The Blog of Harald

With rogers.com blocking SMTP in both directions, I needed an offsite backup for persephone.cfrq.net and related e-mail.

I’ve opened a tektonic.net “Virtual Private Server” account. $8/month gets me 128M of memory and 5Gb of disk space. It’s a very strange measurement, though, because the server hosts (running “Virtuozzo”:http://www.swsoft.com/en/products/virtuozzo/) do all sorts of dynamic stuff that reduces my usage. For example, the OS binaries all appear to be linked to “master” copies outside of my VPS, so they don’t count against my quota. Memory management is also strange. The data reported by “top” doesn’t match “free”; my current guess is that virtual memory is handled by the host OS, and any pages in my processes that are swapped out don’t count against my quota.

Anyway, the net result is that I’m currently running a backup mailserver in about 500Mb of disk and 16Mb of “memory”, for $8USD/month. Nifty!

There were a couple of problems with reliability the first few days; apparently these were caused by the host server I was assigned to. After they migrated everyone off that machine to a new host, my virtual server has been solid. It’s running Debian Stable, and while I’d prefer Ubuntu Dapper, I’m not going to upgrade just yet; I’m still working on upgrading persephone, after all :-)

Last Monday night Charlotte said “I’m never going to learn to steer my bike!”. By the end of the week we were riding all the way around the block without stopping. So it’s official; “Never” has arrived. It’s time to do all of those things you were never going to get to :-).

A belated Happy Summer! I was watching the groundhog babies frolicking on the deck outside my cabin last Wednesday, nowhere near Internet access… :-)

bq. “The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”

– George Bernard Shaw

(via “Quotation of the Day List”:http://ca.geocities.com/quotationoftheday/index.html)

I just wrote a simple wordpress filter that automatically creates links to a post if the title of that post (or other ‘link names’ in the post’s metadata) appear in text. I wrote it for the “Queen’s Guard”:http://www.the-gang.ca/roleplay/queensguard/ game log. It gives us a little bit of wiki-ness without having to use a full-blown wiki; I haven’t found any wiki software that I like enough to foist on my non-technical gaming buddies.

If anyone’s interested I can clean it up and post it somewhere.

(Update: It’s published: “Title Links Plugin”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2006/08/02/title-links-plugin/)

* A couple of weeks of high-priority customer escalations
* a whole bunch of internal stuff
* first communion for the kids
* Gareth’s trip to Ottawa
* digging up the back yard (which drains better now)
* preparing for vacation and summer camp
* prep for “The Queen’s Guard”:http://www.cfrq.net/~rolemaster/queensguard/ and our first session

I’m ready for my vacation now…

Darn; the census asks me about things that happened “last week”, defined as May 7-13, so I have to stop filling it out…

* very high winds, potentially damaging to kites, but fun anyway (I flew the cheap kites just in case)
* phone calls with work
* much fun tangling my spinners into other people’s kite lines
* seeing people I haven’t seen since September (sometimes caused by the previous item)
* 7 hours of code wrangling to refactor error handling and reconfiguration logic
* slightly low winds, but enough for the 5′ and 6′ deltas, which stayed parked in the sky all day
* two-line foolishness with Norm
* Gareth got a pie in the face for his birthday!

Yes, another fabulous start to the kiting season :)

I got the long census form! I got the long census form!

(I love filling out forms; it’s a weakness :-)

“Film of the Book: Top 50 movie adaptations revealed”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1756384,00.html

I’ve marked the one’s I’ve seen (any version of) and/or read (12 books, 20 movies, including 10 “both”):

1. [BM] 1984
2. [BM] Alice in Wonderland
3. American Psycho
4. [M] Breakfast at Tiffany’s
5. Brighton Rock
6. [BM] Catch 22
7. [BM] Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
8. A Clockwork Orange
9. Close Range (inc Brokeback Mountain)
10. [BM] The Day of the Triffids
11. Devil in a Blue Dress
12. Different Seasons (inc The Shawshank Redemption)
13. [BM] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Bladerunner)
14. Doctor Zhivago
15. [M] Empire of the Sun
16. [M] The English Patient
17. [M] Fight Club
18. The French Lieutenant’s Woman
19. [M] Get Shorty
20. The Godfather
21. [BM] Goldfinger
22. Goodfellas
23. [M] Heart of Darkness (aka Apocalypse Now)
24. [B] The Hound of the Baskervilles
25. [M] Jaws
26. [BM] The Jungle Book
27. A Kestrel for a Knave (aka Kes)
28. LA Confidential
29. Les Liaisons Dangereuses
30. Lolita
31. [B] Lord of the Flies
32. [M] The Maltese Falcon
33. [M] Oliver Twist
34. [BM] One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
35. Orlando
36. The Outsiders
37. Pride and Prejudice
38. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
39. [M] The Railway Children
40. Rebecca
41. The Remains of the Day
42. [M] Schindler’s Ark (aka Schindler’s List)
43. Sin City
44. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
45. The Talented Mr Ripley
46. Tess of the D’Urbervilles
47. Through a Glass Darkly
48. To Kill a Mockingbird
49. Trainspotting
50. The Vanishing
51. [BM] Watership Down

