Dear internet, please shut up

Honestly, the fervor over Iran? Enough. While it’s certainly an important event, it merely serves to illustrate that the people of Iran have a nominal choice over their president. That is all. There’s some feeling of solidarity with Iran’s youth (about 30% of the populace) in the US, but people seem to have deluded themselves into thinking it’s another Iranian Revolution or a harbinger of Western-style democracy. First, I guess, a little background on Iran’s government structure:

• Supreme Leader:

Controls everything, really, as we’ll see in a bit. Personally has the power to declare war and peace, command army/intelligence/police forces.

• Assembly of Experts:

Clerics who determine who the next Supreme Leader will be, though they capitulate to his desires in every recorded instance(see: Montazeri). Elected to 8 year terms by direct public vote, but the list of candidates is screened anyway, so it’s not like a “free election.”

• Guardian Council:

Easily the most powerful force in Iranian politics. Twelve members, 6 picked directly by the Supreme Leader, 6 picked by the head of the judiciary (who is also picked by the Supreme Leader). Confirmed by Parliament, but it’s mostly for show. Functions as a combination Supreme Court and presidential veto (except Parliament cannot actually override their veto, it just gets sent back for revision). Screens candidates for every imaginable branch of government and arbitrarily excludes them (this has been happening for a while to keep reform candidates out — the 2004, 2006, and 2008 electiosn were particularly bad). May as well have total control of the Revolutionary Guard (which is not a branch of the normal army).

• Expendiency Council:

Nominally there to function as a screen between the Guardian Council and parliament. In reality, just advises the Supreme Leader

• Majlis (parliament):

Does the things you’d normally expect parliament to do (approve budgets, treaties, drafts legislation), only neutered by the Guardian Council. As with everything else, candidates are screened.

• President/VPs/Ministries

Executive branch stuff — day-to-day running of the state. Nominally right below the Supreme Leader. In truth, Guardian Council wields more power. Candidates are elected, but are screened by Guardian Council beforehand, ensuring real reformers never even make it to the vote. Best described as a figurehead.

There is very little debate in Iran about the importance of religion. They’re not going to turn into a secular nation. There’s hardly any protest (even now) against the Supreme Leader, though some resentment against the Guardian Council for the behavior of the Basij. No matter how the protests go, it’s unlikely to be another revolution — very few revolutions succeed without support from another sovereign nation, which they are not getting. The nature of the screening pretty much ensures that it’ll be another conservative candidate even if it does succeed, but Ahmadinejad and the Guardian Council control the complete apparatus of the state. It’s likely to be brutally repressed (granted, I’ve seen very little from outside Tehran, which I consider to be an indication that it’s relatively calm there).

Mousavi’s campaign? Move control of the police from Khamenei to the president. Make government a little more transparent. Allow non-state run television. Not exactly Kucinich here, or even Obama. Maybe Ron Paul is an apt comparison.

Karroubi? Actual reform! Freedom of the press, women’s rights, nationalize the oil industry and distribute the profits to the people, etc. As you’ve maybe seen, he was not the winner.

With that out of the way (and the background may have been necessary for those thinking about Iran becoming South Korea or post-imperial Japan), can we stop the damn Twittering? Changing your timezone to Tehran? Ahh… I’m not sure what you think that’s accomplishing. Under the assumption that the Iranian government can track individual people Twittering (and really? They’ve got more important things to worry about — just that people don’t post updates after going to rallies), it’s because they control the feeds out of the country. Your timezone isn’t fooling them, unless you’re routing it through Iran, which is doubtful. Open proxies? Let’s say they can track Twitterers — that means they’re using Deep Packet Inspection and, well, proxies don’t exactly help against that. They get around blackholing IP blocks (Facebook/whatever), and the headers change a little, but the packet contents are still eminently sniffable.

Tor exit nodes are a better option, but there’s the possibility the Iranian government is running an exit node themselves as a honeypot (extremely unlikely). VPNs are much better, and not all that hard to set up, as long as you keep the address of the server relatively private. For the sake of argument, we’ll say OpenVPN — which is SSL based — running on port 443. It should be utterly indistinguishable from HTTPS traffic, since the key negotiation is also encrypted, and DPI isn’t going to help them here. For all they know, people would be conducting internet banking or one of the million other things SSL is used for.

