Combine a few minutes of sitting in a sleet blizzard with a panasonic toughbook tablet,
and this is what can result.

This morning, our 3.2-year old Eric was browsing through our picture album on the web. He took a closer look at this one:

He then asked: “What is the name of that baby?”. Then he answered “Stuart” (his 1.1-year old brother).

When I corrected him: “Eric Dreman Eigler”, he paused, looking puzzled. Then, with a little smile, the conclusion: “I was young, I was a baby.”.

So it turns out that once in a long while, slashdot serves to notify one of interesting news. If you are looking for a temporary band-aid to patch over this linux kernel security bug, consider the following systemtap script. While running, it will neuter all sys_vmsplice calls by overwriting one of the incoming parameters.

# stap -g -e 'probe syscall.vmsplice {
   printf("blocking vmsplice (%s) uid %d pid %d exec %s\n", argstr, uid(), pid(), execname())
   $nr_segs = 0
}'
blocking vmsplice (4, 0x00007fff25697ac0, 1, 0x0) uid 500 pid 32475 exec a.out
blocking vmsplice (4, 0x00007fff8c1da600, 1, 0x0) uid 500 pid 32476 exec a.out
blocking vmsplice (4, 0x00007fff71aaeed0, 1, 0x0) uid 500 pid 32477 exec a.out
blocking vmsplice (4, 0x00007fff215efa10, 1, 0x0) uid 500 pid 32478 exec a.out

UPDATE: If your systemtap doesn’t understand “syscall.vmsplice”, add this piece into
the script and try again:

probe syscall.vmsplice = kernel.function("sys_vmsplice") ? {
        name = "vmsplice"
        argstr = sprintf("%d, %p, %d, 0x%x", $fd, $iov, $nr_segs, $flags)
}

Hey, why not keep it running until you install a patched kernel and are ready to boot into it?

In the “kids say the …est things” category, I was unable to convince our 3.2-year-old that I am a super man. Instead, “you are an ancient, gigantic man.”. Thanks, kid.

I received an invoice today from the local toll highway company. It is for $0.01.

Yeah, it seems like I made an off-by-one-cent error in my last payment. So the company spends at least $0.52 (first-class postage), plus printing costs, to send me a notification about that penny. The entire ancestry of accountants is slowly rolling in their collective graves.

What next? Well, an unpaid bill apparently suffers interest at 27%/year. That would be a quarter of a cent of interest over the year – I could probably afford that much, considering the entertainment value. As the years drag on, imagine the company sending a monthly “you’re late on your ridiculously tiny bill” statement. According to Mathematica, it would take them almost 43 years — roughly my remaining lifetime, if I’m lucky — to break even considering the most basic costs of monthly billing all that time.

There is only one fly in this tasty ointment. The small print on the bill says that unpaid bills after 90 days are sent to a collection agency, with an extra “collection fee” added. I fear this undisclosed fee is not simply a small multiple of the charge. And, ooooooohhh scaaaaary, they threaten to put it onto my credit rating.

I hereby solicit advice about whether I should let my naughty side override the Morally Appropriate Behaviour Module, and wait 90 or even 9000 days, versus paying the lousy penny now.

Fidel Castro’s recent self-eulogy (er, “resignation letter”), and its favourable presentation by the modern media is another delightful demonstration of the absurdity of some aspects of the modern left. The same journalist that praises Castro is invincibly ignorant of Castro’s explicit intent to nuke the USA (=> the journalist and/or her parents) during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (That’s according to McNamara’s first-hand account in The Fog of War),

It reminds one of modern gay/feminist/…ist activists allying themselves with islamists – not apparently realizing that their “allies” would have them killed if they only could.

In an interesting turn of phrase, on the Fox News website, there is a featured article entitled World’s Longest-Serving Leaders After Fidel Castro. While in the west, “public service” is an acceptable synonym for working in some level of the government, it is surely an error to apply the term to dictators, such as just about all on that list. They do not serve – they dictate. It’s a whole different world – something not acknowledged by naively reusing local idioms.