BitsOfMyMind

While getting my oil change at Mr. Lube, I was thrilled to see that they were using Ubuntu for their customer service computer. I asked the employee if he liked it and he replied to me that the system was brand new and that he had a bit of difficulty adjusting to it, but other than that, he had no complaints about the OS.

Good job . . . → Read More: It’s coming…

A bit more than a year, I realized that if I wanted to ever get in business, I had to come clean with my questionable software licensing practices. Back then, I was operating solely on Windows XP Pro and many other programs that were not acquired in the most legal of ways. Such practices being obviously very risky for anyone making a living out of working computers, I was faced with the decision of either changing everything and shift to a mostly open-source and free software suite or keep the software I was currently using but purchase licenses. I decided to take the harder but cheaper route.

I do not currently run a business, so I guess I could have kept my old habits for a few more years. However, the rationale for making the switch so early is that it takes a fair amount of time to become proficient with a certain program and learning to use one while running a business that depends on it at the same time is quite risky. This is the reason I did it well in advance so that I would not have to bother about server downtime because I am a noob with the . . . → Read More: My move to open-source

“Shape your tools or you will be shaped by . . . → Read More: Repurpose

Concepts pertaining to divinity or the supernatural have always been a peculiar philosophical problem and a major source of discord when subject to discussion. This, in my humble opinion, apart from the emotional arousal they often cause on their proponents, is caused by the fact that those concepts can by their nature only be proven, not disproven. Those who tend to have faith in such concepts have been capitalizing on this disparity forever, at the expense of their opponents, who are most of the time left with empiric arguments and human reasoning as their sole ammunition apart from unilateral proofs (or proofs that cannot disprove), which are in essence flawed tools. However, when the debate becomes stale, this type of proof nonetheless remains valuable as it can at least aid in the convincing of either party, or cause one to reformulate its argumentation. The only problems is that for supernatural phenomenon, most available methodologies for testing are empirical, therefore holding no value in the eyes of the believers, or are simply unrealisable due to the fact that they try to cause a supernatural concept to manifest itself through a rational medium.

While discussing of this problem with a few friends, I came . . . → Read More: The teleportation test

Finally. It took a lot more time than I expected but I got carried on in fixing bugs that I was finding along the way.

v0.2a brings many new things to the table but the most obvious to visitors are:

Comments
feeds (RSS and Atom)
Improved look

On the deployment side of things, I must admit it was a lot more complicated that I had originally planned. v0.1a was a breeze, but for this version, because I had to make changes to the database rather than creating it from scratch, I encountered a huge amount of faults due to changes in names, constraints, tables, etc.

Anyway, this is a great milestone, but there are many others pending in my personal trac. I guess thats what software is: projects with ever-growing room for improvement. If nothing breaks too badly, I’ll put this project aside for a few months and go invest my time in something else. In the meantime, if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to post them or send me . . . → Read More: v0.2a is live!

No they don’t, just the shitty ones do because you rarely go out looking for bad things to happen to you.

If you want something cool to happen (I am not talking of a car, promotion or fame here but about creative ambitions), you have to set the optimal conditions. It will most likely not trigger it automatically, but at least you will up the chances of it happening by a fair amount. Be at the right places, talk with the right people, get youself known by those that might be interested in what you do but above anything stay focused and devote your energies to it. You will most likely not suceed at first, but you will most often have a foot in the door. The biggest effort is removing yourself from that semi-comfortable materialistic life, the rest is easy because at that point, it starts being cool already.

If you want to dance profesionnally (not that I do) then staying in an office just for the sake of financial comfort is most likely not going to cut it. I do not advise on quitting a well paying job to pursue any dream (some are worth it though), but what I would . . . → Read More: Cool things do not happen by accident

I have been using Tree v0.1a, the initial release, for two good months now and I must say I am overly satisfied with the quality of the product. It has not suffered a single failure and is performing up to my expectations.

I know I am not in position to give constructive comments about my own creation, but I think I am well past the “This thing is the next Windows” point. Even if the framework is seriously alpha, I am not the only person who can use it (to a certain extent) and it has not failed miserably whenever I wanted to show it to someone.

Finally some software of my own making that did not get the boot halfway through development and that everyone can use(everyone visiting my site that is). Yes, defects and enhancements are piling up in Trac, but thats a side effect . . . → Read More: Impressions of v0.1a

I am a strong advocate of judgment being the best anti-virus, anti-trojan, anti-worm and anti-etc, but when it comes to protection against intrusion well, judgement cannot be of any help, so I put my trust in firewalls. However, I have lately seen many of my 8-thoushandish (8000, 8001, 8002) ports that I use for development http servers being taken by unknown programs.

In order to identify the culprits, I portscanned all my interfaces (you can do that with nmap) in order to find the associated protocols in the hope that this would give me hints on what processes are to blame. Turns out portscans just give you the name of the protocol that is registed with that port through IANA, which gives you no guaranty the process bound to this port is using that particular protocol (I momentarily had forgotten that TCP and UDP do not care for what they transport). For instance, 8000 is reserved for irdmi, which seems to be lost technology as no ones has clue on what the hell its for.

The commands that are actually needed to find what process owns what port under *nix OSes (beside netstat, whose output I find painful to read) is lsof (list . . . → Read More: Giving a meaning to port scans

Look at this, its about time someone made good use of the hot-swappable physique of the SATA connector. I can finally take advantage of my many spare SATA drives without having to buy a external enclosure for each of them. I just take the drive out of its anti-static wrapping, mate it with the BlacX, and watch OSX’s Time Machine do its magic…

No seriously, I really needed to improve my backup system. As it stood, someone robbing my house could have easily taken all of my digital life with them, but now, I would still have that hidden drive. The next step is protection against fire and other natural disasters, but for that, I just need another loose drive that I could keep at a friend’s place. Aaaahhh, backups, sometimes, I wish I could still think like the profane, that computers contain a certain type of smoke, and that once the smoke is released, it stops working. But no, I have witnessed too many case of data loss (A few years ago, one guy showed at our service desk with his masters on a fried hard drive) and I still pride myself in saying that I have . . . → Read More: The BlacX

I have had many requests to enable comments on my blog, but the reality is not so simple… In fact, it would not be enable comments but rather implement comments. During the development of the Tree Framework (on which my blog runs), I had a primitive commenting system working, but for the version that I fielded, I decided not to use it because it was insecure. I do realize a blog without comments is not really a blog, but the Web is a wild place, and leaving a website on its own with unprotected HTML forms is asking for trouble. Spiders can generate canned spam comments faster than I can delete them.

But rest assured, comments are on the top of my priority list, and I have identified a very neat way of securing the whole thing: ReCaptcha. For those too lazy to click the link, ReCaptcha is a system that aims at validating whether the user submitting a form is human or not by having them solve a captcha; a test computers are notoriously bad at. We have all encountered such a thing when registering on a website, but reCaptcha adds to the concept by using character blocks . . . → Read More: No comments