Barnson.org

So in the middle of the big move, Weed calls me, and makes some off-hand comment about how my fingers will hurt by the end of the day.

Weed, how right you were. I can barely type, much less open and close my hands into a balled fist. My forearms are gone as well.

10 hours of moving boxes, and we’ve only just begun!

Sammy G

So I’m off work this week, visiting friends on the East Coast. I’m sitting at Justin‘s PC typing this up while checking email.

Unfortunately, somehow the Apache web server startup script on my box got foosed, and it looks like my virtual hosting provider had some kind of outage yesterday. Since I’m on vacation, I don’t feel like taking the time to debug the problem, but I’m sure it’s something fairly trivial. Using “apachectl”, the built-in apache control script, started the web server just fine, but “/usr/local/etc/rc.d/apache.sh start” didn’t do the trick — which would prevent the http daemon from starting up automatically.

It’s been an interesting few days. I flew in Tuesday, and Justin picked me up from the airport. We’ve hung out, hashed on a few tunes on the guitar, and generally had a relaxing, enjoyable time. Today I’ll be hitting the National Air and Space Museum with Jon Brusco. Not sure what else we’re going to do, but considering my flight leaves tomorrow, it doesn’t really matter — it’s just nice to hang out with friends I haven’t seen in nearly (or, erm, more than nearly) a decade.

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.

Hey.. I rarely do this, but I’ve copied this review at both barnson.org and timpane.com.. Oh.. and this review is Spoiler free.

Why?

Because everyone should get out and see this movie now. yup, thats right. Send a message to hollywood that making superhero movies with charm, wit, intelligence, real acting, and a well thought out story is ALWAYS the way to go.

Its true.. this movie is better than the (exceptional) first movie. Like X2:XMen United, this movie picks up from a flawed but good first story, and runs with it, improving on everything good abotu the first one, with lots fewer flaws.

Acting: I hated Dunst as Mary Jane in the first one, but this time she actually had me involved in her story. Tobey is a LOT less bored looking. The villian is 3 dimensional, and not as showy as Dafoe was. Aunt May has an expanded role and plays it beautifully. James Franco as harry osborn takes his character to new heights.. it is just, well, better.

Action: Less of it this time, but when it does come.. it blows away the first movie by leaps and bounds. The CG was seamless.. the scenes tighter.. and there are quite a few “wow” moments.

Story: More complex, less convoluted. It ebbs and flows nicely, and doesn’t rely on some of the contrived conventions of the first film.

Overall: It is a slower movie than the first, but thsi isn’t a bad thing. Instead of a smattering of 2 minute action sequences, it gives you big sequences with more time inbetween centering on story, LOTS of humor, and some real human drama things..

Its hard to do more without giving stuff away. So.. go out and see it.. its worth it.

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

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

In no particular order, here’s a list of what I found that I’d like to see in Vegas.

Pay Stuff: STAR TREK EXPERIENCE: $30 gets 2 different simulator rides, and access to the museum

VENETIAN GONDOLA RIDES: $15.00 with a group

CIRCUS CIRCUS ADVENTUREDOME: $22 for Adults, $14 for kids

STRATOSPHERE:Tower Admission, Big Shot and X Scream $19, Just Tower admission $9

NEW YORK NEW YORK: Manhattan Express Roller Coaster $12.50

PARIS: Eiffel tower $12 for adults, discount for kids

TOURNAMENT OF KINGS: Basically its “Medeival Times”, but it could be a fun dinner. 50 bucks a ticket.

FREE STUFF: Free acts at Circus-Circus every 1/2 hour Kids under 3 are free at the Stratosphere tower Bellagio fountains Fremont Street Experience Lion Habitat: MGM Grand Tiger Habitat: Mirage Masquerade Show in the Sky: Rio Hotel M&M World The SIRENS OF TI at Treasure island (Replaces the Pirate Show) Volcano at the Mirage

As for the day with the Barnsons: Here’s an idea:

1. – Lunch at Quarks Bar and Grill, About 11AM. (On Deep Space Nine) Cost: Moderate, we’ll prbably split a burger (called a “HamBORGer”) and get a snack later in the day. Avg. 8/person (if we get water, which Kel and I will)

2. – Trek (hee hee) over to Stratosphere (north Strip) Go to the top.. see the sites.. Matt and I can ride the 2 thrill rides (Kel may join for 1, but not for both). Cost: $19 for me and matt, $10-15 for Chris and Kel, about $6 for each kid over 3, free for each kid under.

3. – Then, hit Circus-Circus, where the kids can play for a few hours, catch a free circus show or two.. and we adults can ride more rides too(trading off with kids.. fun for all ages. Cost: $22 per adult riding adult rides, $14 per kid. This will take off hours, so it seems to be the best deal.

4.1 – At this point, if we feel like going, it will be like we’ve been at an amusement park all day.. But, if its early, or we feel adventurous.. 4.2 – We could trek to South Strip and see the Lions at MGM (free), walk the Streets of NY (maybe try the coaster), and scope out the M&M World (free), all within 1 block or so..

5. At that point, we will probably be super super tired, so we can grab a car and split.

Total Cost: About $46 per adult About $30 per kid over 3 About $15 per kid under 3

Not bad at all for a FULL ON day in Vegas including lunch..

Of course, none of this is set in stone.. but still, not bad at all.

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!

Okay.. here’s a pinch..

Matt has always been the man to turn to if I had a computer problem.. And I just emailed him about this.. but, just for fun (since I know Matt is not the only computer guru who reads this site)I thought I’d put it up here and see if anyone had a solution.. Official No-Prize to anyone who can solve this.

I have a computer with XP. It doesn’t have an XP disk but rather a restore disk that slaps XP back onto the hard drive.

I shut down that computer yesterday, but it wouldn’t close.. so I had to turn it off. When I tried to turn it back on, it loaded up.. the XP thingy with the green bars scanning across like KITT came up.. it looked ready to go to the desktop.. and..

“click” – it shut down. Did it again.. asked me if I wanted to reboot in safe mode.. said yes.. “click”.. did it again.. this time chose “older configuration”.. “click”, did it again… and again.. and again.

So, I slaved the Drive, which worked fine in that capacity on another computer, copied my files, and reformatted it. Ran the restore disk.. started up.. “click”, did it again.

Thinking I must have a bad hard drive, I took an old HD, reformatted it, installed.. “Click”, did it again.

So, thinking.. “okay, must be a non HD issue”, I brought the two HDs to a working computer.. made them the master.. “Click”, did it again – on both of them.

Tried an old win 98 installed HD on the computer with the problem.. worked fine.

So, I’m thinking there must be a fixable software prblem here.. any takers?

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.