They are my oldest and deadliest enemy. You cannot trust them.
If Hitler invaded Hell, I would give a favourable reference to the Devil.
Saturday, November 11
Shitheads
I hate spammers.
But spammers are at least trying to do something constructive for themselves. Sure, the damage they do to others far outweighs any possible economic benefit to themselves, but that's another matter. (That's why we have laws.)
There are worse people. Like the cretin in the Netherlands who just downloaded 20,000 copies of a 2.5MB file from a dormant blog here at mu.nu. That's why I enforce bandwidth quotas, by the way. I don't mind at all if someone like Ace or Rusty is using 200, 300, 400GB a month if that's going to real readers.
But when some idiot chews through 50GB in three hours - and the best explanation I can think of is referrer spam, the least effective marketing tool ever invented - I want CPanel to lock down that account.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Crappy Piece Of Crap Of The Day
Today's crappy piece of crap is
Yumex, a remarkably bloated and sluggish graphical front-end to Yum, written in (sad to say) Python. It's using 97MB of memory and 20% CPU and not, so far as I can tell, doing a goddamn thing.
And that's once I managed to actually get it to run (I almost said "work", but I have no sign of that); for hours it was complaining that something else had locked yum and wouldn't run at all.
I tried running it using X over SSH - locally - and sshd was chewing up 40% of my CPU.
I swear that Fedora Core 4 didn't suck this bad.
Update: OKay, I'll give it some credit. If you wait the fifteen minutes or so it takes to start up, and put up with its wallowing GUI, it will actually let you browse packages and install them.
Just.
Very.
Slowly.
Update: God, this thing is just excruciating. It's using 177MB of memory now - resident. I tried the category view. Clicked on Applications, and then on Educational Software. Nothing happened for a couple of minutes (but the CPU was very busy). Then, nothing continued to happen, although now the application responded to mouse clicks.
Then I found out that in the category view, it divides packages into Mandatory, Default, and Optional. It defaults to Mandatory, and since there are no mandatory educational applications, it didn't show anything.
There's no indication that it's busy - other than the fact that it locks up.
There's no All tab.
I clicked on the Engineering and Scientific category a few minutes ago, and it's still frozen. Okay, so that bloody beagle-build-index thing is still running (620 minutes of CPU time now). Okay, so I'm running under VMWare with only 400MB of memory allocated. I expect it to be a little slow; that's part of the reason I set it up this way. I want performance problems in my code to be obvious so that I can catch them early.
I wish someone had taken the same approach for yumex, because it is pure, distilled suck.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Yumex, running fast
Doing almost nothing, but
Who needs resources?
Posted by: TallDave at Saturday, November 11 2006 11:41 AM (oyQH2)
2
I gave up in the end and went with CentOS.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 15 2006 11:40 PM (xyVrU)
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Crappy Piece Of Crap Of The Day
Today's crappy piece of crap is
beagle-build-index, which has so far spent
five and a half hours indexing the documentation on my new Fedora Core 6 install.
It's not the only thing that runs for ages after a fresh install, either.
Feh.
If I wanted Gentoo, I'd have downloaded Gentoo.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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1
rpm -e beagle is the only way. And by the way, I told you before that "install everything" is retarded, and yet you have the temerity to complain about the consequences of it. You, and only you installed that crap, and now you do not even have the excuse of "Install Everything" button.
Actually, I take it back -- for the case of beagle specifically. Beagle is going to be in the core for a long time [unless Microsoft kills it, see below], so you have to deselect it specifically every time you install. If you recall, Fedora always shipped with file indexing enabled. The only difference that it was locate back in RHL 7 days, and slocate in FC1. I asked around why the heck this nonsense is going on and the definitive answer is, "because notting likes it that way".
Beagle comes from Ximian as a showcase of the power of Mono (together with Tomboy and other such crap like f-spot). It is supposed to be a phenomenal improvement over slocate, and should finally be doing its indexing "in the background", without killing your system. Guess what, not only it doesn't deliver, but it is worse than slocate. But you should welcome your new Mono overlords, or else you're "divisive", "NIH man", "paranoid".
