SoylentNews

This is a generic journal entry posted entirely so that you can tell me I'm awesome, call me a dick, or impart useful information since SN lacks a messaging feature and I'm not giving out my email address.

I've been working harder since I retired than I did working. Maybe it's because it's something I want. I've spent the last week proofreading. I found that typos and other errors are far easier for me to find in a printed book than on a screen.

I finished yesterday, updated and uploaded the file and ordered a new copy. Still having writer's block with Mars, Ho! (which is only 20% done) I checked Amazon and Barnes to see if they had Nobots available. Not yet.

Fifteen years ago when I had the Springfield Fragfest I had a terrible plagiarism problem. Folks weren't just infringing my copyright, they were posting my own work under their name. Not a week would go by that I didn't have to issue a DMCA takedown notice to someone, usually a university (a different one each time) where a student was plagiarizing my work. So I googled for pages using Nobots in an infringing way.

I publish under the noncommercial GPL license. All I demand is that it's non-commercial and I get credit.

I ran across this German site. I was taken aback at first... DMCA doesn't apply to Germans. Then I realized they were displaying mcgrewbooks.com in a frame!

I don't see how it could harm me and do see how it might actually sell a book or two so I'm not going to hassle them.

I wish I'd learned German rather than Spanish.

So ... I've recently gotten back into minecraft, and figured that perhaps there are other MC players here at SN, so I wanted to know if there was enough interest to setup a MC server in general. I'd probably use CraftBukkit, and I'm open to running mods if others are interesting. Leave a message below if you'd be interested.

Mods I'd like to run:
  * Traincraft
  * Railcraft
  * Mystcraft (useful for getting new ores without having to reset maps; age creation would be restricted to admins though; mystcraft is a server hog).

Leave your thoughts below.

Since we've got a fair number of complaints about us running too many site news articles, I'm going to condemn this to my journal, then link it next time we *do* post something about the site. For a large portion of today (4/16), SoylentNews users had issues with commenting, and moderation was completely hosed. This was due to a backend change; we shifted the site behind a loadbalancer in preparation of bringing up a new frontend and give us considerably more redundancy and latitude with working with the backend.

This change had been setup on dev for the last week with us testing it to see what (if anything) broken, and it was discussed and signed off by all of the staff. Last night, I flipped the nodebalancer to connect to production instead of dev, then changed the DNS A record for the site to point at the loadbalancer.

I stayed up for several hours at this point to ensure nothing odd was going on, and satisfied that the world would keep spinning, I went to bed. What I found though was I broke the formkeys system. Slash knows about the X-Forwarded-By header, a mechanism for when a site is behind a proxy on how to relay client IP information (this mechanism was already used by both varnish and nginx), however, for security reasons, we strip out the XFF header from inbound connections unless its on a specific whitelist. On both dev and production, we had whitelisted the nodebalancer to pass this header in properly.

Or so we thought. Linode's documentation doesn't mention, but the IP address listed in the admin interface is *not* the IP used to connect to the site; instead it uses a special internal IP address which isn't listed or documented anywhere. Our security precautions stripped out the X-Forwarded-By header, and made it appear that all inbound users were coming from the same IP. This wasn't noticed on dev as slash ignores the formkeys system for admins, and the few of us beating on it with non-admin accounts weren't able to do enough abuse to trigger the formkey limiters.

Our peak hours are generally evenings EDT, which means the low traffic at night wasn't enough to trip it either (or at least no one on IRC poked me about it, nor were there any bugs on it on our github page. However, once traffic started picking up, users began to clobber each other, commenting broke, and the site went to straight to hell. When I got up, debugging efforts were underway, but it took considerable time to understand the cause of the breakage; simply reverting LBing wasn't an easy fix since we'd still have to wait for DNS to propagate and we needed the load balancer anyway. After a eureka moment, we were able to locate the correct internal IPs, and whitelist them, which got the site partially functional again. (we have informed Linode about this, and they said our comments are on its way to the appropriate teams; hopefully no other site will ever have this same problem).

