Author: matthew

Disinfopedia, a non-partisan watchdog wiki for political spin doctoring, led me to a story today that the Bush-Cheney campaign has been asking religious volunteers “to turn over church directories to the campaign”.

My gut reaction here? That’s just repugnant.

My wife and children, all church-goers, have their information on the records of their church so that other church members can contact them about church-related business. Not that I think that here in Utah, the Republican political equivalent of Nirvana, there’s any doubt who our electors will be voting to be President this fall.

But encouraging church members to be activists for a campaign by having them submit rosters of church members to the GOP without the consent of those on that list? Ugh, that’s vile. Particularly when (at least on our local church rosters) there’s a big, important-looking notice informing readers that any non-church-related use is prohibited. And volunteers doing this could endanger their church’s tax-exempt status.

Maybe I’m way off base here. I’d love to learn that I am, since I voted for Bush in 2000, and I supported him through 9/11 and the early days of the Iraq war. I’d love to learn this was some kind of big mistake by an overzealous Bush campaign writer. But this latest bit of information sure seems to be another black mark against Bush for the “John Kerry Is A Douchebag But I’m Voting For Him Anyway” page.

Just in case you can’t leave home for Independence day:

http://www.scottferguson.com/pages/LadyLibertyFireworks/LadyLiberty.html.

So Rampant Games ran an all-day press playable demo this past Saturday. It was for press folks to drop in, download the game, play some multiplayer, interview the developers, and that kind of thing. I’m the composer for the soundtrack for “Void War”, a Rampant Games title due out this summer.

Well, Void War got a review on War Cry, a popular online gaming site. Since I am writing the music from the game, all I’m going to excerpt is this:

<the game> has a very fitting score.

Woot, yeah, that’s me, I wrote the score!

I’ll see if I can get a full demo song up here so you can get a feel for the music. Justin listened to one tune, and said it reminded him very much of the screaming guitar/classical style from near the end of “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure”. I’m not sure if that’s a compliment or not, but the music was definitely written to suit the feel of the game.

My firewall has been running OpenBSD 3.2 for a very, very long time. It’s been extremely stable, attached to an Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), and keeping my computers safe and free from the latest worms people worry about on a seemingly weekly basis. Really, it’s been almost maintenance-free. I’ve really enjoyed it.

It’s running on an old Pentium Pro 200MHz with 64 Megabytes of RAM. Donated to me by American Investment Bank, this old box was, literally, headed out the door for the junk pile when I interposed and asked if I could rescue it from that ignoble fate.

The things I like about it?

• It’s extremely quiet, since the processor only uses a heat sink, and not a fan. There’s a fan on the power supply, but I seriously think this little box could do without any fans and still keep a reasonable temperature.
• It’s kind of large-ish, but very empty, and sits next to my entertainment center on top of the UPS that keeps the power supply to it stable.
• It doesn’t have a reset switch, and I can cover the power switch with duct tape to prevent 2-year-old fingers from exploring.
• Running BSD on it is a joy. For most of what I need it for, it’s more than fast enough, and OpenBSD (unlike the Linux kernel) avoids paging things to swap if possible. This means that, I can come back to it after a few days of not using it, and log in quickly. On some of my Linux hosts, if I haven’t shelled in for a while, they take a while paging back in the stuff the computer hasn’t used in a while before giving me a chance to log in.

Anyway, I finally decided it was time to upgrade the old girl again. She was running an old version of OpenSSH, that, while not vulnerable (since OpenBSD wasn’t vulnerable to a recent OpenSSH exploit), was a target for automated attacks to just keep trying. I got sick of it. And I wanted to start over fresh, have a chance to remember what it was like to configure an OpenBSD system from scratch again.

So I swapped in a relatively new hard drive left over from my recent upgrade of my home studio workstation, and began the CD-ROM install. I chose to go ahead and install everything. In OpenBSD, this means (oh, the horror!) that the install is close to 400 megabytes. For EVERYTHING. Compare that to RedHat, where an “everything” install clocks in at about 6 gigabytes.

