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January 28, 2010
Currently in: Changable
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April 16, 2009
Recovering from: Fencing World Championships
Next destination: Israel
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September 3, 2008
Recovering from: Discworld Convention
Next destination: Florida
June 3, 2008
Organizing: TechAdventure
Returning from: Israel
Destination: DC
----------------------------------------------------------------------- The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n-1 As we enter the scene, an Imperial Multiplexer is trying to kill a consulate ship. Many of their signals have gotten through, and RS232 decides it's time to fork off a new process before this old ship is destroyed. His companion, 3CPU, is following him only because he appears to know where he's going... "I'm going to regret this!" cried 3CPU, as he followed RS232 into the buffer. RS232 closed the pipes, made the sys call, and their process detached itself from the burning shell of the ship. The commander of the Imperial Multiplexer was quite pleased with the attack. "Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?" asked the lieutenant. "Hold your fire. That last power failure must have caused a trap thorough zero. It's not using any cpu time, so don't waste a signal on it." "We can't seem to find the data file anywhere, Lord Vadic." "What about that forked process? It could have been holding the channel open, and just pausing. If any links exist, I want them removed or made inaccessable. Ncheck the entire file system 'til it's found, and nice it -20 if you have to." Meanwhile, in our wandering process... "Are you sure you can ptrace this thing without causing a core dump?" queried 3CPU to RS232. This thing's been striped, and I'm in no mood to try and debug it." The lone process finishes execution, only to find our friends dumped on a lonely file system, with the setuid inode stored safely in RS232. Not knowing what else to do, they wandered around until the jawas grabbed them. Enter our hero, Luke Vaxhacker, who is out to get some replacement parts for his uncle. The jawas wanted to sell him 3CPU, but 3CPU didn't know how to talk directly to an 11/40 with RSTS, so Luke would still needed some sort of interface for 3CPU to connect to. "How about this little RS232 unit ?" asked 3CPU. "I've delt with him many times before, and he does an excellent job at keeping his bits straight." Luke was pressed for time, so he took 3CPU's advice, and the three left before they could get swapped out. However, RS232 is not the type to stay put once you remove the retaining screws. He promptly scurried off into the the deserted disk space. "Great!" cried Luke, "Now I've got this little tin box with the only link to that file off floating in the free disk space. Well, 3CPU, we better go find him before he gets allocated by someone else." The two set off, and finaly traced RS232 to the home of PDP-1 Kenobi, who was busily trying to run an icheck on the little RS unit. "Is this thing yours? His indirect address are all goofed up, and the size is gargatious. Leave things like this on the loose, and you'll wind up with dups everywhere. However, I think I've got him fixed up. It seems that he's has a link to a data file on the Are-Em Star. This could help the rebel cause." "I don't care about that," said Luke. "I'm just trying to optimize my uncles schedualer." "Oh, forget about that. Dec Vadic, who is responsible for your fathers death, has probably already destroyed his farm in search of this little RS232. It's time for you to leave this place, join the rebel cause, and become a UNIX wizard! I know a guy by the name of Con Solo, who'll fly us to the rebel base at a price." --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n Luke was feeling rather bored. 3CPU could get to be rather irritating and RS232 didn't really speak Luke's language. Suddenly, Luke felt someone's eyes boring through the back of his skull. He turned slowly to see...nothing. A quiet voice came from somewhere in front of him. "Grasshopper, the carrier is strong within you." Luke froze, which was a good thing since his legs were insisting that he run but they weren't likely to be particular about direction. Luke guessed that his odds of getting lost in the dense tree structures were pretty good. Unfortunately, the Bookie wasn't available. "Yes. Very strong, but the modulation is yet weak. His network interface is totally undeveloped," the voice continued. A small furry creature walked out of the woods as Luke stared on. Luke's stomach had now joined the rest of his body in loud complaints. Whatever was peering at him was certainly small and furry, but Luke was quite sure that it didn't come from Alpha Centauri. "Well, well," said the creature as it rolled its eyes at Luke. "Frobozz, y'know. Morning, name's modem. What's your game? Adventure? D&D? Or are you just one of those Apple-pong types that hang around the store demonstrations?" Luke closed his eyes. Perhaps if he couldn't see it, it wouldn't notice him. "H'mm," muttered the creature. "Must use a different protocol. @@@H @@ @($@@@H }"@G$ @#@@G'(o% @@@@@%%H(b ?" "No, no," stammered Luke. "I don't speak EBCDIC. I was sent here to become a UNIX wizard. Must have the wrong address." "Right address," said the creature. "I'm a UNIX wizard. Device drivers a specialty. Or do you prefer playing with virtual memory?" Luke eyed the creature cautiously. If this was what happened to system wizards after years of late night crashes, Luke wasn't sure he wanted anything to do with it. He felt a strange affection for the familiar microcomputers of his home. And wasn't virtual memory something that you got from drinking too much Coke? --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Further Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+1 The story thus far: Luke, PDP-1 and their 'droids RS232 and 3CPU have made good their escape from the Imperial Bus Signals with the aid of Con Solo and the bookie, Two Bacco. The Milliamp Falcon hurtles onward through system space. Meanwhile, on a distant page in user space... Princess _LPA0: was ushered into the conference room, followed closely by Dec Vadic. "Governor Tarchive," she spat, "I should have expected to find you holding Vadics lead. I recognized your unique pattern when I was first brought aboard." She eyed the 0177545 tatooed on his header coldly. "Charming to the last," Tarchive declared menacingly. "Vadic, have you retrieved any information?" "Her resistance to the logic probe is considerable," Vadic rasped. "Perhaps we would get faster results if we increased the supply voltage..." "You've had your chance, Vadic. Now I would like the princess to witness the test that will make this workstation fully operational. Today we enable the -r beam option, and we've chosen the princess' $HOME of /usr/alderaan as the primary target." "No! You can't! /usr/alderaan is a public account, with no restricted permissions. We have no backup tapes! You can't..." "Then name the rebel inode!" Tarchive snapped. A voice announced over a hidden speaker that they had arrived in /usr. "1248," she whispered, "They're on /dev/rm3. Inode 1248." She turned away. Tarchive sighed with satisfaction. "There, you see, Lord Vadic? She can be reasonable. Proceed with the operation." It took several clock ticks for the words to penetrate. "What!" _LPA0: gasped. "/dev/rm3 is not a mounted filesystem," Tarchive explained. "We require a more visible subject to demonstrate the power of the RM STAR workstation. We will mount an attack on /mnt/dantooine as soon as possible." As the princess watched, Tarchive reached over and typed "ls" on a nearby terminal. There was a brief pause, there being only one processor on board, and the viewscreen showed, ".: not found." The princess suddenly double- spaced and went off-line. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Even Further Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker Episode n+2 The Milliamp Falcon hurtles on through system space... Con Solo finished checking the various control and status registers, finally convinced himself that they had lost the Bus Signals as they passed the terminator. As he returned from the I/O page, he smelled smoke. Solo wasn't concerned--the Bookie always got a little hot under the collar when he was losing at chess. In fact, RS232 had just executed a particularly clever MOV that had blocked the Bookie's data paths. The Bookie, who had been setting the odds on the game, was caught holding all the cards. A little strange for a chess game... Across the room, Luke was too busy practicing bit-slice technique to notice the commotion. "On a word boundary, Luke," said PDP-1. "Don't just hack at it. Remember, the Bytesaber is the weapon of the Red-eye Night. It is used to trim offensive lines of code. Excess handwaving won't get you anywhere. Listen for the Carrier." Luke turned back to the drone, which was humming quietly in the air next to him. This time Luke's actions complemented the drone's attacks perfectly. Con Solo, being an unimaginative hacker, was not impressed. "Forget this bit-slicing stuff. Give me a good ROM blaster any day." "~~j~~hhji~~," said Kenobie, with no clear inflection. He fell silent for a few seconds, and reasserted his control. "What happened?" asked Luke. "Strange," said PDP-1. "I felt a momentary glitch in the Carrier. It's equalized now." "We're coming up on user space," called Solo from the CSR. As they cruised safely through stack frames, the emerged in the new context only to be bombarded by freeblocks. "What the..." gasped Solo. The screen showed clearly: /usr/alderaan: not found "It's the right inode, but it's been cleared! Twoie, where's the nearest file?" "3 to 5 there's one..." the Bookie started to say, but was interrupted by a bright flash off to the left. "Imperial TTY fighters!" shouted Solo. "A whole DZ of them! Where are they coming from?" "Can't be far from the host system," said Kenobie. "They all have direct EIA connections." As Solo began to give chase, the ship lurched suddenly. Luke noticed the link count was at 3 and climbing rapidly. "This is no regular file," murmured Kenobie. "Look at the ODS directory structure ahead! They seem to have us in a tractor beam." "There's no way we'll unlink in time," said Solo. "We're going in."