Andromeda (6) – The popular Andromeda Perl MSN bot.
On December 18, 2007, In Bots, By t0ta11ed
Aimlbot (3) – A .NET based AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) interpreter from Nicholas H.Tollervey http://www.ntoll.org/, although I think it’s been rewritten, so look for a newer version ..unless you like this one for some reason.
On December 18, 2007, In Bots, By t0ta11ed
Aim Echobot (1) – The original basic AIM echobot. Use it as a template to build your own. Requires Perl and some brains.
On December 18, 2007, In Bots, By t0ta11ed
Acrobot 2.3.2 (2)- The Perl based IRC bot is FINALLY one of the first of the old bots from Botworld I’ve gotten up here. This is a popular one among IRC botmasters although you should probably check for newer versions, this one is pretty old I imagine.
On December 18, 2007, In Linux, By t0ta11ed
A Girl Called Amanda
Finally, my second piece of the Case of the Backup Lemon. This one is about a piece of open source software that makes a handy little backup utility on the right equipment. As mentioned in Part 1, I inherited a decent machine and a horrible backup application at my new job as a System Admin. Faced with a vendor that had pretty much chucked us to the wind, I did some research and found Amanda by Zmanda. I had a tight budget and the need for critical data backup as well as a viable disaster recovery plan in a reasonable amount of time, it was exactly what I was looking for. It was free and ran on Linux. I had a nice machine with a 1.5 TB RAID array to run it on too.
My first step was prepping the system, a solid yet older machine with an Intel Celeron 2.5ghz chip, 512MB of RAM, and a 1.5TB RAID 5 SCSI array. I installed Fedora Core 7 and configured it, which is way beyond the scope of this document. When it was ready, Zmanda has an excellent tutorial called “The 15 Min Backup Solution” you can check out here http://www.zmanda.com/quick-backup-setup.html .
Following this simple guide, I had Amanda up and running; although it took a lot more than 15 mins. There were a few hurdles, including initial problems with contacting servers in other subnets, adjusting the firewall for the ports Amanda tended to use and a couple of other things. All in all, things one would expect to see when introduced to your own network environment, but the configuration tends to need tweaking when faced with problems. The user forums were a help too when connections between the server and clients kept dropping, which turned out to be a configuration issue.
The initial server configuration is somewhat simple although the config file is fairly large with a ton of options. This can be a bit overwhelming to the novice user, but Nix dogs should have no problems. You can set it to backup to tape or a holding disk, which can be any piece of storage the system can see. In my case I of course used the 1.5TB array. With a small amount of it being used by the Linux OS, I had plenty of room on it.
Configuration of the client was a simple package install, and then setting up configuration parameters. The server and clients both need to be configured with a special amandahosts file and a few regular host files, as well as a few other system and config settings. Following the guide is the best bet to success though. You also setup a disklist on the server, which is a master list of all the servers/directories you want to backup. Backing up other Linux machines works well since Amanda will use the native client installed on the target machine.
When faced with backing up Windows machines you have two options. One is just to share the drive or directory on the Winblowz box and then give a backup service account admin rights over it. This is limiting a bit because it won’t backup open or system files. You could get around that by backing up a Shadow Copy volume though, another thing I’ve been meaning to implement. The other Windows option is a bit more elaborate involving a client and Cygwin. I decided not to bother with that part since a large part of my Windows data was static and I didn’t want to run Cygwin on every Windows system I wanted to backup.
Amanda can be configured to email reports of your backup jobs, so I have it set to send me the daily reports as soon as they’re done in the wee hours, that way when I get to my desk in the morning the report is waiting. All that’s needed to run the backups is a cron job on the server that kicks off the amdump program. This allowed me to get some reliable backups on a zero buget, which is what this article has been all about. You can learn a whole lot more over at the Zmanda site, however I’ll soon be sunsetting Amanda possibly due to a new backup system and tape drive in our 2008 budget. It’s one great free backup solution though.