I chose a relatively sensible (from a security perspective) partitioning scheme: a 4 GB / (root) partition, 4 GB /var (people can DOS your box by filling up log files), and really big /home. I thought about doing a /usr/local partition (for those ports and packages you know), but the only real advantage I see there is that you can mount that partition read-only to prevent people running custom binaries. Given that I’m the only user of the system, and that if an attacker chose to, he could just umount /usr/local and remount it read-write if he were able to get in anyway, I thought it was of dubious benefit.

I did flag /var and /home noexec, and / will be mounted read-only (which includes /usr/local) once I’m done installing packages, so it’s all good.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. I ran into an incredibly annoying behavior: My OpenBSD firewall would keep just disappearing on me. I mean, one minute, I’m surfing the ‘net with impunity, the next, I can’t resolve hostnames, can’t ping it or anything past it… gah, annoying. Went a whole day today without being able to check on it, because it was down.

And my kids were ticked 🙂 “Dad, I couldn’t Google all day!” “Dad, I couldn’t visit Barbie.com!” “Dad, why wasn’t my email working?” “Dad, what happened to barnson.org today?”

You get the idea.

Well, after much Googling, thinking, and checking for flags, I finally figured out the solution from this cryptic man page entry for apmd:

If the -a flag is specified, any BIOS-initiated suspend or standby re-quests are ignored if the system is connected to line current and not running from batteries (user requests are still honored).

That was my problem: though I wasn’t loading the APM (Advanced Power Management) daemon, the BIOS of the box was sending standby requests which the operating system was honoring: turning off the monitor, slowing down the CPU, turning off the hard disk, but most importantly:

Shutting down the network interface cards

I can deal with a machine being slightly non-responsive when I first connect (after all, it’s little better than a dumb router with a really secure operating system), but when the NICs shut down, it’s useless. So I edited /etc/rc.conf.local, adding this line:

# MattB: “-a” causes apm to ignore standby events.
apmd_flags=”-a” # for normal use: “”

I fired up apmd with “-a” manually from the command line, and it seems to be behaving now. But I keep getting this message in the log file now, hundreds of times:

Jun 24 18:15:40 monica /bsd: apm0: APM set power state: parameter out of range (10)

Guess that will be the next thing to figure out. The long-term solution is probably to go into the BIOS of this decrepit old system and change the power management setting.

The problem?

This is one of those ancient Compaq systems where the BIOS menus are stored on the hard drive, rather than being a chip on the board.

I nuked the first hard drive when I installed OpenBSD.

The joys of computing!

So several years ago I used to work for Excite@Home. Except when I was hired there, they were called “iMall”; our e-commerce operation was one of many acquisitions in the years prior to @Home’s demise.

Anyway, I used to make the daily drive to go work for Steve Fulling and Phil Windley. It wasn’t too bad: an hour and fifteen minutes from my house, sixty-six miles each way, driven lovingly on back roads from my home in Tooele, UT to Orem.

I have an interview with a company in Provo, just slightly south of Orem, on Thursday, so I decided to follow my usual routine and make sure to stake out the building in advance. Really, it’s so that I can be sure I find the place; the only thing worse than my sense of appropriate comedic timing is my sense of direction. Anyway, I made the drive from Salt Lake City, to Provo to check out this enormous campus. I mean, enormous. I know, people from back East will think our little large companies are laughable, but this would be, by far, the largest company I’d worked for if I am hired.

Anyway, so I discovered that, in the intervening years, the little back country road I took every day to work has now become a gridlocked, bumper-to-bumper, torn-up main street. There are thousands of homes now where there used to be fields of potatoes and other vegetables. In the verdant valley I used to pass through without noticing much development, the community of Eagle Mountain has encroached half the mountain side.

A part of me mourned the serene country ride I’d never have again.

And a bigger part of me wanted to move to one of the new houses if I do get this job. They are big, and inexpensive, and closer to my work than I am now.

Ever find yourself on that same kind of mental path? Remembering the way things were, wishing they were still that way, and yet being glad for change because it keeps life fresh and interesting?

