06 Jun 2004
Whilst I got absolutely no work done today (this is becoming a pattern on weekends – I need to do something about it. If anyone sees me around on a weekend, belt me over the head with the nearest piece of furniture and tell me to start doing some work!), I did do some other stuff.
Like develop about three new styles for this website, two of which were scrapped, and one which will now load at random on the front page (n.b. if you’ve clicked a link already, the style has locked on to you – this is so it doesn’t change every page load and annoy the crap out of you, and people paying the bandwidth bills ;) – if you want to try and randomly load the other style, simply access this website via the address you normally come by (that is, http://streetcomputing.tk/ or http://sc.dalegroup.net/) and press F5 until you see something different ;) ), in addition to the original style of this website.
I just realised it’s not today anymore. Doh. Ah well. In other news, there is now a link you may notice in the linkbar at the top of the page to an area named “My Ramblings”.
That is where all the fun stuff goes. Everything that is too random, or too undeserving of a post of its own, gets dumped there. It’s a highly volatile area, at least, that’s what I’m planning – I don’t know if I’ll simply overwrite old content, or just add bits to the section as I go – the latter is a recipe for a huge page load, so I’ll probably just end up overwriting things. It will possibly make for interesting reading, if all the geek stuff I rant about in the general course of the day bores you – that said, of course some of the stuff in there will be geek-centric. I am a geek, enough said.
So yes. Two (main) new features, that are visible to the outside world. A few CMS-side tweaks and improvements (documentation still needs work, eep! I really should be adding to docs as I add functionality. I need a week off school to get on top of everything, I think.), although nothing major. Little, niggly things, which will be visible when I use them, and are features that I’ve been wanting for a few weeks now – so chances are they’ll get used pretty soon.
That is all I can think of at this time of day – late nights (well, late nights at the computer) aren’t something I’m accustomed to, so forgive me if this is less coherent than usual…
Oh, my printer just made a random purring noise. I think it’s trying to scare the dog away.
Oh, crap – wrong area… *wanders off to ramblings*
05 Jun 2004
Wooooooo!!!! My HP is working again *grins* <— see, I’m happy.
Albeit only in black and white – that, however, is no fault of mine, so all is good. Currently looking into exactly what is the cause of that problem (something hardwareish – heh… I almost said layer 1… doh, I’m a geek.) I didn’t manage to work miracles with the parallel, though – ye good ole USB cable was retrieved from the depths of a briefcase, so that’s (fortunately) what I’m using.
Scanning is working great, xsane preserving sanity… I hadn’t used it before, for a first experience, it was great. Kinda antiquated interface, but still, it was usable, and worked without a glitch to be spoken of. I’m happy.
Back to chopping down trees, I suppose…
05 Jun 2004
Just because Kim wrote the URL in my english folder, and because there are some very cool pictures up in her gallery, a behemoth link to her site: http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/loth/l/i/lithanya/
No progress on the HP front – I’m thinking there is something screwy with my parallel port – perhaps it IS time to bother taking this mobo back… hmm. Onboard sound frazzled a few months ago, and I’ve been putting off replacing it – perhaps parallel got cooked simultaneously? Shrug. It wouldn’t be a problem, but for the fact that I’m unable to locate the USB cable for the damn thing. I’ll have a look around later for that, I guess.
As best I can tell, the Platform Seven streaming media server is still down — so, even if a recording was made, it couldn’t be uploaded until Monday at the earliest. I’ve had enough of a whinge about IT @ SACS in recent days, so I won’t say any more, other than that I think an outage may be in connection with paranoia over certain other… system compromises. Pure speculation, so don’t bother attacking me over that statement.
Even if I don’t give them abuse about it, another site hosted on the same server probably will — as malicious as this may seem, the longer it is out, the better – lower QoS means that people are more likely to start jumping up and down, making noise, and generally demanding that certain problems be resolved. Well, that’s the theory, anyway. I’ve sent emails to staff at SACS before and had them arrive four days late – whilst iiNet’s mail servers aren’t wonderful, if there was that kind of a delay, then they send out NetStatus messages about it, which didn’t happen, so I’m assuming it was a SACS problem, and not iiNet’s. The worst thing is, people haven’t jumped up and down that much about it. Brewing discontent, perhaps, but we’re yet to hit a stage of open rebellion.
When THAT happens, it will be most interesting to watch. Call Ticketek on 9266 4800 now. Err… okay, maybe not.
As alluded to yesterday, I was planning on writing a song about a certain series of events which have been happening over the past week. It doesn’t say anything more than what I have already, but some people may find it vaguely amusing, so what the heck.