The last remaining item was SSL; we had originally opted out of terminating SSL on the loadbalancer, prefering to do it on the nginx instance, so Port 443 was set to TCP loadbalancing. This had the same effect as there is no way for us to see the inbound IP (I had assumed it would do something like NAT to make connections appear like they were coming from the same place). The fix was utlimately installing the SSL certificate on the load balancer, then modifying varnish to look for the X-Forwarded-Proto header to know if a connection was SSL or not. I'm not hugely happy about this as it means wiretapping would be possible between the load balancer and the node, but until we have a better system for handling SSL, there isn't a lot we can do about it.

As always, leave comments below, and I'll leave my two cents.

[ I've been kinda obsessed with this idea for a while. Have posted something similar under the same title a few other places, although I decided to completely rewrite it here given the more technical audience and the amount of time I have to kill tonight at work ;) ]

So, holograms have long been a staple of sci-fi techologies. And there's a lot of projects that have been working on making these a reality in some way. We've got 3D TVs on the lower-end, and crazy laser and water mist projection systems in labs. But there doesn't seem to be any true, free-floating holograms coming any time soon. That stuff is HARD.

On the other hand...perhaps we can do better. We have Google Glass. We have the Oculus Rift. We have augmented reality apps. How long before we can start to merge these product lines? How long before you can run an augmented reality app projecting 3D images on your smart contact lenses? Given that there are ALREADY prototype technologies to project onto a pair of contacts, I don't think it will be that long. A couple decades, surely, but I'm 23 years old now, so I expect to see that in my lifetime. After all, this isn't revolutionary new tech anymore, just incremental improvements to products you can already purchase.

Now, I said this would be *better* than true holograms. But there's an obvious disadvantage -- you have to wear something. So what's the upside? No hologram projector for one. Not limited to a specific space. Instead of merely controlling what my hologram projector creates in my own apartment, I can control what holograms are projected to me everywhere in the world. It can work around corners and such where any kind of projection may be difficult or impossible. And different people can see different images.

So what happens should this techology become ubiquitous? What's this got to do with the title of "Euthenasia of Consumerism"?

With this tech, you sure as hell don't need a TV. You don't really need a computer. You don't need anything decorative. Anything you don't directly interact with can be projected. But you can go even further than that -- all aesthetic aspects could eventually be virtualized. Everyone can buy the same plain white everything, and project whatever designs they want onto it. No stains either!

So you end up with that ultimate sci-fi apartment, where you press a button and your bedroom becomes the office which becomes the living room. Blast this signal through your wifi router, and everyone who enters your apartment sees the same. Or have some security settings -- your mom sees one decor while your friends see another. Even if they're in the same room together.

And then you open-source this stuff. Or pirate it. Whatever. Screw the 3D printers, half your apartment is now just code. And the only skill you need to DIY all of that is the ability to program. Or not even that -- just the ability to write themes for someone else's program. Or for the lazy, walk into someone else's home and *control-C* the TV.

Yeah, you can't virtualize everything, but looking around my apartment I could certainly virtualize all the most expensive things. The computers, the projector, even the stereo system. And most of the things I haven't gotten to yet because I don't feel like spending the money fall into that category as well. And hey, my nightstand may already be a cardboard box, but at least it could not look like one ;)

So, am I just nuts, or are we inching towards a global economic collapse in the best possible way?

I've hardly logged on to the internet at all this past week, too busy correcting a mistake software houses frequently do: Trying to rush a project out the door. The fact is, I'm tired of The Paxil Diaries, but I don't want to ship a flawed piece of crap.

The first copy had a messed up cover; my printer's "cover generation wizard" has an interface almost as bad as GIMP. I fixed it and ordered a corrected copy, and a day later as I was converting the .odt to .html I discovered that some of the chapter numbers were wrong and there were no page numbers. I fixed it, resubmitted it and thought "This time it'll be right."

Number three showed up bright and early Thursday morning. I started going over it with a fine toothed comb. Almost halfway through and I started to think I'd be able to release it. The weather got really nice so I decided to read it in Felber's beer garden.

