular votes, I include a reference to the 2016 voter figures)

Point being, Republicans have a pretty stable turnout model, but Democrat turnout fluctuates a lot more.

Now, the problem with polls is that most people, these days, plain simply do not answer the phone and take the time to answer a poll — people have been inundated by telemarketers to the point they just don’t answer the phone if they don’t know the number calling them — and, with the entire culture of free, there is less money to do a proper poll.

So, when someone does answer the phone (or take the online survey), they then ask questions about gender, race, ethnicity, age, and likelihood of voting.

Since different races and ages have different rates of answering the phone, and since said groups have different rates of voting (with some groups being reliably Democratic, and other groups being reliably Republican), what the pollsters then do is skew their numbers so that their sample is (hopefully) the same as the number of people who go out to vote.

However, if you look at the figures, Democratic turnout is highly violate. If a polling firm uses, say, 2012 voter turnout models to determine who is going to vote in 2016, they will predict the kind of decisive loss Romney had in 2012.

The issue here is not that Trump energized some base of voters; the issue here is that reliable Republican voters held their nose and voted for Trump, while 10%-20% of Democrats stayed home instead of voting for Hillary.

When pollsters called me, the first questions were screening questions. One time, I said I was fairly (but not very) likely to vote; that resulted in them ending the call. If this is how polls are run, they are not getting very good demographic information about people who stay home instead of vote.

It’s the Democrats staying home which gave the election to Trump. Pollsters did not get good information about who was staying home, and that is why they saw Hillary having the same kind of victory Obama had in 2012.

References

[1] https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​United_​States_​presidential_​election,_​2016

[2] http://​interactives.​ap.​org/​2016/​general-​election/?​SITE=​APQA

December 2016 update: The current numbers are 62,800,198 Trump — 65,443,689 Clinton. This in mind, the issue is not only the Democrats who stayed home (but that’s a factor; if Clinton had gotten as many votes as Obama did in 2008, she would have won) but also the fact that Trump was able to get about two million more voters than Romney and McCain did; he energized conservative voters in key swing states that previous candidates did not — voters who the pollsters probably did not account for.

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Trump is toast

October 8, 2016

In light of yesterday’s leaked audio of Trump saying some very crude and derogatory things about women, his political career is over.

Warning Strong language. Potential triggers for survivors of sexual abuse. Reader discretion is advised.

Teflon Trump finally has made a gaffe which has ruined him. Just as Todd Akin’s political career was killed for his line “If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down”, Trump’s presidential hopes have been killed for saying “Grab them by the pussy.”

Why did this and not anything else kill Trump? Because:

It’s a very short and memorable soundbite, only five words long

It’s on tape, so the misogynists can’t pretend the allegation is false

It’s something that offends rank and file Republicans (especially the religious right) strongly enough that they can’t ignore it anymore

The original plan was to air this after the debate Sunday; I think it was better to air it before, because it makes it impossible for Trump to win the debate. I would not be surprised if Trump doesn’t even show up.

There’s a reason why the Republican politicians in large numbers are finally moving away from Trump. They know that anything less than a complete condemnation of this will kill them down-ballot. Actually, it will probably kill them down ballot anyway.

And, yeah, I have grabbed women there. But only with their full consent when I was in a long term relationship with them.

Addendum

While we’re on the subject of respecting woman and not treating them like sex objects, let’s put some PUA/Misogynist myths to rest.

First, Alpha F***s/Beta Bucks (and, likewise, the notion of “Chad” seducing every man’s wife) is a lie; women very rarely make their husbands cuckolds:

http://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2016/​04/​12/​science/​extra-​marital-​paternity-​less-​common-​than-​assumed-​scientists-​find.​html?_​r=​0

Second, there is no “cock carousel.” Women, on average, have fewer sexual partners than men:

http://​www.​cdc.​gov/​nchs/​nsfg/​key_​statistics/​n.​htm

Finally, women do not think being raped is sexy:

https://​www.​psychologytoday.​com/​blog/​all-​about-​sex/​201508/​why-​do-​women-​have-​rape-​fantasies

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Album: Almost done

September 19, 2016

An update on my album project, the Star Trek movies, and a note on something I wrote on my Facebook back in 2010.

Album update

The album is almost done. All of the songs have been recorded and mixed; right now the only things that need to be done before release is to get the songs mastered and to draw the cover art. The album represents nearly two years of making music while busily being a single parent with a full time job; there will be ten songs with over 69 minutes of music on the album.

The album should be released before the end of the year. Look for it on Bandcamp.

Star Trek: Beyond

The only movie I got a chance to see in the theaters this year is Star Trek: Beyond; I saw this because I have seen pretty much every Star Trek film when they first came out. I liked the movie; it’s what happens if you take the classic Star Trek characters, have them played by different actors, and have the movie directed by someone who has directed Fast and Furious movies.

This movie ended up being more popular with hard core Star Trek fans but, unfortunately, not as popular with the viewing public as the previous two Trek movies.

Something I said in 2010

I wrote this six years ago, just as the “tea party” movement was making a foothold. Here in 2016, we’re seeing the Republican party about to have its worst election since Goldwater — because the Republicans chose to embrace candidates that represent the worst of conservatism (Bigotry, intolerance, hatred) instead of the best (Hard work, personal responsibility, sacrifice)

I support conservative values in so much as they represent honesty, reverence, hope, thrift, humility, charity, sincerity, moderation, hard work, courage, personal responsibility, and friendship. I reject conservative values in so much as they represent intolerance, bigotry, insensitivity, and hatred.

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Christianity and bigotry

August 26, 2016

I originally wrote this right after the Orlando nightclub shooting, where a madman killed a large number of gay people. I talk about the sin of using “Christianity” to justify intolerance.

Becoming Christian

I was once an atheist. I was too smart to be a Christian. This changed when I had a spiritual experience. This particular experience happened the night a devoutly Catholic gay man I knew succumbed to AIDS. I knew God was love and became a person of faith that evening.

When I started sharing my faith, and met other people of faith, I had a rude awakening. Instead of it being about the love of God, these men wanted it to be about going to the right church and avoid going to “cults”, where a “cult” was any religion they disagreed with. Their belief system was not about love, but about believing they were right and other people were wrong.

This was before widespread internet access; it would be a few years before I got my first email address and internet connection. So, back then, information was spread via television and books, and research meant hanging out at the school library.

The type of Christianity I saw was not impressive. The preachers on TV, when not asking for money, talked about how all nonbelievers were going to Hell. The books I read were making weak arguments that one particular form of Christianity was absolute objective truth — but without there being a way to comment on the books short of writing another book or getting an article published in a magazine, there was no way to refute what the book was saying.

So, when I looked at religion, I saw a lot of intolerance being done in the name of Jesus. This leads me to...

“Christianity” and gay people

First of all, whether the Bible condemns gay people (No, Lev. 18:22 does not apply today) and encourages bigotry is questionable. The old testament laws against gay sex do not apply today any more than, say, the prohibitions against eating shellfish.

Secondly, in terms of the New Testament, the supposed prohibitions against gay people by Saint Paul stem from the translation of two words: Malakoi and Arsenokoites, neither of which refers to a gay person in a long-term monogamous commitment.

Thirdly, the condemnation of gay people by “Christians” goes against the spirit of Matthew 7:3-5 and Luke 10:25-37 (The parable of the Good Samaritan). There are a number of Christians today who, for example, have engaged in extramarital sexual intercourse or who are divorcees. This goes against Jesus’ words on the matter but we do not see fundamentalist churches trying to make divorce illegal nor having “Christian” bakers refuse to make cakes for second marriages done after divorce. Why is this?

There is a desire among people — a sinful desire — to make another group the other, and to, instead of looking at our own sins, condemn people who are part of the other group. By looking and condemning gay people, fundamentalists can avoid taking responsibility for their own sins. By being narrow-minded and intolerant, people can use religion as an excuse to become angry, instead of as a reason to love thy neighbor.

There is a reason young people are turning away from Christian religion — they see it as a place for demagogues to engage in intolerance instead of as a place where people can learn to love each other by experiencing God’s love.

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New single released

July 21, 2016

I have released a new single this month. Also, some thoughts on current events and MaraDNS.

New single released

I have released another single from my slowly developing album (as a single parent with a full time job, it’s going to take time to finish the album). It’s called “Foggy Beach Party” and it’s available to listen to or buy on my Bandcamp page:

https://​caulixtla.​bandcamp.​com/​album/​foggy-​beach-​party

The A-side of this single, “Foggy Beach Party”, is a mid-tempo dance number which also has a nice ambient feel to it. The B-side, “Clouds”, is a purely ambient song.

Race doesn’t matter to kids

This month, the week after the Dallas shootings, and just before the Baton Rogue shootings, my daughter — white latina — had a positive experience playing in the park with some black and Asian children. Indeed, I was the only non-latino white at the park’s playground. Was there any conflict or name calling? No, just some kids sharing the park in a friendly, civilized manner.

It’s a shame that multiple races of kids playing in the park together are more mature than the click bait articles and hideous comment sections which constitute modern journalism. The forces which want a race war are not winning here — Martin Luther King’s dream of little black kids and little white kids being together is very much a reality.

Then again, I live in a state where the Republican party pulled out the racism card two decades ago in an attempt to energize their base. It didn’t work — and now they have no power at all in state level politics.

MaraDNS: Not chasing moving goalposts

MaraDNS is an open-source project I did in the first 2000s decade to keep my skills current while I lived in Mexico.

Summary: Some domains don’t resolve when using Deadwood as a fully recursive resolver, and I don’t have time to fix the issue.

When I originally wrote MaraDNS, in 2001, I went to a lot of effort to have it handle CNAME glue the same way legacy versions of BIND handled it, without the resulting security problems BIND had.

When I rewrote that code for Deadwood in 2010, I used the same algorithm.

Let’s look at a real world example, cdn.kraftmusic.com:

cdn.kraftmusic.com. CNAME kraftmusic.kraftmusic.netdna-cdn.com.

kraftmusic.kraftmusic.netdna-cdn.com. A 141.8.225.31

MaraDNS looks at this, and stores, in the slot for “cdn.kraftmusic.com”, the IP 141.8.225.31. However, the people serving DNS records for Kraftmusic.com have an out of date IP for their CNAME glue. Here’s the real IP from one of the nameservers for netdna-cdn.com:

kraftmusic.kraftmusic.netdna-cdn.com. A 94.46.159.2

Like the issue of CNAMEs being combined with other records, I have no plans to fix this issue, for pretty much the same reasons. I might change my stance in five years when my child is a little older, but, ever since I became a single parent, I have not had time to play the “let’s update Deadwood to resolve every single corner case bug-for-bug the way BIND does” game without getting paid for my work.

I encourage aspiring programmers to fork MaraDNS and fix this issue themselves. Use The Source Luke (UTSL). However, please don’t call your forks “MaraDNS.”

2022 update: I finally fixed this bug in MaraDNS-3.5.0023

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The primary is over

June 8, 2016

Now that the Democratic primary is over, my thoughts on how it went and a revised prediction for the November 8 election.

Nov 8 prediction

OK, now that we know it’s going to be a Trump - Clinton match, and primary season is over, my revised presidential prediction: This contest will be won hands down by women and minority voters.

It’s well known that a Republican can not win without Latino support (hence why the Bushes were so friendly to them). Even Florida Cubans look at Trump in disgust. So FL looks to be a pretty easy win for Clinton.

Trump supporters and BernieOrBusters consist primarily of white males; the Republicans might get Ohio this time around, but, if so, it will be the first time since 1960 Ohio is not a bellwether for the general election. Virginia is somewhat more blue than Ohio; it got more raw votes for Hillary in the primary than Trump, so I think this will go blue again.

Without Florida or Virginia, there are very few paths of victory for Trump. I’ve already bet money on Hillary winning and I don’t see anything to change that prediction.

Here is my current prediction map:

http://www.270towin.com/maps/qOzNA

I am glad Bernie ran

I am very glad Bernie ran. My goal ultimately is to see government do something to fight the income inequality that has been increasing ever since the Nixon administration. Bernie Sanders, even though he had some ideas which may not be practical, had the right mindset: The increasing income inequality is one of the biggest problems threatening our nation, and it’s one we must look at.

I think Bernie had some really good proposals. I don’t think the US is ready for them yet. That’s why I filled in the oval for Hillary yesterday in my primary; not out of some great support for Hillary’s ideals, but out of a pragmatic concern that I would rather win an election than support someone who is unelectable (e.g., McGovern, Mondale, or Dukakis).

The popularity and support Bernie got shows that there are a lot of people out there ready for progressive ideals. But those ideals are not ready to become a reality yet.

Yes, the primary got ugly as Bernie was losing and his supporters were going through the denial and angry stages of grief. Yes, Nevada was a low moment in the primary. But we’re beyond that now. Hillary has won the nomination, and it’s time to concentrate on the general election.

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Making music

May 1, 2016

This blog is about making music: Vinyl or CD, Bandcamp, and my up and coming album.

Vinyl or CD?

Should musicians press to vinyl or CD?

The big disadvantage of vinyl compared to CDs is that it costs quite a bit more to make. Replicated — that means silver, like the ones you get at Amazon, and not CD-Rs — can be had for just over $1 each in fairly small quantities (300-500). Records are about $6 each to make in fairly small quantities (300-500), can only fit about 40 minutes of music [1], and have a lot of audio limitations to watch out for which CDs do not. [2]

[1] I am aware that people have squeezed more on vinyl; Irv Teibel put about 30 minutes of ambient sound on each side of his “Environments” discs back in the 1970s, but the sound quality suffered.

[2] Bass must be cut off fairly high (this can be minimized by pressing a 12" 45 and only having 12 minutes of music on each side), bass must be panned to the center, dynamic range must be minimized (yes, I know, everyone minimizes the dynamic range with CDs to make the music as loud as possible), the high end must be cut off (be careful with those cymbals and hi hats if pressing to vinyl!), and forget about matrix encoded surround sound on vinyl (yes, I know, several attempts to do precisely that were done in the 1970s)

[3] All of this, I’m sure makes the music sound warmer. Extra points are given if recording with an Ampex MM1000 16-track and mixing to 1/2". Be sure to record using a fully decked out Eurorack modular — get a U87 for extra measure — because, you know, if your kids are college material, they can get fully paid for scholarships and go to public universities.

[4] With the amount of student loan debt out there, it’s a better idea to go to a public university anyway. But I’m going to continue recording using a DP-32SD instead of a MM1000, thank you very much.

Bandcamp

Actually, I just release my music on Bandcamp. Simple, no up-front costs, and allows me to share my music with the world.

My album

Right now, my album is over 50% done. I have released one song from the up and coming album, have three other songs mixed and ready to release, one song that will definitely get on the album once I finish it up, and a few ideas which may or may not make it on to the album.

I hope to have something out by the end of 2016. We’ll see.

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RIP Prince and George Martin

April 21, 2016

This blog is a tribute to Prince, who died today, and to George Martin, who died on March 8.

Prince

I found out Prince had passed away today in a tweet from reverb DSP guru Sean Costello.

It was the sexual content of his songs, particularly “Darling Nikki”, that inspired the PMRC, resulting in those stickers on albums warning buyers of explicit content. One of the recording engineers who was recording live tracks for his Purple Rain album tells the story of an attractive woman wearing nothing but a trenchcoat flashing to Prince after the recording. To say Prince had access to more tail than a toilet seat at a sorority house would be a vast understatement.

Despite this, he was led to a deep faith in God and a belief that sex is only appropriate to have in a lifetime monogamous commitment. All that promiscuous sex he undoubtedly had during the peak of his career in the 1980s did not satisfy him in the long run, but a faith in God and in monogamy did.

George Martin

George Martin, who died on March 8, will be remembered for his contributions to the Beatles’ music, but another great album he produced was 1982’s Quartet by Ultravox. This album shows that not only could he produce some of the finest classic Rock and Roll ever made, he was also able to make a really great electronic music album when tasked to do so.

Even though this album is very much electronic, it sounds very orchestral and epic. It would have been interesting to hear how Quartet would have sounded with the live orchestra used in the Beatles’ recordings, instead of the layered analog synthesizers it ended up using, but this album’s amazingly orchestral sounding textures show that Martin was an effective producer and arranger, regardless of the instruments he used. This is a monumental feat when taking in to account that this album was made before digital samplers sounded realistic (an Emulator I or Fairlight in 1982 was a very interesting artistic tool, but a very ineffective “orchestra in a box”); making electronic music sound like in an orchestra in 1982 as well as Martin did is an amazing accomplishment.

The presidential primary

Hillary Clinton is still on track to securing the Democratic nomination; things are much more interesting on the Republican side. Ever since the New York primary on Tuesday, Donald Trump is the only candidate who can secure enough pledged delegates to win the nomination. Whether or not he can is up in the air. How the Republican party will handle things if no one gets enough delegates before the convention in July is an interesting question.

The Republicans are in a difficult situation. If they make Trump the nominee, they will get soundly defeated in the presidential election and the “blue wave” voters who show up to vote against Trump will also make the Republican party lose the senate this November. If they do not make Trump the nominee, Republican Trump supporters will stay at home this election, resulting in the same “blue wave.”

Either way, Hillary Clinton will win this fall. And, yes, I have bet money on her winning.

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Super Tuesday

March 4, 2016

After the Super Tuesday results, I have revised my presidential election prediction.

My prediction

Clinton will win in the Trump vs. Clinton race on November 8, 2016.

I predict the same result we got in 2012: The Democrats will get 332 electoral votes, and the Republicans will get 206 electoral votes: http://www.270towin.com/maps/qjjxE

It’s not going to be an easy victory for her: Her favorability rating has gone down over the last month, and it’s going to take a lot of work on her part to win over middle of the road voters, as well as left-wing voters who will be disillusioned by Sanders’ losing.

Trump will attempt to paint her has someone beholden to Wall Street; Clinton’s campaign is already planning how they will win the general election this November.

Sanders is toast

It was expected that Clinton was going to win the states in the deep south. It was expected that Sanders was going to win the states in the flyover states with mostly white populations. However, Sanders needed to win more states in the northeast besides his home state Vermont, and he needed to get more votes in the southern states than he did.

While Sanders made up some of his lost votes in Colorado, Oklahoma, and Minnesota, it’s not enough for him to be able to catch up. Clinton will become the Democratic nominee for this election.

This gives the Democrats the best chance of winning the general on November 8: If Sanders got the nomination, the “socialist” label would kill him in the general election.

What I hope happens is that the young people supporting Bernie right now don’t give up when he loses the primary and hold on to their ideals. Maybe in 20 years we can have someone like him become president, and we can join the rest of the 1st world industrialized nations with regards to public health care and benefits.

It took nearly two decades for California to go from Proposition 187 to the Republicans having no political power at the state level, and the Republicans did every dirty trick to hold on to that power (most notably the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election).

Head to Head polls

The head to head polls showing Bernie doing better than Hillary are inaccurate, as described here:

https://​fivethirtyeight.​com/​features/​a-​year-​out-​ignore-​general-​election-​polls/

One case study: Bush lost 20 points between 1999 and 2000 as voters became more familiar with him.

Trump: Winning with under 50%

While Trump is only getting about 40% of the Republican vote, he is creaming all of the other Republican candidates. If either Rubio or Cruz, as well as Carson and Kasich, dropped out right now, Trump would not win the primary — but none of the current candidates is willing to give up their shot at the White House, even if it means Trump will secure the nomination with less than 50% support from Republicans.

Trump has hit his ceiling: About 45% of Republicans, at most, will vote for him. That’s enough to win the nomination.

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Bernie Bro award

February 28, 2016

I preset for you the Bernie Bro award, for the most obnoxious and inaccurate statement made by a fanatical supporter of Bernie Sanders.

The Winner

Here, a Bernie Bro claims that Nader didn’t let Bush win in 2000:

For those who can not see the screenshot, this Bernie Bro said the following:

So you're just going to keep on pretending that Nader lead to Bush, eh? Keep telling yourself that. Just to be safe, don't look yourself in the eye when you're doing it. You may make yourself sick...

Fact: If 5% of the voters who voted for Nader in Florida in 2010 voted for Gore instead, Gore would have won in 2000. But that doesn’t stop this Bernie Bro from claiming otherwise, and being really obnoxious about it.

Let’s see:

Inaccurate. Nader gave Bush a razor thin margin in 2000.

Obnoxious. This Bernie Bro uses inflammatory language.

Content free. This Bernie Bro doesn’t have one single rational argument to back up their point.

With supporters like these, Bernie Sanders doesn’t need enemies.

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Winter NAMM 2016

January 29, 2016

This blog is about this year’s winter National Association of Music Merchants (NAMM) show, and the synthesizers introduced there. I also have my first prediction for the 2016 presidential election.

NAMM 2016: Synthesizers

I’m not that excited by this year’s NAMM. The only really interesting synth to come out is from Korg: The $500 Minilogue is nothing short of amazing. Their 3-voice Volca DX7 also looks interesting, and is more flexible than Yamaha’s disappointing Reface DX.

In terms of the other stuff: Moog didn’t come out with anything new; since they are having a hard time keeping up with demand for their Mother-32, I can see why they haven’t had a chance to do so. They are phasing out their flagship Minimoog and have nothing to replace it yet.

Roland is making modular again, but you’re looking at $2000 for a basic monophonic synth module without patch memory and without a keyboard; the keyboard is a $400 Boutique A01. Speaking of Boutique, I was really hoping for a $1000 or so bigger Boutique with more voices, or a Boutique modeled analog drum machine, but that didn’t happen. Nor did Roland release something like a System-8 ARIA plugout with more than four voices of polyphony. But that talented lady demoing their new Cajón drum unit sure is a lovely latina. Compared to the JD-Xi and JD-Xa which they showed last year this time, 2016 Winter NAMM was a letdown.

It’s nice to see Oberheim’s back, but the $3000 OB-6 isn’t that different from last year’s Prophet-6, and I’m a bit disappointed DSI is phasing out their under-$1000 stuff (Morpho, Tetra, etc.) without coming out with something new at that price point like a Prophet-1.

The Matrixbrute from Authuria looks interesting, but, again, we’re looking at thousands of dollars for a monophonic synth, and with the QC issues they have had with their micro and minibrutes, I’m not sure how reliable these critters will be.

That MakeNoise 0-Coast looks interesting, but we’re looking at paying $500 for a monophonic one trick pony. Teenage Engineering’s three new pocket operators are much more affordable at $100 each (once you get a real case for them), but, again, these are one trick ponies.

The much anticipated Behringer analog synth was a complete no-show.

Last year’s winter NAMM, with Roland making analog again and with Dave Smith making end-to-end analog poly again with the Prophet-6 was, with the exception of this year’s amazing Minilogue, a much more interesting show.

My first 2016 presidential prediction

I have made my first 2016 presidential prediction:

http://www.270towin.com/maps/qgwJD

To save you a click: I think the Republicans will get Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina, but Democrats will get Virginia. It will be 285 electoral votes for Democrats; 253 for Republicans.

I think it will probably be a Clinton-Kasich match; Sanders, Trump, and Cruz all have the problem of appealing to certain groups of loud spoken voters but don’t have enough appeal to win a general election. Kasich is leading in a recent New Hampshire poll, and has the advantage of being Ohio’s governor, which will give the Republicans one key swing state.

If Trump were to get the nomination or run as a third party, it would be a disaster for the Republicans; there would be feasible chance the Democrats would get Texas for the first time since 1976.

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2015

All blog entries written in 2015

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Removing MaraDNS’ ads

December 7 2015

This blog is about why I removed the ads from samiam.org and maradns.samiam.org, and an issue I had restoring Windows 7 on my Lenovo Thinkpad.

Removing the ads

When I originally put the ads on maradns.samiam.org and samiam.org, I promised that the ads would always be unobtrusive and text-only. Well, Google changed the ads they give their subscribers; what were once text-only ads now have images in them, making them obtrusive and gaudy.

So I have pulled all ads from my websites. Yes, this is going to cost me real money. But I made a promise to the MaraDNS community, and I can no longer be a client of Google ad words and keep that promise. So the ads go.

I have replaced the obtrusive text + image ads with a single unobtrusive one-line ad at the top of the MaraDNS webpages: “Support MaraDNS or listen to my music” “Support MaraDNS” takes users to a page where they can make a PayPal donation. “Listen to my music” takes users to my page where they can listen to for free and optionally buy the music I am composing.

I keep the promises I have made to the MaraDNS community. That is why I released Deadwood and MaraDNS 2.0 after I realized I no longer wanted to define myself as “The MaraDNS guy.” That is why I still fix security problems in MaraDNS 2, even though, as a single parent, it’s hard to find time to do so. And that is why I spent a lot of time this last weekend scrubbing all of the ads from my web sites.

Reinstalling Windows 7 on my Thinkpad

Lenovo Thinkpads come with an tool which supposedly makes DVDs of all of the files needed to reinstall windows from scratch on a Thinkpad. Only one problem: When I needed to reinstall Windows on my Thinkpad, the image discs did not work. I had to take a fresh install of Windows 7, on my Thinkpad’s identical twin sister which I keep in a closet and sometimes run Windows Update on, make a sector-by-sector disk image of the hard disk, and copy that image to my current Thinkpad.

This process took 12 hours but gave me a working system again. Lesson learned: The only way to ensure I can recover a Windows image so I can reinstall it without purchasing another Windows license is by spending the six hours or so making a sector-by-sector copy of the hard disk when I first buy the system.

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Round up

November 30, 2015

This blog is a quick round-up for November of 2015.

France

My prayers are with the victims of the horrible tragedy that happened in France earlier this month, and will say no more out of respect for the victims.

Equal temperament

Human ears like the ratios of 2/1 (octave), 3/2 (perfect fifth), 4/3 (perfect fourth), 5/4 (major third), and 6/5 (minor third). 12-tone equal temperament gives you a really good (but not perfect — that is mathematically impossible with equal temperament) fifth and forth, but its minor and major thirds are over 10 cents out of tune. Then again, equal temperament allows a composer to change keys without having to retune all of the notes.

If you will, all of the notes are equally out of tune in all keys when using equal temperament.

There are a number of interesting ways solutions to try and improve things. I’ll name just one: 19-tone equal temperament gives you a better minor and major third, but its perfect fourth and fifths are barely in tune (7 cents instead of under two cents away from the ideal)

Music update

Since one of my older pieces of gear for making music is starting to experience hardware trouble, I have been distracted by having to replace it with a complicated but reasonably inexpensive setup involving making an older computer part of my recording studio. The new technology sounds better, is far more flexible, and costs a lot less than the technology I was using in the late 1990s and early oughts (first 2000s decade), but it’s a lot more time consuming to set up than a “plug in an go” box from the 1980s or 1990s.

That said, I have gotten a really nice track for my up and coming album finished this month. I will probably release it on Bandcamp before the end of the year.

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MaraDNS update, making music

October 8, 2015

In this blog, I discuss making music again and a MaraDNS update.

Making music again

Since the beginning of this year, I have started to make some music again and am slowly but surely writing an album of music. Right now, four songs are mostly finished, and I will make the music public once I have at least eight songs and 30 minutes of music.

In the meantime, I have set up a domain (and Facebook and Twitter and Bandcamp and Soundcloud and even a Reddit sub) for promoting the music:

http://caulixtla.com/

I hope, once this is released, people enjoy listening to the music as much I have enjoyed making the music.

MaraDNS update

There is a buffer overflow (actually, underflow) in Deadwood which allows an out of bounds memory location to be overwritten with the output of malloc().

It is unknown whether this buffer underflow is remotely exploitable; it has only been seen on systems where there is no default gateway route.

Unlike other recent bugs which have popped up, this is not something from the 2001-2002 codebase; this is from the 2009 codebase when I added code to merge multiple inflight connections, to protect against attacks like https://​cve.​mitre.​org/​cgi-​bin/​cvename.​cgi?​name=​CVE-​2008-​4392 (Yeah, spoofing is much more dangerous than being able to possibly remotely crash Deadwood, so I made the right call)

I have verified that the 2.3 branch of Deadwood doesn’t have inflight merging, so it doesn’t have this bug.

In flight merging (and this bug) was added on August 31, 2009, in Deadwood 2.4.07 http://​maradns.​blogspot.​com/​2009/​08/​deadwood-​2407-​released.​html

In addition, there are two buffer overflows (actually, one buffer overflow and one buffer underflow) in ParseMaraRc.c. One of the buffer overruns can not be exploited, the other is a difficult to exploit buffer overflow (actually, underflow) in the mararc parser. The workaround is to not let random people edit the mararc file (which is usually in /etc and owned by root); the fix is in MaraDNS 2.0.13.

The MaraDNS exploit is very limited. It’s not possible to write to any memory with this bug; it only allows MaraDNS to read from a memory location she should not read from.

Deadwood 3.2.09 and MaraDNS 2.0.13 fix these bugs, and are available for download here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download.​html

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Welcome to September

September 1, 2015

Welcome to September of 2015, everyone. I discuss gay marriage, keeping my camera with a phone secure, the Sad Puppes Hugo fiasco, and a very minor MaraDNS security bug.

Gay marriage

The fundamentalists continue to make a stink about marrying people who are gay. Kim Davis in Kentucky still refuses to issue marriage certificates, even though it’s now the law of the land that she must issue those certificates (the Supreme Court refused to hear her appeal). I told her legal counsel that her open defiance of the law is not Biblical on their Facebook page:

Romans 13:1 “Let every soul be subject to the authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those who are authorities are ordained by God” It’s OK to think gay marriage is a sin, just as it’s OK to think marrying someone previously divorced is a sin, but it now is the law that they be given a secular marriage license. Luke 20:25 “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”

After writing that, I found out that Kim Davis has been divorced at least three times. Pot, kettle, black.

Should I mention that the group giving Davis legal counsel believes that “Those who are not saved will be forever separated from God in hell?”

My camera got a security update

I was very pleasantly surprised to get a message from AT&T that they had an update for my older cell phone, a Galaxy S4 Zoom (which is more a camera with a phone than a phone with a camera). While AT&T does not list the security bugs patched, it presumably patches the Stagefright bug and hopefully patches the keyboard update security bug.

Sad Puppies

A few thoughts about the sad puppy nonsense, which caused the 2015 Hugos (one of the most prestigious awards in Science Fiction; you could, for a long time, get Asimov’s “The Hugo Winners” collection of stories and be guaranteed a great read) to have far fewer meaningful winners.

It started when the social justice warriors (SJWs — yes, you heard me say “SJW”, and I’m talking about the really resentful hate-filled extreme left, not just anyone left-of-center) were very inappropriate to Larry Correia at Worldcon 2011 because they disagreed with his politics.

In retaliation, a large number of right-wing people, calling themselves “Sad Puppes” (or “Rabid Puppies”) have been voting for the same stories in all categories. In 2015, this resulted in entire categories (best short story, etc.) having only candidates the “Puppies” voted for.

GRRM (George Martin), who wrote a lot about the sad puppies, just could not understand how Correia could have had such a negative experience, because he experienced the Worldcon of the 1970s. He wrote that “I have read Correia’s blog, and I know he says that he was treated very badly at the Reno worldcon, attacked for his views, denounced as a racist and homophobe. I was at Reno myself, but I don’t recall meeting him, so I don’t know the details of any of that. It shocks me to hear it, because the fandom I know has always been warm and welcoming to people of all political views.”

Vox Day, who started the “Rabid Puppies” list, is a radical extremist who attracts the resentful hate-filled far right. He gave people a list of sci-fi works to vote for, including his own works, and the extreme right voted for the items on his list without reading them or otherwise making an attempt to appreciate great Sci-Fi. So, you got a lot of people who didn’t really care for SF stacking the vote by all voting for the same five items (called “slate voting”).

Because a number of categories (including “Best Short Story”) only had the five works Vox Day chose as 2015 nominees, a lot of categories at this year’s Hugo just didn’t get winners. The Hugos big time lost.

There is a proposal to make it not feasible for a minority to stuff the Hugo nominee ballot box via slate voting called SDV-LPE. It’s fairly simple, and explained fully elsewhere. SDV-LPE is a fair system which favors people choosing the works they genuinely liked the most while making mindless slate votes less able to dominate who gets nominated.

It’s unfortunate that the radical right destroyed the 2015 Hugos, but it’s also unfortunate that the radical left was so hateful towards Larry Correia in Worldcon 2011. The Sad/Rabid Puppies happened because the Twitter and click-bait internet we have encourages tribal thinking and mob mentality over logical, reasoned critical thinking.

Minor MaraDNS security update

Another bug from MaraDNS’ original 2001 codebase has been found. There’s a difficult to exploit buffer overflow (actually, underflow) in the mararc parser. The workaround is to not let random people edit your mararc file (which is usually in /etc and owned by root); the fix is available on GitHub, as a development snapshot, not to mention a patch, and will be made part of MaraDNS proper when I release 2.0.13 next year.

I checked, and, yes, MaraDNS 1.0.00 from 2002 had this particular bug. Most of the things like this come from the 2001-2002 codebase; I wrote too much code too quickly because there was a hurry to have an open-source DNS server that wasn’t BIND at the time.

The exploit is very limited. It’s not possible to write to any memory with this bug; it only allows MaraDNS to read from a memory location she should not read from.

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MaraDNS 2.0.12

August 19, 2015

I have released MaraDNS 2.0.12 to fix a security bug in the zoneserver daemon. All users are encouraged to update to this version of MaraDNS.

The bug

I got a GitHub bug report about MaraDNS’ zoneserver program getting a segmentation fault. In the stack trace, free() was being called against a memory location whose value was uninitialized (and therefore random).

This bug allows a denial of service attack; by making the zoneserver daemon free an invalid memory location, it was possible to terminate the zoneserver process. I do not know whether or not this bug is remotely exploitable.

The fix

I now always initialize the memory location in question.

Because of the nature of this bug, I have made a MaraDNS 2.0.12 release to fix this bug. It can be downloaded here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download.​html

Sourceforge

As I have promised before, I am no longer updating the Sourceforge version of MaraDNS. People may download MaraDNS from the MaraDNS web site, or from GitHub:

https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

MaraDNS 1

This bug impacts MaraDNS 1. I will not fix this bug in older versions of MaraDNS; I have given users a three-year warning that MaraDNS 1 is no longer supported. All MaraDNS 1 users need to upgrade to MaraDNS 2.

Other changes in MaraDNS 2.0.12

In addition to fixing this bug, MaraDNS 2.0.12 updates Deadwood (documentation updates and increased maxprocs values), fixes zoneserver to work with newer versions of dig, and has a number of documentation updates.

Future MaraDNS plans

When and if letsencrypt.org becomes live and offers free HTTPS certificates, I will get a free wildcard cert for samiam.org and start serving MaraDNS over SSL (TLS).

Unless another security bug comes up, my next MaraDNS and Deadwood release will be in the late summer of 2016.

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God is Not a Bigot

July 24, 2015

God is not a bigot. I will explain why, using scripture.

Luke 10:25-28

Behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tested him, saying, “Teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?”

He said to him, “What is written in the law? How do you read it?”

He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind; and Love your neighbor as yourself.”

He said to him, “You have answered correctly. Do this, and you will live.”

Discussion

I heard this morning about a vandal who defaced a Christian church because this church performed gay weddings. This made the news in quite a few places on the Internet. To save you a click, someone spray painted “You’ll burn; Leviticus 18:22” on the doors of a church in Georgia which performs gay weddings.

This is not Christianity. It is hatred, intolerance, and bigotry using a perverse version of Christianity to justify sin.

Jesus warned us of these “Christians” (Matthew 7:15-17), as did Paul (2 Corinthians 11:13-14).

See also: Applebee’s and God - On Anne Frank - On rationalization - On fundamentalist reasoning - On my faith in God - Everyone has a soapbox - The Rapture - Final 2010 post; NIV update

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MaraDNS 1 plans

June 12, 2015

I explain why I am going to keep a MaraDNS 1 download on MaraDNS’s webpage after its end of life. And, oh, I have made a minor ObHack update.

Sourceforge: Betrayed trust

For years, I knew I could download something from Sourceforge knowing that I didn’t need to worry about Sourceforge adding adware or other unwanted programs to the download.

Sourceforce, alas has started bundling adware with their downloads. Not only does this break the trust Sourceforge had with users downloading software from their site, but also it was an attempt to cash in on other people’s hard work.

That in mind, I will no longer upload MaraDNS updates to Sourceforge. MaraDNS 2.0.11 will be the last version of MaraDNS uploaded there. The Sourceforge MaraDNS page from now on is merely an archive of old MaraDNS releases.

I suggest for anyone who downloads and old MaraDNS release from Sourceforge to check the GPG signature to make sure Sourceforge has not altered it.

2019 update I have forgiven Sourceforge because they have been under new management for three years, and have stopped making trojan binaries.

MaraDNS 1 will remain available on my page

While I normally remove older MaraDNS releases from my page, I will keep a copy of the final release of MaraDNS 1.4 up to stop people from going to Sourceforge or other shady download sites to get MaraDNS 1. I have also updated the Windows MaraDNS 1.4 binary to use the latest version of Deadwood (the only change to non-Deadwood MaraDNS 1.4 since 1.4.12 is to decrease max_glueless_level).

Come father’s day (June 21), I will add a note that this version of MaraDNS is not supported at all, including no support for any critical security bugs found.

I will now need to ask anyone requesting MaraDNS support which version of MaraDNS they are using, but it’s important that a trustable download of MaraDNS 1 remains available.

ObHack update

When I made my final version of ObHack, I also made a version of FreeDoom with the levels replaced by ObHack-generated levels, so people could get a feel of what the randomly generated levels were like without needing to run the program.

Unfortunately, I subsequently learned that some of the music in FreeDoom was plagiarized. In addition, the ugly Zomebieman and Shotgun Guy sprites have finally been updated to look really nice, and I have modified the title screen to make it clear this is an unofficial version using random maps.

The updated download is here:

http://samiam.org/obhack

Scroll down to where it says “FreeDoom 0.7 using ObHack-generated maps” to download it.

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MaraDNS, GPG, and trust

May 27, 2015

In today’s blog, I remind people to stop using MaraDNS 1, and discuss how to use GnuPG to verify that releases of MaraDNS are legitimate.

MaraDNS 1: Stop using it!

As I announced three years ago, MaraDNS 1 support stops on June 21, 2015. That is within one month. If anyone still wishes to use MaraDNS 1 after that date, they are on their own: No support nor updates (not even security updates, no matter how critical the security bug) will be provided.

I know some people are still using MaraDNS 1; I got a support request for MaraDNS 1 as recently as last December:

https://​github.​com/​samboy/​Mara​DNS/​issues/​5

Trusting MaraDNS’ GPG key

Since there has been a report of a trojanized version of a popular program out there, I will detail how MaraDNS users can trust the GPG key MaraDNS has, and use this GPG key to verify a given release of MaraDNS.

There has been, ever since the 1.0 release of MaraDNS in 2002, two different GPG keys used:

A 1024-bit DSA key used from 2001 until 2012

A 2048-bit RSA key in use since 2012

The 2012 key has been signed with the 2001 key. The 2001 key can be trusted because it has been in use for a long time. Not only is it still included in every single MaraDNS release, it has been included in releases since 2001. It’s pretty easy to verify that, say, a 2002 release of MaraDNS was using the same 1024-bit key new releases are included with:

https://​web.​archive.​org/​web/​20020803040619/​http://​www.​maradns.​org/​download.​html

http://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​maradns/​files/​Mara​DNS/​1.​0.​00/

The DSA key has a key ID of 1E61FCA6 and the following fingerprint:

D167 252A 18BC D011 7CB4 6CA8 0BE8 D6AE 1E61 FCA6

Note that this fingerprint can be verified by looking at multiple mailing list postings over the years, e.g.:

http://​marc.​info/?​l=​maradns-​list&​amp;​m=​101195132232108&​amp;​w=​2

http://​osdir.​com/​ml/​network.​dns.​maradns.​general/​2003-​09/​msg​00008.​html

Both MaraDNS GPG keys are also available on the MIT GPG key server:

http://​pgp.​mit.​edu/​pks/​lookup?​search=​Mara​DNS&​amp;​op=​index

The 2048-bit RSA key has a key ID of 6D150805 and the following fingerprint:

A96E 30DD A360 FC63 42B2 D9AB 5FF4 96D1 6D15 0805

This key can be verified because it is signed by the older DSA key:

gpg --list-sigs 6D150805

Using GnuPG

One issue is that GPG is not the easiest program to use. To add the MaraDNS keys to one’s GPG keyring, enter the MaraDNS top-level directory and then:

cat maradns.gpg.key.old | gpg --import

cat maradns.gpg.key | gpg --import

To verify a signed file, do something like:

gpg --verify maradns-2.0.11.tar.bz2.asc maradns-2.0.11.tar.bz2

Verifying a key fingerprint:

gpg --fingerprint {ID}

Where {ID} is the ID of the key we wish to view the fingerprint of.

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The Roland TB-303

April 14, 2015

There is only one time in my life that I saw a real Roland TB-303 synthesizer.

Many moons ago, I went to the local music store to get something cheap to expand my then very simple recording studio. I went up to the owner and asked him to show me the really cheap stuff he was getting rid of; I had already gotten a cheesy analog ARP AXXE from him for under $100.

He bought out his cheapest stuff: A Roland TB-303 and a DOD Chorus 690. The TB-303 was appealing; while it was a really, really crappy analog synthesizer, and didn't even have MIDI, it did have a built in sequencer and I could hook it up to a drum machine I had already bought. Alas, I only had $35 and it would have cost me $60 to get the TB-303, so I ended up leaving the music store with that chorus pedal.

As I type this, TB-303s are going for $2,000 to $3,000 on eBay. People who spend that kind of money on what is, in truth, one of the most lousy analog synthesizers are missing the point.

The reason why so much great music ended up being made with the TB-303 is because talented musicians with low budgets ended up buying those units and being really creative with them. It had a lot more to do with the talent of the musicians than it had to do with the fact that the cheapest synthesizer + sequencer at the time was the TB-303.

These days, I would get a basic M-Audio 2-in 2-out and MIDI interface for under $100 and download free digital audio workstation software and plugins. If I didn’t have a computer, I would — indeed, I just did — get a cheap Yamaha QY10 synthesizer/sequencer for under $50.

A lot of really great music is being made on computers, which are far more powerful and flexible than the setups those musicians using TB-303s and TR-808s had, before their prices went through the ceiling.

The secret to making good music is having something to say. It’s not about the gear; it’s about the talent and the willingness to spend the time to do things right. That just as true for those dance musicians who made amazing stuff with the TB-303 back in the day, as well as the musicians making amazing stuff with computers today.

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Love live the Netbook

March 22, 2015

A couple of years ago, I lamented the end of Intel-Atom based netbooks. I had spoken too soon.

Long live the Netbook!

Let me introduce you to the ASUS X205TA-HATM0103. This is a Netbook. To wit:

Costs about $200. Check.

Intel Atom CPU. Check (it’s using an Atom Z3735f, which is one of the cheapest Atoms out there, but is a good deal faster than the N450s and N455s which drove the 2009/2010 Netbook craze, and has VT-x to boot).

Maximum memory 2gb. Check (that’s the amount of memory it has; Microsoft has long since stopped requiring Netbook makers to not put more than 1gb in their cheap computers)

Small solid-state file system. Check (just like the original netbooks, before they started putting cheap 160gb hard disks in them).

Small size. Check (They have stopped making these critters 10 inches — the keyboard was just too cramped at that size — but it’s a tiny 11 inch computer)

My biggest annoyance with the current crop of netbooks is that they no longer have a mechanical drive, but instead use a pathetically small amount of solid state storage. 32 gigs is really not enough storage; I would not want to install Microsoft Office on one of these, but would instead put on Softmaker Office (maybe even the older Softmaker Office 2006 which I still use today — its word processor, TextMaker 2006, uses only 20 megs of disk space).

While Netbooks are no longer driving the computer world, they have come back and still fill a niche. Now, whether I will actually get one of these is another question.

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More King v. Burwell & Star Trek

March 17, 2015

Here are some other predictions for King v. Burwell, and reviews for four Star Trek episodes.

Predicting King v. Burwell

This continues my discussion of King v. Burwell which I describe in a previous blog entry.

The most accurate predictor of Supreme Court decisions in the world is a gentleman named Jacob Berlove. He has put up his prediction for King v. Burwell: 6-3 that the ACA subsidies will be upheld. His prediction is the exact same prediction I made.

The {Marshall}+ prediction

The {Marshall}+ computer program predicts that the ACA subsidies will survive, but its prediction is a little odd:

It predicts that Thomas will vote to uphold ACA subsidies for states without exchanges (?)

It predicts that Ginsburg will vote to remove ACA subsidies for states without exchanges (???). Not bloody likely, since Ginsburg, right at the start, raised questions about standing, and also raised questions about how the plaintiff’s interpretation of King v Burwell is even constitutional.

Marshall+ is pretty unsure about Roberts (52% change of upholding ACA subsidies), Thomas (51%), Kennedy (49%), and Ginsburg (48%). Since Thomas didn’t say anything during the oral arguments, the computer prediction of him upholding subsidies is interesting — and even plausible.

Star Trek: Spoiler warning

I am now watching episodes from the original Star Trek. Below are my thoughts on four episodes; spoilers follow. Since the story are nearly 50 years old, at this point anyone who is interested has probably already seen them.

The Naked Time

What makes this story great is George Takei without his shirt on swashbuckling a fencing sword. Watching him makes me wish I was gay and could fully appreciate the scene — especially in light of the fact that it came from 1966, when “Gay Pride” did not even exist.

There are other memorable scenes: Spock admitting his inner suffering (not in the script; Leonard Nimoy completely improvised this scene) and Captain Kirk talking about the sacrifices he has to make to be captain — namely, that it is impossible for him to be romantically involved and take walks on the beach because of his duties as captain. This theme of sacrificing romance and being a noble character is one I have seen in other stories from the 1960s; in To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus never remarried after losing his wife.

This story, above all, is a lighthearted look at the characters on the Enterprise and their motivations. I can see why they redid this story as one of the first episodes in Star Trek: The Next Generation; this plot is perfect for introducing the audience to all of the characters as they lose their inhibitions and reveal their true selves.

The Enemy Within

The premise, scientifically, of a transporter malfunction separating our internal Dr. Jekyll from Mr. Hyde is pure fantasy, but Star Trek was never hard science fiction.

The attractive girl in this story is a victim of attempted rape — and the way she reacts to it is an incredibly realistic portrait of how a woman reacts to a man raping her. It was, of course, a traumatic experience, but there was also some level of mixed feelings. There’s a reason why women often times do not react to rape appropriately (call the police immediately, get a rape kit and every other possible bit of evidence for the inevitable trial where the rapist will try and claim the sex was consensual), which this episode portrays beautifully.

Sadly, truth emulated fiction a little too closely: The actress playing the attractive girl and attempted rape victim ended up being a victim of a real rape on the set of Star Trek; in the aftermath, she ended up being fired. Women’s rights, thankfully, have made a lot of progress since then.

The reason they do not solve Sulu’s problem (well acted by George Takei) with a shuttle craft is because the Enterprise did not have a shuttle yet; fans have retconned the issue by saying the upper atmosphere of Alfa 177 made it impossible to bring a shuttlecraft through.

This story is a well-written look at our psychological nature, and the need for our dark side, but the story is one which could have been told in 30 minutes; I get the sense that a lot of filler was added to this episode to give it a 50 minute run.

Mudd’s Women

Beauty is only skin deep. In this comedy-themed episode (which still makes me laugh after all these years), we meet three beautiful women. But where does their beauty come from?

The best part of the episode is the relationship between Eve and miner Ben Childress. Ben is intimidated when he finds out that Eve is smarter than he is, and that Eve’s beauty is temporary. Eve doesn’t want to be seen as beautiful, yet Ben’s marriage to her is based strictly on physical attraction. Kirk resolves the problem by a psychological trick to make Eve being out her inner beauty.

While this episode impressed me as a child, I find the way all of the men fawn over the women downright annoying rewatching this episode. The women are not treated like human beings, but objects of the men’s lust, seen as goddesses and not people.

Sulu’s reaction to the ladies is muted; while he can appreciate their beauty, he is not overwhelmed by desire the way other men are. This is because George Takei, the actor playing Sulu, is gay, a fact reflected in his character.

This episode is a good look at how shallow lust really is, and how foolish it is for men to think any woman, no matter how beautiful, is somehow a goddess.

What Are Little Girls Made Of?

This is the first episode where the “redshirts” killed to demonstrate the danger the main characters are in are, indeed, wearing red shirts. Two redshirts get killed in total. There is also a scene, which has become an internet meme, where William Shatner is holding an object that looks a little like a penis.

The best parts of the story include scenes with the beautiful Sherry Jackson who plays an innocent and naive robot that was programmed to be a sex toy, as well as a well-filmed scene where William Shatner talks to his double.

The plot is a fairly standard action story with an interesting take on how machines can not have empathy the way humans can, and how that lack of empathy can be dangerous.

More to come

I will be watching more episodes of the original 1960s Star Trek and will continue to post my thoughts here on my blog.

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King v. Burwell; Star Trek

March 6, 2015

In today’s blog, I explain why I think King v. Burwell will be ruled for the government (Obamacare will not be affected), and review three classic 1960s Star Trek episodes.

King v. Burwell is toast

It looks like the government will win the King v. Burwell challenge to the ACA (Obamacare). They will not win because of the “Pennhurst doctrine” (which I call Vogon Logic in a previous blog), but because the swing votes feel that not giving subsidies to states without exchanges would be an unconstitutional threat.

The thinking is this: If the law really told states “Set up an exchange or we will not give you subsidies”, this would be tantamount to putting a gun to their head and saying “you must set up an exchange.” Having this kind of threat in the ACA is an overreach for the federal government.

Here is the relevant part of the exchange. First, justice Sotomayor (an Obama appointee) gives the plaintiff some hard questioning:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR: That was the choice. If we read it the way you’re saying, then we’re going to read a statute as intruding on the Federal-State relationship, because then the States are going to be coerced into establishing their own Exchanges.

[...]

Tell me how that is not coercive in an unconstitutional way?

As the plaintiff was trying to answer the question, Kennedy chips in to support Sotomayor:

JUSTICE KENNEDY: Let me say that from the standpoint of the dynamics of Federalism, it does seem to me that there is something very powerful to the point that if your argument is accepted, the States are being told either create your own Exchange, or we’ll send your insurance market into a death spiral. We’ll have people pay mandated taxes which will not get any credit on — on the subsidies. The cost of insurance will be sky-high, but this is not coercion. It seems to me that under your argument, perhaps you will prevail in the plain words of the statute, there’s a serious constitutional problem if we adopt your argument.

This is very telling. It indicates that Kennedy appears to be willing to reject the plaintiff’s arguments in King v. Burwell based on constitutional principles. I can see why Kennedy thinks this way. It satisfies progressives like myself because the court does not whittle away at our universal health care system. It satisfies the conservative federalist principle of upholding states rights. It satisfies business interests because the medical industry in states without exchanges do not have the rug pulled from under them. And, finally, it allows Kennedy to wax about constitutional principles and overreaching federal power in a case that would otherwise be a mere discussion of statutory interpretation.

I can understand why Verrilli, the lawyer defending the ACA (Obamacare), doesn’t fully support Kennedy’s reasoning. As a lawyer for the United States government, he is not about to support a line of reasoning that reduces federal power.

It’s obvious Roberts doesn’t want to use the Chevron deference to save the ACA. My sense when I was reading the transcript of the oral arguments is that Roberts does not want to make a court decision that expands federal and executive powers. He will probably concur with Kennedy.

My King v. Burwell prediction

My prediction is 6-3 for Obamacare. Kennedy doesn’t like the notion that the federal government would compel states to set up their own exchanges or lose subsidies. Roberts will probably agree.

Alito/Scalia/Thomas would probably argue that the moon is made out of green cheese if they thought it would hurt Obama; Sotomayor/Breyer/Kagan/Ginsberg will, of course, vote to uphold Obamacare.

Star Trek

In honor of Leonard Nimoy’s death last week, I am now watching one episode a night of the original Star Trek. So far, I have watched three episodes. Below are my thoughts; spoilers follow. Since the story are nearly 50 years old, at this point anyone who is interested has probably already seen them.

The Man Trap

There is, in “The Man Trap”, a strange conflict between the idea of the last of a dying species and the pressures to make a simple “monster” plot to have more perceived appeal. The fact that the story has as compassionate as a portrayal of the monster as we see was very impressive for a story from this era.

It would have been a better story if the monster did not kill its long-term companion (it didn’t in the original draft) and if they did not kill the monster, but that would have been difficult to get past the censors half a century ago.

Charlie X

This is the story of an insecure adolescent kid who is more than he seems.

This is one of my favorite episodes because I can relate to Charlie: Immature, unable to see or understand that others have feelings as much as he does, selfish, unable to accept life on life’s terms, despite all the love and care Captain Kirk and others give him. I’ve been all that, as we all have been.

This story would have had a happy ending if Charlie was merely a boy, learned he couldn’t always have his way, and grew up. In this alternate version, it would have ended, after some frustration, with Charlie realizing that Tina Lawton (the young yeoman Janice introduces Charlie to) was just as beautiful a girl as he thought Janice Rand was, and them having a happy date together.

The story was very well acted; Robert Walker has a look in his eyes which perfectly conveys Charlie’s deep discomfort. William Shatner does a good job playing the captain forced in to the uncomfortable role of being a father figure, and the recently departed Leonard Nimoy shines as the first one able to figure out what is really going on.

Where No Man Has Gone Before

While “The Man Trap” was the first Star Trek episode aired, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was the pilot episode.

Like “Charlie X”, this story explores how a man with the powers of God is not a good thing. Since the purpose of this story was to make an action-filled episode to sell the series to NBC, it doesn’t explore the man-as-God theme as well as “Charlie X” did.

What makes this story interesting is that it’s the first story to have Spock as an emotionless alien who makes all of his decisions using logic. Namely, Spock is the first one who realizes the logical thing to do is to kill the man-becoming-God antagonist. In later stories we find out that Spock is not always this cold; the motivations for his logical decisions are kind.

Coming back to the 21st century, if Spock were to look at King v. Burwell, he would have concluded that the most logical thing to do is uphold the ACA law and decide against the plaintiffs. While Spock did occasionally logically decide that someone needed to die for the greater good, he would look at the text of the law as a whole and conclude there is no logical reason to kill about 9,000 people a year based on what is nothing more than a questionable technicality.

More to come

I will be watching an episode of the original 1960s Star Trek every night and continue to post my thoughts on my blog.

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King v. Burwell: Vogon Logic

February 28, 2015

In order to accept the logic opposing ACA subsidies put forth in King v. Burwell, you would have to be a Vogon. Let me explain.

The ACA

The ACA, a.k.a. “Obamacare”, is a law that makes it possible for everyone to have health insurance at a reasonable price in the United States. While not as advanced as all other first world countries’ health care — all of whom except the United States use a form of health coverage called “single payer” — it is a great step forward from what we had before. It used to be, for people with chronic medical conditions, the only way to get medical care without becoming bankrupt was to have a job — or have a family member have a job — which provided medical insurance.

The ACA fixed this. By a combination of expanding medicaid to cover the poorest, subsidizing medical insurance for the working and middle class, and mandating that everyone who isn’t poor enough for medicaid buy insurance, it makes universal medical care finally a reality in the United States.

Medicaid expansion

For reasons I am unable to fully understand, there are a number of people who are opposed to there being universal health care in the United States. They tried to remove this health care with a lawsuit back in 2012. The Supreme Court compromised: They upheld most of the ACA, but made it optional for states to expand medicaid so that their poorest can have medical care.

Right now, of the 50 states, 28 have opted to expand medicaid, while 22 have not yet pass legislation to allow their poorest to have medical coverage.

King v. Burwell

Not satisfied with the 2012 compromise, a number of people opposed to Obamacare came up with another lawsuit to try and remove the subsidies in 37 states based on an unusual interpretation of four words in the ACA law.

Last year, the Supreme Court decided to hear this case.

Should the Supreme Court side with the plaintiffs and not allow 37 states to have insurance subsidies, the consequences would be terrible. As one opponent of the ACA admitted, there will be “Chemotherapy turned off for perhaps 12,000 people, dialysis going dark for 10,000. The horror stories will be real.”

Meet the Vogons

Douglas Adams’ classic book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy starts off with our hero, Author Dent, waking up to find a bulldozer about to demolish his house. He has this conversation:

Mr Prosser said: “You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time you know.”

“Appropriate time?” hooted Arthur. “Appropriate time? The first I knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday. [...]”

“But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”

“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them had you? I mean like actually telling anybody or anything.”

“But the plans were on display ...”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

Soon after this, the Vogons arrive to destroy Earth:

“People of Earth, your attention please,” a voice said, and it was wonderful. Wonderful perfect quadraphonic sound with distortion levels so low as to make a brave man weep.

“This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council,” the voice continued.

“As you will no doubt be aware, the plans for development of the outlying regions of the Galaxy require the building of a hyperspatial express route through your star system, and regrettably your planet is one of those scheduled for demolition. The process will take slightly less that two of your Earth minutes. Thank you.”

[...]

“There’s no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.”

[...]

The PA slammed back into life again. The voice was annoyed. It said: “What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? For heaven’s sake mankind, it’s only four light years away you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs that’s your own lookout.

“Energize the demolition beams.”

At this point Earth was destroyed.

Vogon logic in action

In the brief from nine conservative states who oppose the ACA and supported the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell, we have this wording:

the States [...] could read the plain text of Section 36B and see that it conditioned the subsidies [...] there is no merit to the argument that the IRS Rule must be upheld in order to prevent unfair surprise to the States

Vogon logic.

The fact of the matter is this: No states actually knew that, by using the federal instead of a state exchange, that there was even the possibility they would lose the subsidies. They were given as much warning as Arthur Dent was given that his house was going to be demolished.

Indeed, in the brief from some 24 different states, both conservative and liberal, they show evidence that the states were given no such notice:

While the extensive records of that deliberative process show that the States relied on many factors and came to diverse conclusions when selecting an Exchange model, conspicuously absent is evidence that States contemplated the dramatic consequence of depriving their residents of tax credits or destroying their own insurance markets. To the contrary, States as diverse as Alaska, [46] Ohio, [47] and Delaware [48] weighed the benefits and burdens without ever suggesting that the ACA conditioned premium assistance on a State’s creating its own Exchange.

Observe that, unlike the other filing, there are footnotes showing evidence that the states had no such knowledge of there being a threat against states who did not establish exchanges.

The Pennhurst doctrine

That brief filed on behalf of 24 states talks about the Pennhurst doctrine, which “requires that Congress give States clear notice of conditions imposed under cooperative-federalism programs.” This doctrine, based on a 1981 Supreme Court decision, flat out forbids Vogon logic being applied when interpreting laws which the US federal government enacts with assistance from the states, such as the ACA.

How partisan is the Supreme Court?

The only way this case can win is if the conservative justices put on blinders and ignore legal precedent forbidding Vogon logic from being allowed. To do so requires them to be partisan hacks with no respect for long-standing principles of how law is interpreted.

Roberts, in a appearance on September 19, 2014 at the University of Nebraska College of Law, said that “I’m worried about people having that perception [the the court makes blatantly partisan decisions], because it’s not an accurate one.” He needs to put his money where his mouth is and rule against King v. Burwell.

Excerpts from The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are Copyright © 1979 by Douglas Adams. Their use in this article is fair use, since only a very small percentage of Adams’ classic work is used, and its use does not harm (indeed it may even help) the market for the original work.

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Superfish

February 24, 2015

Last Thursday, the Internet’s daily two minutes hate was directed towards Lenovo because they have installed a piece of adware on their more inexpensive computers called “Superfish.”

What happened

It has been a long-standing practice for computer makers to get paid for adding software to their Windows installs. The software traditionally has been trial versions of commercial programs; the thinking being that some small percentage of users will purchase the software after the trial period ends.

This is a win-win: It’s a win for the computer makers, because they get some extra money for each computer they sell. It’s a win for the software makers, who get more users of their software. It’s even a win for end-consumers because they usually end up paying less for their computers.

Lenovo took this to the next level: They installed a piece of software called “Superfish”, which injected ads in to user’s web pages. The first complaint about “Superfish” on Lenovo’s forums appeared in September of 2014. They pointed out, in the thread, the Lenovo was not the only computer maker to add unwanted programs; other computer makers add an unwanted and difficult-to-uninstall program called “Wild Tangent Games.”

The thread remained relatively quiet until last Thursday after Robert Graham extracted the root certificate. The Superfish developers were very careless with their security. So careless that the mainstream press promptly reported that Lenovo was adding malware to their computers.

At this point, the floodgates of rage opened and the Lenovo became the victim of last Thursday’s Internet two minutes hate.

No Thinkpads were affected

Lenovo never installed the Superfish program on any of their Thinkpads. The software was only installed on their Ideapad consumer line in 2014, and was already being phased out in early 2015 before the mainstream press discovered it was malware last Thursday.

Lenovo listens to their customers

The thing to keep in mind is that Lenovo listens to their customers. Why do I know this? Because, last year, Lenovo tried to make their Thinkpads a little better for customers who prefer using a touchpad instead of the trackpoint (the red “button” on Thinkpad keyboards which acts like a mouse) by making the touchpad bigger. They did this by removing the mouse buttons for trackpoint users, having them click the touchpad instead.

The reaction was negative. Not only did traditional Thinkpad users not like it, but also the new method of using the touchpad for the trackpoint mouse buttons got negative reviews in the mainstream press.

Lenovo listened. It was a very pleasant surprise when I looked at the 2015 lineup of Thinkpads and saw that the trackpoint mouse buttons came back.

Lenovo can redeem themselves

Since Lenovo listened when it came to the Trackpoint mouse buttons, I have the utmost of confidence that they will listen again and make changes so that something like Superfish never happens again.

One way to rebuild consumer trust is to have many of their computers available as Microsoft Signature computers, ensuring that there is no third party software besides drivers installed on the computers.

Another is to simply have little or no third party software on their Thinkpad lineup. While some Thinkpads may need third party software added to reduce their price (such as their low cost “E” series), the high-end Thinkpads (the small “X” series, medium sized “T” series, and large “W” series) really should only have Windows and Lenovo’s drivers installed; if any other software is installed, the customer can choose to install (or not install) it when configuring their computer.

Just as Lenovo rebuilt trust with their most devoted users by restoring the Trackpoint mouse buttons, Lenovo can rebuild the trust damaged by the Superfish fiasco by giving customers more options about what third party software is or is not installed on their computers.

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Thinkpad mouse buttons

February 15, 2015

Now that Lenovo has restored the mouse buttons for trackpoint users in their 2015 lineup, I am listing the models currently available for sale with trackpoint mouse buttons.

Already available for sale

X1 Carbon (3rd generation)

X250

W541

W550s

Yoga 12

E450

E550

E555

Helix 2nd Gen

Not yet available

Thinkpad T450, T450s, and T550

Thinkpad L450

Lenovo may make an update to the student-oriented 11 series with discrete mouse buttons.

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Don’t mix CNAMES

February 11, 2015

This blog discusses a possible issue with how Deadwood (MaraDNS) resolves a corner case which violates the Internet standards.

The problem

In DNS, a CNAME record is a record which points to another record. It is roughly the equivalent of a of a shortcut in Windows, a symbolic link in Mac OS, or a forwarding address with the postal service. For example:

www.example.com CNAME www.example.net

In English, this means “www.example.com will have whatever IP www.example.net has”.

This allows someone to change www.example.net’s IP address without changing www.example.com’s IP address; any change to the www.example.net IP automatically changes www.example.com’s IP.

However, what happens if we have these DNS records:

www.example.com CNAME www.example.net
www.example.com A 10.2.3.4
www.example.net A 192.168.1.1

(In the actual packets which I saw last night, the www.example.com answer with the CNAME was in one DNS packet and the www.example.net answer was in another)

Well, now, whether www.example.com has the IP address 10.2.3.4 or the IP address 192.168.1.1 is ambiguous. The official Internet specs — called RFCs — have no way to resolve this ambiguity; they merely tell people “Don't do that!”

Quoting the RFCs

Let me quote chapter and verse of the RFCs which say “Don't do that!”

RFC1034 section 3.6.2: “If a CNAME RR is present at a node, no other data should be present; this ensures that the data for a canonical name and its aliases cannot be different.”

RFC1912 section 2.4: “A CNAME record is not allowed to coexist with any other data.”

How to handle this kind of DNS information

Since these packets are not permitted in the RFCs, the way DNS servers will handle these packets is undefined. Some DNS servers accept the CNAME record and ignore the non-CNAME answer to the original question.

Deadwood, on the other hand, considers the question solved: It stops solving the query as soon as it gets the answer to the original question, even if there is also a CNAME in the packet.

I have no plans to modify Deadwood

While, yes, I could come up with some heuristics to handle this kind of RFC violating DNS packet the same way some other DNS servers do, now that I am a single parent working a full time job, and since my DNS server is a free open-source project I am not getting paid to work on, I am not going to change things on my side.

The fact that BIND or whatever handles a particular RFC violating DNS packet a particular way does not compel me to have Deadwood handle that corner case the same way. Not unless there is significant money on the table.

Over the years, I have added countless fuzzy heuristics to Deadwood so that it can resolve as many names as possible. For years, I have said “If BIND or Unbound can resolve a given name, but Deadwood can not, that is a bug.”

But, my life has changed, and I need to put the foot down: For something this badly RFC violating, the solution is not to make Deadwood act, bug for bug, exactly like BIND. The solution is to tell people to fix their zone files.

To be fair to the owner of the actual domain with this problem, they promptly fixed things on their end.

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Goodbye Radio Shack

February 6, 2015

Now that Radio Shack has declared bankruptcy, here is my eulogy for the store.

Just three weeks ago, in the process of rebuilding my recording studio, one of my old drum machines complained about a low battery. Instead of having to drive an hour to and from to get a replacement battery, I was able to get one in under ten minutes by going to the local Radio Shack.

Radio Shack gave me my first ever credit card which let me build up credit and have a credit rating. I remember getting my first ever MIDI cable at a Radio Shack. My first ever mixer was a tiny inexpensive mixer Radio Shack sold. I got my first ever cell phone at a Radio Shack. Countless parts from Radio Shack (patch cables, adapters, power supplies), overlooked but necessary, keep my hardware-based recording studio going to this day.

As I was buying that battery for my drum machine, I chatted with the salesman. I told him:

“You know, it's really convenient to be able to get a part like this without having to drive for an hour. I hope this place stays open.”

With a grim look on his face, he replied “Yeah, I hope so too.”

Hopefully Sprint will decide the Radio Shack just up the street from my place is worth keeping. Hopefully. I wonder if they still sell MIDI cables; one of my old MIDI cables broke last night.

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MaraDNS hotfix

January 29, 2015

Because the new NS tarpit security code did not always perform bounds checking, I have made a new hotfix release of MaraDNS and Deadwood.

Please update to MaraDNS 2.0.11 and/or Deadwood 3.2.07. MaraDNS 1 downloads are disabled until I can update MaraDNS 1 to have Deadwood 3.2.07.

Where to download

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download.​html

https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

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MaraDNS security update

January 25, 2015

I have made three MaraDNS and Deadwood releases with an important security update.

The issue is CERT VU#264212. I have also incorporated other bug fixes.

Deadwood 3.2.06 released

Security update: Better protection against malicious NS tarpits

Removed two warnings generated by GCC 4.8.2

Return the correct ID in SERVER FAIL errors

Log a message when a RFC1918 IP is blocked from resolving

Deadwood now ignores the CD and AD bits as defined in RFC2535 section 6.1

SERVER FAILs no longer incorrectly sent when Deadwood gets a glueless NS referral

The MacOS and Linux Makefiles now should make version.h correctly

MaraDNS 2.0.10 released

Deadwood updated to 3.2.06 (security fix)

Zoneserver now compiles and runs in Cygwin

MaraDNS 1.4.15 released

This is the legacy branch of MaraDNS. Please upgrade to MaraDNS 2. This will probably be the final MaraDNS 1 release; all MaraDNS 1 support ends on June 21, 2015.

Deadwood updated to 3.2.06

Security update: max_glueless_level now defaults to 4 instead of 10

Where to download

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download.​html

https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

https://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​maradns/

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2014

All blog entries written in 2014

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MaraDNS update

December 14, 2014

I have fixed two bugs in Deadwood, and am making a statement about CERT vulnerability VU#264212 (Summary: MaraDNS might be vulnerable; updated download available)

Two bugs in Deadwood fixed

Sten Kultakangas pointed out that MaraDNS sends the wrong ID when sending a SERVER FAIL message. After working with him to recreate the bug, and an hour of hunting, I have determined this is not a security bug.

Deadwood takes the DNS packet it gets, performs some sanity checks on it, changes its ID and RD bit, and then sends it to the upstream server. This is fine in normal usage.

However, in the unusual case of giving a SERVER FAIL back to the calling DNS thingy (because of high load, etc.), it sends back the packet it sent upstream instead of sending back the packet the DNS thingy sent Deadwood, causing the query ID mismatch.

When looking over this bug, I found another bug: If there is a glueless NS record, Deadwood starts processing the NS referral, but sends a server fail to the DNS thingy (instead of sending nothing until the NS record is worked out).

I have also fixed this bug.

Statement on CERT VU#264212

Deadwood (MaraDNS 2.0) might be vulnerable. That in mind, I have made a new MaraDNS snapshot release with some code added to harden Deadwood against CERT VU#264212.

The early 2015 MaraDNS release will have this hardening code in it.

I do not feel this issue is critical enough to make an out-of-band new MaraDNS release, nor is it critical enough for me to muck around in the 1.4 codebase with. The attack requires the attacker to devote a lot of resources generating the “tarpit” DNS packets, and, since MaraDNS does not support Edns, amplification should be fairly minimal.

As an aside, this hardening code has finally made Deadwood too big to fit in 64kib, so I will no longer compile it with “-Os”, but have started compiling it will “-O3”; the -O3 binary is 150,671 bytes in size, which is still tiny, and it’s probably faster than the -Os binary.

Downloads

The updated Deadwood is available here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

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The 2014 midterms

November 5, 2014

As a whole, Democrats did a lot better than they did in 2010, when they lost 63 seats in the house. Democrats only lost about seven or eight house seats this time around. In terms of the senate, this isn’t some mandate for Republican politics — this was a midterm election where a lot more red states than blue states had seats up for grabs.

Nothing will get done at the federal level for the next two years (It would be interesting to see what would happen if Democrats filibuster as many bills as the Republicans did when they were a minority in the senate), Obamacare (ACA) will continue to give hourly contractors like myself health insurance, and Republicans will probably be claiming they have always supported universal health care by 2020.

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MaraDNS support update

October 25, 2014

Why I have stopped using MyBB, and how to now get MaraDNS support.

Goodbye MyBB

Now that I am a family man, I do not have time to be on the constant upgrade treadmill. MyBB 1.6.4 (which required a lot of core files to be replaced to update from the previous 1.6 release) was released three years ago, and they now have released 1.8 which requires a lot of changes which I would have had to do my hand to update.

Since MyBB does not have a great security record (with some 114 CVE results), the only way I can keep MyBB reasonably secure is to constantly update it. Since they no longer are updating the 1.6 branch, it’s just too much bother for me to still use this program.

That in mind, http://forum.samiam.org is now a static archive of posts made there; MyBB has been completely removed. I have added a note at the top of every page there on how to get MaraDNS support.

Getting MaraDNS support

The way to now get MaraDNS support is to file an issue in GitHub:

https://​github.​com/​samboy/​maradns/​issues

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Best 80s Music

September 25, 2014

January 2015 update: Edgar Froese, front man of Tangerine Dream, whose song Love on a Real Train is listed here, has passed away. He once said that “There is no death, there is just a change of our cosmic address.” How very true.

While listening to a really long continuous mix of 80s music, it amazes me how goofy much of that 80s music was. A lot of it has not aged well. As someone who lived in the 80s (and who really enjoyed those now-goofy-sounding pop songs) here is my list of the five best songs from the 80s:

U2: With or Without You

This song, indeed the entire album this comes from, The Joshua Tree, is considered one of the great classics of rock, with good reason. Brian Eno’s production makes what would have been a simple rock song in to a dreamy, ethereal soundscape with a pop song put on top almost as an afterthought.

Depeche Mode: Get the Balance Right (Combination mix)

Depeche Mode made a lot of really great music in the 1980s. I chose Get the Balance Right because that was my first introduction to the band. Today, the song is most famous among Depeche Mode fans for the wrong band member miming the lyrics at the beginning of the video.

The PPG baseline in this song is really great; the 8-minute-long Combination mix adds a nice long ambient sounding break before the final chorus which sounds really nice.

Tangerine Dream: Love on a Real Train

I didn’t discover this gem until the late oughts. This is the love theme from the movie Risky Business and it has a really nice relaxing feel to it, taking me to another world in the intensity of its soundscape.

Brian Eno: An Ending (Ascent)

While I was a fan of Eno’s earlier ambient work in the 1980s (Music for Airports), I only discovered this song recently. This song is featured in the end credits of Traffic as well as in a key scene in 28 Days Later.

It is a cult classic among fans of electronic music today, with good reason. There are countless remixes out there—Frou Frou’s Hear Me Out stands out—but the original is probably the best version.

Jonn Serrie: Glyder

Coming from 1989, this song barely counts as an 80s song. Thankfully, it is, and it’s a very beautiful one. I listen to this song every day, and have been doing so for many many years. A quiet, relaxing piece which takes what Brian Eno did with ambient music in the 1970s and 1980s and takes it to the next level.

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People like the ACA

August 7 2014

The fact of the matter is this: People like the ACA (Obamacare). The survey released by the Kaiser Foundation saying otherwise is invalid. I explain why.

The survey

When the Kaiser Family Foundation released a survey this month showing a jump in the number of people who do not like the ACA, a lot of press reports discussed how people are liking the law less. What the press reports failed to do was look closely at how the survey was done. I did.

Methodology

There was a big disclaimer on the last page of that Kaiser survey (the “endnotes” tab when viewing in a browser), and I’m disappointed that no one has caught it: “The change in the share with an unfavorable view may be at least partially attributable to a change in question order in this month’s survey. In the July poll, the ACA favorability question was asked after two questions about national issues, while in the June poll it was the first question on the survey. It’s possible that for some respondents, hearing these preceding questions may have changed the way they interpreted and answered the ACA favorability question.”

In plain English, the only useful information this survey gives us is that, when you change how a survey is run, you will get different results.

Indeed, when you look at satisfaction vs. dissatisfaction numbers, dissatisfaction jumped up last October when the news about the ACA website having problems made the rounds, but have been steadily decreasing every month, and only jumped up again this month when the Kaiser poll changed how they asked the questions.

My speculation is that most people don’t have that strong of an opinion on the ACA, to the point they change how they feel depending on the order of questions in a survey.

Another survey

Meanwhile, the Commonwealth Fund’s July survey shows a high level of satisfaction with Obamacare, ranging from 74% to 87%:

http://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2014/​07/​11/​upshot/​newest-​health-​insurance-​customers-​are-​generally-​happy.​html?_​r=​1

My experience with the ACA

As an hourly contractor, I am glad to have the ACA because it keeps me covered at half the cost it would have cost me before the ACA kicked in at the beginning of this year.

Conclusion

Don’t put any trust in the results of a survey without carefully reviewing how it was conducted.

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Women against feminism

July 31, 2014

I look at what modern feminism has become and why women in droves are railing against it. But, let’s first start with some...

Racist Tweets

Last year, a number of people in the left wing got upset that a few people posted racist tweets in reply to an Indian-American winning the Miss USA pageant. The tone from the left-wing media implied that this kind of backwards racist thinking was somehow mainstream conservative thought (an article at addictinginfo.org directly blamed the racist tweets on “The conservative twitter-verse”).

The reason I bring this up is to establish a precedent of the liberal media judging conservatives by the actions of a few extremists in the right wing.

Meet Tasha Polwright

That in mind, I would like to introduce my readers to one Tasha Polwright. She currently calls herself an “Intersectional feminist and women’s right microblogger” in her Twitter profile. On June 13th this year, she tweeted the following:

#SingleMothersDay #endfathersday because who really needs a father? Boys don't need a rape instructor.

Now, yes, this is just a random person on Twitter sharing their opinion with the world (I would guess, as a father of a beautiful daughter, that this young lady sadly has never had a father in her life). But, on the other hand, the liberal media has a history of judging the conservative movement based on the actions of a small number of Twitter users.

What is feminism?

A lot of liberals seem confused that women, in droves, are eschewing the “feminist” label and that #WomenAgainstFeminism has been trending on Twitter. They claim that anyone against feminism is against equality for women, ignoring that fact that feminism, as it exists today, condones hate-filled tweets like Tasha’s rant, which got some 311 retweets and was favorited some 51 times. In contrast, I only saw two liberal women, Paola Poot and someone who uses the handle “Victrix”, condemning this tweet.

The old dictionary definition of “feminism” being a movement for equality no longer matters. Feminism, as used by its own followers, is no longer about equality, but is instead about misandry. Worse, feminists are not going to any effort to weed or or even distance themselves from their more extreme adherents.

I, of course, am not the first one to observe this change in feminism. Just one example: Some 20 years ago, one Christina Sommers wrote Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women which describes how the extremists have been taking over feminism.

Taking away constitutional rights

Modern radical feminism does not restrict itself to posting offensive tweets, but is such a part of modern mainstream feminism that it has succeeded in taking fundamental constitutional liberties from men.

One of the cornerstones of the constitution is the presumption of innocence; this comes from a famous quote known as Blackstone’s formulation: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”

Modern Feminism has removed this protection: Men can now be expelled from college with their guilt judged under a “preponderance of evidence” standard of evidence instead of the more fair “clear and convincing” standard that people accused of heinous crimes like rape should be judged with. Colleges are forced to use this standard because, in April of 2011, the US Government required any college getting public funding to no longer have a presumption of innocence when it comes to sexual harassment and sexual violence complaints.

Indeed, one Caleb Warner was expelled from college from a rape accusation so flimsy that, when the police investigated it, they issued an arrest warrant for filing a false rape charge:

http://​www.​usnews.​com/​opinion/​blogs/​economic-​intelligence/​2013/​10/​24/​statistics-​dont-​back-​up-​claims-​about-​rape-​culture

http://​america.​aljazeera.​com/​watch/​shows/​america-​tonight/​america-​tonight-​blog/​2013/​10/​31/​for-​the-​falsely-​accusedmovingonfromrapistbrandingach​allenge.​html

Is rape a horrible crime? Yes. Is it a crime so bad that we should suspend the fundamental constitutional right of presumption of innocence, and expel from college clearly innocent men like Caleb Warner? No.

Feminism needs to change

For feminism to remain relevant, it should not be engaging in misandrist activity such as removing constitutional protections from college students. Instead, it needs to weed its more extreme elements from its ranks and go back to its original mission of promoting equality of women. There are still countries out there where women can not legally drive; why aren’t feminists in the west concentrating on that?

If modern feminism can not answer that question, movements like #WomenAgainstFeminism will continue to grow in popularity.

See also: Why I need Masculism - Creeper cards

2016 update: Keep in mind that a lot of stuff Pick up artists / misogynists say to justify their predatory behavior towards women is pure BS

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PT Sans and PT Serif

July 19, 2014

In today’s blog, I give PT Serif and to a lesser extent PT Sans a more full review. Summary: While a very good font, I feel Charter is an even better font.

Background

PT Serif and PT Sans were commissioned by the Federal Agency on Press and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation, who are also known as “Rospechat”. The fonts were designed, to quote the Wikipedia “to support all the different variations of Cyrillic script used by the minority languages of Russia”. The fonts not only have fairly extensive Latin support (ASCII, ISO-8859-1, Windows Codepage 1252, etc.) but also support a number of mathematical symbols and have, as per their design, some of the most extensive Cyrillic support for any font out there.

The important thing to keep in mind is that these fonts were, first and foremost, designed to render Russian languages well; rendering Latin script was a secondary priority.

Bitstream Charter, on the other hand, was designed by Matthew Carter to render English and a few other Western European languages. The version donated to the X Consortium in 1992 only supports English and the other languages “Mac Roman” supports (The languages Mac Roman supports include Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic).

PT Sans and PT Serif were developed by a type foundry in California called ParaType. Not only does ParaType sell expanded versions of PT Sans and PT Serif, they also sell a version of Bitstream Charter with Russian letters (made by one very talented Vladimir Yefimov who sadly is not with us any more; the late Vladimir Yefimov also oversaw the development of PT Serif) that Matthew Carter has praised.

Now that we have gone over the background, let’s have a...

Visual comparison of PT Serif and Charter

In the first image, on the left is Charter and on the right is PT Serif.

The “y”, “3”, and “J” close up in Charter and PT Serif

Here, we can see that Charter is more rounded looking and PT Serif is more angular. I don’t like PT Serif’s “Dagger” serif in the “3” at all (As an aside, I really feel Constantia would have looked a lot better if it used rounded or slab instead of “dagger” serifs). The descender in Charter's “y” is longer and ends more smoothly, and I prefer its slab serifs on the top over PT Serif’s angular serifs. The “J” looks a lot better in Charter — it is wider and far easier to read; I just am not a fan of this “dagger” J which sometimes pops up in serif typefaces.

The reason why the “3” looks so distinct in PT Serif is so it is not confused with a letter in Cyrillic.

Another visual comparison

This is a Clear Type rendering of Charter and PT Serif converted to greyscale; Charter is on the left and PT Serif is on the right

Now, when rendered at screen resolutions using modern font hinting technologies, I will conceded that the two look similar, but I think Charter looks a little better.

One feature PT Serif has that Charter does not have is delta hinting. This makes PT Serif look a lot nicer on now-obsolete Windows XP systems, but not as nice as Carter’s delta hinted fonts (Verdana and Georgia). Indeed, I had this to say about PT Serif three years ago:

PT Serif, coming from Russia, has, to western eyes, a very distinct look to it that is not entirely satisfactory, reminding one of dusty old books in a dusty old library. It's perfectly readable, but very stiff. It doesn't have the soft charm of, say, Matthew Carter's serif fonts like Georgia and Bitstream Charter. And, like PT Sans, it's not really a screen font the way Georgia is.

I was referring to the delta-hinted version of PT Serif; when using clear type rendering, PT Serif has less of a hard edge to it and is a really nice looking readable screen font.

Charter’s weight

One thing to keep in mind is that Charter is a good deal lighter than PT Serif’s regular weight. While the for-pay version of PT Serif has a lighter “book” weight, it still is not quite as light as Charter. The reason Charter is so light is probably because, to quote one graphic design professional on Typophile, “Charter was designed when the print workflow was repro-negative-plate”. In other words, there was an intermediate step in the printing when Charter came out that made letters darker; Carter compensated for this by making Charter’s letters a little lighter.

Ironically, since the current trend is to make web fonts a little lighter, Charter works nicely as a very modern looking serif webfont. For people who wish for a slightly heavier Charter, Charis SIL is an excellent free choice (and has a far greater Unicode and language support than the free Charter).

Conclusion

PT Serif and Bitstream Charter are both very beautiful fonts which are available in free versions. The free version — and, indeed, the for-pay version — of PT Serif has a larger number of weights and forms, including, quite nicely, a version with a small “caption” optical size which is available both as regular and italic for free. As far as I know, PT Sans and PT Serif are the only open source fonts with variable optical sizes.

While I feel PT Serif is an excellent free font, I think Charter has a slight edge when used for Western European language body text. This is why I gave Charter my best serif font prize, while giving PT Sans a honorable mention for best condensed font. I will also give both PT Sans and PT Serif a honorable mention for being the best free fonts with a “caption” optical size available.

Charter was designed by an expert font designer who had over three decades of font design experience when he made it, and it shows. It is the best free serif font I have found.

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Bitstream Charter and more

July 4, 2014

In today’s blog, I discuss the typeface update for my web site, the band Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD), and post a rant about Google’s long-dead (and rightly so) SideWiki service. But first...

Happy Independence Day!

I would like to wish my fellow Americans a happy Independence Day as we celebrate my nation’s 238th anniversary. My prayers are with those suffering the effects of Hurricane Andrew, but I hope everyone has a safe enjoyable day today. Drinking and enjoying today’s festivities is OK, but remember: Do not drink and drive. One’s freedom to drink ends when risking innocent people’s lives.

The typeface facelift

I have just praised Bitstream Charter in my last blog entry, and now that it is the font I use for body text on my web page, let me praise it again.

Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of typefaces knows about Georgia, a beautiful serif font that is installed on nearly every computer (not to mention iPhone) on the planet and is one of the most widely read fonts in the world. Georgia, of course, was made by Matthew Carter.

Not as well known as Georgia is Bitstream Charter, a typeface Carter made back in 1987. Matthew Carter is a font designer whose genius shines the most when he is faced with a unique challenge. The challenges Carter faced when making Bitstream Charter was to make a font that looked good on the then-300dpi laser printers of that era, and to make a serif font with a very small file size that could fit in the very limited space of the rendering engine Carter was using at the time; while the limited size issue Carter designed Charter to work around was solved by the time Carter finished the design, the font is still one of the most compact fonts out there: My WOFF conversion of Charter, in two font faces (Roman and italic), takes up only 33,244 bytes of space.

While older than Georgia, Bitstream Charter looks more modern and fresh to my eyes. Its serifs are more angular and crisp; I prefer its tabular lining numbers over the old-style numbers Robert Norton hoisted upon Georgia at the last minute. Since Charter was a font made for the printer instead of the extremely limited resolution screens of the 1990s, its italic is a true italic, lighter and more compact than the non-italic “Roman” form, and with flourishes such as a very stylized z that Georgia does not have.

While Carter claims he doesn’t have a style to his font design, to my eyes Georgia and Charter have a similar feel to them. They have the very same X-height, the “Q”s are very similar, and the metrics are almost the same in the non-italic form.

Web font rendering technology in the mid-2010s has finally caught up to the point it can render a font made for a 1987 laser printer. I only felt the need to reduce the size of the serifs in the “E” and “F” with the Roman font (as well as raising where the underline is placed) to make it a screen font for today’s web pages — as well as remaining a beautiful font when printed out.

Since Bitstream very generously donated the four basic forms of Bitstream Charter to the X Consortium back in 1992 under very liberal licensing terms, it can be legally downloaded, modified, and used for free. Professional graphic designers, of course, are better off using one of the commercial versions of Charter:

http://​www.​myfonts.​com/​fonts/​bitstream/​charter-​bt-​pro/

http://​www.​myfonts.​com/​fonts/​linotype/​itc-​charter/

http://​www.​myfonts.​com/​fonts/​itc/​charter/

http://​www.​fonts.​com/​font/​paratype/​itc-​charter-​multilingual

Charter has been used in a number of places. My older Shirt Pocket New Testaments from the International Bible Society are typeset in Bitstream Charter; they are the most readable small Bibles I have used. There is a greatly expanded Charter variant that is also free, Charis:

http://​scripts.​sil.​org/​cms/​scripts/​page.​php?​site_​id=​nrsi&​amp;​id=​charissilfont

When I lived in México, I printed my English lessons in a Charis variant which my students loved.

Bitstream Charter is what you get when the same font designer who gave us Georgia is asked to make a more modern-looking serif font that renders well with today’s font hinting technologies, that fits in as little space as possible (to minimize web page load time), that has a more traditional italic form than Georgia’s pseudo-oblique italics, and is a fully free font with a generous open-source license.

I understand why Matthew Butterick feels that Bitstream Charter is one of the very best free fonts out there.

For people who are interested in variants of the Free version of Charter, I have a number of downloads here:

http://samiam.org/fonts/Charter/

Why I changed the typeface

Since I mentioned I was waiting for Windows XP holdouts to upgrade in my last blog entry, I should explain why I changed my mind. When I looked at my server logs, under 2% of visitors to my site in 2014 have used the only browser (Chrome in Windows XP) that might not be able to effectively render a modern web font. Chrome users who haven’t enabled Clear Type are free to read this site in another browser, or turn on Clear Type in their system.

I am not going to hold back the design of this webpage from using the latest technology of the mid-2010s on account of at most 2% of my visitors.

Why SideWiki sucked

Google’s now-dead SideWiki was an attempt by Google to put their own content on every single page on the Internet. SideWiki was a browser extension that added, to the left of every web page, a section where anyone on the Internet could comment on the web page or anything else; the comments were visible to anyone else on the internet who visited that web page and had SideWiki installed.

Google introduced it in the fall of 2009. It, thankfully, did not last very long. In under two years, Google already announced its termination; it was removed (including having all comments deleted) before the end of 2011.

SideWiki was not the first attempt to add a place for comments on every single web page. There has also been, over the years, Third Voice, Diigo, Fleck, ShiftSpace, Stickis, and Trailfire, to name just a few. Like SideWiki, all of them are either out of business or no longer actively marketing web annotations.

What Google did was more menacing. They made SideWiki part of their popular toolbar; they leveraged the userbase of another unrelated product to hoist SideWiki upon web pages. People who didn't know what SideWiki was were suddenly under the impression that webpages now had a comment bar on the left hand side.

They never even implemented a way for webmasters to opt out of it, despite repeated requests for them to do so.

SideWiki was a haven for spammers, trolls, crackpots and pretty much no one else. Here is some of the documented abuse SideWiki was forcing webmasters to put up with:

http://​marketersboard.​com/​google-​sidewiki-​controversy/

Also, here is Jeff Jarvis’ well articulated criticism of SideWiki:

http://​buzzmachine.​com/​2009/​09/​23/​google-​sidewiki-​danger/

Remember: Freedom of speech does not guarantee one a printing press — or, in the case of SideWiki, the ability to vandalize other people’s printing presses. Based on the precedence in the related Washingtonpost.newsweek Interactive Company, LLC, et al. v. The Gator Corporation case, I think there would have been legal sanctions imposed against Google for SideWiki (such as enjoining them to allow web sites to opt out via a special HTTP header) had it actually caught on.

A SideWiki alternative

One of the few good features SideWiki offered was the ability to warn people about online scams. This feature, however, is better served with the Web of Trust browser plugin. Web of Trust rates sites for whether they can be trusted and whether they are safe for children.

Web of Trust is available for all major browsers, and, unlike SideWiki, does not attract trolls and crackpots, nor does it pretend to be part of the website the way SideWiki did.

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark

I have always been a fan of Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark (OMD), especially their more peppy music (“Enola Gay”, “Locomotion”, “Tesla Girls”, “So in Love”, and their biggest US hit, “If You Leave”), and even once had their album “Crush” on vinyl.

Then again, I never cared for “Joan of Arc” (too brooding for my tastes).

The Mexican Radio my wife and I listen to has “Enola Gay”, “Secret” (which didn't even break top 40 in the US — strange how “So In Love” from the same album is forgotten there and this song which was only an album track here ended up being a big hit there), and “If You Leave” in heavy rotation every weekend when they play oldies.

Some trivia: OMD’s lead singer Andy McCluskey formed the British girl band Atomic Kitten and co-wrote their only original #1 song “Whole Again”. This is the only #1 hit penned by an OMD member — and they needed the Tesla Girls to sing it for them to hit that spot.

They recently reformed and are coming out with new albums. Here’s a really good NYT piece on them from last year:

http://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2013/​05/​12/​magazine/​omds-​plot-​against-​rock.​html?​pagewanted=​all&​amp;_​r=​1&​amp;

2016 edit: Fixing link rot with archive.is

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The best open-source fonts

June 21, 2014

In this blog, I list the best open-source fonts out there, discuss getting lining numbers in Georgia (yes, it can be done without buying Georgia Pro...kinda sorta), and somewhat revise my outlook on web fonts for body text.

Best open-source fonts

I am listing the best open-source fonts out there by category. An open source font is one I can freely download, use in any program (open source or not), modify, and share with others (either with or without modifications). So, without further ado:

Best Serif Font: Bitstream Charter

Matthew Carter, the same font designer who gave us the legendary Verdana and Georgia fonts, has made one font which has become open source: Bitstream Charter. This is one of the first digital typefaces, having come out back in 1987.

While the bold form looks a little distinct for my tastes at large font sizes (it’s perfectly good at body text sizes), the regular weight is very attractive at all font sizes. I use it for my PDF resume with excellent results.

It was donated as a postscript font to the X Consortium back in 1992 under open-source license terms. For years, it was a beautiful printing font but not the best screen font; ttfautohint has made it possible for it to finally be used as a web and screen font at body text font sizes.

Matthew Butterick has converted it in to modern font formats; I have used ttfautohint to make it a really nice web font. It is available for download here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​best-​opensource/​charter-​2014-​06.​zip

Here is a demo:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​charter-​2014-​06/​demo.​html

A possible improvement to Bitstream Charter

For screen rendering, I find Charter’s "E" and "F" to have serifs that are a little too large, so I have created a modified version of Charter with smaller serifs in the uppercase E and F letters:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​Charter/​Chortle​2014​e.​zip

It can be seen here on the screen:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​Charter/​Chortle​2014​e/​woff/​demo.​html

Best Sans-Serif Font: Source Sans Pro

The best grotesque (Sans-serif) open source font is Paul Hunt’s very beautiful Source Sans Pro. Commissioned by Adobe to use in their open source applications, it makes for a very good font, both on the screen and on paper. I use a modified (and renamed) version of it for headings on this web page; I also use it for the web site’s body text on mobile browsers and will make it the body text within a year once I feel holdouts still using Windows XP without clear type have finally upgraded their systems.

Source Sans Pro also wins a prize for being the best open source Multi Master font out there. Source Sans Pro’s weight can actually be dynamically changed to be any value, as I demonstrate here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​Userspace/​Userspace​MMr/​Web/​demo.​html

Not only is Source Sans Pro available for download on Sourceforge, but also I have a mirror of it here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​best-​opensource/​Source-​Sans-​Pro/

Here is a demo of my derivative of Source Sans Pro:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​Userspace/​2014/​rev​3​a/​demo.​html

Best Monospace vector font: Cousine (OFL)

A few years ago, RedHat comissioned Steve Matteson to make Liberation Mono, a monospace font that is the same size as Microsoft’s Courier New. Google then paid for the font to be released as an OFL font as part of their Google Web Fonts.

Unlike the majority of open source fonts, Cousine has full delta hinting, which means it looks very good, even on older Windows XP systems without clear type as well as in terminal applications when the font is configured to be rendered with any anti-aliasing.

Recently, Google “updated” the license of Cousine to no longer be OFL licensed, and removed the delta hinting that has made Cousine such a beautiful terminal font. I have an older OFL version of Cousine available for download:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​best-​opensource/​Cousine.​zip

Here is a demo (note that the left smart quotes in this Cousine variant, called WTerm, have been modified, and that Cousine, unlike WTerm, has an italic/oblique, bold, and bold italic form):

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​terminal/​WTerm/​demo.​html

Best monospace pixel font: Misc-fixed 7x14

Like Bitstream Charter, this font dates back to the 1980s. Unlike Bitstream Charter, we do not know who originally made this font. Misc fixed 7x14 is one of the terminal fonts that comes with the X windows system. I have been using this font since 1995 and still use it today as my preferred terminal font.

It’s very readable and small enough that two terminals fit side-by-side on a 1366x768 (or even 1280x800) screen, and three terminals fit side-by-side on a 1920x1080 (HD) screen.

The font comes with Linux; Macintosh users can get it via the XQuartz package. I have made a Windows conversion of this font which works well in Cygwin (right click on a terminal, choose “options”, then choose “text”), PuTTY, or even MSys’s RXVT terminal:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​best-​opensource/​m​7​x​14.​fon

More information about this conversion is in a previous blog entry:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20131215.​html

Here is a screenshot with this font:

http://​samiam.​org/​screenshots/​screenshot-​2004.​05.​23.​png

Honorable mention: PT Sans Narrow

PT Sans Narrow gets an honorable mention as the best open-source condensed font that I have found. PT Sans has a very distinct style to it; for example, the "3" is very angular. To me, PT Sans Narrow feels a little like a Trebuchet Condensed font.

