Film: Prometheus directed by Ridley Scott

I remember the hype when this film came out a couple of years ago.  I did not get to see it - so I watched it on DVD.

All I can say is what a massive disappointment.  There are a lot of good ideas in there which are never fully developed - about man's quest for answers on his origins, the quest for longer life, the dominance of large corporations over wider mankind.  These are all thoughtful themes that really could have driven the film.

It is all drowned out by a implausible main plot and way too much homage paying to the original Alien film.  It is set in the same universe as Alien - but that really does not help it.

Just some things that stick in my mind:

• The Wayland corporation has spent untold billions to travel to an Alien planet - but take with them a complete bunch of amateurs who fail to work as any form of team.
• The weaponery is simply ridiculous - flame throwers on a alien world - hardly practical.
• The CEO of the corporation is supposedly dead but makes an appearance as he has secretly travelled as well.  He meets one of the aliens to request eternal life - but is just zapped.

And that is just the glaring things I could see.

Centos install from media scripts

Sometimes it is useful to install from media directly rather than take the latest version from yum for a package.

These scripts provide that, with the c6-media location mounted:

install-media.sh:

yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=c6-media install $1


provides-media.sh:

yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=c6-media provides $1

E-book read The Hitchikers Trilogy by Douglas Adams

I only ever read the first of the books, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when I was younger.   By the time I had read that the BBC series had been broadcast - so I did not then read Restaurant at the End of the Universe, or Life the Universe and Everything.

So I had been meaning to read them again - they contain a lot of humour and word play that would have passed me by before.  Also a lot of philosophical ideas about life are present especially in the first book.

I think the first book is the strongest with a lot of clever ideas in there, by the time you get to Life the Universe and Everything it feels like the attempt at a story line has taken over from the comedy and ideas.

Still great to be able to read them again - I will move onto books 4 and 5 of the trilogy soon.

Heartbleed Articles

I've been following the heartbleed bug in OpenSSL, for a developer it is quite an eye opener.  It is just a common buffer overrun that returns sensitive data to the client.  It is fascinating to think that so much ofthe security on the internet depends on this - and how fragile the whole ecosystem is.

There are some interesting implications.  Firstly over reliance on code review (it is hard to think like an attacker when reviewing - you are mainly concerned with "is this doing the right thing").   Secondly the lack of funding for this project that many corporates are using is pretty shameful.  Thirdly it shows the inevitble limitations of static analysis which OpenSSL has been exposed to.

Here is an XKCD which sums up the problem.

http://xkcd.com/1354/

Here is a technical article on how this type of flaw could be detected/avoided:

http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/heartbleed.html

Here is an article about someone trying to exploit the bug:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/04/how-i-used-heartbleed-to-steal-a-sites-private-crypto-key/