Billy the Martian

• M&Ms
• Scotch Whiskey. Glendronach is my current favorite.
• Guns. Lots of guns.
• Unix. I’m currently using FreeBSD almost exclusively at work and at home..
• Blondes.
• Guinness.
• Deep Purple.
• Rare beef.
• Dirty jokes from people who don’t often tell them.
• Movies where shit blows up and people die.

I’ve just stumbled across a couple different programs that seek to intertwine
different communications environments.

The interesting one is called “Gush”. It’s for Windows, but it’s still
interesting anyway. It combines Jabber-style IM with a pretty RSS-feed reader.
You can find it here.

There’s something interesting about mixing Jabber and RSS, but I can’t really
put my finger on it. The only things I can think of that they have in common is
that they’re both XML based, and they are both the kind of program that you
leave running all day while you do “real” work. That seems like an
odd marriage.

If I was in the prediction business, I’d throw out a wild guess that in
5 years, email will have been drowned by spam and abandoned, and that
people will be doing instant messaging (and protecting their contact
lists aggressively) instead, with blogs and RSS replacing discussion lists.
But I’m not sure how strongly I agree with that. It could just be the result
of fighting another spam battle recently on top of seeing two dozen stories
over the last couple days on how big blogging has gotten. But, the instant
messaging thing gets a lot more useful and interesting when everyone has
always-on connections and/or data-enabled cellphones.

Thoughts, anyone?

I’m a gun-nut. I like shooting guns. I like cleaning guns. I like shopping for guns, and their assorted paraphernalia. I like talking about guns with my firearms-aware friends, and I like discussing the politics of gun-ownership.

So, I’m thinking I’d better put a Gun Rant here. People are expecting it.

I was surfing the many pro-gun sites out there, and I read many interesting things. Most of them were things I’d read before — this discussion has been
with us forever, and won’t go away any time soon. But while I surfed, I felt
a certain nagging feeling in the back of my head, and I let it grow into
something I could form into words. As I read all the pro- and anti- gun
sites, I got the feeling that they all missed the point.

There’s people who argue that, in America, at least, the Constitution
specifically mentions that we have the right to keep and bear. (And I agree
with them.) There are those that argue that the statistics of gun ownership
show that crime would decrease if responsible people were armed. The stats are
complicated at times — or perhaps there are people on one side or the other
who have a vested interest in making them complicated. There are people with
emotional stories to tell on both sides of the issue, either how a firearm took
the life of a loved one, or how one saved a life. There are people who argue
from a sportsman’s point of view, that guns are needed for hunting. There are
people who argue that we can’t get rid of all firearms, so we shouldn’t try in
the case of the law-abiding citizen.

Don’t get me wrong — I think that all of those arguments are good and valid.
But, I think that because I’m a computer nerd, I like to whittle things down to
single and simple causes. I think that at the root of gun ownership, there’s
one basic principle at stake:

You’re not qualified to decide this issue for me.

That’s it. It’s beautiful because it’s so universal. It doesn’t matter if you,
the reader, are the best chief of police the world has ever seen. It doesn’t
matter if you’re the most successful district attorney ever, nor if you’re
the best school administrator or the best parent in your town. You’re not
qualified to decide what tools I can use to defend myself.

The 2nd Amendment of the Constitution is just our forefathers declaring in
advance that the government is not qualified to decide this issue.

As rallying cries go, this doesn’t have much of a ring — as I’m reading
people’s opinions on this issue, especially ones I disagree with, I frequently
mutter it in my head. Alas, as soon as I do that,
as I start to utter it aloud, my voice switches to a bad English accent, and
I picture John Cleese in surgical gear in “The Meaning of Life” — the
scene where the mother in labor is asking Cleese what she should do now,
and he responds: “Nothing, dear, you’re not qualified!” And then I giggle.

I don’t have any solid meat to post today. I just want to say that spammers
suck!

I spent most of today debugging my ISP’s spam filtering system. It’s
a real pain in the ass to have to double my hardware and skull sweat on this
every couple of months. I hate the scum bags who are responsible for this.

I’ve stumbled across an application that makes me want to surf from a Windows
machine, rather than my usual Firefox/Mozilla/flavor-of-the-month. It’s an
add-on for Internet Explorer called Pluck.
It’s an RSS feed reader, with some interesting group options. I like the
three-split pane approach, and I like that you can drag-and-drop those little
orange RSS icons to start tracking a new feed. The integration with IE seems
well done, and it hasn’t caused any crashes or other issues. Also, it allows
me to share bookmarks between machines effortlessly. (Looks to me like they’re
stored offsite, which is a bit of a privacy issue, but right now I don’t mind.)

It’s really cool. Click here to
see a map of recently modified blogs. I had my signs reversed on my GPS
coordinates, and for a minute there it looked like I was located in the Indian
Ocean somewhere.

So, tonight’s movie is Thief, with James Caan. I’ve seen it before, and I know I liked it. But it was long enough ago that I don’t remember why.

I’m really surprised while watching the initial credits. First off, it’s a Jerry Bruckenheimer movie. I didn’t know who he was when I saw it initially. Then I see that it’s produced and written by Michael Mann. The soundtrack is by Tangerine Dream — I saw them live once almost 20 years ago. I love a lot of movies with soundtracks by them.

