Tag: random musing

Musings: SSH key types, PayPal API documentation, and more

I have a few random musings to arf about today.

Sleep is miserable. I don’t know why I even bother pretending to have a schedule to myself. Between work demands, personal issues, and the fact that I tend to favour going to sleep around the 05:00 hour naturally, it’s impossible. Sure, I can hold a “normal person” schedule indefinitely… if I have no external factors. But my life is full of external factors that make it impossible. And there are some people in my life that try and make me feel guilty for not being able to hold a schedule. It feels miserable.

In other news, PayPal’s API documentation for their SetExpressCheckout call lies. They say the xsi:type for the SolutionType is “ebl:SolutionTypeType”, but I found out the hard way that passing that as the type causes a SOAP Fault (and leaks the API password and signature out in the error message)! The only way I can find to do it properly is to set xmlns=”urn:ebay:apis:eBLBaseComponents” on the SolutionType node and then set xsi:type=”SolutionTypeType” (no ebl: namespace). Then the API accepts it fine. Who knows why their systems do what they do.

I investigated making a new SSH key that would be stronger than my current one. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem I really have a choice in the matter. The only common denominator is RSA, as shown in this matrix:

Key Type Mac OS X NetBSD Debian
RSA Yes Yes Yes
DSA Yes Yes Yes
ed25519 No No No
ECDSA No Yes Yes
SSH Version / OS Version 5.6 / 10.8.5 5.9 / 6.1.5/i386. 6.0 / 8.0 “Jessie”.

Note that the following systems supported all listed key types:

  • Gentoo 20150623
  • FreeBSD 10.1
  • OpenBSD 5.6
  • Alpine Linux 3.2
  • Windows 2000

Truly a sad day when a 16 year old Windows OS has more SSH key types available (via mingw) than Mac OS X, NetBSD, and Debian combined. Looks like I’m sticking with RSA keys for the foreseeable future.

Musings: Just another lazy Sunday.

Okay, I guess I’m doing this daily. Sundays are usually pretty lazy for me, so this will be short.

Found more interesting tidbits, still configuring the 4.1 kernel for my laptop. RC8 came out before I even finished, so now I have some oldconfiging to do.

Still felt dizzy from yesterday, so spent 20 minutes on the treadmill. Blew all the cobwebs out of my blood, I suppose. Almost completely better afterwards, so that’s a good thing.

Found a really intricate resource pack for Minecraft, S&K Photo Realism. I’ll have to try it out the next time I’m on the desktop with the Radeon 5700HD. My laptop can’t handle resource packs; the poor little Sandy Bridge HD Graphics is too overwhelmed.

Helped Horst debug an i915_drm driver issue on 4.0.5. Not sure the root cause, will have to probe further tomorrow.

Started planning how to install Foxtoo, my own little brand of Gentoo, on to my Pentium-100 laptop. I think I have a way and it’s going to make for quite an article if I manage to make it happen.

Actually excited for work tomorrow. Lots of cool things in the works there.

 

Musings: libxo, Python code quality, and Linux kernel shenanigans

I’ve been inspired to actually make this in to an actual bloggy journal thing instead of just writing occasional long-winded well thought out articles. I still want to do long-winded well thought out articles, but the entire reason I got this thing in the first place is to share my knowledge and experiences with the world. Might as well.

Caught up on the backlog of happenings on the freebsd-current mailing list. Lots of people are upset about libxo, including myself. May mean a Linux migration in my professional future. Disappointing, especially since there is a lot of opposition, but it’s understandable that it’s going forward anyway. Juniper pays to keep the lights on at the FreeBSD foundation, so they have a lot of pull. Sad to see they don’t really care about the community or what we have to say.

Looked harder at GCC 5.1 code output. Then looked harder at switching default compiler from GCC to Clang on Gentoo. 😉 It’s not all there yet but it seems to be improving every day. Looking forward to trying out a Clang-compiled kernel if that patchset advances.

Played with Pylint and Pyflakes. Ran it on a few of the projects I work on and a few of the ones I write with Elly. PyIRC 3 got a rating of 8.5 out of 10. Really impressive. I hope to show Pylint to the people at work in the coming week and improve the quality and process there too.

Tried playing Minecraft. Already felt a bit dizzy before playing, so that was a mistake. Logged off after about 20 minutes from the ill feeling. Perhaps tomorrow.

Found out about a lovely years-old DoS vulnerability in the Linux kernel’s UDP stack. Ran netstat on my servers to make sure they had no UDP listeners. Not sure what to do about the Minecraft server, perhaps the DDoS protection we already have on it is good enough.

Read a hilarious article comparing the Pentium 4 Northwood to various new CPUs, where the AMD “accelerated” notebook CPUs performed worse. I can’t believe AMD has gone so downhill that a Pentium 4 from 2002 can spank its brand new designs.

Decided to start configuring a 4.1-rc7 kernel for my laptop. 3.18 is so old (by my own standards) and I really want to get off of this line since my checkout is still affected by that stupid exit race bug which sometimes causes Firefox to die. Found an interesting knob, CONFIG_EXT4_ENCRPYTION, which is apparently the same encryption stuff Android “M” will be using. Pretty neat but seems useless for my needs. Might try it on the Pentium II for the hilarity.

Tried to tinker with the internals of OS X Server 5.0 beta 1 before bed, but it’s compressed with a weird algorithm (ADC?) that none of my Linux utilities can break open. I’ll need to investigate that more tomorrow.

 

Not having "resolutions" this New Years

Okay, I understand that many people like to make up “resolutions” for New Years. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

  • “This is the year I start eating healthier.”
  • “This is the year I go the gym ALL THE DAYS.”
  • “This is the year I volunteer to ALL THE CAUSES.”
  • “This is the year I will change (some basic trait) and instead (do something seen as better by society)!”

Right, that never works. And here’s why: the motivations are completely wrong. “New Year’s Day” is, by the by, just another day. It’s another day that is usually felt hung over, but still it is just another day. This is not a catalyst with which to make a large change, for yourself or for anyone else. What matters is not when you start something, but how and why you start it. Why do you want to eat healthier? Is it because it’s the “in” thing to do, or is it because you genuinely want to be healthy? Do you really only want to be healthy because it’s a new year?

I realise that many people view a new year as a “new beginning”; whilst a happy sentiment, and one that can sell a lot of greeting cards and party hats, it is nothing more than just that – a sentiment. The boundary of a year is an invented one. If you truly want to be healthy, you should do it because you want to be healthy, not because you want “this year to be different”. When you inevitably slip up — don’t be ashamed of yourself, we all do at one point or another — you can simply say “I still want to be healthy and I’ll keep at it” instead of “oh well, this year isn’t being different, I’ll try again next year”. You’ll eventually run out of next years with which to try again.

So what are my goals for this year? I’d like to move to a better locale than I live now and finally finish my schooling. However, these aren’t new goals I pulled out of my rear for the new year; I have been working at them for months now and I plan to achieve them this year. Plan ahead and don’t stop for the bumps. Be inspired to smooth over the next ones!

I suppose my major point to this is that the best thing you can do this New Years is enjoy it with your friends and family. And if you want to change something besides your wall calendar, you need to have the right reasons for it. You are definitely worth your own investment of time and energy. You just have to see yourself that way, and then it will pay off in dividends.

Now playing: ♫ Skyfall – Adele