/dev/blog

Last week the PiQ team announced that their fourth issue would be the last.

Ok, now I’m seriously considering a Newtype JPN subscription.

It’s offical, Newtype USA’s February 2008 issue will be the last magazine produced. On the other hand its Newtype JPN counterpart will live on for those of us interested in imports.

Update: Got my first issue of PiQ today, an attached note states that “Not only will PiQ fulfill the rest of your remaining subscription, but you’ll also receive two issues for every remaining Newtype USA you’re owed.”

Kudos to the PiQ team.

Turns out that 320GB “cheap investment” saved me from losing a lot of important data, almost a year later I have lost my 250GB Seagate hard drive. Some data is still recoverable, but I can’t rely on faulty hardware and went ahead with badblock’s destructive write-mode test (-w).

Here’s a sample of dmesg, smartd, and badblocks’s output. They are all a pretty good warning signs of the impending hardware failure to come.

$ dmesg
[…]
hdb: task_in_intr: status=0×59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error }
hdb: task_in_intr: error=0×40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=170135808, high=10, low=2363648, sector=170135808
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
end_request: I/O error, dev hdb, sector 170135808
Buffer I/O error on device hdb, logical block 21266976

$ badblocks -wsv /dev/hdb
Testing with pattern 0xaa: done
Reading and comparing:
178003968
178003969
178003970
178003971
178003972
178003973
178003974
178003975
[…]

Please update your bookmarks and RSS feeds, here’s the new address:

It’s been a few years since I’ve played Team Fortress Classic, to this day very few people can say they have played the original 1.0 Half-Life mod which was released in April 1999. I did. I was also there for the big 1.5 update in June 2000, and I was there for the Steam port when teleporters were introduced in the game for the first time. For much of its early history, Team Fortress Classic was second only to Counter Strike as the most played and popular of online games. For a long time afterwards it consistently ranked between the top 5 or top 10. As of right now only 122 servers remain.

I am a veteran player of Team Fortress Classic. When I discovered the Fortress Forever project, it brought back some fond memories while at the same time reminding me of the mindless chaos that made Team Fortress Classic so enjoyable.

The Fortress Forever team is quite large (composed of abut 20+ developers), with members from the US, Canada, UK, France, Norway, and Finland. And wouldn’t you know, Valve announced the beta release of Team Fortress 2 to be on the same day. Coincidental? Or are they worried it may be shadowed by Fortress Forever?

Fortress Forever, seems to have two things going for them:

1. It’s more ’serous’ then Valve’s Team Fortress 2. Keeping in mind that both mods run on Valve’s Source engine, Fortress Forever is keeping closer to its roots whereas Team Fortress 2 has taken the ‘comical approach’.

2. It’s a free mod with an open community. Ever submit something to Valve? Most Steam reports go ignored. Unless if it effects everyone in the community, it will never happen. I believe having an open community can be one of the most important things when it comes to a project this size, and it doesn’t stop there. Think about Debian, GNUnet, and Wordpress. Drop into the IRC channel, meet with the community, chat with the core developers, resolve issues, and submit bugs.

Regardless, I’ll purchase Team Fortress 2 eventually. Hopefully Valve will bring the Black Box bundle back so I do not have to repay for content that I have already bought at full price.

The next thing on my list that I’m keep a close eye on? Sven Co-op 2.

Don’t fret, this blog is still active. Soon hikikomori will set in and I’ll be back to my usual routine.

And on another note; it has been a little over a year since this blog was first started. As of lately I’ve considered renaming it. It has never been considered an actual “journal”, but personally I think the word “blog” is a little over used. Suggestions anyone?

No more tarballs for me, following papmech this blog is now running Wordpress 2.3-alpha revision 5773 via Subversion (SVN). I have set up a cron job to run every 8 hours to automate the process, so I will always be running the latest development code.

The trunk contains the latest development code, which is currently tagged as 2.3-alpha. The major versions of WordPress (1.5, 2.0, 2.1, and 2.2) that are still maintained by developers and are split into branches.

Trying to run beta (let alone pre-beta) software in a stable environment is never suggested, especially when it changes every 8 hours. From personal experience I can say that living on the bleeding edge has its benefits but they are easily outweighed. This results in a small handful of errors from time to time, or the entire database disappearing altogether.

If absolutely necessary; my fall-back plan is to drop back from /trunk to the stable /branches/2.2 revisions.

My old PGP key, 0×8D1F7423, expired last April. Once again I generated a key that expires in 365 days, exported my public key to key servers, and generated a revocation certificate for it. Saving one revocation certificate to a file and printing the other in the event that my hardware becomes misplaced, destroyed, or otherwise ’superseded’.

I navigated to the directory and double clicked the revocation certificate expecting gedit to appear, but nothing happened. After launching GnuPG I was able to confirm what had just occurred.

Seahorse (a GnuPG front end for Gnome) imported the signature into my keyring. Ah Shit.

Normally I’d restore the backup, but the key was so new I didn’t have time to make one. Luckily I had yet to publish the newly revoked key to any key servers, so I figured there had to be a way to strip out the revocation signature as it only existed on my PC. After a little research I stumbled upon a message board giving me the solution I needed.

Computer forensics and cryptography have always been a hobby of mine.

Grid.org, best known for their distributed cancer research project, retired last night. I’ve racked up a total of 469,870 points; that’s 2 years, 292 days, 15 hours, 52 minutes, and 30 seconds of idle processing power.

After doing a battery of tests with memtest86+ and mprime, I will be joining Folding@Home later this week. For those who are interested, Wikipedia has a list of distributed computing projects.

My United Devices Stats

Yuzu is a dedicated box in my basement with a LAMP installation that I can just ssh or rsync into form any computer within my home. As of April 9th this sever is now running Debian 4.0r0, or simply “Etch”. 21 months in development and worth every minute, Debian Etch is by far one of the most stable Linux distributions I’ve worked with to this day.

I’ve been experimenting with Debian’s ‘testing’ repository on my PC for a few months now, now that they officially support the AMD64 architecture. I’ve grown tired of Fedora, although it is professionally polished, Fedora has always lacked the vibrant community of Ubuntu. Not to mention yum (think: apt-get but for RPM’s) has always been a big pain (think: RPM hell… but automated).

And for those who were wondering; The last Debian Sarge install topped out at 149 Days, 0 Hours, 55 Minutes, and 32 Seconds of uptime.