Claymore

• Sat, 14:35: RT @DrTwittenheimer: I live by a simple rule: treat other people's cookies the way I treat my own. #fb
• Sun, 11:09: The shops all seem strangely quiet this morning... #fb

• Tue, 16:44: RT @Book_of_Sassi: RT @Inspired_Ones: Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out. -John Wooden #fb
• Tue, 21:55: RT @dotmaura: RT @scalzi: And now, photos of the devastation in DC: http://t.co/Wcm2Gee #fb

• Tue, 20:40: An old one but a goodie - the Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo: http://bit.ly/mTKCSi #fb

• Wed, 21:26: RT @DrTwittenheimer: With a proper diet and regular exercise, women can retain a perfect body well into their early twenties. #fb
• Thu, 06:35: I'm glad we finally have some decently cool weather for winter. #fb

• Fri, 12:37: I think the archbishop should have done the Princess Bride speech: "Mawage. Mawage is what bwings us togethah." "Skip to the end." #fb
• Fri, 12:39: "Wuv. Twue wuv, will fowow you fowevah. So tweasue your wuv..." "Skip to the end." Yes, would have been much better. #fb

• Fri, 13:30: RT @DrTwittenheimer: If you edited out all the boring, pointless parts, most people's lives would be the same length as an average movie.

• Thu, 20:06: Overheard: "Sex came later in life. That's why I learned Linux." Response: "And which was better?" #fb

• Thu, 08:16: RT @DrTwittenheimer: These sports bras are getting really specific. Did you know that they have one just for doing push-ups? #fb

• Tue, 05:55: RT @FakeScience: Be careful when consulting quantum mechanics, since their bills are usually hard to understand.
• Tue, 07:04: RT @jonolester1: Amazing photos on Boston.com as ever - Nyiragongo Crater: Journey to the Center of the World - http://t.co/mnBiFU9
• Tue, 08:35: RT @Kokor_Hekkus: A real flying house - "The House From Up! Now Exists In Real Life—and It Flies! ": http://gizmo.do/gN8Y4l
• Tue, 09:58: RT @Free082SMS: Opera Opens Mobile App Store That Works With (Almost) All OSes http://on.mash.to/fBUKJx

• Wed, 07:09: I just saw a woman walking beside the road in a bridal gown. How very odd. #fb
• Wed, 09:31: RT @Snowflake_007: I wish that someone would invent something like 'Caller IQ' - that way I can at least see how stupid someone is befor ...

How To Use The Wandering Damage System

First there was the wandering monster. They serve well when applied in hordes, but why not cut out the middleman and just deal out damage to the characters directly? It makes for a smoother, faster-paced game, and if you want to kill off characters quickly, it can only be beaten by divine intervention by Cthulhoid godlings.

Instructions: Whenever a player annoys you in any way, by wearing tasteless clothes or eating the last corn chip, ask him to roll a d20. He may become worried that he's rolling a saving throw. Ha, ha!!! Little does he know that he just rolled on the Wandering Damage System matrix!!! Repeat the roll as often as desired.

The Wandering Damage System Matrix
Roll Result
1 Your character has fallen down a flight of stairs; roll his dexterity or less on percentile dice, or else consult Limb Loss Subtable.
2 The monster your character just killed gets up and attacks him, doing 8-80 points of damage.
3 Your character smells smoke; his right arm is on fire. Take 14 points of damage and save vs. gangrene.
4 Your character cuts himself while shaving; consult Limb Loss Subtable.
5 Your character's nose hairs catch fire and he dies of smoke inhalation.
6 Your character stumbles backward into a yawning chasm and disappears from view.
7 The next time your character says something, he eats his words, chokes on them, and dies.
8 Something cuts your character's nose off, doing 2-12 points damage and really messing up his charisma.
9 Your character steps on a piece of glass; consult Limb Loss Subtable.
10 Your character suddenly catches a severe case of brain death.
11 Something invisible chews on your character, doing 6-36 points damage.
12 Your character develops an incredibly severe case of arthritis and can grasp nothing with his hands; he drops anything he's holding - and if that happened to be a sword or an axe, consult the Limb Loss Subtable.
13-20 Consult the Random Damage Subtable for no reason whatsoever.

Limb Loss Subtable (roll d6)

1 - Left leg gone
2 - Right leg gone
3 - Left arm gone
4 - Right arm gone
5 - Head gone
6 - Torso cut in half

Random Damage Subtable
Dice roll Result
01-05 Take 10 hit points damage.
06-10 Take 15 hit points damage.
11-20 Take 30 hit points damage.
21-25 Take 10 hit points damage and consult Limb Loss Subtable, modifying die roll by +5.
26-30 Take 10 hit points damage and roll again on Wandering Damage System Matrix.
31-35 Take 15 hit points damage and then take 30 more.
36-40 Roll every die you own for damage.
41-45 Take 17 hit points damage.
46-50 Take 42 hit points damage.
51-55 Multiply your character's age by 5. Take three times that much damage.
56-60 Take 24 hit points damage and then take 31 more.
61-65 Take 1,000 hit points damage and roll again.
66-70 Roll every die within 30 feet for damage.
71-73 Add up the total hit points of everyone in the party. Take that much damage.
74-75 Take 3 hit points damage and consider yourself very lucky - for the time being.
76-00 What? You didn't get hurt? That's impossible - this system is foolproof. Roll again.