And I’m surprised to see Jim Belushi in a movie back then. I don’t remember him in anything serious that long ago. And I just spotted William Peterson in a bit role — on screen for maybe 2 seconds. No grey hair.

And Belushi — that reminds me — I’ve got to pick up Wild Palms, which starred Belushi. I remember liking at least the first half of that miniseries.

Anyway, no wonder I liked it.

Rant Chair.
Scotch.
Philosophy.
Crypto in FreeBSD.
Fun Stuff learned while running an ISP.
Dumb user stories.
Smart user stories.

I found these instructions here.

Why would you want an encrypted file system?

Well, for starters, if you have to ask, you’re not going to be
impressed by the answer. You’re not the kind of person who wanted
a crypto-decoder ring when you were a kid. (Yes, I’ve got one. Here’s
a picture. Mine’s more dinged up than this one is, though. And yes, it actually says “Digital Decoder Ring” on it. And it really runs Java.)

You might want to keep prying eyes off of your email. You might want
to run an anonymous remailer system, and you want to protect the files on it even if the men in black take
the whole machine away. Heck, maybe you’ve got that one recipe for those
cookies that the lady paid $1000 for, and you want to keep it safe!

0.	Add GEOM_BDE support to the kernel.
	options GEOM_BDE

NOTE: you could also load the kernel module: `kldload /boot/kernel/geom_bde.ko`
1.	Create a few directories. One for lock files, and the other for a mount point.
	# mkdir /private
	# mkdir /etc/gbde

2.	Create an empty images file of 1000Mb.
	# touch /usr/local/cryptfs.img
	# dd if=/dev/zero of=/usr/local/cryptfs.img bs=1024k count=1000

3.	Create a virtual device that points the empty file.
	# mdconfig -a -t vnode -u 9 -f /usr/local/cryptfs.img

4.	Invoke the gbde program on the new virtual device.
	This will ask for a passphrase twice, and open an editor.
	# gbde init /dev/md9 -i -L /etc/gbde/md9

5.	In the Editor, alter the "sector_size" line, and exit.
	g/sector_size = 512/s//sector_size = 2048/g

NOTE: You should have a /dev/md9.bde device-node.

6.	Invoke the gbde program to attach the image file to the kernel.
	# gbde attach /dev/md9 -l /etc/gbde/md9

NOTE: You will be prompted for the passphrase.

7.	Format the attached image with UFS2
	# newfs -U -O2 /dev/md9.bde

8.	Mount the md9.bde filesystem to the mount-point we created earlier.
	# mount /dev/md9.bde /private

9.	Check to make sure everthing worked.
	# df -h

What’s my motive for writing a blog? Well, all my friends are doing it,
for starters. (Examples: Dave, for
one, and Steph and Tim, for another.)

Also, I’ve always been a heavy reader. I think that lurking inside each
bookworm is a little voice that says either “I could do this!” or “I wish I could do this!” My wife often tells people that I want to be a writer, and I
usually step in and say that I actually just want a writer’s working situation.

I hated writing classes in school, but I think that was largely because I
never wanted to write about the things that I was assigned. Later on
in life, though, my wife got me to write one of those Christmas form-letters.
I had fun with it, since humor was the main goal, and enough people told
me that they liked it that I realized that I could write to please an
audience, if only in a limited fashion.

Plus, there’s lots of cool blogging software out there!

So, here I am!

I’m Bill O’Hanlon. I’m not the Bill O’Hanlon who writes self-help books.
He can be found at his website here. I don’t think we’re even related, really.

I’m president and part-owner of Professional Network Services, Inc., a Minneapolis-based internet service provider. The company was started 8 years ago. 8 years is the longest, by a factor of almost 8, that I’ve stayed in one job. I guess I must be pretty happy with my current occupation!

Before Pro-ns, I’ve worked at a bunch of different high-tech computer companies as a software developer and a system administrator. I’m not great at any particular computer-related task, but I know a little bit about a lot of areas. I’m broad, rather than deep, and that describes me physically, too.

I live in Minneapolis, with my wife and two daughters.

I have the urge to explain something. I REALLY like Microsoft’s OneNote, and I’m not a Microsoft fan.

I use vi. I like vi. My fingers know vi keystrokes at the cellular level.

I can’t explain why OneNote is cool. I’ve tried, verbally, and gotten nowhere. I suspect that a visual demonstration might work with most folks.

But I really love using it. And I’m pretty happy with the OneNote Blosxom plugin. It seems to do the right thing with pictures and other attached bits. (Pity that OneNote won’t attach audio or video segments to the “Single Web Page” .mht file, but the rest is 95% of what I want, anyway.)

Oops. I guess I’d better mention this here, so that some folks don’t get confused.

If you get mail from nobody@cryptofortress.com, and you’re coming here to see what’s up, it isn’t from me. Cryptofortress.com is also the home for a Mixmaster-style anonymous remailer, and the anonymous mail is sent out from that address.

Chances are good that the guy pictured below did NOT send you the mail that pissed you off. But heck, don’t let that stop you from raving if that’s your thing. (You know who you are, anon-41148477@craiglist.com. The person sending you that mail is probably someone you know.)