Things that go WTF? in the night

About 02:30 this morning, while dead asleep, I was awakened by some noise. The cats all leaped up at the same time that I sat bolt upright. (The cats were all curled up around me, so it wasn't one of them — which it usually is — which made me worried that perhaps someone was breaking a window or something.)

I got up and proceeded to turn on lights all through the house trying to figure out what noise had awoken me.

After five minutes of this, I finally "mentally replayed" the sound I'd heard and thought, "Gosh, that sounded like something falling in a bathtub or shower." I checked the bathtub — nothing. But in the shower, there was a conditioner bottle lying on the floor.

How does a conditioner bottle that sat, stable on the shelf, for 19 hours, suddenly fall off in the middle of the night?

WTF?

 

(This is why I'm a little groggy today. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

Bea Arthur, Class Act

Bea Arthur, in her will, left $300K to a homeless shelter for LBGT youth.

Visualizations of Music

So very cool. Someone has made videos which show which instruments are playing which notes as the music plays. Some examples:

Beethoven's 5th, 1st movement

Beethoven's 7th, 2nd movement

Bach Double Concerto

Pachelbel's Canon (which illustrates why this comedian hates it so much).

These appear to have been done by the same YouTube user, but their page doesn't seem to link to all of the extant videos. (Warning: that page starts playing The Stars and Stripes Forever after a few seconds!) There does seem to be a playlists page, though, which gives a thematic/historical categorization and includes more of the recordings.

 

(I discovered these videos via Kristin Cashore's blog.)

The War On Halloween

The Onion takes on the War on Halloween.

Why I Enjoy Foxtrot

Last Sunday's strip.

The Benefits of Checking One's Credit Card Bills...

extend to finding out that McAfee keeps billing for anti-virus software that has been uninstalled from a non-working computer, even a year later.

It's amazing how willing companies are to take advantage of standard human cognitive deficits.

Sun breaks gethostbyname(), nscd.

Thanks, Sun!

gethostbyname(3) is supposed to return the canonical hostname in the h_name field of the struct hostent that it returns a pointer to. It is supposed to return any aliases (e.g. CNAMEs in DNS) in the h_aliases field.

Sun recently released a version of /lib/nss_dns.so.1, which is used by nscd (which, if it is running, all calls to gethostbyname(3) go through). This is part of patch 140391-02 (for SPARC) or 140392-02 (for x86). The -03 version of these patches also has the problem. This patch is part of the most recent Recommended Patch cluster, and it is included in the Solaris 10 u7 release.

This patch messes up the return from gethostbyname(3), so that when you look up a CNAME, the CNAME goes into the h_name field and the actual canonical name goes into the h_aliases field.

This breaks anything that uses gethostbyname(3) and actually expects the h_name field to contain the canonicalized hostname. (At work, we found the bug because certain software wouldn't start right -- because the start script compares the local hostname to the result of a lookup of a CNAME, and that no longer worked right.)

Note that this bug persists even if you have hosts caching turned off in nscd.conf.

The simple workaround is to turn off nscd (by using svcadm disable name-service-cache). This can cause some serious slowdowns if you have a lot of name lookups (e.g. directories that contain lots of different users and groups). I measured a slowdown of a factor of 7.7 doing 'ls -l' on a directory containing 150 files each owned by a different user and group. (It was a local directory, and I redirected the output to /dev/null, so I believe I limited confounding factors.) If you don't want to turn off nscd, your only other choice (until a real patch is released) is to ask Sun for their IDR ("Interim Diagnostics and Relief") pseudo-patch for this, which is IDR142516-01 for SPARC, IDR142517-01 for x86. This will require a Sun service contract.

Feh.