KCLUG

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the great multiplier that is incompetence
by David Nicol 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Adam Shand <adam(a)shand.net> Date: Jan 5, 2007 11:17 PM Subject: [wordup] The Grim Ripper To: wordup(a)lists.spack.org This is quite long and fairly geekish but it gets better the farther down you get. For those that run web sites with images and have dealt with hotlinking ... it's straight up heelarius. Adam. Via: Joel Sadler <null@spack...> Source: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/000278.html January 03, 2007 Freedom, Justice and a Disturbingly Gaping Ass I'll be nice and warn you that this essay links to disturbing images. That is, THIS ENTRY LINKS TO VERY DISTURBING IMAGES SO IF YOU LIKE EVERYTHING TO BE A VARIATION OF KITTENS LICKING EACH OTHERS EARS YOU ARE GOING TO THE WRONG PLACE. PLEASE GLIDE ALONG QUIETLY TO THE NEXT OR PREVIOUS WEBLOG ENTRIES WHERE YOU WILL BE A MUCH HAPPIER PERSON. Everyone gone? OK, good. I mentioned in a previous entry about the happy-go-lucky adventure of the massive downloading of a single image on textfiles.com, one of a cheery Grim Reaper holding a glowing hourglass. It was quite popular, and I talked about the situation where I had seen downloading of this image go from nothing before April 2006 and it had quickly unseated all other comers by a factor of 100 to become the most downloaded file out of the millions in the textfiles.com family of websites. This was, I mused, some sort of payback for when I was a youth and a leech, and so I let it go. Incredulity was the order of the day in the comments, with a few people speculating that since my website doesn't know where the source of my files always are, I might in fact be considered compelled to do this sort of charity work to atone. Others thought that I was brave to allow hotlinking at all. Both, it turned out, were wrong. Idly sitting around during the holiday season, I went to go check how that popular ol' Grim Reaper image was doing. The answer: very very well for Mr. Reaper. Not so well for Jason's bandwidth. I said that in September of 2006 he was downloaded 212,000 times. For the month of December, he was downloaded 401,000 times. This was going to get a lot worse, I could see that immediately. The problem wasn't just academic anymore, either. You see, I've been lucky enough to host with a number of good providers over the years, who have treated me well, and eventually I have outgrown them. When that happens, there's a mad scramble to find new hosting and I have to often host it locally, to the detriment of everyone. Additionally, I am scrambling for the privilege of spending lots of my own money. While this is all fine with me, the "service" I am doing by allowing the hot-linking of images by Myspace is really no service at all. Myspace is roughly the 4th most visited English language website, according to reports. It is owned by News Corporation. News Corporation is fucking huge. My dad used to work for News Corporation, so I am very appreciative of that but not to the point of happily whistling a tune while they bleed my generous hosting company's connection dry. Everything, you see, has limits. I hope it's not like hearing there's scant evidence of Tooth Fairies to know that I have some of my own. So, sleepy with egg nog and considering what to do next, I decided I would replace the image. Initially, I thought an ad for Notacon or Blockparty or the documentary would be good. But the fact is, the vectors just don't line up. People who are on Myspace are hardly going to be swayed by an ad for something one way or another, and it felt icky. So I goatse'd them. If you don't know what I mean by "Goatse", then let me go on the record, right now, as saying this is just what Wikipedia is good for. You can go and read up on the history of what "Goatse" is. If you don't have the time or patience and yet still don't know what I mean, let me say that it is a disturbing image of a gentleman (it is clear he is a fellow) using almost yoga-like skills to display the eye-watering sight of the inside of his own rectum. If that sounds horrible, it is. It is truly, truly horrible. This is interesting on its own levels; I don't know why we didn't think this through in the early stages of Internet, but the fact is so obvious that to hear it makes you think you always knew it: the pipes can back up sewage. The same open door that gives you a world of knowledge and communication is also a piping hot shit-gun of horror. Like looking to see if a rifle is loaded by peering down the barrel, your screen can turn from a breathtaking visage of insight into a Gatling Gun of mind-scarring infinity-pain within the literal blink of an eye. Or, as they say: ONCE YOU CLICK, YOU CANNOT UNCLICK. If you are truly fine with this, then go ahead: See what I replaced the Grim Reaper with. Anyway, on with the show. Assuming you find the idea of some errant myspace numbnut faced with a gaping ass entertaining, then you will become first giggly, and then fall aside laughing to know that within an hour I had "goatse'd" 400 people. Within two days it was 25,000. Twenty five thousand. We are now up to nearly a hundred thousand viewings of this file in its new ass-o-rama version. I am sure that through libraries, schools, colleges, cubicles, offices, warehouses, the sound of someone's throat reflexively making a sound not unlike "Uuuuaaaaaghhhghh" has filled the air. The amount of time lost in horrified stares and frantic jabs at the keyboard and mouse to get away, far away must be into the realm of hours by now. Maybe days! Days of slack-jawed horrified faces staring into a big square eyeball. I don't know, that gets a chortle out of me. I'm easily entertained. But after the initial thought of this Towering Tidal Wave of Tweener Terror, I started to consider how it had gotten to be so bad in the first place. And this is where it gets interesting. Any entity interested in what is called "market share" must eventually expand out into regions of people far outside those would normally patronize that entity. Not to ensure survival, but to ensure growth - which eventually supplants survival as a metric of health. An excellent example of this is air travel: whereas the original passengers on a plane in the first decade of air travel had a reasonably good chance of knowing how to operate that plane (the pilot and his passenger, two air enthusasts trying out a new machine), we are now at the point that we can have 300 individuals inside a jet and less than a handful could possibly operate the thing. That is, less than 1% of the people inside a machine, whose lives depend on that machine and who are paying to use that machine, have any idea how to make it work. This is, ultimately, fine: air travel is very safe and we have lots of safeguards in place so that generally the whole shebang doesn't explode. Still, you cross a line and the trends will be for even more people packed into an airplane, not less. This isn't evil, per se... it's just how this whole growth thing works. And eventually, this came to the Internet. As college students were dumped onto Internet connections, they faced, essentially, a sea of pilots; people trained to operate the craft who followed some levels of lore and rulesets to keep things running smoothly, if jarringly Libertarian. As these college students flooded the gates around the month of September, they would eventually get assimilated into the Way of Things by a month or two, or sulk away and watch things from afar. Either way, it