A few reasons to avoid socializing at work

... or why you should avoid messing with your co-workers and stick to your old school friends. While some people prefer to go all way liberal and social, chit chat loving hipsters et al, some find out that work is really meant to be for work and skip the social crap.

Here we go with a few reasons for avoiding (in general) socializing at work:

1. Your coworkers are far more likely to develop envy and other vicious feelings towards your persona.
2. Your coworkers are there for the paycheck, probably as much as you are, if not more.
1. They will most likely do whatever comes around for getting a better one.
2. That means selling your ass out. Really.
3. It's human nature when it comes to money to fuck up things. Especially confidence.
1. Everyone has a price.
2. Sadly, the world is full of cheap people.
4. They will usually engage in so-called 'social chat':

• Buddy X: Hey dude, I'm just back from the gym!
• Buddy Y: Yo, I bench press 140 pounds, lol!

Let's go on the analysis of the conversation above:

1. Buddy X is ingenuous e¡to enough to talk about gym. You know, it's about 2% of the world population that truly care about their fitness and shape. People out there think bioimpedance machines tell the truth (you seriously think you have 12% bodyfat if you can't even see the joint point between your chest and abs!?).
2. Buddy Y knows what anyone who was watched a cheap sitcom knows: there's a thing called bench press. Pushing it further, you get him to know about the Guido work out! (Evil grin).
3. Buddy X afterwards thinks Buddy Y is a moron. If you weight 200 pounds and you think lifting 140 is quite an accomplishment, you seriously need therapy. Now, if you weight 140 and lift 200, it's not yet an accomplishment but you are more likely to achieve one. Hah.
4. Buddy Y claims he goes to the gym 'on regular basis'. Buddy X suddenly has to live together with Buddy Y and finds out that Mr. 200 pounds is a bedroom worm. Wake yourself up, soldier! Hah.
   

Let's continue with more reasons and suggestions...

1. Never cook at work. Especially in IT jobs, that's like a serious curse on your persona. You are supposed to grow the mandatory belly. That gives you a coolness factor of seventy-five chin-up coupons. Or fast food discounts, whatever comes first.
2. Your co-workers will hate you if you are able to fit more than just work in your life.
1. Example 1: Look at Buddy X, he's leaving at 4pm! - a 9pm-regular whispers...
3. Your co-workers might be a bunch of liberal asses like most commie imitators around the globe. This is fairly usual at Europe nowadays. Now, they wear Levis too.

The solution is simple: quit and kick their butts afterwards. For real and great justice. Army way.

A simple trick to improve Firefox security

Firefox can run with add-ons disabled and what not, but if you run Firefox under Gentoo Linux, using the hardened profile, you can use a simple trick to have two different instances of Firefox available, with different enforcement of memory permissions and the usual PaX features:

PaX features disabled via PT_PAX_FLAGS, will allow most plugins to run without issues (although, for example acroread will require specific permissions on its own binary to run):

paxctl -pemrxs /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/firefox-bin

Recommended settings (that might slow down Firefox in some systems, with noticeable overhead when there's a heavy use of Javascript or AJAX functionality):

paxctl -PEmRXs /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox/firefox-bin

For Acrobat Reader (only Address Space Layout Randomization -ASLR- can be enabled without affecting the functionality, blame the poorly compiled binary):

paxctl -pemRXs /opt/Acrobat7/Reader/intellinux/bin/acroread

You should try to use a different PDF application anyway, if you really trust any of them :)

Description of the PT_PAX_FLAGS flags:

PaX control v0.4
Copyright 2004,2005,2006 PaX Team 

usage: paxctl  

options:
      -p: disable PAGEEXEC            -P: enable PAGEEXEC
      -e: disable EMUTRMAP            -E: enable EMUTRMAP
      -m: disable MPROTECT            -M: enable MPROTECT
      -r: disable RANDMMAP            -R: enable RANDMMAP
      -x: disable RANDEXEC            -X: enable RANDEXEC
      -s: disable SEGMEXEC            -S: enable SEGMEXEC

      -v: view flags                  -z: restore default flags
      -q: suppress error messages     -Q: report flags in short format
      -c: convert PT_GNU_STACK into PT_PAX_FLAGS (see manpage!)
      -C: create PT_PAX_FLAGS (see manpage!)

