Terminally Incoherent

If you noticed general slowness and or occasional outages in the last few hours I apologize. I was busy eating a late lunch at work, which included a salad that contained lethal dose of garlic. Seriously, I could totally slay a vampire with my breath right now. That is if we are talking about a universe in which vampires are vulnerable to garlic. So White Wolf’s World of Darkness is definitely out. Were vamps in Buffy affected by garlic? I don’t remember. Anyway, assuming that vampires hurt by garlic, my blood would probably be lethal to them. The salad, despite being a tad too garlicky was not that bad.

So while I was doing that, the server started acting all kinds of wonky. When ssh’d over and ran top, I noticed that the average server load was waaay over 200. Now, depending on your number of CPU’s and cores per CPU maximum acceptable server load may vary. But on modest hardware with 1 or 2 CPU’s you really don’t want to see that number being above 10. If your server load is a two digit number, it usually means you are having a bad day.

Server load over 200 means that this machine was pretty much dead (and possibly on fire). It went down few seconds later. Since the reboot, the load dropped down to much more acceptable 20. Two digit system load seems to be a norm around here.

I guess you get what you pay for. Thanks Dreamhost! I really appreciate that you are overselling the shit out of your resources.

Anyway, if you guys have suggestions for good hosting companies please post them in the comments. I need:

1. LAMP - cause fuck windows, and fuck IIS and fuck ASP
2. Full shell access (cause I’m not gonna fuck around with web panels)
3. Cron jobs, and similar goodies.
4. Decent amount of space, and no silly database quotas
5. Not too expensive

And I do realize that decent hosts who do not oversell won’t give me the as much space and bandwidth as dreamhost. I’m just looking for something roughly comparable. I’m actually thinking about trying virtual hosting so that I can reboot my own machine and have root access. Anyone has a good host who offers this kind of services?

At this point I see basically two legitimate uses for telnet: mud’s and nethack. While both forms of entertainment are still popular, they are far from mainstream even in the geekier circles. They have mostly niche audiences, and general public has little or no use for telnet these days. You really do want to use ssh for any kind of remote shell stuff. This is evidenced by Microsoft disabling the telnet client by default in Vista. So the only remaining use for the tool is simply poking around by connecting to random ports. These days I mostly use telnet to see if I can access an email server from a remote location by telnetting to port 110 or 25. But then again, I could also use netcat for that with pretty much the same results.

As you may or may not know, I set up my own little public nethack server that can be found by telneting to luke.kicks-ass.org. And since for some reason he output is a bit garbled in the default windows client, I sought out replacement. PuTTY is probably on of the better free, open telnet clients for windows out there. There is simply not much competition on that market anyway, because the basic windows client is not that bad. Still, I find PuTTY superior.

The problem is, by default handling telnet links such as telnet://luke.kicks-ass.og is by default hard wired to the windows client. Therefore if I wanted to use PuTTY I had to manually open it, and type in the server address instead of just clicking on the link. I decided to change this behavior, and set PuTTY to be my default telnet handler from now on.

How to do it? You can use the little registry hack below:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\telnet\shell\open\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\PuTTY\\putty.exe\" %1

Copy the code snippet, paste it into your favorite text editor and save it as a .reg file. Then double click it to run it. From now on, telnet links should open in putty, as long as you have it installed in C:\Program Files\PuTTY. If you want to change it back to the windows client, here is a snippet to reverse it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
 
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\telnet\shell\open\command]
@="rundll32.exe url.dll,TelnetProtocolHandler %l

Enjoy!

Btw, can you think about other legitimate uses of telnet, that would not be appropriate for ssh or other tools? Let me know in the comments.

Here is a somewhat interesting topic: how do you as a parent introduce your child to computers and technology? Let me preface this by saying that I have no children, and I don’t plan having any for quite some time. The way it worked in my family (and I think the way it works in most families) is that kids figure out technology on their own, and then they teach it to the parents. My dad is pretty good with hardware and electronics so he could probably build a computer given the right parts, a decent manual and enough time to figure it out. Using that computer on the other hand is a whole other ballpark.

So kids learn technology in a somewhat chaotic, random manner. Or rather, those who don’t exhibit the geeky drive for tinkering and learning figure it out just enough to get by. And thus we have a whole generation of people who can use MySpace, webmail email of some sort, Facebook, p2p, iTunes and not much else. They end up in the same boat as their parents, not knowing enough about technology to teach their kids - so they more or less let them figure it out on their own.

This is not the case for us. I assume that most people who read my ramblings here share my passion for technology at least for the most part. We are in the unique position of providing a structured, well rounded technology experience for our children. We can expose them to different systems, different computing paradigms, and instill strong electronic security and privacy related instincts. So even if they choose not to follow us into the science and/or technology field, they at least won’t be lusers and noobs.

For example, I would love to raise a child in an operating system agnostic environment. The kid could be growing up using 3 or 4 major operating systems simultaneously gaining appreciation for all of them, and forming informed opinions about them. I don’t care if they develop strong affinity for windows, as long as they have spent equal amount of time on linux and unix based systems.

What I hate the most is the annoying Windows user who have never used anything other than WinXP, never heard about unix and yet he will claim that he hates Macs because they are stupid. I don’t want my kid to be that guy. Hell, I don’t want your kid to be that guy either.

I like to think that parents have a huge influence on your values - especially the ones instilled early on. If we start from a very early age we might have a chance to produce individuals who not only have strong sense of morality, but also are religious about backups, privacy and encryption.

Has anyone ever tried doing that? Did it work? Have it failed? Is it possible to raise a child to be competent and cluefull even if they do not show special interest in technology? Or is this just wishful thinking on my part?