Of course, doing this requires more effort than changing your Twitter timezone or giving yourself a green background for “solidarity.” Worse than that, the technical issues should have been obvious to a lot of people by now (or at least the contradiction in assuming they can track what IP addresses are using Twitter to individuals, yet thinking that packets which are never routed through Iran will somehow fool them). The irony of the “solidarity” is that our elections in 2000 and 2004 were filled with questionable voter purges, yet we didn’t rise up. The candidate they elected (assuming the leaked results are true) is more comparable to Reagan or one of the Bushes than Johnson or Carter — a man who the people in support of “#iranelection” would never, ever vote for, but they don’t realize that as he’s a “reform” candidate. We arrested twice as many journalists in the 4 days of the RNC in Saint Paul than Iran has in a week of street riots.

Until you can drop the hypocrisy, technical incompetence (and don’t think most of the people wanted to think about that, since they might have to stop patting themselves on the back for “helping Iranians” with a fucking website that has the same limitations as SMS), and utter lack of understanding about Iran’s politics (ahem, even if Mousavi is inducted, not much is likely to change in Iran until the Guardian Council stops culling candidates who want actual change), you can shut the fuck up and keep your self-righteousness to yourself.

XMonad and xmobar on OpenSolaris with functional monitoring (mutt to boot)

I’ve been having carpal tunnel flareups lately, so I went looking around for things I could do to use the mouse less and the keyboard more (as counter-intuitive as that may sound, I find that holding a mouse for hours irritates it far more than any amount of typing, YMMV). Vimperator is an obvious first step, but, well, I love vi, so I already had that running.

Tiling window managers came to mind. I’ve already used wmii and dwm once upon a time, but they’re hardly state of the art (as state of the art as tiling window managers get, anyway), and hacking together a reasonable workspace status bar in dzen/Perl didn’t appeal to me. Awesome3 (the window manager) does appeal to me, but getting it running on Solaris looked like a little more work than I wanted to invest, and I’m sick of working with moving targets (Awesome3 looks like they’re almost as “break your config” happy as Rails).

Mind you, I still love Openbox, but given that 99% of my time is spent in terminals (irssi, mutt, ssh, vim, mcabber, slash’em), I see no reason why I should even bother with having window decorations and manually arranging them at all.

Had I known what I was getting into, I probably would have just used Awesome. I mean, it needed two libraries I didn’t have, and some dzen hacking. Not… this. Not that I’m unhappy with XMonad, but…

Firstly, there’s no build of GHC (Glaskow Haskell Compiler) in the OpenSolaris repositories. There’s a pre-compiled version of GHC 6.10, but only for SPARC. Pre-compiled version of GHC 6.8 for x86/amd64, but that ain’t helping me (a scary amount of stuff from Hackage, Haskell’s version of CPAN/rubygems/whathaveyou doesn’t want to run in GHC 6.8, and the recommended fix for some bugs is “upgrade to 6.10″).

No GCC 4 in the repos either, and GCC 4.1.2 is the recommended version for building GHC. So, onto the magic. Don’t even try with SunStudio. GNU-isms in the code stopped me dead.

I was bitching to Dan about how ridiculous this process was a few weeks ago. Maybe it’ll help somebody.

Firstly, either install readline from the OpenSolaris Pending repositories or compile it yourself.

Next, we need to bootstrap gcc. For that, we’ll need gmp from GNU and mpfr. Grab the precompiled version of GHC 6.8.2 while you’re at it. You should also get the newest versions of ghc and ghc-$version and ghc-$version-src-extralibs to get running later.

Complaint #1: GNU automake is braindead. It, I assume, just checks `uname` and not `isainfo`, so I can’t tell when we’re running 64 bit. Either use Solaris libtools or do the following for gmp and MPFR

./configure ABI=32 && gmake && pfexec gmake install
make distclean
configure --prefix=/usr/local/lib64 && gmake && pfexec gmake install

If you don’t specify another prefix, it’ll stomp all over the 32 bit libraries it just installed on your 64 bit box.