Speaking of paranoid, you heard about the $328 million deal between Microsoft and Novell (who owns Ximian (who wrote Mono (in which Beagle is written)))? Can you spell P-A-T-E-N-T-S? Maybe we only need to endure Beagle for two or three more Fedora releases.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, November 11 2006 03:04 PM (9imyF)
2
Install everything used to work just fine, back in the days of RH7-8-9, and even in the early Fedora releases. Back then, they didn't dump elephants into the mix without thinking about whether people
wanted elephants.
Sigh.
Thanks for your answers, by the way. Very much appreciated.
The evil beagle is off on a second round. Last night it had accumulated 12+ hours of CPU. This morning it's around 5 hours.
Yuck.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 11 2006 08:29 PM (HEe1u)
3
I'll tell you even more. Beagle was developed specifically as a response to *rumours* about new Microsoft database-driven filesystem. You know what kind of Microsoft fanboys work in Novell/Ximian. Of course they had to copy the idea.
Beagle even looks good at PowerPoint presentations. The idea is, you never remember any file names, just drop everything into the bottomless maw and then say, "hey computer, what about that picture where I passed out drunk in Stacy's vomit... No, not Tummy's vomit, search again!" That's how F-spot is supposed to work. It's kinda like Google and "never delete anything" system.
Obviously, some people have this urge to be total revolutionaries, to discard the current paradigm. Filenames are so 20th century.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, November 11 2006 11:13 PM (9imyF)
4
I don't mind that paradigm so much.
What I do mind is really really bad implementations thereof.
It's spent 20 hours (CPU time) indexing 800MB of docs. On a 2.6GHz P4. Given the high-quality high-performance open-source full-text indexing applications that are readily available, that's ludicrous.
Oh, and my install process died. Couldn't download one of the files, so yumex didn't install anything at all. And lost the list of packages I wanted. And took ten minutes to reload itself. Gah.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 11 2006 11:24 PM (HEe1u)
5
I seriously suggest you to suffer with yum in FC-6 and hope that Jeremy fixes Pirut for FC-7. After all, RHN has to migrate off up2date to yum-based backends, so it's budgeted to a degree. Yumex is likely to be a dead end. Also, if you filed specific bugs against Pirut, it would help.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Sunday, November 12 2006 01:27 AM (9imyF)
6
Yeah, actually filing bug reports would be a step up from whining. ;)
I did use yumex to disembeagle my install, which both amused me and made things run a lot faster.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 12 2006 04:06 AM (HEe1u)
7
Well written bug reports are generally effective ... I used to alpha test utilities for a living ... you can blame me for bugs left in the old IBM DOS 6.3 toolset.
Just note what you did, what you expected, and what actually happened.
Don't tear the heads off the programmers ... they are the ones reading the report and deciding what to do about it.
End with a request to consider fixing the problem in a future release if they cannot correct the problem now ... often bad program behavior is a result programmers getting painted into a corner by someone else's earlier bad decisions.
Bugs generally fall into three categories:
1) "Fix it now"
2) "Fix it later"
3) "We meant to do that"
Enough complaints about a bug can get it moved up a notch towards "Fix it now".
Posted by: Kristopher at Monday, November 13 2006 04:17 PM (kuCLH)
8
Pixy, look at "Install Everything" discussion for Fedora 7
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2007-January/msg00345.html
As I gather, it might be possible, althogh you'd need a stack of CDs sky high now with former Extras on the same media; also someone has to work on fixing conflicting packages and proper selections for alternatives. It can be done, but needs work.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, January 06 2007 09:29 PM (9imyF)
9
Thanks Pete.
Unfortunately, a lot of the posters seem to be missing the point.
Yes, I can do a yum-install afterwards -
if it works. Even if it works, that's a very time-consuming and bandwidth-hungry process. And I've already
got the media. (And based on experience, the chances of it working are about one in twenty.)
Putting Extras into the main distribution certainly complicates matters, because as you say, Extras isn't necessarily free of conflicts.
And I think Core+Extras will fit on a single DVD, though probably not with all the source packages as well.
