bryan wann :: binary fury

Admittedly it’s been a few months since I’ve taken a walk around the neighborhood, but I noticed for the first time people around here don’t go out of their way to avoid each other on the sidewalk. Ever since covid started people on their daily walks would brutally social distance outside, either darting off into the bike lane, walk off into the grass, or even onto the side of the street to avoid oncoming pedestrians or overtake somebody else. This happened well into 2021, both in the neighborhood sidewalks but also the park here. I haven’t noticed it so much in downtown areas like San Jose or Santana Row, everyone has been quite happy to congregate for quite a while.

Last summer after peak covid, I ballooned up to 224 pounds. I saw a photo of me at a cookout and I had a definite belly which really motivated me to do something. It was starting to affect my sleep as I’d have to start rolling over to sleep on my sides, because laying on my back was uncomfortable. A couple of my buddies had just started either a keto or paleo diet and after hearing what they were doing it didn’t sound so terrible. I love me some meat and cheese so I started trying to do a keto diet in July.

I quickly realized unless I cooked at home I couldn’t get in enough protein to go completely zero carb. At the end of the first week I felt so hungry no matter how many cheese sticks, beef jerky, or pork cracklins I ate it didn’t help, I had to run to In n Out for a burger. I improvised a bit and cut out all the carbs I could, no pasta, no pizza, no fries, virtually no bread, no candy, no beer, no breaded meats, and went for BBQ brisket, steak, pulled chicken, hot links, and drank only Diet Coke / coffee / tea. Instead of beer my drink of choice was rum and diet soda which had surprisingly few calories, yet very tasty. I lived on In-n-Out 3 x 3s and Flying Dutchmans on the weekends which certainly got me protein and fat. Eventually the hunger calmed down and while sometimes I felt hunger it was easier to ignore, much unless the first week. Admittedly I was very lazy and did not hit the gym at all so I probably could have lost it a lot quicker if I was active.

A pound here, a pound there the weight started coming off. I plateaued at 201-203 around the holidays, but finally hit 199 this weekend. I’ve now basically gotten rid of my covid weight and back at the weight I was at when I was going rucking in the summer of 2020 to originally lose weight. I’d love to get back to 180 again, we’ll see.

It was rather amazing to realize just how much carbohydrates we eat out of convenience. Hit the convenience store, potato chips and a soda? carbs. candy? carbs. Fast food, burger bun? carbs. french fries? carbs. Breakfast? pancakes, toast, biscuits, waffles, potatoes, oatmeal, cereal, juice? all carbs. It also turns out carbs are really cheap compared to only eating proteins, my cost per meal went up a good amount during all of this.

Dreams are weird and so personal that they’re useless to try to describe to somebody else. I seem to have three recurring dreams that happen occasionally and they’re kind of fascinating to me.

One is where I imagine my iPhone bending and breaking up. Like it starts off as a couple of hairline cracks through the front/back glass, maybe a defined bend where I carried it in my back pocket and sat on it. As time goes on more cracks appear and the shell starts to come completely apart and feels like a melted candy bar, to a point it looks like it got ran over by a car, and have to gently press bits of the phone together where it still works. Most interesting about this dream is that I’ve realized when my phone starts coming apart (I’ve never sat on my phone and bent it IRL) I know I’m in a dream and can either try to wake myself up or play with some lucid dreaming.

A second related one is that while trying to use a phone/computer/tablet I can’t type and/or the UI gets messed up. Most commonly I’m trying to type in something and the output isn’t what I want, like I’m hitting the wrong keys repeatedly or the auto-correct has gone way crazy. I’ll try over and over and think I wind up waking up from frustration. Or, I try to wake up my phone and there’s constant ads I have to click through even to get to the home screen. Or, I try to take a photo and the phone decides to auto-crop on a particular subject instead of the entire scene like I want. Those are the frustrating ones.

