Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Thanks to pixeldusted for the post, it says more about the bureaucracy than I can even convey. Sweetness.
OS X is at 10.4.5 right now, but an intrepid hacker known as Maxxus has developed a hacked version of 10.4.4 that can be set up and operate on ordinary Intel-based PCs. I really wonder what Steve Jobs is really thinking right now. He must surely realize this is the most leet (1337) or stylish way to get people around the world interested in running OS X on PCs. Thus, he's prepped to fight Microsoft Windows on his own turf, and the first attack wave could be the hackers. This would be cool as hell.
On the other hand, the bread and butter that kept Apple solvent through the bad years was hardware sales, not OS sales. Nowadays, the iTunes Music Store has good volume but razor-thin margins, and OS sales are pretty much icing on the cake. (also Apple podcasting is starting to do pay subscriptions, via Slashdot) If Apple tried to license its operating system, they could essentially cannibalize their hardware market share.
Oh wait, that already happened in the days of the Mac Clones, a misstep that nearly killed Apple. So when they saw that Maxxus had posted the hacks to one site, the vaunted packs of carnivorous Apple lawyers sent out a DMCA warning to that site, osx86project.org, which is focused on the possibilities of OS X + x86. The proprietors of that site have no wish to offend Apple, and have removed the links to Maxxus' site and the patches he developed.
As I also have no real desire to receive a DMCA notice from Apple, I will leave it to you to google the matter if you really want the patch, or refer to BoingBoing's coverage, MacSlash on it, or Slashdot. As one internationalist hacker type I know remarked,
Dude, it is illegal to DISCUSS how to go around encryption in the US.
Yes, this is what happens nowadays. But it's nothing new. Consumer electronics like your DVD player are now Black Boxes of Mystery which you, as a mere Owner, are un-Privileged to mess around with. It is a horrifying infringement of freedom that will require a second Revolution to defeat. In the meantime, well damn, the OS X patches are still on the Internet (hosted in more rebellious countries) so you can get them.
Linux is booting on Intel Macs now, even via an external USB drive (via MacSlash). Better yet, it is on Gentoo Linux, the same flavor that powers this very website.
In its infinite loop wisdom, Apple decided to embed a secret message to hackers in the new Intel machines, via CNN, slashdot and OSX86project:
Your karma check for today:
There once was a user that whined
his existing OS was so blind
he'd do better to pirate
an OS that ran great
but found his hardware declined.
Please don't steal Mac OS!
Really, that's way uncool.
(C) Apple Computer, Inc.
There is also a hidden kernel extension, Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext . Apple has never made it very hard to pirate the OS — which I think is actually part of a long-term subversive strategy, rather than some kind of incomprehensibly huge oversight on Jobs' part. They have never required call-in serial activation or any of that shit, for example. Again, the OS was always icing on the cake. Bill Gates is perplexed.
Gary Busey nukes conventional cinema: In other news, Gary Busey plays a crazed American doctor stealing organs of Arabs for Israel in a wildly popular Turkish film, "Kurtlar Vadisi Irak" or "Valley of the Wolves: Iraq". Billy Zane is also in it. Apparently it was on Turkish television for a few seasons before getting turned into a movie.
Fortunately I have ascertained a way to download this film from the Internet, as (somehow) it has not yet found an American distributor. Get it off BitTorrent right here. There are warnings that the sound and video quality are terrible (1 or 2 out of 10), but such a spectacle cannot wait. I will post if i find a better version.
A mercilessly geeky tale: I am recording this so that myself and others may deal with similar problems better in the future. I will soon forget the details of how I fixed it, so it is best to write it down now.
It took a couple days, but the Linux server (Tarfin), a reliable Dell Dimension 4400 running Gentoo Linux, is back from its brush with Hardware Hell. The problems began after I found out about my new mysterious Politics in Minnesota project... The work at this stage would best happen using MediaWiki, I reckoned. MediaWiki has performed well as the HongWiki platform, and has reliably served wiki pages that have done Real Well on Google, although with the service problems it's gone south a bit.
