/dev/null productions

They are. And it’s amazing how often they happen at work. Time flows normally while the work comes in and is feathered nicely over the course of the day. Then at some point, the work breaks. Either it gets accomplished much too quickly and a day’s tasking becomes an hour’s blitz, or something is said and any motivation quickly dwindles.

In either case, these relativistic space-time distortions are far-fetching and disastrous. They suck co-workers in like black holes, absolutely refusing to let go no matter what comes its way. This is especially true during holiday weeks and early dismissals, as space-time collapses to a relativistic crawl.

These are the accounts of nightmares.

I’ve fulfilled the requirements of the Nanowrimo competition as of this past Sunday. Fifty-thousand words lie in wait for final verification, to prove themselves to the lords of the Nanowrimo that I have successfully joined their ranks.

But the story continues.

As I’ve enjoyed telling those that ask, I’m almost out of Mexico. There are really only two more acts that need fleshing, and after that comes whatever resolution the characters deem necessary. Elizabeth Wilde has seen more rapid development than I intended. My original purpose through the total arch of 52 assassinations was a slow degradation of her moral fabric. Now, post-arrest, she has grown far more ruthless than I originally intended.

I’m trying to avoid references to the Rivernator, but a couple scenes have definitely played out as such.

My goal is still to finish by November 30th, but I don’t see that happening. There’s just simply too much left to tell. Not that I won’t try, but I’m expecting at least another twenty thousand words before I can finally slap the almighty “The End”.

This has been a spectacular month of storytelling, though, and it’s affected more people around me than I originally thought. My wife is showing an honest interest in the story. My folks constantly ask if I’ve finished. So coworkers got involved and participated on their own (You guys rock). Jim even dived in, and I can’t wait to see what he’s come up with. I’m eager to see the fruits of this past month.

Around the time of Kubuntu 9.04, I was pretty annoyed. I’ve read plenty about how Kubuntu is pretty much the bastard child of KDE and Ubuntu and received very little love insofar as development time, effort, energy, etc. 9.04, I believed, showed this to an extreme. It was buggy, and a lot of these bugs showed up just in the process of ordinary use. These are just my own personal examples:

* Unstable OpenGL Desktop acceleration (I typically ran without effects 24/7)
* Poor Suspend-to-RAM recovery. 1 in 3 wake-ups would hard-lock the system
* Power Management daemon hardlocks system if plugged in during Suspend-to-RAM
* Crash-happy OpenOffice Writer
* KDM crashes

This is in addition to other minor bugs, such as libpam-mount being flaky and KNetworkManager being unreliable (I ended up using WICD, which was a godsend).

Thankfully, 9.10 redeemed Kubuntu for the year.

I switched over around Release Candidate 2, and even that proved more reliable than 9.04. Power management seems much tighter. I’ve had only 1 hardlock in many, many Suspend-to-RAM instances. I can plug the laptop in when it’s in sleep mode. The OpenOffice integration with KDE is nice, though it did decide to take a nosedive a few days ago; that has yet to repeat, however (**knocks on wood**).

KNetworkManager still pisses me off. The application seems to be married to KWallet, an app that I absolutely hate. If I turn off the wallet system, KNetworkManager is neutered. In addition, it did not auto-detect my wireless network’s encryption method… something I’ve come to expect these days. Easy to fix once I realized the problem, but still surprising.

I do believe they gimped WICD with this release… though I can’t prove it. That service does not seem to recover from Suspend-to-RAM. It loses all ability to scan for wireless networks and refuses to reconnect when the laptop comes back up. Maybe this is just my own personal experience, but I’ve put up with the KWallet pestering up until now (It only insists on the password once per login and doesn’t ask again coming out of sleep).

The option to automagically encrypt home directories was a beautiful addition, and pretty much nullified any need for that other article I posted a while back. Given this OS is on my writing laptop, I jumped all over this option. It may cause problems at reinstall time if I ever need to just upgrade the OS. I keep my /home root on a separate disk partition, so I can upgrade the OS without worrying about my preferences and files. This option stores everything in a /home/.usernamePrivate file and mounts the file at log-in time. I’m sure this will cause problems later on, but I can worry about that later.

I discovered the Globe desktop integration as part of this release. Maybe I’m just behind in the times, but this is a nice feature. Pretty eye candy, doesn’t require OpenGL acceleration, and any kind of dynamic desktop is a boost when showing off the operating system to the Windows babies at my office.