Simply copy the firefox-bin binary to firefox-secure and apply the different flags as necessary.

Darth Vader: today we dine with Jesus!

"Your lack of Vodka supplies is disturbing."

dynamips (Cisco 7200 Simulator) on Mac OS X

It runs pretty decently so far, just need to get couple things installed manually or via ports if available:

 $ curl 'http://www.mr511.de/software/libelf-0.8.6.tar.gz' -o libelf.tgz
$ tar -zxf libelf.tgz
$ cd libelf-0.8.6
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local
$ make
$ sudo make install ...
$ cd ../dynamips-0.2.5 && make
$ ./dynamips ../../c7200-ik9su2-mz.124-13b.bin
Cisco 7200 Simulation Platform (version 0.2.5-x86)
...
Cisco IOS Software, 7200 Software (C7200-IK9SU2-M), Version 12.4(13b), RELEASE SOFTWARE (fc3)
Technical Support: http://www.cisco.com/techsupport
Copyright (c) 1986-2007 by Cisco Systems, Inc.
Compiled Wed 25-Apr-07 03:18 by prod_rel_team
Image text-base: 0x60008F10, data-base: 0x6258C180
...
Router>

Find about dynamips and the development blog. You already know about Cisco, no link loving for them today. ;-)

Those games never end

One of the most amazing things about gaming, is to find out that a game is still being played after years of its release date. Maybe this is the usual practice for someone used to the likes of old gaming platforms and the availability of emulation software, but we also have the usual late-to-mid 90s "PC game" which became a cult. Quake 3 is still active and many other fun LucasArts games are also actively played in public servers. This is the case of Jedi Academy and a bunch other titles from the same company. The interesting point is how things are shifting towards more massive multi-player games and the role-playing genre, instead of the good old FPS. LucasArts has a rather exciting title (Force Unleashed) in the works which may be only available for consoles, and many other game development companies are doing the same.

Something changed in the game industry that makes most companies release the best games primarily for gaming-oriented platforms. If the graphic drivers for Vista didn't suck...

Back!

Hopefully the old content will come up soon, it just takes some time to re-format it for Blogger. Until that is completed, enjoy the usual humor from Wikipedia free-for-all policy and the amusing changes made to OpenBSD's head Theo.

Improving propagation with ionized meteor trails

From the Wikipedia definition of "Meteor Burst Communications":

Meteor burst communications, or MBC for short, is a radio propagation mode that exploits the ionized trails of meteors during atmospheric entry to establish brief communications paths between radio stations up to 2200 kilometers (1400 miles) apart. It is also referred to as meteor scatter communications in some documents.

As the earth moves along its orbital path, tens of thousands of particles known as meteors enter the upper atmosphere. When these meteors enter the atmosphere and begin to burn up, they create a trail of ionized particles that can persist for up to several seconds. The ionization trails can be very dense, and used to reflect radio waves. The frequencies that can be reflected by any particular ion trail are determined by the intensity of the ionization created by the meteor, often a function of the initial size of the particle, and is generally between 20 MHz and 500 MHz.

The distance over which communications can be established is determined by the altitude at which the ionization is created, the location over the surface of the earth where the meteor is falling, the angle of entry into the atmosphere, and the relative locations of the stations attempting to establish communications. Because these ionization trails only exist for fractions of a second to as long as a few seconds in duration, they create only brief windows of opportunity for communications.

A nice read for anyone interested on radio communications. The known origins go back to 1929 when a Japanese individual, Hantaro Nagaoka, reported the interaction between meteors and radio waves propagation. Later in 1931, it was noticed that long distance propagation occurred at times of major meteor showers for a short time.