Complain #2: gcc is even more braindead. It’ll build a 64 bit binary but link it against 32 bit libraries, then eat itself during stage 2 bootstrap. You’d think the FSF would be smarter, but no. It just finds the wrong ELFCLASS down the line. To correct:

export LDFLAGS=-L/opt/local/lib -L/opt/local/lib/64 \
-R/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/lib/64
export LD_OPTIONS=-L/opt/local/lib -L/opt/local/lib/64 \
-R/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/lib/64
./configure && gmake -j4 && pfexec gmake install

Complaint #3: The precompiled ghc-6.8.2 we got? It sucks. The rts library is broken (check it with ldd). It would be nice to avoid this, but, well… Bootstrapping ghc from C sources and no Haskell compiler involves another goddamn system which DOES have Haskell installed, AND knowledge of what registers your CPU uses. Whoever thought up that notion of bootstrapping? Well… The “goal” is to have Haskell self-bootstrap (it currently does not, since, ironically, Haskell is too “pure” to actually be written in a “pure” language, since we need dirty things like actually doing something useful with “impure” data, like user input or stuff sucked in from a file).

cd ../ghc-6.8.2
./configure && pfexec gmake install
ghc-pkg describe rts > rts.pkg
vim rts.pkg
#add -R/usr/local/lib to the end of the ldoptions field, or ghc bombs bootstrapping the new version in stage 2
ghc-pkg update rts.pkg

Complaint #4: GHC is even stupider than GCC, if possible. Not only do we have to prepend /usr/local/bin to $PATH so GHC can find our shiny new gcc-4.1.2, we have to pass ridiculous amounts of config flags (including one which tells it where GCC is — if the $PATH OR –with-gcc is wrong, it won’t bootstrap. Don’t ask, because I don’t know why).

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
./configure --with-gcc=/usr/local/bin/gcc --with-gmp-libraries=/usr/local/lib --with-gmp-include=/usr/local/include --with-readline-libraries=/usr/local/bin --with-readline-include=/usr/local/include
gmake -j4 && pfexec gmake install

Yay! Working GHC. Sadly, if you want to reclaim the 350MB or so the GHC 6.8 install is taking up, you have to go remove it yourself (apparently the GHC team does not believe in `make uninstall`). This means we can install cabal, which requires nothing special, other than you grabbing the tarball and installing it as normal.

Next, `cabal install xmonad xmonad-contrib` I said we were going to install xmobar, and we are, but it’s a little tricker. You see, even though Xmobar mostly reads a pipe to give us a title and workspace listing, the plugins are not optional. They also depend on libnotify, which is only present on Linux. Good job, xmobar developer! Fortunately, this is easily corrected, and xmobar (mostly) works. Caveats explained later.

You can’t just `cabal install` xmobar. No-go since hinotify will not install, and there’s not a clear explanation as to why from the output. As noted, it doesn’t really depend on it, just that the developer can’t be bothered to use Haskell’s typing system to throw messages at you when you try to use features that are not implemented. So… edit ~/.cabal/packages/hackage.haskell.org/xmobar/$version/xmobar-$version/xmonad.cabal

Take out the lines referring to hinotify. Then `cabal build && cabal install` from the directory xmonad.cabal was in. Ooh and aah, but don’t try to use, well… anything. BatteryReader, CpuReader, MemReader, Net, Swap, all broken. Thankfully, we have Dtrace and Python to replace it with, since xmobar’s PipeReader still works.

Memory usage?

#pragma D option quiet
#pragma D option bufsize=16k
 
dtrace:::BEGIN
{
}
 
profile:::tick-1sec
{
	/* RAM stats */
	this->ram_total = `physinstalled;
	this->unusable  = `physinstalled - `physmem;
	this->locked    = `pages_locked;
	this->ram_used  = `availrmem - `freemem;
	this->freemem   = `freemem;
	this->kernel    = `physmem - `pages_locked - `availrmem;
 
	this->ram_total	*= `_pagesize;  this->ram_total	/= 1048576;
	this->unusable	*= `_pagesize;  this->unusable	/= 1048576;
	this->kernel	*= `_pagesize;  this->kernel	/= 1048576;
	this->locked	*= `_pagesize;  this->locked	/= 1048576;
	this->ram_used	*= `_pagesize;  this->ram_used	/= 1048576;
	this->freemem	*= `_pagesize;  this->freemem	/= 1048576;
	printf("RAM: %2d%%\n", ((this->ram_total - this->freemem) * 100 / this->ram_total));
}

Network speeds?

