A couple of days ago, I ran the systeminfo command on one of our production servers because I wanted to know how much memory was being used by the machine. The result:
Total Physical Memory: 4,091 MB
Available Physical Memory: 3,329 MB
Page File: Max Size: 83 MB
Page File: Available: 3,243 MB
Page File: In Use: 18,446,744,073,709,548,456 MB
Page File Location(s): c:pagefile.sys
I hope I’m not the only one who thinks a 18,446,744,073,709,548 gigabyte swap file is a bit excessive.
Tonight, I was surprised to find that BoingBoing, one of my favorite sites, posted my submission about the audio recordings I made of “phone phreaking” (a.k.a., phone hacking) back when I was a troublemaking teen. The recordings are a snapshot of a seemingly by-gone age of hacker culture when it existed primarily in BBSes and compromised voice mail box systems. I kind of miss those days. My Apple //c’s 2400 baud modem was a speed demon!
Many, many thanks to Jason Scott of Textfiles.com and BBSDocumentary.com for his gracious support and efforts with hosting and cataloging my recordings. Be sure to visit his sites and see all of the wonderful work he has done to preserve computing history.
Update: I just wanted to post a pic of the type of recording device I used to obtain these recordings.
Prior to purchasing it, I spent a lot of time scribbling down on paper the codes and numbers I heard on the voice mail boxes. Some of the phreakers spoke too quickly, so I bought the recorder in an effort to keep up. It was crude but very effective.
We’re on our insane crunch period trying to push out the latest release of our case management software for the Kentucky Department of Public Advocacy. We finally got a build together after many long hours, late nights, and weekend toil. A very frustrating and work-intensive time. So, today we finally start deploying our software to the client’s SQL Server environment, and all is going very well. The software is prepped, the environment is set up, files are transfered, and the databases are installed. We are moments away from showing the customer the software they’ve been patiently waiting on for many months.
Then, as is typical in software development, the last minute blockade appears. In this case, it was TCP port 1433. The SQL Server instance, despite being rigged to listen to TCP port 1433, would not listen to TCP port 1433. Was it the firewall? No. Some kind of network configuration error? No. SQL Server’s error logs show nothing. I keep looking, and looking, and still nothing. Valuable time drips away. The customer’s still waiting. I conference in with their network administrators, who are as baffled as me about what could possibly be causing this problem. I read several troubleshooting guides. Nothing. Then, I decide to look in the Event Viewer, and I find this gem:
You are running a version of Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Desktop Engine (also called MSDE) that has known security vulnerabilities when used in conjunction with the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 family. To reduce your computer’s vulnerability to certain virus attacks, the TCP/IP and UDP network ports of Microsoft SQL Server 2000, MSDE, or both have been disabled. To enable these ports, you must install a patch, or the most recent service pack for Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or MSDE from http://www.microsoft.com/sql/downloads/default.asp
Our little software development army was pressed up against tiny, insignificant port 1433, simply because Microsoft had enough foresight to realize that maybe they shouldn’t allow their own virus-vulnerable product to sit naked on port 1433 inviting malware to feast on the server. Which, of course, made it useless to our app, since we need to connect to that port.
We lick our wounds and carry on, waiting for the next inevitable encounters with Murphy’s Law and Hofstadter’s Law.
The development team I am a part of is scattered across the country. We chat in an IRC channel to keep in touch about our progress, questions, issues, schedules, and whatever else comes to mind. In the IRC channel there is an IRC bot named inky that is used to store occasionally useful snippets of information, such as phone numbers, development server logins, and so forth. But one of its fun features it that it is able to generate random haikus based on phrases that are taught to it by participants in the IRC channel. Here are some highlights:
pelvis and booty
it’s a crazy chicken world
you boinked the undead
what a flippin tool.
