I needed to run a BIOS flash utility that was only available for DOS. To complicate matters, the server I needed to run it on doesn’t have a floppy or CD-ROM drive. I figured I’d hop on the Internet and download a bootable USB flash drive image. Right? Wrong.

I found a lot of instructions for how to make such an image if you already have a running Windows or Linux desktop, but they weren’t very helpful for me and my Mac. After some trial and error, I managed to create my own homemade bootable USB flash drive image. It’s available at http://www.mediafire.com/?aoa8u1k1fedf4yq" if you just want a premade ready-to-download file.

If you want a custom version, or you don’t trust the one I’ve made — and who’d blame you? I’m some random stranger on the Internet! — here’s how you can make your own bootable image under OS X:

Relax!

There are a lot of steps, but they’re easy! I wanted to err on the side of being more detailed than necessary, rather than skipping “obvious” steps that might not be quite so easy for people who haven’t done this before.

Download VirtualBox and install it

1. Download VirtualBox. I used version 4.1.4. The version available to you today might look different but should work mostly the same way.
2. Open the “VirtualBox-[some-long-number]-OSX.dmg” disk image.
3. Double-click the “VirtualBox.mpkg” icon to run the installer.
4. Click “Continue”.
5. Click “Continue”.
6. Click “Install”.
7. Enter your password and click “Install Software”.
8. When it’s finished copying files, etc., click “Close”.

Download FreeDOS and create a virtual machine for it

1. Download the FreeDOS “Base CD” called “fdbasecd.iso”. Note: the first mirror I tried to download from didn’t work. If that happens, look around on the other mirrors until you find one that does.
2. Open your “Applications” folder and run the “VirtualBox” program.
3. Click the “New” button to create a new virtual machine. This launches the “New Virtual Machine Wizard”. Click “Continue” to get past the introduction.
4. Name your new VM something reasonable. I used “FreeDOS”, and whatever name you enter here will appear throughout all the following steps so you probably should, too.
5. Set your “Operating System” to “Other”, and “Version” to “DOS”. (If you typed “FreeDOS” in the last step, this will already be done for you.) Continue.
6. Leave the “Base Memory Size” slider at 32MB and continue.
7. Make sure “Start-up Disk” is selected, choose “Create new hard disk”, and continue.
8. Select “File type” of “VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image)” and continue.
9. Select “Dynamically allocated” and continue.
10. Keep the default “Location” of “FreeDOS”.
11. Decision time: how big do you want to make your image? The full install of FreeDOS will take about 7MB, and you’ll want to leave a little room for your own files. On the other hand, the larger you make this image, the longer it’ll take to copy onto your USB flash drive. You certainly don’t want to make it so large that it won’t actually fit on your USB flash drive. An 8GB nearly-entirely-empty image will be worthless if you only have a 2GB drive. I splurged a little and made my image 32MB (by clicking in the “Size” textbox and typing “32MB”. I hate size sliders.). Click “Continue”.
12. Click “Create”.
13. Make sure your new “FreeDOS” virtual machine is highlighted on the left side of the VirtualBox window.
14. On the right-hand side, look for the section labeled “Storage” and click on the word “Storage” in that title bar.
15. Click the word “Empty” next to the CD-ROM icon.
16. Under “Attributes”, click the CD-ROM icon to open a file chooser, select “Choose a virtual CD/DVD disk file…”, and select the FreeDOS Base CD image you downloaded at the beginning. It’ll probably be in your “Downloads” folder. When you’ve selected it, click “Open”.
17. Back on the “FreeDOS — Storage” window, click “OK”.

