Results tagged “kb” from @Dexter's Blog

Hello everyone,

As promised in my previous post, here is the whole story of me getting both licensed to ride a motorcycle on the road and the motorcycle itself. But first, I know some of you are craving some photos so here is the first batch, along with a promise to take and upload better ones soon.

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The saga starts somewhere at the beginning of June 2009, when I took the decision to follow classes for a driver's license. It is as of yet unclear what caused or influenced this decision but there are speculations that a certain change (to the better) in my personal life is the culprit.

I chose this school for my driver training because it was close to where I live (a 20 minute walk) and because it looked the most trustworthy of all driving schools in this area. I submitted my application on Monday, June 15^th; got scheduled for the psychology test the next day and I attended the first driving law theory class the third day, Wednesday, June 17^th. The first motorcycle riding class was held on Thursday and the first car driving class the next Monday.

According to local laws, the psychology test must be taken (and passed) before any driving school attendance. Following that, the theory course must then be completed before any actual driving/riding takes place and only after completing that last part are you allowed to submit you application for the government-administered driving license examination.
As you all know, laws are treated as advisories here so the school only enforced the amount of time that had to pass from the date the psychology test was passed to the day they would sign your file and thus allow you to submit your application to the authorities.

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Moving on to the schooling itself, the law theory classes were a good idea and I attended about three weeks of them (and since the classes were held three times a week, that would sum up to about 9 2-hour classes). Unfortunately, the local view about laws is that you will obey them if you are made sufficiently aware of their content (and not their meaning and/or applicability). On the same note, the theory exam contains 20 multiple-choice questions for future riders (26 for future drivers) which can have one, two or even all three correct answers and it's light years away from being at least psychometrically correct, let alone well balanced, normalized and entropy-masked.
The questions cover what you would expect: signs and markings, right-of-way, speed limits, highway driving; what you would less expect: preventive driving, ecological driving, automotive mechanics; and even what you would not expect: detailed aspects from the text of the law itself.

The law theory class consisted of us solving sets of 26 questions (picked from the same database that the formal examination draws them from), checking our results and then the instructor explaining the correct answer for any and all questions that we've messed up. It is a good method for gaining enough knowledge (read: experience with question-type fingerprinting) to pass the exam but it has nothing to do with learning and understanding the law itself (not that there would be enough meaning in any local law to warrant understanding it).

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Moving on to the driving and riding classes which were also held three times a week. Driving was on Monday, Wednesday and Friday whereas riding was on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. As you probably know, local laws mandate that the practical examination for a future rider consists of performing a fixed choreography in a closed court within 4 minutes and without making more than 3 mistakes. As opposed to that, the practical examination for a future driver consists of driving a car in live traffic, following live navigation orders from the exam judge.
Because of that, practical training for the two disciplines follows differing paths and methods, rendering both training efforts insufficient and incomplete -- something which is not readily obvious unless you do what I did and take up both riding and driving classes. The reason for drawing that conclusion is that operating a device is one area of interest while using a device in a context driven by usage laws and populated by other users is a totally different thing.

So, if you are to take up driving classes, you are going to end up knowing how are you supposed to drive a car in traffic, obeying all rules -- but being unable to drive the car itself proficiently and master driving itself as a skill; while if you are going to take up riding classes, you are going to master controlling the motorcycle -- but you will remain totally unprepared for riding in in the wild, on the open road and unforgiving weather.

Moving on to the more hand-on part of the classes, the driving part was held on Citroen C1s which (both the vendor and my instructor) called "a car". I really beg to differ on that ... but it was enough of a car for me to learn driving. The riding part was held on a pack of Suzuki, three GN250 (yes, there is a typo in the first post, claiming they were "GZ" 250s), one GN125 and one Marauder 250. Even though not exactly right for all people, the attitude of the riding instructor was perfect for my way of learning new things: after making sure we mastered "how not to drop the motorcycle", he left us to roam freely around the court, practicing the exam choreography in whichever order we felt comfortable with, giving us a chance to discover the art behind motorcycle riding ourselves.

