Shortwave Numbers Stations are coded broadcasts assumed to be intended for agents of governments and intelligence agencies. Radio transmissions in the shortwave range (3 – 30Mhz) can propagate quite well around the world. If enough power is behind the transmitter and atmospheric conditions are right the signal can be heard very well with a tiny simple radio receiver half way around the world. The “technology” seems popular as ever as according to various sites the number of such broadcasts has increased since the end of the cold war.

The Conet Project collected a large number of example recordings back in 1997. An archive of these records can be found on the Archive.org website.

The spookiest one has to be “the swedish rhapsody irdal” recording. It features music and the broadcast is done with the voice of a young female child. It would seem someone involved gets to express a little bit of creativity in these broadcasts.

I’m ditching self-hosted Wordpress and I’m going to give Posterous a try. Considering my last blog post was back in December it’s rather obvious the whole Wordpress blog thing wasn’t working for me anymore. I’ve find myself drawn to Twitter more than traditional blogging. If I want to say something with Twitter I just say it. I don’t have to get a form of anxiety over if my thoughts are structured enough to be worthy of a blog post. Why get anxiety over something so stupid? It’s not logical but there is no sense in ignoring it.

Posterous and its main competitor Tumblr seem to promote a more free-form means of communication. They feel like a hybrid between the traditional blog as implemented by WordPress and the often too-short microblogging format presented by Twitter.

Posterous in particular is interesting because of the main method you use to add content to your site. To add a post just send an email to post@posterous.com. That’s it. Posterous then goes through the email and converts it into a post. If images are attached it creates a gallery with thumbnails and puts it in the post. If video is attached it transcodes it and puts a flash player widget in your post. No formatting or HTML if you don’t want to. If you want more control over formatting Posterous supports the Markdown text format.

Of course you can use the website to add and manage content. There is a WYSIWYG editor with the typical brain damage, a raw HTML mode and some meta data editing provided for all posts. The management website is clean and gets the job done. The multimedia uploader widget worked quite well. I was able to upload a couple dozen images at the same time and it added them to the post, put them together as a group with thumb-nailing and Javascript slideshow love. Slick.

There is no iPhone app or Android app. You are encouraged to use your email client or SMS to generate content. Take photo, tell the photo app to send email. The philosophy is that you shouldn’t need to use or learn a special program or way of doing things. Just dump your thoughts into text and attach your multimedia without having to worry about presentation details. Wordpress involved uploading media to your media library and pulling it into the post and gallery support was incomplete and required plugins to not suck. The Android app didn’t make this any less annoying sadly.

I imported my self-hosted Wordpress into Posterous using Posterous’s migration tool. All of the posts imported over along with all their comments and some of the images. While the “migration” only took a few minutes for several years worth of blogging it unfortunately required some manual cleanup. The three sources of problems requiring manual intervention:

• In Wordpress’s export file a couple dozen of my posts were marked as being posted on January 1, 1970 even though the correct date is shown within Wordpress. Thankfully Posterous let me manually edit the post dates on these entries.

• Many years of fighting with Wordpress’s changing content munging and WYSIWYG editors meant quite a few posts ended up in the Wordpress export XML file without appropriate HTML formatting. Sigh. Posterous seems to generate sane HTML formatting at least so I viewed it as a long term investment.

• Some images didn’t import correctly. It seemed the newer the post the more problematic the image import. The older images that imported correctly were included in the original Wordpress post with manually written HTML. The newer posts tended to be WYSIWYG edited. Not sure who to blame on this one.

(Sorry for the RSS churn caused by the move!)

You know... It could be right.  Everquest 2 requires administrative privileges if you are using the old-style client, opens multiple network connections, slams the CPU for hours and tries to sell me stuff constantly.

Best antivirus software evah.  *Clicks Send*

I keep telling myself one of these days Apple will get the whole "Windows" thing right... While trying to figure out why (yet again) the Quicktime plugin silently fails within Firefox I decide to do an uninstall and reinstall.  During the uninstall this lovely thing pops up...

NFS v4 is broken on ALL systems running Red Hat Enterprise 5.4.  The Bugzilla entry is Bug 524520.

If you are lucky you'll be using some Java app that will throw a fit immediately about not having permission to create files.  If you are not lucky you won't notice until you see that file permissions are all randomized on the backing host file system.  Who wants random SUID files?  I do!  I do! Red Hat knows this is a security issue.  The bug report says it is "Important".  All it takes is a single "yum update" and if you are using NFS v4, congrats, you win!

Red Hat won't release a fix for this until November. Guys?  Hello?  NFS v4 shouldn't be broken for three months!  It isn't a "preview" it is a production feature.  The fact you are setting file permissions to uninitialized values at all SHOULD BE FIXED YESTERDAY.

