Welcome to MekTrix 4.0

Finally got round to checking out wormholes, ended up making ~100mil in loot. Quite pleased, just salvaging one more wreck before heading home; not bothering to check d-scan since the system’s been empty all night, and what could turn up in the final few seconds? Look away for a moment, look back — webbed, scrammed, jammed, and neuted by a group of T2 gankers. Pants were shat, drones were launched, and fingers were crossed. Can’t tell what’s happening as all systems are down… 15 seconds later, an explosion. Still under heavy fire, but my sleeper tank has held and the warp drive is unlocked \o/ Flee before the backup tackler gets in range~~~~

Having run to safety, I check my kill list and see that the tackle ship was more than twice as expensive as mine, and it’s also my first killmail for that character since IRON was around XD Plus, 4.5mil bounty from that pilot’s pool \o/ A nice bit of extra win to a profitable evening /o/

Graphics drivers lock up, but I don’t want to reboot, or even log out / in again since I’m in the middle of stuff. What to do?

Ctrl-Alt-F1 to switch to console mode. Screen is black, as the drivers are still locked up; but pulseaudio has detected that my desktop login is no longer visible, so it mutes the sound from that session. That’s pretty cool.

Blindly type in my username and password in the hope that I can log into a locked-up console. Turns out that firstly, I can (yay), and also, pulseaudio detects that I have a new session for the same user, and sends my desktop session’s audio stream to the console session, so my music continues playing from where it left off (wtfawesome).

Then “killall -ABRT enlightenment” to kill my window manager – with most WMs, they’d just die and exit and I’d be at the login screen again, but Enlightenment is a desktop by coders for coders, and hence does something far more awesome — pops up a message saying “Hey, E crashed, would you like to relaunch it and carry on?”, to which I respond “yes”, and it re-initialises the graphics stack and picks up all my still-running programs just as they were before the lockup.

Uptime \o/

I saw a music video with clips from the series, and it seemed pretty cool; the best of magical girl and mech worlds? Unfortunately not. After trying really hard to like the first episode, I can’t think how to describe it other than “a bit pants”:

(Background: Braid is a game where you can do stuff, then rewind time and use your knowledge of the “future” to your advantage)

As far as I remember, I only briefly played Braid as a demo, on my own, a couple of years ago, and I skipped most of the levels for being a pain. But I have just spent the evening playing the full game, with Aoi (who I met this year) telling me how I solved the puzzles before, and how I got 100% completion on them. Then when she can’t remember one level’s solution, I think to myself “maybe I should look online”, and she says “this is where you looked online last time… but you can’t now because the internet has cut out”; then I went upstairs and checked, and it had o.o

I wonder which is weirder — her being a magical girl with the power to see the future, or me actually having played a lot of Braid and then completely forgotten it…

I do kind of vaguely remember it, now that she tells me in detail what happened, but that in itself is weird as I was waiting for the linux release before buying — and if we were watching a youtube run through just to see the plot, why does she know so much about the puzzles? Did we really go through the demo, then watch a full plot + puzzle run on youtube, she remembers every detail, and I don’t remember it at all? o____o

A tangent on free will / determinism / many worlds — apparently, I approached each puzzle in exactly the same way this time as I did when I was playing it the first time, as though this time /was/ my first time… This then makes me ponder the many worlds theory — in one universe a coin flip lands heads, in another tails; but would it? As eeriely demonstrated, even with a system as complex as the human brain, given the same inputs you get the same outputs…

I wanted my VMs bridged onto my LAN so they would be publicly accessible, but virt-manager only had options for creating new, private bridges. However, it turns out that if you create the bridge yourself, libvirt will use it. So, in /etc/network/interfaces:

auto virbr0
iface virbr0 inet manual
pre-up ifconfig eth1 down
pre-up brctl addbr virbr0
pre-up brctl addif virbr0 eth1
pre-up ifconfig eth1 up
post-down ifconfig eth1 down
post-down brctl delif virbr0 eth1

Then when libvirt-bin tries to find / create the “default” network on virbr0, it uses the already created one, and the guests are then bridged with the rest of the network. Note that adding this config on eth1 stopped networkmanager from working for eth0, so I had to set up eth0 in interfaces too. Having this setup on a single port should be similar (I would guess that replacing “manual” with “dhcp” would work?)

Somebody needs to take Next’s web developers out back and shoot them v_v The reason

Good idea: Go for a walk.

Bad idea: Go for a walk at 11pm, up the steepest hill in the area, directly away from civilisation, into the middle of a forest, where the main form of life is stinging nettles, and there is no light, and your torch is just about out of batteries, and even in daylight it’s impossible to tell where the path is, and what path there is alternates between slippery mud and rubble hills, while carrying a 30kg backpack just to see what it’s like.

(“Bad” can also be read as “fun”)

Specifically, this wins a place on my “things that are so awesome I cried” list :3

Having spent several hours trying to figure out what was causing the following, it turns out that the selinux policy installer hadn’t noticed I was running SSH, and thus hadn’t loaded the module to allow it. “semodule -i /usr/share/selinux/refpolicy-strict/ssh.pp” loaded the module, then “restorecon -R -v /usr/sbin” reset the security tags to say that sshd belongs to ssh.

sshd[2454]: Accepted password for shish from 10.0.2.2 port 40878 ssh2
sshd[2457]: (pam_unix) session opened for user shish by (uid=0)
sshd[2457]: Unable to get valid context for shish, No valid tty
sshd[2457]: error: PAM: pam_open_session(): Authentication failure
sshd[2457]: error: Failed to get default security context for shish.Continuing in permissive mode
sshd[2454]: error: Failed to get default security context for shish.Continuing in permissive mode
sshd[2454]: error: security_compute_relabel(/dev/pts/1) failed: Invalid argument
sshd[2460]: error: Failed to get default security context for shish.Continuing in permissive mode
sshd[2446]: error: chown /dev/pts/0 0 0 failed: Permission denied
sshd[2446]: error: chmod /dev/pts/0 0666 failed: Permission denied