| Wednesday, September 15th, 2004 |
| 10:28 pm |
*Sigh*
Today I had one of those fun days at work where one coworker decided that I had to rewrite everything a major chunk of code to suit his needs. And my boss, after spending about 10 minutes pondering what I was doing declared "That's really clever. Stop doing that." It's really a shame that the programming environments in OSX don't quite overlap in capabilities. There are some really brilliant things you can do in each, but not reliably across all of them. The end result is that you can't really use these things when building frameworks, because somebody might try to use it in a different environment that doesn't support that. BTW: WTF is AppleScript too stupid to be able to iterate over the keys of a dictionary? Current Mood:  depressed |
| Tuesday, September 14th, 2004 |
| 8:12 pm |
Happiness is...
...getting a "Show-Stopper" grade bug and being able to throw it back at the filer resolved as "Behaves Correctly". Current Mood:  giddy |
| Sunday, September 12th, 2004 |
| 8:59 pm |
Suck/Yay!
Suck: UMich football lost an ugly game to Notre Dame this weekend Yay: Detroit Lions managed, for the first time, to win a road game during the Bush administration Suck: I've felt like crap all weekend thanks to my allergies and maybe a cold Yay: I'm pretty sure I've caught up on the sleep this weekend I've been losing over the last few weeks. Suck: I've got a ton of work to do before the next release of OSX Yay: I got a number of bugs, including some performance issues, taken care of this weekend Current Mood:  tired |
| Sunday, August 29th, 2004 |
| 9:49 pm |
Silly Brain
Recipe for a strange friday night in San Jose: 1. Be tired and hungry 2. Have a beer and fish and chips at Tied House while starting to read "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" At this point, you might be feeling a little off 3. Grab a Frappucino and start drinking 4. Head over to the Musuem of Art 5. Sit down outside and go back to reading while drinking the Frappucino At this point, the combination of alcohol and caffeine should be doing interesting things to you 6. Watch "Astro Boy", "Gigantor", and "Speedracer" on a big projector, while various people wander by, confused to see old cartoons airing in this public place Honestly, I can't quite explain it, but Friday was a surreal evening for me. It was a lot of fun too. And watching the two guys sitting in front of me smoking pot like they'd get busted by a cop any time now only made it more fun. FWIW: Astro boy was cute. Gigantor sucked. Speedracer was fun. Except I don't think the narrator in Speedracer needed to constantly remind the audience that Racer X is Speed's older brother Rex. Current Mood: tired |
| 9:33 pm |
Making progress on projects...
The coffeetable is done. I bought more powertools yesterday and put the feet on it finally. Next up is to get the ping-pong tracking webapp done. After that, back to hacking TinGLE a bit. The current list of projects to explore: * Ping-pong webapp built and installed at work * TinGLE drawing mechanism reimplemented * Distributed Object-based bitmap server * Open Type Font File System As far as the Gentoo box is concerned: it's looking good. The one problem I've found so far is that I can't get my NetGear MA111 802.11b interface to work. Otherwise it works pretty well. Current Mood: tired |
| 12:42 am |
I feel old today
i feel very old today. at the movie theatre, a kid was wearing a 'Nirvana' t-shirt. it occurred to me as i looked a this kid. that there was a very real possibility that nirvana's first album had come out before he was born BTW: 'I, Robot' is a decent, but not spectacular flick. Entertaining, even if the plot ends up being a bit cliche'd. Current Mood: tired |
| Monday, August 9th, 2004 |
| 11:31 pm |
Linux
So, I'm building an experimental box to toy with various technologies. I thought I'd give Linux a try on it, see where it's gotten to. The box is a VIA EPIA 500MHz board. Nothing particularly fancy or out of the ordinary. My experiences so far: Fedora Core 2 won't install, as it never loads the kernel during the installer boot. Sometimes it hangs. Sometimes it reboots. Debian Woody works for the 2.2 kernel, but not the 2.4 kernel. Turns out that when I install the pre-built 2.4.18 kernel package, I get mismatched kernel modules, resulting in my NIC not working. The problem here is the modules are built with the extra signatures attached to function names, but the kernel isn't. So kernel modules, including the VIA Rhine NIC module I need, refuse to load. Debian Sarge RC1 works for the 2.4.25 kernel, but there's some serious mismatches between the package management interfaces, with the standard developer tools being only partially available via dselect. Having a freenix that doesn't install ssh by default was amusing. Gentoo 2004.2 looks promising so far. It's still in the install process, doing a build world. I'll see where it's at in the morning. So far this reminds me of the 3 day build worlds that I used to endure on OpenBSD on my SPARC 5. Any others worth trying? This machine probably won't be the same OS for more than a week or two, depending on how much time i can spend working on it. Does Slackware no longer require 40 odd floppies for install? :) Current Mood: tired |
| 11:21 pm |
TinGLE
Hmm...maybe i'll skip the OpenGL implementation and just pre-render the mapview...that might work better. Just need to figure out the CGBitmapContext to CGImage conversion, and what limits I can push there. Current Mood: tired |
| Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004 |
| 10:17 pm |
More TinGLE Progress
5) Network authentication when accessing wigle.net Next: OpenGL context for mapview Current Mood: tired |
| Saturday, July 31st, 2004 |
| 6:55 pm |
TinGLE Progress so far:
1) Mappack ingestion and I/O code rewritten. Over 100 fewer lines of code 3) Updates work 6) Asynchronous load/save of access point cache Next: how to handle authentication? Current Mood:  lazy |
| Thursday, July 29th, 2004 |
| 11:05 am |
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| 10:13 am |
Bravo!