:: rogerebert.com :: Editor’s Notes :: 101 102 Movies You Must See Before…

bq. This isn’t like Roger Ebert’s “Great Movies” series. It’s not my idea of The Best Movies Ever Made (that would be a different list, though there’s some overlap here), or that they were my favorites or the most important or influential films, but that they were the movies you just kind of figure everybody ought to have seen in order to have any sort of informed discussion about movies. They’re the common cultural currency of our time, the basic cinematic texts that everyone should know, at minimum, to be somewhat “movie-literate.”

Of course, I just love movie-list memes, so here’s the list with the ones I’ve seen marked. 34 out of 102; more catching up to do :-). I know Rob & CL have some of the movies I haven’t seen; I’ll have to borrow them sometime.

I was a little surprised by the smattering of movies I have and haven’t seen, both before and after the early 1980s (when I started going to movies regularly). Although, many of the “classics” are actually Andy Beaton’s fault, via the old rep theatres in Toronto :-).

“*2001: A Space Odyssey*” (1968) Stanley Kubrick
“The 400 Blows” (1959) Francois Truffaut
“8 1/2” (1963) Federico Fellini
“Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) Werner Herzog
“*Alien*” (1979) Ridley Scott
“All About Eve” (1950) Joseph L. Mankiewicz
“*Annie Hall*” (1977) Woody Allen
“*Apocalypse Now*” (1979) Francis Ford Coppola*
“*Bambi*” (1942) Disney
“The Battleship Potemkin” (1925) Sergei Eisenstein
“The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) William Wyler
“The Big Red One” (1980) Samuel Fuller
“The Bicycle Thief” (1949) Vittorio De Sica
“The Big Sleep” (1946) Howard Hawks
“*Blade Runner*” (1982) Ridley Scott
“Blowup” (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni
“*Blue Velvet*” (1986) David Lynch
“Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) Arthur Penn
“Breathless” (1959) Jean-Luc Godard
“Bringing Up Baby” (1938) Howard Hawks
“Carrie” (1975) Brian DePalma
“*Casablanca*” (1942) Michael Curtiz
“Un Chien Andalou” (1928) Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali
“Children of Paradise” / “Les Enfants du Paradis” (1945) Marcel Carne
“Chinatown” (1974) Roman Polanski
“Citizen Kane” (1941) Orson Welles
“A Clockwork Orange” (1971) Stanley Kubrick
“The Crying Game” (1992) Neil Jordan
“*The Day the Earth Stood Still*” (1951) Robert Wise
“Days of Heaven” (1978) Terence Malick
“Dirty Harry” (1971) Don Siegel
“The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) Luis Bunuel
“Do the Right Thing” (1989 Spike Lee
“La Dolce Vita” (1960) Federico Fellini
“Double Indemnity” (1944) Billy Wilder
“*Dr. Strangelove*” (1964) Stanley Kubrick
“*Duck Soup*” (1933) Leo McCarey
“*E.T. — The Extra-Terrestrial*” (1982) Steven Spielberg
“Easy Rider” (1969) Dennis Hopper
“*The Empire Strikes Back*” (1980) Irvin Kershner
“The Exorcist” (1973) William Friedkin
“*Fargo*” (1995) Joel & Ethan Coen
“*Fight Club*” (1999) David Fincher
“Frankenstein” (1931) James Whale
“The General” (1927) Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
“The Godfather,” “The Godfather, Part II” (1972, 1974) Francis Ford Coppola
“*Gone With the Wind*” (1939) Victor Fleming
“GoodFellas” (1990) Martin Scorsese
“*The Graduate*” (1967) Mike Nichols
“Halloween” (1978) John Carpenter
“A Hard Day’s Night” (1964) Richard Lester
“Intolerance” (1916) D.W. Griffith
“It’s a Gift” (1934) Norman Z. McLeod
“*It’s a Wonderful Life*” (1946) Frank Capra
“*Jaws*” (1975) Steven Spielberg
“The Lady Eve” (1941) Preston Sturges
“*Lawrence of Arabia*” (1962) David Lean
“M” (1931) Fritz Lang
“*Mad Max 2” / “The Road Warrior*” (1981) George Miller
“*The Maltese Falcon*” (1941) John Huston
“The Manchurian Candidate” (1962) John Frankenheimer
“Metropolis” (1926) Fritz Lang
“*Modern Times*” (1936) Charles Chaplin
“*Monty Python and the Holy Grail*” (1975) Terry Jones & Terry Gilliam
“Nashville” (1975) Robert Altman
“The Night of the Hunter” (1955) Charles Laughton
“Night of the Living Dead” (1968) George Romero
“North by Northwest” (1959) Alfred Hitchcock
“Nosferatu” (1922) F.W. Murnau
“On the Waterfront” (1954) Elia Kazan
“Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) Sergio Leone
“Out of the Past” (1947) Jacques Tournier
“Persona” (1966) Ingmar Bergman
“Pink Flamingos” (1972) John Waters
“Psycho” (1960) Alfred Hitchcock
“*Pulp Fiction*” (1994) Quentin Tarantino
“Rashomon” (1950) Akira Kurosawa
“Rear Window” (1954) Alfred Hitchcock
“*Rebel Without a Cause*” (1955) Nicholas Ray
“Red River” (1948) Howard Hawks
“Repulsion” (1965) Roman Polanski
“The Rules of the Game” (1939) Jean Renoir
“Scarface” (1932) Howard Hawks
“The Scarlet Empress” (1934) Josef von Sternberg
“*Schindler’s List*” (1993) Steven Spielberg
“The Searchers” (1956) John Ford
“*The Seven Samurai*” (1954) Akira Kurosawa
“*Singin’ in the Rain*” (1952) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly
“*Some Like It Hot*” (1959) Billy Wilder
“A Star Is Born” (1954) George Cukor
“A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951) Elia Kazan
“Sunset Boulevard” (1950) Billy Wilder
“Taxi Driver” (1976) Martin Scorsese
“The Third Man” (1949) Carol Reed
“Tokyo Story” (1953) Yasujiro Ozu
“Touch of Evil” (1958) Orson Welles
“*The Treasure of the Sierra Madre*” (1948) John Huston
“Trouble in Paradise” (1932) Ernst Lubitsch
“Vertigo” (1958) Alfred Hitchcock
“*West Side Story*” (1961) Jerome Robbins/Robert Wise
“*The Wild Bunch*” (1969) Sam Peckinpah
“*The Wizard of Oz*” (1939) Victor Fleming