I was talking about different email protocols in the class, and I noticed that the difference between POP, IMAP and SMTP is absolutely irrelevant to my students. I asked students in both of my classes if they ever actually used an actual email client like Outlook, or Thunderbird. Not a single hand went up in either of the classes. That’s around 52 college students who never, ever in their life seen anything other than webmail interface. In fact, most of them hardly use email at all. Most communication between them seems to happen via Myspace/Facebook.

When we work in the computer lab, most people have the following pages open in the background: Facebook, Myspace and sometimes Meebo. I have yet to see a Gmail or Yahoo inbox on someones screen. Two years ago, I actually seen people checking their email in the lab. It’s funny that my students seem to be a demographic completely opposite to my regular readership here who still prefer email as their primary means of communication.

My students seem consider it a necessary evil. They reluctantly check their university account because the old, backwards professors still use it for posting assignments and such. I mean, that’s like so 90’s it’s not even funny. Some of them also reluctantly use their AOL email which came free with the AIM account, to write emails to their mom and all the other old timers. Why can’t they all set up Myspace and Facebook profiles like normal people.

I know, I know. This is beginning to sound like an old fart rant about “the damn teenagers these days”. The thing is that I don’t have anything against IM, social networks, twitter and etc. I use them all, and I really think they are great. It’s just that sometimes people abuse them. For example, I can’t tell you how many times I had a back and forward correspondence via the retarded MySpace private message interface, and wondered why can’t this be done via email. After all, all we were doing was using an internal email-like system to facilitate an email-like exchange. Only the interface was klunky and lame, the conversation was kept separate from all my other email, and I actually had to go out of my way and log into MySpace to see if I got a reply.

But I guess it’s a matter of convenience. I check my MySpace 3 or 4 times a week, when I remember about it. On the other hand I have a Firefox plugin that checks my Gmail account and notifies me of incoming messages every minute or two. On the other hand, most of my students and many of my friends are the exact opposite. They are always logged into MySpace and Facebook but never actually check their email. So if we were to take the conversation outside their proffered network it would then be separate from all their usual conversations, done with unfamiliar interface, and forcing them to log into another application to talk to me.

So I do understand the issue here. Maybe we need an email-to-facebook messaging bridge or something… Nah, scratch that. I’m right, and they are wrong. I’m using an open, extensible platform. If I want to, I can encrypt my email, sign it digitally, attach whatever the hell I want to it, and I can choose a way I can read it. What they are doing is locking themselves in a walled garden where they can only talk to other inhabitants of the garden, only using the tools that the garden provides for them.

I’m suspecting that the difference between us and them is the degree of clue. Note that the people I teach are not technology or science majors. They are also not business school students, because they have their own MIS course geared for their “very special” needs. And yes, I mean special in the most demeaning, and condescending way possible.

My students are a motley bunch of all these weird majors that I didn’t even know existed. Like phys-ed, dance and nutrition for example. I mean who knew that you can actually get a college degree without ever learning anything about science and literature. I mean I really don’t want to demean their career choices or anything. After all they are in college, which is a good thing. It’s just that when I write a summation formula on the board in the Sigma notation and then I turn around to see 30 faces stricken with the expression of absolute, inexplicable horror, I get a little bit sad. I mean, this is something that they should know from high school math classes, and yet they all act as if they just lost sanity points after glimpsing at some contorted mathematical horror from the deep.

Then again I sometimes correspond to young up and coming bloggers and/or linux enthusiasts, who seem to be perfectly comfortable using email. So here is my theory: cluefull people, young and old tend to gravitate towards email since it is open, flexible and it facilitates structured, and thoughtful information exchange. They don’t reject social networks - they embrace them, but use the right tools for the right jobs.

Clueless people shun email, and remain perfectly content to live in their walled gardens of social networks complementing their lack of complexity with services like IM, and text messaging.

So, email is not for old people. It’s for cluefull people. The big problem is that not all young people out there posses a clue. In fact, most aren’t since the distribution of technological competence in general population follows the bell curve. So chances are, someone who you are trying to communicate with is not in the awesome tail of the curve, but rather somewhere in the middle. And clueless uses tend to think about using the right tool. They just use whatever is within their arms reach and doesn’t require a lot of effort or learning on their part.

I started playing Episode Two today. I was excited because Episode One was awesome so my expectations were high for this title. Unfortunately, my first impression was not a very good one. Immediately after launching the game, it would crash with the following error:

HALF-LIFE 2: hl2.exe - Application Error
The instruction at “0x________” referenced memory at “0×0________”. The memory could not be “read”.

Googling around didn’t help as much as I hoped for, since just about every single person who encountered this error (I’m not alone having this issue) found some kind of unique fix of their own. I did follow one suggestion which recommended extending the maximum size of the page file in Windows. I set it to the maximum value of 4GB and then rebooted my machine. Curiously enough this worked. If you encounter a simillar issue, try setting the max size of your page file to a higher value.

The game picks up right after Episode One, and once again you somehow managed to lose all your weapons and you start bare handed. You and Alyx must now find your way to White Forest station which means a trek through some deserted rural areas full of zombies, ant lions and all kinds of other threats. Alyx’s role is diminished as opposed to Episode One because she gets incapacitated pretty early on. As a bonus, you get to work alongside some NPC’s that do not die like flies. You even hook up with some Vortigaunts who now pack a mean punch.

Oh, and by the time you finish the game, you will feel like you have gained some invaluable insight into the life cycle of an Ant Lion colony.

I saw some new HUD tweaks. Episode One introduced the ammo and health bars on the crosshair, and now Episode Two moved the flashlight to it’s own HUD item. It’s actually nice because it seems that it has it’s own internal battery now, allowing you to run and/or swim with the light on, without exhausting it.

So far I like it. I’m only about an hour or two into the game, but it’s already interesting. I will write more after I finish the game.