Suffice to say I've pretty much fallen in love with it. It pretty much mirrors the way I type plain text documentation, but it manages to generate quite pretty HTML output. All of the advantages of plain text (I get to use Vim, version control Just Works, ...), with only one downside: no previews of what I'm doing.

So I did something about that: qinotify is a small Qt utility which monitors .asciidoc files with for changes, and displays the latest version of the HTML output.

I publish them, not because I believe they'll fix the spam problem, but because a spammer has taken to forging their sender address to appear to originate from my domain. Obviously none of my servers are involved in such loathsome activities.
I publish these records to give other mail admins the chance to reject such e-mail outright, or at least to assign it a higher spam probability but mostly so they won't bug me about having rejected it.

Google rather seem to have missed the point though because they use them to reject the spam, which is good, and then send delivery failures to me. They know that it's spam with a forged sender, that's why they're rejecting it in the first place, yet they bug me about it.

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

     efqrbsuglyjfuhxy3uca3w1b@jbinup.com

----- Original message -----

X-Received: by 10.68.42.9 with SMTP id j9mr23765326pbl.142.1362320729989;
        Sun, 03 Mar 2013 06:25:29 -0800 (PST)
Return-Path: 
Received: from [41.143.193.146] ([41.143.193.146])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTP id tv4si18179919pbc.155.2013.03.03.06.25.24;
        Sun, 03 Mar 2013 06:25:29 -0800 (PST)
Received-SPF: fail (google.com: domain of B37FBAB0D@sigsegv.be does not designate 41.143.193.146 as permitted   
+sender) client-ip=41.143.193.146;
Authentication-Results: mx.google.com;
       spf=hardfail (google.com: domain of B37FBAB0D@sigsegv.be does not designate 41.143.193.146 as permitted s
+ender) smtp.mail=B37FBAB0D@sigsegv.be
From: "Tanya Guerrero" 
Subject: hi there
To: 
List-Unsubscribe: 
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Type: text/plain; chars="iso-8859-1"
Date: Sun, 03 Mar 2013 14:25:21 -0000
Message-ID: <20130303142521.244356B88AC8AC5DC029.4744484@SARA-PC>

SPAM SPAM SPAM

It needs no introduction, but I'll give it one anyway: The ISC DHCP server and client are the standard DHCP(v4/v6) implementations and they're used all over the place.
Recently I was fixing a bug in a dhclient-script.sh. It incorrectly parsed an IAID value because it contained an '='.

The relevant bits of source code:

	ient_envadd(client, prefix, "iaid", "%s",
			print_hex_1(4, ia->iaid, 12));

Looking a little deeper there's the first disturbing bit:

#define print_hex_1(len, data, limit) print_hex(len, data, limit, 0)
#define print_hex_2(len, data, limit) print_hex(len, data, limit, 1)
#define print_hex_3(len, data, limit) print_hex(len, data, limit, 2)

#define HBLEN 1024
char *print_hex(len, data, limit, buf_num)
        unsigned len;       
        const u_int8_t *data;
        unsigned limit;      
        unsigned buf_num;    
{
        static char hex_buf_1[HBLEN + 1];
        static char hex_buf_2[HBLEN + 1];
        static char hex_buf_3[HBLEN + 1];
        char *hex_buf;

        switch(buf_num) {
          case 0:
                hex_buf = hex_buf_1;
                if (limit >= sizeof(hex_buf_1))
                        limit = sizeof(hex_buf_1);
                break;
          case 1:
                hex_buf = hex_buf_2;
                if (limit >= sizeof(hex_buf_2)) 
                        limit = sizeof(hex_buf_2);
                break;   
          case 2:        
                hex_buf = hex_buf_3;
                if (limit >= sizeof(hex_buf_3))
                        limit = sizeof(hex_buf_3);
                break;
          default:
                return(NULL);
        }

