Checksum Arcanius

Progress on WoW has slowed significantly since the early days, but this morning saw a significant advancement. Logins are now supported on Facebook as well as Bebo. From the log:

FYI, LithiumPolymer is my main Warbook account.

This is especially nice because it will allow me to do things like this:

p = Player('LithiumPolymer')
p.land.allocate_to_state({'training grounds': 0, 'forts': 0, 'mines': 1, 'amplifiers': 0, 'barriers': 0, 'barracks': 0})

To reallocate all of my land to mines. Currently, this takes about 30 mouse clicks and about 4 minutes. It can now be done in about 10 seconds — and all of that time is server latency.

I’m not sure if I’ve ever posted to the effect, but I was turned off to the iTunes music store as soon as they upgraded their DRM, breaking the tool I was using that allowed me to continue using my music player of preference, foobar2000.

In conversations since then, I have always maintained that I would become a music consumer once again as soon as I found a store that would sell me the music I wanted without the stupid (breakable) strings attached that came with other services. For example, it would have been easy enough to burn my iTunes music to a CD, and then rip it using EAC and encode it with LAME, but that required work that I didn’t have to do if I just typed a name into eMule and downloaded the song in a few minutes.

I am happy to announce that I have recently discovered the store that I was looking for, and to find it I didn’t have to go very far. Local retail powerhouse Amazon.com has introduced high-quality DRM-free MP3s at a reasonable price at the Amazon MP3 Store. I am once again a music consumer. See, music industry, that wasn’t so hard, was it?

The right tool makes any job easy. Thats why I like posting about when I find the perfect tool for a job. In this case, I was testing out a serial translator program I wrote yesterday for a former coworker. The program I wrote takes in one stream of bytes from one com port and outputs another, translated stream of bytes to another com port.

To avoid using three computers and two cables for testing, I needed to connect two virtual com ports to each other on one computer. Com0Com to the rescue!

It installed quickly and painlessly, was intuitive and easy to use, and did exactly what I needed. I input characters using a terminal emulator to one virtual com port, and they magically came out of the virtually connected com port, then went through my program, and out a real com port to my laptop, which saw the translated stream just as expected.

Bobby and I have started development on an application we call WoW, short for “Win on Warbook,” and of course a play on the popular MMORPG. The basic idea is to help us dominate the online game Warbook, a Facebook application that Joel hooked me on a while back. It is my first attempt at coding an actual project in Python;  it is also my first time using Mercurial. After some initial glitches, both Py and Hg seem be to going smoothly.

Domination is forthcoming.

After attempted to run the open-source Math software Sage on Frankenputen and being harshly greeted by an error message claiming that libc was out of date, Bobby and I decided that it was time to upgrade the Dapper Drake edition of Ubuntu Linux that was running the server to the modern Gutsy Gibbon edition.

The first attempt was an abject failure. Used to Debian’s nearly perfect reliability, I thought I could get away with upgrading direct from Dapper to Gutsy by simply changing my sources.list file, the running apt-get update followed by apt-get dist-upgrade. Well, this series of actions ended quite poorly — what was left over was a pretty broken, not very-installed hybrid of Dapper and Gutsy. So, after some tinkering and with some help from Bobby, we managed to revert — eventually — to Dapper. Bobby then set about doing a more incremental upgrade, stepping from Dapper to Edgy to Feisty and then to Gutsy (notice the progression of letters). This apparently worked, almost.

Well, it did work, but at the same time something else broke. Namely, the kernel version shipped with Gutsy — 2.6.22 — and a package called evms do not coexist peacefully. The result was a system that would being the boot procedure and then get stuck in an infinite loop of error messages. The key services — such as SSH — that we would normally use to try to fix the problem never came up, so all hope was lost, right? Well, not quite.

Back when Dan purchased all the smograsbord (sp?) of technology that now comprises Frankenputen, the computer currently responsible for serving much of silverfir.net’s content, he had the foresight to purchase an nice little piece of technology called a RILOE card. RILOE stands for Remote Insight: Lights Out Edition. Basically, its a video card with a network port on the back. It runs a web server, which allows administrators to access a variety of functions on the server as if the administrator where at the computer physically. Even more spectacularly, it has a virtual local console — basically a virtual screen that shows exactly what would be on the real screen. So when the server was dead to the rest of the world, after a little tinkering, I was able to log in and watch the system boot from the ground up — even the BIOS messages are visible! Its really like being at the computer in pretty much every pertinent way expect physical proximity.