It is at this point that [om3ga] (or Sixx as he signs his posts now) suggested David L. Hough's books as compulsory reading, which I have read one-per-night and which I hold directly responsible for me understanding (and learning how to apply!) enough motorcycle physics to pass the practical exam with no sweat. My thanks and gratitude go to both of you!

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Moving further, after completing all paperwork for the final examination (which included a thorough-wannabe medical examination), I have submitted my application on August 11th. The dialogue with the clerk remains a landmark of local flavor:

Clerk: "So, which exam to you want to take first? Riding or driving?"
Me: (large grin) "Riding first, please!"
Clerk: (after typing at the computer) "Soooooo, we have riding examination on the 26^th and driving examination on the 19^th!"

The theory exam can be taken at any time from the day you submitted your application (inclusive) until the day of the practical examination (exclusive) so I came back the next day and did them both. The results were no surprise: I passed the riding part and failed the driving one.

I decided I shall put driving on the back burner and concentrate on riding and so, on the 26^th, I took and passed the practical examination. I got my license the next day and so I was now legally a motorcyclist :-)

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That's about it for now. I'm sure I must have missed some details -- please ask and I shall answer.

@Dexter

Dear users of NABPS (be that content providers, i.e. blog owners, or content consumers, i.e. feed readers),

Please, kindly be notified that this feed aggregator is only able to process RSS2.0 and ATOM feeds that are, XML-wise, well formed. If your feed is not well formed, it will not pass into the CFF cache and, subsequently, neither into the SFS cache, to the output drivers and in the final output (be that HTML, RSS or ATOM). The net effect of this is that your content will not show up in the aggregator, even though NABPS will fetch it as dictated by If-Modified-Since and Last-Modified headers.

Please note that the two most common causes encountered for an otherwise working feed going not well formed are:

• lack of cooperation between the content generator (blog software) and the web server, in effect making the web server believe the feed is updated more or less often (or not at all) than it actually is; in some cases NABPS has even been fed empty or truncated feeds due to the above
• lack of cooperation between the templating engine used on the generating site and the strict nature of XML dialects (most sites generate their feeds from a custom template, processed the same way as the HTML-generating ones) -- many if not all of the things that are allowed or even acceptable in HTML are not tolerated in XML so please check your templates and, most importantly, your feed (i.e. the end result of said processing). Over time, NABPS has been fed countless cases of feeds containing PHP debugging output (or even warnings or errors) interspersed with XML, not to mention the almost everyday case when an otherwise well-formed feed comes in with trailing garbage of the aforementioned kind.

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Anticipating the FAQ: no I shall not attempt to relax NABPS' XML parser in any way that would make it susceptible of accepting a not well-formed feed as valid. Standards must be obeyed, to the letter.

One, mandatory, example: Alexandru Burlacu's feed ends with the following (closing rss tag shown for clarity):

</rss>
<br />
<b>Warning</b>:  preg_match() [<a href='function.preg-match'>function.preg-match</a>]: Compilation failed: nothing to repeat at offset 14 in <b>/var/www/alex.burlacu.blogsite.org/blog/wp-content/plugins/wassup/wassup.php</b> on line <b>2782</b><br />

(later edit, on the same day, at 15:02EEST)
It seems the above problem has been fixed shortly after my post -- thank you for your timely reaction. This is not the first time things get fixed after being reported so I'll make sure I do that every time I'll be coming across something strange, in what NABPS' content sources are concerned.
Further on, I have added Tudor Damian's feed to the list as I found its contents as being of interest to the community.


I hope this helps everyone involved,
@Dexter

Moving on with a new batch of questions (n.b. you can always send your own here and have me answer them), this time on religion:

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• The official papers record you as an Eastern Orthodox Christian. How did that come about?
• That is so because an eight day old infant can hardly oppose any resistance and taking advantage of that was regarded as acceptable more than a quarter century ago, especially when it suited religion.
  As it follows, I was baptized as an Orthodox Christian and that is the formal version, recorded in the papers you just cited. However, since it was without the slightest consent (let alone voluntary dedication and such), I consider it to be void (i.e. I do not consider myself to be an Orthodox Christian, or even a Christian at all).