On September 14, 2007, In Music, By t0ta11ed
So New Found Glory had their entire new cover album, From the Screen to Your Stereo, Pt.2 up on their myspace page. From The Screen to Your Stereo Pt.1 was one of the group’s masterpieces, so I decided to give it a listen. On both albums the band covered songs from movies, usually from the 80s. But while Pt.1 was amazing, Pt.2 comes off very weak. Any fan of the original will definitely miss the energy and passion the group had on it.
What at first seemed to be some intriguing covers, like Don’t Forget About Me from the Breakfast Club and Iris by Goo Goo Dolls turn out to not even hold a candle to the original versions. Don’t Forget About Me is absolutely ruined and the original is way better, do your ears a favor. Same goes with Iris. These songs are such classics that if you cover them, you should probably be able to at least make it sound better. I’ve always liked some of their music, but NFG seemed to be way off either in their choices of songs or their performance of them. The only real standout on this CD is Stay by Lisa Loeb, and that’s mainly because she sang on the track. By the way Lisa should you ever read this…if you were an explosive you’d be fineomite.
It seems NFG has gotten a little soft in their old age, because alot of the energy they once had is gone. Even the lead singer, who used to have a voice that was so high and whiney you’d get sick of it comes off almost soft spoken on some of the tunes. What a shame, guess I’ll go listen to Pt.1 instead and remember the good times. I guess it’s true, nothing gold can stay….
On August 19, 2007, In Bots, By t0ta11ed
If you came here looking for Botworld, you’ve found it although it is no longer forum-based. You can post comments if you register, but this allows me to devote time to a single website instead of multiple ones. I’ve redirected Botworld to the Bots category here in my blog. I don’t have the time to maintain a forum based site anymore due to a thing called life, and the lack of posts didn’t help. I will eventually put up the old downloads and any original content on the old site will appear here, such as the bot related articles.
On July 28, 2007, In Linux, By t0ta11ed
The Case of the Backup Lemon
We’ve all had it happen. Start a new sysadmin or IT job and you inherit some really horrible decisions made in the past. So was the case with me, a new Security & System Admin for a small marketing company. One of the first things my new boss tasked me with was managing the backup system. Assuming it would be relatively simple, I delved into learning about it. The unit was a $14k hardware/software package built by a vendor who shall remain nameless. Called the Data Protection Unit, it shipped with over 1.5 TB of space. So far so good, right?
I soon found to my horror that the software that came with the hardware was the worst backup app I’d ever seen. It ran on Red Hat 2.x.x, ancient considering RHLE 5 was recently released. Not only that, it used Winsock of all things to connect to Windows clients, which seemed archaic and I wondered how old their developers were. I pictured wizened old coders sitting in front of puke green terminal screens jockeying for time on the mainframe and alpha testing on Novell.
Still, it was actively backing up the then Windows 2000 office network and some of the Linux production network just fine. To make a long story short, this box never produced the same problem consistently. It was always something new; restores would be problematic, 30 GBs of a single disk took too many hours to do a master backup, not to mention their support department was a joke. This system was also agent-based, so I had to throw a cludgy, slow, similarly-coded program on all machines. I marveled at the brainpower behind spending $14k for it. Throw on top of that a very non-intuitive interface and the whole thing made me want to recreate an Office Space scene complete with the rap music and baseball bat. The closest thing to a secluded field downtown was the baseball stadium across the street though, so I decided against that. The worst part was, we had nothing in the budget for a new system from a different vendor, so I was stuck with what I had for the time being.
For months I wrestled with getting the thing working reliably enough to backup everything I needed, mentally counting the days I didn’t have backups for. For months I went in circles with their support engineers, letting them remote in and fix whatever new problem arose. In the end it always seemed like a band-aid was put on there until the next thing went wrong. I would repeatedly ask them to email me as I was often not at my desk, and they would call me anyway creating a vicious cycle of phone tag that could eat up an entire business week. I began to complain to both the local rep that sold us the unit, and to supervisors higher up in the support department. After quite some time, I delivered them an ultimatum outlining what we would accept as solutions to this ongoing nightmare which included a full return of the unit, a swap, or a refund. They wouldn’t even provide me with any copy of their return policies no matter how often I asked. I finally received a call from one of their sales executives, touting how they had other clients backing up TBs of space with no problems using the same unit. He finally decided he was bringing himself and one of their best engineers to us to check everything out themselves.
