Both were awesome. It was my second LCA (last year I went to the one in Hobart), and it was my first KapCon.

The one thing I noticed at LCA, or rather noticed the lack of, was attendance by Linus. He was at last year’s LCA, and he says he tries to make it out to all of them, but unfortunately he didn’t make it out this year (or stayed hidden, which isn’t likely).

This year’s LCA was very well organised, and the loot was really cool. One awesome man-bag, a super-sized coffee thermal mug thing, a cool t-shirt, and a few other random items — one of which amused me no end: a hand cleanser spray. Oh, and I won a VOIP phone in one of the morning prize draws — a snom 300. I have to go pick it up from Andrew Ruthven some time next week as he’s on holiday relaxing this week. They used those phones during the conference and gave four of them away as prizes. Guess it’ll motivate me to use the phone more often, or at least give me something safe to play with in front of others.

There’s not a lot I can say about the LCA, because it’s mostly high level (or I guess low-level in programming language terms using the closeness to the machine as lower levels), but one interesting talk was Rusty Russell’s talk on how to use a wii-mote to train your child hand-eye coordination. It was pretty hilarious, and included videos of his daughter with her modified scrunchie that packed a wii-mote sensor in it. When she moved her hands, stuff would happen on screen. Rusty had programmed some basic stuff in Python that moved eyes around the screen, and in one experiment designed a paint smearing program, but it turns out she might have been a bit too young. When she put the scrunchie on, she ended up waving the opposite hand. But she did notice that something she was doing was affecting something happening on the screen; she just wasn’t coordinated enough (or didn’t have the attention span) to focus on it. Most of the time, she’d notice that something was happening on-screen, then daddy would encourage her, and she’d turn to look at him rather than the screen. It was pretty hilarious, and not just because he wasted so much time coding just to be thwarted by by a user…

The other con I attended was KapCon — the first time for me ever. Even though this was the 19th KapCon, and I’ve been roleplaying for over 20 years, I just never went before. I think it’s because they started out in Kapiti, and I didn’t know they had moved to town. I wouldn’t have liked to drive for an hour each way before and after the con, especially with those early starts. But they’re hosting it now at Wellington High School, which is a good venue from the point of view that there are all separate rooms in which to game in. Having them all in one hall wouldn’t have worked very well because most gamers are quite loud.

I played in two RPGs and a few board and card games throughout the weekend. The RPGs were Paul Wilson’s game of Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies — a sci-fi pirate swashbuckling game — and an RPGA game which was pretty much old school D&D dungeon hack — and unfortunately running 4th edition D&D. It was actually a bit of fun (except for the munchkin who was trying to play everyone’s characters and who took loot without asking the party). I’m playing in a 4th ed game at the moment, but had to jump in at 7th level to fit alongside the other characters. D&D isn’t the sort of game that’s conducive to jumping in so late and having to learn so much about your character’s abilities.

So I thought starting at 1st level might provide a different experience. And it actually did. I decided to jump in the deep end and try out a wizard, which would normally have worked out well… except I kept rolling fours. Yes, The Fours was with me that day. I ended up naming my character Fumbledore, because quite frankly he had trouble hitting the broad side of a tower while standing directly in front of it. Needless to say, hitting the skeletons, the wight, and the liche were quite beyond his capacity for quite a while.

That aside, it actually worked semi reasonably. Yes it’s a stupidly complex system, but if you start at level one, it’s probably a game you can grow into. Of course, I wouldn’t run a game of D&D because I’m not insane, so I’m writing my own system, but that’s another story.

Speaking to the RPGA rep, she told me that the number of people playing RPGA games fell through the floor upon the introduction of 4th edition. And I think that she only ended up running two or three games over the whole weekend. Apparently with 3rd edition, there would be two reps running a game apiece for all six rounds. Actually I think there was another guy running RPGA games in another room, but whatever they were playing, the games were designed for 4-hour sessions, so were mis-timed for KapCon’s 3 hour sessions. I don’t know what they were doing though, as I never went into that room.