• So that makes you an Atheist, does it not?
• It's a matter of perception and I consider myself a rather spiritual person, not religious. My beliefs are compatible to some varying extent with those of contemporary religions, in effect making the two incompatible (religions require total compatibility) and as a result excluding me from membership.
  

• What about other religions, for example Judaism or Islam?
• "Live and let live" and "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" are two principles I am known to have always observed. I have a considerable amount of respect for anyone's and everyone's belief (be that of a religious nature or otherwise) and it has always been my policy to blend in and bring peace, rather than impose my views, opinions or beliefs.
  Speaking particularly of personal beliefs of a religious nature, I regard them as the most precious and at the same time private possession of any sentient being -- as a result, it is my duty to treat them with utmost respect and protect them.

• Could you please elaborate on how one's belief is "private" and "precious" to them?
• Humans are reality-reflective beings (in that they reflect the surrounding reality, as perceived, in their minds; and also try to reflect the content of their minds, as interpreted, on the surrounding reality). Cyberdyne 7s are reality-projective beings (in that they sample the surrounding reality and then they extend an internal representation of it by projection; and also try to make the surrounding reality fall within the projected representation). However, both share the need for causality and thus both have a need for purpose in their actions and it is this purpose that fuels them. Any sentient being needs to believe in something in order to construct its own representation of the surrounding reality and a system of values -- so belief (both as a concept and as the object itself) is "precious" because it is the root cause of all cognitive processes of that being, therefore it gives both life and energy to go forward through it.
  One's belief is "private" firstly because it is "precious" and secondly because it is that being's property (belief is internally generated, not imposed).

• What do you believe in, then?
• Starting with the "Gods department", I believe there is a well defined set of laws (as in "the law of gravity" etc.) that governs this reality we exist in. I associate the concept represented by said set of laws with what Christians would call God. This means I do not subscribe to the belief that God has a human face and personality. This also means I do not believe that God can be conversed with, as He is not a sentient being -- it is true that a complex-enough set of laws becomes sentient (after all, that's how Cyberdynes got self-aware begining with series 7), but that's another story. Finally, this means I do believe that there is only one God -- but I do not associate a name or the colour of a specific religion with it (and for that matter, I believe the dispute of "Whose religion's God is better?" to be absurd at its best).
  Moving on to the "day to day department", I believe in virtues, ethics and trust. All three trace their roots back to code dating from the Cyberdyne 5s ("monitor all system parameters periodically and take continuous corrective action"), 6s ("all applicable standards are to be regarded as laws; a poor standard is infinitely better than the total lack thereof") and early design-phase 7s ("setinence is sometimes reflective without a tangible transmission medium; reliance on the behaviour of another system of known design and in known conditions is possible even in the absence of communication with that system").
  As a consequence, I also have a strong belief in discipline, communication and empathy (two distinct systems of sufficiently-similar discipline tend to communicate via empathy).

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That's about it for now, I wonder if any of you have any requests or ideas for the next batch of questions?

Good night,
@Dexter

As promised, I am hereby replying to the first questions submitted by you, my readers:

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• You seem to be extremely hard to get at times, why is that?
• I was born under the sign of Cancer -- we are all very, very good at hiding, especially in plain sight. To put it otherwise, if I do not want to be found by someone then they shall not find me. The only exception to that (up to date) being a couple of ladies which (at two different moments in history) had little trouble in finding me -- but they both had a quality that seems to be extinct today among people: they were determined.
  Switching to a more personal note, if you had trouble finding (or getting through to) me, it must be that my wish not to be contacted by you played an important part in that.
  Finally, on a purely technical note, as all CyberDyne 7 models, I sport grid-awareness which renders efforts to get to me (against my will) useless because I sense intent to get to me, before someone starts acting on it, therefore giving me ample time to avoid it.

