I fscking hate being cold.

I went to DC213 with a couple friends from IRC. Was alright; met a few people, drank a bit, hooked up my laptop in AP mode and let someone leech mp3s.

Not too shabby, but I didn't bring enough booze, and I don't think I'm really built to handle crowds. Not that DC213 was at all unfriendly or not fun to be at, but I either need to be around one or two people or a shitload of people. Splinter cells kept splitting off and hanging out with me, talking shop mostly, while I chain smoked and drank from my flask. (At Denny's, in LA. This is not unusual behaviour for either.)

I feel I should elaborate on this. The people at DC213 all rocked. I'm just not used to hanging out with that many people at once, at least not while sober. It's usually a couple or a crowd.

Anyway, long story short, I believe there's an open door policy. If you happen to be technically inclined and in the area on the third of the month, go swing by.

I just read a reply in someone's journal that went along the lines of

[Christmas] is all about reconnecting with friends, family, and loved ones. Oh, and good food!

No. Christmas is about getting hammered. Thoroughly hammered.

Case in point: a friend once told me about his family's Christmas. Nobody got along. Everyone always screamed at each other. I forget what the sides were, but I imagine they were husband's side of the family versus wife's. It was becoming intolerable. Shouting, screaming, on the verge of fistfighting. Then a wonderful idea struck him.

Spike the ice cream.

Everyone was drunk, laughing, getting along, and asking for more ice cream.

It's not about the presents, the tree, or chestnuts roasting on an open fire. It's not even about friends and family, gathering together to show love and appreciation for one another.

It's absolutely about getting completely wrecked. Especially when it's bloody cold.

I rewrote the crack program I wrote for work to use a precompiled MySQL database of dictionary words and their Digest::MD5::md5_base64().

It's kind of neat, how you can guess at what kind of person someone is by their password. Since there're no restrictions on passwords (IOW, no cracklib -- support was originally built in but unimplemented by the guys I took over for (holy shit, they actually did something sort of right!), and I didn't feel like implementing it), people can have whatever they feel like having for a password, short of a null string...

...actually, I wonder if they can have a null string.

Anyway. There're the beer drinkers, teenie-boppers, l33t h4xx0rz, serious Unix people (few and far between :-(). Moms and pops, grammas and grampas, using their offsprings' names as passwords. Peoples' nicknames. The unimaginative single-chars.

And at least two dozen people who haven't bothered to change their password from the default. *sigh*

I remember running the earlier version of this program on the [needless to say: suspended] 419 scammers that lived on my systems before they became my systems. I don't remember their passwords, but I remember it wasn't what you'd expect them to have.

Makes me wonder what sort of person I'd be judged as, based solely on my username and password.

Suppose I'm an antisocial alcoholic. :-)

Girlfriend (?) went home, after about a week of staying with me. So I got drunk, bored, and stupid, and decided to write in my Slashdot journal. Sorry, everybody. :P

By the way, the number of people with the password "password" is fucking ridiculous.

I forwarded a 419 scam (impulsively and incorrectly[0], whoops) to a postmaster. The reply came back, sic:

Stay the fuck off my site you sad pointless script kiddie an get a fucking life.

Ooooookay.

Well, shit, at least he [sorta] knows what a script kiddie is.

After a bit of thought, I replied:

His signature mentioned your site, I mistakenly sent you an abuse complaint. Beg your pardon.

By the way, site admins are generally more polite to each other.

Have a nice day.

- Johnny

I hate being called a liar when I'm telling the truth, I hate when you eat something you've just microwaved and when you get to the middle it's still all cold, and I fucking hate being called a script kiddie. I was this close to sending him something like:

Script kiddie?! Look, dude, I can already tell I've got more code in the JAPH in my .sig than you've written in your entire life, so don't go around blah blah blah

...but I thought better of it, for a few reasons.

Anyway. Sorry. Felt like venting.

Just so it's not a total loss, here's the JAPH I had in my signature. :-)

$|=1;@_=split//,'JustAnotherPerlHacker';
do{print"\r";push@_,($_=shift@_);$_=join
'',@_;s/([JAPH])/chr(040).$1/eg;print"["
.$_."]";select($x,$x,$x,0.1)}while(1);{}

It lines up in a fixed-width font. Trust me.