This guy gets it, anyway. I don't intend to do this on a production box - ever - but it's enormously useful to me in a development/support role to have everything already installed.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 06 2007 09:53 PM (GaSFI)
10
I thought yum could install from DVD, including the '*'. This is of the things that the unified back-end between yum and Anaconda allows to do. I understand that it's still not quite what you want. For one thing, it lacks integration into Anaconda's GUI. But it should be less painful than pulling from common repositories at least.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Sunday, January 07 2007 02:37 AM (9imyF)
11
Ah. Well, yes, that would certainly help.
I still want to see the "everything" option back in place, though. CentOS 4.4 has it, even if it's a smaller "everything".
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, January 07 2007 02:55 AM (GaSFI)
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Friday, November 10
Need For (Quad) Speed
Running yum update for a new Fedora install under VMWare and snarfing my daily podcast fix via iTunes.
That's more than enough to turn a 2.6GHz Pentium 4 into jelly.
Just on that subject, is iTunes a complete and utter cow on MacOS too, or does that version actually work? Grabbing 100% of the CPU simply to download a file (at, I might add, an effective speed of 128kbps) seems a bit much.
Hrrm. I have a 7.02 update to apply. Bet you twenty cents it doesn't help.
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That really doesn't sound right. I just asked Brian Tiemann about it, and he responded:
"I just did four simultaneous video podcast downloads in
iTunes 7.0.2 on a Sempron 1.6 GHz with 768 MB of RAM, and the CPU usage never averaged more than about 18%. Sounds like your friend's got something unusual happening, though I couldn't guess what at this point."
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, November 11 2006 01:58 AM (+rSRq)
2
It may signify that I have 3000+ podcasts and 10,000+ music tracks. I don't recall that it used to be this slow, but since I got serious about downloading podcasts, it's turned into a giant slugcow.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 11 2006 05:05 AM (HEe1u)
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Burning Thread Of Fire
It burns, burns, burns:
Hello Pixy Misa, you are logged in to Minx.
Processing 0.38 seconds.
17 queries taking 0.059 seconds, 1027 records returned.
Page size 377 kb.
Powered by Minx 0.7 alpha.
But Minx don't do too bad.
Most of that time is taken up by the HTML sanitiser, which is dynamic (it runs every time, rather than storing the sanitised HTML*) and uses an SGML parser written in Python instead of a C library. I'm looking to improve that, but in the meantime, 0.38 seconds for 1000+ comments on older hardware (2GHz Opteron) without the benefit of Psyco (which had a memory leak) is, as I said, not too bad.
* Because the sanitisation rules are context-sensitive.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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The Fedora Package Updater is frigging
useless.
There have to be a dozen superior open-source package managers already in existence, so what's the excuse?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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What in the world is "Fedora Package Updater" and why are you trying to use it? I, for one, have no idea what you are talking about, and computers in my house were running Fedora for years. Just use yum already.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, November 10 2006 04:50 AM (9imyF)
2
I thought to myself "surely there is a decent GUI tool for performing updates thes days", and after hunting about the menus a bit, found this... thing.
It looks and acts like it came straight out of Red Hat 6.2.
As you say, I shall use yum. Not that I'm overly fond of yum either, but it does work.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 10 2006 05:05 AM (9mnkm)
3
The point being (as much as I have a point) that someone bothered to sit down and write a
really bad package manager and then someone else made it the only one available to the casual user in Fedora Core 6. (Well, at least under KDE. Maybe there's something decent in Gnome.)
That second someone in particular needs to be hunted down and slapped with a wet fish.
While I'm bitching about Fedora, Core 6 still hasn't replace the "just fucking install everything" button, and even if you go through the menus trying to choose everything, you inevitably end up with strange gaps in your install. And of course, if you try to complete your install afterwards, you run into this pile of crap.
I'd just run CentOS, but its clock goes berserk under VMWare Server.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 10 2006 05:10 AM (9mnkm)
4
OK. I looked at that thing. When that thing starts, it pretends to be Pup, in reality it's Pirut in Pup compatibility mode. My Dear God. The "rpm -qi --changelog pirut" shows that Jeremy was kicking it. I guess there were requests for GUI and the "community" was unable to deliver. I heard that gyum is, if anything, worse than Pirut. GUI people scare me.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Friday, November 10 2006 06:56 AM (9imyF)
5
Hmmmm .... synaptic works fine for me.