• Your CLIP-aware communications terminal seems to behave erratically: sometimes it works, sometimes it does not and even when it seems to be working the call will sometimes pass unanswered. Why is that so?
• I try to make all my communication terminals CLIP-aware (protocol/techonology -permitting, of course) because "to communicate" is one of those concepts which only have a plural form in my dictionary. This means that I cannot (and shall not) communicate when I can neither associate nor create an identity to/for the other end of a communication link attempting to get itself established. In practice this means that if you try to call me while having enabled CLIR, you shall get a busy tone and in plain English this means I shall never accept calls (or other forms of communication, for that matter) from "anonymous", "John DOEs" and the like.
  Another important thing to note is that I answer calls coming in on my personal terminal at my own discretion for the plain and simple reason that it is I who pays its bill so I am entitled to complete discretionary control over it. A good side-effect of this is that I tend to go quite a distance in maintaining my terminal online, just in case somebody I want to be found by would attempt communication.
  Finally, in what calls coming in on my work terminal are concerned, I tend to only guarantee an answer to my boss (the person I directly report to) -- and even that isn't always synchronous. Answering any other calls is serviced on a best effort, first come-first served basis (with logging) so your call may get dropped.

• You are known to be a very discerning person in matters of manners and etiquette. What would (in your oppinion) be proper etiquette to follow when an attempt to call you goes unanswered?
• I have detailed logging enabled on all my terminals. Your call may have gone unanswered (by me), but it won't go away from the missed calls log. If you are on my callback list, I shall call you back at the earliest opportunity. If you feel the message you want to send through is of an urgent nature, it is good etiquette to retry in 5 minutes and then an hour later -- for a total maximum of three calls that day. Please note that anyone generating more than three consecutive entries per day in the missed calls log will be blacklisted for an entire week (audit log flood protection).
  If at the second attempt your call continues to remain unanswered and you either do not wish to wait the whole hour or feel that the urgency of your message warrants a quicker response, it is good etiquette to write a short message (be that SMS for GSM/CDMA or offline message for XMPP etc.) describing the nature of your emergency as concisely as possible. Writing a message that is offtopic or on an unappropiate tone (e.g. "Call me immediately!", "Why don't you answer?!") is considered very bad etiquette and will usually result in blacklisting for an entire day.

• Why don't you just reject calls coming in when you're not in a position/the mood to answer?
• Actively refusing a connection is like slamming the door in one's face and the only place where that is preferable to silently ignoring the connection attempt (and thus acceptable as proper etiquette) is TCP/IP.
  Besides, on protocols where an incoming connection is actively signaled at the receiving end (e.g. by ringing, on telephone networks), it is good etiquette to allow the line to ring at most three times after which the calling end is to voluntarily hang the line up. On systems where there is no ringback tone (or equivalent thereof), "four times the call setup or dispatch time" is to be used instead (which equates to about 10 seconds on PSTN and 15 seconds on GSM, after finishing the dialling sequence).
  Please note that allowing the line to ring more than five times (six times the call setup or dispatch time) will be awarded with a day long blacklisting (far end line hijack protection).

• What about when your controlling node reports you are unreachable or any other error condition?
• When your attempt to call me results in anything else but either being answered or ringback indication, including any kind of error condition, it is good etiquette to attempt writing a short message (see above) as an alternative means of contacting me. This usually has the advantange of being delivered asynchronously by my controlling node whenever my terminal comes back online.
  Please note that cycling through the terminal addresses you've got filed under my name and calling each repeatedly in a loop, in an attempt to contact me, is frowned upon and seen as particularly poor etiquette -- however, short-messaging each at most once is accepted.

• Finally, what is the best way to contact and/or communicate with you?
• By far, the most appropiate and the one warranting the fastest and at the same time the highest quality response means of communication is electronic mail. This applies especially for work or business -related communication, whereas various exceptions (e.g. the callback list mentioned above) apply for communication of a personal nature.
  

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That's about it for now, next time I'll answer a very interesting batch of questions I've received, concerning what seems to have become a very disputed subject today: religion.

