Critical Exponent

The Baltimore Sun is carrying an article on people who spend quit a chunk of their time immersed in virtual worlds, whose posessions and money can be traded in the real world for cold hard cash:

Companies in China pay thousands of people, known as “farmers,” to play MMORPGs [massively multiplayer online role-playing games] all day, then profit from selling the in-game goods they generate to other players for real money.

Trade in virtual items is now worth more than $100 million each year. In some Asian countries, where MMORPGs are particularly popular, in-game thefts and cheats have led to real-world arrests and legal action.

In one case in South Korea, the police intervened when a hoard of in-game money was stolen and sold, netting the thieves $1.3 million.

This has been getting some publicity lately, but I figure it’s always nice to have handy. Here’s Paul English’s cheat sheet to get around automated voicemail systems and speak to a live person.

While I’m at it, let me air a pet peeve: you dial some sort of service provider (bank, broker, it doesn’t matter), the voicemail system asks you to input your account number and other identifying information, puts you on hold, and finally transfers you to a live person… who then proceeds to ask you for exactly the same information you already typed in! Grrr….

In honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., here’s an annotated version of his “I have a dream” speech, highlighting Judaic references.

Credits

I hunted around for a while for ways to get the wireless to work, to no avail. My suspicion most of the time was that the wireless driver was not working, but it turns out that it probably was, earlier than I realized– it’s just that the system-config-network, the GUI to configure the wireless network, did not deal with the options I had set on my router.

Without delving into the path I took to get here, I wound up essentially following the suggestions by FedoraJim on this forum.

• From http://atrpms.net/dist/fc4/ipw2200-testing/, get the following:

  • ipw2200-1.0.10-36.rhfc4.at.i386.rpm
  • ipw2200-firmware-2.4-7.at.noarch.rpm
  • ipw2200-kmdl-2.6.14-1.1656_FC4-1.0.10-36.rhfc4.at.i686.rpm

• From http://atrpms.net/dist/fc4/ieee80211/, get the following:

  • ieee80211-1.1.8-8.rhfc4.at.i386.rpm
  • ieee80211-kmdl-2.6.14-1.1656_FC4-1.1.8-8.rhfc4.at.i686.rpm

• Then install all these rpm’s (via rpm -hiv *rpm as root) and reboot.

I first realized this worked just fine when I changed my router to be an open network and system-config-network to log into such an open network. Under my usual router settings, however, I was not establishing a connection. The problem is the following:

The router is using WEP Shared Key Authentication (sometimes also known as “non-beaconing”). Under this scheme, the router does not make its presence known to network probes (note that this is a separate issue from disabling SSID broadcast or not). This scheme is not handled by system-config-network. The other scheme, which is apparently assumed by system-config-network, is an “Open system,” where the router does become visible to the probes (what happens when you have SSID broadcast off on an open system, I don’t know).

The workaround, as I discovered here, is to go to your /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/keys-XX file (XX represents your logical network device) and replace the WEP key with a quoted string that contains the keyword restricted followed by the key, like so (where xxxxx represents your key):

key="restricted xxxxx"

After I had done this, I could indeed connect to my Shared Key WEP wireless network.

There is currently a bug report asking that system-config-network work with Shared Keys; unfortunately, it appears to not have seen any activity since 2004.

I also ran into another bug with that program, which has been previously reported multiple times: system-config-network makes you think you’re creating separate profiles, but all the profiles it writes to disk turn out to be identical (see the /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles/XXX directory).The workaround might be to enable all the logical devices you want for all your profiles, exit system-config-network, and then manually go your profiles directories and take out the logical devices (and their keys) that you don’t want. Unfortunately, this procedure would probably need to be repeated every time you use system-config-network. However, I have not tested this workaround because every time you switch profiles, the keys-XXX files from both /etc/sysconfig/networking/profiles and from /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts get re-written, overwriting the restricted workaround for the other bug. Sigh. For now, I guess I’ll have all the wireless logical interfaces in a single profile.

After verifying basic functionality with the pre-shipped Windows XP, I burned a few CD’s: an Ubuntu Live CD and install kit and a Fedora Core 4 Install Kit (four CDs).

