Nervousness-induced Stupidity

Last Friday (6/27) I had an interview for my entrance exam for a scholarship program over Skype. And I kind of failed it, quite miserably I have to admit. The pace of the interview was so nervous-inducingly fast.
  • I forgot my registration number for the test,
  • I forgot what RISC stands for, it's reduced instruction-set computer anyway,
  • I couldn't even said that RISC uses fewer clock cycle(s) per instruction compared to "de facto" standard of x86 processor architecture family which belongs to CISC architecture: complex instruction-set computer,
  • I couldn't clearly explain my internship experience (which could be strong point in the interview)--even I mention the organization's name wrong in English,
  • I showed how little my experience with FPGA by saying the furthest I had gone with it is merely dumb stopwatch, 
  • I showed how lame my experience in programming in assembler language,
  • I spoke gibberish thing like: I love being in a team, which has no real implication IRL,
  • I brought up non-technical issues on something in which we hope such issue won't happen related to its technical implementation,
  • I was pausing mid-sentence... over and over again,
  • I was sure my voice wasn't audibly illegible,
  • ... and all other silly mistakes I did unawarely
The only thing I was confident about is when I said "I'd definitely do".
...I was just panicking like stupid, definitely.

iptables: transition intrapositioned to extrapositioned negation

Just today when I was writing iptables rule for my lab's gateway which (sadly) still have to rely heavily on IPv4 NAT (network address translation), it spew something cute when I put such rule:

# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/25 -d ! 192.168.0.0/24 -o br1 -j MASQUERADE
The rule tells iptables to masquarade packets originating from 192.168.0.0/25 which destination isn't within 192.168.0.0/24 (my lab has two gateways for each /25 subnet, fyi).

It said:
Using intrapositioned negation (`--option ! this`) is deprecated in favor of extrapositioned (`! --option this`).

The rule still worked just fine. But as a good guy, let's adhere to the current standard (which is assumed to be 'more correct' :D )
# iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s 192.168.0.0/25 ! -d 192.168.0.0/24 -o br1 -j MASQUERADE

vsftp: anonymous can do 'em all

I need quick vsftpd config to allow anonymous user to anything on my ftp server, I wouldn't need security/auth this time.

anon_root=/home/liyan/ristie
anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES
anon_other_write_enable=YES
anon_upload_enable=YES
anon_world_readable_only=YES
anonymous_enable=YES
listen=YES
listen_port=21
local_enable=NO

write_enable=YES

Spring the daemon up and you're good to go.

Qt 4.8 is better than Qt 5.x

I am currently helping a friend doing project on Qt and OpenCV. There're some problem I encounter regarding library dependencies:

I can't build newer OpenCV (2.4.9) against  libavutil.so.52 (ffmpeg-2.1.4), therefore I resorted to Slackbuild's prebuilt OpenCV 2.4.5

I can't compile sanely valid Qt program OpenCV 2.4.5 on Qt 5.2. Which in turn becase OpenCV 2.4.5 is build around Qt 4 (4.8 most likely). I hate this dependency hell.

So here I am, reverting back to Qt 4.8. Good thing Slackware64-current's is Qt 4.8.2.