I haven’t posted in a long time. So here goes.

Yesterday, I was talking to Pete and I showed him a simple demo of a patch I made a couple days ago on my synth. It sounded spacey, like a UFO landing or something. He asked if Enthused could use it in a song on their next album. I said yes. That’s it.

Next, I’ve been on a Plan 9 from Outer Space kick lately. It’s really a great movie. You should watch it. Really. I’m serious.

Then, today I was detained by the….erm….authorities for use of Putty to ssh into styx where I could get all my files from school, and do work. This is nothing new; I’ve been doing this since 8th grade with no major problems. Matt got bitten in the ass that year for installing winVNC (pronounced “vee-unkh” by our wonderful assistant principal at the time) on a machine in the computer lab (he forgot not to install the server component….a stupid mistake). Then he got yelled at for doing exactly what I was doing just a few months ago, and had the usual account suspension. (he was sshing into his box to setup a proxy server for something, and Mr Snow [admin] logged into his terminal and started moving the mouse on him. He was subsequently called down to Lynch’s office and reprimanded, and had his account disabled for a week or so).

My story starts a couple days ago when I was in the library for study and doing some quick changes to the fakedbfs code, because I had a cool idea to implement a part of fedit(1) as a shell instead of just running it from the user’s shell for each command. As I was implementing this, the librarian came up behind me and asked me what I was doing; I promptly explained that I was programming. She said that I probably shouldn’t be doing that. I said fine. A few minutes later, someone else came up and questioned me, and I told them what putty was and she said “I guess it’s ok if it’s going through.” I figured that was the end of the situation.

But I was proven wrong today when all three of Kroll, Chronin, and said librarian asked me to go to Kroll’s office. I went in, and Chronin said “I hear tell you’ve been doing some monkey business on the computers,” to which I replied “Well, it’s just logging into my system at home; nothing malicious. Where in the AUP does it say I can’t do this?” I should have shut my big mouth right before the last question, but I didn’t. He replied “don’t get smart….it’s just common sense.” I wanted to give a nice witty riposte, but I figured that would be a bad idea, and refrained from doing so. Kroll proceeded to tell me that she talked to Snow about putty and he said that I knew exactly what I was doing, and that I was circumventing the firewall. I said that port 443 is indeed open (in 8th grade, when this firewall BS started [all ports but 80 and 443 blocked], I setup styx to run sshd on 443 as well and all was fine) and hence I wasn’t really circumventing anything (you can argue that this is BS all you want, but it’s true). Chronin then said that my account would be disabled for one week as a “slap on the fingers” (he later explained that it wasn’t even a slap on the wrist, and that he initially recommended a much harsher punishment, but Kroll intervened and said it wasn’t anything too bad). I told him I had no intent of malice and was simply trying to do work, since I could also access my school-related files on styx from the terminals at school (such as the speech I was writing when they called me in for questioning). They thanked me for my honesty in the matter. I said “fair enough” and left. That was the end of that. But now I have nothing to do in study, especially for the next week (and I’m not chancing it with putty anymore, so probably for the remainder of the quarter as well). Oh well.

And that’s it. Have fun.

Dan out.