Lastly is a dream of this posh apartment. It has wooden roman columns out on the front porch, brick exterior walls, and a nice interior. The kitchen has a bunch of boxes piled up around it because I don’t cook much and haven’t gotten around to unpacking my cookware (this is something I’d do IRL). Nothing of particular interest happens here. Occasionally I’ve moved to another apartment and a month later remember I haven’t cleaned this unit out of all my property so I have to go pack it up. This dream apartment feels so strongly familiar I’ve actually woken up in the middle of the night and seriously had to think about every address I’ve lived at to try to remember where this place was, and finally realize I have in fact never lived anywhere remotely like this.

Finally got around to getting my covid booster. Holy crap, the side effects were even worse than the 2nd dose. Hours of chills and shaking, inability to sleep, then a fever all day where I soaked anything I was wearing or laying on, then body aches and stomach cramps. Today I feel like I got hit by a truck, but much better than yesterday. This better last me a while!

TL;DR it’s SHA1 with no newline

We wanted to create off-line templates for our Netgear SmartManaged switches (which runs a blatant IOS CLI ripoff), but needed a way to generate the encrypted password hash from a given plaintext password:

username test password test
-to-
username test password encrypted a94a8fe5ccb19ba61c4c0873d391e987982fbbd3

For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what algorithm they used, it wasn’t an obvious salted hash (lack of $x$saltsalt$ prefix) nor was it the old style Cisco MD5 mechanism. Wasn’t SHA256 either.  It’s 40 characters long, consisting of [a-z0-9] which looked like a hex representation of something. Frantic googling wasn’t helping me, nor the myriad of various password generators.

I was at my wits end and was about to post on r/networking (yay talking to rubber duckies) about it when I decided to go back at the list of algorithms I tried and wondered if we tried SHA1 with no line return like I had seen in some examples. That worked:

bwann@basic76:~$ echo -n "test" | openssl sha1
(stdin)= a94a8fe5ccb19ba61c4c0873d391e987982fbbd3

Got both doses of the tracking chips in and my 5G coverage is increasing!

(I forget how this is supposed to work, do the tracking chips provide 5G and GPS, or do the 5G towers attract bats that infect people with covid? or do the 5G towers cause covid and the vaccination will kill my 5G service? Do I need to buy a bat? What about my GPS service while I’m in a tunnel or underground garage or the shower?  Is there a data cap? Will my 5G shed RF matter on other non-vaccinated people? So many questions!)

The mass vaccination site I went to in Oakland was something straight out of a CERA setup in Division 2 with all the cones and barriers and National Guard and pop up tents.

The first dose (Pfizer) was a no-op but the second dose kicked my ass. At first was headaches, then some wicked chills. I got up to use the bathroom at 3 AM and started shaking so bad by the time I made it back to bed I buried myself in all the covers and had to catch my breath. A couple hours later I was sitting in front of my space heater on full blast. Then I was just dead tired for the rest of the day, couldn’t even be bothered to use a laptop while laying down.

Tossed and turned all night, practically didn’t sleep at all.  Finally a bit better yesterday evening, a bit headachy and groggy.

I wonder what the booster shots will be like?

Welp, it didn’t take long for 2021 to get crazy

Jan 3  Washington Post has audio of Trump pressuring GA to find votes
Jan 4  UK declines to extradite Assange to the US
Jan 5  Dr. Dre in ICU due to brain aneurysm
Jan 6  Protestors storm the US Capitol, Senate chambers and offices
Jan 7  Congress confirms Biden vote in early morning
       People I know get COVID vaccines
Jan 10 Everyone bails on Parler, site taken offline;  all data archived
Jan 20 Biden sworn in, Q people freakout at lack of mass arrests and martial law
Jan 28 Gamestop GME hits $500 high, reddit rejoices
Feb 11 Oklahoma, Texas, most of central US get hit by blizzard
       water/gas/electricity shit hits fan
Feb 21 777 engine explodes over Denver
Feb 22 Daft Punk breaks up
       US hits 500,000 covid deaths

Working in a Ubuntu world now, I really miss the Anaconda installer that CentOS/Fedora used. Every time I find myself having a problem with the d-i installer when doing network PXE installs, I find myself grepping and tracing through the source code.