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s
#pragma D option quiet
dtrace:::BEGIN
{
	TCP_out = 0; TCP_in = 0;
}
 
 
mib:::tcpOutDataBytes		{ TCP_out += arg0;   }
mib:::tcpInDataInorderBytes	{ TCP_in += arg0;    }
 
profile:::tick-1sec
{
	OUT_print = TCP_out/1024; IN_print = TCP_in/1024;
	printf("Out:%3d|In:%3d", OUT_print, IN_print);
	TCP_out = 0;
	TCP_in = 0;
 
}

.xmobarrc

Config { font = "-*-terminus-*-*-*-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-*-u"
       , bgColor = "#000000"
       , fgColor = "#AFAF87"
       , position = Top 
       , lowerOnStart = True
       , commands = [ Run Date "%a %b %_d %Y %H:%M:%S" "date" 10 
                    , Run Weather "KSTP" ["-t","<tempF>F","-L","64","-H","77","--normal","green","--high","red","--low","lightblue"] 36000
		    , Run PipeReader "/export/home/ryan/dtrace/net" "wireless"
		    , Run PipeReader "/export/home/ryan/dtrace/netspeed" "speed"
		    , Run PipeReader "/export/home/ryan/dtrace/psr" "cpui"
		    , Run PipeReader "/export/home/ryan/dtrace/ram" "mem"
                    , Run StdinReader
                    ]
       , sepChar = "%"
       , alignSep = "}{"
       , template = " %StdinReader% } { %cpui% | %mem% | %wireless% %speed% | %date% | %KSTP%"
       }

A script to feed those pipes. If you don’t have python2.6, pexpect on python2.4 (the Solaris/OpenSolaris default) works. Just install pexpect with easy_install, an .egg, or whatever your poison may be.

#!/usr/bin/python2.6
import math
import os
import platform
import re
import stat
import sys
import time
 
import pexpect
 
#Get the directory we're running from to create the fifos rather than the $pwd of whatever called us
path = os.path.dirname( os.path.realpath(__file__)) + "/"
 
wificonfig = ""
 
#Y'know, I haven't actually written the iwconfig thing.  It's here for posterity and possible later use.
osystem = platform.system()
if osystem == 'SunOS':
  wificonfig = 'wificonfig'
elif osystem == 'Linux':
  wificonfig = 'iwconfig'
 
 
#Kill off any old instances which may be running.  Poor man's pkill, but guaranteed to work pretty much anywhere.
pexpect.run('bash -c "ps -ef |grep mpstat |grep -v python| awk \'{print $2}\' | xargs kill -9"')
pexpect.run('bash -c "ps -ef | grep speed.d | awk \'{print $2}\' | xargs kill -9')
pexpect.run('bash -c "ps -ef | grep meminfo.d | awk \'{print $2}\' | xargs kill -9')
 
def checkfifo(path):
  #If it ain't there, make it
  if not os.path.exists(path):
    os.mkfifo(path)
    handle = open(path, "r+")
    return handle
  #If it is, just return it
  elif stat.S_ISFIFO(os.stat(path).st_mode):
    handle = open(path, "r+")
    return handle
  else:
    if os.path.isfile(path):
      #Not a FIFO, and it needs to be
      os.unlink(path)
    os.mkfifo(path)
    handle = open(path, "r+")
    return handle
 
#Set up our fifos
psrfifo = checkfifo(path + "psr")
netfifo = checkfifo(path + "net")
nspdfifo = checkfifo(path + "netspeed")
ramfifo = checkfifo(path + "ram")
 
#Fire off the processes we'll be reading from.  Using pexpect seems like overkill, but mpstat is apparently smart enough to tell when it's being read from a pipe, and it'll buffer no matter what you do.  pexpect/expect fake being interactive, so it happily runs without buffering.
mpstat = pexpect.spawn('bash -c "mpstat 1 | grep -v CPU"')
ramstats = pexpect.spawn(path + "meminfo.d")
nspeed = pexpect.spawn(path + "speed.d")
 
