Posts by Vic

Re: A bit like a ... 386?

What ever happened to Chuck Moore's low power parallel processors?

Several things happened.

Chuck uses his own layout tools, which produce very small dice for the amount of compute they provide - but the yield is far smaller than is commercially viable. As a result, although the engineering samples were fairly slappy, they would need a total re-design for mass production - and that idea didn't go down too well.

There was also a change in the way patent fees were allocated in the US; the parent company was funding the venture on the expectation of other patents deriving cash based on the value of the complete item in which the patent was used. When they suddenly had to confine themselves to a portion of the balue of the individual component, that left the cashflow a little bit sticky.

And then there were certain interpersonal issues. The less said about those, the better.

Vic.

Re: Know what one is doing

But it's a real pain to use and a massive drag on development.

I disagreee. I've found Puppet very useful, quite simple[1], and very useful for accelerating rollout[2].

As with all these technologies, a little time up-front spent learning the tool goes a very long way...

Vic.

[1] I did fail to get a single rule working to remove the "Addr=127.0.0.1" line in the standard RHEL senmdail.mc line, then rebuild the config and restart the server. But I'm sure someone more skillful than I could do it.

[2] I run the manifest against a designated staging machine first, to do tests is a "production" environment. Then, once that's proven, it's just a case of changing the manifest file on the real server to do a rollout. That really does prevent finger trouble on release day...

Re: NTHell, Teleworst and Virgin Mumble

If the mergers had been done properly

That was never going to happen.

Project Harmony was the attempt to unify the various systems involved. It was actively opposed by the former bosses of the bought-up companies, who still believed themselves to be the heads of their own respective fiefdoms, despite having sold the company...

But it does look as if an email store was intercepted "in transit" from gmail to VM

That is one possible cause. It is far from the only one. It wouldn't be where I would start investigating.

Vic.

Re: ntlworld email

This is definitely not anything to do with the individual user. The emails in question are only kept on the Virgin server as some of them are that old and PCs/laptops have been replaced a number of times since

That means nothing. Spammers keep target lists for a *very* long time. I still see attempts for addresses I retired a decade ago, as well as long-lived, recurring attacks against addresses that have never existed (there are some clear typos, indicating that some addresses are hand-typed into lists, some are snaffled using faulty scripts).

I'm not saying the VM isn't the problem - but the data you're presenting does not support the conclusion you're drawing.

Vic.

Re: Definitely VM

So without a doubt someone had access to my email and was able to mine it for addresses.

Although it does sound like the Bad Guys^TM have seen an email you sent, that doesn't mean they saw it in your account; there are at least two endpoints for every email unless you're only sending stuff to yourself.

Spammers have been correlating addresses for years - it improves the hit rate dramatically, as they'll often hit whitelisted addresses.

I frequently see spam purporting to be from one of my addresses, going to another of my addresses[1]. Spammers have not been inside my mail server - I watch it like a hawk.

Vic.

[1] It bounces off my SPF milter. Which is nice.

Surely they must know they would be obliterated out of existence if they started throwing nukes about

The North Korean playbook hasn't changed in decades. This is entirely an internal control thing.

1. NK waves a weapon about - doesn't matter if it's functional or not

2. The US obligingly steams in making a fuss about how much they're going to punish any military action

3. NK leadership shows its population how they're being threatened by the US, and it's only the Kim and his cronies protecting them from the enemy

Any real conflict is not in NK's interest - but being regularly threatened by the US is essential to their power structure. And so we get the same pantomime on a regular basis...

Vic.

Re: Old Linux Steam Client ...

But they probably *did* intend to nuke the file system

In which case, they won't be using the rm -rf / command, since it will fail to do so. Adding the --no-preserve-root flag would turn it into a very slow way to detroy a computer.

Vic.

Re: This is like BIOS flashing by Unix commands

Linux should take steps in the same direction of making accidents harder, like making the --one-file-system option a default for rm.

Perhaps. But then again, --preserve-root is the default behaviour for rm, which gives the POSIX-standard behavioiur of refusing to delete recursively from / - so this whole thing is pretty unlikely to occur...

Vic.

Re: Sounds Really Clever?

This is a longstanding "problem" with the Unix permissions model. "Write" always implies "delete"

This is not true,

[vic@perridge foo]$ touch bar

rm: cannot remove `bar': Permission denied

It is the directory's write permission that decides whether or not you can delete a file; the file's write permission merely decides whether or not you can write data to it.,

Vic.

Re: I'll tell you one thing...

I think the problem is that CFIT sensors can be fooled, throw false alarms, or be overridden

Such alarms are regularly ignored.

When I was doing my retractable undercarriage training, the aircraft I was flying had an alarm that sounded below a certain height if the wheels were still up and the engine revs dropped below a certain level.

During the week, we fly a lower circuit than at weekends[1]. So as soon as I reduced power, the alarm would sound. Every single circuit. And so the alarm gets ignored.

Vic.

[1] Thruxton is situated within the Boscombe Down / Middle Wallop CMATZ, so on weekdays, when Boscombe is active, we have to keep low to make sure we don't interfere with anything they might be flying.

Invent a hyperspace button. Problem solved

*Immediate* problem solved - but you just know you're going to rematerialise right in front of a big rock...

Vic.

Only thing which might be of value could be the ability to jettison a burning engine, leaving the rest of the aircraft intact

You sort of have that - the engines are fixed to the airframe with low melting-point pins. In the event of a (serious) fire, the pins melt and the engine falls off.