kind of worked. And then America On-Line dumped everybody onto the Internet at once. This phenomenon was so marked in Internet history that it even has a name: The September that Never Ended. There's a story from that time, which I love to tell, which will have meaning in this entry shortly. Someone put up a webpage about America Online, criticizing the company and the service it provided. It advocated untoward behavior on AOL and generally represented a typical "slam site", which I myself have been known to take part in from time to time. After the time that AOL was fully loosed on the Internet and sending people willy-nilly around, this site got a letter that I think really underlines the problem with this sort of culture class. An AOL moderator, that is, a guy whose job is to look for troublemakers on the AOL service, contacted this webmastrer, and told him he was violating the AOL terms of service and to cease his website immediately. As far as this mop-head was concerned, AOL now "owned" the Internet and anyone on it, even someone running a site not in any way connected with the AOL service (except in discussing them) was under its jurisdiction. The webmaster did the logical thing: he posted the letter for all to see, garnering ridicule and some thoughtful chuckles. Myspace, and sites like it, also have to take a tactic similar to the airlines. The somewhat large barrier-to-entry of hosting a website has already been reduced a great deal, but social websites remove it entirely; you only need an e-mail address to be able to host and provide content. And now the whole part where you have to learn enough HTML to be able to make it render in a browser is wiped clean. It is possible, very possible, to go from Tweener at Hot Topic to Webmistress of the Dark and Foreboding Webpage of Sin without ever using a single bracket. Is this bad? On the one hand, people who would never have had a voice before are given one. On the other, that voice is occasionally droning, illiterate, and borderline schizophrenic. And multiplied by tens of thousands. However, Myspace (and News Corporation) has market share, and that's the primary goal of the whole activity. Part of hosting a website is providing the content. While it's possible to use the internal templates to at least indicate what hobbies you have and whether you like to smoke. folks are naturally inclined to upload pictures, change the color of the background, and add design schemes that make Holly Hobbie look like Prada. To help them, a little cottage industry of templates are now around so that instead of making that huge step into markup languages, patrons can simply copy and paste designs into their own pages. Here, then is the source of this sudden interest in my website's artscene section; someone created a "design" that directly hotlinked to the artscene.textfiles.com website and used the image as the background. The design, by the way, is absolutely horrible, and I don't know how anyone ever found it readable in the first place; the default font color was red, with a line through the text! This said, I'm sure I have a number of pieces of clothing that call into question my qualifications for a fashion police badge. Soon after I converted the image from Grim Reaper to Grim Ripper, one of the thousands of people getting eye-lashed by the image saw the "textfiles.com" mention at the bottom, figured out how to mail me, and did so: Date: Fri, 29 Dec 2006 21:45:40 EST From: Motorjames1(a)wmconnect.com To: jason(a)textfiles.com Subject: myspace hacking Hello. Someone is hacking into myspace profiles and claiming to be "textfiles".com.If you are unaware of this, they are using your web-name to be quite offensive. I thought you might like to know. It's a pretty childish, sophmoric stunt {easily cleaned up,} but annoying.If it happens to actually be you doing it, You should really hope we never meet- you will end up looking worse than the photo you have been posting- This is a fascinating character study on several levels. First of all, there's the immediate assumption that someone "hacked" myspace. The fact that I used the deadly spell "mv" to shift a few things around on a machine I own is not a possibility as far as Motorjames1 is concerned. Next, just to make sure all bases are covered, he threatens me. Ostensibly he is indicating he will punish me by doing something traumatic to my ass. Perhaps, however, he merely means he will do something to my face so that it will be as horrifyingly offensive as the Goatse ass. Either way, I question his diplomatic skills. Communiques were quiet on my side for days, and I assumed that people were figuring out how to remove the image and replace it with something else, which is the "cleaning up" that motorjames1 had indicated. Nobody, it seems, was inspired to seek me out. So, I went on a little fact-finding mission of my own. Checking the referrer logs of my webserver, I found places where people were writing helpful notes to their friends to perhaps figure out how they too had been "hacked". Granted, a lot were in the form of "WHAT T FUK WITH U BACKGROUND??????", but the essence was clear. Hotlinking in itself is not so bad, in my book. I certainly get people hotlinking to my textfiles and directories, skipping over my introductions and context to provide others with information that I'm hosting. I even have people link directly to images on the DIGITIZE sub-site to prove a point about catalogs or old computers or so on. But in all these cases, the hotlinking is in the course of providing knowledge. Someone is trying to inform others about a subject and my library is being utilized to share. I feel like this is right and good, and I encourage it. But what is being done by myspace is that this data is not being used for knowledge. It's being used as decoration. Beyond that, it's being used for inefficient, meaningless, taste-lacking decoration, just to give someone's poorly-written "website" a "dark feeling" by putting a visage of death on it. Maybe that's an odd, arbitrary line to draw, but after being at the ass-end of that line, if you will, I think I have to consider drawing it. I was idly wondering today where to go with this, whether to simply refuse to allow myspace pages to hotlink to any images whatsoever, when I recieved this in my inbox: Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007 20:46:11 -0800 From: HotFreeLayouts COM To: mailbox(a)textfiles.com Subject: hardcore porn pic - take down asap please hi, you really should take down ASAP www.textfiles.com/artscene/mirrors/GRAPE-DEMO-ARCHIVE/graphism/rs/razorback/ razorback-the_grim_reaper.png somebody is flodding our server with that / posting it on myspace etc. -- HotFreeLayouts.com Abuse Team And here we are, back full circle. "Hotfreelayouts" is one of the sites that offers up these design templates for downloads (along with ads, of course), and these fellows, the pilots of the current generation if you will, were utterly unable to do anything about my "flod". Or my flodding. Consider, then, what was going on here. Myspace, a site which is being used by people who don't know how to host or design, ends up with a gaping ass provided by a design firm which can't understand the nature of hotlinking (or of spelling), who have written to someone who can host, design and spell but are doing so with a demand that this person take action. And this, my friends, is ass. Posted by Jason Scott at January 3, 2007 12:24 AM -- List: http://www.spack.org/index.cgi/WordUp More: http://www.spack.org/index.cgi/AdamShand -- pre-Α, Α, Β, rc, release.