So my new WordPress-powered HongPong website (under development) takes a lot more RAM to serve PHP files than this current MovableType-powered HongPong.com, and as I sat down to get the Politics in Minnesota project going, I noticed that Tarfin was basically maxed out for RAM. It only had 128 MB, which is really way too low for this. It only had a few megs of RAM available and had 80 MB in the swap partition (which is the same as Virtual Memory on a PC or Mac). Gridlock.
So in other words the stress of serving had totally maxed out the RAM, which I noticed when the site -- which is usually lickety-split quick over the LAN here -- was going much slower. More RAM, always a good solution. I looked up my usual suspects, namely Tran Micro and General Nanosystems on University, whose prices will pretty much always beat Best Buy type places. Only Nano had the type of RAM for Tarfin, PC2100 SDRAM. So I got two 256 chips (though I'd have liked a 512, they didn't have).
The Dell only has 2 slots, thanks Dell, so I pulled the old 128 and put these in. Turned it on, it booted fine, and I ran 'emerge sync', the nice Gentoo command that permits me to update all the various Linux software packs I have running. This streamlines one of the bitchiest problems in systems administration - tracking down the damn software packs and keeping up with their security patches.
It ran alright until suddenly it hit a Segmentation Fault, followed shortly by a Kernel Panic, the hardest Crash that Linux can Go Down with - it's real ugly, gibberish and Hex codes spilling all over.
So I have to reboot. The file system checker program, fsck, auto-scanned the main partition and found all sorts of horrible errors. I tried to have it fix, but then it hit another Segmentation Fault:
A segmentation fault occurs when your program tries to access memory locations that haven't been allocated for the program's use.
Therefore I should have thought that maybe it was the damn new chips. I had a flashback to the death of the first Hongpong.com (the one that got me suspended from MPA) - which was an old PowerPC 6100/60 running a hacked old Linux, whose hard drive abruptly refused to come back from a nasty death right around when I graduated from high school. And I had no backups. In other words, the first HongPong server died almost exactly four years ago, and took with it the great contributions of everyone in that strange season of 2000-2001. It couldn't happen again, could it?
So I started looking around the various forums for a solution to a sudden filesystem corruption, one of the true hells of computing. To compound this, I hadn't backed up all the new HongPong site stuff, nor the Mysql databases that run the sites, in quite a while. Fortunately I had just exported this entire site a few days ago to put it into WordPress (as it is now - mostly purged of the spam), so if it truly crashed, the Bulk would be safe.
After reboots, I could come back to the low-level emergency maintenance fsck (file system check) shell, and from there I could READ the messed up drive, but not write to it without risking more damage. And I could see that most files seemed ok. But I couldn't get the file sharing, or Apache webserver, or MYSQL database running again, without risking wrecking it. And I couldn't figure out what was really wrong. The solution?
Install a brand new Gentoo Linux setup on another old hard drive I had sitting around, and then pull the old stuff of the messed-up drive in Read-Only mode. After I put the drive in, the handy BIOS error light told me something was dreadfully wrong and it wouldn't boot at all. I found that on a Dell you have to only set the 'cable select' ATA hard drive jumper pins - the machine automatically takes the last drive on the ATA cable to be the Master drive. So I did that but it was still stuck.
I had pulled out the new RAM earlier, but I'd put it back in by this point. Then I tried taking out one of them. It booted! I pulled that one out, and put the other in. It halted! When I put both in, it would boot, but if I switched them, it would halt. In other words, the Dell could detect the bad RAM when it's by itself, but NOT necessarily when it's with others, BUT this depended on their order.
So I returned the bad RAM to Tran Micro the next day, and they nicely exchanged for another one and tested it there in the store. It was OK, so I was on my way, and everything went smoothly afterwards. (Other than this incident of random bad RAM, Tran Micro are fine folks - this could happen anywhere - their service was all right)
I used the memtest86 memory checker on the Gentoo Linux install CD to Make Very Sure they were ok - i wish I'd done it earlier. So it took a few more hours, especially since when I installed Gentoo on this machine a year ago, I hardly took any notes about it. There are some weird things about the Dell machine - in particular, (some/all?) Dells have a strange first boot partition or /dev/hda1 in Linux parlance, which makes the Dell screen and some BIOS stuff happen. I think I destroyed this partition last time, and it's a huge pain in the ass to repair with floppy disks and stuff.
