About Me

I am a systems administrator for the Math and Stat Sciences department. I deal primarily with the Unix and infrastructure side of the day to day tasks. I also mind the network and system security side of the department. I've been in a systems administrator role for about 7 years now. Running my own ISP for 3 years before starting here in 2001.

Projects And Ugly Hacks

Corewars (Has its own page)

Sudoku-tron is a daily sudoku website I run.

*BSD

Unix/Free software manual collection. Fairly handy.

Open 3.6 CGD Diff: cgd-patch.diff and cgd.tar.gz. You'll then need to rebuild your kernel, install the patched MAKEDEV, and install src/sbin/cgdconfig. Don't forget to create /etc/cgd owned by root 0700. This patch is based on tedu's original, updated to the netbsd-2.0 version to fix a couple bugs and add functionality. I've been using this on a number of i386 and AMD64 systems for about 6 months now with no major issues, Although I suspect there is a deadlock in the code somewhere. I haven't found it yet.

Diceware: Diceware is a system for generating more secure passphrases while also making them easier to remember. I've hacked together a little utility to generate passphrases from the random device on *BSD. On some systems this is seeded from hardware RNG. diceware.tgz

install_ports.py - This was a handy little script I cooked up to make upgrading FreeBSD boxes easier. You feed it the output of the previous pkg_info, and it'll do its best to install all those packages on the new box. I've got a local FreeBSD mirror in the department, so all my packages download via gigabit etherenet, sometimes the slow part is untarring them on the local system! You'll likely want to pick a package mirror site thats closer to you network wise.

Mitzi

A couple of friends and I picked up a cute little Sun Enterprise 4500 on ebay for next to nothing. We've got it currently kitted out with:

o 14 x 400Mhz 8MB cache CPUs
o 14GB of RAM
o 8 x 18.2GB 15k RPM SCSI disks in a RAID0 stripe

Its currently running Solaris 9, and I've got it busy running corewar evolving, and a few other small projects. Sometimes its nice to have a box with 14GB of RAM. That and there is something very satisfying about a machine that can not only tell you when its found a bad memory page, but flags it as bad for you, and can isolate the physical memory slot that page is on. Not to mention you can add and remove CPU boards without powering the machine down.

Technical docs for Mitzi if you are curious.

Its interesting to note that we could have gotten an E10k instead, with a top end of 64 CPU's. The price wouldn't have been very much more. However, we calculated the power requirements for the full E10K to be about $1200.00 per *MONTH* and decided to stick with something a little smaller. However, it would be very cool to own a computer that has its own internal breaker panel. Sun has all the technical docs online for the E10K

Mitzi has been quite a bit of fun to play with. I think when the next generation hit ebay for the same low low prices, I might have to pick something up.

Nethack

I actually got started with nethack the same way I got started with corewars. An entry in an old copy of jargon file sent me to rogue, which I couldn't figure out how to run on my machine (a linux box with kernel 1.1.18). I then downloaded a copy of nethack from MegaSoft BBS by begging the SysOp Paul to make a long distance call to a BBS in the US and get the distro for me (as I wasn't able to get a working internet connection that summer).

After spending years of mind-breaking frustration attempting to finish nethack, I finally found the magic formula (I think there was an audiable click when it all fell into place). I've now ascended many times, even a few in the most recent nethack competition. Although my entries in the nethack competition were removed because I ran a server. *sigh*. This year I won't be running a server, so I will be doing my best to give Marvin a run for his money.

I suggest everyone tries nethack at least once. It certainly isn't for everyone, finishing the game requires inhuman patience and attention to detail. On the other hand, if you manage to ascend, it is quite a feeling of accomplishment, as the number of YAAP posts in r.g.r.n can attest.

This is the post I made about my extinctionist game in the 2004 nethack tourny. I spent *MANY* hours playing that game, only to find out that killing everything (almost), only got me the *RUNNER-UP* high score wizard trophy. I think it was gender discrimination by the RNG, female wizards only make 1/3 as many points as male wizards doing the same job! So you just better watch out when trying on those unknown amulets! On the other hand, how many people can say they've got the patience to kill that many nethack monsters.

You can get nethack here.

You can get spoilers here .

You can be told how to ascend here. But it won't help.

You can participate in the annual nethack competition here. It runs from 23:59 Oct 31 -> 23:59 Nov 30th every year. I've hosted a server a couple times, but I do like to play in it. So some years I get Kuethe to host. I've found it's quite a bit of fun, but the bones files some of these guys leave behind are really wicked. (Although I'll admit to leaving Yeenoghu with a demon entourage running around minetown a couple of times)

SameSolve

There is a game in KDE called KSame. It is a simple game of matching little colored balls. So I wrote a program to provide solutions to the the boards in the game.

You can download two versions: 1.0 and 1.1. 1.1 is significantly faster, but will still take weeks to completely exhaust a board. One day I'll finish the significantly improved version that is nearly finished that borrows from the chess engine crafty to prune the solution tree like a rabid gardner on meth.