I’m pretty new to this kind of thing, so I’ve been using web tutorials to work my way up from the most basic blinking LED to something that actually monitors oxygen sensors and populates an LCD with information. Some of the more valuable resources I have used are as follows:

• A really good five-part tutorial to get started
• A tutorial to get started with analog input
• Guide to using serial LCD’s from Spark Fun Electronics
• A solution to some common problems with interupts
• Some good examples of code using an LCD menu with three buttons

A few banana slug facts:

• They are native to the Northwest
• The are HUGE! Some have reached 10 inches in length, and weights of a quarter of a pound.
• They were almost the official mollusk of California. Yes, the legislature actually voted in the noble slug, but the Governor vetoed it.
• They are the official mascot of UC Santa Cruz.

Banana Slug

This is exactly what happened when I saw this article about the Pionen datacenter, owned by Bahnhof in Sweden. Located nearly 100 feet beneath the city of Stockholm, this epic datacenter has been compared (fairly I might add) to the secret layer of a James Bond villian. It’s got backup power provided by twin submarine engines, triple-redundant internet backbone connections, and can reportedly stand up to a Hydrogen bomb. We spend so much time and effort trying to make our servers comfortable when designing datacenters, we often forget about the Human element. Even though these guys are literally working in a cave, it’s nice to see that Bahnhof is trying to make its people comfortable as well.

I applied for a UNIX Systems Engineer position at the University of California Santa Cruz, and was offered the job back in July. After some serious soul searching, I decided to accept, and we started the process of relocating a full 3,000 miles from home, which I can assure you is no simple task! I’ve been here just under two weeks, but Courtney is still tidying up our affairs in Vermont before she starts the long journey out here in our car. Yep… That’s car, not cars. The public transportation system is so good out here that we can finally be a single car family. For my part, I’ve managed to move clear across this country twice and not driven it a single time. This is fine with me, however, since I have very little interest in seeing middle America.

Casey and I managed to find Paula’s Breakfast Shack while he was out for WordCamp 08. Home of the $1.99 Basic Breakfast, this place is so good, that I simply can’t imagine going anywhere else for eggs and home fries! I’ve tried a number of taquerias, but the jury is still out on which one is best. Once I find it I’ll have to freeze some tacos and burritos and send them out to Matt, who has strongly indicated that he hates me for having such easy access to good Mexican Food.

To do this, I started by installing a minimal copy of RHEL 4, making sure to lay the filesystems out in exactly the same way as they were on the old server. I then went through several experiments, leaving just the bare minimum files and directories required for the hardware and booting, but formatting all other filesystems and restoring the data from our old server. In the end, the below process resulted in system that worked perfectly, and very closely mirrored the original server.

• I conducted a minimal OS install on the new server, replicating the filesystem layout on the old server.
• I booted the new server from DVD in rescue mode, allowing it to mount the filesystems in /mnt/sysimage
• I removed EVERYTHING in every filesystem and directory EXCEPT the following:

• Everything in /sys
• Everything in /dev
• Everything in /proc
• Everything in /boot
• /lib/modules
• /etc/grub.conf
• /etc/sysconficg/grub
• /etc/modules.conf
• /etc/fstab

Next, I went to my backups and restored the entire system to /mnt/sysimage, making sure not to overwrite existing files. We use NetBackup, which defaults to not overwrite, but other systems are not so careful. If you accidentally overwrite the files we excluded from deletion above, your restored system will not boot.

Once the restore was complete, I rebooted the system and it came up pretty much as a carbon copy of the old server. Once it was up and on the network, I ran “up2date -uf” to install the latest version of the kernel and I was done.

Even though I still feel the iPhone is too expensive, and that it is lacking in some basic features, this might just be the thing that gets me to buy one. After all, I love hacking hardware!

I heard an interview with Hots on the way home from work Friday. When asked to respond to internet rumors that former phreaker Steve Jobs was mad at him, he said “I want Steve to call me up. Let’s he and I have a man to man about it.” It was wonderful! If Steve Jobs can’t remember his days hacking the phone system and respect Hots and the team for their accomplishments, he truly has lost touch with what hacking is all about.

Wonderful job guys! Congratulations.

It was, in fact, Joybubbles that first discovered the giveaway Captain Crunch cerial whistle could be modified to generate 2600 Hertz and taught John T. Draper, a phreaker who would later go by the nickname Capn’ Crunch about it.

