About Me

I don’t know why you would need or want to know any of this.

I was born to and raised by hackers — more or less raised — and I grew up on Unix systems. My first computer was a Sharp Zaurus, one of the little chiclet keyboard ones with the tiny displays that only did vt100 (and did it very well) with a 2400bps dialup to a SunOS 4.1.x machine, where I started learning how to use Unix. My first real computer was an HP, which ran Windows until mom got back with the Red Hat box set… and it was all downhill from there.

I started out happy with the 2.0.0 kernel, and around 2.0.34 or so, whenever it was, wrote a kernel module to remap the ptrace syscall to do some sanity checks, nullifying the local ptrace exploit. I believe it took two kernel panics to get it right.

At some point in my Slackware days, I finally decided to get X11 running. I believe it was around the same time I realized that I could view several terminals at once. I had a massive .fvwm2rc, until my friends, wherever they are now, finally convinced me to switch to Enlightenment, which I found had a similarly hackable configuration file. I continued using Slackware until 2006, when a hard disk crash at work forced me to use the only installation media at hand — a Debian unstable CD. A new laptop after that encouraged me to try Ubuntu, and I have nothing bad to say about it.

(Yeah. I went Slackware -> Red Hat -> Debian -> Ubuntu. I’m getting soft.)

I also started the Linux-Laptops page for the Sharp Moebius PC-MM10 (the first page for the laptop, not the first LL page). It was later mirrored by a guy at MIT, who took over when money got real short and I didn’t pay my DSL bill for a while.

Funny story: Back in the EFNet days before TS, I ran an Eggdrop 0.9r, eventually upgrading to whatever version supported Tcl. I learned C because I was part of a 200+ bot botnet, and IRC opers kept finding their way onto the botnet and K-lining based on “.whom” commands. My first stint with C was hiding my hostmask in the bot’s source, and I eventually even attempted to embed Perl in Eggdrop — with limited but functional success.

I’m also an asshole and I drink way too much. Just so you know.

Speaking of drinking way too much, I’m also serving in the reserves of the United States Marine Corps, and, yes, that’s me on the left, and, no, I’m not trying to look badass. That shirt is around my face because I’m in the back of a 7-ton truck in the back of that picture, on a dirt road that was paved with moondust. I was trying not to breathe it. If you look real close, you can see my rifle on my shoulder. The sunglasses are self-explanatory, and I’m scowling because I’m fucking pissed off. Being a Marine is hard god damned work and a thankless job while you’re around other Marines.

Before I went in, I was a professional Linux admin/programmer, and since reservists need day jobs, I’m trying to get back on track in the civilian world. (Psst. I hear you get huge tax breaks when you employ a Marine.) And, by the way, my MOS in the Corps is completely unrelated to computers.

About This Blog

Originally, this was a testbed for Vissago’s blog (note the similarities in the tagboard, etcetera). It kind of grew, and became its own deal, even though nobody still cares. Posts usually alternate between technical stuff (”I didn’t know Perl could do that”), and personal stuff (”I didn’t know my girlfriend’s car could do that”). Its primary function is still to test things, but I do post actual stuff. Granted, stupid random blogger (ugh) stuff that nobody cares about, but stuff nonetheless. I try very hard to keep whiny emo crap out of my site.

To elaborate a bit: I post technically useful stuff, and I post interesting stuff, but for the most part my interest here is in how far I can push PHP, Perl, Javascript, and my poor little laptop poor little network. (Note that I said PHP, as in, I will hack the shit out of my own blog. It may go down or explode sometimes.)

As far as gaming systems go, I have a Nintendo Wii, an XBox360 (not mine, but established semipermanent residence here), a PlayStation 2, and a PSP, all of which are wired for network connectivity. Except for the PSP, which is currently entertaining my girlfriend in Iraq.

For x86 hardware, I have had an IBM Thinkpad A20m running Debian unstable and a Toshiba Satellite A215-S7407 running Ubuntu Feisty. I also have a homebuilt …something-or-other, which has been offline for a while, and my girlfriend has a Compaq Presario V5000, which dual-boots Ubuntu Feisty and Windows XP. I also owned, dammit a SparcStation IPC, which I’ve never bothered to get fully online. My home network, back in the day, peaked at around a dozen x86 machines, all (save one?) running various distributions and versions of Linux. Some were diskless, mostly based on Slackware. I forget its name, but it my favorite was literally a motherboard screwed into a wall with an ne2k. For fun, one day, I turned them all on…

About the code

Code tends to be Perl, though I can hack C, Tcl and Tcl/Tk, bash, awk/sed, MySQL, and a couple other things I’ll forget about until I’m hacking a game written in that language so I can cheat. I don’t know Python very well, I don’t know C++ or C# or .NET or any of that crap.

It also tends to be second- or third-draft. E.g., I’ll hack something together to do X, get it working, post source, and then continue optimizing it locally without updating the public version.

Unless it says otherwise, I claim no copyright on any code I post that I’ve written.

Compatibility Notes

I occasionally check things out with IE, and notice that all the nifty little whatsits tend not to work, or work sporadically. Yeah. Get Firefox (or IceWeasel, if you’re the Debian type).

The default theme for the PSP is a modified version of the WP “Classic” theme.