jc blog - tales of a modern-day nomadic hunter-gatherer

Follow jcomeau_ictx on Twitter This is the weblog of Intrepid Wanderer. You never know what you might find here; graphic descriptions of bodily functions, computer programming secrets, proselytizing for the antichrist, miscellaneous ranting and kvetching, valuable information on living off the land... if you don't share my rather weird interests you may want to try slashdot instead.

You can consider my Del.icio.us links an extension to my blog, as are my LifeTango goals and my other to-do items. My to-buy list is also public, but only for sharing any useful ideas that might be there; I'm not requesting charity, neither do I offer it.

You can find me easily in google searches, as jcomeau, jcomeau_ictx, or jcomeauictx. There are lots of other jcomeaus, but AFAIK I'm the only jcomeau_ictx out there so far.

If you want to comment on anything you see here, try the new Facebook comments, reachable by clicking the "[comment]" link at the end of each post. If for some reason that isn't working, go ahead and email me, jc.unternet.net. You know what to do with the first dot. Make the 'subject' line something reasonably intelligent-looking or it goes plunk! into the spambasket unread.

This RSS feed may or may not work. Haven't fiddled with it in forever. RSS Feed


2014-11-30-0439Z

cleaned off the rest of the adhesive left after removing the protective plastic from the glass table top, using the peel from a single grapefruit. the first, largest removal job was a week or three ago using 4 orange peels.

checked my distillation experiment after having forgotten about it for a few days. there was about two tablesppons worth of water in the cup.

with a #6 by 3/4" flathead screw, I mounted a Gillette Fusion blade set on the other end of my sawed-off toothbrush. a minor space- and weight-saver, but every little bit helps. [comment]

2014-11-27-1902Z

yesterday, among other things, I learned to identify guamúchil, one species of Damiana (probably not T. diffusa as its flowers look like asters), and Mexican oregano. [comment]

2014-11-25-1941Z

jogging along the malecon last night, didn't see the iron bench I was approaching. whack! my right hand hit it hard. just a tiny bruise on the outside, but it did some internal damage. hurts to grip anything.

amaranth kraut still very slow forming, so added another lump of sea salt, bringing the total to about 1.5tsp so far.

steeped a scoop of ground espresso roast in about an ounce of rum overnight, and just topped up the glass with water. hopefully the grounds will settle out in time for dinner. [comment]

2014-11-25-0456Z

a couple of experiments are showing some promise. the batch of native amaranth I'm attempting to brine pickle hasn't spoiled, and if my taste buds don't deceive me, is starting to taste a little sour.

the other is a simple water distillation setup. I placed a coffee cup in the center of a pot, filled the pot partway with nonpotable water, and inverted the lid so that the lid handle acts as the drip point for the condensate. collected maybe a little less than a teaspoon with only the afternoon sun. up on the roof it may get twice as much. and there's room for hundreds of these. [comment]

2014-11-24-2126Z

here's the patch if you're interested in debugging a similar problem. so far I still haven't figured out how to make it build with the right header files. [comment]

2014-11-24-2032Z

pretty sure I figured it out... rebuilding now. my own damned fault: I had the -I options in the wrong order, and it was finding the bdb4.8 includes before the version 5.1 header files. so it had the wrong value for DB_NOTFOUND. [comment]

2014-11-24-1927Z

downloaded dogecoin-1.8.1-beta-1 and built it on my server. I get "Wallet corrupted" errors when running, but db_dump doesn't give any errors. I added some debugging output to walletdb.cpp and now get the error code and proof that the entire (new, empty) wallet is read correctly:

jcomeau@hetzner2:~/src/dogecoin-1.8.1-beta-1/src$ grep -C3 LoadWallet ~/.dogecoin/debug.log
2014-11-24 19:11:57 init message: Loading wallet...
2014-11-24 19:11:57 LoadWallet() starting
2014-11-24 19:11:57 LoadWallet() successfully read record 0776657273696f6e: 247b1000
2014-11-24 19:11:57 LoadWallet() successfully read record 0962657374626c6f636b: 247b1000019156352c1818b32e90c9e792efd6a11a82fe7956a630f03bbee236cedae3911a
2014-11-24 19:11:57 Error -30987 reading next record from wallet database
2014-11-24 19:11:57 Error loading wallet.dat: Wallet corrupted
2014-11-24 19:11:57 wallet 67ms
jcomeau@hetzner2:~/src/dogecoin-1.8.1-beta-1/src$ ~/bdb5.1/bin/db_dump ~/.dogecoin/wallet.dat
VERSION=3
format=bytevalue
database=main
type=btree
db_pagesize=4096
HEADER=END
0776657273696f6e
247b1000
0962657374626c6f636b
247b1000019156352c1818b32e90c9e792efd6a11a82fe7956a630f03bbee236cedae3911a
DATA=END

yeah, open source for the win and all that, but how could this have ever made it to release? I'll probably figure this out today and get it running, but I found by Googling many others had this error and couldn't find an answer. [comment]