Joybubbles was reported to have an IQ of 172 and only occasionally used his talents to cheat the phone company. Instead, he preferred to educate others in the style of Mr. Rogers with his weekly telephone story line called “Stories and Stuff.” The numbers were +1 206-FEELING (+1 206 333-5464), +1 612-813-1212, and +1 773-572-3109. Later, he ran a call in show called the “Zzzzyzzerrific Funline,” which, due to all the “Z’s”, had the honor of holding the last entry in the entire phone book.

UPDATE: The history of Phone Phreaking blog points out that I did not provide a source for the above information regarding cause of death. This is correct, and I apologize for the oversight. In an effort to put to rest any conjecture, they have provided the actual death certificate, which lists the immediate cause of death as “Natural causes” along with “congestive heart failure” as a contributing condition.

The “emergency” that precipitated the ordinance was an elderly Arizona man who decided to attend the city’s gallery walk in the nude. Apparently the conservative blowhards can handle it when nude people are young and beautiful, but they draw the line and call it an “emergency” when it’s an old saggy guy. Nice going fellas!

I can’t say that I truly understand why these people enjoy being nude in public, but I’m totally sick and tired of this country’s uptight and irrational hangups about the naked body. Many news articles covering this story have quotes from people saying things like “I don’t think children should be seeing this”. I suppose they would rather our children learn to be ashamed of their bodies and perpetuate the misconception in this country that all nudity is sexual? Don’t you think the more casual attitudes towards nudity we see thru-out much of Europe are a lot healthier for our children than America’s ludicrous, Christian imposed complex about it? I don’t have children, but if I did, I would much rather they be exposed to nudity outside the sexual context so they could realize that everyone’s body is different and that it is OK for them not to look exactly like the models in glamour magazines.

A naked body is something that each and every one of us have, but for some reason we are taught to be ashamed of it. Like it or not, most of the body-image issues and eating disorders that prevail in this country can be directly traced back to our villification of the naked body. Wouldn’t it be great to see people from all over the country descend upon the streets of Brattleboro and stage a Spencer Tunick style installation of thousands of naked bodies in protest of this draconian ordinance? I certainly think so.

Thru-out the 18 seasons of “The Simpsons”, the location of the fictional town has never been revealed. The creators have often frustrated the audience by cutting the scene just before the state would be named, leaving them to wonder which town Matt Groneing had in mind when he conceived the show. If Springfield Vermont is, indeed the place, is hard to say. There is no Shelbyville nearby, but the town is not too far from the Vermont Yankee nuclear power-plant, and the vermont climate does seem to fit with the show. Perhaps we will never know for sure, but I sure look forward to seeing the movie in my home state.

I don’t race sailboats anymore, but I have to admit that I have that I’m glad to see the Swiss beating the New Zealand team and staging a strong defense of the cup. Today’s race was called off because the wind never settled down enough, but I’ll be eagerly checking in Tuesday to see the results. Obviously I would have rather seen the US make it to the finals, but I’m proud to be pulling for Alinghi in this contest. Go Alinghi Go!

UPDATE:
Alinghi won the32nd America’s Cup Match with a 5-2 victory over the Challenger Emirates Team New Zealand. The Swiss completed up the exciting match just ahead of the kiwis with a nail-biting, 1 second win to take home the cup!

This tuesday, only two days before Hutchinson was to go to trial, Orange County State’s Attorney Will Porter decided to drop the charge, after viewing a videotape of the incident. The subsequent charge of “resisting arrest” was also dropped because prosecutors did not think they could get a jury to convict her without the “cruelty to a police animal” charge.

Since she never even touched the dog, I tend to think the charges were more about her having challenged police authority than about hassling the police K9.

Jeffrey Long, a high school student from the Buffalo, NY area, decided that the time had come from someone to unseat the late, but long-winded US Senator and proposed to out-talk him for his senior project. He set up camp at the Buffalo Historical Society and started talking. He talked and talked and talked until shortly after 4:00 AM, when he sat down to take a short break and promptly nodded off to sleep.

He was only five hours short of breaking Thurmond’s record.

I’m sorry you didn’t quite make it Jeffrey. It’s not easy to out-talk the biggest windbag in America’s history.

In its purest form, the term kinetic sculpture refers to a class of moving art that originated in Europe, but became internationally popular from the late 1950s through 1960s. The moving parts of a kinetic sculpture can be powered by anything from wind to the maker’s hand, but a sculpture that is to be raced must cary the artist with it and be entirely human-powered. As you can see by the photos the race participants have come up with some very creative and interesting contraptions to race. More photos can be seen here.

