2008 Mitsubishi Evo photos

I’m selling my Evo. Here are more pictures.

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Hummingbirds

We appear to have been adopted by three hummingbirds now: a greenback, an orange-chest and redneck (as in, it has a red neck).  Our sparrow was not amused.

 
Hummingbird hovering next to a feeder in Kitsap, WA.
Sugar, sugar, sugar!

Moose camouflage

Moose hiding behind a bush in Denali National Park, Alaska.
Indecisive moose. Wouldn’t hold still.

We saw some moose in Alaska. They’re big, indecisive, and disinterested in bipedal tourists.

Spiderdrops

I don’t know if our spider liked the rain today, but the drops looked pretty.

Spiderweb with rain drops.
Rain on the web.

Shooting the Buck Moon

The moon moves really fast when it’s behind trees.

Buck Moon, July 2021, Kingston WA

Hotel wildlife

We just got back from vacation in Florida, where we stayed at a lakeside apartment. On the last day, we got to see some cool wildlife. (From our downstairs, screened in porch. The lake had a substantial fence, with bars that might mildly inconveniance a large alligator.)

Alligator crawling out of a lake at hotel grounds in Florida.

Our hotel wildlife.

Weird Al Yankovic sings “The Elements”

Weird Al Yankovic in concert at the Golden State Theatre, Monterey, 2018-05-17.

My wife and I got to see “Weird Al” Yankovic in concert in Monterey last Thursday night. He covered Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements”. This is interesting because….

  • Al doesn’t often do covers, but often does parodies.
  • Tom’s song was itself a parody.
  • The source material (from “The Pirates of Penzance”) was, some say, partly a response to the rampant musical piracy in the U.S. at the time.

So there’s a thing. Anyway, I really enjoyed the concert, and I wanted to test some experimental binaural microphones I’d constructed. Bada-bing! Bada-boom!

Me and Sara enjoying the calm before a concert at the Golden State Theatre, Monterey, 2018-05-17

So, please Don’t Download this Song, and if you want to help Al and Tom get their Solid Gold Humvees, then support them by doing stuff!

Oh, and Emo Philips is a great opener, very funny, and (despite rumor) still alive.

Princess Ida Sitzprobe recordings

Yes, it’s done! Relive the excitement and adventure of cramming a full cast and orchestra into a band room!

Poster for Lyric Theatre's 2017 production of Princess Ida

Usual caveats about “this was not a studio recording”, etc.
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Cygwin bash in the context menu

Getting the Cygwin bash (mintty) in the Windows context menu is a little esoteric. Mostly this is because you have to set the directory at Windows time, rather than Cygwin time. (Otherwise you would have to convert the directory pathname with drives and colons into Posix-ish format of /cygdrive/D/….)

Here’s the way that works for me. Add the Windows Registry key
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\shell\bash\command
and set the default string (REG_SZ) to the impressively unwieldy value of
C:\utils\cygwin\bin\mintty.exe -i /Cygwin-Terminal.ico --dir "%V" /bin/env CHERE_INVOKING=1 /bin/bash -l
(Modify the mintty pathname as required. Also, –dir is only supported on newer versions of mintty.)

The Wonderful World of Fibre Channel on eBay

I just bought a fibre channel HBA for $15 on a whim. This is (was) expensive equipment, and I joke that I have spent a significant portion of my career trying to kill the technology (see, e.g., iSCSI). Now that it’s cheap, I figured the least I could do was play with some equipment at home; and hopefully learn something.

Well, first I needed to connect it to something. Witness, a Brocade Silkworm 3200 switch (with 6 SFPs installed) that I bought for $9 (plus shipping).

Brocade Silkworm 3200E

But I still needed cables to connect the devices. At work they were throwing away fiber optics, and I also bought some for $1 each (free shipping!).

Picture of a fiber optic cable

But now I had a problem. I suspect the reason for the multi-thousand-dollar switch selling for under $10 was that the passwords were lost. Oh dear. Apparently many of these switches have been junked because the person who knows the passwords leaves the company. Brocade does not provide any support for these bricks (why should they, when you can buy a new one from them?) and the password reset is unique for each switch.

No problem, find a serial cable, and… oh, the management port is also password protected. Never mind, vxWorks has a terrible password hash (only about 80k unique hashes), so I tried them all over telnet. No dice, but the python telnetlib is nice.

Brocade was nice enough to leave the boot loader program in only a slightly disabled state though. That meant that I was able to dump the firmware out over the serial port (several hours of pressing ‘d’ to get a 9600bps hexdump).

The passwords were listed in the dump! They weren’t vxWorks, they were MD5-crypt(), gah! So I embarked on a fruitless guessing spree, but the standard password guessers (including a 15GB dictionary and brute force) only found a single, disabled user password. Hmm.

Another tack. After uncompressing the OS code, I was able to compile an old GNU binutils for the Intel 80960 and disassemble the machine code. Using the ECOFF information gleaned from Brocade’s obsolete PasswordRecovery3.0.zip procedure, I was able to flip a bit in the firmware. Yay! Default passwords again, and zones removed.

Now I can find out what FC is all about. In the mean time, I’ve learned a bunch of useless, but very enjoyable, password workarounds.