In my previous gig, we used this for PDF reports when we needed to fit a lot of text on a single line, with very good results.

I have a mirror of the font here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​best-​opensource/​honorable-​mention/

Georgia with lining numbers

I mentioned in a previous blog that Georgia originally had lining numbers. As it turns out, Microsoft kept Georgia’s lining numbers in the version of the font for Windows 3.11. Keep in mind that these are proportional, not tabular, numbers.

This font is an earlier version of Georgia; in particular its language support is far less extensive than more recent versions of Georgia — it only supports characters in earlier versions of the Windows-1252 code page without the Euro symbol.

For people interested in a free version of Georiga with lining numbers, I have made a mirror of the older Georgia here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​other/​Microsoft/

Web fonts for body text

In my last blog, I mentioned that we might not be ready for web fonts in body text, because of holdouts still using Windows XP without clear type. It is true that back in 2011 one could not readily use a web font for body text without non-cleartype users complaining, but the number of such people has certainly greatly decreased.

Fonts with modern hinting technologies only look bad in Windows XP without clear type enabled systems in the following browsers (mostly outdated):

Opera 12

Older versions of Firefox

Chrome (But not as bad as Opera and older Firefox)

For people using Opera 12 or and older Firefox in Windows XP, please update your browser. Opera 12 is scheduled to no longer get security updates and any version of Firefox which doesn’t mandate clear type rendering for clear type is unpatched.

All users in Windows XP should enable Clear Type:

Right click on the desktop

Click on “Properties”

Select the tab above marked “Appearance”

Press the button marked “Effects”

Select “Clear Type” as the way to smooth font edges

Better yet, Windows XP users really should replace their systems with either Windows 7 or Linux; Windows XP is no longer getting security updates (no, the security updates for the point-of-sale version of XP do not protect the entire system) and is a security incident waiting to happen. And, yes, modern web fonts tend to look better in Linux and Windows 7 than they do in XP.

I will update my web page to use my Source Sans Pro derivative for all body text in early 2015 — I am giving holdouts who still use XP and who still haven’t enabled Clear Type eight months after Microsoft has stopped supporting XP. The mobile design of this web page already uses a webfont for body text, as well as the compact blog index:

http://samiam.org/blog/all.html

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Fonts in 2014

June 11, 2014

In today's blog, I discuss web fonts in 2014.

New in 2014

Both Firefox and Safari have fixed their bugs with printing pages that use a web font. This makes web fonts finally a solution for both on-screen and on-paper rendering of web pages.

Windows XP has reached its end of life. There are people and corporations stubbornly holding on to this now-dead operating system, of course, and, more to the point, there are people on fixed incomes who may not have had a chance to scrape together enough money to get a computer that can run anything newer than Windows XP. As one example: My old Thinkpad 600X -- a computer from 1999 -- ran XP fine but would not even boot in to Windows 7. Another data point: Just two years ago, a friend of mine bought a refurbished computer (a Thinkpad, to boot) running XP which could not be readily upgraded to Windows 7.

Point being, Windows XP is still out there. World wide, 16% of users are still using it. While XP does support Clear type, enabling it is well hidden (Control panel -> Display -> Appearance -> Effects) and there are many XP users out there who haven't done that. Indeed, while Internet Explorer 8 forces Clear Type font rendering in XP, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera do not. (Firefox in Windows XP, however, will usually use Clear Type to render web fonts, but Chrome, which has a higher browser market share, does not).

Bottom line, while every day fewer and fewer computers are using older font rendering technologies, there are still enough of them out there that I still feel uncomfortable using a font without delta hinting (one that looks like discrete pixels on a low-resolution display) for body text.

To make things worse, since there have been bugs in font rendering engines which could have been used to allow attackers to break in to desktop computers via "drive by download" attacks (when, upon visiting a web page, someone's computer gets infect by malware), browsers strip out delta hinting information from fonts download from the web. So, even if there was a beautiful web font out there with delta hinting, those delta hints will not render in an old XP system, and the font will almost always look grey and blurry (I will mention an exception to this rule below).

This leaves us with very few choices for body text out there.

Fonts for body text

There are only seven "web safe" fonts (fonts installed on pretty much any computer out there, including Linux) with full delta hinting: Comic Sans, Courier New, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Arial, Georgia, and Verdana. In more detail:

Comic Sans. This is a very polarizing font; people either love it or hate it. It's a very feminine font, so I can see why insecure "macho" men are repelled by it. As a practical matter, it's too stylized to make for really readable body text.

Courier New. This is a rather ugly monospaced font. While usable for code samples when I have to use a 100% web safe font (such as using an HTML email editor which forces me to name the font), it otherwise should not be used.

Times New Roman. This is a great printing font when something has to be readable in a small space. On the screen, not so great -- it looks rather bland and plain, and is harder to read than a good screen font.

Trebuchet. This was a great choice a decade ago when designers still had to use web safe fonts for all the fonts on their page, yet wanted to use a font with a bit of a flair. It's good for headings, but has some readability issues when rendered using Clear Type (the M and W look a little off). I use it as one of the fallback fonts for headings when the browser can not or will not install a web font.

Arial. This font is the most popular font with young "hipster" web designers for body text. I can see why they like the choice -- while not the most readable web safe font out there, it is probably the most aesthetically pleasing one. As an aside, some font stacks (list of possible fonts to use for a web page) put Helvectica before Arial, but that may not be a good idea because Windows users sometimes install programs that add a Helvectica that is a really ugly, unreadable mess on the screen.

Georgia. A beautiful serifed screen font with full delta hinting designed by Matthew Carter. Its only real defect is that it only has old-style numerals, which do not look as good as lining numbers for on-screen text. Carter is not responsible for the old-style numbers; the original Georgia had lining numbers but Carter's supervisor, Robert Norton, forced the numbers to be old-style at the last minute.

Verdana. Hands down the most readable web safe font out there. It's really beautiful at 9 or 10 point. At 12 point or bigger, it remains really readable, but looks a little gawky and awkward.

For this web page, I use a large version of Verdana because, for me, readability of body text is more important than aesthetics.

Since Verdana's bold is really heavy (it would better be described as "Verdana Black"; the reason Verdana is so heavy as a bold is because the technology Verdana was made for -- pixel rendering on low-resolution screens -- forced the bold to be twice as heavy as non-bold), in places with a lot of bold text I use Arial as the bold font along with Verdana for non-bold text. While not a perfect match, it looks better than having a lot of Verdana bold on a page.

There actually is a better solution out there: Verdana Pro Semi Bold. The main problem is cost: It would cost me $40 each year to add that single typeface style to my webpage. Since this is a noncommercial page that is already losing money for me, it's hard to justify yet another expense when I have three mouths to feed.

As an aside, Georgia Pro has lining numerals, solving one particular issue. Unfortunately, since it is a web font, it does not have delta hinting, so loses the one big advantage Georgia has: Readability on older computers. Sure, one could use Georgia Pro with lining numbers for numbers and normal Georgia for the rest of the text, but having a blurry-looking font next to a clear delta-hinted font would be a jarring experience (it would look OK on computers using modern font hinting).

Since a semi-bold does not need delta hinting as much as a font with "regular" weight, combining Verdana Pro Semi Bold (without delta hinting) with Verdana (using delta hinting) looks good, even on systems with old font rendering technologies.

One possible web font

One web font that is remarkably readable, even when using older font rendering technologies, is Matthew Butterick's really beautiful Equity font.

While it is a little blurry around the edges when rendered with older font rendering technologies, it is still perfectly readable at 12 point or larger. It looks really great on systems with modern font rendering technologies.

The font is remarkably affordable, especially considering that it comes with a license to use it as a web font (as long as its used for one's own web page -- companies need to buy a separate, inexpensive license).

The font has a true italic, which I find a little jarring for a screen font (many fonts these days have an "italic" which is really an oblique with a couple of letters stylized differently), but I applaud Butterick for being one of the relatively few designers who has done the work of making a real italic font.

This is a font I will proably get down the road when I can pull enough funds together to do so. I don't plan on using it for my web page, however (except possibly my resume); it's a little more formal looking than the design I like my web page to have.

See also

Embedding web fonts - Webkit @font-face bug - IE8 @font-face bug - Web typography - On web site design - RMS on Jobs; Raspberry Pi (I briefly discuss C|Net moving away from webfonts at the bottom) - Slashdot and more (I discuss why I changed from Ubuntu to Source Sans for my page's webfont) - Web typography (2012) - Web font rendering

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Miguel: In Memorandum

May 24, 2014

Marina, my wife, and her mother first met Miguel, a cat who looked like a small tiger (albeit with a white belly), in 2000. He was a few months old and starving to death. Since they did not have any food for him, they ended up feeding him some cantaloupe they had around. He eagerly ate it and had a love for cantaloupe for the rest of his life.

After feeding him and bringing him back to health, Miguel became a womanizing cat, very popular with the lady cats. As Marina told me the story, he was so popular, the lady cats were chasing him around. There were countless kittens in their neighborhood in Puebla that Miguel sired.

Miguel was a strong kitten. Marina told me the story of how, one day, he came in seriously bruised and black all over. He recovered from that — just as he recovered from almost starving to death — and was soon back to health.

Marina’s mother finally told Marina that Miguel was getting hurt too often fighting other cats. They ended up neutering him so he would not get in to so many fights any more.

How I met Miguel

I did not meet Miguel myself until 2009 when I was dating Marina. He was always a really fat cat. He was a cat of high class: For example, while he really enjoyed cheese, he would only eat fancy, expensive brands.

He was a very friendly, big, albeit timid cat when I met him. I remember Marina complaining that he would not pick a fight with a possum that was stealing his food when we lived together in Cuernavaca. He usually liked to stay outside, but sometimes came inside to eat or even to cuddle with us.

He was a survivor; while Marina’s other pets came and gone, Miguel stayed around. One time, we came back from flying to Ciudad Juarez getting her green card processed; he was in the middle of what was left of the neighbor’s pool precariously floating in the middle of the pool. With great effort, Marina and I rescued him and he lived another day. Marina told me that Miguel was the longest companion she still had.

One day, Marina was upset with Miguel and told him that he was a useless cat. Miguel, taking offense at this, came in to our house that evening while we were watching a movie with a mouse in his mouth, proclaiming “I may be an old cat, but I can still be a useful cat catching mice!” Marina was so horrified by the sight of the mouse that she screamed.

Coming to America

In late 2012, we had to bring Marina in a hurry to the US. Miguel had to stay with the other cat Rayita unattended for a couple months until I could find an apartment that would take pets and fly them up to the US. Miguel was not the same when we picked him up; he had lost a lot of weight which he never recovered.

Miguel adjusted to living with us in the United States. He wanted to be outdoors, but since the apartment complex where we lived had a lot more people in it than Marina’s gated yard, he only came out late at night when no one was in front of our place. There was a tree in front of our apartment that he loved to scratch his claws on. Sometimes he would walk further and explore the entire area; we kept a close eye on him to make sure he was OK.

While we did not realize it, he began to get sick. The first symptom was that he became incontinent — he started, much to our annoyance, pooping or peeing on the ground or even the carpet in the living room. After cleaning up after him countless times, Marina discovered that Miguel would go in the bathroom if we left newspapers there for him to go on. This mostly resolved the issues with the messes that he was leaving.

He was still good to have around. When I would sleep on the couch in the living room (sometimes needed when the baby was making a lot of noise really late at night), Miguel would almost always jump on to the couch to be with me, sleeping either at my side or on my feet.

Miguel was still a useful cat. While I was talking with a recruiter about myself and what jobs would be a match for my skills, I showed her Miguel over the videophone; she thought the cat was adorable and it helped me build a good rapport with her. Indeed, it was through that very same recruiter that I ended up getting a job with really good pay — Miguel helped me get that job.

Miguel’s sickness

It was soon after starting that well-paying job when Marina noticed that Miguel was really skinny and sick. He was eating and drinking very little, hiding in the closet, and Marina set up a special box for him while we made arrangements to take him to the doctor.

One night, I had to go to the kitchen in the middle of the night to make some food for our crying baby. As I was up, I was pleasantly surprised to see Miguel coming in to the kitchen, just like the old days; I made him some food, but he would not eat it. Finally, I put him back in his box and gave him some water that he drank. That was the very last time I saw Miguel.

My mother very kindly took off some time to take Marina, the baby, and Miguel to the veterinarian. After I talked to the doctor on the phone, Marina and I decided that the best course of action was to put him to sleep; he was very sick and any attempt to keep him alive would have been painful for him.

Miguel was a beautiful loving cat who lived a long healthy life. His time to go had finally come. After surviving countless struggles through his entire life, he breathed his last on May 22, 2014. He was a very kind cat who I will never forget.

I would like to thank Marina for letting me use a picture of him. A version of Miguel’s story with more pictures is also available. To post a comment about this blog entry, go to the forum (self-signed https). New accounts may post once I approve the account.

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MaraDNS Update

April 27, 2014

I have updated MaraDNS to have DNS-over-TCP work in Windows.

MaraDNS update

For a while now, the "zoneserver" DNS-over-TCP daemon would compile in Windows (as long as Cygwin was installed), but would not run.

I have fixed this bug. It's now possible to have DNS-over-TCP using MaraDNS in Windows.

Downloading this update

The patch can be downloaded here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download/​patches/​2.​0.​10/

The snapshot can be downloaded as a tarball (.tar.gz file) here:

https://​github.​com/​samboy/​Mara​DNS/​releases/​tag/​2014-​04-​26.​1

Getting DNS-over-TCP in Windows

Get Cygwin. Be sure to have the gcc compiler.

Download the latest MaraDNS snapshot (see link above).

Compile it in Cygwin.

Read this documentation:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​tutorial/​dnstcp.​html

Why I did this

Last November, an anonymous user requested to have DNS-over-TCP in the Windows MaraDNS port. Nearly six months later, I finally got this to work.

MaraDNS timeline

Unless a security hole is found, updates to MaraDNS are pretty slow. Since I have a six-month-old daughter, and since I am not getting paid to write this code, I have to put MaraDNS on the back burner.

My rough roadmap is to update the random prime generator in Windows. There currently exists a patch by Tobias Frost to give Deadwood a random prime number for its hash compression code. I will probably eventually update this code so that, in Windows, it will use CryptGenRandom() instead of random(), which will give the random prime number guaranteed strong entropy.

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Alpine in CentOS

April 23, 2014

This blog is about how I set up Alpine, an easy-to-use text-based mail client, in CentOS 6. I also discuss accessing my Gmail with Alpine.

Why Alpine?

Alpine is an open-source reimplementation of Pine, a classic text-based email client that was very popular in the 1990s, by the same development team.

I am not using Alpine because of a sudden nostalgia for the 1990s. I use Alpine because I need to sometimes check my email while I am out on the road with my metered-bandwidth G3 internet connection. By using a text-only interface, I can read and send email using 1% of the bandwidth of a webmail interface.

Getting Alpine

Alpine does not come with CentOS 6 (the only included email client is Mutt, which I never cared for), but I have made an RPM of Alpine 2.00 which can be downloaded here:

http://samiam.org/software/alpine/

To install this RPM in a 32-bit setup, download alpine-2.00-1.i686.rpm, then:

rpm -i alpine-2.00-1.i686.rpm

To install this RPM on a 64-bit system, download alpine-2.00-1.src.rpm, then:

rpm -i alpine-2.00-1.src.rpm
cd ~/rpmbuild/SPECS
rpmbuild -ba alpine-2.00.spec

This might take a couple of minutes while Alpine is compiled. Once done:

cd ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/
rpm -i alpine-2.00-1.x86_64.rpm

To verify Alpine has been installed, type in "alpine".

Using Alpine with Gmail

Most of these directions are adapted from these HOWTOs:

http://​people.​virginia.​edu/~​ll​2​bf/​docs/​nix/​alpine.​html

http://​www.​wijeyesakere.​com/​tech/​alpine/

First, I had to set up Gmail so Alpine can access my Gmail inbox. To do this: Tools (gear icon) -> Settings -> Forwarding and POP/IMAP -> IMAP access -> Enable IMAP.

After doing that, since IMAP does not support two-factor authentication, I had to set up an application specific password, as described here:

https://​support.​google.​com/​mail/​answer/​1173270?​hl=​en

Once I did that, I then had to set up Alpine to read my Gmail via IMAP. I went in to Alpine, then went to Main menu -> Setup -> collection List -> Add (I just typed in 'MSLA' after opening Alpine). The nickname is how the mailbox will appear under "folder List"; the server line looks like this:

imap.gmail.com/ssl/user=username@gmail.com

Replace "username" with the actual Gmail account user name.

At this point, I could read, but not send email in Alpine. To set up the SMTP server so I could send email, I did the following:

I went to Main menu -> Setup -> Rules -> Roles ('MSRR'), added a role, which I gave the nickname 'Gmail' to. I then scrolled down to "Actions begin here", put in my Gmail name and email in the Set From field, so it looked like "My name <username@gmail.com>" (Replacing "my name" with my name and "username" with my Gmail username).

For "Use SMTP server", I put in a value like this:

smtp.gmail.com/novalidate-cert/user=username@gmail.com/ssl

Again, replacing "username" with my Gmail username.

I then went to the bottom, where it says "Compose Use", and put in the value "With confirmation".

For security reasons, I have set up things so I need to enter a password to read or send email; to change this requires recompiling Alpine.

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The “Heartbleed” bug

April 12, 2014

I briefly discuss the “Heartbleed” bug, and why my https certificate key has changed.

This bug has been getting a lot of press, even making the front page of the BBC.

My experience

Five days ago, one of my hosting providers tweeted that there was a nasty bug in OpenSSL, which hardly surprised me considering OpenSSL's security history.

The heartbleed bug is not that severe of a bug (5.0); indeed, MaraDNS’ most recent CVE report was a more severe bug (6.4).

The fix

The bug was very easy to fix:

yum -y update
service nginx restart

It was yet another routine update, in the scheme of things.

Making a new server key

For those who wish to be extra-careful, here is how to make a new self-signed server key:

openssl genrsa -des3 -passout pass:x -out server.pass.key 2048
openssl rsa -passin pass:x -in server.pass.key -out server.key
rm server.pass.key
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key \
 -out server.crt

Hardening nginx

While I was at it, I also hardened OpenSSL on nginx to only use secure ciphers, as per Hynek Schlawack's instructions, by adding these lines to my nginx.conf file:

ssl_prefer_server_ciphers On;
ssl_protocols SSLv3 TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
ssl_ciphers ECDH+AESGCM:DH+AESGCM:ECDH+AES256:DH+AES256:
 ECDH+AES128:DH+AES:ECDH+3DES:DH+3DES:RSA+AESGCM:
 RSA+AES:RSA+3DES:!aNULL:!MD5:!DSS;

The last three lines above are actually one long line in my nginx.conf.

I also made sure root owns my server.key and server.crt files, and that they are only readable by root:

chown root:root server.key server.crt
chmod 600 server.key server.crt

As an aside, I use my own fork of nginx 1.2 with all CVE security patches applied.

Still supported by CentOS

While OpenSSL does not have the best security, it is a package that is included with CentOS 6 and, hence, will be supported with security updates until 2020.

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Postfix + Mailman in CentOS 6

March 23, 2014

This blog describes how I have configured Postfix to work in CentOS 6 to receive email, and how I set up Mailman. It includes information on getting Nginx to display Mailman's web interface.

Mail transport agent

A mail transport agent (MTA) is a program that sends and receives email.

There are a number of mail transport agents out there: Smail (last updated 2005), Qmail (last updated 1998), netqmail (last updated 2005), Courier (currently maintained), Exim (currently maintained), Sendmail (CentOS package available), and Postfix (CentOS package available).

I chose Postfix becuase

It is included with CentOS. This saves me from the bother of having a package which I have to track security updates for.

It is more streamlined than Sendmail, the other MTA included with Postfix

Installing Postfix

As root:

yum -y install postfix
chkconfig --levels 2345 postfix on
service postfix start

After installing Postfix

After installing Postfix, I edited /etc/postfix/main.cf

inet_interfaces = server.example.com, localhost

inet_protocols = ipv4

mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost, example.com, server.example.com

recipient_delimiter = -

The reason I changed the recipient_delimiter is because a lot of web sites out there will not accept an email address with a + in it, but have no problem with email addresses with a '-'.

Change server.example.com in to the name of the machine running the Postfix server.

Note that it is not possible to run a SMTP server on most home internet conections without complicated configurations, since ISPs have had to block outgoing SMTP because of spam abuse.

Adding an alias

An alias is another name for a given email address. For example, to allow mail sent to foo@example.com to be delivered to bar's account, edit /etc/aliases, adding the following line:

foo: bar

Next, do this as root:

newaliases

Now, all mail sent to foo@example.com will be forwarded to bar@example.com

Adding an alias that uses delimiter

To add an alias with virtual address support (foo-anything@example.com is delivered to foo@example.com), it's necessary to set up a virtual host. Here is what /etc/postfix/virtual looks like:

foo@example.com bar

Once that is set up, do this as root:

postmap /etc/postfix/virtual

Make sure virtual support is in the main.cf file. The lines look like this:

virtual_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual
virtual_mailbox_base = /var/mail

Don't be a spammer!

Now that basic email works, the next step was to install mailman, a mailing list manager, in my VPS.

First of all, before installing mailman, make sure your hosting provider's AUP allows mailing lists. Since I use inexpensive $15/year nodes, not all of them allow mailing lists.

It is best to use an ISP whose AUP explicitly allows mailing list software to be run. For example, while I am very happy with the service I have gotten with my node on Crissic, it is not a node for running any kind of mailing list. Even though Crissic's AUP allows me to send 400 emails a day (less than the amount of traffic my one list generates), their spam filters stopped me from sending any and all email after I sent only 136 mails.

Their support department explained to me that the issue was that Mailman sends too many emails at once, which triggers their spam filters. The way to not trigger those filters is to rate limit outgoing email. Unfortunately, neither Postfix nor Mailman appear to have a global sending rate limit. While Postfix can rate limit how mach a single email or mail server gets email via destination_concurrency_limit, destination_rate_delay, and extra_recipient_limit, Postfix needs a third party module like Policyd to have a global quota.

BuyVM, on the other hand, allows me to run a mailing list, but their AUP requires me to get permission via a support ticket first. After opening up a ticket asking to run my low-traffic mailing list, I almost immediately got a reply approving the request (even though I sent the request late Saturday night).

It's very important to make sure anyone and everyone on your mailing list has opted in to the mailing list. This means: They sent an email to the mailing list manager which then subscribed them; they gave explicit consent to receive email from the list.

Installing mailman

There is one, and only one mailing list package included with CentOS: Mailman. The issue is, since I use Nginx and Postfix, installing mailman is somewhat difficult. Partial instructions are here:

http://​black-​pixel.​net/​mailman-​with-​postfix-​and-​nginx-​on-​centos-​6.​html

I will recap those instructions, filling in holes as needed.

fcgiwrap for CentOS 6

That page does not include instructions on giving CentOS 6 fastcgi cgi-bin support (fcgiwrap), so I have forked fcgiwrap to port it to CentOS 6:

https://github.com/samboy/fcgiwrap

To install that package, as root:

yum -y install git

Follow this by, as non-root (user):

git clone https://github.com/samboy/fcgiwrap

Read the README file in the fcgiwrap directory for instructions on compiling and installing fcgiwrap in CentOS 6. Unlike other packages, EPEL is not needed to use fcgiwrap.

postfix-to-mailman.py for CentOS 6

In addition, here is postfix-to-mailman.py for CentOS 6:

http://​samiam.​org/​software/​postfix-​to-​mailman-​centos.​py

But, as it turns out, my particular mailman setup doesn't use it (I just edit aliases by hand to add a new mailinst list), so this script has not been fully tested, but starts up.

Nginx and mailman

Here are the relevant lines from my Nginx configuration:

    # Mailman mailing list web interface
    server {
        listen       [::]:80;
        listen       [::]:443 ssl;
        ssl_certificate /usr/local/nginx/server.crt;
        ssl_certificate_key /usr/local/nginx/server.key;
        server_name  mailman.example.com;
        location / {
            root   html/;
            index  index.html index.htm index.php;
        }
        location ~ \.php$ {
            root           html/samiam.org/;
            fastcgi_pass   unix:/tmp/php.socket;
            fastcgi_index  index.php;
            include        fastcgi_params;
        }
        location /mailman/cgi-bin {
                root /usr/lib;
                fastcgi_split_path_info (^/mailman/cgi-bin/[^/]*)(.*)$;
                include /usr/local/nginx/conf/fastcgi_params;
          fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
                fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_path_info;
            fastcgi_param PATH_TRANSLATED $document_root$fastcgi_path_info;
                fastcgi_intercept_errors on;
                fastcgi_pass   unix:/var/run/fcgiwrap.socket;
        }
        location /icons {
                alias /usr/lib/mailman/icons/;
        }
        location /images/mailman {
                alias /usr/lib/mailman/icons/;
        }
        location /pipermail {
                alias /var/lib/mailman/archives/public;
                autoindex on;
        }
    }

Note two different values for fastcgi_pass. The PHP scripts are passed to a fastcgi socket started using this code (run as "nobody"):

#!/bin/bash
if id | grep root > /dev/null ; then
        echo Do not run this as root
        exit
fi
BIND=/tmp/php.socket
USER=nobody
PHP_CGI=/usr/bin/php-cgi
export USER=nobody
export PATH=/usr/bin
nohup php-cgi -b $BIND &

The mailman CGI scripts are passed to fcgiwrap; its installation is described above.

Configuring Postfix for Mailman

Postfix doesn't need a lot of configuration for Mailman, as long as new lists are being generated from the command line.

It's important to edit /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Defaults.py to have lines that look like this:

DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'mailman.example.com'
DEFAULT_URL_HOST = 'mailman.example.com'
DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN = 'https://%s/mailman/cgi-bin/'

And edit /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py to have lines like this:

DEFAULT_URL_HOST   = 'mailman.example.com'
DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'mailman.example.com'

This should be done before making any mailing lists for Mailman.

Make a new list in Mailman

cd /usr/lib/mailman/bin
su
./newlist

It will ask you the name of the list, the email of the person who runs the list, as well as for an initial password.

Once the list is made, the command will output lines like this:

## foo mailing list
foo:              "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman post foo"
foo-admin:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman admin foo"
foo-bounces:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman bounces foo"
foo-confirm:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman confirm foo"
foo-join:         "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join foo"
foo-leave:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman leave foo"
foo-owner:        "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman owner foo"
foo-request:      "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman request foo"
foo-subscribe:    "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe foo"
foo-unsubscribe:  "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe foo"

These lines need to be added to /etc/aliases. Once added the newaliases command needs to be run.

Note that mailman will refuse to start up unless a list with the name 'mailman' is created.

Starting Postfix and Mailman

To start the Postfix and Mailman services:

service postfix start
service mailman start

To have these services run when the system is started:

chkconfig --levels 2345 postfix on
chkconfig --levels 2345 mailman on

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Gravity: A review

March 14, 2014

I finally had a chance to see "Gravity" last night ... a local big-screen theater is temporarily showing it again on one of their screens in wake of its impressive performance at the Oscars and Golden Globes.

Every time I see an Alfonso Cuarón movie, it always blows my mind away. This is the second movie of his I have seen, the first being his extremely erotic and equally fantastic "Y Tu Mamá También".

What makes "Gravity" great is its remarkably realistic portrayal of what it's like in space. Every spaceship here is a real design. Watching this movie on the big screen is as close as one can get to being in space without spending millions of dollars, Mark Shuttleworth style, going there.

For a review with more spoilers written by a scientist and professional science fiction writer:

http://​davidbrin.​blogspot.​com/​2013/​10/​gravity-​high-​praise-​plus-​few-​quibbles.​html

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MaraDNS security update

February 12, 2014

Today, I celebrate my anniversary with my wife, release a MaraDNS security update, and post a couple links given to me in private email.

¡Happy Anniversary Marina!

The most important thing comes first:

Four years ago today, I had the great honor of marrying the most beautiful woman in the world. My life is infinitely better than it was when I was alone. It is a great honor to celebrate four years of marriage with Marina today. I LOVE YOU! May God continue to bless our marriage.

MaraDNS security update

I have released MaraDNS 2.0.09, MaraDNS 1.4.14, Deadwood 3.2.05, and Deadwood 2.3.09. This is an important stability and security update and all MaraDNS users are encouraged to update at their soonest convenience.

How to download

Most MaraDNS users should download MaraDNS 2.0.09, which includes Deadwood 3.2.05:

http://​maradns.​org/​download/​2.​0/​2.​0.​09

https://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​maradns/​files/​Mara​DNS/​2.​0.​09/

The GitHub version of MaraDNS has also been updated (it was actually the first version to be updated):

https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

git clone https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

It's also possible to download just Deadwood 3.2.05:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​stable/

https://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​maradns/​files/​Deadwood/​3.​2.​05/

People who are still using MaraDNS 1 may download MaraDNS 1.4.14 (source code "tarball" only):

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download/​1.​4/

https://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​maradns/​files/​Mara​DNS/​1.​4.​14/

Please note that MaraDNS 1 will stop being supported on June 21, 2015.

For anyone still using Deadwood 2.3, here are links to Deadwood 2.3.09:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​tiny/

https://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​maradns/​files/​Deadwood/​2.​3.​09/

Note that Deadwood 2.3 will stop being supported on June 21, 2016.

Description of the problem

There has been a long-standing bug in Deadwood (ever since 2007) where bounds checking for strings was not correctly done under some circumstances.

Because of this, it has been possible to send Deadwood a "packet of death" which will crash Deadwood. Since the attack causes out-of-bounds memory to be read, but not written to, the impact of the bug is denial of service. It appears this attack can only be exploited by an IP with permission to perform recursive queries against Deadwood.

This bug is fixed in Deadwood 3.2.05 and Deadwood 2.3.09. MaraDNS 2.0.09 and 1.4.14 have been updated to include Deadwood 3.2.05.

Note that this bug only affects users of the Deadwood recursive resolver.

CVE number: None

Impact: Remote denial of service

My mistake

The mistake I have made was to make one of the core string handling functions an overly complicated "Swiss army knife" function; when it comes to security, it's better to have two simple functions than one overly complicated function.

VirtualBOX host-only network

A few months ago, I posted a blog entry showing how to set up a host-only network, as well as how to edit the registry to work around a bug in how VirtualBox sets up host-only networks. David gave me the following link:

http://teamchivers.com/?p=48

Updated link for bulk polyhedral dice

A couple of years ago, I posted a blog entry on buying bulk polyhedral dice (I was part of a role playing game campaign at the time). Some of the links in that blog no longer work (one eBay supplier has since closed up shop) but William Joyner pointed out this new listing at Amazon:

http://​www.​amazon.​com/​gp/​product/​B​00​G​1​RPRUO

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MaraDNS on GitHub

February 5, 2014

There has been some talk about setting up a repository for MaraDNS. I have now made it so: MaraDNS is available on GitHub.

For people who wish to make their own fork of MaraDNS, or who prefer to download with git instead of downloading a tarball, one can now grab MaraDNS thusly:

git clone https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

The above link can also be opened in a browser; I have gone to some effort to ensure MaraDNS compiles when downloaded via git or if GitHub's zip file of MaraDNS (on the linked webpage) is downloaded.

Feel free to fork this repo, but please do not name your fork "MaraDNS" or "Deadwood"; some names that can be used are "MaraDNS-ng", "N-MaraDNS", or any other name besides "MaraDNS" and "Deadwood".

Note that having MaraDNS in git does not affect future tarball/zipfile releases of MaraDNS; those continue to be built and released separately from git.

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Returning to Fresno

January 28, 2014

I lived in Fresno for three years to get my degree in Computational Linguistics. I had to return there one last time.

Once upon a time

It was a decade ago when I studied in Fresno.

To socialize while in college, I went to three different church groups (Two English speaking groups and a Spanish-speaking Catholic group) and made a lot of casual friends there as well as in classes and even made one cool friend at the gym I went to.

After getting my degree, I only went back to Fresno a couple of times to visit friends up there before taking the plunge and moving in Mexico. Over six years passed without me entering Fresno.

Returning to Fresno

I finally went back to Fresno late last December to clean out an old storage locker I’ve had up there (it got renewed every year on New Year’s day).

Fresno has always had issues with poverty (it’s the poorest city in California), but the economic collapse has not been friendly to this town at all. I saw a lot more homeless people in Fresno on the street asking for money or just roaming around than I did a decade ago.

While the Blockbusters stores that used to be around other parts of the state have been replaced with restaurants or other stores, the one former Blockbuster I saw, in an upscale part of Fresno to boot, is still a shuttered building with a "For Lease" sign.

Remembering old friendships

In a way I enjoyed saying a final goodbye to a place I lived for three years, and in a way it’s sad to realize that I have completely lost touch (no Facebook, nada) with most of the people I knew when I lived there.

While I managed to touch base with two old friends, I could not find my old gym buddy: Where he worked last time I saw him over six years ago has been bought out--the guy there didn’t know who I was talking about; the lady who opened the door where he lived didn’t recognized his name.

When driving up there, I went through the hometown of another person in my life back then who I lost touch with over the years; driving through her hometown, I warmly remember what a lovely friend (yes, it was I who friend zoned her, not that women mind that the way guys do) she was and how I could very well never see her again.

Some of the people I knew here were on my MySpace friend list, but I canceled that account years ago. When Facebook gets replaced by whatever the next thing is, I wonder how many Facebook friends I will lose touch with.

Life moves on

I made a point of listening to my favorite song in the car — Jonn Serrie’s very peaceful Glyder — as I left the town for the last time.

Life ultimately moves on forward, not backwards; Steve Jobs articulated this well when he said “If you look backwards in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.” Then again, it was important to say one final goodbye to a place which helped define who I am today.

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Microblogs January 2014

January 22, 2014

Here are the microblogs I posted between January 8 and 22, 2014.

Death of the web?

Wired has an interesting article about the possible death of the web:

http://​www.​wired.​com/​business/​2014/​01/​death-​pc-​also-​mean-​end-​web/

The problem with today’s web is that the underlying code for web pages has become a mutant monster.

Back in 1994, one could make a compelling web page with just <h1>, <h2>, <b>, <i>, <p>, a couple of <a href=whereever.html>s, possibly even an <img src=whatever.gif>. Then the dot-com party started and it quickly became much more complicated: Plugins, CSS (with a completely different syntax than HTML), using <table> for layout, proprietary HTML tags, Java applets (which started slowly dying because of the browser wars), SSL, Javascript (unrelated to Java), Flash (which is finally slowly dying), IE6 hacks, HTML5, web fonts, and so on.

Somewhere along the way, the web became far too complicated for anything less than a multi-million dollar company to make something to render it (as observed by Opera throwing in the towel and no longer making their own web rendering engine), much less something possible to implement by a hobbyist programmers in their spare time (try browsing the modern web in Dillo).

It has also gotten worse for webmasters: Back in the early oughts, it took me at most a week to design my then-webpage. In the mid-oughts, it took me a couple of weeks to design the webpage I had, the lion’s share of the work being getting the page to look decent in Internet Explorer 6. The current design took about two months of work to make (over nearly two years, off an on), the lion’s share of the work “under the hood” (getting it to look decent in various Internet Explorer versions out there, working around other various browser bugs, editing its webfont in Fontforge so it would render decently with multiple font rendering technologies, having it be readable on small screen mobile devices—which required redoing some of the Internet Explorer hacks, etc.)

There is a lot of appeal with not having to target the web. An app only has to run on iThings and Android devices (with possibly a Windows and Mac port if the app is a runaway success), cutting down on development expense. I can see why many developers want to avoid putting something on the web.

Posted Jan 14 2014

MaraDNS and clang

The only warning clang emits when compiling MaraDNS is a bunch of warnings where the code does a comparison like this:

if(some_unsigned_var > max || some_unsigned_var < 0)

I don't see the point in removing all those sanity checks (I would rather have a sanity check like that with an unsigned variable than not have the sanity check with a signed variable)

Posted Jan 12 2014

MaraDNS/Deadwood and Cppcheck

I just learned about Cppcheck, which, like Valgrind, is a useful tool for finding errors in C programs. I ran Cppcheck against Deadwood and MaraDNS and have made a few updates:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download/​2.​0/​snap/

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

MaraDNS came out remarkably clean; while there were a couple of memory leaks in Deadwood, none of the leaks are a security concern (the issues are along the lines of “memory leak if malloc() fails here”, “null pointer dereference if malloc() fails”, or even one case of “memory leak if a string over 16 megabytes in size is requested”).

The Cppcheck updates for authoritative MaraDNS will be part of the 2.0.08 release later this month, and the Cppcheck updates for Deadwood will be part of Deadwood 3.2.05 released near the end of this year (barring a CVE-worthy security hole).

Posted Jan 09 2014

2013-2014 archive

I have archived the microblogs posted between mid-2013 and January 8, 2014:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​2014-​01-​08.​html

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MaraDNS 2.0.08

January 14, 2014

I have released MaraDNS 2.0.08:

Deadwood updated to 3.2.04

Make DNS packet compression case-insensitive

Attach IPv6 glue to NS and MX records when MaraDNS is compiled for IPv6

Remove warning when MaraDNS is compiled for IPv6

Remove warning when compiling getzone.c

It can be downloaded here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download.​html

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Microblogs 2013-2014

January 8, 2014

Here are my microblogs from mid-2013 until January 8, 2014.

New MaraDNS and Deadwood snapshots

I have updated the code in Deadwood and MaraDNS that determines the version number to be able to use YYYY-MM-DD datestamps in snapshot releases:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download/​2.​0/​snap

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

Posted Jan 08 2014

BuyVM has stock

BuyVM has $15/year stock again: http://doesbuyvmhavestock.com/

Posted Jan 08 2014

Minor MaraDNS update

I have updated the changelog for MaraDNS:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download/​2.​0/​snap/

Posted Jan 07 2014

How to say “pussywhipped” in Spanish

Pimsleur’s Spanish lessons will not teach you this: The way to say “pussywhipped” in Spanish is “mandelon”

Posted Jan 05 2014

The Pimsleur approach

Since this is getting advertised everywhere on the Internet, here’s my link to the Pimsleur approach:

http://www.pimsleur.com/

The sense I get is that the Pimsleur approach is effective for people serious about learning a foreign language, but the lessons can be dry and tedious. And, yes, $450 for the full lesson set for a given language is not chump change, but mastering a foreign language is expensive.

For people who are serious about learning Spanish, the best way to learn it is to go to a school in a Spanish speaking country. I learned Spanish at the Spanish Institute of Puebla with very good results:

http://sipuebla.com/

Puebla is one of the safest areas of Mexico (well, except possibly for the nearby Popocatepetl volcano which acted up some last fall) and a very good city for learning Spanish.

(Full disclosure: The school’s owner was the best man at my wedding)

Posted Jan 04 2014

Minor MaraDNS/Deadwood update

I have updated both MaraDNS and Deadwood to use YYYY-MM-DD instead of YYYYMMDD timestamps for snapshot tarballs. I have also fixed the compile warning discussed at https://​forum.​samiam.​org/​thread-​39.​html

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download/​2.​0/​snap/

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

Posted Jan 03 2014

Adam Cadre on article comments

Adam Cadre, a few years ago, had this to say about people who post comments on articles:

http://​adamcadre.​ac/​calendar/​14/​14105.​html

He refers to article comments as “the bottom half of the Internet”, and I agree. It would sure be nice if Discus and Livefyre allowed me to killfile idiots.

Posted Jan 02 2014

Death of Facebook? Hardly

Teenagers don’t like Facebook for no particular reason except that their parents are using it:

http://​www.​telegraph.​co.​uk/​technology/​facebook/​10539274/​Young-​users-​see-​Facebook-​as-​dead-​and-​buried.​html

I do not see this as the death of Facebook; the apps teens are using instead (Twitter, Instagram, etc.) have only a subset of Facebook’s functionality. They’ll probably be happily using Facebook as soon as they get over their “teen rebellion” stage sometime in college. If teens were using Google+, Livejournal, or one of the open source alternatives (Diaspora, etc.), Zuckerberg should start worrying, but not until then.

Posted Dec 29 2013

The Christmas story in Luke

Reading Luke chapter 2 -- the Christmas story with Jesus in the manger as well as the shepherds -- I observe one detail missed by those who only know the retail-induced Christmas of buying things is this: the point of the story is that God listens to the poor as much as if not more than those who own too many materialistic things.

Look at what Jesus was in -- a manger. A manger is a place where animal food is stored. By putting Jesus in a manger, Luke is emphasizing the poverty God was born in, and how being poor is, if anything, better in God’s eyes than being rich.

http://​www.​biblegateway.​com/​passage/?​search=​Luke%​202&​amp;​version=​NIV

Posted Dec 25 2013

Why the web was created

As I am reading CERN’s webpage explaining the Higgs Boson, I realize the reason the entire web was invented (at CERN, to boot) was to share information about theoretical physics.

http://​home.​web.​cern.​ch/​about/​physics/​search-​higgs-​boson

Posted Dec 24 2013

More on unions

I have been having a debate about the value of unions in decreasing income inequality. After giving me the classic conservative “the only reason the us did so well in the mid-20-century was because we won the war” chestnut, my debater claimed that Japan beat us in the 1970s and 1980s because we had unions and they did not.

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that. Comparing Japan and US when talking about the importance of unions here is like comparing apples to oranges. Japan doesn’t really have unions, true, but, then again, they come from a culture where workers really don’t need unions either.

In traditional Japanese culture, employees are treated well, expected to work for a single company for their entire lifetime; traditionally companies even hooked workers up with women so they could get married.

Compare that to the US, where, unless the workers and their unions fight tooth and nail for worker’s rights, company owners get richer while workers get poorer.

There are a number of reasons Japan beat the US in the late 20th century, but it was not an issue of whether or not workers were treated well.

Posted Dec 23 2013

Holy Mass in Spanish

You know, I think my favorite Spanish is the order of Holy Mass. It sounds very nice, a lot better than mass in English (since Spanish is a lot closer to Latin). I can see why the Holy Mother Church did mass only in Latin for so many years.

Posted Dec 22 2013

Increasing inequality can be solved

From a comment I made in Facebook:

Technological development is not the sole reason for the increasing inequality. The technology of the late 1800s was a lot more primitive, yet the monopolists and CEOs of that era were able to become obscenely wealthy while the workers who made their products lived in squalor. The inequality is, front and center, a societal and a social problem, and the ways to solve it have been known throughout the 20th century (stronger unions, stronger government).

We know exactly how to solve these problems; it’s just a matter of getting the political will to do so.

Posted Dec 22 2013

Charts showing America’s increasing inequality

Some charts showing America’s increasing inequality:

http://​www.​huffingtonpost.​com/​2013/​12/​21/​charts-​2013_​n_​4486391.​html

Posted Dec 22 2013

We’re getting closer to CentOS 7

While it won’t come out in 2013, CentOS 7 should be out by mid-2014:

https://​access.​redhat.​com/​site/​products/​Red_​Hat_​Enterprise_​Linux/​Get-​Beta

Posted Dec 20 2013

Wow. JSON in AWK

I didn’t think AWK would be able to support JSON (no non-associative array type, no multidimensional associative arrays) but someone has pulled it off:

https://github.com/step-/JSON.awk

I need to see how they did it.

Posted Dec 16 2013

CEO vs. Worker pay

CEO vs. worker pay, in one graph:

http://qz.com/156522

Posted Dec 12 2013

Firefox users only

Firefox and IE users only: 𝑌𝑜𝑢𝑟 𝑏𝑟𝑜𝑤𝑠𝑒𝑟 𝑟𝑜𝑐𝑘𝑠

Posted Dec 11 2013

Microsoft can always bring back the netbook

Supposedly, Microsoft is scared of Google’s Chromebook:

http://​www.​theverge.​com/​2013/​12/​6/​5181974/​why-​is-​microsoft-​scared-​of-​chromebooks

If the Chromebook really made Microsoft nervous, they could bring back the netbook by making a Windows 8 Starter. I discuss why a Chromebook is not a netbook replacement here:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20131117.​html

Posted Dec 08 2013

Star Wars vs. Star Trek

Star Wars vs. Star Trek:

http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​v​FCBwob​65​Nw

Posted Nov 25 2013

¡Rob!

In early 2012, the TV series ¡Rob! ran for only eight weeks as a mid-season replacement. It was the story of a Caucasian man married to a Mexican woman -- and all her family. While the show got good ratings, it was canceled very quickly (CBS felt Rob's ratings were not good enough for something that came immediately after their smash comedy The Big Bang Theory).

The series is available on Netflix and my wife and I finally finished watching the final episode.

It was a very enjoyable comedy with a very enjoyable premise. Then again, I am married to a Mexican, so my opinion is biased.

Here is my favorite episode of this short-lived comedy:

http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​j​Hl​6​g​GQRF​58

To translate the Spanish at the beginning: "I accept my wife is hairy, but don't throw peanuts at her"

Cariño means "darling"

"How is it possible that Rob doesn't understand any Spanish at all?"

"The problem is that Rob can speak at all" (literally, "in any language")

"The worst thing about Rob is that he buys his clothing at the Baby Gap"

"Well, for me I find that .... " and then the conversation becomes a bunch of quacks, followed by "I want more coffee, please".

I think the actress who plays "Juana" (one Jennifer Delaeo) at 12:56 is very pretty...too bad they didn't do more with her (but, then again, too bad this comedy didn't last more than eight episodes).

Posted Nov 24 2013

Chrome in CentOS 6

The disadvantage of running Linux on the desktop is that I am using an operating system that only 1% of desktop users use. That 1% is fragmented across dozens of different distributions, each of which has its own application binary interface (ABI).

There is no practical way for Google to have their Chrome browser support all of the different flavors of Linux out there. To wit, they no longer support CentOS 6/RHEL 6. Fortunately, for now, there is a workaround to get Chrome to run with all the relevant Fedora system libraries in a separate directory:

http://chrome.richardlloyd.org.uk/

This hack will eventually stop working, so I will have to resort to setting up an OpenVZ container to run Chrome:

http://​myatus.​com/​p/​x-​server-​with-​sound-​inside-​an-​openvz-​proxmox-​container/

http://openvz.org/X_inside_VE

Slashdot had a story on this lack of support and I think Google made the wrong decision cutting off Chrome CentOS/RHEL/Scientific/Oracle 6 support, but it's their browser and their decision [1].

Google, after all, already did give me a 100% refund. They have paid back all of the money I paid for Chrome ($0.00) as then some (they pay me a modest amount of money every month since I use their network to run ads).

P.S. Another solution is to use the open-source Chromium with Chrome's Flash player:

http://​www.​webupd​8.​org/​2012/​09/​how-​to-​make-​chromium-​use-​flash-​player.​html

[1] To be fair, the Googletalk plugin for Firefox still works really nicely in CentOS 6

Posted Nov 23 2013

Filtering white noise

I just posted how to generate a white noise .wav file in Linux. Here's how to take a file with random bytes and make a interesting ocean-like sound from it:

sox --channels=2 --encoding=ms-adpcm -b 16 -r 44100 -s whitenoise.raw oceannoise.wav gain -12 band -n 1200 200 phaser 0.7 0.7 .1 0.5 0.1 -s reverb

Or for something more windlike:

sox --channels=2 --encoding=ms-adpcm -b 16 -r 44100 -s whitenoise.raw windnoise.wav gain -12 band -n 800 200 phaser 0.5 0.5 .1 0.5 0.1 -s echos 0.3 0.3 187 0.2 83 0.2 131 0.2 1024 0.3 reverb

(My wife says this second incantation sounds like street traffic)

These incantations is based on the command line posted here:

http://unreasonable.org/node/303

(Note that those Sox settings do not generate true pink noise)

It’s also possible to download white noise files for free here:

https://​archive.​org/​details/​Ten​Minutes​Of​White​Noise​Pink​Noise​And​Brownian​Noise

Posted Nov 22 2013

Why Upworthy sucks

Any web site that posts a video without summarizing said video is a waste of time (I never bother watching videos at a site like that). Upworthy is the biggest offender of this. To quote this guy: “Their headlines are the purest, crack-cocaine of clickbait. And when you do click, the content they've dredged up from YouTube never, ever pays off.”

http://​happyplace.​someecards.​com/​27437/​upworthy-​clickbait-​spoilers

Posted Nov 21 2013

How to make white noise

To generate white noise is a two-step process.

The first step is to generate a random file. This can be done, in Linux, with

cat /dev/urandom > whitenoise.raw

Or, using the rg32-bin tool available at http://samiam.org/rg32

rg32-bin '' > whitenoise.raw

In both cases, terminate the process after a few seconds with Ctrl-C (hit the "Ctrl" and the "C" keys at the same time)

Sox, which is included with CentOS 6, can then make this file an audio file:

sox --channels=2 --encoding=ms-adpcm -b 16 -r 44100 -s whitenoise.raw whitenoise.wav gain -6

We add the “gain -6” so that the file does not distort.

Posted Nov 21 2013

Kids have it so easy these days

I remember wanting to look at and drool over beautiful Stevie Nicks sitting in a luxury chair inexplicably in the middle of a desert and watching MTV nonstop for two or three days until they finally showed this video (Let me tell you, I got really familiar with Duran Duran’s music). And then, since we didn’t have a VCR, I had to content myself with memorizing every curve on her face to play over and over in my mind.

These days, since Stevie has kindly uploaded said video to YouTube, all I have to do is click on this link and pause at 1:51 to marvel at her beauty:

http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​RAbf​PDZd​EBU

Kids have it so easy these days. I also had to walk uphill in the snow to go to school, both ways (since the path from home to school went both up and down). Well, actually, when the snow got too bad, they just closed the schools.

Posted Nov 18 2013

The destruction of America’s middle class

A good article on the destruction of America’s working class:

http://​prospect.​org/​article/​40-​year-​slump

Posted Nov 17 2013

Radio in Spanish

To help my daughter be fully bilingual, I like to use my Netbook to tune in to this Mexican radio station:

http://​www.​radioformula.​com.​mx/​estaciones.​asp

With the miracle of the Internet, I can be on a Mexican radio from anywhere in the world.

(Sorry about the delay posting a new microblog; the CPU fan in my main computer died and I have been madly setting things up to work on my older computers)

Posted Nov 17 2013

New cannonball run record

It looks like the previous speed record for a cannonball run has been broken:

http://​jalopnik.​com/​meet-​the-​guy-​who-​drove-​across-​the-​u-​s-​in-​a-​record-​28-​h-​1454092837

The current Manhattan - Los Angeles record: 28 hours 50 minutes

Posted Oct 31 2013

I now have a Diaspora account

In support of open source software, I have made an account on a Diaspora node: https://​despora.​de/​people/​0​dbb​61​c​466905​a​8​c

Posted Oct 28 2013

Once the world’s most densly populated neighborhood

This place, demolished 20 years ago, was once the world’s most densly populated neighborhood:

http://​www.​dailymail.​co.​uk/​news/​article-​2139914/​A-​rare-​insight-​Kowloon-​Walled-​City.​html

Posted Oct 28 2013

Too many freeloaders on the Internet

Trust me, software developers get the exact same treatment on the Internet:

http://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2013/​10/​27/​opinion/​sunday/​slaves-​of-​the-​internet-​unite.​html?​pagewanted=​all&​amp;_​r=​1&​amp;

Posted Oct 28 2013

The Psychology of [anonymous] Online Comments

The Psychology of [anonymous] Online Comments

http://​www.​newyorker.​com/​online/​blogs/​elements/​2013/​10/​the-​psychology-​of-​online-​comments.​html

There’s a reason I do not allow anonymous entities on my forum at https://forum.samiam.org (self-signed cert)

Posted Oct 26 2013

A modest proposal to neutralize gerrymandering

A modest proposal to neutralize gerrymandering:

http://​www.​salon.​com/​2013/​10/​20/​a_​modest_​proposal_​to_​neutralize_​gerrymandering/

Summary: Democrats in heavily red congressional districts should register as Republicans to make sure Tea Party extremists do not win primaries.

Then again, if everyone with left-of-center tendencies actually bothered to go to the polls and vote every two years, the Republicans would never be able to shut down the government again after the 2014 midterms.

Posted Oct 22 2013

Another reason to closely control comments

Unfiltered comments on the mostly anonymous Internet just do not work. They killed Usenet and can cause problems when not carefully managed. Spammers, trolls, and sock puppets will infest boards and comment sections like maggots unless carefully monitored.

As just one example:

http://​www.​slate.​com/​blogs/​the_​slatest/​2013/​10/​21/​muroch_​s_​world_​npr_​reporter_​s_​book_​claims_​fox_​news_​waged_​pr_​war_​with_​anonymous.​html

Posted Oct 22 2013

Worst song ever? Hardly!

Even though this song was called the worst song ever by now-defunct Blender magazine (the male lead singer replied by saying “Blender's folded, and we're still here”) as well as the #1 worst song of the 1980s in a 2011 Rolling Stone poll, I have no shame saying I enjoy this song.

I would rather listen to this song 10 times in a row than anything by The Smiths (then again, “How Soon is Now” is pretty good)

It’s 1980s super-slick electronica from a once-classic rock band. It probably gets a lot more heat than other electronica-pop from that era since it gets more airplay on classic rock stations than, say, The Art of Noise or Stacey Q (who actually likes classic rock more than the 80s electronica that made her famous)

After nearly two decades, this song gave finally gave this classic rock band a #1 hit (after countless changes to their line up and two name changes), but as the Rolling Stone pointed out, “To the Woodstock generation, [this band’s] success in the 1980s just seemed like the final nail in the coffin of their youth”

Without further ado...“We Built This City” by Starship.

https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​K​1​b​8​Ah​Is​SYQ

Posted Oct 21 2013

Intel’s answer to the Raspberry Pi

Now that the Raspberry Pi is not vaporware, Intel has made their own Galileo board to compete with it.

My initial impression: I prefer the Pi because the Galileo uses the messy Pentium instruction set instead of the elegant ARM instruction set.

Posted Oct 19 2013

David Brin nailed it

David Brin, on October 5, accurately guessed how the shutdown/debt ceiling crisis would end:

http://​davidbrin.​blogspot.​com/​2013/​10/​how-​shut-​down-​will-​likely-​end.​html

Posted Oct 17 2013

87 Republicans who are still sane

I feel a little hope for the Republican party. 87, count then 87 Republicans stood up to the Tea Party extremists in their party and voted to keep our government running. The debt ceiling has been lifted and the shutdown is no more.

For the Republican party to survive, they must eschew their Tea Party extremists and move closer to the center.

For the record, here is the Senate Roll call and the House Roll call.

Here’s a map of congressional districts.

Posted Oct 16 2013

What you pay for when getting RedHat

Open software is not free:

http://​news.​idg.​no/​cw/​art.​cfm?​id=​8​D​9​F​0​C​4​D-​D​4​EA-​68​DD-​5​C​1​E​1​E​993​D​9​FDB​86

The issue with free RedHat clones like CentOS is that they sometimes are badly out of date.

Posted Oct 16 2013

Moral indignation

“There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as ‘moral indignation,’ which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.” -Erich Fromm, in the book Man for Himself: An Inquiry Into the Psychology of Ethics

Posted Oct 15 2013

Does anyone on board know how to fly a plane?

That classic trope of 1970s movies — “does anyone on board know how to fly an airplane” — has never happened on a big jumbo jet, but, every now and then, it happens with a small plane. http://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​news/​uk-​england-​humber-​24450534

Posted Oct 10 2013

Lots of free 20th century science fiction

Lots of free 20th century science fiction:

http://​www.​munseys.​com/​detail/​mode/​cat/​25/​Science_​Fiction

Posted Oct 09 2013

Have new Doctor Who episodes been found?

Which missing episodes of Doctor Who may have been recovered for its 50th anniversary? http://​thedragonsmaw.​blogspot.​co.​uk/​2013/​10/​what-​are-​newly-​recovered-​doctor-​who.​html

Posted Oct 08 2013

On the shutdown

Ever since last year’s presidential election, I have not much posted my political opinion here, but since the political state of affairs has resulted in most of the US Federal Government put to a screeching halt, I am going to make precisely one political comment.

This shutdown is only going to speed up the destruction of the Republican party as it exists today. Here in California, I can already see the future of what the political climate will be like across all of the USA within a couple of decades: The Republican party has no political power to speak of in state-level politics; it may as well be a one-party state here.

There is a lot I don’t agree with Bill Maher on, but his recent comments about California politics are spot-on:

http://​www.​huffingtonpost.​com/​bill-​maher/​bill-​maher-​california_​b_​3999675.​html

While Rachel Maddow is rather biased, this poll she cites shows the Republicans going the way of the Whigs:

http://​maddowblog.​msnbc.​com/_​news/​2013/​10/​01/​20773488-​gop-​invites-​a-​public-​backlash?​lite

There are a lot of disadvantages to having a one-party system of politics. There is a lot I don’t like about conservative politics, but there also is a lot I do not like about liberal politics either. It is unfortunate the Republican party is not updating their message so we have a real choice in elections again.

Edit Since is already a meme blaming the Democrats for the shutdown, here’s a counter-meme: http://www.quickmeme.com/p/3vnbq5 Original photo: https://​twitter.​com/​Leo​Shane/​status/​385066927506194432/​photo/​1

Posted Oct 01 2013

Death by GPS

A story of Apple’s map application directing people to drive on to an airport runway has gone viral:

http://​www.​alaskadispatch.​com/​article/​20130924/​iphone-​map-​app-​directs-​fairbanks-​drivers-​airport-​taxiway

This is a new case of “Death by GPS”, which was covered a few years ago:

http://​www.​sacbee.​com/​2011/​01/​30/​3362727/​death-​by-​gps-​in-​desert.​html

The lesson to be learned is to not blindly trust what a GPS says. Then again, when I lived in Georgia, the roads were so confusing, I often times would be completely lost without a GPS helping me along the way.

Posted Sep 26 2013

The most interesting legacy of the Righthaven lawsuits

The most interesting legacy of the Righthaven lawsuits is probably Righthaven LLC v. Center For Intercultural Organizing, the lawsuit where judge James Mahan stated that it was fair use to copy an entire newspaper article.

Righthaven tried to appeal the case; EFF filed an amicus curiae supporting that this usage was fair use.

The docket ends in January of 2012, right around the time Righthaven was dissolved and its domain name was sold. Since Righthaven no longer existed at that point, the case ended and Mahan’s decision is precedent that can be used in future cases (not binding precedent, since this notion of quoting an entire article being fair use never went before an appellate court)

Edit Some more information about what happened with the fair use decision: http://​www.​wired.​com/​threatlevel/​2012/​07/​righthaven-​second-​life I also like the article posted here.

Posted Sep 24 2013

IPv6 deployment in the Internet top 12 sites

The Alexa top four sites (Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Yahoo) all have IPv6 addresses. Number five (Baidu, mainly popular in China) doesn’t (but, then again, large numbers of web surfers still use Internet Explorer 6 there), number six (Wikipedia) does use IPv6. QQ, another popular Chinese site, doesn’t, and LinkedIn has the dubious honor of being the most popular English-language website without IPv6. Microsoft’s live.com website also doesn’t have IPv6, nor does Twitter or Amazon. Blogspot.com, Google’s blogging platform, on the other hand, does have IPv6.

So, seven of the top twelve sites use IPv6. IPv6 is slowly replacing IPv4; it’s like the battle for standard compliant web browsers in the oughts (first 2000s decade); we need to have an IPv6 version of the Acid2 test to get ISPs and major websites off their butt and make IPv6 more universal.

Posted Sep 18 2013

Thoughts on the Miss USA offensive tweets

As someone in an interracial marriage, an as someone who was born and has lived in the South, I am both offended and unsurprised by the offensive and possibly racist tweets made in the wake of an Indian-American winning the Miss America pageant.

These tweets are a natural consequence of the fact that everyone has a soapbox on the Internet. What was once merely whispered between two rednecks in a backwater bar in the deep South is now being proclaimed from the rooftops thanks to the miracle of the Internet.

Making a big deal about a handful of otherwise unknown people on Twitter saying inappropriate things because they do not like the race of the Miss America winner seems to be the ultimate tempest in a teapot. It offends me a lot more when someone with real power, such as the congressman Steve King (not to be confused with the author Steven King) says things that appear to be racist.

The important thing is to make sure people with real political power do not pander to racists; recent elections show that is exactly what is happening.

Right now, the Republican party has no power to speak of in California. One of the big reasons for this is because, two decades ago, they made a metaphorical pact with the Devil and got an upswing in popularity pandering to racists (namely, Proposition 187). This was, however, only a brief surge; the damage is long-term and the Republican party is still perceived as the party of bigots by many in the expanding base of Latino and young voters in California.

Posted Sep 17 2013

Why people think Friday the 13th is unlucky

Why people think Friday the 13th is unlucky

http://​gizmodo.​com/​why-​people-​think-​friday-​the-​13​th-​is-​unlucky-​1306401570

Posted Sep 13 2013

Digital shareecropping indeed

Digital sharecropping indeed:

http://​socialfixer.​com/​blog/​2013/​09/​12/​beware-​your-​business-​is-​at-​the-​mercy-​of-​facebook-​social-​fixer-​page-​deleted-​without-​explanation/

(Digital sharecropping is when your business model is at the mercy of another company who takes a cut of your profits and can cut you off anytime)

Posted Sep 12 2013

Remembering September 11

I was in Mexico on this day in 2001: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20120911.​html

Here is how my web page looked in response the attack: http://​samiam.​org/​screenshots/​2001​webpage.​html

Posted Sep 11 2013

On the new iPhones

It’s brilliant marketing on the part of Apple and the cell phone carriers that the cheapest iPhone 5c is a $550 phone masquerading as a $100 phone.

I’ll stick to my Nokia X2-00 phone. Mobile web sucks (especially for posting), the old-school Nokias can survive more drops than any smartphone, and it’s only a $100 replacement (unlocked) if anything happens to the phone.

Posted Sep 10 2013

It’s possible to use Dillo to post in my forum

One of the nice things about the back-end forum software I am using is that it is possible to post here using Dillo. Indeed, I have decided to turn off reCAPTCHA because:

It does not work. Stopforumspam works a lot better.

It makes it more difficult for visually impaired people and people using older or non-mainstream browsers (such as Dillo) to register here.

People who type in reCAPTCHAs are providing data that benefits only Google without getting paid for their work (micro-“digital sharecropping”)

If I start seeing a lot more successful spam registrations, I will turn it on again, but, until then, I think the common sense questions are just as effective at slowing down dumb robots.

Posted Sep 08 2013

“Liberal” and “Conservative” are just labels

I think there is something really cool about a classically really “liberal” group, ACLU, joining forces with a classically really “conservative” group, the NRA:

http://​pjmedia.​com/​tatler/​2013/​09/​05/​nra-​aclu-​join-​forces-​against-​nsa-​on-​guns/

Posted Sep 05 2013

On Miley Cyrus’ twerking

Miley Cyrus twerking? Meh. Now, what would be epic is Miley Cyrus singing “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails.

Posted Aug 29 2013

That’s one way to stop telemarketers

Here’s one way to stop telemarketers: Charge them by the minute to call me.

http://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​news/​technology-​23869462

Posted Aug 29 2013

I try to avoid being a “digital sharecropper”

The reason I like to post here on my microblog instead of some big corporate website (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) or online community is became I’m the one who gets the ad revenue should something here go viral:

http://​www.​codinghorror.​com/​blog/​2009/​08/​are-​you-​a-​digital-​sharecropper.​html

I don’t mind my occasional contribution to Wikipedia since they are strictly ad-free, and since anything there is released under an open license.

I also don’t mind using Facebook to share a photo with old acquaintances or using Twitter to have some level of contact with actors in the Mexican telenovelas that I watch. But anything substantial is here on my own webpage.

The reason I no longer get too involved with online communities is because it’s just too much work for what amounts to nothing more than a virtual pat on the back, and because web-1.0 style online communities get really angry really quickly at any attempt to make money from one’s hard work.

“Digital sharecropping” can also refer to programmers whose revenue stream is tightly controlled by another company, such as the companies making games for Facebook or people whose income comes from selling iPhone apps.

Posted Aug 29 2013

11 Words without English equivalents

11 words without English equivalents:

http://​www.​huffingtonpost.​com/​ella-​frances-​sanders/​11-​untranslatable-​words-​f_​b_​3817711.​html

I can think of a couple more in Spanish: Tocayo, someone you share a name with, and paquetería, where you store your bags when entering a store.

Posted Aug 29 2013

I’m glad to see web anonymity go away

To quote this article, “Craigslist is a Web 1.0 dinosaur that has stubbornly resisted the shift to a less anonymous, more social web”.

People are more respectful and flame less when their name is on it. I’m glad to see the troll-filled anonymous web going away.

Posted Aug 29 2013

Melbourne IT and hijacked domains

Back in 2005, Melbourne IT allowed one of its clients to hijack the panix.com domain, and did nothing all weekend to restore the domain before finally restoring it on Monday morning. Now I am hearing that Melbourne IT allowed nytimes.com and some of Twitter’s domains to be hijacked.

Here, at least, unlike the Panix attack, nytimes.com and the relevant Twitter domains appear to have already been using Melbourne IT as their upstream registrar, and unlike last time, Melbourne IT immediately fixed the hijack.

Posted Aug 28 2013

Chess Variants with real-world tournament play

Thousands upon thousands of Chess variants have been proposed. Most have never been played. Of the relatively few played, only a small handful have had real-world face-to-face tournaments. Namely:

Bughouse Chess (a frequent sideshow in Chess tournaments) http://​www.​chess.​com/​chessopedia/​view/​bughouse-​chess

Chess960/FischerRandom chess (another frequent sideshow) http://​www.​chess.​com/​chessopedia/​view/​chess-​960

Circular Chess (which had and might still have an annual face to face “world championship” for many years) http://www.circularchess.co.uk/

Polgar Star Chess (has an annual “world championship” in Hungary every year) http://polgarstarchess.com/

Grand Chess (Possibly the best Chess Variant out there. This was once a sideshow tournament at the 1996 Chess Olympiad in Armenia; a couple of those games were mentioned in a 1997 Chess Life article by Burt Hochberg) http://​www.​mindsports.​nl/​index.​php/​arena/​grand-​chess/

Gliński's hexagonal chess (tournaments between 1976 and 1982) http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Hexagonal_​chess#​Gli.​C​5.​84​ski.​27​s_​hexagonal_​chess

Mongredien chess (swap the Queen’s knight with the King’s bishop so the Queenside flank has two bishops and the Kingside flank has two knights) had a tournament back in 1868. http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Displacement_​chess This is also Chess960 opening setup #692.

The national variants almost certainly have had tournaments:

Chinese Chess/Xiangqi (mainly in China) http://​www.​crockford.​com/​chess/​xiangqi.​html

Korean Chess/Changgi http://​history.​chess.​free.​fr/​changgi.​htm

Shogi (mainly in Japan; possibly the best Chess Variant out there)

Shogi has a number of variants. Both Tori Shogi and 5x5 Mini Shogi have been played in the Royston Shogi Club by a handful of players: http://​www.​shogi.​net/​shogi-​l/​Archive/​1995/​Nsep​29-​03.​txt (this is only one of many Royston Shogi face-to-face tournaments with Tori and/or Mini Shogi)

Thai Chess/Makruk http://​ancientchess.​com/​page/​play-​makruk.​htm

Shnterej/Ethiopian Chess http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Senterej

Shatar (Mongolian Chess) http://​www.​chessvariants.​org/​oriental.​dir/​shatar.​html

Sittuyin (Burmese Chess) http://​www.​ancientchess.​com/​page/​play-​sittuyin.​htm

There are probably other national variants

So, of all of the possible Chess variants out there, only 16 have been notable enough to have a real tournament, or be an integral part of a culture.

This is what usually happens with a Chess variant: Someone comes up with some interesting rule changes to Chess. The game is usually not playable (greatly favors White, drawish, etc.) Even if the game is playable, it’s nay to impossible to drum up interest in the variant. It only takes a minute to come up with new rules for Chess, but it takes months, if not years to get familiar with the new rules to see if the game is balanced and not drawish.

For example, I once had a Chess variant invention called Schoolbook Chess. It looked pretty good (I did some computer testing with it and what not before making it public in 2006), and it took three years and extensive computer testing to show that White has a very strong, possibly winning game by playing 1. c4.

Drumming up support to get a face-to-face tournament going? Good luck! There are thousands of proposed Chess Variants over at my Zillions Museum. There have only been, at most, a couple of dozen Chess Variants with real face-to-face tournament play, even counting things like Tori Shogi, which was a sideshow with only four participants at an already small Shogi tournament in England. (To be fair, there probably have been Tori Shogi tournaments in Japan, but my Japanese is not strong enough to look them up online).

Posted Aug 27 2013

Beautiful optical illusions

Some beautiful optical illusions:

http://​blogs.​smithsonianmag.​com/​artscience/​2013/​08/​each-​of-​these-​patterns-​move-​but-​its-​all-​an-​illusion/

Posted Aug 23 2013

People are becoming nicer

Now that social media sites encourage people to use their real names, people are becoming more nice and positive:

http://​ideas.​time.​com/​2013/​08/​21/​how-​the-​news-​got-​less-​mean/

Posted Aug 22 2013

So much for anonymous comments

Arianna Huffington concedes that anonymous comments bring out the ugliest in people. I have known this for a while:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130728.​html#​The_​name_​of_​the_​deportation_​bill

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20110512.​html

Posted Aug 21 2013

August 2013 archive

I have archived the microblogs posted between July 30 and August 18, 2013:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130818.​html

To post a comment about this blog entry, go to the forum (self-signed https). New accounts may post once I approve the account.

Blog index

2014 goals

January 1, 2014

This blog looks at some of my goals for 2014.

Returning to the gym

I got a gym membership in 2013. One goal in 2014 is to use it more frequently.

Getting up at a reasonable hour

One nice thing about having a baby in my life is that I have finally stopped being a night owl and usually go to bed around 10pm at night, waking up fairly early in the morning. Another goal for 2014 is to maintain a normal sleep schedule.

Making money

Another personal goal for 2014 is to find more sources of revenue in my life to better support my wife and child. I don’t have a solid plan on how I will go about doing this yet, but am open to suggestions.

That in mind, one step is for me to minimize spending time on things that do not get me closer to that goal (video games, time wasting web sites, Internet communities, any kind of partying, etc.).

This leads me to my...

MaraDNS roadmap

MaraDNS is in maintenance mode, as I mentioned yesterday. I need to update and reinforce the support boundaries for MaraDNS:

No new features added without me getting paid

All unpaid support is now done in the forum.

New for 2014: The minimum fee for paid MaraDNS work is now $500. Any request for paid MaraDNS features will require a non-refundable $500 payment made to me before any work is done. These terms are not open to negotiation.

My plan for 2014 is to, barring a security hole with a CVE number, make a single MaraDNS release (2.0.08) later on this month, and a single Deadwood release (3.2.05) incorporating any and all hostname resolution updates near the end of the year.

The only supported OSes for MaraDNS and Deadwood in 2014 will be CentOS 6 (barring CentOS falling behind on updates like they did in 2011) and partial support for Windows 7 (while Deadwood has full Windows support, the native Windows version of MaraDNS’ authoritative server does not have DNS-over-TCP nor the native ability to run as a Windows service).

People using MaraDNS in more recent Linux releases with systemd are free to use Tomasz Torcz’s systemd patch.

I know these are pretty strong support boundaries, but the fact of the matter is this: The only revenue stream I have found for MaraDNS has been to use it as “resume-ware” (showing it to potential employers to get better job offers), and working on MaraDNS does not otherwise help me find solid revenue sources.

Internet communities

I used to be a pretty active member of Slashdot, the Wikipedia, and other Internet communities. Since being a part of those communities is not making me any money, it’s time to cut the cord: No posting in places like those (including, but not limited to: Reddit, Ycombinator’s “Hacker news”, etc.)

One possible exception: Stack Overflow. I use Stack Overflow a lot in my day job for finding solutions to problems developing our software. The advantage of being a part of this community compared to others is that I can show my programming expertise in a public manner which might help me get more revenue in my life.

My blog

Another goal is to only make at most about one blog entry a week. I made 73 blog entries in 2013; my plan is to make no more than 52 blogs in 2014, unless, of course, someone wants to pay me to blog.

Speaking of my blog, my first geek accomplishment in 2014 has been to change my blog’s date format from YYYYMMDD (for example, “20131231”) to ISO-8601 compliant YYYY-MM-DD dates (for example, “2014-01-01”). The reason I did this just after the new year is so the transition does not break sorting with old blog entries in the previous date format.

2014: Let’s go

While there are a lot of other things I would like to accomplish in 2014, making this list is a pretty good start. 2013 was a good year but I know 2014 will be even better.

To post a comment about this blog entry, go to the forum (self-signed https). New accounts may post once I approve the account.

Blog index

2013

All blog entries written in 2013

Go to blog index

2013 in review

December 31, 2013

2013 was a good year in a lot of ways. Here are my personal accomplishments for this year:

It’s a girl!

My wife and I had a beautiful daughter together this year.

Servers updated

I managed to get better virtual server nodes for hosting my web pages by finally getting two nodes with BuyVM and one node with Crissic. This allows me to have IPv6 for all my web pages, and the server upgrade has made my sites more reliable.

MaraDNS maintenance

While I, by and large, no longer actively develop MaraDNS, I still maintain MaraDNS (and its recursor Deadwood) in the following ways:

I will update the software as needed for the IPv6 transition which should finally become mainstream later on in the 2010s

I will fix security and other serious bugs in MaraDNS and Deadwood

I will continue to fix corner cases which cause Deadwood to be unable to resolve a given hostname (as long as said hostname has a real-world example on the Internet)

In 2013, I only had to fix one security issue in Deadwood (be sure to be using MaraDNS 2.0.07d with Deadwood 3.2.03d or a more recent release), but ended up handling three issues causing names to not resolve in Deadwood:

An unusual corner case where a record started at a particular point in the uncompressed DNS packet: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130320.​html

When Deadwood receives a name with a different case than the original query sent to Deadwood: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130713.​html

When a DNS server does not have an IP for its NS records: http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​browse-​source/​stable/​update/​3.​2.​04/​deadwood-​3.​2.​03-​oncetv-​ipn.​net.​patch

In addition, I have improved MaraDNS’ IPv6 support by having the authoritative server include IPv6 glue records for name servers.

Besides that, I didn’t add anything to MaraDNS.

Since I lost a couple of subscribers every time there was a big support thread in the MaraDNS mailing list, I changed the mailing list in to a moderated list where I only announce new MaraDNS releases; MaraDNS support is now available in a special forum I have set up (and heavily moderate to keep it spam and argument free).

I also saved the MaraDNS Wikipedia article by clearly showing that it has generated enough attention in reliable sources to merit a Wikipedia page.

Other minor geek projects

I played around with the ancient video game Pitfall to give it different maps: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130617.​html

I finally added an RSS feed to my web pages: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130731.​html

I dealt with one of VirtualBox’s annoying bugs: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130826.​html

I made yet another implementation of SipHash: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20131006.​html

I updated my TinyOVZ Busybox-based virtual machine for OpenVZ: http://samiam.org/TinyOVZ

I converted the 7x14 font included with X-Windows in to a Windows font that works both in PuTTY and in MSYS: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20131215.​html

Other accomplishments

I have had a storage locker in the US to store some of my things while I lived in Mexico. After not even opening the locker for six years (since it was out of town), I finally emptied it out.

I joined a gym again.

I converted my old Windows XP laptop in to a Linux server running multiple virtual machines via OpenVZ.

2013 was a good year but I know 2014 will be an even better year!

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Deadwood 3.2.04 released

December 20, 2013

I have released Deadwood 3.2.04. This has, compared to Deadwood 3.2.03 (released a year ago), a number of bug fixes and one security update.

Users of Deadwood 3.2.03d do not need to update to this release to stay current with regards to security; however, there are a number of bug fixes for 3.2.03d users and it is worthwhile to update. More information is in the CHANGELOG:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​doc/​CHANGELOG

Users of older Deadwood releases who set root_servers in their Deadwood configuration file need to change the IP for one of the root servers from 128.8.10.90 to 199.7.91.13.

There is one bug fix which could cause issues with certain, probably hypothetical, DNS setups on the Internet:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20131206.​html

It can be downloaded here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​stable/

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New Cousine/MSYS font

December 15, 2013

I have converted the 7x14 version of the misc-fixed bitmap font to a Windows-compatible version that both PuTTY and MSYS can use.

Downloading and installing

The font can be downloaded here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​terminal/​misc-​fixed/​m​7​x​14.​fon

After downloading, to install in Windows, double click on the font (m7x14) then click on the button in the font preview window marked “install”.

Using the font in PuTTY

After the font has been installed, in PuTTY one can change the font used for a terminal session by going to Window -> Appearance and clicking on the button marked “change” to the right of where it says “Font”.

Select the font “m7x14” in the menu on the left then click on “OK”.

To save these settings, click on “Session”, put a name in the box for “Saved Sessions”, then click on “Save”.

Using the font in MSYS

In MSYS 1.0.10 (which is available for download right here), one changes the font by editing the file msys.bat. In that file, there is a line that looks like this:

start rxvt -backspacekey ^H -sl 2500 -fg %FGCOLOR% -bg %BGCOLOR% -sr -fn Courier -12 -tn msys -geometry 80x25 -e /bin/sh --login -i

Change the line to look like this:

start rxvt -backspacekey ^H -sl 2500 -fg %FGCOLOR% -bg %BGCOLOR% -sr -fn m7x14 -tn msys -geometry 82x25 -e /bin/sh --login -i

It’s possible to choose colors here. For example, green on black:

start rxvt -backspacekey ^H -sl 2500 -fg #00d000 -bg #000000 -sr -fn m7x14 -tn msys -geometry 82x25 -e /bin/sh --login -i

Note that the ^H is a literal ctrl-H character.

Once this is done, MSYS should restart using the 7x14 font. Two things to note:

The “-fn m7x14” part chooses which font MSYS starts with

The geometry is 82x25 because a RXVT’s code for calculating the screen size is buggy; the resulting window is 80x25

How I made the font

First I went to the current page for the misc-fixed fonts and downloaded the most recent version of the fonts. The source font I used was 7x14; its source file is 7x14.bdf, which can be seen here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​terminal/​misc-​fixed/

I then opened up the font in FontForge, and exported the font as a Winwdows .fnt file.

Once I had the Windows .fnt file, I used Simon Tatham’s dewinfont.py tool to convert the font in to a “.fd” file. Once I had the fd file, I had to make sure of the following:

The font needs the line near the top with the charset to say “charset 0”, otherwise MSYS will be unable to open the font

To avoid looking buggy in MSYS’ RXVT client, I had to make sure the letters had no pixels in the leftmost column of the font. 7x14 comes from upstream “left aligned” (the blank pixel separing characters is on the right size of the font); I used a Perl script to make the letters “right aligned”, by moving all characters one pixel to the right, discarding the blank right column, and inserting a blank column on the left hand side.

The RXVT included with MSYS will not open a font whose name starts with a number. This is why the font is called “m7x14” instead of “7x14”.

All of the characters needed to have the same width (no “width 0” characters), or PuTTY would refuse to open the font.

Once all that was done, I used Simon’s mkwinfont.py script to convert the .fd file in a to the final Windows .fon file.

Simon’s tools can be downloaded here:

http://​www.​chiark.​greenend.​org.​uk/~​sgtatham/​fonts/

I have made a mirror here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​terminal/​Simon-​Tatham/

Conclusion

While bitmapped fonts will become obsolete once retina displays are universal (probably within 10 years), it’s nice to be able to use a font I have been using since 1995 with all of my Windows terminal applications.

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More font updates

December 14, 2013

Yesterday, I mentioned that I was having technical problems with the Windows bitmap conversion of WTerm, forcing me to rename the font WTm. I have fixed this problem. I also discuss the Cousine font losing its delta hinting.

The problem with WTm

The problem is that Windows .fon files are not fully documented, and the open-source tool I was using to convert the fonts was having issues making the font one MSYS would recognize. After hours of trying different things Fontforge finally made a MSYS-capable .fon file by having three fonts in the file, only one of which I used. The font name was one-letter long; I changed it to a three-letter name by using a binary editor.

Fixing WTm

Simon Tatham, the same guy who wrote the PuTTY client I am using to write this blog, also wrote his own .fon generation scripts in Python. His scripts were able to take the hacked-together .fon file and convert it in to a .fon file with the correct font name (WTermA, to distinguish it from the scalable WTerm font). The resulting file is smaller since it now only has one font in it.

I have made a local mirror of his scripts and fonts (which, being bitmap fonts, are public domain in the US):

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​terminal/​Simon-​Tatham/

Download and using WTermA

WTermA, the updated and fixed WTm, is available here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​terminal/​WTerm/

It has the file name WTermA.fon. To use this file, download it, then click on it in Windows to install the font. After installing the font, it can be used in MSYS by modifying msys.bat to look like this:

start rxvt -backspacekey -sl 2500 -fg #00c000 -bg #000000 -sr -fn WTermA -tn msys -geometry 80x25+15+15 -e /bin/sh --login -i

Cousine lost its delta hinting

One of the hardest parts of making a font is giving it good hinting. This is a tedious, time consuming process. As a result, very few open-source fonts include delta hints.

The best-looking open source with delta hinting has been the monospace OFL-licensed Cousine. When I downloaded the new Cousine today, it was a shock to discover that, when Google changed its license from the OFL to the Apache license, the updated font no longer has delta hinting.

That in mind, I have mirrored a copy of the older Cousine with delta hinting, which can be downloaded here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​terminal/​WTerm/

While retina displays will become universal in a decade or so, until then delta hinting is a technology that allows for crisp, readable fonts on today’s displays.

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Better fonts for MSYS

December 13, 2013

I discuss how to get better looking fonts for Microsoft Windows and MSYS.

What is MSYS

MSYS is a UNIX-like environment for Windows that, unlike Cygwin, makes native Windows binaries and not GPL-tainted. It is part of mingw and consists of a terminal program (a Windows port of RXVT) and some basic UNIX shell utilities. Since newer versions of MSYS require a special download manager to download, I use an older version (1.0.10) which is available in my software directory).

Fonts in MSYS

MSYS’s default font is the fairly ugly Courier. It is, because of limitations with the font rendering engine, difficult to get fonts to work with it. Indeed, it took me most of a day and some really ugly hacking to port a font to Windows that looks nice in MSYS.

The WTm font

The font I have ported is called “WTm”. The name is shortened from WTerm, which is my own in-house version of Cousine; for technical reasons, I had to shorten its name when porting it to Windows. It can be downloaded from here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​terminal/​WTerm/​WTm.​fon

Once downloaded and installed (double-click on a font and click “install” to install it), MSYS can be altered to use this font by changing the line in msys.bat that invokes rxvt to look like this:

start rxvt -backspacekey ^H -sl 2500 -fg #00c000 -bg #000000 -sr -fn WTm -tnmsys -geometry 80x25 -e /bin/sh --login -i

Ovserve the “-fn WTm”

Another font: Misc-Fixed

X11 has a font called “Misc fixed” that many, including myself, really like. There is a Windows package of the X11 Misc Fixed fonts for Windows prepared by Sergey Khorev; while his webpage doesn't have an explicit license, the .fon file says all fonts are public domain.

I have a mirror of this font here, in the file X11.fon:

http://samiam.org/fonts/terminal/

To get this font to look nice in MSYS, install it in Windows, then the relevant line in msys.bat might look like:

start rxvt -backspacekey ^H -sl 2500 -fg #00c000 -bg #000000 -sr -fn "X11 Misc Fixed-15" -tn msys -geometry 80x25 -e /bin/sh --login -i

And another terminal font

While it doesn’t work in MSYS, another attrative terminal font for Windows and X11 is Zevv’s Peep font. The font is available under the MIT license; I have a mirror of it here:

http://​samiam.​org/​fonts/​terminal/​zevv-​peep/

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MaraDNS Update

December 12, 2013

I have updated MaraDNS’ snapshot release to use Deadwood 3.2.03d, which has an important security update.

It can be downloaded here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download/​2.​0/​snap/

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Using Crissic

December 11, 2013

I have been having a lot of problems with AlienVPS -- the only active node I have when them went offline Saturday and they have been ignoring my support ticket about the issue (as well as my tweet) -- so I opened up a node with Crissic.

Crissic net right now is the best $15/year OpenVZ virtual server out there. A typical server at this price offers 128 megabytes of memory (maybe another 128 of “burst” memory) and under 20 gigs of hard disk space; Crissic offers 512 megabytes of memory and 50 gigs of disk space. Instead of one IP, they supply two; the maximum monthly bandwidth is also higher. The offer is here:

https://​vpsboard.​com/​topic/​2862-​new-​hardware-​same-​great-​price-​vps-​from-​15​yr-​and-​4​m-​crissic-​solutions-​llc/

The server was set up very quickly (within a few hours after ordering) and when I asked for an IPv6 IP, Skylar almost immediately gave me one by hand (they will give customers up to 200 IPv6 IPs for free).

The server is also faster than my other nodes.

While I can not know how this server will turn out in the long run -- any node that costs less than $20 a year is a gamble and I have already been burned three times -- so far they look like an excellent VPS provider.

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Interactive Fiction

December 10, 2013

Back in 2007, I wrote a couple of interactive fiction adventures for the late 1970s early 1980s “Scott Adams” adventure format.

I used to have a Java virtual machine set up for playing those adventures. Since Java applets is no longer a viable way of distributing applets on the web, I spend today finishing up updating these adventures to run in Javascript:

http://​samiam.​org/​software/​parchment/​cloak.​html

http://​samiam.​org/​software/​parchment/​desert.​html

Since the code I use includes GPL code, here is the source:

http://​samiam.​org/​software/​parchment/​lib/​source-​code/

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The OnceTV update

December 6, 2013

I discuss the OnceTV update from the other day and some possible consequences of the code change I did.

Note on updating Deadwood

When updating Deadwood to fix the oncetv-ipn.net bug, be sure to delete Deadwood’s cache:

Stop Deadwood

Remove the cache file

Start Deadwood again

Otherwise, Deadwood will have bad NS referrals in its cache.

The speed up

Let’s suppose we have the following gluless name referral to follow to resolve name.example.net:

First we go the the root name servers

Which point us to the .net servers, who point out the nameservers for name.example.net are ns1.example.org and ns2.example.org:

AN
<blank>

NS
example.net NS ns1.example.org
example.net NS ns2.example.org

AR
<blank>

We now go back to the root name severs

Which take us to the .org name server who give us this packet:

AN
<blank>

NS
example.org NS ns1.example.org
example.org NS ns2.example.org

AR
ns1.example.org A 172.31.254.1
ns2.example.org A 172.31.254.2

Now, with versions of Deadwood before the oncetv-ipn.net update, we would now go to one of the example.org name servers before getting our final answer; the oncetv-ipn.net update saves us a single DNS query by resolving the glueless record when querying the .org name servers.

In most cases, when resolving glueless name server records, this saves us one DNS lookup.

One minor disadvantage is that if we want to find another record in example.org, Deadwood and have cached all the records needed to solve name.example.net, Deadwood will now have to do two instead of one lookup (since earlier versions of Deadwood would cache the nameservers for example.org, but current Deadwood will instead cache the IP for either ns1.example.org or ns2.example.org).

A new corner case

Let us suppose we are looking for ns01.example.org and the upstream DNS server gives us this record:

AN
<blank>

NS
example.org NS ns1.example.org

AR
ns1.example.org A 172.31.254.1
ns1.example.org A 172.31.254.2

The updated Deadwood, when getting this packet, will assume ns1.example.org only has one IP, 172.31.254.1 in this case since that was the first IP in the packet Deadwood got. Should 172.31.254.2 be the only server that can resolve example.net (and lists ns1.example.org as its glueless name server), Deadwood would now be unable to resolve example.net.

Should I see a real-world case where this particular corner case causes a domain to be unable to resolve, I will update Deadwood to handle it. At this point I only update Deadwood to solve real-world domain resolution issues (as well as security issues); theoretical problems are put on the back burner.

Deadwood roadmap

I plan on releasing Deadwood 3.2.04 soon; at this point, 3.2.03e would only be released should I discover another security issue. 3.2.04 will first be a testing release; I will mark it as being a stable release after seeing no problems caused by it for a couple of months.

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Deadwood updates

December 3, 2013

I have updated Deadwood to resolve yet another corner case and updated TinyOVZ to have Deadwood 3.2.03d.

Deadwood update

Because Canal Once has misconfigured DNS servers and the .tv root servers do not return answers in the AN section, I have had to apply a non-trivial patch to get oncetv-ipn.net to resolve in Deadwood.

Since this patch is non-trivial, and since I have just updated Deadwood with a security patch, I will not make a Deadwood 3.2.03e release. Instead, I will release Deadwood 3.2.04 fairly soon.

It can be downloaded here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

TinyOVZ update

Not only have I renamed my Tiny OpenVZ template TinyOVZ (instead of its old name TinyVZ), I have also updated it to have Deadwood 3.2.03d. In addition, I am beginning to add other services to TinyOVZ; right now it has a web server suitable for static files (sthttpd).

The release is TinyOVZ-0.7.04, and it’s available here:

http://samiam.org/TinyOVZ

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MaraDNS security update

December 2, 2013

While looking over the source code to Deadwood, I discovered that Deadwood 3 releases before Deadwood-3.2.03d have a security issue caused by a programming error I made.

Under certain exceptional circumstances, it may have been possible to perform a blind spoofing attack against unpatched releases of Deadwood. The IP performing the blind spoofing attack needs to appear to have permission to perform full recursion with Deadwood in order to carry out the attack.

Upgrading will fix the bug. Then again, administrators who already perform good practices, making sure that only authorized IPs can use Deadwood recursively (pretty much mandatory in light of DNS amplification attacks) will only be affected by this bug if either a machine with an authorized IP is compromised, or if it is possible for the attacker to send the Deadwood server a packet with a spoofed IP.

This update was released today. MaraDNS 2.0.07d, Deadwood 3.2.03d, and MaraDNS 1.4.13 are patched against this bug. Deadwood 2.3.08 is not affected by this bug.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download.html
http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/stable/

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MaraDNS RPM files

November 27, 2013

I have made CentOS-6 compatible RPM files for MaraDNS 2.0.07c.

The spec file has been updated to integrate Deadwood; the default mararc file no longer uses recursion.

Note that the default configuration has MaraDNS listen on 127.0.0.1 and Deadwood listen on 127.0.0.2; /etc/mararc and /etc/dwood3rc should be updated by hand after installing the RPM.

It can be downloaded here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download/​2.​0/​2.​0.​07​c

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Deadwood Update

November 24, 2013

I have disabled the compile-time option to have RadioGatún[64].

This code is not needed. Even though RG64 is faster, even on 32-bit systems, it uses more code on 32-bit systems (breaking Deadwood's ability to fit in 65,536 bytes on Windows).

In addition, this code does not have a test for it. RG32 is good enough; if I'm going to update Deadwood's crypto, do it right: add SipHash, add Keccak, add maybe another stream cipher. But, quite frankly, that probably will not happen unless some academic paper comes out questioning either Panama's or RadioGatún[32]'s security as a stream cipher.

The fact of the matter is this: While it is a lot of fun to play around with cryptographic primitives, the choice of cryptographic primitive is usually not the cause of security or performance problems. Yes, Keccak fixes some theoretical issues with RadioGatún's security when used as a cryptographic hash -- but those issues are nowhere near a practical weakness in RadioGatún right now, and probably will never result in a real-world attack. More to the point, Deadwood doesn't use RadioGatún as a cryptographic hash, but as a stream cipher, and there is no known attack against either Panama (RadioGatún's predecessor) or RadioGatún used in this manner.

While RadioGatún[64] is faster than RadioGatún[32], this is not Deadwood's bottleneck. Deadwood's main performance bottleneck is waiting for an upstream DNS server to reply to a query, or moving on to the next DNS server if there is a query timeout.

This update can be downloaded here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

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Living in poverty

November 23, 2013

I'm not going to play the X things you don't know about me game that is currently very popular on social networks right now, but I am going to mention one thing you probably do not know about me:

For two years, I supported myself working restaurants, often times working two jobs at the same time. I had no car, so relied on a combination of a bicycle (multiple bicycles, actually, because one broke down and another was stolen) and public transportation to get around. When, one week, the buses stopped running because of a strike, I had to bicycle two hours to and from work and one day was so weak I almost fainted on the job.

Getting a job at the local gas station was a step up. Yeah, sure, I had to work graveyard two days of the week, which made going to college at the same time impossible, but it was steady 40 hour week work with steady pay. I was finally able to start saving up money for a car.

The way I got out of that cycle was by spending my free time on the then-Internet and learning enough about computers to get a job at a dot-com. I got my break when I met Sean Lynch who was having lunch with my friend Hope Esperanza one day; Sean helped me get my first middle class job and out of the cycle of poverty.

Not everyone is as lucky as I was. Here is a story of one woman who has to work two jobs just to make ends meet.

http://​www.​huffingtonpost.​com/​linda-​tirado/​why-​poor-​peoples-​bad-​decisions-​make-​perfect-​sense_​b_​4326233.​html

Edit: Updated link to Huffpost version of article which better compensates the author

The above photo was taken by my friend Amy Ihde

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Root server change

November 19, 2013

Last January, for the first time in over five years, the IPv4 address of one of the DNS root servers changed.

As per their announcement, d.root-servers.org is moving from 128.8.10.90 to 199.7.91.13. While 128.8.10.90 still works as a root server, this machine will eventually be taken offline.

This in mind, I have updated Deadwood’s default root server list as well as all references in the Deadwood’s documentation to use this new IP. Deadwood is MaraDNS 2’s recursive resolver.

Anyone with a Deadwood configuration file which has the old 128.8.10.90 IP should update that file.

Note that MaraDNS 1 will not be updated, since this isn’t a security hole with a CVE number. Users of MaraDNS 1 need to transition to MaraDNS 2; MaraDNS 1 will no longer be supported at all on June 21, 2015.

It can be downloaded here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

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RadioGatún[64], etc.

November 18, 2013

In this blog, I discuss Deadwood’s RadioGatún[64] support, MaraDNS’s cost, and getting Unicode characters in Xterm when using CentOS 6.

Deadwood now can use RadioGatún[64]

I have updated Deadwood to optionally use RadioGatún[64]; the default is still to use RadioGatún[32].

On 64-bit systems, not surprisingly, the 64-bit version of RadioGatún is about 45% faster than the 32-bit version. What did surprise me is that, on 32-bit systems, the 64-bit version is about 5% faster than the 32-bit version. While the 64-bit version needs more operations on a 32-bit CPU, these operations are done only half the time; one gets an overall performance boost.

One advantage the 32-bit version does have is that its code is about 33% smaller (600-700 bytes smaller) than the 64-bit code on 32-bit systems.

RadioGatún, unlike ARX (add-rotate-exclusive or) ciphers, only performs bitwise rotations, exclusive or, and bitwise or operations, so it does not have the performance penalty running the 64-bit version on a 32-bit system that ARX ciphers have.

It can be downloaded here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

MaraDNS’ cost

Using the COCOMO II - Constructive Cost Model and my take-home pay at the time I started developing MaraDNS (which is less than what I actually cost my then-employer), MaraDNS is worth about two million dollars (US currency). I have freely donated all this effort to the Internet for anyone to download and use.

I devoted a decade of my life and $2 million worth of software development time making MaraDNS.

Xterm 7x14 Unicode font

If I do the following in CentOS 6:

xterm -fn 7x14

I get almost no Unicode characters, but if I do this incantation:

xterm -fn -misc-fixed-medium-r-normal--14-130-75-75-c-70-iso10646-1

I get reasonably good Unicode BMP coverage (including smart quotes).

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An ode to Netbooks

November 17, 2013

In an alternate universe, all of the major tech news sites would be excited about Intel’s new Atom E3845 processor and Toshiba, Lenovo, Dell, HP, ASUS, Acer, and other computer makers would be rushing to make new Netbook models using Intel’s latest Atom chip.