I remembered to set the clocks forward.

I completely failed to reactivate the alarm before bed last night.

Getting out of the house this morning was merely fast, not frenzied, only because the boy (who has to be at school earlier than the girl) was sick today, so I got a half-hour back.

I found it wonderfully ironic that this appeared in my inbox on the same day that we are moving into a new cubicle farm:

Schneier on Security: Cubicle Farms are a Terrorism Risk

must … not … strangle …

I went to log on to my Group RRSP provider’s website today Thanks to a misguided policy that HR introduced this year, my January RRSP contributions ended up in a non-registered plan, and I wanted to fix it. It turned out that I can fix this particular problem on the web, but that’s beside the point.

When I logged in, I was informed that my password had expired, and must be changed. It’s been 18 months since I logged in (yes, I check my quarterly statements, but I’m happy with the results; no changes required). I dutifully filled in the boxes, only to be faced with password strength requirements. Now, the whole point of these things is to prevent high-speed, dictionary-based password guessing attacks. You can’t launch a high-speed guessing attack against this website because it’s really slow, and after a certain number of failures, your account is locked out. And we have the research to prove that these kinds of passwords are less secure, because people cannot remember them and are forced to write them down. But a bunch of security consultants are getting paid to write password policies, and they’re an insurance company so care greatly about liability, so there you go.

Anyway, for as yet unknown reasons, I managed to fumble the password change, so I couldn’t get back into my account. So then I trundled off to the password reset page. And it occured to me:

* My password expires regularly. The problem is, I don’t login regularly (who moves RRSP funds around that often, anyway?).
* Password strength rules are enforced (mixed-case, numbers or symbols, minimum length, etc.)

And yet, the password reset page does none of this, and doesn’t have any other security checks! At least they used to make me phone Ireland to change my password. Now, I type in the answer to my challenge question, my date of birth, and instantly a new password is printed on the screen. The answer to my challenge question doesn’t have to be mixed case or have numbers, and never changes! They don’t even take the minor step of using e-mail to send my either my new password or a temporary, expires soon password reset URL. Granted, this is a minor security enhancement, but it does keep the amateurs out.

Does anyone else see a false sense of security here?

The irony is that I spent the rest of today fighting with our own password reset implementation :-).

