I was at Good Guys today and I saw some really cool animated music running on the HDTV’s. Animusic.com has some downloadable clips from the DVD on their web site, but the web clips are significantly worse than the the DVD I saw. If you like synthesized music and/or cool animations, it’s worth checking out.

I’m a really bad Magic: The Gathering player. I just don’t have the patience to analyze all the possibilities and determine the best plays. I’ve let Mike play most of my games lately just so my record doesn’t look so bad(and so he can win me some prizes). I’ve also been busy at work, so I haven’t had time to play much either, but even practice doesn’t make me a better player. I think I might give up on the game(again). Like a lot of sports, it’s only fun while you’re learning and improving. After you plateau you lose interest and it is no longer fun.

I liked whitebox, but I was getting annoyed at the fact that all the update and mirror servers were always down, so I switched to a new OS. CentOS is just like whitebox, which is to say it’s exactly like Redhat Enterprise Linux without all the proprietary stuff that redhat has. CentOS is different from whitebox because it has a whole bunch of people maintaining it. Whitebox was just one guy, and while creating whitebox wasn’t a huge amount of work, the maintainer didn’t have time to make updates as often as people wanted. What makes CentOS is nothing technical, it’s just the number of people working on it is greater, so updates are more timely. This is pretty typical with open source software, the survival of a product is a most dependent of the number of people working on it, and as a secondary criteria the technical merits of it.

Anyways, the switch from whitebox to centos was painless. It took about 5-7 commands, but some of the downloads took overnight.

There’s been some good press about our site lately. Here’s some of it.

We have so much work to do, I’m swamped. I need to figure out how to relax a bit more about work.

My friend Alec relayed to me a story of how his brother drove from Palo Alto to San Diego in about 3 1/2 hours averaging over 120 mph. That is scary. I believe him because both Alec and his brother race cars and have been known to drive cars that could actually do that. I think he was driving a Ferrari Testarossa. He said the funny thing about it was that the car got noticeably slower with the lights on because the popup headlamps have a negative impact on the aerodynamics of the car at those speeds. And of course to average that speed you have to be driving at night otherwise traffic will get in your way.

Less than 5 months after it was bought, the lot next door to our house is on the market again for a lower price this time. We aren’t sure why, but maybe they found out about some zoning or regulation which makes it hard for them to build on that piece of land.

Tracy and I spent the weekend in Carmel. It was a really good time, we stayed at the Wyndham at Carmel Valley Ranch. It’s a nice place. Tracy likes the luxury hotels. The golf course looked really nice, not that I play golf. I really needed some time to relax with all the work I’ve been doing.

I am finally starting to work out again sort of. Tracy’s running a lot more than me(she’s doing almost 20 miles a week), but I’m determined to fit into some of those jeans that I’m currently too fat to get into. I lose weight somewhat easily, but I also gain it back if I don’t stay on top of my diet.

I knocked down a really nasty bug today, the type that only exhibits itself under heavy load. Good thing I was doing some stress testing to find out exactly this type of problem. Sometimes I wonder why people bother writing in C/C++ anymore. It took a couple of days to track down, but it was the type of error that most modern programming languages would have caught immediately.

Well the rebuilding process for my hacked machine is well under way. My linux box is now a fresh install of White Box 3.0. And with a completely fresh machine I had to reinstall everything I really use on a daily basis. First things first, I used the built-in package management tools Yum and Up2Date to get the latest version of the OS to prevent known attacks. I installed a fresh version of Firefox. I read most of my news on My Yahoo so I didn’t lose any settings there.

Next up, Mutt for mail. People think I’m a freak for using a text based email program, but you really can’t be the speed of text based email. Also I like feeling old school. With the amount of spam I get(800+/day) the most important thing for me is to be able to delete it quickly and using a mouse to click each one doesn’t cut it. And I can set it up so that mutt has decent html email capabilities. The reality is that about %95+ of HTML email I get is spam anyways(of plain text email, I’d say only %70 is spam), so an email reader without HTML capabilities isn’t much of a loss. One unfortunate thing about mutt is that you have to have sendmail or anther appropriate Mail Transport Agent(MTA) configured properly, so I had to spend some time doing that, that was more of a pain than I expected.
Finally I had been meaning to find a new IRC client, so I looked around and found irssi and I’m really liking it. It’s much cleaner than my old client bitchx.