2014-11-23-0839Z

it was maybe the best damned seafood dinner I've ever cooked. I had 3 helpings.

note that, except for the errors/omissions listed in the previous post, I doubled the recipe, which means I used about a quarter cup of soy sauce (4 tbsp). it wasn't too much! [comment]

2014-11-23-0109Z

trying a shrimp pasta recipe with a half kilo of shrimp and a half kilo of callos de almeja, clam muscles, similar to bay scallops. added almost 3 times as much soy sauce than called for, misreading tsp as tbsp, and left out the brown sugar, but hoping for the best. had to throw away a few of the shrimp, some were stinky with ammonia and others didn't smell too bad but were soft and falling apart. best to stick with the local seafood here, apparently. [comment]

2014-11-22-1515Z

yesterday or, more likely, the day before, I cleaned most of the leaves off a native amaranth, packed them into a jar, and added about a teaspoon of sea salt. want to see if I have any luck brine-pickling it. [comment]

2014-11-19-2029Z

here is the script, shellbot, that was uploaded to my server using vulnerabilities in my Bash CGI scripts, mostly failure to sanitize REQUEST_URI when interpolating it. posting it here for reference, since searching for various words in it doesn't bring up any Google hits on the actual source.

from my logs, I gather they backticked wget calls into the request, which fetched the above script into /tmp/bbr, then backticked the call to /tmp/bbr. that's all it took.

and all it hopefully takes to fix it is to use Bash's pattern substitution: ${REQUEST_URI//[^A-Za-z0-9\/.-]/} instead of $REQUEST_URI. [comment]

2014-11-19-1830Z

if parts of my website aren't working right, I disabled all of my CGI scripts except for those that I sanitized today. let me know if something you need is broken and I will bump its priority.

I killed the processes started by the intruder, after chmod'ing -x the scripts he used to break in with. got to keep checking in case he left some backdoors. and got to go through the logs and make sure I understand the vulnerabilities he used, and make sure I don't make the same mistakes again. [comment]

2014-11-19-0058Z

arggh! left some ancient CGI scripts in plain sight on my server, executable by anybody. who knows what the crackers managed to do with them. found and killed one listening process, but the file itself was apparently removed and I can't find any other obvious problems. dumb, dumb, dumb! [comment]

2014-11-18-1731Z

no more useless exim4 installation on my netbook. configuring it to use my server as smarthost was too much work and a year later I still hadn't accomplished it. one single line in my /etc/inittab allows me to mail from the commandline.

exim:2345:respawn:/usr/bin/ssh -p2345 -n -N -T -L 25:localhost:25 root@mailserver

where 2345 is the root ssh port (not really! you'll have to nmap it to find the real one) and mailserver is, of course, the server that runs exim4, to which I'm connecting. [comment]

2014-11-17-2333Z

argh.

/usr/bin/ar: creating libleveldb.a
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/jcomeau/src/bitcoin/src/leveldb'
CXXLD bitcoind
libtool: link: warning: library `//home/jcomeau/lib/libdb_cxx-4.8.la' was moved.
libtool: link: warning: library `//home/jcomeau/lib/libdb_cxx-4.8.la' was moved.
/usr/bin/ld: //home/jcomeau/lib/libssl.a(s2_meth.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 against `.rodata' can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
//home/jcomeau/lib/libssl.a: could not read symbols: Bad value
collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [bitcoind] Error 1
[comment]

2014-11-17-2306Z

got configure to run at least, latest bitcoin on my 64-bit Debian box: jcomeau@hetzner2:~/src/bitcoin$ CPPFLAGS="-I$HOME/include" LDFLAGS="-L/$HOME/lib -Wl,-rpath-link,$HOME/lib" ./configure --prefix=$HOME --with-boost=$HOME --with-sysroot=$HOME [comment]

2014-11-15-0450Z

to all my fellow gun nuts who are looking forward to war with the government, blacks, and muslims all at the same time: maybe better narrow it down to one front. there are plenty of blacks and muslims on the side of freedom. remember Arab Spring? remember the Deacons of Defense and Justice, and their modern day counterparts such as the Huey P. Newton Gun Club? these are not our enemies. the politicians are, as are the police who do their evil bidding. sure, there are individual muslims and individual blacks who are against freedom, as there are individuals of all races and religions who are antithetical to our cause. keep it simple, please. the whole world is counting on us to win this. [comment]

2014-11-14-1555Z

"If someone's open carrying, I don't know as a mom whether that person has passed a background check, whether they have any training," said Turner. "Basically, I don't know if they're a good guy with a gun or a bad guy with a gun."

