Electric Skies.

Morning.





This reminded me of the opening line to Neuromancer: The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. Anyone have more links to literature (in all of it's forms) using the meme of an electric description for the sky?

YE OLDE MAINFRAMES ARE SCREAMING AT ME

As one who works in the financial services industry, I get the vituperation privilege of working with a mainframe on what seems to be at least a weekly basis, if not daily for weeks at a time.

As I fire up certain programs that are required for my job, I'm confronted with the following woes:

• Certain software doesn't know what lower-case letters are or how to utilize them.  This, to me, comes off as THE MAINFRAME SCREAMING AT ME.
• Version 2.08 of some program no one cares about anymore is now Y2K Compliant!  Oh, the joy!
• A typoed query can easily ABEND certain applications, jettisoning the user back out to the ISPF or TSO prompt.  I jokingly call this "Crashing the mainframe" however I'm really just crashing a poorly written (non-mission-crtitical, mind you) application.
• These insidious machines have somehow leveraged the ability to use electronic mail.  Simply not logging into the mainframe does not spare me from its wrath.  Occasionally, I will get e-mail from one of the nodes, again, tactfully crafted IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS just so that I get the point.

I suppose I'm relatively young and as such biased towards the flexibility and interoperability of modern Open Systems over monolithic big-iron mainframe dinosaurs of hackneyed days (even if some of the mainframes in use aren't all that old)

Epoch Fail!

(Bug, via xkcd)
I recently introduced AsmodianX to the somewhat dated "FAIL!" Internet meme. That is, illustrations where something has gone wrong, captioned with the word "FAIL!" This can be a boat full of cargo that's about to fall overboard or a skateboarder doing a face plant. Things of that nature.

Of course, this evolved, and certain tragic situations (such as an entire truckload of beer bottles shattered on the highway) came to be labeled "Epic Fail!"

Epoch Fail is a terribly funny play on words with Epic Fail, obviously. This refers to Epoch time. The current POSIX Epoch started midnight, Jan 1, 1970 and will come to an end (run out of the 32-bit space) sometime in 2038.

Friday Funnies - Nerd Humor

Physics Humor

Werner Heisenberg went for a drive and got stopped by a traffic cop.
The cop asked, "Do you know how fast you were going?"
Heisenberg replied, "No, but I know where I am."


What do you get when you combine a 30-mph car and a geese flying 10-mph West?
ERROR: You can't add scalar and vector quantities

Chemistry Humor

Two atoms bump into each other.
"Are you okay, buddy?", asks the first atom.
"I lost an electron" replies the second atom.
The first atom asks "Are you sure?"
The second atom snarls, "I'm positive!"


Susan was in chemistry,
Susan is no more.
For what she thought was H2O,
Was H2SO4.


Johnny, feeling life a bore,
Drank some H2SO4.
Johnny's father, an MD,
Gave him CaCO3.
Now he's neutralized, it's true,
But now he's full of CO2!


Jokes about cobalt, radon and yttrium are so CoRnY

Philosophy Humor

René Descartes walks into a bar. The bartender says "Hey pal, want a beer?"
Descartes replies "I think not." and disappears.

Want a web developer job? Oh, the irony!

[eric] sent this job posting to me today and I just about fell out of my chair!

Quoted for evidence (I'm sure the posting won't last forever out there)

Title:

PHP/MySQL Web Developer

Skills:

6+ Years in PHP Programming with Proficiency using MySQL, Standards-compliant HTML

Date:

1-24-2008

Location:

Kansas City, MO

Area code:

816

Tax term:

FULLTIME

Pay rate:

Based on experience

Length:

Permanent

Position ID:

073134

Dice ID:

10217525

Job description:

Premiere Web development firm looking for experienced Web developers with the following characteristics:
* Proficient in PHP, MySQL, CSS
* Likes working in small, talented team environment
* Welcomes challenges, trouble-shooting and diversity of jobs
* Enjoys client contact
* Interested in learning new skill sets
* Hosting environment setup and management a plus

Note: Candidates who rely on open source code to solve problems need not apply.

Obviously, they're talking about self-described "web developers" or "web designers" who take open-source web-apps and build around that. Still, worded this way, I have to laugh out loud.

Update! Looks like they got enough "what in the hell?!" responses to refine the last sentence:

Note: Candidates who rely on pre-packaged applications or frameworks such as Joomla or Cake to create web sites need not apply.