I discovered I was far better at proofreading when I've had a few beers than sober. When I'm sober what the words are saying distracts me from the words themselves, and I read too fast and miss errors.

It was full of errors, many of them whoppers. I marked them drinking, and finished correcting this morning while sober and sent for copy #4. It may be available in a couple of weeks depending on if I find more errors when it comes. I'll upload the book's HTML and PDF versions as soon as I decide I can release it.

Meanwhile, I can get back to Mars, Ho! this week.

A $1,499 supercomputer on a card? That's what I thought when reading El Reg's report of AMD's Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card which is rated at 11.5 TFlop/s(*). It is water-cooled, contains 5632 stream processors, has 8 GB of DDR5 RAM, and runs at 1018MHz.

AMD's announcement claims it's "the world's fastest, period". The $1,499 MSRP compares favorably to the $2,999 NVidia GTX Titan Z which is rated at 8 TFlop/s.

From a quick skim of the reviews (at: Hard OCP, Hot Hardware, and Tom's Hardware), it appears AMD has some work to do on its drivers to get the most out of this hardware. The twice-as-expensive NVidia Titan in many cases outperformed it (especially at lower resolutions). At higher resolutions (3840x2160 and 5760x1200) the R9 295x2 really started to shine.

For comparison, consider that this 500 watt, $1,499 card is rated better than the world's fastest supercomputer listed in the top 500 list of June 2001.

(*) Trillion FLoating-point OPerations per Second.

Now that I've had some time to clear my head, I want to expand on my original feelings. I'm pissed off about this, and my temper flared through on the original post. I'm leaving it as is because I'm not going to edit it to make myself look better, and because it sums up my feelings pretty succinctly. How would you feel if something you worked on under the promise of building the best site for a community was regularly and routinely causing corporate firewalls and IDS systems to go off like crazy?

You'd be pissed. Had we known about this behaviour in advance, it would have been disabled at golive or in a point release, and a minor note would have gone up about it. Instead, I found out because we were tripping a user's firewall causing the site to get autoblocked. I realize some people feel this is acceptable behaviour, but a website should *never* trigger IDS or appear malicious in any way. Given the current state of NSA/GCHQ wiretapping and such, it means that anything tripping these types of systems is going to be looked at suspiciously to say the least. I'm not inherently against such a feature (IRC networks check for proxying for instance), but its clearly detailed in the MOTD of basically every network that does it.

There wasn't a single thing in the FAQ that suggested it, and a Google search against the other site didn't pop something up that dedicated what was being done; just a small note that some proxies were being blocked. Had the stock FAQ file, or documentation, or anything detailed this behaviour, while I might still have thought it wrong, at least I wouldn't have gotten upset about it. I knew that there was proxy scanning code in slashcode, but all the vars in the database were set to off; as I discovered, they're ignored leading me to write a master off switch in the underlying scanning function.

Perhaps in total, this isn't a big deal, but it felt like a slap in the face. I know I have a temper, and I've been working to keep it under wraps (something easier said than done, but nothing worthwhile is ever easy). CmdrTaco himself commented on this on hackernews and I've written a reply to him about it. Slashdot did what they felt was necessary to stop spam on their site, and by 2008, slashcode only really existed for slashdot itself; other slash sites run on their own branches of older code. Right or wrong, such behaviour should be clearly documented, as its not something you expect, and can (and has) caused issues to users and concerns due to lack of communication. Transparency isn't easy, but I have found its the only way to have a truly healthy community. Perhaps you disagree. I'll respond to any comments or criticisms left below.

