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October 03, 2004
Failure
My clan apparently has devolved into a group of slobbering drunks. Don’t get me wrong, I still love ‘em, but Allan told me about Thursday night’s sexual weirdness and I think you’ll agree, it shows that stupid repressed sexual urges should probably stay stupidly repressed rather than revealed in the context of drunken shenannigans.
Evidently, everyone was drinking, which is now normal, and somehow Bill, Brian, Mattax and Erin wound up topless together in some room. This strikes me as doubly asinine because:
- Brian is married
- Bill and Mattax both have attractive girlfriends
- Erin is… Erin
Julie showed up, wasn’t allowed in the room, Jenna and Mattax left the room (apparently she could contain her excitement), Mattax goes back in the room, Allan wises up and leaves.
So the question of the hour is, by God, did you morons have any idea drinking could lead to this much fun? I bet I get a lecture from Brian about it being none of my business. He’ll be right, but goddamn. I can’t conceive of an explanation for this which will make it sound reasonable or understandable. The story itself just oozes with the kind of lame foppishness I don’t expect from my clan, the style of overblown sexual tension that makes theatrical British matrons giggle that shrill, soul-offending way. Imagine an X-rated, tit-out Jane Austin novel—gleefully retarded, socially reprehensible yet socially obsessed, and you may come close to what I’m picturing—a scenario in all ways deserving of immediate decimation with extreme prejudice.
Wake up, you tards. You aren’t having “more fun,” you just managed to dull your senses enough that you can’t tell that you aren’t. The glory of the old clan was that we could all be ourselves around each other. The most obvious symptom of a failure of this system is the need to inebriate to tolerate and converse. We used to like each other. We didn’t need to get drunk to socialize.
Insert Major-esque “I’ll feel bad about this in the morning and wish I hadn’t said this” disclaimer here.
On to the usual computer shit.
On Thursday, Michael and I spent 3 hours trying to get an SSL certificate installed from GeoTrust. For those who do not know, SSL is a complete and evil racket. The idea behind SSL is that you trust the host you connect to, because some certificate authority or CA signed the certificate. In actual fact, people trust SSL because it’s so hard to crack (ha! at Bill’s work they crack it every day). Meanwhile, in the real world, we treat SSL as being nothing more than an encryption mechanism, and rightly so.
Look at who created SSL: Netscape. Everyone liked their browser the best because, among other things, it gave very thorough security information. But the security information was used as a ploy, because Netscape more-or-less invented SSL, and if self-signed certificates were just as good as “official” certificates, nobody would pay $400 for them. Netscape knew the browser market was going to fall apart, it had to. Not-too-unfamiliarly, Netscape created a great deal of fear through the browser warnings, which were quickly replicated in IE; this fear propelling SSL certificate sales. Today, most people are unaware of the trust angle—because it’s irrelevant.
Do you know where the trust comes into it? When buying a certificate, the CA is supposed to go to great length to verify your organization, your ownership of the domain in question, and all the other data you provide. In practice, they delay for a few minutes and then give you the certificate. There are tons of CAs that specialize in bargain-price certificates, but it doesn’t matter, because as long as your CA is signed by one of the toplevel CAs, all browsers will trust them.
Suppose I have some secret data. I give it to three people I trust: Alice, Bob and Oscar. Alice and Bob always verify who they give this data to by going to great lengths checking their character. Oscar, on the other hand, says “give me $20, and I’ll let you know.” Is it safe for you to assume that the secret is safe? Would it be reasonable to program all computers everywhere to trust in the secret data? Because that’s how SSL works.
Anyway, yesterday the main failure was seeing the guy pulled over in the left turn lane, standing in the door of his truck, taking a leak. In the middle of the road. During rush hour. God I hate this town.
There were other intermediate failures though. I was setting up Mail.app for Alex, and apparently it doesn’t take too well to being told where its folders are going to go unless you have two accounts set up in it. I was only setting up one. I tried to do a pvmove on my Linux box so I could free up a hard drive and install OpenDarwin, FreeBSD or OpenBSD on it. Well, the LVM2 implementation for Linux 2.6 doesn’t support ioctl msg 9, meaning doing a pvmove /dev/hda5 caused it to make a big temp logical volume but not actually move any data. I downloaded the newest version of LVM and 2.4 kernel, because they fucking don’t support 2.6 anymore. It did get done though, eventually.
At one point in time, I told all my friends to go with LVM. At the time, I was right. We’ll call this period of time “the Golden Age of LVM” and we’ll say it lasted basically from LVM 1.0 to when Linux 2.6 came out, a period of about a year. Then we had to upgrade to the new device-mapper/LVM 2.0 buttsex, which didn’t work for a while and then was painful to use. Apparently they never implemented pvmove in 2.0. Now they have, but they haven’t made it work on the modern 2.6 kernel. So fuck them, I was wrong, avoid Linux Logical Volume Manager like the plague. It is ass. You’re better off with RAID anyway, so just fucking do it. This was apparently a mistake along the same caliber as recommending XFS, and I apologize.
Why OpenDarwin, you ask? Because I’ll be taking this box in to work and using it as my own private staging server, and it will be helpful if it is running an OS comparable to Mac OS X. But it’s a PC. OpenDarwin is as close as I can get, and I think it will be just fine. All of my hardware is supported. I reserve the right to eat my words—I’m already expecting to put FreeBSD 5.3 on it instead.
Posted by FusionGyro at October 3, 2004 01:28 AM
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Comments
Your clan is lost without you. The secret is, the clan was always all about its charismatic leadership. You’re Bush, and they’re Texan.
Posted by: eparchos at October 3, 2004 07:21 PM