Joe Auricchio

As Ben demonstrated tonight, Beer + Xilinx is a slightly better idea than Beer + Car and a slightly worse idea than Beer + Scissors.

Teresa has a loft bed. The frame is above my eye level but below head level. I’ve hit my head on it about a dozen times. I’ve been lucky so far: each time I was already ducking, but not far enough, so I’ve only grazed it. One of these days I’m bound to hit it squarely and get a good concussion.

Last time I hit my head, she suggested I put a post-it note on the edge, so I’d be reminded to duck. Since I always carry a pack of post-its and a pen, I whipped them out and made a warning sign for myself:

           watch

          out

          joe
                      

Reflecting upon its asymmetry, I said, “Hmm, it doesn’t seem to be very centered.”

Teresa took the post-it and added to the top and bottom:

  <center>

  </center>

Isn’t she wonderful?

Update! About a minute ago, I was sitting on the floor under Teresa’s bed. I stood up rapidly and hit the frame squarely with the top of my head. It hurt. A lot. Ow.

So Rushi inadvertently invited like ten of our mutual friends (Lizzie, Mignon, Dan, Elvia, Paul, Kyle, Rego, Mark, Nik, and Sheenika) into an AIM chat. Most of them only knew a few of the others.

Notice I said “inadvertently”, not “accidentally”.

One of these days, Rushi…

We’ve had some downtime recently. Two and a half weeks’ worth. Today I’m going to write about that.

On the evening of August 7th, I drove back up to Cambria. In a later post I’ll talk about what happened after that.

A few hours after I left, my server went down. Rushi tried to restart it, but lilo threw an error on startup. He and I tried to debug it, and we decided to boot a liveCD and re-run lilo. Rushi booted Knoppix, re-ran lilo, and restarted. The machine crashed on boot. Repeated restarts would cause it to crash in different places on boot. Clearly, something was up. DJC tried his hand, but the machine just kept crashing. Eventually liveCDs would crash, and I even got the BIOS to lock up on the boot-menu - several times. Conclusion: bad mobo.

So yesterday Mark, Rushi, Scott, and I all went to Fry’s. We talked for a while in the motherboard section, and I finally settled on an Abit KV-85 and a Sempron 2800+ (socket 754, the good one). Cost: $90.

I had a nightmare of a time trying to get it all up and running again, greatly assisted by Rushi with moral support from Mark, Scott, and Ben. I was hampered especially by, well, lilo, which was in fact legitimately broken unrelated to the mobo troubles. So I’ve negotiated with it and /boot is no longer a software raid1. That means if hda dies I’m in some hefty trouble. (Hear me baby? Hold together.)

Or, Vegas Baby Vegas!

So I went to DefCon this weekend.

After Scott and DJ returned from the 2600 meeting on Friday night, they asked if I wanted to go. Since DJ, a few others, and I had a final exam on Saturday night (7-10pm), we’d all figured we couldn’t go. At 2600, though, somebody suggested that we take off immediately after the final; we’d be there by 1 or so, and he knew somebody who had a room where we could stay. So DJ and Scott made preparations to go, and asked if I was interested. I thought for a while, about how awesome it would be, and how crazy it would be, and how scary it might be, and how boring it might be, and eventually I decided I might as well because I may never even have the opportunity to do something so crazy again.

So I left my PowerBook at home, and took everything out of my wallet except proof of car insurance, AAA card, medical insurance card, and cash; and put my drivers license in my shoe. DefCon is possibly the worst place on earth to lose a DL - it WILL make its way to identity thieves, and I guess these days a DL# is enough. DJ made more extensive preparations, since he brought his laptop.

After the final, we took off up I-15. Shortly after we got on, around Carroll Canyon Rd, I think I saw a DeLorean. It exited before we could get closer, though. We stopped for burgers and gas at Corona. Somewhere just this side of the CA/NV border is a road called Zzyzx Rd, which has an interesting story behind it.

By 1:15am we were rolling down the Strip. It is, in fact, crazy. We found the Riviera, parked, and headed up to the Skyboxes overlooking the convention halls - where all the parties were. As we waited for David, our contact, we sat in the hallway and Scott and DJ tried to get online. Scott’s machine got unstable after just a few minutes — might have something to do with using an Intel wireless card. I enjoyed watching the people walking by in various states of inebriation discussing obscure issues of computer security. A pair of guys walked by, party-hopping, one saying to the other “…and we’re not gonna drop anything out of this fuckin’ skybox, are we??” We met up with David and hung out in his skybox for a while. Eventually we headed off toward the Hilton, where David had a suite, and crashed.

The next morning we woke up around 11 and lazily got ready. We helped David get packed, and gawked at his 4U two-motherboard machine with around 10 FPGA cards. He’d used it for his talk on cracking wireless encryption in real-time. We went to eat at the Riviera’s champagne brunch. No cards, we just came back to the table and there were four cups of champagne. Only in Vegas would champagne be served from a pitcher into small plastic cups.