And the idiot-gui update manager in ubuntu is actually rather smart about not screwing the pooch by upgrading past the version your distro is currently on.
Since I use an encrypted root and home on my desktop machine, I have to be careful about updating ... one bad move and I'll have to spend hours fixing my /boot directory....
Posted by: Kristopher at Friday, November 10 2006 12:05 PM (giy+l)
6
I don't think I've used the Redhat installer since about version 7 ?
apt / synaptic works pretty much. I've used yum since Core 3 with the appropriate extra repositories.
Pup and pirut are just too terrible for words.
Posted by: Andrew at Friday, November 10 2006 06:57 PM (t8tOu)
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Thursday, November 09
Blug
I have a wonderful new Core 2 Duo system with 4GB of memory at work.
Naturally, my job has just changed and it looks like I'll mostly be working at home from now on.
And my home PC is a three-year-old Pentium 4.
I'm building a development environment under Linux under VMWare right now, and let me say, yes, there really is a difference. Even though the clock speed of my home PC is faster than that of the office machine.
I wonder if they'll let me swap...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Don't the new Core chips have native virtualisation support as well ?
If VMware is making use of it then it should see a significant performance increase.
Now you can plug in the Core 2 Extreme as well. Quad CPU anyone ?
Posted by: Andrew at Friday, November 10 2006 07:28 PM (t8tOu)
2
Vroom! Bit expensive at the moment, though. I'll wait for the non-extreme quaddies.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 10 2006 08:45 PM (9mnkm)
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Whee
I forgot Madman's Tenth Anniversary Sale - they're selling their entire back catalogue at $10 per DVD - but fortunately (for me) their servers fell over during the stampede and they decided to extend it.
So I just picked up:
The first two-and-a-half seasons of Galaxy Angel
Days of Midori and Magical Shopping Arcade Abenobashi, which I loved on fansub but never got around to buying
Porco Rosso, Pom Poko (which I might already have somewhere...), Nausicaa, and a spare copy of Millennium Actress to foist upon the unwary
Kaleido Star
Burst Angel
Colorful (heh)
Uh, and something that rhymes with Mickey Mousen
Should keep me occupied for a day or three.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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Mickey Mousen (ahem) isn't that bad. Compared to Dokuro-chan, for example, it's downright brilliant.
Oh, it's no classic (like Dirty Pair Flash, say), but at the prices you're buying it for, it's perfectly acceptable.
(yes, I'm joking about DPF)
Posted by: Wonderduck at Thursday, November 09 2006 09:58 PM (6YRS5)
2
You didn't really buy Ikki Tousen, did you?
Actually, if I ever see a real cut-rate sale, I might pick up the rest just so I can watch them with the sound turned down. And lots of skipping to the good parts.
Or maybe not. It never actually gets ecchi, does it?
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, November 10 2006 03:30 AM (+rSRq)
3
I'm not sure quite where the line between fanservice and ecchi lies, but I'm pretty sure
Mickey Mousen crosses it. Not hentai, but ecchi.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 10 2006 05:52 AM (9mnkm)
4
To achieve the vaunted heights of ecchi, you need something that rhymes with "Tipples". I didn't see any on the first DVD, which is all I bought.
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, November 10 2006 06:25 AM (+rSRq)
5
Ah. They do pop up in the manga, but I'm not sure what happened to them in the anime.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 10 2006 06:50 AM (9mnkm)
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None in the anime. Barely. Just barely.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, November 10 2006 10:52 AM (6YRS5)
7
If you're fast, you can catch one in Ep. 4 of Code Geass.
Posted by: Ubu Roi at Friday, November 10 2006 01:03 PM (dhRpo)
8
I went slightly more overboard. I ended up with 62 DVDs. I really should catalogue all that I haven't watched ... and not by anymore.