To the tune of Pete Murray – So Beautiful:
Built this box just the other day
Installed FC1 booted away,
Hackin’ about j00,
Hackin’ the net j00′re in,
What you up too where you /bin?
(Just hackin’)
And all the packages j00 wear,
And the users in your /home
Shouldn’t chown you
Now you tell me why it’s so
You bigger than mighty Windows,
(At least you think so)
God my fingers burn,
Now when I think of hacking your lair
You have changed so much that I don’t know,
If I can login and tell you I care
And I would love to bring you down,
Set your uptime back on the ground
Throw my mouse down on the desk,
Turn my head, start to stress,
(They’re coming after me)
Compromises are so sweet
Always so much fun, so l33t
(At least I thought so)
Now you think j00′re so damn fine
j00 can’t rule the ‘net no not mine,
I don’t think so.
God my fingers burn,
Now when I think of hacking your lair
You have changed so much that I don’t know,
If I can login and tell you I care
Now the scan that you’re in,
And the users that login
Just get to me,
But j00 think I’m not as cool,
As j00 are so skillful
Well who j00 fooling
Well I’m here to tell you babe
The game j00′re in is just a game
So damn pretentious
God my fingers burn,
Now when I think of hacking your lair
You have changed so much that I don’t know,
If I can login and tell you I care
And I would love to bring you down,
Set your uptime back on the ground
You think you’re so skillful
(So skillful)
Sincerest apologies to Pete Murray and Sony Music Australia.
05 Jun 2004
I was going through a folder today which contained various stuff, and stumbled accross a piece of paper which had been written on the way to reha… the place where we had visions.
This has no real relevance to anything, at least, no more than most things posted here do, but I found it, and it’s kinda cool (I still don’t get how it works), so I’m posting it. If you want to know how on earth it is worked out, ask Tori!
I will end up marrying Katy, drive a Tricycle, have -3 (yes, negative three) children, and work in web development.
One out of four?
I think it was something like come up with five names of people from the opposite gender, five modes of transport, five numbers, and five occupations, and then draw some random spiral thingamajig. I was following it okay up until then… guess I’ll just have to trust her on the actual results, hey? :p
For those who care enough to want to know what COULD have happened:
Names: Tori, Sam, Katy, Kylie, Kim
Transport: Tricycle, Dump Truck, Unicycle, Limo, Jet ski
Numbers: -3, 9, 28, 3000, 2
Occupations: Custodial engineer, Waiter, Web developer, Sign painter, Butler.
Anyway, if you see me driving a tricycle anytime soon, be afraid. ;)
05 Jun 2004
I’m about to have another dig at SACS IT. Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear any more.
So, they’re a school, right? You’d presume that they, like most other businesses, would experience peak activity sometime during the week. You’d be wrong.
A few attacks ago, I made reference to the schools’ email system (specifically staffmail – studentmail reliably delivers all my spam quite nicely. Scary thing is, I haven’t ever used that address for anything outside school! Since I started checking studentmail from home, I’ve picked up 263 spam messages – I think that was about two months ago, now. Sure, it’s well below my regular account, but then “jstreet@subdomain.subdomain.statecode.edu.au” is hardly as predictable as “josh@majorisp.net”, you would think.) — well, that’s what is currently on the “this thing sucks” list.
(n.b. I’ve decided I want to add some sections to this site for that kind of stuff – random thoughts of the moment, etc. I’ll stop interrupting myself, now…)
So on Friday, a certain ITSS teacher sent out an email to all Cisco academy students (basically to check that it was all workingish), with a request that people replied upon reciept. So, people did. People the proceeded to get messages such as this one, politely sent in reply from the schools’ staff email server:
—– Original Message —–
From: “System Administrator” postmaster@sacs.nsw.edu.au
To: someone@somedomain.tld
Sent: Saturday, June 05, 2004 10:08 PM
Subject: Undeliverable: Re: test from Mr Hawkes
Your message
To: Hawkes David
Subject: Re: test from Mr Hawkes
Sent: Fri, 4 Jun 2004 21:14:16 +1000
did not reach the following recipient(s):
Hawkes, David on Fri, 4 Jun 2004 21:11:04 +1000
The recipient could not be processed due to congestion in the message
transfer service
The MTS-ID of the original message is: c=us;a=
;p=sacs;l=STAFFMAIL0406041111LXRJ88GJ
MSEXCH:MSExchangeMTA:STAFF:STAFFMAIL
You really do have to wonder what kind of network congestion an email server at an academic institution can be experiencing at ten o’clock on a Saturday night…
Just for the record, I didn’t get an error when I sent my reply to the email. That one was courtesy of Michael Dale.