Aside from the gridlock, though. That’s boring.

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

I just received this valuable terrorist alert in my inbox. In the interest of furthering the war effort, I present it for you now:

At New York’s Kennedy International Airport today, an individual, later discovered to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide rule, and a calculator.

Attorney general John Ashcroft believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement. He is being charged with carrying weapons of math instruction.

“Al-gebra is a very fearsome cult indeed”, Ashcroft said. “They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on a tangent in search of an absolute value. They consist of quite shadowy figures, with names like ‘X’ and ‘Y’ , and although they arefrequently referred to as ‘unknowns’, we know that they really belong to a common denominator and are part of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country. As the great Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, ‘There are 3 sides to every triangle.’ ”

When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, “If God had wanted us to have weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes.”

“I am gratified that our government has given us a sine that it is intent on protracting us from these math-dogs who are willing to disintegrate us with calculus disregard. Murky statisticians love to inflict plane on every sphere of influence,” he said, adding: “Under the circumferences, we must differentiate their root, make our point, and draw the line.”

He warned, “These weapons of math instruction have the potential to decimal everything in their math on a scalene never before seen unless we become exponents of a Higher Power and begin to factor-in random facts of vertex.”

He said, “As our Great Leader would say, read my ellipse. Here is one principle he is uncertain of: though they continue to multiply, their days are numbered as the hypotenuse tightens around their necks….”

I apologize for my lack of posts lately; I’m cooking up a couple of technical articles with tips I’ve picked up on FreeBSD and spam filtering.

But more important than that, I’ve been working my keister off preparing music for Void War by Rampant Games. We have about half the songs ready that we need, and there’s about six weeks until release.

Suffice to say, I’m stressed 🙂 But the game is looking really good already, plays very well single-player, and Jay and John, the programmers, are working out some multiplayer bugs (though it’s quite playable multiplayer, just not on a link that’s subject to really bad packet loss). It’s not much money unless the game scores incredibly big, but still, the worst case is that I’ve spent several months preparing music for a game that doesn’t take off.

And I really think this game will do well in the independent market 🙂 Otherwise, why do it?

But if nothing else, doing so much music has got me back “in the groove” of it again. Not a day goes past that I don’t end up having a new riff or theme playing in my brain on my trip home from work. I’m eager to sit down to my synthesizers and Cakewalk Sonar 3.1 to compose music when I get home.

Some technical things bug me, like some really weird routing changes in the signal path between Sonar 2.X and 3.X. Why did they route everything to a sound card channel by default rather than to BUS A and then the channel? Why’s the CPU usage so much higher on the same tune as 2.X? Progress, I guess.

Which means I’m saving money for a new computer, too. Got a check in the mail from a good friend who owed me money, and it looks like I should be able to afford that dual Athlon motherboard, memory, and CPU combo I’ve been hunting for.

Dual-processor computing rocks. People pooh-pooh it because it doesn’t “benchmark” as well as a single-CPU system, but if you’ve used the two types, you know the difference. A duallie remains very responsive under heavy load, while a single doesn’t. Simple as that. Sure, you lose some top-end performance, but when I’m adjusting sliders, tracking my automation in setting and killing effects, and trying to use various software synths, I need all the responsiveness I can get. I know what it takes to max my CPU, and if I could just do that, and be able to manually adjust a slider without causing a dropout or jerkiness in the slider motion as recorded due to a badly lagging machine, I’d be satisfied.

Well, OK, not really. It doesn’t matter how much hardware I have, I’ll probably drive it to the max anyway.

So last night I started a new tune for Void War called “Bereft”. Umm, here, I’ll give you a little chunk of it:

“Bereft” Sample. Internet Explorer screws this up if you just click. Try right-clicking and “save as” instead, otherwise it chops it in half. Lame web browser.

(Note: You’ll need a player capable of ogg vorbis to play this. I recommend WinAmp. I’ve changed audio formats; I’m sick of the politics surrounding MP3, and the fact that OGG is half the size for the same quality doesn’t hurt. I’m pretty limited on space here in my virtual server.)