People would be talking about its four cores, its adoption of VT-x and AES instructions, its support for up to eight gigabytes of memory, its remarkable speed (faster than the core 2 duo machine I use as my home Linux server), and how Netbooks keep getting better and better.

That never happened. When the Atom E3845 came out, hardly anyone noticed. No major headlines in tech sites. No articles with 165 comments. No inquiries about when Linux will run on it. And, worst of all, no Netbook computers that sport this CPU. The cloest we will come is a “Bay Trail” Chromebook. The new Atom chip, while vastly superior to anything that was actually used in a Netbook, was received with a collective yawn.

When I last discussed Netbooks, I admitted that they were no longer being made in the US, but were still available overseas. Netbooks are drying up even in overseas markets. The Lenovo S110? It was available in India in January, but no more.

A lot of former Netbook makers are now making “Chromebooks”. A Chromebook is a low-cost notebook that is designed to run only a web browser.

The Chromebook: No Netbook replacement

In some ways, the Chromebooks are what the Netbooks originally were until computer makers started putting Windows XP and later on Windows 7 Starter in Netbooks, along with 160-250 gig hard disks. Indeed, the latest Intel Atom E3845 is already in a prototype Intel Chromebook which will undoubtedly be available to end-users soon.

My issue with the Chromebooks is that attempts to mass market dumb terminals to end users have been done for a long time (anyone else remember the short-lived Sun Java Station that came out during the height of the dot-com boom and was dead by the time the dot-com party ended?) and none of them have succeeded.

Acer had the right idea with the original C7 Chromebook which had a 320 gigabyte hard disk, but cost only $200. Alas, that C7 has been replaced with the C710 which, like all other Chromebooks, has only a 16 gigabyte solid state drive.

Chromebooks are, by design, a one trick pony. If you use a web browser and absolutely nothing else, it’s a great option. Heck, some adventurous hackers have gotten a whole lot more running on a Chromebook, but, even so, 16 gigs of hard disk space means cool useful things a computer like this could do — such as virtualization or a music library — are not really possible.

Chromebook’s failure to replace Windows Netbooks does not mean fans of small sub-notebooks are out in the cold.

Options for Netbook users

While 10 inch computers are fairly hard to find, Acer makes 11-inch models that are the spiritual successor to the Netbooks of 2009 and 2010, such as the AO-756 series or the Acer V5-131 sub-notebook.

If I were in the market for something to replace my aging Netbooks, I would probably get one of these low-end Acers.

Netbooks were one of the better technologies to pop up in the ‘oughts (first 2000s decade); it’s sad they only lasted a couple of years.

See also

Low-end Netbooks

Android SDK on a Netbook

Atom Supercomputer

Lenovo S-100

Scientific Linux 6 on a S10-3 (As an aside, there is a bug where the Lenovo S10-3 refuses to boot if I update the CentOS 6/SL6 kernel)

Netbooks in 2013

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Deadwood Update

November 13, 2013

I have updated Deadwood and discuss DNS-over-TCP.

Deadwood update

I have fixed some warnings that came up when compiling Deadwood using llvm's clang.

It can be downloaded here:

http://​www.​maradns.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

DNS over TCP

Since this has come up twice this last week: DNS-over-TCP is optional as per section 6.1.3.2 of RFC1123. Any program or web service that considers no DNS-over-TCP an error is not RFC-compliant.

Not having DNS-over-TCP is more secure, because it gives attackers a smaller surface to attack. While I do allow MaraDNS users to have DNS-over-TCP via the zoneserver program (Windows users will just have to modify and compile the source, or use Cygwin if they want zoneserver), it is not necessary or even that good of an idea.

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TinyVZ update

November 12, 2013

TinyVZ (not to be confused with the hosting provider) is a Busybox-based OpenVZ template which uses a fraction of the ram and disk space that an OpenVZ template based on a traditional Linux distribution uses.

Since I use TinyVZ as a tiny recursive DNS server toaster, I have just updated it to use the latest version of Deadwood (3.2.03c), with all of the fixes to resolve names out there.

It can be downloaded here:

http://samiam.org/TinyVZ

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Forum will be down

November 8, 2013

Edit The move has been completed and forum.samaim.org is up again on both IPv4 and IPv6.

Because the ISP for forum.samiam.org is moving servers this weekend to a new datacenter, the MaraDNS support forum will be down for much of the weekend.

The forum should be back up again by Sunday or Monday.

The MaraDNS website and blog will be functioning normally during this move.

The good news is that the new datacenter will be much better. Among other things, this node will finally have native (as opposed to tunneled) IPv6 connectivity.

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MaraDNS and DOS attacks

October 22, 2013

This blog post is a small HOWTO showing how to stop MaraDNS from taking part in a distributed denial of service attack.

The problem

Earlier this year, there was a huge denial of service attack that used DNS packets.

The reason DNS was used is because it is fairly easy to use DNS to make a fairly small packet a really large packet to send to the victim. This is especially true when using a technology called EDNS which MaraDNS does not support.

The solution

When this attack was big news, I mentioned that I do not have time to implement rate limiting. However, CentOS 6 does support rate limiting at the firewall level. While some of the incantations on the Internet do not work in CentOS, the following iptables commands allow a given IP to only send MaraDNS/Deadwood 20 DNS queries every four seconds:

iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 53 -m state --state NEW -m recent --set --name DDOS --rsource

iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 53 -m state --state NEW -m recent --update --seconds 4 --hitcount 20 --name DDOS --rsource -j DROP

To verify they are applied:

iptables --list

To save these commands in CentOS so they are applied at system boot time:

iptables-save > /etc/sysconfig/iptables

Disclaimer

These incantations work in CentOS 6 but may or may not work in other versions of Linux. I do not support non-CentOS Linux installs of MaraDNS.

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October MaraDNS Updates

October 20, 2013

I have updated MaraDNS and Deadwood this month.

MaraDNS update

I mentioned last month I was working on making MaraDNS more IPv6 compatible. I have finished that work. In the snap branch, if MaraDNS is compiled with IPv6 enabled, IPv6 glue records are now shown to the user. This makes it possible to, in theory, resolve DNS names using entirely IPv6 packets.

Note that Deadwood, MaraDNS’ recursor, still can not handle a glueless NS referral with only AAAA (IPv6) records. But, since most registrars have issues with IPv6 glue in their referrals, IPv4 is still needed to resolve DNS names.

This update can be downloaded here:

http://​www.​maradns.​org/​download/​2.​0/​snap/

Third party patch

Last year, Tomasz Torcz provided a patch for running MaraDNS with systemd. Just a couple of weeks ago, he updated this patch. While I no longer accept third party patches, I have made a copy of his updated patch, which can be looked at here:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download/​patches/​3​rd_​party/​Thomasz-​Torcz-​systemd-​2013-​10-​14.​patch

Deadwood update

In this month’s Deadwood update, I have added another question and answer to the FAQ.

It can be downloaded here:

http://​www.​maradns.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

Forum update

While I really can’t provide hand-holding support, I have been helping Vlodko Petrov on the MaraDNS support forum. By making this help public, Google and other spiders are indexing this information, allowing the help and answers I provide to be readily available in search engines.

SipHash for Deadwood?

While SipHash would make Deadwood a little more secure, this security improvement would be strictly academic. I have to balance making an academic security update against Deadwood’s code against the need to keep Deadwood small and fast.

That in mind, I have no plans to make my implementation of SipHash to Deadwood’s hash compression function at this time. However, the code has already been written should I wish to do this in the future.

If SipHash existed in 2001 when I implemented MaraDNS’ random number generator or in 2010 when I was still actively developing Deadwood and last updated its hash compression function, I probably would have had the code use a 32-bit SipHash variant.

But, with a full-time job as a software developer and a baby to take care of, I no longer am actively developing MaraDNS the way I was until 2010. There is a reason that I stopped marketing MaraDNS as being secure last year.

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More on SipHash

October 9, 2013

This blog attempts to better explain why SipHash was created.

SipHash in Javascript?

There is, believe it or not, a Javascript implementation of SipHash. While an interesting thought experiment, SipHash really isn’t an algorithm for running in a high-level scripting language. It’s an algorithm for low-level languages like C, LLVM, or assembler.

What should be using SipHash is not a script, but the underlying engine running a script.

The type of code that would use SipHash

Most high-level scripting language have a data type called either an “associative array”, a “hash”, or a “dictionary”. This data type allows a collection of data to be indexed by a string in addition to being indexed by number.

Here is how a dictionary is used in Python:

last_name = {}
last_name["John"] = ["Smith"]
last_name["Debby"] = ["Harry"]
last_name["Miley"] = ["Cyrus"]
last_name["Tom"] = ["Hanks", "Cruise"]

Here, “last_name” is a collection of last names, indexed by the person’s first name. It lets us know that, in our circle of friends, there are two Toms: Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise.

Under the hood

Computers, at a low level, do not index data by string, but instead index data by number. Under the hood, Python has special code that converts a string in to a number, and then puts the data in a “hash bucket” with that number.

The problem SipHash solves

The underlying code for converting a string in to a number is designed to not have a lot of strings converted in to the same number. If this assumption is broken, then certain types of attacks are possible.

Until SipHash came out last year, programmers had to resort to using ad-hoc methods to convert strings in to numbers in a way that was hard for attackers to guess. Deadwood, for example, uses a method that is secure assuming that the attacker does not know the numbers strings are being converted in to.

The reason Deadwood uses an ad-hoc method instead of a real cryptographic primitive was because there was not, when I designed Deadwood in 2007, a way of very quickly generating a small random number from a string using a cryptographic primitive. Indeed, I observed, while designing Deadwood in 2007, that “the quick and dirty hash [that Deadwood uses] is between 750 and 1400 times faster than Radio Gatun” for hashing short strings.

SipHash solves the very particular problem of implementing a hash data type in a low-level language where it’s important the “hash compression” function (the code that converts a string in to a number) is one where an attacker can not guess what number a given string will generate, even if they somehow know the numbers generated by other strings.

See also

My SipHash implementation SipHash

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My SipHash implementation

October 6, 2013

In my last blog entry, I mentioned a fairly new cryptographic primitive called SipHash. Here, I will discuss my implementation of SipHash, and how SipHash fixes yet another security hole in unpatched DjbDNS 1.05.

My SipHash implementation

I now have a tarball with my implementation of SipHash. While there are many excellent public domain versions of SipHash already out there (including the reference code), this implementation uses the same data types Deadwood’s strings use (making it fairly easy to plug in to Deadwood), and is more extensible than other versions of SipHash. In particular, I have used the code to make a 32-bit SipHash variant (SipHash uses 64-bit words).

S32Hash

S32Hash is my own 32-bit variant of SipHash. It generates a 32-bit hash compression constant from a 64-bit key and a string of any length. While 64 bits is really not quite long enough to be secure — a 64-bit key was brute force solved (PDF document) in a little under five years using thousands of computers in 2002 — it should be secure in cases where an attacker does not have ready access to the compressed hash values (the normal case when using it to determine the hash buckets to use).

The initial XOR constants to apply to the key are the top 32 bits of the corresponding 64-bit constants:

32-bit   64-bit
736f6d65 736f6d6570736575
646f7261 646f72616e646f6d
6c796765 6c7967656e657261
74656462 7465646279746573

The rotation constants are simply the 64-bit rotation constants divided by two, and rounded up:

64-bit 32-bit
13     7
16     8
32     16
17     9
21     11
32     16

The first eight test vectors, where the key is 0x0001020304050607 and the text to hash is {0-length string, 0x00, 0x0001, 0x000102, 0x00010203, etc.}:

9dd5acc0
8e478ea4
dfc77dc1
a41e0118
918a67d2
f3ba2c74
2b1691d7
a7e80642

There is a tarball with reference code for this SipHash variant.

If I ever use this code in Deadwood, I will change the key setup to, instead of using a 64-bit key, initialize the four 32-bit values with random numbers generated by Deadwood’s cryptographic pseudo random number generator (PRNG). To minimize the chance of a weak key, I would make sure no single byte in the initial values has a value of 0.

The reason for this SipHash variant is because one of Deadwood’s design goals is to run best on a 32-bit system. For example, even though a 64-bit version of RadioGatún (Deadwood’s PRNG) exists, I use the 32-bit version.

Yet another DjbDNS security hole

Since DjbDNS was released before hash collision denial of service attacks were well known (I myself didn’t think of them until designing and implementing Deadwood in 2007), it has a hash collision security hole:

https://​00​f.​net/​2012/​06/​26/​dnscache-​poisoning-​and-​siphash/

There is a patch:

http://​download.​pureftpd.​org/​misc/​dnscache-​siphash.​patch

While DJB probably has too much pride to openly admit that he made a security mistake with his 1990s hash compression algorithm, he has made up for this security deficiency by kindly giving us SipHash.

I was aware that this part of djbdns’ code probably had a security issue back in August of 2010, but did not follow up on my investigation.

See also Finally, a CVE-2012-1911 patch The ghost domain bug djbdns 1.05: False security

MaraDNS was secure first

Deadwood was secure against hash collision attacks back in 2007. This security was improved in 2010. Even then, MaraDNS 1 was legacy code, so I did not patch MaraDNS 1 until hash bucket collision attacks were more widely known in early 2012. All of this preceded the publication of SipHash in the summer of 2012, and the above djbdns security patch on July 27, 2012.

Adding SipHash to MaraDNS

As I mentioned before, while SipHash would improve Deadwood’s and MaraDNS’ authoritative security, since the hash compression values can not be readily seen by an attacker, the security improvement would be an academic one. I have to balance any security improvement against the potential for increased code size and slower code. And, more to the point, MaraDNS is finished. Since I never found a good revenue stream for MaraDNS (besides its value as “Resume-ware”), development is now firmly on the back burner.

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SipHash

October 4, 2013

This blog is about the SipHash cryptographic primitive. In summary, SipHash would have made MaraDNS a little more secure if it existed in 2001 (when I developed MaraDNS’ authoritative code) or 2007 (when I developed Deadwood, MaraDNS’ recursive code).

What is SipHash

SipHash is a cryptographic primitive that solves the following problem:

One needs to make a small random-looking number from a longer string.

The random number needs to be generated very quickly

The random number has to be difficult to guess unless you know the secret key

It is the first cryptographic primitive I know of fast enough to be used as a hashing compression function.

Without something like SipHash, the following attack is possible:

An attacker comes up with a large number of different strings which make the same random number (“hash value”).

The underlying data structures which allow one to quickly look up a piece of data assume that there will not be a lot of different strings with the same hash value.

If that assumption is broken by an attacker, the code will run more slowly and use more resources.

This is a type of denial of service attack.

Protecting against this attack

I was not aware of this attack when I wrote MaraDNS in 2001; I finally patched against this attack in late 2011 and early 2012 (resulting in three CVE reports: 2011-5055, 2011-5056, and 2012-0024).

When I started Deadwood in 2007, however, I was aware of the attack, so I always made Deadwood use a randomized hash compression function. In 2007, the hash used a secret number which only changed whenever Deadwood was compiled. This was an issue with precompiled binaries (such as the Windows binary); in 2010 I revised it to use a second secret number that changes every time Deadwood is started.

The algorithm is quick and simple, and assumes that, not only does the attacker not know one or both of the secret numbers Deadwood uses for its hash compression function, but also that the attacker does not know the compressed hash values.

SipHash: Even more secure

SipHash takes it to the next level. Not only is SipHash secure against hash collision attacks when the attacker doesn’t know the compressed hash, SipHash is also secure against attacks where an attacker would know the compressed hash output. With SipHash, the only thing that should be kept secret is its 128-bit key.

Possible variants

SipHash has a 128-bit key and performs add, rotate, and exclusive or (XOR) operations on 64-bit words. Its output is a 64-bit number. It would be possible to come up with a 32-bit SipHash variant with a 64-bit key; only the rotation constants have to be changed. This would run more quickly on 32-bit computers but its security margin would be a little low.

While it would be best to use rotation constants carefully tuned to maximize diffusion, a 32-bit version of SipHash where the rotation constants are divided by two (rounded up) should be pretty good.

It might be possible to have v0, v1, v2, and v3 have separate values in SipHash; this would result in the 64-bit word size version of this SipHash variant having a 256-bit key; a 32-bit word size variant would have a 128-bit key. The security impact of using a larger key is unknown; provided the key is well-chosen, such as one randomly generated or generated by another secure pseudo random number generator (PRNG), I can not see how a larger key would worsen security.

Another way to add some more entropy to SipHash is to change the XOR constant added to v2 after the message to have a value besides 0xff. This would, coupled with the v2/v3 change in the previous paragraph, give 64-bit SipHash a 320 bit key and a 32-bit SipHash variant a 160 bit key. Again, this works best if all subkeys are generated by a good PRNG.

Using SipHash in MaraDNS

While SipHash would increase MaraDNS’ security from an academic standpoint, as a practical matter the hash compression used by MaraDNS and Deadwood should be secure since the attacker can not readily determine what compression values are generated.

If SipHash had existed when I was fully developing MaraDNS or Deadwood, I would have used it. Even though the project is finished, I may update Deadwood (and maybe even MaraDNS’ authoritative server) to optionally use SipHash (or a 32-bit variant as described above) instead of its own home-grown hash compression function.

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MaraDNS 2.0.07c

September 20, 2013

I have just declared MaraDNS 2.0.07c stable. MaraDNS (authoritative) is unchanged; Deadwood has (compared to 2.0.07a/b) a 7-line patch to fix an obscure name resolution problem:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130713.​html

Downloads:

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​download.​html

http://​maradns.​samiam.​org/​deadwood/​stable/

I also have improved MaraDNS' authoritative handling of IPv6 (we now link to IPv6 glue) and hope to have time today to prepare and upload a tarball. (Edit: Done)

As a reminder, the mailing list is now only for MaraDNS announcements and support concerns sent to the list will not be posted. MaraDNS support is available at http://forum.samiam.org

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IPv6 update

September 15, 2013

I have updated my servers to more fully use IPv6. To wit:

All domain names (samiam.org, www.samiam.org, etc.) now have both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

There are multiple IPv6 servers and DNS failover should one of the servers go down.

Just in case there is an issue with IPv6 on these servers, there are also IPv4 only aliases:

http://ipv4.samiam.org/

http://maradns-ipv4.samiam.org/

http://forum-ipv4.samiam.org/

I am guessing that, by 2020, IPv6 adoption will be widespread and IPv4 will be looked at the way people look at CRT televisions today.

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Mailbag

September 12, 2013

Naida Gonzalez writes the following about La Tempestad:

I stopped watching the above novela a few weeks ago. I find all the participants over act their characters. The only character I enjoyed is Estercita, who I find to be a good actress, at least better than the rest of the crew. It never came to light that she drugged William Levy to make him think he had sex with her...or did he? Not one person is doing an exceptional job on this one. Levy needs acting school and Navarette needs to look for another career.

OK, I will admit it. I still watch and enjoy the novela some days of the week, but if my wife wants to go shopping while the show is on, I don’t complain as much as I used to.

One frustration, as someone who speaks Spanish as a second language, is that Levy is sometimes impossible for me to understand. There is a lot of truth to the joke that La Tempestad will do better in the United States because they will give Levy’s character subtitles.

At this point, the story has gone really downhill. Minor spoiler follows: They have killed two of my favorite characters. Even the heroes, at this point, come off as whiny drama queens, with everyone yelling at each other and breaking in to tears for no particularly good reason. Another minor spoiler: The Magdalena character’s romantic plot is just wrong.

It’s good for practicing my Spanish comprehension (especially William Levy’s and Iván Sánchez’s thick accents), but in terms of a story, I think the writers could have done a lot better.

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Forum spammers

September 4, 2013

Even though the forum has only been up since Sunday, and only linked to since Monday, I have already had seven spammers attempt to register accounts. Here is how I stop forum spammers:

I have, from the get-go, set up the forum to not allow anyone to post unless I activate the account by hand. I started off handling the spammers by sending them emails asking for their real name. They did not reply to me, so I just deleted the spam accounts.

I turned on reCAPTCHA, but that didn’t stop them. It would appear there are spammers sitting in little sweatshops in front of a computer screen answering reCAPTCHAs all day so they can spam to forums.

So, the next step was to install the registration security module and put in a few custom common sense questions like "Name the president of the United States". That still didn’t stop them. Again, spammers are sitting in little sweatshops filling out these registration forums by hand eight hours a day, five days a week. (Note: If using this plugin, use the updated version I posted at the MyBB community.)

Finally, I added another defense: The Stop Forum Spam plugin. What this plugin does is check new registrations against a black list of spammers and block anyone who looks like a spammer.

A few minutes after installing this plugin, it already stopped spammers in their tracks; I saw in the logs a blocked registration.

I verified the filter worked by testing it from a Tor exit node, which was (not surprisingly) blacklisted as a spammer. The only issue is that there’s a bug where, in MyBB’s admin control panel, it says “Install and activate this plugin” even though the spam-blacklister has already been installed.

I will see how well these protections work over the new few days, but, so far, I am ahead of the spammers.

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MaraDNS support

September 3 2013

I am changing how MaraDNS support is handled. The mailing list is no longer for MaraDNS support.

Whenever a lot of support emails are posted to the mailing list, a couple of members always end up unsubscribing. The majority of people on the list are lurkers who just want to receive occasional updates about new MaraDNS versions and security patches.

That in mind, I have finally gotten around to setting up a forum for MaraDNS support. This way, people on the mailing list will only read about updates to MaraDNS, while people who need support can use the forum. This is a win-win for everyone.

The support forum is here:

http://​forum.​samiam.​org/​forum-​5.​html

It is also available as a self-signed https link:

https://​forum.​samiam.​org/​forum-​5.​html

Accounts need to be activated by me before they are allowed to post. To speed up activation, please send me a private email with your real name. I strongly discourage anonymous posting in this forum; your real name will be visible in all of your posts unless you have a compelling reason to stay anonymous.

The mailing list is now moderated and, from now on, I will redirect people wanting support to the support forum.

I would like to thank all of my users and hope this new forum makes support more accessible for all.

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day in a couple of months unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

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I now have a forum

September 2, 2013

I now have a forum for discussing my web page, MaraDNS support concerns, or anything else set up at https://forum.samiam.org (self-signed certificate).

About the forum

This forum will allow me to:

Give users of my free software better support than a mailing list.

Allow blog entries to have comments without me needing to filter them by hand.

Allow people to provide feedback about my web page in an open forum.

Not clog up the MaraDNS list with support email back-and-forth exchanges.

I have given the forum a look that goes fairly well with the look of my web pages. While the underlying template code is very flexible, the forum’s default look has a very gaudy late 1990s dot-com-era look to it as well as the first 2000s decade’s look of having very small fonts, which I have somewhat fixed.

To give credit where credit is due, the forum software is MyBB and the forum buttons are made by Justin S.

Accounts have to be activated by hand (register an account, and I will then email you to activate it so it can post there), and I do not think this forum will ever become big enough for me to change that. This is a small forum for a few small discussions.

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MaraDNS webpage update

August 29, 2013

Now that I moved MaraDNS’ webpage to maradns.samiam.org, I have given the design a facelift to look more like the the web design for the main samiam.org site.

Navigation and usage is identical to the old maradns.org web site. The web page is compatible with Internet Explorer 6-10 and any modern CSS browser (Firefox 3.5+, Safari 5, Opera 12, Chrome 29, etc.). It gracefully degrades in Internet Explorer 5, Netscape 4, and browsers without CSS and Javascript.

Like yesterday’s move of maradns.org to maradns.samiam.org, I made this change to more closely associate MaraDNS with my personal web page.

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maradns.samiam.org

August 28, 2013

Just a quick heads-up that I have moved the maradns.org webpage to maradns.samiam.org. maradns.org is still up and redirects all maradns.org links to their corresponding maradns.samiam.org locations. maradns.org is still used to host MaraDNS’s mailing list. I have no plans to bring the maradns.org domain down.

The reason I have done this is to connect MaraDNS more closely to myself; so that people are less likely to see MaraDNS as an anonymous free program and more likely to see it as my project.

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day in late September unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

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VirtualBox’s host-only adapter

August 26, 2013

How to fix VirtualBox’s host-only adapter when it breaks down in Windows 7.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is an emulator that allows an entire virtual computer running its own operating system (called a guest) to run as a program inside an actual computer (the host) running either the same or another operating system. It allows me to run Linux and Windows at the same time on the same computer.

Networking with VirtualBox

It is best if the machine running in VirtualBox is in its own virtual network, so that I can both:

Use SSH to access the Linux virtual machine from Windows

Have the Virtual machine run regardless of the network the host computer is in.

If the host computer has Internet, the virtual machine should also have Internet connectivity.

To do this in Virtual Box, the machine needs to have two network adapters enabled:

A NAT adapter to give the virtual machine Internet access

A host-only adapter to allow SSH access from PuTTY on the Windows host.

Ifconfig looks like this on my Linux virtual machine:

eth1      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:7A:32:A4
          inet addr:192.168.56.101  Bcast:192.168.56.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

Some redundant data removed

eth2      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:00:27:5F:03:F9
          inet addr:10.0.5.15  Bcast:10.0.5.255  Mask:255.255.255.0

Eth1 is the host-only adapter; I use this to connect to the box using PuTTY on the Windows host and sshd (openssh-server) in the Linux host. The Windows host, on the eth1 adapter in Windows, has the IP 192.168.56.2. When I connect to 192.168.56.101, Windows uses a special virtual Ethernet adapter called the "VirtualBox Host-only Ethernet Adapter" to connect to the virtual machine.

Here is the output of "route" on the virtual machine:

Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Iface
10.0.5.0        *               255.255.255.0   eth2
192.168.56.0    *               255.255.255.0   eth1
default         10.0.5.2        0.0.0.0         eth2

The Ethernet adapter eth2 connects the virtual machine to the Internet via the host computer’s Internet connection because it uses a “NAT” adapter.

Setting up the network in VirtualBox

Network adapter settings can only be altered in VirtualBox when the virtual machine is powered off. Once the virtual machine has Linux installed on it and is powered off, click on the yellow “settings” gear button after selecting the Linux virtual machine. Next, click on the network button. Make “Adapter 1” be a NAT adapter, and “Adapter 2” be a host-only adapter. Make sure the check box "Cable connected" is checked, and power up the Linux virtual machine.

Once the Linux virtual machine is powered up, the virtual networks can be enabled by running this as root:

dhclient eth0 eth1

The host-only network stops working!

Unfortunately, there is a bug with VirtualBox’s host-only network adapter which makes it stop running in Windows. Rob Boek blogged about the solution so the network adapter works again:

Run regedit

Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SYSTEM\ CurrentControlSet\ Control\ Class\ {4AD36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

There will be a bunch of folders with names like "0000", "0001", and so on.

Look for the folder with a key named "DriverDesc" with the value "VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter" in the folder

Create a new Dword (32-bit) called "*NdisDeviceType" (yes, it needs to start with a star) and a value of 1, in the same folder with the "DriverDesc" of "VirtualBox Host-Only Ethernet Adapter"

Disable then enable the VirtualBox host-only adapter.

Some more information is in a MSDN article.

Warning: Regedit is a very dangerous tool. Making a mistake here can make it necessary to reinstall one’s operating system. Use at your own risk!

Once the above is done, make sure the host-only adapter has a good IP and DHCP server settings by going to, in VirtualBox, File -> Preferences -> Network

Conclusion

It took me over an hour of research to find this solution to VirtualBox’s host-only network problems in Windows 7. I hope this blog entry helps the next Linux + Windows power user with the same problem.

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MaraDNS: All looks good

August 20, 2013

I have been using MaraDNS-2.0.07c (Deadwood 3.2.03c) for a month now and it is working really nicely; I haven't found a single DNS name out there which this release can’t solve after a month of “dogfood” testing.

My plan is to make MaraDNS-2.0.07c the stable release in another month if I continue to not encounter problems. I encourage users to use this release and report on the mailing list any DNS names which resolve with another DNS server but not with Deadwood 3.2.03c.

Downloads:

http://​maradns.​org/​download/​2.​0/​snap/

http://maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

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Microblogs August 2013

August 18, 2013

This blog is an archive of all of my microblogs posted between July 30 and August 14, 2013. I discuss Chess and card games, Christianity and spirituality, and adding RSS to my blog.

I’m learning Cribbage

I have decided to learn the classic card came Cribbage with my wife. In order to make the game easier to learn, I think we will learn the game in stages. The simplified variant I am thinking of playing is one with only the show—the part of the game where we count combinations that add up to 15 (2 points each), runs (3, 4, or 5 points depending on the number of cards in the run), pairs/three-of-a-kind/four-of-a-kind, flushes, and nobs.

After we get comfortable counting points in “the show”, the next step is to deal both of us six cards, have each of us discard two cards (into the crib), then show the “turn-up” card and count the hands. Once we’re comfortable with that, the next step is to count the points in the crib and see who gets more points in two rounds (alternating dealers).

At this point, we should finally be ready to play full Cribbage.

Posted Aug 14 2013

Am I having a dialog?

Am I having a dialog, or am I just talking at people?

http://​desertretreathouse.​blogspot.​com/​2013/​08/​dialogue.​html

Posted Aug 12 2013

Love is a decision, not a feeling

Love is a decision, not a feeling.

http://​desertretreathouse.​blogspot.​com/​2013/​08/​the-​myth-​of-​falling-​in-​love.​html

Posted Aug 10 2013

My Morphy number is 7 (or 8)

Actors in movies have a “Bacon Number”. For example, the young lady who is in the sex scene at the beginning of the Spanish-language Y Tu Mamá También (Ana López Mercado) has a Bacon Number of three, even though she never starred in another movie (which is a shame, since she is a very attractive young woman):

Ana López Mercado was in Y Tu Mamá También with Diego Luna

Diego Luna was in Milk with Sean Penn

Sean Penn was in Mystic River with Kevin Bacon

Likewise, Chess players have a “Morphy Number”. Paul Morphy was a chess genius from the mid-1800s who only played tournament chess for a couple of years before going back home and becoming a lawyer. I have a Morphy number of seven or eight:

I played chess with Keith Mehl, the local Chess master at our Chess club in the mid-1990s.

Keith Mehl played Chess with grandmaster Walter Browne at the "CalChess State championship" in 1994.

Walter Browne played Boris Spassky in 1969 in Puerto Rico.

Boris Spassky played Miguel Najdorf at the 1955 Gothenburg Interzonal.

Miguel Najdorf played Savielly Tartakower in 1938.

Savielly Tartakower played James Mortimer in 1907.

James Mortimer supposedly played Paul Morphy in some casual (skittles) Chess games, but the scores to those games are not extant. Mortimer also played Henry Edward Bird in 1883.

Henry Bird played Paul Morphy in 1858, and those games have survived.

There are a few people alive today who have a Morphy score of three. For example:

http://​www.​theguardian.​com/​sport/​2008/​jun/​28/​4

Then again, I could not find an extant score for Barden’s game against Jacques Mieses.

Posted Aug 09 2013

On Christianity

The problem with Christianity is that its most outspoken proponents have little compassion for the feelings of others, are egotistical, and believe in a judgmental and not loving God:

http://​www.​patheos.​com/​blogs/​unfundamentalistchristians/​2013/​07/​what-​non-​christians-​want-​christians-​to-​hear/

For the record, I enjoy talking to Jehovah Witnesses, have been to one of their town hall meetings, and even offer them coffee.

Posted Aug 07 2013

Kids and going to church

There has lately been a lot of discussion about why 20-somethings are not going to church.

The issue with young people is not faith in a higher power; except for a few loudmouths, young people have no objection to spiritual beliefs. The issue they have is with the bigotry and ignorance of science religious (not spiritual) belief usually has.

My sense is that young people are turning away from church because it promotes narrow-minded bigoted beliefs — being against gay rights, believing the universe is 6,000 years old despite all scientific evidence to the contrary, and believing that all non-Christians will forever be tormented in Hell — that today’s youth simply do not tolerate.

Take away the bigotry and Christianity becomes appealing again. Unfortunately, few churches have the courage to say “It’s OK to be Gay, the Earth is over four billion years old, and non-Christians can go to heaven”, because they’re afraid of losing too many older bigots by taking a stand on what is right and good.

Posted Aug 05 2013

People do have spiritual experiences

As a former atheist, I understand how they can be so very closed-minded and downright uncomfortable about spiritual experiences. Which is why, while annoying, I’m not surprised they are going to so much effort to discredit a story about a doctor’s near death experience.

My life became a lot more meaningful and fulfilling when I realized that there is a God and stopped trying to reject something I always believed in deep down inside.

Posted Aug 02 2013

Quote of the day

Welcome to the Internet. You will not find a more wretched hive of greed and idiocy

Posted Aug 01 2013

I’m glad I didn’t follow the herd

A couple of years ago, the big rage was to have a website’s CSS use a bunch of really small fonts, like 10-point Arial and 9-point Verdana. I never followed that trend; ever since 2005, my site has used 12-point Verdana and continues to do so to this day.

Now that the trend is to use larger fonts—I’ve seen websites with 14-point or even 16-point body text, I feel vindicated. 10-point Verdana is really too small to read, and 12-point is that sweet spot where it still looks nice on older systems without modern font hinting technologies, while being large enough to be readily read by all.

Posted Aug 01 2013

RSS Update

I have updated the main RSS feeds to generate proper XML (by doing a non-HTML closing of the “p” tag), so they will open in most RSS readers. For the occasional RSS reader which demands anally-compliant RSS, I now have the following feeds which validate:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​blog_​strict.​rss

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​maradns_​strict.​rss

In terms of RSS readers, the best web reader I have found so far is the Digg reader (How Digg has grown up since the days of being dominated by immature flame wars and “-1 disagree” in their now dead and gone comments section), and the best RSS application I have found is the now dead Feed Demon.

One of RSS failings is that it never had a fully standardized way of including markup tags in the RSS feed, so RSS ended up adding non-validating hacks to make up for this deficiency. This caused how RSS feeds look to be very inconsistent; it’s ugly enough I need to have two different versions of each of my RSS feeds. Ugh.

Posted Jul 31 2013

I now have a RSS feed

While RSS is slowly dying, I have added an RSS feed for my personal blog:

http://www.samiam.org/blog/blog.rss

Unlike the obsolete Gopher service which I shut down, the RSS feed generator is completely automated. Now that I have written the script to update it, it will always be current whenever I add a new blog entry.

Note that only the first paragraph of a given blog entry is available via RSS; people who want to read more will have to click on the link and go to my webpage, where I have unobtrusive text ads on the right which help defray the costs of hosting my web pages.

Also, I do not have a RSS feed for my microblog, only for my main blog entries. The reason is because the main blog already has most of the code for summarizing entries in the code; adding an RSS format for the index only took about 30 minutes (including the time researching the RSS format, verifying that time stamps do not need a day of week, and making sure everything looks good in an RSS reader). Adding an RSS for the microblog is too much work for what is, in truth, a waning format.

I think the reason RSS feeds are going away is because publishers can’t find a good way of making money with them.

Posted Jul 30 2013

An ode to Zillions of Games

During the height of the dot-com boom, Jeff Mallet and Mark Lefler worked together to create a game called "Zillions of Games" (ZoG). Not only could ZoG play Chess, it could play pretty much any variant of Chess as well as a lot of other abstract strategy games.

After releasing 2.0 in 2002, Zillions began to languish: They stopped updating or making new versions of the ZoG program. The website recently has had issues with the third party game downloads no longer working, and there looks to be a lack of interest in fixing this issue.

While I no longer play Chess variants, it still saddens me that ZoG is slowly dying.

I like Zillions because it has an adjustable difficulty slider and can be set up to play some really fun club-level chess games full of cheesy mistakes. Grandmaster-strength chess programs are like the master at the local chess club you never enjoy playing but who gives you great analysis to improve your chess. Zillions, on the other hand, is your fun-loving buddy at the local chess club who you love to play with because he will play whatever line (or even variant) you feel like playing, and because you can defeat him about half the time.

Here’s an example Zillions game, showing the kind of coffeehouse fun Chess Zillions can play:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​files/​Zillions-​shrine.​pdf

Posted Jul 30 2013

June-July 2013 archive

I have archived the microblogs posted between June 5 and July 17, 2013:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130728.​html

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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RSS and Zealots

July 31, 2013

In this blog entry, I discuss the RSS feed I have added to this blog (as well as an RSS feed for just MaraDNS blog entries), as well as take a brief look at Reza Aslan’s book Zealot.

RSS Feed

While RSS is slowly dying, I have added an RSS feed for my personal blog:

http://www.samiam.org/blog/blog.rss

As well as a feed for just MaraDNS blog entries:

http://​www.​samiam.​org/​blog/​maradns.​rss

These links are in the corresponding headers in the home pages for samiam.org and maradns.org for easy import in to RSS readers.

For the occasional RSS reader which demands anally-compliant RSS, I have the following feeds which validate:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​blog_​strict.​rss

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​maradns_​strict.​rss

Unlike the obsolete Gopher service which I shut down, the RSS feed generator is completely automated. Now that I have written the script to update it, it will always be current whenever I add a new blog entry.

Note that only the first paragraph of a given blog entry is available via RSS; people who want to read more will have to click on the link and go to my webpage, where I have unobtrusive text ads on the right which help defray the costs of hosting my web pages. Also note that RSS entries are not available for the microblog (too much trouble for what is a dying service).

Zealot by Reza Aslan

Readers of my blog know that Christian fundamentalists annoy me; I found the way the right-wing Fox News attacked Reza Aslan for being a Muslim writing a book about Christianity annoying, especially since they didn’t criticize a Christian for writing a book about Islam.

That said, I think there’s something a bit dishonest about a book that claims that, not only were the Gospel writers lying through their teeth, but also that Jesus was a militant, especially in light of the fact that Muhammad (the founder of Islam) was, in fact, the militant leader of Medina which was at war with then-pagan Mecca.

The fact of the matter is that the only records we have of Jesus’ life come from Christian sources. If we can’t trust those sources, reconstructing Jesus’ life is little more than guesswork.

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Microblogs June-July 2013

July 28, 2013

These are the microblogs I posted between June 5 and July 17, 2013.

We now know PayPal uses 64-bit ints

We now know PayPal uses signed 64-bit integers to store people’s PayPal balances:

http://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​news/​world-​us-​canada-​23352230

2 to the power of 63 is 9,223,372,036,854,775,808. In cents, the number is $92,233,720,368,547,758.08, and the press claims this gentleman had a balance of $92,233,720,368,547,800.

Posted Jul 17 2013

Time to learn ARM assembly

The day when ARM assembly becomes a very hot skill is getting closer and closer:

http://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​news/​business-​23352536

Posted Jul 17 2013

New Deadwood/MaraDNS bugfix release

A couple of days ago, I fixed a bug in Deadwood; a very rare DNS packet would cause a name to not resolve:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130713.​html

I have now made a formal testing release with the seven-line patch to fix this bug, MaraDNS-2.0.07c (Deadwood 3.2.03c):

http://​maradns.​org/​download/​2.​0/​snap/

http://maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

This will probably become the stable MaraDNS/Deadwood release in August or September.

Posted Jul 17 2013

Woman in Korea being abused: Fake video

There are stories making the rounds, even on professional news websites, about a video showing a Korean woman being abused by two guys in a bar.

According to a source who claims to be one of the guys, the video was staged and the people in the video are actors:

http://imgur.com/a/5Z6OF

Posted Jul 16 2013

Zillions of Games’ future

During the height of the dot-com boom, Jeff Mallet and Mark Lefler worked together to create a game called “Zillions of Games” (ZoG). Not only could ZoG play Chess, it could play pretty much any variant of Chess as well as a lot of other abstract strategy games.

It was a huge hit in the Chess variant community, with hundreds of games made by well over a dozen people soon being available for Zillions. Unfortunately for Mallet and Lefler, this community was very tiny, and they did not make too much revenue with Zillions. After releasing 2.0 in 2002, Zillions began to languish: They stopped updating or making new versions of the Zillions program.

Despite this, they kept their website up, and until 2011 or 2012, they allowed people to submit new games running in the Zillions engine to the website. I submitted my own modest Chess Variant there in 2006. Well, some time in 2012, they stopped taking new game submissions, and, indeed, it is no longer possible to download the older games:

http://​boardgamegeek.​com/​thread/​835811/​what-​happened-​to-​zillions-​of-​games

And, there is a rumor that Zillions will go away for good soon:

http://​zillionsofgames.​com/​discus/​messages/​3/​1527.​html?​1371650945

http://​tvtropes.​org/​pmwiki/​posts.​php?​discussion=​13716534090​A​27426800&​amp;​page=​1

Update: Jeff Mallett denies that there are any plans to bring the Zillions site offline

http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​w/​index.​php?​title=​Zillions_​of_​Games&​amp;​diff=​next&​amp;​oldid=​508466091

As someone who used to be a big fan of Chess variants, it’s sad to see that Zillions may be going away. Even though I myself stopped playing Chess variants in 2010, I sometimes like looking at Zillions’ site to see what new Chess Variants people devised.

Here is my goodbye to Chess variants from 2010:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​old-​201002-​im-​done-​with-​chess-​variants.​html

Posted Jul 16 2013

Linux for Workgroups

Well, I must say, I like the names Linus gives his Linux releases. Linux 3.11 is called “Linux for Workgroups”:

http://​www.​theregister.​co.​uk/​2013/​07/​15/​linux_​for_​workgroups/

Posted Jul 15 2013

On Ender’s Game

(Please imagine me saying this in my natural southern drawl) I’m actually hoping there is a boycott by the Gay community against “Ender’s Game”. Why?

Because there’s a chance that narrow-minded bigots (in the south and elsewhere) who see the movie as a counter-protest will learn some of the valuable lessons in the movie about the evils of bullying and the folly of mindless military conflict.

Ender’s Game is in no way a story that attacks or says anything negative about gay people. It can even be argued that the story is a gay coming-of-age story (complete with our young hero staving off bullies).

An interesting article on the controversy:

http://​io​9.​com/​could-​the-​enders-​game-​boycott-​actually-​tank-​the-​movie-​749408769

Posted Jul 13 2013

My favorite Star Trek episode

My favorite Star Trek episode is “Errand of Mercy”. This is classic 1960s Trek machismo, but the story ultimately denounces Kirk’s testosterone overload. Here’s a good discussion (spoilers, but, then again, anyone who has any interest in 1960s Trek has already seen the episode dozens of times):

http://​trekmovie.​com/​2007/​05/​14/​review-​errand-​of-​mercy-​remastered/

Just as interesting as the review itself are some of the comments. I like this particular comment (#32):

It’s super duper easy for fans to lob tomatoes from the comfort of their desktops and insist that other people should pay more money and spend more time (which means more money) on something they’re getting for free. Personally, I love spending other people’s money but how about a moment of perspective.

Posted Jul 12 2013

The C lanuage FAQ

Here is the web version of the classic Usenet FAQ for the C programming language (comp.lang.c):

http://www.c-faq.com/

Posted Jul 12 2013

R.I.P. PC World

For me, PC Magazine was the magazine to keep up on computer technology, Computer Shopper (which was once the size of a phone book) was the magazine to find a computer to buy, and PC World was always the “other” magazine which I read after reading PC Magazine.

Once the Internet started becoming mainstream, these magazines were behind the curve because they did not see Linux (instead of Windows NT) replacing *NIX operating systems in the server back room (then again, there was the distinct possibility back then that Linux would take over the desktop, but Linux never got over a 1% desktop market share).

Computer Shopper became a smaller and smaller magazine every year. Finally, along with PC Magazine, it ceased publication in 2009. PC World continued to limp along, but now is also ceasing publication:

http://​techland.​time.​com/​2013/​07/​11/​pcworld-​exits-​print-​and-​the-​era-​of-​computer-​magazines-​ends/

The paper computer magazine is now no more. It was fun while it lasted.

Posted Jul 11 2013

The ARM continues to overtake x86

The way I program x86 assembly is by using a C compiler. ARM, on the other hand, has a much cleaner assembly language (it is, if you ask me, 32/64-bit 6502). While I can’t stand tablets, I do like the chip powering those tablets, and I am waiting to see more ARM notebooks come out.

http://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​news/​business-​23251285

Posted Jul 11 2013

Good job Deborah Hersman

Deborah Hersman, the leader of the NTSB, is a fine counterexample disproving the misogynist notion that women can not be “alpha”. Here is a very professional woman who is a very effective leader.

Posted Jul 07 2013

My prayers are with the passangers of Asiana Airlines Flight 214

With family and friends up there, it’s quite a shock to see the horrible crash of Asiana Airlines Flight 214 at SFO (San Francisco Airport). This really hits home for my wife and I; my wife and I have been in this airport together three times.

We know there are survivors from the crash; our prayers are with the passengers and I hope a miracle has happened and no one has died.

http://​www.​sfgate.​com/​bayarea/​article/​South-​Korean-​passenger-​jet-​crashes-​at-​SFO-​4650259.​php

Posted Jul 06 2013

I learned something useful watching an infomercial

I actually learned something watching an infomercial for a high-speed high-cost blender called the Nutri Bullet.

According to the host, the best anti-inflammatory ingredient readily available in the US is something called Turmeric.

Posted Jul 06 2013

Yet another idiotic site with overly anal password rules

I have had a system in place for the last decade or so which allows me to give every site I go to a fairly strong password, while having the password for each site be different (and have it so having one site password doesn’t give an attacker access to any other sites I log in to).

Alas, a few sites have arbitrary rules for their passwords which doesn’t allow these generated passwords. Usually, the rule is “you must have mixed case and a punctuation symbol”. I wish the idiots who make up password rules like that would read The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll, which shows how forcing people to have hard-to-remember passwords can actually make things less secure, because they then write down the password on their desk or in a file someone with a partial security breach can access.

Posted Jul 05 2013

Happy Fourth of July Everyone!

Happy Fourth of July Everyone! Or, at least, readers in the United States of America reading my microblog.

I have been spending the last few days collaborating with other people coming up with a good refutation to a recently proposed Young Earth Creationist theory called “Anisotropic synchrony convention”; I finally have a full refutation. The trick for solving the puzzle is not to question the “Anisotropic synchrony convention”—special relativity allows for it, and it’s fruitless arguing with Einstein’s science [1]. The refutation comes from thinking about a universe created by a miracle 6,000 years ago and how it would appear in this bizarre “Anisotropic synchrony convention” frame of reference:

http://​rationalwiki.​org/​w/​index.​php?​title=​Anisotropic_​synchrony_​convention#​Problems_​with_​Lisle.​27​s_​paper

[1] If I were able to argue with Einstein’s science and have my argument stick, I wouldn’t be posting to some random Wiki on the Internet. I would be publishing my stuff in peer-reviewed journals and using my Nobel Prize money to buy a Raspberry Pi.

Posted Jul 04 2013

A look at modern cannonball runs

Once upon a time, long long ago there was a game called a “Cannonball Run” where people would see how quickly they could (legally and illegally) travel across the United States using public roads. The last record set was back in 1983, when, as the tale goes, the world was a different place and it was easier to break speed limit laws.

Much more recently, in 2006, one Alex Roy tries to beat the 1983 record for fastest road trip across the US:

http://​www.​wired.​com/​cars/​coolwheels/​magazine/​15-​11/​ff_​cannonballrun?​current​Page=​all

I think what would be more interesting would be “fastest road trip across the US without ever once going over the speed limit”. While that would have been impossible to verify in 1983, with today’s GPS units, one could keep a record of the exact route used in the road trip, and the exact speed at all times.

Posted Jul 03 2013

An Orwell Quote

A George Orwell quote, from 1984:

“No one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.” — George Orwell

Where I break from Libertarianism is that not only can government institutions seize power and take away people’s liberty, but also monopolistic corporations can control a society’s economy to the point that people’s freedoms are curtailed.

Posted Jun 27 2013

What causes complex code

In my experience as a professional software developer, the #1 cause of complex code is when the requirements change during the development process. In professional environments, this is often caused when a new unanticipated feature is suddenly required (unanticipated complexity, sales or management change their mind, or a customer won’t buy the product unless it has feature X).

Here’s an article on how code sometimes has to be complex:

http://​www.​drdobbs.​com/​architecture-​and-​design/​the-​misplaced-​obsession-​with-​simplicity/​240157265

As one open-source example: When I wrote MaraDNS, my plan was originally to make a simple authoritative-only server. A friend suggested adding recursion to the code. I thought it was going to be fairly straightforward six month project. It wasn’t; while I did manage to finish the code in about a year, the resulting code was very very messy.

When I finally got around to rewriting the code, over six years later, it took me three years of development to do it right. There may still be the occasional corner case bug to be fixed (my last fix was just a couple of months ago), but the code has been stable enough for me to use for all Internet access from home for years.

A sad note: That friend who told me to add recursion to MaraDNS ended up dying very young while I was rewriting MaraDNS’ recursive code; he didn’t live to see his thirtieth birthday nor to see MaraDNS finally finished.

Posted Jun 27 2013

RHEL7 should be available for ARM

Since RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL7) is reported to be based on Fedora 19, it should be available for the ARM architecture when it comes out. Most likely, CentOS 7 will have an ARM version available. With low cost devices like the Raspberry Pi, and ARM starting to get server-level performance, and with the open source nature of Linux, x86 Linux servers should start getting replaced by ARM.

For me, as a programmer, it’s nice to see an architecture that is a lot cleaner at the assembly level than x86 getting so much momentum.

Here’s a link to Fedora/ARM:

https://​fedoraproject.​org/​wiki/​Architectures/​ARM

Posted Jun 26 2013

RedHat 7: Not Until 2014

It looks like Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (and its clones, such as Scientific Linux 7 and CentOS 7) will not come out until early 2014:

http://​www.​serverwatch.​com/​server-​news/​where-​is-​red-​hat-​enterprise-​linux-​7.​html

With a 10-year-long support cycle, it makes sense to make sure everything is just right before making a release public; it will come out a little before halfway through RHEL6’s lifetime cycle (2010-2010) and RHEL5 (2007-2017) will still be supported when it comes out.

I wonder if LXC will be feature complete enough to replace OpenVZ by the time RHEL7 comes out.

Posted Jun 25 2013

Stuart Smith: Found

After years of search John Romero (Doom Episode I, etc.) finally found Stuart Smith (Adventure Construction Set, Ali Baba and the 40 Theives RPG, etc.) and will interview him, hopefully soon:

http://​www.​youtube.​com/​all_​comments?​v=​s​8​ty​3​pwecc​A

Posted Jun 24 2013

The name of the deportation bill

A couple of weeks ago, the House of Representatives voted to restore deportations of children of undocumented immigrants. It took me nearly an hour of sifting through articles, a lot of which had the most vile racist anonymous comments, to finally find the vote tally: It was HR 2217, Role call 208, and the voting record is here:

http://​clerk.​house.​gov/​evs/​2013/​roll​208.​xml

Shame on the AP and all the newspapers parroting the AP for not providing essential information like this about a bill. Shame on the online newspapers who allow racists to cowardly post anonymous comments. Here’s a clue: Use Facebook for comments. That way, the racists have to show their name and face when they talk Nazi-like about the evils of “Illegal” people.

For example, in this thread, the racists were all of two fat white men trying to dominate the conversation; once I blocked their Facebook profiles, the comments became readable again:

http://​blog.​seattlepi.​com/​seattlepolitics/​2013/​06/​06/​house-​republicans-​vote-​to-​deport-​dreamers/#​comments

Posted Jun 23 2013

Twice in my life

I regret the two times in my life a lady approached me and indicated to me she was abused, and I did nothing to help her. Here’s an article about a woman who did help women in need:

http://​www.​xojane.​com/​family/​what-​my-​mother-​taught-​me-​about-​the-​eff-​words-​feminism-​and-​fear

I’m no feminist, but one does not need to be a feminist to help a woman in need; one only needs to be a decent, honest human being.

Posted Jun 23 2013

It has become a lot harder for writers

It has become a lot harder to make a living as a writer:

http://​www.​theawl.​com/​2013/​06/​dox-​dox-​dox

Here’s one interesting line from the article:

The reason Google is worth $30 billion is because [the publishing] industry decided to give away its 'content' for free

This is why places like The Huffington Post and The New York Post now have talking ads on their websites; without a paywall, these sites need to have pretty aggressive advertising to make ends meet.

Posted Jun 21 2013

Now I’m using NoScript

Web content producers desperate for revenue have started putting talking Javascript ads on their pages.

I understand and indeed sympathize with content producers desperate for more revenue streams, but I do not like moving ads and I especially don’t like web pages that make noise; this in mind, I’ve enabled NoScript in blacklist-only mode and have black listed huffingtonpost.com and nypost.com from running Javascript in my browser.

Note: I will not run AdBlock, because the underlying attitude behind ad blockers is one I do not agree with; TANSTAAFL (There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch), and if everyone ran ad blockers, there were be little or no compelling content on the web.

Posted Jun 19 2013

ARM is catching up to x86

I remember when the consensus was that the x86 would never have the kind of performance custom RISC chips like the DEC Alpha had. I am pretty sure that, by the end of the 2010s, high-end ARM is going to have the same or better performance as anything x86, or any other chip, will offer.

http://​arstechnica.​com/​information-​technology/​2013/​06/​amd-​announces-​its-​first-​64-​bit-​8-​and-​16-​core-​arm-​based-​server-​socs/

Posted Jun 18 2013

An in-depth look at Pitfall’s map generator

In the original classic Pitfall game, David Crane was able to, by clever programming, represent a 255-location jungle in only 31 bytes of code. I look at exactly what he did in a five-part blog series, as well as look at possible alternate jungle maps which are as little as 18 bytes in size:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130606.​html

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130608.​html

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130612.​html

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130616.​html

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130617.​html

Posted Jun 17 2013

My Google web browser compatibility rant

I can understand dropping support for IE7 and can probably even understand not supporting IE8, but Google’s way of not fully testing their web applications in Firefox 17 is really annoying (two bugs: The new mail compose interface something has an annoying jump in FF17; the bottom direction on a given page when printing directions doesn’t print correctly). This is a browser that’s not even a year old.

For the record: My own webpage is fully compatible in Firefox 3.5+, IE9+, and any recent release of Chrome, Safari, and Opera; it usually remains readable on mobile browsers (code samples on small screens are tricky, but I try my best); it gracefully degenerates down for an obscure browser called Dillo, the text-based Lynx, as well as IE8, IE7, IE6, and even IE5. It’s perfectly usable in older Firefox releases (albeit without CSS); where there is a rendering issue with links in Netscape 4 (little annoying black boxes), the pages can still be used.

I don’t expect Google to make their pages that cross-platform compatible, but they could easily, if they wanted to, make Gmail perfectly Netscape 4 compatible again and even have it be usable in Dillo (that old “HTML only” Gmail interface Google used to be so proud of). They need to keep IE6 compatibility if they want to make any inroads in to China; even if not, I think asking users to upgrade their browser more than once a year is unfair.

Then again, since we don’t pay for Google’s products, we become the product. It goes back to TANSTAAFL: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. That is why I prefer to post updates to my own domain than to Twitter, Google+, and Facebook.

Let me wrap up this rant with a link:

http://​www.​xconomy.​com/​national/​2013/​06/​14/​dont-​panic-​but-​weve-​passed-​peak-​apple-​and-​google-​and-​facebook/?​single_​page=​true

Browser notes

Netscape 4 users: I apologize for the little squares in that link. It’s either having little squares in Netscape 4 or breaking formatting in newer versions of Internet Explorer. Any computer which can run NN4 can also run the open-source Dillo, which does not have this problem. Yes, I know there are no NN4 users out there in 2013, but I am, as a matter of principle, against forcing people to upgrade their computer to read my website.

For contracting web design projects, I would design on Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, test in IE10 and IE9, make sure there aren’t any glitches in Firefox 17 (the oldest currently supported Firefox), and possibly go down to IE8, probably not IE7 (though, it’s easily enough reasonably well tested in IE9 or IE10). IE6 compatibility is still important, but only if the website is in Chinese.

Some important webfont gotchas: Test web fonts in Chrome + modern Windows. Test web fonts in Chrome or IE in Windows XP without Clear type. Test printing webfonts in Safari 5 (It doesn’t work, last time I looked). Do not have webfonts in iframes in IE8 (it’s a bug which only shows up in IE8, not even IE8 compatibility mode in IE9/IE10).

More details on fixing web fonts to look decent in Chrome: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20120918.​html

Posted Jun 15 2013

The 32-bit 6502 exists

I always wanted to see a 32-bit or 64-bit 6502 with protected mode. Well, it exists. It’s called the ARM—the principal architects of the ARM were hardcore 6502 programmers and the ARM has 6502 quirks like rotate instructions that use the carry bit and “bne” (same mnemonic as the 6502) meaning “branch if not zero”.

http://​www.​ot​1.​com/​arm/​armchap​1.​html

It looks like the ARM architecture is slowly replacing the x86, which I think is a good thing.

Posted Jun 12 2013

Being bilingual is good

Why Being Bilingual Can Actually Make You Smarter

http://​www.​howlifeworks.​com/​a/​a?​AG_​ID=​1192&​amp;​cid=​7111​ab

Yes, this is a thinly disguised ad for The Pimsleur Approach. The sense I get is that the Pimsleur Approach can be remarkably effective—probably one of the best “teach yourself a language” programs—but the lessons are somewhat dry and tedious.

The best way to learn a language is to go to another country and learn the language there. This is how I learned Spanish after a couple of years of high school and college classes:

http://www.sipuebla.com/

For the record: Puebla is still a remarkably safe area of Mexico right now; I’m more worried about the nearby volcano than the drug gangs in that particular city. And, yes, the owner of that school was the best man at my wedding.

Posted Jun 10 2013

Movie review: Now You See Me

(This is a spoiler-free review)

Now You See Me’s best moment was on May 23, when Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine were interviewing together to promote the movie, and Morgan Freeman fell asleep during the interview. This was far more entertaining than any scene in the actual movie.

The movie has more plot holes than swiss cheese. The movie emphasizes action sequences over character development or a plausible plot. While it has some entertaining action, I wish I had waited until this movie was available on Netflix before watching it. I think, instead of seeing this at the local theater, one should wait for the new Superman to come out later this month, or see Before Midnight if it has made its way to a local movie theater.

Posted Jun 09 2013

Classic Pitfall with a new map

Using a modern random number generation technique that did not exist when David Crane wrote the original 2600 Pitfall in the early 1980s, I have created a version of Pitfall with a new map.

I have not fully play tested this map, but simulations indicate it should be possible to finish the map in under 20 minutes (just like in the original Pitfall).

A download is here:

http://samiam.org/pitfall/

Posted Jun 09 2013

My favorite Doctor Who trivia factoid

My favorite factoid about Doctor Who actors: Four, count them four actors who have played the doctor have also played Winston Smith from Orwell’s 1984:

Patrick Troughton, the second doctor, played Winston in a 1965 BBC radio adaptation of Orwell’s story.

Christopher Eccleston, the ninth doctor, plays Winston Smith in a BBC radio adaptation of 1984 that came out earlier this year.

Peter Cushing, who played the Doctor in the 1960s movies, played Winston Smith in a 1950s adaptation of 1984.

John Hurt, who will be an incarnation of the Doctor in the 50th anniversary special coming out this fall, was Winston Smith in what is probably the most famous adaptation: The film made in the real year 1984.

I’m very pleased in particular that the BBC has made John Hurt, who has always been for me Winston Smith, the Doctor. This very extensive overlap of actors playing both characters show that Winston Smith struggles for the same thing the Doctor struggles for: to protect humanity from the forces of evil that want to oppress our freedom and liberty, that want to rule us with a fist of fear, that want to replace the truth with a lie.

Posted Jun 06 2013

IE6 only matters in China

During the first decade of the 2000s, keeping a web site Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) compatible was the bane of every web designer out there. At first glance, it appears that IE6 is stubbornly holding at about 6% of users:

http://​arstechnica.​com/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2013/​06/​internet-​explorer-​versions-​2013-​05-​640​x​480.​png

However, the true story is this: China is the only country in the world that is clinging on to IE6. Every other country out there (including other former IE6 holdouts like South Korea) has stopped using IE6. Here’s the more detailed breakdown from Microsoft themselves:

http://www.ie6countdown.com/

To summarize: China still has 24% IE6 usage. India has 2.8% IE6 usage. Every other country has under 2% IE6 usage. Except for web designers of webpages written in Chinese, IE6 does not matter anymore.

Then again, I keep this website IE6 compatible (and even recently did a modest update to have it degenerate gracefully in IE5), but that’s because I enjoy the challenge of making this website render well on as many different browsers as possible (it even fairly gracefully degenerates in the very obscure Dillo browser).

As for my personal choice in browsers: Usually Firefox in Windows 7; Chrome if I’m using a slow netbook or one of Google’s “runs best on Chrome” sites. I briefly used Chrome as my main browser but went back to Firefox because there are too many “made on a Mac” sites with custom webfonts that look horrible in Chrome. I’ve mainly been using Firefox in some form for 12 years now, going back to when it was called “Mozilla” and included an Email and Usenet client.

Posted Jun 05 2013

My paleo diet

If I were to do a “paleo” diet, I would do a pre-Hispanic (before the arrival of the Spanish) Mexican diet. To wit:

Corn

Beans

Peanuts (originally from Peru, but were in Mexico by the time Cortéz showed up to liberate the Tlaxcaltecas from the Aztecs)

Turkey (but, as it turns out, not chicken)

Chocolate

Avocado

Tomatoes

Nopales (an exotic Mexican edible cactus leaf)

Huazotle (an even more exotic Mexican seed)

Honey (this appears to be the only pre-Hispanic refined sugar, Piloncillo uses post-Hispanic cane sugar)

Some more information:

http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Aztec_​cuisine

http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Domesticated_​plants_​of_​Mesoamerica

Posted Jun 05 2013

May 2013 archive

I have archived the microblogs posted from May 6 to June 1 2013:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130604.​html

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La Tempestad: A review

July 21, 2013

In this blog, I look at the Spanish-language novela “La Tempestad” and why it has low ratings. This review has spoilers which reveal plot details.

La Tempestad

In order to not lose my Spanish-language fluency, I have been watching Spanish language soap operas (called novelas)

The most recent novela I have been watching is La Tempestad, which has been struggling with low ratings.

This weekend, a Radio Formula talk show savagely attacked the novela and gave it various criticisms. One critic mentioned it has a “bad story” without getting more specific.

Problems with its story

Warning: Spoilers follow.

The problem with the story of “La Tempestad” is that it is not a proper story for a novela. In a novela, the good guys should be pure and morally upright, without any shades of gray. Only the villains are allowed to have ambiguous shades of gray in their actions.

Unfortunately, in the story, the hero has sexual relations with a woman who he has no intention of having any serious relationship with, much less marrying. The woman he had sex with, however, wants to be with him and marry him. Instead of the hero marrying this woman he seduced (like he should), he ends up chasing another woman.

A good guy in a novela should not be having sex with women who he has no intention of marrying. That kind of behavior is something villains do in a novela, not heroes.

While they have responded to the low ratings by sweeping this morally ambiguous subplot under the rug (by having the woman in question disappear and lose her memory), the damage has already been done. Removing this entire part of the story has not helped—the program’s ratings are, if anything, continuing to go down.

In conclusion

While I continue to enjoy this novela, and I concede that there are other issues (the TV show immediately before “La Tempestad” on the same network has its own issues), I can see why a lot of Latina women, who tend to still have the old-fashioned traditional values, were turned off by the story and no longer watch it.

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MaraDNS testing release

July 20, 2013

A few days ago, I fixed a bug in Deadwood; a very rare DNS packet would cause a name to not resolve:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130713.​html

I have now made a formal testing release with the seven-line patch to fix this bug, MaraDNS-2.0.07c (Deadwood 3.2.03c):

http://​maradns.​org/​download/​2.​0/​snap/

http://maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

This will probably become the stable MaraDNS/Deadwood release in September or October.

While not a critical security bug, I consider name resolution bugs in Deadwood important, and may do out-of-band updates to fix them. Otherwise, I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day in a couple of months unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

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UltraDNS vs. Deadwood

July 13, 2013

UltraDNS sometimes adds upper-case letters to their replies. These host names were unable to resolve in Deadwood; I have updated Deadwood to have these names resolve.

Deadwood update

www.getcafecup.com did not resolve in Deadwood because UltraDNS, in their custom DNS server, decided to add upper-case in a reply from their server:

$ askmara Awww.getcafecup.com. 204.74.108.1
# Question: Awww.getcafecup.com.
WWW.getcafecup.com. +7200 a 216.242.93.163

Observe how the “www” becomes “WWW”. This is, as pointed out in the 0x20 hack document, unusual behavior. Not only does this break resolution in Deadwood (until today, anyway), it also results in bigger DNS packets (they do not compress quite as well).

To work around this behavior, I have had to patch Deadwood to ignore case when deciding whether a DNS label is the same.

It can be downloaded here:

http://​www.​maradns.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

This is another out-of-band update. When Deadwood doesn’t resolve a domain on the Internet that other DNS servers can resolve, I usually patch Deadwood until it can resolve the name in question.

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Deadwood Update

July 6, 2013

I have updated Deadwood; Deadwood has always had a limit of 20,000 fixed upstream servers. While this does not affect normal usage of Deadwood, people trying to have a huge blacklist in Deadwood would be unable to resolve any domains.

The workaround is to make this silent limit more visible; Deadwood will now complain with a fatal error if there are more than about 20,000 upstream/blacklist entries in one’s dwood3rc file.

Note that this does not affect the total number of NS referral cache entries that Deadwood can handle, only the user-defined upstream servers.

It can be downloaded here:

http://​www.​maradns.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

This is an out of band update; while I do not actively work on new features I still fix serious bugs (or, in this case, what looked like a serious bug at first glance) when I become aware of them.

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MaraDNS Update

June 22, 2013

I have updated MaraDNS to incorporate a one-line bugfix with Deadwood (MaraDNS’s recursive resolver) in to the codebase. The name of this release is MaraDNS 2.0.07b (for more details on the unusual naming patterns, read the May 23 blog entry)

This will hopefully stop complaints of being unable to resolve some domain names that occasionally pop up on the mailing list.

It can be downloaded here:

http://​www.​maradns.​org/​download.​html

While not a hard-and-fast rule, my plan is to work on MaraDNS or Deadwood again one day in a couple of months unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

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Deadwood Update

June 21, 2013

11 years ago today, I released MaraDNS 1.0 to the world. Today, I have updated Deadwood and am announcing another end-of-life.

Deadwood update

I have added a FAQ entry about using Deadwood with RFC1918 addresses.

It can be downloaded here:

http://​www.​maradns.​org/​deadwood/​snap/

The updated FAQ:

http://​maradns.​org/​deadwood/​doc/​FAQ.​html#​11

Deadwood 2.0 end-of-life

I have dropped most support for the older, more compact Deadwood 2.0 release. The only thing I update in this branch of Deadwood is security holes with CVE numbers.

The last update to Deadwood 2.0 was Deadwood 2.3.08, which addressed CVE-2012-1570.

I am now placing an end of life on Deadwood 2.0: June 21, 2016. This gives users three years to update to Deadwood 3. With Deadwood 3 out for over two years, it’s time to upgrade.

MaraDNS 1 end-of-life

Please remember that all MaraDNS 1 releases are only supported for CVE security holes, and that this branch of MaraDNS will no longer be supported two years from today (June 21, 2015):

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20120621.​html

Current MaraDNS plans

Unless a CVE security hole comes up, my present plan is to release Deadwood 3.2.04 and MaraDNS 2.0.08 sometime around the end of the year.

While not a hard-and-fast rule (for example, I answered a lot of email on the list this month), my plan is to work on MaraDNS or Deadwood again one day in a couple of months unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

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Alternate Pitfall maps

June 16, 2013

This blog entry is my final look at Pitfall’s map generator. In this entry, I look at possible variant Pitfall maps. This is the final installment of a series with four previous blog entries.

ARX: More compact than an LFSR

A lot of modern cryptographic research looks at a type of operation called “add-rotate-xor” (where “xor” means “exclusive or”), or ARX for short. For example, the SHA-3 finalists Skein and Blake are both “ARX” ciphers.

Since the 6502 supports both modulo addition and xor (with the mnemonic “EOR”), as well as one-bit rotates, we can compactly implement an 8-bit ARX in 6502.

The one I tried out is like this for the forward function:

uint8_t xar(uint8_t r, uint8_t a, uint8_t b) {
        int y;
        for(y = 0; y < 3; y++) {
                // 12 bytes in 6502
                r ^= b;                  // lda r ; eor #b
                r += a;                  // clc; adc #a; sta r
                r = (r << 1) | (r >> 7); // asl ; rol r
        }
        return r;
}

And like this for the inverse function:

uint8_t rsx(uint8_t r, uint8_t a, uint8_t b) {
        int y;
        for(y = 0; y < 3; y++) {
                // 14 bytes in 6502
                r = (r >> 1) | (r << 7); // lda r; lsr ; ror r ; lda r
                r -= a;                  // sec; sbc #a
                r ^= b;                  // eor #b ; sta r
        }
        return r;
}

There are some 40 different possible values for a and b that give us a full permutation: All 256 possible 8-bit values are seen. The constants I used for my alternate 256-location Pitfall map are, in decimal (a=3;b=11). I carefully tweaked the map to be solvable in about the same amount of time as the original Pitfall map.

Not only are there 40 possible 256-location jungles, there are a total of 2,176 different possible (a,b) values where:

One can grab all 32 treasures

The default player’s start is can reach these 32 treasures

Note that the above code runs the ARX loop three times; this is because my experiements show that a single ARX iteration doesn’t make a sufficiently random-looking map (the “diffusion” is poor). Some of the map lengths, such as 255, will need to use a different number of iterations besides three (since 255 is 3 * 5 * 17). The most number of times this loop would have to be run is can be as high as seven for the 16 240-length maps; fortunately, there appear to be enough cycles leftover during the vertical blank to do this (and even enough cycles to run it 21 times for the underground passages in the 16 240-length maps).

An easier Pitfall variant

The smallest jungles using this ARX generation technique with all treasures are 125 locations in size—under half the size of Pitfall’s original jungle. One of these values, again in decimal, is (a=16, b=10). I have made a special easier training version of Pitfall where the jungle is replaced with this smaller, easier 125-location jungle.

I have increased the player’s time limit from 20 to 60 minutes in this jungle, have given the player 60 instead of three lives (the player just loses a minute of time every time they die; if they die with under a minute left, the game ends), and have removed all of the underground walls.

Since the main map is only 125 locations in size, I looked more closely at the random number generator when given (a=16, b=10) and discovered there are 19 other jungles available, albeit without treasure, with these constants; one can enter one of those jungles by simply changing the location Harry is in.

I have taken one of those 19 jungles and have converted it in to a one-minute challenge course for Harry to run through. This other map can be entered by hitting “game Select”. It places Harry in a small training course suitable for practicing movement and jumping. The goal is to get to the right end of the course within a minute. This training course discourages bad habits by being more deadly: Touching a log or falling down ends the run. Harry is not allowed to run left from the starting line; no underground shortcuts may be used or the player has to start over.

These changes do not affect the gameplay of the main jungle. Along with the other easier jungle, this allows people to train for Pitfall with either a medium sized easy-to-play jungle, or a small very difficult to play jungle.

The way I was able to pull off these changes is because removing the code to process underground walls gave me just enough room to implement this obstacle course.

These files can be downloaded here:

http://samiam.org/pitfall

Galois LFSR

Thomas Jentzsch pointed out to me that we can even more compactly represent a LFSR in 6502 by using a “Galois” LFSR instead of the “Fibonacci” LFSR that David Crane used for Pitfall. This is extremely compact in 6502:

  lda random
  lsr
  bcc .skipEor
  eor #$d4
.skipEor:
  sta random

Its inverse is equally compact:

  lda random
  asl
  bcc .skipEor
  eor #$a9
.skipEor:
  sta random

Code that can run both the forward and inverse Galois 8-bit LFSR in C:

uint8_t lfsr(uint8_t random, int taps, int direction) {
        uint8_t c;
        if(direction == 0) {
                c = random & 1; random >>= 1;                   
        } else {
                c = random & 0x80; random <<= 1;               
                taps <<= 1;
                taps |= 1;
        }
        if(c != 0) {                                          
                random ^= taps;
        }
        return random;
}

Valid “taps” values are: 0x8e, 0x95, 0x96, 0xa6, 0xaf, 0xb1, 0xb2, 0xb4, 0xb8, 0xc3, 0xc6, 0xd4, 0xe1, 0xe7, 0xf3, and 0xfa. I chose 0xd4 because it appears to generate a jungle that can be finished in 20 minutes, just like the original Pitfall jungle.

A comparison of RNG techniques

David Crane’s code used up 31 bytes total, for both the forward and inverse LFSR. The ARX code uses 26 bytes, five bytes smaller, and has many more solvable jungles than the LFSR code. A Galois LSFR is the most compact, using only 18 bytes.

ARX number generators as well as Galois LFSRs are random number generation techniques unknown to David Crane when he developed Pitfall (to be fair to Crane, ARX did not become popular until the mid-’00s, and Galois LFSRs probably were not widely used back then); they allow Pitfall to have some interesting alternate jungle maps.

Downloads

I will mention one more time a couple of downloads for alternate Pitfall maps:

http://samiam.org/pitfall/

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More on Pitfall’s polynomial

June 16, 2013

In this blog, I continue looking at Pitfall's random number generator. This continues a series with three previous blog entries.

How to make a LFSR more compact

In a previous blog entry, I looked at how to implement a LFSR in 6502. The code took 18 bytes of ROM. The actual code used in the Pitfall cartridge uses 15 bytes:

uint8_t lfsr_3(uint8_t r) {
        uint8_t a, c, t;
        a = r;               // LDA r a: r
        c = a >> 7; a <<= 1; // ASL a: r << 1
        a ^= r;              // EOR r a: r << 1 ^ r
        c = a >> 7; a <<= 1; // ASL a: r << 2 ^ r << 1
        a ^= r;              // EOR r  a: r << 2 ^ r << 1 ^ r
        c = a >> 7; a <<= 1; // ASL a: r << 3 ^ r << 2 ^ r << 1
        c = a >> 7; a <<= 1; // ASL a: r << 4 ^ r << 3 ^ r << 2
        a ^= r;              // EOR r  a: r << 4 ^ r << 3 ^ r << 2 ^ r

The next command is a little tricky. It takes the left bit of a and puts it in the “carry” bit.

When grabbing the 7th (left) bit of a value which is a series of left shifts, we can convert the left shifts in to the corresponding right shifts by taking 7 and subtracting it from the right shift value.

When this is done, grabbing the left bit makes a left shift of 0 become a right shift of 7, a left shift of 1 be a right shift of 6 and so on:

Before (<<)    After(>>)
0              7
1              6
2              5
3              4
4              3
5              2
6              1
7              0

This in mind, by taking the left bit of “r << 4 ^ r << 3 ^ r << 2 ^ r” (4,3,2,0), we get “r >> 3 ^ r >> 4 ^ r >> 5 ^ r >> 7” (3,4,5,7). Let’s continue the code in the actuall Pitfall cartridge:

        c = a >> 7; a <<= 1; // ASL
        t = r >> 7; r <<= 1; r |= c; c = t;     // ROL r
        return r;
}

The reason David Crane wrote the code this way was to save three bytes; while the code is harder to follow, it’s now 15 instead of 18 bytes long.

Why this particular tap sequence

There are 16 different possible tap sequences for this particular random number generator. The reason Pitfall uses this particular one is because it has the most compact representation in 6502; other sequences use more code.

More to come

If David Crane knew then when we know today about pseudo-random number generators, he would have used a different algorithm. The code we have been looking at is actually called a “Fibonacci LFSR”. There is a variant way of representing a LFSR called a “Galois LFSR” which is even smaller; we will look at that as well as another small possible variant random number generator for Pitfall in a future blog entry.

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Pitfall’s polynomial

June 12, 2013

In this blog, I continue looking at Pitfall's random number generator. This continues a series with two previous blog entries.

Implementing an LFSR in 6502

Here is one way of implementing a LFSR in 6502 and c:

uint8_t lfsr_1(uint8_t r) {
       uint8_t a, c, t;
       a = r;              // LDA r
       c = a & 1; a >>= 1; // LSR;   a: r >> 1
       c = a & 1; a >>= 1; // LSR;   a: r >> 2
       a ^= r;             // EOR r; a: r >> 2 ^ r
       c = a & 1; a >>= 1; // LSR;   a: r >> 3 ^ r >> 1
       a ^= r;             // EOR r; a: r >> 3 ^ r >> 2 ^ r
       c = a & 1; a >>= 1; // LSR;   a: r >> 4 ^ r >> 2 ^ r >> 1
       a ^= r;             // EOR r; a: r >> 4 ^ r >> 2 ^ r >> 1 ^ r
       c = a & 1; a >>= 1; // LSR;   a: r >> 5 ^ r >> 3 ^ r >> 2 ^ r >> 1
       c = a & 1; a >>= 1; // LSR;   a: r >> 6 ^ r >> 4 ^ r >> 3 ^ r >> 2
       c = a & 1; a >>= 1; // LSR;   a: r >> 7 ^ r >> 5 ^ r >> 4 ^ r >> 3
       c = a & 1; a >>= 1; // LSR; c: (r >> 7 ^ r >> 5 ^ r >> 4 ^ r >> 3) & 1
       t = r; r <<= 1; r |= (c & 1); c = t >> 7; // ROL r; r <<=1; r |= c;
       return r;
}

The 6502 above is a bit confusing to follow because our code is affecting both the 8-bit accumulator (“a”) and a 1-bit carry flag (“c”). Until the final LSR, the accumulator is the variable affecting the final result; the final LSR is there to store the low bit of the accumulator in the carry flag. The subsequent “ROL r” operation shifts “r” one bit to the left, setting the low bit to the value of the carry flag.

Here is easier to follow equivalent code:

uint8_t lfsr_2(uint8_t random) {
        uint8_t t; // temp
        t = (random >> 7) ^ (random >> 5) ^ (random >> 4) ^ (random >> 3);
        random <<= 1;
        random |= t & 1;
        return random;
}

When you need to store an entire game in 4,096 bytes, it is very important to make code as compact as possible. The above 6502 takes 18 bytes of code to render (“LDA r”, “EOR r”, and “ROL r” take two bytes; “LSR” uses one byte). Is there a way to make it smaller?

More to come

In a future blog entry, we will look at how to make the above code even smaller, and look at the code used in the actual Pitfall game.

Edit: The code I posted had an error (fixed June 16, 2013)

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Pitfall redux

June 8, 2013

In this blog, I discuss Pitfall's random number generator by looking at 8-bit linear feedback shift registers (LFSRs) in general. This continues a series started in the last blog posted.

Pitfall uses a LFSR

In previous blog entry, I mentioned that Pitfall uses a LFSR. LFSR exist for every single power of two four or higher; since the Atari 2600’s CPU is an 8-bit CPU, Pitfall ended up using an 8-bit LFSR that looks like this in C:

uint8_t pitfall_lfsr(uint8_t random) {
        uint8_t t; // temp
        t = (random >> 7) ^ (random >> 5) ^ (random >> 4) ^ (random >> 3);
        random <<= 1;
        random |= t & 1;
        return random;
}

The values 3, 4, 5, and 7 chosen for the shifts were not chosen at random; while there are 128 possible 8-bit LFSRs (128 because tap 7 is always set in an 8-bit LFSR), only 16 of them have a period of 255. In other words, only 16 different 8-bit LFSRs, when run repeatedly, generate all 255 non-0 8-bit numbers.

Of those 16 possible LFSRs, 12 of them have four “taps”; the other four have six taps. This detail is important when representing a LFSR in compact 6502 code—each tap takes two bytes of code to represent. For example, the above LFSR, which Pitfall uses, has the following four taps: (3, 4, 5, 7). This particular tap configuration, in lists of LFSRs, has the hexadecimal number “b8”, which looks like this in binary:

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
1 0 1 1 1 0 0 0

In the number “b8” (184 when represented in decimal—the numbers normally used by humans), the bits (3, 4, 5, 7) are set, which correspond to the taps seen above.

The 12 4-tap 8-bit LFSRs are, in hexadecimal: 8e, 95, 96, a6, b1, b2, b4, b8, c3, c6, d4, and e1.

Here is the number “b1”, in binary:

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0
1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1

And the function to implement the LFSR:

uint8_t b1_lfsr(uint8_t random) {
        uint8_t t; // temp
        t = (random >> 7) ^ (random >> 5) ^ (random >> 4) ^ random;
        random <<= 1;
        random |= t & 1;
        return random;
}

The inverse LFSR

To calculate the inverse LFSR, do the following:

Convert the shift after the taps from a left shift in to a right shift

Have the or (“|=”) operation affect the top, not bottom bit of the number

Convert the “7” tap in to a “0” tap; add 1 to all of the other taps

In a previous blog entry, I showed both the forward and inverse LFSRs for Pitfall’s random number generator. Above is the forward LFSR for the “b1” tap configuration; the inverse is:

uint8_t inverse_b1_lfsr(uint8_t random) {
        uint8_t t; // temp
        t = (random >> 6) ^ (random >> 5) ^ (random >> 1) ^ random;
        random >>= 1;
        random |= t << 7;
        return random;
}

Instead of the taps (0,4,5,7), the taps here are (1,5,6,0)—each tap (except the “7” tap) is increased by 1; the “7” tap is converted in to a “0” tap.

A final note

If any LFSR is given a zero input, it will always output a zero; a full period 8-bit LFSR cycles through all 255 other 8-bit values.

More to come

Now that I have looked at the various 8-bit LFSRs that exist, I will next look at how a LFSR is implemented in 6502 assembly language, which will explain why David Crane chose the “b8” LFSR. All of this is in a future blog entry.

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A 4096-byte jungle

June 6, 2013

In 1982, the video game to have was Activision’s Pitfall, which featured one Pitfall Harry running, jumping, climbing, using vines and tunnels to travel through a jungle seeking treasure.

Even though the video game allowed Harry to travel through a huge jungle with some 255 different locations, and included then cutting edge graphics including snakes, scorpions, alligators, and four different type of treasures, the entire game fit in only 4,096 bytes.

Let me repeat that: 4,096 bytes. Not kilobytes. Not megabytes. Just bytes. 4,096 bytes is the equivalent of one—possibly two—pages of written text.

Storing the jungle

As mentioned above, this 4,096-byte game stored some 255 different locations to explore in the jungle. In that little space, it was not possible to have even a 256-byte look-up table with a map of the jungle. Instead, David Crane (Pitfall’s developer) used a pseudo-random number generator.

In particular there are two pieces of code: One piece that uses the random number generator to calculate what the screen to the right of a given screen looks like, and another piece of code, the inverse function which calculates what happens when one travels left.

At the beginning of the game, Pitfall Harry starts in location “c4”, which means “This room has a ladder in the middle, a single unmoving log, and a wall on the right hand side underground.”

Immeditely to the left of location “c4” is “e2”, which has a scorpion underground and a crocodile pit in the jungle.

Calculating a location

The code that takes the number like “c4” (which is 196 in normal decimal numbers) and converts it in to, as in this example, the number “e2” (226) looks like this in the original 6502 Pitfall code:

       LDA $81 ;# A5 81
       ASL     ;# 0A
       EOR $81 ;# 45 81
       ASL     ;# 0A
       EOR $81 ;# 45 81
       ASL     ;# 0A
       ASL     ;# 0A
       ROL     ;# 2A
       EOR $81 ;# 45 81
       LSR     ;# 4A
       ROR $81 ;# 66 81

Translated directly in to C, the 6502 looks like this:

uint8_t left_random(uint8_t random) {
        uint8_t a, c, t; // a: accumulator c: carry t: temp
        a = random;                                             // lda random
        c = a >> 7; a <<= 1;                                    // asl
        a ^= random;                                            // eor random
        c = a >> 7; a <<= 1;                                    // asl
        a ^= random;                                            // eor random
        c = a >> 7; a <<= 1;                                    // asl
        c = a >> 7; a <<= 1;                                    // asl
        t = a; a <<= 1; a |= (c & 1); c = t >> 7;               // rol
        a ^= random;                                            // eor random
        c = a & 1; a >>= 1;                                     // lsr
        t = random; random >>= 1; random |= (c << 7); c = t & 1;// ror random
        return random;
}

This more concise code functions identically:

uint8_t left_random(uint8_t random) {
        uint8_t t; // temp
        t = (random >> 6) ^ (random >> 5) ^ (random >> 4) ^ random;
        random >>= 1;
        random |= t << 7;
        return random;
}

To allow the player to move either left or right, David Crane added this code to calculate what happens when the player moves to the right. This code, for example, takes “e2” and converts it back in to “c4”:

       LDA $81 ;# A5 81
       ASL     ;# 0A
       EOR $81 ;# 45 81
       ASL     ;# 0A
       EOR $81 ;# 45 81
       ASL     ;# 0A
       ASL     ;# 0A
       EOR $81 ;# 45 81
       ASL     ;# 0A
       ROL $81 ;# 26 81

The “ROL” operation looks like this when directly translated in to C:

       t = random; random <<= 1; random |= (c & 1); c = t >> 7;// rol random

And the entire “move one location right” code looks like this in C:

uint8_t right_random(uint8_t random) {
        uint8_t t; // temp
        t = (random >> 7) ^ (random >> 5) ^ (random >> 4) ^ (random >> 3);
        random <<= 1;
        random |= (t & 1);
        return random;
}

How does this code work?

This code allows 255 different locations in Pitfall’s jungle to be represented in only 31 bytes of code. This 224-byte savings was very significant when an entire game had to fit in 4,096 bytes.

The code is a classic pseudo-random number generator called a linear feedback shift register (LFSR). I will discuss LFSRs more, and look at possible variants in Pitfall’s LFSR in a future blog entry.

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Microblogs May 2013

June 4, 2013

In this batch of microblogs, I have spolier-free reviews of the new Star Trek and Fast and Furious movies, discuss a new programming language (Dao), discuss marriage, look back at the environment where I started MaraDNS, among other topics.

Did they bury all those unsold E.T. games?

Back in the early 1980s, Atari supposedly buried thousands of unsold E.T. games, as depicted in this mid-2000s music video:

http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​8​Rt_​3_​b​QVJU

They will finally put to rest the open question of whether this really happened (the guy who made the E.T. cart claimed it did not)

http://​arstechnica.​com/​gaming/​2013/​06/​film-​crew-​to-​dig-​up-​atari-​landfill-​site-​maybe-​score-​3-​5-​million-​copies-​of-​e-​t/

Posted Jun 01 2013

It’s not obsolete if it gets the job done

12 “Obsolete” Technologies Americans Still Use

http://​www.​livescience.​com/​37004-​12-​outdated-​technologies-​refuse-​to-​die.​html

Dialup is pretty badly obsolete. I have a setup that lets me approximate what my website is like to use on dialup: It takes about a minute to load all of the elements needed to view a page (and I still go to some trouble to make things as small as reasonably possible), but once that it done, pages load quickly. My webpage tells browsers to cache the elements for nine months so dialup users only have to wait a minute once.

Pay phones: This is one technology I really wish wasn’t going away. While pay phone calls are expensive, they are cheaper than international roaming on a cell phone. The US doesn’t have real options for low-cost cell phone use. The best deal is T-Mobile’s pay-as-you-go plan, which gives a year of mobile use for only $100—as long as the phone is used for less than 1,000 minutes of talking and, since in the US people pay for incoming texts (even from spammers), text messages are blocked.

Windows 2000: I have a soft spot for Win2k: It’s the last version of Windows without intrusive DRM. I have a Windows 2000 virtual machine for playing older games. The only gotcha with Windows 2000 is that browsers are finally no longer running in Win2k—the latest Firefox to run is Firefox 10, and, even here, a web page with a bad webfont can cause the entire system to reboot. I use Dillo, a tiny minimalist browser, to browse the web in Win2k. If I ever make Linux my desktop OS again, I will use that Win2k virtual machine to run the few Windows-only apps I still use.

Posted May 31 2013

A sign of having wisdom

The ignorant always want to teach. The knowledgeable (wise) always want to learn.

Posted May 30 2013

The Dao of Programming

Dao is a lightweight programming language which appears to be, if you will, “Lua on steroids”. It’s bigger than Lua, but not as big as a “full sized” scripting language, while having most of the features of a bigger language:

http://daovm.net/

http://​lua-​users.​org/​wiki/​Lua​Implementations

For something smaller than Lua (64k!)

http://www.tinypy.org/

Posted May 28 2013

Fast and Furious 6

(This is a spoiler-free review)

The Fast and Furious franchise is notorious for check-your-brain-in-at-the-door moments. Fast 2 had one. The final car chase in Fast 5 defies the laws of physics (Warning: link has Fast 5 spoilers). Not surprisingly, Fast 6 has its share of “yeah, right” moments.

My wife told me after the movie that Star Trek: Into Darkness was a more realistic movie than Fast 6.

But this doesn’t mean the movie isn’t fun to watch. The viewing public agrees: The only movie to do better this year so far has been Iron Man 3.

For people that like to watch fast cars in high-speed chases, and look at beautiful men and women (albeit in a PG-13 movie), Fast 6 delivers.

Posted May 27 2013

Map of London tubes (subways) using only CSS

This is a map of the London tube (subway) system rendered using only CSS:

http://​www.​csstubemap.​co.​uk/​index.​html

Note: This site does not render correctly in any version (not even 10) of Internet Explorer, but renders fine in Firefox, Chrome, and even Opera.

Posted May 22 2013

Star Trek: Into Darkness

(This is a spoiler-free review)

Star Trek: Into Darkness is a very good continuation of the Star Trek franchise. The movie is written more in the spirit of the original Star Trek series and early movies, completely ignoring the Berman and Braga (B&B) era of the franchise.

Like the original Star Trek, there is a lot of action in this movie. Like the original Star Trek, there is social commentary about current events. Like the original Star Trek, Kirk is a brash, prideful, and womanizing captain. Unlike the B&B Star Trek, doing the ethically right thing is not always unquestionably rewarded.

As someone who mostly lost interest in Star Trek a few years in to the B&B era, this is a nice revival, taken to the next level: Unlike the original Star Trek, the special effects are not campy and my wife does not fall asleep while watching it.

I’m very glad to see the old Star Trek again.

Posted May 19 2013

My favorite dot-com era job

The best dot-com job I had was my last one: I was working for a tiny little consulting company. The company was still growing in the later days of the dot-com party. We finally had enough money coming in to move to a real office (before, we were working in some extra rooms a private school had which we converted in to office space) and hire a number of workers.

We were in a beautiful neighborhood in Mountain View, just across the business park from where Netscape still had their offices. The weather was beautiful sunny California weather; instead of driving, when it was lunch time, I would often just walk around the business park we were in and enjoy the beautiful weather, going to a restaurant close by or this small Mexican market near the office.

In was at this job that I decided to start MaraDNS. The positive atmosphere working at that job helped encourage me to work hard and make my mark on the world.

Posted May 16 2013

A use for floppy drives in 2013

Here’s one way to still use floppy drives in 2013:

http://​gizmodo.​com/​floppy-​drives-​are-​only-​good-​for-​playing-​daft-​punk-​music-​500903524

The James Bond theme played with floppy drives is remarkably accurate:

http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​Wti​AP​8​x​MSPo

On the topic of floppies, C-evo 1.1.1 is a fully playable game that fits on a single 1.44 meg floppy disk (albeit without sound); C-evo 1.2 needs one of those rare 2.88 meg floppies that never caught on (getting C-evo 1.2 that small required building the C#-free version and hacking on my part to remove the requirement for the new larger graphics)

Then again, with C-evo 1.1.1, only the essential files to make a bare-bones playable game are on disk #1, and a lot of useful files for the game are on disk #2 (the sounds, the strong Seti AI, the sounds, the graphical tech chart). One of the big reasons C-evo 1.2 needs a single larger file is because the graphical techchart is now integrated in to the core game.

Posted May 14 2013

Congrats Nate Silver

Nate Silver, after predicting all 50 states in the last presidential election, as well as doing a remarkably good job predicting the Academy Award winners, has been voted most creative person in business of the year:

http://​www.​fastcompany.​com/​3009258/​most-​creative-​people-​2013/​1-​nate-​silver

Posted May 13 2013

Four things that can kill a marriage

According to a scientific study, there are four factors (contempt, criticism, stonewalling, and defensiveness) that kill marriages:

http://​blogs.​scientificamerican.​com/​psysociety/​2013/​05/​10/​marriage-​tips/

Posted May 11 2013

Gay marriage: Now in Telenovelas!

For the first time ever, they showed a gay marriage in a Mexican soap opera (telenovela) last night. The novela is called Amores Verdaderos (true love), and it’s in its final week, where they wrap up the various open stories. In traditional Latin Soap Opera fashion, a lot of marriages happen during the final episodes.

I prefer Latin TV a lot of ways over TV in the US. They do not have any qualms showing a beautiful girl and having guys appreciate her beauty; the novelas show people praying, something one almost never sees on US TV; and, there is not this disconnect between being religious and respecting human rights for gays the way there is in the US.

Posted May 09 2013

On analog vs. digital synthesizers

I prefer the music made in the early 1980s, when synths were expensive and unreliable; it is a lot more compelling than the stuff from the late 1980s, when the technology matured.

Analog does not sound better because it has an inherently better sound. It sounds better because the limitations of analog forced musicians to be more creative in the early 1980s.

In 1983, no one would trade a Linn Drum for a TR-808—yet today, the 808’s sound is much more coveted. The musicians who used an 808 did so because the Linn Drum was out of their budget. Their creativity with limited tools is what made that sound “classic”.

Posted May 07 2013

April-May 2013 archive

I have archived the microblogs posted from April 15 to May 5 2013:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130505.​html

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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MaraDNS and Deadwood update

May 23, 2013

I have updated both MaraDNS and Deadwood. Mainly Deadwood.

SQA tests

As I mentioned in a previous blog entry, I will, once every few months do nothing more than make sure all of the tests run fine. That is what I did this month; both MaraDNS and Deadwood pass all tests.

A new Deadwood release

I have been silently updating the version of Deadwood available at http://maradns.org/deadwood as well as the version bundled with MaraDNS. Deadwood 3.2.03a is simply Deadwood 3.2.03 with a one-line bugfix patch which I have been testing for the last three months; no problems have arisen so I am declaring this patch stable.

Currently the numbering is a little strange:

MaraDNS 2.0.07a is MaraDNS 2.0.07 with the one-line Deadwood patch applied.

MaraDNS 2.0.07b is MaraDNS 2.0.07 with the one-line Deadwood patch, as well as having the Windows Deadwood binary stripped (to keep it under 65,536 bytes—64k—in size)

Deadwood 3.2.03a is Deadwood 3.2.03 with the one-line patch

MaraDNS-20130523 is the latest release: It’s MaraDNS 2.0.07 with the one-line patch in Deadwood, as well as a copy of the actual patch in deadwood-3.2.03a/update. This is the version which passed all SQA tests this morning.

If nothing else, in early 2014 I will release MaraDNS 2.0.08 and Deadwood 3.2.04 with this patch.

MaraDNS-20130523 can be downloaded here:

http://​www.​maradns.​org/​download/​2.​0/​snap/

Deadwood 3.2.03a is here:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/stable/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day in a couple of months unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

Update: When I wrote this blog 2.0.07, not 2.0.06, was the current MaraDNS release.

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Microblogs April-May 2013

May 5, 2013

Here are the Microblogs I posted between April 15, 2013 and May 5, 2013. Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Random card game generator

Having been a long-time fan of random map generators, it tickles me to see this idea taken to the next level. There is now a random card game generator:

http://​www.​newscientist.​com/​article/​dn​23447-​ai-​card-​game-​knows-​how-​to-​bend-​the-​rules.​html

They have written a program which will randomly generate a card came, validating said game to make sure it’s reasonable.

Then again, there are plenty of different card games at http://pagat.com.