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Re: Upgrading from FC4 to Kubuntu???
by Jared 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

>I have to recommend Gentoo for anyone who doesn't mind learning >internal workings. Binary OS have too many problems with application >availability, and while Gentoo adds some new scary issues (such as >forseeing what programs you want to install a few hours in advance), >it's at least a step in the right direction. I second the Gentoo motion. Gentoo teaches you much. For years my fascination with Linux was largely that I was attracted to the Philosophy driving it, and as I sincerely had a hard time reading man pages (call it a form of dyslexia), I could never run a linux box without help. Until I met Gentoo. Doing the simplest upgrade of Apache+PHP, I spent hours HOURS learning about the emerge system because PHP is considered experimental and recent releases are all kinds of INTENTIONALLY complicated, in order to keep newbies from breaking their system by installing PHP. Well I needed the most recent PHP because of object-oriented and PDO improvements. Anyway, long story short: A few painful days with Gentoo taught me more about Linux than years of tinkering. It was painful, painful indeed, but now I have a sense of what's happening under the hood with Linux, and that's worth its weight in gold. Now that I "get" it, Gentoo is a breeze, and if Gentoo is a breeze, what's next? Slackware? That used to be the 'hard' one. Is it still difficult? Course, all of this is because I don't like Kubuntu politics, and thus I'm still on topic. -Jared

