Lord Andrei's Blog

Yesterday I had two annoying traumas. One of which involved a replacement cell phone that I payed to have expedited. The other was a pizza order.

The replacement phone hadn’t arrived Monday afternoon so I called them to ask what had happened. The person who took my tech call to replace my phone asked me if I wanted it sent express for a charge and then ignored my request to do so.

The person assured my I wouldn’t be charged. And then asked if there was anything else she could do.

“Yes, could you send a message up the line to the person who took the order and explain that he made a mistake and my phone will now be delayed because of his error.”

“But you won’t be charged sir, there’s nothing to worry about.”

See, that’s what pisses me off. Not only didn’t their department ‘service’ me to begin with, but when I asked them to prevent repeating the problem for others they ignored me as if I’d missed the point that an apology made it go away.

Dear customer service, an apology if empty not only does not fix a problem, but proves to the end customer that you really don’t care about the customer anyways.

Onto the Pizza delivery…

Last night at 6pm we called for a food delivery at a friend’s house. The street has a strange name and it’s a small off-off-a main street residential road. At 6:45 the first call came in. My friend who lives there of course fielded the call only to discover she had to explain a second time what the address was.

Then there was the 2nd, third, and 4th calls. Each time she was unable to get the person to understand street names, or the request to explain where he was so wi could give him directions.

By the 5th call 7:30… we were all getting rather unhappy, hungry and annoyed at the incompetence of the driver. I offered to field call #5. I made him pull out a local map book (which he said he had) and made him read it to me street by street.

“I’m sorry, my english is no so good, Yes?”
“Yes.”

It turned out that he was incapable of reading a map, following street and reading the roads that intersected it involved him jumping back and forth around the blocks. It turned out, that he did not have the map he said he did. It turned out that I had to patronize him and treat him like a 4 year old to make him understand where we were.

At 7:40 he showed up. Which was lucky for the guests as we almost ate the person who showed up at 7:35 to teach a class.
(Ding dong)
FOOD
Door!
Aww. You’re not food.
Then we had to explain our reaction.

So, the guy shows up with food. I payed him no tip beyond the $0.30 that I wasn’t going to try to explain that he owed me.

Now, I guess I’m a mean evil person. I don’t like incompetence. To me incompetence is the inability to do the basic tasks required of the job or activity you are doing. For Pizza delivery it’s the following

There is a phrase in the SCA called YKYISCAW (You know you’re in the sca when) or some vairant. Now I haven’t touched the sca in close to a year.

Sadly, however, I had what I can only call a “YKYACMW” This would be: ‘You know you are a ceremonial magickian when…”

I was looking over a reference book on ‘Cocoa’ today. This is the major programming framework for the mac. For those of you out there who would like to join in the fun, turn in your hymnals (Cocoa in a nutshell) to page 89.

There was an illustration on how to generate graphics. Using a broken dashed set of lines as an example. I opened the book and thought to myself… Hmmn, I wonder what the I-Ching for the diagram is.

Now, the added icing on the cake as I know there is at least one CM who reads this who has that book near his desk at home… (Fra. S, yes I am talking about you)… I wrote up the post and noticed that the chapter section title at the bottom of the page is, “Working with paths”

As our learned Fra. S. would inevitably say, “sigh”

–“It’s all in your head. You just have no idea how big a place that is.”
(Rabbi Lamed ben Clifford)

I received a phone call from the Provost of the University of Pittsburgh for hacking their main computer system.

therrall pointed out:
I think if that happened, you’d have been in some serious shit, ’cause it’s a Federal Crime to hack anyones computer. :p

So, I get this nifty, neato job at Pitt. I am Lead Macintosh Engineer for the University of Pittsburgh. And my first job was to make Mac OS 7.0 a multi-user login environment that took its password library from Kerberos over AFS and then mounted application servers through Novell.

For the non-techie-lay types, this was to take 3 puzzle pieces from three different puzzles made on 3 different media in 3 entirely different shapes and build a picture out of them that no one had ever seen.

For the techie types who understand the technology at the time I’ll say that a lack of multi user technology coupled with the lack of Novell APIs for the Mac was… a challenge.

Back to the NTL types. An API is a list of commands a computer program can make to assist the program with tasks he shouldn’t need to write from scratch. Commands like DrawWindow(at position here) to save me from commands like, “Okay to draw a window you start with how to draw a boarder, how to paint it in, blah blah blah”

Novell was the big bad server environment that could authenticate files, folders, volumes, users, groups, devices, flavours of ice cream, bathroom stall locks… it was all very ZEN ™ Unfortunately, this was about ’96 when people were asking me (upon hearing the job title), “Didn’t Apple go bankrupt or something” {Apple fans are thinking, ‘yeah which time….’}

As a result, Novell really didn’t play well with Macs. In fact they didn’t play at all. The APIs I had were from 91 and were for something like Novell 2 and we were on Novell 5. All I needed it to do was let me say, “Yeah, I’ve checked out this user… they are legit, can you let me have volume ‘foo’ with all the mac software the management decided to store on it (for reasons we never could argue).. .Oh and I’d like to show the volume on the mac’s desktop.

Two weeks I plumbed thru a lack of documentation that equaled out to binary dumps of the interface library. (NTL-types: translation — loud wretching noises) I finally found a command NVMOUNTVOL(userid) or something to that effect.. the details are kind of furry.