Posted May 04 2013

Gary Wright: Rock and Roll

I remember having a conversation with my buddy Victor Waters about Gary Wright:

“Gary Wright is Rock and Roll!” I said

“Ummm...I would call him Soft Rock...” said Victor

“Consider this: Judas Priest has covered his music. Indeed, that ‘satanic’ song that got Judas Priest in that 1990 lawsuit was written by Gary Wright. Having Judas Priest cover your music makes you Rock and Roll, no matter what!”

Victor laughed.

Gary Wright is Rock and Roll. Case closed.

Posted May 01 2013

A good lesson for pirates

Who knows? Maybe some software pirates will learn why it’s not right to pirate software:

http://​www.​greenheartgames.​com/​2013/​04/​29/​what-​happens-​when-​pirates-​play-​a-​game-​development-​simulator-​and-​then-​go-​bankrupt-​because-​of-​piracy/

This reminds me of a conversation I once had with a bunch of software developers. We were discussing how to have a game act if it was a pirated copy. One idea was to make the bad guys so hard to kill, the game would be unplayable. That idea was shot down—it would make people not like the game.

What we agreed would work was to have the game show the pirate a graphic of a hand flipping them off about halfway through the game before freezing. I was laughing about the idea for a month.

This entire conversation predates the “immortal pink scorpion” in Serious Sam 3. Heck, the conversation predates the copy protection 1990s SNES games had.

Posted Apr 30 2013

Belief in God can heal

People with belief in God can and do get better:

http://​psychcentral.​com/​news/​2013/​04/​26/​belief-​in-​god-​improves-​mental-​health-​outcomes/​54121.​html

“Your faith has made you well” — Luke 8:48

Posted Apr 28 2013

More FM

The radio station my wife and I like to listen to while driving is More FM:

http://​tunein.​com/​radio/​More-​FM-​989-​s​24591/

https://​cadenanoticias.​mx/​streams.​php?​xe=​xh​98

Even though this station is transmitted from Tijuana, we can hear it all the way up in northern San Diego county.

It’s a mix of pop and rock in Spanish from the 80s until now.

Posted Apr 27 2013

Crunch gym: Just the basics, $12 per month

The gym I go to is Crunch Gym, which advertises their gym as costing $10 a month. Of course, there’s a $30 sign-up fee, as well as an annual fee of $24 or so, so the real price is about $12/month. They also nickel and dime on other things: You can’t enter the gym without your membership card; they charge for a replacement. You shouldn’t use the equipment without a towel; they charge $3 for a small towel CostCo sells for $1.50 a pop (in packs of 12); etc.

The basic membership includes use of the weight machines, cardio machines (and yes, there is always a treadmill available, even at peak hours), as well as a number of classes offered. The gym includes a locker room with a shower, but, unlike $20/month gyms, does not include a swimming pool, hot tub, or sauna/steam room.

Posted Apr 26 2013

Great graphical “du” like client for Windows

Old-school UNIX and Linux users are familiar with the “du” program which reveals how much disk space a given directory and all of its sub-directories take up. Steffen Gerlach, who wrote my favorite freeware/open source video game C-evo, has also a really great graphical “du”-like client for Windows.

“Scanner” uses an interactive pie chart to show how much space a given file or folder takes up. Mousing the cursor over part of the pie chart shows the name and disk usage of a given file or folder. By using concentric circles, “Scanner” is able to show the usage of multiple subdirectory levels at the same time.

It’s an extremely useful program for finding out what is taking up so much space on one’s hard disks.

Posted Apr 23 2013

The dot-com crash made me cynical

The path to prosperity is to look forward and think positive.

As a former dot-com employee, seeing the dot-com party fall apart in the early 2000s was very disheartening. In a way, I was very lucky...I was still really young when I got my dot-com layoff. I wasn’t yet married or have a mortgage to deal with when I found myself laid off.

After getting my degree then working in a Mexico for a few years riding out the post-dot-com crash as well as the big crash of 2008-2009, I finally was able to return to the US and get a computer job again. I was able to get a good job because MaraDNS game me a strong enough reputation to find work.

But, yes, the post-dot-com era made me very cynical. Something that, alas, sometimes comes out in my writings.

Posted Apr 21 2013

I’m glad we captured Dzhokhar Tsarnaev

I am very glad that we captured Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the two kids responsible for the horrible Boston Marathon bombing. It is very important that we respect all of the constitutional rights this kid has—the right to remain silent, the right to a fair trial, the right to Habeas corpus, an so on.

What separates a civilized society from a barbaric dictatorship is that we treat our citizens as human beings. We are not savages like Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his now-deceased brother. This is what makes our country a great country.

Posted Apr 20 2013

How to dress in Mexico

I just saw an image of a Mexican Barbie:

http://​abcnews.​go.​com/​US/​mexico-​barbie-​stereotypically-​colorful-​critics/​story?​id=​18925079#.​UXBQd​Xdx​PKA

(For people who do not bother to click on the link, it shows the doll of a Hispanic young lady dressed in a long pink dress with a full-sized skirt)

Now, the truth is, the only time I have seen ladies in Mexico dressed like this is at cultural events where they show, on stage Mexican men dressed in traditional mariachi costumes and women dressed in the traditional Mexican dresses. To see someone on the street dressed like that in Mexico would be like someone walking on the street dressed in a tuxedo in the US.

The only real cultural gotcha with dressing in Mexico is don’t wear shorts. As a rule of thumb, people on the street wear what we call “Business casual” in the US: Slack pants, button down shirt (with either short or long sleeves), dark shoes. People, generally young people, will occasionally wear jeans or a t-shirt, but it’s fairly rare in Mexico.

Suit and ties are only worn while people are working or at a very formal occasion; people are more likely to wear ties at work in Mexico than in the US.

In summary, people dress a little more formally in Mexico than in the US, but the difference is not that huge.

Posted Apr 18 2013

1993...the first digital generation?

What a surprise. Wired claims that the first digital generation started in 1993. It’s just a random coincidence that Wired’s first year of publication is also 1993.

Home computers started popping up in the 1970s, and became a mass market item at the very end of the 1970s, and became really cheap in the early 1980s.

Posted Apr 17 2013

In light of yesterday’s terrorist attack in Boston

A quote Romney said last year comes to mind in light of yesterday’s terrorist attack in Boston: “At a time like this, we can't risk partisan bickering and political posturing.” Let us be unified and bring those responsible for this evil act to justice.

Posted Apr 16 2013

Thoughts on the Boston bombing

My first thought after hearing about the terrorist attacks in Boston today is who did it?

Some possible suspects:

North Korea. Maybe in retaliation for us stepping up South Korea’s security.

Domestic terrorism. The 1995 Oklahoma bombing was done by a right-wing extremist. With today’s economic problems and with the “tea party” movement’s defeat in the last major election, this is a very distinct possibility.

Pakistan or Afghanistan terrorists retaliating for the drone strikes against the Taliban in that area.

Here’s a picture of the president being briefed on the terrorist attack:

http://​www.​flickr.​com/​photos/​whitehouse/​8652493831/

Posted Apr 15 2013

April 2013 week 2 archive

I have archived the microblogs posted in the second week of April:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130415.​html

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

Blog index

MaraDNS and the Wikipedia

April 20, 2013

I did not get a chance to update MaraDNS this month. The reason is because I already have devoted a few hours to MaraDNS, fighting an incorrectly proposed request for deletion.

Attempts to remove MaraDNS from the Wikipedia

I always feel hurt and upset whenever some “deletionist” at the Wikipedia tries to delete my MaraDNS article. A now-banned Wiki editor tried to delete the article over three years ago and another editor put it on the Wikipedia deletion page just a couple of weeks ago.

MaraDNS will stay on the Wikipedia

I am pleased that the MaraDNS article was able to survive this “Articles for deletion” nomination with a strong “Keep” consensus because of the significant coverage in third party sources establishing notability. Because of how Wikipedia works, now that the MaraDNS article has clearly been shown to be notable enough to keep on the Wikipedia in this deletion discussion, it is very difficult for another editor to try and delete it in the future. Indeed, Wikipedia has a policy called “Notability is not temporary” which means MaraDNS is now permanently notable enough to stay on the Wiki for the foreseeable future.

While I have finished up actively developing MaraDNS in 2010, and am slowly winding the project down, MaraDNS will always be something important to me. Indeed, MaraDNS may very well become be my legacy, the thing I will show my grandkids when they ask me what I accomplished in my life, and it’s good to know it will have a Wikipedia article.

Down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole

Wikipedia, being a large community, has created their own terms for describing Wikipedia-related things.

In Wikipedia-speak, for an article to remain on the Wikipedia, it needs to be “notable”. Notability has a very specific meaning in the Wikipedia world: It means that the subject in question has “received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject”.

“Significant coverage” also has a specific meaning: It means that the subject in question has more than a vaguely-defined “trivial mention”. For the purposes of this blog posting, I will consider “significant coverage” more than 100 words discussing MaraDNS.

“Reliable” additionally has a specific meaning: It generally means something published by an established journalistic entity and/or publishing company, or a peer-reviewed academic paper.

How MaraDNS is notable

Here are three sources which are both reliable and devote well over 100 words to discussing MaraDNS:

Jan-Piet Mars, in 2008, wrote Alternative DNS Servers: Choice and Deployment, and Optional SQL/LDAP Back-Ends, a book published by UIT Cambridge Ltd. and now available as a free PDF download. In this book, there are over 7,000 words (an entire chapter and mentions elsewhere in the book) that discuss MaraDNS.

Carla Schroder wrote a two-part article about MaraDNS that is published in Enterprise Networking Planet: Buck DNS Monoculture with BIND Alternatives (part 1) and Buck DNS Monoculture with BIND Alternatives (part 2). This two-part article talks about pretty much nothing but MaraDNS; that’s over 2400 words from a reliable third party source.

A peer-reviewed article by Sooel Son and Vitaly Shmatikov, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to DNS cache poisoning (PDF download) devotes well over 300 words discussing MaraDNS’ recursive resolution algorithm. This article was published in the book “Security and Privacy in Communication Networks: 6th International ICST Conference, SecureComm 2010.” (edited by Sushil Jajodia, Jianying Zhou) printed by Springer.

There are a number of other mentions in other sources; click “show” on the green box in the MaraDNS deletion article for them.

Why did they try to delete the MaraDNS article?

Considering that MaraDNS easily meets even the most strict Wikipedia definition of “notable”, how did the article get nominated for deletion?

While I can not enter the mind of another person and determine what exact feelings they had when adding the deletion discussion for MaraDNS, we can make some reasonable speculations.

Wikipedia is a crowd-sourced web site; like open-source software, the majority of contributors are volunteers. Since no one is getting paid, it is hard to motivate people to do the tedious work which an encyclopedia sometimes needs.

The request for deletion appeared about a week after I put up a request for a neutral third-party editor to update the MaraDNS article. That request was ignored for over a week; nine days after my request, MaraDNS was nominated for deletion.

It took an editor only seven minutes to say, in so many words, “MaraDNS is not notable, delete it”. I got the seven-minute figure because seven minutes elapsed between this editor’s last edit before marking MaraDNS for deletion and his final MaraDNS-deletion related edit.

It took me, on the other hand, about three hours to look through all of the links provided by the relevant Google searches, find notable mentions of MaraDNS, and catalog them (who wrote it, when did they write it, who published it) to add them to the deletion discussion. It probably took me another hour or two to write my own version of the MaraDNS article, to help the Wikipedia no longer have an outdated article about MaraDNS.

In summary: Seven minutes work to say “let’s delete MaraDNS”. Five hours work to establish MaraDNS’ notability and update the article.

I don’t blame unpaid editors for sometimes taking the easy way out; with the number of editors per reader decreasing, and with Wikipedia’s increasing popularity to the point it’s an Alexa top 10 site and almost always one of the first hits when one does an Internet search, I am sure a lot of editors have become very jaded with the number of “POV-pushers” (people who edit the Wiki not to make it a better encyclopedia, but to have it promote their company or product) out there.

The history of MaraDNS’ Wikipedia article

MaraDNS’ Wikipedia article is almost as old as the Wikipedia itself; it was created in December of 2001, before even the stable MaraDNS 1.0 release came out (that happened in June of 2002).

The article pretty much languished until 2005, when, after getting permission, I started expanding the article. Before I started editing it, it was a 4-sentence stub; after making a few edits over a couple of months, it had become a much more extensive article.

All of this was done during the “growth” period of the early Wikipedia, when the priority was to grow the Wikipedia and get as many articles as possible written. Sometime between 2005, when I was able to edit the MaraDNS article without controversy, and 2007, things changed.

The Wikipedia had become more popular; as a result, a number of parties otherwise uninterested in the Wikipedia started coming to the Wikipedia to promote their products and services.

This kind of editing violates a guideline called “Conflict of Interest” (COI in Wikipedia-speak). With many Wiki newcomers attempting to use the Wikipedia as a promotion vehicle, the consensus changed from one where people could edit an article they were personally involved in as long as they tried to stay neutral to one where it was strongly discouraged to edit an article one was personally involved with.

By 2007, an administrator asked me to stop editing the MaraDNS article. After that, all of my MaraDNS-related edits, with one exception, have been the kind of “non-controversial” edits that an editor with a “conflict of interest” is permitted to make.

The only “controversial” edit I made has been an edit where, after having the MaraDNS release number on the Wikipedia page be a year out-of-date (it claimed that 2.0.04 was the current version even though 2.0.05 was released a year before my edit), I finally took it upon myself to update the MaraDNS version number to 2.0.07.

(It’s an open question whether I would have gotten consensus to edit the MaraDNS article in 2005 if more editors had been part of the discussion back then. I think I would have; the change in Wikipedia’s culture towards editors with a conflict of interest [COI] happened between 2005 and 2007. To wit, a COI notice on another article was added in October of 2006.)

How the Wikipedia has changed

Back in 2001, when the MaraDNS article was first created, MaraDNS was a computer program which would not pass today’s arbitrary “notability” guidelines. It’s an open question whether MaraDNS ended up getting enough attention from journalists and academic researchers to become a subject that passes Wikipedia’s “notability” tests because it has had a Wikipedia article which the press and academia noticed.

I think it is very unfortunate that it’s a lot harder for a new open source project to get a Wikipedia article than it used to be. Open source developers are people who work very hard but usually do not get financially compensated for their effort. It’s very important that today’s hard-working open source developers get compensated in other ways; letting even new open-source projects have a Wikipedia article would be one way for the Internet to show appreciation for their hard work. I really wish that Wikipedia’s current crop of admins did set the bar for new articles to be so high.

Indeed, while I used to be a regular Wikipedia editor—I contributed a lot more to the Wikipedia than editing the MaraDNS article, back in the day—I have mostly stopped editing the Wikipedia after seeing a number of useful open source projects get deleted from the Wiki. My Wiki user page used to have this on it:

I find the deletionist movement here very disturbing and very much against this hacker ethic. I think there is something fundamentally broken with the way the Wikipedia allows articles to be deleted because the subject they cover is not “notable” enough; to me the deliberate destruction of information goes against the hacker ethic of making information freely available. It’s sad that the Wikipedia allows a single person using TW [Note for blog: TW is a tool used by some editors to help automate the editing of Wikipedia articles] to mark dozens of useful articles to be deleted in just a few minutes, and has a culture that encourages this what I see as destructive behavior.

Then again, I should really just let go of the Wikipedia and let the deletionists go on their rampage here; if they continue unabated, Wikipedia will ultimately become a less useful place for readers, but that’s Wikipedia’s problem, not my problem.

I can not speculate why other editors have quit editing, but undoubtedly many of them also quit because they did not like how deletionists became so powerful.

Back to MaraDNS

Since I devoted so much time dealing with Wikipedia’s MaraDNS article, I did not get a chance to do any actual MaraDNS development this month. Maybe next month, but, then again, I am in the process of transitioning from working on MaraDNS once a month to once every other month. I probably will not devote time to MaraDNS again until June, unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

Blog index

Microblogs April 2013 week 2

April 15, 2013

In my microblogs for the second week of April, I discuss living in Mexico, filing taxes online, keeping my online banking secure, and much more.

Going to Mexico: Learn the culture

Living in Mexico means learning to overcome both a language barrier (by learning Spanish) as well as a cultural barrier. Before going down to Mexico, I picked up this book, which is an excellent in-depth look at Mexican culture and guide for people used to living in the US to Mexico’s cultural quirks:

http://www.peoplesguide.com/

This book made adjusting to Mexican life a lot easier.

Posted Apr 15 2013

The return of the netbook

Now that the ultrabooks have faltered—they were too expensive for end consumers and I am sure a lot of IT departments balked at how hard those computers are to repair—the next attempt is the “ultramobile”. This will consist of Windows Blue—which may as well be called “Windows 8 starter”—coupled with a netbook-sized computer with a touchscreen:

http://​techland.​time.​com/​2013/​04/​08/​windows-​blue-​and-​the-​rise-​of-​ultramobiles/

The truth is that low-end laptops like Acer’s AO756 are today’s netbooks. Which the AO756’s battery does not last as long as a netbook’s battery, and while it is a little bigger (11 instead of 10-inch screen), they are being sold at the same price point as yesterday’s netbooks.

Posted Apr 15 2013

TurboTax’s web site strains under the load

It would appear Turbo Tax’s web site is straining under the load of all of the last-minute filers.

http://​www.​buzzfeed.​com/​buzzfeednews/​turbotax-​falters-​at-​the-​worst-​possible-​moment

I prefer http://hrblock.com for filing taxes more than Turbo Tax; the prices are more reasonable. I also find it somewhat amusing that the only “Turbo” software package still being sold is “Turbo Tax”, whose name was modeled after Borland’s programming packages: “Turbo Pascal”, “Turbo C”, “Turbo Assembler”, etc.

Posted Apr 15 2013

New C-evo release

C-evo is my favorite open-source video game. Steffen Gerlach, the developer, has made a new release this month after a five-year hiatus.

It is a Civilization II-style game with a focus on AI development. Unlike other games, the AI never cheats: It has to work with the same limitations a human does (fog of war, limited knowledge of the map, etc.). C-evo comes with its own built-in AI, and a number of other AIs are available for download; the strongest AI is probably the “Seti” AI (which does very well despite being unable to fight a naval war).

C-Evo has always been a one-trick pony: One set of rules, one game pace, one map script (with all of two “sliders”: Six fixed map sizes and a variable land mass/water level), one interface, one single game adjustment (difficulty level), one victory condition, one multiplayer mode (hotseat), and one tech tree. But C-Evo does all of that very well, better, in my opinion, than any other open-source game.

Posted Apr 14 2013

I’m on a Mexican Radio

I’m sure listening to Wall of Voodoo’s one-hit wonder “Mexican Radio” as a little kid was a factor that encouraged me to learn Spanish and eventually live in Mexico for a few years.

The song can be listened to on YouTube here:

http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​V​04​IBsz-​9​Wo

and purchased at Amazon here:

http://​www.​amazon.​com/​Mexican-​Radio/​dp/​B​001​QSGILA/

Here’s an article which discusses how the song was composed and recorded:

http://​mixonline.​com/​mag/​audio_​wall_​voodoos_​mexican/

Posted Apr 13 2013

John Hurt starring in Doctor Who!

John Hurt is going to star in the 50th anniversary special of Doctor Who:

http://​tennantnews.​blogspot.​co.​uk/​2013/​04/​john-​hurt-​talks-​about-​david-​tennant-​and.​html

I wonder if he is going to be a Time Lord. People who have played Winston Smith in depictions of Orwell’s 1984 (Hurt did so in the 1984 movie, which also features Richard Burton in his very final role) tend to play the Doctor in Doctor Who (Patrick Troughton, Christopher Eccleston, and Peter Cushing from the 1960s movies have all played Winston Smith).

Posted Apr 12 2013

Quizlet Lock Screen

There is a “quizlet lock screen” useful for practicing Spanish:

http://​lifehacker.​com/​5994499/​the-​quizlet-​lock-​screen-​teaches-​you-​foreign-​language-​vocabulary-​with-​your-​facebook-​feed

One issue is that it is using a machine translation for the Spanish words. For example, it wants to ask me the Spanish word for “some” in this phrase:

Bet we have all used one of these at “some” time

The choices it has are “unos” (“some”, but not in this context), “lejos” (“far”), “jugo” (“I play” or “juice”), and “por” (“for” when it’s the motivation for doing something, “per” as in “miles per hour”). The correct Spanish word would be “a” (as in “a veces”), “algunas” (“algunas veces”—“sometimes”) or even “unAs” (“unas veces”—“a few times”), but never “unos” because “veces” is a feminine noun.

While not perfect, it’s a useful tool for refreshing vocabulary.

Posted Apr 12 2013

What happens to Winston Smith

After the end of “1984”, based on both the acting careers of Peter Cushing, who played Winston Smith in 1954, and John Hurt, who played Smith in 1984, Winston Smith becomes big brother. To wit:

Peter Cushing played Grand Moff Tarkin, the leader of the evil Death Star in Star Wars

John Hurt played the evil Big Brother-like dictator in V For Vendetta

So, after the final scene of 1984, Winston Smith becomes promoted by the party and eventually becomes Big Brother himself.

Posted Apr 11 2013

What’s in deodorant?

What’s in deodorant?

http://​www.​refinery​29.​com/​natural-​deodorant?​utm_​source=​feed&​amp;​utm_​medium=​rss

I can not use aluminum-based deodorants because they irritate my skin...I usually use Mennon’s Speed Stick or the ordinary Axe-based brands; they use the much milder Propylene glycol instead.

Posted Apr 10 2013

I shouldn’t even be lurking at Slashdot

Looking over Slashdot’s front page today, I only saw two positive articles. All of the other articles were about very negative things like lawsuits, allegations of privacy breaches, a ban, unemployment, etc.

Compare this to Digg, where at most, half of the articles were negative. Also, ever since Digg removed the discussions, we don’t have the problems with negative people driving the discussion, something that inevitably happens with unmoderated discussions.

Even better is Life Hacker, where almost all of the articles are positive.

I shouldn’t even be lurking at Slashdot, much less trying to have a reasonable conversation with the kind of jaded and cynical people who post there.

See also:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20120903.​html

Speaking of positive, I’m really happy to see Blake’s Seven coming back again (this was the second positive article I linked to above). That was one of my favorite series when I was a kid. Then again, when I recently watched some of the reruns, it annoyed me just how cynical the characters were. Then again, England did have a pretty bad economic crisis when the original series aired.

Posted Apr 09 2013

The Opus codec

My buddy Michael Dean just posted about the new low-bitrate Opus audio codec (A codec is a way of compressing audio or video so that files are smaller). It’s already supported by Foobar2000 and Firefox (even the older ESR Firefox 17 release), and, since the codec is free and open-source, hopefully more browsers and audio players will support this new low-bitrate speech and music codec:

http://www.opus-codec.org/

Posted Apr 09 2013

My site never looked like that!

Here is a tribute to the excesses of 1990s web site and first-2000s-decade MySpace profile design:

http://​www.​theworldsworstwebsiteever.​com/

My site never looked like that... its old school design was actually pretty mild (the way things are scrunched up on the left side is par for the course for a design of that era; this was before widescreen monitors).

These days, with people by and large using Wordpress themes instead of making their own HTML, I now only very rarely see a “1990s” web page design. People who still post to what is left of Usenet are the ones to have a “1990s design” web page, if they have a web page at all.

There’s something to be said for DJB’s “no design at all” web non-design.

Posted Apr 09 2013

My sleep cycle is actually pretty normal

Sometimes, I go to sleep early in the evening for a couple of hours, wake up again, and then finally going to sleep in the middle of the night. This is actually perfectly normal and healthy:

http://​www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​news/​magazine-​16964783

[Roger Ekirch]'s book At Day's Close: Night in Times Past [...] unearths more than 500 references to a segmented sleeping pattern

Posted Apr 09 2013

I lived in Mexico for five years

I was just thinking that a lot of my blogs have been about very dry and boring geeky subjects like Linux and implementing a “DNS server” (a DNS server is a mysterious thingy the Internet needs to function—I am one of the relatively few people to have written one). Well, I’m moving away from my DNS server project so it’s probably time to talk about something actually interesting.

I lived in Mexico for five years. It started after getting laid off from yet another dot-com who went under; I decided to take an extended vacation by living in Mexico for four months to learn Spanish. After doing that, I got my college degree in the US and then moved to Mexico for five years.

I know that Mexico has recently had a lot of issues with violence, but the fact of the matter is this: Mexico is a beautiful country with beautiful people. I will discuss my life in Mexico more in future microblog entries.

Posted Apr 08 2013

I’ve cleaned most SSL certs from my online banking browser

Stories of the occasional SSL Root Certificate being compromised sometimes make the press (anyone remember DigiNotar?).

In plain English: When I go to a secure site, such as my bank, my browser makes sure I am, in fact, going to my bank. It does this by validating the “certificate” my bank has for generating encrypted messages. How does my browser know the certificate really is coming from my bank and not from a hacker? Because the bank’s certificate is signed by another company called a “certification authority” (CA) whose job it is to make sure that my bank’s certificate really and truly comes from my bank.

The issue is this: Modern browsers trust dozens of different CAs to sign certificates vetting for companies’ secure web pages. DigiNotar was an obscure CA which the Dutch government used; browsers allowed DigiNotar to sign certificates for any company in the world.

A hacker from Iran broke in the DigiNotar network and make their machines fraudulently sign a number of fake certificates for companies like Yahoo and Google; Iran was then able to hijack traffic sent to Google and Yahoo, yet have the cryptographic certificate appear legitimate.

In the browser I use only for online banking, I just removed most SSL certificates from its list of trusted CAs; if the next DigiNotar compromise ever happens, I want to make sure my online banking browser warns me of an untrusted certificate; my banking browser no longer blindly trusts Random Banana Republic’s SSL root CA.

I really wish Firefox made this process easier (you have to remove dozens of root CAs by hand to pull it off).

Posted Apr 08 2013

Does George Shaheen still get $375,000/year from Webvan?

Once upon a time, during the height of the dot-com boom, an online grocery store called WebVan hired one George Shaheen to be their CEO. As part of the deal to hire him, WebVan agreed to pay him $375,000 a year for the rest of his life.

I wonder if George Shaheen still gets that $375,000/year from Webvan. The Wikipedia article implies that he does, but I think that’s inaccurate. [Update: That inaccuracy bugged me enough that I removed the inaccurate statement] According to one source, that $375,000/year for life golden parachute closed as soon as WebVan filed for bankruptcy. In http://​community.​seattletimes.​nwsource.​com/​archive/?​date=​20010709&​amp;​slug=​webvan:

With the bankruptcy, Shaheen "will have to get in line with the rest of our creditors," [Bud] Grebey said

WebVan.com still existed in some form when Amazon bought it a few years ago, and it’s an open question whether Amazon’s deal to buy the domain name includes them compensating Shaheen again.

Personally, I doubt it; Shaheen’s contract states that the “company” would pay him that amount, and that company stopped existing in 2001 when WebVan went bankrupt; Amazon probably just bought the domain name from whoever got that WebVan asset during the bankruptcy fire-sale.

Posted Apr 08 2013

Net Café

Net Café is a late 1990s-early 2000s TV series which looked at all of the dot-coms that existed at the time as well as giving advice on finding interesting things on the then-young commercial Internet; it was a spin-off of Computer Chronicles. Like Computer Chronicles, episodes are available for download at the web archive:

http://archive.org/details/netcafe

The episodes about startups can be sad to watch because most of the businesses they interviewed back then have gone under, many without even a Wikipedia article commemorating their brief existence. Some even have become cyber-sqatter owned domains. However, this episode is notable because it interviews the famous quarterback Steve Young as well as Google co-founder Sergei Brin:

http://​archive.​org/​details/​Newwebsi​01

Unfortunately, the audio suffers a technical problem where the mono track was mistakenly encoded as a stereo track with audio only coming out of the right speaker.

Posted Apr 08 2013

Kirk battles the Gorn again!

Kirk battles the Gorn again!

http://​www.​hollywoodreporter.​com/​heat-​vision/​star-​trek-​william-​shatner-​fights-​431693

ObMegaTrekkie: The battle music in this ad is inaccurate, since parts of it use the theme from the second season “The Doomsday Machine”, but “Arena” was a first season episode. It may be a case that it was easier getting rights from Sol Kaplan’s estate instead of Alexander Courage’s estate.

Posted Apr 08 2013

Interviews with classic 80s game developers

Here are some interviews with some classic early 1980s computer and console game developers, back when a video game was a one-man operation:

http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/

I actually personally knew Steve Hales, one of the people interviewed here, when I was a kid.

Posted Apr 08 2013

CMA Communications appears to be injecting ads in to web pages

It appears that CMA Communications, a rural Internet provider in the deep South (Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc.) has a router that alters HTML and injects ads in to web pages:

http://​arstechnica.​com/​tech-​policy/​2013/​04/​how-​a-​banner-​ad-​for-​hs-​ok/

My solution: I run my own DNS server, and have updated its blacklist to block the ad provider used here (r66t.com):

http://​maradns.​org/​deadwood/​doc/​my.​current.​blacklist

Update: It appears that, after the above article got published, CMA Communications stopped injecting ads in to the web pages their paying customers download.

Posted Apr 08 2013

The failure of the Super Mairo Brothers movie

A look at the 1993 flop “Super Mario Brothers” and speculation about why it failed:

http://​www.​grantland.​com/​story/_/​id/​9123782/​the-​strange-​case-​super-​mario-​bros-​movie

Personally, I think its failure was caused by “too many cooks spoil the broth”; the script was written by too many different writers, becoming guacamole.

Posted Apr 07 2013

The Internet in 1995

A look at the Internet in 1995, from a TV episode of a show called “Computer Chronicles” (May 2, 1995):

http://​archive.​org/​details/​CC​1232_​internet

The computers used these big boxy monitors; the Internet at the time was a combination of Usenet Newsgroups, FTP sites, and mostly-text webpages. People used only Mosaic to surf the World Wide Web in this episode.

This episode has also been uploaded, in lower resolution, to YouTube:

http://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​Xluovr​UA​6​Bk

La Peña Cultural Center, whose webpage can be seen in this episode (No accents back then—it’s spelled La Pena in the pictures of their 1995 webpage), is still around:

http://lapena.org/

Another web site seen in this episode, http://apc.org/, is also still around.

This episode recently got some press:

http://​www.​sfgate.​com/​technology/​businessinsider/​article/​FLASHBACK-​This-​Was-​The-​Internet-​In-​1995-​4415170.​php

http://​www.​businessinsider.​com/​flashback-​this-​was-​the-​internet-​in-​1995-​2013-​4

The Business Insider link has a really good summary of the episode with screencaps for people who don’t want to bother watching the 30-minute episode. The only issue is that they got their screencaps from the low-resolution YouTube video instead of the broadcast-quality MPEG2 video available at archive.org.

Posted Apr 07 2013

April 2013 week 1 archive

I have archived the microblogs posted in the first week of April:

http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20130407.​html

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

Blog index

Microblogs April 2013 week 1

April 7 2013

This is an archive of my microblog postings for the first week of April, 2013.

See also: March Microblogs

DNS security comparison update

I have updated the DNS security comparison document in light of the patch finally made for PowerDNS’ CVE-2012-1193 security report, as well as clarifying in two parts of the document that only DJB’s recursive component has CVE security vulnerability issues:

http://​www.​maradns.​org/​DNS.​security.​comparison.​txt

Posted Apr 07 2013

Another reason why I really like Source Sans Pro

Another reason I really like Source Sans Pro is that it comes in six different weights. Instead of being just “regular” and “bold” like most conventional fonts, Source Sans Pro comes in “extra-light”, “light”, “normal”, “semi-bold”, “bold”, and “black”.

With my inexpensive HP Desktop 1000 J110, fonts tend to be printed a little darker than they really are. By using one level lighter in Source Sans (“light” instead of “normal”), the fonts, when printed, look somewhat normal again.

It’s a free (OFL) download:

http://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​sourcesans.​adobe/

Source Sans has a monospaced sister, Source Code Pro:

http://​sourceforge.​net/​projects/​sourcecodepro.​adobe/

Posted Apr 05 2013

Now I can auto-update when I last edited the wiki

This link purges the cache for my user page and allows it to have an updated “time since my last Wiki edit” value:

http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​w/​index.​php?​title=​User:​Samboy&​amp;​action=​purge

Posted Apr 05 2013

“Alternate DNS Servers” is now a free PDF

A book which devotes an entire chapter to MaraDNS, “Alternative DNS Servers”, is available as a free PDF:

http://​jpmens.​net/​2010/​10/​29/​alternative-​dns-​servers-​the-​book-​as-​pdf/

I would like to thank Jan-Piet Mens for this book and making it free (and mentioning my big open-source project I did in the first 2000s decade in it), and thank Mark Viking for the link (and for the keep vote for MaraDNS)

Posted Apr 05 2013

Are Xbox players really better in bed?

This article says Xbox players are better in bed than other console gamers, as well as PC gamers:

http://​metro.​co.​uk/​2013/​04/​04/​xbox-​players-​better-​in-​bed-​than-​playstation-​and-​wii-​rivals-​study-​finds-​3582709/

The article does not link to the original survey, so it’s hard to determine what level of statistical confidence these results really have. But, then again, I’m a PC gamer, who are considered the worst in bed according to the article.

Posted Apr 05 2013

The “Linux” name is toxic to end-users

You know, with the kind of hostility Linux advocates can have, it’s no surprise the “Linux” name is toxic to end-users:

http://​www.​linuxadvocates.​com/​2013/​04/​the-​linux-​inside-​stigma.​html

Of course, Linux can be a friendly end-user environment: Observe Android and the Chromebooks, as well as countless consumer gateway routers which use a Linux kernel.

Posted Apr 05 2013

Smaller Paddles

There is an episode of That 70’s show where Michael Kelso (Ashton Kutcher) and Red Forman (Kurtwood Smith) attempt to modify a pong machine so it has smaller on-screen paddles. Somebody recently modified a recreation of the original arcade version (which uses discrete digital logic) of Pong thusly:

http://​hackaday.​com/​2013/​01/​28/​tv-​show-​inspires-​this-​smaller-​pong-​paddles-​hardware-​hack/

Yes, Red and Kelso could have made this modification to even a chip-based pong machine; with home pong consoles using the GI AY-3-8500 chip, it was possible to specify the size of the paddles (“bat”s in the documentation) by sending a signal to pin 13 of the original AY-3-8500. They would have needed the documentation for the AY-3-3500 to pull it off, so maybe the episode omitted the scene where Red called up General Instrument to figure out how the chip worked...or maybe their neighbor Bob Pinciotti (Donna’s father) had a copy of the relevant schematics at his appliance store (not entirely implausible, since they may have sold pong machines)

Another possibility is that Red soldiered his own pong game: http://​www.​pong-​story.​com/​eaus​0576.​htm

Posted Apr 05 2013

Markdown text

After inventing my own form of “it looks like an old-school Usenet posting but becomes HTML”, I discover it has already been done with a language called Markdown:

http://​daringfireball.​net/​projects/​markdown/​syntax

Of course, I prefer my own take on “let’s make plain text HTML”, and it only took me a couple of days to implement.

Posted Apr 05 2013

PR companies influencing Wikipedia articles

This article about using PR to influence Wikipedia articles talks about the correct ethical way involved parties are supposed to influence articles:

http://​motherboard.​vice.​com/​blog/​meet-​the-​pr-​guru-​who-​wants-​to-​help-​corporations-​get-​heard-​on-​wikipedia

I’m very mixed about this. The reason for WP:COI is to keep articles more neutral, but, then again, it’s very frustrating for me to be unable to edit the Wiki article about my main free software contribution to the world: http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Mara​DNS (The article is pretty badly outdated right now; editors have ignored my plea on the talk page to update the article).

As it turns out, I did update the MaraDNS Wikipedia article this year to fix an objective factual error in the infobox (after being out of date for over a year, I finally updated MaraDNS’ version number); no editors have contested the edit.

I think there are PR firms out there who hide their affiliations. The fact that Mitt Romney’s incident bullying a kid and cutting his hair never made the Wikipedia article except as a footnote at http://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​Mitt_​Romney#​cite_​note-​26 to me stinks of a very biased paid hack job.

As a final note, Wikipedia’s strict policies on conflict of interest editing are fairly recent; as recently as six or seven years ago, people were allowed to edit about themselves or their own projects as long as their edits were objective and neutral.

Posted Apr 04 2013

I found an IE6 workaround for the word-break problem

I found a way to put zero-length word breaks in the middle of long links and retain full cross-browser compatibility, including Internet Explorer 6 (IE6):

<![if gt IE 6]>&#8203;<![endif]><wbr>

In more detail: Newer versions of Internet Explorer do not honor the <wbr> tag—but they, post-IE6, do honor &#8203;. Chrome doesn’t honor &#8203; in the middle of a conditional statement like this, but it does honor the invisible-to-IE <wbr> tag. Even IE6 sees the above code as an invisible line-break, probably because it treats unknown HTML tags that way.

It’s ugly but works. Also: It looks like about 3% of my visitors still are using IE6 (then again, a lot of those may be bots and what not; one visitor with IE6 in their user-agent string was obviously a bot probing for security holes in the website to exploit).

Posted Apr 04 2013

Mark Zuckerberg’s first webpage

As confirmed by the web archive, this is Mark Zuckerberg’s first web page: http://​web.​archive.​org/​web/​20021104225654/​http://​www.​angelfire.​com/​ny/​mez​51/ (Observe “Mark Zuckerberg” in the headers [after the Web Archive prologue] when viewing the source code for this page)

Posted Apr 03 2013

TinyVZ update

I have updated the TinyVZ template for OpenVZ to act as a DNS toaster, as well as fixing a couple of long standing bugs in TinyVZ: http://samiam.org/TinyVZ/

Posted Apr 03 2013

I should not be so cynical

Two years ago, I posted a blog criticizing Bitcoin: http://​samiam.​org/​blog/​20110323.​html If I had, instead of being so cynical, spent $1,000 on bitcoins instead, I would be $140,000 richer today.

Note to self: Don’t be so cynical in life.

Posted Apr 03 2013

Humanity is sinful

When I look at how selfish and dishonest people can be, it can make me upset. Christianity teaches me that our inherit nature is sinful: Selfish, dishonest, resentful, fearful, self-pitying.

It is only through God that I can move beyond these selfish instincts and be a whole person.

Posted Apr 03 2013

Wikispaces is ending IE7 support

Wikispace is ending Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) support: http://​blog.​wikispaces.​com/​2013/​03/​ending-​support-​for-​internet-​explorer-​7.​html As that article points out, Google and Facebook have already ended IE7 support two years ago.

My rule of thumb is “ten years after a given browser is released”; I plan on supporting IE7 until at least October 18, 2016. But, then again, I only have to worry about HTML and CSS; this site is Javascript-free.

Posted Apr 03 2013

Fontsquirrel now restricts conversion of Adobe’s fonts

For legal and ethical reasons, Fontsquirrel’s webfont generator no longer allows Adobe webfonts to be uploaded unless they happen to be called “Source Sans Pro” or “Source Code Pro”.

Because of the OFL license “Source Sans/Code” is under, and because I have modified the fonts, I can not call these fonts “Source Sans Pro” any more. Because of this, and because I can not legally or ethically remove the “Adobe” name from the fonts, I used the tools at http://ttf2woff.com/ and http://ttf2eot.sebastiankippe.com/ to convert the fonts.

Unfortunately, the ttf2woff.com tool screws up the kerning in the web font in Firefox, which means I will be unable to update the fonts here unless I were to remove Adobe’s name from the font.

I think it’s best to keep the web fonts here as-is. I have already made a version of the fonts without pre-ClearType hinting that looks better in modern systems which I may upgrade to once XP passes its end-of-life next year.

Posted Apr 02 2013

The college hookup culture redux

A number of points of views about this “hook-up” culture that is supposedly happening at college: http://​theweek.​com/​article/​index/​242137/​6-​ways-​of-​looking-​at-​college-​hookup-​culture

Posted Apr 02 2013

End-of-2013 MaraDNS goal

My goal is to, by the end of 2013, only update MaraDNS once every two months instead of once a month.

Posted Apr 02 2013

Web browser compatibility chart

In light of the lastest development (slightly) breaking things in Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), here is my updated web browser compatibility chart.

Fully supported:

Firefox 17

Opera 12

Safari 5

Internet Explorer 10 (IE9 also supported using IE10’s “IE9” render mode)

The current Chrome release (Right now Chrome 26)

Partially supported. With these browsers, while the look of the web page may be different, the web page will still render and be perfectly readable:

Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (Again, tested using IE10 and its “IE7” and “IE8” render modes)

Dillo Win32 3.0p9 (available at http://samiam.org/software/dillo/). I support this because it is the best browser for pre-XP versions of Windows.

Whatever version of Lynx comes with RHEL/CentOS 6 (right now 2.8.6rel.5, from 2007) I support this because it works well with screen readers for visually disabled people.

Obsolete. While the web site has workarounds for these browsers, I will not update the web page design to work around bugs these browsers have unless the workaround is trivial to implement:

Internet Explorer 6

Netscape Navigator 4 (Yes, I still occassionally test my page on this antique, even though the modern web is not at all usable with it; it has an issue with Unicode zero-width spaces)

(Right now, the web design works in IE6 but has ugly squares in the links in Netscape 4)

Posted Apr 02 2013

Dillo

I have created a mirror of the final Dillo-win32 release which is available here: http://samiam.org/software/dillo For any version of Windows earlier than XP, this is actually the best browser out there.

Web sites no longer cater to IE6 (Internet Explorer 6); Dillo renders non-IE6-compatible websites better. The only reason why the web looked good in IE6 for so long is because web designers spent millions of man-hours adding IE6 workarounds to their sites throughout the first 2000s decade.

Intalling newer browsers is a hit-and-miss affair in pre-XP Windows. Even if the browsers install, the underlying OS can have issues which cause instability and security problems.

For example, there is a bug in Firefox 10.0.12 where, in Windows 2000, it will crash and reboot Windows when loading some webfonts. A bug like this can undoubtedly be exploited to install “hit and run” malware; with the underlying OS so outdated, the only safe browser is a really simple one.

Posted Apr 02 2013

Love means never having to say you’re sorry

People Who Never Apologize Are Probably Happier Than You http://​www.​npr.​org/​2013/​04/​01/​175714511/​why-​not-​apologizing-​makes-​you-​feel-​better

“When you refuse to apologize, it actually makes you feel more empowered,” he said. “That power and control seems to translate into greater feelings of self-worth.”

Posted Apr 02 2013

Moving away from IE6

With worldwide Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) usage under 10%, and with usage at a fraction of a percent in the US, Mexico, and a lot of other western countries, I am finally phasing out IE6 compatibility.

I’m not going out of my way to break things in IE6, but I am not going to spend hours coming up with IE6 workarounds either.

To wit, I just discovered an issue with long URLs in microblog entries screwing up the layout in Chrome and all recent Internet Explorer releases. The only way to fix this is to add the & #8203; (zero-width space) character to long URLs, which will cause them to optionally break at that point. While this works with IE7 and above, and doesn’t cause any issues in Lynx, Opera, or Dillo, it does cause long URLs to have ugly squares in them in IE6.

I couldn’t find a simple workaround (putting the & #8203; thingys in <span> causes them to not break lines in Chrome), so, guess what: Welcome to 2013, IE6 users. I have made the layout of my site gracefully degenerate for IE6 users, but, unfortunately, I have two choices: Have the site look weird in IE6 or look weird in modern browsers. IE6 support is going away; if you have an old computer that can’t run IE7 or other modern browsers, the site is perfectly readable in Dillo and Lynx. It’s also still perfectly readable in IE6, except for those squares.

Posted Apr 02 2013

Conspiracy theories

In America, who believes in what conspiracy theory: http://​www.​publicpolicypolling.​com/​pdf/​2011/​PPP_​Release_​National_​Conspiracy​Theories_​040213.​pdf

In my experience the “9/11 was faked” conspiracy theory is more popular in Latin America than stateside, and the “USA faked the moon landing” conspiracy theory is more popular in Russia than here.

People will believe what fits their worldview.

Posted Apr 02 2013

Life without Google

Tips on how to use the Internet without Google: http://​www.​itworld.​com/​software/​350485/​my-​divorce-​google-​one-​year-​later (Because of Adsense, people who want to completely avoid Google will need to block their adsense servers)

Posted Apr 02 2013

Announcing a MaraDNS discussion board

Hello, everyone,

I am in the process of shutting down the mailing list and replacing it with a PhpBB discussion board. This new discussion board will have three sub-forums:

1) The contributer's forum

The only members of the mailing list will be members who have made financial contributions to MaraDNS or who have done other work such as reporting security bugs (which get assigned CVE numbers), making patches for MaraDNS available, or contributing to the MaraDNS-ng project (which will soon have a Git tree). Indeed, this forum will have a sub-forum which will only contain MaraDNS patches.

2) The guest's forum

This forum will be open to anyone and everyone. Clueful posts in this forum (read: Patches, useful "this host does not resolve" bug reports, etc.) will be moved to the contributer's forum, with the clueful poster marked as a "clueful poster".

Other posts, such as requests for MaraDNS 0.5 support, will remain on this forum.

3) The leecher's forum

This forum will be for the kinds of wannabe leachers posts which pass off as "hacking" these days. Postings talking about how piracy should be legal, conspiracy theories about some shadowy "copyright cartel", postings bragging about using adblock, even postings discussing using MaraDNS to block ads will be placed here.

For example, this MaraDNS 2.0 recursive configuration snippet would be placed in the leecher's forum:

http://​maradns.​org/​deadwood/​doc/​my.​current.​blacklist

The reason being because it has the following lines in it:

# Those "mouse over text" ads (the ones where keywords are double-
# underlined) are really annoying, since I like to move the mouse cursor
# around while reading something; having part of what I read replaced by an
# annoying mouseover ad annoys me to the point I don't want to read the
# article any more.
# (I also use a combination of click-to-flash and disabled animated GIFs
# to block annoying animated ads. I don't block and sometimes even click
# static ads; I understand that web sites need money to stay online.)
root_servers["kontera.com."]="192.168.255.255" # Annoying mouseover ads
root_servers["infolinks.com."]="192.168.255.255" # Annoying mouseover ads
root_servers["intellitxt.com."]="192.168.255.255" # Annoying mouseover ads

Since I only work on MaraDNS once a month, it will take me a while to implement this. Hopefully, this will be ready by next year this time, on April 1, 2014.

- Sam

Posted Apr 01 2013

Current MaraDNS plans

I’m going to still fix bugs and update MaraDNS so she will continue to work on the internet. I will also continue to update her to work with newer versions of CentOS/RHEL Linux. For example, I will probably eventually finish up MaraDNS' IPv6 support and will update her for systemd.

What is changing is that I am no longer going to discuss MaraDNS anywhere except on my personal blog and the mailing list.

People who whine about MaraDNS not having DNSSEC are the same people who whined (and probably still whine) about djbdns not having Notify/AXFR a decade ago. Again, TANSTAAFL: I can make, in my spare time, a basic DNS server, but complicated features like DNSSEC require financial backing to become real.

For the people whining that MaraDNS should not get financial support until she has features like DNSSEC:

DNS monoculture—remember, when I started MaraDNS, there was only one open-source DNS server—is a bad thing

No, I’m still not developing DNSSEC for free. Nice try.

Posted Apr 01 2013

Should we have more state-owned banks?

An article about North Dakota’s state owned bank: http://truth- out.org/news/item/15435-why-is-socialism-doing-so-darn-well-in-deep-red-north- dakota Should we have more state owned banks?

Posted Mar 31 2013

Happy Easter everyone!

Have a good Easter everyone!

Posted Mar 31 2013

The ultimate problem with Internet communities

The ultimate problem with the Internet is that it is much easier to express and incite negative feelings (in particular, fear and anger) on the Internet than it is to create and share positive feelings and experiences.

Posted Mar 31 2013

The Bible

I am enjoying “The Bible” miniseries that the History channel is showing right now. One thing that our society is losing is the basis of The Bible as a common story that everyone in our society knows, a story that, whether Christian, of another faith, or atheist, everyone knows and can share.

I hope this miniseries helps reduce the amount of Biblical illiteracy today’s society has.

Posted Mar 30 2013

March microblogs archived

I have archived all of the microblogs for March 2013

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

Blog index

March 2013 Microblogs

March 30, 2013

Here are all of the microblog postings I made in March 2013. I discuss Linux and how TANSTAAFL (there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch), MaraDNS, gay rights, sex and being in the friendzone, etc.

WPA in Linux without Gnome

I know all of the hardware on my primary laptop, except for the wired ethernet, works in CentOS 6 Linux. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the time to figure out how to use wireless networks without using Gnome’s GUI; this blog answered my question: http://www.janoszen.com/2013/03/26/using-wpa-from-the-linux-command-line/

Posted Mar 29 2013

Thank you, anonymous poster

Since I have no plans to post to Slashdot again until 2014, I will post a thank you to the anonymous hero who posted this at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3592647&cid=43313739

Thank you for MaraDNS. It's a great piece of software. This incident again demonstrates, that DNS security is pivotal, and that is why I chose MaraDNS to manage my own domain name. It has all that I need, with everything explained in relatively simple terms and the security implications are always well-documented. Thank you!

I wish more people at Slashdot were as kind as this anonymous poster.

Posted Mar 29 2013

Letting go of MaraDNS

One of the challenges I am dealing with right now is letting go of MaraDNS. I’m not talking on a development level — I have long since stopped actively developing Mara and now only maintain her — but on an emotional level.

The truth of the matter is this: Back in 2002, MaraDNS was good because it was the first complete open-source authoritative and recursive DNS server besides BIND. Things have changed a lot since then and I no longer consider MaraDNS “Secure”, and I sometimes wonder what lies in the future for MaraDNS.

MaraDNS was an important part of the development of DNS options in the first 2000s decade, but that time is past and I need to find a different identity for myself in geek-space besides “the MaraDNS guy”.

In more detail:

BIND ultimately won 2001’s BIND-vs-djbdns endless flamewar because of DNSSEC; DJB tried to stop DNSSEC steamrolling djbdns with DNSCURVE. For better or for worse, DNSSEC won, and now DNS is no longer can practically be implemented by a one-man show any more. While I disagree with DJB on a lot of things, I understand why he rejected DNSSEC and proposed DNSCURVE: He wanted to keep DNS simple, to keep DNS something that a single talented developer can implement in their spare time.

I plain simply can not implement DNSSEC for MaraDNS unless someone were to put some serious money on the table. Neckbeards are good at operating computers, but their social skills and empathy for others is at best so-so, which makes them not very good at making that kind of money. (A “neckbeard” does not have to be literal; Sheldon Cooper, for example, is a canonical neckbeard)

As for the monoculture problem DNS had in 2001 (open-source DNS was a monoculture because djbdns wasn’t open-source back then), nlnet labs was, a few years after MaraDNS 1.0, able to get a government grant and use the money to develop a DNS server suite (NSD/Unbound) that not only fully supports BIND’s zone file format, but also fully supports DNSSEC. The sense I get is that many who used to use MaraDNS (people who wanted something open-source but wasn’t BIND) are now either using a newer BIND or a combination of NSD and Unbound.

I will continue to maintain MaraDNS but I will no longer define myself by MaraDNS.

Posted Mar 29 2013

The gay marriage debate in 50 years

The gay marriage debate in 50 years: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/gay_marriage

An older friend in the south who remembers the battle for civil rights in the 1960s tells me that it got really ugly.

Posted Mar 29 2013

Living in mom’s basement

In other cultures, multiple generations living under the same roof is normal; I feel the idea that a kid has to move out of the house at 18 to be a real man is one that is bad for families. It's actually in many ways good when a 45-year-old man still lives in his mother's basement, since he will become the one taking care of his aging mother instead of sending her to a nursing home.

Posted Mar 29 2013

Linux Game Tome announcement

Here is the Linux Game Tome announcement of the site shutting down:

Hi folks,

The Linux Game Tome will shut down on April 13. Those of us who have maintained happypenguin.org over the years now lack both the time and the ambition to do what is necessary to keep the site afloat. If you've been paying attention, you've noticed the spam clogging the forums, the lack of updates and the increasing brokenness of the site. The code driving this site, written by a novice web developer in 1999, is sorely out of date. It's time to put it out of its misery.

If the community misses this resource, I urge it to build The Linux Game Tome v3.0. If such an effort ever came to fruition and publicly pledged to remain free and not for profit, I would be delighted to transfer ownership of the happypenguin.org domain. Sometime soon, I'll make available a dump of the Game Tome games database (minus user information) that anyone may use for any purpose they'd like, including building a successor site. Before you ask: no, you may not have a copy of the site code. It is not fit for human consumption. Even as a reference, it can only corrupt.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the site over the years, either as moderators, contributors or benefactors.

bobz

Posted Mar 28 2013

DNS and DDOS

I will probably make this entry a full blown blog, but in the meantime, in light of the huge (300Gb/S) distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack against Spamhaus that used DNS, here are my thoughts:

MaraDNS 1 and Deadwood do not support a technology called “EDNS” that allows for large DNS packets. By only supporting 512-byte packets, both DNS servers do not allow for the 100x amplification used in this DDOS that other DNS servers have.

My DNS software does not come with unrestricted recursive access enabled by default, and the documentation strongly discourages open recursion.

I will have to double check, but, as I recall, the documentation and example configuration files do not include an example with unrestricted recursive access.

One feature that would be nice would be to be able to restrict how much data my DNS server sends to a given IP (again, as noted above, MaraDNS/Deadwood already has a form of this because they do not support EDNS). Unfortunately, since I am not developing new features for MaraDNS like this without being compensated for my time, I would need a corporate or government grant to implement this.

Posted Mar 28 2013

Friendzone Powned

In the old “That 70’s Show” episode “A New Hope”, the notion of a guy in a girl’s friendzone being able to convert the friendship in to a relationship is shattered to pieces. The episode can be seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSDZgnNoLR8

For any guy in a relationship like this: Stop fooling yourself! While it is possible to have a productive friendship with a girl, a “friendship” when someone has more-than-friends feelings is just going to hurt until expectations are reset and the misplaced romantic feelings go away.

Posted Mar 27 2013

Life Cycle of a Freeware Game

Steffen, author of the open-source C-evo game, has an interesting summary on the life cycle of a freeware game: http://c-evo.org/forum/recall.php?p=4615

I think this is generally true of all software, open-source or not. A new program hits the market, people have a lot of interest in it, it no longer is new and shiny, stops making money (if commercial), and eventually people lose interest in it altogether. It’s more true of games than applications, but the same cycle applies with applications (I see a lot more of Google Docs being used than Microsoft Office these days).

Posted Mar 27 2013

Google Reader

The lesson to learn from Google Reader is this: When using a free web service, said service can go away any time; especially if they can not figure out how to make money from its free users.

A web service is very different from a piece of software. It requires someone to actively keep the site up:

Upgrading the system the site is on with respect to security and other updates.

Paying hosting fees to keep the site up. Said hosting fees go up when the web site gets more users.

Keeping the site current so that it continues to work with newer browsers and newer environments that access the web.

This is the baseline maintenance needed for a web site; compare this to a piece of software, where baseline maintenance is fixing security bugs. Indeed, I still use a program called FVWM1 today, a piece of software which has not been updated for nearly two decades. I would not be able to use a web service the author lost interest in a year ago (much less two decades ago); their web site would have been shut down already.

Posted Mar 27 2013

Mosaic’s default home page is still around

Mosaic was the first mainstream browser; it made the Internet graphical instead of text-based. http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/NCSAMosaicHome.html (Mosaic’s default home page) is still around and redirects to a page that says “get another browser”

Speaking of getting other browsers on older systems, newer versions of Firefox do not install in Windows 2000, but Firefox 10.0.12 ESR does: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/10.0.12esr/

Posted Mar 26 2013

Linux Game Tome shutting down

The Linux Game Tome has been, for years, a very useful resource for reviewing and finding games for Linux. They have announced yesterday that they are shutting down the site in April; the site is currently non-responsive. Here is Slashdot’s coverage: http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/03/26/065223/the-end-is-nigh-for-the-linux-game-tome

The reason why many Linux and free software sites keep going down is because, without money changing hands, there is relatively little motivation for people to keep sites up, even if the sites are popular. TANSTAAFL (There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch). This sarcastic /. post summarizes what is wrong with a lot of thinking in the open source community: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3582897&cid=43280533

The best monetization strategy I have seen for Linux websites is the one LWN uses: http://lwn.net/subscribe/Info

Posted Mar 26 2013

That red and pink equals sign

That pink equals sign with a red background which a number of people are making their Facebook profile picture today is a symbol representing human rights for gay people. http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/03/26/what-is-the-red-equal-sign-all-over-facebook-and-twitter/

It goes back to the book I’m reading right now—Orwell’s 1984. In 1984 “All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee”. I don’t want that. Our country is about freedom. It’s the freedom to say “I want to marry who I love”. It’s not the government’s place to say “You can’t marry this adult”.

Posted Mar 26 2013

SSI Entitlements

I can’t say that The Atlantic is a liberal shill. Not when they complain about this government entitlement: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/disability-insurance-americas-124-billion-secret-welfare-program/274302/

The problem with SSI entitlements is that they are set up to encourage people to not work. If someone gets a job while on SSI, they take away the SSI entitlement and usually won’t allow them to get SSI again.

Pournelle’s “iron law of bureaucracy” is in play here: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

I have a better idea: Anyone on SSI entitlements who gets a job is allowed to keep one dollar of every two dollars they earn. If they end up earning more than twice of what they got on SSI, and keep the job for a year earning that much, they are automatically taken off of SSI.

They are probably better ways to get someone on SSI working again. See Clinton’s “Welfare to Work” programs implemented in the 1990s.

Posted Mar 25 2013

Proud to move away from Twitter

And then, there’s people like me who no longer actively use Twitter. Real developers can implement their own Twitter clone in a day or two. http://mashable.com/2013/03/25/tech-industry-obnoxious-tweeters/

Posted Mar 25 2013

LXC is still not there

Back in 1991, Linux had no future and GNU Hurd was going to soon replace it. Didn’t happen. Likewise, for me to see OpenVZ replaced by LXC, it is going to have to be able to to do everything OpenVZ does first (or, at least, provide secure isolation from other containers). Here’s a comparison: http://www.janoszen.com/2013/01/22/lxc-vs-openvz/

Posted Mar 25 2013

Special Effects people not paid enough

The only significant non-unionized group in Hollywood, special effects people, are not getting paid enough and, indeed, a number of special effect houses are going out of business: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-runaway-visual-effects-20130324,0,1842816.story

Posted Mar 25 2013

Reading 1984 again

I’m reading Orwell’s 1984 again. I read this book once every decade or so to remind me why I must never take my own freedom for granted—or take anyone else’s freedom from them. It can be legally downloaded here: http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/

I find it ironic that Kindle owners who had their copies of 1984 yanked from their Kindles by Amazon can now legally download 1984 from this site in a Kindle-compatible format (it’s also available there as epub and nicely formatted html; I’m using Lynx to convert the html in to text to read it in a PuTTY terminal)

Posted Mar 24 2013

Finally, a patch for CVE-2012-1193

It took over a year, but PowerDNS finally has a patch for CVE-2012-1193: http://wiki.powerdns.com/trac/ticket/668 I was about to declare PowerDNS’ recursor abandoned.

Posted Mar 23 2013

Bad sex isn’t rape

This one is personal to me: I had a friend falsely accused of rape after having consentual sex with a girl, because she didn’t want to admit she cheated. “My bad sex wasn’t rape”, by Anna March http://www.salon.com/2013/03/22/my_bad_sex_wasnt_rape/

Posted Mar 23 2013

Friend zone

I have had very positive friendships with women where sex or even the potential for sex was not on the table.

The thing men need to understand that being in the friend zone is just that—the relationship will never become physical.

Women in a friend zone relationships with men need to understand that it is not appropriate to ask for favors from male friends that they would not ask for from a female friend.

Posted Mar 22 2013

Hookup culture

Today’s “hook up” culture is downright dangerous. A society where the majority of women only have sex with relatively few Alpha males is a much more unstable society than one where lifetime monogamy is the norm. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/boys-on-the-side/309062/?single_page=true

Posted Mar 22 2013

Alpha Beta

Alpha Beta is not only a name of a defunct grocery chain|, it is also a view of human reproductive strategy: Alpha males end up having more access to females and, therefore, more offspring, while Beta males end up having fewer offspring.

The paper Strong gender differences in reproductive success variance, and the times to the most recent common ancestors by Maroussia Favre and Didier Sornette presents evidence that, historically, men had about a 40% chance of propagating their genetic code, while women have had an 80% of doing so.

One can read this paper here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.6231.pdf (PDF file)

Posted Mar 21 2013

How fame fades so quickly

I’m amazed how quickly fame fades with those things that go viral on the Internet. Remember that young lady who got fired for posting a receipt online? (If not, I blogged about it at http://www.samiam.org/blog/20130205.html). She now has a Twitter account, with all of 20 (yes, 20 as in twenty) followers, and still hasn’t found a new job: https://twitter.com/ChelseaGWelch

In addition to my comment, when I discussed Adria Richards, about being very careful with one’s words in public that may reflect poorly on one’s employer, I also have this to say: I blog here so that, should something I post ever go viral, I’m the one making the ad revenue. This way, I still have something to show for my 15 minutes of fame once the Internet loses interest and moves on to whatever becomes viral next. I’m sure Ms. Welch would feel very differently today about how things went down if she had a few thousand dollars of ad revenue to show for it.

There’s one thing I don’t understand about people spending so much time on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and other corporate sites owned by someone else: Time spent there becomes money in someone else’s pocket. At least with Usenet, no megacorp was directly making money from people’s postings.

Posted Mar 21 2013

Adria Richards

To summarize a hugely viral story making the rounds right now:

One Adria Richards was at a “sausage fest” conference where she felt offended that a couple of men were making what she felt were off-color sexist jokes.

Instead of directly confronting the men, she took their picture, along with a short summary of their joke, and posted it on Twitter.

One of the men pictured was fired from his job

This person getting fired upset a number of people, resulting in Ms. Richards herself getting fired.

The lesson here is: Be very careful with what you say in public that may represent your employer. An off-color joke that may be OK when said in whispered tones in the corner of a cubicle should not be repeated in public—not with people one does not know well, not even in a personal conversation if said conversation is in a public place.

People had to be fired not because of the joke or because people were outed for saying said joke. People were fired because all of this happened in public, where the employers were forced to be held accountable.

My experience is that employers are a lot more tolerant of things that stay within the walls of their offices than they are of things that the entire Internet can see.

Here’s the best summary of the whole soap opera that I found: http://amandablumwords.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/3/

Posted Mar 21 2013

Nginx quirk

With nginx, the following will show you the PHP source code for foo.php when going to nginx.foo:

location / {
 root html/nginx.foo/;
 index foo.php;
}

location ~ \.php$ {
 root html/nginx.foo/;
 fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php.socket;
 fastcgi_index foo.php;
 include fastcgi_params;
 index foo.php;
}

To fix this:

location ~ \.php$ {
 root html/nginx.foo/;
 fastcgi_pass unix:/tmp/php.socket;
 fastcgi_index foo.php;
 include fastcgi_params;
 index foo.php;
}

location / {
 root html/nginx.foo/;
 index foo.php;
}

This way, all PHP pages are processed by fastcgi first.

Posted Mar 20 2013

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Tweets March 2013

March 29, 2013

I am moving away from Twitter and to using my own code for microblogs.

Here is a summary of my tweets from March 2013:

Goodbye Twitter

I don't understand why people spend most of their time on the Internet using corporate-controlled websites like Facebook and Twitter. Indeed, Twitter has decided to not index my #INeedMasculismBecause hashtags, so I'm going back to only using Twitter to announce new blog entries.

Goodbye, Twitter. It’s time to bring the community back to the Internet and stop being a corporate drone when I’m not getting paid.

Where’s a killfile?

Usenet faded away because of the trolls, spammers, and tribalism. Unmoderated internet forums are a wasteland: http://www.npr.org/2013/03/11/174027294/the-nasty-effect-how-comments-color-comprehension?ft=1&f=1007 I miss killfiles: http://www.samiam.org/blog/20111222.html

Gay marriage

Among Republicans, support for gay marriage has risen only to 25% from 20% ten years ago. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/among-g-o-p-voters-little-support-for-same-sex-marriage/

Intel Atom and Linux

The “Cedarview” Atoms also appear to have Linux compatibility issues—which is why I use older “Pineview” netbooks. http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTMyODA

The new pope

Argentinian Cardinal BERGOGLIO is the new pope. With a Jesuit at the helm, there is hope for the Holy Mother Church (Catholic Church) again.

A Jesuit to the rescue: http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbaldoni/2013/03/13/pope-francis-jesuit-to-the-rescue/

Nate Silver’s take on why Cardinal Bergoglio’s age may have been helpful to him electorally: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/for-cardinals-advantages-in-choosing-an-older-pope/

Speaking of the pope, the celibate life was never for me, even though I thought so at one point. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21739640

Screwing over workers again

I am sure the new Hostess will pay workers a good deal less than the old Hostess, while increasing CEO pay. http://bostinno.com/2013/03/12/twi

Real Men

Real men do not go around treating women like objects or whining about how horrible our “feminist society” is; Real men get and stay married

Speaking of real men, “Girls Just Want To Have Fun” is a masculine “Alpha” song. Few know it was written by one Robert Hazard; when the same lyrics are sung by a man (like they originally were), the song gets a completely different meaning.

I still feel his song “Escalator of Life”, about the emptyness of greed, is better.

Speaking of “manly men”, here’s one answer to Planet Fitness’s “no grunt” policy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXwMXp0NV1I I have never had a negative experience with a jock when working out at a gym; indeed, I have made a lot of jock friends while doing exercise.

That said, I am skeptical about men’s “my wife became a b—— at 40 and I had to divorce her” complaints. Maybe the wife just stopped being fertile at 40.

In terms of meeting and kissing women, people regret not making the approach more than making the approach: http://xkcd.com/458/

A great resource for men in abusive relationships (There’s a reason I no longer date strippers) http://www.shrink4men.com Yeah, I dated strippers and they opened up emotionally to me. I learned how they felt working. As a result, I never could enjoy a lap dance again.

Prenda Law

While #Prenda Law consists of a bunch of dirtbags, the bottom line is that willful copyright infringement is not OK. #TANSTAAFL

CentOS 6.4 update

I’ve updated all my servers from #CentOS 6.3 to CentOS 6.4. I thank the CentOS team for all their hard work getting 6.4 out there so fast.

Can a girl give dating advice?

A girl helping guys to learn how to date women: http://takopop.com/how-not-to-talk-to-cosplay-girls/ (Some useful advice is near the bottom before the comments). That article has the same general issues when girls give dating help: No pointers on how a man can become more sexy and desirable.

Red Light Cameras in Ohio

Red light cameras struck down in Ohio http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2013/03/08/judge-to-village-no-cameras.html

Lynx lives

By using “lynx -dump -nolist http://whatever | sed 's/^ //' | less”, I am looking at modern webpages as pure text in a terminal.

Source Sans: A beautiful font

I printed a few pages of text using Source Sans Pro—it looks beautiful! Much better than Verdana on paper and licensed with the Open Font License to boot.

Here’s a demo of the 2013 Wordpress theme showing Source Sans used as body text: http://twentythirteendemo.wordpress.com/about/

“Source Sans is more than a mere typeface. It’s a platform for development, expansion, & education.” http://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/source-sans/

Cussing in Spanish

Mexican Supreme Court makes the Spanish word for “f*ggot” (“maricón”) subject to civil penalties—but the word can also mean “pussy” (coward). Indeed, that is a question being asked in a lawsuit recently made against a journalist in Puebla named Enrique Núñez. http://www.sexenio.com.mx/columna.php?id=5053

As an aside, “Homophobic” is a word in Spanish. I kid you not.

Income inequality

Here’s the source article for that recently-become-viral video showing the problems of inequality in the US: http://harvardmagazine.com/2011/11/what-we-know-about-wealth

Note that Wealth = Money in the bank. Income = Money earned from work. Wealth != Income.

The Violence Against Women Act

In a world where women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined, it’s important to have protections against the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA). I am very glad my representative voted for the VAWA. How did your representative vote for it? Find out here: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/113-2013/h55

Wyoming has the dubious honor of being the only state in the Union where not one senator nor representative voted for the Violence Against Women Act. I call that “patriarchy”.

Masculism

I notice that a lot of women are posting knee-jerk reactions to me using the #INeedMasculismBecause hashtag. It has been my experience that women are not the best teachers for men when it comes to a man learning how to be someone a woman will want to date and have an intimate relationship with.

Ladies, the bottom line is this: I need masculism because...getting laid is very difficult for a guy. Since marriage has broken down in our culture, a man needs to learn how to get laid in order to start a relationship that can lead to marriage. While I find it disgusting to call sexual experiences “notches”, PUAs are teaching men how to get laid.

Twitter finally reacted by no longer indexing my #INeedMasculismBecause posts. It probably is a case of “-1 Disagree” mods being allowed to stack the vote; I have blocked the militant feminists who reacted negatively to my tweets in retaliation and will no longer use Twitter except to note new blogs.

Here’s one debunking of the seduction community: http://aaronsleazy.blogspot.com/ That said, the seduction community did help me date normally and meet my wife. On second thought, Aaron isn’t a real hater, since he does sell his own PUA guide: http://www.aaronsleazy.com/cms/aaron-sleazy-minimal-game It’s just jealously among PUAs.

Flash and Linux

These days, Linux’s lack of good Flash support is a less valid complaint about Linux on the desktop than it used to be (see, for example http://xkcd.com/619/ ) Today’s web is moving away from proprietary technologies like Flash. Flash is that is going away and being slowly replaced by HTML5, which is much more open.

Working at home

Does working remotely make you less productive? http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-yahoos-confess-marissa-mayer-is-right-to-ban-working-from-home-2013-2

My comment that this is a stealth layoff stands; The article states that “It's a layoff that's not a layoff.”

Blast from the past

Images like this were sent from fax to fax during the war with Iraq in 1991, long before Facebook and Instagram: http://twitpic.com/c96c14

Laissez Faire working conditions

An article from 1894 looking at the horrible working conditions in steel mills at the time http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/mmh/Steel/June1894-Garland_Homestead.cfm The article was written by one Hamlin Garland, and was called “Homestead and its Perilous Trades - Impressions of a Visit”

Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card is a writer I greatly respect, and I’m sad he has become so militantly anti-gay. http://www.npr.org/2013/02/17/172229592/man-of-tomorrow-superman-orson-scott-card-and-me That said, It’s important we do not become intolerant when fighting intolerance. http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2013/03/05/chris-sprouse-orson-scott-card-superman-comic/1964845/

Militant Atheists

Yet another “look at how horrible those Christians are” article that militant atheists love. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/03/05/teri_james_says ... ; Here’s the original source article which the left-wing blogosphere commented on: http://lifeinc.today.com/_news/2013/02/28/17106895-christian-school-fires-pregnant-woman-over-premarital-sex?lite

So long, WaSP

A relic from the Netscape-MSIE “browser wars” and Microsoft’s 1990s attempts at controlling the web closes shop: http://www.webstandards.org/2013/03/01/our-work-here-is-done/ The WaSP project was needed in the mid-2000s when there wasn’t a single browser that could render a smiley face at http://acid2.acidtests.org/#top

Dillo still doesn’t render a smiley face for the ACID2 test and quite frankly, they never will.

EFF: Stop enabling piracy

The EFF criticizes ISPs taking measures to reduce piracy?? What a surprise! https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/02/copyright-propaganda-machine-gets-new-agent-your-isp EFF doesn’t understand that #TANSTAAFL

Deadwood update

March 20, 2013

I have updated Deadwood to fix a long-standing bug resolving host names that only pops up once in a blue moon.

I discovered that the host name “whatever.scalzi.com” was not resolving with Deadwood. After spending an hour or so looking at the issue, I discovered an off-by-one bug.

One of the sanity tests performed when making an incomplete CNAME chain has a subtle bug. The sanity test in question makes sure a CNAME referral has records in the AN section of the reply before gluing together incomplete CNAME referrals with the records the CNAMEs point to.

The bug only manifested itself when an incomplete CNAME chain has its last DNS record start 256 (or 512, or 768—at this point in the code, we’re looking at the uncompressed form of the packet) bytes in to the packet, and would cause the sanity test to incorrectly fail.

Since this test otherwise incorrectly passed, it remains an open question whether this bug fix will cause other hostnames to not correctly resolve. I will continue to perform dogfood testing with Deadwood to see if any other problems pop up.

The fix is a one-byte change to the code.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

Note that I found and fixed this bug before the 20th; while I normally do not work on MaraDNS or Deadwood before the 20th, this particular bug was annoying me enough that I fixed it right away.

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day next month, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

As an aside, I am not a big fan of Scalzi’s writings. His “An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping” article creeps me out, and has the same issues as those “Creeper cards” I recently blogged about.

2016 update: Keep in mind that a lot of stuff Pick up artists / misogynists say to justify their predatory behavior towards women is pure BS

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Why I need Masculism

March 16, 2013

This is my explanation for feminists who get upset whenever I use the #INeedMasculismBecause hashtag on Twitter.

What Masculism is not

“Masculism” is not the same thing as “patriarchy”. I acknowledge that modern society’s greater respect for the emotional needs of women has resulted in a better society for both men and women, and that the solution is not to revive the intolerance and bigotry previous generations had.

Masculism does not mean opposing the Violence Against Women’s Act, or thinking it is OK to be violent with a woman. Masculism does not mean one is liberal or conservative; bloggers and commenters who support men’s rights come from all parts of the political spectrum.

Bottom line: For people upset with the “masculism” label, it really doesn’t mean what you think it means.

What Masculism is

Masculism is a movement which has emerged from the PUA (pick-up artist) community, and is an extension of that community. A lot of people in that community feel very wronged by women, for a number of reasons: Failed marriages with what the men feel are unfair divorce settlements, friendships with women that leave men hurt and sexually frustrated, just to name two.

The community, being an extension of the PUA community, still has a lot of discussion about how to become attractive to and have physical intimacy with women. But there is also discussion about the problems run-away feminism has caused in society. As just one example, I have a friend who ended up sleeping with a girl who had a boyfriend. Instead of this girl taking responsibility for her decision to sleep with my friend, she filed a false rape charge (even though the sex was completely consensual) and gave my friend a lot of legal hassle which deeply scarred him emotionally.

While there is a lot about the PUA and masculism community I do not like—it offends me deeply when they call a physically intimate encounter or a woman a “notch”—I do appreciate how they go to a lot of effort to teach men effective techniques for being attractive to women.

Dating is hard work

A lot of what a woman finds attractive is subconscious to the woman.

What makes an approach “sexy” or “creepy” is not really about how sexual the approach is. Being “sexy” instead of “creepy” is really about how attractive the woman finds the man who makes the approach.

Becoming a man attractive to women so they will not consider advances “creepy” is really hard work. It means going to the gym; it means learning how to dress well; it means learning how to project, on a very deep intuitive level, high self-confidence; it means overcoming a lot of social anxiety men have. It is a good deal more difficult for a man to get a date with a woman than vice versa.

For years, I listened to the useless advice women gave me to try and learn how to date normally. The advice was useless trite like “just be yourself” and “the right one will come when you are no longer looking”. I even bought a book about dating written by a woman which was completely useless.

Men, on the other hand, gave me useful advice like “work out and look healthy”, “don’t have oneitis”, “act dominant because women find that sexy”, “have more self-confidence”, “getting women is hard work”, and “you may have better luck with women outside of the country” [1]

I would not have the wife I have today if I did not integrate some of the more useful advice the PUA/Masculism community gave me when I was a single guy who could not get a decent date with a girl.

Women and “white knight” men who call men creeps for approaching women do not help socially awkward men date normally. Men who embrace masculism, on the other hand, do help men. A man who listens to their advice, while discarding the bitterness towards women in the PUA/Masculism community as well as idea the women are objects, will do much better with women than a man who just listens to the advice a woman gives about romance.

And that is why I need masculism.

Footnote 1: To be fair, a woman gave me this final piece of advice; I met my wife while living in Mexico.

I next discuss feminism in Women Against Feminism.

2016 update: Keep in mind that a lot of stuff Pick up artists / misogynists say to justify their predatory behavior towards women is pure BS

2021 update: Reading it again, I observe I had a lack of empathy for women and their issues finding a good date or relationship. I regret not being more empathic eight years ago.

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Creeper cards

March 7, 2013

In today's blog, I discuss those creeper cards which have recently been passed out at some “hacker” conferences.

About the cards

Recently, some of the relatively few women at those “hacker conference” sausage-fests (A “sausage fest”, of course, is a social gathering with far more men than women) decided to react to some of the harassment they were getting by making two different cards to give to guys.

Here is the text of the yellow card:

CREEPER MOVE!

If you have received this card, you have done something mildly inappropriate to the person who handed this to you. Your intentions might have been good, but before future engagement make sure you are being respectful and mindful of people's boundaries.

And the text of the red card:

CREEPER MOVE!

If you have received this card, you have done something wildly inappropriate or otherwise harassed the person who handed this to you. You should be happy you got a card and not a punch in the face. Check yourself — you might not be this lucky twice!

What is wrong with the cards

Bottom line: I don’t like those “creeper cards”. Men need to be taught how to become attractive, how to talk to a girl in a way she finds sexy and flirtatious, how to look for IOIs (indicators of interest) and act upon them.

Those “creeper cards” do none of that. All they do is teach lonely men with social skill problems that there’s something wrong with finding women attractive. These “creeper cards” do nothing to teach men that women are beautiful, that women deserve respect, that women are not just their bodies, and that there are things a man can do to make himself more attractive to women.

Some women who have either passed out or support these “creeper cards” have no interest in improving men’s social skills; to wit the anonymous commenter who said “If you don’t know how to speak to a woman without being so incredibly rude then you deserve to be forever alone.”.

I’m not alone in not liking these cards; the comments on another page show women expressing similar sentiments.

Better solutions

Well, the first solution is obvious to men who have learned anything about meeting women: Don’t try to meet women at sausage fests. If you want to improve your chances, go to places with more women in them.

The other is: Learn ways to approach women that actually give you a chance of having a date with them. It’s unfortunate that the women who make these cards are not helping men here.

To be blunt, I have more respect for the “pick up artist” (PUA) community than the pro-“creeper card” community. While there is a lot wrong with the PUA community—treating women like sex objects, for one—they at least are trying to teach men social skills in a way that is positive for males.

2020 update: I no longer have any respect for the majority of the “pick up artist” (PUA) community because of how they objectify and lack empathy for women.

Indeed, one player in the PUA community makes a better version of the “creeper card” which points the rejected man to actual advice that can make them a better person—but even giving that card to a guy can be rude.

The best solution

I will go further and state that the institution of monogamous marriage is the best way for a woman to establish a healthy boundary with men.

In a culture where marriage has broken down and where promiscuity is the norm, women tend to end up having unsatisfying short-term hook-ups with the relatively few “Alphas” who know how to be attractive to women. This is not helpful to women, who need to realize that, in a promiscuous culture, physical intimacy is not an implied contract for a long-term relationship; this is not helpful to the majority of “Beta” men who don’t know how to play the game to seduce a women, and end up lonely and sexually frustrated. It’s not even helpful for the “Alpha” men, since they have to be someone who they truly aren’t in order to seduce women.

2020 update: I no longer believe that 20% of the men sleep with 80% of the women.

Conclusion

I understand that women are frustrated by how they are sometimes treated by men. I understand there is something seriously wrong in our society with the way men can treat women, and something seriously wrong with a world where women aged between 15 and 44 are more likely to die or be maimed by male violence than by cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.

Handing out cards that hurt men’s feelings, however, is not the best solution to these problems.

Education is the solution here. And that means, yes, teaching men how to become someone attractive enough to women that they can be in a consensual relationship where their sexual needs are met.

Ultimately, however, we need a culture that respects marriage. This will give women a culture where they can more easily establish a strong boundary with men they do not know.

See also: Why I need Masculism

2016 update: Keep in mind that a lot of stuff Pick up artists / misogynists say to justify their predatory behavior towards women is pure BS and that women making their husbands cuckolds is actually very rare

The text of “Creeper Cards” is public domain (“CC0”, which is the same thing). I have made my own image of the red card. To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Twitter wrap-up

March 1, 2013

In today's blog, I go over tweets from my Twitter feed posted in February.

Intel Atom update

Intel finally is making significant improvements to the Atom: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/intel-gets-aggressive-with-new-smartphone-and-tablet-chips/ Too bad getting a new netbook in the US is fairly difficult, since the mainstream computer makers no longer sell netbooks stateside.

The GAU-8 avenger

Now, here’s a good question. Is there anywhere where mounting a GAU-8 Avenger to your car is legal? Here’s a really funny article that looks at this possibility: http://what-if.xkcd.com/21/

Reducing big government

I saw a cute chart that tried to argue how much our government is getting bigger. A far more useful chart is government spending as a percentage of GDP (gross domestic product—how much money our society has): http://samiam.org/pics/Govt-spending-as-GDP.png

The friend zone sucks

I don’t want to ever be trapped in the friend zone ever again. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/26/19-people-stuck-in-the-friend-zone_n_2760362.html?utm_hp_ref=comedy#slide=2151325

Violence against women

Women worldwide aged 15-44 are more likely to die or be maimed by male violence than by cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.

Hollywood and VFX makers

People should not go to ThePirateBay or Demonoid for movies. Netflix is better. Hard working VFX people should not be struggling. http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/25/4028014/why-are-digital-video-effects-artists-angry-at-hollywood (Yes, Hollywood’s greed is a part of the problem. A part.)

I have disabled WOT

I have disabled WOT. Puahate.com was marked "unsafe"; A classic case of "-1 disagree" unfair moderation. http://www.mywot.com/en/scorecard/puahate.com?utm_source=addon&utm_content=warn-viewsc. I’m not saying puahate.com is a good site. It isn’t. But the site doesn’t give people drive-by malware or run a scam either.

The Oscars

#DrunkNateSilver does it again. Not only did he guess the president last fall, he predicted Argo winning “Best picture”. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/22/oscar-predictions-election-style/?hpw I was not expecting “Argo” to win, but Nate Silver nailed it.

It was beautiful how the first lady presented the award. Sad that the extreme-right-wing in the US got so upset over it: http://mediamatters.org/blog/2013/02/25/michelle-obama-attacked-for-oscars-appearance/192788

In light of “Argo” winning the big Oscar....looking back, the Iranian hostage crisis could very well have been what cost Carter reelection in 1980.

“Silver Lining Playbook” finally got a significant Oscar with best actress. Yeah, I know. Nate Silver predicted it.

I was really glad to see the thunder out of the sails of “Les Miserables” sweeping the early Oscar awards. “Silver Lining Playbook”, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”, or indeed “Argo” deserved the award more.

Despite what the ads being played during the Oscars say, I don’t need a smartphone to be a complete person. Did I mention the first-ever Android app was a SSH client? Did I mention that I’m using a SSH client to type this text?

Yahoo no longer wants tele-commuters

Yahoo no longer wants remote workers (tele-commuters): http://allthingsd.com/20130222/yahoo-ceo-mayer-now-requiring-all-remote-employees-to-not-be-remote/?mod=tweet http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lisa-belkin/marissa-mayer-work-from-home-yahoo-rule_b_2750256.html

Personally, I agree that this is a stealth layoff—Yahoo is getting rid of remote workers because that’s a very convenient way of reducing staff without having to do a real layoff. I don’t think Yahoo has a real problem with remote workers.

The holy grail of fonts

I would love to see an OFL-licensed screen font that is as readable as Verdana (with full delta hinting). This is the holy grail of fonts for me. I have been looking for something like this for over five years without success.

The closest is probably the beautiful delta-hinted Cousine, but that, alas, is a monospaced font.

Ubuntu is pretty good, but it’s no Verdana, and its license is an unusual non-OFL one. The PT series (PT Sans, etc.) is nice, but not quite as readable as Verdana. It’s a shame that PT Sans Caption doesn’t have decent delta hinting (nor an italic/oblique).

Here are some good fonts not available on Google Web Fonts: https://github.com/theleagueof/. None of them look like a Verdana replacement; Junction is close but really needs delta hinting, a bold, and an italic (or at least an oblique).

The underlying issue: Everyone wants a really great free web font, but no one wants to pay for it: href=http://www.typographyforlawyers.com/?page_id=3207

But, then again, maybe there is some hope. The Exo Fontface family kickstarter project was able to get the $7,500 of funding it was looking for: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1010856090/the-exo-typeface-family?ref=search

Then again, $7,500 isn’t enough to fund a full roman / bold / italic / bold-italic font with complete delta hinting.

Delta hinted beautiful sans-serif fonts are out there if you’re willing to open up your wallet. For example: http://www.linotype.com/469/frutiger-family.html Then again, even Frutiger is no Verdana on monochrome displays—but it’s closer than any OFL font.

PuTTY and UTF-8

Nice blog about how to get PuTTY to play nice with UTF-8: http://thegreyblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/configuring-putty-to-use-utf-8.html

In a nutshell: Window -> Translation -> Remote Character Set -> UTF-8

Mark Crispin RIP

Mark Crispin, creator of IMAP, recently passed away: http://lwn.net/Articles/539655/. Please no snarky comments about how IMAP died too.

I always liked his joke RFC from 2005, RFC 4042. He will be missed.

Firefox vs. Chrome

I prefer Firefox over Chrome on my notebook because it has better web font rendering. I prefer Chrome over Firefox on my netbook because it's faster--Chrome doesn't let the slow javascript in a background tab slow down the active tab.

Is our universe stable?

Is the quantum structure of our universe stable? Maybe not. http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/finding-the-higgs-good-news-finding-its-mass-not-so-good/

This reminds me of a sad science fiction story, "Last Contact" by Stephen Baxter.

Lawsuit to block Yoga classes

As a right-of-center conservative, I have always found ACLU’s lawsuits to remove Nativities from court houses and what not annoying. Then again, it’s annoying when the right wing retaliates by suing over Yoga programs in high schools: http://thecoastnews.com/2013/02/eusd-sued-over-yoga-program/ http://thecoastnews.com/2012/12/parents-weigh-in-on-yoga-program-at-school-board-meeting/

I don’t think these lawsuits will hold water; it’s a lot easier to argue a Yoga class is secular than to argue a Nativity scene is secular (not that we should remove the Nativity).

A few days after I first tweeted about this, the lawsuit attracted the attention of the left-wing blogosphere: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/02/22/1625281/yoga-religious-freedom/ http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/02/23/17067920-this-week-in-god

Duke Nukem Forever

In the time it took for Duke Nukem Forever to come out (announced in 1996, came out in 2011), I accomplished the following:

Had my salary more than triple working for dot-coms

Became fluent in Spanish

Lived in Mexico for five years

Got a college degree

Started MaraDNS

Finished MaraDNS

Had my first date with my now wife

Married my wife

Right-wing journal dies

A right-wing journal who published, among other things, a horrible article justifying gerrymandered presidential elections; I do not miss their journal dying: http://www.salon.com/2013/02/18/right_wing_journal_quietly_dies/

The lessons of Proposition 187

If I were to attribute a single event to Romney’s loss in 2012, I would say it was when Rick Perry was booed by tea baggers for supporting in-state tuition for children of undocumented immigrants. Even the very right-wing Redstate.com supports in-state tuition for immigrants.

This is a train wreck I have seen before: Two decades ago, California Republicans supported the very racist proposition 187. While it gave them more votes in the short term, it has killed them in the long term: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/01/5157052/dan-walters-demography-may-doom.html

The problem is not brown-skinned people taking jobs away from Americans. The problem is CEOs increasing their salaries while screwing over the middle class. Let’s not fall for the same BS that gets people riled up and passing laws like SB1070. This also applies to H1-B visas.

My only objection to H1-B visas is that the pretext to increase H1-B quotas —“There aren’t enough qualified Americans to fill our job openings”—is a bald-faced lie. There are enough qualified Americans, but companies with overpaid CEOs do not want to pay the salaries a quality engineer commands. The Immigration Innovation Act of 2013 is not a law being proposed to benefit hard-working Americans, but a law to benefit executives of large corporations. I have yet to see a proposal to replace upper management with H1-B immigrants.

Gerrymandered elections

The current electoral college system in the US is broken. One cute idea (just a blue-sky one) would be to redraw the states: http://fakeisthenewreal.org/reform/ Yes, the linked article does point out a national popular vote is the right solution.

As it turns out, this cute plan to make 50 states with equal populations probably would have made Romney win last fall: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112467/electoral-college-reform-romney-wins-redrawn-us-map

This article has some good maps showing my gerrymandered elections are unfair: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/24/republican-vote-rigging-electoral-college_n_2546010.html

Here’s a NY Times article on the Great Gerrymander of 2012: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/opinion/sunday/the-great-gerrymander-of-2012.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2&

Republicans’ Push to Tilt Elections Will Backfire http://bloom.bg/XK2KgP

So much has changed

One amusing very hostile reaction to commercial advertising on the Internet of 20 years ago, when Usenet was king: https://groups.google.com/group/alt.humor.best-of-usenet/msg/353d41b6b8adfbd9?dmode=source&output=gplain

Goodbye, Presto

For many years, Opera’s rendering engine has been its own proprietary code called ”Presto”. But that will soon change: http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2013/02/13/webkit

Presto has been the best engine for using the modern web on an older computer; I’m sorry that it will be no more. Then again, I do like proprietary code being replaced by open source.

Come on, Wikipedia

I shouldn’t have to be the one who has to update the Wikipedia to reflect a new MaraDNS release: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MaraDNS&diff=538036654&oldid=526563607

Year of the Snake

We celebrated the coming of the Year of the Snake in February: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/1302010-chinese-lunar-new-year-culture-snake-science-animals/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21378306

The Web is the Internet

Where the "the WWW is not the Internet" idea comes from, and why this meme is outdated: http://samiam.org/internet-vs-www.html

The Web in 1999

Speaking of outdated, here is how the Internet looked in 1999: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/06/best-websites-90s_n_2542393.html?ir=Technology

This is how this site looked in 2001: http://www.samiam.org/screenshots/2001webpage.html

Recess appointments

A more in-depth look at those recess appointments: http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/02/05/16854765-the-consequences-of-scrapping-recess-appointments

Red Light Cameras

I don’t think the annoying red-light camera at Ted Williams and Pomerado is going away quite yet, since that’s in Poway http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/feb/01/san-diego-red-light-cameras-filner-halts/

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Deadwood update

February 22, 2013

In today’s blog, I discuss today’s Deadwood update.

The problem

When I updated Deadwood to no longer read the cache if the dwood3rc file is newer, there was still a problem when:

Deadwood is started

The dwood3rc file is modified

Deadwood is stopped, writing a new cache file

When this happens with Deadwood 3.2.03, the cache file (which is a stale cache) is newer than the dwood3rc file.

The solution

In order to solve this problem, Deadwood needs to have this workflow:

Make a note of the timestamp for the dwood3rc file when Deadwood is started

The dwood3rc file is replaced with a new file

The cache is written, including a note of when the dwood3rc was modified when Deadwood was started

Deadwood is started again. It sees that, while dwood3rc is older than the cache, the dwood3rc timestamp is not the same as the older one, so it doesn't load the cache.

The cache is no longer stale.

I spent today adding the ability to write metadata to a cache file in a format that allows the cache to be read by older Deadwood releases. Now, I need to add the code to make sure the dwood3rc file hasn't changed since the last cache read before reading the cache. I will do that in March.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day in March, after the 21st.

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Netbooks in 2013

February 17, 2013

In today's blog, I discuss netbooks in 2013.

Netbooks are not dead

While computer manufactures have stopped making netbooks in the US--probably because Microsoft is no longer making Windows 7 Starter available to OEMs here--netbooks are still available.

For example, Lenovo still sells the S110 in India for about $370 US, and suppliers in China still make netbooks which can be readily bought and sent to the US.

Netbooks were a product niche which never caught on in the US. They are not suited for power-users who want to play modern video games on all of their PCs; their 10 inch size is too small for many users. With companies starting to make 15-inch laptops for about the same price as a netbook, they stopped having appeal for the "give me the cheapest computer you got" crowd.

Then again, there's a lot to be said for the 10 inch form factor. It's small; the keyboard, however, is still usable. It is far easier to generate content on a netbook than on a tablet. While it is possible to attach a keyboard to a tablet, the resulting system ends up costing far more than a netbook ever did.

The first netbook

The first netbook was probably the Gateway Handbook, which you might be able to see pictured above. It came out in 1992, and was about the same size as a netbook. Like a netbook, it was very small. Like a netbook, its computing power was the equivalent of a computer from eight years before. Unlike a netbook, the Gateway Handbook cost US $1295 in 1992--some 305 hours of labor at the then minimum-wage rate in the US. A netbook cost roughly $300 in 2010--only 42 hours of minimum-wage labor.

I still consider the Handbook a netbook. After all, anything to do with computers was expensive back then. It was before the Internet was readily available for home computers; it was only during the dot-com revolution that computers became desirable enough again for end-users that companies like eMachines figured out how to make one cost less than 100 hours of minimum wage labor.

I took the above image years ago and submitted it to the Wikipedia; a higher resolution versions of this image can be seen there. To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Applebee's and God

February 5, 2013

Recently, there was a pastor who went to Applebee's. While there, she scratched out a large mandatory tip on her receipt and wrote "I give God 10%. Why do you Get [sic] 18?" This story quickly became viral, and the waitress who posted the receipt online got fired.

Something like this would normally have been posted to some website where people complain about bad customers and then forgotten. But that didn't happen here.

The main reason this recent Applebee's story became so viral is because it gave atheists a chance to say "Look how horrible those Christians act!" While I think Pastor Alois Bell was rude trying to stiff the waitress of her tip, and I think it was not fair for Applebee's to fire Chelsea Welch (and I will boycott them -- not just because of this -- but because some franchises whined about Obamacare), a story like this about rude customers would not normally have become so viral.

There is an expectation, even among atheists, that people who are Christian need to show their faith via good deeds. This is why rude actions like this with God's name on them cause so much outcry, and why it is disgusting for people to use faith to justify a "god" that would send someone like Anne Frank or Gandhi to hell.

If you are a Christian, show it to the word with your good deeds. Be very careful how you represent your faith, and especially do not ever judge or condemn someone in the name of God (Mt. 7:1).

See also: On Anne Frank - On rationalization - On fundamentalist reasoning - On my faith in God - Everyone has a soapbox - The Rapture - Final 2010 post; NIV update

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Web font rendering

February 3, 2013

In today's blog, I will discuss web font rendering on Chrome, and the work arounds I use.

Web font rendering in Chrome, especially on Windows, is less than ideal. Fortunately, there are some workarounds which can make a web font look acceptable on this browser:

Make sure to use a font that can be modified. I personally will only use an OFL web font on my page. (If you edit an OFL font in any way, you must change its name)

FontSquirrel.com has a free web font generator that usually will make a font look acceptable across browsers.

Another program that will make a font look even better on modern computers is TTFautohint. Unfortunately, this tool usually makes a font look worse on legacy Windows XP systems without Clear Type.

Put font-weight: bold; in the @font-face part of the CSS so Firefox won't try to make a (usually ugly) faux-bold version of the font.

Some users use noscript or other tools which disable web font rendering. Make sure the page looks decent if the fonts are replaced by "web safe" fallback fonts. In my particular case, the web font I use looks somewhat like Calibri, so I use that as the first fallback font, as well as Arial as the secondary fallback font for Linux and Mac users who may not have Calibri [1]

Printing pages with web fonts in Webkit browsers (Chrome, Safari) and Gecko browsers (Firefox) doesn't work. My workaround is to hide the web fonts from Webkit's printing CSS, and have old-school "web safe" fallback fonts for Gecko-based browsers.

A friend of mine pointed out that using Google's web font API can minimize Chrome's web font rendering problems.