        print_hex_or_string(len, data, limit, hex_buf);
        return(hex_buf);
}

/*      
 * print a string as either text if all the characters
 * are printable or colon separated hex if they aren't
 *        
 * len - length of data 
 * data - input data
 * limit - length of buf to use 
 * buf - output buffer
 */       
void print_hex_or_string (len, data, limit, buf)
        unsigned len;
        const u_int8_t *data; 
        unsigned limit;
        char *buf;
{               
        unsigned i;
        if ((buf == NULL) || (limit < 3))
                return;
          
        for (i = 0; (i < (limit - 3)) && (i < len); i++) {
                if (!isascii(data[i]) || !isprint(data[i])) {
                        print_hex_only(len, data, limit, buf);
                        return;
                }
        }

        buf[0] = '"';
        i = len;
        if (i > (limit - 3))
                i = limit - 3;
        memcpy(&buf[1], data, i);
        buf[i + 1] = '"';
        buf[i + 2] = 0;
        return;
}       

PVOID NdisAllocateMemoryWithTagPriority(
  __in  NDIS_HANDLE NdisHandle,
  __in  UINT Length,
  __in  ULONG Tag,
  __in  EX_POOL_PRIORITY Priority
);

Read the documentation:

Tag [in]
    A string, delimited by single quotation marks, with up to four characters, usually specified in reversed order. 
    The NDIS-supplied default tag for this call is 'maDN', but the caller can override this default by supplying an explicit value.

That's right. Pass that string as a ULONG please. I just don't have the words.

[1]Think kmalloc, but harder to type.

I'm not going to bother explaining what that was about, I'm sure everyone knows by now. Instead, I'm going to complain about a little experiment I did more than three years ago. Hopefully all the buzz around World IPv6 day and the IANA pool exhaustion has encouraged a few more people to offer their blog over modern IPv6, in addition to crusty old IPv4.

The results are, ... well, results. Three years ago there was one blog in Planet Grep which was reachable on the IPv6 internet. This blog is still there (though with a different IP) and there's all of four more. That's 5 out of 69, or 7.24%.
Just for fun I reran the test on the current list of blogs on Planet Grep. 7 of 97 sites, or 7.21% have an IPv6 address.
Not exactly great that. On the bright side: at least the sites which advertise quad-A records are indeed reachable on those addresses, and the one site which had an IPv6 address back in 2008 still has one.

Come on guys (and girls obviously), we can do better than this.

Why? Well, two reasons really, the first is that a really interesting project and the second is the bad influence of a few friends.

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, ...
Well, you should probably call the A-Team, but you've got a software problem you should call me. The A-Team doesn't know anything about software.

While adding support for my board I ran into the following error message:

	make: *** No rule to make target `ts7800_config'.  Stop.

     line=`egrep -i "^[[:space:]]*${2}[[:space:]]" boards.cfg` || {
                echo "make: *** No rule to make target \`$2_config'.  Stop." >&2
		exit 1  

Now to get U-boot to actually start...

So, anyway, it wasn't a dark and stormy night but a bright and sunny afternoon a few weeks ago when I ordered a USB charging cable for my cell phone. They're unreasonably expensive in Belgium but I found a great deal on DealExtreme. A Genuine© Immitation™ Nokia®-Like one even.

Today the cable arrived but when I plugged in my phone it refused to charge.
Linux complained too:

[959307.552135] hub 5-0:1.0: over-current change on port 2

Clearly something was wrong with the cable. Two minutes with a multimeter and a working cable for comparison showed that somehow the ground and +5V connections were inverted.
15 minutes with a soldering iron fixed that. All in all I got a great deal: a charging cable, half an hour of entertainment and that lovely feeling of having fixed something for less than a quarter of the price of a genuine Nokia cable.

Beware of geeks with soldering irons.

${Work} has decreed that passwords must be changed regularly and today it was my turn. Fine, despite the usual silliness in reducing the key space (by enforcing certain sets of characters to be present) and a ridiculous maximum length of 8 characters, I can deal with that. pwsafe generates and remembers the password for me. After a while I even manage to remember it myself.

Clearly that's not a good rant. This, however, is worth complaining about:

  dd if=/dev/urandom bs=1k count=10 | md5sum

]]> Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:19 GMT