More Zonkyness

Christian Homophobes Are Really Sexual Perverts …

Aug 212014

Everyone knows who I am talking about – those christians who keep banging on about how homosexuals are “broken” or evil or whatever weird names they’ve come up with lately. Like Scott Lively, Fred Phelps, Laura Schlessinger, etc.

The normal and sane response to finding out that someone prefers same-sex partners is to shrug it off as a matter that is nobody’s business but the people involved.

But “god hates homesexuality” claim the christian homophobes. So I gather, but I also gather this god person hates lots of other stuff too – mixed textiles, women who try and stop men fighting, no cursing, no gossiping, weird foods, etc. So why are these people so bent out of shape when it comes to a little harmless sex between consensual adults?

Well, when we normally encounter someone with a prurient interest in the sex lives of other people, we usually find that they like watching other people have sex. And we call them “voyeurs”.

If we were to postulate a hypothetical group of voyeurs who for some reason or another (perhaps “christianity”) repressed their sexual perversion, we would be quite likely to find them coming to hate the “objects” of their unnatural desire.

Which sounds a great deal like these christian homophobes.

Perhaps we should be treating these christian homophobes with compassion. Telling them their desires are perfectly fine (if they get permission first) and sending them free porn!

Islamic Extremists Buy Into The Myth of The “Weak West”

General, Politics, Religion No Responses »

Aug 202014

The average Islamic extremist when he has time to think about anything other that licking his favourite pig, is under the mistaken belief that the western world is fundamentally weak. Weakened by our dissipated and irreligious lives; weakened by our usual sympathy for the underdog.

This is perfectly understandable for the moronic medieval minds that most Islamic extremists carry around with them. Because in some ways the west does look weak.

But the west is not weak as it has shown again and again since the start of WWII. However it is reluctant to start anything without taking care that it is doing the right thing. Time and again, whenever the west has gotten involved with something without thinking enough in advance (Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) it has gotten bogged down in something it realises that it shouldn’t have started.

But the west will get involved if it is provoked enough and it believes that it is on the right side.

The beheading of James Foley by the pig-licking thugs sometimes known as ISIS, ISIL, IS or just Daesh would appear on the surface to be an attempt to discourage the US and the west from getting involved. It would seem that the US air strikes and the push by the Kurdish and Iraqi military have started making things difficult for IS, and they would like to stop the US air strikes.

What they have accomplished is to encourage the US and the rest of the west to stay involved and take more measures.

They may regard themselves as some sort of ultra-religious freedom fighters, but anybody who uses extortion, flogging, amputations, rape, and indiscriminate killings are nothing more mindless pig-licking thugs.

Is Putin Another Hitler?

General No Responses »

Aug 152014

To anyone who is aware of the history of Nazi Germany’s actions leading up to Word War II, there’s something alarmingly familiar about Putin’s actions recently.

Germany lost a lot of territory after World War I, and Russia lost a lot of territory after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Germany annexed Austria in what became known as the Anschluss, and in a quite similar move Russia annexed the Crimea.

Germany “rescued” the German minorities from “repression” in Czechoslovakia by annexing the parts of the country with large ethnic German populations; Russia appears to be trying the same thing in the eastern Ukraine.

It is probable that Putin is not trying to emulate Hitler by exterminating a whole “race” of people, but Hitler wasn’t considered to be a monster just because he tried to exterminate the Jews (and other minorities he didn’t like), but also because he was a military adventurer who provoked one of the deadliest wars in history.

And Putin does seem to be in the early stages of something like that.

Exploring (U)EFI

Computing, Linux, Working Notes No Responses »

Aug 152014

This post is likely to change frequently after it first appears as experiments/research/etc. occurs to me.

To get to grips with it, let’s first define the software that is in control of your PC when it first starts as the system firmware rather than the BIOS, as system firmware is a generic term which can refer to BIOS, EFI, UEFI, OpenFirmware, or anything else that someone comes up with.

UEFI (and the older EFI) is a replacement for the legacy BIOS that we’ve been stuck with for decades. Despite advances in almost every aspect of the “PC standard”, the BIOS has hardly advanced at all. To be fair, the user interface has gotten a bit less 1980s, and it of course deals with hardware devices that weren’t even imagined decades ago. But there are still some rather nasty limitations, which UEFI is supposed to resolve.

Of course there are those who claim that UEFI is a complete mess with no redeeming qualities, but the truth is probably somewhere between it being that and the neatest bit of system firmware ever invented.

This posting are my working notes (with the addition of a bit of pointless waffling) on UEFI, given that I’m likely to be found staring at a UEFI shell on a broken server at some point in the future. All experiments (so far) have been carried out with a VirtualBox-powered virtual machine (with UEFI turned on) running Ubuntu server.

Installation

The boot process looks a little different … unsurprisingly. And there’s an error in relation to missing UEFI stuff from the hard disk. But once the CD is booted the process looks the same …

Partitioning: Initially “Guided – use entire disk and set up LVM”

Doesn’t give an opportunity to review the partitioning, but :-

EFISystem (/boot/efi) is roughly 512Mbytes
/boot is roughly 256Mbytes
LVM Volume Group

The Ubuntu installation uses grub as the boot loader, although it’s hardly the only option and there are hints that grub has been known to have issues with EFI. Although this could be “early adopters pain”, and not applicable currently.

GPT Partitions

See the Wikipedia article, but basically GPT replaced the old Master Boot Record partitions. The main advantage is that there are fewer dumb limits with GPT – there is no limit of 4 primary partitions (and no hacks to support extended partitions), but instead a minimum maximum of 128 partitions, which basically translates as the required minimum size of a partition table allows for up to 128 partitions but the partition table can be bigger. More than you’re likely to need anyway.

