| < November 2008 | Matthew Loar > Blog | January 2009 > |
Followup to yesterday: Sand on roads worse than salt, scientists say - look for the quote from the guy in Mchenry County, IL. Ironically, that's where my parents live and where I might have gone for the holidays.
It has finally gotten above freezing here, and so we're getting some rain. But it's supposed to drop below freezing tonight, and the NWS is predicting snow for tomorrow. But they also have a statement that Friday and Saturday will see a return to normal temperatures and rain, which will likely result in flooding. What fun!
Oh well. Merry Christmas!
As I stay home from work for the fourth straight day, the Seattle Times publishes this: Seattle refuses to use salt; roads "snow packed" by design.
So apparently the huge spike in emergency calls, pulling what few buses are running out of snow-filled intersections, and the huge loss of tax revenue from having stores closed or deserted on what are supposed to be the busiest shopping days of the year are preferable to using a little salt.
Good job!
Stayed home from work again today. It didn't snow any more, but this being Seattle, that didn't mean that most of the roads weren't still covered in ice. At work they had emailed everybody Thursday night to say that there wouldn't be a receptionist in our building, our cafeteria would be closed, the shuttles wouldn't be operating, and the sidewalks would likely be covered in ice. So I stayed home even though SoundTransit did manage to restore the 545 to normal operation.
So I grabbed lunch at Blue Moon Burgers, and then I checked out a new bookstore that opened a little bit ago called Inner Chapters. They sell (and buy) used books as well as coffee and sandwiches, and it's a cozy, locally-owned establishment. I had a postcard good for 25% off my book purchases, and so I picked up a few books:
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. I've been meaning to pick this up for a while.
A Time for Peace by Mikhail S. Gorbachev. It's a collection of letters and public statements with an introduction by the same. The interesting thing is that this book was published in 1985, while Gorbachev was still General Secretary and before the fall of Communism and the USSR. It should be interesting to read knowing what ultimately happened.
You Can Trust the Communists (to do exactly as they say) by Dr. Fred Schwarz. This tome from 1961 is exactly the sort of fearmongering propaganda that the title suggests. Should be an entertaining read.
Monarch's Dictionary of Legal Terms. Not exactly a page-turner, but since I'm planning to purchase a residence soon, a reference of those pesky Latin phrases could prove useful.
The Perfect Drink for Every Occasion. A book of familiar and exotic cocktails spiced with tongue-in-cheek humor.
So now I should have plenty to read when I'm stuck at home, which is good, because the National Weather Service just put this out:
..A MAJOR DISRUPTIVE WINTER STORM WILL AFFECT MOST OF WESTERN WASHINGTON LATE SATURDAY AFTERNOON THROUGH SUNDAY.. ALONG THE I-5 CORRIDOR NORTH OF TACOMA...INCLUDING SEATTLE AND EVERETT...STORM TOTAL SNOWFALL OF 4 TO 8 INCHES IS EXPECTED.
Oh, joy.
I wish I had saved the title of my previous post for today. I woke up this morning early afternoon and checked my email only to find about a dozen RPIN emails to the effect that Seattle was paralyzed and good luck trying to get to Redmond on the bus. So I went to Southlake Grill and got some lunch and a few Winter Hooks. I used my phone to email my manager to say I wasn't coming in and he replied to the effect of "you and 90% of the company, including myself."
This whole thing just reiterates the point I made in my last entry. It's not as though the city doesn't have any snowplows or sanding trucks. They certainly do, but it doesn't seem to be nearly enough. My sister was trying to convince me earlier that it is not economically feasible to have more infrastructure for Seattle's relatively few snowstorms, but I pointed out that they incur a lot of expenses as a result - more emergency calls, lost bus fares, towing and repairing damaged or disabled buses, lost tax revenue when businesses are closed, and so on. I don't claim to know where the break-even is, but as someone from Illinois I just find it mind-boggling that a city the size of Seattle would be all but shut down by 3 inches of snow.
I will concede, however, that Seattle is a lot less flat than Chicago. I
suppose that makes some difference.
So having grown up in the Chicago area, I can't get over the difference in reaction to snow between Chicago and Seattle. My high school had a reputation for never closing no matter how much snow came down. During my four years there, we only had one snow day, and the only reason they closed school that day was that the district had just purchased this fancy robocall system that could call all of the parents with a prerecorded message, and so they were just looking for an excuse to try it out.
Contrast this with Seattle. The forecast called for a couple inches of snow today. So the Seattle schools were closed. As it turns out, it didn't snow at all in Seattle (outlying areas did get snow). Now that the forecast calls for up to three inches (oh, the humanity!), a bunch of other districts have already cancelled classes, and the verdict is still out on the Seattle schools. Tonight on the news they had footage of cars and buses (with tire chains, even) getting stuck in the snow. A lot of people at work live out in North Bend or Duvall and so don't bother coming to work if there's a hint of snow because they're liable to end up in a pileup at the bottom of a hill.
It's one thing for say, Houston to shut down when it gets an inch of snow. But from
what I have seen, this isn't exactly a rare occurence. I don't comprehend why
there seems to be such a dearth of snow removal infrastructure in the Puget
Sound Region.
Slicehost moved my slice to a different host yesterday, and their filesystem copy didn't preserve my POSIX ACLs, which brought my site down. I've sent them an email to see if they could do this in the future, but for now I have a ghetto script to fix the ACLs at boot. It's also high time I set up some monitoring.
So yeah, testing. I had tested my gssapi-keyex support against Sun SSH. Testing against OpenSSH revealed some issues:
Group exchange was totally broken. Sun SSH doesn't appear to support group exchange.
The hash H was improperly computed if the server omitted the optional SSH_MSG_KEXGSS_HOSTKEY message. Sun SSH apparently sends this message.
Also, rekeying was broken.
Now I have tested all three kexes against both Sun SSH and OpenSSH, and tested that rekeying works.
You can find the updated version on the PuTTY page.
I have finished adding GSSAPI key exchange support to PuTTY. I intend to submit the patch upstream once it has some more testing.
Note that any session configs which were saved in the registry by a previous PuTTY version will not have the new GSS kex methods. You will need to move the GSS methods up to the top under SSH->Kex in the PuTTY Configuration dialog. Also with the move to the upstream GSSAPI support, the registry value name for GSSAPI credential forwarding has changed from GSSAPIFwdTGT to GssapiFwd.
You can find it on the PuTTY page.
| < November 2008 | Matthew Loar > Blog | January 2009 > |