Have Clue - Will Travel

GPH (in Korea) makes a little thing they call the "Wiz", based on its predecessor, the GP2X handheld gaming device.

It's just a little ARM linux box, with an SDRAM card, a touch-screen OLED, and a 7-hour battery. I picked it up to play with the touchscreen OLED and ARM linux environment (in a software sense), I just have a few itches to scratch and ideas to try here...but most people pick it up for the wealth of emulators and old games you can carry around in your pocket with it.

I had two major obstacles to starting out writing code for the thing. The first was that the only build environments for it are produced by the community of users - and bless them they aren't trying hard enough. To use these toolchains you have to bundle modern libraries along with your code, which completely annihilates any manifest benefit of having shared libraries already on the Wiz...a system that is already strapped for resources. Continue reading "Playing with the GP2X Wiz"

There are a lot of nuts out there. In fact, all of us are more than a little nutty in one way or another.

Recently, I've been thinking a lot more than I should after reading what one more widely spoken nut had to say, in particular;

the human, as a species in the animal kingdom, is known to be the kind of
animal who fouls its own nest and overruns its habitat. the idea of a
tipping point, whether it be for CO2 in the atmosphere or polar ice shelves
or explosively deaggregated IPv4 routing tables, does not occur in the
minds of individual decision makers. instead it's left to us "chicken
little" types, and the only way the individual decision makers ever make
their decisions on the basis of tipping points is if some kind of
"governance" makes them do so.

[1]

Continue reading "Internut Governance"

Up there in that 'Calendar' section, you'll notice I'm going to LISA 2008. I'm speaking at the W8 tutorial, "DNS and DHCP considerations migrating to IPv6."

So, the single largest webhits I'm getting lately are from the WPAD Howto I wrote earlier.

This is maybe obvious in retrospect; people want information that is useful to them.

I'm thinking of writing more howto's like that, judging by google's ability to send searches here. The question is, what do people want to know?

Randy Bush wrote a famous rant on the situation between network operators and the network protocol designers (the IETF). In it, he characterized the current situation thus; The Internet Vendors are throwing spaghetti at the wall, just to see what sticks. The criticism is that a lot of protocols overlap in purpose and function, and still more are complete competitors and the IETF can't or won't choose one to standardize...the phrase often used at IETF meetings was "let the market decide." This is essentially a cop-out.

Well, I've made a more recent discovery that will shock you. The wall is asking for spaghetti to be thrown at it. Continue reading "IVTF Discovery: The Wall wants Spaghetti thrown at it."

It ocurred to me that my WPAD HowTo needs to be updated considering the recent Dan Kaminsky DNS vulnerability. This is one more reason to put out a WPAD poison pill, if you're not using it, in your users best interests.

We have our Alaskan photos up on something resembling a website now. Rather than send you all to the full set of photos - about like staring into the sun - I'm going to run through day by day and pick out some highlights photos. Contact me directly if you really want the "staring into the sun" variety.

On the 13th of June, after work, we left San Jose for the great north. The FJ Cruiser was packed up with care. The little MaoMao bird was carefully deposited in her own home cage, which we moved to "Bird Camp" (Yifun's parents' house). Our plan was to make Redding or thereabouts by nightfall. The plan worked out. Continue reading "2008-06-14: The Departure"

For some reason, it seems like my weight seems to follow more of a sinusoidal curve than a direct line. So I wind up 'hovering near' some benchmark weight for several weeks before a large plummet. I suppose this is probably healthy and unwise to attempt to accelerate, so it suits me fine.

But it's cool when you see your weight drop below the lowest recent point; in my case hitting 199.5 a few days ago. Wii fit isn't to blame, but I suppose it probably doesn't hurt either.

I'm wondering, with our upcoming Alaska trip looming, if I'm going to be losing weight...we don't want to "eat out" the entire way as much as we can avoid it, as this quickly gets expensive, so we've developed a complex system of preparations that hopefully makes simple but satisfying dinners on the road and in the campsite. With rich stews, hearty stroganoff, thick potatoes au gratin, and the "dutch oven" factor (an extra portion of oils and shortening), one really wonders just how lean we're going to be eating.