The Ubuntu Live CD worked just fine; the Ubuntu installer, however, crashed upon bootup.

The Fedora Core Installer begins by suggesting you check your install CDs for integrity. This media check kept failing at first, but I discovered here that this could be an innocuous artifact of discordant padding schemes by the CD writing software; the workaround is to reboot the installer, specifying ide=nodma at the boot prompt. With this check, the CD-Rs validated fine. Interestingly, one of the CDs I burned wound up being a CD-RW, and that the media check would not validate successfully (I even downloaded and burned a new copy to a virgin CD-RW). I arbitrarily chalked this up to the media checker not handling CD-RWs correctly rather than a corrupt image, crossed my fingers, and proceeded.

After a successful, issue-free install, I booted up the new Linux system. It hung at the PCMCIA initialization phase. The solution, as I discovered here, is to reboot in single-user mode and then issue the commands

# chkconfig pcmcia off # reboot

to turn off PCMCIA initialization. I’ll have to come back to this to turn it on eventually.

After this change, Linux booted up successfully. However, the wireless did not work and the display was small and centered on my screen, at what was probably 1024×740 instead of the maximum1280×800.

I became the superuser and ran up2date from the command line. This did not bring up the graphical installer because root was having problems accessing X. I wound up logging into a new X session as root and running up2date manually from there. I upgraded all the packages, including the kernel and the sources. I am now running under kernel 2.6.14-1.1656_FC4. To be honest, part of the reason I ran up2date was trying to get the wirelss to work. It still didn’t, but it gave me an up-to-date place from which to start.

My new laptop arrived today. It’s a Sony VAIO VGN S580. Here are the specs:

• Screen: LCD 13.3″ WXGA Screen (1280×800)

• Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce Go 6400 with TurboCache

• Wireless Internet: Wireless LAN (802.11a\b\g) and Bluetooth Technology

• CPU: Intel Pentium M Processor 760 2.0GHz

• Memory 512 MB DDR-SDRAM (DDR2-400, 256 MBx2), which I will manually upgrade later to 2GB (ordering 2GB directly from SOny is outrageously expensive).

• Hard Disk: 100 GB Hard Disk Drive

• Optical media: CD-RW_DVD Drive

• Battery: Lithium-ion (BPL2)

All too often, people focus on immediate crises at the expense of long-term plans that can prevent such crises in the future. Case in point: diabetes treatment:

[Diabetes centers across New York] did not shut down because they had failed their patients. They closed because they had failed to make money. They were victims of the byzantine world of American health care, in which the real profit is made not by controlling chronic diseases like diabetes but by treating their many complications

The New York Times is running a series on diabetes. The first article remarks on the dramatic increase in diabetes, largely due to inactivity and obesity:

[T]the velocity of new cases among all races has accelerated significantly from just a few decades ago. Genetics cannot explain this surge, because the human gene pool does not change that fast. Instead, the culprit is thought to be behavior: faulty diet and inactivity. Dr. Vinicor, of the Centers for Disease Control, likes to use this expression: “Genetics may load the cannon, but human behavior pulls the trigger.”

The article then goes on to talk about the dire social effects of a population decimated at the prime of life by the diabetes contracted in youth:

Predicting the path of a disease is always speculative, but without bold intervention diabetes threatens to hamper some of society’s most basic functions.

For instance, no one with diabetes can join the military, though service members whose disease is diagnosed after enlisting can sometimes stay. No insulin-dependent diabetic can become a commercial pilot.

Shereen Arent, director of legal advocacy for the American Diabetes Association, says she already fields 150 calls a month from diabetics who complain that they are being discriminated against in the workplace, double the number just a couple of years ago. She mentioned a typical case, a man rejected for a job at a baked-bean factory in Texas as a safety risk. “If this continues,” she said, “we’re in big trouble.”

Apparently, it used to be a common, if not much discussed, practice to bind some books in human skin.

AMERICAblog reports on how, for little over $100, anyone can obtain a record of the calls made to and from any phone number. This, apparently, has been possible for quite a while.

Goodbye privacy, goodbye confidential sources, goodbye national security.