I expect in reality even that would be of minimal use

ISTR an aircraft dropping an engine over Schiphol about 20 years ago. It didn't end well...

Vic.

Re: Personal parachute

I've never been offered a parachute in any GA aircraft

We have them available at the airfield. I've yet to see anyone take one[1]...

Vic.

[1] I might for my next aero flight. I'm planning on doing some inverted spinning :-)

Re: Looks as though it requires a high-wing aircraft configuration.

a 747 can't land on landing strips or gravel runways.

It can. But only the once...

Vic.

Re: 'Without life rafts'

the only evidence of their departure was the sound of their screams in the darkness as they were picked off one by one.

You're unlikely to hear much screaming from a shark attack; if they're actively hunting you, the attack will be from depth. The (2-ton) shark will hit you at about 30mph, taking a dirty great bite out of you, then leave you to bleed out. It's unlikely that you'll be able to scream...

Vic.

Re: Really?

And then it'll need to scrub speed to prevent the parachutes and/or their attachment points from failing

That one is a solved problem - you initially deploy a small drogue patachute which slows the payload and puts tension on the line ready to pull out the main chute.

You then have a "barostat" - combination timer and pressure sensor - preventing the main chute from deploying. If the payload is too high or moving too fast, the pressure on the barostat is too low, and so the main chute stays packed away. Once the pressure reaches the appropriate value, the cable is released, and the drogue now pulls out the main chute.

This is how the Martin Baker ejection seat works.

Vic.

Re: if they collect every ICR ...

4) Target is investigated for working with terrorists etc

That would be an effective DDoS against the security services themselves, since they'd spend their entire lives chasing red herrings - until they realise the data they're collecting is useless and start ignoring the whole thing. What a way to hide a real terrorist cell...

Vic.

Re: A better suggestion

'not deserving of a rise oxygen this year'

I'm getting the hang of this correction malarkey...

Vic.

Re: ICR

[2] I haven't done so, and don't intend to, so I can't tell you anything about the site, or even if it responds on port 80!

[vic@perridge ~]$ nmap -p 80 horsesex.com

Yep. It does.

Vic.

Re: causing the crash of a plane is already a serious crime.

What we don't want is some idiot walking out afterwards because his lawyer managed to get the term reduced..

FTFY...

Vic.

Re: Registration will not help

All I have to do is push out a couple of Watts worth of power on those frequencies with a directional antenna and your controller won't be able to get through

That depends on the kit in question...

Spread-spectrum transmission has many benefits, including resistance to jamming. That, coupled with its being usable with levels below the noise floor, made it very useful during the war...

Vic.

Re: I hope you drone pilots have decent insurance

I would personally have no problem with anyone declaring the unauthorised/uncleared use of drones near air traffic as equivalent to an act of terrorism

I would.

Hoever reckless/idiotic/dangerous it might be to fly a drone near an airfield, it's not an act of coercion, and therefore clearly not terrorism.

The problem with using the word to describe everything you don't like is that pretty soon, you cannot differentiate between terrorism and any other sort of law-breaking. Before you know it, all those anti-terror laws become pertinent to day-to-day problems...

Vic.

Re: SOAP web service client… written in bash and netcat

I did one sanity-improving step to swap out the homebrew netcat HTTP client for curl.

I saw a SOAP interface[1][2] on a device with a set of bash scripts on the client to control it. The bash scripts used netcat to dump a hand-crafted bit of XML into the maw of the device...

I ran away from that one.

Vic.

[1] I use the word in its most generous sense; IMO, an interface is generally supposed to abstract the implementation details...

[2] Oh - and no WSDL either. Cheers for that.

Re: contract: clean up existing code

1. lost source files

I used to work on HP 98xx-series machines. Although they did have a Pascal system available, most people programmed them in HP's Rocky Mountain Basic[1]. We were no exception.

Although these machines could have large amounts of memory for the time, they were limited to 32K lines of Basic - larger numbers simply weren't valid. To overcome this limitation, HP produced a "compressor", that would cause functions to take up a single line - with no code displayed, just an asterisk.

We shipped code like that - we had to. Our Head of Software kept the original source on disk[2] on his shelf, so we could recreate any of these "compressed" functions on demand.

Until, that is, I demonstrated that what we were shipping could not possibly be produced from the code that was supposed to be its source. It had different behaviour...

HP claimed it was impossible to write a decompressor. So I wrote one[3].

Vic.

[1] ::shudder::

[2] Yes, IIRC it was a single copy of each function on a single disk

[3] To be fair, I never finished it - I decompressed enough to work out what the code was actually doing.

Re: An excerpt from the Rogue's gallery...

Apparently, in the 21st century, he didn't like code where lines wouldn't fit in an 80x24 vi window.

Expect to see more of that. Python's PEP8 coding standard says :

Limit all lines to a maximum of 79 characters.

For flowing long blocks of text with fewer structural restrictions (docstrings or comments), the line length should be limited to 72 characters.

I've seen some right pig's ears from developers trying to comply with that,.,.

Vic.

Sadly a lot of C code horrors are covered by compiler warnings or static analysis tools, but are ignored all the same.

I worked with some code a couple of years ago where the developer had turned on both -Wall and -Werror. And it failed to build on the test rig I was running.

We had a couple of days of argument about that - it didn't fail on his machine, after all, so it *must* have been the test rig's fault - until he tried to cross-compile it for the embedded target, where it failed in exactly the same way...

Vic.