While doing a Ubuntu 18 network install with a preseed file (all of which had previously worked just fine, no changes) we hit this error after the installer brought up the network: Downloading a file failed: The installer failed to access the mirror. This may be a problem with your network, blah blah blah.

Getting on the machine and diving into syslog, this is where things were going south:

Oct  6 23:10:48 anna[4786]: 2020-10-06 23:10:48 \
  URL:http://mirror.example.com/repository/ubuntu/dists/bionic/main/binary-amd64/Release \
  [109/109] -> "-" [1]
Oct  6 23:10:48 anna[4786]: WARNING **: bad d-i Packages file
Oct  6 23:10:48 anna[4786]: 2020-10-06 23:10:48 
  URL:http://mirror.example.com/repository/ubuntu/dists/bionic/Release \
  [22243/22243] -> "/tmp/_fetch-url_net-retriever-4838-Release.4839" [1]
Oct  6 23:10:48 net-retriever: Not verifying Release signature: unauthenticated mode enabled
Oct  6 23:12:34 anna[4786]: WARNING **: bad d-i Packages file

This was very confusing because watching the logs on the mirror server, Packages was never even attempted to be downloaded, so how could it complain about a bad Packages file?  The Releases file seemed sane, downloading it with wget on another machine, size, checksum all lined up.

(Also for the love of god, why are there no pagers in the install environment?  no less, no more, not even vim, which makes it agonizing to look at logs. There’s just nano.)

Further, going onto another machine at the same site, doing an apt clean and blowing away all of the apt cache directories, then doing an apt update, everything was fine. I was able to download the packages indexes and install a package just fine.

So what gives?  The Internets didn’t have any good leads, everyone seems to hit this bad d-i Packages file error while installing from CD-ROMs in 2009.

I went directly to the anna source code to see exactly what it was doing to generate that error. It’s written in C and I couldn’t see any obvious things that were going wrong.  I didn’t find any other way to generate some debug logs for what d-i was doing. The closest thing I could find was doing dconf debugging by putting DEBCONF_DEBUG=developer on the kernel command line and re-trying the network install. This didn’t give me any logging for what anna and other commands were doing, but I did notice around my error it was setting a retriever/net/error value.

Googling around for what might set retriever/net/error lead me to the source for /usr/lib/debian-installer/retriever/net-retriever.

(have I mentioned how much I hate all the janky shell scripts that this installer calls out to?)

Inside the net-retriever script it’s doing some things with Package files which caught my interest. On my trouble system, I shoved an echo $* >> /tmp/blah-cmds to get it to record all of the arguments that the script was getting and tell me its secrets.

I hit retry on the installer, got the same error, but got this output of things fed to net-retriever:

# cat /tmp/blah-cmds
cleanup
config
packages /var/cache/anna/Packages
packages_one mirror.example.com /repository/ubuntu /var/cache/anna/Packages bionic
error packages
packages /var/cache/anna/Packages
packages_one mirror.example.com /repository/ubuntu /var/cache/anna/Packages bionic
error packages
cleanup

hmmm. I went back and added a set -x at the top of the file and ran the script with the packages_one line.  (The installer environment uses Busybox, so can’t just say bash -x of course)

Looking at the trace output I saw things like this:

+ pkgfile=restricted/debian-installer/binary-amd64/Packages
+ grep restricted/debian-installer/binary-amd64/Packages$ /tmp/net-retriever-5295-Release
+ line=
+ [ 1 != 0 ]
+ continue
+ exit 1

What’s this debian-installer business?

We didn’t have that directory available on our repos, and it finally dawned on me that it’s looking through the Releases file for various debian-installer/.../Packages paths. Because our Releases file didn’t have entries for them, this is what was causing anna to throw the bad d-i Packages file error. My other system worked just fine because it wasn’t trying to fetch installer packages.  blah!

My understanding of the problem was that in our Aptly mirrors we weren’t mirroring udeb for our various components. Once we fixed that, debian-installer became available and everything was happy.