We cruised around the vendor area and bought some stuff. I got three very nice t-shirts and an EFF membership. DJ renewed his EFF and picked up some stuff, I didn’t see what. Scott got a few shirts (one free) and a diskless thin client: 800MHz cyrix, some ram, full complement of ports, one PCI slot, and CompactFlash slot, for $60. I think he’s gonna make it his router, once he refactors Athena.

After that, we caught the closing ceremonies. Interesting stuff; next time I would like to see some of the CTF games.

We met some cool folks around our age, one from MIT and one from Santa Cruz, had dinner with them at a very nice Korean restaurant down the street, said our goodbyes, and headed home.

I’ll upload pictures later. Remind me.

Scott has a much shorter take on the whole thing.

(allusion)

On Monday, I bought a Seagate 300gb HD at Fry’s for a record low price. On Tuesday evening, after a bit of trouble with the power supply, I got it installed and started a bad block scan.

It’s still running, on Friday night as I write this. It’ll probably finish sometime during the night. So that’s around 80 hours to read then write every sector on the disk 4 times. Twenty hours to fill the disk.

That’s insane.

Who could possibly need that much space? I sure don’t. Even after I integrate it into the RAID ((We’re going from a 160gb 2-drive RAID 1 to a 320gb 3-drive RAID 5 on the same spindles without rebooting. Because I’m crazy like that.)), I’ll still have a few hundred gigs free on the system. I might have to start stockpiling films, more than the few Kurosawas I’ve torrented. Or perhaps I’ll make every vhost on the system a usermode-linux virtual machine, each with a ~4gb filesystem image.

Remember when hard drives and filsystems couldn’t handle 4gb? The progression of technology is amazing to me, and I’ve only been at it ten years or so. What must it be like for real old farts like these fine people? Apparently, Creed doesn’t have a site these days?

queer* + weird => queird

(* original meaning of odd, quirky**)

(** as I wrote this, Rushi asked “Frickin’ Amy?”, since we both knew which of our friends might take issue with our use of that word. Amy, if you’re reading this, 1. <3, and 2. ask Rushi for what he said after that***)

(*** Rushi says he’s gonna forget what he said after that, but it’s highly unprintable.)

In other news, today I did extremely dark voodoo magic with routing tables and netmasks. And now, somehow, my Linux server/router, my WRT, and an 8-port hub are all playing nicely together. 10.24.0/24 is static addresses. .1/24 is wired DHCP. .2/24 is wireless DHCP. .3/24 is VPN. All these nets can talk to each other and the world. Generally, it’s sweet.

(Rushi wanted me to stop at the word ‘magic’: “Before it was sweet, warlock status… and now it’s geeky. Now you got demoted.”)

So I put my number on the Do Not Call registry this evening. I was not impressed by what I saw.

To register a phone number through donotcall.gov, you must enter your email address. Why? Turns out they have a FAQ on this:

22. Why do you need my email address?

When you use the registry’s website to put a phone number on the National Do Not Call Registry, we collect your email address to confirm your request. We will send you an email and you will need to click on the link in the email within 72 hours to finalize your registration. We also collect your email address when you request to verify your registration online so that we can email you a response to your verification request. We will store your email address in a secure manner, separate from your telephone number. We will not share your email address with telemarketers.

So… they’re collecting my email address to “confirm my request”. They will send me a link to click. When I click on the link, then my number will be added.

The problem is, that technique of emailing a magical link is intended to verify ownership of that address, not the original action. It’s absolutely needless; all it does is slow the whole process down.

So I decided not to give them my email address. You can add your number to the registry by calling their 888 number. The automated voice says:

You must be calling from the number you want to register. If you are not, please call back from that number. Or, you may register now using our website at donotcall.gov.

Remember, you are registering for everyone in your household who uses this phone.

Beginning with the area code, please enter your ten-digit phone number.

(expectant pause)

Wait, what? I must be calling from the phone number I want to register… and yet, I still have to type it in? I admittedly haven’t tried entering a different number, but it just seems to be wasting everyone’s time. It should read off my caller ID. If it can’t be, then how do they know I’m calling from the phone number I want to register?

Here’s what that message should say:

You are about to register the number: five. five. five. one. two. one. two. If this is correct, press 1 to register your number. Otherwise, you will have to use our website at donotcall.gov.

Two separate systems; two groups of people aren’t thinking. No bueno.

From the I Hate My Life department…

That’s Google’s IP.

This is what happens when school wireless is so bad, I have to resort to using my phone as a Bluetooth modem and calling up Earthlink.

Starting in June, I’ll be living in a 3br 2.5ba quadplex (four units to a building), on Via Tranquilo, about a mile and a half from campus. Inhabitants: Paul, Rushi, Ben, and myself.

All four of us are compsci majors. So, of course, we have a wiki.

It’s about fifty feet from Scott’s house, wherein live another four compsci majors and assorted hangers-on.

It’s going to be a wonderfully, terrifically geeky few years.