The problem is that Gentoo Linux install instructions tell you to put GRUB, the bootloader, on /dev/hda or /dev/hda1 , and this time I almost commanded grub-install /dev/hda before I caught myself. That would have taken hours to fix. Instead it must be on /dev/hda2 or /dev/hdb1. hda2 is I think automatically loaded up after the Dell thing is done. But I did it right, and so I was able to reboot Linux and finish installing the system.
Downloading & installing the key web programs was easily done with 'emerge apache php mod_php' and the correct USE flags. Other various things were properly updated and recompiled.
I was able to get back into the messed-up drive using read-only mode, which doesn't touch the filesystem. All the elements of the site easily copied to the new drive. Happily, the Mysql database -- which can really be a bitch to put together from a crashed system, if you don't export it cleanly first -- went over VERY easily. All I had to do was 'cp -av * /var/lib/mysql' from the old /var/lib/mysql. Then a reboot, plugging it back where it belongs in my bedroom, and All Systems [ OK ].
So now, in short, I have a TON of Actual Real Professional Work for both Politics in Minnesota and Computer Zone. I don't have time to say much else about the Gaza situation and so forth. sry!
Sorry we are temporarily offline. I purchased some more RAM to speed up the server and one of the chips was bad. But I didn't realize this right away, and then fsck got involved.... Please Stand by.
Naturally, the talk about Apple putting Intel chips into Macs has the open source community chattering, and a massive thread on Slashdot revealed a few interesting things about the current possibilities for using open-source tools to run OS X on generic PC hardware, using tools such as Linux as a layer to simulate the proper hardware environment.
The great thing is that there is already software, PearPC, the PowerPC Architecture Emulator, which can simulate Macs on PCs running Linux. Right now, PearPC is relatively slow in convert PPC instructions to x86, but with future Mac software recompiled for x86, an entire technical hurdle will disappear. Speculations on running OS X on Beige box PCs also at PearPC community site.
It will not be hard to get current Mac software to run on Intel chips. The Unreal Tournament developer reports that it is not at all hard to get his games switched over.
I thought this concept was interesting...
The future of Linux in the server market is secure simply because IBM has invested in Linux on the server. IBM never abandons rich customers who have purchased legacy (which, in this case, is Linux servers) from IBM.
However, the desktop is where Linux will die before it is even established. Apple will not drive a stake into the heart of Linux, but rather, the hordes of hackers and Taiwanese-run peripheral factories in China will kill Linux on the desktop. There are 3 scenarios. First, the hackers write a patch that will enable Mac OS X to run on conventional x86-based IBM PC clones. Second, the Taiwanese engineers will violate scores of American patents and build a cheap (possibly, $10.00) hardware plug-in card that will enable OS X to run on conventional IBM PC clones. The 3rd possibility is a combination of the first two.
An interesting side effect of these efforts will be taking marketshare from Windows XP and successors. In the server market, Linux has taken market share from UNIX instead of Windows. However, on the x86 desktop market, there is no 3rd OS to compete against MAC OS X. There are only 2 OSes: Windows and OS X on x86. They will compete head-on, against each other.
Although I would rather that Apple have picked another processor (e.g. ARM), I would be pleased to see Apple crush Windows on x86. Apple has a good chance of winning this matchup since the goodwill of open-source developers is on the side of Apple.
Apple's team: million-person army of open-source developers + freeBSD + most-consumer-friendly (i.e. idiot proof) OS called OS X Microsoft's team: couple thousand paid but possibly disgruntled slaves (including) H-1Bs + consumer-unfriendly OS. "It" is no contest. Apple wins by 70% marketshare.
This is nothing but good news for Apple. Microsoft should be paranoid as hell...
Ok, so right now I am sitting in the computer lab at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities West Bank, where I took an electronic arts class. My video is rendering for what I hope will be the final time.
The process of making a DVD entails generating a huge MPEG-2 video file that DVD Studio Pro burns onto DVD-Rs. This process works best when the computer processes the whole video stream twiceor two-pass variable bit-rate encoding. It just started the second pass about 10 minutes ago.
In a delightful turn of events, the DVD recording of John Kerry's appearance at Macalester that I ordered from C-SPAN in the middle of last month finally showed up this morning. I brought it straight into the lab here and extracted my 15 seconds of C-SPAN fame for the project. This would be "Fair Use" if such a thing still exists.
