Mindstab.net

I'm a little blown away that Ubuntu 9.10 still has no DVD support and can't even install it. Pretty amazing 0_o.

Ah well, after seconds of googling I found a slightly popup laden answer:
http://shibuvarkala.blogspot.com/2009/10/how-to-make-ubnutu-910-karmic-koala.html

Not bad. a) install Mediabuntu repos, b) install DVD support.

Still, it's 2010 and Ubuntu has no support for DVDs. In any way. Lame.

So, what have I got on the go?

• School: Last semester, just two classes, but they are looking like they'll be delicious and meaty
  • CS 411: Compiler design: We build a java compiler
  • CS 415: We build an operating system, fun times with C!
  • ...actually, I'm also taking spanish!
• "Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming: Case Studies in Common Lisp" by Peter Norvig. I got this for christmas and have started to work through it. I'm really excited about getting further into it. In the middle of it I'll be implementing prolog in Lisp and the in the latter half I'll be working on a natural language processor! Not to mention tons of other stuff, this book is huge and dense.
• BattleCode 2010 has just started so my team and I are just about to start digging into that. Lots of AI coding to be done there.
• Peter Michaux's Scheme from Scratch. I stumbled upon this from Hacker News. This fellow wants to write his own scheme to scratch a mental itch, and he's blogging each step and posting the code as well. I think it looks like a great amount of fun and that I too have that mental itch, so I'm following along, using his blog as a guide and looking at his code as well when I get stuck, but doing my best to do it myself.
• The great mindstab.net migration to the cloud! Yes, setting up an entirely new server and migrating years of site history and email etc can take a lot of work.

So yeah, I have an insane amount of work on my plate, but I couldn't be more excited! All of it is thrilling and amazing!

Also, if I haven't mentioned it before, the dynamic duo of Jono Bacon and Stuart Langridge of Lug Radio fame are back with a new podcast Shot of Jaq! It's fun. Really, those two Brits have been the source of the only podcast's I've ever listened to. They are a great source of both Linux and British in my weekly diet.

But now I'm stoked to just find out that Ximian/Linux rockstar coder Nat Friedman and Tomboy creator and a rock star in his own right Alex Graveley have started a brand new podcast Hacker Medley that is the first new podcast that I'm actually quite excited to try out.

Finally, I'm reading "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson in my spare time (read: on the bus) and finding it pleasant.

... and we're back! Just in time for our 8th birthday.

Mindstab.net's been around. It started back in January of 2002 running on a 486 from my bedroom. A few years later when I had some money, I bought a trusty 1U rackmount server, kvasir, and migrated mindstab there. Kvasir started co-located but when money dried up some, I brought kvasir home and mindstab has been living in my room for the last several years.

That all ended yesterday morning at 3:30am when I was awoken by kvasir's PSU fan screaming to death. The writing had been on the wall for a bit that things were going to have to change. I knew the fan was on its last legs, and hosting from home had been getting ever more precarious as both the local ISPs seem unable to provide a stable and reliable net connection. To that end I'd been playing with a VPS at linode.com (recommended in a blog post by Brian Carper) but I hadn't gotten very far. Actually, after a month I was still poking at the kernel trying to get my general paranoid level of security with grsecurity and PaX to work with the Xen virtual host at Linode. Anyways, at 3:30am yesterday I went into emergency mode and acceptable that their stock kernel "might just suffice" and started madly installing infrastructure software. Since then I've been copying over data and starting to bring services back up. So far we have a firewall, DNS, Jabber and I'm just starting to get the websites back up, this being the first.

Lots of work ahead. I need to get the rest of the sites up. Then I have to dive into the mess that is e-mail. I'd previously been using a qmail/vpopmail/courier system but I think I'm chucking that for a postfix/dovecot system, but I'm sure it'll take some kicking to get it up and get all my mail into it. Hopefully not too much. Then onto less crucial systems, then go back and re-vet alot of things.

So yeah, as of now, mindstab.net is coming to you from my new server Loki, in the cloud... or New Jersey more specifically :P

• Enjoyed being woken up at 3:30am by his server's fan screaming to death #
• back to bed while shit compiles. uuuug. #

• If You're Typing The Letters A-E-S Into Your Code, You're Doing It Wrong
  Story about how hard it is to get Crypto + Auth right and secure. A few pointers at the end for where to start.
  (tags: crypto)

• Translink's new site is confusing, hard to use and it lies #

• Delphi had some of the best intro books of any language I've yet seen. What's up with that? (Tho PCL is definitely in the right direction) #

• "What, you're going to bail because of one little screw up?" "That's what you call dead Steve?" #

• A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Netcat - good coders code, great reuse
  A good run through of netcat, Unix network swiss army knife
  (tags: netcat, linux)
• A Unix Utility You Should Know About: lsof - good coders code, great reuse
  A good run through of what lsof can be used for!
  (tags: lsof, linux)
• Charlie's Diary: Gadget Patrol: 21st century phone
  Interesting predictions on where Google and Android seem to plan on taking the phone/cell networks, somewhat against their will. I'm hopeful :)
  (tags: google, android, iphone, cell, internet)

• 70-Minute Video Review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace | /Film
  The definitive evisceration of the Phantom Menace. An amazing and detailed dissection and comparison of episode 1 and the original movies.
  (tags: Star Wars)