The awards contestants can win for their efforts are extremely entertaining and include prizes for such off-the-wall categories as “Sock Creature of the Universe”, “Golden Flipper”, and “Worst Honorable Mention”. The grand prize bestows upon its winner the esteemed title of “Grand East Coast National Mediocre Champion”.

It is highly suggested that spectators refer to Karen Wallace’s Kinetic Costuming Guide when putting together their outfit for the day, and they are expected to abide by the “Official Spectator Code Of Conduct“, which states:

This morning I heard a radio story about Cassandra Openshaw and Nick Carber, students at Narraguagus High School in Milbridge Maine who used used 45 rolls and 9 different colors of Duct Tape to make the attire for their tropical theme prom… And I thought the guy I saw selling duct tape wallets was cool!

Later I read about the “Stuck At Prom” contest that awards $6,000 in scholarship money to the couple with the most creative and original duct tape prom cloths. Past winners can be seen here.

Cassandra Openshaw and Nick Carber

This Sunday Tunic shattered his previously set Barcelona record when, an estimated 18000 to 20000 people lined up naked in Mexico City’s Zocalo Square to be photographed. The event was of so much interest to locals and onlookers that a no-fly zone had to be declared above the plaza to keep airplanes away! Tunic also did a smaller shoot this morning with a group of 105 naked women resembling Frida Kahlo, the eccentric artist known for her extremely personal paintings.

Tunick is planning another shoot later this year in Amsterdam and is looking for volunteers who are interested in being a part of his photographs.

Spencer Tunic - Mexico

Spencer Tunic - Mexico

Spencer Tunic - Mexico

“It was not intended to be taken literally, as its author, Connie M, Meskimen is a Little Rock lawyer known for penning sarcastic letters with tongue planted firmly in cheek.”

Looks like you got us Connie! Apparently the fact that the paper published it caused quite an outrage amongst its readers. Well, at least this explains why the letter was written fairly well. Still, I shudder at the thought of how many neo-conservatives ignoramuses down there must have read it (or tried to read it) and found themselves agreeing, in whole with its premise. Thanks to Murphy for pointing out the Snopes article.

Pople are constantly finding new levels of idiocy, but this Arkansas woman who blames Daylight Savings Time for the hot weather demonstrates a truly stupefying lack of intellect! Connie M. Meskimen is apparently convinced that the hot weather she has been experiencing lately is caused by the fact that Daylight Savings time started about a month early this year. Then, as if this vacuous assertion was not enough, she goes on to surmise that the legislation responsible for moving Daylight Savings ahead on the calendar was a ploy by the “liberal congress” to “make us believe that global warming is a real threat”.

Telling Connie that she needs to check her facts seems mind-numbingly obvious! Aside from her needing to realize that Congress, no matter how liberal, can’t alter the rotation of the Earth, she needs to remember that it was the Republicans that passed this ridiculous legislation!

Anyhow, here is the article:

Prank Letter

If you can’t read the image for some reason, here is the text:

John M. Grohol, Psy.D. writes: “As predicted, the media is now making some very generalized and meaningless connections between Cho’s hospitalization 16 months ago in 2005, and his actions on Monday.” The media in their undying need to sensationalize just keeps spoon feeding the public’s need to blame and retrospectively criticize everything surrounding last Monday’s shooting.

The implication, of course, is that since Seung-Hui Cho had undergone a psychological evaluation in 2005 and subsequently ordered to seek outpatient treatment, campus psychologists should have somehow been able to magically predict his shooting rampage. I actually heard a VA Tech student on NPR news say “They knew he had a mental illness so it seems like this could have been prevented somehow if someone had just done something.” Amazing! Never have I heard a comment of less value!

The bottom line is that things were done correctly. When problems were seen, Cho was sent for a psychological evaluation an ordered to get followup treatment. To those who say he should have been removed from school or locked up, I ask one very simple question. What if he had not gone on a shooting rampage? How would your actions of denying him an education or his freedom be seen if he never actually did the horrible things he did?

The point here is that a lot of people suffer from mental illness. For every person who looses it and starts shooting, there are hundreds of thousands more who are just trying to get through life the best they can with their illness. They never hurt anyone. We have to ask ourselves if we want to be a society that demonizes and alienates people with mental illness or one that is sympathetic, inclusive and helpful to them.