So, I made my test program and used me as the guinea-pig.

>run

“Illegal access, server intrusion violation: user gt42”

Dialog appears on my screen.Actually, it was kind of neat because it appeared on my coworker’s screen too.

I made a change or two and ran it again.

“Illegal access, server intrusion violation: user gt42”

Just about then my manager called me. He wanted to know what I was doing. Apparently, that message was being sent out to every user logged into that Novell Volume. He was curious because he got the message and then got a call from the Provost who wanted to know who user gt42 was and why he was hacking the main system.

15 minutes later, my research turned up that I was using a depreciated (read: old discarded, you really shouldn’t use) API that told the servers in the main computer warehouse to force themselves to give me the rights to tell them to add and remove entire tape libraries on their end for public consumption.

I explained this first to my manager and then after we figured out how to ‘dumb down’ the explanation… I took a call from and spoke to the provost to guarantee him we (and especially I) were working for the university to strengthen security and that was proof that the stronger security was in place.

Remember the last post… Kids: it does not pay to be a hacker. Especially with intentions to cause problems. 😉

I once intentionally crashed Carnegie Mellon University’s computer system

The Andrew system (as I have been told) tends to run at about 130% or its prime operating system. What this obscene statistic translates to is that it is typically pushing its resources to the point where the slightest thing could really mess it up.

About 7-10 years ago the ‘net’ in Pittsburgh went to absolute hell one afternoon across the city. An industrial backhoe had been digging without checking with the PUC somewhere around one of the surrounding counties. The backhoe had managed to take out one of the T-3 bundles that fed the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, which in turn (I’m given the ‘correctable’ impression) at the time fed most of the city’s universities and ISPs.

Service at Pitt and CMU went to absolute hell. The systems were running, but since their mere operation was so dependant upon the internet, they were more than a little flaky. A colleague and I were looking for something net related (a usenet archive) on one of the served Andrew systems. (Andrew had this strange method of email and news that allowed you to actually look at the USENet hierarchy as a series of folders with cryptically named files. I asked my colleague if we could do a recursive search for a directory. I was looking to see if there was a news group that had the name ‘foobarsomethingorother’ in it.

This was a very innocuous command, something to the effect of:

ls -alR /andrew/usenet/ | grep fly-fishing

There was a longer than average pause which we credited to the fact that the net had wreaked havoc on the system, but we figured the directories were local, so this should not have been a bad task. Suddenly the terminal started sending us strange errors:

Vice 2 going down
Vice 3 going down
…
Vice 23 going down

It was explained to me that those were the mounted user system partition mirrors which kept the files for all users and other necessary data. After those messages, his account was no longer accessible and his directory was ‘temporary unaccessible.’ We looked at each other. This thing happened on occasion and it tended to mean something sorta crashed and needed to re’something’ and come back up. The process took about 4 minutes to fix itself.

After 4 minutes… Vice 2 is up….etc

“Did we do that”, I asked him
“Dunno.” he replied.

I hit the up arrow to cycle to the last search command and intentionally hit enter.

“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Finding out if it was coincidence or us…”

Vice 2 going down
Vice 3 going down
…
Vice 23 going down

And then 4 minutes later it was back up again.

“So what was the point of that?”
“Now I can email their management and tell them to investigate a nasty bug in their system”

——-

A few years later I was applying for a software engineering position at Pitt with an emphasis in networking and security. During the interview the following exchange occurred:

“Are you familiar with large scale networking dynamics and fault tolerance management.”
“I crashed CMU once”
“Intentionally ?!?!?!”
“Not the first time.”
“Excuse me”
“I had to go back and find out if it was me, so I could send the issue to someone for diagnosis.”

And 3 days later I was hired. I was notified by the manager that that comment was the one that put me ahead of the other guy who had my level of experience and broke the tie.

Summary: Hacker… Was as a kid, discovered that mucking with a system can be dangerous and it’s better to be helpful to them than an outsider that they can come after. By college age, I was trying to be knowledgeable without being intrusive. Anything that went wrong was not as a result of me trying to do something that one was not supposed to do.

I’ve taken candid photos of Brooke Shields… and almost got arrested.

The year was 1980… I was in 7th grade. I was attending a private school called “Princeton Day” Probably one of the worst years of my life…

Some rival school from North New Jersey came to play the High school (PDS was 1st – 12th). The whole school was buzzing that Brooke was a cheerleader for the oposing team. So, I opted to bring a camera with me to the sporting event.

At one point I managed to get under the small set of visitor bleachers and snap off a picture of her at a bout a range of 5 feet straight on. She was visibly startled. Some big burley guy noticed me and headed for the bleachers. I took off in the other direction. He ran after me signalling a security guard to join him in the chase.

Fortunately, at that time I was a scrawny little non=descript 13 year old. I took off…well, primarily out of fear and never looked back.

The following week when the film came back I had my prize posession. A fairly good candid shot of Brooke Shields.

A note looking back on something that is approaching 2/3 of my lifetime ago… It was really nothing invredibly special or hard to do. But I think the event was a landmark for me because it was the first time I did something that had to be planned that I would have gotten in trouble for. It was the first time I ‘dared’ to do something. And I was proud of the results.