Bill Gates has promised that the password will be obsolete in 2007; I’m beginning to hope he’s right…

It figures. After doing a bunch of work to move my backup mailserver to a “virtual server”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/archives/2006/01/29/power-and-virtualisation/, it worked fine for about 10 days, and then suddenly I was seeing no incoming email in the logs. This is a sign of a problem; even when the primary server is working, spammers are always connecting to the backup (in the hopes of getting past filters).

Much testing has determined that rogers is now blocking inbound SMTP on my portion of the network (something they’ve apparently been rolling out for over a year now). The best laid plans of mice and men, and all that…

I have three (linux) servers in the office, stacked in the corner behind the desk.

One is my original server, an old P-75 that I bought from Secure Computing seven years ago. It’s been upgraded over the years; I added a new harddrive, a bit more memory, and I upgraded the CPU up to the awesome power of a P-133. These days, it’s stuffed in the corner as a firewall and my wife’s email server, and is otherwise consuming kWh and manufacturing dust-bunnies.

The second is the backup mailserver. A while back my 486-based backup box coughed up a harddrive-ball. In the search for a replacement, I found a whole machine for $10 more than the harddrive it contained, so I bought it. It’s a P-100 with 48Mb of memory and 1Gb of disk; more than enough for its single purpose. It used to be offsite, but I lost my free hosting when Baltimore became HP, so I took the backup server home, and moved the primary over to where the backup used to be.

The third is a machine I inherited from Baltimore; a Dell server, P-733 with 128Mb and a 40Gb disk. Recently I upgraded the OS to Ubuntu, which I love! Over the last couple of years this box has become the primary internal network server. I’ve added disk, memory, and CPU; moved services (email, house control, yadda yadda) from the old server.

Anyway, back to the subject. I was chatting with my brother-in-law before Christmas, and the topic of electricity came up. He has been aggressively replacing lightbulbs with CFLs, installing timers, and so on. His hydro bill was almost a third less than mine! Now, my kids are the ones who run into the house and turn on _every_ light, and are atrocious at turning them _off_ again; I’m sure that accounts for a significant portion of the difference. Until the recent window upgrade my house was a sieve, so I’m sure my furnace runs a lot more than his does. But nagging at the back of my brain for a long time was a comment I saw discussing computer power use. Estimating the power consumption of my servers suggests they account for somewhere between 10% and 15% of my total power consumption!

Obviously, It was time to do something. Solar panels were briefly considered; I have a beautiful expanse of southeast facing roof, but cost and ROI still aren’t there for southern Ontario. And besides, it should be relatively easy to reduce the power consumption of my computer network without inconveniencing anybody; if I start small, the task is likely to get finished. As an added bonus, reducing the server load means that the UPS will last longer during a power outage, and the room will be cooler in the summer.

Also just before Christmas, I read that Linksys had introduced a new model (version 5) of the WRT54G wireless gateway that did _not_ run Linux. So when I saw a stack of version 4s on sale at Best Buy, I snagged one. I’ve moved e-mail to the more powerful server, and installed OpenWRT on the Linksys; ta-dah! One server eliminated.

Also before Christmas (coincidence? I think not!) we filled up the server disk (the new camera takes _large_ pictures :-). I’m not quite ready to drop a wad of cash on a proper RAID array, but I did pick up another disk for the server.

Which brings me to the second half of the subject line. I’ve been a big fan of Vmware and related technologies for a long time. After listening to a seminar on Xen and virtualisation at work, it hit me; I could move the backup mailserver onto the P-733 box! So, that’s my next IT hobby project.

One more bonus? When I’m done, I’ll have enough spare hardware to start building a replacement for persephone (the main webserver)… (ducking)

We were in and out of ER this morning (including two sets of X-rays) in less than two hours.

(Yes, he’s fine. A really bad bruise, but no breakage or dislocation.)

There were three party representatives at my polling station. Two Conservative, and one Communist.

There was no Communist Candidate on the _ballot_, mind you…

A most excellent, if short, time off was had.

It was busy, of course, but a different sort of busy than work, which was very nice. After the usual flurry of family Christmases, I spent a couple of days helping my dad move his office and put up window blinds, and a day of computer maintenance. We spent two days finding our house so that we could host a New Years Eve party (we still hadn’t found all of the rooms after the Great Window Replacement of December 2005 :-). C. was a real trooper; she tidied up two _rooms_ all by herself! I’m hoping to keep the house tidy; we’re back down to having three rooms that need major work, which is nice.

The NYE party was smaller than usual, but that was ok; I think we had almost as many kids as adults in the house! Let me tell you, 4 girls jumping up and down and screaming at midnight is a terrifying sight. Sunday was the annual (legendary) CFRQ brunch of champions, where I ate too much and then spent half the day holding tools and flashlights for the intrepid electricians. An abortive trip to IKEA yesterday completed the week, and now I’m back in cubicle hell.