Huntley case helps Darfur survivors gain perspective

CAPE TOWN. Survivors of the genocide in Darfur have issued a formal apology for overstating their case, saying they were forced to reassess the extent of their plight once confronted with the terrible story of South African refugee Brandon Huntley. "It's like Jerry Springer," said one, "you only realize how fortune has favoured you when they bring out the seriously dysfunctional at the end of the show."

Sudanese refugee, Abdul Wardi, currently living illegally in Mowbray, Cape Town, said he could only imagine how tough things must have been for Hartley. "He spent a whole winter living in a basement in Ottowa. Could anything be worse?"

Wardi, who walked from Khartoum to Cape Town said Huntley's journey must have been significantly more dangerous than his own. "He made it all the way to Canada, I only made it to South Africa. It's hard to imagine the degree of persecution a man must have suffered for him to be driven that far."

Wardi said it was only after Monday's ruling that he was finally able to understand why repeated appeals to the West from humanitarian groups working in Darfur had fallen on deaf ears.

"They are busy assessing important applications like Huntley's," acknowledged Wardi. "They can only do one thing at a time."

He said he was also able to understand why Huntley had chosen Canada as the place to lodge his appeal for refugee status. "The most famous black person in Canada is Leonard Cohen," he said. "It's all so clear now."

Meanwhile responding to Wardi's comments and the furore that greeted the ruling on Huntley's status a spokesman for the Canadian government, Chalky Canuck, expressed regret.

"It saddens us to hear of a second genocide in Africa so soon after the terrible events in South Africa."

Canuck went on to say he hoped his country's decision to grant refugee status to Huntley would be a small silver lining and a tribute to the millions of white people who had suffered during South Africa's worst ever atrocity."

When it was pointed out to him that raced based persecution in South Africa had ended in 1994 and that the country had never experienced the horrors of a genocide, Canuck said the evidence presented by Huntley's attorney's had shown otherwise.

"The tribunal has ruled," he said. "I am sure history will prove them correct."

Source: Hayibo

Bourne Into Oblivion
2009-07-21
by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles

Jerry wasn't the sort of guy who would normally vent frustration out loud at work, yet here he was - cursing into the air at two individuals in particular - the first round of explitives being directed at the toolbag, somewhere, who had botched months of server backups by reusing the same set of tapes for months and the other being a long ago departed developer whose name he was continually being subjected to in the comments of the rotten shell script he was now stepping through.

What had started out as a 7:30am ticket from an early-bird user getting a error message when trying to open a spreadsheet test plan from the week before had turned into a full-on, corporate-wide DEFCON 1.

To make matters worse, Jerry had just delivered his two-week notice a few days prior which meant that in every meeting Jerry was getting "thanked" for the company's current nuclear crisis and that he should have set his little "time bomb" to go off AFTER he was gone. Naturally, while his being "blamed" helped to improve the morale of everyone else, it didn't do much to help Jerry's outlook - especially since it appeared as if this was someone else's "parting gift".

Questions? Please Refer to the Scriptonomicon

For as long as anyone could remember, everyone just kind of just coped with the Bourne shell script that was the framework to a test environment. It was originally designed to run automated tests for a single product, but management was so thrilled at how well it worked that they got other projects to adapt the framework.

Over the next few years, it became the de-facto test framework used by applications throughout the corporation. However, in order to make "one size fit all", it had morphed into something... different. It became one of those gnarly applications that everybody acknowledged was a bit sketchy behind the scenes, but it worked. So long as you stuck to the S.O.P. and knew the different locations where the same value had to be defined and accepted that P_OPERATOR_ID was a unique network identifier that is NOT a normal network ID that you had to get from Chuck in the Infrastructure Group, you'd be ok.

However, recently, the developer who had originally created the framework had left the company in search of greener pastures and, rather than handing off the task of running the scripts to a developer, it was given to a co-op student. After all, running the script was like checking off steps on a list, right? The co-op set up the configuration, scheduled it to run over the weekend, and merrily left it to return the following week. As it turned out, he missed a few details.

Cleaning Up

From a high level, the Bourne script would essentially ssh into each target machine, do its thing, and then exit. As part of its "thing", the designer of the framework wanted to make sure the script cleaned up after itself so subsequent runs of the framework would not re-process old data. To accomplish this, one of the enhancements after the initial release was to add two cryptic variables that (redundantly) contained the project name and the version being tested. Utilizing an unpatched flaw in sudo's setup to gain real root access, the script would then do the following as part of the clean up:

rm -rf $var1/$var2

Ordinarily, this worked just fine, but the co-op student was unaware these SPECIFIC variables needed to be set. With them being left blank, the following was the end result upon execution of the script:

rm -rf /

With the script running as root on a setup with NFS (which, in turn, granted access to everything on the entire UNIX/Linux network and a few Windows Servers via SAMBA), the script had a chance to do a good bit of damage... and it did. Home directories, file repositories, customer data, test results, all seemingly evaporated into nothingness.

All told, it took 6 hours to wipe out the entire network. It took 4 hours to figure out what happened (turns out the script ssh'd onto its own server and the rm -rf wiped out the scripts which did the rm -rf and most the evidence of what happened) and it only took 10 seconds to realize that the latest backups were completely SNAFU'd.

So, as his parting gift, while the most critical drives were being sent off for possible forensic recovery, Jerry was asked to review the test framework and look for any possible flaws where something similar could re-occur. After hitting the 10th instance where deviating from the normal routine would result in some degree of disaster, Jerry knew one thing - even though he had less than two weeks to go, this is one script that would be haunting his nightmares for a long time to come.

Source: The Daily WTF