Watching the system come up gave some error messages which Google turned into problem-solving tips. Then, by booting an older kernel, uninstalling evms, and rebooting, the machine was back to working as good as old. But with a bunch of upgrades of course!

A few months ago I picked up a Motorola RAZR V3xx phone along with a new 2-year contract from AT&T Cingular AT&T. I have been quite happy with the phone, and I have even managed to treat it considerably better than my old T720. The phone’s slim profile lets me keep in in the pocket with my wallet; the T720 had to live with my keys, which were not the nicest to its shiny finish.

At any rate, back on Thanksgiving day, my phone started sending MMS (aka “Multimedia”) messages instead of the regular SMS (“Text”) messages. This was confusing to recipients because they thought I was sending them blank slide shows, and it was distressing to me because I’m sure MMS messages are at the very least as expensive as SMS messages. So today, I finally stumbled across the solution to this vexing problem, and it makes absolutely no sense.

Apparently, this bug shows up when there are too many messages in the phone memory. By deleting every message in my inbox after giving the same treatment to my outbox, the problem simply went away. And this occurred despite the memory being nowhere near full — I had over 450 messages in my inbox, and that rated only a 4/7 on the memory usage meter. Nevertheless, clearing my messages promptly did the trick. I guess this world could use a good test engineer. Of course, I’m sure it could use a good developer as well. <g>

Even when I’m not using it, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 appears to be trying very hard to make sure that I can’t ignore it. Recently installed after Microsoft decided to push out IE7 to users who, like me, refused to install Windows Genuine disAdvantage, I thought that it would be relatively harmless. Although I wasn’t planning on using it much anyway (at least not outside of the IEtab plugin), IE6 certainly needed an update and I thought it couldn’t hurt. Well, I was wrong.

First, the backstory. On Kaleidoscope, my venerable 2004-era desktop computer, I have a 4-disk RAID 0 stripe. At the time, this choice made a lot of sense, because I used the computer primarily for video editing and playing video games. Speed, not data security, was the primary concern. I kept all of my important documents on Kleinoscope, my laptop at the time, which I occasionally backed up.

However, Kleinoscope died a rather horrific death several months ago, and before the arrival of Graphitica, I ended up using Kaleidoscope for productivity considerably more than I had originally anticipated. Combined with several scary refusal-to-boot episodes, I decided that data security had to become a higher priority. So I headed to Fry’s and created Nexus, a file server with a couple of 750 gigabyte hard drives. I decided to transfer all of the documents I had been storing on Kaleidoscope to Nexus and just set that up as my default Documents storage location. Over a gigabit connection, response was snappy and everything worked great. Until I let IE7 install itself.

At that point, whenever I clicked on my Documents folder, I first received a pop-up warning dialog:

This page has an unspecified potential security risk. Do you want to continue?

Well of course I wanted to continue. I wanted to access my documents, and there was of course no potential security hazard, specified or not, in my doing so. I didn’t specifically link the appearance of this dialog to the installation of IE7 at the time, but I did find it annoying. Today, I was feeling a bit petulant and decided to see what would happen if I clicked “No” to the dialog’s inane question instead of my customary “Yes.” Well, I didn’t get to see my files, and my desktop decided that it was busy for the rest of time. Although performance appeared to be unaffected, whenever I hovered my mouse over the desktop, I was treated to an hourglass icon. A good 30 minutes later, the icon is still persistent. Well, this travesty motivated me to fix the problem once and for all. So I did the most anti-Microsoft thing imaginable: I Googled it. And true-to-form, Google delivered some excellent results.

The solution, found here, is simple:

Open Control Panels > Internet Options
Select the Security tab
Select the Local Intranet icon
Click the Sites button
Click the Advanced button
Type the name of the file server into the text box and click Add
Select Close and OK to exit all of the dialog boxes

Viola! Windows no longer complains about unspecified potential security risks that are not actually risks.