Grumble Grumble: The things that piss me off.

Mad marking

15 February, 2009

I’m marking the first assignment for the data structures and algorithms course. Two problems – a painful but well-defined majority element and the other a linked list. I’m reading this code and I’m getting a headache. I need to take a break every 30 minutes, it’s so hard. The problem is I’m looking at the …

Squeeeeeeeeee

31 January, 2009

A few months ago my computer started squealing. It was annoying when it started – a kind of squeeck squeeck one or two seconds each, once a day. But recently one or two seconds turned into five or 6 seconds and once a day into twice and hour. You have no idea how bad it …

Bloody scholarly papers

24 January, 2009

I’m gettng a master’s degree. And in the current course I have one of those professors who act like something’s up their ass whenever someone cites a work that’s not ‘academic’. For the assignment this week I actually needed to get my hands on some academic papers, because the topic is so uninteresting noone else …

Hacked! Part 3 – Teaser

12 January, 2009

I left off with my server almost completely back up, but not yet Apache. I’ve had to make sure the web apps off the internet weren’t full of security holes before allowing access to them again. Though this is my third post 4 days later – in real time it’s been less than 24 hours …

Hacked! Part 2 – Open source hacking

11 January, 2009

First things first – my server had to be brought back up. But bringing it back up was not a matter as simple as reinstalling Slackware and plopping the home directories back in. So the first thing that needed to be done was to figure out how the server’s been compromised. The quickest way to …

Hacked! Part 1 – The Surprise

10 January, 2009

On thursday evening I had a couple of hours to spare, so I’ve SSHed to my server (yours truly littlesvr.ca) to get the Apache logs from the last couple of months. I do this now and then because I like seing the ammount of traffic going up every month. But this time it was not …

Doing worthwhile things is hard

5 January, 2009

Sometimes I think the world would be a much better place if everyone just accepted that I’m smarter then them and did what I said. This of course is not the case, and I when I take some time to think about it – it’s good, I have no desire to be a puppet master …

ISO Master has been cracked

9 December, 2008

For the last wo days or so I’ve been suffering from bandwidth troubles. I throttled the children’s upload to 10K so it wasn’t that. Finally I’ve decided to watch the web server logs for a minute, and I’ve noticed a pattern: 63.226.153.189 – – [09/Dec/2008:17:48:05 -0500] “GET /isomaster/wp-content/themes/ISO_master/images/ss-started-vista.png HTTP/1.1” 200 26112 “http://scenereleases.info/category/applications” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE …

Nice guys finish last

15 November, 2008

Whomever didn’t know that already? But knowing a fact without understanding the causes or implications can be pretty useless. So here is a summary of my wonderings of the last couple of weeks. For me to remember and you to enjoy. All of this year I’ve persistently worked on one thing and have signed up …

Lost in the sticks

12 October, 2008

It’s getting cold. In a few weeks it will be way too cold to ride my Vulcan 500, so I’m trying to make use of it as much as I can before I have to put it into storage for a half a year. Now it’s 2 AM and I just came back from a …