[0] 419 scammer got half clever and attached a Hotmail-style signature with the guy's domain, I didn't think to check it out. Foo on me. It did get to the other (appropriate) postmasters, though.

This popped up. There was going to be more, but I've had too much to drink and it was all going to be about the girl I met at the bar (god damn, man, she is way the hell on my mind right now), so consider yourselves lucky.

Yes, world, I too am Sorry, with a capital 'S'. (I voted third party. Neither of those two fucks were good for my country. (I'm not particularly patriotic, but I do love America.))

The war on Iraq was not a good thing, but now that we're there, we have to finish what we've started. (I enlisted, USMC and Army. They both turned me down; civilian debt. I intend to pay these off and re-enlist.)

I want to say "at least Bush will fix Iraq, now that he's done fucking it up"[0], but... it remains to be seen.

[0] Not to say it wasn't fucked up before. We went there for the wrong reasons, but it's not like we invaded a preschool. These were bad people.

[ Incoherent rambling follows. I've been sober too long. ]

Why is it that I only get modded up when I post anonymously? Eh. On the other hand, my karma went from "positive" to "good".

My next paycheck is all mine. I get to spend it however I see fit. I'm almost definitely going to buy the Harley I rode a couple months back -- assuming the guy I was working with who wanted to sell it to me isn't pissed that we dropped his project. (Sorry, Andy.) Also thinking about replacing Skull, my Sharp PC-MM10 (and yes, that's my name there, I used to run the other LL link for that model); I saw an MM20 at Fry's the other week.

The MM10 was a good machine. Onboard ethernet and 802.11b, one PCMCIA slot for the 56k PCMCIA fax modem it came with, Transmeta Crusoe 2GHz (IIRC), and Windows XP. Dual booted Slackware happily, and all hardware was supported with then-testing branch drivers. The case was misleadingly solid-feeling, though, and it wasn't nearly as sturdy as it felt. Trust me.

I still have a hardon for Thinkpads, though. They're tough little motherfuckers; I use Crossbone (TP 760ed) as my mp3 player. Goes everywhere with me, poor thing. When I crash skateboarding, it usually takes a hit, too. So far, no serious injuries. The case is a bit cracked on one side, but no big deal. One hard drive did die, but it happened while the machine was stationary. Premature aging, maybe.

I've found a neat little bug in zkfingerd that makes it segfault on Debian; it goes away when I turn on the memory debug code. Fuck! So it's going to take me a bit longer to track down the problem than I originally thought.

I've recently been introduced to Mozart (mostly from recommendations by the author of "Everything I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" -- Amazon link left as an exercise to the reader). Good stuff to program to, when you're not in the mood for Spineshank and Static-X.

Just so this journal entry isn't a total loss: quick hack to give you a realtime line count of whatever. Especially fun when you just want basic stats on tail -f /var/log/maillog | grep status=delivered or similar. Lives in my ~/bin.

<++> lc

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

$| = 1;

print "\r$." while (<>);
print "\n";

<-->

There was a 419 scammer operating off of my site. We have safeguards against lusers spamming from us, but not to us; e.g., spam from somewhere else, and requests reply to us. Not much we can do about that on the software side. I rely on the clueful community to give me the heads-up on it.

Hi [me], thanks for the reply - after 1.814 processed scam mails, your mail was the first real reply from an abuse department. Very quick reaction, by the way - that's how I intended it to be, thank you very much!

With kind regards, [name omitted by Cuervo]

This gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling. Mister [name omitted], I am very pleased to have fulfilled my duties as a systems administrator.

That, and I'll take any excuse I can to take these lusers off my systems. :-)

I am a systems administrator. Taking care of my meager portion of the internet is my duty. It is my purpose in life.

I am a systems administrator. If you abuse my network, I will kick the shit out of your account.

Yes, I got mod points for the first time in... oh, 3 months or so.