Having just written about DVD decryption for my journalism law class, it was interesting to try the process again. The tools are easier than ever to find. The indispensible VersionTracker readily lists several programs that will hack DVD copyright protections for you, a gutsy step considering that not too long ago, those who linked to DeCSS got their butts kicked in court.
So in other words, to get DVD footage into a personal project on the Mac, it is basically a two-step process. First, extract the chapters you need with DVD2oneX, which works even if you haven't registered (and don't forget to get the audio as well). This will produce a decrypted .VOB file inside a VIDEO_TS folder on your hard drive. Then use the freeware MPEG Streamclip to turn the .VOB file into whatever format you need, in my case a digital video stream.
It took quite a bit of fiddling to find the programs and get it working, but the results are undeniable. Now I've really got the kicker for the end of my disc. Hurry up and render now!!!!!!
In other grand news,
HongPong.com has another blog... bumm bumm bumm...
That dark denizen of Wild Canyon, Mordred himself, i.e. Nick Petersen, is going to shower us with his irregularly formed thoughts on an intermittent basis. Or else he will take us to David Brooks-like heights of flowery mescal divinations.
The new blog is located at http://www.hongpong.com/mordred, and I will be setting up some new menus and update boxes so that Nick's latest is excerpted on the front page.
Nick also has a posting account to this page, as well, so he may yet add some wisdom to the front page, if he so chooses. And Nick has just informed me that his associate Leroy Babolian is about to make his first post.
Further down the road, I have secured the donation of one aged Dell Pentium 4/1.1GHz machine to act as a Linux server once I return from a family wedding after this weekend. We will probably institute something like TikiWiki, Scoop or PHP-Nuke for our global plot to thwart control of everything.
I will be gone from Wednesday to Sunday, up in the mountains above Salt Lake City, participating in a most modern ceremony. Should be fun.
This week i have to try to find another job since I can't get enough hours randomly making websites to get by. There are some leads out there, but who knows? At least there's finally been a bump in the number of jobs available around here.
The new server I've dubbed tarfin, after a character I made up in an old story, is kind of a pokey beast, again an old Compaq PII/266. I am not sure if it is suitable for advanced php or Perl projects. Someone told me that 266s like these are sold for around $35, so that's the kind of power we're talking about. But there is a possibility of getting a better one, if I can find another job.
The Linux project has borne some results and led to new internet possibilities. In the software packages that Gentoo's software manager, portage, makes available, I found TikiWiki, a fairly advanced web system that would let me run multiple blogs, forums, a good links directory, and the all-important (and thus far very lacking) image galleries. However, the TikiWiki system is really oriented around Wikis, which are like a sort of digital whiteboard, with their own syntax that's much easier than HTML. "Wikiwiki" is the word for fast in Hawaiian, and wikis facilitate the rapid, collective collection and organization of information, including tables, hyperlinks, and pictures, in a very public and revolutionary way.
As a test, I installed in on the desktop computer, and you can interact with the test installation at http://tiki.hongpong.com . (Incidentally this whole thing showed me how to set up subdomains at the flick of a config file under hongpong.com... there's a lot that could be done with that.) I have set it up so that people don't even have to give it their real email address. Just register in two seconds and you're set.
The Wiki feature is quite easy to use. You can put stuff on any page you open up or create. Just press the edit tab, and hit "Wiki quick help" inside the edit window for the all-important wiki syntax. To get around the site, note that the :: double colon symbols are actually buttons you press to open up sub-menus. This software has so many nice features, and it's totally Free. It is the product of a serious, sustained community development and documentation effort.
If you want to see some excellent wikis, I highly recommend the great free internet encyclopedia Wikipedia as well as the funky Disinfopedia, which is:
a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests.Wikis: extensible and public. Yes.
So again, the ultimate result of this whole new thing will be something unique and totally different from hongpong.com... to another internet domain????????
I saw Eyedea & Abilities with Dan Schned and Jitla last night. That was an excellent show, and it let out just as the T-Wolves beat the Lakers. We went storming around the packed downtown bars, and it was really one hell of a time.
