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2007 Jul 02 garnet


Guy Blade Guy Blade---04:02:00


Security Controls
About an hour ago, I decided that I wanted to print off some BESM character sheets. I don't have a printer myself, but my hotel does, so I went down to the public-use computer which has a printer. I browsed to the White Wolf website and loaded the character sheet. The thing about BESM character sheets, though, is that they are actually designed to fill one-half of an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. Because of this, I wanted to print both halves of the character sheet on one page. This is usually accomplished by setting the printer to print two sheets per page. This particular computer, however, would have none of it. Whenever I opened the properties page to set the printer into two pages per sheet mode, a window popped saying "Unauthorized Function", and the properties window would close.

I found, though, that the amount of time the properties window stayed open was not constant. In fact, it seemed like whatever watchdog program was keeping the window from staying open was simply polling all of the processes and looking for things it did not like. Thus, I kept opening the window and attempting to change the setting before it closed until I was finally successful and printed off 5 properly sized character sheets. Luckily, the program closed the properties window by simulating a click on "OK", so all I had to do was select the appropriate number of pages per sheet. This particular choice was bad design.

The real difficulty came when I tried to change the setting back. I didn't want to inconvience others, so I tried to change the setting back. I had no luck at this, and after a few dozen tried, the machine locked me out with a "Sabotage cooldown". I found this humerous as what I was attempting to do was reset it to standard operating conditions. Apparently, the sabotage-prevention mode reset the page setup on its own, so I didn't have to worry about it.

All in all, I consider this program's behavior to be primarily annoying and not particularly effective at controlling access.

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2007 Jul 01 celes


Guy Blade Guy Blade---08:44:00


Delivery
Today, I had to get up at 6:45 just as I do during the week. I was up this early because I needed to be at my apartment by 8 am so that my things could be delivered. It only took about 2 hours to actually move everything into my apartment, but I expect it to take quite a bit longer to actually get myself unpacked.

So far, I have unpacked perhaps a dozen boxes. I have unpacked all of my clothes, most of my computers, and my dishes. Unfortunately, there is little point to moving in as of yet. I will not have power until Tuesday and I won't have internet/cable television until Saturday.

Speaking of the internet, I have decided to take a two pronged approach to my internet connection needs. Since I need to have a service that gives me static IP addresses (at least 2) and decent upload in order to continue to host blade.io, I have decided to get some form of business class DSL for my hosting needs. Unfortunately, this leads to ugly and slow download speeds which always come with DSL connections. As such, I have decided to also get residential class cable modem service through Charter. My current plan is to set up my network such that the two external machines (freasha and eve) are connected to both the DSL and Cable service. Eve, my current router, will also serve as a router for my internal machines which will remain behind a NAT.

This setup will likely require a fair bit of fiddling with iptables rules in order to get functioning correctly, but I do not believe it is impossible. I will likely have to buy a few more network cards in order to get everything going, however.

I've also been working on a monthly budget. So far, I have put in numbers that I know (such as rent, cell phone, etc) as well as numbers that are less certain (power, gas, food). Not counting Renter's Insurace (because I haven't bought it yet), It seems like my monthly budget is something like $2900. I expect this to be a gross over-estimate as I'm putting in very large numbers for some of the expenses (such as over $320 for gas per month when I plan on biking to work or $400 a month for electricity).

We'll just see what happens, I suppose.

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