Gekitsuu's Geekery

I'm a big fan of iTunes and I need to say that up front because what I'm about to say will appear to be nit picky. Yesterday I bought a song and a video by Three Days Grace named "Animal I Have Become". I was rating them and sorting them in my play lists when I noticed that the video and the track listed the song in different genres. For someone like me who uses the ID3 tag information often this is a nusance. I now feel like I have to check each of the songs I download to make sure the id3 tag information is accurate but also consistant. ID3 tags are difficult to maintain because what is considered modern rock today will be, by definiton, classic rock in 20-30 years. What one person may consider Metal another person might consider Speed Metal or Death Metal. I had hoped that by buying songs from iTunes I could expect their conventions to be consistant which would make my life just a bit easier. The example I sited to them in the ticket I created is if it takes me 30 seconds to check each song after I download it and I download 100 songs in the next year then I will have wasted 50 minutes of my time. If you multiply 50 minutes by the number of users that iTunes currently has then what you have is a compelling reason for Apple to fix it on their end and save their customers the hassle. Here's a screenshot from my iTunes library.

I've been reading the book Operating System Concepts which is a college book for computer science majors. I have been really enjoying the insight this book is giving me into my career. When you think about how an operating system handles communication between the various parts of the computer, it isn't a far stretch to view the "user" as another part of the system that needs a driver to interface properly. What makes a good userland driver is a subject of many debates. It's unreasonable for the user to have to adapt to the computer. I think the solution is to retrain how the companies developing operating systems think about the interface. The mentality seems to be that we will use what ever they produce because we have no choice. I think that someone should do research and begin developing a system for relating to a computer. You know what size shoes you wear, you know what size your clothes are, why not have a computer interface number. Something that would translate on all systems. I could log in to a system at a new job and punch in my number and instantly my new account on the system would get set up with preferences like, "I only like working with files in lists, not with icons". Many people who are not considered computer savvy probably have issues with the way they are required to interface with the computer and would get much more use out of it, if the computer had to adapt to them. This is something that would require a massive amount of work due to the diversity of peoples needs. The task is one the open source community could tackle if they had the backing of science institutions to provide guidance.

I posted a book review of "The Official Ubuntu Book" on Amazon and I'm really excited about the project. I've subscribed to all the mailing lists I feel might be able to offer something to and for now I've been just lurking trying to see where the groups currently are and where they are trying to go. I have already started working on some ideas I have and want to see what they think when I get to a point where I can share them. The link to my review is here if you are interested.

The exibit hall was big and I went through it a few times just to make sure i got to each both and talked to as many people as possible. I bought some Perl books and picked up some goodies although there wasn't enough bribery trinkets to go around for sure. I did have some good conversations with the SugarCRM people and Kris Moore the inventor of PCBSD. Like all good ideas Kris has very valid reasons and a good vision of what he wanted to accomplish with PCBSD. He wanted to make a BSD for the average windows user and he designed his packaging system in such a way that my mom could use BSD and I could still use ports to bring down anything I want or compile things from source without breaking his system. He's just one of the many fun people to meet here at OSCON.

It's a good thing I bought a second battery for my laptop; I barely had enough juice to last yesterday. I was very psyched about Damian Conway's tutorials; truth be told they are one of the major things that got my interest in the convention. This morning, while I was waiting for his talk to start, I created a Flickr account so that I can enter the HP Photo contest if I get any pictures I think are worth entering. I'm picking front row seats at each of the talks which is something I wouldn't normally do but I feel like I need to make sure I'm not hendered by being too far away to see the slides, or hear the speaker. There are some big thinkers here and listening to them got me thinking about possibly giving my own talk some day. I don't consider myself an expert on any of the things love enough yet but someday I'd like to speak before an audience.
Today I learned that I am very dumb. In order to become undumb I will require (much * infinity) more practice at my craft. While I could keep up ok with the Perl Best Practices tutorial. I was mostly lost during the object oriented tutorial. Not because I don't understand the concepts or what he was suggesting but because I've had little experience with object oriented Perl. That particular tutorial assumed that you had a bit more knowledge than I do. I will be fixing that at some point in time. There are many smart people here which is nice but somewhat intimidating. So far I've met and spoke with 5 of the presenters at the convention and all of them seem to have intuitive understanding of their topics. I am still battling jet-lag but having an easier time than yesterday, where once I got back to my room I could no longer fight to stay awake. After a long day I really enjoyed the speeches at the "Tuesday Night Extravaganza".
This "sun" thing up in the sky is very strange. It seems to produce a type of radiation that the "day-people" accept being irradiated with. It is very hurty on the eyes and makes sleepy ju-ju at me. When I find a way to turn off the sun I'll surely execute the proper procedure.

Well it was a good first day at OSCON I got up around 5 and managed to snap some photos of the sunrise. Tomorrow I'm going to try and get out earlier so I can take it from the bridge. Speaking of bridges I found the list to sign-up for the Portland bridges tour on Friday. They were offering pastries and coffee in the hall in front of the conference rooms so after I checked in I made my way to the munchies and grabbed a chocolate croissant. After hopping on the wifi and checking my mail, harassing my friends and family with phone calls, and much pacing; it was time for the talk to begin. The first tutorial I went to was on robust authentication. When I saw the talk I thought I might be able to get some useful information from it but didn't have high hopes. I was pleasantly surprised when not only did I get answers to several questions for my company but I also reviewed some of the topics of the RHCE exam. All in all the talk was entertaining and I'm glad I went. The second one was on Snort Database reporting. I had hoped this one would cover advanced snort analysis but it turned out to be more of how to correlate data from the tables in a snort database. Don't get me wrong that information is just as useful to me but it wasn't what I was expecting from the name. Portland is a pretty place and I'm looking forward to tomorrow. It's time for Perl.

