In case anyone is interested, here is an updated lpk patch for openssh 5.8p2. It is a little different from previous patches because it handles whatever URLs OpenLDAP does. This means you can now use SSL or sockets.

The patch is here.

I have benefited greatly from reading. You could say that my entire livelihood is indebted to people who shared information with me through text. There is nothing better than becoming absorbed in the text of someone who knows a subject while they lead you plainly down the paths of knowledge. Words and phrases are tools brought out at the right time to convey meaning with precision. On the other hand, there is nothing more frustrating than someone who wants stroke his own ego by bewildering you with words which exclude your understanding. He strings together bits of fecal matter, and presents them as if they were a string full of unobtainable and priceless pearls reserved for someone greater than yourself. As I've gotten a little older, I think I can spot this much more quickly than I used to.

Here is an obvious example. Today I was reading something and enjoying myself when I followed a link to wikipedia, and ran into this nonsense...

In type theory, the type of functions accepting values of type A and returning values of type B may be written as A → B or BA. In the Curry-Howard correspondence, function types are related to logical implication; lambda abstraction corresponds to discharging hypothetical assumptions and function application corresponds to the modus ponens inference rule. Besides the usual case of programming functions, type theory also uses first-class functions to model associative arrays and similar data structures.

I get mad when I read logorrhoea like this. Seriously, was that the crystal clear product of your distillation for the masses? Do you really think like that inside your head? We have a joke at work that wikipedia is often only understood by people who already know the subject they are reading about. It's a shame.

If you've ever wished you could record what openvz container was doing what on your server, I have something for you.

Atop has been really useful for me in the past. I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I could map openvz containers to their process when looking through an atop history? Well, that thought prompted me to write a patch to do just that.

You can get it here.

This will allow you to see what veid a process belongs to. It will also let you group processes by veid and sort them based on whatever atop will let you sort by (cpu, disk, memory etc.).

If you are like me, you've been infuriated by BIOS writers that don't give you a humane way to get into BIOS from a terminal server. Most of the time, the only option they give you is to hit the delete key. It's just about guaranteed that what you send when you hit the actual "delete" key on your keyboard is not going to be what BIOS is expecting.

Finally, someone at work dug this out from some somewhere on the 75th page of a google search.

Press esc and then - (the minus key), and it should work.

If you get stuck having to use a Java app in your wonderful Unix Kerberos environment, you may have some problems initially. You might notice that even though you have asked it to use your ticket cache like so,

 com.sun.security.auth.module.Krb5LoginModule required client=TRUE useTicketCache=TRUE 

it still refuses to find a principal.

This is because it will choke on encryption that isn't des3. On my personal laptop which runs Heimdal, I needed to add this to krb5.conf lib-defaults to restrict the encryption type:

default_etypes=des3-cbc-sha1

At this point it will find your pricipal and TGT correctly, and setup an ecrypted connection.

If you've dealt with kerberos at all, you've maybe dealt with the problem of hosts with more than one name. It's a pain in the #$%.

I've written up a description of my adventure with it in one of those nifty article links to the left. You can read it here.

My dad's friend just died, and not too many people noticed. My only theory as to why is because they didn't appreciate what he was, or were too caught up in pointless things to notice. He was a self taught electronic engineer, who also taught himself medicine. He always knew more than the doctors we went to. I remember him correctly diagnosing a nerve tumor before the doctors had any idea what the problem was. I remember him also telling us what he would do for my dying Grandpa days before the doctors came up with the same ideas. I know that he regularly treated himself, because he couldn't stand doctors (he was mistreated by doctors as a child). He also studied ancient literature, not to be a snob, but because he enjoyed it. The loss of him isn't the loss of the last smart person, but he was one of the last old time smart people.

As a child, I knew several of my dad's friends who were similar. Most of them are dead now. I haven't really met anybody that replaces them. As I think about it, it makes me sad, because people don't remember the way things were. There is a huge disconnect from previous generation. My theory is that it comes in part from a breakdown of family. A lot of people my age were raised by their peers, so not too many have a clue about what exists outside of themselves and their generation.

Thankfully, I grew up in a stable family where I was able to experience and respect people older than myself. What I've been able to experience is seeing how the generations before me were smart in a different way. It was their attitude about what they did. It is precisely that attitude that made me want to follow in their footsteps, but which I have been unable to find among my generation.

This man was a person who grew up playing with machines and electronics when much of it was new and exciting. I can almost picture him sitting in his room assembling a radio transmitter to communicate with someone in the next state. This doesn't seem like a big deal. Today it certainly isn't the same. Back then it was a bit more exciting and new. That isn't what makes it different though. The part that makes it different is the way in which people like him did these things.

The old generation did these things because they were fun and they enjoyed them. Here is how I think that changed. These people grew up to be the ones doing the interesting and astonishing things. People in the following generations saw them and how society lifted them up for their intelligence, and decided that they wanted to be "one of those people everyone thinks is smart". So these people grew up to do the same types of things, but no longer because it was fun, but because they had something to prove. It became a competition. No longer was it simply about enjoying the work of your hands and mind.

This man who just died did the things he did because it was what he grew up doing and enjoyed. He had friends who grew up doing the same things, and they remained friends for their whole life. People in my generation do the same things in a frenzy in hopes that someone will praise them. They aren't friends to anybody, because they can only think about themselves. All their time is spent being around lots of people, and trying to be better than most of them.

When I get in a group of older engineers, there is a calm and relaxing feeling in the atmosphere. This isn't the most descriptive way to explain what it is like to be around them, but it does highlight the immediate difference I notice compared to people of the same intelligence of my generation. I can just sit, listen to them talk, and gain a feeling of excitement in hearing the minds that dreamed up many of the things we have today. There's a certain stability and friendliness in their personalities and thinking that is absent today.

So even though the world will not end because of his death (it won't end for the loss of any of us, which is a shock to some), I figured I would make mention of him and his type, if simply so I can pay him a little respect that I feel was missing.