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Re: Distros
by Jared 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

>>> Kubuntu-- ok, I can deal with this while I don't have a HD; wtf? no >>> Ethereal?? >> You've been repeatedly corrected about this, stop harping on it. You don't >> get ethereal on a gentoo live CD either. > > You still think I'm talking about what's on the CD...... Delightful. I like your style, Luke. :-) And so that I'm on topic, in order of preference: Debian: Love it. Bruce Peren's philosophy of freedom herein woven. Gentoo: Hated it for a long time. Now I love it. SUSE: Helped write a piece of YAST code once, now I like it. DSL: Boots from a USB drive. A small one. Very cool. Knoppix: Beautiful technically and for what it did to Linux. Vector: Still trying to get this one running on a 1990s laptop. Red Hat: No thank you. Technically sweet, politically Seattle. Kubuntu: No thank you. Technically sweet, politically left coast. Looking forward to another Slackware experiment. Disappointed when they adopted the Red Hat version numbering a few years ago. -Jared -- "The penguins were all facing north." -- one of the lines spoken by my crazy friend who was thereafter hospitalized and medicated. He knows nothing about Linux. p.s. JH, you could've just dropped it. You're bringing a flame war from a previous thread into this one. And if the previous one degenerated into character attacks, perhaps wisdom is to leave it be. Of course, arguing with a programmer is like presenting yourself as a bug which needs repairing. Sigh. It's why we're geeks, don't you know? We never let go...

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Re: Upgrading from FC4 to Kubuntu???
by Jared 06 Jan '07

06 Jan '07

>> Sigh. We must run such criticism through the JH filter, and see >> if anything survives. > > When facts fail you, fall back to character attacks. Never use character attacks, even when a character is accusing you of doing so. When facts fail you, advance forward to methodology and logic. I like Oren's approach, which is: often more important than who is right is the overall teamwork effect. This is methodology triumphing over fact. You were disparaging an entire distro: Gentoo. I was revealing that you possibly didn't understand how to run it yet, and that it is better to say kind things about that which you do not understand. You later returned to say kind things about Gentoo. I consider the job well done. -Jared p.s. while we're on the subject of character attacks, is there anything you *don't* disparage? Look through your posts to KCLUG for the past decade and see what I mean. Almost all of mine are off-topic. Almost all of yours are insulting or complaining about something or another. I'm working on getting on topic.

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Adobe
by Jonathan Hutchins 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

Somebody on the IRC channel ("Alter-Ego") said that adobe products allow average users to create great web sites. I disagree. I think that they allow people who would have created great web sites without adobe do do things a bit differently. People who would have created lousy web sites without adobe will still create lousy web sites - they'll just have a meaningless animated splash page on them.

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Distros
by Bradley Hook 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

There has been a lot of chatter about different distros on the list recently, and I just wanted to throw out a quick poll of sorts, and maybe encourage a little more discussion. I would prefer to avoid any flames or childish "xyz distro sucks" insults, but I would like to know what KCLUG members have and are using. So, what distro(s) do you use on your primary system(s)? What distros have you tried in the last year or two? In 10 words or less describe why you did or did not like them. As for me, I use Slackware on almost everything. I have 2 Slackware machines at home: one for me to game on, one for my wife to dabble on. At work, I have a triple-boot laptop running Slackware/OSX/WinXP. I have roughly 10 servers, all running some version of Slackware. We are also running some UML instances within these servers, which all use a Slackware root_fs. We keep a few machines around running various other distros, from DSL to Ubuntu. Distros I have tried: Slackware - I love it because "It just works(tm)" Ubuntu - I recommend it a lot, but I don't do GNOME Kubuntu - Easy to install, and I like KDE Damn Small Linux (DSL) - Name says it all Knoppix - Eh, it's cool RedHat - Fragged my bootloader more than once Debian - Bad experiences with dependency checking Gentoo - Novel idea, but installs take too long Also, on every installation, I tend to download the latest kernel source (without a fourth number, ie 2.16.19) and build it specific to my hardware. I also usually compile my own Apache/PHP/PostGreSQL from vanilla sources. ~Bradley

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None
by Dale Beams 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

I do this exactly. I have a separate drive where I store my data, and a separate drive where I store my OS's. _________________________________________________________________ Type your favorite song. Get a customized station. Try MSN Radio powered by Pandora. http://radio.msn.com/?icid=T002MSN03A07001