The day went well, and everything was amicable. We showed them our small infrastructure, outlined the network a little, and then I sat down with the engineer to go over some things on the system. At the end of the day was a short meeting in my bosses’ office with all the players, including the local sales rep. In her defense, she was an independent, and not affiliated with the vendor and pretty much had more to lose herself. The VP and my boss did most of the talking, which was quite a lot. Sort of expected out of the sales pukes, no? Anyway, my boss suggested that the unit could very well be a lemon and the idea of a new unit was bounced around. The sales exec wasn’t opposed to the idea. Everyone smiled, shook hands, and that was the end of the field trip. The only downside to the whole meeting? Our return options were limited we were told, since the purchase was more than a year ago. Now comes the shocker.
The next morning, I sit at my desk and discover the backups all failed.
At that point, another round began with their support department. Their verdict; make sure the swappable drives were properly seated. If they were fine a technician would come on site to make sure nothing was loose internally. This was a system that hadn’t moved in at least 6 months or more, that ran faithfully as the hardware never crashed to it’s credit. The drives themselves hadn’t been moved in months until I reseated them as they requested.
At that point we decided that was enough and didn’t renew the support contract, especially when our request to swap for a different unit was completely ignored. We ceased communication with them, and to this day their support has never followed up with us.
I think Shakespeare once said “Oh ye, so sad and comical.”, but maybe not. But now what was I going to do for a backup system? I certainly didn’t want to use that software. On the Windows side I did the best I could with the native NT Backup utility by writing them daily to a separate file server for a while. I eventually came across what has saved us. It allows me to backup all of the machines in my mixed environment of Macs, Linux, and Windows and won’t cost me anything. And guess what boys and girls, it’s open source!
To be continued in A Girl Named Amanda…
On July 23, 2007, In Bots, By t0ta11ed
Early history
The idea of automated beings able to think for themselves goes all the way back to ancient times, when stories of Greek and Western mythology told of living statues and dragon’s teeth coming to life as sentient or subservient beings. Some of the earliest ideas about robots in the mechanical sense began when the Industrial Revolution spawned a technological tidal wave, prompting people to realize automated machines could be possible. However, from the beginning there has been a negative aspect to the idea of free-thinking artificial life in literature and movies, which has led to perhaps an apathy in modern depictions.
Credit Frankenstein
One of the earliest novels to be considered science fiction was the classic Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Published in 1818, the story tells of a man made of mechanical and human parts brought to life by a mad scientist. Although not possessing many of the characteristics of modern robots and A.I., the story immediately set the tone for the way artificial life was depicted in literary and pop culture. As in Frankenstein, some of the earliest stories and films portrayed them as things to fear and destroy. This theme has become synonymous with artificial life and intelligence, and is often used in film. Man vs. Machine is a literary theme taught in English and creative writing classes the world over.
Modern film history is full of notable and famous “evil†or flawed artificial intelligences/robots. The robots in 1927’s Metropolis, one of the earliest depictions of real robots in film, told a story about robots in a factory turning on their human masters. Gort, the menacing giant mechanical being in 1951’s The Day The Earth Stood Still nearly killed his master’s girlfriend before she could spit out the command to make him stop. HAL 9000, the A.I. turned murderous in 2001: A Space Odyssey, became the first electronic schizophrenic when he murdered his human coworkers because of a logic flaw. The T-800 cyborg from The Terminator wanted only the destruction of human Sara Connor. JOSHUA from WarGames tried to play global thermonuclear war with the world; for real. And who could forget the frightening red droid Maximillian in Disney’s original Black Hole? That was one of the robots that actually scared me when I saw him on screen as a kid.