I literally had my hair cut in a shady back alley in Palo Alto. It was legit business with pop-up tents and chairs and everything, but I just like the clandestine sound of that statement.

The only upside of all this crazy time is businesses doing business outside on a fine California summer day. I think we’ve only had two businesses with any sort of regular outdoor dining in Fremont, now there’s more, even if it is basically outdoor takeout in a parking lot. I really missed all the outdoor dining we had in Austin when I moved to the west coast. It remains to be seen if this is even sustainable for business, but I hope it becomes a more permanent thing.

In other news, I finally got my FAA medical sorted out, and well on my way to solo phase check!

Update 2/2022: who knew back then this mask thing would blow up into an enormous personal and political battlefield, and we’d still be dealing with them two years later!?

Air is hard. People do not seem to get it or can’t be bothered. I’ve watched this play out both during the choking California wildfires and the current Coronavirus pandemic. Air goes in the body, air goes out of the body. I see so many people having heated arguments and confusion now about what masks to wear, wearing masks incorrectly, what’s effective, and how you must hate America if you are sheeple wearing a mask in public (what?). Fuck, people are getting outright assaulted or killed over wearing masks.

I don’t pretend to be an epidemiologist, I just want to talk about air. I like air.  I guess the point of all this is that masks, face coverings, et al, do have a purpose, they’re not completely useless, but lots of people don’t seem to reason through it.

Masks and respirators are different, having different jobs depending if air is going in, or going out. Masks catch things going out, like sneezes, spit, snot; they’re generally loose against the face and on inhale air can easily come in from the sides. Basic respirators will catch things going in, like sawdust, smoke, asbestos, bacteria, and mold, because when worn properly they form a tight seal against the skin around the mouth and nose; air has to go through the filter medium to get into your body.

However! Adding an extra caveat in today’s world, most consumer and professional respirators are only designed to filter air coming in, and have a valve to allow air to go out unobstructed for comfort.  Medical respirators are solid (no valves) and will filter air in and air out, and are a little more moisture proof.

Bay Area air quality index 2018

During the 2018 Paradise fire, the Bay Area was blanketed for days in smoke. It was very obvious when you walked outside and could smell it (and quite frankly, taste it). The government air quality index considers a “Good” AQI to be on the order of 0-50; during the worst, where I lived hit around ~180, “Unhealthy” for people with heart/lung disease; just over the hills in Livermore they easily hit ~270, “Very Unhealthy”, all older adults and children should avoid physical activity outdoors.

The tiny particles of burned up houses (PM2.5) that could irritate the lungs were only filtered out if you had a N95 respirator or better. Yet many people were walking around wearing surgical masks instead of respirators. I would’ve expected this to work itself out, “Geee, I’m going to all the trouble to wear this thing on my face and I still smell burning smoke, what ever could be the problem? Maybe I don’t have the right thing?”  Alas, it didn’t, many people still walked around with surgical masks loosely dangling off their ears, still inhaling smoke from around the sides of the mask.  I guess, oh it’s good enough?

Today we’re dealing with both air in and air out. We want to filter droplets from entering the respiratory tract that may have Coronavirus in it, this protects the wearer. We want to filter droplets from leaving the body, when we breath out, talk, sneeze, cough, this protects everyone around us.

Duration matters too, there’s a huge difference between walking somebody in the store and being in close proximity to somebody else for hours on in end in closed quarters.

I feel like most people finally understand the former case, air-in. Wearing a respirator directly protects the wearer, such as a healthcare worker, or your parent.

“But I’m not sick! Why do I have to wear a mask to go to the grocery store! You’re all stupid sheeple!”

Now we’re up to the air-out case, with the added bonus of contagion. The big problem: lack of early symptoms of covid, or a complete lack of symptoms. It’s been shown that a person is most contagious right before they start showing symptoms.  A person could be breathing/spitting/slobbering infectious particles for days before realizing they are sick and decide to stay inside and away from others.

