Archive for February, 2005
Flaming
Returning to work after a weekend is always difficult, returning to work after a week off is like trying to jump through a flaming hoop with your legs tied together. Challenging and potentially dangerous.
It’s not just getting up early again that’s the problem, the rushing around trying to get ready and the inevitable traffic jams caused by never ending road works don’t help either.
And then when you get there you have to walk back in the front door and settle down into the old routine again. Catch up on all the email you’ve missed, find out what stage everybody has got up to in their projects and answer the standard question of whether or not you enjoyed your time away.
And finally the real challenge, pretending that you care, that you want to be there, and that lying in bed until midday is less appealing.
Webdog
Today I shutdown Webdog, the project that introduced me to so many people, Perl and mySQL.
I believe it’s been almost 7 years that the site has been running (in one shape or form), but .plans are no longer relevant in 2005. And since running it means processor cycles, bandwidth and maintenance, it seems like retiring it is the best thing to do.
Hopefully over the years we introduced something to the gaming community, even if it was just ugly design, badly written code and a dog called Tico.
May she rest in peace.
Compromised
At around 11:45pm tonight I was notified that the Chatbear server was portscanning a remote host, something which, as you can imagine, is not something it normally does. A quick look at the process list showed a mysterious pscan2, which appeared to be running a couple of times. Killing it as quickly as I could I came to the sudden realisation that the server had been compromised.
Now I’m not exactly in the best of places mentally right now, so having this happen is more than I could cope with. Stress levels elevated, and my brain shut down.
I looked around the server a bit to see if I could see any obvious signs of entry and found nothing, nor did I find the pscan2 executable which appeared to have deleted itself. I did find some odd files in the /tmp directory which I deleted, one of which I also found was running. Not knowing what else to do I shut down the server and started a backup before going to bed. Short of ideas and short of reasoning, maybe I’d be more relaxed in the morning.
Returning to it on Sunday (yes I know this is Saturday’s entry, but use your imagination), I still couldn’t find any normal traces of a hack. Log files still existed, no rootkits were installed, password files hadn’t changed and it didn’t appear as if there was much I could do. So I started the services back up again, and they’re still running.
As for where we go from here, I don’t know. Just have to watch out for further signs of nastyness.
Exploration
After spending four hours playing WoW with Graham tonight he left in disgust and then wrote up his second diary on whatvideogame.
Everything he says in there is very true. It does feel very arbitary at times, and there are definite improvements that can be made in the area of group questing, but yet I continue to love it. Entering the area of Loch Modan for the first time on Friday was a glorious experience, just as entering each new area beforehand has been. The exploration and discovery process of a world that looks so alive makes up for any of the tedious "go kill 15 of these" quests.
The simple fact is that despite the obviously glaring flaws, I haven’t played a game for this much in years. And that’s got to be a sign of something.
Smite
I stayed up until about 6am this morning reading various websites about why PHP sucks (and more).
This isn’t a particular smite against PHP, I’ve done it in the past for other languages as well, it was just particularly easy to find articles for this one. Some of it I didn’t know and makes me wonder why it’s used so much, but I’m not going to turn this into a one language vs. the other post.
You’ll all be using Bearscript before long anyway. Which is why I was reading these, so I don’t make the same mistakes.
Monosyllabic
I got woken up this morning after very little sleep to one of the biggest surprises I’ve encountered in a while. I think it’s going to take me a few days to fully recover.
I just wish I’d been slightly less monosyllabic. And dressed.
Majority
I really need to stop procrastinating and do something this holiday. Still feeling really tired though, I might have cleared the majority of the cold symptoms by Sunday, but since I still have this need to keep sleeping I don’t think I’m completely germ free.
Wonderful
You create a Bearscript component, it has some template blocks and it accesses a database table. You include that component on a page available on your site, let’s say yourname.hostbear.com/index.bhtml.
Then you decide to do some development work on it, like adding a new field to the database table and changing the way it displays. But you don’t want to break your site as you do it, because you’re new to Bearscript and make lots of mistakes.
So you select your page and ask for it to be duplicated onto the development server, and it automatically makes a copy of the page itself, all the components on there, the templates they use and the database tables they access. You can then access this at dev.yourname.hostbear.com/index.bhtml, make any changes you wish and then publish the tested and working page back to the live site once you’re done.
Isn’t Bearthing wonderful.
Reinstall
Continued today just installing software. Programs like Editplus, SecureCRT, WS_FTP and World Of Warcraft that just work without needing to reinstall are my friends.
I tested out my new graphics card by first loading up WoW and sticking all the settings and resolution as high as possible. Stunning does not quite describe it. The level of detail and draw distance as I walked up towards the Gates Of Ironforge made such a difference to the integrity of the world.
Then I loaded up Half-Life 2 and did the same thing. I always had stuttering issues before, but now, there’s nary a hitch with everything turned up full. I just wish it supported multi-monitors, it would be pretty fantastic playing it with the display wrapping around me. Me and my ant lion army did some damage before I had to switch it off because of motion sickness.