The upside of joining in an RPGA game is that you get a character that you can keep for use in other RPGA sanctioned games, and you get loot. Each player also received a free D&D miniature, on top of the free D&D miniature given to every con attendee.

Now the downside to playing board games and card games is that now I have stuff I am going to spend money on. I played a board game called Agricola, which seemed daunting at first but is actually very easy once you get started. It was described as “Pimp My Farm” — a game in which you have to build up a farm, plow some fields, and raise children to do more work. It’s a very good game, and can apparently be played single player, so that might be something to keep me warm on cold lonely nights.

Another game that I will definitely be getting is Munchkin. The Steve Jackson Games rep (who was also one of the RPGA reps) ran a game of the wild west Munchkin game which was a blast. I’ll probably end up buying either the space version, or the original dungeon hack version, both of which look very appealing. Oh, it was funny to see Eric S. Raymond’s name on the credits for the western Munchkin as having contributed or suggested some of the nasty card ideas.

So yeah, pretty interesting week. This week I’m hoping to get to AC/DC — one of the girls at my dad’s work has apparently got me a couple of free tickets, but my parents were away last week and she didn’t call me. Hopefully, with the concert being this Thursday, I’ll see her Wednesday..

This week is the NZNOG conference up in Hamilton, but because of my going to LCA, I’m skipping the NOG. Next year LCA is in Brisbane, and while it’d be nice to go there to see my cousin, the reality is that it’s fucking hot over there and I’d die. I’m not really enamoured by the idea of dying, so I’m going to have to at least give it some thought. The organisers, in their wisdom, decided to make it early February, which apparently maxes at 29ºC with humidity in the region of 69%. But from actual accounts, it hits the 30’s regularly. BBC reckon that’s medium discomfort due to heat; I’d hate to see a high discomfort area. :/

Could be interesting. Maybe I’ll pass up LCA next year and go to the NOG instead. If I go to Brisneyland, I’ll have to make a holiday of it and that’ll get expensive.

Things certainly have changed, as in the old days, I could rock into somewhere like Mind Games or Pendragon, and pick up any assortment of miniatures designed for RPGs — Ral Partha, Grenadier, and Marauder were available, although from memory Marauder were producing more LotR targeted figures. Now nothing. There are a few random figures available, but they mostly seem to be aimed at a specific game.

So I thought that my options might be to get some D&D ones made by WotC. The only options available were a starter set of what appears to be a collectible figure series — why the fuck they’d do that for an RPG is beyond my comprehension, but so are most things that Wizards do — and a couple of “boosters.” The starter was $40 and had 3 heroes, 1 baddie, and one dragon. So 3 figures I might reasonably expect to find useful. The boosters were $28, of which 2 figures in one of them might have been useful. And they were the worst quality figures I’d ever seen. Very very shoddy crap. There are rumours (that I’ve seen but not read in depth) that Wizards are canning their figures. Part of me thinks it’s a bloody good idea, but there’s a niggling part of me that wonders what (or who) will fill the gap.

Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff on eBay, but I like to be able to walk into a shop and have something to play with by the time I walk out.

OK, so the WotC figures weren’t an option as they’d work out to be about $15 a figure, and I’m not prepared to pay that for such low quality mass produced junk. So what are my options?

I had almost given up when I spotted a huge, and I mean fucking ginormous, box set of a board game called Descent: Journeys in the Dark for $157.. A bit pricey I thought, but I’ll have a look. Lifting it off the shelf almost gave me a hernia. Its contents included 20 hero miniatures, and 60 plastic monsters. Eighty furgin’ figures for under $160! That’s less than $2 a figure. Alright, so I have to paint them, but a) they look to be much better quality than the WotC figures, and b) they’re two fuggin’  dollars each. And I get a board game for free.

Yep, I’ll take it. I got me a wheelbarrow and I took it home (after paying for it of course).