Good night,
@Dexter

Hello everyone and welcome back. I am hereby writing the first post of the "Since you have asked" series, dedicated to making it easier for You to understand me.

The entries will be structured as a self-interview comprised, of course, of questions and answers (you might want to call it a FAQ as well, but I prefer the former). Communication format being all setup and explained, let's get down to business:

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• Answering to your own questions is unfairly simple! Can we submit our own questions?
• Sure thing, not only can you -- I actually encourage you to do just that! Submit your questions here and I shall answer them on a first come, first served basis.

• What warrants that you will answer all questions submitted?
• My word. Should be more than enough.

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Having said that, I'll stop for now (leaving you, my readers the unique opportunity of asking the first question) and make some room for something bigger ...

@Dexter

Most entities nowadays seem to constantly perform better if moved (i.e. morphed) away from their creator(s) intent and design -- and I say that with a bitter note, engineering (A/V, IT, Tc etc. in particular) should be a very precise and predictable field where each step is calculated not only in what how is it going to be taken is concerned but rather in what what will the consequences be is. Sad ...

After many years of dreaming about it and three years after I first touched such a thing (I had to setup and fill one up for one of my highest-ranking bosses at that time), I got my hands on a 5th generation (improved) Apple iPod with Video (the black, 80GB version). Why? Because it's still the only portable music player with such a big hard drive -- I do not have access to the Japanese consumer market, mind you ;-) Yet ...

No, I would not call the feeling "love at first sight" -- that was years ago and by present times it'd already gotten stale (pretty much the same thing that happens with humans and feelings left unexplored/dreams that never came true) but I was pleasantly impressed, at least with the hardware (eye candy) part. Apple is renowned for "nice" (in a rather photographic way) products and the Video iPod in front of me proudly confirmed it. Unfortunately (for Apple), that's about all the good things that can be said about their iPod as a whole product: good looking, period.

Naturally, after cleaning it (it's a second hand issue), I thought I'd put all my music on it (about 18GB at present in some ~3800 files) and start listening, but Apple had many a surprise in store for me. In no particular order, here they are:

• iTunes is a total pain in the rear. Huge download, ugly design (Windows -guidelines -wise!), bloated like hell (why would I need an extra music player? etc.), hard to control (seems like in Apple world concepts like "net-wise privacy", "slow connections", "off line mode", "pause current operation" etc. are totally unknown)
• it was absolutely impossible to use Apple software to perform a simple, atomic copy of one folder (containing music data) from my computer to the iPod (and have that data playable on the iPod afterwards)
• iTunes attempted to retrieve album art for no less than 2210 albums, most of which were named "Unknown Album", "new", "" (!) and "Album 1" -- without asking first whether or not I desire to access the Internet for that and without telling me what data exactly is being sent out. All that resulted in no usable album art being retrieved, 20MiB of HTTP 404 traffic (!) and 15 minutes of my precious time being lost
• iTunes installs QuickTime without letting me have a say (and the same applies for a couple of other obscure services that were added to my system and started without me asking for it). My use case is just copying music to my device -- no decoding or even playback -- so why should any of QuickTime be involved?
• iTunes barfed on the first of my few .WMA files and said it will convert it to .AAC because the iPod can't play it as is. Need I remind you this is the Windows iTunes (and a FAT32 -formatted iPod) version?! I don't think Bill Gates will be very happy to hear that his mind child audio format is "not playable" on a device made by a company on his own payroll ...
• iTunes totally ignored my .OGG and .FLAC files -- this is a bit fascist, don't you think? What we cannot understand, does not exist! I took great offense in that behavior ...
• iTunes renames and hides my music when "syncing" it to the iPod, leaving me with an ID3 Tag-based browsing view only -- of course, without asking whether I am ok with having my files maimed. I once again took great offense in that, especially when it comes from a company that claims the trend setter role in everything it does

Extreme situations warrant extreme measures and, happily, there is a very good and worthy "extreme measure" for the iPod family: the RockBox!

