Ok, for the folks who keep telling me to "fix" my Prius, here are the TSBs for the reported problems.

• EL002-05 - Revised model of the Multi-Display (stuck buttons in the older multi-display panel tend to confuse the computer, causing it to "crash"). If you can toggle between info views with the view button on your steering wheel, you don't need this update. Seems to apply to older 2004 vehicles.

• SSC-40A - Electronic-Control Unit Reprogramming. Seems to apply to older 2004 vehicles.

• LSC-40E - Engine Compartment Seal - Again, seems to apply to older 2004 Vehicles.

See the second and third items on page 7 of 8 of this EPA page for SSC 40A and SSC 40D - covering 25,000 model year 2004 vehicles.

There are a couple of other TSBs to be aware of as well, though neither of these seem to apply to my vehicle either:

• LSC-40J - Replace inacurate DENSO NAV map data v4.1 with fixed v4.2

• SSC-40J - Potential brake-light switch failure (in several Toyota vehicles, not just the Prius).

"Roadcasting is a system that allows anyone to have their own radio station, broadcasted among cars in an ad-hoc network. It plays the songs that people want to hear and it transforms car radio into an interactive medium."

"Roadcasting has emerged as the result of an 7-month project at Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute. The research and development arm of a major automaker commissioned us to create a revolutionary application and service for the car that uses mobile ad-hoc networks for a release target of 2010."

As SAProxy Pro is dead, SpamFu Proxy is a free continuation of the same idea.

Win32 users may use this to filter Spam from their inbox by pointing their Mail User Agent (MUA) e-mail client toward the locally installed SpamFu proxy.

Based on SpamAssassin 3.0.2+ with DCC and Razor, this is the same great engine used by many managed service providers on their own server farms (minus all the custom spam rules, hand-rolled whitelists/blacklists, distributed bayesian learning, and other bits that make those services worthwhile).

If you must use a pop3 mailbox, your provider doesn't filter your Spam, and your e-mail client has no functionality for filtering the same, this is a must-have for your windows desktop.

Tor is an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) anonymizing proxy for TCP connections. The bittorrent client Azureus supports this proxy.

MetaVNC is a window aware VNC that merges windows of multiple remote desktops seemlessly into a single desktop screen.

Here are a few great sites for determining wether you are on an RBL:

• DNSStuff.com
• RBLs.org

The default method of watching filesystem changes in a Linux 2.4 kernel based system is to use dnotify.

There is a enhanded dnotify patch that works in a recursive solution based on RML's Linux 2.6 inotify patch and fixes some of the drawbacks of the default dnotify mechanism.

SGI's FAM project supports both dnotify and IMon inode monitoring.

With Mac OS/X 10.4 Tiger came Spotlight - a search engine that indexes content as you create it. The underlying kernel hook exposed for Spotlight to use can also be watched with your own homegrown userspace tools. The first such tool to appear is fslogger.

In the Linux world, the closes kernel hook to this would be inotify.

Robert M. Love's inotify patches against the 2.6 kernels. The replacement for 2.4's weak dnotify.

There's a perl script that uses the inotify patch if you're interested in playing around with it.

Firefox is the next generation of the [[mozilla]] foundation's web browser.

Version 1.0.4 fixes two publically released expoits. Get your patches on.

Rottlog - A flexible pure bourne shell log rotate script

PDF files containing printable graph paper in various forms.

When dealing with Mac packages (.pkg extension) in a scriptable fashion, it's better to use installer directly rather than ditto.

COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL=1 export COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL; installer -target / -pkg "A Software Package.pkg"

Setting COMMANDLINEINSTALL=1 seems to override some GUI questions in preflight/postflight scripts.

This is the appropriate way to install Mac packages in a scriptable manner. Together with "hdiutil attach" for a .dmg volume, scripting package installs is generally painless.

Looking through some install packages, I found preflight and postflight scripts with COMMANDLINEINSTALL variable checks. Sure enough, this works with softwareupdate. Putting the following into cron will auto-update a Mac OS/X box (without reboot, which should be scheduled as well):

COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL=1 export COMMAND_LINE_INSTALL;softwareupdate -i -a

The more I dig, the more I like OS/X.

When Firewire drive meets Tiki... Big Tiki Drive

There are a number of incompatibilities when dealing with the new Tiger update.

Mac OS/X 10.4 (Tiger) has a wonderful new integrated search engine called Spotlight. By default, it only indexes locally attached storage volumes. Spotlight has a set of command line tools that allow you to change this behavior, however. If you have a Volume named "Remote", you can turn on spotlight using:

mdutil /Volumes/Remote -i on

Checking the status of spotlight on a Volume is just as easy with the -s flag:

mdutil /Volumes/ldm -s

You should see the following:

/Volumes/Remote/:
    Status: Indexing Enabled

Other commandline tools for manipulating the metadata store include:

mdls
mdfind
mdimport
mdutil
mdcheckschema

After spending most of the day fighting with operational issues and working on eat/feed, I've only just managed to reconsitute NetFlow logs after being transmitted securely via SMTP. Hooray Ruby and YAML.

On the Tiger front, I've built quite a repository of Mac packages for pushing to a farm of OS/X boxen using the NKS infrastructure. It's quite slick what you can do with hdiutil and ditto in a Makefile.

Caedes.net is a great desktop wallpaper site.

The BlogDemo project is an Xcode 2.0 tutorial designed to get a Core Data app running as quickly as possible.