Since I wasn't 100% happy with how the numbers looked with Font Squirrel's hinting, I ended up using Font Forge to edit the font's numbers by hand. It took me about a week to get the font to look decent across all browsers [2].

See also: Embedding web fonts; Webkit @font-face bug; Web typography (2011); Web typography (2012)

Footnotes

1: I don't think there's a legal way to install Calibri in Linux, but it's legal to download the older Arial, Verdana, Georgia, Trebuchet, etc. in Linux.

2: The web font's numbers look very slightly off in Linux, but since Linux is at most 1% of web users, and since the glitch is subtle, trying to fix it is not worth it for me.

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Thank you, Virginia

January 31, 2013

This is an email I sent out earlier today

Mark Obenshain, Ralph Smith, Jill Holtzman Vogel, and Jeff McWaters:

I would like to thank you four Virginia Senate Republicans for killing SB723 (allocate electoral votes by congressional district); while this bill would have benefited Republicans in last November's presidential election, it was, in my opinion, an unethical law that would preempt the democratic principle of "one person, one vote" that keeps our great republic together.

I believe a lot of Americans share fundamentally conservative principles: hard work, integrity, strong marriages and families, taking responsibility, and knowing there is no such thing as a free lunch. I am very pleased to see you all having the integrity to vote against SB723. Even though it probably makes it harder for the Republican party to secure the white house again in the short term, it benefits the Republican party in the long term because it shows how much integrity its members can have.

More information about this issue can be obtained in this link; note that Think Progress is an extreme-left-wing shill site and there are a lot of negative and bitter people who comment there.

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BuyVM: All is now good

January 24, 2013

Just a brief note that all is now well with BuyVM at Fiberhub. Everything now works, including the IPv6 pages. Indeed, things appear faster than they were when BuyVM was in San Jose; I can see why they moved.

As mentioned before, two of my nodes are now in Fiberhub, and, indeed, three days ago both of those nodes went down at the same time because of Fiberhub power issues.

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A brief look at systemd

January 21, 2013

In today's blog, I look at systemd, the program that will replace init in Red Hat and CentOS 7, from the point of view of a software developer.

The problem

UNIX's traditional way of starting daemons -- usually called "System V init" -- is something of a hack. SysVinit simply calls a bunch of shell scripts at system boot up time to start all of the processes.

This leaves process management to each program. MaraDNS, for example, has three different 100-line shell scripts to manage the starting and stopping of MaraDNS processes, and a nearly 300-line C program (duende) which handles making MaraDNS a UNIX daemon ("service" in Windows' parlance) and logging MaraDNS' messages.

Much to Nicholas Bamber's annoyance, the way daemons are managed on Red Hat/CentOS 6 (the system I develop MaraDNS on) is somewhat different than the way Debian (the system Nicholas ports MaraDNS to) handles processes, which makes the port more difficult than it should be.

SysVInit has other annoyances. For example, a single daemon that, for whatever reason, takes a while to start up will slow down the boot process for the entire system. Sendmail is notorious for sometimes taking minutes to start up; it's a very frustrating experience watching a system boot stall until Sendmail is finally running.

Some old solutions

Software developers have been coming up with different ways to move beyond the limitations of SysVInit. DJB developed daemontools, Python developers developed supervisord, I developed duende, and so on.

Pretty soon, a UNIX server can be running a number of different "daemonizing" programs that all do more or less the same thing: Starting, stopping, restarting, and logging processes.

This kind of fragmentation is a headache for system administrators, who now have to learn multiple ways of handling processes on their system. It also means that each "home grown" solution will not be as well-developed as a single unified solution. Duende, for example, only respawns a terminated process under certain circumstances which are hard-wired in its C source code.

systemd

This brings us to systemd. Systemd is a single unified daemon which replaces init on new Linux systems. It will allow me to replace 3 100-line shell scripts and a 300-line "daemonizing" program (which spawns three processes per daemon) with a single configuration file about a dozen lines long.

It replaces a menagerie of different daemonizers with a single clean, elegant, centrally maintained init replacement. It will make it easier for me to maintain MaraDNS, because I will be able to concentrate on the central daemon that processes DNS queries instead of worrying about how its daemonization is handled in a given Linux distribution.

Systemd is a much-needed step forward for Linux servers. I am glad Red Hat is making this transition.

IPv6 update

While my BuyVM node is now happily in Nevada, IPv6 doesn't route on this node yet. My web pages are currently only accessible on IPv4. I will keep readers updated. Update: IPv6 is good

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MaraDNS update

January 20, 2013

MaraDNS update

I have released MaraDNS 2.0.07. This release updates Deadwood to 3.2.03 and MaraDNS to run in any RedHat Enterprise Linux 6 clone. The supported OSes for MaraDNS are now any RHEL6 clone and Windows 7.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/2.0.07/

BuyVM is moving to Vegas

One of my providers, BuyVM, is moving its servers to Vegas right now. Because of this, I will not be able to update this node until it is online again. There is a small chance that people going to the MaraDNS web page will only see the outdated 2.0.06 download between the time the node goes online again and I update said node.

I understand BuyVM wants to get better download speeds from Fiberhub, but the move is a little annoying for me because I already have an AlienVPS node in Fiberhub. The issue is that entire colos can and do go down: The New York colo with one of my nodes went down when Hurricane Sandy hit the east coast.

Evening update: The BuyVM node is back up again and all files have been synchronized

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samiam.org on IPv6

January 6, 2013

With the inevitable transition to IPv6 looming, and with IPv6 support on my new BuyVM node, I am starting to add IPv6 support to my web pages.

Since IPv6 isn't quite as reliable as IPv4 today, and since most of my nodes do not have IPv6 yet, I am using the "ipv6" host name. For people who have IPv6, my web pages can be seen on IPv6 using the following URLs:

http://ipv6.samiam.org/
http://ipv6.samiam.org/blog/
http://ipv6.maradns.com/
http://ipv6.maradns.org/

Once I have more nodes with IPv6 support, I will add IPv6 IPs for the "www" and bare names.

Update: IPv6 update

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Minor Civ4 update

January 5, 2013

I have been starting to play Civilization 4 again and have made a minor update to Legends of Ancient Arabia:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=12124577&postcount=92

In addition, I have completed my transition from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6 on all of my servers. The only thing I have to update now for CentOS 6 is MaraDNS (Deadwood has already been updated in the 3.2.03 release).

Update: With MaraDNS' 2.0.07 release on January 20, I have completely phased out CentOS 5

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Finally, I have BuyVM

January 1, 2013

Last year, I complained that it was impossible to get a BuyVM node. Actually, it's not...I finally have one.

I didn't even have to try that hard to get it; I happened to visit doesbuyvmhavestock.com yesterday, saw they still had a few 128 megabyte nodes (only $15/year) available, and was able to easily purchase my new node.

They are out of stock again today, but the sign up page was not at all overloaded yesterday and purchasing a node was a perfectly smooth process.

I can see why this virtual machine provider is popular on WHT; the node I have is very snappy and responsive, and includes 16 IPv6 addresses in addition to its IPv4 address.

I chose to put CentOS 6 on this new node and spent the good part of today converting one of my other virtual machine nodes from CentOS 5 in to CentOS 6. One of my 2013 resolutions is to completely phase out CentOS 5; I have one more node to convert and plan to finish up the MaraDNS upgrade to CentOS 6.

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2012

All blog entries written in 2012

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2012 wrap-up

December 31, 2012

2012 has been a good year.

While I only devote one day a month to MaraDNS, I was able to update MaraDNS to be immune to the "ghost domain" security bug which hit every single DNS server (including djbdns) this year. I was also able to update Deadwood with a bunch of bug fixes as well as update it for CentOS/RHEL 6.

In addition, I finally purchased Civilization IV and made a number of contributions, most notably improvements to Cephalo's "Perfect World" map script. I also fixed some bugs and added some polish to the mostly forgotten "Legends of Ancient Arabia" Civ IV mod--it is now possible to play random maps with this mod.

In addition, Fritz made another release of the ObHack Doom random map generator this year

Looking ahead at 2013, now that Deadwood has been updated for CentOS 6, I plan on making a MaraDNS 2.0.07 release which updates the rest of MaraDNS for the most current RHEL release. This is my last planned OS update until 2017 (RHEL/CentOS 6 will be supported until 2020).

I am also starting to play Civilization IV again, and may have time to make some more contributions for this game. I am not promising anything.

Finally, I have decided to no longer use Facebook comments. Since Facebook doesn't allow me to approve postings before they become visible, the comments are spam magnets in waiting. People may email me if they have anything to say about any of my blog entries.

Happy 2013 everyone! I know it's going to be a fabulous year!

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MaraDNS 1.3 end-of-life

December 21, 2012

It may not be the end of the world today, but it is the end of MaraDNS 1.3.

Ever since 2009, when I released MaraDNS 1.4, I set the end of life day for MaraDNS 1.3 to be December 21, 2012. I have removed all downloads of MaraDNS 1.3 and no longer support this code branch. There is documentation available that tells people how to update from 1.3 to 1.4.

Keep in mind that MaraDNS 1.4 also has an end of life: June 21, 2015. The only 1.4 updates are security patches for bugs with a CVE number. I have no plans to stop supporting MaraDNS 2 at this time.

Also: I have closed comments on older blog entries; blog comments are a spam magnet if they stay open for too long.

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Deadwood 3.2.03 released

December 20, 2012

Deadwood has been updated. This is a bugfix-only release relative to Deadwood 3.2.02. The main change that will affect end-users is that Deadwood no longer uses the cache file if it's older than the dwood3rc file.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/stable/

Here is a full changelog:

Added a whole bunch of security validation to DwCompress.c (always make sure offsets are within bounds)

Deadwood now compiles with IPv6 support again

We now handle EasyDNS' bad truncation in a reasonable manner

Added new SQA test for es-us.noticias.yahoo.com issue in May/June 2012

Replaced "malloc" with "dw_malloc" wrapper (make it a little easier for embedded devs)

Updated INSTALL.txt (Windows 7; Deadwood's malloc use)

There is now a compile-time flag (-DSHOWPACKET) to see every single packet Deadwood receives (for debugging)

If /etc/deadwood is missing, we now tell them what the missing directory is

Made the underlying RNG a little faster and about 50 bytes smaller (I like keeping the Windows binary under 65,536 bytes in size)

Documented the difference between a string, numeric, and dictionary parameter

If the Deadwood cache file is older than the dwood3rc file, do not load the cache

SQA update: Netstat changed, breaking one of the SQA tests. These SQA tests have been updated to pass again (and should work when run against an older netstat)

SQA update: Sometimes the ttl ages one second, which made one of the tests sometimes fail.

OS Update: The supported OSes for Deadwood are now CentOS/RedHat 6 and Windows 7

Since it took a while to update things to get all of the SQA tests to pass, I am going to implement a policy to, every fourth month, not fix bugs or update documentation in Deadwood, but make sure that none of CentOS/RedHat 6's security updates have broken any of Deadwood's SQA tests. It would be nice if a routine security update did not say, as happened this time, change netstat's output, but it's very hard to force core system tools or the kernel not to change their behavior at all when the code is entirely open-source. Sometimes, you do get what you paid nothing for.

Speaking of open-source economics, I will not work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again until one day next month, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

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How many squares?

December 19, 2012

There's a puzzle making the rounds on social networks where one needs to count the squares in a geometric shape. The correct answer is 40.

However, whenever this puzzle appears on a social network, instead of having the conversation dominated by the correct answer, the conversation is dominated by a number of guesses, most of which are incorrect.

It's an interesting comment on Internet socal networks that incorrect information is so prevalent. Online communities have the same issue: When people become attached to an online community, pretty soon they believe the misconceptions said community has. This effect is often times called the "echo chamber" effect.

For example, I used to be an active member of a Linux-friendly community who frequently got upset that they did not have more commercial applications. One day, I had lunch with some professional software developers and they pointed out that they did not make more Linux software because there just was no money selling end-user software for Linux.

When I pointed this out to the online community I was a part of, the response was hostility and denial. The community had created a lie and did not want to see the truth. This experience taught me that online communities often times believe in lies.

For extremists who still believe the lie of mainstream commercial end-user software for Linux PCs: Please google "Loki Games". Or look at what happened to Corel in the early 2000s.

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Round-up

December 12, 2012

I discuss an ObHack update and the 2012 Wrex the Halls concert, as well as discussing today's date.

ObHack 007.4 released

ObHack is a random map generator for classic Doom

Fritz made a new ObHack release last week; I finally had a chance to upload it Monday and am now making a note in my blog about it. He has posted a changelog which describes what's new in this release; it's available for download at the usual place.

Wrex the Halls 2012

This last Friday, my wife and I went to a concert of the band "The Killers" which featured some eight different bands; we arrived a little late and saw the last five bands.

It was a very enjoyable concert. I am very happy that today young people are just as happy rocking out to synthesizer-centered music as to guitar-based music. The guitar-vs-synthesizer war is over, and electronic music in various forms is now completely mainstream.

Two of the opening acts: Passion Pit and M83, make very electronic music; my favorite song during the entire concert was M83's recent hit "Midnight City". The Killers, being the headliners, also had a very good set.

91X, the promoters of the concert, have put up a web page with pictures of all of the acts in the concert.

National Sound Check Day

Today's date is "12/12/12", and is the last "repeat three times" date for the 21st century. I like Geroge Takei's joke on Facebook that today is "National Sound Check Day"..."1-2-1-2-1-2" (as in "Testing testing 1 2 1 2 1 2" which people say when testing sound systems). My favorite "repeat three times" day has probably been 7/7/7, when I was at a small concert at a friend's house.

The picture

The picture included in today's blog represents a time in my life when I made a painful, but very important, positive transition in my life. I will sometimes put this picture in my blog to remind myself to make other positive transitions in my life.

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Blog meta-index

December 1, 2012

Today's blog is an index of previous blog entries.

Every now and then, I will discuss a given subject across multiple blog entries. While these entries are not numerous enough to merit a tag, they can be read together. Some of these are in ascending chronological order; others in descending order.

DjbDNS: djbdns 1.05: False security - The ghost domain bug - DNS security comparison - Finally, a CVE-2012-1911 patch

Religion and Fundamentalism: On Anne Frank - On rationalization - On fundamentalist reasoning - On my faith in God - Everyone has a soapbox - The Rapture - Final 2010 post; NIV update

Slashdot: Part one - Part two - Part three

SHA-3: Deadwood and SHA-3 - Keccak: The best choice - The case for 32-bit Skein - My first look at the SHA-3 candidates

2012 election predictions: Final election prediction - Saturday election prediction - Saturday election prediction - Friday election prediction - Saturday election prediction - Thursday election prediction - Wednesday election prediction - Tonight's election prediction - Predicting the election

2012 election commentary: George Orwell and the truth - Objective truth is going away - No more politics - Post-election thoughts - Obama: Looking forward

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Adios, Gopher

November 30, 2012

A few months ago, I put up a Gopher server. Today, I have shut down the Gopher server.

When my hard disk died while I was out of the country, I lost the files to update the Gopher files. Now that I have returned, while I can recover the files from backup, doing so will take a non-trivial amount of time which would better be used elsewhere.

The decision is also a philosophical one. The path to success and abundance is one looking forward, not backwards. Gopher has been a great protocol, but the 1990s are over and for me to have a prosperous 2010s, I need to live in the 2010s, not pretend it's 1994 again.

For visually impaired people, my web site and blog is fully accessible using Lynx or another text-based browser.

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Deadwood update

November 24, 2012

After adding a domain to blacklist to my Deadwood server and restarting the process, I discovered that Deadwood had a bug where it would sometimes give out a confusing error message if the cache file was older than the dwood3rc (configuration) file.

I fixed this problem by having Deadwood compare the timestamp for the dwood3rc file and the cache file; if the cache file is older than the dwood3rc file, Deadwood will now refuse to load the cache.

As it turns out, the interface for stat() that I use is identical in Windows and *NIX. Another thing: I now understand why *NIX fanatics hate it when you say that st_ctime is the creation time of the file: In Windows, st_ctime is, indeed, the file's creation time. However, in *NIX, it's the last time the inode (meta-information) for the file was changed.

Here's an interesting question: Does the file's st_ctime change if the files contents are changed, but no inode information is changed? Of course, since the file's size and atime is in the inode, then I would say st_ctime changes every time the file is changed. Indeed, since inode information is changed every time the file is accessed, I think it would make sense to change the st_ctime every time we change st_atime (the last time a file was accessed).

st_ctime really should have been the file creation time if you ask me. Windows, not *NIX, gets this right.

All of this, of course, is academic; Deadwood looks at st_mtime to verify the cache is newer than the dwood3rc file.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day in December, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

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Let's not secede

November 14, 2012

I agree with fundamental conservative principles: I agree that if we do not reward people for hard work, no one will do the hard work needed to keep our society prosperous. I agree in the importance of marriage to keep our society cohesive. I despise those on the left with an entitlement mentality who think it's OK to pirate intellectual property or to get something for nothing.

However, joining the rest of the 1st world and having universal health care will not all of a sudden make people want to stop working and live on welfare checks. Respecting gay rights does not mean that the institution of marriage is going to fall apart. Respecting all Americans, regardless of race, religion, and sexual orientation is fundamentally a very conservative position, and was the position of the Republican party before they made a deal with the devil and adopted the "Southern Strategy" which is now hitting them like a boomerang.

Right now, we have a right-of-center Democratic party and a Republican party who has been pandering to a downright fascist and scary group of people -- including all of the idiots who have decided "One nation under God INDIVISIBLE" doesn't mean anything and who think we should secede and have another civil war.

Anyone who voted for Romney or who has been a supporter of Romney should listen to his concession speech again. America faces great challenges. We have lost our sense of unity, our sense of working together to make the US a great nation. Republican or Democrat, Liberal or Conservative, white, black, Latino, Asian, gay or straight, we need to stop bickering with each other and come together united and work hard to keep America a great nation.

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Obama: Looking forward

November 7, 2012

As an Obama supporter, the last thing I want to do is gloat right now. I pray for the United States that instead of being resentful (Eph. 4:26), we can be loving (1 Cor 13) and that Democrats and Republicans can work together to reduce the debt and keep this nation strong and prosperous. Obama only won by 1% so the needs of people who didn't want him to win can not be ignored.

The message voters gave politicians in this election is that the politics of hate and bigotry and the politics of obstruction will no longer be tolerated. Pro-gay marriage laws won and anti-gay laws lost in four different states last night. Thinly disguised racism--Calling Obama a "Muslim" or claiming he can not legally be president because he's not "American" enough, or calling Latinos "Illegals"--no longer has any place in politics.

I'm really hoping Obama's victory will put a lot of the ugly resentment-based politics we've seen these last four years to rest, and that Republicans will start working with Democrats again to make America an even stronger and more prosperous nation.

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Post-election thoughts

November 6, 2012

As I write this, Romney is making his concession speech; I will discuss why I feel this is a very historic night.

The Southern Strategy

The civil rights act of the 1960s, which made it illegal to discriminate against someone for their skin color, fundamentally changed the demographic makeup of the Democratic and Republican party. To summarize a long history, the Republican started tailoring a message to appeal to racist white males, as just one part of a multi-honed strategy to get as many people in their "big tent", voting for them (other groups being religious conservatives and small-government supporters).

The strategy bore fruit starting in 1980 with Regan's defeat of Carter; by 1984, the Democrats lost by a landslide. The Democrats were only able to get the president's seat in the 1990s by having a southern white male with very conservative politics (such as NAFTA and repealing parts of the Glass-Steagall act) for their presidental candidate.

Getting universal health care and rights for gay people was unthinkable in the 1990s; Clinton tried but failed to get both.

The rise of Obama

I remember in the 1980s speculating with my mother whether we would first have a black president or a woman president. This question was finally answered in 2008, when Obama became president. Obama in the White House was the beginning of the end of the southern strategy and of pandering to racists to get more votes.

The reason why Obama was able to win can be summarized in one word: Demographics. In more detail, if only white males were allowed to vote, Obama would have lost by a landslide tonight. Obama won tonight because of the women's vote, and because of the minority vote. Tonight's election has shown, once and for all, that the southern strategy is dead: The White House is no longer won by pandering to bigots.

The future of the Republican party

The bottom line is this: Obama won only by the thinnest of margins. I think the Republican party can become relevant again by no longer pandering to racists and homophobes. There are many many fiscal conservative Americans out there, and a fiscally conservative person who supports gay rights and has no tolerance for prejudice against minorities is someone who definitely has a shot at the White House.

The fact that Romney was only about a percentage point behind Obama means that the wants and needs of mainstream Republicans--the many Republicans who are not bigots--can not be ignored.

How accurate were the predictions

I correctly predicted 50 out of 50 states two nights ago (Florida leans Obama but still hasn't been called as I type this), and predicted 48 out of 50 states two months ago. My prediction was based on Nate Silver's numbers; we both got all states correct this time.

The number of people who were wrong predicting who would win tonight, and why they were so wrong really deserve their own blog entry. Hopefully I'll have time to write that blog sometime soon.

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Final election prediction

November 4, 2012

Since Nate's numbers are looking better and better for Obama every day, with only two days until the election, here's my final prediction, based on Nate Silver's model:

http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/custom-presidential-election-map#njavdnjannaajenae

http://samiam.org/images/Final-2012-election-prediction-20121104.png

For people who do not look at this map, I am predicting that Obama will win with either 303 or 332 electoral votes, depending on whether Florida goes to Obama or to Romney. If Romney gets either Virginia or Colorado, he will have a better night than I predict he will have--but, without all of Florida, Virginia, Colorado, and Ohio, he can not win the election on Tuesday. (To be pedantic, there are other much less likely paths to victory for Romney; he could, say, get Pennsylvania but not North Carolina, but results like that are really unlikely)

As it turns out, back in early September, I predicted an almost identical result:

http://www.270towin.com/2012_election_predictions.php?mapid=vkb

That map is identical to my prediction today, except I predicted Romney will get Florida on Tuesday, as well as predicting Romney getting Iowa.

As an aside, this is how things looked back in 2004. Like today, there was one state up in the air--but, unlike today, that state (Ohio) determined the election:

http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/custom-presidential-election-map#nkamdnjannbljenje

This concludes my series of presidential elections predictions. I will not comment on politics again until after the presidential election is decided.

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Saturday election prediction

November 3, 2012

With only three days until the election, here's my prediction, again based on Nate Silver's model.

No correlation between states

Assuming there is no correlation between the states, we get the following numbers. In other words, I am assuming that Obama getting Ohio does not affect his chances of getting Florida, and vice-versa.

 Romney  2.648% Tie      .203% Obama  97.149%

With these numbers, unless Obama is caught in bed with another woman between now and Tuesday (my birthday guys; I request, for my birthday this year, for everyone who is a US citizen to vote), he will win the presidency.

How Romney could win

Here is Romney's most likely path to victory:

http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/custom-presidential-election-map#nkamdnjannabjenje

As we can see, of the 10 swing states in play (Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin), Romney best chance of winning is to get the following five: Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia; with the possible exception of New Hampshire, these are the easiest five for Romney to get...and he has to get all of them to get the White House. (Correction: If Romney doesn't get Colorado, he can still win by getting New Hampshire)

Let's look at Romney's chances of getting each of these states, as per Nate Silver's numbers:

 Colorado    32.1% Florida     54.8% N. Carolina 79.6% Ohio        16.2% Virginia    33.0%

As we can see, North Carolina will probably go for Romney; Florida is now essentially a flip of the coin (50% chance of going either way), albeit one that still slightly favors Romney, Colorado and Virginia are sliding out of reach (they were both a flip of the coin on October 15th, until Obama started to bounce back from his post-first-debate slump), and Ohio is, at best, a long shot.

For Romney to win at this point, he will have to pick up all five of these states. North Carolina (he probably will) and Florida (which has been favoring Romney, but may still go for Obama) are the easiest of these states for Romney to get. Colorado and Virginia can go either way. For Romney to get Colorado, he has to energize the conservative voters in Colorado Springs and other areas to go out and vote this coming Tuesday (again, my birthday). Likewise in Virginia.

Even if Romney gets all of North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado, he still has to get Ohio to win the election. This is where things get really hairy for Romney. Romney did oppose Obama's auto bailout which saved the economy in Ohio, and it's going to be very difficult for him to get enough people to vote for him there.

If Romney fails to get any of these five states, he has very few paths to victory. My model shows that, without Ohio, Romney only has a 0.8% chance of winning the election; without both Florida and Virginia, he only has a 0.7% chance of winning this Tuesday. Colorado has fewer electoral votes; without it Romney has only a 1.7% chance of victory.

Right now, I would much rather be in Obama's shoes than in Romney's position.

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Deadwood and SHA-3

November 2, 2012

In today's blog, I discuss the possibility of updating Deadwood's underlying cryptographic primitive, as well as post an updated election prediction.

What I chose

Back in 2007, when I began working on Deadwood, the only real interesting algorithm for me was an oddball cryptographic primitive called "Radio Gatun" (RadioGatun[32], which I also call RG32, to be exact). This primitive not only generates a secure stream of pseudo-random numbers, but also "compresses" entropy from a variety of sources. All in under two kilobytes of code.

In 2007, RG32 was the best cryptographic primitive to use for Deadwood's random number generator. But things started changing in 2008.

SHA-3

My favorite SHA-3 candidate has always been Radio Gatun's direct successor, Keccak. Back in 2008, I wrote that "Keccak looks promising":

http://samiam.org/blog/old-20081217-rg32.html

By 2010, as I pointed out yesterday, my praise for Keccak became less guarded:

If I were to use one of the SHA-3 submissions for Deadwood’s PRNG, I would use Keccak. Like Skein, it can output a stream of infinite length from any input of any length. Unlike Skein, it is more 32-bit compatible; not only is there a 32-bit “reduced word length” variant officially blessed by the algorithm’s creators, but also 64-bit Keccak more easily scales down to 32-bits than Skein, since the only operations done are permutes, rotates, and exclusive ORs.

http://samiam.org/blog/old-20100912-openwrt.html

Now that Keccak has won and is now SHA-3, it's time to seriously consider upgrading. The main advantage of Keccak over RG32 is that, now that it is the new hashing standard, cryptographic researchers will concentrate on finding weaknesses in it. In addition, it is more flexible in a lot of ways than RG32--it is possible, for example, to simply increase the rounds (or, likewise, increase its "capacity") should any weakness be found in it.

Making the transition

Since I only actively develop MaraDNS and/or Deadwood one day each month, it is going to take me a while to get around to updating Deadwood's cryptographic primitive. Since RG32 is the direct ancestor to SHA-3, it should be a secure stream cipher (and probably a secure hash [1]) for the foreseeable future.

In addition to the time needed to implement SHA-3 as Deadwood's random number generator, another factor is an ascetic one: Right now, Deadwood's Windows binary is 65,024 bytes in size. I want to keep it under 65,536 bytes in size for as long as I can. Since Keccak is somewhat more complicated than RG32, changing the cryptographic primitive will probably finally make Deadwood over 65,536 bytes in size once and for all.

Like making sure Deadwood works in IPv6, this is a low-priority "wish list" feature, but one I hope to have time to eventually implement.

Updated election prediction

With only four days to go until my birthday and the presidental election, here is my updated prediction, again based on Nate Silver's model:

 Overall Romney    3.72% Tie       0.27% Obama    96.01%  Obama gets OH Romney    1.11% Tie       0.13% Obama    98.76% Romney gets OH Romney   14.28% Tie       0.86% Obama    84.86% Obama gets FL Romney    0.05% Tie       0.00% Obama    99.94% Romney gets FL Romney    6.67% Tie       0.49% Obama    92.84% Obama gets VA Romney    1.42% Tie       0.24% Obama    98.35% Romney gets VA Romney    8.21% Tie       0.34% Obama    91.45% Romney gets FL and VA Romney   14.75% Tie       0.62% Obama    84.63% Obama gets FL and/or VA Romney    1.18% Tie       0.19% Obama    98.63%  Obama EVs 240-249   0.2% 250-259   0.9% 260-269   2.9% 270-279   7.6% 280-289  13.6% 290-299  19.8% 300-309  16.9% 310-319  15.8% 320-329  11.0% 330-339   8.4% 340-349   2.7% 350-359   0.1%

Footnote

[1] RadioGatun's predecessor, Panama, has been around for over a decade and, while broken as a hash function, is still a secure stream cipher. While there have been some cryptographic analysis of RadioGatun, and while one of RadioGatun's designer admits that "experiments did not inspire confidence in RadioGatun", resulting in fairly significant tweaks between RG32 and SHA-3, there is no attack, theoretical or otherwise, against unmodified RG32 better than 2 ^ 352. It is my personal opinion that RG32 will probably always be secure enough to make a 512-bit hash (2 ^ 256 collision, 2 ^ 512 preimage), and will almost certainly always be secure enough for a 256-bit hash (2 ^ 128 collision, 2 ^ 256 preimage). I also understand that its low algebraic degree puts "hairline cracks" in its design; its direct successor SHA-3 is probably better for new deployments of a secure cryptographic hash and/or stream cipher.

If anyone knows of an attack against RG32 better than 2 ^ 352, please email me.

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Keccak: The best choice

November 1, 2012

In today's blog, I discuss the Keccak hash, and why it was the best choice for SHA-3.

A brief history of SHA-3

In late 2008, all of the SHA-3 candidates were released. There were a large number of them; two of the four I liked the most became finalists: Keccak and Skein (the other two, LUX and MeshHash, unfortunately had security problems).

As the SHA-3 process went on, I became more attached to Keccak over Skein. Not only is Keccak the direct successor to RadioGatun, the algorithm Deadwood uses for secure random numbers, but also Skein runs like a dog on anything besides a 64-bit CPU.

Indeed, back in 2010, I expressed my preference for Keccak over Skein:

If I were to use one of the SHA-3 submissions for Deadwood’s PRNG, I would use Keccak. Like Skein, it can output a stream of infinite length from any input of any length. Unlike Skein, it is more 32-bit compatible; not only is there a 32-bit “reduced word length” variant officially blessed by the algorithm’s creators, but also 64-bit Keccak more easily scales down to 32-bits than Skein, since the only operations done are permutes, rotates, and exclusive ORs.

Keccak is the fastest SHA-3 finalist

As the SHA-3 process was approaching a close, the consensus on the mailing list was that none of the SHA-3 finalists was significantly faster than SHA-2. And, indeed, in software SHA-2 has better performance than all of the SHA-3 finalists (yes, Skein is faster on 64-bit systems, but it is a dog on anything else).

When the SHA-3 process was started, there were fears that SHA-2 would fall just like MD5 fell. Fortunately, no significant cryptographic attacks have been mounted against SHA-2. Coupled with the fact that none of the SHA-3 finalists have significantly better software performance than SHA-2, it was logical to choose the one algorithm which is head and shoulders faster than SHA-2 in hardware: Keccak.

While some of other SHA-3 finalists have better software performance than Keccak (Blake is remarkably fast, for example), Keccak still has good software performance. Until dedicated instructions for Keccak are added to CPUs, a sure thing in light of the widespread AES instruction support, applications where software performance is critical can continue to use SHA-2.

Since none of the SHA-3 finalists had better hardware and software performance than SHA-2, it made sense to choose the one algorithm that runs far better on dedicated hardware.

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Deadwood update

October 28, 2012

Deadwood update

In today's update of Deadwood, MaraDNS' recursive resolver:

Updated doc: Made clear the difference between string and numeric parameters; made clear that string parameters are in quotes and that numeric parameters do not have quotes.

"Dogfood" testing to make sure "Deadwood stops" bug is unreproducible. Looks pretty stable to me; here is a Deadwood process I've been processing a lot of my internet DNS queries with:

 $ ps auxw |  grep Deadwood | grep -v grep root   32431 0.0 0.0 1736  188 ? S Jul21 0:00 duende Deadwood nobody 32432 0.0 0.7 2820 1616 ? S Jul21 7:50 Deadwood 66     32433 0.0 0.1 1740  372 ? S Jul21 0:00 duende Deadwood

This process has been running for over four months.

Replaced malloc() in DwSocket.c and DwStr.c with dw_malloc() (which is just a #define back to malloc(), but using the macro makes it a little easier for embedded developers on ultra-tiny systems)

Made DwRadioGatun slightly smaller. I like keeping the Deadwood win32 binary 65,536 bytes in size or smaller; in making a "golf code" version of RadioGatun[32] (RG32), I found some optimizations that make Deadwood's RG32's library a little smaller and faster.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day next month, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

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Saturday election prediction

October 27, 2012

In today's prediction, I am using Nate Silver's numbers from yesterday which can be seen at 538.vk.tj to see how likely each candidate is to win, and by how many electoral votes.

To make these numbers, I ran 100,000 simulated presidential votes; this is a type of simulation called a "Monte Carlo" simulation.

No correlation between states

Assuming there is no correlation between the states, we get the following numbers. In other words, I am assuming that Obama getting Ohio does not affect his chances of getting Florida, and vice-versa.

 Overall Romney    8.86% Tie       0.64% Obama    90.50%

These numbers are show a considerable bounce for Obama compared to my last numbers.

By state

In these numbers, I have determined a given candidate's chances of winning based on them winning or losing a given state.

 Obama gets OH Romney    3.46% Tie       0.43% Obama    96.11% Romney gets OH Romney   26.40% Tie       1.31% Obama    72.29% Obama gets FL Romney    0.28% Tie       0.03% Obama    99.70% Romney gets FL Romney   13.88% Tie       1.00% Obama    85.12% Obama gets VA Romney    3.46% Tie       0.55% Obama    95.99% Romney gets VA Romney   15.27% Tie       0.75% Obama    83.98% Romney gets FL and VA Romney   23.85% Tie       1.17% Obama    74.99% Obama gets FL and/or VA Romney    2.78% Tie       0.43% Obama    96.80%

In the above blog, we look at the election probabilities based on various conditions. For example, if Obama wins Ohio, Romney has only a 3.46% chance of winning the election.

By electoral vote

Here are the chances of the incumbent (Obama) getting a certain number of electoral votes (EVs):

 Obama EV 230-239   0.2% 240-249   0.6% 250-259   2.6% 260-269   6.0% 270-279  12.3% 280-289  17.8% 290-299  19.9% 300-309  14.8% 310-319  12.7% 320-329   7.5% 330-339   4.2% 340-349   1.2% 350-359   0.1%  Mean   295.5 Median 294

"Mean" is adding up all of the possible EVs together and dividing by 100,000. Median is sorting by the number of electoral votes and choosing the middle one.

Alternate point of view

In contrast to this prediction, Dan McLaughlin thinks "Obama is toast".

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Friday election prediction

October 26, 2012

In tonight's prediction, I am using Nate Silver's numbers from yesterday which can be seen at 538.vk.tj to see how likely each candidate is to win, and by how many electoral votes.

To make these numbers, I ran 100,000 simulated presidential votes; this is a type of simulation called a "Monte Carlo" simulation.

No correlation between states

Assuming there is no correlation between the states, we get the following numbers. In other words, I am assuming that Obama getting Ohio does not affect his chances of getting Florida, and vice-versa.

 Overall Romney 13.4% Tie      .9% Obama  85.7%

These numbers are similar to my last numbers.

By state

In these numbers, I have determined a given candidate's chances of winning based on them winning or losing a given state.

 Obama gets OH Romney   5.85% Tie      0.65% Obama    93.50% Romney gets OH Romney   34.20% Tie      1.47% Obama    64.33% Obama gets FL Romney   0.52% Tie      0.08% Obama    99.40% Romney gets FL Romney   19.55% Tie      1.24% Obama    79.21% Obama gets VA Romney   6.08% Tie      0.79% Obama    93.13% Romney gets VA Romney   21.67% Tie      0.96% Obama    77.37% Romney gets FL and VA Romney   31.54% Tie      1.36% Obama    67.10% Obama gets FL and/or VA Romney   4.95% Tie      0.63% Obama    94.42%

In the above blog, we look at the election probabilities based on various conditions. For example, if Obama wins Ohio, Romney has only a 5.85% chance of winning the election.

By electoral vote

Here are the chances of the incumbent (Obama) getting a certain number of electoral votes (EVs):

 Obama EV 220-229   0.1% 230-239   0.3% 240-249   1.3% 250-259   4.1% 260-269   8.4% 270-279  15.2% 280-289  19.5% 290-299  19.2% 300-309  12.9% 310-319  10.1% 320-329   5.6% 330-339   2.6% 340-349   0.6%  Mean   290.7 Median 290

"Mean" is adding up all of the possible EVs together and dividing by 100,000. Median is sorting by the number of electoral votes and choosing the middle one.

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Saturday election prediction

October 20, 2012

In tonight's prediction, I am using Nate Silver's numbers from yesterday which can be seen at 538.vk.tj to see how likely each candidate is to win, and by how many electoral votes.

To make these numbers, I ran 100,000 simulated presidential votes; this is a type of simulation called a "Monte Carlo" simulation.

No correlation between states

Assuming there is no correlation between the states, we get the following numbers. In other words, I am assuming that Obama getting Ohio does not affect his chances of getting Florida, and vice-versa.

 Overall Romney 13.6% Tie      .8% Obama  85.6%

These numbers more favor Obama than Wednesday's numbers; it appears he is getting a post-second-debate bounce.

By state

In these numbers, I have determined a given candidate's chances of winning based on them winning or losing a given state.

 Obama gets OH Romney   6.02% Tie      0.56% Obama    93.42% Romney gets OH Romney   32.85% Tie      1.55% Obama    65.60%  Obama gets FL Romney   0.70% Tie      0.10% Obama    99.20% Romney gets FL Romney   20.99% Tie      1.26% Obama    77.74%  Obama gets CO Romney   9.72% Tie      0.76% Obama    89.51% Romney gets CO Romney   18.68% Tie      0.93% Obama    80.39%  Obama gets NH Romney   12.06% Tie      0.93% Obama    87.01% Romney gets NH Romney   17.27% Tie      0.60% Obama    82.13%

In the above blog, we look at the election probabilities based on various conditions. For example, if Obama wins Ohio, Romney has only a 6.02% chance of winning the election.

By electoral vote

Here are the chances of the incumbent (Obama) getting a certain number of electoral votes (EVs):

 Obama EV 220-229    .1% 230-239    .4% 240-249   1.4% 250-259   4.1% 260-269   8.4% 270-279  14.2% 280-289  18.3% 290-299  18.3% 300-309  13.6% 310-319  11.2% 320-329   6.1% 330-339   3.0% 340-349    .7%  Mean   291.6 Median 290

"Mean" is adding up all of the possible EVs together and dividing by 100,000. Median is sorting by the number of electoral votes and choosing the middle one.

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Thursday election prediction

October 18, 2012

In tonight's prediction, I am using NerdWallet's numbers from today. This is otherwise very similar to yesterday's blog.

No correlation between states

Assuming there is no correlation between the states, NerdWallet gives the following numbers. In other words, I am assuming that Obama getting Ohio does not affect his chances of getting Florida, and vice-versa.

 Overall Romney   32.4% Tie       1.2% Obama    66.4%

The big three: Florida, Virginia, and Ohio

I have looked at how Romney's victory or loss in these three states affects the election results based on Nerd Wallet's numbers:

 Obama gets OH Romney   20.88% Tie      0.73% Obama    78.38% Romney gets OH Romney   50.52% Tie      1.98% Obama    47.50%  Obama gets FL Romney   6.23% Tie      0.74% Obama    93.04% Romney gets FL Romney   46.91% Tie      1.46% Obama    51.63%

As before, there are few paths to victory for Romney if Obama gets Florida. Romney's chances decrease by over 10% if Obama gets either Ohio or Virginia.

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Wednesday election prediction

October 17, 2012

In tonight's prediction, I am using Nate Silver's numbers from yesterday (they appear to be pre-debate; Nate hasn't updated his numbers yet) which can be seen at 538.vk.tj to see how likely each candidate is to win, using two different models.

No correlation between states

Assuming there is no correlation between the states, we get the following numbers. In other words, I am assuming that Obama getting Ohio does not affect his chances of getting Florida, and vice-versa. Indeed, as recently as 2000, Bush fairly easily won Ohio but won Florida by a much narrower margin.

 Overall Romney   19.48% Tie       1.32% Obama    79.21%

The big three: Florida, Virginia, and Ohio

The three key swing states are Florida, Virginia, and Ohio. That in mind, I have looked at how Romney's victory or loss in these three states affects the election results. To summarize:

 Obama gets OH Romney    9.47% Tie       1.10% Obama    89.42% Romney gets OH Romney   40.56% Tie       1.77% Obama    57.68%  Obama gets FL Romney    1.40% Tie       0.22% Obama    98.38% Romney gets FL Romney   28.77% Tie       1.88% Obama    69.35%

In the above blog, we look at the election probabilities based on various conditions. For example, if Obama wins Ohio, Romney has only a 9.47% chance of winning the election.

As per yesterday's blog, if Obama gets Florida, there are very few paths to victory for Romney. A friend of mine who lives in Florida told me that Romney supporters are very busy putting up signs down there -- and with good reason.

Despite the low chances, my simulation today found some 263 unique paths to victory for Romney if Obama wins Florida. Most of them (178) give Romney under 280 electoral votes. Here is one 270-electoral vote victory for Romney where Obama gets Florida:

http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/custom-presidential-election-map#nkaddnjannjbkenje

Correlate the states

If one clicks and looks at the above map, it is apparent that the model assumes that there is no correlation between the states. Since Nate's model gives Romney a 9% chance of winning Pennsylvania, it is possible to have a scenario in this model where Romney has Pennsylvania while Obama wins Florida.

Realistically, Pennsylvania is more liberal-leaning than Florida, and, if Obama wins Florida, it's really unlikely he will lose Pennsylvania to Romney. The political climate of the nation as a whole affects how the candidates will do in a given state. Since Florida leans more to the right than Pennsylvania, Obama would probably win Florida after already securing enough other key battleground states to win the election.

This in mind, I ran another model against Nate's numbers: What happens if we have full correlation between the states. In other words, I used a model where Obama gets all of the states with more than a (for example) 50% chance to vote Obama on November 6 (my birthday, guys). I ran this model with all 1000 possibilities from 0% to 100%.

In this model, using Nate's numbers, Obama has a 62.7% chance of winning the election. In other words, if Obama gets all of the states that he currently has a 62.7% chance or higher of getting, he will win the election. The key state right now is, of all places, Iowa.

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Tonight's election prediction

October 16, 2012

I am using Huffpost's numbers for today (pre-debate) for tonight's election prediction. These numbers much more strongly favor Obama than either of the two other numbers I am using. Simon Jackman has an article that explains the model used to make these numbers.

My simulation with Huffpost's numbers

Using a strong random number generator (described in yesterday's blog), I simulated the presidential election 100,000 times. The simulated results for today's Huffpost numbers are as follows:

 Chance of winning election Obama  96.7% Romney  3.2% Tie     0.2%

By State

Here are some raw numbers showing how much influence a given state has on the election results. What I have done is look at all of the cases in the model where a given state is won by a given candidate, and compare how winning or losing the states affects their chances of being in the White House next year this time:

 Obama gets CO Romney   1.72988% Tie      0.10658% Obama    98.1635% Romney gets CO Romney   5.41102% Tie      0.225566% Obama    94.3634%  Obama gets FL Romney   0.00313372% Obama    99.9969% Romney gets FL Romney   4.64833% Tie      0.224706% Obama    95.127%  Obama gets NH Romney   2.34891% Tie      0.153086% Obama    97.498% Romney gets NH Romney   4.54009% Tie      0.152856% Obama    95.3071%  Obama gets NV Romney   2.49987% Tie      0.118921% Obama    97.3812% Romney gets NV Romney   5.67856% Tie      0.281542% Obama    94.0399%  Obama gets OH Romney   0.894281% Tie      0.100098% Obama    99.0056% Romney gets OH Romney   25.8884% Tie      0.682143% Obama    73.4294%

The most interesting thing for me is that the model has only one path to victory for Romney if Obama is able to get Florida. I have made a map of Romney's one and only 1-in-100,000 (according to Huffpost) path to victory for Romney without Florida, which can be seen here:

http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2012/custom-presidential-election-map#nkadmnjannjkjenjn

Then again, Huffpost's model says that Obama right now only has a 32% chance of getting Florida (Nate Silver and Nerd Wallet give Obama a slightly higher chance of getting Florida, but they both give Obama a lower chance of winning the election).

A note on the random number generator

The random number generator rolls a 1000-sided dice by grabbing two bytes from RadioGatun[32]'s bitstream. This gives us a number between 0 and 65535; should the number be 65000 or higher, the program discards the roll and tries again.

Once it gets a good roll, it takes the low three digits of the random number to get a number between 0 and 999. For example, if the number is 45,737, the program uses the number "737" for the dice roll. If Obama's chance-in-1000 of getting a state is lower than the roll, Obama gets the state, otherwise Romney gets it. Using the 737 example and Florida, since Obama has a 32% chance at Florida in Huffpost's model, Obama won't get Florida since he needs a 319 or lower to get it.

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Predicting the election

October 15, 2012

I am discussing politics again. As per my previous promise, I will not waste my readers' time with my personal opinions. Instead, I am looking at a couple of models of the election and predicting the winner.

Finding a model to use for the vote

Right now, Nate Silver at 538.vk.tj is saying Obama has about a 66% chance of winning. This comes from, admittedly, a left-leaning source, so take that number with as much (or little) salt as needed -- if anyone knows of a more right-leaning source with state-by-state win prediction percentages, I will gladly run a simulation with their numbers. (Update Nerd wallet uses the same methodology as I do, and Obama shows a 67.4% chance of winning when I run their numbers).

What I have done is write down the chance of Obama or Romney getting a given state from his state-by-state numbers and then ran a simulation which assumes a given state going for a candidate does not affect the other states.

In more detail, using a strong random number generator (details below), I rolled a 1000-sided dice for each state and/or district with electoral votes. In this model, for example, Florida has a 63.3% percent chance of voting for Romney, so if the dice rolled a 367 or higher, I gave the state to Romney; otherwise I gave it to Obama.

I did this for all states and districts 100,000 times. The results were as follows:

 Obama  81.9% Romney 16.8% Tie     1.3%

I wonder why Nate is getting a 66.6% chance for Obama from the same numbers; perhaps he is coupling results more than I have (for example, if Romney gets Iowa in a given simulation, Nate probably lowers Obama's chances of getting Florida).

As an aisde, I also ran this simulation against some more liberal numbers from Huffpost; their numbers give Obama a 98.1% chance of winning.

New Hampshire

While New Hampshire has only four electoral votes, it is still a very key swing state. Right now, Nate's model gives New Hampshire a 71.4% chance of going for Obama (which is higher than electoral-vote.com, which currently says that Romney has a 2% lead in this state).

What I have done is go through the results of my 100,000 run simulation and compared the chances of winning depending on how New Hampshire goes. Here are my results:

Obama wins New Hampshire
Obama wins election    83.5%
Electoral vote tie      1.4%
Romney wins election   15.1%

Romney wins New Hampshire
Obama wins election    77.9%
Electoral vote tie      1.0%
Romney wins election   21.1%

While New Hampshire has under 1% of the electoral votes in the nation, its influence on the election results, according to my model (loosely based on Nate's model) is 6%.

In summary: Voters in New Hampshire are best off getting out and voting, and voting for one of the two main candidates this election cycle. (Update The Nerd wallet numbers show a nearly identical 6% effect on the outcome).

The random number generator

The random number generator I am using is something oddball called RadioGatun. While RadioGatun is rather obscure, its direct successor, Keccak, just won the SHA-3 competition. This is a very good number generator for using with this kind of simulation; I ran a bunch of statistical tests against it a couple of years ago and it passes with flying colors.

For the record, here is the source code to the core of the random number generator:

 /* Public domain crypto-strong random number generator; no warranty */ #include <stdint.h> #define rgp uint32_t #define rgf(a) for(c=0;c<a;c++) #define rgn rgf(3){w[c*13]^=s[c];u[16+c]^=s[c];}rgk(u,w); void rgk(rgp *a,rgp *b){rgp A[19],x,m=19,o=13,c,y,r=0,q[3],i=o;rgf(3){q [c]=b[c*o+12];}for(;--i;){rgf(3){b[c*o+i]=b[c*o+i-1];}}rgf(3){b[c*o]=q[ c];}rgf(12){i=c+1+(c%3*o);b[i]^=a[c+1];}rgf(m){y=(c*7)%m;r+=c;r%=32;x=a [y]^(a[(y+1)%m]|(~a[(y+2)%m]));A[c]=x>>r|x<<(32-r);}rgf(m){a[c]=A[c]^A[ (c+1)%m]^A[(c+4)%m];}a[0]^=1;rgf(3){a[c+o]^=q[c];}}void rgl(rgp *u, rgp *w,char *v){rgp s[3],q,c,r,x,d=0;rgf(19){u[c]=0;}rgf(39){w[c]=0;}for(;; ){rgf(3){s[c]=0;}for(r=0;r<3;++r){for(q=0;q<32;q+=8){*v?x=*v++:(d=x=1); s[r]|=x<<q;if(d){rgn;rgf(16){rgk(u,w);}return;}}}rgn;}}rgp rgi(rgp *m, rgp *b){static int a=2;a&2?rgk(m,b):0;a^=3;return m[a];}

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Why use MaraDNS?

October 6, 2012

I had a friend of mine recently ask me why MaraDNS is a DNS server worth using. I gave him this reply.

MaraDNS is a good solution where you need a currently supported cross-platform recursive DNS server with a small binary footprint (under 64k!) and a relatively small memory footprint (about 2-4 megs with the default settings). As an authoritative server, MaraDNS is a good solution if you have relatively few reasonably static domains (IPs don't change very often) and need a DNS server that very quickly fetches records from memory.

MaraDNS makes a lot of sense on low-end low-cost servers (where any file open or fork() is dog-slow) and on systems where the DNS server is best small. MaraDNS also can make sense for embedded systems (OpenWRT, etc.), but keep in mind that its constant malloc()s and free()s of memory is not ideal with some low-end embedded toolkits.

MaraDNS as an authoritative server is a mature product with over a decade of real-world use. Deadwood, the newer recursive server, is younger: It has existed in some form for five years but has only been fully recursive for two; it has had a fair amount of testing in that time frame.

MaraDNS doesn't make sense if you need DNSSEC, full zone transfers, EDNS, or other newer DNS features. MaraDNS doesn't make sense if you need a server that developers are still adding features to: It is a mature and, barring a large inflow of cash or another open-source developer willing to step up to plate, a finished product.

Deadwood turned five yesterday

I just realized that Deadwood turned five yesterday; it now has been over five years since the groundbreaking of the Deadwood project. The reason I started the project is because I wrote MaraDNS' original code too quickly and without knowing all of the corner cases to handle correctly in order to resolve most names on the Internet.

The result of both having to add a bunch of features to handle corner cases in MaraDNS' code and trying to get a working recursive DNS server out there quickly was guacamole code. The code was messy and nigh-to-unmaintainable by the time I was done -- Franky and I spent months chasing down all of the memory leaks before making the 1.0 release over a decade ago.

My plan was always to make a "prototype" recursive DNS server so I could fully understand how DNS works before making the real recursive server. This is why MaraDNS 1.0 used threads: It made implementing recursion that much easier.

Deadwood, MaraDNS 2.0's recursive resolver, is a project I probably should have started 10 instead of five years ago. If everything had been on schedule, it would have taken me about 18 months, not three years, to get the 1.0 release out the door after I started Deadwood. We could have had MaraDNS 2.0 in 2004.

That didn't happen because of open source economics: Since no one was paying me to write this software, I just did not have the motivation to develop it more quickly. Indeed, the only reason I finished up Deadwood's recursion was because I made a promise to myself to have new recursive code out the door before putting MaraDNS on the back burner.

Making MaraDNS and Deadwood has been a lot of fun. It would be wonderful to be in an economic position to be able to actively develop open source again.

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Why is Git still using SHA-1

October 4, 2012

Back in 2008, Dancho Danchev praised MaraDNS, my DNS implementation, for being secure. At the time, there was a nasty attack against DNS implementations making the rounds. MaraDNS was immune because, back in 2001, I listened to what DJB had to say.

DJB has just posted the following on the SHA-3 mailing list:

the details of the original MD5 collision attack turned out to be a terrifying indictment of the structure of MD5, and the details of the SHA-1 attack are similarly scary

An anonymous poster on Slashdot posted back in 2009 a plausible attack scenario with Git using collisions in SHA-1. There was also some mumbling in the blogosphere back then for GIT to update its underlying cryptographic primitive.

The bottom line is this: It is high time for Git to move on beyond SHA-1. Ideally, Git should store hashes in an "algorithm:hash" format, and support all four variants of both SHA-2 and now SHA-3.

The above picture contains an image from the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Ménage à Troi", copyright 1990 CBS Studios. I believe this use of the image qualifies as fair use, since it is only a very low-resolution single frame, and its use does not harm (indeed it may even help) the market for the original work.

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Slashdot: A final look

September 29, 2012

In today's blog, I wrap my series on Slashdot which I have written about in two previous blog entries.

The decline of Slashdot

Once upon a time, famous people posted to Slashdot. John Carmack and Wil Wheaton, to name just two, were regular posters there.

No longer. Carmack hasn't posted anything to Slashdot for over four years; Wheaton has only posted a single journal to Slashdot in the last three years.

I have already mentioned that one reason for Slashdot's decline is that it started catering to the immature pro-piracy crowd. There are a number of other reasons why Slashdot became less appealing:

The flame wars. Just like Usenet, once Slashdot starting getting popular, it attracted the kinds of Internet loudmouths that make an online community unpleasant for everyone else.

Beating the dead horse of Linux vs. Windows on the desktop. The Slashdot editors never let go of the 1990s Linux vs. Windows on the desktop war which Microsoft won in 2002. To sound like a cynical Slashdot poster: 1997 called and wants their "Micro$oft Windoze sucks" post back.

Becoming more political. Slashdot started off concentrating on the Linux-vs-Windows desktop war and cool little geek projects (making a computer case that looks like an old Atari 800, etc.) Over the years Slashdot focused less on "News for Nerds" and slowing became more and more a ticker for news stories I already saw on other websites a day or two before it made Slashdot; more and more political stories started to get posted on Slashdot.

For a website that makes money from page views and ad clicks, it makes a lot of sense to post an inflammatory political article and watch the inevitable flame war start. But that was not good for Slashdot's community.

These factors, among others, have contributed to Slashdot's slow decline.

Moving on

Some geeks have decided that Slashdot's problems could be resolved by going to a different geek-friendly web site. The progression usually has been like this:

Slashdot was one of the first web-based geek friendly online communities.

Some people went from Slashdot to Kuro5hin. Kuro5hin's problem is that it ended up requiring people to pay to be able to post there, which is a big no-no among the "freetard" geeks who think everything on the Internet should be free. It ended up getting taken over by the kind of demented "trolls" who used to plague Slashdot with Goatse pics and who say stuff they don't really believe just to get negative attention. It's a stagnant community; the last article to make front page is from nearly half a year ago.

People then moved from Slashdot (or possibly Kuro5hin) to Digg. Digg suffered from the "disagree, down-vote" problem for a long time before the site revamped their comment system.

People then moved from Digg to Reddit. I have never been an active member of this community, so I can not comment on how good this site is, but it appears to appeal to a more immature user base than Slashdot or Digg ever did.

People then supposedly moved from Reddit to Hacker News. Again, I have not had a chance to fully evaluate this community, but I suspect it has many of the problems Slashdot has, and, unlike Slashdot, discourages long comments.

For me, jumping from community to community like this isn't the solution to the underlying problems these kinds of communities have. One fundamental issue with geek-friendly sites is that a lot of people with the kind of mind needed to be a good computer programmer do not have very good social skills and often times lack empathy or compassion for other people's feelings. Also, sites that predominantly use anonymous identities -- something all of five site I listed do -- tend to bring out the worse in people.

In contrast to these "geek-friendly" communities, Facebook is successful because:

It discourages anonymity.

It allows people to fine-tune how public or private their posts are.

It has killfiles, something lacking with most web-based communities.

The death of Slashdot

Now that Slashdot has been bought out, its days are numbered. There just is no money to be made pandering to a community of grouchy cynical users who think everything on the Internet should be free.

It's interesting that Slashdot, Sourceforge, and a couple of other non-notable sites, combined, were worth only 20 million dollars. Alexa's stats for Slashdot are very telling and probably explain why they were eager to sell the site for so little: Ever since mid-2011, Slashdot's Alexa rank has been in a steady decline. It had an Alexa rank of 1,100 or so in the first quarter of 2011 -- in other words, it was roughly the 1100th most popular site on the Internet. Right now its Alexa rank is higher than 2000; nearly 1,000 sites have become more popular than Slashdot in the last 18 months or so.

Slashdot is in the same death spiral that Usenet has been in since the late 1990s: It is losing users, its user base is becoming older, and it is not getting enough new users to replace the users it's losing, much less grow.

My final thoughts on Slashdot

While I am no longer an active part of Slashdot's community, I will continue lurking there. Slashdot is best when it talks about technology and working in the technology industry; the comments from experienced middle-aged IT workers and managers are still very enjoyable to read.

Slashdot is a place with a lot of nostalgia. It reminds me of a job I had in Mountain View, back when SGI and Sun were still around and when it was Netscape (not Google) who rented the most office space in that town, getting paid too much to do too little work for a tiny consulting company. I would sit at our Linux server and use it to read Slashdot when our company didn't have enough contracts to keep us busy. That company, like many others, did not survive the dot-com washout.

The world has moved on it's time for me to look beyond Slashdot and other time-wasting sites on the Internet.

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MaraDNS update

September 22, 2012

In today's blog, I describe the work I have done on MaraDNS, link to a new DNS server, explain why I don't like some ultrabooks, and post an update for BuyVM.

Deadwood update

I have gotten an unconfirmed report of Deadwood no longer running after a couple of days from a friend. While I am unable to recreate this bug, I take reports like this very seriously. That in mind, I have created a special debug version of Deadwood which logs all packets Deadwood receives.

To use this debug version of Deadwood, enable the "SHOWPACKET" compile-time tag (such as with export FLAGS='-Os -DSHOWPACKET' before compiling Deadwood).

For Windows users, I have made a debug build of Deadwood with this flag set. It has the name "Deadwood-showpacket-20120922.exe"; use this binary to replace "Deadwood.exe" in Deadwood-3-2-02-win32.zip.

If this bug does not pop up again, I plan on releasing Deadwood 3.2.03 next month.

In addition, I have updated the documentation to reflect the fact that Windows 7 and any RHEL6 clone are now the supported OSes for Deadwood, added a note on Deadwood's use of malloc() (may not work with some embedded systems), as well as having Deadwood give out a more useful error message if chdir() fails (it now lets the user know which directory it tried to go to).

Downloads are here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

MaraDNS update

In today's MaraDNS update, I have updated MaraDNS to use a new GPG key (see below), use xz instead of bz2 compression for the snapshots, and have changed the ej2txt tool to use lynx instead of links (since CentOS 6 does not have a package for elinks). Note that Deadwood still uses bzip2 compression because the old version of msys I recommend people use doesn't have an xz binary, and won't compile xz.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

MaraDNS GPG sig update

I mentioned in an earlier blog that I lost my MaraDNS signing key. Fortunately, I had a really old backup lurking around down here and was able to recover my signing key.

However, since it has been over a decade, I have created a new MaraDNS signing key which is signed with the old MaraDNS signing key (the paranoid amoung you can now breathe a sigh of relief). Barring a compromise of MaraDNS' private key, this will be the last MaraDNS GPG key I will generate until 2017, around the same time I update the OS MaraDNS is supported on.

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day next month, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

Knot DNS

I just found out about a nice authoritative-only server called "Knot DNS". Unlike MaraDNS, it has DNSSEC and full zone transfer support. More information:

http://www.knot-dns.cz/

Why I don't like ultrabooks

While I really like the idea of having a full sized computer the weighs less, I really don't like the Macbook air clones called "ultrabooks". The purpose of a laptop is to be able to travel; a laptop that doesn't use standard parts is a disaster waiting to happen.

To wit: If someone goes wrong with an Ultrabook and I'm in an exotic country, I am screwed until I can get back home to get the computer repaired. With my Sandy Bridge Inspiron 14z, on the other hand, when something goes wrong in an exotic country, I can go down to the local technology bazaar, pick up a standard part (a hard disk, in my case), and be working again within 24 hours.

It's just not worth paying $1,000 more for a computer that can not be repaired in the field -- nor have its memory upgraded -- just to have something that weighs one pound (1/2 a kilogram) less. [1]

BuyVM finally has regular stock

A few months ago, I complained that BuyVM never has stock. Jonathan Obrania Tan has let me know that BuyVM has improved things and, indeed, has stock. Current information about BuyVM's stock is here:

http://doesbuyvmhavestock.com/

Footnotes

I need to note that some computers marketed as "Ultrabooks", such as the Inspiron 14z "Ultrabook", are not really Ultrabooks and use more standard parts.

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Web typography

September 18, 2012

In today's blog, I discuss the current state of web typography, and some of my struggles making web fonts cross-browser compatible on my web page.

Web-safe fonts

Once upon a time, one was limited to a very limited selection of "web safe fonts" that one could have on their web page. This fairly recently changed, and one can have pretty much any font they want on their web page.

Kinda, sorta.

The first challenge, and one that bit C|Net, is that the font needs to look good on older systems without Clear Type or other modern font hinting technologies. Since there are almost no good free proportional fonts that look good using delta hinting, my web site design only uses a single custom font for headline text; body text is still using Verdana, an old school "web safe" font used by almost all computer users, even Linux users. For the occasional Linux or Mac user without Verdana, I have listed a number of similar wide proportional sans-serif fonts in my CSS:

font-family: Verdana, "Bitstream Vera Sans", Geneva, "DejaVu Sans", sans-serif;

The second challenge is finding a font that both looks very good and has a good license. During the '00s, there really wasn't a good open-source license for fonts out there. Bitstream Vera, for example, used a rather unusual license, and RedHat's "Liberation" fonts used a variant on the GPL. It was only in the late '00s that the Open Font License came out, and it has taken years for there to be a significant number of OFL-licensed fonts. Even the relatively new Ubuntu font uses an unusual non-OFL license. The font this web page uses is Abobe's "Source Sans Pro" font which was released this year.

Making a web font kit

After finding a font that looks good on a web page, the next challenge is to convert the font in to a form that renders well on all major web browsers. To make a font compatible across all web browsers, it needs to be in three different formats: Internet Explorer's "EOT" format, Firefox's "WOFF" format, as well as True Type for Chrome and Apple's Safari browser.

FontSquirrel.com has an excellent free web service that converts a true type font in to the other two formats and can optionally hint the fonts, as well as providing some example CSS and HTML showing how to use the fonts on a web page.

Making the fonts cross browser compatible

After making the fonts at FontSquirrel.com, there is still a lot that needs to be done to make the fonts look the same across browsers. Firefox, unlike any other browser, will alter the shape of the fonts unless the CSS is peppered with "font-weight: lighter;" which fortunately all of the other browsers ignore. If only Firefox honored "font-synthesis: none;", but alas no. Update: I found an article which shows how to eliminate Firefox's faux bold via CSS.

Since I have some text rendered with "font-weight: bold" using the web font, I am using a semi-bold instead of a fully bold version of the font so that it is still readable when converted in to a darker font by Firefox.

Unless one is using one of the very few open-source fonts with delta hinting (such as PT Sans or Cousine), it is necessary to test how the font rendering looks on Windows XP systems without Clear Type enabled. Font Squirrel's default hinting usually does a pretty good job of ensuring that fonts look OK on older systems, but it sometimes distorts the form of the fonts a little.

There is a really great free tool out there called "ttfautohint" that automatically provides nice hinting for true type fonts. The main disadvantage to the "ttfautohint" tool is that it makes the fonts look "grey" and blurry for people still using Windows XP who haven't enabled Clear Type.

It is true that both Internet Explorer 7 and higher, as well as Firefox 4 and higher, force web fonts to be rendered using Clear Type on Windows XP. Unfortunately, neither Safari or Chrome force Clear Type hinting on XP. Considering the number of people who complained last year about how C|Net's fonts looked when they tried using a font that looks beautiful on systems using modern font hinting technologies, but looks grey and blurry without modern font hinting, there are still quite a few users using outdated font rendering technologies.

Cross-browser font rendering is a matter of compromise. While I would love to use the "ttfautohint" version of the font on my web page--in addition to having better looking numbers, it also looks a lot better at 12 point than the FontSquirrel-hinted form of the font--I really can not until 2014 or 2015 when people using XP are forced to upgrade after Microsoft stops providing XP security updates in 2014.

Since FontSquirrel's hinting made the numbers in Source Sans Pro look ugly, I ended up using Font Squirrel's hinting for most of the characters but "ttfautohint" to hint the numbers. Because of the combined hinting, the numbers can look a little "off" on Windows systems with Clear Type; I hide this by carefully choosing font sizes where the numbers render well.

To do this font editing, I used a free tool available for Linux called "FontForge". While the program has a bit of a learning curve, it does allow fonts to be fully edited.

In addition to combining two different hinting strategies, since there are still a number of Internet users out there without broadband, I made the font a smaller download by only having one font weight, and by removing all characters not in either of the languages I speak (English and Spanish).

There are a couple of bugs to keep in mind when using web fonts. One is that webfonts can not be in iframes when using Internet Explorer 8, otherwise the web fonts do not load at all. Annoyingly enough, this bug only shows up when using IE8 natively; things look OK when using IE9 in IE8 render mode.

Another bug, or if you will feature, is that web fonts do not load for Firefox users who use the "noscript" add-on.

Another significant bug is that web fonts do not work when printing web pages in Firefox, Chrome, or Safari.

Web fonts and printing

When trying to print pages with web fonts in Chrome or Safari, the printed page look really bad. The ugly workaround is to disable web fonts in these browsers; I describe how to do so in an earlier blog:

http://samiam.org/blog/20110606.html

In addition, web fonts do not correctly print in Firefox; they simply print using a single font in the entire printed document.

The only browsers the correctly print a web page using web fonts are Internet Explorer and Opera. With all of the other major browsers, font printing is still the 2002 era of "web safe" fonts.

For printing, I use "Trebuchet MS" as the web-safe font for browsers that don't support web font printing. While Trebuchet has too much contrast against Verdana to use on the screen, it adds interest to the simpler print layout.

While the number of people who will see the screen "web safe" font is far smaller, they are still a significant number of users. Firefox users using Noscript won't see the web font (unless they explicitly enable @font-face support in Noscript's settings), and there is at least one browser with limited CSS but no @font-face support: Dillo. More to the point, Internet Explorer and Opera users will see a brief "flash" of the web safe font as the web font loads the first time they come to my web page.

I chose Arial for the screen web safe font; it's more plain that Trebuchet, but works better on the screen because there are more visual elements than in the print version of the page.

While Cambria actually has more compatible metrics with Source Sans Pro, I am not using this font because it's not "Web Safe": While free with Windows as well as Microsoft Office for Mac, it is a $120 download for Linux users. Unlike the 1990s "Core fonts for the web" (which is a free download), there are just too many users out there without the Windows Vista fonts to use them on a web page.

To summarize

The state of web typography has greatly improved in the last decade and the era of "web safe" fonts. Unfortunately, there are a lot of issues that still plague web fonts: How they look with older font rendering technologies, printing with web fonts, Firefox's rendering of web fonts, and other issues that make using them very challenging.

Undoubtedly, over the next years web font rendering will improve in browsers and web font design will not require as many workarounds and compromises.

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Remembering September 11

September 11, 2012

For people like my stepmother who have a birthday today, their birthday will never be the same again. Indeed, this day will never be the same again for anyone in the world who remembers what happened 11 years ago today.

September 11 2001 is one of those very few collective “flashbulb moments” where pretty much everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when it happened. This is how the day was for me.

My September 11 experience

On September 11 2001, I was in Puebla Mexico taking Spanish classes in a full-immersion language program. I had taken a shower and dressed and was about to leave the house when my roommate shouted to me.

“Sam! There’s been a big crash.”

In their kitchen there was a small 13-inch TV; one of those old TVs which needed about a foot (1/3 meter) of space behind it to fit the CRT tube, and which bulged out about an inch (3 centimeters) in the front. [1]

On the TV, I saw an image of a plane crashed in to one of the twin towers. I mentioned to my roommates that it must have been an accident with the Blue Angels (an air show). They said that it wasn’t and then I saw on the TV a video of a second plane crashing in to the other twin tower.

I looked at my Mexican roommates and told them “This is an act of war”. Realizing that there was nothing else I could do, after looking at the news for about 15 or 20 minutes at the house, I packed my stuff together and started walking to class—a good 30 minute walk.

My American classmates

No one was in Spanish class that day at our school. All of us American students were in this small room that had a handful of computers in most of the room, as well as two small multimedia TVs with built-in VHS VCRs. [2] We were huddled together in front of the two CRT TVs on one end of the multimedia room at the school.

By the time I got to school, one of the towers had already fallen. The north tower was still standing, and CNN—which we were able to get in English despite being in Mexico—was showing non-stop news from New York with commentaries on the attack and people talking about the attack, coverage of the attack of the Pentagon, as well as repeatedly playing amateur videos of the second plane hitting the south tower from different angles. [3]

I was on one of the computers sending via email [4] my family my impressions of the September 11 attack. While doing this, I heard a shout from my classmates and saw on TV live images of the north tower collapsing. Up until that moment, I had hoped that the north tower would stand and we would be able to repair it.

One of my classmates was from New York. Indeed, her uncle was a firefighter and one of the first responders to the September 11 attacks. He did not survive the towers collapsing. My classmate was not even able to return to New York to go to his funeral—all flights had been canceled for a few days in the wake of the attacks.

The aftermath

Since the September 11 attacks canceled all flights, students ending their classes that week were not able to fly back home. They generally ended up taking buses instead to Mexican border towns and either taking buses or having family drive them home from there. [5] One pair of students ended up going to New York to see what they could do to help with the clean up.

Since I was in an extended Spanish learning program, I ended up staying for a couple more months before finally returning to the US. When I left, before September 11th, my family was able to be with me at the departure terminal and watch me board the plane. Indeed, before September 11th, you would meet your family or friends at the arrival terminal unless it was an international arrival. For the first time, when returning from Mexico, I had to get out of the boarding area and go to the airport’s lobby before being able to meet my family.

Even though months had passed before I had returned to the US, there were still patriotic signs and USA flags visible from the freeway as we drove home from the airport; my mother mentioned to me that there were even more right after September 11th.

September 11, 2001 is a day that changed the world.

The picture above, taken by Leo Marihart, shows how I looked a couple of months before 9/11.

Footnotes on technology and society

[1] Flat panel CRT TVs were a rare luxury item, and while the underlying technology to make LCD TVs existed in my then Thinkpad 600X laptop, LCD TVs were not yet a mainstream technology.

[2] While DVDs did exist, tape-based VCRs were still being widely used. In addition, even though Apple was already making their computers WiFi aware, it would be another year or two before WiFi became really mainstream; I either physically connected my laptop to an ethernet cable to go online, or simply used a desktop computer already connected.

[3] While still expensive, portable video cameras were widely used. Digital cameras existed, but cost hundreds of dollars and had only around two megapixels of resolution. Cell phones did not have cameras yet. I was still using film cameras to take pictures, but that would change in a couple of years.

[4] Neither Myspace nor Facebook even existed in 2001. People mainly used email to keep in touch; personal websites were probably more common than they are today.

[5] This was years before the Mexican drug violence got really bad; it was still relatively safe to take a bus or even drive in Mexico's border cities.

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Multi Master fonts

September 8, 2012

In today's blog, I discuss a new open-source Multi Master font, as well as an update on my Gopher files.

Multi Master fonts

In the early 1990s, people were really excited by a technology called morphing. Morphing uses digital technology to smoothly transform one shape to another. Adobe got on the morphing bandwagon by creating a font technology called "Multi Master" (MM) which allowed a font to smoothly transition from one shape to another as seen in the above image where the letter "a" smoothly goes from being pencil-light to extra-black bold.

While Adobe made a few fonts taking advantage of this technology, it did not catch on and Adobe stopped selling commercial MM fonts a few years ago. A shame too, since it allowed a font to go from one arbitrary form to another: Adobe Jenson, for example, allowed a font to change its optical size.

I mentioned that Adobe recently released an open source font called "Source Sans". What has not been as widely advertised is that this font is generated from two freely available multi-master fonts.

The source code to "Source Sans" includes two MM fonts: One for the "roman" form and another for the italic form. The fonts can smoothly transition from a very-thin font to an extra-black bold font.

I spent this morning generating 15 different thicknesses of this open-source MM font, resulting in some 15 different weights for my variant of this open source font. It can be looked at here:

http://samiam.org/fonts/Userspace/UserspaceMMr.zip

Gopher update

I lost the script that automatically converts my HTML blog pages in to text pages suitable for looking at in Gopher. This in mind, people using a Gopher client to read this page will either need to wait until I return home and recover this script from my backups, or to use a text-based web browser to read new entries.

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Slashdot and more

September 7, 2012

In today's blog, I discuss changing fonts on my webpage, my SSD hard disk crash, and Slashdot some more.

Changing the webpage font

After reading a couple of articles on LWN, I looked over the license of the Ubuntu font which I have been using on my webpage and realized that its license may or may not allow me to embed their font on my web page with the name "Userspace", depending on whether the changes I made (removing a lot of glyphs and converting it in to various web-friendly formats) constitutes a "Substantially Changed" font.

In truth, I was never 100% happy with this font. While Ubuntu's font is one of the relatively few open-source proportional fonts with delta hinting, this actually doesn't matter because I used a semi-bold version without delta hinting at the sizes the webpage renders the font. The font looked a little too stylized for my tastes, since its "science fiction" look didn't quite work with the rest of the web page's design.

Since the 2011 web page redesign, Adobe has released a new open source font called "Source Sans Pro", which is OFL-licensed (I can use it as long as I rename it; to make the transition as easy as possible, I just renamed it "Userspace" to minimize the CSS changes). This font is less stylized and has a more informal and friendly look to it. It looks best with advanced font hinting, but is perfectly readable with basic hinting (such as in legacy Windows XP installs) or even on a monochrome display.

My SSD hard disk crash

I used to believe that SSD (Solid State Drive) hard disks were immune to failure. While I have been making regular backups, I kept the backups home before going traveling. Naturally, my SSD hard disk died on me just one week after leaving my backups 2,000 miles away.

Fortunately, I was able to burn recovery DVDs to restore the system before the SSD completely died, and get a fairly inexpensive replacement hard disk down here.

I am still recovering from the failure, but am productive at work again and have a much cleaner system now. This was a time consuming process. As just one example, Windows updates everything at once after a system restore. I lost my GPG private keys; it has been time to make new MaraDNS signing keys (the last key was generated over a decade ago) and the next release of Deadwood will be signed with the new key.

Unfortunately, for the paranoid out there, I will not be able to sign the new key with the old key until I return from my travels and have access to my old backups, probably mid-October.

Slashdot and the Napster crowd

This section continues my look at Slashdot which I started a week ago

Slashdot started to change with the Napsterization of the Internet. Before Napster, copyright infringement was frowned upon in public forums.

The original Linux developers respected copyright. They went to great effort to make a clean-room implementation of Linux which did not violate any copyright or patent laws. Their effort paid off: Linux became the dominant free Unix while BSD was fighting a copyright lawsuit from the original creators of UNIX.

Napster changed the face of the Internet and how people looked at copyright. Before, the Internet community understood that making meaningful intellectual property was hard work and should be respected. Once Napster allowed anyone with an Internet connection to have all the music they wanted for free, with only a small nagging detail that it was violating copyright, thousands of self-centered young college students and others did just that.

Instead of taking the high road, Slashdot decided to (by and large) side with the masses of people coming up with convoluted rationalizations and justifications for downloading copyrighted content without permission.

This resulted in Slashdot attracting a much less mature community of posters. It was the beginning of the fall of Slashdot.

In a future blog entry, I will discuss some of Slashdot's other problems which stopped me from being an active poster there.

Continued in Slashdot: A final look

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Slashdot

September 3, 2012

Slashdot has been a guilty pleasure of mine ever since it came out. Indeed, I have a four-digit user ID on that site. This blog entry is the first part of a (hopefully) multi-part series on my long-term love-and-hate relationship with that website.

In the beginning

Once upon a time, before computers were powerful enough to allow Microsoft to make a stable operating system, it made a lot of sense to use Linux as a desktop OS. For people too young to remember the 1990s: Windows back then was really unstable. Any application had the ability to crash the entire system or infect it with viruses.

Linux, meanwhile, was much much more stable. While it was possible to crash Linux, crashes were quite rare. This stability came with a price: Linux was very difficult to set up. For example, it took me about an hour to set up dialup networking in Windows 95; the same thing took me about two days to set up in Linux.

Microsoft in the 1990s

In addition to having a lot of stability issues, Windows also suffered from Microsoft's then monopolistic practices. One of Microsoft's key strategies was to "embrace - extend - extinguish". What they would do was take a technology whose market they would wish to control and implement the technology so it was 100% compatible with their competitor. Then they would add Microsoft-specific extensions to the technology; people who wanted the extensions would have to use Microsoft's version of the product.

Pretty soon, the competitor would be caught in a catch-up death spiral, where they would madly try to implement whatever features Microsoft added to their version of the product, but always falling behind Microsoft. Pretty soon, Microsoft would buy out the company or the company would go bankrupt.

One example of this was Java: Microsoft made their own version of Java, which was compatible with Sun's implementation, but added Microsoft-specific features. Programs using Microsoft's features would only compile and run on Windows.

Another example was how Microsoft handled Netscape: When Netscape refused to be bought out on Microsoft's terms, Microsoft did everything in their power to kill Netscape. One big reason why HTML and the web is such a mess today is because both Microsoft and Netscape were adding proprietary HTML tags to their browsers in an attempt to win the "browser wars".

It was not until Microsoft cheated by including their Internet Explorer browser with Windows that they started getting significant leverage against Netscape. This resulted in Microsoft being investigated by the United States Department of Justice for engaging in monopolistic practices. Netscape could not survive this onslaught as a software company; they ended up having to open source their browser before throwing in the towel.

My early days at Slashdot

I was disgusted with Microsoft's monopolistic practices and wanted something more stable than Windows 95. So, I became quite a Linux fanatic and refused to dual boot. A co-worker suggested, since I was so gung-ho about Linux, to check out Slashdot. This was the environment I started reading and posting to Slashdot in.

Pretty soon, I was getting a lot of my comments moderated up to +5, the highest level of moderation available for Slashdot postings, indicating a well-written post which the community really liked. I was a very active member of the Slashdot community.

To be continued

When I get time to write in my blog again, I will continue this series with a blog entry about how I became disillusioned with Slashdot and started moving away from this online community.

Continued in Slashdot and the Napster crowd

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No more politics

September 1, 2012

I have made a decision to no longer post or comment publicly about my political opinions until after the election. I have already made my opinions well known and I am repeating myself at this point. I will just say this:

I believe the USA is a great country with great people. I know we can overcome the problems we have today, just as we overcame the problems we had during the great depression, the civil war, and during the Gilded Age. The USA can and I believe will become a very prosperous nation again.

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MaraDNS update

August 27, 2012

MaraDNS non-update

I have made a new snapshot of MaraDNS 2.0 here; this is a non-update. The only change I have made is to my mqhash password generating utility; MaraDNS is unchanged (and won't be changed until late September barring a security hole with a CVE number).

Look here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

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MaraDNS update

August 23, 2012

MaraDNS update

I have finished up porting all of MaraDNS 2.0's SQA tests to work in CentOS 6 (RHEL6/Oracle Linux 6/Scientific Linux 6). MaraDNS 2.0 is now fully RHEL6 compatible.

There is a bug somewhere in CentOS 6 that causes Valgrind to report a 24-byte fixed-size leak when MaraDNS is compiled with '-O2'; since the leak goes away when MaraDNS is compiled with '-g', it's an error with the compiler and/or Valgrind.

I'm not going to waste time chasing ghosts that change with different compiler flags.

I have added a couple of documents to the MaraDNS tarball: TESTING.PROCEDURE, which describes how to compile and run MaraDNS so it passes all SQA regressions in CentOS 6, as well as README.malloc, which spells out how MaraDNS and Deadwood act on systems where malloc() fails. If anyone wishes MaraDNS/Deadwood to handle malloc differently, show me the money and we will talk. I would need a five-figure sum (in US dollars or Euros) on the table to even consider looking at the issue.

OS Support

The version of Linux that MaraDNS officially supports has been under a lot of flux. Last year, CentOS was really slow with security updates so I moved over to Scientific Linux. This year, CentOS has finally caught up and Scientific continues to have issues with routine security updates breaking things (I had an issue last year where a security-only update broke wireless networking; just this week a security-only update in Scientific Linux broke X on one of my virtual machines). If CentOS ever lags with security updates again, I will try out Oracle Linux.

The point being, the next MaraDNS release is supported on any RHEL6-compatible clone of Linux. Right now, I develop it on CentOS 6, but that can become Oracle Linux 6 or Scientific Linux 6 depending on which RHEL clone is most up-to-date with security fixes.

I am no longer using Windows XP and will change the official version of Windows supported to be Windows 7 when I make my Deadwood release next month.

I have updated the operating systems MaraDNS supports in 2012; I will not update them again until 2017 (both RHEL6 and Windows 7 will be supported by their vendors until 2020).

Current plans

Now that both MaraDNS and Deadwood have been updated for CentOS 6, my plan is to release a new Deadwood release in September, followed by a new MaraDNS release in October.

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day next month (September), after the 20th, unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

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The great recession

August 18, 2012

If I were to blame the housing bubble and subsequent recession on any single event, I would blame it on the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act of 1999, which repealed significant parts of the Glass–Steagall Act. Both Democrats and Republicans approved of it, and Clinton signed it in to law, but more Democrats than Republicans voted "no" on it.

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Server Fault Fail

August 15, 2012

Over at Server Fault, someone resurrected a years-dead thread by claiming that "MaraDNS is no longer maintained by the author". Can you say fail?

The truth of that matter is that I still maintain MaraDNS, pretty diligently once a month for an hour or two. That gives me enough time to fix security and other bugs, and update MaraDNS to run on newer versions of Linux -- my project right now is to update MaraDNS to fully run in CentOS/Oracle/Scientific Linux 6.

It would have been far more accurate to say "new features are no longer being added to MaraDNS" -- which, barring me winning the lottery or otherwise becoming independently wealthy, is true. Please, guys, check what you say before spouting off on public forums.

2014 update: I finally became an active member of the Server Fault community and posted a correction in response to the comment in question.

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Objective truth is going away

August 14, 2012

Geroge Orwell lamented, in his essay "Looking back on the Spanish War", that "The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world".

Let's look at just one point. Recently, the acclaimed writer George R.R. Martin (who edited the "Wild Cards" series and is the writer of "Game of Thrones"), complained about voter supression being done by one of the political parties in the US. A poster, in reply, claimed that "the Obama administrations lawsuit in Ohio is meant to prevent active duty servicemen from being allowed to vote early". This is a flat-out falsehood. The minitrue of Orwell's 1984 could not come up with a statement any more false.

I could come up with a dozen links going from Fox News' own web site, to Politifact, or to any number of countless web sites refuting this lie. Quite bluntly, I think the more conservative posters here will say "well, that's coming from a liberal source and I don't believe them".

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. There are two stories being circulated around: One is that Obama is suing Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted to allow the polls to be open for everyone the three days before the November 6 presidential election. The other is that Obama is suing Ohio to repress the military vote. The people on the right aren't even being told the same story.

This is the game the extreme-right-wing propaganda machine plays. A recent study (done by Fairleigh Dickinson University) showed that an average US citizen only correctly answered 1.8 (out of 4) questions about international news and was correct only with 1.6 out of 5 questions about domestic news. Fox News followers were worse: They answered correctly only 1.04 domestic news questions. That's worse than people who watch no media at all (1.22)!

There is no point in debating someone who stubbornly believes a lie and refuses to acknowledge any evidence contradicting the delusion they believe in.

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I edited this page on October 17, 2013, to update a link

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Adding Facebook comments

August 6, 2012

Comments are difficult to deal with. I had to turn off comments on the old MaraDNS blog because of spammers and because of anonymous requests for MaraDNS support.

On the other hand, when a blog posting expressing my frustration with Linux went viral, it would have been better to allow people who didn't like what I had to say about Linux have their say, perhaps only censoring obvious trolls and spammers.

This in mind, I have trying out Facebook for handling my comments. Some advantages of Facebook commenting:

Most identities are not anonymous. This minimizes issues with people using an anonymous identity to post offensive stuff they would not say if their name was on it.

Killfiles. Facebook, unlike the majority of web discussion systems, allows you to killfile someone: Go to their profile, click on the gear icon, select report/block, and block the user.

Comments? I will make this my first blog entry with Facebook comments!

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George Orwell and the truth

August 3, 2012

"The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world" -- George Orwell

One thing I find very disgusting about today's politics is how easily truth is being replaced with a lie.

Liberal ideas have merit. Conservative ideas have merit. It is, however, neither liberal or conservative, but instead fascism when people refuse to believe established science like Evolution and the Greenhouse Effect. It is fascism when "file sharers" believe it is economically viable for a business to make money when no one is paying for the product the business creates.

It is fascism to be a Christian, read the Bible and believe Jesus' message was to hate the homosexual instead of loving your neighbor, as written in Luke 10:27. It does not bode well for Christianity that its members (which I am one) are not doing more for gay rights, the way previous generations of Christians have spearheaded increased literacy, the abolition of slavery, and civil rights.

It is true the fascism of the 20th century was by and large secular. It is also true that fundamentalism -- which is any religious belief system that discourages questioning the "absolute truths" of its dogma and shun people for having different belief systems -- does result in fascism. Examples include the oppression of science in Christian Europe in the middle ages, the inquisitions, and today's oppression in the Islamic middle east.

Hate and lies are the forces that drive fascist regimes. It is love and seeking the truth that counteracts the forces of fascism.

Orwell's quote comes from Looking back on the Spanish War. To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Oracle Linux: Now free

July 31, 2012

Ever since I had issues with CentOS over a year ago (which have greatly improved since then: CentOS did not significantly lag behind RHEL in 2012), I have been looking around for a really good RHEL clone.

Scientific Linux is really good, but it has issues being updated from one version to the next using the "Yum" command. CentOS has been really good in 2012, but has been highly variable over the years.

Another RHEL clone I haven't paid much attention to is Oracle Linux. While it was free, you had to pay to get security updates. Well that has recently changed and, indeed, it's possible to switch from either CentOS or Scientific Linux to Oracle Linux without reinstalling. This is especially useful for cheap OpenVZ accounts, since one can install an ancient template of CentOS or Scientific Linux, update it to Oracle, and have an up-to-date RHEL clone.

In terms of people looking for good work, I once had a phone screening from a clueless HR drone that went like this:

"Do you have experience with Red Hat?"
"Yes, I have used RedHat since RH4.2 in 1997 and use both CentOS 5 and CentOS 6 on my servers."
"But CentOS is not Red Hat!"
"It's 100% compatible"
"Sorry, we only want people with recent Red Hat experience"

Now that Oracle Linux is free, it's a lot easier to get past a clueless HR drone with the buzzword "Oracle" than with "CentOS".

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I no longer accept patches

July 23, 2012

MaraDNS update

I am letting the MaraDNS community know that I am no longer integrating third party patches in to the MaraDNS codebase unless the patch fixes a security problem with a CVE number.

While I do appreciate third-party contributions to MaraDNS, I am the one who takes responsibility for any bugs a patch I accept introduces. I do not at present devote enough time to MaraDNS to be fixing bugs introduced by patches.

There has been talk of setting up a Git tree for a MaraDNS-ng fork and I hope that a MaraDNS-ng fork can be started. I would not be able to devote any time to contributing or approving patches for this fork, nor in setting up a Git host, but I do agree there is need for a MaraDNS-ng branch more open to third party contributions.

2014 update: MaraDNS now is in GitHub at https://github.com/samboy/MaraDNS

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Deadwood update

July 21, 2012

Deadwood update

I have updated the patch resolving the problem Deadwood had with es-us.noticias.yahoo.com last month so that, should a similar issue pop up in the future, Deadwood logs messages (starting at log level 100) describing the issue. In addition, in light of Rich Felker's concerns a couple of months ago with MaraDNS' handling of malloc() I have replaced all calls to "malloc()" in the code with "dw_malloc()", which is simply a macro that is replaced with "malloc()".

Doing this would make it easier for one to replace malloc() in Deadwood with something that more gracefully handles malloc() failures, such as blocking Deadwood until malloc() succeeds again, or by having malloc() failures terminate Deadwood and wrapping Deadwood in a script that restarts it when terminated. Since I am in debug, not develop mode, I have no plans to implement this kind of code myself. Deadwood was written for Linux and Windows; Linux does not, by default, have malloc() fail; it simply terminates processes that use too much memory.

For the record: MaraDNS terminates upon a malloc() failure. Deadwood's behavior is undefined should malloc() fail. If anyone is using MaraDNS in an environment where a kernel allows malloc() to return a NULL pointer, it is best to wrap MaraDNS in a script that restarts it when it terminates. If using Deadwood in an environment where malloc() may return NULL, please replace the dw_malloc() macro with a function that can properly handle a malloc() failure.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day next month in August, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug with a CVE number is found.

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Finally, a CVE-2012-1911 patch

July 11, 2012

After nearly five months, there is a patch for CVE-2012-1911. The patch has a big "this has seen very little testing. Use at your own risk!" disclaimer, but at least some effort is finally being done by the DjbDNS community to fix this security problem.

See also: The Ghost Domain bug djbdns: False security is dangerous

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Deadwood update

June 23, 2012

Deadwood update

Earlier this month, Deadwood was unable to resolve es-us.noticias.yahoo.com (Deadwood's recursion problems always seem to be caused by either Yahoo or EasyDNS).

Yahoo has since fixed things on their end. Since I recorded the DNS packets when Deadwood had the issue, I was able to make a SQA test to reproduce it.

Once I did that, it took me over an hour to find the problem and make a one-line patch to fix it.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day next month, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug is found.

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MaraDNS 1 End-of-life

June 21, 2012

MaraDNS 1 end-of-life: June 21, 2015

Ten years ago today, I released MaraDNS 1.0. All things have a beginning and an end. Today, I am announcing the end of life for MaraDNS 1.

Support for MaraDNS 1 will end three years from today, on June 21, 2015. To clarify for people who do not regularly read the MaraDNS blog or mailing list: MaraDNS 1 has only been supported for critical security bug fixes as of the beginning of this year.

People are encouraged to upgrade from MaraDNS 1 to MaraDNS 2. I understand that MaraDNS 2 does not support every single configuration MaraDNS 1 supports. My plan was originally to have MaraDNS 2 be more compatible with MaraDNS 1, and come out with a MaraDNS 3 release that would have been completely compatible but then open source economics kicked in and I realized I could no longer do professional quality software development "for fun and for free".

Work plans for June

Things are really busy with my day job right now. I hope to be able to put aside a little time for MaraDNS baby sitting this weekend.

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Legends of Ancient Arabia

June 11, 2012

In today's blog entry, I review the Legends of Ancient Arabia (LoAA) modpack for Civilization 4.

In summary, it's an excellent mod pack which is still a little rough around the edges.

Overview

LoAA is a great little mod. It covers the period of ancient Arabian history about a thousand years before the rise of Islam.

The atmosphere and feel of this game is superb. The music, which Gordon Farrell insisted on having with the mod, adds a very nice touch. The units are redrawn and have a very distinct Arabian flare to them. I especially like the scimitars some late game horsemen have.

I actually prefer the flavor of this mod over stock Civilization, since it is more focused and has a stronger atmosphere than Civ's "kitchen sink" approach to covering the entire history of mankind in a single game. One ends a LoAA game in roughly the same world that one begins the game in.

Game mechanics

Unlike a lot of mods, the tech tree has been completely revamped. There are some 52 different techs one can develop--the mod has even more techs which only the AI can develop in the game's scenario map. The tech tree is one for an ancient world: There is no gunpowder here, and you will never build a spaceship.

While the technology progress has been greatly altered, the feel of the techs will be very familiar to civilization players. The library, for example, may have a different name, but it benefits research the same way Civ4's library does. The "build all trade routes to win" victory condition is obviously Civ4's spaceship with different names.

Once hitting the end of the tech tree, there simply is no more technology to develop; one may as well invest all of their technology research points on wealth or culture.

Since the tech tree is cut off compared to stock Civ4, some things are possible to obtain--including, to my surprise, deep water ships--while some other techs, such as the universal suffrage civic, can not ever be researched by the player.

The mod gives the player an early strong (strength 6) archer that is not made obsolete until late in the middle game; having such a strong unit makes battles more a question of outnumbering and outmaneuvering the opponent instead of beating them with superior technology. City sieges are assisted by a catapult equivalent unit which comes early in the midgame.

The Civlopedia has been completely rewritten for the units and wonders this mod offers; it is missing entries describing the Arabian tribes one can play, but that's why there's the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-Islamic_Arabia

Bugs

The game, while really fun, feels a little incomplete. The buttons have minor graphical glitches which make them not quite "fit in" with Civ4's buttons. The mod was never updated to run on Beyond the Sword instead of Warlords.

It also has some bugs. One is minor: While there is an endgame technology the supposedly allows workers to build windmills, it doesn't actually work and windmills can never be built (the tech, at least, also gives the player a free tech, so researching it isn't a complete waste) [Update: I have now fixed the windmill bug]. Another annoying bug was that random maps were broken; I had to modify an XML file to make a proper random map for this civ.

The mod's biggest bug is that it drags down and becomes dog slow by the end game. I decided to win the game on a huge (144x96) map at marathon speed peacefully by building all of the trade routes. Since the other civs and the barbarians were not threatening me, it was just a matter of hitting "turn done" about 60 times until all of the trade routes were done.

In the end game of finishing last two trade routes, each "turn done" was a 1 to 2 minute ordeal on my high speed Core i5-2430m processor (albeit with a slow HD 3000 graphics chipset). It took me about two hours to finish up the endgame, with most of the time waiting for me to be able to hit "turn done" again after dealing with choosing city improvements and negotiation with the remaining AI players.

Conclusion

LoAA is a fantastic free download with only a few incomplete rough edges (the broken windmills and random maps; the lack of optimization) stopping it from being a superlative game.

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MaraDNS update

May 21, 2012

MaraDNS update

I am in the slow process of updating MaraDNS for RHEL6-based Linux distros (CentOS6 and Scientific Linux 6). It will probably take me a couple of months to finish this process.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day next month, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug is found.

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On Civilization IV

May 10, 2012

I have begun work on Totestra, which is my modifications to a Civilization IV map script. Civilization IV is a mid-2000s strategy video game; I finally purchased it because I now have a laptop that can run it smoothly. The map script is a Python program that generates a random Civilization IV map.

Perfect World: The best map script

Hands down the most popular map script for Civilization IV is Cephalo's "Perfect World" map script. This script uses plate tectonics and weather modeling to create a remarkably Earth-like random planet.

The main disadvantage of this script is that it takes far longer to render a map of an imaginary world; people using mid-2000s CPU talked about it taking 10 minutes to generate a Civilization IV map.

This is less of an issue on a modern Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge processor; on my Core i5-2430M, it takes 30 seconds to a minute to render a map.

Totestra: My fork of Perfect World

I like the script so much that I am beginning work on making some modifications to it. My goal with this fork is to address issues people have had with the script which Cephalo has never addressed. Unlike Cephalo, I feel basic settings should be changed from Civ4's menus instead of editing the script. I like having the knobs on the front instead of in the back of the unit.

It is currently possible to set the ocean level from inside of Civ4, but I have not bothered setting up climate parameters yet. It's also possible to use a fixed seed instead of a randomly chosen seed.