• Update other pages from the original site (such as gallery, articles, and “stuff”)
• Add my sidebars with my cool linkages from the original site
• Migrate over my old BlogSpot blog
• Migrate over my old LiveJournal
• Possibly consider migrating content from my old fatbastards.net.nz site which dates back to 1999-2000, and is archived on the Wayback Machine (sans images)

It’s going to be a bit of work, but I’d like everything in one place, and once I find a nice theme for WordPress, it’ll be so much the better.

That works very well, and a (reasonably performing) box takes about 5-10 minutes from plugging a flash stick in, to pulling it out and rebooting with a fresh OS install.

But one thing we’ve needed is to build a recovery stick for use on a customer’s site. The default LiveCDs are too bogged down with extraneous crap (like X for a start) to be of any use in the field, while the recovery option on an install CD suffers the opposite problem. I needed to build something that was the best of both worlds — it had to have heaps of tools on there and it had to boot quickly. On top of which we’ve got some custom stuff that would be useful to be able to carry around such as a custom version of gawk that has a lot of modules written by my boss, Don, such as file IO functions (ala libc), cgi, and more.

So I investigated building a flash image that would meet all our worldly desires.

Accessible through CentOS is a LiveCD repo that can be used to build a LiveCD ISO image, which can in turn be written to a flash stick. You could just write the ISO image direct to CD if you like, but then you don’t get the persistent filesystem feature. In other words, you can set up “persistent” space so that any changes you make to the filesystem will be saved.

Doing it’s pretty simple. First add the LiveCD repo so yum can see it. Put this into /etc/yum.repos.d/centos-livecd.repo:

# Name: CentOS LiveCD repository
[livecd]
name = CentOS $releasever - LiveCD
baseurl = http://www.nanotechnologies.qc.ca/propos/linux/centos-live/$basearch/live
enabled=1
protect=0
gpgkey = http://www.nanotechnologies.qc.ca/propos/linux/RPM-GPG-KEY-PGuay

Then run

bash# yum install livecd-tools syslinux anaconda-runtime

OK, so now you’ve got all the tools you need on your system. The two we’ll use are livecd-creator and livecd-iso-to-disk. It’s not a complicated process, but the one thing you will put some thought into is creating your kickstart file. Here’s mine:

lang en_US.UTF-8
keyboard us
timezone US/Eastern
auth --useshadow --enablemd5
selinux --disabled
firewall --disabled

repo --name=a-base  --baseurl=http://foo.nz/centos-5.4-base/i386
repo --name=a-updates --baseurl=http://foo.nz/centos-5.4-updates/i386
#repo --name=a-extras --baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/extras/$basearch
repo --name=a-live --baseurl=http://www.nanotechnologies.qc.ca/propos/linux/centos-live/$basearch/live

%packages
bash
kernel
syslinux
passwd
policycoreutils
chkconfig
authconfig
rootfiles
comps-extras
xkeyboard-config
util-linux
vim-minimal
openssh-clients

# extras
dhclient
bind-utils
bzip2
bc
lsof
man
parted
pciutils
traceroute
dmraid
dump
ftp
man-pages
mdadm
mkbootdisk
mlocate
mtr
nc
nfs-utils
rsync
tcpdump
telnet
unzip
wget
time
which
zip
tar

# dev stuff
autoconf
automake
binutils
gcc
gcc-c++
gdb
gettext
libtool
make
pkgconfig
rpm-build
strace
elfutils
patchutils
python
perl
gawk

This will create a LiveCD of about 180MB and will consume about 6-700MB unpacked in memory.

From there, you create the LiveCD ISO image:

bash# LANG=C livecd-creator --config=centos-livecd-minimal.ks --fslabel=CentOS-minimal

The –config parameter is the filename of the kickstart file you created above, and the –fslabel defines what your ISO image’s filename will be. For example, the one above will deposit a file in your current directory called Centos-minimal.iso.

This step take a frackin’ long time. Or at least it did on the P3 devbox I was running it on. It looks like it’s dead but it’s not. Check top if you’re paranoid. SquishFS takes forever.