I have to say that it seems like Americans are calling for some pretty Orwellian policy when they start demanding that people with mental illness be removed from society. I would go on to suggest that doing so would make them more dangerous. Let’s look at what we know about Seung-Hui Cho. He was an outcast who didn’t have friends and was picked on by other students. In effect, he had been alienated from his community and demonized because of his illness. This, of course, all within the informal social context of a University setting. What Americans are calling for is a much more dramatic and official form of this ostracism. I can’t help but think this would only serve to further alienate people, causing them to decline and crack all the more easily.

Rather than pointing fingers and making mal-informed, unreasonable, knee jerk demands, America needs to try to truly understand what pushes people over the edge if they want to prevent these shootings from happening in the future. Since every school shooter we have seen was a bullied outcast, I think its safe to say we have a model to work with. Rather than vilifying the mentally ill, we need to focus on what causes them to get sick to begin with. A strong, zero tolerance approach to bullying seems like a very good start!

Everyone seems so quick to second guess the camps administration and police, suggesting that the community should have been told or the campus should have been closed down. What I don’t think these presumptuous pundants realize is that a shooter will always be able to find large groups of people on a college campus no matter how “locked down” it is. Had the administration canceled classes and somehow informed every student at VA Tech about the shooting, they would have all rushed to the nearest computer cluster and started emailing their friends. If they didn’t do that, they would have gathered in large groups to play hackie sack or some other group activity. The point is that people on college campuses tend to gather. When they don’t have classes, they tend to gather more. In all likelihood the shooter would have been able to find even larger groups of people to target had the campus been locked down.

I’m usually not one to stick up for the police, but in this case they did the right thing. When a person kills someone, they tend to run as fast and as far from the crime-scene as possible. The assertion that the shooter had probably left campus after the fist two shootings was reasonable and prudent. Ignoring the fact that it is logistically impossible to instantly notify 30,000 students of anything, closing down the campus would have most likely led to larger individual groups of students that could be more easily targeted. Americans really need to lose the habit of finger-wagging and blaming after something bad happens. The administration and police probably feel badly enough without having the whole country pontificating about what they should have done.

Many consider him to be among the best authors that have ever lived, but even those who don’t feel so strongly are challenged to point to any who wrote in the genre of satire better than Vonnegut. Being a fan of satire, I count myself among those who treasure his work and find it to be among the best I have ever read. I will further honor him by not using semicolons.

Vonnegut writes:

First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are trans-vestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.

Chang was rushed to the hospital while the rest of the team pondered how to recover the severed limb so that it could be re-attached. They finally settled on a plan and “shot two bullets at the crocodile’s neck,” causing it to release the bloody arm. It is not clear exactly what kind of bullets were used, however, because the giant crocodile “was unharmed as we didn’t find any bullet holes on its hide”. Zoo workers suspect that the animal was “just shocked”. Maybe they were using BB’s.

Chang had his forearm reattached Today and is now recovering from the surgery. They’re pretty grisly, but more photos can be seen here if that’s your thing.

North Korea has a population of 23 million, many of whom, according to the United Nations Food Program, are suffering from widespread food shortages and sustain themselves on a diet lacking critical proteins and fats. When the communist country heard about these huge rabbits, they wasted no time in asking Szmolinsky to help them set up a rabbit farm to help relieve the country’s hunger problems.

“I’ll be travelling to North Korea in April to advise them on how to set up a breeding farm. A delegation was here and I’ve already given them a book of tips”, Szmolinsky said back in January. Recently he sent them 12 of the huge bunnies, but when he went to arrange his visit, he was told that the Government had canceled his trip because it was unhappy with news coverage of the sale.

While North Korea denies it, Szmolinsky suspects that the animals have already been sold and eaten. It’s a shame that they most likely ended up on the tables of some rich people who fancied the novelty of it all rather than helping to provide nutrition to the poor and starving.

This solution worked well for a long time, but suddenly the iPhoto uploader to Gallery2 broke, and I was faced with a decision. I reluctantly decided to try Flickr. After struggling for what seemed like hours, I finally managed to find a crappy Yahoo username that I could only half tolerate. I tried it, but quickly gave up because I could never remember the cryptic username I had selected.