The elephant in the room are asymptomatic carriers. It’s been shown there’s a likely a huge amount of asymptomatic carriers walking around that have no idea that they’re infected because they never feel sick, breathing/spitting/slobbering particles forever that could make other people sick. 60% of sailors on the USS Theodore Roosevelt that tested positive for covid did not have symptoms. I frankly assume I have a good chance of being an asymptomatic carrier because I live near some of California’s hot spots. We won’t know we’re asymptomatic until we get some sort of test that can detect the presence.

The thing en vogue today is “mask” or “face covering”.  This is dealing with air-out and the blast radius of your breath/spit/slobber/snot. It’s true, masks are not filters. They will not filter out every micron of air leaving your body. But, they help you from breathing/spitting/slobbering particles (which is what viruses ride outside) all over the produce at grocery store, the handlebars on the train, or gym equipment. In the former case I mentioned above, a face cover could help reduce (not eliminate!) the spread before you can take yourself out.  I don’t have numbers on how effective face covering are, but it seems pretty obvious that it limits your blast radius before particles get a chance to fall out of the air.

This is where we start running into problems with respirators with valves, which can be a false sense of security depending on the intended purpose. If the intent in the current state of the world is to filter air-out to protect others, air is not being filtered at all on exhales. At best it’s just slowing down the air and limiting your blast radius. The joke is I could wear my full-face gas mask with P100 filters in a crowded store, I would protect myself all day long from others, but my bad breath goes right out the front without any sort of filtering.

(Technically I’m kind of boned because even though I trimmed my beard way back, my mask can’t get a solid seal so some air still gets in around the sides)

Nose cockers, why do you do this

My #1 pet peeve is people walking around wearing a mask but only covering their mouth, leaving their nose dangling out. I saw this as far back as the beginning of March. Your nose hole and mouth hole are directly connected inside your head, you’re still either exposing others or exposing yourself. Why intentionally half ass-it?  Whyyyyyyyyyyyy? The majority aren’t wearing glasses so I know fogging isn’t an issue. Either wear a mask or not, I don’t care. Whyyyyyyyyy do people do this?

I still don’t get the earlier kerfuffle from earlier this year where CDC., et al., were telling us not to wear a mask, wear a mask, don’t wear a mask, wear a face covering. No wonder people are confused and revolting about masks. I actually saw the same thing during the California wildfires, some health officials were saying not to wear a mask.

Happy birthday to me

Want to stir up a shit storm? Post a photo of yourself wearing a mask. Holy shit, the Internet has opinions about this and they will let you know. I get it, people on principle are against the government telling them what to do, and there’s been advocacy for shaming people in public for not wearing a mask, even if they’re nowhere near anyone else or a crowded spot.

For the record I’ll wear my buff when I go into stores or the office, but not while I’m out on walks around the ‘hood because people literally go out of their way to avoid each other. Personally I get a kick walking around masked up like a cartel hitman and it’s totally cool to do these days. I haven’t had an excuse to walk into my credit union with a mask on, but have had to pull it down a few times when I get ID checked for beer.

My other hot takes on present memes:

“hurrr durrr but if I fart in my pants, I still smell it, that means cloth doesn’t filter shit”  Technically it did have substantial effect, when you farted, you did not spray shit droplets six feet away.

“hurrr durrr take that goddamn mask off, you’re American!”   err sorry for carrying about your health?

Then again, maybe air really is hard and people are fed up with trying to understand the details. They just want somebody to tell them to what to do today, or maybe not. I largely suspect many people are just wearing a mask for the appearance of due diligence. I guess also a large percent of the population have never had to wear any sort of protective equipment while working around fumes/dust/mold/construction/sawdust and have never experienced the differences.

Also for fucks sake people stop throwing your latex gloves away in the Target parking lot. Think of the sea turtles.

We also have people that think 5G radio waves transmit the virus, so maybe we’re all doomed.

#2020 keeps on delivering. I’m tired of the mask ordeal, I’ve moved onto our upcoming food shortages.