Today I leave for Portland Oregon to attend OSCON and I'm pretty
excited. I know I haven't been blogging lately but I've been very busy at home and at work preparing for this trip. I
leave from BWI today around 2 and I'll be arriving in Portland at 8 local time. I managed to shift my sleep schedule very
well and I'll be alert for the convention which is critical. I don't just want to be awake for the convention I want to be
able to soak up everything I can. This morning I'm going to make sure I have everything packed so I can spend the remainder
of the morning with Melissa before I have to leave. Another good thing that's going on is I'm finally getting
SpeakEasy DSL and VOIP the week I come back. This is my second attempt at getting
service from them but it looks like this time it will actually go through. I may setup an asterix box once I have the VOIP
just so I can play around with it. I will definatly be blogging about what I did each day at the con so if you're interested
in nearly-live reporting of OSCON2005 stay tuned.

Ok so earlier I blogged about Whax which is very, very cool. I also wanted to mention I sent an email to Muts about his collection methods for the vulnerability databases and not only did he respond,but it was damn fast too. Last night I checked on qemu to see if they've fixed the bugs in the Mac version yet and they say they have. This is great news because now I can emulate a PC to run Whax inside my Mac . I did run into a crashing problem which I'm going to submit a bug report on when I tried to startx but even getting the console to run is a huge benfit.

I'm still learning Python and there are many many things that I like and a couple that are painful. Like for instance
storing a function in a "dictionary" (I still think hash when I read that) as an element is strange. I can see it
being useful but it seems like an ability that isn't entirely necessary. I do like how the "Learning Python, 2nd
Edition" and nearly every other python tutorial I've read plays with the fact that the language was named for Monty
Python. I like Monty Pyton so that's OK with me. I don't really understand why they structured the language the way
they did and I'd be curious at some point to do some research or maybe write Guido and ask. My impression so far is
that Python is deceptively complex; because it was being designed in such a way as to keep code "clean" and easy to
read it does things in its own unique way. A very strange way like your cousin Norman who eats glue and is 25 but a
unique way none the less. One of the things I like is the "in" function you can do some very simple pattern matching
in strings with it and to do the same thing in Perl would involve more typing.

I've been teaching myself Python the past few days and while it is VERY different from Perl, I like some of the
differences. The way variables, arrays, and hashes are implemented is somewhat alien but I can see some of the
benefits and ideology already that make it appealing. I do like that I can program in a shell (which I'm sure Perl can
do too but I never tried before) and this would be a great language for "Firing Tracer Bullets". I can't wait to get a good understanding of the basics so I can take this language out for a test drive. I already have a project in mind to use as a feeler.

I've decided to augment my Perl skills with some Python. After reading some convincing
arguments in the Perl vs Python debate I decided in order to have an informed opinion I would
have to learn Python. This isn't a bad idea due to the fact that many of the
Red Hat tools/scripts are written in Python and I'm beginning to see they had some very good
reasons for choosing that over Perl, Ruby, or anything else. For one Python was designed to
be "cleaner" and easier to read. This promotes good coding and security. That's not to say that Perl can't be written in a clean way that's easy to maintain but with a motto such as "There's more than one way to do it" they have some problems that will be exaggerate by bad coding. I'm very impressed with how Python handles somethings and I can see why it would appeal to people. I've also been reading the RHCE exam study guide I purchased a couple months ago and I hope to take the exam in sometime in August.

So I went to the whoppix website to check out what's doing with those guys and found out that they've changed the name. Whoppix has become Whax (I like Whax much better) which is based on Slax. I think is an interesting move. I'm currently downloading their beta 2 ISO and I can't wait to see what this badboy can do. This has become my default Live CD to tote around with me since it has many of the tools that I use on a day to day basis for work. Of course I keep my Mac in the same backpack so I don't usually need it.

I've been working on a web stats solution for my company using awstats to process the web logs of our customers.
Today I was working on the script which will setup configs/directories for new clients, servers, or websites and ran
in to a problem that I haven't decided how I'm going to tackle yet. My original plan was to take the stats from any
one box and dice the log files so that each line was examined to determine which website that line in the log file pertained to. Then have the script shunt that to another file (using something like SEC) for processing for that specific site, on that specific server. The problem I ran into had to do with how
to determine the website that was being hit. Since a typical line in a log file might look like this:

66.249.65.77 - - [28/Jun/2005:13:26:14 -0400] "GET /galleries/ HTTP/1.1" 404 346 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

I have no way to determine which website the person was hitting only that they tried to "GET" /galleries/ so I'm
trying to decide if I want it to be setup so that each customer will have a different directory for each website to
dump stats. It's causing me a brain cramp so I thought I'd take a break and whine about it.

last night I purchased linuxisforlosers.com and .org. I was very surprised to find out that they had not been snatched up already, so I
jumped at them when I saw they weren't. For those who aren't familiar with the story Forbes published, which is located here, titled "Is Linux for Losers?" It was an
interview with the driving force behind OpenBSD who brought up some very valid points about design problems with Linux. Once I had the
domains I knew exactly what to do with them. I'm going to setup a site where people can discuss the general design
problems with the Linux kernel and hopefully help the developers by giving them an outsiders perspective. I haven't decided exactly
what the scope of the site will be but at least for starters it will cover the Linux kernel. I'm excited about this and hope to have up
something in the next couple weeks.