Chapter One
Previously

Pirates
        Nothing happened in the last week that I didn't log in the ship's log. At least not what you want to hear, I get it. You don't need to know every time I take a shit or what I had for breakfast, right? Anyway, the whores pretty much behaved themselves. Like the log says, robots were trying to fix the busted generator but I knew they couldn't. They do what they're programmed to do no matter how impossible.
        Anyway, after a week there were some more little rocks in our way, but these were mapped; we could just go around them. The computers would do the actual steering but I have to sit in the pilot seat in case the four of them disagree about something and I have to make a decision. I've never seen that happen, though.
        While we were driving around the rocks, Wild Bill called over the MASER link. "John, Bill here. I'm about a light minute ahead of you and I'm standing still again, but this time it's on purpose. There's pirates ahead, and I can't outrun them on batteries. If your systems are all in good shape, run like hell. If you're having problems you should stop."
        Shit. I could out run them on one generator but what if the other one went out? Hell, I could just detour around them. Too bad Bill didn't have that advantage, batteries just didn't hold enough energy.
        I answered him back. "Pirates? This far out? Are you sure they're pirates?"
        It would be a couple of minutes before I heard back. I put the course correction into the computers' input console while I waited, then addressed the folks on board. "Passengers and cargo, attention. Prepare for unexpected gravity changes. That is all."
        Bill answered. "It's a fleet and they're not listed in the computer. Hell if I know what they're doing out here."
        Damn. Bill was a damned good friend who had helped me out of jams more than once. And he was hauling tons of different metals, a valuable cargo inside a valuable ship. His short circuit could have been sabotage; pirates have been known to infiltrate the company before. The company wouldn't too much mind pirates killing Bill but they'd hate to lose the ship and cargo, so maybe I wouldn't get in too much trouble for what I planned. I picked up the phone and addressed the ship's P.A. System. You can probably get a lot more detail from the computers, but anyway I got on the P.A. "Attention, ladies, this is the captain," I said. "Strap down, we're going to have some crazy gravity in a few minutes. That is all."
        I strapped myself into the pilot's chair myself. I turned the boat around and decelerated, shut down half the engines, made one look like it was sputtering, and informed Bill to get ready. Then I went toward the pirates while the computers figured out the trajectory for what I'd planned. I'm glad I have those computers, I could never do the math myself.
        They saw me, and I pretended I'd just noticed them and changed course. I wasn't kidding when I told the women gravity was going to be weird.
        They took chase. I went just slow enough to keep them the right distance and get where I was headed when I was headed there. From the radar it looked like they were steering those things by hand. Good, that raised my chances. Actually there wasn't any danger to me since I could outrun 'em easy and they can't shoot at me or anything that might damage the boat and cargo, which is what their goal is. But it raised my chances of saving Bill's ship.
        You know how the pirate fleets work, with a lead ship carrying an EMP. They don't know we designed these ships with pirates in mind and their EMP wouldn't stop us. And I didn't want them to know so I sent them a nice little present, fired from the rail.
        I hear the pirates still use gunpowder.
        The bastard's ship exploded and we were almost there –
        When I reached the right spot we took off like a bat out of hell. Ten seconds later the poor pirates got caught in the rain, as we say. They probably all died. I sure hope so, murderous bastards after my friend!
        I set the course back to Mars and addressed the ladies. "You can unstrap now."
        Time for inspection, since I'd pushed her hard on one generator.
        Like it says in the log, it was fine but a little warm. The engines were in good shape, too, but I shut down the one I made stutter for twenty four hours, just like the book says.
        This called for a beer. Hell, this called for champagne but I didn't have any. I started back to my quarters for a beer.

To be continued.

Don't use a skillet for your bacon, use your oven! In my case 225 degrees Celsius for about 10 minutes results in perfectly crisp bacon simmering in its own fat.

I use a sheet pan in the middle of the oven, two layers of baking paper under the bacon, and leave room for some half-baked small baguettes that I add when the remaining time is right.

Take it all out, slice the baguettes, put on bacon, put on cheese (maybe some cheddar slices) = simple and quick filling hot bacon & cheese sandwich.

Next time I do this I'll try wrapping the paper around the bacon to minimize any grease splatter. I might have to add a bit more baking time to get it as crisp since it's loosely covered.

Ovens are also great for making super-crisp sausages but I've only tried it with the thick kind that are about 3cm or 1 and 1/2 inches across: bake them until they rupture! Exploded sausages taste a lot better but be careful as they're really hot.