I set this up at a recent bush craft training weekend (which was, as ever, an excellent weekend). You can tell I was listening to the training because I identified the tonewood used to make it by the fungus growing on it. This is not a recognised techiniue for identifying a guitars tonewood!

It was tuned to F3 although I only checked this on the last day and didn’t know this as I was playing it. Talking of which it is not terribly easy to play largely because the string is so far from the ‘fretboard’ that the parallax effects means you only play in tune if you get your head in exactly the right place.

Nevertheless it works! Also for those of you who know where we were camped its still there ready to be played by the next visitors.

I’m already making plans for another, slightly easier to play, model construct from a dead branch.

This is the view from the campsite I was a me to grab whilst someone else makes me a cup of tea.

• Press Back
• Select the comment you have just written
• Copy it to the clipboard
• Reload the page in your browser
• Paste the comment back into the text field

Other than the obvious epic fail regarding usability there is one additional problem in the instructions above. When you press back the rich text editing widget no longer has your comment in it! That’s right. Forty five minutes expressing my highly insightful view point as clearly as possible… gone.

Grrr…

I could tell the text was still there because I could press Forward and refresh but I just couldn’t see it.

At this point I fired up wireshark to try and capture my work as it went out over the network. This was when I realized that the bug tracker was using SSL and trying to launch a man-in-the-middle attach on myself was likely a waste of time.

So, the last resort of the desperate(ly lazy) is to grab the data from the memory image itself. That should be dead easy, I’ve been running GNU/Linux at home for almost fifteen years. I must have learnt my way around by now. Surely I just attach to a running process and dump its memory.

Having got the PID of the firefox process I fired up gdb:

 butch$ gdb
 GNU gdb (GDB) Fedora (7.3.50.20110722-10.fc16)
 Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
 License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later
 This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
 There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law. Type "show
 copying" and "show warranty" for details.
 This GDB was configured as "i686-redhat-linux-gnu".
 For bug reporting instructions, please see:
 .
 (gdb) attach 23639
 Attaching to process 23639
 /usr/lib/firefox/firefox (deleted): No such file or directory.

At this point I tried the gcore command. No luck there either. gdb couldn’t figure out the memory ranges it needed to dump. Still I’m not one to give up. After trying and failing to scan /proc/23639/mem I decide to scan the list of the memory mappings and dump each one. When I discovered that firefox had over 700 blocks of mapped memory I decided to generate a gdb script to dump the memory automatically:

cat /proc/23639/maps \
| cut -d' ' -f1 \
| tr '-' ' ' \
| awk '{ print "dump memory core-" $1 "-" $2 " 0x" $1 " 0x" $2 }' \
> dumpmem.gdb

It worked. I have the memory in files. From here things get much easier:

cat core-* | strings | grep -C 40 BD-ROM | less

Yay.

As you can see above the colour of the wood depends heavily upon the lighting. The final two photos, which were taken in the shade, give the best impression of the instruments real colour.

So far, so hoopy.

However a recurring class of bugs in the hot plug logic is failure to tear down the encrypted device mapper when the media is removed without unmounting it first.

It results in a message something like this:

Naturally this is a bug in your distribution but it is one that sends to regress as the desktop stack is developed so knowing how to workaround will do you no harm at all.

I generally use:

sudo cryptsetup luksClose udisks-luks-uuid-d9fb9d0d-74e6-49b1-94d3-7edc083f04c0-uid80377

Note: gnome-shell-3.2 will prompt you for a password but doesn’t issue an error message if the automount fails. If you want to see the error message (and hence the name of the mapping) open the file manager and try to mount the encrypted partititon from there instead.

Although I couldn’t really be bothered you could easily write a script to automatically identify encrypted device mapping that aren’t being used and undo them by getting a script to look at the output of ls -al /dev/mapper. Probably it would be best to look for devices that have a mapping but are not mounted.

Wyming Brook is a terrific wooded stream near Sheffield. It’s always worth a visit. In winter and with no leaves on the trees it feels much more opened up than it does at the height of summer.

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After reading a little more on the subject of spam comments I quickly learned two things. The first is that spam comments are a fact of life if you want to allow anonymous comments (and doubly so if you don’t like CAPTCHAs). The other is that the part that always gives away the spammer is that the comment doesn’t contain any information related to the actual content of your article. This is because the spammer has to write one text and then post it to many different sites. Philosophically speaking if the spammer wrote bespoke comments for each site they would not longer be a spammer. Perhaps an artisan spammer who wrote bespoke comments would wind up being called a fillet-steaker.

Anyhow even with no obvious motivation for the comment the following messages did rather give away their true nature, especially when you remember that many bloggers only moderate the first comment from a user so if you let them through assume they will be back.

Thanks for taking this opportunity to mention this, I’m strongly about it and I benefit from garden greenhouse structures this subject. When possible, when you gain data, please update this website with new information. I have found it extremely useful.

[From a person in "trading strategies"]

After reading your blog post I browsed your website a bit and noticed you aren’t ranking nearly as well in Google as you could be. I possess a handful of blogs myself and I think you should take a look here: http://nottherightlinksothere.org You’ll find it’s a very nice tool that can bring you a lot more visitors. Keep up the quality posts

[From a SEO company]

The next two posts represent the most sophisticated spam comments I’ve received so far. Both avoid flattery and instead try to latch onto technical paranoia instead. The first one is particular clever for the question in the middle and its assumption that other humans really need to read this message. Whilst I’d prefer spammers to find some more productive line of work you have to admire someone at the top of the game like this:

I don’t know if it’s just me or if everybody else encountering problems with your blog. It seems like some of the text within your posts are running off the screen. Can somebody else please provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to them as well? This may be a issue with my browser because I’ve had this happen before. Cheers

[From a fake Burberry scarves salesman]

Howdy just wanted to give you a quick heads up. The text in your content seem to be running off the screen in Chrome. I’m not sure if this is a format issue or something to do with browser compatibility but I figured I’d post to let you know. The layout look great though! Hope you get the problem solved soon. Kudos

[From a pornographer]

It’s getting towards time to finish this post so I’ll introduce one of my favourites here. It’s not because of the quality of the prose, although one does have to admire the excellent spelling together with correct use of capital letters, commas and full stops (even on the last line). The reason it’s my favourite is this transparent attempt to flatter me into accepting the spam was attached to a pictoral joke. The “astonishingly thought-provoking” words that inspired such gushing praise numbered only ten.

You have written an astonishingly thought-provoking article. Your written content speaks to me and I share inside your views. Countless writers do not write original material, but you have really achieved an awesome job with this information.

[From a fake ugg boot salesman]

So to close I shall leave you with this comment and sincerely hope you share the sentiment.

I would brand your blog the dreamland! though Santa knocks at our door just once every year, you blog is open the entire year ¨C wow!

[From a fake ugg boot salesman]

Mother: Well! You just can’t do that. Full stop.

Child: I think you mean Exclamation Mark.

OK. It’s not a collection and it’s nothing to do with the telegraph. However it is a photo, it almost dates from the late twentieth century and it is a pole. It’s a power pole to be exact. It was located on a campsite I recently visited and I rather liked the huge switch that can presumably be used to cut of all power to the nearby village.

I know. Pictures of poles are not that cool. I don’t care. It’s interesting to see how big a switch has to be even for a ‘baby’ pole like this.

Of course as a photographer I wish I’d remembered to take a shot without the pole. It would have been a good donor image for a sky replacement!