This accidentally fell out of her pocket when I bumped into her. Took me four goes.

Happy Fireworks Day

Happy Independence Day to all my American readers!

Where I am, the 4th is nearly over, so I hope it was a good day for you.

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Well, That Was Weird

Had a long and blerky day at work (If you are expecting a file to arrive at nine A.M. as usual because you have promised to process it, check it, and get the results back out by mid-day, you can be sure of receiving it promptly at half-past-four in the afternoon) so... Where was I? Blerky day, yes. So I thought I'd have a nap before heading online for my daily fix. I didn't have pizza for lunch, so I have no explanation for this dream:

After a short film involving a Galactic Empire trying to select a suitable new ruler from among the hopelessly inbred children of the nobility (I blame this on too much MST3K), we moved to me at a Consumer Electronics Show demonstrating my company's latest product: A cluster of 192 Playstation 2's programmed to digitally apply make-up and costumes to actors in real time. I'm sure the hobbits and orcs in Lord of the Rings (not to mention John Rhys-Davies) would have appreciated our dedication. I wandered around the audience with a hand-held high-defintion digital video camera turning girls into princesses and boys into goblins.

A bonus feature was that it could also modulate voices, not just to another pitch, but to any pattern required. I demonstrated this by having audience members sing into a microphone, and regardless of talent (or the quite remarkable lack thereof) they all sounded like Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. The demonstration was a huge success until I reached the end of my power cord without realising it. Oops.

Cut to the commercials, quick! First up, two — let us say, low end — spin-offs of the same technology: DeerMaker and DeerMaker .45.

DeerMaker allows you to quickly and easily add deer to your family photos! And DeerMaker .45 allows you to quickly and easily — yes, that's right — quickly and easily add dead deer to your photos.

Which shows what my subconcious knows. Surely it should have been called DeerMaker .22?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:18 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Mud Pies, Anyone?

Blog of the day is Mudpiemarie:

1. How are you planning to spend the summer?
Tough one. I think I'll be at work during July and at work during August... Oh wait, that is the entire summer. Can we say bitter? Anyway, I am taking a dance class this summer and I am going to attempt to take a couple of days off around labor day to go to New York.

2. What was your first summer job?
My first summer job was babysitting the devil child. Devil child was five years old, watched Mtv, had a dog that could jump as high as my head, and invited large quantities of toddlers over to her house when I wasn't looking. She also had one of those Barbie cars that runs on batteries, except her batteries were never charged so I would end up pushing the thing back home. This would always lead to the argument of why I couldn't push her in the car, which would inevitably lead to her having a tantrum and me looking like the devil babysitter. Ahhh, the joys of early employment.

Don't go there expecting lengthy and detailed political analyses (but then, you won't get those here, either). What you get is little slices of Jeanine's life (no, I don't know what happened to Marie) and wonderful photos. Jeanine has a really good eye for composition and colour. The site design is delightfully minimalist too.

She had this to say about Harry Potter:

Friday was pure crazy-stuff at the bookstore. We sold 650 copies of HP5 that night. In the whole scheme of things that may not sound like a lot, but you must keep in mind that every copy had at least two people attached to it (if not more). So according to my calculations, we broke approximately 108 fire codes on Friday night.

I had been fooled into thinking that we were actually going to open the boxes prior to midnight so we could have them ready to sell. I was wrong. We sliced the boxes open at midnight and sold them straight from the boxes. Oh the nerdiness. People were actually taking pictures of the boxes. Oh wait, I did that, too.

And like all right-thinking people, she lusts after the Macintosh G5.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:44 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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That Will Slow The Fish Down

Between my ISP sending my packets on a grand tour of the Solar System and having to be at work early today (early being 8:30, as opposed to my normal time of 11), I forgot to shut off Kazaa, which was busy downloading a set of large files which I will refer to by the code-name "MST3K".

Well, what's the big deal? So I left my file sharing running.

The big deal is this: Between 1 AM and 8 AM, my ISP gives me free downloads (and cuts my speed by 70%, but I'll save that for another rant). From 8 AM onwards, they charge me - once I exceed my princely monthly allowance of 2.5 gigabytes - 14.9 cents per meg. (Also note that sometime in the night they fixed the problem so that my packets were now staying in the general vicinity of Earth.)