Overall I’m surprised at how few things I had installed on my old machine that I actually miss having. Most of those things I just played around with once or twice and never needed again. That is good news, it means that the default OS install comes pretty close to providing me with what I need. I did have a few customizations in shells and such that I wanted to keep around, but I’m even finding that I don’t need that many of those. Maybe I’ve just adapted to default installs more than I know. It also could be a sign that the default installs are just extremely bloated because they have at least a couple different types of tools for every need. There must be a dozen text editors and another dozen products with text editors embedded in them.

Still working on gallery. That won’t get done until this weekend.

I also had to stop and think about whether I prefer to use hosted services for my personal stuff or whether I should just do it all at home. Having done it all myself for a couple of years, I know I can do it, but this is the second time in about 3 years that I’ve been hacked and it makes me wonder if it’s all worth it. The value of learning all the webmaster stuff is nice, but it is kind of troublesome when something like this happens. For now I’ve moved all my personal services(mail and web) off of my home machine and on to my friend alex’s. And these days the hosted services have become so commoditized that it’s really not necessary for me to do it. A couple of friends have domains with Dreamhost.com and they highly recommend it. They have lots of bandwidth(20GB/mo I think), full shells, php, mysql and a lot of other features for about $8/mo. That’s a real bargain.

Well this weekend chen.net got pwnz3d(which is hacker-speak for owned). In this case there wasn’t too much damage. He just replaced a bunch of my html with some of his own. The new html put up a few ads and replicated itself all over my website. It also installed a backdoor and some other annoyances. At that point, the end result is pretty much the same. I have to reformat and rebuild my system in any case so the amount of work required to restore is pretty much the same. I had been meaning to make some changes to the way my site works anyways, and this was a good excuse. My blog is hosted by blogger.com so I was able to reload all of my posts from there. That was actually the easiest part of it. Alex already does proxying for my web site and mail, so I just moved all my content over there. I’m still in the process of restoring all the gallery and images that I had up, so that’ll take some time, mostly just to make sure everything is in the right place again.

Now I’ve reinstalled WhiteBox Enterprise Linux 3.0 on my machine and I’m doing a full update to rid myself of any known vulnerabilities.

If you’re curious, the vulnerability that hit me was the use of awstats.pl for web statistics. It’s version 6.2 which I was using had a significant exploit which caused many people grief. From there the hacker used another program to gain root access and install backdoors and other stuff. The latest version 6.3 has a patch to correct the weakness.

All in all, just a minor annoyance which cost me a few hours of work. This person was an amateur just looking to make a few extra dollars on his affiliate ads or something. Hardly a sophisticated hacker at all. Didn’t bother to cover his tracks or disguise his intentions.

My cousin Ed Chen(aka skp) has been working on his Live Journal Image Deathmatch. It’s a part of his Live Journal Image Playground. It’s a neat hobby project and looks pretty good. It’s the kind of simple project that can generate a lot of traffic without a lot of money or programming. Sort of like AmIHotOrNot.com.

I was thinking about why people hate the music companies and Recording Industry Association of America(RIAA) so much, and it seemed odd to me that people don’t hate the movie studios nearly as much. Then I remembered something I read a few months ago about how people hate renting music, they prefer to buy(on CD or iTunes). But people are happy to rent video content(via blockbuster, netflix, or pay per view). Consumers want to own music permanently, but they don’t like to own videos.

Why are people happy to listen to the same song a thousand times, but few people will watch a movie more than once? Part of it is that music is something you listen to in the background, while watching a movie is a primary activity, but I don’t think that can explain it all. Another thing is that a song takes a couple minutes, a movie usually takes a full 2 hours(or even 1/2 hr for a tv show). But it still feels like there is a big gap in how people want to pay for audio content compared with video content.