MindlessCode.net

This is so wrong…Snow in March, 150m above sea-level, just south of the 45^th parallel. That just doesn’t around here, even in December.
Sorry the thumb nails so crappy, it’s too early in the morning for me to make a decent one…

Now I get to go write some PHP interface between www.wildgardenseed.com and the USPS Zipcode Lookup API… Fun. More XML parsing.

I screwed up my neck somehow on Monday. I couldn’t play violin for a few days (still can’t). Whatever.

Anyway, I heard a review of Cuckoo’s Egg on LugRadio. I read the first few pages on Amazon and put it on hold at the library. What a great book.

Clifford Stoll, an astronomer at Berkeley runs out of money (his funding dries up) and so he gets “recycled” and ends up as a sysadmin running Berkeley’s UNIX boxes. Back then, computer time was billed by how much processer time you took up. So they needed to keep track of time. And, for some reason, they had 2, count ‘em 2, accounting systems to keep track of the time and sent off the bills to the correct departments every month.

One month, a sysadmin noticed that there was a discrepancy of $0.75 between the two systems. Intrigued, Clifford decides to take a look at the arcane accounting and try to figure out where that 75¢ had come from. He spends a day or two paging through the ancient source code, but doesn’t find anything that would amount to 75¢ of unbilled time.

Someone is stealing time, 75 cents worth of it–first-degree robbery, I know. Turns out someone had become the superuser by exploiting a bug in some great, popular, and common software that lots of people love and lots of people hate (it stars with an E and ends with an S and has an A in the middle). See Wikipedia’s page on the nesting habits of Cuckoos if you want a hint on how he got in.

After locating the all-powerful unauthorized superuser sets up a “monitoring system” which involves some old printers, a pager that gets called by a hacked up script that beep in Morse code, 50 “borrowed” terminals, and other such hi-tech network security paraphernalia.

A good intro/reminder of what the “internet” looked like in the 1980s and how everything worked back then. I loved it, go read it.

I love this song, Nickel Creek rocks.