Casey reminded me that he had invited me to Flickr before they had merged with Yahoo, and that I had created an oldskool, non-Yahoo Flickr account with my normal human readable username. I decided to give it another shot. I hated the restrictive terms of service, and the dozens of clicks it took to get a different sized image, but I tolerated it because images were easy to upload. I even went so far as to create a Pro account.

Well, that all came crashing down around me, and thousands of other Flickr users today when I received notification that Flickr was forcing all their users to merge with a Yahoo account! I was furious! I do not have a lot of images in Flickr, but many of them are linked and presented in this site, and I really don’t want to take the time to go back and change all those links. I would have to create a Yahoo account and merge it thanks to Flickr’s Nazish new policy.

I’m not the only one who is cheesed off either. ThomasHawk.com has been following the forums and has compiled a collection of peoples complaints.

One user had this to say:

What really pisses me off is Yahoo’s God-awful ID setup. It took me over an hour this morning to set up an ID, mostly because every name I tried was taken – including random letters I got by hitting the keyboard in frustration. So now I’m stuck with a username I didn’t want, can’t change, don’t like, and won’t remember.

Another user writs:

Is yahoo offering any sort of counselling for people who go into fits of rage after the 387th attempt to find an available user ID that doesn’t suck?

I could not agree more. It took me forever to find a username, and as before, it’s cryptic, and I will never remember it. Somehow I very much doubt that my Flickr Pro account will stand the test of this betrayal. I have never really liked Flickr, but tolerated it. This will most likely be the last straw for me. I’m just glad I left my Gallery2 integration up and running!

It was not be be, however, because when the hunter’s wife opened the fridge two days later, she was shocked to see the duck’s head pop up and look at her. She quickly rushed the plucky duck to a local animal hospital, and then on to the Goose Creek Animal Sanctuary where she was given more specialized treatment. Vets at the sanctuary gave Perky a 75% chance of survival. They were optimistic about her chances for recovery, but doubted she would ever be well enough to be released into the wild.

The gunshot wounds had injured Perky’s wing, leg and bill, and as veterinarians were conducting surgery to repair the damage, her heart suddenly stopped. Dismayed, senior vet David Hale declared her officially dead. Amazingly, however, in yet another death defying comeback, Perky came around, stuck her head up, and began flapping her wings! Few details have been made public about how the medical team brought Perky back to life, but the Associated Press said she was revived using CPR.

Perky is now recovering at the Goose Creek Animal Sanctuary where she is expected to make a good recovery. Time will tell if she will heal enough to return to the wild. She has a pin in her wing, so her chances of flying again are uncertain. Either way though, it seems she will be welcomed at the sanctuary for as long as she needs to stay.

UPDATE: You can buy a Lucky Duck T-Shirt with a picture of Perky on it by clicking here. The proceeds go to the Goose Creek Animal Sanctuary, and help with Perky’s recovery.

The guys at Princeton have put together a video that shows just how insecure these systems really are. Aside from the multiple logical attacks that work against them, the ways to defeat the physical security are countless. They seem to use a “wafer-tumbler” type lock that can be easily picked in under 5 seconds. Don’t know how to pick locks? No problem. Just unscrew the bottom and you have access!

As if all this was not disturbing enough, Diebold had put a picture of the master key to these systems up on their online store and Ross Kinard of SploitCast used it to create a working key of his own. While this may seem difficult, it is not. Using the image, one can determine which key blank to use fairly easily. This is because there are really not that many key blanks in use; especially for “wafer-tumbler” type locks. Once the key blank is determined, all that is left is to figure out how deep make the cuts. This can be quickly determined by referencing the photo that was so kindly provided by Diebold on their online store. Granted, there are a few more details to be aware of, but anyone who has invested much time in learning how to defeat locks should have little trouble in figuring them out.

Ross writes:

I bought three blank keys from Ace. Then a drill vise and three cabinet locks that used a different type of key from Lowes. I hoped that the spacing and depths on the cabinet locks’ keys would be similar to those on the voting machine key. With some files I had I then made three keys to look like the key in the picture.

He then sent the keys to J. Alex Halderman at Freedom To Tinker.com who quickly confirmed that two of the three keys would, indeed, open the door to the memory card on the Diebold system. This video shows the key Ross made opening the voting machine used in the Princeton study:

Didbold has finally removed the picture of the key from their website, but it would seem that it’s too little too late. The picture is out there along with more than 130,000 voting machines on which a key made from it will work. It looks like this is one company that has some explaining to do!