Install FreeDOS

1. Back on the main VirtualBox window, near the top, click “Start” to launch the virtual machine you just made.
2. A note about VirtualBox: when you click the VM window or start typing, VirtualBox will “capture” your mouse cursor and keyboard so that all key presses will go straight to the VM and not your OS X desktop. To get them back, press the left [command] key on your keyboard.
3. At the FreeDOS boot screen, press “1” and [return] to boot from the CD-ROM image.
4. Hit [return] to “Install to harddisk”.
5. Hit [return] to select English, or the up and down keyboard arrow keys to choose another language and then [return].
6. Hit [return] to “Prepare the harddisk”.
7. Hit [return] in the “XFDisk Options” window.
8. Hit [return] to open the “Options” menu. “New Partition” will be selected. Hit [return] again. “Primary Partition” will be selected. Again, [return]. The maximum drive size should appear in the “Partition Size” box. If not, change that value to the largest number it will allow. Hit [return].
9. Do you want to initialize the Partition Area? Yes. Hit [return].
10. Do you want to initialize the whole Partition Area? Oh, sure. Press the left arrow key to select “YES”, then hit [return].
11. Hit [return] to open the “Options” menu again. Use the arrow keys to scroll down to “Install Bootmanager” and hit [return].
12. Press [F3] to leave XFDisk.
13. Do you want to write the Partition Table? Yep. Press the left arrow to select “YES” and hit [return]. A “Writing Changes” window will open and a progress bar will scroll across to 100%.
14. Hit [return] to reboot the virtual machine.
15. This doesn’t actually seem to reboot the virtual machine. That’s OK. Press the left [command] key to give the mouse and keyboard back to OS X, then click the red “close window” button on the “FreeDOS [running]” window to shut it down. Choose “Power off the machine” and click “OK”.
16. Back at the main VirtualBox window, click “Start” to re-launch the VM.
17. Press “1” and [return] to “Continue to boot FreeDOS from CD-ROM”, just like you did before.
18. Press [return] to select “Install to harddisk” again. This will take you to a different part of the installation process this time.
19. Select your language and hit [return].
20. Make sure “Yes” is selected, and hit [return] to let FreeDOS format your virtual disk image.
21. Proceed with format? Type “YES” and hit [return]. The format process will probably finish too quickly for you to actually watch it.
22. Now you should be at the “FreeDOS 1.0 Final Distribution” screen with “Continue with FreeDOS installation” already selected. Hit [return] to start the installer.
23. Make sure “1) Start installation of FreeDOS 1.0 Final” is selected and hit [return].
24. You’ll see the GNU General Public License, version 2 text. Follow that link and read it sometime; it’s pretty brilliant. Hit [return] to accept it.
25. Ready to install the FreeDOS software? You bet. Hit [return].
26. Hit [return] to accep the default installation location.
27. “YES”, the above directories are correct. Hit [return].
28. Hit [return] again to accept the selection of programs to install.
29. Proceed with installation? Yes. Hit [return].
30. Watch in amazement and how quickly the OS is copied over to your virtual disk image. Hit [return] to continue when it’s done.
31. The VM will reboot. At the boot screen, press “h” and [return] to boot your new disk image. In a few seconds, you’ll see an old familiar “C:" prompt.
32. Press the left [command] key to release your keyboard and mouse again, then click the red “close window” icon to shut down the VM. Make sure “Power off the machine” is selected and click “OK”.

Convert the VirtualBox disk image into a “raw” image

1. Open a Terminal.app window by clicking the Finder icon in your dock, then “Applications”, then opening the “Utilies” folder, then double-clicking “Terminal”.
2. Copy this command, paste it into the terminal window, then hit [return]:

/Applications/VirtualBox.app/Contents/Resources/VirtualBoxVM.app/Contents/MacOS/VBoxManage internalcommands converttoraw ~/"VirtualBox VMs/FreeDOS/FreeDOS.vdi" ~/Desktop/freedos.img

This will turn your VirtualBox disk image file into a “raw” image file on your desktop named “freedos.img”. It won’t alter your original disk image in any way, so if you accidentally delete or badly damage your “raw” image, you can re-run this command to get a fresh, new one.

Prepare your USB flash drive

1. Plug your USB flash drive into your Mac.
2. If your Mac can’t the drive, a new dialog window will open saying “The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.” Follow these instructions:
   1. Click “Ignore”.
   2. Go back into your terminal window and run this command: diskutil list
   3. You’ll see a list of disk devices (like “/dev/disk2”), their contents, and their sizes. Look for the one you think is your USB flash drive. Run this command to make sure, after replacing “/dev/disk2” with the actual name of the device you picked in the last step: diskutil info /dev/disk2
3. Make sure the “Device / Media Name:” and “Total Size:” fields look right. If not, look at the output of diskutil list again to pick another likely candidate and repeat the step until you’re sure you’ve picked the correct drive to complete eradicate, erase, destroy, and otherwise render completely 100% unrecoverable. OS X will attempt to prevent you from overwriting the contents of drives that are currently in use — like, say, your main system disk — but don’t chance it. Remember the name of this drive!
4. If your Mac did read the drive, it will have automatically mounted it and you’ll see its desktop icon. Follow these instructions:
   1. Go back into your terminal window and run this command: diskutil list
   2. Look for the drive name in the output of that command. It will have the same name as the desktop icon.
   3. Look for the name of the disk device (like “/dev/disk2”) for that drive and remember it (with the same warnings as in the section above that you got to skip).
   4. Unmount the drive by running this command: diskutil unmount "/Volumes/[whatever the desktop icon is called]"
   5. This is not the same as dragging the drive into the trash, so don’t attempt to eject it that way.