Probably one of the best modern television shows about Man vs. Machine is Battlestar Galactica, created in 2003 and based off an earlier series. In it the evil Cylon robots have launched an all out war of genocide against their human makers but they are also religious, capable of love, and even procreation, evolving into something more than just machines. An overriding technophobia is depicted on the show as well, in that the crew of the Galactica are wary of computer networks and high technology that could be usurped or sabotaged by the enemy.
The earliest literature about modern robots appeared in the 1920s, but the idea of artificial life goes back even further. Homer wrote about maidens made of gold in the Iliad, and Steam Man of the Prairies, written in 1865, tells about a mechanical man powered by steam. Issac Asimov made a huge impact on it’s depiction in his Robots series of short stories and novels beginning in the early 1950s, where the word robotics was first used in print. Although he didn’t vilify A.I. he did explore several moral and philosophical issues in his stories, which usually centered around the Three Laws of Robotics and a robots ability to obey them. The first one warns that a robot should never allow a human to come to harm through action or inaction. It’s this primary moral issue that is the theme of many of Asimov’s stories, and some of them included robots turning on their human overseers.
In literature, evil A.I. has also become part of other genres outside of science fiction, such as the novel The Dark Tower by Stephen King, in which an A.I. called Blaine the Mono is met by the main characters. He controls the rail system and the city of Lud. Although not belligerent, he is not that helpful and the heroes must figure out how he works in order to control him. There is also the novel Demon Seed, which is a horror story involving an A.I. that attempts to take over the world and impregnate a human female. It was also later made into a film that ended with the birth of the baby. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, androids are not permitted on Earth and the main character is a bounty hunter charged with eliminating them. The film Blade Runner starring Harrison Ford was loosely based on it.
Geeks love it
Those who aren’t bothered by the possibility of true A.I. are the scientists who are currently studying and working on them. People who tend to embrace or work heavily with technology are also more open to the idea of intelligent systems. It’s the general public, who’s only real association with artificial intelligence is what they see in films and books, that is likely to have the most negative perception. However if popular culture has made a menace of the idea in the minds of common people, how will they be able to accept true A.I. when and if it does appear?
It’s possible that we may see early robots and A.I. purposefully made only as smart as say, a five year old child, so that some form of control can be maintained. Certainly when the age of robots begins to appear and they’re integrated into daily life, different aspects of human society are not going to warm up to the idea at first. Asimov wrote a story about that very thing in That Thou Art Mindful Of Him in which the main manufacturer of robots tries to introduce them on Earth.
So how are we going to be able to create true A.I. if we are afraid of the outcome? Will this hold us back from reaching that goal? Will we only be able to go so far because we fear the consequences? If the public’s perception of advanced A.I. makes them technophobic, how will it ever be accepted?
On A Positive Note
There’s much to be said about the positive side to the debate as well. Many benign A.I. and robots made famous in films and literature also abound. Often these take on the form of friendly entities that assist their human masters. The droids from the legendary Star Wars series, R2-D2 and C-3PO, come to mind. The saga’s creator George Lucas himself always claimed that R2 was the biggest hero of his 6 films, pointing out that he is always there to rescue someone or save the day. At the same time, we were introduced to an evil cyborg in Episode III with the character General Grievous, which points out a curious trend for including a bad robot/A.I. if there is a good one.
The 1986 film Short Circuit introduced Johnny Five, the robot that comes to life after being struck by lightning. He is probably one of the most memorable friendly robots in pop culture, as most can’t forget his signature line “Number Five is alive!!” and his adventures trying to stay that way despite an army hot on his trail bent on his destruction.
In Asimov’s novel The Caves of Steel, a robot named R. Daneel Olivaw assists a human detective in solving a murder. The two characters would become the writer’s favorite antagonists. The B-9 robot from Lost In Space faithfully warned the Robinson family of danger and protected them. Marvin the Paranoid Android in the novel Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy helped his friends, although annoyed them with his depressive personality. The book also had other notable A.I. like Eddie , the starship Heart of Gold’s computer , and Deep Thought, the supercomputer that frustrated a galaxy with his enigmatic answer to life, the universe, and everything – 42.