Overall, not a bad release thus far. I believe I’m pleased, and may not have to jump on the upgrade bandwagon come next April.

All right, I need to vent, and this web site is closest. This is a rant; you have been warned.

My PS3 has joined the thousands of others that have perished under mysterious circumstances. What circumstances? Well, the system hardlocked to the point where no amount of holding the power button would shut the thing down. Turned the thing off, then back on. . . and lo and behold, it suddenly won’t read a disc. I don’t even get an error message; it’s like the drive isn’t even there. Supposedly a bug in the firmware is the culprit; there’s a lawsuit out in California that I’ll be watching pretty carefully for the next few months, I think.

So, anyway, I was going through and backing up my data this evening in preparation of parting with the PS3 (and $150) to send it to the service facility for repair. Naturally, the PS3 backup utility failed, so I had to resort to copying my save game data over to an external hard drive by hand. I reached my file for Demon’s Souls (a game I’ve put a ridiculous number of hours into, considering the short time I’ve had it), went to copy it. . . and discovered that the save game file was copy protected. No way to back it up.

I can understand (but strongly disagree with) putting DRM on music, movies, and games. My question, though, is why the hell would anybody feel some kind of burning desire to copy protect a save file? “Hey, you can use those bytes to reconstruct part of our intellectual property! We can’t let you do that!”

Yeah, this entire situation is pathetic.

Jim.Opinion.FROM_SOFTWARE = Jim.Opinion.SONY = INT_MIN;

Ever since picking up my laptop, I have had a concern about having my stories on such a portable machine. I bought myself a Bauer-like man-purse, so this laptop basically goes everywhere I do. It’s convenient with the lappy being so light, but it IS a laptop. It’s not hard to take, mount the drive on an external system, and voila… all my stuff is in the open.

I’ve been keeping an eye out for a solution, and I think I found one after some Googlin’.

Some details:
• OS: Debian-based distribution
• Kernel:2.6.28-15-generic
• Encryption used: AES
• Prerequisite Packages:
  • loop-aes-utils

  Create an Encrypted Filesystem
  The first thing to do is create a loopable filesystem that can be mounted by the kernel. Find some place on your filesystem that’s nice and out of the way… or that’s plainly obvious, since we are using encryption. I threw mine in my Documents folder. Nice and hidden where absolutely everyone will find it. But meh.

  Create the filesystem image with the following command:
  dd if=/dev/urandom of=imageName.img bs=1M count=100


  According to the article, using /dev/urandom makes the file a bit more indistinguishable from other used filesystem sectors, but /dev/zero works fine as well.

  Next, assign the filesystem image to a loopback device:

  sudo losetup -e aes /dev/loop0 /path/to/imageName.img

  If the kernel complains about invalid arguments, make sure that your encryption libraries are installed (IE: AES, Twofish, etc) and that the modules are loaded. If not, run the following command:

  sudo modprobe aes

  Keep in mind that for AES, you’ll need a password of 20 characters.

  Now that the image is associated with a loopback device, create the filesystem:

  sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/loop0

  Mount the Filesystem
  Now that you’ve created your filesystem image, it needs to be properly mounted in order to be used. You can do this by passing the encryption argument to the mount command:

  mount -o loop,encryption=aes /path/to/imageName.img /path/to/mount

  Using this Filesystem
  My filesystem will hold some rather sensitive data… my work. Mostly I’ll toss my stories in there. We’ll see what else I plug in. A nice feature will be to tie the mounting process in with the system log-in. We’ll see if that works out.

  I did throw a nice li’l launcher on my taskbar with a lock icon. Makes it feel all nice and special.

  RESOURCE: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6481

Anyone that knows me knows I’m a pretty big ‘Skins fan these days. I got back into the sport when Coach Gibbs came back, and have stayed on-board through some pretty lackluster seasons.

Well, I foresee a nasty week in the tri-state area, especially for anyone that listens or sees any kind of broadcast that originates from within the beltway. Honestly, though, maybe they deserve it. There’s too much talent, too much skill, for this team to be squandering the year like this.

Now, granted, it’s only week three. And I seriously doubt we’ll see a major change this week. But Snyder has deep pockets. He’s watching. And he is not patient.

At this point, something needs to change. Something in that ‘Skins locker room is broken. Be it Campbell (which I don’t think is the problem) or Zorn (maybe it is him), something has to change. Maybe it is time. Who knows…

Gonna be a long week in DC. Maybe I should phone in sick Monday.