#Regular expressions to use later.  Since it's a long-runnign script, they may as well be compiled
mpre = re.compile(r'^\s+?(?P<cpu>\d+).*?(?P<idle>\d+)$')
solwifire = re.compile(r'.*?linkstatus: (?P<status>\w+).*essid: (?P<essid>\w+).*strength: \w+\((?P<strength>\d+)\).*', re.DOTALL)
 
def prstat():
  #Yay for awk/sed abuse, but it's concise and I'm already forking.  Basically getting a list of CPUs to check later, so this script should perform its duty no matter if you have 1 CPU or 128 (T2 users)
  psrinfo = pexpect.run('bash -c "psrinfo -v |grep MHz | awk \'{print $6,$7}\' | sed -e \'s/,//\'"').rstrip().split('\r\n')
  output = ""
  for cpu in psrinfo:
    line = prmatch(cpu)
    output = output + line
  psrfifo.write(output + "\n")
  psrfifo.flush()
 
def prmatch(cpu):
  line = mpstat.readline().rstrip()
  m = mpre.match(line)
  #Match it against our earlier regex and subtract the idle value from 100 to get the actual used percentage, which isn't wholly accurate (IOWAIT and whatnot), but it's good enough for me
  usage = 100 - int(m.group('idle'))
  #Padding the string seems stupid, and it is, but xmobar arbitrarily decides spots that it's not going to refresh even if text shows up there, leaving it (black in my case) when text slides.  Padding fixes that.  Also, if your CPU goes to 100%, you probably shouldn't have a script which reads dtrace probes running.  Just sayin'.
  return "Cpu%s: %2d%% (%s) " % (m.group('cpu'), usage, cpu)
 
def memory():
  #I haven't found any swap information from dtrace probes as easy to manipulate as thi sis
  swap = pexpect.run('bash -c "/usr/sbin/swap -l |tail -n 1 | awk \'{print $4, $5}\'"').rstrip().split(' ')
  #Ugly?  You bet.  Cast the subtract free swap from total swap blocks, divide it by free swap blocks * 100 cast to an int to give us an actual percentage, floor that, then cast THAT to an int
  usedswap = int(math.floor(((int(swap[1])-int(swap[0]))/int(swap[1])*100)))
  ram = ramstats.readline().rstrip()
  output =  "%s Swap: %2d%%" % (ram, usedswap)
  ramfifo.write(output + "\n")
  ramfifo.flush()
 
def network():
  #Filter out interface which aren't up, which are vnics, which only point to localhost to get the running interface.  I'm assuming you only have one at a time, but if you have more modify this to suit.
  iface = pexpect.run('bash -c "ifconfig -a | grep UP |grep RUNNING| grep -v IPv6 |grep -v lo | grep -v -E \':[0-9]: \' | awk \'{print $1}\' | sed -e \'s/://\'i"').rstrip()
  if osystem == 'SunOS':
    command = "wificonfig -i " + iface + " showstatus"
    status = pexpect.run(command).rstrip()
    output = ""
    if solwifire.match(status):
      #Beauty of regexes.  If it doesn't match, it's not wireless (or not connected).  It if is, give us values.
      m = solwifire.match(status)
      strength = math.floor((int(m.group('strength')) / 15.) * 100)
      output =  "%s: %s(%s) %3d%%" % (iface, m.group('status'), m.group('essid'), strength)
    else:
      #Probably not wireless
      output = iface + ":"
    netfifo.write(output + "\n") 
    netfifo.flush()
 
def netspeed():
  #Is this method really necessary?  Couldn't the dtrace probe just write to the fifo itself?  Probably, but if you (or I) want to colorize it at some point, it may as well get sucked in here.
  speed = nspeed.readline()
  nspdfifo.write(speed + "\n")
  nspdfifo.flush()
 
while 1:
 
  prstat()
  memory()
  network()
  netspeed()
  time.sleep(1)

It’s not the prettiest python. I should probably move those repetitive fifo flushes/etc to a method, but I didn’t honestly expect that I’d need to replace this much XMobar functionality. Notably, XMobar can colorize things with <span> attributes setting colors in case somebody wanted to pretty up the usages (really, to make it look more like XMobar’s [colorized] defaults for CPU/net usage). I don’t care, personally. I didn’t implement a battery monitor either, but hey, you can if you want to.

