John Johnson Jr. of the LA Times reports that NASA investigators narrowed down the loss of the Mars Global Surveyor to a bad command sent to the wrong address. Johnson also reports, “The review also said the spacecraft’s onboard fault protection system failed to respond to the errors.” Surely, NASA could afford to run through […]
The New York Times has posted an obituary for John Backus. All recent computer science graduates have been exposed to John Backus’ work with BNFs, making him a legend like Djiskstra. John Backus makes up the Backus in the Backus-Naur duo. I admit that I did not remember Backus as the creator of Fortran, but […]
Poor scheduling has been the bane of several projects with which I have had involvement. Ever since the one-month estimate that I gave for my first independent software development project, a shopping cart, a statement by Fred Brooks resonates continually in my mind. In The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks states, “More software projects have gone awry […]
Brandon Hutchinson provides a concise howto for chrooting SSH. For recent distributions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (like CentOS), the following may also be needed in addition to Hutchinson’s Fedora Core procedures: $ cp /lib/ld-linux.so.2 /chrootedpath/lib/. $ chmod 666 /chrootedpath/dev/null $ chmod 666 /chrootedpath/dev/zero Running ldd on the sshd binary executable will display the executable’s […]
I have dealt with multiple dedicated hosting and colocation service providers within the last three years. I maintain the servers at the colo where stevedoria.net is hosted, and I assist clients who do not receive their hosting services from me. Dealing with demanding clients and their always very restrictive budgets gave me experience in configuring […]