I had about 700 MB left for the month. (My month ends on the 10th.) Left to itself, my link can transfer about 500 MB per hour. I left home at 7:45, and would probably be back around 7 PM. So, that's eleven hours times half a gig minus seven hundred meg times 14.9 cents seven hundred dollars in excess usage charges.

Oh. Dear.

The first of the month is by far our busiest time at work; there was no way I was going to get to run home and turn my computer off. The alternative - calling my ISP and telling them that I'd left my file sharing running and could they please disconnect my line - was more palatable than a $700 bill, but only just.

So... Think like a geek.

I SSH'd into my home firewall box. (Thank Linus for Linux, and thank my foresight that I'd set things up so I could do that. I hardly ever need to; mostly I work from home and connect to servers at the office.)

Now what? I'm on Linux. Kazaa is on my Windows box. If I was still runing ME I could have just crashed it remotely, but after the great Driver Plague of '03 I upgraded to XP, which is a little more robust. After a little thought, I set off a ping flood aimed at my Windows box (which is named Ukyo) from my firewall (Pixy). Hopefully that would choke the downloads enough so they wouldn't bankrupt me utterly.

Then I stopped and considered for a minute. I have a router. It's a little blue Netgear thingy that connects my home network to the internet (via my ADSL modem). I viewed it until now as a black - or rather blue - box. Plug it in, turn it on, start sucking data.

But it's a router. And routers route stuff. So if it works like a real router, I should be able to tell it not to let my PC download a squigabyte of data and burn my bank account to the ground.

It has a web interface, but that wouldn't let me do what I wanted. If it was a real router, the good stuff would be accessible by telnet. (Everyone know what telnet is? Good.) But was it? Easy way to find out:

$ telnet router
Trying 192.168.0.1...
Connected to router.
Escape character is '^]'.

Password: *******

pixymisa@>

Woot! I'm in! (Half the stuff I own is named "pixymisa" or something related to it, by the way. If I boot up an old, disused system that I'm planning to give away, there's a 90% chance it has a /pixy or a /misa filesystem. Or both.)

A couple of minutes of poking around revealed the command ip route add which would add an IP route. (Yes, the commands do actually make some sort of sense.) A route tells the router how to move packets from point A to point B. (This is why routes are called routes, and why routers are called routers. Simple, isn't it?)

In this case, point A was the Internet, and point B was my PC, and I didn't want anything getting from A to B. It's not hard to achieve this. Indeed, it happens all the time, mostly by accident.

Imagine that you were having a party, and wanted to invite everyone at the office except for this one person who you can't stand. You can't just not invite her; that would be rude. So what you do, is you give her bogus instructions. Turn left into Floogleman Street, you say. It's the house next to the Fire Station. You can't miss it. Of course, there is no Floogleman Street, no Fire Station, and you live in a condo. You take the phone of the hook, and the party is a huge success.

That's just what I did. I told the router that any packets bound for Ukyo had to go down Floogleman Street (after making damn sure there was no Floogleman Street on my network). The packets would arrive, wander about for a minute with confused expressions on their headers, and quietly expire. Since nothing ever came back, the servers at the far end eventually gave up sending anything, and my bandwidth (and my bank account) was saved.

Try that with a Windows box.

(The title comes from an incident that took place back in the dawn of time when I was at University. Uni, as we knew it. At Uni, there was an ornamental pond in the middle of the library lawn. One day, for no reason that was ever disclosed, the Powers decided that the pond was to be filled in. A group of workpersons duly arrived with a truckload of dirt and dumped it into the pond. One of the workpersons was heard to say the line, and became instantly - if anonymously - famous.)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:02 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Stuck... Can't... Move...

No... updates... for... a... little... while... because... my... ISP... is... routing... all... packets... via... Mars...

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A Man's Castle

Ooh! More Flash gaming goodness! Check out the aptly named Defend Your Castle. Weeeeeeeeee splorch!

(via The International Squirrel Conspiracy)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:04 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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