So, today at work, a co-worker sends an email saying that ‘ps’ is segfaulting whenever it’s run.  This is usually a very bad sign (since it frequently means that you’ve been hacked, and a rootkit has been installed).  So I start digging around.

Top runs just fine.  Shows everything that’s running.  I check the md5sum of the ps binary against another machine (presumed to be good), and notice that it’s different… oh boy… that’s a really bad sign.  Oh, and the rpm database is corrupted beyond repair.

So I start checking the md5sums of lots of other binaries in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, etc.  And LOTS of binaries have different… so many that it takes me quite a while to find one that ISN’T different… even /bin/true is different, I mean /bin/true???

So, I find three freshly installed boxes, and do the md5sum trick against all their binaries, and I find that of the 4200ish binaries out there, 27ooish of them have different md5sums from the same binary on a different host… but the RPM database swears up and down that the checksums are right.

Turns out that RedHat in their infinate wisdom has turned on the prelinker.  This shoves each library into a randomized place in the virtual memory, and modifies the binaries in place so that they know where these libraries are.  This is done for two reasons: 1) since the binary has a cashed clue as to where the libary lives in virtual memory, it’s much faster to load it. 2) This also is a nice layer of defence against buffer overflows… they’re somewhat harder to exploit if the bits of memory you want to overflow into are randomized.

Somehow, in ways that I don’t understand as yet, the prelinker also informs the RPM database of the changed checksum and ‘rpm -V’ doesn’t complain about them, but tripwire would (if you’re using tripwire).

The prelinker is actually an interesting idea, but the problem is that it violates a key assumption most sysadmin’s will have about the OS, which is ‘take a system binary (say ‘/usr/bin/find’ for example) and compare the md5sum of it between two machines of identical patch level, and we’d assume the md5sum would be equal for them’.  This assumption lies at the heart of how tripwire works.  It also would force you to have seperate tripwire read-only media per host you have installed.  Oh, and you need to update that read-only memory every 14 days by default, because prelink changes the randomized locations every 14 days (and therefore re-writes the binaries).

GAH.

But on the plus side, all three Unix admins learned something new today, which doesn’t happen very often.

This affects RedHat AS 4 and 5 and ES 4 and 5 (And CentOS and Oracle Unbreakable Linux).

This book goes into how the internet has made it possible for truly ad hoc organizations to form, and then disappear with almost zero organizational cost.  This is an amazing thing, for example, the London Transport bombings, since photos and video of the event were available in an organized manner on Flickr within minutes of the event.  This is hugely dangerous when more radical groups use the very same tools to organize themselves for crimes against society.

It’s easy, but shortsighted to argue that these tools should be outlawed on the basis of the purposes to which they could be put.  People make the very same arguments with regards to firearms.  But the courts and society have repeatedly shown that, say, Smith and Wesson isn’t responsible for the murder caused by their Magnum handguns.

I was very intrigued by the review’s implications that these tools will allow for people to become far better informed decisions, and to increasingly isolate themselves from good information.

Basically, there are a bunch of math problems that roughly go up in difficulty.  If you can solve a problem, you get access to a thread discussing that problem by people who have already solved it.  Some are straightforward and a little silly (sum all the digits in the number 2^1000, for example), but some of them are pretty challenging, and send you off into number-theory land looking for a way to effeciently count the number of divisors of an big number (say, 78million and change).

People use all sorts of tools in their solving, so it’s not limited to coders… Lots of people have used Excel to solve these things (and boy… if you’ve ever dived into Excel Macros, you’ve done programing…).

Currently, I’ve solved 18 of the first 20 problems.  I’ve got one more 98% solved (except for finding my one-three silly little mistakes, which will probably take me another 98% of the time).  I’ve also got problem #67 solved, because of a note on problem #18… it told me that if I solved the problem wrong, the heat death of the universe would happen before I solved the longer one.  If I did it right, well, let’s just say that my little p3 700MHz firewall solves it in 0.09 seconds.

So, for the three of you readers out there, go and take a look.  Have some fun with it, and who knows, I may even offer some pointers if you get stuck… (assuming I can stay ahead of you…)

I got the LG Voyager.

What changed? Well, two big things: First I discovered (through online reading, and a hands on demo at a Verizon Store) that the LG DOES have a text editor/notepad application. And this holds true for the Venus, and the Env. I realize I’m weird about this requirement, but hey, it’s my money.

The second big thing is that the Voyager (after discounts) costs the same as the Blackberry pearl. And it doesn’t have the Verizon mandated requirement of a data plan. Note: if you buy a blackberry from Verizon, you’re required to have a $30/month minimum data plan.

That adds up quick.