Copy your drive image onto the USB flash drive

1. Go back to your terminal window.
2. Run these commands, but substitute “/dev/fakediskname” with the device name you discovered on the previous section: cd ~/Desktop; sudo dd if=freedos.img of=/dev/fakediskname bs=1m
3. After the last command finishes, OS X will automatically mount your USB flash drive and you’ll see a new “FREEDOS” drive icon on your desktop.

Add your own apps to the image

1. Drag your BIOS flasher utility, game, or other program onto the “FREEDOS” icon to copy it onto the USB flash drive.
2. When finished, drag the “FREEDOS” drive icon onto the trashcan to unmount it.

Done.

1. You’re finished. Use your USB flash drive to update your computer’s BIOS, play old DOS games, or do whatever else you had in mind.
2. Keep the “freedos.img” file around. If you ever need it again, start over from the “Prepare your USB flash drive” section which is entirely self-contained. That is, it doesn’t require any software that doesn’t come pre-installed on a Mac, so even if you’ve uninstalled VirtualBox you can still re-use your handy drive image.

While waiting for Jen to return from a conference, I thought about calling her to get her estimated time of arrival, or her ETA. I realized she might be might be pretty far away still and thought I better ask for an estimate of the accuracy of the estimate, or meta-estimate: her META. Hey, neat! META can be a recursive acronym for “meta-ETA”, so it also references the nature of the acronym itself, sort of making META a meta-acronym, which truly makes it both meta and META.

There are few joys in life like using something that is the perfect expression of its intent. Each trade has its representative tools, and their common trait is quality, even if it’s not obvious to the casual observer, and often counterintuitive. The best tools in a category are almost always the least flashy, and rarely the ones a new practitioner would choose.

The Model M keyboard is like that: it’s loud, ugly, heavy, and utterly lacking modern niceties like buttons to change your sound volume or check your email. And yet, it has that transcendent feeling that’s hard to explain, that sense of rightness where you realize that you’re using the best that’s ever been made, that every change since then has been superfluous and cosmetic. With time, the loud clacking becomes the background music of your work, the harmony that tells you that your thoughts have become words. Its beige boxiness yields to elegant simplicity and the realization that true beauty is born of function, not appearance. The sheer weight of the thing turns to solidity and the confidence that it will stay where you put it. The dearth of features becomes the singleminded dedication to the parts that really matter and a proud disregard of unneeded distractions.

A tool attains its peak when a craftsman forgets that he’s using it because it has become an extension of himself. Thus the humble Model M has become the iconic favorite of hackers everywhere, an ode to the engineers who grasped for excellence and acheived it.

Did you know that you’re probably not allowed to make backups of your computer? It’s true, if you believe in the legal fiction known as “End User License Agreements” (or EULAs), which are those annoyingly long contracts where you have to click “I Agree” before you’re allowed to install some program or another.

For example, here’s a snippet of the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) End User License Agreement:

2.3 Backup Copy. You may make one backup copy of the Software, provided your backup copy is not installed or used on any computer.

Nice, huh? If you install this software, its EULA forbids you from making more than one backup copy. This is a deal-breaker for business which keep multiple backup archives from days, weeks, and months past. According to this agreement, you could hypothetically alter your corporate storage system to ignore each of the files that would be installed, but realistically no one would ever even attempt this.

This is just one more reason to be grateful that EULAs are almost universally believed to be legally unenforcable. However, unless you’re willing to tell a jury that you don’t think you’re bound by such an agreement, remember that every piece of software with a similar license is a potential time bomb. Theoretically, you could be sued just for having it, even if you probably wouldn’t be found liable.

Fans of commercial software often talk about the “impracticality” of Free or Open Source Software, but the alternatives are starting to look a lot worse.

Skip this unless you’re really, really geeky.

