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The third part of the I.T. fable, "A bedtime story for A.I.s. in training", is now available at my blog,

Chapter One
Previously

Alarm
        The alarm went off when we were watching a movie; a real one this time, a modern holo rather than the ancient two dimensional ones we'd been watching. So of course I thought "damned whores."
        "Sorry, hon, we have a fire in the commons. I'll be back when I can." Damned whores.
        When the yellow light flashes over most doors, they can only be opened from the outside. When it flashes red outside it won't let you in, when it flashes red on the inside you'd better get the hell out of there.
        There were a few exceptions, like my quarters. It would only keep me in if there was a vacuum or a fire outside the door. It only flashed yellow as a warning.
        I went to the commons and another alarm went off. What the hell? This one was in the passenger section, apartment 12. Nobody should be in there. Whores? More electric problems?
        The commons was closer and I had to make sure the cargo had evacuated.
        There were no whores and no fire. My tablet reported it was a scheduled drill. That explained number twelve, sometimes they simulated more than one fire.
        It went off again. "Cargo section, #6." I laughed, the computer was posing a conundrum for me. And the cargo. If your quarters caught fire you were supposed to go to the commons but what if it were on fire, too?
        Number six... that was the Thai girls, wasn't it?
        There was screaming from the other side of the door. "Computer, open the door" I ordered.
        "Unable to comply. Danger to ship, passengers, other cargo, and crew."
        "Report."
        "Fire in cargo hold six. Fire suppression technologies deployed."
        The damned thing talks like it's went to college.
        "Let those girls out, damn it!!"
        "Unable to com..."
        "GOD DAMN IT!!"
        And then another damned alarm went off. Son of a bitch! "Computer, source of new alarm."
        "Meteor shower ahead." The door opened and the girles stumbled out, along with the fat blonde, coughing. Smoke billowed from the door before it closed.
        "Meet me in the commons, I have an emergency." I ran to the pilot room on my sore legs.
        This time, like most times, meteors meant slow down. I reduced gravity to 10%. This time I wasn't going to face the whores until it was over, we were already behind schedule.
        After the rocks all passed in front of us I sped back up and adjusted course to make up for the damned rocks.
        I checked the passenger quarters and sure enough it was a drill. What morons program this shit, anyway? Having emergency drills when there's a real emergency? That's dangerous. Stupid dangerous. Those bozos might have went to college but they were morons. God damned idiots!
        What? Yeah, yeah, just shut up and let me talk, I want to get this over. Anyway, the three girls were still sitting on the medic outside their apartment sucking oxygen. The door light was red but no longer flashing.
        "So what happened?" I asked them.
        "Don't know," the blonde said. I can never remember her name. Anyway, she says "we were just talking when that damned noisy maid burst into flames and the room locked us in! We were scared shitless!"
        It happened sometimes, but they usually smoked for a while before they started burning, and then only when they were old and worn out. I hoped the ship had a robot that made robots.
        The light went out, the door opened, the Thai women went in and the blonde went home. So did I.
        Destiny had fallen asleep, so I got a beer and put the movie back to where I'd left off.

Continues...

Part 2 of "A bedtime story for A.I.s In Training" is now available at my writing blog Falling thru Reality. It's a five part fable concerning the ways an A.I. can fail to learn essential lessons as it endeavors to become an I.T. professional.

I've just posted part one of a five part "I.T. fable" entitled "A bedtime story for A.I.s. in training."

It is a rather tongue in cheek warning to those of you who "do" technology for a living... especially those working in toxic work environments.

You can find it on my blog Falling Thru Reality

Last night I cloned the git repository. Today I was perusing some static pages on the site and I noticed there's the term Slashdot in a few places, most notably on moderation page. But in the version I pulled down these have been changed to SN.

How long does it take to get changes merged down to the site's main trunk?

some some notes & snippets from fun with the chat bots in IRC.
times are australian eastern daylight saving time.