I may tack on a data plan to the Voyager later, but for now, I’m not going to use it.

A third huge bonus is that bitpim is really close to having full support for the Voyager, so I’ll be able to do the full sync dance easily.

First decision: Which carrier?

To me, this is a no brainer. I’m staying with Verizon. Yes, they’re evil. The problem is: who isn’t? And all of my family are on Verizon, so the ‘in calling’ thing helps me a lot. Verizon does have several downsides though: they’re somewhat expensive, their data plans are very expensive, and they have a poor selection of phones.

Second Decision: To data plan, or no data plan?

I’m torn on this one. On one hand, having the internet on the phone would rock. It gets us one step closer to ubiquitous computing (meaning: ubiquitous networking… quoting Rands ‘The Cave‘ article: “The fact that a computer without an Internet connection is essentially a very expensive DVD player is a recent development”). On the other hand, it’s still pretty expensive. T-Mobile gets serious props for it’s $10 unlimited internet on your phone deals. Verizon has some serious problems with it’s ‘unlimited’ plan really meaning ‘unlimited except for P2P apps, movies, and so long as you don’t go over 5 GB/month transfered’. I think I’m going to end up with a data plan though. We’ll see.

Third decision: Qwerty or no qwerty?

I realized last night that I really don’t want to go back to a non-qwerty keyboard… I do enough text messaging that typing with just a number pad would suck. That, and I don’t like reading messages like “Will C 2 B there 2nite”, so sending messages like that would be ugly. So I’m limiting myself to phones which have a qwerty or qwerty like keyboard.

Fourth decision: Since I’m in Qwerty land, do I do Windows Mobile?

This one is one I don’t have a clear answer for. I’ve been screwed by Windows Mobile (v5) on the treo, which by all accounts is just a bad implementation, hobbled by only 32mb of onboard ram. The treo 700wx (which I don’t own) theoretically fixes this with 64mb, but still. I’m TOLD that other implementations of Windows mobile are lots better, and that mobile v6 is even better (which has been released).

As of this moment, I’m not planning on staying with Windows Mobile. I have a few other options with Verizon, but price limits me to the Motorola Q if I were to stay.

Fifth decision: Which phone?

So, I’m basically down to a few phones: 1) Blackberry Pearl, 2) Motorola Q, 3) LG enV 4) LG Voyager. The Q tends to be fairly poorly rated, so it’s out. The LG enV has a good price, but lacks what I see as an essential feature: a free text editor[1]. However, the LG enV is a strong contender that’s very highly rated. The LG Voyager is LG/Verizon’s attempt to dethrone the iPhone. It’s really cool, and inherits a strong bit of engineering from the enV (released last year). However, it’s a $300 phone. I don’t think I can let myself spend that much on a phone.

So, we’re left with the Pearl. It has some really solid first user reviews, it has a text editor, it has a reasonable price ($199, with a $50 rebate if I choose a data plan)… well, I can’t call that REASONABLE, but it’s budget-able, which is almost the same thing. It has strong outlook sync capabilities, which is a bonus, and it has a proven record with a dataplan. So, as of this instant, it’s my choice. Granted, I haven’t slapped down cash for it yet, but that’s the current decision.

–Jason

[1] All I’m looking for is something where I can write quick (or long) notes to myself. Like directions, or just some thoughts, or what have you. I realize I could pay for one and/or use a java one, but geez.

(Speaking of, Gary Kasparov has an interesting article about the match from his perspective here.)

Chess is a reasonable target to which Artificial Intelligence can apply itself. AI offers some interesting and useful branch pruning concepts which help to avoid searching the full space of possible chess moves.

Go is a fascinating game that computers are not even close to defeating humans on. There are several reasons for this, but the largest one is that the search space is orders of magnitude larger than chess, and the pruning algorithms are less well suited to reducing that space.

As for the author’s comment about making better ‘brainchildren’ than our biological children, well, we can’t even envision how to do that yet. Despite the best effort of Science Fiction dreamers, and AI hype artists, Artificial Intelligence really isn’t. Some people have started to proclaim that AI should mean Artificial Insects, since advanced AI behaviors far better map to what insect behaviors than human.

There are reasons that general purpose AI’s do not exist. Complexity and flexibility are the two biggest ones. Until we can make several quantum leaps in the art of understanding HOW we think, AI will never excel to anywhere CLOSE to the flexibility of a human child.

Apple has dropped ‘computer’ from their name. Instead of ‘Apple Computer Inc’, they are now ‘Apple, Inc’, to indicate that they are more than a PC maker. This matches their more recent ‘lifestyle’ type products (ipod, iphone, etc)

So, what will Apple do next?