Complaint #5 (did I lose track?): SUNWmutt doesn’t have support for header caching, which is a real bitch when I have 12,000 emails. It also doesn’t support SMTP over SSL, making it pretty well worthless for Gmail. I have other accounts I use mutt for, but Gmail’s an important one.

This isn’t that tough, really. You need some kind of a database for the mutt config script, and gdbm is trivially easy to get running (normal ./configure && make && make install). On the other hand, we run into two hiccups. The configure file depends on ncurses, which is just a link to plain ol’ curses on lots of Solaris boxes. Secondly, (and I don’t really begrudge the Mutt guys for this, since there’s actually a commit to fix this, unlike GCC and GHC, whose response is “too fucking bad” [GHC actually posts the recommendation for fixing rts.pkg and the configure flags on their own site rather than FIXING THE BUILD]), configure.ac does some things wrong with libidn.

Find $with_idn, and replace the block which follows it with this (–with-idn doesn’t seem to build properly).:

if test "$with_idn" != "no" ; then
  if test "$with_idn" != "yes" ; then
    AC_CHECK_HEADERS([idn/idn-int.h],
      [AC_CHECK_HEADERS([idn/idna.h], [],
        [CPPFLAGS="$CPPFLAGS -I/usr/include/idn"])])
  fi
fi

If you don’t have or want ncurses (or it’s a symlink on your system), fix configure. `sed -i -e ’s/-lncurses/-lcurses/’ configure`.

./configure –with-regex –with-gnutls –enable-hcache –enable-smtp –enable-imap –enable-pop –enable-mailtool –with-sasl –with-idn=/usr/include/idn

Congratulations!

Next up, re-implementing htop for Solaris with dtrace probes, python, and ncurses.

Bored

So bored it’s unreal, actually. Other than a strong desire find a Haskell developer and treat him like a punching bag (but that’s another rant, probably this weekend, now that I’m finally done getting a working Xmonad/xmobar/Mutt/zsh combination on OpenSolaris with proper statistics), I haven’t had anything to do. I haven’t logged into WoW in a month or so, though I may do that this weekend also. I’m sort of stuck in a rut here.

Half-Price Books had their warehouse sale last weekend, so I picked up some new books, but those aren’t going to keep me occupied for very long. Heather’s website has to be rewritten at some point, but I’m still debating technologies to use for that (I like Rails, I really do, but the core team doesn’t give a shit if they break features during minor version releases, so almost all the documentation you find is out of date without going back $n versions and applying all the errata). Django is seeming appealing. I do not, however, have any idea how well that’s supported on Dreamhost. Sure, there are entries for it on their wiki, but Rails wasn’t exactly stable when they first added support for that. For a personal site, m’kay. For a site for her business? I’d rather have something reliable. Not that Django isn’t reliable, just that I don’t know how reliable it is on Dreamhost. Maybe I’ll set up a Django site on my VPS and just point her DNS servers (which are not hosted by Dreamhost) there.

I am, in truth, spending an inordinate amount of time questing for the Amulet of Yendor. I forgot how much I loved NetHack, and Slash’em just makes it better. On the downside, valkyries don’t appear to start with a longsword in Slash, so I’m not going to get any free Excaliburs at level 5. Monks aren’t bad at all, but food is kind of a pain in the ass. I’d also guess that blessed scrolls of genocide drop less frequently, leading to me getting killed by liches a few times. Awesome.