Grrrr.....  How many bugs like this are being hidden inside Bugzilla?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 is getting very old. As an example let's look at RHEL 5's kernel. RHEL 5's kernel is based on upsteam vanilla 2.6.18.4. The original 2.6.18 release happened in September of 2006. Every RHEL 5 kernel is a modified version of this upstream release.

The source RPM file for building RHEL 5's 2.6.18-128.1.14.el5 kernel contains 2680 patch files to be applied against vanilla 2.6.18.4 source. The diffstat from a full patched tree vs 2.6.18 vanilla:

3780 files changed, 235061 insertions(+), 170479 deletions(-)

Since RHEL 5's release they have backported large chunks of drivers, bugfixes, and new functionality from mainline to their custom 2.6.18 kernel. As a RHEL and CentOS user these efforts are appreciated. I religiously read the release notes from major updates hoping that Red Hat has blessed us with gifts backported from the mainline tree. But more often then not one ends up disappointed that some key functionality available from the mainline Linux kernel is nowhere to be found.

The userspace receives a bit less attention. Bugfixes and security issues that bite Red Hat's biggest customers get backported and there is an occasional version bump but for the most part the userspace doesn't get much churn. As time rolls on my coworkers and I find ourselves reaching for compilers more and more often as the included open-source tools become so outdated as to become obsolete.

In the RHEL 3 and 4 days these backports served the purpose of introducing some needed new functionality and bugfixes while providing a long supported stable environment. It was just enough so that one could get along until the next major RHEL release. The time between new major releases was about two years give or take a couple months.

Unfortunately we're about three months beyond the two year mark since the release of RHEL 5 and the next version (RHEL 6) is nowhere to be seen. Even more concerning is that Red Hat has announced that in the next major update (RHEL 5.4) they will be introducing a new virtualization platform and spinning off new products based on it. There is no concrete information on RHEL 6 anywhere that I can find.

What do I take away from this? RHEL 6 is at least six months off if not over a year off. The userspace of RHEL 5 is getting to be so old it's starting to stink and frankly I'm getting tired of not having access to newer userspace and kernel features. I like Red Hat as a company but I'm getting annoyed at their flagship product.

I work in a .EDU and we use Red Hat's very generous discounts so we are definitely not one of their high margin customers. I personally maintain a mix of commercial and open source software installs and in the past I've chosen to standardize on RHEL and it's clone CentOS.

Unfortunately with the RHEL release schedules becoming so long between releases it looks like it would save me time and effort to start dumping RHEL for anything except Oracle and proprietary application servers. It certainly would reduce the amount of SRPM fiddling I end up doing and give me many more options as to update frequency.

Switching between Ubuntu LTS and the most recent non-LTS is trivial compared to switching between Fedora and Red Hat. And as much as people in the Fedora camp protest this view to the outside world Fedora's lack of polish and 13 month support cycle means it is little more than an installable checkpoint on the Rawhide road. There is no granularity between them whereas in the Ubuntu world there is.

Is this really the trend that Red Hat wants to continue? Is there nothing in between excruciatingly slow updates with long support and Rawhide? Can there be a RHEL release lifecycle that doesn't involve end customers eventually having to drag out the compiler and replace a part of the product?

Last Sunday I took a trip to the Bronx Zoo. I took a few hundred photos over a 5 hour period. I used the trip as an excuse to learn how to use my new camera and managed to get a few decent shots. Below are the best photos from the trip.

                                                 

Here were the best of the test photos I took with my new camera. This gives me an excuse to play with Wordpress's built-in gallery system.

     

Just finished a great little game available from Steam called "The Maw". The game is a modern Platformer with disgustingly cute aliens. The two aliens escape from a prison together and form a friendship centering on the one alien helping the other alien eat everything on the planet. While the characters, the animation style and the style of mayhem might seem a bit childish I can assure you its highly entertaining and very unpredictable.

Not a single word is spoken throughout the game yet there is plenty of story. Emotions are conveyed through the style of animation quite well and I couldn't help but like the characters. The graphics are cartoony but really well done and the music is fantastic and helps keep the mood. Overall very well worth the $8.99 I spent for it and I'll probably pick up the $4 - 6 worth of optional content available in the coming weeks.

Twisted Pixel Games, the indie publisher who made the game, has posted a decent trailer on Youtube:

A kind soul over at Red Hat sent me an email to let me know they were aware of the issue covered in my recent RHN rant. The issue is being worked on and the individual also pointed me to the following note sent to the RHEL 5 mailing list:

After digging into this a bit more it looks like the ""Error: failed to retrieve repodata/primary.xml.gz from rhel-x86_64-server-5" error is part of an issue on RHN. This will also be addressed by the fix going out next week.

Thanks to the individual who emailed me and thanks to Red Hat for working on this.