mark mazurek

My friend Pixy, a Web backend guy, news. The good news: we’ve become much better at running virtualized. The bad news: Pixy rejects Xen and KVM and continues with VMWare.

After installing Fedora 8, the mouse pointer automatically tracked between Windows and Linux even without installing VMWare tools (a good thing, because I haven’t been able to install VMWare tools). And the clock problems that made standard Linux 2.6 builds all but useless under VMWare have completely disappeared.

This must be Dan Berrange’s work on the mouse (and someone in X land). I’m uncertain if my patches were ever used, and in any case I only delivered the absolute events to the input framework. Someone else made evdev not to crash as much and also had it configured in F8 by default.

Retrocomputing is silly, but fun.

I understand that WRT54GL is only $79+tax in Fry’s, but then again, this thing runs Fedora. I only had to tweak rpm, which is built with mandatory NPTL these days, so although it pretends to be i386, it really requires i686. The Versa is a 486. Also, I threw on it a kernel RPM with hostap, but that was trivial.

A chance brought me into a chain bookstore in the middle of nowhere, so I took an opportunity to browse.

Greg’s “” is interesting, because it exposes the tribal knowledge. Probably needs a bit more git these days. $35 (there’s also a free PDF).

” is fascinating. I cannot help thinking that someone is trying a technical solution to a social problem. We all know how a certain reputable kernel developer replugged a major subsystem from one API to another in order to bypass a clueless maintainer. I had my doubts, but it was a great success, despite the cost of userland-visible changes (I’m actually disadvantaged by this, because I have a small fixed-function box where the API the new code needs was completely deconfigured… Now I have to carry 220KB of extra stuff.). WiMAX attempts the same on a much bigger scale: its providers and users have a chance to bypass the exploitive, rent-seeking, carteilized cellular market. The audacity of the plot is breath-taking.

: Got this, mostly because I remember that it was hard to find information about my Series 2 TiVo. Everything falls off the net pretty quickly these days.

To illustrate the dangers of knowing too much trivia, a hard drive in a company Dell Latitude D600 died on me today across a reboot to install Fedora 8. I’m quite certain that it happened because an hour previously I applied “hdparm -B 254 /dev/sda“, about which I’ve read in . Before today, the drive worked for 3.5 years and accumulated about 1,300,000 duty cycles.

In my defense, the sound the drive made when parking was annoying and the two-second delay every time Firefox wanted to move a RAM page to swap was irritating, so I was somewhat justified in my attempt to make my life more convenient. Also, my (newer) Dell Inspiron 1501 appears to be none the worse after a treatment with -B 254, so…

There was a bit of Kindle noise recently. I have no clue about it, I just read what . However, one note for those who think that e-book cannot catch on because it’s “inconvenient”: they are very popular in Russia. I don’t have one, but a large number of my old University cohorts do. The reason is: content aplenty, most pirated. Frankly, if it supported PDF, I wouldn’t mind one, because a) evince is slow, b) separate screen saves real estate. Copy-paste is not very functional in evince either (e.g. keeps grabbing wrong column), so a separate device is no big loss.

I’m torrenting Fedora 8 now, which apparently does not come broken-up into CD-sized ISOs anymore. I was afraid that I would need to get a DVD drive at last, but on second thought, perhaps I can get by with an existing external hard drive.

Seen in the promoted by today:

I have become convinced that this “principle of least privilege”
is fundamentally wrong. Minimizing privilege might
reduce the damage done by some security holes but almost
never fixes the holes. Minimizing privilege is not the same
as minimizing the amount of trusted code, does not have the
same benefits as minimizing the amount of trusted code, and
does not move us any closer to a secure computer system.

He is taking a jab at SElinux here, isn’t he?

I was unable to find the original author of this joke, which I received from my friend Sergey working in Electronic Arts.

From my experience of outsourcing work to emerging markets:

Chinese:

Me: do X, Y and Z
Them: ok
Me, week later: how goes it?
Them: did you mean X is Z and Y is not?
Me: what?!

Indian:

Me: do X, Y, Z
Them: thank you Sir and have a wonderful day
Me, week later: how goes it?
Them: beautiful
Me: did you finish X?
Them: we are analyzing it

Russian:

Me: do X, Y, Z
Them: why do X, when you can do N?
Me: customer wants it that way
Them: tell the customer he is stupid; here, take N

Sergey commented that it was “very life-like”.