After that you want to put a flash stick in a USB hole. Mine had a FAT16 partition on it, and I left it as is. That partition does have to be bootable though.

bash# livecd-iso-to-disk --overlay-size-mb 200 CentOS-minimal.iso /dev/sdb1

That overlay is the size of the “persistent overlay” which defines how much space you’ve got to write to, basically. You can modify any files on the filesystem, or install new stuff or whatever you want. The bigger your memory stick, the bigger you can make this.

After that you’re done. This guy boots up in 30 seconds and leaves me at a fully functional prompt. We can futz with md devices, dmraid devices, roll a new initrd (which my boss has had the pleasure of having to do a few times on shitty Intel Matrix WinRAID shit), dump and restore stuff, ssh to boxes on the network, configure the network manually or via dhcp, it’s got GCC, python, perl, and gawk so we can write scripts onsite, and keep them on the stick.

The gist of it is that you each play mobsters that have to get truck-loads of money onto a Money Train so it can be taken to the launderers. The first person to hit $10 million wins the game.

You will be able to attack other players by stealing their loot, causing their trucks to get lost via “detours”, dob them in to the cops, put out a hit on them, and more. Of course, there will be cards to block these actions too, such as “donut shops” to throw the cops off your trail, corrupt lawyers, and more mobsters.

Currently the deck size is probably suited to 2-4 players, but I’d like to get this to a max of 6 players without making the deck too unwieldy.

I’ll be playtesting it starting this week and over the xmas holidays, so send me an email, post on my BBS, or contact me on Facebook.

It’s well known that TradeMe store your password in a plaintext cookie in your browser, but that’s OK (?) because your box has to be owned before that matters. However, people sniffing network traffic shouldn’t be able to sniff your password. And given that most people use wireless now, the likelihood of this is pretty high. So I tried to change that http://www.trademe.co.nz to https://www.trademe.co.nz. Should be a simple thing — one extra character on your URL ensures all your requests are encrypted.

OK, so I hit their site with https, and my browser tells me there’s something funny about the certificate. Really? Were they too cheap to get it signed by a known Certificate Authority? I mean it’s a few hundred bucks a year, but this was a company that was purchased by Fairfax for seven hundred fucking million dollars. Plus an extra $50 million if they met certain targets over the next two years, which apparently they did.

Right, so they can afford a cert.

I pull the cert up to have a look at it and find something a bit more innocent. It was registered with a proper CA, but they registered secure.trademe.co.nz and www.secure.trademe.co.nz (the latter of which, incidentally, doesn’t even resolve in DNS). But, no problems, I plug https://secure.trademe.co.nz expecting to get to a secure login page. Guess what? It just automatically redirects to http://www.trademe.co.nz. WTF? I tried appending /Members/Login.aspx at the end of that secure URL and I still get redirected. Try it yourself: https://secure.trademe.co.nz/Members/Login.aspx

Thanks TradeMe, I can’t use your site while I’m on a wireless network.

If anyone from TradeMe ever reads this, why did you buy a certificate if it isn’t being used? And why can’t I log in via SSL? This isn’t complicated shit (nor expensive) we’re talking about. I’d offer to fix it for you guys, but you couldn’t pay me enough to touch a Windows server. Actually maybe Fairfax could.

I’m writing this partly because I’d like to help people shift gear, and partly because many of my friends read interesting things online every day and I’m a nosy bastard and don’t have enough crap to read.

In ancient times, back when stone was being beaten into simple tools and wheels were being invented, people read their news on large sheets of pulp. The papers would even be delivered to your house so that you didn’t have to venture farther past your over-grown, under-loved garden, and you could find out how the world devolved today before you even had pants on.

Fast forward to the end of the 20th century, and news was being displayed as pixels on computer screens. The problem with this was that you had to visit various different sites. Bookmarking them all, and visiting, waiting for their epileptic-fit-inducing banner ads to display before you could even get a list of the available articles. So some days you’d forget, and some days you’d spend in bed recovering from yesterday’s seizures.