Cleverly (if you want to put it that way), GPT can live alongside the old MBR partitions as the GPT starts at block 1 rather than block 0. This has been used by Apple to keep two partition tables so that OSX can use GPT whilst Windows still uses MBR.

Keeping two partition tables in sync is perhaps not the best idea for stability and given the need for backwards compatibility has only a limited useful lifetime, I’d rather live without it. In fact it would be nice if I could fill up the old MBR with stuff that told all MBR tools not to mess around with the partition tables.

In theory, (U)EFI and GPT are independent of each other, but in practice, GPT implies booting from UEFI and MBR implies booting from BIOS (some UEFI implementation switch to a BIOS-compatibility mode when they see an MBR).

The EFI System Partition

(U)EFI requires that to boot, a disk must have an EFI System Partition formatted as FAT. This is used as effectively a replacement for the BIOS boot method of loading code from block 0. This file system is usually mounted under Linux as /boot/efi and contains various files that allow Linux to be booted (more details to be added).

It is perhaps a shame that the EFI standards people didn’t suggest making the EFI system partition part of the on-board firmware. It wouldn’t be impossible (or very expensive) to incorporate a small writeable FAT file system into the motherboard to avoid the need for the EFI partition on one of the storage disks. It is not as if the EFI system partition needs to be very big – Ubuntu configured one as 512Mbytes in size which is vastly larger than required for what is actually installed which adds up to less than 4Mbytes.

EFIBOOTMGR

The tool efibootmgr is for interacting with the EFI boot manager and the EFI variables that control what gets booted in which order :-

# efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0003
BootOrder: 0003,0000,0001,0002
Boot0000* EFI DVD/CDROM
Boot0001* EFI Hard Drive
Boot0002* EFI Internal Shell
Boot0003* ubuntu

The command has plenty of other options …

You can set the boot order with: efibootmgr -o 0002,0003,0001,0000. So I’ve set the preferred boot order to include the internal shell first … the purpose here is to look into EFI after all.

I also somehow managed to erase the “ubuntu” so re-created that with: efibootmgr -c -L UbuntuServer -l “\EFI\ubuntu\shimx64.efi” (yes unfortunately they use the wrong path separator).

EFI Shell

Is surprisingly limited. And rather too DOS-like for me.

Command	Description
help	Displays a list of the commands available … which very unhelpfully doesn’t pause at the end of the screen. Can also display additional details of a command if you try help command.
mode	Displays a list of the available screen mode commands.
mode x y	Sets the screen mode to the size specified (as listed with mode).
cls	Clears the screen.
cls ${n}	Clears the screen and sets the colours to a set specified by the number (0-7). Don’t bother; most of the choices are nasty.
map	Displays teh mapping table showing the block devices (BLK${n}) and the recognised file systems (FS${n}). If you don’t have fs0 you’ve got problems!
fs0:	Sets the specified file system as the current file system. This will change the prompt appropriately.
cd ${directory}	Changes to the specified directory. Remember that the path separator is the DOS preferred character (\).
ls	Lists files in the current directory.
edit ${filename}	Edits the specified file (^S saves, ^Q quits), but don’t try editing files ending in .efi!
${filename}.efi	Runs the EFI binary from the current directory, and yes that does mean you can boot Ubuntu Server by browsing to the \EFI\ubuntu directory and entering shimx64.efi (as I discovered after breaking the ubuntu boot option).

What’s With The Anti-Social Media?

Computing No Responses »

Aug 072014

There’s a bit of an anti-social media buzz around at the moment – apparently we’re not communicating properly if we’re not doing it in person, via phone, or by letter. There’s even a fairly popular video going around Facebook moaning about how we don’t communicate properly which I unfortunately cannot find a link to right now.

But what’s so bad about using technology to communicate?

Let’s get a few things settled to begin with :-

Letters are just 19th century emails.
Telegrams are just 19th century texts or instant messages.
Phone calls are just 19th century (stretching a point here) voice chats.

Just because a technology is old doesn’t make it right; just because a technology is old doesn’t make it wrong.

There’s no arguing with the fact that communicating in the flesh as it were, is a much more complete form of communication than anything else. Take moving into a new place for example, someone who helps you move in by helping move the furniture is going to get a much better grasp of what your new home is like than someone who just sees a few snaps that you’ve tweeted.

But not everyone can be there helping you move in :-

They could be stuck at work and unable to take the day off.
They could be living on the other side of the planet – are you going to pay their travel costs?
They could be physically limited and unable to handle the moving furniture bit.

But tweet a pic, and they’ll be able to share some part of the experience.

Now let’s assume you’re obsessed with physical keyboards (or any other unusual interest). Do the people around you share your obsession? Or do you have to visit specialist forums/groups/etc. to communicate with your fellow enthusiasts?

And not everyone finds it easy to communicate in a physical context :-

People who are house-bound find it difficult to make new physical acquaintances – should they stick a sign outside their front door saying “Lonely person fancies a chat.”, and would you respond to that?
There’s a whole bunch of “differently normal” people (specifically those with ASD) who may find physical communication impossible, difficult, or just rather boring who will gain a great deal more by communicating electronically.
Most of us have old acquaintances that we’re too busy to communicate “fully” with, but we’re definitely interested to see that they’re still alive and getting up to fun stuff.

Using technology enhances our communication options. We can choose to use those options, or not. Just as we can choose to emphasise physical presence or not.

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