In addition, I have made it a tunable parameter how many islands the script has (it doesn't reduce the "grain" size but instead makes the height map larger which makes the grain relatively smaller), and began work on having it be possible for the script to make "quick and dirty" maps (rendering time appears to be the square of the heightmap size, so smaller height maps result in faster renders). This has not been extensively tested.

This script is currently derived from Cephalo's last (and probably final) release of PerfectWorld2.py (version 2.06), and currently does not incorporate any third party changes.

Getting the script

Totestra is available at http://samiam.org/Civ4/.

To install the script, download then copy Totestra.py to the PublicMaps directory, which should be at /Users/yourname/Documents/My Games/Sid Meier's Civilization 4 Complete/PublicMaps or somewhere similar.

Getting support

Before filing a bug report or making a feature request, please keep in mind the following:

Make sure logging is enabled. In CivilizationIV.ini (this may be a different file depending on the Civilization IV install being used), make sure LoggingEnabled = 1, RandLog = 1, and MessageLog = 1

If you try and load the script and it gives you nothing but grassland, this means the script failed for some reason. Make sure to post the relevant lines of PythonDbg.log and PythonErr.log so we can try and figure out what's broken with your Civ IV install.

I can not look at any reports of issues with strange looking maps, strange player placements, etc. unless I know the exact parameters that made the map in question. To get this information, look in PythonDbg.log for the map seed as well as the map parameters; post these parameters along with your bug report.

I will probably not implement whatever pet feature you want to have implemented. You have the source and I don't think Cephalo will mind if you implement it yourself.

All support requests or comments need to be posted at http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=461262. Do not email me, or use any other contact method to discuss with me this map script.

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Inspiron 14z sound problem

May 8, 2012

I had a bizarre problem on a Dell Inspiron 14z with a Conexant SmartAudio HD driver: The sound would intermittently cut out. To be more precise, the soundstage would collapse and it would output mono instead of stereo audio.

After some maddening troubleshooting, including reinstalling the drivers and multiple reboots, I finally found the culprit: The Conexant SmartAudio driver doesn't work very well when it is outputting 16-bit 44.1 KHz audio; it's a lot happier outputting 24-bit 44.1 audio.

To change this in Windows 7:

Go to the start menu (you know, the Windows logo button usually in the lower left corner of the screen)

Click on "Control Panel"

Make sure "View by" in the upper right hand corner of the control panel says "View By: Small Icons" (makes finding things much easier)

Click on "Sound"

Click on "Speakers: Conexant SmartAudio HD" then click on "Properties"

In the "Speakers Properties" window, click on the "Advanced" tab

Make the "Default Format" "24 bit, 44100 Hz (Studio Quality)"

Click on "OK"

Close all Control panel windows.

At this point the sound will (knock on wood) no longer switch from mono to stereo.

Bizarre driver bug.

As an aside, choosing a higher sampling rate like 96000 Hz or 192000 Hz won't make any difference anyone besides your cat can hear, and might very well not make any audio difference at all.

Indeed, David Griesinger, creator of the legendary Lexicon reverberation sound (Griesinger's sound can be clearly heard in the "booms" at the beginning of Blade Runner's opening titles), has an amusing Powerpoint which points out that there are sound cards that advertise 96Khz sampling, but don't actually output audio above 23 Khz.

For people who don't want to download a Powerpoint file, this Google cache of the file might work.

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EasyDNS and truncation

April 24, 2012

I have updated Deadwood today. This will be my last MaraDNS and Deadwood update until late May.

EasyDNS sometimes has given out packets marked "truncated" that, in violation of RFC1035 section 4.1.1, do not mean that "[the] message was truncated due to length greater than that permitted on the transmission channel.", but mean "our UDP server is broken, try using our TCP server".

This in mind, I have updated Deadwood so that if we got a truncated packet and can not extract any useful information from the packet, unless Deadwood is using DNS-over-TCP, it's better to completely ignore the reply (when EasyDNS has had this issue, only some of their DNS servers have been affected).

I have added a SQA test to ensure Deadwood correctly handles this abuse of the "truncated" DNS bit.

In addition, Makefile.ipv6 now works again. Keep in mind that, while Deadwood has IPv6 support, Deadwood with IPv6 has not been widely tested.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day in May, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug is found.

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Groundhog Day

April 8, 2012

Groundhog Day, a 1993 movie starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, is the story of a man who wakes up every morning on the same day: Groundhog Day.

No one else in the town is aware that the same events are repeating over and over; from his point of view, every morning he wakes up and it's the same day yet again.

Having finally seen Groundhog Day two decades after it came out, and greatly enjoying it, here are my thoughts:

The movie was successful because Bill Murray very effectively made a very funny movie from this premise; the romantic plot also works very well.

The idea of being in a "time loop" was shown near the ending of the 1971 Doctor Who story The Claws of Axos.

The idea that time loops for everyone except for one character who remembers previous iterations of the loop was done by Richard A. Lupoff in his 1973 story 12:01pm

Lupoff's story eventually became an Oscar-nominated 1990 short film.

Variations on the same idea were used in two previous Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, both in the 1989 episode Time Squared as well as the 1992 episode Cause and Effect

The loop in Groundhog Day is probably not possible in our universe because of its quantum nature (Our universe does not appear to be a cellular automata).

It would have been nice to have a Michael Landon-style angel show up who is also aware of the loop Bill Murray's character is trapped in and give us some explanation of why the loop is happening. On second thought, the movie works best without an explanation or anything else supernatural besides the time loop.

The movie implies that Bill Murray was trapped in the town as well as being trapped in February 2. It would have been interesting to have him leave the town (in a taxi after pulling the money from an ATM) early in the morning, hop on a plane from an airport near the town he's in and see if he can fly far enough away from Punxsutawney to break the loop. Presumably:

No matter how far away he gets, as soon as 6am comes around, he is teleported back in space, time, and body to the same hotel bed in Punxsutawney.

If he shifts time zones, the loop-back still happens at 6am EST (Punxsutawney local time)

The most likely reason they didn't do this in the film is because of the budget it would have taken.

I assume that if Bill Murray's character stays awake until the 6am loop-back, everything fades to black and he's waking up in the hotel room bed again (in Lupoff's 1973 story, the character is awake when the loop happens; in the original script, the character physically can not stay awake for the 6am turnover)

There's a lot of speculation on the internet (Warning: Linked article is full of spoilers), and, yes, even the director has chimed in about the number of times Bill Murray is stuck in the Groundhog Day loop (the original script mentions "10,000 years")

The New York Times had an article in 2003 about the religious significance of "Groundhog Day". The original script does have a few religious undertones, most notably the main character and his love interest speculating about there being an "absolute good".

The expression "Groundhog Day" is used in the military to represent being stuck in a repetitive rut. Indeed, Lupoff claims this is exactly what his original story was a metaphor for.

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Getting DNSSEC for MaraDNS

April 3, 2012

I would love MaraDNS to have DNSSEC support. Unfortunately, I have bills to pay and a family to feed, so I will need to be paid for my work.

For me to implement DNSSEC for Deadwood using an external crypto library (like LibTom) would currently require a grant of $50,000.

For parties interested in funding Deadwood having DNSSEC support, please contact me (Important: this email address is for people in a financial position to give me a $50,000 grant, not for random people on the Internet wanting free MaraDNS support).

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Humility

April 2, 2012

Humility is not thinking less of myself; it is thinking of myself less.

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MaraDNS now has funding

April 1, 2012

In today's blog entry (for April 1, 2012), I discuss MaraDNS' funding and my development plans.

MaraDNS now has funding

I am very pleased to let the community of MaraDNS users know that I have gotten a $1,048,576 USD grant from an anonymous donor. In light of this, I will be able to implement some features I have been meaning to implement in MaraDNS.

DNSSEC and DNSCurve

First of all, this funding will give me a chance to fully implement DNSSEC and DNSCurve. Due to the amount of code that needs to be written, I will hire Dan Kaminsky to help me implement the DNSSEC code, as well has contracting Daniel J. Bernstein to write the DNSCurve code.

The code will be in separate modules and I hope it will be possible to compile MaraDNS and Deadwood with both DNSSEC and DNSCurve support at the same time; this is a logistical issue we will work out.

Random number generator

In addition to contracting Daniel J. Bernstein to write the DNSCurve code, I will also bring in Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michael Peeters, and Gilles Van Assche who will work with Bernstein in implementing a high-speed cryptographic block cipher with a 1024-bit block size on 32-bit platforms, a 2048-bit block size on 64-bit platforms, a 4096-bit block size on 128-bit platforms, as well as a 1152-bit block size on 36-bit platforms for our substantial number of users who run MaraDNS and Deadwood on PDP-10s.

This block cipher primitive will be used in a sponge mode of operation as a pseudo-random number generator for Deadwood.

We will also research making a hash compression primitive for 32-bit, 36-bit, 64-bit, and 128-bit platforms which is both very fast and cryptographically secure from collisions as long as our attacker doesn't know the primitive's randomly generated secret number.

Other plans

I was hoping to be able to implement a 20nm 128-bit version of the 6502 processor with memory management and protected mode, as well as a series of op codes to make processing DNS packets faster (such as FINDDNSLABEL). Unfortunately, my anonymous donor will not give me the $5 billion grant needed to implement this processor until our team successfully implements DNSSEC, DNSCurve, as well as the large-block-size cipher, not to mention the secure hash compressor.

This should all be done within a year, and I will then be able to get a larger grant. I will let people know what that grant will let us do a year from today, on Monday, April 1, 2013.

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The mythical $15/year VPS

March 27, 2012

In this blog, I briefly go over low-cost VMs, discuss the non-availability of BuyVM's nodes, and give updated reviews of my VPS providers.

As I have blogged about before, it is now possible to order a basic virtual machine for under $20 a year. Indeed, this blog is hosted on a network of four such machines with failover set up.

BuyVM.net: Pretty much mythical

When going to web forums, such as WHT and asking about who supplies a good low-cost virtual machine, one name that constantly comes up is BuyVM.net. Unfortunately, it is practically impossible to get a $15/year account with them.

To wit: Some stock of these $15/year 128 megabyte accounts opened up in the wee hours of the night today; I woke up at an ungodly hour, stock opened up, I ordered a 128/256 VPS, hit "complete order", and it never went to the Paypal page to complete the order. I did get a message that the order was completed, and that a confirmation email was sent, but I never got an email and there is no record of me getting an account anywhere in Frantech's system.

Stock ran out within five minutes; I did try going back to buyvm.net to see if I could get stock again.

For all intents and purposes, it is impossible to get a basic buyvm.net account. This is 10 times worse than the special at Fry's that runs out within an hour. I'm not going to try again; a responsible company is one that has product available for customers in sufficient quantity so that there is at least, say, a one hour window to order stock.

Update: I was finally able to get a BuyVM node many months later

123systems.net: Very good service

I mentioned, in an earlier blog posting, that it is difficult to update CentOS on a basic 128/128 123systems.net account. Indeed, it is, but the procedure is pretty routine once I figured it out:

yum install strace

yum -y update This will crash

cd /var/cache/yum/base/packages/

for a in *rpm ; do strace rpm --upgrade $a --nodeps; done

cd /var/cache/yum/updates/packages/

for a in *rpm ; do strace rpm --upgrade $a --nodeps; done

"yum -y update" This should now report everything as up to date

Should the rpm process freeze while trying to do this, restart the OpenVZ container via the "reboot" command and try again

And, indeed, 123systems just opened up some more 128/128 stock and people can get a good VPS for less than the cost of an impossible-to-get buyvm.net account; I have gotten very good service and am very happy with my 123systems node.

FastVPS.co: Moving to Chicago

My node with FastVPS.co moved everyone to Chicago this weekend; there were a lot of issues with my node with them in Kansas city being very slow to the point of frequently being unusable (It would serve pages via nginx and domains via MaraDNS, but logging in to perform rsync updates would often not work). So far, things look better with the Chicago node and I hope they don't start having the slowdown issues they had in Kansas City.

AlienVPS: Good, fast node with downtime issues

I have two nodes with AlienVPS; both nodes run really great when they are up. As reported on WHT, they are fairly frequently down. Roughly speaking, one of my two nodes with them is down for a couple of hours every two weeks or so. It's very rare that both of my nodes with them are down at the same time.

Because of how my domains are set up, this is a non-issue with me; every time one of the nodes with AlienVPS goes down, DNS failover kicks in and traffic is redirected to another one of my low-cost nodes.

In order to still be able to work when a node goes down, I do all of my work on a VPS on my home computer and use rsync over SSH to transfer the files over.

See also: Dirt cheap Linux hosting - Adios cripperz.sg - A brief review of my VPS hosts

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MaraDNS: No DNSSEC

March 26, 2012

In 2001, having a secure DNS server meant running a DNS server did not expose you to remote root exploits.

Things have changed since then. There are now five major DNS server projects and none of them have remote root exploits popping up every couple of months.

The new gold standard for security is DNSSEC. BIND, NSD/Unbound, and the authoritative half of PowerDNS have DNSSEC support. MaraDNS, on the other hand, does not.

I have nothing against DNSSEC; it's just that I no longer have the free time to spend months implementing DNSSEC "for fun and for free" and I seriously doubt anyone with deep pockets is going to show up to finance MaraDNS having DNSSEC.

That in mind, I have updated MaraDNS' tagline from "MaraDNS: A security-aware DNS server" to "MaraDNS: A small open-source DNS server". I can't say MaraDNS is secure with a straight face any more. Not in 2012 without DNSSEC support.

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A thought

March 25, 2012

I am responsible for every resentment I have. This doesn't mean I am at fault; it just means I am the one who has to fix the resentment.

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New MaraDNS CVE: 2012-1570

March 22, 2012

In today's blog entry, I discuss CVE-2012-1570 as well as Deadwood 2.3.

CVE-2012-1570

CVE-2012-1570 is the CVE number assigned for MaraDNS updates made in light of the "ghost domain" bug. I have already updated Deadwood as well as the legacy MaraDNS 1 branch; this CVE just formally declares these updates to be serious security updates.

Here is a rundown of all MaraDNS versions affected by the ghost domain security bug:

All MaraDNS 0 releases with recursion (Do NOT use; not maintained)

All MaraDNS 1.0 releases (Do NOT use; not maintained)

All MaraDNS 1.1 releases (Do NOT use; not maintained)

All MaraDNS 1.2 releases (Do NOT use; not maintained)

All MaraDNS 1.3 releases besides 1.3.07 (Do NOT use; not maintained)

All MaraDNS 1.3.07 releases before MaraDNS 1.3.07.15

All MaraDNS 1.4 releases before MaraDNS 1.4.12

All MaraDNS 2 releases before MaraDNS 2.0.06

All Deadwood 3 (subpackage of MaraDNS) releases before Deadwood 3.2.02

All Deadwood 2 releases besides 2.3 (Do NOT use; not maintained)

All Deadwood 2.3 releases before Deadwood 2.3.08

The following releases have been patched to address this bug: MaraDNS 1.3.07.15, 1.4.12, 2.0.06, as well as Deadwood 3.2.02 and Deadwood 2.3.08 have been released to address this security bug. It is very important that all MaraDNS users update to one of these versions.

Please note that MaraDNS 1.3.07 will no longer be supported on December 21, 2012. Please upgrade to MaraDNS 1.4 or 2.0 at your soonest convenience if feasible. Here is an update guide:

http://maradns.org/tutorial/update.html

Distributions and users who wish to continue, against my wishes, supporting an outdated version of MaraDNS 1 may (or may not) be able to update MaraDNS 1 by using this patch:

http://maradns.org/download/patches/security/maradns-1.4.11-ghostdomain.patch

Deadwood update

As noted above, I have updated the older "tiny" branch of Deadwood to address the important "ghost domain" bug; Deadwood 2.3.08 has been released.

This took all morning to do; the "tiny" branch has diverged from the main branch of Deadwood enough that it was necessary to completely redo the patch by hand.

After doing that, a number of SQA regressions failed because CentOS 5 has changed enough since the last time I ran the Deadwood 2.3 regressions: example.com has a different A record, netstat's output format has changed, and Valgrind complains about "possibly lost" memory it wasn't complaining about before. I had to verify the failed SQA regressions were caused by issues external to Deadwood, and that the code changes did not break anything.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/tiny/

At this point, I am only supporting Deadwood 2.3 for security and other critical bugs. Deadwood 2.3 only makes sense if one is in an environment where it's better to have a 32 kilobyte non-recursive DNS cache instead of a 64 kilobyte fully recursive DNS cache.

Also: Because of how Deadwood 2.3 works, records with TTLs longer than one day will show a longer TTL when said record is retrieved. This update only affects how long the record is stored in Deadwood 2.3's cache. If there is any suspicion that resolvers downstream from a Deadwood 2.3 cache honor large TTLs, please upgrade to Deadwood 3. Also note that Deadwood 2.3 doesn't properly age TTLs.

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day next month, after the 20th, unless another critical security bug is found.

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DNS security comparison

March 21, 2012

DNS security comparison

I have compared the CVE history of four of the "big five" DNS servers out there and published my findings:

http://www.maradns.org/DNS.security.comparison.txt

To summarize, MaraDNS was not as secure as I wanted it to be in 2002. Attacks against MaraDNS started popping up in 2007 and since then about one attack a year significant enough to merit a CVE report is discovered. Nothing more dangerous than denial of service has ever been discovered [1]

Unbound has a really good security history; better than MaraDNS. This is impressive in light of the fact that Unbound does a good deal more than MaraDNS; two of the CVE reports are about NSEC3 records, which neither MaraDNS nor Deadwood support.

NSD has a perfect security record (no CVE reports) so far.

Deadwood, MaraDNS 2.0's resolver, also has a perfect security record (no CVE reports)--but there is at least one security bug in older Deadwood releases which deserves a CVE report.

Desperately seeking a DjbDNS maintainer

In light of my recent rant on DjbDNS being unmaintained, I have been contacting known DjbDNS advocates to see if anyone is willing to maintain a fork of DjbDNS. So far, no one is interested, and more than one of these advocates has been downright rude with me.

Note to self: Don't try to find a maintainer for DjbDNS. Anyone still interested in DjbDNS does not appear to be willing to acknowledge and take responsibility for its bugs. It's a shame too, since DjbDNS is becoming more and more irrelevant every day it's not actively maintained.

MaraDNS' future

In light of DNSSEC and the fact I'm no longer in a position to actively develop MaraDNS, I am no longer going to even pretend MaraDNS is secure. I still fix security bugs and one should be OK as long as one stays current; even if someone doesn't, there is no real chance people will be able to break in to a system because it is running MaraDNS.

I'm pretty sure I have done a better job with Deadwood than with MaraDNS 1 with regards to security. Time will be the judge; it took five years after MaraDNS 1.0.00 was released for security bugs to start being reported; right now it's been a year and a half since Deadwood 3.0.01 came out (the first stable fully recursive release).

As I have said before, I'm really happy with what I have accomplished with MaraDNS. It's my mark on the world; it's my Wikipedia page and my 15 minutes of fame. I would not have the job I have today if it were not for MaraDNS.

All things have a beginning and an end. MaraDNS helped add diversity to the DNS server space when there were not enough open-source DNS servers out there, and it kept my skills relevant while teaching English in Mexico.

Deadwood is what MaraDNS 1 should have been. It's too bad I never had a chance to better merge it with MaraDNS' authoritative half.

When IPv6 finally really comes along, I might make the relevant updates to Deadwood to make sure it works well on an IPv6 network. I have no plans to add DNSSEC support; use Unbound or BIND instead if this is needed.

Deadwood still fills the need for a really tiny DNS server which is useful in places where Unbound is too big, such as low-cost routers. When that $20 router at Wal*Mart becomes powerful enough to run Unbound without breaking a sweat--it's only a matter of time before we get there--I'm not really sure what niche Deadwood or MaraDNS will fill.

It doesn't really matter. By the time that happens, I should be too busy raising kids and bringing the bacon home to worry about whether anyone still uses MaraDNS or Deadwood any more.

Footnote

[1] I understand that CVE-2011-0520 is a buffer overflow. However, the impact is denial of service since an attacker could not control the contents of the overflown buffer.

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Deadwood update

March 20, 2012

In today's blog entry, I describe this month's Deadwood update, as well as discuss why IPv6 should have NAT66 support.

Deadwood update

When looking at the source code of DwCompress.c, I discovered that input validation was not always done. I have updated DwCompress.c to have more input validation.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day next month, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug is found.

NAT66 will be needed

There is a religious belief among some proponents of IPv6 (a proposed method of increasing the network numbers the internet has, which we will undoubtedly make standard during the 2010s because we're running out of numbers in the current internet) that NAT--the process of converting a single routable IP like 199.167.196.104 in to multiple local private IPs like 192.168.1.196--should never be done.

Indeed, the expansion of IPs that IPv6 gives us removes one reason to have NAT. But people who dismiss NAT as being "evil" ignore some of the other benefits of NAT:

NAT causes a network to have a built-in firewall. Yes, it is possible to have a firewall without NAT. However, NAT's natural default configuration is one where computers on an internal network are invisible from the big bad internet.

NAT hides the network topology from external attackers.

NAT allows one to add as many IPs as needed to one's internal network without needing to get IPs from one's ISP. Anti-NAT fanatics claim that ISPs will always give customers a generous number of ISPs (keep in mind that a /96 in IPv6 is as big as all of today's internet; IPv6 is huge); these claims ignore the fact that, without NAT, you can only have a large internal network if your ISP lets you. Indeed, low-cost hosting providers with IPv6 today sometimes only give their customers 16 IPv6 IPs.

NAT allows one to change ISPs or use multiple ISPs at the same time without needing to revise the numbering of their internal network. Changing IPs on even a small network is non-trivial; I had to spend a good part of Sunday afternoon revising my home network to use a /16 (65,000 IPs) instead of a /24 (256 IPs), and this network only has a handful of computers on it. (Since you asked: I use a lot of virtual machines for my work and it's logistically simpler to give each computer their own /24 than to split up a single /24).

I am not ignoring the disadvantages of NAT: It makes peer-to-peer applications, such as Skype, harder to implement. However, implementing peer-to-peer through NAT is a solved problem, and making services on an internal network available to the external internet is trivial with most NAT firewalls.

LWN recently had an interesting discussion about IPv6 and NAT.

(NAT44, for the record, is the technology used in most of today's internet, allowing a single IPv4 IP to represent a number of internal machines on a network. I remember when NAT44 was called "IP masquerade". NAT66 is the technology to allow a small pool of IPv6 IPs to represent a large number of internal machines on a network. NAT64 and NAT46 are something else entirely.)

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MaraDNS 1 update

March 17, 2012

Security fix for MaraDNS 1: Maximum TTL is now one day, to avoid ghost domain-style attacks with the legacy version of MaraDNS. This is akin to the recent Deadwood update.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/1.4/

http://www.maradns.org/download/1.3/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day this month, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug is found.

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The ghost domain bug

March 14, 2012

In today's blog entry, I look at the ghost domain bug, and how various DNS servers have been updated to address this bug.

Ghost domains

The big DNS security hole for early 2012 is the "ghost domain" attack (PDF file). It has hit every single major recursive DNS server out there: BIND, Unbound, PowerDNS, Deadwood (while the ghost domain paper correctly points out that Deadwood's recursion is immune to this particular attack, Deadwood was vulnerable to a related attack: allowing a really long TTL), and, yes djbdns.

Response to this attack

BIND has been patched to fix this issue. Unbound fixed this issue a while ago; the CVE simply informs users to make sure their copy of Unbound is up to date. I updated Deadwood back in February and made new MaraDNS releases with the updated Deadwood this week.

This leaves two DNS servers without this issue fixed.

PowerDNS

I am surprised that PowerDNS has not fixed this issue yet; they appear to have an active development community so hopefully a fix is in the pipeline.

DjbDNS

DjbDNS, not surprisingly, has no update for this issue. I don't see any updates to fix this issue from the unofficial forks; Zinq-djbdns, for example, hasn't been updated for nearly a year.

There is no traffic on the mailing list about this issue. Indeed, there hasn't been a single posting to this mailing list this month and none of the postings last month discussed this security hole.

dnscache and www.nature.com

The last active discussion on the djbdns mailing list was people whining about how www.nature.com takes 30 seconds to resolve with dnscache.

Let me give the five people still using dnscache a hint: It is not Akamai's problem that www.nature.com takes 30 seconds to resolve with DjbDNS' dnscache. It is dnscache's problem.

Deadwood 3.2.02 is able to, with an empty cache, resolve www.nature.com within 2 seconds. With an active cache, it can resolve it in under a second.

I have not investigated exactly why it is www.nature.com takes so long to resolve with dnscache. My guess is that it is similar to the EasyDNS tarpit issue Deadwood had.

Taking responsibility

The only way to take responsibility is to have someone step up and say "I will make sure that bugs in djbdns get fixed". DJB stopped doing this well over a decade ago.

It was not feasible for someone else to take responsibility for the program for many years because of DjbDNS' old license. When it finally became legal to make DjbDNS forks, it was too little, too late. There is no longer an active community of developers contributing improvements to DjbDNS' in a cohesive, organized manner. There is no one in the DjbDNS community that you can point to and say "DjbDNS is vulnerable to security bug CVE-2012-1191. You are responsible for making sure this issue gets fixed."

Because there is no one left responsible for DjbDNS' bugs, the community handles bugs in an immature, unprofessional manner. They either blame someone else for DjbDNS' bugs (such as blaming Akamai), or they come up with convoluted justifications about why a bug isn't really a bug, or they simply ignore the bug altogether.

Blaming Akamai for not resolving a domain quickly isn't going to make the offending domain resolve any more quickly. Ignoring a security bug isn't going to magically make the security problem go away.

For DjbDNS to remain viable, someone needs to step up to plate to take responsibility for its bugs.

See also: DjbDNS: False security is dangerous

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MaraDNS 2.0.06 and 1.4.11

March 11, 2012

I have updated MaraDNS to use Deadwood 3.2.02. Deadwood 3.2.02 is a security update to Deadwood 3.2.01. This update has been done in both MaraDNS 2 and MaraDNS 1.4; MaraDNS 2.0.06 and MaraDNS 1.4.11 are the releases with this update. MaraDNS 1.3 is not affected because it does not include Deadwood.

For people who want to file a CVE report: Deadwood releases before Deadwood 3.2.02 allow entries to remain in the cache for a long time. In light of the Ghost domain exploit (PDF file), this is a security problem.

Deadwood 3.2.02 is updated to only allow entries to remain in the cache for one day. If max_ttl is set, one can choose to store entries in the cache for up to 90 days.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/2.0.06/

http://www.maradns.org/download/1.4

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood again one day this month, after the 20th, unless a critical security bug is found.

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On Anne Frank

March 7, 2012

In today's blog, I discuss Anne Frank's fate in the world of a fundamentalist with a Baptist doctrine, and look at how a person is responsible for the beliefs they hold.

On Anne Frank

The fundamentalist believes Anne Frank is going to hell. This is a logical consequence of their doctrine:

Only Christians go to heaven

Anne Frank is not a Christian

Therefore, Anne Frank will be tortured for ever and ever in ways Hitler could only dream of being able to do.

Of course, the logical thing to do is to tell the fundamentalist that they are a morally depraved person for believing in such a twisted God (as one Rabbi put it, "I reject this as a perverse doctrine, one that is an affront to what I understand to be moral and true").

A fundamentalist wishes for Anne Frank's damnation

The fundamentalist, when confronted that they believe Anne Frank and Gandhi are in hell, uses the Bible as their defense. They proclaim "I must believe Anne Frank and Gandhi are in hell because I can not deny the Bible!"

To this I say "Bollocks! To believe the earth is not flat and doesn't have corners is unbiblical (Rev. 7:1). To believe that the return of Jesus in glory did not happen 2000 years ago is unbiblical (Luke 9:26-27, I John 2:18, etc.)"

A person is responsible for choosing which Biblical verses they take literally, and which verses they take metaphorically. One can read John 3:18 and choose to say that it means Anne Frank is now being tormented far worse than she was tormented in the German concentration camps. Or one can read John 3:18 and say that it is a metaphor, and that it is people who do not believe and do not follow a good and loving God, people who choose to remain in their evil who are condemned.

If you are so depraved as to believe in the damnation of Anne Frank and of Gandhi, just come out and be honest: You simply are so narrow-minded, bigoted, and full of hate that you want these people to be tortured for having a belief different than your own. Don't blame the Bible for your choice to believe something that is morally reprehensible.

See also: On rationalization - On fundamentalist reasoning - On my faith in God - Everyone has a soapbox - The Rapture - Final 2010 post; NIV update

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Remembering 1992

March 6, 2012

In today's blog, I share a Bible verse, and reminisce about the Michelangelo virus.

Verse of the day

"The LORD is near to all those who call on him, to all who call on him in truth" Psalm 145:18 (Public domain translation)

The Michelangelo virus

20 years ago today, the infamous Michelangelo virus was supposed to strike computers far and wide, on Friday March 6, 1992. I did not have a computer at home, since a computer cost between $1500 and $2000 at the time (once in a while, a low-end 386 without a monitor would be seen in Computer Shopper for only $1000), but used the computers at the local computer lab for writing documents with Microsoft Word and writing the occasional small computer program in Qbasic.

I first read about it in the local newspaper and didn't think about it too much. At the time, we were discussing how news was reported in our English class and one of our assignments was to watch the news and report in class what we saw on the news. Every network was giving extensive coverage to the Michelangelo virus.

They did not take chances in the computer lab; on March 6, all of the computers had their date set to be a week in the future to completely avoid any chance of the virus being triggered.

It would be over a year before I finally had internet access, discovered open source, and became interested in computers again. In the above picture, you may see how I looked at the time; I fancied myself a musician.

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Geomyidae is stable

March 5, 2012

In an earlier blog entry, I implied that Geomyidae, the gopher daemon I am using, has some stability issues and crashes. I was in error; the problem was that the node running this gopher daemon has been rebooting a lot and I had not correctly set up the system startup scripts to restart this daemon.

Geomyidae is stable and a good daemon to use for people who want a currently maintained Gopher server. I would like to thank Christoph Lohmann, Geomyidae's author, for working closely with me while I resolved this issue.

On rationalization

I believe that someone who is truly walking in the path of God does not need any rationalization--any need to make excuses--to justify their faith. The fundamentalist needs rationalization on top of rationalization--such as the convoluted and intellectually dishonest reasoning to justify that the massacre of the innocents really happened or that the census in Luke 2 happened when Herod was still alive to make their faith work.

John 4:24 says that "those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth" and I worship a God that is real because I am blessed enough to be able to feel His spirit at work in my life today. I do not have to rationalize or make any excuses to know that God is real.

Update The Bible verse chosen today by a "Verse of the Day" that I subscribe to on Facebook is very fitting: "Trust in The LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding." (Proverbs 3:5). God does not need to be rationalized nor justified, and attempts to do so distract from the true worship of God.

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On fundamentalist reasoning

March 4, 2012

This blog entry looks at an event in the Bible which is widely regarded as fictional, at how fundamentalists try to argue it is not fictional, and at how the fundamentalist's worldview is flawed.

The Massacre of the Innocents

The story I will look at is this one, in Matthew 2:16:

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked by the wise men, was exceedingly angry, and sent out, and killed all the male children who were in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding countryside, from two years old and under, according to the exact time which he had learned from the wise men.

This event never happened.

Problems with this story

This story has the following problems:

No one in the first century besides Matthew mentions this massacre of babies.

In particular, Flavius Josephus, who described in great detail other atrocities done by Herod, does not mention this massacre.

This first mention of this story, a second-century story written by Protoevangelium of James, is clearly a fable. It claims both Mary and Elizabeth were in Bethlehem when this massacre happened, which contradicts both Matthew and Luke.

The first non-Christian source to mention the story--Macrobius--did so some 400 years later. Macrobius undoubtedly got his information from Christian sources.

Fundamentalists' attempt to resolve these problems

The fundamentalist argument made is that the massacre of the innocents was such a minor event that it was not important enough to be mentioned at the time.

For example, the Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on this incident points to sources pointing out it only would have been at most a couple dozen babies killed, and concludes that this made the event too minor to be mentioned by anyone. I have not checked their sources but considering this encyclopedia feels Macrobius is reliable about this event, I do not fully trust them.

Indeed, this arguments glosses over the fact that Matthew did not just say that the infants in Bethlehem were killed, but that all male infants in both Bethlehem and all the surrounding countryside were killed.

Refuting these fundamentalists

In reality, with good reason, most recent biographies of Herod do not believe this massacre happened at all (see Paul L. Maier, "Herod and the Infants of Bethlehem")

Indeed, Richard Carrier, when refuting similar arguments used by fundamentalists to argue the census as described in Luke 2 happened when Quirinius was governor, points out that not only would such a massacre not have escaped the notice of historians (and very well could have started a war), but also that this massacre story was a common motif used by writers of this era, such as the story of Chrishna of India, Sargon, Cyrus, and others.

Is is clear Matthew was just retelling what was a well-known story at the time; one has to engage in rather convoluted thinking to argue that this event really happened but somehow wasn't recorded by anyone else at the time. To argue that this massacre really happened, a position a fundamentalist is forced to take, requires far more doublethink than I am willing to do.

The fundamentalist's big lie

Matthew did not live in a world where journalists like Stephen Glass, who attempted to pass off fiction as fact, are fired and shunned. Just because parts of Matthew are fictional does not make Matthew a liar; he wrote in a very different era. The error a fundamentalist makes is to take the writings of a first century evangelist and treat them like the writings of a twenty-first century journalist.

The reason why the fundamentalist is forced to do this is because they advocate the very arrogant idea that their particular faith is based on objective fact, that only members of their particular religion have genuine experiences from God, and that people who experience God but have different beliefs are having "counterfeit experiences".

This is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. The fundamentalist is unable to supply any convincing evidence whatsoever that their particular doctrine, and only their doctrine, is true.

In conclusion

There are many ways to God. The majority of religions and the majority of religious people live in God's truth and God's love. To say otherwise requires one to be closed-minded, bigoted, and to ignore the vast body of evidence that says otherwise.

Bible verses come from a public domain translation I use for Bible quotes. To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

See also: Deadwood update; etc. Everyone has a soapbox The Rapture Final 2010 post; NIV update

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MaraDNS 1 has limited support

March 3, 2012

This is a heads-up that MaraDNS 1 is no longer supported for anything besides security holes; I mentioned this policy at the beginning of the year. I actually have been phasing out of support for MaraDNS 1 since 2009:

http://maradns.blogspot.com/2009/05/alexa-top-500-list.html

http://maradns.blogspot.com/2010/08/deadwood-2904-released.html

http://samiam.org/blog/20120101.html

Since I understand a lot of MaraDNS users do not carefully read my blog, and since I have made updates to MaraDNS 1 this year, I can see why some people are not aware of my support boundaries for MaraDNS 1. This in mind, I have updated the relevant download pages for MaraDNS 1 to make it clear only security support is supplied for this older software.

I wish I was in an economic position to supply full support for all MaraDNS releases, as well as being able to add DNSSEC support as well as better integration between the authoritative and recursive parts of MaraDNS 2, but unfortunately no one with deep pockets has offered to pay me to work on MaraDNS full time.

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MaraDNS donations

March 2, 2012

In today's blog entry, I discuss why I have changed the link for making MaraDNS donations, and discuss the two ways MaraDNS users can contribute.

Adios PayPal

PayPal is not the most friendly company for processing donations for open-source projects. Ever since the Diaspora PayPal incident and the Regretsy PayPal incident, I have been looking for a viable PayPal alternative. I have now found one.

Hola WePay

My good friend Sean Lynch pointed me to WePay. I am now using WePay for accepting donations for MaraDNS. Donations are completely voluntary and I currently do not sell extended technical support or any other MaraDNS-related services.

If you find MaraDNS useful, please make a $25 MaraDNS donation at WePay:

https://www.wepay.com/donations/198134

People who are interested in signing up for WePay for their own open-source or other project can register here:

https://www.wepay.com/x1hqecu

Disclaimer: This second link is an affiliate link. I encourage people who are using MaraDNS and want to collect payments for any reason to use this link to help support MaraDNS maintenance.

If you would prefer to make a smaller donation

Students, teachers, retired and other people on fixed incomes, or plain old cheapskates who do not want to make a $25 WePay donation can make a Flattr donation instead. Yes, I would prefer a WePay donation. But I have also opened up a Flattr account so that more people can donate, irregardless [1] of their income.

All donations are optional

Since MaraDNS is an open-source project, all donations are of course optional. However, donations are the best way for MaraDNS users to show their appreciation for all of the hard work I have done making MaraDNS and the work I continue to do maintaining MaraDNS.

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[1] "Irregardless" is a word because I say it's a word.

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Deadwood 3.2.02 released

February 29, 2012

I have released Deadwood 3.2.02 today. If all goes well, I will not have to do another Deadwood release until we see another February 29 roll around. Or, who knows, maybe someone with deep pockets will pay me work on Deadwood full time.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/stable/

A changelog is here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/doc/CHANGELOG

I plan on updating the version of Deadwood bundled with MaraDNS to be 3.2.02 sometime next month. This will be my last work on MaraDNS for a while, barring a critical and/or security bug being found.

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Deadwood update

February 28, 2012

Today's update of Deadwood only updates the documentation:

I make it clear that it's important to adjust the cache size if there are a lot of root_servers and upstream_servers elements.

I have split up the description of how Deadwood does recursion in to sections.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

Or, more simply, just look at the updated documents:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/doc/

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Deadwood update; etc.

February 26, 2012

In today's blog I mention a minor update I did to Deadwood yesterday, discuss my future plans for MaraDNS, as well as discuss theology and God some more.

Deadwood update

I have updated a comment in DwMararc.c to be more accurate in Deadwood.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

MaraDNS roadmap

The funding I got from last September's drive has allowed me to direct more attention to MaraDNS these last few months. I plan on continuing to give MaraDNS full support until mid-March.

The donations I have gotten allowed me to finish up adding some features I wanted to add to Deadwood 3.0 (finer timestamps; better CNAME handling) for a while now, as well as be prompt about answering bug reports and other emails on the MaraDNS support list.

Since the amount of work I'm doing in my day job is increasing and since I have gotten a raise at the beginning of 2012, I will not be doing another funding drive for MaraDNS for the foreseeable future.

I plan on releasing Deadwood 3.2.02 in mid-March; this will signal the beginning of a maintenance-only support cycle for MaraDNS:

I will read the MaraDNS mailing list once a month and fix security and other critical bugs. There is no guarantee I will answer other support questions or even acknowledge non-critical bug reports.

On my faith in God

There is a lot of truth to the "Religion is a Penis" meme that has been making the rounds on the internet. There is a reason I have only discussed my personal religious beliefs two times on my blog so far. Well, three times counting this entry.

One of the reasons I have been contemplating religion so much these last few days is because Lent has started this last Wednesday; this is, for me, a time for greater contemplation of God.

My faith in a nutshell: I was an atheist until I was 19, when I had a vision of Jesus Christ and heard a voice in my head telling me "I LOVE YOU". After having this vision, I became the worst kind of religious fanatic, angering people with my insistent desire to talk about God.

It took me two years to finally calm down; when I did, I had made a nearby liberal Catholic parish (where deacons would say things in mass like "Gay people do not choose to be gay") my church.

I always found the writings of fundamentalists--such as "Evidence that demands a verdict"--very dogmatic, shallow, and narrow-minded. When I got online a year or two later, I finally found communities of people who agreed with me. Indeed, one of the very first documents I passed around in email was a point-by-point refutation of "Evidence".

I have never lost my faith in Jesus--it's pretty hard to deny a vision that I have had--but I have become disgusted with the faith of hard-core fundamentalists, having briefly dabbled in fundamentalism myself.

The reason why fundamentalism angers me so much is because it is a very paranoid belief. It takes the legitimate experience someone has of God--such as the one "RogueValley" of Democratic Underground had--and says this experience is actually a well-crafted deception from Satan unless it conforms to the fundamentalist's narrow-minded doctrine.

To take the spiritual experience of someone and claim that the experience is "counterfeit" if it does not conform to a particular dogma is to engage in fear-based conspiracy theory thinking. To believe something like that requires a belief of there being a conspiracy of evil spirits who, in every way, shape, and form appear to be spirits of a loving God but who are really agents of the devil.

I do not subscribe to conspiracy theories and the underlying fear such theories cause. To quote 1 John 4:18: "He who fears is not made perfect in love."

The Holy Bible is not an inerrant book but instead an inspired book. If the book was inerrant, the second coming of Jesus would have happened 2000 years ago (I discuss this in more detail in an earlier blog entry). For me, the Bible is the story of imperfect human beings having an experience of God and writing that experience down.

In light of the narrow-minded, intolerant, and fear-based beliefs of the fundamentalists, it is no wonder that Bruce Gerencser, a recovering fundamentalist, has stopped believing in God. He came to realize that God could not possibly be so narrow-minded and intolerant and create the universe we live in. While I feel Bruce may have thrown the baby out with the bathwater--there is value in believing in God--I respect him for being honest about his beliefs and for moving beyond the close-minded beliefs he used to have. Lukewarm he is not (Rev. 3:16).

(Update: Bruce has clarified that he stopped being a fundamentalist some 15 years before making a decision to stop believing in God altogether.)

Some links

Let me finish this blog with a couple of links:

How do I know I'm experiencing God?

A look at how dogmatic fundamentalism is driving people away from the church

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Fundamentalism & Christianity

February 25, 2012

Everyone has a soapbox

The advantage of the internet is that it lets people present their point of view. The disadvantage of the internet is that it lets crackpots present their point of view.

The internet is a true miracle. Every single idea, viewpoint, opinion can be found and expressed here. That is, every single idea, viewpoint, and opinion that someone is willing to express for fun and for free.

"Free" being the operative word here. In other words, expressing something and not getting paid. It is amazing the number of crackpots out there whose opinion is worth precisely nothing.

My rule of brevity

I believe in the rule of brevity: The more worthwhile someone's writings, the less they write. I came up with this rule back in the days of Usenet, after seeing countless crackpots post long, rambling posts no one wanted to read; people whose net contribution to the internet is to anger people and start flame wars.

That in mind, today's blog post is pretty long.

The John 14:6 litmus test

I was looking around for a decent free online commentary on the Gospel according to John. My litmus test was simple: I would open up the commentary and see what it said about John 14:6 ("I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father, except through me"). If the commentary said words to the effect that 14:6 means that all Muslims, Buddists, Hindus, etc. are going to Hell, I knew using said commentary would be a waste of my time.

Fundamentalists who use 14:6 to justify their intolerant and bigoted "God" gloss over 14:2: "In my Father's house, there are many mansions". It is no coincidence Jesus said that before affirming that he was an integral part of the universal God all religions aspire towards. What 14:6 is really saying is that truly Godly people will live a life like he lived: Loving and compassionate, as opposed to the legalistic and judgmental life the Pharisees of Jesus' time lived.

The only free online commentary of John I found worth reading was the Wikibooks one.

The Gandhi is in Hell litmus test

I have another theological litmus test: Do you believe Gandhi is in Hell? Not surprisingly, there are a lot of crackpots on the internet who believe precisely that. Take, for example this rather obnoxious "Christian":

John Chisham

John Chisham is a rather obnoxious fundamentalist "Christian" who, no surprise, flunks the "Gandhi litmus test". This particular, err Christian has offended a large number of people, including Christians and his types of beliefs have even caused someone to lose Christian faith.

A tree and its fruit

Luke 6:43-45: "There is no good tree that brings forth rotten fruit; nor again a rotten tree that brings forth good fruit. For each tree is known by its own fruit. For people don’t gather figs from thorns, nor do they gather grapes from a bramble bush. The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings out that which is good, and the evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings out that which is evil, for out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks."

Someone who preaches a "gospel" which is lacking in love and whose fruit is to drive people away from Christianity is someone who is preaching a "gospel" giving out very rotten fruit indeed.

Two blogs worth reading

Now that I got that rant off of my chest, two blogs worth reading:

Landon Dyer, the guy who wrote the Atari 8-bit PC versions of Donkey Kong and Super Pac Man, has a very enjoyable-to-read blog which is sadly only periodically updated.

The Christian Research Network (not to be confused with the very narrow-minded Fundamentalist CRI)

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Bulk polyhedral dice

February 18, 2012

Buying dice

After a 20-year hiatus, I am starting to play role playing games again. When making characters, we discovered that no one in our party had dice. So, I spent some time researching getting bulk polyhedral dice for the entire party, so we never will have to worry about dice again. Some results:

The most common source for bulk dice is the Chessex pound of dice bag.

Other similar sources of bulk dice are the Crystal Caste 1 pound stocking, the Koplow Games pound of polyhedral dice, and Game Science's pound of dice.

The Ebay store Brilliant Star Corp is selling bulk dice at even better prices right now, including a jar of 360 translucent dice for under $70 (including shipping).

Another Ebay store selling bulk dice at a really good price is Melendy Trains, who right now is selling 500 dice for $55 (including shipping).

While not as pretty as other dice, EAI Education sells bulk polyhedral dice.

Likewise, Enasco sells polyhedral dice for a little more than EAI Education.

If you want to buy a really large quantity of dice, Gameparts sells in bulk.

One may be able to get a good low quote directly from Koplow Games

Geomyidae is crashing

I have been having some issues with Geomyidae, the Gopher server I use, crashing. I have recompiled with server with debugging symbols enabled and have allowed it to dump core next time it crashes. Hopefully, I will be able to find and fix the issue.

Gopher is so 1990s, so I'm not making stability of my Gopher server a priority. It's more important to me to know where the bug is in the Geomyidae daemon.

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Classic X11 fonts for Windows

February 16, 2012

For people, like myself, who are fans of the classic X11 font misc-fixed, there is now a Windows version of this font, and I have made a local mirror of the true-type version of the 6x13 font, which seems to be available under a GPL license.

This font is very useful for having two 80x41 terminal windows side-by-side on a tiny 1024x600 Netbook screen. The font is a true-type font which looks good at only one size: 9 point.

For anything larger, I recommend using Cousine (also sometimes known as "Liberation mono"), which is a beautiful and fully readable fully delta hinted monospace font released under an open-source license (the Open Font License); I also have a local mirror of this font.

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RedHat extended support

February 15, 2012

I just found out today that RedHat has added three years to the support lifecycle of both RHEL 5 and RHEL 6. Instead of being cut off in 2014, RHEL 5 will continue to be supported until 2017; instead of being cut off in 2017, RHEL 6 will continue to be supported until late 2020.

This not only benefits the high-paying customers of RHEL, but also benefits the derivatives of RedHat. CentOS has already extended their support timelines and while Scientific Linux hasn't extended their end-of-life timeline, there's a pretty good chance they will.

While many operating system upgrades are quick and easy, and while periodic updates is a good idea, it's nice to have the ability to continue using an older operating system and stay current with security fixes.

Indeed, I still use CentOS 5 for MaraDNS development, since I haven't had the time to update MaraDNS' regressions for Scientific Linux 6/CentOS 6.

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Happy Valentine's Day

February 14, 2012

Happy Valentine's day everyone. For people happily in relationships, today is a very good day to remember how special your loved one is. For people who are single, today is a great day to get yourself a date and get someone in your life--I once had a roommate who started dating this girl on Valentine's day.

For you single nerds out there, today is a good day to stop spending so much time on Slashdot and editing the Wikipedia, and spending more time flirting with and meeting girls, even if you're meeting them online--I met my wife online, so Internet dating does work.

On the Debian OpenSSL RNG bug

I have been reading up on the Debian OpenSSL RNG bug. I personally am no fan of the Debian bureaucracy and deeply thank Nicholas Bamber for dealing with it to keep MaraDNS (mostly) up-to-date in Debian.

However, I think the real reason this happened is the very nature of open-source. Ben Laurie summarized it well:

Despite the widespread use of OpenSSL, almost no-one funds development on it.

Ubuntu rant

Right now, I am creating eight Ubuntu virtual containers so that I can test a deployment script I am writing for my day job. My script to create the containers calls apt-get -y dist-upgrade which is supposed to patch any known security problems in the containers unattended.

Unfortunately, apt-get, even though it is called with -y, stops the automated security patching with this rather obnoxious prompt:

Configuration file `/etc/init/portmap.conf'
 ==> Deleted (by you or by a script) since installation.
 ==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
   What would you like to do about it ? Your options are:
    Y or I : install the package maintainer's version
    N or O : keep your currently-installed version
      D : show the differences between the versions
      Z : background this process to examine the situation
 The default action is to keep your current version.
*** portmap.conf (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ?

Note to Ubuntu maintainers: We don't care. A fresh system calling apt-get -y dist-upgrade should never prompt the user for anything--that's why apt-get was called with the -y flag. From the apt-get man page:

-y, --yes, --assume-yes

Automatic yes to prompts; assume "yes" as answer to all prompts and run non-interactively. If an undesirable situation, such as changing a held package, trying to install a unauthenticated package or removing an essential package occurs then apt-get will abort.

My work-around:

vzctl exec $NUM 'yes Y | apt-get -y dist-upgrade'

See also: Linux is only for bachelors, I made LXer, and Linux: Desktop fail.

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On Ghost Domains

February 13, 2012

Earlier this month Haixin Duan, et al released the paper "Ghost Domain Names: Revoked Yet Still Resolvable" (PDF document). For people who do not have the time to read the paper, this paper describes how a phisher can keep a malicious domain resolving after said domain is canceled upstream.

As it turns out, Deadwood is immune to this attack because it uses a different method to resolve domains than what most other DNS servers use. While more complicated, Deadwood is immune to some attacks which other DNS servers are vulnerable to.

I describe how Deadwood resolves domains in great depth in the following paper:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/doc/Recursive-algorithm.html

Since the above document does not clarify this: Deadwood, like any other modern DNS server, does DNS ID and source port randomization. Indeed, Deadwood was doing this well before Kaminsky's attack came to surface in mid-2008.

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MaraDNS 2.0.05 released

February 12, 2012

I have released MaraDNS 2.0.05 today. This release updates the recursive code to use Deadwood 3.2.01 and fixes CVE-2011-5056.

All users of MaraDNS are encouraged to update to 2.0.05, unless one has a really compelling reason to still use a 1.4 release (MaraDNS 1.x users should be using 1.4.10).

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download.html
http://sourceforge.net/projects/maradns

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Deadwood update

February 11, 2012

I recently mentioned that the changes to give Deadwood finer time stamps was causing one of the TCP regression tests to fail.

The reason this test was failing was because the code to make Deadwood's time stamps more fine-grained also decreased the amount of time given to allow a DNS-over-TCP connection to complete. I have fixed this issue by increasing the time we give Deadwood to finish a DNS-over-TCP connection, letting the test pass again.

If all goes well, I will be able to release Deadwood 3.2.01 later this weekend.

The updated code can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

Update: Deadwood 3.2.01 released:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/stable/

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My Gopher server

February 6, 2012

As a geek, I sometimes have an interest in technologies and forms of communication which have little or no real-world monetary value today. One of these technologies was Gopher, a short-lived hypertexting technology which briefly existed before the world wide web took over.

How to use Gopher

The simplest way to use Gopher today is to use the Firefox web browser along with the Overbite Firefox plugin.

To verify that Gopher is working, once Overbite is installed, go to this Gopher link to verify the Gopher protocol is supported by your browser.

Setting up a Gopher server

I use the Geomyidae Gopher server (Warning: Gopher link) as my Gopher server. Once it is compiled and installed, here is the format of an index.gph file:

Here is some free-form text
tthis line needs two 't's at the beginning

[0|Title of text document|/filename.txt|gopher.samiam.org|70]
[1|Gopher index location|/some_directory/|gopher.samiam.org|70]
[h|World wide web URL|URL:http://samiam.org|gopher.samiam.org|70]

Here, any line that doesn't start with a '[' or 't' is rendered as-is. Text lines which start with 't' have the first 't' dropped. Lines which start with '[' are Gopher hyperlinks.

The fields of a hyperlink are:

The type of hyperlink. 0 is a link to a text file, 1 is a link to another Gopher index of hyperlinks, and 'h' is a modern URL link.

The title of the hyperlink.

The location the hyperlink is on.

The name of the server with the hyperlink.

The port the hyperlink is on

Note that, with 'h' hyperlinks, the server and port number are usually ignored, but should point to the gopher server serving the hyperlink (Not the server the link points to).

My Gopher server

As I alluded to above, I now have a Gopher server at gopher://gopher.samiam.org/. It contains a mirror of my index page, as well as a text copy of this blog. For people who do not want to install a Gopher client, there are at least two different Gopher proxies available.

To be honest, I was never much of a Gopher user; by the time I got on the Internet, the steamroller of HTML was in full force and Gopher was quickly going the way of bell bottoms. However, it's an interesting technology which should not be completely forgotten.

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A brief review of my VPS hosts

February 5, 2012

I will briefly review the four VPS hosts I have used. A VPS, or virtual private server, is a type of low-cost hosting where one has root on their own IP at a fraction of a cost of having their own computer at a colocation. Plans start at only $10 a year.

I described these plans in more detail last year in my blog. Buyer beware: Of the three providers who I listed last year, two are deadpool (no longer exist).

These reviews come from the viewpoint of someone using CentOS on the server.

AlienVPS

The very first VPS I have signed up for. $19/year comes with enough ram to allow one to easily update the system once the "fastestmirror" plug-in is disabled. Uptime is about 98%-99%; the company has experienced growing pains but is remarkably stable.

I am very happy with their response time to the tickets I have opened up with them.

The normal price is $19, but they right now have the low-end VPSes on sale for $15/year

Cripperz

As I recently blogged, Cripperz recently went deadpool. My VPS with them was noticeably slower than my nodes with AlienVPS, and they had more downtime. System was easily updated--I didn't even need to disable "fastestmirror" to do so.

FastVPS.co

This is a really new company offering VPSes. Since they are unproven, they are deeply discounting their service; it's only $12/year. I got one just last week to replace my now-dead Cripperz node. So far, it's really fast, and I'm getting a lot more bandwidth (one terabyte per month) than I am with my other providers. CentOS updates were not a problem.

Sign-up page.

123Systems

They have been around a while and people seem happy with their service on WHT. Their really-low-cost $10/year nodes are really low-end. Running updates in CentOS was a royal pain; I needed about an hour to finally get the system updated because the VPS doesn't have the resources to do a really big update all at once, and the OS template is an older CentOS release.

The sign-up page for their low-cost solutions is hidden. They do not offer CentOS 6, but unlike other providers listed here, they do offer Scientific Linux 6.

Right now they are out of stock of the $10/year plan. Just as well; I only would recommend this VPS for a seasoned UNIX user who knows their system well enough to update a distribution piecemeal.

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Adios cripperz.sg

February 3, 2012

One of the three nodes I have used for hosting my domains (samiam.org, maradns.org, etc.) was a low-cost VPS with cripperz.sg. The good news is that the domain was only supposedly $20/year with a $1 setup fee. The bad news was that the machine was slow (a good deal slower than my $19/year AlienVPS nodes) and cripperz.sg fell off of the earth and was marked deadpool in late January.

My node with them was still up until yesterday around noon (Central time) then went belly-up, undoubtedly for good, since cripperz.sg stop resolving over a week ago on January 21. So, instead of getting a VPS from them for $21 a year, I ended up paying $21 for over seven months. It wasn't a bad server for $3 a month, and I did have warning it was going to go offline (which I should have heeded), so all is good. I wish the people at Cripperz the best.

Since I have redundant servers and DNS failover set up for my domains, and since my node with Cripperz was always a backup node, there was no downtime. Cripperz served me well keeping my web pages up when AlienVPS was having some minor issues keeping their servers running last fall.

To replace my Cripperz node, I chose one the cheapest VPS providers, namely FastVPS. For only $12, I had within a couple of hours a new backup node for samiam.org up and running. It feels fast--it's a new server in the same datacenter as Cripperz's servers, but with a more powerful and less overloaded machine.

I so far am very happy with my node with FastVPS. I am a little worried that they are offering so much for so little, but, considering there was over a week's warning Cripperz was going deadpool, and considering I have two other nodes up and running with AlienVPS, I should be fine even if they can't keep their shop open. The most I have to lose is $12 and a couple of hours work moving my backup node yet again.

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Having a spiritual experience

January 30, 2012

I did not write this entry. This entry was written by Abhinabha Tangerman and is a mirror of a page at www.srichinmoybio.co.uk which is available under a Creative Commons license.

Spirituality has become a subject which over the last few decades has gradually entered into the mainstream of human thought and experience. Confined only to a limited number of practitioners and well-wishers for the larger part of the previous century, nowadays with movies like The Celestine Prophecy, The Secret and Conversations With God coming out at a regular basis, a new trend in human thinking and striving is revealed. More and more people seem to be looking for a glimpse or a taste of God - or the higher reality that name embodies. We are longing for a spiritual experience.

A spiritual experience may consist of happiness, joy, peace, bliss or a feeling of oneness and wholeness with life, nature or the universe. To have a spiritual experience is not a difficult task, if you are prepared to make a little personal effort. It may happen that such an experience occurs spontaneously, out of the blue, without us trying to invoke it. In such a case we should take it as an unconditional blessing from Above. But there are certain things we can do to expedite our spiritual progress and have spiritual experiences on a more regular and rewarding basis.

Prayer and meditation are tools with which we can accelerate our spiritual progress enormously. Both are ways to communicate with that higher, divine energy that is both deep within us and all around us. Whereas prayer is like a flame rising upwards, meditation is an expanding silence coming from deep within. The difference between prayer and meditation has been clearly and lucidly expressed by spiritual teacher Sri Chinmoy: "When we pray, we speak and God listens; when we meditate, we listen and God talks."

It takes some practise, but anyone who is sincere and serious can achieve amazing results from daily practising prayer and meditation after a mere three weeks. We feel an inner calm and inner strength slowly developing inside us. This inner calm is the best possible antidote for stress. Our sleep will become deeper and in our waking hours we will be more conscious and aware of what is happening. We will see that through prayer and meditation the quality of our life gradually and unmistakably improves.

It is more difficult to meditate than to pray. Almost everybody knows how to pray, but meditation is something that does not come as natural to us. In meditation the main thing is to keep the mind calm and quiet and not to allow thoughts to enter into the mind. This may be very difficult indeed, especially in the beginning, but through regular practise the mind is gradually brought under control. The silence between two thoughts then begins to increase up to a point where we will eventually experience complete inner silence. This inner silence is the essence of meditation.

"Meditation is communication with silence," as Sri Chinmoy states.

Prayer and meditation are part of the spiritual life. The spiritual life is the life that is consciously striving and aspiring to reach higher levels of consciousness. In that elevated state of consciousness the communion with the higher reality becomes clearer, more inspiring and more fulfilling. We start to see a deeper meaning in life, hidden in the commonest of things.

The most important thing in practising spirituality is never to give up. And if we are willing to give it a try, Sri Chinmoy has encouraging words for us:

"Try to live the life of spiritual discipline for a day, a single day! You are bound to succeed."

The above content was written by Abhinabha Tangerman and is available under version 2.5 of Creative Commons' by-nc-nd license (Attribution/Noncommercial/No Derivative Works). Attribution: www.srichinmoybio.co.uk. To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Deadwood update

January 28, 2012

The code to give Deadwood finer timestamps has triggered a regression: For reasons I have not figured out yet, this code breaks Deadwood's DNS-over-TCP support.

If I compile Deadwood with the older coarse timestamps, the code passes this DNS-over-TCP SQA regression with flying colors.

I do not feel comfortable releasing Deadwood 3.2 until this SQA regression passes again. While DNS works really fine without DNS-over-TCP, and while Deadwood has DNS-over-TCP disabled by default, DNS-over-TCP is something that has been working in Deadwood for nearly three years, and I am not in the business of having new releases break things.

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Deadwood update

January 25, 2012

I have been improving Deadwood's resolution of domains with a bugfix as well as a new SQA test.

The other night, I discovered that the recent changes to the CNAME chasing as well as the LRU hash code made it impossible to resolve one particular domain. I have fixed this bug.

In addition, I have added a new SQA test (which isn't an automated regression but a test run by hand) that checks to see which domains in an older list of the Alexa top 500 (now top 497) do not resolve.

Running this test several times and seeing which domains do not resolve has resulted in me tuning Deadwood to have a default num_retries of 5 instead of 2. This greatly reduces the number of non-resolving domains in the Alexa list starting with an empty cache.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

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I oppose SOPA

January 19, 2012

On the right, you can see a picture of me in San Jose protesting the DMCA at a July 2001 protest of Dmitry Sklyarov's arrest. Keep this picture in mind while reading my rant about piracy.

Piracy is stealing

I have been thinking a lot about SOPA. One thing that has made it very hard for me to look at it in an objective way is all of the noise against SOPA from the kinds of people who come up with convoluted justifications for piracy.

I do not have any particular respect for left-wing liberals with an entitlement mentality who fail to understand basic economics. [1] I have even less respect for the extremists who think piracy somehow encourages a "new economy" or who pretend wide spread piracy increases sales. These extremists are like young earth creationists, global warming deniers, and others who refuse to acknowledge any facts that contradict their skewed world view.

The bottom line is that piracy is stealing, and that piracy is taking jobs away from thousands of hard working people who make a living making content. I have little respect for the viewpoints of people who either refuse to acknowledge this, or are plain simply so selfish that they think their entitlement to illegal free content is more important than the well-being of hard-working content creators.

Such extremists will oppose any law, no matter how reasonable, that tries to stem the tide of piracy on the Internet that is decimating the music and movie industry.

This in mind, when looking at the SOPA, I have done my utmost to ignore these extremists.

SOPA is not the right answer

SOPA is the most recent proposed law in a string of laws which greatly favor the content creators and are unfair for consumers. The first of these laws was probably the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) of 1992 that was the final nail in the coffin for widespread consumer adoption of Digital Audio Tapes (DATs).

In the early 1990s, the technology was there for really inexpensive digital recording and playback. Because of the meddling of the music industry, that technology was never made available at an affordable level for end-consumers. A digital recorder that should have cost $300 in 1992 actually ended up costing $1200; garage bands had to pay royalties to the major labels every time they bought a DAT to record their own music. [2]

This was the first of many laws enacted in the 1990s that greatly favored content producers at the expense of everyone else. The DMCA made technical measures to facilitate fair use, such as allowing one to play a game one legally owns the CD to on a netbook, illegal. The Sonny Bono copyright act increased copyright terms to unheard-of levels; because of this act, no works will have their copyright lapse and enter the public domain until 2019.

SOPA is the latest attempt of big content to impose more draconian controls on the Internet. I feel no need to repeat the objections to SOPA posted (PDF file) elsewhere. To summarize: SOPA will give government unprecedented power to suppress speech they find objectionable without due process.

Piracy is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. I do not believe SOPA is the best way to address this problem.

[1] I also have no respect for right-wing conservative bigots, but that's another topic.

[2] This was before the Internet made it easier for like-minded people to share ideas. No one in my circle of friends appreciated the issues at the time.

The picture at the top was taken, I believe, by Greg Broiles, and is used under fair use copyright provisions. To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Deadwood update

January 17, 2012

I have been updating the Deadwood documentation a little. In addition, I introduced a bug in the snapshot branch of Deadwood where cache entries with a timestamp before March 20, 1979 stored to disk would never expire.

I have fixed this bug; users of the snapshot branch of Deadwood will need to delete any cache files on disk (such as dw_cache or dw_cache_bin) before upgrading to the latest snapshot. This bug does not impact users of the stable or testing version of Deadwood.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

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MaraDNS 1 update

January 13, 2012

Hopefully the third time is the charm. While I added hash randomization to MaraDNS 1's code in late 2011, there was still a fairly easy way to add elements that collide to the hash. Hence, a one-line tweak to the hash. The hash should now be collision-resistant.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/1.4/
http://www.maradns.org/download/1.3/

See also: MaraDNS 1 update MaraDNS 1 update

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New Deadwood snapshot

January 6, 2012

Here's a new FAQ question and answer for Deadwood:

Records added to the cache when the timestamp is set to 1970 do not expire

Deadwood is year-2038 compliant, even on systems with a 32-bit time_t. In order to pull this off, Deadwood assumes that 32-bit time_t systems showing a timestamp before May 6 2007 (chosen because it was 6 months before the first Deadwood release) have had their clock "wrap around" and that it's really far in the future, not far in the past.

This allows Deadwood to have accurate timestamps on systems with a 32-bit time_t until 2143. The side effect is that Deadwood assumes that systems with a timestamp of 0 are not in 1970, but instead are in the year 2106. This results in all records stored in the cache on systems with an incorrect timestamp not expiring until 2106.

If building Deadwood on a system which sometimes has an incorrect timestamp, there are a couple of ways to work around this:

Run Deadwood on a system with a 64-bit time_t.

Set up the system to not start up Deadwood unless the system clock is set to May 2007 or later.

Change the value of DW_MINTIME in DwSys.h to a lower or negative value. Note that, if this is set, for example, to -1 instead of its current value (1178488417: May of 2007), Deadwood will start to have inaccurate timestamps on systems with 32-bit time_t in 2106, not 2143. If this is done, please upgrade to a system with a 64-bit time_t before 2106.

Please also note that dwh_put_int64() in DwHash.c (the code that writes the cache to disk) will not correctly store timestamps earlier than March 20, 1979 (they will simply be marked as being on that day). Such records in the cache should immediately expire on systems once the timestamp is correctly set, but this has not been tested at all.

I have updated the Deadwood docs to include this information.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

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Deadwood bug fixed

January 4, 2012

I have fixed a bug in Deadwood: Srinivas Hebbar reported that Deadwood changed the TTL of cached records to always have a TTL of at least 30 seconds. This resulted in Deadwood not removing a record from the cache if it's retrieved every 30 seconds or more.

The reason why Deadwood did this is because:

The code for adding records to Deadwood's LRU hash requires a record to have a TTL of at least 30 seconds

Deadwood's code that ages TTLs and rotates records fetches a record from the LRU hash, then immediately puts the same record back in the LRU hash.

To fix this issue, I modified the code that adds a record to the LRU hash. I have added special code, so that if the TTL has a value of -2, this means do the following:

Look to see if the record is already in the LRU hash.

If it is, do not alter the TTL when updating the record.

If it is not, give the new record a new TTL of 30 seconds.

Using a SQA test I created for this issue yesterday, I have verified that my patch resolves Srinivas' issue.

The patch is here:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/patches/deadwood-3.1.03-ttl_expire.patch

And the snapshot with this patch as well as the new SQA test is here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

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Welcome to 2012

January 1, 2012

In today's blog entry, I welcome my readers to twenty-twelve (2012) and discuss my hopes and plans for this new year.

New MaraDNS snapshot

Let me start off 2012 with a new MaraDNS snapshot: I have forward-ported the randomized hash to the 2.0 branch of the MaraDNS tree.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

MaraDNS 2012 roadmap

MaraDNS 1.3 will no longer be updated or supported on December 21, 2012. I currently do not have an end of life for MaraDNS 1.4, but am decreasing my support for it: While I did fix non-security bugs with MaraDNS 1.4 in 2011, this will no longer be done. Other bug fixes will only be applied to MaraDNS 2.

MaraDNS 2 has been declared stable for over a year and it's time for MaraDNS 1 users to upgrade.

As mentioned before, I have no plans to add significant new features to MaraDNS, but I am currently getting enough funding to do basic babysitting: Fixing non-security bugs and answering email sent to the mailing list. Hopefully the funding will continue so I can provide the bug fixes and email support for all of 2012.

Netbooks in 2012

I am looking forward to the new Cedar Trail netbook chips. Not only do they offer slightly superior CPU performance than last year's N550 Atom chip while using less energy, their GPU performance is twice that of the older Atom chips. It may even be possible to play 2004 and 2005-era video games on them.

2011 was not the best year for netbooks. Not only have both Dell and Samsung declared they they are pulling out of the netbook market, but also Lenovo and Toshiba only released their newer mid-2011 Atom N550 netbooks outside of the US.

While there is already buzz about the Lenovo S110 with a Cedar Trail chip, I find it unlikely it will be released in the United States.

Both Acer and ASUS, however, appear committed to releasing newer Cedar Trail netbooks state-side. Hopefully they will do well enough in 2012 that Lenovo and Toshiba will also make their new offerings available here in the US.

The economy in 2012

It appears that the tech economy is really picking up for 2012. I was able to get more face-to-face job interviews in the last two months of 2011 than I was able over a four-month period a year ago.

It is going to take a while for our economy to fully recover; it will probably be at least a couple of years before we have dot-com levels of employment again, but the economy is at least moving upward again.

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2011

All blog entries written in 2011

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MaraDNS 1 update

December 30, 2011

Looking closely at the patch I applied yesterday, I realized that it had a couple of problems:

Instead of the hash randomization having 24 bits of entropy, it only had 2 to 5 bits of entropy

The hash randomization would sometimes not do a good job of randomizing the hash buckets chosen, slowing down MaraDNS' performance

This in mind, I have release MaraDNS 1.3.07.13 and MaraDNS 1.4.09 today with both of these issues fixed. The hash randomization now has 31 bits of entropy, and the hash does a fairly good job of choosing a random hash bucket again.

The tarball files can be found here:

http://maradns.org/download/1.3

http://maradns.org/download/1.4 (also has Windows binary)

The patch is here:

http://maradns.org/download/patches/maradns-1.3-better_hash.patch

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MaraDNS 1 update

December 29, 2011

One issue with making software is that a responsible programmer takes responsibility for his mistakes. Even if the mistakes were made years ago. MaraDNS is a lot of code dating back to 2001; even though a good deal of the code has been completely rewritten, I still take responsibility for code I wrote in 2001 and 2002.

I very strongly encourage people still using MaraDNS 1.x's recursive code to upgrade to MaraDNS 2, and use Deadwood to process recursive queries. I have completely rewritten the code from the ground up -- Deadwood shares no code whatsoever with MaraDNS -- and did a better job of it the second time around.

The new Deadwood recursive resolver, for example, has been using randomized hashes since 2007, and today's hash randomization attack making the rounds has never affected Deadwood. The older MaraDNS 1.x recursive code, however, did not use a randomized hash. While people really should be using Deadwood for recursive queries, I have released MaraDNS 1.4.08 and MaraDNS 1.3.07.12 with an updated randomized hash.

For anyone who is still using MaraDNS 1, it is important to upgrade to this version in order so that hashes are randomized and not vulnerable to hash collision denial of service attacks. Or better yet, upgrade to MaraDNS 2.

Note that a randomized hash needs a source of entropy; that in mind, the *NIX version of MaraDNS 1.4.08/1.3.07.12 requires /dev/urandom and the Windows version of MaraDNS needs "secret.txt" in the same directory as "maradns.exe". People running MaraDNS 1 on *NIX systems without /dev/urandom are on their own -- I do not support MaraDNS on anything besides CentOS, Scientific Linux, and Windows.

Note that this security bug only affects you if:

You are using MaraDNS 1, *not* MaraDNS 2

recursive_acl is set in MaraDNS 1

Untrusted potential attackers can perform recursive queries with MaraDNS 1.

For example, if using MaraDNS 1 as described in http://samiam.org/blog/20111128.html, one is safe as long as ones mararc file recursive_acl line looks like this:

recursive_acl = "127.0.0.1/8"

The tarballs files can be found here:

http://maradns.org/download/1.3

http://maradns.org/download/1.4 (also has Windows binary)

The patch is here:

http://maradns.org/download/patches/maradns-1.3-secret_hash.patch

No, MaraDNS 2.0's authoritative server does not use a randomized hash. No, this is not a problem because a remote attacker can not control the hash keys. Yes, this could be an issue if an untrusted attacker were able to control MaraDNS' zone files, but that is a much smaller attack surface. I will fix this in MaraDNS 2.0, but only once Deadwood 3.2 is out the door next year.

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2011 Wrap-up

December 24, 2011

Now that the year is wrapping up, here is a look at what I accomplished with MaraDNS in 2011 and my future plans.

MaraDNS in 2011

Not counting the changes to Deadwood, in 2011 I made five different releases that fixed some 12 different bugs and added three new minor features to MaraDNS, as well as making revisions to the documentation.

Deadwood in 2011

In 2011, I applied 14 different bug fixes to Deadwood, added two new minor features (--pid for Duende and reject_ptr), added a lot of code to speed up Deadwood's resolution of host names, made Deadwood's parser more pedantic, and made documentation as well as SQA updates.

Other 2011 accomplishments

Yesterday, I went over the 2011 accomplishments for my web page design. In addition, I did a lot of cool stuff at my day job for Flight Lookup Services, managed to go the whole year without making a single edit to the Wikipedia, said a (hopefully) final goodbye to Usenet, and published some 143 blog entries which I hope you guys have enjoyed reading.

Looking ahead

I hope 2012 is a very prosperous year and that our economy finally starts to significantly recover.

At this point, MaraDNS and Deadwood are finished. I have no plans to add significant new features to either program. Right now, I have received enough contributions to babysit the mailing list and fix non-critical bugs until mid-March.

I will, of course, fix critical bugs without sponsorship, but support above and beyond that depends on the amount of my users' contributions.

Merry Christmas everyone

I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. See you all in 2012!

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Wrapping up the web design

December 23, 2011

Now that 2011 is coming to an end, it is time for me to wrap up the web page facelift for 2011.

My web site design has improved

At the beginning of 2011, my web site design was a simple design from five years ago that only used one font, wasn't very compatible with small-screen browsers, and had a somewhat plain look to it. Oh yeah, the picture of me at the top was out of date.

I was able to completely overhaul the web design in 2011. The design is tighter, more fancy looking, more readable, and includes layouts for medium and small screen browsers.

As I wrap up the web design at the end of 2011, some thoughts on its process.

CSS has gotten so much better

Five years ago, the state of CSS -- the language used to determine the visual look of a web page -- was a lot worse. Back then, with Internet Explorer 6 still being so prominent and with so few web users using a browser that could pass even the Acid 2 test (Acid3 didn't even exist), there were two choices: One could either make a page using CSS layout that required the web page to have a fixed width, or a web page using table layout with a more flexible design.

I chose a design with a fixed width using pure CSS for samiam.org (just under 800 pixels, because 800x600 was still common at the time) and a variable-width design for MaraDNS.org using tables for layout and CSS for visual appearance.

Back in 2006, I wanted to use display: table in my CSS; this was just not possible with the browsers of the time. I finally had a chance to use this in the update to the late 2011 design; it allows desktop computers to see one layout and mobile small-screen devices to see another layout. Since IE6 and IE7 are still around, I still have hard-coded HTML tables -- but only seen by those older IE releases.

Fennec: A useful tool for mobile device web design

I discovered another useful tool for testing my web page: Fennec (also called "Firefox for Android" or "Firefox for mobile"). While Fennec is a mobile browser, there is also a build of it for desktop operating systems, which is very useful for testing out how a web site looks like on a mobile device without needing to walk away from ones desk.

Verdana doesn't have a great bold

While Verdana is the reference standard for a great looking screen font, it is only so at its normal weight. While Verdana bold looks good on older systems without true type, its bold is thick to the point of sometimes being difficult to read (especially with strings like ill) on systems with modern font hinting technologies; the letter spacing is a little tight.

One of the advantages of web fonts -- another technology just not there five years ago -- is that I can use Verdana where it's strongest, namely body text, and another font for headings.

Looking ahead

I used my last web page design for five years. I hope that the new 2011 design can be used for a couple of years, maybe even half a decade like the previous design.

Did I mention that it's a lot easier to keep the picture of me at the top up-to-date with this new design?

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I miss killfiles

December 22, 2011

Usenet and killfiles

Once upon a time, before the world wide web, the primary way people communicated was via a technology called Usenet, which, while far from perfect, had the ability to do something that often isn't possible on today's web discussion boards: It had killfiles.

What killfiles did was make it possible to never see the posts of an obnoxious person again; the computer program used to read comments would filter out any posts from obnoxious people.

Facebook has killfiles

Thankfully, Facebook has similar functionality. If someone is acting annoying or obnoxious, it is possible to block that user so you will never have to read their drivel again. Just yesterday, there was a thread about global warming which an obnoxious global warming denier was hijacking, going on and on about his pet theory and completely ignoring our refutations of his arguments.

So, I killfiled him. Very simple; I went to his user page blocked the user. Instantly, it was no longer necessary for me to read this person's drivel on this thread, making said thread far more pleasant to read.

Huffpost.com doesn't have killfiles

It would be nice if other sites had similar functionality. For example, every time the Huffington Post posts an article about Latino human rights, such as one where women are shackled during childbirth for the crime of being born in the wrong country, all of the bigots come out of the woodwork and go on and on about how these people do not deserve basic human rights because they are illegal and how they are stealing tax money and blah blah blah.

Since any argument these trolls make has long since been refuted years ago, there is no point in arguing with them. The best way to handle these kinds of people is to have a filter hide their postings and turn ones back on them.

Unfortunately, the Huffington post does not appear to have a handy way of letting people do this.

My college roommate

Before I left college to work in the dot-com industry, I had a very bigoted roommate. He was a very angry and bitter person; when I took his picture, he flipped off the camera for the pose. He would go on and on about how non-whites never accomplished anything in society. I finally put him to task and called him a bigot to his face. We stopped talking after that.

When I later on accidentally left the door locked and had to knock on the door to get in, he jumped out and practically assaulted me. He was not a very pleasant person to be around.

Bigots use sockpuppets

After the dot-com bubble popped, I went back to college, majoring in linguistics. One of my classes was with Gerald McMenamin, the expert who recently got national press in his role showing that someone may have forged email supposedly from Facebook's founder. One thing we did in his class was look at a number of rejected letters to the editor to see if one person was using multiple names to make his ideas appear to have more support.

The content of the letters was the same kind of bigoted nonsense that now gets published in the comments section of web discussion boards. I remember all of us being really offended by the comments, and using McMenamin's methods to demonstrate that there were only one or two bigots using multiple "sockpuppet" names to make their bigoted views appear more popular than they really were.

I'm sure it's the same with these anonymous identities on web discussion boards: A very small number of people with a large number of sockpuppet accounts.

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Deadwood 3.1.03 released

December 21, 2011

I have somewhat of a tradition of releasing new versions of MaraDNS on winter solstices; MaraDNS 1.2 was released on December 21, 2005, MaraDNS 1.3 on December 21, 2006, and MaraDNS 1.4 was released on December 21, 2009.

This year, I am making an update of the testing release of Deadwood available on the winter solstice. While this is a testing release, it is feature-complete; all of the features I will add to Deadwood 3.2 have already been implemented. My plan is to make a stable Deadwood 3.2 release in a month or two.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/testing/

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Looking at Celery

December 20, 2011

In today's blog entry, I describe how to have cloud (distributed) computing with Python.

Celery is the technology this blog entry will look at. Celery uses the following components:

A daemon, called celeryd that is placed on each node (computer, either physical or virtual) and queries a "broker" to see if any tasks are to be performed.

A broker, which can be one of several databases or other data store systems, which is used to store which tasks are to be performed. The client sends a task request to this broker; the celery servers (celeryd instances) get task requests from the brokers and perform them. Once a task is finished, its return value is stored on the broker to give back to the client.

The clients, which request celery tasks to be performed.

Installing Celery

Not only does Celery need to be installed (after installing Python, naturally), the broker server has to also be installed (this is an issue Celery's documentation is not clear about). Celery's preferred broker is something called Rabbitmq, written in erlang.

Once Python, Erlang, and Rabbitmq are installed, Celery can be installed.

Using Celery

Once celery is installed, set up a directory for running celeryd which will process tasks. Celeryd uses a file called celeryconfig.py to get configuration. Here is a simple configuration file which uses Rabbitmq on localhost (the same machine/node) as a broker:

BROKER_URL = "amqp://guest:guest@127.0.0.1:5672//"
CELERY_RESULT_BACKEND = "amqp"
CELERY_TASK_RESULT_EXPIRES = 300
CELERY_IMPORTS = ("tasks", )

The "CELERY_IMPORTS" line lists the files that contain tasks that this Celery daemon can process. "tasks" above points to a file called "tasks.py" which contains the code for the actual task to perform. In this example, the tasks is a simple brute-force search for a prime number:

from celery.task import task

@task

# Determine if a number is prime. This is slow -- the point of this
# is a computation that is slow enough it should be handed off to another
# computer or thread

def is_prime(x):
    s = x ** .5 # Square root of x
    if (x % 2) == 0:
        return 0 # Not prime; even number
    q = 3
    while q < s + 1:
        if (x % q) == 0:
            return 0 # Not prime
        q += 2

    return x # Prime

The above code is run on a celery server, and determines whether or not a given number is prime.

Now that the above code is in place, we can have a client that determines the first number that is prime after a given number:

#!/usr/bin/python

from tasks import is_prime

def find_prime(x):
    p = 3 # We can run up to three tasks at once
    results = []

Below, we fill up the task queue by testing the first p (maximum simultaneous tasks run at one time) numbers.

    a = 0
    while a < p:
        results.append(is_prime.delay(x))
        x += 1
        a += 1

Now that the task queue is full, we wait for tasks to finish. If a task is finished and the candidate number, in fact, is prime, we output the prime number and stop spawning new tasks. If a given task is finished and the candidate number is not prime, we use the now-empty task slot to spawn a new task testing the next-higher to see if it is prime

    a = 0
    while a < 2000: # Infinite loop protection
        b = 0
        while b < p:
            if results[b].ready():
                if results[b].result != 0:
                    return results[b].result
                results[b] = is_prime.delay(x)
                x += 1
            b += 1
        a += 1
    return 0 # No prime found :(

That finishes the code looking for a prime number. We now run this code to find the first prime number for a series of power of 10s.

print find_prime(1000)
print find_prime(1000000)
print find_prime(1000000000)
print find_prime(1000000000000)
print find_prime(1000000000000000)

This simple example shows how Celery can be used with Python programs to make programs run across multiple computers, which increases the scalability and speed of Python applications.

While this blog post is copyright 2011 Sam Trenholme, all code contained here is public domain and can be used for any purpose whatsoever. To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Deadwood update

December 18, 2011

Yesterday, I mentioned that there was a bug in MaraDNS (OK, Deadwood). I have fixed this bug and uploaded a new snapshot.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

I would like to thank Nicholas Bamber, again, for his sponsorship that made this bug fix possible.

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Round Up

December 17, 2011

In today's blog entry, I discuss SOPA, a bug in MaraDNS, revising my web design for older IE releases, and a css3pie issue.

My thoughts on SOPA

I have been seeing a lot of noise on the Internet about the problems with the proposed Stop Onine Piracy Act (SOPA). I have to question the motives of a lot of people who are against this act.

For anyone reading this blog who is against SOPA, let me ask you this: Do you feel piracy is stealing?

Personally, I don't think piracy is stealing under all circumstances. For example, if one has the CDs to an older game, and the game isn't available to purchase in a version that doesn't require the CD, I think it is fair for someone to download a version of the game to play it on their computer without a CD drive, as long as they buy the game when and if it becomes legally available in a no-CD version.

There can very well be first amendment issues with the SOPA as it is currently worded. But, I wonder if such issues are being blown out of proportion by people who really just want to continue downloading digital media without compensating the content creators for their hard work.

A bug in MaraDNS

Deadwood, MaraDNS' recursive resolver, has a bug where it will take too much time to process a large configuration file with a lot of entries.

The issue is in DwDict.c. In technical detail, dwd_nextkey() does not use the hash function dwh_hash_compress() (in DwHash.c) to find the right hash bucket, but instead performs a slow traversal of the hash buckets.

Revising the design for older IE releases

Even though Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) holdouts only account for 2.5% or so of visitors to my web site, I went to a lot of trouble last night making sure that IE6 users will see the pretty clouds and my face at the top of my web pages instead of the grey background they were getting.

To pull it off, I had to make another version of the image at the top. There are now three versions of this image:

A version of the image with the clouds, the "Sam Trenholme's page" text, and my picture in the corner for IE6 users.

A version of the image with just the clouds and my picture for IE7 and IE8 users. The "Sam Trenholme's page" text is another image.

A version of the image with just the clouds for IE9 and other modern browsers with current CSS support. My picture and the "Sam Trenholme's page" text are separate images.

I will probably continue to support IE6 in my web page designs until early 2014, when Microsoft finally pulls the plug on Windows XP.

css3pie issues

I mentioned yesterday the one issue css3pie has is that it slows down page loading on netbooks. Another issue is that it does not correctly zoom background images.

I was able to kill two birds with one stone: My workaround is to not use css3pie for the background image of the clouds at the top; this is where the slowdown was most visible and where css3pie's zoom bug was an issue. Instead, the top of the page has square corners and uses the IE7 version of the top image.

I also made the gradient background for the link bar a tileable version for IE8 so it doesn't look too bad when zoomed while having the css3pie curved corners.

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Round-up

December 16, 2011

Today's blog discusses giving modern CSS to IE8, my site's browser usage stats, and Dell leaving the netbook market.

css3pie: Improves CSS for older Internet Explorer releases

I discovered a tool today called css3pie which gives older releases of Internet Explorer better CSS3 compatibility. It works really great; my site now gives Internet Explorer 8 users the complete design instead of a degraded version of the page.

The only issue it has on this site is that there is a "flash" for a couple of seconds on netbooks, during which the image of me at the top is a solid color instead of the picture. This isn't an issue on mainstream computers, just slower netbooks.

I have decided to only use css3pie to shoehorn in modern CSS for Internet Explorer 8 users; there's a greater chance IE7 and IE6 users are using older computers that are really too slow to be using fancy javascript to give them modern browser CSS. I'll continue to give them the degraded design that looks good in IE7 and is perfectly usable in IE6.

Browser usage stats

It looks like most people going to my web site are using modern browsers to access its content. Here are recent stats:

Webkit (Safari and Chrome): 31.2%
Firefox: 42.1%
Opera: 4.9%
IE: 18.9% (IE6 2.47% IE7 3.43% IE8 8.99% IE9 4.24%)

(The numbers add up to 97%; the other 3% are mainly robots crawling the site and what not.)

With the css3pie update, only 6% of users are getting a degraded version of the web site; everyone else is getting the current design. This minority is getting a web site with a perfectly usable (and even attractive for the 3.5% or so using IE7), albeit degraded design.

Further shrinking of the netbook market

Not only is Samsung pulling out of the netbook market, but Dell has (mostly) stopped selling netbooks. With the netbook fad fading away, it looks like the companies who merely rode on the bandwagon are moving on.

The netbook itself isn't going anywhere; ASUS still plans on releasing the 1025C and 1025CE netbooks which will use Intel's next-generation Atom CPUs, albeit not until next year.

Personally, I think Dell is making a mistake leaving the low-end netbook market, just as they made a mistake giving up on the Adamo line of ultrathin notebooks before they had a chance to catch on. If Dell had not given up on the Adamo, they would now have a head-start with the current "ultrabook" trend.

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Dillo CSS hacks

December 13, 2011

A while ago, I posted an article about Dillo CSS hacks. Since that article came out, Dillo has changed and the old CSS hacks for hiding content from Dillo no longer work.

Since I'm not particularly interested in chasing a moving target, I gave up on trying to make my web page good in Dillo. Then, I found out last night that the Windows port of Dillo is frozen. This in mind, I revised my web design to better accommodate Dillo.

The only CSS that Dillo has a problem with is the complicated CSS on my site map page that Internet Explorer 6 and 7 also have a problem with. Since this CSS is only used on two pages, I have split off the mainstream CSS that Dillo does not have a significant problem rendering; While Dillo doesn't support a lot of this CSS, such as float:, display: none, display: table, or background-image:, the site still reasonably degrades and remains attractive.

Unfortunately, the CSS used only on the site map page looks really bad in any browser that doesn't pass the Acid 2 test. Indeed, I use a combination of the Owen hack and the html>/**/body hack to hide most of this CSS from Internet Explorer 6 and 7. To reduce loading times for most pages without this CSS, it is now in a separate file. While Dillo doesn't render Acid 2, it ignores CSS selectors and parses pretty much everything. So, I added another bunch of CSS which only Dillo sees, which "corrects" the CSS Dillo doesn't properly render so the page looks reasonable.

Here is what the header of my site list page looks like:

We have a special style sheet for small-screen devices, such as smart phones

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="samiam_smartphone.css"
media="only screen and (max-device-width: 640px)" />

We have another stylesheet for modern mainstream browsers. We use the "only screen" instead of just "screen" so that older versions of Netscape, Opera, Firefox, and so on do not load the CSS at all

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
media="only screen and (min-device-width: 641px)"
title="Blue Sky (default)" href="samiam_b5.css" />

Load the special CSS used for the boxes on the the site map page

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
media="only screen and (min-device-width: 0)"
href="linkbox.css" />

Have Dillo, and only Dillo (or any other browser which doesn't understand media queries in CSS), load some CSS to hide the CSS it can't effectively render in linkbox.css. This is my "Dillo-Win32 hack".

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
media="only screen and (dillo-hack: 1)"
href="dillo-win32.css" />

Tell small-screen browsers that, yes, I have tailored CSS for a small screen, and there is no need to try and scale the page

<meta name="viewport"
content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1.0,maximum-scale=1.0,user-scalable=0"
>

Since older versions of Internet Explorer still have a large market share, I use IE-specific code to load the CSS so the web site looks attractive in these older browsers. In the CSS file, there are a number of selector hacks to hide the CSS IE6 and IE7 can't effectively render from these browsers.

<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="samiam_b5.css" media="all" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="linkbox.css" media="all" />
<![endif]-->

In summary:

Smart phones get a simple design that works well on a small screen

Modern desktop web browsers get a nice-looking design that works for anything from a netbook-sized screen up to a super-HD screen.

Users of rare older browsers (Netscape, older Firefox, ancient Opera releases with ads, etc.) will usually get a version of this site without any CSS which, while not attractive, is perfectly usable.

The site looks remarkably good on text-only browsers like Links

The CSS gracefully degrades for users of Internet Explorer 6-8

Dillo-win32 users get a reasonably nice-looking site.

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Deadwood update

December 11, 2011

Today's update to Deadwood does not update any source code; what I have done is:

Added a file, Makefile.fallback, for compiling Deadwood on UNIX systems without clock_gettime() (Mac OS X, for example)

Updated INSTALL.txt

Added a new document, execfile-HOWTO

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

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ObHack 007.3

December 10, 2011

ObHack 007.3 released

Fritz has made and I have uploaded ObHack 007.3. This is an update to ObHack, a random map generator for Doom and other games that use the Doom engine. It can be downloaded here:

http://samiam.org/slump/

Deploying the updated web site

I am in the process of deploying the updated web site design. This new design looks virtually identical to the previous design in modern desktop browsers, but the stylesheets and HTML layout are revised to look better both on older browsers and on smart phones as well as other mobile devices.

There are a lot of web pages on the web site, so it may take a few weeks to fully deploy the new design. Right now, the main web pages, as well as the blog and the ObHack webpage have been updated with the revised design. Other web pages will be slowly updated.

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Web page design update

December 9, 2011

As I have mentioned before, I am not completely satisfied with how this web site looks on mobile browsers. While I was able to make some minor changes to get the site to look half-decent on a mobile device, further testing on an iPod touch shows there was still work to be done.

I have done this work. Instead of using an actual table, the CSS now uses display: table to arrange the page in a table layout. For Internet Explorer 7 and 6 -- the only browsers today with significant market share that do not support display: table -- I have used IE-specific HTML to show the tables only to these older programs.

Because of this, I can now move the ads on the right hand side of the table to the bottom of the page on mobile browsers; in addition, since I now use viewport in the head of the document, the ads are fully readable in mobile browsers without needing a pinch zoom.

I have also tested the web page in Internet Explorer 6 and the page's content degenerates fairly reasonably on this ancient browser. The top of the page is light grey instead of having my picture, because IE6 doesn't support PNG transparency and that's how the PNG's background looks in IE6. I have removed the link hover colors in IE6 via the Owen Hack; on pages with the Google ads, move hovers cause the page to annoyingly "blink".

I have removed the text razzing users who still use IE6; I have decided it's not my place to tell people what browser they should or should not be using, and there may be someone out there who somehow has an internet connection, but is not in a financial position to upgrade their older computer. IE6 is the oldest browser that mainstream web sites still cater their design to accommodate.

The site also looks reasonable on Dillo as well as being perfectly readable on a browser that does not support CSS.

My goal in my web site designs has always been to have my site render reasonably well on as many browsers as possible. While I'm no longer worried about how it looks on museum pieces like Netscape 4, I have made sure the web site looks good on Opera 11, Chrome 15, Safari 5, both Firefox 8 and Firefox 3.6, Internet Explorer 8, on mobile browsers (namely, the iPhone), and reasonably degenerates in Internet Explorer 6-8.

In Dillo and Links, the site does not look perfect, but it is reasonably attractive and perfectly readable. On browsers without CSS, the site is perfectly readable, albeit not pretty.

I have not had a chance yet to test the revision of the web site's design on iPads or other tablet devices, nor on any non-iPhone smart phones, but suspect the site will look good (it should look the same as it does on a desktop browser; the mobile page is only for small-screen devices).

I would like to perform more testing on mobile devices before going live with the site; in the meantime, its design can be tested here:

http://samiam.org/try/

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MaraDNS and Paypal

December 7, 2011

On Facebook, my friend Sean Lynch posted a Paypal horror story of someone having their funds frozen for using the PayPal "Donate" button. While I have had a PayPal donate button on my site for five years without problem, I was unable to find the part of PayPal's terms and conditions that spells out under exactly what conditions a Donate button is or is not allowed to be used (probably because their terms and conditions state no such thing).

Doing a Google search yesterday morning, the only advice I could find (I can't find the source today because the outcry over PayPal blocking Regretsy's funds is all over the blogosphere) was to not use the word "Donate" when accepting PayPal funds, but to use a phrase like "Buy me a cup of coffee" instead. Also, it appears that PayPal only holds funds like this when someone has a funding drive for a traditional charitable cause (disaster relief, toys for tots, etc.) but is not a registered charity (presumably to stop people fraudulently representing themselves as a charity when they are not).

Since I don't want to deal with the headache of having my PayPal funds put on hold, I have replaced the PayPal donate image with an image containing the words "Support MaraDNS development", and have removed the words "donate" and "donations" from MaraDNS' home page.

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MaraDNS funding ; etc.

December 1, 2011

MaraDNS funding

Last month's funding drive gave me enough money to devote my time off during the Thanksgiving week to improve Deadwood's handling of CNAME records, as well as allowing Deadwood's to accurately wait less before giving up on an unresponsive DNS server.

Right now, I have enough funds left over to be able to provide basic bug-fix support for MaraDNS and Deadwood on the mailing list for three and a half months. In other words, if I get non-security bug reports or other significant support requests every month, my funding will dry out in mid-March.

I currently do not have enough funding to implement split horizon or any other new features. If these features are desirable, please send me a private email and we can discuss rates.

The job market

A year ago, when I was looking for a job, it took nearly three months to schedule a face-to-face interview and another month for them to come up with enough money to hire me.

This year, I have already, within a month, scheduled multiple face-to-face interviews. This, in spite of the fact that I started my job search in the slow-to-hire holiday season. The job market has definitely improved in the last year (it helps that I no longer need to work remotely, but still). Other friends who were struggling in the post-2008 crash have already found jobs.

For anyone who has been looking for a job and has given up hope: It's a good time to hit the pavement and look for work again.

High-definition video

Ten years ago, I remember researching how much it would cost to have a high-definition video camera. At the time, it cost over $50,000 for a camera with 720p and 1080i resolution.

A few days ago, I went to Costco and saw a 1080p video camera for under $100. Not only does this camera have higher resolution than the $50,000 camera I was looking at a decade ago, it, unlike that old expensive camera, also is a five-megapixel still camera.

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New Deadwood snapshot

November 30, 2011

In today's snapshot of Deadwood, I have fixed a bug where the CNAME of multi-link incomplete CNAME records would always be only 60 seconds long. The TTL is now whatever TTL we get upstream.