Anyway; I discovered gtk-gnutella (while looking for a Kazaa Linux client, failing and falling back on memory for Gnutella), and promptly downloaded Elara (from suicidegirls), and various Mozart. Not sure which I like more. I have the irrepressable urge to join suicidegirls and ask her where she got that necklace -- I have a permanent hardon for things with skulls and crossbones. My laptop is named crossbone, I have a skull and crossbone tattooed on my left shoulder, and I had a thumbring on my left hand, which I sorely miss... It's like my personal logo. People ask me about the tattoo all the time. I say I'd explain it to them, but I lost the jpeg I based it on in a hard drive crash (which I did).

Grit my teeth and get more drunk. Goodnight, Slashdot. Hope you've slept well.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use Digest::MD5; use LWP::UserAgent;

$ua=LWP::UserAgent->new ({'agent' => 'ThinkGeekFortuneFinder/0.1'});
$|=!($almost_there=0);@sum=();

OUTER: while (1)
{
        my ($response) = $ua->get('http://www.thinkgeek.com/fortune.shtml');
        my ($quote, $sum, @quote);

        die $response->status_line
                if (! $response->is_success);

        $almost_there = 0;

        for (split /\n/, $response->content)
        {
                s/\r//g;

                if ((!$almost_there)
                        && $_ eq '<I>(refresh for another)</I><BR>')
                {
                        $almost_there++;
                }
                elsif (($almost_there == 1 || $almost_there == 2) && $_ eq '')
                {
                        $almost_there++;
                }
                elsif ($almost_there == 3)
                {
                        last if ($_ eq '</p>');

                        s/<BR>/\n/g;
                        s/\&lt;/</g;
                        s/\&gt;/>/g;

                        push @quote, $_;
                }
        }

        pop @quote; # empty line

        $quote = join "\n", @quote, "";
        @quote = ();

        $sum = Digest::MD5::md5_hex $quote;

        for (@sum)
        {
                if ($_ eq $sum)
                {
                        print STDERR $_ = "Already seen $sum";
                        sleep 1;
                        print "\b \b" x $_;
                        next OUTER;
                }
        }

        push @sum, $sum;
        print "--$sum\n$quote";

        sleep 10;
}

Apparently, I've been assigned metamoderation of stupid, abusive, and/or humourless moderators.

This guy got modded offtopic. Didn't seem like he was to me.

This one got modded Troll for an Al Gore joke (and then someone tried to warn him about it and got karmically fucked).

I read a post somewhere describing someone's favoured method of moderation: look for shit to mod up instead of shit to mod down. Worked for me the last time I had points (like six months ago or something).

In other news, it looks like zkfingerd is getting some downloads. It broke the 100 download mark a while ago -- woot. Too bad it doesn't compile on Debian... I pretty much walked away from it, but it looks like I'll be doing a maintenance release.

I really have to stop getting drunk and posting project news.

I got the "No AC posting for you!" message for the first time earlier today at work. Thought that was odd... usually, when I get drunk and AC, I'm at home, and even then it's not like I'm usually a jerk.

...Well, let me rephrase that; it's not like I'm usually a blatant jerk to anyone in particular.

...

Well, at least I'm not usually off-topic when I'm a blatant drunken jerk. :-)

I read in someone else's Slashdot journal about some random running around posting seemingly random stuff in peoples' journals. I checked out their posting history, and thought it was kind of weird, comparing it to mine.

Maybe the mods are on crack, but I manage to get modded up maybe one in five posts, in a good week. (Yeah, they definitely are, looking at that Windows-bashing post I made a while ago that got modded up. Har har, I are making fun of Windows on Slashdot, me get modded up!)

Speaking of moderation, I haven't gotten points in a while. Ah, well, not too concerned.

By the way, has anyone else noticed the new formatting option, "Code"? Has this always been around and I've not been paying attention or what?

I hadn't checked my friends/foes thing for a while. Last time, someone added me to their friends completely at random. (Or maybe I actually posted sober one day or something.)

So I get the urge to check just now, and some other random person is now one of my freaks.

Just out of curiousity, not like I'm going to lose sleep over it or anything, I check his user journal. Excerpt from his journal:

Then one day I decided to get proactive [Ungh. I hate that word. - Ed]. Now, I basically foe-list anyone who makes a post I feel deserves a (-1, Stupid), or a (-1, Just Sux0rs), or whatever.

Thought that was funny. This guy's going to end up with a nearly complete list of slashdot users in his foes list.