Posted by: Alex at Friday, November 10 2006 09:18 PM (kwBWI)
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Two Out Of Three Ain't Bad
Michelle Malkin:
I'm hanging it up for the night, er, morning. Unlike Michael Moore in 2004, however, I will not be staying in bed for three days in a catatonic state. I will not need PEST shock therapy. I will not move to Australia.
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But looking reasonably, what's good about Australia?
Yes, there's John Howard, but for how long? And I expect the pendulum to swing to some kind of leftist appeaser next.
And your gun laws are, frankly, insane. What's up with the ban on .223? That's a deal-breaker right there.
I'm going to be at a conference in Sydney in January. Already received the Electronic Travel Authority thingie. So I'm going to look around. But I'm not too optimistic.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, November 09 2006 11:35 PM (9imyF)
2
But looking reasonably, what's good about Australia?
Compared to what?
Compared to America, it's a toss-up. Japan also has its good points. Compared to just about anywhere else in the world: Australia has a growing economy, a growing population, and a government that isn't completely worthless.
And I expect the pendulum to swing to some kind of leftist appeaser next.
I doubt that, but we'll see. Remember that we don't have term limits; this is Howard's fourth term, and he can run for a fifth if he wants.
And your gun laws are, frankly, insane.I'll grant you that.
Anyway, I was thinking more that Australia was missing out on Michelle than vice versa.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 09 2006 11:55 PM (9mnkm)
3
what's good about Australia?
1) Beer.
2) Accent.
3) Pixy's there.
4) Girls!!!
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, November 10 2006 05:36 PM (+rGmJ)
4
The girls are amazing. I'm sure there are lots of pretty girls in America too, but it's wall-to-wall Playboy bunnies here in Sydney.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 10 2006 07:17 PM (9mnkm)
Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Saturday, November 11 2006 01:01 AM (+rSRq)
6
We only pretend to be gay to fend off stuck-up British trollops.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 11 2006 04:59 AM (HEe1u)
7
Look, every Aussie lass I've known (five) may as well have been a Playboy model... just stunningly hot. And funny. Intelligent. And oh that accent!
Perhaps that's not a large enough sample size to judge from.
Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, November 11 2006 10:30 AM (YWRlP)
8
Seeing what the world's melting pot produces, I'm not that fond of it (not that there's anything wrong with it, it's just not in my taste), but I'm married anyway, so the Australian Advantage makes no difference to me.
Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Saturday, November 11 2006 03:09 PM (9imyF)
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INXSS
My current headache is cross-site scripting, or XSS.
Cross-site scripting is an unforseen product of the combination of browser programmability and communally-updated websites. Javascript and XMLHttpRequest let your browser do all sorts of nifty things; community web sites let people build really nifty things; together they let bad people steal your ID.
Anyone can create a web page that will read your cookies, but browsers aren't stupid, and they will only cough up the cookies for that web site. Which was not a problem in the past, because before anyone could do anything untowards they had to take control of the website by some other means.
But if you have a community site where people can insert unfiltered HTML, that lets other people steal your cookies for that site. Badness.
The approaches to this problem seem to be threefold:
1. The listen-to-nanny approach, as typified by CERT: Tell people to turn off Javascript, and not to browse unknown web sites, especially after dark.
2. The patch-it-and-hope approach: Scrub the HTML for any untowards Javascript. If your site can restrict what users put up on their pages, you may be able to eliminate Javascript altogether - though even then, you might get tripped up the way MySpace was.
3. The keep-the-doors-and-windows-locked approach: Don't use cookies that give users global access. I think Blogger may be doing this, and that's why you keep having to log in to comment.
You have to do some of
2 in any case. If you don't scrub comments of bad HTML, you will find your page layouts corrupted in very short order.
3 looks likely to be the most robust, but at the cost of user functionality.
Anyone know of any in-depth resources on this? Or are people keeping their solutions close to their chests?
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
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( usenet oldbie )
HTML in posts is Evil!
That, and top posting.
Die, HTML, Die!
( /usenet oldbie )
Posted by: Kristopher at Thursday, November 09 2006 12:00 PM (giy+l)
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