They’re going to want a market where the current market options suck.
They’re going to want a market that’s technology driven.
They want a market WHICH MAY BE A NICHE MARKET, but if the trendy people are doing it, then they want in.

This isn’t a new thought, but Apple isn’t a pure technology company.

They’re a Style company. Their goal in almost all things is to be so hip, you can store a side of beef in there.

So, I don’t know where they’re going next. But it’ll probably be two years before it happens… they seem to like having new stuff every two years (the last ‘revolution’ was the Mac Mini, which came out in Jan of ’05).

We (the Alpharetta Fraternity Brothers Lunch group) were arguing yesterday about Apple. We were trying to devine what they were going to get into ‘next’.

To my mind, phones are an obvious extension of what they do great. They find a market where the current options suck, or at least are far under-realized. They reset all the assumptions about what said device can or can’t do, and then they design something that almost everyone would want, starting with themselves.

You can see this played out twice in recent times: mp3 players, and now cell phones.

With mp3 players, before the iPod, you had really bad mp3 players. You either had small ones, maybe with a one line display, with maybe 128mb of space. Or you had brick ones (archos?) which were huge, had hard drives, had a multi line (but still only text) display, and had AWFUL interfaces (make sure you put the songs in the right folder. Make sure you don’t use long filenames…)

Along comes the iPod. It’s a hard drive (5 or 10 gb if I recall), it’s got a nice monochrome screen, it has a solid program to do EVERYTHING for moving music around (Rip? sure. Write to harddrive? no problem. Sync to device? Great. Only want a playlist to come to the device? no worries). And never forget: It’s pretty. It’s got a cool/novel click wheel interface that’s elegant, simple, and easy for everyone.

No longer do you need a household nerd to take arbitrary music with you. Now it JUST WORKS.

The open question is ‘Can they repeat history with the iPhone?’.

Cellphones of this generation are awful. The vendor lockin sucks. The voicemail options are tollerable. We’re shocked when a phone has 1gb of storage (sprint). My ‘smart’phone has 64mb of space on it. I mean, what the heck? Granted it has a sd slot, but that’s ONLY up to 2gb of space, and it’s a pain to use. Blackberrys are interesting/cool, but only if you want access to your work email. For the rest of the phone/PDA market, they kinda suck.

They’re certainly starting out right… it’s got style, it’s got a cool interface, it’s got a beautiful screen. It looks like it takes care of a LOT of annoyances with cellphones. It’s got either 4 or 8 gb of storage. It accesses your mail, it integrates in neat ways with maps.google.com, and google local search (witness Steve looking for nearby starbucks, and ‘ordering’ 4000 lattes).

The challenges:

1) It’s locked to a single vendor at the moment (Cingular/ATT wireless).  That makes sense since they’re the largest GSM provider here, and GSM gets them a LOT further into Europe/Asia than anything else does.  But forcing a new contract on people might not be a great thing.

2) It’s expensive.  $500 and $600 for the 4gb and 8gb models respectively.  Thats a LOT for a phone + an iPod.  There’s no discounts either.  That’s the price with plan.  But people have been proven time and again to spend money on ‘sexy’.  (witness the iPod)

3) Typing without buttons for it isn’t optimal.  First hand reports indicate that it’s kinda annoying.  Apple does have some really nice spelling correction/word completion stuff to help with this though.

4) They didn’t pick Verizon.   This makes sense since Verizon is CDMA, not GSM, and Verizon has a HUGE history of locking their users from doing ‘Cool Stuff’ with their phones, so that they can be charged for it ($20 per month to sync contacts? What?).  But Verizon has a huge network also.  I imagine that Verizon will have a CDMA version of this phone somewhere between 9 months and 1 year after launch.

Well, I’m just a jolly ftp code producing junky… I’ve even made working with an ANCIENT box running (ha) windows 2000 and IIS as a FTP server almost not painful.

And my code relies on this assumption: that I can’t rename/delete a file while another user is playing uploading it.

IIS (which uses the NTFS permissions) supports this.

So fantastic news! We can bring this box out of the stone age!  And we can upgrade it to run Linux, since I can script all the administration work, and take a 40 minute process down to about 4 seconds!  Happiness and Joy abound.

Then I run a test, and the Ext3 Filesystem will let you delete/rename files while someone else is writing to them.  Both things ‘Just Work’[1].  However, I can’t rely on my previous assumption any more, so I’m going to have to dive into the most complex part of my code, and write something ELSE in there to handle this case… and since the business is insisting on REALLY SHORT SWEEP INTERVALS, that increases the odds that I’m going to trample on something if I don’t take care of it now.

Everybody now:

“All software sucks, all hardware sucks.”

[1] This is even a good thing… it makes real/useful tempfiles possible and secure.