Today, inside during this endless rain, I am bringing together the elements of the new server "tarfin", poking around, adding mod_perl to Apache2 (a slightly tricky proposition) and helping move some furniture around for people, and cleaning the room a little bit.
Oddly enough in the last 3 days two people have each given me CRT monitors—three, if you include the one that Eric let me use with the Compaq—and now I am in a world of Cathode Ray riches.
Then again, we should take a reality check here and look at a recent piece in the Times:
Studies show that gregarious, well-connected people actually lost friends, and experienced symptoms of loneliness and depression, after joining discussion groups and other activities. People who communicated with disembodied strangers online found the experience empty and emotionally frustrating but were nonetheless seduced by the novelty of the new medium. As Prof. Robert Kraut, a Carnegie Mellon researcher, told me recently, such people allowed low-quality relationships developed in virtual reality to replace higher-quality relationships in the real world.Wisconsin's senator Russ Feingold has put together an advertising campaign on the blogs. My dad recently sent me a Feingold 2004 bumper sticker, which has a certain geographic symmetry across the car bumper from my Wellstone! sticker.
........
Marcus is a child of the Net, where everyone has a pseudonym, telling a story makes it true, and adolescents create older, cooler, more socially powerful selves any time they wish. The ability to slip easily into a new, false self is tailor-made for emotionally fragile adolescents, who can consider a bout of acne or a few excess pounds an unbearable tragedy.But teenagers who spend much of their lives hunched over computer screens miss the socializing, the real-world experience that would allow them to leave adolescence behind and grow into adulthood. These vital experiences, like much else, are simply not available in a virtual form.
For those of you deeply saddened by the lack of news tidbits, well, I have been keeping looser tabs on the news than usual, but I have been saving a lot of news bookmarks, and you can expect that things will be parsed again more closely this coming week.
It took a great deal of hacking around and starting over from scratch a couple times, but the old beast of a Compaq is finally up, running, and correctly talking to its ethernet card. Now I am updating Gentoo with the slick command
emerge sync
which you have to admit sounds nice. Then Apache2 and Php will get on there. it will be nice. Then it will be the new Hongpong.com, if the perl execution is fast enough.
My upstairs neighbor Eric let me take an old Compaq Pentium II for this project. The older one worked, but it was incredibly slow. The Compaq, a Deskpro 4000MMX @ 220 MHz, handles Linux a lot faster than the Pentium I.
Unfortunately Compaq was a crappy company that put very important BIOS and boot stuff on a weird little hard drive partition instead of the motherboard, like any sane PC manufacturer. I erased said partition and then installed Linux, but the damn thing won't boot up. Fortunately I found the floppy boot disks to replace it (or else this one). Such is the PC world—bad operating systems and bad hardware setups. The plot continues...
The Gentoo kernel has finished compiling. It took more than an hour. Now, to install the Gentoo distro filez....
Updates:
Now I am thinking about getting Perl, PHP and Apache v.2 onto this beast, which is slow as hell at compiling just about anything. This site has info about PHP and Apache2.
After talking with Paulo last night, I decided to try to install Gentoo Linux on the old Pentium I/200 MHz machine that Alana gave me. After some finagling, the Ethernet card finally started working, which was the main problem when I tried to install Slackware last time.
Now I can ping to my heart's content!
If this works, I will be moving hongpong.com over to the little old machine shortly. That will get the server stuff off my computer, a great relief.
This is some weird stuff. I found a whole bunch of system files with lots of garbage. This would affect compiling programs, which could explain why the compiler's been weird all along. Compiler said:
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61:39: invalid suffix "s" on integer constant
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61: error: stray '\10' in program
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61:47: invalid suffix "R" on integer constant
/usr/include/mach/exception_types.h:61: error: stray '\352' in program
Meanwhile inside exception_types.h:
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Things inside /usr/include/mach are the "hooks" for compiled programs to "include" to talk to the computer correctly. If garbled, they won't work. This means I may have to go scanning the directory system to see if it is writing garbage all over. Ohhh dear. Site may go down tonight for checking this stuff.
There are also some indicators (CASIO, JPEG) that this stuff is related to the digital camera. There were some strange buffer overflows when the camera's image card was attached to my computer, so were things being written all over the drive? How alarming.