Those of you too squeamish to use actual cadavers as material from which to fashion your undead legions of terror may wish to consider cucumbers, instead:
Now Reading: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. Fine, I’m reading it, okay? Now stop asking.
Just Finished: A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers.
So, as you may recall, Dave Eggers was recommended to me based on a complex mathematical algorithm that took into account my personal tastes based on how I rated a bunch of books that I wanted to get rid of. I didn’t know quite what to expect upon reading this book, but was quite pleasantly surprised. In fact, it seemed eerily familiar, almost as though it were something I, myself, would have written.
So, what is the heartbreaking work of staggering genius? It’s the story of a young man and his kid brother who lose their parents and then move to California. Most of it has more to do with the narrator’s internal state, his reaction to events around him, than to the events themselves. I quite liked it.
It’s a shame that the media has perverted the word hacker into a pejorative. The original meaning behind the word is a wonderful one. A hacker was somebody that loved to learn how things worked and used that knowledge to do new things, which they loved to share with other people. Sadly, somewhere along the line, a journalist who wasn’t quite clear on the concept (or just didn’t care) added the connotation of crime to the word, and there it’s stuck. It’s too bad, too, since there’s not really another word that means quite the same thing. But that’s just the evolution of the language, I suppose. Gay meant cheerful before it meant homosexual, after all, and now, to many people gay is nothing but a synonym for pathetic.
Anyway, I went to an Information Security conference this weekend. Calling it a hacker’s conference would probably give someone out there the wrong idea. But there were hackers aplenty. And they had lots of interesting things to say. I also vaguely recall a party of some sort.
And now to answer the question, did you learn anything useful?
Sure, although it would take a long time to explain, and after a few minutes of my trying to explain it, most non-geeks would probably lose interest. (Ah, geek— there’s another word that’s changed its meaning, from social misfit to expert in a technical field or hobby.) But if I were to sum it up in one sentence, that sentence might be: as long as there is sloppy code, there will be exploits. Or in other words, as long as there are hacks, there will be hacks.
I guess the pool with the cocktail bar was heated. Stupid Global Warming! But seriously, the reason I’ve been so quiet lately is that I had to RMA my bionic hands have been far too busy being delicious am struggling to stay afloat in a rip current of mundanity. Furthermore, in this rip current, some unwelcome-and/or-annoying, yet utterly mundane situations have arisen. As a result, I have been giving thought to changing my name and moving somewhere far, far away, such as Miami or France or Baltimore.
But rather than liquidating my possessions and crafting a technically real, yet wholly phony alternate identity, I have so far spent the weekend sitting on my couch immersed in Rock Band 2. And what has this taught me? Were I ever to have auditioned for American Idol, I would not have been the guy who impressed the judges by choosing an easy but obscure lounge song in his vocal range. I’d have been one of those people who made it on to TV by being not just bad, but extraordinarly bad.
*sigh*
Here’s hoping the mundanity passes and things can get back to their usual interesting selves.
I wanted to do the Google Image Meme today, but I didn’t like what I was coming up with, so instead, here’s Friday Fun: This or That Edition.
- 1. You are in an adventurous mood. Do you go deep sea diving or sky diving? Any idea where you would like to do it?
- I would love to go scuba diving at some beautiful tropical reef somewhere, just to see all the exotic fish and corals and other creatures in their natural habitat. Then, afterward, I would lie on the beach drinking rum, and a little later we would all build a fire and make fish tacos, and then we’d drink more rum and sing and dance. The next day, I’d wake up in a fancy room at an island resort curled up next to the toilet, covered in what used to be rum and fish tacos, but you know what? It might be worth it.
- 2. You just won an all expenses paid trip to anywhere in the world. Do you go to Japan or to France? Why?
- Oooh, tough choice. Japan, or France? Paris or Tokyo? Wine or sake? Eiffel Tower or Mount Fuji? *sigh* Well, they don’t have creepy blue androids in France, so I think I’ll have to go with Japan.
- 3. You meet a stingy genie that will only grant one wish. Do you wish for more money or a better body? Why?
- Oh, a better body. For sure. As long as this genie’s not one of those literal genies— you know, the type that would summon a body of ideal proportions and then lay it at your feet. Or the type of genie who takes artistic license — you know, the type that would take the liberty of changing your species. Or a pissed-off genie like the one from Wishmaster— you know what? I think I’ll just take the money, even though it’s sure to be cursed, or booby-trapped, or stolen, or fake, or all of the above…
- 4. You have $50 burning a hole in your pocket. Do you head to the book store or to a spa? What would you get?
- Bookstore. I’m not sure exactly what I’d get. I suppose it would depend on which bookstore I ended up at.
- 5. It is time for a caffeine jolt. Do you go for the coffee pot or for the soda? Any favorites?
- Not long ago, I’d have headed straight for the soda machine, but the break room now has one of those single-cup coffee makers. You know the sort. You pop in a plastic thimble full of coffee grounds, press a button, and moments later, a steaming cup of joy awaits you any time of the day! For FREE! Wheee!!!
Now reading: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.
Just Finished: The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner
I originally became interested in this book when I heard that it contained the earliest reference to a computer worm, that is, a program that eats its way through a network, much as a bookworm eats its way through the pages of a book. Interestingly enough, the data network in the book is so infested with "tapeworms" that it’s easier just to ignore the tapeworms than to try to destroy them. Much, it seems, as is the Internet of today.