Speaking of Dutch Ovens, I've noticed that in googling for dutch oven recipes, they all say at the bottom, "Feeds 18-20." This kind of takes the dutch out of the oven, when you look at it from a couple's point of view. So I'm thinking of starting a wiki of my modified-downward recipes for 8" dutch oven cooking, all serves: 2. I've found it's not as obvious as people might think; you can't simply divide one egg into thirds (at least not and still make it something you can easily prepare while camping). You have to make tradeoffs, strike out some things, and make substitutions for others. We've distilled recipes down to a set of at-home preparations (putting mixtures into ziplock bags), on-the-road happen-to-finds (meats and other perishables you may not be able to 'pack in', but instead find at the grocery the day before), and at-the-campsite cooking instructions boiled down to 2-3 simple steps (involving throwing the previous packets of stuff into something that cooks them).

I wonder if others would find documenting that useful; more like a how-to for camp cooking. If so we could do a wiki. If not, we would just make our own recipe book and laminate it.

I started playing EVE Online again, which for the two of you that don't know is very much like a Freelancer MMO (but without space-flight-sim controls), or as I prefer to think of it, like Cowboy Bebop - the game. For those that don't even get those references; it's a space game. You fly ships around, blow stuff up, trade, research, mine, build, upgrade, all that.

They've got a promotion I guess where they hand out 14-day free trials to friends; if you convert to a paying customer then I also get 14 free days. So let me know if you want to give it a shot.

It's cool because I can log in for just 30 minutes and get something done and get out without a lot of fuss. It's good to hang with people, but not people you don't know/trust, so the game is very lenient on 'solo' play...no wasting hours trying to find a 'party' just to get something done. Most missions really assume you're playing alone. There are, as with many games, some frustrating points, but nothing overly tiresome for me. The learning curve is rather steep, and there are a great deal of 'kids' hanging around to be ignored.

But for example one day I might be running missions, cleaning up the galaxy one bad guy at a time, and another day I might be psuedo-afk-mining an asteroid field while watching TV or whatnot. The other day, I was poking around the market, and found a guy buying some stuff called "Kernite" for 500 ISK (the game currency) per, and usually (these days) sells for more like 260-300 ISK...so I made the trip and cleaned up 4 mil. ISK...quite a good haul for just a few short jumps.

PVP is permissible in the entire game world, but you can avoid it effectively by just sticking to the "high security" solar systems.

The biggest advantage to the game, and the best design decision, is that there is no XP, and no classes. The analogue are skill points, which accrue even when you are not in the game towards some skill you've selected to improve (or train anew). You sort of make your own class by training the skills you want/use. The wonderful side effect of this is that "playing the game more" does not "speed up progression." So the usual disease I have with MMO's - where I find that I want to stay online for multiple hours to get "the next level" - is vapor. I can stay logged in, I can log out, and either way I get the next level on the same schedule. So I have less trouble logging out. Playing the game more does get you more cash, but cash becomes markedly less useful without skills to use the stuff you might buy.

One more subtle design decision is that everything in the game is made out of some number of minerals. So unlike other MMO's where better stuff comes out in patches and drives prices of old gear down to nothing, you retain a lot of the value of your purchase (but there is still a supply/demand curve). You're always guaranteed that your equipment will be worth as much as you can recycle it back into minerals, and as everything, even new gear in new patches, are made from these minerals, there's always a good demand for them (in fact, it's what makes mining profitable).

Anyway, I'm having a lot of fun with it.

Back when I was in High School, I took this class where the final grade was decided by whether or not our 1 Hp motor would turn over, and run for 90 seconds.

We'd be given a 1-piston engine from the school, and we had to take it all apart and put it back together again - every piece.

It was actually quite a rush when mine worked - that was cool.

I've always wanted to take a wrench to my Jeep. I think of things to do with it, but I never actually take anything apart...for the fear of not being able to put it back together again in time to go to work on Monday.


So I'm thinking of getting an old beater, take it apart just to see what makes it tick, and the worst case is I have to get a tow truck to come pick it up and take it off to the dump. All for entertainment.

Now I just need to find a cheap old beat up car.

WPAD, or Web Proxy AutoDetection, is a protocol that was designed to convey Netscape's PAC format (Proxy Auto Config file) to web browsers automatically - without the user ever having to type a button. It never became an RFC proposed standard, but rather died as an Internet-Draft. I can only wonder what politics led to its demise...but it's full of wonderful hints of terrible flamewars, including the admission that the option code, 252, was 'assigned by the DHC WG chair.' Maybe I need to point out: option codes are never assigned by WG chairs...they are assigned only by IANA after standards action. Meanwhile, 252 is in the "site-local" space - it is not available for allocation! Not by a WG chair, not even by IANA. The site-local options were intended for site administrators (your network's sysadmin) to allocate - not manufacturers.