I’m sort of considering implementing Vassal in PyGame. Vassal 40k is a really neat system. Dice rolling isn’t handled all that well, it doesn’t import AB files, and the Vassal engine doesn’t do reforms/wheels well at all. I’m not going to hack at the Java to fix Vassal (thought the developers have started work on Vassal Fantasy Battles), and I sort of want to learn PyGame anyway, which seems like a good motivation to do it. Dan and I never did finish the C# implementation (in fact, I never really did anything other than the XML parser, and I have no idea how far he got). I don’t imagine it taking me all that long to do it in Python though, with PyGame doing the heavy lifting of the GDI crap C# needs for me. Thoughs (take a look at Vassal 40k, for instance)? I don’t picture it being difficult to render sprites from images of models I find on Google Image Search, but I guess you never know.

I do have lots of time to read news, though, and I’ve come to the following conclusions:

• Slashdot: My first, and probably still my favorite. The Firehose is worthless, but the community moderation system is incredibly effective. It is the only place I visit where I can regularly expect to see somebody with a post-graduate degree in whatever subject it is posting. People like NYCountryLawyer (who is actually a lawyer) make the site. There are, of course, some libertarian “omg government never solves any problems” trolls (who don’t think they are trolls), but that goes across the spectrum (generally people who say this in response to anything have never looked at numbers comparing government spending to private spending in the same field — Medicare being a great example — and mistakenly believe that corporations wouldn’t rape everybody). Increasingly dominated by people who have never worked worked in the real world (with user ids near 1.5 million) and an astounding amount of GPL trolls (who think it’s the greatest license since sliced bread and slander any company which does not abide by it — including Sun’s CDDL, which was devised because they don’t own the IP on some of their drivers — while simultaneously whining that they can’t steal code [ZFS, dtrace, etc] from alternatively-licensed projects). These, though, are generally modded into oblivion also.
• (Total)Fark: Biting headlines, little regard for the average human being (which I sort of appreciate, actually, since most of the people in their stories deserved what they got). Effective moderation, but the comment threading system sucks (not that I really need to read the comments with TotalFark having ~1 story per minute, most of which are worth a read). JonSnow is awesome.
• Reddit: Reddit seems to be a mixed bag. I love /r/programming, and some of the other SubReddits are great. At the same time, the average Redditor believes that they are much more intelligent than they actually are. I often see people talking about how they were “too smart” to be in school which, while possibly true, isn’t really relevant given that school is primarily a social tool. People spew nonsense about how the public education system was designed to make for complacent workers who will follow commands and obey the bell (this is true, but that was 130 years ago, and I’d hardly say school is psychological prep for working in a meat processing plant these days). There’s a lot of talk (on Reddit and Slashdot) about home schooling by parents who believe their children are beautiful, brilliant, unique snowflakes. Their child is doing $randomthing (3d rendering, programming, whatever) or is in “7th grade” at age 9, so it must be better, though they have no unbiased metrics to use for comparison.

  This particular aspect of Reddit comes out in shit like this (which is, by the way, the 2nd time that subject has been on AskReddit in the last few months). I’m all for being inclusive, but seriously? Not everybody deserves it. Reddit’s comment threading system is good, even if I don’t like it as much as Slashdot’s (in particular, if a parent post is downvoted too many times in Reddit, it hides the entire tree, even if one of the replies has 1,000,000 upvotes), but I don’t know where the fuck the moderation is sometimes. To give this guy a platform where he can answer selected questions to rationalize his behavior and make it seem as if he doesn’t need help is, well… Ephebophilia isn’t that uncommon, but this guy states he’s attracted to 2 year olds, FFS, and that he “admires them” at playgrounds and whatnot (he says he’s never touched them or seen images/videos, but that’s extremely dubious, and it’s virtually assured that he will act upon his urges at some point). I’m not easily sickened but, well, read the comments. Virtually nobody calls him out on it. They just stroke his ego.

Somebody give me a suggestion. If not, I’m just going start writing a frontend for a Vassal clone (while that may sound stupid, I suspect that the biggest obstacle WILL end up in unit reformation/wheeling/etc rather than back-end logic, so I’ll write it first. Integration tests can cover everything else when I write it).