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Ricers
by Jonathan Hutchins 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

I find the analogy also holds like this: Unlike the do-it-yourself hot rods of the fifties, one of the implications of calling a car a "ricer" is that it's composed of a bunch of bolt-on performance enhancing kits and accessories. You get the feel that you've built a hot rod, and all the tweaking and fiddling needed to keep the bits from falling off or out of sync makes you feel like quite the mechanic, but you're not an engineer or a machinist. In like manner, all those meaningless messages scrolling off your screen too fast to read when you do an emerge world make you feel like some 'leet coder, even if you wouldn't know what they meant if you _could_ read them. Yeah, you can get under the hood and mess with the USE flags and the package masks - but you're really just pressing the same button as someone using aptitude. Yeah, you learn a lot about how to fix the gentoo package sysetem, but it's gentoo specific knowledge, seldom applicable to any other linux distro. Source packages, and instructions on how to tune and rebuild them, are available for all of the binary distros I know of.

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Re: Upgrading from FC4 to Kubuntu???
by Jared 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

> I haven't found anything significant that was available, or more current, in > Gentoo than in *buntu and in Mandriva. Better yet, the binary packages work > when installed, and I don't get stuck in a dependency upgrade lock because > some required file won't build or isn't the right version. Sigh. We must run such criticism through the JH filter, and see if anything survives. (ie. it could be an email from someone who Just Hates everything he doesn't understand). Thus, if he doesn't like Gentoo, it's possibly because he couldn't get it running, not because it has any flaws. For example: > Nobody should kid themselves that using emerge is anything like building LFS, > compiling and installing from a tarball, or the best practice, building your > own binary .deb or .rpm files. Those tasks will teach you useful things > about your system. Gentoo will just teach you to hate it because it's always > broken. Let's look carefully at the logic here. Logically, this is comparing binary .deb and .rpm scripts with "using emerge". Not a fair comparison. This is two different classes. Why not compare "creating ebuild scripts" and "building .deb or .rpm"? Emerge is only "always broken" to people who don't know how to fix it, same as anywhere else. So the true underlying question, having filtered the noise out: If you want to learn useful things about your system, do you want to study source or pre-compiled binaries? Leaerning "useful things about your system" does not come from installing binary pre-compiled packages, HALF as much as it comes from installing from source. Yes, it's more difficult to master. So? Gentoo. Smooth, and like a rock. And very very fast, managed by people who know what they're doing. Look, I know VERY LITTLE, and I'm comfortable with Gentoo. It's not that I know a lot, it's simply that I do not despise what I do not know. Debian is still my favorite, even though it's "always broken." And Suse is what's on my dual-boot box, only because I haven't figured out how to get rid of it without clobbering the Windows partition. And none of these I despise. :) Oh, and here is what EDOS says about packages. You'll see that "always broken" is not specific to any single flavor of Linux. http://www.edos-project.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/PackageOverview -Jared

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RE: Upgrading from FC4 to Kubuntu???
by Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO 05 Jan '07

05 Jan '07

Maybe I should clarify. I use a separate /home partition. I just typed too fast. It should have read: "This is exactly why I keep a separate partition for /home directory." _____ From: Oren Beck Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 1:03 PM To: Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO Cc: KCLUG(a)kclug.org Subject: Re: Upgrading from FC4 to Kubuntu??? On 1/4/07, Kelsay, Brian - Kansas City, MO <> wrote: This is exactly why I keep a separate /home directory. You can always slap it in another system and copy it over or wipe the other partitions and reinstall and all your crap is still there. Some of your dot files may need to be deleted, but should still work with newer program versions. You shouldn't need /var unless you put stuff like your website in there or files for FTP or mail files. Since I use web mail and have FTP directory on another drive that is not a problem. I only save /home before a new system load. And I do back that up prior to reload, usually. I've only had to save it from the dead once by breathing life back into the partition table, but then I like a good resurrection every now and then. This is getting plugged in here at a later date due to sober deliberation. I am going to raise a proposal here that will also be used to begin a different thread- but is quite on topic here. If one is doing a migration from one distro to another that seems a good point in time to add a "userdata" drive. My admittedly painful lack of detailed "how to" not being of issue here, What's involved in copying /home, /var and anything else liable to have unique "userdata" in it to a new drive, and setting partitions to have the physical location/s be keeping OS on one drive and "your data" on another drive? Would not having "your data" safe on a totally separate device lower the worry factor of migrations? And it would seem that Gentoo power users doing frequent emerge updates would have lower risk of losing "their data" Or am I far wrong?

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