señor taco’s travels

Well, I’m going to have to dig in some of the dusty recesses of my brain on
this one. Often times I will put my iPod in shuffle song mode, goto
Browse->Songs, pick a starter song and then let it pick from all
(currently) 5359 songs on the unit to play. Occasionally there will be songs
from the same artist and even album following each other. That’s fine I
guess, but I’d rather if it didn’t do that. However today there was an odd
occurrence. A song by the band Avail played and then the song that followed
it was the song that follows on the album. I though the shuffle had been
turned off for a second there.

I’m so rusty at statistics that I’ll need to look at some reference to
remember how to calculate the probability of that happening (and if you’re
going to comment with the answer please put something like SPOILER in the title
of your comment, thanks).

Firesomething “is
an extension for Mozilla Firefox/Firebird. It allows you to change the product
name in various parts of the browser. Random name generation ensures perpetual
humor and possible end-user confusion.”

As you can see I’ve been kind enough to put a comment in my User-Agent string
so sites can deduce the true browser. I also didn’t change it from Mozilla,
but that is possible.

Okay, the server move went smoothly. Everything should be up and running, but
if you notice something wacky with the site then please let me know.

One change on the blog side is that I went to mostly static content. I still
have comments on for now, but I’ve been getting comment spam so I’m going to
have to figure out how to deal with that. Part of this change is that my RSS
feed has moved (the old one still works until I disable that :) so please
use this link to grab
RSS from here now.

Thanks.

I’ll be moving things over to a different server over the next couple of days.
Please let me know if you see anything odd.

alt="EA Billboard" />

Cruising around the net this morning I checked href="http://www.decafbad.com/blog/" title="0xDECAFBAD">0xDECAFBAD to see
what new quick links where there. One of them was titled href="http://www.pbase.com/images/24017078.original.jpg" title="EA Billboard">
EA billboard ad for nerds (one line of C code) so of course I had to look.
It’s a great ad (as you can see above) for us nerds.

For those not of the nerdly persuasion (or for those nerds that don’t speak C)
here is the rundown for you. The code in full, compilable C:

#include <stdio.h>

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    const char msg[] = {78, 111, 119, 32, 72, 105, 114, 105, 110, 103, 0};
    printf("%s\n", msg);
    return(0);
}

and then, once compiled you get (click and highlight to see the answer, I don’t
want to spoil the fun for everyone):

underdog: ./billboard
Now Hiring

Overall it’s pretty cool. I wonder how many people will understand it and how
many will apply based on it.

I recently obtained a copy of BSD Sockets Programming from a Multi-Language Perspective by M. Tim Jones and decided to href="http://www.sfobug.org/reviews/BSDSocketsProgramming.html"
title="BSD Sockets Programming Review">review it. It’s a good book for
learning network programming. The review is hosted by the href="http://www.sfobug.org/">SFOBUG. Please direct any comments on the
content of the review to me.

For those of you that may or may not care at all I have written a review of
the O’Reilly published
book, title="ORA catalog">Secure Programming Cookbook for C and C++. The review
is available on the href="http://www.sfobug.org/reviews/SecureProgrammingCookbook.html"
title="Secure Programming Cookbook Review">SFOBUG website. Comments should
be directed to me.

Last night was the September meeting for the SFOBUG and the speaker was none other than
Vipul Ved Prakash of
Vipul’s Razor
fame and now the Chief Scientist at
title=”Cloudmark, Inc.”>Cloudmark.

Vipul came in and gave us an excellent overview of Razor and
href=”http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/” title=”SpamNet”>SpamNet
and how they work with the Cloudmark servers. The overall structure of the
process is fascinating (hopefully Vipul’s sketch will be available online
soon and I’ll link to it then). He also went into a little bit of the way the
spam email is analyzed and what is stored and what is thrown away.

Since the Razor/SpamNet system is based on trust and community there are
definitely benefits to blocking spam in this way. For instance, Vipul related
the fact that when the Sobig virus started up they got a few reports from
Denmark at first, then, with the trust in place the users of Razor and SpamNet
had those emails blocked before Sobig got really going. Simply amazing.

If online notes become available I’ll post a link to them or the notes
themselves.

So, I have worked with alpha-based computers for several years and I even
had a few for a while, but in preparing to move I decided I didn’t want
those any longer, but I did want an alpha. Well, this last week I put a
posting on craigslist.org saying I wanted an alpha. This weekend I
was able to pick one up really cheap. Man I love the Bay Area. I can
probably find any hardware I’d want out here.

The alpha is a Personal Workstation 600a:

• 21164A EV56 600MHz Alpha cpu
• 128MB RAM (with 2 open slots so I can expand it later)
• 2x 4GB SCSI hdd
• SCSI CD-ROM
• SCSI 4mm Tape Drive (DDS-3 DDS-2)

This machine will be named Bob, after Silent Bob in the Jersey Trilogy.

Last week I went down to San Jose and picked up an UltraSparc 5. The specs
are:

• 333 MHz UltraSparc IIi with 2MB cache
• 512MB Ram (50ns stuff I think)
• 8.4GB IDE HDD (I’ll add another one later, this is fine for now)
• ATI video on-board (runs X-Windows at 1280×1024 16-bit with no problems)

That’s pretty much it. I’ve got OpenBSD-current running on it (3.4-beta
as of this writing). Ports work fine except I already found a problem
with my audio/p5-CDDB_get port, it fails the ioctl on big endian machines.

In keeping with my naming convention of characters from Kevin Smith movies (with one exception, but I just loved the name smudge too much not to use it) I’ve named this one Steve-Dave after the owner of Comic Toast in Mall Rats (mostly because it starts with an “s” just like sparc64).