Oi, work

It’s such a joy to come in this morning to find out that somebody has helpfully shut down the virtual machine I was testing a RHEL4.7 -> 5.3 migration in. Not a supported move by RedHat (as noted, their consultant will charge us lots of money to certify a process that I’ll already have done), and it involves mucking about with lots of important parts of the system. So, when I haven’t taken a snapshot in a couple of hours, and I leave a script running overnight, no big deal, eh? Sadly, the team lead did not agree, and needed the precious ESX resources for the (3!) other VMs that were running at a total of 7% CPU load. Goodbye, 800 lines of Perl to massage the system into place. This would be less of a mess if there were any sort of reasonable rollback method, but the Linux devs, in their infinite wisdom, don’t think that’s important.

In fact, if you clone a drive, the logical volume manager will arbitrarily choose which one to boot from and prevent you from managing the other, even if the contents are totally different, since the cloned logical volume will have the same UUID. More than that, you cannot boot from a LV, so RHEL sets a label in the metadata for the boot partition (typically /boot1). This means in order to have a rollback method (a -real- rollback method), you have to clone said partition, take an LVM snapshot, rename it, hack the /etc/fstab for the partition which will become recovery, munge up the bootloader config files to get it to boot from /dev/vol/orig instead of /dev/vol/upgraded, etc. It was nicer to have straight-up partitions, in a way.

The sad part is that this is a SOLVED PROBLEM. ZFS (and Solaris Live Upgrades on UFS/VxFS/SVM) handle it with aplomb. The license simply doesn’t agree with Linux developers, so they’re slowly (and poorly) implementing it with btrfs and ext4. BSD has HAMMER now, and the license permits ZFS (though only FreeBSD has integrated it so far). Hell, OSX has ZFS support (not ZFS root, but you can get around that). Even better — ext4 loses data if you get a kernel panic, since they decided to delay allocation cycles by 115 seconds (from 5 -> 120) for a marginal performance gain unless you forcefully fsync(), which sorta defeats the point of having a journaled filesystem.

Maybe the work in Solaris Live Upgrade is from Bob. It very well may be, according to him, in one of those “I don’t know whether to gape in horror, pretend it was never said, or just say ‘lolwut’” moments. Specifically, he said that Microsoft contacted him and somebody else we went to school with 10 years ago to work on Solaris. Nevermind that Solaris is 18 years old, and Solaris <2.6 goes back further than that, that's it's based on code written around the time he was born, he doesn't really know C, and it has abso-fucking-lutely nothing to do with Microsoft. For that matter, I think Xenix (Microsoft's UNIX) was sold off to SCO before I ever used a computer. The worst part, really, is that he'll be an IP lawyer, and he wants to be one of the non-litigating ones who just researches things.

At the same time, his only knowledge of RISC processors is that the GBA and DS run on ARM (which he didn't know was RISC). Arguments about whether or not the PS3, 360, Wii, DS, PS3, his cable box, microwave, phone, and virtually every other device he uses fell on deaf ears. Which is fine, normally. I don't expect people to know that their cable box uses big-endian MIPS, or that the Wii, 360, and PS3 essentially run on the same processor with minor tweaks (ok, major tweaks, but they're all PPC970 at the core). Then again, I don't expect people to litigate patents related to these things, either.

It's just that I had no way to express to him how absolutely out of his depth he was -- that this is what I do for a living (about 50% of our systems are still AIX on POWER, and some are HP-UX on PA-RISC, with a little Solaris 10), and that he's dead wrong. No successful argument could have been made, since it wasn't Microsoft on x86. At the same time, though, I couldn't explain that a $400 PS3 has no tangible benefits over a $0 laptop (given that I already have it) when it comes to running emulators hooked up to a HDTV, since the controllers work on PCs just fine, and that throwing $400 at a PS3 so I could run Linux on POWER (well, the Cell) isn't really that interesting. At some point, I stopped doing things because I could, and just went with solutions that work for what I need (hence, fileserver is Solaris, for which he insisted I needed to buy a MyBook, but he's never seen a drive fail, and the fact that it comes with them set up in RAID0 with a processor so wimpy it cannot saturate a single GigE interface isn’t a problem).

On the other hand, hanging out with Bob is entertaining most of the time, and it definitely got my mind off of the pain I’m in. Tomorrow, I think, I’ll actually sign into WoW (assuming that I don’t go watch the crappy miniseries based on crappy books [Sword of Truth] that Bob is putting on a showing of).