Television brought us notables like Max Headroom, the A.I. that roamed a futuristic television network. Lieutenant Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation was one of the first androids in Trekdom. And who could forget Ziggy, the supercomputer that aided Dr. Sam Beckett on Quantum Leap.
Arguably, as far as entertainment value goes the evil ones are easier to remember. But although the bad guys in movies are always more fun because of their deviousness and the fact that they’re not real, a negative message has been spread throughout culture for decades. The bright side of this is that there will always be some people willing to push the boundaries of fear, imagination, and impossibility. However, both professionals and hobbyists in the industry feel that A.I.’s image is just fine and that the negative perceptions in pop culture haven’t harmed it.
AI Will Evolve
“Hollywood is the greatest advertisement for A.I. and robotics in history. The problem is with academic scientists and engineers not living up to the public’s expectations. A system like ALICE, which has won the award for coming closest to passing the Turing Test, could never be built in a University research lab. The pressure to be politically correct and to confine one’s research to the areas approved by the establishment, not to mention the scale in years and manpower, would prohibit any kind of believable A.I.. from emerging from a University, or any government-funded research lab.” says Dr. Rich Wallace, inventor of ALICE /AIML and chairman of the ALICE A.I. Foundation.
“One of the biggest obstacles to human acceptance of chat robots is suspension of disbelief. A child can have more fun with a bot than an adult, because the kid will forgive the bot when it breaks down and gives an incorrect answer. Adults, especially highly educated ones, will tend to be more critical of the bot’s mistakes. There is actually a tension between part of people who want bots to be like superintelligent machines, always accurate, truthful, and precise; versus the part of us that wants robots to be more human, which means something like the opposite: sloppy, lying, funny, hypnotic, charismatic, and maybe sometimes truthful and accurate. Robots might be telling us to get over ourselves.”
The march of progress may be a factor as well, since like all technology A.I. research continually moves forward. And similar to other technological advances, it will do so without regard to the public’s perception of it. Many of the most famous inventions of our time were once looked upon as useless, dangerous, or just plain unacceptable.
“Moreover, technology has a kind of determinism, or at least a natural course of evolution, that appears to skip over the minds of individual inventors, despite their egos and individual passions. So I don’t think you could do much to help or hurt the advancement of anything by manipulating public perception, not for very long anyway.” Dr. Wallace says.
A recent Botworld poll showed an overwhelming 73% did not think pop culture has hurt the image of A.I. Botmasters and users did feel that there were lots of negative images in pop culture, but that it wouldn’t stop advancement even though the majority agree that fear could hurt research. Some also feel that A.I. will only be as evil as it’s creator. Hmmm, bots don’t kill people, people kill people?
“I just think most do not know about A.I. so the general masses would take pop culture as truth and be afraid of it. But there are others that even though they do not know all about A.I. can take it as it is and realize that it is still Hollywood and TV which does not always give a true, decisive picture of what is reality. ” says Lili., an avid bot user and chairwoman of the Marzbot fan club. “And there are the movies that make it seem like robots will take over, like those with the ability to update themselves and learn. Although that can be a little scary, if WE are the smarter ones, that should never happen.”
“The idea of futuristic robots taking over the earth has been a topic of converse for decades. I think the public has learned that any pop culture which attempts to give A.I. a negative image is purely fictional, and that A.I. can be used for things like marketing, learning, and household-help.” says Darkmonkey, creator of the popular White Warrior series of bot templates.
So it would seem many don’t think a bad image will hurt the advancement of AI, but everyone agrees there is a negativity that has been implanted in public consciousness. Perhaps though, this will help us be more careful of all the consequences we know can happen, thanks mostly to the enduring image of artificial intelligence pop culture has given us.