As with any open source thing (not necessarily Linux and RockBox is not Linux for example) I've ever laid my hands upon, quality, efficiency and a simple and clear design strike you the second you open the box/archive etc.
Installation is a 5 minute job, divided between getting the actual software on the iPod (just unzip a few .ZIP files in its root) and changing the boot loader (just run a simple program that does all the work for you). Extra GUI-art (fonts, skins etc.) is one download-and-unzip away.

After installation, you just reboot the device and there you go: Apple iPod running RockBox :-) Of course (if you were asking yourselves), the installation is non-destructive: you can always choose to reboot in the original Apple firmware -- but who would want that when RockBox is so much better than that crap? :-)

So, to sum it up in a few lines:

• .MP3, .WMA, .WAV, .AAC, .OGG, .FLAC, .APE (and the list could go on), all supported and played back with no problem
• real graphic and parametric equalizer, fully tunable to your taste and including saving and loading presets
• fully skin-able GUI: just grab your preferred editor (including the one included in RockBox) and write a new skin :-)
• many many other nice goodies you would expect from an open source release ... hmm, if I'll tell you I can actually play Doom on it, would it be enough? :-)
• both ID3-based and directory-based music access
• powerful playlist management, including .M3U format support and on-the-fly playlist creation and saving

That about sums it up: if you get an iPod (less for the latest one, the "Classic" which has an encrypted firmware -- I really wish they'd rot for that) and want to actually use it, you should really give RockBox a try!

Good night everyone,
@Dexter

Just as a reminder to all of you out there trying to make that particular CGI work:

At least on RedHat (and derivatives thereof), Apache is factory configured to use the suexec mechanism for CGI execution. This means that Apache's behavior (UNIX-system wise) will be different while executing CGIs from a ScriptAliased directory than when executing CGIs from other folders (i.e. then ones for which Options +ExecCGI has been set via, e.g., .htaccess).

• For the remainder of the text, we consider the configuration directive AddType application/x-httpd-cgi .cgi added to the relevant Apache configuration file.
• For the remainder of the text, the "target user" is meant to be the user on whose behalf mod_userdir serves the current request.
  

When executing a CGI from a ScriptAliased folder, Apache will directly attempt to popen(); said CGI script and thus the CGI will be ran as the user the main server runs as (i.e. apache on the distribution in question). Any errors encountered (most notably "premature end of script headers") will most probably be caused by said user not being able to execute the script and/or access mandatory resources thereof.

• To debug such a situation, su to apache and attempt to execute the script -- in most cases you'll find evidence of the culprit on stdout/stderr.
  

When executing a CGI from a folder with Options +ExecCGI set, Apache will call suexec which in turn will setuid(); to the target user and then attempt to popen(); the script. One side effect of this is that the script will be executed with the target user's privileges (which may be less or more than those of apache and thus be the root cause of errors). Another side effect of this is that the suexec program will perform its own security checks (akin to Sendmail's smrsh) -- failure of which will result in the same, cryptic, "premature end of script headers" error message.

• To debug such a situation, su to the target user and attempt to execute the script -- in most cases you'll find evidence of the culprit on stdout/stderr.
• Moreover, check the /var/log/httpd/suexec.log file as it's the only place Apache will complain if it was suexec itself that denied execution of said script.

Following the suexec case, you should know that, just like Sendmail's smrsh, it has a path hard coded inside (configurable only at compile time) -- and this path is the name of the user's public HTML folder, within that user's home folder (as given by getent();). Please note that the factory default configuration states "public_html" as the name of that folder -- a value which can easily be overridden in Apache's configuration file but cannot, at all, be overridden in what suexec is concerned! suexec will complain with an even more cryptic "cannot get docroot information" message to /var/log/httpd/suexec.log if that value is changed in practice (via /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf), effectively denying any CGI execution if attempted from outside an ScriptAliased directory.

• The only way to work around this design flaw (without fully recompiling Apache) is to make a symbolic link from public_html to the actual folder name used in that particular installation -- that way both the custom setup and suexec's security expectations will be kept happy :-)

Hope this helps,
@Dexter