Still with us? OK. In the movie “Antitrust”, there’s a screenshot of some code that has a possible Denial Of Service vulnerability:

/* are we doing a GET or just a HEAD */
boolean doingGet;
/* beginning of file name */
int index;
if (buf[0] == (byte)'G' &&
    buf[1] == (byte)'E' &&
    buf[2] == (byte)'T' &&
    buf[3] == (byte)' ') {
    doingGet = true;
    index = 4;
} else if (buf[0] == (byte)'H' &&
           buf[1] == (byte)'E' &&
           buf[2] == (byte)'A' &&
           buf[3] == (byte)'D' &&
           buf[4] == (byte)' ') {
    doingGet = false;
    index = 5;
} else {
    /* we don't support this method */
    ps.print("HTTP/1.0 " + HTTP_BAD_METHOD +
               " unsupported method type: ");
    ps.write(buf, 0, 5);
    ps.write(EOL);
    ps.flush();
    s.close();
    return;
}

Because I can’t resist such things, I paused the movie to read over the code. Now, I’m assuming this is Java instead of C++ because “boolean” wasn’t spelled “bool”, although I’m not sure why they’d be using Java for performance critical code. Anyway. See the ps.write(buf,0,5); line near the end? Well, “buf” is presumably the string that the client sent to the server. If the client is broken (or malicious) enough to misspell “GET” and “HEAD”, then the server politely tries to tell the client what it did wrong by sending “buf”’s value back.

Which brings us to the hack. If “buf” is less than five characters long, then that “ps.write” line will attempt to read past the end of “buf”. If the calling function doesn’t handle index error exceptions, boom! The service crashes: Denial Of Service. Note that this is still better than the C++ equivalent, which would write the contents of memory immediately following the end of “buf” back to the client.

No, I’m not exactly good at sitting back and watching movies.

From the manual of an Asus Eee PC:

The solid-state disk drive’s head retracts when the power is turned OFF to prevent scratching of the solid-state disk drive surface during transport.

I think someone got a little zealous with the find-and-replace.

I was about halfway through a game called “Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings” on my Nintendo DS. I was having a great time and loving it until a stupid bug wiped out all the work I’d put in and made me start over.

When I was in the middle of a particularly involved battle, the red “low battery” warning light came on, so as soon as I finished I tried to save my game. Big mistake. The DS used up its remaining power during that instant and turned itself off. When I plugged it into the charger and turned it back on, I got a message saying that my game file was corrupt and had been deleted.

OK, in retrospect, I should have plugged my DS into the charger before I tried to save my game. Still, it should be impossible to destroy your old information by writing a new version of it. That’s just good design. Unfortunately, FFXII doesn’t have a good design. See, the problem is that FFXII saves its game by writing over the pre-existing save file. Since the power died during that write, the results were half old game and half new game. Hence corrupt. Hence deleted. Here’s how a competent programmer would handle the same situation:

1. Create a new save file and write the information to it.
2. Delete the old file.

See the difference? At no point do the two files get mingled together, and the old file stays valid and ready to use until the new one is completely written. In the absolute worst case of a power failure during the saving process, you’d lose the new information but the old data would still be intact and safe.

I don’t know whether the buggy code was written by Square Enix, or if they were using Nintendo’s built-in game saving method. Regardless, it’s dumb and should be fixed ASAP for all new games.

Right now, as I type this, the Yahoo! Finance page for SCO has a caution sign and the text: “SCOX is deficient and bankrupt.” We’ve all been thinking it for ages, but this is the first time I’ve seen an “official” source say so. Wonder what that’s all about?

Back in my Amiga-using days, I had an email program called YAM. It was excellent and ubiquitous; almost everyone used it. It had three unique features:

• You could configure it to embed small bits of personal information in outgoing emails, such as your birthday.
• When it saw these bits in email that other people sent to you, it could add the information to your address book.
• It had an option to automatically send a “happy birthday” email to everyone in your address book on their birthday.

I was active on a lot of mailing lists, so my address book was pretty full with people I’d hardly met. I sent them happy birthday emails each year, and on my birthday, it was fun to get flooded with a few hundred little messages from well-wishers I didn’t know except maybe from some obscure discussion group.

I had the sad realization a few days ago that for the first time ever since I started using YAM, I didn’t receive a single email from it this year. Not one of my old friends still does this. While it’s not very big in the scheme of this, it still marks the sad end to a happy era.

So, I forgot my root password. For non-technical types, that’s pretty much the key to the kingdom when you need to get full access to a computer, or install new software, or to make backups, or to fix something in an emergency. I use this little program called “sudo” all the time that lets you do most of the same things except with your own password. I guess it’d been so long since I’d actually needed that root password that it just slipped my mind. Still, I felt pretty dumb and resigned myself to coming up with a new one and resetting it on all the computers I use.

So, this morning something came up where I really needed that password, and without thinking I picked up a keyboard and mashed it out. It worked. “Oh joy,” I though. “I’ll just do it again and pay attention to what I’m typing.” Except that try as I might, I just can’t type that password if I’m consciously thinking about it.

This has not improved my outlook on an upcoming birthday in the slightest.