Book Club

Started: 2003-06-28 10:32:00

Submitted: 2003-06-28 10:54:00

Visibility: World-readable

The Kiln People discussion was interesting, although I think I would have had something to offer about the ending had I actually read it. The general consensus seemed to be that it was rather strange, although probably the only real ending that could have existed. When I finally finished the book last night, I didn't think the ending was unduly strange; I've read and seen far stranger endings in numerous other works.

Gem and I headed back to Boulder and I decided to try an alternate route: C-470 around the southwest side of Denver to Golden, then Colorado 93 to Boulder. I think it was a longer route, and perhaps a little slower, but it had distinct advantages over driving through Denver on I-25, especially under construction.

Thursday evening I got off work early and figured out another harder-to-exploit feature in my code to gain root access. (I distinctly was not looking forward to the prospect of heading to Denver to fix Hydrogen in person, especially since I was supposed to show up to praise practice at 1900.) I poked around and concluded that an old customer-created account called test (presumably with a password of test) had been compromised by a less-than-brilliant cracker from Mexico and used with a ptrace exploit to gain root access. The fact that I was able to figure all of this out, and the fact that I was alerted in the first place when the root password changed, is why I say the cracker was less-than-brilliant. He didn't even bother wiping his .bash_history.

I called Scott, told him what I knew, and we called off our trip to Denver. I headed to a rather useless praise practice, then to Hacking Society.

Friday night Gem and I were the only two at home; Bethany and Willy were off water skiing with the youth, Mom was setting up for Becca's wedding reception in Littleton, and then picked up Dad at DIA. Gem and I watched 10 Things I Hate About You, which was greatly amusing; I especially liked the well-written dialogue. I finally finished Kiln People and failed to find the ending nearly as strange as everyone else did.

Church is almost underway. Peace.