Angela Turner is a "gun owner and volunteer for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America" according to the article. Austin Police chief Art "Oathbreaker" Acevedo also spouted some inanities, but let's just deal with Turner's for now.

sorry, Angela: you cannot know. neither can you know if that truck driver is about to swerve into a head-on collision with you, either due to some homicidal whim or just failure to change his bald front tires, of which the left is about to rupture. you don't know if that approaching jogger plans to throw you out into traffic or off the Golden Gate bridge.

what you can do is analyze the situation, check your options, determine the threat level if any, and act accordingly, all the time. your beloved universal background checks can only analyze past behavior, and are subject to all kinds of errors, particularly same-name conflation, which deprives rights of the innocent.

perhaps you'd be happy in a world where everyone is microchipped with a kill switch, so that a bureaucrat monitoring your thought patterns can see every little crazy thought that goes through your mind and shut you down if it looks like you might hurt someone. perhaps you'd trust Obama, or Acevedo, or the guy in the car behind you with that kind of power.

if so, please feel free to go land on a comet somewhere and get that world going. but leave this one alone. thanks. [comment]

2014-11-14-0055Z

walked the arroyo across from Marina Palmyra earlier today. lush and green. spent maybe a half hour picking grass stickers out of my socks afterwards. [comment]

2014-11-13-0240Z

I was only going to have a liter at El Parnazo, but made the mistake of sitting at a table of Canucks. Terry was buying, and if I'd stayed I'm sure I'd have had at least a gallon and would have had to crawl home. thanks Terry, Michael, John "JB" and Barry for the beer and pleasant company. cooked up some sesame-crusted jurel (yellowtail) with onions, peppers, bean sprouts, and white rice for dinner and, despite my drunkenness, it came out great, moist and delicious. [comment]

2014-11-11-2129Z

hauled the spent motor oil to the marina, walked all the way to the back and, sure enough, there's a tank in which to dump it. climb the stairs and pour it into the hopper. got home just in time, Mother Nature was being rather insistent.

back from the beer store with a Ballena, and am enjoying my first glass of the day. [comment]

2014-11-10-1610Z

want to look into the possibility of implementing the W.A.S.T.E. mail delivery system, using the Bitcoin blockchain or Etherium, such that everybody along the route gets paid, and nobody has to travel more than a few miles a day. [comment]

2014-11-09-0205Z

at Asupmatoma, eating a dinner of fish soup and rice after the clusterfuck of releasing the baby turtles, which were disoriented and confused by being held captive until all the visitors had pawed and photographed them to their hearts' content. many of them were tired already, and wandering back and forth along the beach instead of heading directly towards the water. my cynical take is that this is all an exercise in futility; the sea turtles will become extinct anyway, and these people will not experience the pleasure of eating them.

there was a baby rabbit, earlier today, hiding in plain sight next to a granite rock along the trail to the beach. another thing that wouldn't otherwise have survived. [comment]

2014-11-08-1859Z

2 humpbacks breaching offshore. beautiful. [comment]

2014-11-08-0027Z

little yellow butterflies or moths have been multiplying by the thousands here in La Paz. I've seen them clustering at night in alcoves and around streetlamps.

that idea of squirting Dr. Bronner's under each arm every now and then is working great. it partly masks, partly kills the odors, and when I get a chance to wash the shirts, the soap is already in them.

I drank almost 3 liters of Pacifico yesterday evening with only gas as the side effect; no hangover, no GI problems today as a result. I don't know any other beer that agrees so well with me. [comment]

2014-11-02-0321Z

last night's diarrhea was way worse than the night before's, it went on all night long and into the morning hours 'til about noon. hopefully that's it. my guess is that it was due to the Indio beer. that stuff from the Cuauhtemoc-Moctezuma brewing company seems to live up to its name, that tag team wreaking revenge upon all the non-native inhabitants of Mexico. I'd better stick to the Modelo brands, which seem to be more forgiving. [comment]

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