Published in 1975, this book makes some good guesses about the future, such as that there will be a global information network (accessed by ‘veephones’ in the book) and that people will become nomadic, moving from place to place and job to job (somewhat true) and that a need for familiarity by the nomads will render cities virtually identical. (Does your town have a Starbucks, a Target, and a Carl’s Jr? Mine, too!)
I think I’d describe this book almost as a proto-cyberpunk V for Vendetta. There is no sense of cyberspace as a place to be visited, but rather as a thing that is tediously interacted with through button pushes. And of course there is nobody in a (literal) mask going around blowing up buildings.
Q: Dear all-seeing, all-knowing, and (pretty, pretty please) all-telling Electronic Replicant,
I am trying to create a passwordless public-key SSH connection between two computers in order to automate a task. I’ve copied the public key from id_dsa.pub on the client computer to ~/.ssh/authorized-keys on the server computer. However, it doesn’t seem to work. I get asked my password every time. I have verified that the cryptographic keys match on both computers. I have tried changing the permissions on ~/.ssh and its contents to 0600. That didn’t help. I ensured "PubkeyAuthentication yes" was in my sshd_config file. I must have restarted sshd a dozen times.
I even tried debug mode (ssh -vvv) and saw this:
debug2: we sent a publickey packet, wait for reply
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password,keyboard-interactive
debug2: we did not send a packet, disable method
Something was clearly going wrong with the SSH daemon, so I built the latest version of both it AND the OpenSSL library from source and STILL I got the same result!
Please help me, Electronic Replicant, before I go insane!
A: The public key file must be named authorized_keys, not authorized-keys.
The good news is that yes, I did get my 360 back.
The bad news is that it might still be just the slightest wee bit off kilter:
I went out to lunch with a friend today. We went to Phil’s Barbecue, a rare treat for me. Why? Well it’s a popular place. How popular? So popular that the line for the counter went out the door and across the front of the building. This is why I rarely go there, even though I’m in the neighborhood almost daily.
Anyway, we got our food to go, since the place was packed, and a picnic sounded nice. But where would we go? Balboa park? No… they don’t have a picnic area that we can recall, and it’s just far away enough that the food might have been getting just a little bit cold by the time we got there. How about the Presidio? No… they do have a picnic area, but it’s at the top of a hill. Mission Bay? Yes, perfect! They have a picnic area and it’s even on the water, and it’s close enough that the food wouldn’t get cold before we got there. Off we went.
So we went to Mission Bay, and found not only a parking spot, but also a picnic table… in the shade. We had a beautiful view of the water and Fiesta Island, and our tasty barbecue sandwiches. Perfect… right?
Did I mention the gentle zephyr blowing across the water? No? That must have been because it wasn’t that gentle. In fact, it was like trying to eat in a convertible, with the top down, on the freeway. Not only did I have to weight my napkins down with my drink, I had to stab my plastic utensils into the food’s styrofoam clamshell to keep them from blowing away. When I finished the meal, I had barbecue spatter up to the elbow on the left arm and none on the right.
Don’t get me wrong, it was far from a disaster. Next time, though, I don’t think I’ll let a little hill stand in the way of a picnic.
Today, I have three highly-to-mildly amusing timesinks for you, presented in order of sinkiness.
Not Always Right is a hall of shame of evil and stupid customers. Even though I long ago put in my time on the far side of the counter, I’m still amazed at how insane some people can be. It seems to me that some people have this bizarre sense of entitlement about themselves, as though merely existing were enough to make one not just special, but practically royalty. I’m kind of reminded of the drive-through woman from a Burger King ad who imperiously demanded to speak to a manager after learning that she would not be sold the hamburger she desired. I’m sure she threw a tantrum when she reached the window. A tantrum over a hamburger. A hamburger which, by the way, the company is not obligated to make available.
I find ridiculous the people that insist on having their own way and who resort to bullying and spurious logic to try to get there. I understand (all too well!) that people sometimes make mistakes, but I’ve never understood exactly what insulting the person who made the mistake is supposed to accomplish.
“To be humble to superiors is duty, to equals courtesy, to inferiors nobleness.” – Benjamin Franklin
Next, we have Basic Instructions, a webcomic. Although the drawing style is quite plain and is clearly meant to suggest that of the Federal disaster preparedness brochures, the writing is truly hilarious and had me laughing out loud much of the time. It joins Darths and Droids and We The Robots in my trusty feed reader.
Say, did’ja ever hear how I used to keep up with web comics in the old days? Why, I kept a list of sites in a text file and had a perl script that would visit each one (using lynx) and then compare what it found on this visit with what it found last visit. I don’t remember exactly why I stopped using it, but I kinda think it had somethin’ to do with some of those strips peggin’ me as some kind of bot. Dunno where they’d get that kind of crazy idea. Why, if people had understood how to use RSS way back then, why, then, I’d probably still be reading those comics.
Ahem. Finally, I call your attention to this photoset, Video games in Lego. I could just restate the obvious here— that it’s a set of photos of Lego reconstructions of classic video game scenes— but I think a picture would illustrate the idea a little more nicely:
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