No change there then.
Woe
Sneezing a bit less today, shakes have stopped, but my body is weak as a kitten. Eyes aren’t watering as much. I’ve started taking Beecham’s Flu Plus caplets, so we’ll see what they do for the situation.
I finished putting together the PC and then attempted to get XP working. I learned when upgrading a machine with 2000 on it that when you change the motherboard there’s a good chance you won’t be able to boot the OS because the hard disk controller has changed. Unlike 95/98/ME these systems are unable to just switch driver automatically, simply dying on first boot. So I looked on the web a couple of weeks ago to prepare me for this situation and found that the way to do it was to boot off the XP CD (and on no uncertain terms let XP try and boot from the HD first, as that will render it unusable), select to install the system, and then choose the existing partition. This will make the setup delete all the system files and install them again, giving you a fresh system, but not upsetting your registry and hence your installed software.
Everything seemed to be going fine using this method until I started getting a blue screen every time it hit the device detection stage. I rebooted a few times but it always died at the same place. Another quick Google search and I find the cause to be system files from an Easy CD Creator CD install from when my machine was running 2000 (it was upgraded to XP). I rebooted off the CD again and used the recovery console to rename the offending system files, thinking that would allow it to complete the setup successfully. Unfortunately this actually resulted in the setup failing to restart itself, simply getting stuck after showing the “Setup is restarting…” message.
Pretty much stuck at this point, I booted off the CD again and did a fresh XP install. Since it was an upgrade before my Windows had been installed in c:\winnt, so this just installed XP in c:\windows. I looked at the contents of the winnt folder and tried to move files around, edit some things and attempt to get the original install working again, but nothing would let me get past the stage it’s stuck at. It seems as if booting the recovery console somehow did the complete opposite of recovery.
So I bite the bullet and start working on my fresh install, which in some ways is quite good. I nice clean system for nice fresh hardware. First thing I notice is how there appears to be extra options in menus or how icons look different. As if a clean XP install is different from an upgrade one. Next thing I notice is how I can’t get anything to work.
Graphics card installed fine, but wireless and wired network just refused to work. Wireless drivers install and it says the hardware is working fine, but no signal. Three hours later and a lot of hair tearing later I put the wireless card in a different PCI slot and lo-and-behold, it works. Still can’t get the wired ethernet port on the motherboard to work though, but I was starting to think I was cursed. Especially since I’m doing this while finding it difficult to hold myself up.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from today, it’s how much I hate computers. XP is quite frankly, a load of shite. Hardware manufacturers don’t know how to design parts that fit together easily, and software designed to do nothing more than burn CD’s that has the ability to bring down an entire system - well it’s just wrong.
But hey, 3.2Ghz, X800, 1GB RAM and three 19″ LCD’s… maybe it’s not all bad.
Sick
I’ve not been feeling too good since Sunday, when I woke up with a sore throat. I’ve been popping Strepsils for most of the week and that’s actually been doing a fair job of calming the pain, but I knew it was going to develop into something more.
On Wednesday I felt drunk for most of the day, I had the dizzyness and light-headedness associated with that, as if I’d consumed a bottle of wine before going to work. Then today my nose started running and now I’m violently sneezing every 10 or 20 seconds, my eyes have given in and I’ve got the shakes.
I hate getting sick. I’ve tried my best to just fight through it rather than letting it consume me, as I feel you do by lying down. I spent this evening finally putting together my new PC now that all the parts have come together, but I’m just going to have to give up now and goto bed. I just have no strength left.
Duplicated
I think it’s time I re-engineered the Bearkey Alerts platform. Every night at midnight my server dies as the old alerts are removed from the system, because every time a new story is found it is duplicated once for every user that has subscribed to that service. This is because each user gets their own alert box, like an email box, on the server. But also because I’m an idiot, and I like designing systems that don’t work properly.
So when a new Bearkey Alerts site suddenly appears with lots of new options, you know why. It’s not because I like providing better services for free, it’s because I’m an idiot, and sometimes I have to fix things.
Direction
I’ve not done any Bearthing or Bearscript for a few weeks now. Part of that is because I launched the whatinterest sites and then I did all the upgrades to Chatbear, and last weekend there’s certainly an element of blaming WoW, but mostly it’s because I’ve lost my way a bit.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about Ruby on Rails, it’s been getting some publicity because it was used to develop the hugely overpriced Basecamp. It’s an MVC OO setup for Ruby, which is a language that in some ways did inspire some Bearscript features. I’ve never been a fan of OO, my brain just doesn’t work like that, but Rails has made me reconsider my position slightly. It’s not that I don’t like OO, it’s that I don’t like any of the current implementations of it. This means that I don’t like Rails that much either, but there’s something about the MVC process, and the relative lack of code required to get something up and running that has just made me stop and think. These are things Bearscript should be doing from the outset, as a built in language feature, just not as OO.