This should slightly speed up resolution of multi-link incomplete CNAME records.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

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Deadwood update

November 29, 2011

Better timestamps

I mentioned in a recent blog entry my plans to implement sub-second finer timestamps for Deadwood's time stamps. This uses the POSIX-compliant clock_gettime() call in Linux and the GetSystemTimeAsFileTime() call in Windows. For systems without clock_gettime() (cough Mac OS X cough), it is possible to use the one-second resolution time() by defining FALLBACK_TIME before compiling Deadwood, like this:

cd src/ ; export FLAGS='-O3 -DFALLBACK_TIME' ; make

The advantage of using finer timestamps is that it allows me to safely lower the default timeout to only one second, which will speed up resolution in cases where a DNS server is not responding.

Since Deadwood has already set aside the lower eight bits of the timestamp for sub-second timestamps, I was able to implement this without changing Deadwood's cache binary format.

This change concludes the adding of features to speed up Deadwood that Nicholas Bamber very generously sponsored. I still plan on fixing bugs with the newly added features, as well as fixing other bugs in Deadwood and MaraDNS.

Deadwood is faster

One issue earlier releases of Deadwood had is that they were sometimes rather slow in resolving some domain names. I've done a lot of work this last year improving handling of the corner cases that slowed resolution down; fixes such as the "truncation hack", the "urbandictionary hack", as well as many other bug fixes have greatly reduced the chance of an unusual DNS packet delaying Deadwood's resolution of a host.

Along with the 3.1 improvements in handling cached incomplete CNAMEs and the improved Deadwood timestamps, the code is now faster.

My own "dog food" testing of the latest Deadwood snapshot feels more snappy than older 3.0 releases of Deadwood. Now that Deadwood appears to be able to resolve domains correctly, I have been able to concentrate a little on speeding things up.

Getting it

The latest development snapshot can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

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MaraDNS can redirect domains

November 28, 2011

Phil Harlow had an interesting problem which MaraDNS beautifully solves. He wants to have all hostnames resolve normally, but control the resolution of one particular host name.

Deadwood has a far cleaner code base and is more enterprise-ready than MaraDNS 1's recursive resolver, but it can not do this easily. As I explained to Phil:

To do this will require running MaraDNS 2.0 (or better, MicroDNS: http://samiam.org/software/microdns.html) on one IP while running Deadwood on another IP. Deadwood is strictly a caching DNS server and my free time ran out before I could merge it with MaraDNS' authoritative code.

Do you have a setup where you can run two different DNS servers on two different IPs? Even if you only have one Windows machine, you can install Linux in Virtual Box or VMWare and use "bridged networking" to give your machine a second IP.

Phil did not have a setup where he could easily run two different servers on two different IPs, so I explained to him that MaraDNS 1 can do this. Of course, MaraDNS 1.0 has a number of disadvantages -- there is a reason I spent three years writing Deadwood, after all. As I explained to him:

The old MaraDNS code became too messy to readily maintain, so I had to completely rewrite the code. The new code is good, but multiple IPs are currently needed to have certain domains give certain replies.

[...]

MaraDNS 1's recursive resolver is very much deprecated and is no longer being actively developed.

[...]

Mara v1 will work fine on newer networks (DNS hasn't changed very much) -- it won't work once IPv6 takes over, but that's a couple of years over the horizon. It will do what you need -- its problem is that it isn't the best solution for enterprise-class servers.

[...]

Yes, it will work with Windows 7 ; just be sure to open the firewall when prompted. Also, MaraDNS 1 will happily answer questions about IPv6 records as long as upstream_servers, not root_servers is used -- but uses IPv4 to answer the questions.

So, on to the solution:

Download the Windows binary of MaraDNS 1.4.07

Explode the maradns-1-4-07-win32.zip file in some directory

In the maradns-1-4-07-win32 directory, have the file mararc have these contents:

 # Win32-specific MaraRC file; this makes a basic recursive DNS # server.  ipv4_bind_addresses = "127.0.0.1" recursive_acl = "127.0.0.1/8" timestamp_type = 2 upstream_servers = {} upstream_servers["."] = "8.8.8.8, 8.8.4.4" csv2 = {} csv2["example.com."] = "db.example.com"

Yes, the example.com above is not a typo. Even though the record we are changing is in another domain, the above will work in MaraDNS 1 -- MaraDNS accepts out-of-bailiwick entries in zone files like this (it changes the AA bit, but that's fine for this purpose).

Use mkSecretTxt.exe to make a random file with the name "secret.txt"

Have the file db.example.com with a line like this:

somename.maradns. 10.1.2.3

Replace somename.maradns. with the host name that needs to resolve to a particular IP; replace 10.1.2.3 with the IP somename.maradns. should resolve to.

Start maradns:

maradns -f mararc

If prompted, allow MaraDNS to punch a hole in Windows' firewall.

It is possible to make MaraDNS a service; see the file service.html included with MaraDNS for details. I have copy of srvany.zip available for download (license unknown; to the extent of my knowledge I am not violating copyright making this available for download).

Please note that following these directions is best done from a "cmd" prompt; Start->Run->"cmd" in Windows XP or "cmd" in Windows 7. Also note that MaraDNS can run as a non-admin user. And, finally, the upstream servers are Google's public DNS servers.

I would like to thank Phil Harlow for his donation that made this blog entry possible. To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Deadwood 3.1.01 released

November 27, 2011

While everyone else in the USA has been celebrating Thanksgiving, I have been taking advantage of the days off from my day job to implement something in Deadwood that I didn't have a chance to implement before. I would like to thank Nicholas Bamber, again, for his sponsorship that makes this work possible.

One issue Deadwood 3.0 has had is that it doesn't use cached incomplete CNAME referrals. Let me explain...

When trying to resolve, say, news.yahoo.com, we end up getting a reply like this: "news.yahoo.com's name is actually some-horrible-really-long-name.yahoodns.net, and I am not going to tell you where to find some-horrible-really-long-name.yahoodns.net". So, Deadwood has to go to all of the effort to locate this really long horrible name.

Now, 15 minutes later, once news.yahoo.com has expired from the cache, let us suppose someone else asks for news.yahoo.com. While Deadwood, in fact, notes that news.yahoo.com really uses some other name, Deadwood 3 does not actually use this information and has to start over to find news.yahoo.com.

Deadwood 3.1.01 fixes all this. Deadwood will now use an incomplete CNAME record that is in its cache to speed up solving these kinds of difficult-to-resolve CNAME chains. Since Deadwood has always cached these records, this change to the code doesn't even change the binary format for Deadwood's cache file.

Since this required re-factoring quite a bit of Deadwood's recursive resolver, it was rather difficult to implement. Also, due to the amount of code rewritten, this is a testing release. Please only use this release if you are willing to subscribe to the MaraDNS mailing list to report bugs. It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/testing/

Update: Last minute testing discovered a crash in Deadwood 3.1.01 (there were cases when a pointer would be uninitialized, causing Deadwood to segfault when dereferencing the pointer); I have released Deadwood 3.1.02 with this fixed.

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Thanksgiving thoughts

November 23, 2011

MaraDNS

Funding received from my November 2011 fund drive is being used to improve Deadwood (MaraDNS 2's recursive resolver).

Right now, I am working on improving Deadwood's handling of incomplete CNAME records. This is to speed up Deadwood's resolving of records where an incomplete CNAME with a long TTL points to a record with a short TTL.

Once that is done, I will update Deadwood to use more precise timestamps, so that Deadwood can more quickly resolve domains with non-responsive DNS servers.

My work so far can be looked at here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

Web site update

I finally had a chance to see how my web site looks in the iPhone and the iPad. The site was remarkably readable, and the ads on the right hand side aren't a problem. The only real issue is that the text is a little small on the iPhone; I have updated the CSS for mobile browsers to make the text larger.

Newer mobile devices render the site well enough that I won't have to do an overhaul of its design in 2012; while the text ads are sometimes too small to be readable (without a pinch zoom), my contract with Google doesn't require me to make the text readable on all platforms. It only requires me to keep the ads visible, which they are.

Errata

In an older blog entry, I incorrectly state that divorces will start happening after the second adultery. They won't because, after the second adultery happens, each adultery victim will think that the other adultery victim thinks that there are no adulteries in the village.

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New Deadwood snapshot

November 19, 2011

I am beginning the work of having Deadwood check for a CNAME record in the cache before sending a query upstream. This should make the program resolve names in what I call "Akamai hell" -- host names with a lot of incomplete (glueless) CNAME records which have to be chased -- resolve more quickly.

This work is a little tricky -- the code I have to change was written to make a simple non-recursive DNS cache -- and progressing slowly. However, in the process of writing this code, I figured out a way to make the Deadwood binary noticeably smaller, by making a frequently called inline sequence its own function.

This code size optimization is useful for embedded applications of Deadwood; one of my goals is to keep the Deadwood Windows binary under 65,536 bytes in size. This optimization reduces the size of the Deadwood binary from 65,536 bytes to 61,952 bytes in size, and allows the tiny version of the binary to have filter_rfc1918 functionality again.

With this change, there is now 3,584 bytes to play with, which should be enough space to add all of the code I will add to handle CNAME chains better and for some other speed optimizations.

To compile a smaller binary, be sure TINY_BINARY is defined; this removes some of the parsing rules used for minimizing the amount of support emails the list gets.

I have, in addition to the source code, the tiny Windows binary. It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

As an aside, I have broken my promise not to post to Slashdot again in order to get the word for MaraDNS out there. It's amazing the number of djbdns users who still believe the myth that djbdns is magically completely secure and never needs patching.

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Deadwood snapshot

November 13, 2011

In today's snapshot of Deadwood, I have added a patch that fixes an issue Deadwood has had with easyDNS' hosts.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

Time stamps

I'm also doing some research on getting a timestamp with fraction-of-a-second information. The way to do it in POSIX is with clock_gettime; the way to do it in Windows is with GetSystemTimeAsFileTime. While Mac OS X is a certified UNIX, as it turns out it doesn't have clock_gettime; it uses something else called mach_absolute_time.

Since I don't have a Mac around, when and if I add support for more accurate timestamps, Deadwood will no longer be Mac compatible. People who wish to use Deadwood on a Macintosh are welcome to buy me a fully decked out Core i7 11.6" Macbook Air so I can do a proper port. And, yes, it needs to be a Macbook Air, needs to be 11.6", and needs to have a core i7 chip.

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MaraDNS 2.0.04

November 12, 2011

In light of Nicholas Bamber's very kind donation, my work on MaraDNS continues. I have release MaraDNS 2.0.04 today -- this is a bugfix-only update of MaraDNS 2.0.03; details are in the changelog.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/2.0.04/

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MaraDNS update

November 11, 2011

MaraDNS 1.4.07

Because of a very very generous donation from Nicholas Bamber, I was able to release MaraDNS 1.4.07 today. This is MaraDNS 1.4.06 with six different bug fixes backported from MaraDNS 2.0:

A typo fix for fetchzone

AXFR-over-UDP packets are now correctly marked "truncated"

It is now possible to have the '/' in hostnames

Fix for Debian bug #607739: Hostname shown when complaining about DDIP issues

AngelD's issue with zone transfers when there are a lot of FQDN4 records fixed.

Karim's issue with '/read' directive fixed

Please note that this is a legacy version of MaraDNS and is only for users of MaraDNS 1.x who are not ready to update to MaraDNS 2.0 yet.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/1.4/1.4.07/

Deadwood roadmap

Because of Nicholas' generous donation, I also plan to make a Deadwood 3.1 branch which will fully utilize caching of dangling CNAME records. Fixing this issue with Deadwood will help Deadwood more quickly resolve names in "Akamai hell" -- names which require chasing a lot of CNAME records to resolve.

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Deadwood 3.0.05 released

November 10, 2011

My funding drive for November 2011 has so far been very successful. Because of the generous donations from Bradley D. Thornton and AngelD, I will be able to release updates for Deadwood, MaraDNS 2.0, and MaraDNS 1.4 this month.

In the 3.0.04 release of Deadwood, I rewrote the code to handle reject_aaaa (a parameter that disables IPv6 lookups; useful for IPv4-only networks). The new code did not have the RA bit set; unfortunately, Linux's rather anal DNS stub resolver rejects replies with RA set, causing reject_aaaa and the new reject_ptr parameter (which disables reverse DNS lookups) to break resolution in Linux.

I have updated the code so that RA is now set when sending out an reject_aaaa or reject_ptr reply.

In addition, I have fixed the Windows release to have the mkSecretTxt.exe program (needed the first time Deadwood is run) again.

As an aside, if the Windows release complains there is a problem creating the Deadwood service, please ensure that the Deadwood service is stopped, and that the previous version of Deadwood is disabled with "Deadwood.exe --remove".

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/stable/

Again, thank you for your generous sponsorship. If the sponsorship continues next month, I will begin to implement split horizon DNS for MaraDNS. As always, please only give if you can readily afford to.

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On Flattr

November 9, 2011

Flattr and Kachingle are two proposed systems for giving money to creators of music, art, software, and other digital goods.

Flattr was created by one of the people behind The Pirate Bay, which should give one an idea of the mindset behind these two schemes. The thinking is this: You put a small amount of money, such as five dollars, in a fund for compensating digital goods creators. Every time you see a digital good you feel is worth paying for, you click on the "flattr me" or whatever button.

At the end of the month, flattr takes the monthly contribution you made, skims off their maintenance fee, then divides up what's left by the number of web sites where you clicked on.

So, say, if someone has a $13 monthly piggy bank for flattr contributions, and flattr gets $1, the contributor has $12 set aside for donating to sites. If they click on a single site, that one site gets all $12. If they click on three sites, each sites gets $4. 12 sites, and each site only gets $1.

The problem is that flattr doesn't allow the buyer to assign a value to a digital good. In the real world, if someone sees 12 different cups they wish to buy, they will have to pay 12 times as much as they would if they only bought one cup. In the real world, if a buyer of goods becomes greedy and wants more of something, it is the greedy person's bank account which suffers the consequences. The greedy person will now have to work harder to generate more goods and services to pay off their debts.

In the flattr world, on the other hand, if the buyer becomes greedy and wants more of something, it is the bank accounts of the creators of digital content that suffer. The greedy flattr user is not motivated to generate goods and services to compensate for the goods and services that they have consumed. Worse yet, the people who do create digital content are given less compensation for the same amount of work, and therefore are less motivated to produce more digital goods.

Flattr is not a sustainable viable model for compensating the producers of digital content a fair price for their hard work.

If people want to see MaraDNS continue to thrive and flourish, they will need to compensate me for my work. That means a real PayPal donation. Asking me to use flattr or some other unproven idea (such as Bitcoin) instead of making a PayPal donation doesn't cut it.

Enough of the excuses. If I don't start getting compensated again a reasonable amount ($100 to $200 a month) for my work on MaraDNS, I will no longer be motivated to work on MaraDNS, except maybe to fix security and other critical bugs a couple of hours once a month. MaraDNS and Deadwood already nicely meet my own needs, so I no longer have a non-financial motivation to work on MaraDNS anymore.

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Call for donations

November 8, 2011

(Update: I have gotten a very kind donation from Bradley at Northtech. This meets level one: I till be able to release Deadwood 3.0.05, MaraDNS 2.0.04, and MaraDNS 1.4.07 this coming month, as well as answer email on the list)

Unfortunately, I have not received my usual MaraDNS donation yet this month from my usual sponsor. He has told me that it may be difficult for him to make funds available to donate to the MaraDNS cause; I told him to not donate any more than he can freely afford.

Without his donation, MaraDNS presently is only getting income from its ads. This income is very minimal and only covers hosting expenses. I am not interested in making the ads more numerous nor in making the ads more obnoxious in order to increase my income; asking for sponsorship has been far more fruitful.

Unlike other open source projects, MaraDNS currently does not have income coming from academic or government sources, nor does it benefit from corporate sponsorship.

If I can get sponsorship totaling $100 each month, I will be able to continue maintaining both the 1.4 and 2.0 branch with basic bug fixes, supply critical security fixes for the 1.3 branch, as well as providing basic support on the mailing list. If I can get sponsorship totaling $200 each month, I will also be able to supply critical security fixes for the 1.2 and 1.0 branches of MaraDNS, as well as continuing to work on improving Deadwood's recursive resolution (speeding up resolution speed and ensuring that Deadwood is fully ipv6 ready).

If I can get sponsorship totaling $300 each month, I will remove the ads from both maradns.org and samiam.org.

As soon as a given level of sponsorship ($100, $200, or $300) is reached for a given month, I will inform the mailing list.

Anyone who sponsors MaraDNS will have their name listed on the sponsors page at http://maradns.org/sponsors.html (unless they explicitly tell me that they wish their sponsorship to be anonymous), be congratulated on the mailing list, and will be happy knowing their contribution helps make continued MaraDNS development possible.

To sponsor MaraDNS, please send a Paypal donation to abiword_bugs@yahoo.com or click on the donate link at http://maradns.org. Note that this email address is only used for PayPal donations and I do not answer email sent to it.

If you wish me to provide a specialized MaraDNS feature, please let me know what you wish in private email and we can discuss rates.

In the case I do not get any more sponsorship, I would still continue to provide basic bug fixes for MaraDNS 2.0 as well as Deadwood, in addition to providing critical security bug fixes for MaraDNS 1.4 and MaraDNS 1.3 (1.3 will only be supported until December 21, 2012). I, alas, would no longer be able to acknowledge bug reports nor provide any other support on the mailing list, and would only work on MaraDNS/Deadwood once a month.

For MaraDNS not to wither and eventually die, financial sponsorship is essential. If you can afford to, please make a contribution to ensure that MaraDNS continues to thrive and improve.

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The Galileo 7

November 5, 2011

There is a classic episode from the original Star Trek named The Galileo Seven where Spock discovers that acting in a perfectly logical way while assuming others are just as logical does not work in the real world.

Likewise, the type of thinking used to solve logic puzzles like the the village adultery puzzle does not correspond to the thinking used to write a real-world program. In the village adultery puzzle, the "correct" solution is found only when one buys the flawed assumption that all of the women are perfectly righteous as well as perfectly rational, and that each woman can safely assume all of the other women will think exactly like her.

With real people in the real world, this never actually happens.

For example, when developing Deadwood, if I were able to use the same thinking used to solve a Smullyan-style puzzle, the program would have been finished years sooner than it really was. A lot of the testing and tuning of Deadwood is working around DNS servers whose behavior is anything but logical.

While these kinds of logic puzzles are fun, and can be solved with a bit of thinking once the assumption that everyone acts perfectly logically and knows everyone else acts perfectly logically is understood, they have little real-world value. When developing Deadwood, there were only a couple of times where I was able to come up with something really clever (the hash compression function and the prime number used to determine which DNS server we should contact next, as well as surveying the cryptographic literature to find a good secure pseudo-random number generator). Most of the coding was somewhat tedious detail work implementing small and simple versions of all of the libraries a recursive cache DNS server needs (the string libraries, the LRU used for storing cached records, associative array support, the DNS compression code, etc.)

Unfortunately, there is a somewhat incorrect idea that a good programmer is also trained to solve these kinds of logic puzzles. Some companies will ask a question like this during the interview, and will not hire someone who does not know how to solve such a puzzle.

In today's job market, I realize that there is a small but distinct chance that someone will ask me a question like this during the interview, which is why I have gone to the effort to figure out how these puzzles are constructed and what logic to use to solve them.

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Logic riddles

November 4, 2011

There is a classic logic puzzle out there which is often not worded correctly. The puzzle is often worded like this:

There is a small village with 1 priest and 7 heterosexual couples. In this village, all 7 men have committed adultery, and all women know it when anyone besides their husband has committed adultery. The law of this village is that the penalty for adultery is immediate divorce.

The priest knows about all the adultery that has happened because he has heard all confessions. One Sunday morning, during his homily, he tells the entire village that there is at least one adulterer in the town.

What happens?

The correct answer (for this wording) is that nothing happens.

In more detail, here are the seven wives and how many adulteries they know about:

Name | Knows about # adulteries
Alice | 6
Belinda | 6
Citlalli | 6
Dawn | 6
Esperanza | 6
Faith | 6
Grace | 6
Priest | 7

Now, when the priest says: "There is at least one adulterer in the town", the women look at each other, giggle, and think to themselves "Of course. Indeed, there are six adulterers". The priest has merely shared information that everyone already knows.

If there was only one unfaithful man, the wife would immediately know they were unfaithful and the divorce lawyers would get a call. In the case of two or more unfaithful couples, nothing happens, except for a bad feeling about the moral decay of the village.

If the priest were to say "there are at least two unfaithful couples" in a town with two unfaithful couples, then there would be two divorces. If the priest were to say "there are two or more unfaithful couples" in a town with three or more unfaithful couples, there would be no divorces.

Yes, there are logic puzzles out there where the correct answer is not the intuitive answer (You're on a game show. There are three doors, only one of which hides a prize. You choose a door. The host opens a door without a prize, and tells you that you can change the door. You, unintuitively, should always change the door). This isn't one of them.

Update Looking more closely, it appears that the great Raymond Smullyan himself originally posed this puzzle. That in mind, yes, the women will figure out the adultery going around if:

All the women are righteous and honest, and therefore would immediately file for divorce if they can show that their husband is unfaithful.

All the women know that every single other woman in the village is likewise righteous and honest.

Of course, if this were true, the village can never have more than one married adulterer, unless all of the adultery happens at once in a single drunken night. Or the puzzle can work if the women will only divorce their husbands for adultery when the priest calls upon his faithful to do so.

This is akin to the "-gry" problem, worded like this:

"Angry" and "hungry" are two words in the English language that end in "-gry". What is the third word. This is a puzzle which requires you to read carefully. So, what is the third word?

The answer is "what" -- the first "What is the third word" is a statement, not a question. Alas, people remember the question wrong and it becomes:

"Angry" and "hungry" are two words that end in "-gry". What is the third common English word that ends in "-gry"?

The answer being that "angry" and "hungry" are the only words in modern English with a "-gry" ending.

The point being: If a riddle like this is not correctly worded, the answer changes.

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Deadwood 3.0.04

November 1, 2011

I have released Deadwood 3.0.04 today. This release fixes some bugs and has improved documentation. Please read the update guide and the change log for more information.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/stable/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood without sponsorship again one day in December, before the 15th; if I get some sponsorship, I will work on MaraDNS and Deadwood again sooner.

My plans are to release the tcc version of Deadwood for Windows (which includes a tiny compiler) and then to release MaraDNS 1.4.07; after that, I will work on the MaraDNS 2.0.04 release. The amount of time this will take depends on how much sponsorship money I get.

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Deadwood hacking

October 27, 2011

One issue that has been annoying me is DNS timeouts wating to get a PTR ("reverse DNS lookup") answer when there isn't one (such as when the system is not on the net, etc.). Since I need my system to be just as responsive to do the software development I'm doing for my day job when the system is not online, I needed to resolve the slow DNS timeout problems.

So, I hacked together a special version of Deadwood which will instantly reject any PTR queries...this is currently hard-coded in to the program, but hopefully I will have time to add a reject_ptr parameter early next month sometime.

I also need to improve reject_aaaa so Deadwood instantly gives out the answer, instead of waiting for a reply from upstream (I have already written most of this code when I did today's hack to Deadwood).

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood without sponsorship again one day next month, before the 15th; if I get some sponsorship, I will work on MaraDNS again sooner.

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RMS on Jobs; Raspberry Pi

October 23, 2011

RMS on Jobs

RMS — the founder of the GNU Free software movement — has little love for Steve Jobs. In the wake of Jobs’ tragic death, RMS said that “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone”.

One of the reasons RMS has such animosity with Jobs is because of Apple’s “Look and Feel” lawsuits from the 1980s and early 1990s that tried to argue that a GUI was copyrighted by Apple; this litigation slowed down innovation in the tech industry. Yes, those lawsuits were a step in the wrong direction, but:

Steve Jobs was not a part of Apple at the time — he was working on the NExT cube and with Pixar while Apple was pursuing those lawsuits.

Apple has, under Steve Jobs, made a number of contributions to open source. Jobs, unlike RMS, brought UNIX — indeed, UNIX built with GNU software — to the desktop. Apple also gave us Webkit and has made a lot of contributions to GCC under Jobs’ tenure

The lawsuits are from two decades ago.

Apple paid a very high price for pursuing an ultimately vain attempt to get a monopoly on GUIs via litigation: Once Windows 95 came out, Apple nearly died until Jobs returned to the reins to make Apple profitable again.

RMS completely misses the point when he complains about Apple taking away freedom. The market has spoken, and people would rather have something that works and is easy to use than have something with a “freedom” that only matters if you’re a programmer or other hardcore geek, but has an inconsistent, obtuse, and hard-to-use interface.

The Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is an interesting idea: Making a usable computer that costs only $35. Right now, the project is vaporware; while the computer is supposed to be available next month, it still can not be purchased.

This looks like the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project over all again. OLPC promised us a usable small laptop for $100 at a time when a small subnotebook would set you back $1000 or more. In the end, it gave us a $200 laptop, but only available if purchased in bulk for the education market in developing countries.

OLPC, however, inspired the netbook revolution of the late 2000s — the best technological development of the first decade in the 2000s — and I hope the Raspberry Pi inspires a similar revolution in low-cost computers. It’s possible today to make a computer more powerful than the desktop computers of the mid-1990s running Windows 95 that propelled the dot-com revolution for $35 — the hard part is finding software that will run on such a computer that people will actually want to use.

C|Net site design

I recently commented on C|Net being very bold by using, for their body text, a font without delta hinting. They got enough complaints from people that the font looks "gray" that they have replaced the slab-serif font they were using with Arial. Personally, I think they would have been better off using a slab-serif web font with delta hinting, such as Monotype's Rockwell Light, but that might have been too expensive — it would cost C|Net well over $1,000 per month to get a site license from fonts.com.

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Dennis Ritchie RIP

October 13, 2011

Just a few short days after Steve Jobs' sad passing, the great Dennis Ritchie has passed away.

Dennis Ritchie was one of the primary architects of UNIX and the C programming language, both essential backbones for the internet and computing today. All modern operating systems are written in Ritchie's C language or its derivatives C++ and Objective C. A derivative or clone of UNIX is used for many operating systems today -- Linux, Mac OS X, and iOS are all part of the UNIX legacy.

Unlike Steve Jobs, I had a few passing interactions with Mr. Ritchie about a decade ago on the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers. I was a much younger, and, looking back, disrespectful person than I am today. I pointed out that, with the release of Mac OS X, UNIX finally became a desktop operating system, contradicting a prediction he made in BYTE magazine back in 1995. Mr. Ritchie told me that he could not remember making this prediction; I found the relevant quote and posted it.

While I was correct, it was arrogant and inappropriate on my part to point out that he once, in some passing comments in a BYTE interview, made an inaccurate prediction. I wish I apologized to him for my behavior while he was still with us.

Like myself, Ritchie came to despise what the Linux movement stood for and the narrow-minded fanboyism many Linux "advocates" have. He was guarded about his criticism of Linux because he did not want to incur the same wrath Ken Thompson got from the Linux fanboys.

A moment of silence for the passing of another great in the computer industry.

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Web site plans

October 12, 2011

Looking ahead

While smartphone views are currently only a small percentage of viewers of my web site (IE6, for better or for worse still has a higher percentage), their number is increasing while legacy IE user percentages are decreasing.

That in mind, here are some tentative plans for updating the web page design in 2012:

The web site was a table-free design until testing shows this was causing problems in Internet Explorer 7 and 8. I had to add tables to work around CSS bugs in these older browsers.

That in mind, I would like to return to the original table-free design, along with <!--[if lt IE 9]><![endif]--> code to show only ancient IE releases tables.

The webpage shows a banner suggesting upgrading for IE6 users. I may either keep this banner, remove the banner and test the webpage design in my older laptop with an IE6 virtual machine, or lock out IE6 users using code like this.

I will need to have access to some kind of smartphone to perform small browser testing.

I will keep the same appearance as the current design; the redesign is so smartphone users on small screens see the ads at the bottom, instead of the right, of the page.

I have already updated my archive of some ancient Usenet postings with a design that works well on smartphones; this design works well because those pages do not have ads--I can simply hide the right-hand sidebar from small-screen users. Of course, looking at 80-column fix-width text on a tiny smartphone screen is never going to be the same as looking at it on a modern tablet or PC.

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On web site design

October 10, 2011

C|Net's new design

I must say, I really like the new web site design that C|Net rolled out today. It, however, has a significant problem: It uses a font without delta hinting. I recently blogged about why this is an issue; there are a number of users using older operating systems without clear type or other modern font rendering technologies complaining about the font being gray and nay-to-unreadable.

I admire C|Net for making a web site design using a very attractive font that breaks the mold of "web safe" fonts we have been stuck with for over a decade, but I do not think modern font rendering technologies are ubiquitous enough to make a website that demands them.

Then again, C|Net should be more interested in the users who will click on the ads and maximize their ad revenue than they are on the users too cheap to upgrade their computer operating system (and probably run adblock to boot).

Mobile browser compatibility

I was able to make a completely portable design for my web page that looks really nice on everything from legacy version of Internet Explorer to small smartphones, as well as desktops running modern browsers.

Then I added ads to my website.

As part of my contract with Google's ad sense, I am required to have the ads visible on my website. Even if the ads ruin the look of the website on portable browsers.

The best solution would be to have the sidebar with the ads visible below the other content on mobile browsers using narrow screens. Alas, in order to make the site compatible with legacy versions of Internet Explorer (I get about 6 times the number of IE6 hits as I get combined iPhone and iPad hits; never mind IE7 and IE8 hits), I had to make the layout a HTML table, which precludes me from making this change.

The second-best solution would be to have the data on the right hand side, off of the screen but visible by horizontally scrolling. This is also difficult to do since there is no CSS property "screen width" (100% in CSS means something different).

What I have settled on doing is having a minimum width for the web page's left-side content be 210 pixels; this means that there is some reasonable room for the content even on browsers using older iPhones or even tiny 240x320 screens, while keeping at least some of the ads visible on the right hand side of the screen. It's not pretty, but it is usable.

For me to come up with a better solution, I would have to rewrite the HTML for dozens of pages (to remove the table and use a pure CSS solution) and use separate CSS for legacy versions of Internet Explorer. I will hold off on doing this until smart phones become a higher percentage of the number of visitors of my web site.

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MaraDNS update

October 9, 2011

Karim Malhas has reported a bug with MaraDNS' csv2 parser when using the /read directive.

I was able to make some time this morning to fix the bug.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood without sponsorship again one day next month, before the 15th; if I get some sponsorship, I will work on MaraDNS again sooner.

Update: Harlan was confused about why Deadwood was not working because he had a bind_address not in his recusrive_acl. In my process of making Deadwood more anal so people can see problems before complaining on the list, Deadwood now exits with a fatal error explaining what is happening if this is attempted.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

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MaraDNS update

October 8, 2011

Thanks to a contribution from a sponsor, I have been able to allocate some more time this month to work on MaraDNS and Deadwood.

Harlan Bloom reported having problems using Deadwood to resolve names on his internal network. After troubleshooting the problem with him, I discovered that he was trying to resolve 192.168.1.x IPs without adding filter_rfc1918 = 0 to his dwood3rc file.

Since this is the second time someone has had an issue like this, I have updated the default dwood3rc files to describe and explain the filer_rfc1918 parameter.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

Karim Malhas has reported a bug with MaraDNS' csv2 parser when using the /read directive. I have been able to confirm the existence of this bug and have example configuration files that reproduce said bug, and will hopefully have time in the next few days to fix the bug.

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RIP Steve Jobs

October 6, 2011

Yesterday's passing of Steve Jobs has greatly saddened me. When he left Apple, I knew his days were numbered and have been praying for him and his family.

I am very sad that I never met nor even seen this great man. But, I do admire his accomplishments.

Personally, I think Steve Jobs' greatest accomplishment was making UNIX for the masses. He started with NeXTStep, which became Rhapsody, and finally became a mainstream hit in the form of Mac OS X.

Fans of open-source software can not ignore Apple's significant contributions to Free software; not only have they greatly improve Konqueror's browser to give us Web Kit, they also have contributed a lot of code to the GNU GCC toolchain.

I think another one of Apple's strengths is how focused their line-up of computers has been under Jobs' leadership. For example, Apple only sells two types of laptops: The Macbook Air and the Macbook Pro. Lenovo, as a point of comparison, has some 13 different series of laptops (Thinkpad T, X, X tablet, L, W, and Edge; Ideapad B, G, S, U, V, Y, and Z). By having a single strong leader at the helm, Apple has been able to keep their product line very focused which minimizes customer confusion.

My prayers are still with Jobs' family and I am sure he found peace with himself in his last days. He has left this world with a great legacy and has changed the face of computing.

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MaraDNS update

October 5, 2011

I have fixed the following issues in today's release of MaraDNS:

Nicholas Bamber pointed out two issues with MaraDNS' documentation. I have updated the script that updates MaraDNS to resolve these issues.

AngelD discovered that the zoneserver would not return all records if a zone file has a lot of FQDN4 records. The bug took me about an hour to hunt down and find:

The zoneserver uses a temporary buffer of records when sending them out. This buffer is 30 records in size, which usually isn't a problem because the zoneserver only loads 20 records before sending the records down the wire and flushing the buffer. However, since each FQDN4 (and FQDN6) record adds two records to the buffer, we only get the first 15 records before the buffer is full and some records get dropped.

The fix is simple: I expanded the buffer so that it now fits 64 records.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

The next day I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood without sponsorship is on one day next month, before the 15th. In other words, I will volunteer one day to babysitting MaraDNS between November 1 and November 15.

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Cloak of Darkness

October 2, 2011

Interactive fiction

Once upon a time, long long ago, the preferred method of playing video games was to have the computer type out a description of your location, and then you would type a command, in simplified English, of what you wanted to do.

These kinds of games were called text adventures. While the commercial market for text-only adventures died in the late 1980s, a number of enthusiasts have kept the text adventure market alive by making amateur text adventure games.

The name for these types of video games has changed; they are now called "interactive fiction".

Since interactive fiction games have very little replay value, and since there is no money in this endeavor, a lot of volunteer effort has been to have these adventures be as easy to create as possible.

Cloak of Darkness

One part of this effort is the Cloak of Darkness project to make a simple interactive fiction game available in as many different formats as possible. For people familiar with the "99 Bottles of Beer" project, this is the text adventure interactive fiction version of the same idea.

A few years ago, I made a version of this game in a long-obsolete format called "Scott Adams". Let me explain...

Scott Adams

Long before Dilbert, a programmer by the name of Scott Adams (different guy, same name) figured out how to make text adventures available for home computers. His solution was to create a simple data format that described the adventure game one played, and then have a small interpreter read the data file and run the adventure.

This format was quite obtuse; it had to be run on the very primitive early home computers. This format quickly became obsolete when a company called Infocom created, long before Java and .NET, a full fledged virtual machine for text adventures.

My download

I made a "Scott Adams" version of Cloak of Darkness a few years ago, but deleted it when cleaning up my web site a couple of years ago. Alan Monroe asked for a copy of this file, so I have made it available again:

Cloak-Scott.zip

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Deadwood update

September 12, 2011

I have finished up all of the work I am going to do for MaraDNS and Deadwood for September 2011 (barring receiving more sponsorship). The work I have done this weekend was made possible by a fairly modest financial contribution.

Investigating the bug that Domenico Rotondi reported, I discovered that there have been some issues with RD (recursion desired) being incorrectly set when both upstream_servers and root_servers are set. I have updated the code and hopefully RD will now always have the correct value in DNS queries sent upstream.

In addition, I have updated Deadwood's parser:

I consider it a bug if any valid dwood3rc file does not parse in Python 2. That in mind, I have updated the dwood3rc parser to not allow parameters to have any leading whitespace (since whitespace is significant in Python).

This is OK:

 recursive_acl = "127.0.0.1/16, 192.168.1.1/24"

But this will raise an error:

  recursive_acl = "127.0.0.1/16, 192.168.1.1/24"

(Observe the extra space in the left of the second example)

It is no longer allowed to set both root_servers or upstream_servers for a given name. In other words, a configuration like this will now raise an error:

 upstream_servers = {} upstream_servers["example.com."] = "127.0.0.1" root_servers = {} root_servers["example.com."] = "192.168.1.1"

Deadwood now raises a warning when the same name is set more than once. This will now trigger a warning:

 upstream_servers = {} upstream_servers["example.net."] = "10.1.2.3" upstream_servers["example.net."] = "192.168.1.1"

I was tempted to make this fatal, but decided not to because making this fatal would make it more difficult to manage large anti-phish/malware blacklists.

It is no longer permitted to initialize root_servers or upstream_servers more than once. This will now raise an error:

 upstream_servers = {} upstream_servers["example.net."] = "10.1.2.3" upstream_servers = {} upstream_servers["example.com."] = "192.168.1.1"

Deadwood will now raise an error for invalid lists of root or upstream servers. This is now fatal:

 root_servers = {} root_servers["."] = "foo"

Yes, I am making the parser more anal. This is to help protect the user from typos and other errors causing problems with Deadwood, giving them a detailed description of the exact cause of a potential problem before Deadwood starts to resolve queries, so that they find and fix it before coming to the mailing list and complaining about the issue.

In addition, I want to ensure that any valid dwood3rc file is also a valid Python 2 script to make it much easier to use Deadwood configuration files in Python scripts.

I have also updated the SQA tests; they now run in both Scientific Linux 6 and in CentOS 5. Two new tests have been added: sqa_server_fail and sqa_root_upstream

Whew! This was a lot of work; I spent most of Saturday and a couple of hours this morning making all of these improvements. This will be all of the work I do with MaraDNS/Deadwood this month unless I can get more sponsorship.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

The next day I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood without being compensated for my time is on October 5, 2011.

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Open-source IMAP clients

September 10, 2011

For my work, I had to find a good open-source IMAP client that runs in Windows. Here are some notes I took during my research:

Claws mail: Unstable code base; frequent crashes. Puts a large number of half-complete draft messages in one's Gmail "sent" folder while composing a message. Does not support IMAP servers without APPEND support.

Sylpheed: Windows port does not have built-in spellchecker.

Mahogany: Dead codebase (no updates since 2006/2008). No apparent support for IMAP-over-SSL.

Mulberry mail: No apparent support for alternate ports for IMAP-over-SSL and SMTP-over-SSL.

Alpine: No apparent support for IMAP-over-SSL.

Thunderbird: Not very suitable for writing traditional 80-column fixed-width text emails. Besides that, excellent (Automatic email configuration, IMAP-over-SSL, supports IMAP servers w/o APPEND, etc.)

KMail: Did not try (Installing an entire desktop environment just to have an email client is overkill)

Thunderbird is the best email client to use in modern work environments where HTML-formatted email is the norm. While it does have support for non-HTML mail, this support is limited.

Claws Mail will become an excellent email client for legacy 80-column monospace text email when and if the bugs are fixed.

Sylpheed may become a good email client, but it could really use Windows spell checking support.

I have made a minor tweak to the CSS: With some video drivers, the CSS elements are placed one pixel off left or right in Internet Explorer 9. This in mind, I have given all of the CSS layers used for the "dissolve border" background colors so the page still looks good when this IE9 bug is triggered.

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Deadwood update

September 5, 2011

I am slowly but surely going through the bugs people have been reporting on the list:

Steve Fatula reported that Deadwood was returning SERVER FAILs on his system. I was and still am unable to reproduce this bug. In an attempt to reproduce this concern, I have created a SQA test that simulates one of the two upstream servers giving out a SERVER FAIL error; this test did not reproduce the condition Steve reported. I am closing this bug as "unreproducible".

Domenico Rotondi reported having issues when both root_servers and upstream_servers are set in a dwood3rc file. I have created a SQA test to use both of these settings in the same Deadwood configuration file; the tests appear to be able to reproduce this problem; I will investigate further in a month.

Angel reported that some records were lost when transferring a zone. I have not had a chance to look at this yet. Hopefully next month.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

The next day I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood is one month from today: October 5, 2011.

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Random map templates

September 1, 2011

I have made two RMG templates suitable for the recent patches to make extra-huge maps for Heroes3. These RMG templates are based on the popular "Jebus cross" RMG template. While these templates will work with an unpatched HOMM3 (as long as one selects a two-level XL map), they are best for really huge XXXXL (254x254) maps, either with or without underground.

These templates can be looked at here

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Global warming denial

August 27, 2011

Everyone is welcome to have an opinion. And, indeed, there are a number of people out there who believe that scientists are either incorrect or outright lying when they point out that the earth is getting warmer as a result of man-made pollution.

I think it is very unhealthy — and, quite bluntly, arrogant — to have a point of view that I know better than the scientists who are experts in a given field of endeavor. I do not, for example, believe the earth is flat, based on the overwhelming scientific evidence showing it is round. Nor do I believe the earth is 6,000 years old, based on the overwhelming astronomical, geological, and radiometric dating evidence to the contrary. I also, for the record, believe Obama's birth certificate is genuine, that we really did land on the moon, that September 11 was entirely caused by nutheads hijacking airplanes, and that Oswald acted alone in killing JFK.

The fact of the matter is that modern society, as we understand it, needs a good deal of energy produced to continue. Using fossil fuels to generate this energy is not something we can continue doing forever (for, yes, the environment, and because we will run out. And, oh, we're mainly importing oil from countries with unstable regimes); personally, I agree with George Bush that nuclear energy is a viable option as long as steps are made to reasonably minimize risks.

Global warming is a real problem that humanity has to face. Putting one's head in the sand and pretending there is no man-made global warming is not the solution.

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On Apple products

August 26, 2011

First and foremost, now that Steve Jobs is leaving Apple, my prayers are with him. Talking to someone familiar with various forms of cancer, they told me that the type of cancer Steve Jobs had is one that usually comes back in another form. Most likely, Steve Jobs' days are numbered.

That in mind, my prayers are with him and his family.

Steve Jobs has been a pioneer in bringing significant advances in computer technology in a form appealing to the masses. Affordable home computers have been around since the Altair; Steve Jobs' Apple II was the first home computer marketed for non-hobbyists and which didn't need a soldering iron to build; it was hands-down the most successful 8-bit computer until the low-cost Commodore 64 came out a few years later.

Steve Jobs was able to move beyond the Apple II with the Apple Lisa, which was far too expensive and was not a commercial success. Jobs did not let failure stop him; he took the good ideas from the Lisa and came out with the enormously successful Macintosh.

Steve Jobs has had a lot of other successes, for the same reason: He did not let failure stop him and revised his designs until they were successful. The NeXT Cube had limited success, but its derivative Mac OS X is--barring Windows--the most successful desktop OS. Apple had little success with the Newton tablet--but instead of writing off tablet because of the Newton's failure, Jobs gave us the iPad, which has been an overwhelming success.

While I am not a user of Steve Jobs' products, and while I do not like how the iPad ended the netbook fad of 2009 and early 2010, I recognize that he is an incredible visionary and corporate leader who has revolutionized the computer industry for nearly four decades.

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TinyVZ security update

August 23, 2011

A discussion with Solar Designer (yes, that Solar Designer) on the OpenVZ mailing list has inspired me to check all of the software in TinyVZ against the CVE database of security vulnerabilities. I discovered one issue that needed patching: CVE-2010-0001, which affects the gzip Busybox applet in TinyVZ.

That in mind, I have released TinyVZ 0.7.02 with this issue fixed.

The only unpaid support I supply for TinyVZ at this time is to fix security problems with a CVE vulnerability number that affect compiled programs outside of the /build tree. CVE 2010-0001 has been patched; other CVE issues have not been patched because they do not appear to be serious security issues that affect TinyVZ. Details are in the file build/CVE inside of the container.

After patching TinyVZ to fix this security issue, and making the TinyVZ 0.7.02 tarball, I discovered a bug in the script /sbin/add_ip.sh (inside of the container) causing the same IP to be added multiple times to /etc/iplist. This bug is not serious enough to merit a new release of TinyVZ; people who wish to not have this bug can use the following revised add_ip.sh file (changes to fix bug are in bold):

 #!/bin/sh  # Copyright 2011 Sam Trenholme. # # This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify # it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by # the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or # (at your option) any later version. # # This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, # but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of # MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the # GNU General Public License for more details. # # You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License # along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software # Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA  # POSIX-compatible script for adding an IP to the TinyVZ container  for ip in $IP_ADDR ; do 	if ! grep $ip /etc/iplist > /dev/null ; then 		echo IPLIST=\$IPLIST\" $ip\" >> /etc/iplist 	fi done  # Reset all IPs ifconfig venet0 down  . /etc/iplist  NUMBER=0 for IP in $IPLIST ; do 	if [ $NUMBER -gt 0 ] ; then 		ifconfig venet0:$NUMBER $IP 	else 		ifconfig venet0 $IP 	fi 	NUMBER=$( expr $NUMBER + 1 ) done

TinyVZ can be downloaded here:

http://samiam.org/TinyVZ

As an aside, Solar Designer has his own highly secure Linux distribution called Openwall which is worth checking out; it has an OpenVZ template and can be updated.

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TinyVZ 0.7 released

August 20, 2011

I have released TinyVZ 0.7 today. This will be my last TinyVZ release for the foreseeable future.

TinyVZ 0.7 is a tiny little OpenVZ template for making OpenVZ containers that use the lowest amount of memory and hard disk space possible.

This is a self-hosting template with all source code; it is possible to compile the entire system inside of the template. Look in the build/ directory (inside the template) for source code.

The main addition to this release of TinyVZ is that it is now possible to use the relevant vzctl commands to add or remove an IP, set the machine's hostname, determine what nameservers to use, as well as setting user's passwords. I had to add the Bash shell to do this; details below.

The tarball now contains the template's tarball inside of it, the relevant scripts used by vzctl, as well as an installation guide (README).

The system is for hard core UNIX/Linux gurus: The only editor is a miniature version of vi included with Busybox (actually, I also compiled in Busybox's version of the "ed" editor, for those who feel vi pampers the user too much); all configuration is done by editing text files. You will need to compile your own mail server, SSH server, web server, or other desired server.

It can be downloaded here:

http://samiam.org/TinyVZ/

One discovery I made making TinyVZ 0.7 is that, for the OpenVZ tools to work, not only is it mandatory for the container to have the Bash shell, but also that /bin/sh has to be a symlink to Bash. This is because the "vzctl" program prepends the contents of the Bash-only "/etc/vz/dists/scripts/functions" script to any script used by the container to configure the system, and there does not appear to be any way to configure a container to not use this Bash-only script.

Any OpenVZ template without /bin/sh as an alias for Bash can not be configured via the "vzctl" tools (nor the corresponding Proxmox/SolusVM/whatever tools that call "vzctl").

Since someone asked: The actual deed of concatenating the Bash-only script with the distribution-specific script run by vzctl is done by the read_script() function in src/lib/script.c in the vzctl source code. read_script() is, in turn, called by vps_exec_script() in src/lib/exec.c; vps_exec_script() is called from several places.

The offending code has the name DIST_FUNC whenever it is used to specify the offending script in vps_exec_script(). DIST_FUNC is specified in include/dist.h.

The code is spaghetti code; it took me hours to unravel all of this.

The real solution to this issue would be to replace DIST_FUNC with a parameter that can be controlled by the /etc/vz/dists/${distname}.func configuration file.

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TinyVZ update

August 16, 2011

I'm still hacking away at TinyVZ.

Working with Busybox can be really frustrating. I tried to update the system to Busybox 1.19; that did not work. The issue is that Busybox 1.19 expects the build toolchain to have a full-blown printf() that can take a large number of arguments; unfortunately, the printf() included with older releases of uClibc can only accept 9 arguments or less.

So I would have to update uClibc to compile a newer release of Busybox. Which is non-trivial, since I would probably need to cross-compile the newer uClibc, as well as the entire core GNU build toolchain (make, binutils, and gcc), as well as Busybox to update everything. Since this is a "for fun and for free" project, that is just too much work for what I getting paid ($0.00), so I'm not going to bother.

What I have done, however, is update Busybox's "passwd" app to have a "-s" option that allows a password to be read from stdin. This will make it possible to make the relevant shell scripts vzctl uses to reset passwords.

In addition, I have renamed this custom Busybox "TinyVZ" instead of "Moam-CD", fixed the install of uClibc so we have symlinks, not copies, of the relevant library aliases, and am updating the files in /etc so I can write vzctl scripts to add and remove IPs, as well as reset the hostname.

It can be downloaded here:

http://samiam.org/TinyVZ/

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Tiny OpenVZ template

August 15, 2011

One issue I have had with OpenVZ is that there is not a small template based on Busybox out there. So, in the spirit of open source, I solved this problem by making my own tiny OpenVZ template based on Busybox and uClibc.

TinyVZ is a tiny OpenVZ template. This allows OpenVZ users to have a container that uses far fewer resources than container built from a traditional Linux distribution. The goals are to have a system that uses less memory and disk space than other OpenVZ templates.

This OpenVZ template is fully GPL compliant. Not only does it include the source code, but I spent all weekend burning the midnight oil to make the system self-hosting: It is possible to compile every program that makes up the system inside of the container. I even have a script that will (given enough time) compile all of the bits and clone the entire TinyVZ tree in a subdirectory.

The system includes the following packages:

binutils

busybox

gcc

make

maradns

uClibc

This Linux distribution is based on some work I did back in 2007 making a miniature Linux system that fits on a business card CD. Since this is based on work from a few years ago, the programs and libraries are older releases (this is also why a lot of files refer to this system as "Moam CD"). Updating the system's toolchain is left as an exercise to the reader. Yes, I did check, and there does not appear to be any glaring security holes with this setup; and, yes, the version of uClibc is recent enough to support the changes made to daylight savings time in 2005.

This is a work in progress. Right now, the system is for hard core UNIX/Linux gurus: The only editor is a miniature version of vi included with Busybox (actually, I also compiled in Busybox's version of the "ed" editor, for those who feel vi pampers the user too much); all configuration is done by editing text files. While the system is a self-hosting OpenVZ template, it appears that the relevant OpenVZ shell scripts for setting up networking and other relevant configurations are not POSIX compliant, breaking in Busybox's /bin/sh. In addition, the compiler can only compile C programs, and can not compile C++ programs. Adding C++ support is also left as an exercise for the reader.

While the vzctl program can not make this container reset its IP or hostname, it is possible to edit the file /etc/sysinit.sh to have it use the IP assigned to it by OpenVZ:

 #!/bin/sh  IP=192.168.1.163 HOSTNAME=nightfly hostname $HOSTNAME  mkdir /proc mount /proc mount /dev/pts  PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin export PATH  ifconfig lo 127.0.0.1 ifconfig venet0 $IP route add -net 127.0.0.0 dev lo route add -net 0.0.0.0 dev venet0  # MaraDNS (Deadwood) duende Deadwood

This script is one that I am using on a tiny little DNS "toaster" OpenVZ container. By getting rid of the entire compiler toolchain (all of /usr/lib, the binutils in /usr/bin, the header files in /usr/include and /usr/src, the gcc library in /lib, the source code in /build, etc.), I was able to get this container to use under two megabytes of space.

I am including a 40-megabyte tarball of this OpenVZ template. This may be used either as an OpenVZ template or as a chroot() environment. IMPORTANT Create a directory for exploding this tarball before opening it up:

         mkdir TinyVZ-0.5         cd TinyVZ-0.5         tar xvJf ../TinyVZ-0.5-self-hosting.tar.xz         chroot . sh

It can be downloaded here:

http://samiam.org/TinyVZ/

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Keeping CentOS secure

August 9, 2011

One annoyance CentOS has is that, whenever Red Hat makes a new upstream release available, CentOS stops making security updates until they are current with upstream's new release; this process can sometimes take months.

For CentOS users who want to be current with security updates until CentOS updates their system upstream, it is possible to use Scientific Linux's repo to apply security updates.

To do this, add the appropriate sl-security.repo file to /etc/yum.repos.d, as well as all of the relevant GPG public keys to /etc/pki/rpm-gpg. I have a handy tarball with all of these files, as well as a GPG signature for said tarball which I have signed with MaraDNS' public GPG key.

While it is a simple matter of exploding this tarball in the root directory to enable Scientific Linux security updates on a CentOS 5 system (via cd / ; tar xvjf sl-security-etc.tar.bz2), please be aware that this update does add GPG signatures that are allowed to sign rpm files.

This is quite useful for CentOS 5 users who want to keep up to date with security without having to reinstall the OS, or for OpenVZ container users, since OpenVZ provides a template for CentOS 5, but not one for Scientific Linux 5.

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MaraDNS 2.0.03 released

August 5, 2011

I have released MaraDNS 2.0.03 today. This incorporates six months' worth of bugfixes; read the changelog for details.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download.html

Now that I have released MaraDNS 2.0.03 (as well as the companion Deadwood 3.0.03), I am going to phase back how much unpaid support I give MaraDNS. Instead of working on MaraDNS once every two weeks without compensation, I will now work on MaraDNS once a month. Since today is August 5, my next scheduled day for unpaid MaraDNS work is going to be a month from today: Monday, September 5. The only exceptions to this will be the occasional comment on the mailing list, or any work needed to fix a critical security problem with MaraDNS.

That said, since JFC Morfin has very generously contributed to the MaraDNS cause every month, I plan on doing the following work with MaraDNS before September 5:

I will write up an essay on how to compile the older 1.4 branch of MaraDNS and post it here on the mailing list.

I will make sure "make install" does the right thing in Ubuntu 10.04 (their most recent long-term-support release), albeit in /usr/local

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Deadwood 3.0.03 released

July 22, 2011

RFC2181 has this bit of text:

"When a DNS client receives a reply with TC set, it should ignore that response"

This should be cheerfully ignored. The fact of the matter is this: When an upstream DNS server sends us a truncated reply, they will usually give us the first 512 bytes of that reply, which can often times have useful information.

Indeed, one of the answers we get while trying to process answers.yahoo.com is truncated. But has useful information. So I have added some code which will, when getting a truncated reply, grab the first answer from the truncated reply and use that.

In the case of getting a reply marked truncated and not getting any information in the packet, it is still possible to enable tcp_listen and get the packet via TCP, but, with this update, this will almost never need to be done to resolve a query. Indeed, I recommend that users with tcp_listen enabled disable it when upgrading to Deadwood 3.0.03.

In addition, this release of Deadwood has a number of other bug fixes from the last six months:

RA bit is no longer sent when sending recursive queries

Synthetic "not there" replies are now correctly formed DNS packets

Domains where one of the nameservers gives us a "QUERY REFUSED" correctly handled unless we are asking for an AAAA IPv6 IP (since some broken DNS servers respond to AAAA requests with "QUERY REFUSED")

SQA tests and other elements updated for Scientific Linux 6

Example dwood3rc file updated to show how to blacklist domains

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/stable/

I have also updated MaraDNS to use Deadwood 3.0.03:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

The next day I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood is two weeks from today: August 5, 2011.

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Web typography

July 19, 2011

2014 update: A combination of Windows XP hitting end-of-life, ttfautohint, and new open-source font releases has made it possible for me to have my web site use 100% open source typography (Modified Bitstream Charter for the serif body text, and Source Sans Pro for the sans-serif headings). Also: PT Serif looks a lot nicer when using modern font hinting technologies.

As I have noted in an earlier blog entry, is is now possible to put just about any font in a web page. And, indeed, Google has a large number of open-source fonts to choose from. All of these free fonts have the same problem: None of them are suitable for body text with current computers.

Sure, a number of them are very attractive at 10pt or 12pt using modern computers with Clear Type or other cutting-edge on-screen hinting capability. Unfortunately, there is still a significant number of computers without advanced on-screen hinting. Not only are there the Windows XP users who haven't downloaded the XP Clear Type update, but there are also Linux users who do not have cutting-edge on-screen font auto-hinting.

Until Clear Type or another equivalent technology is universal across desktops, a webpage's body text needs to use a font with full delta hinting. There are not that many open-source fonts with full delta hinting; the only ones I can think of are the PT font series (PT Sans, PT Serif, but PT Sans Caption alas doesn't delta-hint), the Ubuntu font, and Cousine (a.k.a Liberation Mono). And, oh, Arvo also has delta hinting, but not at the font size I like to use for text.

Ubuntu is a beautiful font, and readily readable, even at body text sizes. Indeed, a modified version of it (to reduce loading times) is used as the non-body-text font on my webpage. However, as I have noted before, this is a branding font so its look is a little too distinctive for me to be comfortable using it for body text. It is, roughly speaking, an open-source font that fills the niche of Trebuchet. In fact, on places on my webpage where I can't use Ubuntu on IE8 because of a bug it has, I use Trebuchet.

The PT series of fonts are attractive, but even though they are fully delta hinted, they were not designed with the screen in mind. PT Sans roughly fills the same niche as Arial: A font that works best when trying to fit as much readable text in as little of a space, but not as readable as a true screen font. Indeed, I feel PT Sans narrow to be the best open source font for condensed text.

PT Serif, coming from Russia, has, to western eyes, a very distinct look to it that is not entirely satisfactory, reminding one of dusty old books in a dusty old library. It's perfectly readable, but very stiff. It doesn't have the soft charm of, say, Matthew Carter's serif fonts like Georgia and Bitstream Charter. And, like PT Sans, it's not really a screen font the way Georgia is.

Cousine (Liberation Mono) is yes a very attractive on-screen font, but its web utility is limited since it is a monospace font.

What is missing is a true open-source replacement for Verdana. Verdana is the king of on-screen readability. The closest font in the open-source world is Bitstream Vera (or its derivative DejaVu), which would be perfect except for two problems. One: Its "I" (upper case i) is identical to its "l" (lower case L); I call this the "PayPaI problem". Two: It does not have full delta hinting.

If someone were to take the time to fix these issues in Vera/DejaVu, the open source world of typography would finally have a really great font for on-screen text. Any volunteers out there?

Perhaps RedHat will hire Matthew Carter to come out with a "Liberation screen sans" with Verdana's metrics and onscreen readability. Or maybe another patron of open source will foot the bill for a true onscreen font for body text.

In the meantime, because Microsoft gave away Verdana and the rest of their web core fonts for years with a license that allows redistribution, Linux users can legally download and install Verdana on their computer, and it appears that about 65% of Linux users have done just that. Windows and Mac users, naturally, all have Verdana.

Of course, with Windows XP approaching its end of life and being replaced by Windows 7, and with Linux's font auto-hinting very slowly but surely improving, most likely the need for a fully delta hinted font for onscreen text will become a non-issue a few years down the road. But that is the future; using a non-delta-hinted font for onscreen body text is still not possible in a 2011 cross-platform web page design.

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Scientific Linux 6 on a S10-3

July 16, 2011

I have installed Scientific Linux 6 on my Lenovo S10-3 netbook and everything works, albeit with some effort. Some issues I had:

Updating the kernel causes the system to crash at boot time. The workaround is to use an older kernel that doesn't crash; right now I'm using OpenVZ's older 2.6.32-042test008 kernel.

The Broadcom wifi driver needs to be downloaded and installed from Broadcom's web site. I'm using a file called hybrid-portsrc_x86_64-v5_100_82_38.tar.gz. One gotcha is to make sure there are no spaces anywhere in the path to this file or it won't compile. Networking is actually better in Linux than in Windows.

Some S10-3 computers have an Atheros wifi card instead of a Broadcom one; this card also has Linux-compatible drivers.

Setting the screen brightness requires an incantation like setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=ff (full brightness) or setpci -s 00:02.0 F4.B=80 (half brightness).

The 32-bit static Skype client works on the 64-bit kernel after installing all of the 32-bit compatibility libs.

The system doesn't come with mp3 codecs, because of the patent issues.

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Deadwood bug

July 14, 2011

I have discovered a bug blocking the 3.0.03 release of Deadwood: answers.yahoo.com does not correctly resolve in Deadwood. I have a pretty good idea what's wrong--this looks to be not too different from the urbandictionary.com problem Deadwood had a few months ago, and hopefully fixing it will be a small patch.

I will look at this issue on July 22, 2011, my next scheduled day for working on MaraDNS/Deadwood.

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GOG HOMM3 Multiplayer

July 10, 2011

It is really nice that gog.com has made a legal DRM-free version of Heroes of Might and Magic III (HOMM3) available. While the program does run nicely in Windows 7 (as long as it's run in Windows 98 compatibility mode), the TCP/IP networking for multiplayer does not appear to work.

This does not mean it's impossible to play multiplayer networked HOMM3 in Windows 7, however.

In order to play a two-player networked game, my roommate and I ended up using a combination of HOMM3's null modem support along with a program called Virtual Serial Ports Emulator (VSPE) which creates a virtual serial port which HOMM3 thinks is a real serial port; it is possible to send information over TCP/IP using VSPE while using HOMM3's "null modem" mode.

Since this program is more geared for other applications (some ham radio operators and what not like being able to have multiple programs use the same serial port at the same time, or have two different programs on the same computer communicate with each other via a virtual serial port), it's a little tricky to set it up for having two HOMM3 players play each other over TCP/IP. To do so:

Make sure both computers have the GOG.com version of HOMM3 installed

Go to eterlogic.com, click on "Downloads" and download the "Virtual serial ports emulator" (VSPE) program. Please note that this program is free, but only for users of 32-bit Windows; people using 64-bit Windows will need to either find another way to emulate a serial connection over TCP/IP, or pay the $25 registration fee (the reason for this is because Microsoft charges $500 a year for a digital signature).

Scan the VSPE file to ensure it has no viruses (this should always be done for executable files downloaded from the internet)

Install the VSPE program on both computers that will be used to play HOMM3.

Open up VSPE on one computer.

In VSPE, go to "Device -> Create" and create a new "connector" device. Give the connector device the virtual serial port COM4, and leave the "emulate baud rate" box unchecked.

Now, go to "Device -> Create" again and create a "TCP server" device. Use "COM4" as the "source serial port", do not make the device read-only nor write-only; keep the TCP port of 5555 and leave "Interface IP" blank (so it will bind to all IPs your computer has)

Click on the "play" icon (which looks like a green arrow pointing right) to start the serial-over-TCP server

Make sure Windows firewall allows VSPE to be available to other computers on the network

Now, open up VSPE on the other computer

Go to "Device -> Create" and create a "connector" device on COM4, just like on the other machine.

Now, go to "Device -> Create" but this time create a "TCP client" device.

For "Remote TCP host", type in the IP of the first computer running the server. If you don't know the first computer's IP, this information may be obtained either by the "ipconfig" command, or by opening HOMM3 on the server and going to "New Game -> Multi Player -> TCP/IP"

Make sure the serial emulation client is enabled by clicking on the green "play" arrow on the client.

Now, open up HOMM3 on both computers, go to "New Game -> Multi Player", and select "direct connect" for the connection type (this is the third icon from the bottom, two above the icon of a circle with a line through it)

One machine will be the "Host"; the other will "Join" the hosted game. Start the host before the second computer joins.

Use "COM4" on both computers, and increase the baud rate to its maximum speed. Make sure any other serial settings are identical on both machines.

At this point, it should be possible to play a two-player HOMM3 game over the network in a modern Windows 7 environment.

There are a couple of disadvantages to this approach:

This trick only works for two-player networked HOMM3 games.

The serial-over-TCP driver is only free for users of 32-bit Windows

Since this driver is not geared for gamers, it is complicated to set up.

However, this is the only working solution I know of for playing multiplayer HOMM3 in Windows 7.

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MaraDNS update

July 8, 2011

I have updated both MaraDNS and Deadwood today.

In today's snapshot of MaraDNS, I have fixed a bug MaraDNS 2.0 has had with binding to IPv6 addresses.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

In today's snapshot of Deadwood, I have finished updating the tests to use Scientific Linux (SL) 6.0 as the underlying OS instead of CentOS/SL 5. I have also fixed a bug where synthetic "not there" replies did not generate completely correct DNS replies, as well as updating the example dwood3rc file to have an example of how to blacklist domains.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

While the next day I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood would normally be two weeks from today, since JFC Morfin has very generously given me a small contribution, I am doing a little more MaraDNS development. Namely:

I have already updated the obsolete MaraDNS 1.0 branch to be current with respect to security holes. It can be downloaded at this location.

I will add documents detailing how to compile MaraDNS 2.0 in Windows using Mingw; this should be done next week sometime.

Since Deadwood now passes all of its SQA tests, I also plan on releasing Deadwood 3.0.03 two weeks from today: July 22, 2011.

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Updating the ads

July 3, 2011

After running ads on Samiam.org for a week, I have enough data to get a sense of how much revenue I get from ads. Looking at the data:

Text-based ads pay a tiny bit more than "rich media" ads. Since I have always found a animated ads annoying, and I haven't found a way to disable animated and flash ads without disabling static image ads, the web page is now going to have only text ads.

I am not going to buy a brand new airplane any time soon with the ad revenue from this site, but it looks like the ads will give me enough money to cover hosting and domain registration expenses.

I am happy enough with the change in mindset toward this site because of the ads--it is now a potential source of income instead of yet another expense in my life--that I plan on adding ads to maradns.org in the near future. I have already modified that layout a little to accommodate ads with the design, and a live demo of the design is at maradns.com

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Tuning nginx + php-fastcgi

July 2, 2011

This article talks about the dark art of making a webpage with a lot of visitors use a minimum of server resources.

Nginx is a web server that is much more efficient than Apache serving static pages.

However, one blogger has pointed out that once we add dynamic PHP content, nginx + php-fastcgi is about as fast and uses as much memory as Apache.

That is only true with the default settings for php-fastcgi.

In truth, nginx can be much more lightweight than the equivalent Apache setup. There are two important variables when tuning php-fastcgi: PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN and PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS

PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN

PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN determines the number of processes php-fastcgi spawns. This affects the number of PHP pages that can be processed at the same time. If this has a low value like 4, then the server will use less memory but will slow down if the server gets a lot of PHP requests.

To use a rough analogy, PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN is akin to the number of tellers in a bank. If there is no one using the bank, then a customer will immediately get service even if there is only a single teller. On the other hand, if there are a lot of people in the bank, having more tellers lowers the amount of time one has to wait before getting service at the bank. Just as it costs the bank more money to have more tellers, it costs our server more memory to have more PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN.

Here's another way of looking at it: If a given PHP script takes 100 milliseconds (1/10 of a second) to process a request, we can process 10 PHP queries a second if PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN has a value of 1, 40 PHP queries a second if PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN has a value of 4, and 320 PHP queries a second if PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN has a value of 32.

Note that this only affects dynamic PHP performance. Static HTML pages will always be served quickly regardless of one's PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN value.

PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS

PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS determines the number of times a given php-fastcgi process will process PHP requests before terminating and being replaced by another php-fastcgi process.

To go back to our bank teller analogy, PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS is how long a teller's shift is before being replaced by another teller. Just like a bank, it is less expensive to give a single teller a shorter shift (we don't need to pay them overtime); just like a bank, when we switch tellers, service at the bank slows down because it takes time to swap cash drawers and what not.

Likewise, a given PHP process' memory usage increases over time; sometimes a PHP script will leak memory. By setting PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS to a fairly low value, we lower the memory usage of php-fastcgi, at the expense of there being more slight delays when a php-fastcgi process is terminated then respawned.

Unlike our hypothetical bank teller, PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS switches out processes after the specified number of requests are made. If PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS has a value of 128, for example, after a single process processes 128 PHP page loads, the process is terminated and replaced by another php-fastcgi process.

Note that, on Windows systems, there is a bug where a PHP process may not properly respawn after serving PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS requests. This is a non-issue on low-end Linux OpenVZ servers.

Concurrency

There is one "feature" to watch out for in a nginx + fastcgi setup. A given PHP script will only run once for a given IP. So, if the same IP loads index.php for a website twice at the same time, index.php will be served sequentially: The second index.php load will not be processed until the first index.php load is complete.

This does not happen if two different IPs ask for index.php at the same time (unless we have more PHP requests than PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN), nor does it happen if the same IP asks for two different PHP pages at the same time.

This may be an issue in some NAT setups.

Conclusion

On this website, I have set PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN to have a value of 4 and PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS to have a value of 128. Since this site is mostly a static HTML site, this does not significantly impact performance, while greatly reducing the amount of memory used to serve web pages.

While low-end OpenVZ virtual servers are inexpensive, they require one to understand how to tune a web server to get good performance while minimizing memory usage. I hope this article has given some helpful pointers.

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Samiam.org now has ads

June 28, 2011

In order to have samiam.org no longer be an expense but instead be a self-sustaining website I have added ads to the site. I am doing this in an unobtrusive way; I have adapted the right-hand bar which was displaying recent blog posts to instead display ads for the majority of pages on this site.

I do not expect to make a lot of income at this; my goal is to have the ads cover the web hosting and domain registration costs. If I'm lucky, I may be able to take my wife out to dinner at AppleBee's once a month from the ad revenue after covering expenses.

I am using Google AdSense to serve the ads; Google is a very good ad provider with a lot of integrity. There will not be any pop-up, nor "pop under" ads placed here, nor ads that cover the content; there is a clear boundary between the site's content and the advertising space.

For people using adblock to block the ad, I humbly request that you find another way to block distracting ads. Yes, I get as annoyed as you do with animated ads. This is why I use a combination of an animated GIF stopper as well as a Flash blocker to block the animated ads--with the added benefit that I have more protection from Flash security holes. Text-based as well as static image ads are still visible, allowing me to support websites that use ethical advertising to pay their bills. There is also an interesting Ars Technica article on ad blocking technologies.

It is my hope that these ads result in a win-win situation. They are a win for me because they help cover the expenses hosting my websites, and may even give me some pocket change to boot. They are a win for you because their presence helps ensure that I will be able to keep this site and its quality content online.

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Deadwood update

June 24, 2011

I have spent all afternoon going through Deadwood's SQA tests to update them to work with Scientific Linux 6 as well as MaraDNS 2.0. Once I updated the tests, I discovered a bug in how ip_blacklist is handled (since Scientific Linux 6's dig is more verbose about unusual DNS packets).

I will fix this bug before releasing Deadwood 3.0.03.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

In addition to fixing the bug in Deadwood, I need to backport an update to ej2html from Deadwood to MaraDNS, so this script will work with the newer version of Perl included with Scientific Linux 6.

The next day I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood is two weeks from today: July 8, 2011.

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Linux: Desktop fail

June 23, 2011

2014 update: Linux desktop usage share in May 2014 was 1.63%. On the other hand, lots of people are using Linux on their cell phones via Andriod

When I wrote a rant about how Linux can sometimes become an absolute headache to deal with, the article became viral. It first showed up on LXer; from there it entered the blogosphere; when Katherine Noyes wrote an article about my blog entry, a number of Linux news aggreator sites picked up the article.

This has been an annoying experience for me. For example, Gerhard Mack called me a "nut" and Robert Pogson referred to me as an "example of the trolls".

I don't think calling someone names is a very effective argument and comes off as someone who is an internet loudmouth. I blogged about Linux internet loudmouths in my old blog over two years ago (local copy) and I'm still not impressed.

The fact of the matter is this: Despite being cheaper than Windows, and despite not having the licensing headaches Windows has, Linux has, according to Robert Pogson's own figures, at most a 1.7% percent desktop share. Compare this to Firefox, a much younger open source project, which has well over 30% of the desktop market share (yes, I blogged about that too / local copy).

While Linux is an excellent server OS and works well in the embedded space (including smartphones and tablets), it has not been able to penetrate the desktop market. Calling people who point out Linux's problems on the desktop names is not going to change that.

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing). Linux advocates: Please perform some basic research about me and how I use Linux (here's one clue) before getting out your flamethrower or deciding that I don't know how to use Linux.)

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Lenovo S-100; Feedback

June 22, 2011

Netbook news and Liliputing have reported that Amazon is accepting pre-orders for the Lenovo S-100.

This Netbook, which is a minor update to the Lenovo S10-3, is already available in Hong Kong and China (in three colors).

The x120e is still unavailable from Lenovo in the US (use a reseller); no word on the up-and-coming x121e

Cedric comments on my blog about low-cost hosts:

Hey Sam,

Just wanted to let you know that BuyVM will still sell $15/year VPSs and that it was not a temporary offer to "get their name out there." They are adding more stock in early July and will have around 1,000 units for sale. Could you please update your blog post to reflect this?

Thanks!

Cedric

(Customer/fan of BuyVM)

I apologize for the error and have removed the one sentence that implied that BuyVM will not have ultra-low-cost virtual private servers (VPS) again.

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While BuyVM was very popular in 2011, by 2020 they were outdated, being unable to run CentOS 8. I moved away from BuyVM in 2020 and moved to a shared Linux Web hosting account for my domains.

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IE8 @font-face bug

June 19, 2011

Since @font-face is a relatively new tag, there are a few bugs with its implementation in browsers. I recently discovered that Webkit has an issue printing pages that use @font-face and discovered just yesterday that Internet Explorer 8 has a nasty bug with @font-face on a page that uses iframes. In particular:

If a page uses @font-face in its CSS to have a custom font

And the page has an iframe which uses the same font

Then IE8 will sometimes incorrectly render the font in the parent frame.

This particular bug does not manifest itself if Internet Explorer 9 is used in IE8 rendering mode; this bug is only visible when using the native IE8 client to render the page.

The workaround is to not have a custom font in the iframe when using IE8 (another workaround would be to have the custom font only in the iframe). Here is what the relevant HTML code in the iframe looks like:

 <![if !(IE 8)]> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="custom_font.css"> <![endif]> <!--[if IE 8]> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="no_custom_font.css"> <![endif]-->

I now have a list of low cost hosting providers; this lists every single hosting provider providing an account with root access for $24 a year or less that I know about.

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Dirt cheap Linux hosting

June 14, 2011

It is now possible to have "root" access on a virtual machine with a high-speed internet connection and a static IPv4 IP for under $24 a year. This kind of connection is called a "Virtual Private Server" (VPS). Since one is "root" on the system, one can have (within the memory, disk space, and bandwidth limitations) an unlimited number of web pages, email addresses, or any other internet service (as long as it follows the provider's terms of service).

The low-cost offers I have seen have the following in common:

They use a type of virtual machine called an OpenVZ virtual machine. The Wikipedia has a good description; to summarize, an OpenVZ guest must run Linux.

To manage the server, they usually use a "web panel" interface called SolusVM. This allows one to reset the root password, "format and reinstall" the Linux distribution used, and keep an eye on one's memory, disk usage, and network quota.

There are four relevant numbers that an OpenVZ account has: Its normal memory usage, its "burst" memory usage (which I will explain below), its hard disk space, and its monthly bandwidth.

One thing to be careful of is that most companies offering $20-a-year plans are new companies and may not last. Another issue is that these kinds of offers are usually only offered by new providers to get their name out there.

One place to look for these providers is at a website called WHT, or at BudgetVPS (who have a special link for plans that cost $2 a month or less).

Some current providers of plans that costs $20 a year or less (prices rounded to the nearest dollar):

AlienVPS' "Abduction" plan. 19 gigabytes hard disk, 192 megabytes of memory, 190 gigabytes of bandwidth a month, for $19 a year. Available at Las Vegas and New York.

CripperZ. 10 gigabytes hard disk, 128 megabytes of memory (256 megabytes burst), 300 gigabytes a month of transfer for $20 a year ($1 setup charge)

FEhosting. 35 gigabytes of hard disk space, 256 megabytes of memory (512 megabytes burst), 500 gigabytes a month of transfer for $20 a year.

All providers provide a single IP; extra IPs cost more.

"Burst" memory usage is memory that can be allocated, but, if the server as a whole is low on memory, processes may be killed if more memory is being used than one's "normal" memory usage.

An OpenVZ guest doesn't allocate cached and buffer memory; this is only seen on the host. The only memory one sees when typing in free in an OpenVZ guest is memory used by malloc in one's processes. For example:

 $ free              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached Mem:        262144      29376     232768          0          0          0 -/+ buffers/cache:      29376     232768 Swap:            0          0          0

This is the output of free on an OpenVZ guest with 128 megabytes of "normal" memory and another 128 megabytes of "burst" memory. Compare this to free on a native Linux host:

 $ free              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached Mem:        511516     489544      21972          0      62204     202884 -/+ buffers/cache:     224456     287060 Swap:      1048568       2476    1046092

Here, we can see buffers being used, as well as cache and swap.

On an OpenVZ guest, memory usage is seen with free, disk usage is seen with df, and network usage can be seen with ifconfig (presumably, the ifconfig number is reset whenever the system is "rebooted", so it may not be an accurate number).

It is amazing how technology has made getting an internet presence very, very affordable.

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Errata: BuyVM does intend to sell ultra-low-cost plans again; this article implied otherwise and has since been corrected.

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MaraDNS update

June 10, 2011

In today's snapshot of MaraDNS:

Certain TXT record parsing errors now tell the user which man page to read.

--pid support for Duende (courtesy Yarin) backported to MaraDNS 2.0's Duende.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

Deadwood has been sending recursive DNS queries upstream with the RA bit set. Occasionally, this results in the upstream DNS server ignoring Deadwood's request. Fixed.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

The next day I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood is two weeks from today: June 24, 2011.

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x120e getting replaced?

June 9, 2011

There is a chance that the excellent Lenovo x120e is going to be replaced by an updated x121e. To wit:

The x120e is no longer available for sale at Lenovo.com

One anonymous blog commenter (by the moniker "magnum") has reported that this will soon be replaced by a "x121e" computer.

One issue I would like to see Lenovo resolve is the wait time to get an x120e; before Lenovo pulled the computer, the wait time to get one was over four weeks long.

Update

Here is another link confirming the existence of the upcoming Thinkpad x121e: http://www.ptcrb.com/vendor/complete/complete_request.cfm?tab=Certified. Search for "x121e" on this page.

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Round-up

June 7, 2011

In today's blog entry, I discuss pasting in X, Windows 8, and the System76 Netbook.

X middle-click pasting

The "normal" way to do middle-click pasting in X is to click on the middle mouse button. This doesn't work very well with the two-button mice, so there is an option to have clicking on both the left and right button at the same time simulate a middle button click. This mouse click chording, alas, doesn't work very will with touchpads where it's impossible to click both the left and right button at the same time.

With such touchpads, the solution is to hit "Shift + Insert", which functions like a middle mouse click in X. I wish I knew this trick six months ago.

Windows 8

Ever since Microsoft released Windows 95, the Windows user interface has basically been the same: A start button in the lower left corner, a taskbar to the right of the start button, and a clock as well as a "system tray folder" on the lower right corner. Aero, Windows 7's interface, has this same basic paradigm.

Microsoft wants to move away from this paradigm with Windows 8. With the rise of smartphones and the iPad making tablets friendly, Microsoft is following the trends by making their Windows 8 interface more like a touch screen interface.

I do not think smartphone-based and tablet-based computing is going to displace desktop computing, for the simple reason that tablets and smartphones are for consuming, not creating content. I can read an ebook just as well on a tablet as I can on a computer with a keyboard; I can not write this blog entry on a tablet as effectively as I can on the Lenovo S10-3 netbook I'm using right now.

System76

System76 makes a netbook called the Starling. This is a Linux-based netbook which comes with a dual-core Intel N570 chip. With a six-cell battery, this computer costs some $444.00--quite a bit more than getting an ASUS 1015PX netbook with similar specs for about $340 (the system costs $320, but a 2GB memory expansion costs $20 more).

So, what do you get for $100 more with the System76 Starling? First of all, it appears to weigh less than the ASUS 1015PX; the ASUS 1015PX is 2.8 pounds with a six-cell battery, which the Starling is 2.0 pounds.

To be honest, I'm a skeptical about the stated 2.0-pound weight of the Starling System76. The lightest mainstream 10-inch netbooks out there weight about 2.4 pounds with a three-cell battery.

Considering that ASUS had to remove the hard disk, as well as having only two USB ports and a single audio jack, to make their X101 weight 2.1 pounds (still more than System76's claimed weight), and considering that System76 is not marketing this as a special ultra-light netbook, but as a Linux-compatible Netbook, the 2.0-pound reported weight of the Starling may well be, say, its weight without a battery.

Since System76 doesn't have to deal with Windows 7 Starter's limitations, the system comes with 2GB of memory already installed. Indeed, if desired, it's possible to get a 600GB solid-state drive (SSD) for the Starling--at the right price.

This looks to be a very good system to have to have for someone who wants to have a Linux system without having to bother with installing Linux and hoping their drivers are compatible. For example, while Linux works nicely on my Lenovo Netbook, I tried two different WiFi cards; neither supports being in "Master"/"Access point" mode for using the computer as a WiFi hotspot, even though the underlying chipsets support this. If a System76 Starling Netbook had this issue, or any other Linux-compatibility issue, I could call up their technical support line and get more than "I don't support Linux" from them.

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Webkit @font-face bug

June 5, 2011

2014 update: This bug has been fixed for a while

As I was testing the printing of my web page this morning, I discovered that Webkit (the HTML rendering engine used by the Safari and Chrome browsers) has a nasty @font-face bug: It can not correctly print pages that use a custom font.

The problem is that the character mapping of the font gets screwed up when sent to the printer, making the text gibberish. I am seeing this problem in Windows 7 using the Safari browser.

My solution is to add something like this to the bottom of my printing CSS:

 @media print and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) { 	h1 { font-family: sans-serif; } 	h2 { font-family: sans-serif; } 	h3 { font-family: sans-serif; } 	.blogtitle { font-family: sans-serif; } 	/* Any other classes or tags that use the custom font get the 	 * same treatment */ }

The first line of the above CSS tells browsers "ignore this CSS if you are not Webkit"; the rest of the CSS tells Webkit "never mind the custom font, just use an ordinary sans-serif font". I'm not a big fan of CSS hacks like -webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio, but I figure by the time Webkit no longer recognizes this tag, they will have fixed their @font-face printing bug.

While discussing @font-face issues, another issue is that some browsers don't show anything while the font is loading. This is an issue for people still in dial-up hell and one I have kept in mind. My solution is to only use one custom font (at one single weight and style); I have also edited the font so that it only has characters in languages I personally know.

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Web page touch-up

June 4, 2011

You know, I thought I had the design to this web page done over two weeks ago. But then, I discovered that it's now possible to embed fonts in web pages and have it render in the majority of web browsers. So, I touched up the webpage to utilize a custom font.

I have hopefully finished that up. Testing of the custom font on Linux-based browsers revealed some rendering problems that I fixed by having only one (instead of two) versions of the custom font, and then tweaking the CSS to have the font look nice at all of the sizes I use for it. This Linux fixup has the side effect of having the fonts look nicer in Windows (especially the Safari browser).

I have also replaced the text saying "Sam Trenholme's webpage" at the top of each page with a transparent PNG image. This is to work around an issue in Internet Explorer, which doesn't support CSS text shadows (not even in IE9).

I actually have both the text and the PNG image at the top; the PNG image is shown to users using desktop browsers, and the text is shown to mobile users. Users of non-CSS-compliant browsers (Dillo and OffByOne) will see both; this is a non-issue since these browsers have almost no users.

So, hopefully, the web page redesign for 2011 is once and for all done. Indeed, things are getting busy at my day job so I won't have time to work on the web page design for the foreseeable future.

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I made LXer

June 3, 2011

Well, I'm glad to see my blog is starting to get read. It would seem that Sunday's rant about wasting all day dealing with things which should just work but do not work in Linux has gotten some attention.

I must say, Linux fanboys advocates are a loud-mouth bunch. Of course, this doesn't mean much in the real world. I remember 1990s Linux advocates making a whole lot of noise about Loki--a company that made Linux ports of then-popular Windows games. The company only lasted three years before going bankrupt; John Carmack pointed out that all of Loki's sales combined were less than a single moderately successful Windows game.

Indeed, I have blogged about internet loudmouths before. There is scientific evidence that Macintosh advocates are quite literally religious about their beliefs; Linux advocates are undoubtedly the same.

Anyway, I found my mailbox full of rants, so some comments:

Tracy (last name not given) writes:

It's also the reason why you are getting serious clock slew. Clock slew is a common problem with Windows. [...] I have never seen clock slew on a Linux desktop or server, except when the Linux desktop is run inside a VM on top of Windows

RTFM...or should I say RTFBlog. I said this in the first paragraph: "my Scientific Linux Virtual box guest developed a serious case of clock slew" (emphasis added).

You would be better of to run a Linux based OS on the hardware, and run Windows in a VM

Been there, done that

Tony Wolfs was kind enough to give me a link to the LXer discussion.

Stan A. McIntosh writes:

I read your blog, and you have to do what works for you, but my experience was opposite. I had no interest whatsoever in trying anything outside of Windows, until XP on a new computer needed constant attention. I just don't have the time or technical skills to make Windows work reliably, and I've found this on several hardware sets since. Linux lets me use my computer and forget about it. If your experience is different, then stick with what works for you.

I had the opposite experience two years ago, so I made the switch from Linux-on-desktop + Windows-in-VM to Windows-on-desktop + Linux-in-VM.

Joe (last name not given) writes:

I'm a long time linux user, married 33 years with 4 grown kids. I don't have any of the problems that seem to plague you. [...] I just bought a new netbook (asus eee-pc) which came with windoze 7. I wiped the disk, installed linux and absolutely everything works, out of the box. Everything.

I actually have a Ubuntu partition on this computer--same chipset as an EEE PC--and it actually does some things better than Windows. Of course, some things are a pain in the neck to set up. One example: Linux's Calibre ereader is a slow dog compared to Amazon's Kindle, for example, and I can't buy ebooks from Amazon in Linux. Another example: I haven't found a mini-PCI wifi card that allows me to enable "Master"/"Access point" mode in Linux.

Steve Rosenberg writes:

I saw a link to your blog at http://www.samiam.org/blog/ on LXer.com, and after visiting the blog I was curious about what software you use to run it. Performance-wise it's working very, very well.

Static HTML files made by UNIX scripts. I have blogged about this before.

Nadav Vinik pointed to a copy of the email Tracy sent me; she also posted it.

Patrick Elliott-Brennan writes:

I can honestly say that I didn't click through to the links you listed.

If you click on the first link I give in my rant, it explains why RHEL 5 (that means: CentOS 5/Scientific Linux 5) has a clock slew problem as a Virtual Box guest, and that the problem can not be fully fixed without a reinstall. Which I have done. After spending eight hours installing Scientific Linux 6 as a Vitual Box guest OS and copying over files from SL5 (Yes, I tried upgrading. No, it did not work), I have once and for all fixed the clock slew problem.

I don't doubt your problems are frustrating and irritating, but I doubt moving to Windows will make a difference if you have a problem with it.

When I moved to Windows two years ago, everything worked. My headaches went away. I still use Linux, but only as a server and only in a virtual machine. Actually, I would use Linux in a non-VM/server role if I ever got an Android development gig, but that's another story.

Not sent to me in email, but in the discussion, "lcafiero" writes:

why the heck is this guy using Scientific Linux when, from the tone of the blog item, it's way over his head? It sounds like trolling to me.

Indeed, it's ironic that the most hardcore flamer (who, may I point out, is completely anonymous) accuses others of being flamers or trolls. It's a psychological game called "projection". It amazes me that, with all of the noise people made wondering why I'm using Scientific Linux, not one of the posters bothered to spend 30 seconds Googling the answer. The first hit using an obvious Google search explains everything.

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Computex 2011

June 1, 2011

A lot of exciting new technology is coming out in the Computex event that a number of technology blogs are covering, including Engadget, Netbook live, Netbook news, Liliputing, and Laptop magazine.

Thoughts on some of the more interesting announcements:

ASUS X101

This isn’t the first time a Netbook using Linux has been released. Like all of the Linux-based Netbooks that have come out before, this model will probably not last too long before being dropped—most users do not want Linux if they are going to use an x86 system with a traditional laptop-like clamshell design (on the other hand, people are fine with using Linux on a mobile phone, as long as it’s Android).

Indeed, ASUS is hedging their bets by not only having the very thin and light X101, but also having the X101H which includes a conventional hard disk and Windows 7 Starter; this should be a reasonably successful netbook. It’s a lot thinner than other netbooks; on the other hand, it will have less ports (the X101 has only 2 USB ports, a SD card reader, and doesn’t have a VGA, Ethernet, nor 1/8” audio port), and it uses the slower Atom N435 chip.

Lenovo S100 starting to appear

Lenovo is starting to sell their latest Intel-Atom based Netbook, the S100. Right now, the machine is only available in Hong Kong and China; this machine is a S10-3 on steroids. The hard disk is larger: 320Gb as opposed to the S10-3’s 160 or 250Gb hard disk. The machine is thinner and weighs less than the S10-3. Even though the system was supposed to be able to have a N570 processor (or at least that was what Lenovo promised us back in January), the only ones that currently are for sale use the same N455 processor as Lenovo’s current S10-3 model.

I would like to see Lenovo make the S100 available in the United States, but Lenovo may not do this (indeed, they delayed their S100 release by a couple of months) because the netbook market is fairly crowded, with current offerings from ASUS, Acer, Samsung, Toshiba, and others, and because the netbook market as a whole lost steam when the iPad made tablets trendy.

In fact, Lenovo is doing quite well with their AMD E-350 based offerings (The ThinkPad x120e, with a four-week wait, and the IdeaPad S205), and may not be entirely comfortable continuing to compete in the higher-volume lower-margin netbook market. There may also be an issue with wanting to deplete the stock of S10-3 computers before bringing a new netbook to the market.

Then again, the fact that Lenovo has announced a low-cost Atom N435 version of the S100 shows that they have not given up on the netbook platform yet.

Intel Competing with the AMD T40E

I mentioned in a previous blog entry that the AMD T40E trounces Intel’s current low-power low-cost Atom offerings. Thankfully, Intel is not standing still. The Cedarview-based Atom N2800 chip is their answer to the T40E. Like the T40E, its TDP is 6.5 watts.

This chip reportedly is a dual-core chip running at 1.86ghz, with an improved “GMA 5650” graphics subsystem (compared to the GMA 3150 used by current Atoms), includes x86_64 support, and allows up to 4Gb of ram. My sense is that it will have better CPU performance than the T40E, but the T40E will have better GPU performance. I also doubt the GMA 5650 will be a programmable.

Speaking of the T40E, AMD has just announced a chip called the Z-01, which looks similar to the T40E but has a slightly smaller TDP of 5.9W.

Web page design update

I have updated the web page design today to not be so dependent on Verdana. Since it is now possible to use any font on a webpage, I have modified the Ubuntu font to have just the characters for writing in English and Spanish and be web page embeddable, and have put the font on my webpage.

Ubuntu's font is about as attractive as Verdana for small text and has full delta hinting. Since this is a "branding" font, it has a distinct (but very readable) look to it that makes it not quite suitable for body text, but it looks really nice everywhere else.

Hopefully a nice-looking open-source sans-serif font with full delta hinting usable for body text will come out soon.

I have also updated my development system from Scientific Linux 5 (SL5) to SL6; this took far too long to do. SL6 is more sluggish than SL5; I had to change my primary browser from Firefox to Opera to still access the internet inside my Virtualbox VM at a usable speed, but it's a lot more current and will be supported until 2017.

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Linux is only for bachelors

May 29, 2011

2014 update: The issue was not really with Linux as much as it was with VirtualBox. It really is worth it to spring the $250 needed to buy VMWare workstation

This morning, my Scientific Linux Virtual box guest developed a serious case of clock slew. After some research, and trying all four possible timing sources (see /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/available_clocksource), having to reboot the Virtual guest every time I tried a different clock source, I finally came to the conclusion that the only way I am going to get a stable clock in Scientific Linux again is by upgrading to Scientific Linux 6.

As a stopgap measure, I have set up a crontab to set the clock via netdate -s tick.gatech.edu every minute, so SL5's clock is always within a couple of minutes of the correct time if I'm connected to the internet.

After failing at that, I then started to research why fontconfig wasn't accepting a perfectly good BDF font file I created in Fontforge and gbdfed. The documentation was useless, and like a good open-source program, the various fontconfig commands (fc-cache, etc.) didn't log any error messages whatsoever.

I finally figured out that the issue is that Freetype's FT_New_face() doesn't like perfectly good BDF font files for as-of-yet unknown reasons. It would be nice if fc-cache had a "super verbose" setting which would report errors like "foo.bdf does not look like a font file. FT_New_face() failed; error:", along with a verbose description of FT_New_face()'s error code. But, since this is open-source software, you get what you pay for.

While ranting (it took me hours to figure this out, so yes, I'm a little annoyed), it would be really nice if FT_New_face() would accept any and all fonts that the old-school X programs like Xterm use. If it's visible in xfontsel, it should also be a legitimate font when opened with FT_New_face().

The bottom line is this: I'm a married man today. I really don't have time to struggle with poorly documented programs which don't give out helpful error messages and require source-level hacking to figure out what the !@#$ is going on.

There is a reason why Windows, not Linux, is my primary desktop OS.

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Embedding web fonts

May 28, 2011

For years, web designers have been forced to select from a very limited number of fonts for their web designs. No longer; it is now possible to put in arbitrary fonts in one's web page.

For example:

This is what some text looks like with a non-standard font. This may or may not be readable in your browser

So the raw technology for embedding custom fonts is now availble. So, that leaves with the next challenge: Finding fonts that look really great at the screen at all resolutions, using both Clear Type and classic font rendering technology (read: a font with "delta hinting", a technology that is very labor-intensive to add to a font). Ideally, a font with an open-source license (read: the "SIL" font license).

Looking at the Google web fonts, there are a lot of really beautiful fonts, but the only one I have seen whose delta hinting I am happy with is the monospace Cousine font (this font also goes by the name "Liberation Mono"). What I haven't found is a font that can replace Verdana.

That said, the open-source Merriweather font has a lot of promise; this would be a perfect font with really good delta hinting (as well as italics). Since it is open source, anyone can delta hint it--or pay the designer to do the hard work.

This problem was solved when Windows XP hit end of life in 2014; anything post-XP doesn’t need delta hinting to look good on the screen

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing). The "Chortle" font used in the above example is an open-source font; license details are available.

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MaraDNS; the PROTECT act

May 27, 2011

As I blogged about two weeks ago, I would not make any updates to MaraDNS today unless users posted bugs or support concerns. That didn't happen, so there's no need to work on MaraDNS today.

The next day I plan to work on MaraDNS/Deadwood is two weeks from today: June 10, 2011. If there are no reported bugs, I will update Deadwood to version 3.0.03.

Some DNS experts have written a paper pointing out their issues with the PROTECT IP act.

As a DNS expert and implementer, I do not feel the clauses in the PROTECT IP act are too onerous. The PROTECT IP act only requires a DNS operator to disable resolution of a domain if they are served with papers ordering them to disable the domain. As it turns out, this is easy enough to do in Deadwood, and most users of Deadwood would not be served with papers.

This does not affect Deadwood nor MaraDNS, but I should point out that because of how DJBdns' dnscache is written, blacklisting a large number of domains without killing performance requires changes being made to that source code.

In terms of DNSSEC, one way to allow this would be to have a second "root key" that can sign PROTECT-IP blacklisted domains.

In terms of issues with piracy, I have mixed feelings. I do not think pirating content is always morally wrong (for example, downloading the electronic version of a book one purchased, or the no-CD version of a video game one owns), but I do find the entitlement mentality that many users of the internet have very irritating; ultimately, there is no such thing as a free lunch (TINSTAAFL). Indeed, I came to a point where I needed to stop non-bugfix MaraDNS development because I realized I was working too hard on MaraDNS for me to continue doing it without getting paid.

Speaking of which, I haven't gotten a single donation since allowing MaraDNS users to donate again two weeks ago. If you find MaraDNS useful, and can afford to pass me a few dollars, I would love it if you would made a donation; the click to donate button is on the MaraDNS home page.

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Beware: O'Reilly reviews

May 26, 2011

Update (May 28): O'Reilly can not contact Power Reviews about this issue until next week, but let me know that their contract with Power Reviews gives O'Reilly ownership of the the reviews, which are then licensed under a much more reasonable Creative Commons license.

This is a warning: Do not, repeat, do not write reviews at O'Reilly's web page.