Oh well, it was funny while it lasted.

Tracing processes with a laugh

I saw this on XKCD yesterday and had a good chuckle:

Of course, If I ran into something that was segfaulting, I'd pick up the pieces, and break out the tracer. If you've got a daemon or program that keeps segfaulting for no known reason, tracing is a great place to start.

In these examples, I'll just trace a quick ls command. In our case, ls doesn't have any problems, but the trace will contain all of the system calls that were executed. If you can replicate problems or crashes while tracing, you can spot where they're happening to report the problem to the developer or vendor of the application. Or, you can go back and double-check your damn pointers, human -- lest the computer eat your comp-sci homework.


Solaris
Truss is a command on Solaris that dumps all of the syscalls for a process. In its most basic form, you launch truss around the program you're going to troubleshoot. The below command-line takes truss' output and puts it in ls.truss.out before running ls normally, listing the files.

$ truss -o ls.truss.out ls

chuser.sh find.truss.out ls.truss.out megascan.sh test.pl

Or you can use truss to get system calls from a running process. For daemons you should launch truss as root or with sudo. -o sshd.truss.out tells it to write the data to sshd.truss.out, whereas -p 3088 tells truss to attach to process ID 3088, the made-up PID for our made-up instance of the ssh daemon.

# truss -o sshd.truss.out -p 3088

You can view ls.truss.out to see what it found.

BSD
A little more complicated, you can use ktrace to do something similar. By default, ktrace creates a (non-human-readable) file called ktrace.out. You can specify the output file with -f.

$ ktrace -f ls.ktrace.out ls
ls.ktrace.out pkgscripts obsd_pkgscripts-1.00.tar.gz static.key

Similarly, with the -p option, ktrace accepts a pid:

# ktrace -f sshd.ktrace.out -p 3088

Then, the fun begins. You have to use kdump to read the syscalls from the file.

$ kdump -f ls.ktrace.out > ls.ktrace.txt

Have a look at the results, if you wish.

Rickrolling with mod_rewrite

Comic Credit:XKCD

Rickrolling is one of the latest goofy internet pranks, memes, or whatever you want to call it. By strictest definition, to rickroll someone is to send them a link that seems to be for something interesting, but actually takes them to a video of Rick Astley's "Never gonna give you up". These can be via e-mail, instant message, or even discussion forums.

Example of rickroll bait:

Did you see the video of the new spy plane the military is working on?!

Fast forward to today. I find out that some morons have planned to have a little fun with one of the websites that I help with. It's not my site, but run by a client and friend of mine. Not too big of a deal, just some bored teenagers, probably. Not sure what they were up to, but it probably involved lots of forum trolling, trash talking, or spamming. Who knows? I figured I would rickroll these twerps. If they click on the URL they posted in their little forum, they won't get the site they wanted. They will get Rick Astley instead. Meanwhile, the site works fine for everyone else.

In the name of keeping both parties somewhat anonymous, I'll set up something similar on my ExplorerHacks site, which doesn't actually have any real content. If you click on this link to www.explorerhacks.com, you'll get rickrolled. Or, you should. I guess. If you just go to www.explorerhacks.com by typing it into your browser, it should load normally.

In order to do this, I used Mod_Rewrite for apache, and added this to my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www\.h-i-r\.net [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU [R]

The first line just initializes the rewrite engine.

The second line checks the HTTP_REFERER server variable to see if it starts with "http://www.h-i-r.net" (It's a regular expression, "^" means "starts with" and the periods have to be escaped with a backslash or else they're treated as wildcard characters) The [NC] simply means "no case" so that the referer URL is case-insensitive.

The third line tells apache what to do. In this case, it replaces the entire url (.*) with a link to the video on YouTube. The code at the end specifies what kind of rewrite. In this case, [R] means that the web server passes an HTTP 302 status, telling the browser that the URL has been temporarily moved. And you just got rickrolled.

Related Links:
Mod_Rewrite Tips site
Regular-Expressions.info (for forming good RegEx rules)
XKCD.com

The MBR Love Letter

First, this was Friday's XKCD comic:


Then today, I ran across someone who decided to actually pull it off, with a nifty how-to. Obviously, tweaking the MBR can render your system unbootable, so it's not recommended to do it unless you really know what you're doing, or if you're going to format and re-install anyways.

I laughed, which is always a good way to get an early start to the work week.

I have to share this...

I saw this on XKCD today and just about died. SQL Injection at its best.