Anyway, that’s just what I worked on last night prior to our playtest. Definitely nowhere near finished, and is a lot of cut-and-paste while I flesh out the structure.

But anyway, to get back to the point of my post: this is why I haven’t had much time to post. Busy, busy, busy. And finding a new job! So if you know anybody looking for a good UNIX admin, point them to my resume, would you?

Off to work now!

So I was reading the latest I, Cringely column which was about the blogging phenomenon, how we have probably 24 years or so more before it becomes an accepted, everyday “normal” thing, when I read to the end of the article.

It was somewhat of a non-sequitur in the article, but he briefly recounted his dinner some years ago with Ronald Reagan. And his main impression? Reagan was a funny guy. Here’s the joke Reagan told him; I thought it was funny enough to share!

---

One night in 1978, my friend John Austin, who had covered Governor Reagan for Time magazine, and I met for dinner in San Jose, California. The former governor wasn’t even running for President yet, but was in town that day to give a lunch speech. Reagan’s plane back to Los Angeles, where Nancy was waiting, didn’t leave for several hours, so we kept him company. Over drinks and then dinner, Reagan never once mentioned politics. Instead he told an unending string of Irish jokes. Here is my favorite:

Two Irish ladies were at the wake for their dear friend. “Poor Mollie,” said the first woman, looking down at the body, “she had such a hard life. First she married Mike, who gave her five crying children in six years. He beat her and never worked a day in his life. Then Mike up and died, and she married Johnny, who was even worse, giving her seven more children and not a penny of support. He was drunk all the time until he died, too. And now Mollie is gone, worked to death taking care of those 12 kids.”

“Well, at least they are together at last,” replied the second woman.

“You mean together in Heaven?” asked the first woman. “But is Mollie together with Mike or with Johnny?”

“I was referring to her legs.”

So, in the grand tradition of Ronald Reagan, what’s your funniest ethnic joke? Try to remember that my children, family, and relatives read this board; the joke above is about as dirty as I want to get 😉 And when I say “ethnic”, I mean a joke representative of a funny stereotype of an ethnic group. Not jokes insulting to that ethnic group.

OK, disclaimer: done…

  I couldn’t sleep last night, so around 2 AM I posted new pictures of the Barnson family. Figured you might get a kick out of seeing the whole clan. So there ya go.

We did the photo shoot in the Oquirrh mountains east of Tooele, UT. There are some beautiful spots within easy driving distance of our house; a pity we don’t visit them more often. These are a few samples; more good ones (including close-ups of the kids) are in the photo album.

The weather was clear and warm, with a light breeze. The principal concern of the children was that the very large termites, on the “log” shots, not get on them. They’re a bit squeamish about bugs — gotta work on that. Afterwards we bought barbecue pork and beef sandwiches from a new roadside stand on main street along with our photographer, Verlene Sedgewick. Verlene is an old friend of Christy’s, and an amateur photographer who does surprisingly fine work.

EDIT by matthew: Experiencing weirdness with my photo gallery software, fixed all photo links to just go to the album instead of individual photos.

So I’m facing unemployment again (my last day on my current contract is July 2). Anybody know of a place needing a good UNIX administrator?

We’re even considering relocation this time! Christy told me, “if it comes down to a choice of you taking a job out of state, or being unemployed for an extended period of time, I’d rather move than be unemployed.”

So, if you’re aware of anybody looking for a UNIX admin with light programming experience in Perl, shell, and Python, have them check out my resume on this site. I also do SANS, Windows (in moderation), and when it comes to Internet infrastructure, that’s one of my specialties. I particularly love work with Apache web server and acceleration/load-balancing techniques.

In fact, if any of you are game, I’d love snail-mails of newspaper clippings from want ads, or links to relevant online want ads in region-specific papers. For the first time in seven years, I bought a Sunday Deseret News yesterday to look at their diminutive Computer jobs column. Who knows what will come next?