(from GMSV) If Amr Mohsen's business decisions were as stupid as his legal ones are alleged to be, the valley really is better off without him. On Tuesday a federal grand jury indicted Mohsen, founder of San Jose electronics firm Aptix, for allegedly soliciting the murder of the judge presiding over his perjury case....Mohsen, who was on the verge of a plea deal to resolve the perjury charges earlier this year, faces decades in prison if convicted of these allegations. Current Mood:  nervous |
| Tuesday, July 27th, 2004 |
| 11:41 pm |
TinGLE rewrite plans
Some goals for while I'm at DEFCON: 1. Clean up mappack load/unload/import code. There's a lot of ugly cruft in there that I've since realized can be shot and replaced w/ existing OS capabilities 2. Progress indicator for access point fetch. It's slow, because wigle.net is slow. But users are convinced that the program is hanging when it fetches this data. So time to give them a damn progress bar. 3. Updates, instead of full fetches, after a mappack's initial download. This further helps deal w/ #2. 4. OpenGL context for map view. WTF would I do this? Because it's the only option I have left for speeding up rendering. Using CGImageRefs and caching them isn't adequate on Panther to allow me to eliminate the navigation buttons. 5. Network authentication when accessing wigle.net 6. Asynchronous load/save of access point cache. It's many megabytes of XML that needs to be parsed. Loading it is inherently going to suck. But maybe I can not hang the UI in the process. I've already started on #1. Other stuff might pop up while I'm at it. BTW: Anybody got some good clip art for labelling access points? The categories I need are: 1. Freenet 2. WEP Protected 3. Paynet 4. Generic Current Mood: tired |
| 8:12 pm |
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| 8:08 pm |
Goals for this Defcon
- Have fun
- Attend many talks, including:
- Freenet: Taming the World's Largest Tamagotchi
- How Do We Get The World To Use Message Security
- A Comparison Of Buffer Overflow Prevention Implementations and Weaknesses
- Tor: An Anonymizing Overlay Network for TCP
- Hack the Vote: Election 2004
- Snake Oil Anonymity
- Weaknesses in Satellite Television Protection Schemes
- Smart Card Security
- Automotive Networks
- IPv6 Primer or The History of the Future
- Ask EFF
- Black Ops of TCP/IP 2004
- PDTP - The Peer Distributed Transfer Protocol or Far More Than You Ever Wanted To Tell - Hidden Data in Document Formats
- Toward a Private Digital Economy
- Hacking/Security Mac OSX Security aka Wussy Panther
- The Advantages of Being an Amateur
- Get my copy of "Hacking the XBox" signed by Bunnie Huang
- Rewrite TinGLE
Current Mood: busy |
| 8:48 am |
Defcon
Defcon is fast approaching... ...more updates about that in a bit. Current Mood: busy |
| Wednesday, July 21st, 2004 |
| 9:53 pm |
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| Tuesday, July 20th, 2004 |
| 1:29 pm |
Who cares about IT security?
From GMSV: "Survey: Senior corporate executives dumber than you think: More than three out of four senior corporate executives open e-mail attachments from people they don't know. This according to a survey released Wednesday by The Economist, which also notes that a similar percentage of execs claim security as their top priority." I'm sorry, but I can't stop laughing. Current Mood:  amused |
| Monday, July 19th, 2004 |
| 8:19 pm |
Useful Mac Sites/Software
Okay, so here's (yet another) list of useful tips/tricks/software for users new to OSX. I'll add updates over time. Also, rather than simply repeat what others have said, I'll link to those lists that look interesting. Besides, I'll probably screw up this list and have to redo it somewhere else. This is above and beyond the very useful software that comes with every Mac. So, here goes: The next list is of software that I personally find useful or interesting.
- NetNewsWire - RSS Feed Reader
- SubEthaEdit - An Interesting Text Editor
- VooDoo Pad - A Text Editor based on the Wiki model
- iJournal - LiveJournal posting software. This begs to be made into a Dashboard widget
- WeatherPop - Reports the weather in your status bar
- Video Lan Client - Plays everything, although not always perfectly
- XeTeX - OSX implementation of TeX
- TeX Shop - Front end that pairs well with XeTeX
- Rendezvous Browser - See what's available on the local zeroconf network
- GraphViz - AT&T's very cool graph generation software.
Current Mood: content |
| 11:27 am |
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