[22:25] <@aqu4> crutchy: s/tim/blaat/
[22:27] <crutchy> $sr /i/u/s
[22:27] <@aqu4> s/u/i/
[22:27] <SedBot> <aqu4> /taalb/mit/s :yhctirc

[22:31] <NCommander> O_o;
[22:34] <crutchy> $sr /O_o/o_O/s :rednammoCN
[22:34] <@aqu4> NCommander: s/O_o/o_O/
[22:34] <SedBot> <aqu4> <NCommander> o_O;

[22:39] <crutchy> $sr /O_o/o_O/s :rednammoCN ## yas sb/
[22:39] <@aqu4> /bs say ## NCommander: s/O_o/o_O/

$sr ++nocab
/bs say ## $sr ++nocab
/bs say ## bacon++

yet to try (bender+aqu4+sedbot?):
xyz say first: bacon++
/bs say ## $sr /--/++/s :zxy

The iGuard IP250E requires cookies for authentication. Modifying Part 3's script is pretty simple. Below are just the additional code chunks. Whole script is available here.

use HTML::Form;
use HTTP::Cookies;

Add these to your includes.

my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->cookie_jar(HTTP::Cookies->new(file => "/tmp/iguard-ip250e.txt", autosave => 1));
$ua->agent("Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.13) Gecko/2009080317 Fedora/3.0.13-1.fc10 Firefox/3.0.13");

Here we tell our useragent object where to store any cookies.

my $uri = 'http://192.168.1.243/image.cgi';
my $res = $ua->request(HTTP::Request->new(GET => $uri));
my $status = $res->status_line;
printf LOG "unable to process initial cookie request, status code is: %s", $status
  unless $status eq '200 OK' || $status eq '302 Found';

my ($form) = HTML::Form->parse($res);
print LOG "form: ", Dumper($form) if DEBUG;

$form->value('$login_un' => 'username');
$form->value('$login_pw' => 'password');

On the iGuard IP250E, there's a simple login form returned if you request image.cgi We parse the form and assign the username/password params.

$res = $ua->request($form->click);
$status = $res->status_line;
printf LOG "unable to submit username/password, status code is: %s", $status
  unless $status eq '200 OK' || $status eq '302 Found';

$uri = 'http://192.168.1.243/showimg_pda.cgi?cam=1';

my $im = Image::Magick->new();

Submit the form by issuing click. The URI showimg_pda.cgi?cam=1 is the way to return just the image from the iGuard. The rest of the code is the same.