In their infancy, news sites offered email updates, but people are at the point now where they get enough crap in their inboxes and don’t want to give out their private info yet again to be on more spam lists. So this feature didn’t really gain the popularity that sites had hoped for.

However, over the years, news sites, and blogs, webcomics, and any other site you care to name that had regularly updated content started syndicating their news by way of RSS feeds. It’s at the point now where any site worth its cream doughnuts has an RSS feed (or 12).

In its simplest terms, an RSS feed is a list of articles/posts/news items/whatever posted onto a particular site. You can then subscribe to the RSS feed and using an RSS reader, you can have all the news headlines waiting for you at your leisure. For instance, some news sites, like Stuff allow you to subscribe separately to the technology news, the sports news, the world news, etc. So if you don’t care about the latest info about homoerotic bumfingerers who throw balls around, then you needn’t worry yourself. You won’t see any of it.

So how does an RSS feed work? Well, in the right hand side of your browser’s address bar, you’ll see an orange icon that looks like a dot with two waves coming off it that looks a little like this: . Click on that little guy and you’ll be taken to a page that lists the feed, and instructions on how to subscribe to it. Note that subscribing to RSS feeds is possible without giving over your contact details — my favourite part.

What you will need is an RSS reader. You can get readers for any OS under the sun to run on your local machine, but my favourite is web based because I can access it from anywhere and it always has my content. My favourite is Google’s Reader. You need a GMail account, which I thoroughly recommend as the best webmail system on the planet (assuming you want lots of space, incredible flexibility to tag messages, and almost zero spam). Another option is something like Feedly. Google is your friend; find something that suits you, but one feature your reader should have is the ability to share news.

We all love to share, and we all like to point out interesting things for our friends to read. Google Reader and Feedly allow you to build an RSS feed of your own that your friends can subscribe to (or “follow” in Google Reader parlance). Reader even allows you to share comments or one-off notes for your friends to read, so it effectively includes blog functionality.

So now we’re in a position where any web content we want (except for that from very backward sites) can be delivered right to us. We can read it all at our leisure, and some readers even allow the content to be downloaded so it can be read off-line. About to go on a trip with only your laptop and only a spare pair of gruts? No problemo. You can has ur news too. In addition to that, you can syndicate your own news feeds for your friends by sharing links from your feeds so that they get to read the stuff you find interesting.

Google Reader even has a nice new function in which you can create “feed bundles.” Look in my right hand sidebar here on this site. “Linux / Tech geeks”, “Rational Thinkers”, and “Great Webcomics” are three bundles I’ve created and shared. You can click on their subscribe buttons and you’ll be subscribed to all of the feeds in the bundle.

This really is the way we read news (and blogs, and comics, and…) today. So if you read interesting things you’d like to share with your friends and you would like that process to be easier than copying a link, emailing, trying to come up with a clever and original way of saying “read this”; or if you don’t like sharing links because you don’t like spamming your friends, then RSS is the most polite way of doing it. If they subscribe, or follow you, then they’ll access your favourite links in their own time, in addition to being able to share stuff back to you in a polite manner.

It’s a win-win.

And if you have a website that doesn’t offer an RSS feed, then look into it. I’m pretty sure every blogging/CMS platform on the planet now has it (inbuilt or via a plugin).

A nice quote from the article:

“Even after SCO’s deception was exposed and the company effectively lost its case, Darl McBride continued to insist that the company has evidence of System V code in Linux. No such evidence has been presented and McBride’s argument directly contradicts testimony given by other SCO executives. McBride’s stubborn detachment from reality has made him a subject of ridicule in the Linux community.“

In the wake of the disastrous attempt at litigation against everyone and their dog, SCO expect to “restructure” and continue to grow their UNIX business as if nothing had ever happened, but I think that irreparable damage has been done to them and their brand by McBride.

He has also brought with him almost 20,000 comic books that will be given to school children. The latter strikes me as a better approach, even though it will no doubt be full of fear-mongering. But education seems to me as being the right alternative to bad law.