And then there’s the Bearthing side. Working with the Chatbear admin system again made me realise that I’ve been going in the completely wrong direction with it, and that I’ve been designing it too much as a developers tool. I need to better cater for my three types of user (easily defined in messageboard terms as somebody who posts on a board, somebody who creates a board and somebody who writes their own board). So that’s slowed me down too, because that requires rethinking a good chunk of what I had planned. And getting it right this time, because I don’t want to be planning it all again in another three months.
Holiday next week has got to involve sorting some of this stuff out. I had hoped by now to be putting this out to a wider beta test, but I need to clear my head of all the crap and find my direction again.
Quests
For the second night in a row I started playing WoW quite late, around 10:30. I figured I’d throw in another hour or so before checking out a couple of websites and going to bed before midnight. But like yesterday it was almost 1am before I stopped playing, because this game is such a time hole. Jumped up a lot of levels tonight, the quests are starting to get larger and more involved, and a bit more inventive. A lot of the things so far have been about killing masses of enemies, but I was switching beer barrels tonight, something that really reminded me of Monkey Island-esque moments like Graham referred to.
Their sales figures are pretty staggering, more than 350,000 copies in the first weekend and 200,000 simultaneous players. Running 80 servers, it means they’re handling 2,500 people on each one. That’s pretty good stuff. But then I guess the majority of it will just be Oracle database queries.
I wish the second monitor was useful while playing, but the game just won’t let me do anything with it unless I play in a window, and that’s just not immersive enough.
Spectacular
I worked from home this morning while I waited for my computer upgrade and monitors to arrive, which should have been before 12. It turned out to be 12:05 before the courier turned up, which made me think I should get all the stuff for free. It should be like a pizza, delivery within the set time frame of your money back.
I’m not going to build the machine just yet, going to wait until I get a Quiet PC CPU fan (which should turn up tomorrow) and even then I’ll probably wait until the weekend - but I did setup the two monitors. And they’re spectacular. Just one dead pixel on each one, red and blue respectively. I would take a photo, but I’ve had to move the iMac into the bedroom and I’ve not set it up yet so I can’t use iPhoto.
I’m left with a number of decisions over what to do with the iMac. I love the design so much that I’m reticent to sell it, but a Mac Mini would make much more sense in here (with a KVM into one of the screens). I’ll decide something eventually.
Now about that third LCD…
Crap
I went through all my recent issues of Wired and Time tonight, read what I was interested in, and threw them out. Then I did the same with the pile of mail on the table, dumped the Christmas cards in the bin (no, they weren’t still up, but I hadn’t thrown them away yet) and cleaned up the kitchen. This is step one in a process that will continue when I’m on holiday next week, where I plan to throw out even more stuff. I collect a serious amount of crap.
Around
About ten minutes after I wrote that post last night somebody on the WoW messageboards suggested trying Firefox to signup. Now this makes no sense at all, there is no reason why it should work just by changing browser when the problem is on the server end. But yet incredibly, it did, I signed up, and I played until I almost passed out from fatigue.
Then when I got up this morning there was an email to say that my PC upgrade and LCD’s had shipped. Unfortunately I never found the option for Saturday delivery so I won’t get them until Monday. But it’s nice how everything suddenly switched around.
Not quite so pissed now.
Pissed
It looks as though I won’t be getting my new PC parts this week, I sent them an email and found out that the processor I ordered is out of stock. They said it should all ship out on Monday, so it’ll be early next week before I’m basking in the glory of triple display goodness.
My copy of World of Warcraft arrived this morning and since I got home from work I’ve been trying to sign up for an account. Apparently the rush of subscribers in the US taught them nothing, because the account creation server has been down for hours. It’s annoying because while Graham is off adventuring and levelling himself up, all I can do is sit here and press F5 on my keyboard in the hope that I get more than a bunch of broken image links.
I’m really pissed off.
Freshening
I’ve been thinking about redesigning the Chatbear website tonight. At the moment I think it’s far too corporate looking, very serious and not particularly fun. There’s various ideas floating around in my head, but nothing that with enough direction. I looked through some stock photography sites tonight to see if I could find some good homepage images, but it’s hard when you’re not sure what it is you’re looking for. All the photos of people just look so forced and faked that it would end up just looking like a cheesy insurance site or something.
Part of me thinks I shouldn’t bother anyway, since I’ll need to come up with a design for the Bearthing site before long too, and I’ll just have all these same problems again. But I really like the idea of freshening up Chatbear a bit more before getting back to that.
Approved
Well the finance has been approved so now I just have to wait for Scan to deliver my stuff. Hopefully I’ll get it before the weekend so that I can set it all up and have a play.
Not much else going on right now, did a whole lot of nothing tonight, just glad I don’t have to write any more crappy Chatbear admin code.
