Who’s Knocking On My Disk Drive? May 28th, 2009
Patrick Stein

I rebooted my Linux box into Windows Vista several times in the last two days while moving things over to VMWare Fusion. All day today, my disk drive has given a little spin every two or three seconds.

When I first noticed it, I tried searching around with iostat and top to see if I had some process run amok. Finding nothing, I tried rebooting.

The magical reboot was not so magical. My machine was still merrily hitting the disk every couple seconds.

I searched around the web for “disk activity” linux and “disk activity” ubuntu. I found recommendations that I:

All of those seemed bogus to me. None of them seemed like anything that would have changed yesterday or today. But, the last one got me thinking. What logs do I have that do get flushed on every message? Are any of them going batty today?

Sure enough, /var/log/auth.log was getting hit every two or three seconds. Someone was trying to guess logins on my machine.

May 28 04:57:57 evariste sshd[6966]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure
; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=nitro.xyzdns.net  user=backup
May 28 04:57:59 evariste sshd[6966]: Failed password for backup from 209.51.159.
194 port 54874 ssh2
May 28 04:57:59 evariste sshd[6968]: Invalid user guest from 209.51.159.194
May 28 04:57:59 evariste sshd[6968]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): check pass; user unkno
wn
May 28 04:57:59 evariste sshd[6968]: pam_unix(sshd:auth): authentication failure
; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=ssh ruser= rhost=nitro.xyzdns.net
May 28 04:58:01 evariste sshd[6968]: Failed password for invalid user guest from
 209.51.159.194 port 54992 ssh2

Looking back through the last week, I’ve had a few spats of bogus login attempts. Most of them were just four or five attempts in a row. This one today had gone for twelve hours.

I threw that IP address into /etc/hosts.deny. Now, all is quiet. Well, except my need to make sure I don’t let things go for twelve hours again….

Apple Missed Their Own Boat On iPhone Backups May 28th, 2009
Patrick Stein

We’ve been able to rearrange apps on our iPhones for a year now, right? We’ve been able to move apps around to different screens.

For even longer than that, we’ve been able to reload our iPhones from backups.

Why, oh why, does a backup not contain the information about which app icons are where? How hard is this? I have 96 apps on my iPhone. Every single one of them still remembers its data despite the fact that I had to wipe the phone and start over yesterday. Sadly, the phone didn’t remember where any of the apps belong.

I spent the better (or worse as the case may be) part of an hour putting my apps back into a useful order. I can find several tutorials on the iPhone developer site that demonstrate how one might save such data in a location that gets backed up. Seriously….

Emacs + Slime + SBCL on Windows Vista May 27th, 2009
Patrick Stein

I just finished setting up Windows Vista to run in VMWare Fusion. Then, I finally tackled setting up Emacs with Slime and SBCL under Windows Vista.

For the most part, I followed Robert Zubek’s gameplan. However, I quickly ran into a problem with swank’s temporary files not being in a writable location. I wish I had found this thread sooner. Alas, I ended up rolling my own by tweaking the temp-file-name function in swank-sbcl.lisp. The new version looks like this:

(defun temp-file-name ()
    "Return a temporary file name to compile strings into."
  #-win32 (concatenate 'string (tmpnam nil) ".lisp")
  #+win32 (concatenate 'string
                       (sb-ext:posix-getenv "TEMP")
                       "/"
                       (symbol-name (gensym "SL"))
                       ".lisp"))

Developing Lisp in Ubuntu Linux with VMWare Fusion May 27th, 2009
Patrick Stein

I am working on some lisp software that I would like to run under Linux, MacOSX, and Windows.

I have a PC that I can boot into either Ubuntu Linux or Windows Vista. Of course, I have a variety of services running under Ubuntu Linux on that box that the rest of my network would rather have around. As such, I would rather never boot that machine into Windows. So, I thought I’d give VMWare Fusion a try.

Actually, I thought I would try both VMWare Fusion and Parallels. Alas, Parallels lets me get my virtual machine set up, but will not let me run it without a license. VMWare Fusion lets me play for 30 days before buying a license. From what I’m seeing from VMWare Fusion’s performance, I can’t imagine dropping $80 on Parallels just to see if its virtual machine can outperform what I’m seeing from Fusion.

Right now, I am in the process of moving over the PC’s Windows stuff to my laptop so I can try running Vista through Fusion. While I was waiting for that, however, I installed Ubuntu under Fusion, updated a ton of packages, installed emacs, sbcl, slime, etc.

For comparison, I took some lisp code that runs in just under 11 seconds on my laptop. I ran the same code under Ubuntu in Fusion on the same laptop. It ran in just under 12 seconds. Some of that may also be that I am using an older version of SBCL under Ubuntu than I am native.

I have some more testing to do to make sure that cl-opengl will perform as well. But, I am quite pleased.

Kindle App Makes Progress May 26th, 2009
Patrick Stein

Last month, I wrote about Four Ways eReader Beats Kindle on the iPhone. It looks like the 1.1 release of the Kindle iPhone app addresses the first of those four ways.

They now let you select between portrait or landscape mode. It lets you turn pages by tapping or swiping. And, it lets you change the background and text colors a bit.

I’m not terribly fond of its mechanism for letting you lock in landscape or portrait mode, but at least you can do it now. And, I don’t have free range on color choices, but at least I have some choice.

I hope they tackle my other three points in later releases.

RSS Feeds

l