I had a bunch of those too
really bites my crank
hey, that fragment sucked
goddamn bill gates and excel
in death’s dream kingdom
she wore blue velvet
never pet a burning dog
rhinoceros? where?
sounds deafen the ear
i’m just thorns without the rose
my skin holds me in
Ah, how it reminds me the good ol’ days when I worked on GOOSE with Jerry.
Posted in computing, funny, meaningless, tech
Bathsheba Grossman makes fantastic sculptures by printing in 3D with metal.
I wish I had the spare cash to spring for one of these. Though, the “Mini” models are somewhat affordable (less than $100).
I found about about the artist from Make Magazine‘s video podcast.
For the same perverse reason people think it’s a good idea to put a chicken inside of a duck inside of turkey, I gave Parallels Workstation a try. Parallels Workstation allows you to run multiple operating systems from within a single host operating system. Here’s an insane shot of my Macbook Pro running Ubuntu Linux (the new Dapper Drake Flight 6 bleeding edge version) simultaneously with Windows XP; and, for extra credit, Karate Champ in MacMame:
Click for full gory detail.
I get a kick out of the fact that both XP and Ubuntu boot faster in the virtual machines on my Macbook Pro than I’ve ever seen them boot on real hardware.
Hmmm, here’s more potential to notch up the nerdiness level: Apple ][ emulators. Though summoning dead ancestors with such tools seems vaguely… unnatural.
Posted in computing, crackbaby, meaningless, tech
On Monday my new Macbook Pro arrived. Three days earlier it was in a factory in Shanghai! Why can’t everyone be as efficient as FedEx?
When I was in 2nd grade, there was a computer in our class and the teacher would let me stay after class to type in programs from a magazine. One of the programs I typed in made some kind of cool graphics display when I finally finished typing. Well, cool at the time, anyway. I was sold onto computers ever since. Picking up on my interest, my parents got me an Apple //c for my birthday which ranks up there as one of the most influential things they did for me.
I kept typing away. While the cool kids were outside playing, I was busy typing in programs from Nibble magazine, which is probably what created my appreciation for programming. Makes me wonder how such an interest is conveyed to today’s kids.
Sure, Lode Runner LOOKS colorful, but all I had on my Apple was green on black! The kids that had Commodore 64s had it better, since the games were superior.
So, I’ve now come full circle with my return to Apple. And like a million other dorks, I’ve posted geeky pictures of my Macbook on my blog.
The cool styrofoam all the Mac dorks keep talking about.
The little square box contains all the user manuals and CDs. Very compact and well designed. And the little remote is cute. You use it to control Front Row, a media center for OS X.
Behold the shiny X. Your brain shall be imprinted and uploaded for review by the cult of Steve.
The machine is very fast. From poweron to desktop took all of some number of seconds that I didn’t count.
Since I am such a greedy bastard I have three laptops now. One runs XP, the other runs Ubuntu Linux, and now I’ve got the Macbook. A buffet of the best and worst of each world.
Overall, I’m enjoying the Macbook Pro quite a bit. I’m still trying to get used to the Apple way of doing things. They certainly put a lot of effort into the look-and-feel of every application. I hope that the attention to detail extends beyond the “ooh, shiny” aspect of the machine.
That look is Bill Gates’ reaction to a hilarious dig by the inventor of control-alt-delete, who at a gathering at the twentieth anniversary of the IBM PC said this:
I may have invented control-alt-delete, but Bill (Gates) made it famous.
Here is a great video of this moment.
Filelight allows you to understand exactly where your diskspace is being used by graphically representating your filesystem as a set of concentric segmented-rings. Filelight creates a complex, but data-rich graphical representation of the files and directories on your computer. The net-result is something similar to KDirStat, however the data is more dense, and the representation more informative. Most people tend to use Filelight to find out where their diskspace is concentrated, and this is what it is mostly designed to do.
And here’s a Flash-based alternative called torta: Link.
Posted in computing
When you stare at data long enough, patterns emerge.
(click for full)
Yeah, I need to get out more. But the glowing box of light resists my feeble efforts.
Posted in computing