O'Reilly uses Power Reviews to process their book reviews. Unfortunately, their click-wrap agreement has this gem in it:

By transmitting product or service ratings or reviews (collectively, "Reviews") to the Review Service, you hereby (a) irrevocably assign and transfer to PowerReviews all of your rights, title and interest, on a worldwide basis, including, without limitation, all intellectual property rights and moral rights, in and to such Reviews

This makes it possible for Power Reviews to, for example, legally sue me for having a review I wrote myself on my blog, since they are now the legal owner of the review I submitted to them. Indeed, I had a blog entry here reviewing an O'Reilly book which I had to remove when I discovered I lost the copyright to the review by submitting it to O'Reilly's web page.

When submitting a review to a web site, make sure the review is not using Power Review's EULA. Otherwise, you can lose the copyright to your review.

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App Inventor

May 25, 2011

App Inventor: Create Your Own Android Apps

By David Wolber, Hal Abelson, Ellen Spertus, and Liz Looney

App Inventor: Create Your Own Android Apps describes and shows people how to use a new web application platform which has the goal of allowing non-programmers to be able to make Android apps. This book is for people who have never programmed before who wish to develop Android apps. "App Inventor" should not be confused with the Android SDK, which is geared towards professional programmers who already know Java, nor with the Android NDK that uses C++.

Computers have made a lot of progress in the last three decades. We have moved from machines that can only work with 80 column text using a fixed-width font to machines with sophisticated graphical user interfaces. This transition has been done piecemeal, starting with the transition from the Apple II to the Macintosh, followed by the transition from DOS to Windows for business computers, which was then followed by the transition of the Internet from Usenet and other text-only applications to graphical web browsers.

The only technology that hasn't made this transition is the interface used by programmers. Programs are still made using the paradigm of an 80-column terminal with a fixed-width font.

App Inventor breaks this programming model. Programs are developed with a mouse; the program structure is described using graphical components resembling pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The App Inventor book walks you through the process of using this platform, starting with a simple "Hello, world" application and finishing with advanced topics such as using Android's web API.

One issue I had with the system is that App Inventor needs a fast computer with a large screen to function well. While I was able to build basic applications on my test system (an Atom N455 Netbook with a small 1024x600 screen), the emulated system I was developing on ran very slowly and developing applications required a lot of switching the window between the web page with the application and the Java-generated page for programming the application's logic.

I might have had better luck running the system using my 64-bit Linux system which runs the Android SDK noticeably faster, but unfortunately I was unable to synchronize App Inventor with its included Android emulator in Linux.

App Inventor shows a lot of promise, and the O'Reilly book does a good job of describing how to use this development toolkit. Unfortunately, the technology is a little too cutting-edge to use with the low-end computers many people have today. Only get this book if you have tried out App Inventor and it runs well on your system.

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing). A digital copy of this book was given to me because I am a member of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program. The above image is part of the book's cover.

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T40E: Atom killer

May 23, 2011

AMD has just released two new chips: The single-core T40R and dual-core T40E. These chips, looking at their specs, are nearly identical to the C-30 and C-50 chips currently on the market. The only difference is that they have a lower TDP--they use less energy (and generate less heat) to generate the same amount of computing performance.

Indeed, the dual-core T40E has identical specs to the C-50: 1.0 ghz clock speed, a 512kb cache for each core, and an included 6250 GPU which can perform both 3D graphics rendering and numerical calculations.

Unlike the C-50 (9W TDP), the T40E had a TDP of only 6.4W. This is less than the 6.5W that the Atom N455 uses, and much less than the N550/N570 (8.5W).

Assuming this chip has the same performance as the C-50, we can use this excellent netbooklive article to get a good idea of how it performs; we can also look at the C-50's Passmark score. To summarize: Faster CPU performance (Passmark 460) than the N455 (PM of 317), but slower than the N550 (PM 561) or N570 (PM 645); faster GPU performance (PM of 198) than the Atom chips (PM of 69), even if the system has an ION chip (PM of 118).

In other words, the T40E, using the same amount of power as an Atom N455, has superior CPU performance (comparable to the N550) and far superior gaming (GPU) performance.

The AMD T40E is an Atom killer. Intel has to significantly increase performance when they release their Cedar Trail chips or they will lose the Netbook market to AMD.

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing). Supplied image showing T40E design courtesy AMD.

Related: E-350 redux E-350 overview

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The Rapture

May 21, 2011

Despite Harold Camping's predictions, the Rapture did not happen today. Thousands of people did not mysteriously disappear. There is no indication that the world is going to end soon.

As a Christian, one of my biggest issues with my faith is the aspect of its belief that the world is going to end real soon. Indeed, there are a number of passages that suggest that, if the Bible is literal scientific truth, then the second coming of Jesus should have happened about 2000 years ago:

"The son will come in his glory, and the glory of the Father, and of the holy angels. I tell you the truth: There are some of those who stand here, who will in no way taste of death, until they see the Kingdom of God." Luke 9:26-27

"When you see these things happening, know that the Kingdom of God is near. Most certainly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things are accomplished." Luke 21:31-32

"For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with God's trumpet. The dead in Christ will rise first, then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air. So we will be with the Lord forever." I Thessalonians 4:16-17

"These are the end times, and as you heard that the Antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have arisen. By this we know that it is the final hour." I John 2:18

Passages like this are a very difficult challenge for those with Christian faith. The early apostles honestly believed that a form of the rapture Harold Camping thought would happen today would happen in their lifetimes. This obviously didn't happen and we are here today.

I don't have a perfect answer to this issue with Christian faith. My answer is that the second coming did happen in a spiritual, not material manner a long time ago, and that predictions about the second coming of Christ are foolish.

Indeed, many Christians who believe in the second coming have this very unpleasant belief that anyone who comes from another culture or religious background will go to Hell for being different from themselves. This aspect of their faith is narrow-minded bigotry, plain and simple. In order for someone to believe in a God who will torture billions of people, they must be a very angry and bitter person. It is an aspect of Christian faith that I find really annoying.

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing). All Bible passages adapted from the public-domain World English Bible. The image of Jesus is public domain.

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Atom Supercomputer

May 20, 2011

Intel, when they designed and released the Atom, probably imagined that it would be used for cell phones and possibly very portable computers. I do not think Intel saw the Atom chip as a replacement for their desktop computer, much less as a chip to power a supercomputer.

A supercomputer using Intel Atom chips? You bet. Seamicro is a Silicon Valley startup that makes Atom-powered supercomputers. Their most recent computer takes 256 Intel Atom N570 chips and puts them in a single box.

The cost of a system is pretty steep: $148,000. Compare this to buying 256 ASUS N570-based netbooks, which currently have a street price of $320. Getting the same number of N570 chips by buying 256 netbooks (where each chip also has a 250gig hard disk, a display and keyboard, ports, etc.) is $81,920.

The advantage of a system like this compared to, say, an Itanium-based supercomputer (yes, the Itanium still lives, but who knows for how long), is that the system uses less power per unit of computing power. The other advantage is binary compatibility with x86 applications. Indeed, Seamicro recently upgraded their flagship system to use N570 chips because they wanted to have x86-64 support.

This system is not designed to be a compute cluster, of course--the Atom is not that efficient per watt when it comes to number crunching. Indeed, each one of those Atom chips in Seamicro's cluster has a GMA3150 GPU that is not being used.

If I were Seamciro and wanted to make a low-energy computation supercomputer, I would probably use the AMD C-50 chip (or possibly the AMD E-350). While the C-50's APU is slower than the N570's, the C-50 has the advantage of having a programmable GPU unit. In a C-50 supercomputer, not only can each CPU use its APU to perform numerical calculations, but the GPU could also be programmed to perform calculations.

An Atom supercomputer is an interesting concept and the idea of using low-cost, low-power-usage chips to make a supercomputer is very intriguing.

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing). Image of Seamicro server obtained from Seamicro's web site.

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The Thinkpad X1

May 19, 2011

Lenovo has entered the "thin and light" 13 inch laptop market with the X1 computer--the market for computers that cost over $1000, have a 13-inch screen, and weigh as little as possible.

Being a Thinkpad, Lenovo has made different compromises compared to other similar offerings, as shown in this table (data mostly comes from Laptop Magazine reviews):

| Thinkpad X1 | Sony Vaio Z | Macbook Air 13" | Samsung Series 9
Weight (pounds) | 3.8 | 3.0 | 2.9 | 2.88
Display | 1366x768 glossy | 1600x900 hybrid [1] | 1440x900 glossy | 1366x768 matte
CPU / PCMark | i5-2520M / 7,535 | i5 / 9,936 | Core 2 Duo / unknown | i5-2537M / 6,857
Battery life | 4:11 / 8:00 [2] | 5:35 | 6:36 | 5:11
Hard disk | Standard | Custom SSD | Custom SSD | Custom SSD
Toughness | Mil-spec | Unknown | Unknown | Unknown

In the above table, we can see that the ThinkPad X1 is noticeably heavier than similar notbooks; this is probably because the X1 has mil-spec magnesium alloy casing, an internal roll cage, and Gorilla glass protecting the LCD panel. In addition, the ThinkPad X1 uses a standard laptop hard disk that can be readily replaced. Quite frankly, these features are worth adding 30% to the weight of the laptop.

The battery life in the base model is not as long as other models; the thinking being that people who need long battery life (trans-Pacific flights, etc.) can get the optional slice battery which lasts some eight hours.

What isn't mentioned in the above table is the ergonomics of this computer. This model, being a ThinkPad, naturally has a trackpoint (as well as a touchpad). The keyboard is very comfortable to use and has a backlight.

The ThinkPad X1 is about as small and light as a computer can be and still be a full-sized ThinkPad. Things taken for granted in a ThinkPad model (durable design, standard parts, readily serviceable) end up adding to the weight to the computer, but do not make the computer a burden to carry.

For people who have $1,400 to budget on a small laptop, the ThinkPad X1 is definitely worth a look.

Notes

[1] The Sony Vaio Z uses a technology which combines the advantages of the deeper colors of a glossy display while readable in sunlight like a matte display.

[2] The ThinkPad X1 has a "slice" battery option which greatly increases the battery life, but increases the weight to 4.6 pounds.

ThinkPad X1 image is courtesy of Lenovo. To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Android SDK on a Netbook

May 18, 2011

As I mentioned in a previous blog, many feel the Intel N455 chip commonly found in low-end netbooks may be underpowered. For example, they are sure that it is not fast enough to perform Android development. But, is it so?

Having downloaded and installed the Android SDK in my 32-bit Windows starter setup, my first conclusion was that running the Android emulator is far too slow to do any meaningful Android software development on a N455-based netbook.

Then I remembered that the Atom N455 is a 64-bit capable chip. So, I brushed off the dust of my 64-bit Linux partition, installed the 32-bit compatible libraries (the Android SDK hasn't been compiled for 64-bit Linux yet), installed a 64-bit version of Java, and fired up the Linux Android SDK.

To say that it is faster than the Windows version is a vast understatement. Granted, the emulated Android platform is still sluggish, but it appears fast enough to develop and debug software on.

So, yes, Android SDK development is a "killer app" that runs better in Linux than it does in Windows.

As a result, I've been spending much of today getting Linux up to snuff (e-book reader, multiple browsers, Skype--now available for 64-bit Linux, etc.).

I don't think Linux will ever be my main desktop again, but it is now my desktop when I am developing Android applications.

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Web page redesign

May 17, 2011

I am wrapping up the 2011 redesign of the web page and blog. I started by fixing how this web page looks in mobile browsers; once that was done, I replaced the entire web page by a mostly entire new design, as I mentioned here.

Today, I worked on redesigning the blog so that it looks more professional. A lot of the work was setting up the automation scripts to use the new design. The web page is static web pages modified by *NIX scripts; I prefer not to use a database back end because that's one less moving part that can break.

I tested the design in the "big five" browsers: Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer. There was only one minor issue in Safari with the iframe on the right-hand side of the pages; this was fixed after a single Google search. Internet Explorer (IE) gave the most issues; while it rendered fine in IE9, I had to fix an issue rendering the page in Internet Explorer 7 and 8. I made my life easier by performing no IE 6 testing; I no longer support Internet Explorer 6.

The new design looks remarkably good in Dillo and is perfectly usable on mobile cell phones.

This hopefully will be the last revision to this site's design for a while.

To post a comment about an entry (or about the new design of this web site), send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Low-end Netbooks

May 16, 2011

In this article I look at two low-cost netbooks from Acer and ASUS. Both of these netbooks use the Intel Atom N455 processor. The Intel Atom N455 is roughly equivalent in processing power to a high-end PC from 2002 or so; the graphics card is roughly equivalent to a good graphics card from 2000.

The models I look at are readily visible when one does a search at B & H Photo for a low-cost netbook.

The Acer Aspire One AOD255E is the lowest-cost netbook with the N455 processor currently available. To keep the cost down, they cut a lot of corners: Updating the memory from 1GB to 2GB is non-trivial and voids the warranty, the speaker is a single monophonic speaker, and the battery is a three-cell battery that only lasts about three hours. This model is available in four colors: Black, red, aquamarine, and brown. It is available at B & H Photo for only $240.

Costing about $10 more is the ACER Eee PC 1001PXD-EU series. Unlike the Acer, this series is only available in three colors: Black, white, and blue. Unlike the Acer AOD255E, it is simple to replace the memory in this model (note that, unlike the Lenovo S10-3 and other netbooks, replacing the hard disk is non-trivial), and stereo speakers are available.

Unlike the Aspire One (which has a glossy screen), the Eee PC uses a matte screen. The Aspire One beats out the ASUS 1001 when it comes to ports: While both models have an Analog VGA port, an Ethernet port, as well as a SD card reader, the Acer has three USB ports as well as separate 1/8" headphone and microphone jacks; the ASUS has only two USB ports and a single combined microphone/speaker 1/8" jack.

The basic low-cost model of the Eee PC 1001PXD-EU only has a three-cell battery that lasts about three hours; a six-cell battery is available for $15-20 more (depending on the model's color). The three cell version costs only $250 at B & H Photo as well as Amazon right now.

Peronsonally, I prefer the ASUS model. While it costs more and has only two USB ports, this is more than compensated for by having the memory easily upgraded to 2GB--something that is essential to have clean multitasking. Also, the matte screen should be easier to read outdoors.

A lot of people point out that the Atom N455 is underpowered. And, indeed, for some tasks like composing music, using AutoCAD, or video editing, a faster processor is desired. But, on the other hand, the N455 can happily run virtual machines, browse the web (I did have to switch from Firefox to Chrome to run Javascript-heavy pages at a decent speed), develop web applications or compiled programs using UNIX-style makefiles, edit photos to post to Facebook or what not, and run a number of applications at the same time as long as the memory is updated to 2GB.

One annoying limitation of the N455 is that it does not accept more then 2GB of memory (The AMD C-30 and C-50, however, accept up to 4GB of memory). For playing games on the web, solitaire, or other games included with Windows 7, the N455 is fine; however modern graphics-heavy 3d games are a bit heavy for this processor.

Before ending this article, I will point to a website which has excellent reviews of current netbook models: netbooklive.com. Keep in mind, however, that this writer only quotes Amazon's prices for netbooks.

The included picture is "CC BY 3.0" licensed. Attribution: Ashley Pomeroy. To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Facebook viruses

May 15, 2011

One of my friends in Facebook recently got stung by a virus; I was able to look at the source code for the virus before Facebook's security team removed it.

The virus is written in straightforward Javascript and does the following:

The virus assumes that someone is logged in to their Facebook account.

The virus uses XMLHttpRequest to post a wall message telling people to download the virus. This is posted to all of the user's friend's pages.

The virus then redirects the user to a page with an advertisement.

The way for browsers to protect themselves from this virus is simple: They should not allow people to enter Javascript code in one's location toolbar. Or, if that is too limiting, they should not allow XMLHttpRequest to be run in Javascript in a URL.

I have just revamped the web page design of my website. I always felt the old site design was a little too sparse; the new design is tighter. The new design also removes the dated photo of myself from the top of my web page.

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Mobile browsers

May 14, 2011

When I originally designed the HTML and CSS for this webpage, cell phone browsers were, at best, very slow and primitive. Giving a cell phone alternate CSS was a simple matter of adding a line like this in the header of a web page:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="handheld.css">

Well, with the introduction of the iPhone, Android, and other advanced cell phone browsers, the above tag was no longer supported. This is because many webmasters made the CSS for handheld pages look very basic.

Because of limitations with CSS implementations in many mainstream browsers in the mid-2000s (can you say "Internet Explorer 6"), many designs (including my webpage) required the page to have a certain absolute size. 800x600 was the smallest common size in the mid-2000s, so a webpage design that was 800 pixels wide was perfectly reasonable.

And that is exactly what I did with my website.

Unfortunately, iPhones and other cell phone browers using screens less than 800 pixels wide decided to ignore @media handheld and tried to render a webpage 800 pixels wide on, say, a 320x480 screen.

I discovered this problem yesterday as I was setting up an Android development environment. So, after doing some research, I now have CSS like this in the top of my webpage:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="cellphone.css" media="only screen and (max-device-width: 799px)" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="only screen and (min-device-width: 800px)" title="Blue Sky (default)" href="computer.css" />
<!--[if lt IE 9]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="computer.css" media="all" />
<![endif]-->

Since I had to update the static HTML of over 100 web pages (scripting languages like BASH and AWK make this reasonably easy), I also went to the liberty of adding some HTML that tells people to no longer use Internet Explorer 6 (courtesy Microsoft):

<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<div style=' clear: both; height: 59px; padding:0 0 0 15px; position: relative;'> <a href="http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/internet-explorer/products/ie/home?ocid=ie6_countdown_bannercode"><img src="http://www.theie6countdown.com/images/upgrade.jpg" border="0" height="42" width="820" alt="You are using an outdated browser. For a faster, safer browsing experience, upgrade for free today." /> </a></div>
<![endif]-->

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MaraDNS update

May 13, 2011

In today's snapshot of MaraDNS, I have reinstated the "PayPal donate" button. I have upgraded employers and no longer have a conflict of interest with receiving donations for the work I have done with MaraDNS.

Note that donations are on a strictly "tip jar" basis: If MaraDNS is useful for you, please leave a tip. That said, I currently am not selling technical support nor any other services.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

I have also uploaded a Windows binary of the most current Deadwood snapshot:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

The next day I have planned to work on MaraDNS is two weeks from today: May 27, 2011. I will probably not update MaraDNS unless someone reports a bug on the MaraDNS mailing list.

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Internet loudmouths

May 12, 2011

There is what I call the "internet loudmouth jerk rule". Basically, when a location on the Internet allows people to quickly and easily post their opinion about something, the forum, unless strictly controlled, will soon degrade in to name-calling and people insulting each other.

The first large-scale Internet forum, Usenet, saw this happen. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was a place where very intelligent people shared ideas and created the very technology that made the internet revolution of the late 1990s possible. Perl became possible because of Usenet. Linux became a reality in Usenet. Even the World Wide Web was first publicized on Usenet.

But then Usenet became too big. By the end of the 1990s, Usenet was a place with little useful discussion and where people endlessly insulted each other. By the 2000s, people were moving away form Usenet in droves and moving towards web-based discussion forums and blogs.

One of the things that destroyed Usenet was the Internet loudmouth problem. This is the problem where a small group of people with a minority opinion dominate a conversation. This happened with Linux desktop users in the 1990s who were convinced Windows users were misguided and that Linux would some day domainate the desktop. It never happened; Linux then and Linux now has, at most, 1% of the desktop market.

Other examples of internet loudmouths are Macintosh advocates (as well as anti-Macintosh trolls), DJB software advocates (this has been dying down in the 2010s as his software becomes more and more dated), Amiga users in the 1990s (finally died in the 2000s), Birthers (finally starting to die now that Obama has released his "long-form" birth certificate), global warming deniers, and, very recently, Bitcoin advocates (I describe Bitcoin and point out its flaws in a recent blog posting).

It's amazing just how detached from reality all these loud-mouthed advocates are. I remember reading Usenet in the mid-1990s trying to get a sense of what it was like to work in Silicon Valley; when I got the Silicon Valley job, it was amazing how different it was from what I saw in Usenet.

Open forums have other issues. Unmoderated forums have people acting on the worst of our tribal instincts, savagely attacking anyone who does not conform to whatever arbitrary guidelines a given forum has. This behavior was one of the things that greatly contributed to the decline of Usenet; web forums with well-defined moderators can avoid this kind of tribalism, since there is no need to fight it out on the forum to determine who the alpha male is.

Another issue is the fact that it appears that the kinds of people who spend a lot of time using a computer to interact with others can be unhappy and bitter people who have a lot of resentment and other real-world problems.

The old adage that "you get what you pay for" is very true; I finally got sick and tired of trudging through online discussion boards and blogs trying to find stuff worth reading. Instead, I have downloaded Amazon's Kindle software for my PC (sorry, Linux fanatics, there isn't a Linux version), and am now reading quality books which I have purchased from the Kindle store.

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Poor man's Widelux

May 3, 2011

Click on the picture to enlarge

One of Jeff Bridges' favorite cameras is the "Widelux". The Widelux is a very expensive special-purpose camera that acts like a fish-eye lens, but with more resolution: It uses a special moving lens that allows ultra-wide-angle shots. Not only is this camera expensive, but it is difficult to work with.

While I like the effect of the Widelux, I do not have Jeff Bridges' budget for fancy cameras. Fortunately, I don't need an expensive Widelux to make panoramic shots. It is possible to make panoramic shots with the basic camera in my cell phone by using the right software.

I use an open-source program called Hugin to make panoramic photos. To use this program, first I take a series of pictures that cover the width I want in my photo. This is done by taking one picture, then turning the camera to the left so that the left half of the picture I just took is the right half of the picture I am about to take. If I do this enough times, I will have turned around and have enough pictures to make a 360 degree panoramic image.

Of course, doing a full 360 degree rotation is not necessary. In the above picture, for example, I only wanted to cover a little over 180 degrees.

Once the pictures are taken, it is a simple matter of loading the pictures in to Hugin. Despite the program being open-source, there is a built-in "wizard" that can, in the majority of cases, take a series of photos and stitch them togeter in to a longer panoramic shot.

One issue Hugin had in this picture was parallax distortion with the tree about one third from the left of the picture. Hugin caused the tree to have branches floating in mid-air; I had to edit the picture in The Gimp for about an hour to resolve this issue.

Also, it can be difficult for Hugin to stitch photos together if less than about half of the picture overlaps the picture next to it. In addition, Hugin will sometimes crop the ends of the photo montage.

Like the real Widelux, Hugin is a little fickle and unpredictable. Like the real Widelux, Hugin can generate some really beautiful panoramic shots. Unlike the real Widelux, Jeff Bridges' income is not needed to have one.

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Firefox and Javascript

May 1, 2011

Since my current gig is having me do a lot of heavy Javascript programming, I have installed all of the "Big 5" browsers on my netbook (Opera, Safari, Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox).

After making a page with a lot of heavy Javascript, I discovered that Firefox is the slowest web browser for rendering Javascript. In more detail, I have some complicated javascript that modifies the DOM of a document. Firefox takes some 20 seconds to do a full run; MSIE 9 can do it in about nine seconds. The other three are lightning fast; Chrome can do it in about three seconds, Safari in two seconds, and Opera only takes about 1.5 seconds to run the same Javascript.

The main thing I like about Firefox is that it has a lot of add-ons and the ability to force all pages to be rendered using Verdana; then again, I like Opera because it looks to be the most lightweight browser to support modern web standards, as well as the fastest Javascript performance.

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New MaraDNS snapshot

April 29, 2011

I have released a snapshot of MaraDNS today that slightly updates the documentation (as well as one of the tools that generates the documentation in various formats). In addition, I answered a MaraDNS tech support request today.

I should note that I will not answer technical support requests on the MaraDNS list unless it's one of my assigned days for working on MaraDNS.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

The next day I will work on MaraDNS is two weeks from today: Friday, May 13 2011.

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E-350 redux

April 26, 2011

I recently posted a blog about the AMD Zacate E-350. In that blog post, I compared the E-350 to the Intel Atom. In this post, as well as comparing it to the Atom, I will also compare it to some of Intel's more expensive offerings. Going to Notebook check, I compared the Zacate with some Intel Processors with a similar TDP (energy usage). Here is the results of my informal comparison:

 Maker   Name            TDP     price   PI-32M  3DMark 06 Intel   i7-2657M        17      317      751    2546 Intel   i3-380UM        18      ?       1719    1426 Intel   i3-330UM        18      ?       1876 	1310 AMD     E-350           18      < 129   2475    1015  Intel   Atom N455        6.5    64      4523     156

In this chart, the PI-32M is the number of seconds needed to calculate 32 million digits of Pi; lower numbers are better. 3D mark numbers record 3D performance; higher numbers are better.

The OEM price for an E-350 is not readily available, but a motherboard with the E-350 chipset is available for $129; I would guess that an E-350 costs about the same or a little more than the Atom N455.

As we can see, Intel is perfectly capable of making chips that have better performance using the same amount of energy. Intel's disadvantage is that they are not doing this cheaply; their high-performance 18W processors use a more expensive 32nm process (compared to the 40nm process used by the E-350 and the 45nm process of the N455).

It would appear that Intel is not interested in filling the gap between their inexpensive Atom processors and their more lucrative core series processors. Their Atom processors are handicapped in a number of ways: they are using a 45nm process while other Intel processors use 32nm; the highest TDP used by an Atom is 13W (for the D525); the maximum memory that an Atom can use is only 2Gb; and the graphics chipset included with the Atom is lackluster at best.

While details about the up and coming Atom Cedar Trail are not public yet, one source shows that Intel is not going to lift the 2Gb limitation with the next-generation Atom chips. While the next-generation Atoms should match the E-350 in terms of CPU speed--indeed the D525 is almost as fast as the E-350 right now--they will probably not match its GPU speed, and they will continue to have their memory capacity crippled.

Quite frankly, it seems to me that Intel does not want to make a low-cost processor that is perceived as being fast enough for mainstream computer use. Intel looks more interested in making their Atoms use less power for the same amount of performance than in giving their Atoms more performance--the Pineview (N450, N455) series of Atoms did not have significantly better performance than the previous generation of Atom chips. When Intel talks about their Cedar Trail Atoms, they talk about better performance at specialized tasks such as video decoding more than about better general performance; they also are emphasizing the ability to make fanless computers with the next generation of Atom chips.

AMD, on the other hand, is marketing their E-350 as a general-purpose chip that costs less and uses less power. Their is no crippled memory limitation; these chips support up to 8Gb, more than enough for most daily computing tasks. Indeed, unlike the Intel Atom, a number of mainstream computer makers (Acer, Toshiba, etc.) are making 15" laptops with the E-350 chipset. In addition, Lenovo is making the C205 desktop computer with an E-350.

Mainstream computer users want an affordable computer they feel is not crippled. While the netbook form factor works very well for some users (I personally don't like anything bigger than 11" because it's too big to readily carry around or to use on an airplane), many find it too small (and the 1024x600 display most common with netbooks is not compatible with a lot of software).

The E-350 works very well for people who want something with the Atom's price but without the Atom's limitations. It's unfortunate that Intel does not appear interested in filling the gap between the Atom chip (perceived by many as underpowered) and their "core" mainstream chips.

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New ObHack release

April 25, 2011

Fritz has made and I have packaged and uploaded a new release of ObHack.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.samiam.org/slump/

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On NXDOMAIN

April 23, 2011

Some feel that NXDOMAIN should not only mean "this host name does not exist", but also should mean "not only does this host name not exist, but any child names also do not exist" (in more detail, if foo.example.com returns a NXDOMAIN, some feel this means bar.foo.example.com does not exist, but tinydns will return a NXDOMAIN for foo.example.com even if bar.foo.example.com exists):

http://marc.info/?l=djbdns&m=130132697825674&w=1

However, back in 1999, Paul Vixie said that a server must return a NXDOMAIN, even if there are child names:

 From: Paul A Vixie {vi...@mibh.net} Subject: Re: sub.dom with cached NXDOMAIN dom Date: 1999/12/08 Message-ID: {199912080700.XAA18392@bb.rc.vix.com}#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 558054698 Approved: use...@vix.com X-Complaints-To: abuse@isc.org Organization: none Mime-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: 8 Dec 1999 08:02:48 GMT Newsgroups: comp.protocols.dns.std  } Here are three ways to use a recently cached NXDOMAIN foo.bar IN A: }  }    (1) Respond NXDOMAIN for any IN query within the foo.bar domain. }    (2) Respond NXDOMAIN for any IN query for the name foo.bar. }    (3) Respond NXDOMAIN for any IN A query for the name foo.bar. }  } RFC 2308 recommends #2. It doesn't mention #1 or #3. Is this choice } based on some unpublished statistics on caching effectiveness? Or did } RFC 2308 actually mean to recommend #1?  NXDOMAIN's scope is the {name,type}.  RFC 2308 implicitly outlawed BIND's behaviour, which is to return NOERROR/ANCOUNT=0 for empty nonterminals. After RFC 2308, empty nonterminals are signalled with NXDOMAIN.  Therefore #1 would be incorrect.  #3, while correct, would waste information since NXDOMAIN signals "no RRs of any type at this name".

Reference:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.protocols.dns.std/msg/69e4500e7b7d73c8

And DJB referring to this:

http://marc.info/?l=djbdns&m=130135043022339&w=1

There actually isn't an RFC that requires this behavior. What there is instead is a draft proposal:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-vixie-dnsext-resimprove-00

Hauke Lampe pointed out that recent Unbound builds no longer expect NXDOMAIN to means "also for all domain names below" unless the remote cache supports DNSSEC:

http://marc.info/?l=djbdns&m=130148377625400&w=1

He is referring to the changelog in Unbound's SVN trunk:

http://unbound.nlnetlabs.nl/svn/trunk/doc/Changelog

MaraDNS and NXDOMAIN:

MaraDNS 1.0 never returned a NXDOMAIN

MaraDNS 1.2 returned a NXDOMAIN if a given name has no answers. Child nodes are not checked.

Newer versions of MaraDNS have MaraDNS 1.2's behavior.

This is generally a non-issue, since MaraDNS synthesizes SOA records for zones if the zone does not have a SOA record.

Since MaraDNS does not have DNSSEC, this should be a non-issue. Quite frankly, this behavior should be considered undefined by default, and, if the behavior is desired, there should be a EDNS0 flag requesting the behavior.

My thoughts:

DJB is right. This is new behavior and a lot of DNS software written before this draft RFC was made do not have this behavior.

Accusations of RFC non-compliance need to quote chapter and verse of the relevant RFC or are invalid.

Even if a future RFC codified that NXDOMAIN means "all names that are a child of this name also do not exist" (this would be a bad case of "retcon") this would be, by and large, a non-issue with MaraDNS since all zones have SOA records at the top of the zone, making it so requests for zone tops do not generate NXDOMAIN records.

Update: I have posted to the dnsext mailing list my concerns:

http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/dnsext/current/msg11207.html

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The AMD E-350

April 22, 2011

At the beginning of this year, AMD introduced a new Zacate E-350 chip (as well as a lower-priced E-240 chip, which we will not look at). The first computers this chip was seen in were 11-inch "notbooks"; computers slightly larger, more expensive, and faster than the 10-inch netbooks which were very popular until the iPad was released.

Indeed, the Zacate E-350 is in, among others, the following 11-inch "notbooks":

Sony Vaio Y series

Lenovo ThinkPad x120e

HP dm1z

In terms of feel, typing on an 11-inch notbook is a more pleasant experience than any of the keyboards the 10-inch netbooks have (I should note that the Lenovo s10-3 had an excellent keyboard until they changed suppliers from Alps to Chicony). The screen on notbooks is usually 1366x768 instead of the 1024x600 display most common with netbooks; this allows notbooks to play games that need a 1024x768 screen (such as Civilization 3) and enables Linux developers have two terminals side-by-side at a legible font size.

In addition to the notbooks, unlike the Atom, the E-350 is readily available in larger notebooks. To name just one model, the Toshiba Satellite C650D lineup includes an E-350 based 15.6" laptop with a DVD player/writer and a webcam/microphone for just under $400. There are also E-350 based motherboards for people who prefer to build their own computers.

Zacate E-350 performance

Looking at the Passmark list of CPU benchmarks, the Zacate E-350 non-GPU performance is nominally (about 15%) faster than a dual-core Atom [1]. Where it smokes the Atom is with GPU (graphics) performance. It is about three times as fast as Atom's built-on GPU, and nearly twice as fast as the ION GPU included with some high-end netbooks.

In terms of gaming--probably the most common way of using a computer where lower performance is noticed--cutting-edge games from five years ago are perfectly playable on an E-350 system. In contrast, an Intel Atom system with the 3150 chipset can only really play hi-end games from 10 years ago [3].

The improved GPU also results in better video playback. Unlike the Intel Atom, the E-350 can smoothly play 1080p Flash videos. [4]

Before concluding the performance section, I should note that the Zacate E-350 does not have the memory limitations that Atoms have. The Atom N455, for example, does not support having over 2Gb of memory, but users of the E-350 based Thinkpad x120e have reported expanding the memory to 8Gb without problem.

E-350 and battery life

One worry I had was the the E-350's higher TDP (18 instead of the Atom's 6.6 watts) would significantly impact battery life. In real-world use, the impact is reasonably small. LAPTOP magazine saw the E-350 based x120e last for 6:05 using a 57 Whr battery; the Atom N455 based S10-3 from Lenovo lasted 6:55 using a 49 Whr battery.

To make this as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as possible, Lenovo's E-350 system lasts 6.4 minutes per watt-hour of battery charge, and their Atom N455 system lasts just under 8.5 minutes per watt-hour.

So, the E-350 uses 30% more energy than a single-core Atom processor.

Conclusion

The AMD E-350 fits a nice sweet spot between the Intel Atom and "mainstream" processors. It resolves most of the performance annoyances some users have had with Atoms--HD video playback is possible and gaming performance is considerably better--with only a minimal impact on price and battery life.

I eagerly await Intel's release of their next-generation Cedar Trail Atoms to see if they will have a higher-performance model that competes with the Zacate E-350.

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Footnotes

[1] The dual core Atom N570 has a Passmark score of 620; the E-350 has a score of 743.

[2] The GMA 3150--Atom's GPU--has a Passmark score of 69. The Radeon 6310, AMD E-350's GPU--has a Passmark score of 205. An ION has a Passmark score of 118.

[3] For example, Quake 3 from late 1999 runs fine on a netbook, but Neverwinter Nights from 2002 is barely playable [3a] on a typical netbook system.

[3a] To cut to the chase: "there were many times when I was thankful for the turn-based nature of the game, since things like number of enemies and area-of-effect spells tend to bog things down considerably."

[4] The linked article was written before the mainline Flash release had AMD HD acceleration support, an issue that has since been resolved.

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IE6 end of life

April 17, 2011

Now that Microsoft has a site telling people to no longer use Internet Explorer 6, it is time to say enough is enough.

Back when I designed the CSS for this site, some five years ago, I went to a lot of contortions to make the website IE6 compatible. Indeed, whenever I did the site design for a web page, about 20-50% of the work involved making the site work in IE6.

A year ago, when I was doing a web design gig, a posted three blog entries about the issues getting web pages to work in IE6.

Enough is enough. IE6 usage in the United State, Europe, and Latin America is below 5%. Google no longer tries to make their sites IE6-compatible. Going to YouTube in IE6 causes one to see a notice that their browser is outdated. It would appear C|Net is doing the same.

While older web page designs will remain IE6 compatible, I will not make any revisions backwards-compatible. I am in the process of starting to have warnings (courtesy Microsoft) to upgrade from IE6 on my webpages.

IE6 was the state of the art of standards compliance when it came out. But that was ten years ago. We are in the 2010s and it's time to move on.

P.S. For people with older computers which can not run newer versions of Internet Explorer, Opera is a lightweight browser with support for modern web standards.

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MaraDNS & Deadwood update

April 15, 2011

In today's snapshot of MaraDNS, I have fixed an error reported by Bryan Duff. In particular, instead of replying with "not implemented" when given an IXFR or AXFR query over UDP, MaraDNS now returns "truncated".

In today's snapshot of Deadwood, I have refined the heuristics of how to handle empty packets by only treating them as "this host does not exist" if the user asked for an AAAA (IPv6 IP) record. This resolves a problem Deadwood has resolving the archive.org names when one of the three upstream DNS servers replied to requests with a REFUSED DNS reply.

They can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/
http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap/

The next day I will work on MaraDNS is two weeks from today: Friday, April 29 2011.

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du for Windows

April 10, 2011

One thing that has always annoyed me is that the version of MSYS I use (MSYS 1.0 with 64-bit compatibility fixed; MSYS is a tiny Unix-like environment for Windows--think of it as "Cygwin light") is that it does not include a version of "du".

Finally, after being annoyed by this for a couple of years (and even going as far as installing Cygwin just so I would have "du"), I have implemented a version of du for Windows.

This program is very simple: It acts like "du -ab". Only directories can be given, not file names. Due to a bug in the program, directory names can not have a trailing slash. The program is large-file-size compatible.

In addition, I have made a program that supplies both the sizes of files and their "Radio Gatun 32" cryptographic sums.

Source code and Windows binaries are provided (compiles with MINGW). The programs are public domain.

It can be looked at here:

http://samiam.org/rg32/

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On Xonotic

April 9, 2011

Once upon a time, there was a real cool open-source first-person-shooter game called Nexuiz. It was a fun little game that was very similar to Unreal Tournament or Quake III.

After being around for a few years, the lead developer decided he wanted to get paid for his hard work, and made the game commercial. The reaction by the open-source community was very disappointing: They attacked the developer for trying to make money.

I've seen this movie played out before. In the early 2000s, when the Tux Racer developers tried to make money with their open-source game, the same hostility was encountered. Then, and now, the arguments boiled down to the open-source community saying "How dare the developers try to make money from their hard work". [1] [2]

In the aftermath of this, Nexuiz was forked and there is now a project called "Xonotic".

I tried playing the original preview of Xonotic. I didn't like it. On my admittedly underpowered netbook (N455 / GMA 3150), Xonotic is too slow to play at all unless all textures are disabled. Contrast this with Nexuiz 2.3, which has a good FPS (frames per second) with textures enabled.

The issue is that, since Xonotic is completely open-source, there is no way to pay the developers, so there is no way to enforce discipline. Each developer is going to make contributions that work well with whatever computer and graphics card they happen to have; there is no one that can say "This game has to be playable on an Intel N455/GMA 3150" or, if that is too limiting, "This game has to be playable on an AMD E-350/Radeon 6310" or whatever.

Because of this, I am still going to be playing Nexuiz.

Since I am going to be using a low-end N455 netbook for a while, I have made a special netbook remix of Nexuiz. Unlike other netbook remixes of Nexuiz, this remix does not eliminate textures; it has the same experience as the full version of Nexuiz. [3]

I am glad to see that open-source Nexuiz lives on in the form of Xonotic, but the resentment the Xonotic developers have against the core Nexuiz developers (as can be seen in their FAQ) for trying to make money is unproductive.

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[1] This kind of knee-jerk reaction is most prominent with open-source games. I do not recall similar hostility when RedHat stopped giving away their operating system.

[2] The arguments made when Nexuiz went commercial were along the lines that the original core Nexuiz developers ignored the entire Nexuiz community. Never mind that the core developers did the lion's share of the hard work. With Tux Racer, the arguments were along the lines that the game was not good enough to be sold.

[3] It also uses Nexuiz 2.3 instead of a newer version of Nexuiz. The community contributions to Nexuiz made after 2.3 slow down the game too much on low-end hardware.

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Another Deadwood bug

March 25, 2011

A lot of the headache of making a recursive DNS server is dealing with misconfigured DNS servers. Let's take the example of a DNS server giving us an empty packet. This can mean various things:

it can mean that there is no answer for the host name in question

Or, it can mean the DNS servers are misconfigured

Right now, one of the three DNS servers for archive.org is broken: Any queries sent to it result in a REFUSED reply.

There are a number of ways of handling this better than Deadwood currently does. What I will probably end up doing is giving these kinds of answers as low of a TTL as I can get away with.

This will all be done on April 15. This is a more important bug than the issue with AXFR-over-UDP which I mentioned yesterday.

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MaraDNS updates

March 24, 2011

As I blogged about before, I have made the transition from CentOS 5 to Scientific Linux 5. This affects MaraDNS development because CentOS 5 is no longer an officially supported platform. The officially supported platforms are now:

Scientific Linux 5

Windows 7

This change should have no practical effect on MaraDNS or Deadwood; the code is quite portable. "Not supported" doesn't mean "won't work"; it means "I won't help with problems one may have running MaraDNS or Deadwood on this OS".

Bryan Duff has reported on the MaraDNS list that zone transfers which start with a DNS-over-UDP query do not work. The solution is to modify the UDP server to send out a "truncated" reply to AXFR and IXFR requests.

The next day when I will work on MaraDNS is on April 15; I will address this issue on that day.

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Bitcoin

March 23, 2011

Bitcoin may be illegal.

Bitcoin is an attempt to create an alternative system of money. The system works like this:

The first users of Bitcoin software were able to reasonably easy have their computers generate bitcoin "money". So, the early adopters now have a large number of bitcoin credits.

Ever since then, it has become harder and harder for new bitcoin users to get any bitcoin "money".

Bitcoin advocates--perhaps people who got in early and were able to get a lot of bitcoin credits--are trying to give these credits real-world value.

This stinks of a ponzi scheme: The late adopters do not have the same chance to get "money for nothing" that the early adopters had.

The US government does not like these kinds of alternative money schemes very much. There was someone who tried to get people to use "liberty dollars" as a kind of alternative currency who recently got arrested. This is not the first time alternative currency brokers have been busted.

Yes, there are a lot of real-world issues with how the mismanagement of real money by banks have put us in the economic crisis we are in right now. America's income inequality--which has been getting worse for the last 30 or 40 years--is a real problem which needs a real solution. Cooking up an alternative currency is not the solution.

At the time I posted this blog, Bitcoins were worth about one dollar. Two years later, Bitcoins had a value of approximately $140 each. If I were not so cynical, and bought $1,000 in Bitcoins instead of posting this, I would have been $140,000 richer.

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Scientific Linux

March 19, 2011

It's time to convert from CentOS to Scientific Linux. Some background: Both CentOS and Scientific Linux are free clones of the for-pay Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a popular version of Linux. More information can be had at the appropriate Wikipedia articles:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux

Let's look at a table comparing when a given CentOS and Scientific Linux release are made after the corresponding RHEL release is made:

Release | RHEL release day | CentOS release | Scientific Linux
5.6 | 2011/01/13 | NOT DONE YET | NOT DONE YET
6.0 | 2010/11/10 | NOT DONE YET | 2011/03/03
5.5 | 2010/03/31 | 2010/05/14 | 2010/05/19
5.4 | 2009/09/02 | 2009/10/21 | 2009/11/04
4.8 | 2009/05/18 | 2009/08/21 | 2009/07/28
5.3 | 2009/01/20 | 2009/03/31 | 2009/03/19
5.2 | 2008/05/21 | 2008/07/17 | 2008/06/26
4.6 | 2007/11/16 | 2007/12/16 | 2008/09/03
5.1 | 2007/11/07 | 2007/12/02 | 2008/01/16
3.9 | 2007/06/15 | 2007/07/26 | 2007/10/12
5.0 | 2007/03/14 | 2007/04/12 | 2007/05/04
3.8 | 2006/07/20 | 2006/08/25 | 2006/10/31
4.0 | 2005/02/14 | 2005/03/09 | 2005/04/20
3.1 | 2003/10/23 | 2004/03/19 | 2004/05/10

Looking at the above table, one can see that while Scientific Linux releases used to come out more slowly than CentOS releases, SL has come out sooner than CentOS or within two weeks of a CentOS release since 2009.

There's more than release dates of iso images, of course. There's also security updates made between releases. CentOS has an issue with not releasing security updates from the time a new version of RHEL is made upstream until they make iso images of the new release. This was an issue back in 2009 and is still an issue today.

A number of important RHEL 5 security updates have not been done for CentOS 5 because they are waiting for CentOS 5.6 to come out first. This means that a number of important and critical security updates are not available for CentOS 5 users.

Scientific Linux, on the other hand, is currently backporting 5.6 security updates in to Scientific Linux 5.5 until they can come out with 5.6 iso images. Indeed, Scientific Linux has a policy to always have someone on hand to make security updates.

There was a recent mailing list posting on the CentOS mailing list showing a number of security problems not fixed in CentOS 5. I went to a mirror showing SL security updates. Every single last security problem listed as not being fixed in CentOS 5 has already been updated in Scientific Linux.

The bottom line is this: Freeloaders are not paying the CentOS development team enough for them to have any obligation to make timely updates to CentOS. Quite frankly, ever since Karanbir Singh (the leading CentOS developer) got married, CentOS releases have been lagging. He's not making enough money with CentOS for it to be worth not being with his wife. I think it’s time for Karanbir to EOL CentOS, pack up his bags, and spend more time with his family.

Scientific Linux, on the other hand is funded by a scientific laboratory with paid developers who can devote time to SL development when it is needed. Security updates are timely; iso images are released about as quickly as they have been with CentOS for the last two years.

It's time for me to switch from CentOS to Scientific Linux.

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New MaraDNS snapshot

March 18, 2011

In today's snapshot of MaraDNS, I have updated the documentation (namely, the webpage source that is bundled with MaraDNS).

As a note, while the next scheduled day for me to work on MaraDNS would be April 1, I actually will be busy that day. Barring a critical security bug, the next day I will work on MaraDNS is April 15, 2011, four weeks from today.

The snapshot can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

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Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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On nuclear power

March 15, 2011

For society to continue to function, we need to continue to have power. Otherwise, we will regress back to the dark ages.

This is a simple fact that the alarmist left conveniently forgets. Wind and solar power are simply not options--we simply do not get enough power from either of those sources to keep today's society running.

Until some way to utilize solar power efficiently enough to meet our energy needs is found, or the holy grail of nuclear fusion is achieved, we will have to use either fossil fuel or nuclear energy. Fossil fuels contribute to global warming, and will run out within 100 years. Nuclear energy has significant risks if poorly designed (such as the Chernobyl disaster), but it is the best option for sustaining society at our current technology level.

It dismays me greatly that the New York Times is devoting more column space to the issues Japan is having with one of their nuclear power stations after the horrible earthquake and tsunami than to all of the rest of the combined effects of this tradegy.

The level of ignorance about nuclear power, both with the journalists and with the people posting comments there, is apalling.

Thankfully, there are more informed people out there. I am reading updates from bravenewclimate.com, written by someone who truly understands the technology and its risks. In addition, I greatly enjoyed reading a piece from the Wall Street Journal, with a more calm and balanced view of the issues with nuclear power.

Is nuclear power 100% safe? No, of course not. But, compared to the alternatives, it is the best energy source possible with today's technology.

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

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Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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Automating the blog

March 6, 2011

I am in the process of updating the blog. I am still keeping the files as flat files; this saves me from having to deal with annoyances like the webpage going down if the SQA server dies, and results in faster performance (all the web server has to do is fetch the HTML file from disk and give it to the user).

However, I spent yesterday writing scripts that update the blog indexes which I run every time I make a blog entry. I have a Perl script which converts one or more blog entries in to one line pipe-separated summaries. I have another another script (mainly AWK) that takes that summary and converts it in to the blog indexes.

This makes it easier for me to write a blog entry, having the scripts do most of the work of indexing the entry.

To post a comment about an entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing)

Blog index

Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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Deadwood 2.3.07 released

March 4, 2011

As described in the MaraDNS schedule, this is a day I have set aside to spend some time baby-sitting Mara. Since no bugs have been reported since the last MaraDNS update, I backported a potential memory leak fix from the 3.0 to the 2.3 "tiny" branch of Deadwood.

The "tiny" branch of Deadwood is an older release of Deadwood that doesn't have full recursion; its binary is half the size of Deadwood 3's binary.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/tiny/

My next planned day to work on MaraDNS is two weeks from today: March 18, 2011.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

Blog index

Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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MaraDNS schedule

February 18, 2011

As I mentioned a while ago, MaraDNS is now stable and the only changes will be, by and large, bug fixes.

Since I have cleaned out all of the pending post MaraDNS-2.0 issues, I have a sense of how much work I need to do to babysit Mara, and can, as a result, stabilize MaraDNS' development schedule. My plan is as follows:

People report bugs on the mailing list

I will note the bugs and queue them

Every other Friday, I will devote approximately half a day to MaraDNS/Deadwood development, clearing out the backlog of MaraDNS bugs. Should there be no bugs in the backlog, I will do other low-priority work (Cleaning up the webpage, adding more SQA regressions for Deadwood, backporting important MaraDNS 2.0 fixes to MaraDNS 1.4, improving Deadwood's recursion, etc.)

The updates will be available as snapshots.

I will, once every six months, make a new release of MaraDNS and/or Deadwood

The next planned day for working on MaraDNS is two weeks from today: March 4, 2011. The day after that for MaraDNS work will be March 18. Followed by April 1. Then April 15, April 29, May 13, May 27, etc. The next planned MaraDNS/Deadwood release is July 8.

Should there be a critical security issue, I will deviate from this schedule to make a hotfix available.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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All MaraDNS issues resolved

February 18, 2011

I have just uploaded a second snapshot today which resolved the final open issue MaraDNS had: Debian bug 607739

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

There are now no open MaraDNS issues.

I also have made the patch to fix Debian bug 607739 available:

http://www.maradns.org/download/patches/

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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New MaraDNS snapshot

February 18, 2011

In today's snapshot, I have finished resolving William Summers' issue with ANY replies which are larger than 512 bytes.

Not only does MaraDNS now send proper TRUNCATED replies over UDP for a DNS packet for an ANY answer that is over 512 bytes in size, but it is now possible to use long_packet_ipv4 to resolve long ANY queries using DNS-over-TCP.

This resolves Willian Summers' issue. I now only have one more open issue with MaraDNS: Debian bug 607739

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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Deadwood now installs

February 17, 2011

Last December, Mike Sands pointed out that the Deadwood install is not complete when MaraDNS 2.0 is installed with "make install" (while Deadwood was installed in /usr/local/sbin/, the Deadwood man pages, default configuration, and system startup scripts were not installed). I have updated the install scripts to fully install Deadwood (binary, man pages, config file, and startup script) when one types in "make install" in MaraDNS 2.0.

Note that the default dwood3rc file for Deadwood will not work on systems without a working 127.0.0.2 loopback IP (I believe some BSD systems do not have 127.0.0.2 for loopback); this IP is used so that "make install" gives a user on CentOS 5.5 (and possibly other versions of Linux) a working MaraDNS and Deadwood configuration that works "out of the box" (MaraDNS listens on 127.0.0.1; Deadwood listens on 127.0.0.2).

I tested this configuration by setting up a special virtual machine to make sure "make install" does the right thing on a CentOS 5.5 system that never installed MaraDNS before. In addition, I have updated "make uninstall" to fully uninstall "maradns.zoneserver" (as well as Deadwood).

The updated MaraDNS can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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New MaraDNS snapshot

February 15, 2011

A while ago, Nino pointed out on the mailing list that MaraDNS is not RFC2317 compliant because slashes are not allowed in hostnames. I have fixed this issue and slashes are allowed in hostnames as long as they are not the first character of a hostname.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

Blog index

Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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New MaraDNS snapshot

February 12, 2011

Last November, William Summers pointed out that MaraDNS has issues with the corner case of an ANY reply which is larger than 512 bytes long. In today's snapshot, I am beginning work on fixing this bug; MaraDNS now sends out a correct truncated reply if it (she) would otherwise generate an ANY reply longer than 512 bytes.

I do apologize for taking so long to start addressing this issue; I am working with my employer to ensure that it no longer takes me three months for me to address an open bug in MaraDNS.

Today's snapshot can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download/2.0/snap/

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

Blog index

Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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Public domain Bibles

February 10, 2011

Poking around on the internet, I have found a few copyright-free (or, in one case, nearly copyright-free) translations of the Bible.

Naturally, translations made before 1922 are copyright-free in the United States. In addition, there are four translation out there (one is only the New Testament) recently made which the author has made (or nearly has made) public domain:

Catholic Public Domain Version

NHEB

WEB This translation has been around the longest and is the most well-known. It's actually derived from a 1901 public domain translation.

OEB Not technically public domain, but licensed under Creative Commons'most permissive license. New Testament only.

A wiki page listing public domain Bibles is at this link

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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MaraDNS outstanding bugs

February 7, 2011

Here is my backlog of MaraDNS bugs to fix:

There is an issue with maradns handling ANY queries that result in a DNS packet larger than 512 bytes in size. MaraDNS does not give a proper "truncated" reply, and it appears the tcp "zoneserver" program can't resolve these names either.

"make install" does not appear to install Deadwood in MaraDNS 2.0

Add support for RFC2317-style reverse zone mapping

Add the hostname and/or domain when a DDIP MX record is seen

I currently do not have a time frame for when I will be able to look at these bugs. I would like to thank the MaraDNS community for patiently waiting to get these bugs fixed; people who need these bugs fixed more quickly are free to submit patches to the MaraDNS mailing list (I was able to integrate everything with a patch submitted in to the 2.0.02 release).

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

Blog index

Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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MaraDNS 2.0.02 released

February 5, 2011

I have just released MaraDNS 2.0. This has the following updates:

Documentation updates

Applied Corey's patch that fixes a typo in fetchzone.c

Applied Yarin's patch that makes the "install.locations" script more flexible

I have adapted Yarin's patch that makes email addresses like 'john\.doe@example.com' possible in SOA records.

Fixed an error message that stated we were running MaraDNS 1.2 (now says 2.0)

Updated the copyright statement to have the year 2011

Deadwood updated to Deadwood 3.0.02

Fixed security vulnerability CVE-2011-0520

Because of the critical nature of CVE-2011-0520, all users of MaraDNS 2.0 are encouraged to update to 2.0.02 at their soonest convenience.

It can be downloaded here:

http://www.maradns.org/download.html

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

Blog index

Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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On the US Constitution

January 30, 2011

Going through my old blogs, I found a blog which is very interesting, in light of the recent "tea party" movement. I wrote this years ago when a tea party was something people in England did; it's about the constitution and how well our country is following it:

July 4, 2003

In light of today being independence day for my country (the US), I would like to reflect on a cornerstone of our laws: The Bill of Rights.

Among some circles, it is said that if the Bill of Rights were proposed to American citizens today, people would not accept it. People would call it too "terrorist friendly", too "unamerican", too "radical". That thought in mind, I will look at each article in the Bill of Rights and comment on how people react to them today.

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Many people feel that America is a "Christian Nation". However, as seen above, America is, in fact, an agnostic nation. Our legal system should not favor any religion over another; nor should it trample on the rights of people of different religions.

This is why the Supreme court recently decided that laws which make gay sex acts illegal are unconstitutional. Many Christians feel that God considers homosexual acts wrong; however, our nation should not pass a law because people feel the law is God's will. Laws should be passed (or not passed) based on secular reasoning.

This is why laws supporting "creation science" are routinely turned down by the courts; "creation science" is the establishment of the beliefs of a religion in a classroom.

This is not to say that God has no place in our nation. It just means, when writing up laws, they should be written up for reasons besides "God says so".

I do not think there is any argument over freedom of speech. Of course, freedom of speech does not mean one is guaranteed to have a free printing press, or that one is allowed to influence another printing press.

A newspaper is free to reject an article, or to not publish a letter to the editor. It is only when it becomes illegal to publish said article in any newspaper that the right to free speech is broken.

Amendment II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

This is the amendment that gun control advocates wished was not in the constitution. I support gun control laws myself: I think there should be a waiting period, I think anyone with a criminal history should not be able to buy a gun, and I think that certain military-grade weapons should not be available to the general public.

That said, I think the city of New York has gone too far making gun ownership outright illegal; I am very surprised that such a law has not been stuck down as unconstitutional. And, indeed, the police can not be everywhere all of the time; there are people who legitimately feel they need a gun to feel safe.

The 1980s story of the New Yorker who shot four people trying to mug him comes to mind. This person was previously mugged and beaten, and the police did not even arrest the muggers. So, the person bought a gun. Next time a gang tried to mug him, he shot them. He was acquitted for murder; however, he was arrested for owning a gun in New York?

I may not agree with America's gun culture; and I have never owned a gun and hope to never own one. However, the constitution allows people to have guns, and I respect the constitution.

Amendment III

No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

"A man's house is his castle".

This was a practice that happened in pre-independence America which annoyed the newly-independent Americans enough to make it a constitutional amendment. And, indeed, there is a reason we have military bases with barracks.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

I know someone who had all of the money in his bank accounts taken away from him. His crime? Someone called the police and said he was a drug dealer.

Even though there was absolutely no evidence that he was dealing drugs, the police felt they could seize all of his funds without a trial, without a court appearance, heck, without probable cause.

He never got his money back.

Another practice: Seizing the cars of men that police suspect are seeking prostitutes.

It is sad that congress has passed laws which so flagrantly violate this amendment of the Constitution. Yes, it is OK to seize money from drug dealers, but such seizures should not happen until there is proof that the person in question is, indeed, dealing drugs.

On a similar note, banks have the right to withhold customer's access to their own bank accounts if they suspect illegal activity, again without any evidence or proof needed.

This amendment needs to be honored by America again.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

In other words, no one can be forced to confess against themselves. I do not think this has been opposed or has generated any serious controversy.

This stops the practice, common in less civilized places, of torturing people until they confess that they have committed crimes. Once the confessions are obtained via torture, the people are tired for crimes which they normally did not commit.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Habeous Corpus. In other words, if someone is in jail, there better be charges brought against them. Ideally, one should not be in jail just because we think the person is, say, a "terrorist".

Sadly, this is being forgotten in our zealous "war on terrorism". People are being held in Guanajuanto Bay in Cuba because we think they might be terrorists. We do not have evidence nor charges against these people; they are being held in violation of the sixth amendment of the constitution.

George Bush should read the Bill of Rights again; what he is doing to these people is clearly un-American.

Amendment VII

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

I, for one, feel that lawsuits have gone too far. In particular, I think the members of the Jury in a lawsuit should be selected by a random process, and that the lawyer's ability to select or reject jury members should be severely limited.

I also feel that Juries need to come to a unanimous decision for a civil suit to award damages to the plaintiff.

That said, lawsuits are much better than the old system of the person with the most money hiring people to beat up the person who they had a grievance with.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

In the name of the "war on drugs", we are arresting people and putting them in jail for long periods of time. We are arresting them, even though their crimes are victimless. Once someone goes to jail, their chances of becoming a hardened criminal increase; their chances of getting a job and contributing to society again decrease.

We need to think long and hard before putting someone in jail, or fining them so much they become bankrupt. Should someone who is just experimenting with drugs be forced to spend years in jail? Our "war on drugs" thinks so; the Constitution thinks not.

On a similar vein, should a restaurant be forced out of business because someone spills coffee on their legs and sues them?

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

In other words, the Constitution exists to give people rights, not take the rights away.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Another amendment forgotten in these times. I think there is something wrong with a system where the lion's share of personal income taxes go to the federal government, and where the federal government then turns around and gives the money back to the states under grant programs. Such money should be given directly to the states via state income tax.

Our federal government has become too powerful. We need to remember amendment 10 and give more power back to the states again.

In closing, on this 4th of July weekend, I want to see America not be so un-American any more, and go back to our roots: The Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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MaraDNS & Deadwood update

Security bugfix

January 29, 2011

In 2002, when I rewrote the compression code for MaraDNS for the first time, I made a mistake in allocating an array of integers, allocating it in bytes instead of sizeof(int) units. The resulted in a buffer being too small, allowing it to be overwritten.

The impact of this programming error is that MaraDNS can be crashed by sending MaraDNS a single "packet of death". Since the data placed in the overwritten array can not be remotely controlled (it is a list of increasing integers), there is no way to increase privileges exploiting this bug.

The patch below resolves this issue by allocating in sizeof(int) units instead of byte-sized units for an integer array. In addition, it uses a smaller array because a DNS name can only have, at most, 128 labels.

In response to this bug, I have released MaraDNS 1.4.06 and 1.3.07.11. These releases are available here: http://maradns.org/download.html

Since sourceforge.net has recently suffered a security breach, their file uploading feature is currently undergoing maintenance and new files currently can not be uploaded there.

I have not made a new release of MaraDNS 2.0 yet. Yarin has contributed a number of patches, and I would like to integrate his patches before making a new MaraDNS 2.0 release; MaraDNS 2.0 users can use the supplied patch.

As an aside, I have become a better programmer since making this mistake back in 2002. Deadwood, which is a complete rewrite of MaraDNS' recursive code, does not have this issue in its compression/decompression code. Instead of using different data types in structures, Deadwood, by and large, uses special overflow-resistant strings to store most data.

In addition, I have released Deadwood 3.0.02; I have made the filter_rfc1035 parameter more secure, fixed an issue resolving www.urbandictionary.com, and have plugged a potential memory leak. Deadwood can be looked at here:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/

I would like to thank Mr. Witold Baryluk for pointing out this issue, taking the time to backtrace the bug, and for bringing it to my attention by posting to the MaraDNS mailing list.

Here is the patch:

 --- maradns-1.4.05/dns/Compress.c       2010-07-31 01:17:08.000000000 -0600 +++ maradns-1.4.06/dns/Compress.c       2011-01-28 18:28:46.000000000 -0700 @@ -22,7 +22,7 @@  #include "functions_dns.h"   /* Maximum allowed number of dlabel points */ -#define MAX_DLABEL_POINTS 512 +#define MAX_DLABEL_POINTS 160   /* Maximum allowed length of compressed string; this is 4096 for TCP   * packets */ @@ -87,7 +87,8 @@          js_dealloc(new);          return 0;          } -    if((new->dlabel_points = js_alloc(MAX_DLABEL_POINTS + 3,1)) == 0) { +    if((new->dlabel_points = js_alloc(MAX_DLABEL_POINTS + 3,sizeof(int))) +               == 0) {          js_destroy(new->compressed);          js_dealloc(new);          return 0;

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Goodbye MySpace

January 26, 2011

I haven't used my myspace account in a while; in April of 2010, I posted my last blog entry there and only logged in once more last year.

While away from MySpace, they changed their privacy settings to make all of my old blog entries not readable. This morning, I logged in to MySpace to get an old blog entry from back in 2006 with some useful information.

I could not get the blog entry. Myspace now is far too much dog slow javascript and Web 2.0 bling. There is no handy way to look up an old blog entry; I had to press "more" over and over again at the bottom to read older entries. The process was so slow and tedious that I gave up when it went back to mid-2008.

Fortunately, I made a backup of the myspace blog I had. The files are in "mht" format; Firefox can read them using the "unmht" plugin, and they should be compatible with other browsers. The files can be looked at in the folder myspace-blog-archive. I will, over the next few months, re-post some of the more interesting MySpace blogs that I had.

Since I (and, yes, the rest of my circle of friends) have stopped using MySpace well over a year ago, I finally put the last nail in the coffin and canceled that account tonight. MySpace made the process difficult (you have to click on "I'm sure" about three times, check your email, and click on a link there, and click on "I'm sure" a couple more times) but I finally got through it and my account will be removed in the next few days.

And, oh, the useful information I wanted from the 2006 MySpace blog was some LAME settings for making a low-bandwidth spoken word MP3:

 lame --preset sw --resample 16 --lowpass 4 --highpass .1 --noshort \ 	file.wav file.mp3

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Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

Blog index

Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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Win32 Deadwood build

January 22, 2011

Wayne, on the MaraDNS mailing list, requested a Windows-compatible build of last weekend's snapshot of Deadwood. I have made a debug ('-g') build of Deadwood for testing on Win32, available at maradns.org/deadwood/snap; look for the file with a ".7z" file extension.

I have also uploaded my 2011 screenshot of Linux today, available at samiam.org/screenshots. Unlike last year's screenshots, this is Linux running natively on one of my netbooks (it's my wireless router).

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

Blog index

Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

Blog index

Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

Blog index

Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

Blog index

Prosperity puzzle

Sorry, puzzle was lost in eBook conversion

This puzzle is a variant of Sudoku I like to call "Prosperity 7". In this Sudoku variant, the board is only 7x7, and only the numbers from 1 to 7 are used. Neither 8 nor 9 are ever placed on this board.

The object of this puzzle is to place the numbers 1 through 7 in the blank spaces such that:

Each row only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given row.

Each column only has one instance of each number between 1 and 7. In other words, no number is duplicated in a given column.

Each of the seven-square shapes bordered by thick lines have all of the numbers between 1 and 7 precisely once.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle. This puzzle was generated using this open-source Sudoku generator (source code), using this template.

To post a comment about this entry, send me an email and I may or may not post your comment (with or without editing; see the blog index for details)

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Deadwood snapshot update

January 16, 2011

In today's Deadwood snapshot, I have fixed an issue I saw a couple of months ago Deadwood has had with resolving urbandictionary.com.

It can be downloaded here:

maradns.org/deadwood/snap

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Deadwood update

January 15, 2011

I made a mistake in applying Yarin's plain diff patch against Deadwood the other day, resulting in a program that would not compile. I have now fixed this, and duende, as a result, now has a "pid" optional argument.

It can be downloaded here:

http://maradns.org/deadwood/snap

There's a reason I prefer "diff -u" patches over plain "diff" patches--it makes it harder to have a mistake.

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Usenet

January 11, 2011

Usenet: The corpse still twitches

A year and a half ago, I posted that Usenet is dead.

I was only partially correct.

Usenet is like a fungus that grows in the ventilation shaft of your car. You can never make it all go away. No matter how much time has passed, there is always a little left.

Usenet is the same way. It's dead, but the corpse still twitches. On a lark, I decided to make my Wifi router (a netbook) a news server, since having it just be a wifi router was a waste.

Back in the day, a Usenet server was a service any decent ISP was supposed to supply. Those days are long gone. Usenet is now served by a variety of for-pay servers catering to people who use Usenet to download pornography or copyrighted material, as well as a speckling of free servers that only serve text newsgroups.

Looking around for the easiest Usenet feed to hook up to, I found aioe.org, who allow posting without any registration required. I figure it would give me something to read the next time my internet connection goes down (Usenet's great strength is that you can read and post to it offline).

After too much bother getting everything set up, I was able to download Usenet articles, store them on my hard disk, post (which goes to a file on my hard disk until either I or the crontab runs the script to update Usenet). That done, I was able to look at what has happened to Usenet in the over seven years since I last was on it (my last posting to Usenet was in July of 2003).

A lot has changed. The number of active newsgroups has decreased greatly. The mass exodus to web bulletin boards (phpbb, etc) was well under way when I left. This process has not stopped. Newsgroups with a healthy userbase back in 2003 are now deserted ghost towns. Others have no on-topic traffic, but are merely repositories for off-topic excessively cross-posted flames. Others have very little traffic, barely hanging on by a thread.

In news.groups.proposals, people talk about demolishing whole scale hundreds of inactive newsgroups, just as they have talked about demolishing entire neighborhoods of towns in suburbs of Detroit where no one lives any more.

A number of newsgroups, however, are still active, albeit with far less traffic than they used to have. To correct something I posted on that blog posting: rec.audio.pro actually is still remarkably active; a lot of regulars who I remember from years back still post there today (and they, nicely enough, remember me).

So, yes, Usenet is dying. It has all of the issues the old Usenet had: Out of control flame wars which can only be stopped by people updating their filters (Usenet is unusable without both a killfile on my local client and a filter for more obnoxious trolls on the server); the same cliquish elitism that it has always had (partially in response to the number of trolls and flamers in Usenet, admittedly); and the same obsolete text-only interface which was outdated in the late 1990s and downright prehistoric today.

But, it has it charm. Mainly nostalgia for someone like me who likes to wear rose tinted glasses and remember the old Usenet. I like to imagine myself in the 1990s with far more money than I actually had back then, using a Poqet PC or Gateway Handbook to access Usenet via a dialup to some *NIX shell account.

Some cool newsgroups I used to participate in which are now ghost towns

alt.hackers (then again, this group was in its death throes back in 2003)
alt.tech-support.recovery
comp.os.linux.portable
comp.unix.admin
soc.religion.christian (to be fair, this was a moderated group and it might just be a case of the moderator moving on to other things)

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Deadwood & ObHack updated

January 9, 2011

I have updated two programs today. Actually, let me take that back. Other people have patched programs, I am merely uploading their changes.

Fritz fixed a bug in ObHack 007.1 that I reported; the revised version overwrites the previous version (since the change is just a simple bugfix). I have made this available at samiam.org/slump.

A ween or two ago, Yarin submitted some patches to the MaraDNS mailing list. I am slowly making these patches part of MaraDNS; currently, I have updated Deadwood to have his patches:

maradns.org/deadwood

I hope to have time to apply Yarin's other patches to MaraDNS this coming weekend, but don't hold your breath.

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ObHack 007.1 released

January 4, 2011

Fritz has relased and I have packed ObHack 007.1 for the new year.

Here is the changelog:

Added: 'Monster Enclosures'(small monster enclosures with triggers) to all Doom based games.

New parameter: 'Monster Enclosures' in gui, to turn enclosures On or Off.

A few more minor fixes resolved.

It can be downloaded at http://samiam.org/slump/

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djbdns 1.05: False security

January 3, 2011

I would like to start off this blog posting by pointing out that djbdns' dnscache is an excellent tiny DNS caching solution for *NIX systems. It has a very small footprint and was the pioneer in innovative techniques to improve DNS security (notably source port randomization).

One issue is that it hasn't been maintained in a decade; one has to use an unofficial fork of the code which updates it for the 21st century (One good fork is Zinq N-DjbDNS).

This is not the most serious issue with djbdns. The main issue with djbdns isn't an issue with djbdns per se but an issue with some of its userbase. A number of users are still using an unpatched copy of djbdns-1.05, released a decade ago because they mistakingly believe the software is perfectly secure.

This myth is still told on online discussion forums; for example, just last year two posters on Slashdot (which has not been a very good place to post anything for years, but that is another rant for another day) spouted that djbdns is (nearly) completely bug-free without anyone posting a follow-up correcting their mistake.

This is very dangerous. People spouting on public forums about how djbdns is magically 100% perfectly secure and never need patching need to -- how do I say this -- pull their head out a place where the sun doesn't shine.

A stock install of djbdns-1.05 has security problems. Three, to be exact. Two of them can be resolved with simple, small patches:

 *** dnscache.c.orig     Sun Feb 11 13:11:45 2001 --- dnscache.c  Tue Mar 18 17:22:03 2003 *************** *** 1,4 **** --- 1,5 ----   #include <unistd.h> + #include <signal.h>   #include "env.h"   #include "exit.h"   #include "scan.h" *************** *** 391,396 **** --- 392,398 ----     char *x;     unsigned long cachesize;    +   signal(SIGPIPE, SIG_IGN);     x = env_get("IP");     if (!x)       strerr_die2x(111,FATAL,"$IP not set");

Patch #2:

 --- response.c.orig     2009-02-24 21:04:06.000000000 -0800 +++ response.c  2009-02-24 21:04:25.000000000 -0800 @@ -34,7 +34,7 @@          uint16_pack_big(buf,49152 + name_ptr[i]);          return response_addbytes(buf,2);        } -    if (dlen <= 128) +    if ((dlen <= 128) && (response_len < 16384))        if (name_num < NAMES) {         byte_copy(name[name_num],dlen,d);         name_ptr[name_num] = response_len;

The third one, however, requires some fundamental design changes to properly address; this webpage has more details.

Personally, my solution to this cache spoofing issue with djbdns is to use deadwood (MaraDNS 2.0's recursive resolver) instead; but I am a little biased.

djbdns is an excellent program. I'm not denying that. But it does have security holes and people need to stop claiming otherwise.

Update (January 4, 2011):

To give credit where credit is due, the first patch above comes from Mark Delany in this mailing list posting; the second patch above comes from DJB himself in this posting.

I also forgot about the large packet compression pointer bug, which also has security consequences. More information is in this mailing list posting.

Updated in 2014 to point to N-DjbDNS instead of the now-dead Zinq.

See also: Finally, a CVE-2012-1911 patch and Yet another DjbDNS security hole

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2010

All blog entries written in 2010

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Final 2010 post; NIV update

December 25, 2010

This will be my last blog posting for 2010, so a quick recap of the major things I accomplished in 2010:

I got married

I finished MaraDNS (all of the new recursion was done this year)

I got a good job in a tough economy

(When I say I "finished" MaraDNS, I mean finished in the sense I have no plans to add new features; I still plan on fixing bugs)

I also was able to give up some unproductive habits in 2010:

I haven't posted to Slashdot since January 20

I gave up Chess Variants on February 8

I haven't edited the Wikipedia since March 9

It has been a very productive year.

The Newer International Version of the Bible

I just discovered the Newer International Version of the Bible, which was released a couple of months ago.

Usually, when a Bible translation gets updated, the name of the translation changes. For example, we had the “Revised Standard Version” which got its name updated to the “New Revised Standard Version” when the translation was updated. The popular “New International Version”, when it was updated in the mid-2000s (2005), was renamed “Today’s New International Version”.

So, it comes as a surprise to me that 2010’s update of the “New International Version”, errr “Today’s New International Version” is called, well, the “New International Version”. Since this is a distinctly different translation than the 1984 “New International Version” (indeed, it is more similar to the TNIV than to the original NIV [citation provided]), I will call this particular edition the “Newer International Version”. Or, better yet, include the year after the translation: NIV1984 and NIV2011.

You can’t get this version of the Bible at your local bookstore yet; according to posts on the blogosphere, it will not be available in a print edition until late 2011 (hence the name NIV2011).

Looking over the changes discussed all over the blogosphere when this came out about two months ago, some things I like:

“Flesh” (as in the “desires of the flesh”) is again correctly translated (no more “sinful nature” nonsense, something that always annoyed with with NIV1984) This is mentioned on this page.

One translation with a slight anti-Catholic bias have been improved (i.e. 1 Cor 11:2), both a couple of other scriptures still use the older biased translation. This is blogged about on another page.

Some more links about NIV2011:

http://nearemmaus.wordpress.com/2010/11/01/niv-around-the-blogosphere/

Merry Christmas everyone! As mentioned before, this will be my last blog entry in 2010. See you in 2011!

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End-of-2010 MaraDNS status

December 24, 2010

Since MaraDNS 2.0 has been released, I am, as I promised to do back in 2009 no longer adding new features to MaraDNS and Deadwood at the present time.

I, however, am still supporting MaraDNS (by answering emails posted to the mailing list when I have time). I am still fixing bugs in MaraDNS and Deadwood. Well, since I'm working 6-day weeks, I haven't had as much time to fix bugs as I would like, but I hope to make time to do this in 2011.

Here are the following known bugs in MaraDNS:

There is (or was) an issue with Deadwood resolving urbandictionary.com. The issue has to do with the corner case where each packet Deadwood sees is under 512 bytes in size, but the final reassembled packet is over 512 bytes in size.

There is an issue with Deadwood resolving Akamai domains, because, while CNAME records are cached, these cached CNAME records aren't actually used. The domains do resolve, but slowly.

There is an issue with maradns handling ANY queries that result in a DNS packet larger than 512 bytes in size. MaraDNS does not give a proper "truncated" reply, and it appears the tcp "zoneserver" program can't resolve these names either.

"make install" does not appear to install Deadwood in MaraDNS 2.0

My last update to MaraDNS was last month, when I fixed a bug in Deadwood's built-in "DNSwall" functionality.

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Windows on ARM chips

December 24, 2010

Every couple of decades, Microsoft ports Windows to some non-x86 chip. The port always ends up with a small userbase, not many applications are ported to it (we’re lucky if Microsoft Office gets ported to it), and Microsoft finally stops supporting the ISA (chip) in question. This happened with NT for Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC in the 1990s. This happened with the Itanium port of Windows (notably, Windows server 2003) in the first 2000s decade.

So, when I saw rumors of there being an ARM port of Windows 8, I was not too excited. Windows is intertwined with the x86 architecture; the reason I like Windows is because it runs TextMaker 2006, Sun (sorry, I meant Oracle) VirtualBox, C-evo, Skype, Firefox + Flash + PDF reader + Java, The Gimp, Doom, Battle for Wesnoth, Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, as well as Heroes of Might and Magic III.

Now, some of these applications could be ported to the ARM. The open source ones written in C (Gimp, Doom, Wesnoth, Firefox, Battle for Wesnoth, and to some extent VirtualBox) may need little more than a recompile to run. There’s a reasonably good chance Skype will port their software to Windows 8/ARM. Flash will probably get ported, and if Adobe doesn’t port their PDF reader, there are free PDF readers that could be used instead. Oracle may (or may not) port Java to Windows/ARM.

TextMaker Office will undoubtedly get ported to Windows/ARM, but I will have to purchase the software (TextMaker 2006 is a “free beer” download to demo their more recent products). Forget about porting AoW: Shadow Magic or HOMM3.

C-evo would need a substantial rewrite before porting could even begin (first, it would have to be ported to Lazarus. Then Lazarus would have to be ported to Windows/ARM. Then finally C-evo’s source code could be looked at to fix issues caused by the ARM port). No, they are not going to make Delphi for ARM unless this thing really catches on (hint: No non-x86 Windows has ever caught on, and they’ve been trying it since the 1990s).

Windows for ARM? If this thing still exists in 10 years, I will be amazed.

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Older blog entries should be online at https://maradns.blogspot.com/

Index

2025

Lua table iterator (2025-03-09)

2024

Free ebook (2024-05-15)

2023

February 2023 (2023-02-28)

New music released (2023-01-28)

2022

MaraDNS 3.5.0035 (2022-12-28)

MaraDNS updates (2022-11-29)

The midterms (2022-11-18)

MaraDNS 3.5.0025 (2022-11-02)

Angela Lansbury (2022-10-11)

MaraDNS work (2022-10-09)

A eulogy for djbdns (2022-09-25)

Chess on 9/11 (2022-09-11)

Baseless accusations (2022-09-06)

Democracy (2022-09-02)

Round-up (2022-08-11)

MaraDNS security update (2022-08-01)

J. Polgar v. Carlsen 2022 (2022-07-15)

Why I’m pro-choice (2022-06-25)

Republicans are dying (2022-06-24)

Remembering Vangelis (2022-05-19)

Star Wars (2022-05-04)

Happy Easter! (2022-04-17)

MaraDNS updates and more (2022-03-29)

Slackware 15 (2022-02-05)

Nexuiz: Beer and pretzels (2022-01-29)

Variable optical size (2022-01-09)

2021

MaraDNS support update (2021-12-19)

1980s songs: Part two (2021-11-07)

1980s songs: Part one (2021-10-21)

AIDS and COVID-19 (2021-09-26)

Jerry Pournelle (2021-09-14)

9/11 20 years later (2021-09-11)

Afghanistan (2021-08-17)

Delta surge (2021-07-31)

MaraDNS and DKIM (2021-07-16)

My Karen Story (2021-06-06)

Pride Month (2021-06-02)

The Drumhead (2021-06-01)

Dan Kaminsky (2021-05-02)

The one true language (2021-04-01)

Remembering Fry’s (2021-03-08)

Online Chess (2021-02-23)

Insurrection (2021-01-16)

2020

Moving to Ubuntu (2020-12-12)

November round-up (2020-11-28)

More predictions (2020-11-02)

2020 election prediction #5 (2020-11-01)

Grab bag: October 2020 (2020-10-25)

Election prediction #3 (2020-10-04)

Ginsburg’s passing (2020-09-18)

Election prediction #2 (2020-09-02)

MaraDNS 3.5.0015 (2020-08-29)

PNY CS900 review (2020-08-20)

MaraDNS 3.5.0012 (2020-08-12)

MaraDNS; SipHash (2020-08-11)

MaraDNS 3.5.0008 (2020-07-25)

COVID-19 Website (2020-07-14)

Harper’s Letter (2020-07-09)

Crime, Police, and Chicago (2020-07-06)

COVID-19 growth by state (2020-07-03)

Election prediction (2020-07-02)

COVID-19 growth (2020-06-30)

Grab bag (2020-06-23)

Juneteenth (2020-06-19)

Cancel Culture (2020-06-16)

COVID-19 and CHAZ (2020-06-13)

Empathy (2020-06-12)

Let’s keep the Police (2020-06-10)

Monday grab bag (2020-06-08)

Masculinity, etc. (2020-06-06)

June round-up (2020-06-01)

Goodbye, OpenVZ (2020-05-29)

May update (2020-05-11)

MaraDNS updates (2020-04-27)

COVID-19: Update (2020-04-11)

COVID-19: Good news (2020-03-22)

Stay home! (2020-03-16)

Sanders should quit (2020-03-11)

Bernie Bro myths (2020-03-05)

Body for Life (2020-02-01)

MaraDNS 3.5.0001 (2020-01-25)

MaraDNS 3.4.02 released (2020-01-17)

2020s: Looking forward (2020-01-09)

2019

The 2010s: A retrospective (2019-12-12)

Richard Feynman (2019-11-16)

November round up (2019-11-04)

October roundup #2 (2019-10-24)

October round-up (2019-10-05)

September 11 (2019-09-12)

August round-up (2019-08)

July round-up (2019-07-27)

June 2019 roundup (2019-06)

New album coming out (2019-05-30)

Deadwood 3.3.03 released (2019-04-30)

March 2019 round up (2019-03-23)

Deadwood 3.3.02 (2019-02-23)

MaraDNS update (2019-02-11)

MaraDNS 2.0.17 released (2019-01-20)

Hello 2019! (2019-01-19)

2018

ACA ruled unconstitutional (2018-12-14)

Remembering the first Bush (2018-12-01)

Deadwood 3.2.13 released (2018-11-11)

Healthcare is here to stay (2018-11-07)

The 5 best 1990s songs (2018-10-07)

Landing on the moon (2018-09-22)

MaraDNS 2.0.16 released (2018-08-16)

Password security (2018-08-04)

Mango Naked Juice (2018-07-07)

On Résumés (2018-06-02)

Configuration files (2018-05-05)

My new job (2018-04-10)

Phasing out email (2018-03-10)

Nolan Bushnell; MaraDNS (2018-02-10)

The ThinkPad T480 (2018-01-04)

2017

Font Update (2017-12-01)

November 2017 round up (2017-11-11)

Round up: October 2017 (2017-10-26)

The night I found love (2017-09-12)

August 2017 round-up (2017-08-12)

My job search (2017-07-08)

MaraDNS 2.0.14 release (2017-06-10)

RIP Robert Miles (2017-05-10)

Trumpcare’s defeat (2017-04-03)

Cakewalk Sonar (2017-03-11)

Jobs (2017-02-23)

Pioneer DEH-X1900UB (2017-01-17)

2016

“Ocean Path” album released (2016-12-06)

Why the polls were wrong (2016-11-14)

Trump is toast (2016-10-08)

Album: Almost done (2016-09-19)

Christianity and bigotry (2016-08-26)

New single released (2016-07-21)

The primary is over (2016-06-08)

Making music (2016-05-01)

RIP Prince and George Martin (2016-04-21)

Super Tuesday (2016-03-04)

Bernie Bro award (2016-02-28)

Winter NAMM 2016 (2016-01-29)

2015

Removing MaraDNS’ ads (2015-12-07)

Round up (2015-11-30)

MaraDNS update, making music (2015-10-08)

Welcome to September (2015-09-01)

MaraDNS 2.0.12 (2015-08-19)

God is Not a Bigot (2015-07-24)

MaraDNS 1 plans (2015-06-12)

MaraDNS, GPG, and trust (2015-05-27)

The Roland TB-303 (2015-04-14)

Love live the Netbook (2015-03-22)

More King v. Burwell andamp; Star Trek (2015-03-17)

King v. Burwell; Star Trek (2015-03-06)

King v. Burwell: Vogon Logic (2015-02-28)

Superfish (2015-02-24)

Thinkpad mouse buttons (2015-02-15)

Don’t mix CNAMES (2015-02-11)

Goodbye Radio Shack (2015-02-06)

MaraDNS hotfix (2015-01-29)

MaraDNS security update (2015-01-25)

2014

MaraDNS update (2014-12-14)

The 2014 midterms (2014-11-05)

MaraDNS support update (2014-10-25)

Best 80s Music (2014-09-25)

People like the ACA (2014-08-07)

Women against feminism (2014-07-31)

PT Sans and PT Serif (2014-07-19)

Bitstream Charter and more (2014-07-04)

The best open-source fonts (2014-06-21)

Fonts in 2014 (2014-06-11)

Miguel: In Memorandum (2014-05-24)

MaraDNS Update (2014-04-27)

Alpine in CentOS (2014-04-23)

The “Heartbleed” bug (2014-04-12)

Postfix + Mailman in CentOS 6 (2014-03-23)

Gravity: A review (2014-03-14)

MaraDNS security update (2014-02-12)

MaraDNS on GitHub (2014-02-05)

Returning to Fresno (2014-01-28)

Microblogs January 2014 (2014-01-22)

MaraDNS 2.0.08 (2014-01-14)

Microblogs 2013-2014 (2014-01-08)

2014 goals (2014-01-01)

2013

2013 in review (20131231)

Deadwood 3.2.04 released (20131220)

New Cousine/MSYS font (20131215)

More font updates (20131214)

Better fonts for MSYS (20131213)

MaraDNS Update (20131212)

Using Crissic (20131211)

Interactive Fiction (20131210)

The OnceTV update (20131206)

Deadwood updates (20131203)

MaraDNS security update (20131202)

MaraDNS RPM files (20131127)

Deadwood Update (20131124)

Living in poverty (20131123)

Root server change (20131119)

RadioGatún[64], etc. (20131118)

An ode to Netbooks (20131117)

Deadwood Update (20131113)

TinyVZ update (20131112)

Forum will be down (20131108)

MaraDNS and DOS attacks (20131022)

October MaraDNS Updates (20131020)

More on SipHash (20131012)

My SipHash implementation (20131006)

SipHash (20131004)

MaraDNS 2.0.07c (20130920)

IPv6 update (20130915)

Mailbag (20130912)

Forum spammers (20130904)

MaraDNS support (20130903)

I now have a forum (20130902)

MaraDNS webpage update (20130829)

maradns.samiam.org (20130828)

VirtualBox’s host-only adapter (20130826)

MaraDNS: All looks good (20130820)

Microblogs August 2013 (20130818)

RSS and Zealots (20130731)

Microblogs June-July 2013 (20130728)

La Tempestad: A review (20130721)

MaraDNS testing release (20130720)

UltraDNS vs. Deadwood (20130713)

Deadwood Update (20130706)

MaraDNS Update (20130622)

Deadwood Update (20130621)

Alternate Pitfall maps (20130617)

More on Pitfall’s polynomial (20130616)

Pitfall’s polynomial (20130612)

Pitfall redux (20130608)

A 4096-byte jungle (20130606)

Microblogs May 2013 (20130604)

MaraDNS and Deadwood update (20130523)

Microblogs April-May 2013 (20130505)

MaraDNS and the Wikipedia (20130420)

Microblogs April 2013 week 2 (20130415)

Microblogs April 2013 week 1 (20130407)

March 2013 Microblogs (20130330)

Tweets March 2013 (20130329)

Deadwood update (20130320)

Why I need Masculism (20130316)

Creeper cards (20130307)

Twitter wrap-up (20130301)

Deadwood update (20130222)

Netbooks in 2013 (20130217)

Applebee's and God (20130205)

Web font rendering (20130203)

Thank you, Virginia (20130131)

BuyVM: All is now good (20130124)

A brief look at systemd (20130121)

MaraDNS update (20130120)

samiam.org on IPv6 (20130106)

Minor Civ4 update (20130105)

Finally, I have BuyVM (20130101)

2012

2012 wrap-up (20121231)

MaraDNS 1.3 end-of-life (20121221)

Deadwood 3.2.03 released (20121220)

How many squares? (20121219)

Round-up (20121212)

Blog meta-index (20121201)

Adios, Gopher (20121130)

Deadwood update (20121124)

Let's not secede (20121114)

Obama: Looking forward (20121107)

Post-election thoughts (20121106)

Final election prediction (20121104)

Saturday election prediction (20121103)

Deadwood and SHA-3 (20121102)

Keccak: The best choice (20121101)

Deadwood update (20121028)

Saturday election prediction (20121027)

Friday election prediction (20121026)

Saturday election prediction (20121020)

Thursday election prediction (20121018)

Wednesday election prediction (20121017)

Tonight's election prediction (20121016)

Predicting the election (20121015)

Why use MaraDNS? (20121006)

Why is Git still using SHA-1 (20121004)

Slashdot: A final look (20120929)

MaraDNS update (20120922)

Web typography (20120918)

Remembering September 11 (20120911)

Multi Master fonts (20120908)

Slashdot and more (20120907)

Slashdot (20120903)

No more politics (20120901)

MaraDNS update (20120827)

MaraDNS update (20120823)

The great recession (20120818)

Server Fault Fail (20120815)

Objective truth is going away (20120814)

Adding Facebook comments (20120806)

George Orwell and the truth (20120802)

Oracle Linux: Now free (20120731)

I no longer accept patches (20120723)

Deadwood update (20120721)

Finally, a CVE-2012-1911 patch (20120711)

Deadwood update (20120623)

MaraDNS 1 End-of-life (20120621)

Legends of Ancient Arabia (20120611)

MaraDNS update (20120521)

On Civilization IV (20120510)

Inspiron 14z sound problem (20120508)

EasyDNS and truncation (20120424)

Groundhog Day (20120408)

Getting DNSSEC for MaraDNS (20120403)

Humility (20120402)

MaraDNS now has funding (20120401)

The mythical $15/year VPS (20120327)

MaraDNS: No DNSSEC (20120326)

A thought (20120325)

New MaraDNS CVE: 2012-1570 (20120322)

DNS security comparison (20120321)

Deadwood update (20120320)

MaraDNS 1 update (20120317)

The ghost domain bug (20120314)

MaraDNS 2.0.06 and 1.4.11 (20120311)

On Anne Frank (20120307)

Remembering 1992 (20120306)

Geomyidae is stable (20120305)

On fundamentalist reasoning (20120304)

MaraDNS 1 has limited support (20120303)

MaraDNS donations (20120302)

Deadwood 3.2.02 released (20120229)

Deadwood update (20120228)

Deadwood update; etc. (20120226)

Fundamentalism and Christianity (20120225)

Bulk polyhedral dice (20120218)

Classic X11 fonts for Windows (20120216)

RedHat extended support (20120215)

Happy Valentine's Day (20120214)

On Ghost Domains (20120213)

MaraDNS 2.0.05 released (20120212)

Deadwood update (20120211)

My Gopher server (20120206)

A brief review of my VPS hosts (20120205)

Adios cripperz.sg (20120203)

Having a spiritual experience (20120130)

Deadwood update (20120128)

Deadwood update (20120125)

I oppose SOPA (20120119)

Deadwood update (20120117)

MaraDNS 1 update (20120113)

New Deadwood snapshot (20120106)

Deadwood bug fixed (20120104)

Welcome to 2012 (20120101)

2011

MaraDNS 1 update (20111230)

MaraDNS 1 update (20111229)

2011 Wrap-up (20111224)

Wrapping up the web design (20111223)

I miss killfiles (20111222)

Deadwood 3.1.03 released (20111221)

Looking at Celery (20111220)

Deadwood update (20111218)

Round Up (20111217)

Round-up (20111216)

Dillo CSS hacks (20111213)

Deadwood update (20111211)

ObHack 007.3 (20111210)

Web page design update (20111209)

MaraDNS and Paypal (20111207)

MaraDNS funding ; etc. (20111201)

New Deadwood snapshot (20111130)

Deadwood update (20111129)

MaraDNS can redirect domains (20111128)

Deadwood 3.1.01 released (20111127)

Thanksgiving thoughts (20111123)

New Deadwood snapshot (20111119)

Deadwood snapshot (20111113)

MaraDNS 2.0.04 (20111112)

MaraDNS update (20111111)

Deadwood 3.0.05 released (20111110)

On Flattr (20111109)

Call for donations (20111108)

The Galileo 7 (20111105)

Logic riddles (20111104)

Deadwood 3.0.04 (20111101)

Deadwood hacking (20111027)

RMS on Jobs; Raspberry Pi (20111023)

Dennis Ritchie RIP (20111013)

Web site plans (20111012)

On web site design (20111010)

MaraDNS update (20111009)

MaraDNS update (20111008)

RIP Steve Jobs (20111006)

MaraDNS update (20111005)

Cloak of Darkness (20111002)

Deadwood update (20110912)

Open-source IMAP clients (20110910)

Deadwood update (20110905)

Random map templates (20110901)

Global warming denial (20110827)

On Apple products (20110826)

TinyVZ security update (20110823)

TinyVZ 0.7 released (20110820)

TinyVZ update (20110816)

Tiny OpenVZ template (20110815)

Keeping CentOS secure (20110809)

MaraDNS 2.0.03 released (20110805)

Deadwood 3.0.03 released (20110722)

Web typography (20110719)

Scientific Linux 6 on a S10-3 (20110716)

Deadwood bug (20110714)

GOG HOMM3 Multiplayer (20110710)

MaraDNS update (20110708)

Updating the ads (20110703)

Tuning nginx + php-fastcgi (20110702)

Samiam.org now has ads (20110628)

Deadwood update (20110624)

Linux: Desktop fail (20110623)

Lenovo S-100; Feedback (20110622)

IE8 @font-face bug (20110619)

Dirt cheap Linux hosting (20110614)

MaraDNS update (20110610)

x120e getting replaced? (20110609)

Round-up (20110607)

Webkit @font-face bug (20110606)

Web page touch-up (20110604)

I made LXer (20110603)

Computex 2011 (20110601)

Linux is only for bachelors (20110529)

Embedding web fonts (20110528)

MaraDNS; the PROTECT act (20110527)

Beware: O'Reilly reviews (20110526)

App Inventor (20110525)

T40E: Atom killer (20110523)

The Rapture (20110521)

Atom Supercomputer (20110520)

The Thinkpad X1 (20110519)

Android SDK on a Netbook (20110518)

Web page redesign (20110517)

Low-end Netbooks (20110516)

Facebook viruses (20110515)

Mobile browsers (20110514)

MaraDNS update (20110513)

Internet loudmouths (20110512)

Poor man's Widelux (20110503)

Firefox and Javascript (20110501)

New MaraDNS snapshot (20110429)

E-350 redux (20110426)

New ObHack release (20110425)

On NXDOMAIN (20110423)

The AMD E-350 (20110422)

IE6 end of life (20110417)

MaraDNS and Deadwood update (20110415)

du for Windows (20110410)

On Xonotic (20110409)

Another Deadwood bug (20110325)

MaraDNS updates (20110324)

Bitcoin (20110323)

Scientific Linux (20110319)

New MaraDNS snapshot (20110318)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #17 (20110316)

On nuclear power (20110315)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #16 (20110309)

Automating the blog (20110306)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #15 (20110305)

Deadwood 2.3.07 released (20110304)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #14 (20110228)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #13 (20110227)

MaraDNS schedule (20110218c)

All MaraDNS issues resolved (20110218b)

New MaraDNS snapshot (20110218)

Deadwood now installs (20110217)

New MaraDNS snapshot (20110215)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #12 (20110213)

New MaraDNS snapshot (20110212)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #11 (20110211)

Public domain Bibles (20110210)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #10 (20110208)

MaraDNS outstanding bugs (20110207)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #9 (20110206)

MaraDNS 2.0.02 released (20110205)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #8 (20110201)

On the US Constitution (20110130)

MaraDNS and Deadwood update (20110129)

Goodbye MySpace (20110126)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #7 (20110124)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #6 (20110123)

Win32 Deadwood build (20110122)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #5 (20110121)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #4 (20110120)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #3 (20110119)

Prosperity 7 puzzle #2 (20110118)

Prosperity 7 puzzle (20110117)

Deadwood snapshot update (20110116)

Deadwood update (20110115)

Usenet (20110111)

Deadwood and ObHack updated (20110109)

ObHack 007.1 released (20110104)

djbdns 1.05: False security (20110103)

2010

Final 2010 post; NIV update (20101225)

End-of-2010 MaraDNS status (20101224b)

Windows on ARM chips (20101224)