Chapter One
Previously

Pressure
        When I woke up, all my muscles were on fire. We would have had to turn the ship around today, and in fact that's what was scheduled, except for the meteors and the drama that followed.
        Destiny was sleeping peacefully. I got up, thankful that we weren't at Earth gravity but wishing we had turned around for deceleration then, because they have it plotted so that you start the journey close to the planet you're leaving's gravity, and reach your destination close to that planet's gravity. We were at half Earth gravity now and it would gradually be lowering to Mars' gravity.
        The girls didn't like half Earth gravity, they were going to hate Mars. I guess these girls were being well paid or something, they sure were paying me good. Except that from what I'd learned about these women they probably just promised free drops. Drops were the addicts' only motivation, only goal, only thing that mattered to them.
        God but my muscles were all on fire. I sat down on the couch and had the robot make a cup of shitty coffee, my legs hurt. I had it bring me water and Naproxin and drank the lousy coffee. Yech. Why can't they program those damned things to make drinkable coffee? I should have went to college and learned programming.
        I only drank half of the nasty brew and hauled myself painfully to the shower. A hot shower would do wonders for my aching muscles.
        The hot water felt as good as the coffee had tasted bad. I took a really long one. It helped ease the pain, and the pill had started working some, too.
        I took one sip of the remaining cold, nasty coffee and started a pot. Damned stupid robots.
        I was just pouring a cup when Destiny came in. "John!" she said. "You look like hell!"
        "I feel like hell. All that damned climbing yesterday nearly killed me. And I still have to check the instruments and inspect the boat."
        "You did inspection yesterday. I thought inspections were weekly?"
        "Yeah, normally, but yesterday wasn't the least bit normal. I have to inspect that busted generator since it would have cooled enough by now, and the other one, too, since it's working harder now that there's only one."
        "Poor baby!"
        "Well, at least I don't have to inspect cargo today. Want to watch a movie later?"
        "Sure. Isn't it almost time to check your instrumentation?"
        "Yeah, it is." I kissed her. "See you in a while."
        I went towards the pilot room, which was really just outside my quarters. Yesterday I'd been wishing for a bicycle, today I was wishing for a cane.
        All the readouts were normal except one – air pressure in the port generator was twenty kilopascal low. That wasn't a good sign at all, I was going to need a suit and tether in case a bulkhead blew while I was in there.
        I noted the log and stopped by our cabin... heh, "our cabin," how about that? Anyway I stopped to fill a bug mug and summon a medic.
        Medics are robots that look kind of like narrow tables with padded tops and appendages to measure bodily functions and administer medicine. Planetside they called them "gurneys" but everything is named different on a boat. Like port and starboard.
        I sat on the medic and ordered it to the port generator and got another robot on the fone to fetch the suit from the starboard hold where Destiny had gone out the airlock.
        After I'd suited up and tethered, the difference in pressure made it hard to get the hatch open. I tried a crowbar and couldn't even make it hiss. So I lowered the pressure where I was and the door popped open by itself. I took a floater with me to hunt for the leak.
        A floater is just a small balloon filled with helium with a small counterweight to make it gravity neutral. It goes where the air goes.
        I found where the air was escaping and patched it. Why can't they program robots to do that? Stupid robots, they could act as maids and medical doctors and all sorts of other functions but the damned things can't patch a hole or make a decent cup of coffee. At least they're cheap.
        The pressure was slowly rising so I sat on the medic and waited until it matched the rest of the ship so I could get out of the room. I hadn't needed the suit, but left it on just to keep my ears from popping.
        The gauge said pressure was normal so I tried the hatch. It opened easy, so I took off the suit and gave it to a robot and rode the medic back to my rooms.
        I was dying of thirst, even after downing that big glass of water when I took the naproxin. I said something to Destiny about it when I got back, taking another pill and drinking more water.
        She laughed. "You're dehydrated, dummy. You told me yesterday you thought you were going to drown in your suit from sweating. You probably need electrolytes, too."
        "And I'm hungry, I just didn't feel like eating when I got up. You hungry?"
        "I could eat. Robot eggs okay or do you want me to cook?"
        "No, robots cook okay as long as it doesn't involve coffee. How do you want your eggs?"
        "Ham and cheese omelette is okay, maybe with some hash browns."
        "Okay. Robot, a ham and cheese omelet, a Denver omelette, two hash browns and toast. No coffee!"
        Them damn robots suck at coffee, and they can't patch a hole at all. I'm glad they can cook.

Continues

The server apparently was only infected with an admin that didn't read RTFA correctly... but it still needs a reinstall... its too bad that they can't do the same to humans... [do an OS reinstall... maybe someday]

I had an old SuSE 9.2 system I brought on-line some time in 2005 [running on an old Compaq D510 desktop with 1.5 Ghz Pentium 4 with 2 Gb of memory]. I used it as an internet facing home web server [dynamic dns]. It had maybe 5 or 6 small web sites for various projects I've done. Nothing critical. Some of my old music mp3s, some of my writings, the former XOOP shell of a writer's forum for I and some of my USENET friends...

I say "had" because I ran the system check as stated in the Ars Tech article on the "infected Linux hosts" and it seems my little home host, Aya, is infected. I shut it down. This was the third incarnation of the system [the first two were zapped by Thunderstorm power surges [amazingly the Hard Drive survived and I just put it in another system]... Took a lickin' and kept on tickin'...

Not sure how it got infected [I never used it for any thing except to serve web pages] probably a worm of some kind but I guess it was over due for a re-build.

I've changed it's IP config to a bogus default gateway so it can't phone home then shut it down. Tomorrow I'll clean off the usable files. Once I've done that I'll yank the drive put another one in [got a lot of retro computing stuff here]then probably install a more up-to-date distro... Maybe Debian or Mint something that will run a light weight GUI or some such and then slot it back into place. I've been using Xubuntu on one of my netbooks... and have it also have Xubuntu running in Virtual Box on my Old Dell T7500 but I'm not too sure about running it on a home server... the last I looked you had to spend a god awful amount of time after you get Ubuntu running to install all of the server services. Never had that problem with SuSE or RedHat [The last time I installed RH, it was a RH 7.2 server in 2001 before RHEL]...

OS or other suggestions? This is a no budget server project.

Of course for all we know this might be an NSA put up job...