But its failure to reach RFC did not stop it from becoming the Internet's de facto standard in configuring web proxies. Consequently, whenever your Windows box boots, it tries WPAD to find proxies in order to get Windows Updates...Automatic Updates does this a few minutes after a box reboots. The first thing to do in WPAD is to try DHCP, so you might see Windows boxes try DHCPINFORMs first requesting option 252. They'll try several times until they get 252, and if they never get it, they move on to DNS. They'll query 'wpad.foo.example.com' if foo.example.com were the configured domain name, then 'wpad.example.com', then they give up. They're looking for A records, although the WPAD standard also describes TXT and SRV records (it never tries these). WPAD also describes using SLP after DNS, but I sincerely doubt anyone bothers.

The DNS method is essentially garbage being flooded out on the global Internet. Some older implementations seem to seek right down to 'wpad.'. It seems this is tried in others if no domain name were specified. Your ISP has to deal with wpad.ispname.com being queried all the time, and the rest of the Internet has to cope if the system has some garbled domain name...the query gets passed all the way down to the roots and up.

Edit 2008-08-13: It's also a security problem! Dan Kaminsky has reminded us that it is still, even with all our protections (short of DNSSEC), quite possible to manipulate DNS data. A ne'er do well that creates a cache entry for 'wpad.etc' in front of a horde of WPAD-capable clients can become the man in the middle for all their web content. You can filter for WPAD DNS queries, but it's easier to just make them stop querying for it.

The way to stop all of these clients that implement WPAD from querying DNS at all is to give them a poison pill at DHCP time; or heck configure WPAD at DHCP time and start providing a caching proxy service. I'll show you how to do both below the cut. Continue reading "HOWTO: WPAD"

A few weeks ago, we drove down south on the coastal highway, and spent some time on the "old" coastal highway, a series of dirt roads further inland.

It takes you up on top of some of the hills, so it's a pretty good view of the ocean. This is springtime, so all the grass is green (it's a very brief part of the year that California is habitable).


We had cloud cover for most of the morning until the road took us above it.


It rides us straight into Big Sur National Forest, so we headed over to a campsite that is literally on the face of cliffs at the end of a mountain ridge overlooking the Pacific ocean.

We stayed for the sunset, then drove home up highway 1.

I'm in Philadelphia for a DHCPv6 protocol bakeoff before IETF 71, so I'm here from now until the 14th (but pretty much chained to meeting rooms). I seem to recall that this is a couple hour drive or train ride from the DC area, so if any of you ex-coworkers and friends down in that area want to take advantage, drop me a line.

There's this 4x game, and I'm sort of a 4x genre guy, but I find instead of really wanting to go and buy what looks like an excellent game that I'm showing remarkable restraint against their pretty graphics, their promises of galactic conquest in real time.

The reason is: Stardock is its publisher. I don't want to give them my money if I can help it.

That's a strange opinion to have, so let me see if I can explain it. Once upon a time, Stardock were the champions of the PC gaming culture. They shook off the reigns of their oppressors and deigned to sell their products without the assorted viral hangers-on which promised to safeguard video game profits. I'm talking about copy protection. Stardock never had any, or when they did, it had a builtin expiration date. They said into the microphone, "We seek customers whom we will not affront.", and it rang around the world.

There was applause. There were lots of game purchases. There were more than a few parties.

And life was good, and the games were great.

Until I got a piece of unsolicited commercial email...spam, I'm talking about spam here...sourced from their headquarters, but not referring to any one of their products. I can't even remember if the advertised product was computer related. Evidently by buying one of their products, at a time when they did not have a checkbox that said "sign me up for spam", I had been automatically entered to win periodic spam emails from them on behalf of other companies that were paying them for the service. This is in 2005! There is no excuse of unawareness anymore. Nor did they think so either. There were apologies, there were excuses ("it was the new guy"), and there were promises it would never be done again. There were assurances ("we've sent someone over with weapons to 'sort them out'").

And then when they created a new 'free newsletter' category for "3rd party games promotions", they elected to sign me up to some opt-out mailing list without asking. Again. This time without apologies, nor excuses, nor promises. This is now de rigeur, it seems. But opt-out is just as spammy as the regular kind. Worse on many levels.

I cannot justify lubricating these engines of war by patronizing its architects, no matter how aromatic the bait.

The source of the report is more than a little suspect on its slant and bias, but the playful side of me just has to wonder:

If you bought CO2 credits to fight global warming, do you get to sell them to fight global cooling?