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2002 April (15)
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Projects
CornFS
DENSO NAV
Rage Powered
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Creative Commons OpenSource Linux Individual-i GeoURL Linux Speakeasy Speed Test
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Ian's shared items in Google Reader (subscribe)

CONSUMER AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS BUREAU EXTENDS EXPIRING CERTIFICATIONS FOR CERTAIN PROVIDERS OF VIDEO RELAY SERVICE AND IP RELAY SERVICE

CONSUMER AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS BUREAU EXTENDS EXPIRING CERTIFICATIONS FOR CERTAIN PROVIDERS OF VIDEO RELAY SERVICE AND IP RELAY SERVICE

Structure and Practices of the Video Relay Service Program

The YouTube Video You Don’t See

Example Show

Shop with confidence across the web

Helicopter view of your driving directions on Google Maps

Google CIO and others talk DevOps and "Disaster Porn" at Surge

Burning Man 2011 - Yes we were there.

September 08, 2011

Getting Started on the Google API

CACertMan app to address DigiNotar & other bad CA’s

Tangled

Custom Class Loading in Dalvik

Jingle Adventures contd…

TWO REPORTS OF ADVISORY COMMITTEES ON DISABILITIES ISSUES RELEASED

Join the White House Disability Group Monthly Call on July 27

Multiple APK Support in Android Market

Debugging Android JNI with CheckJNI

Android 3.2 Platform and Updated SDK tools

Geektalk

Believe in yourself

Forever alone involuntary flashmob

PS3 root key released - sign and run anything

lunar eclipse shadow on earth

hotpot NFC tags in portland

Oh, little bobby tables

Don't have a front-facing camera?

Tango.me

Looxcie

Mobile phone product testing: Models

Visual 6502

Extruding Light

Foam Printer

How Can the LHC withstand 1 Petabyte of Data a Second?

Linus Torvalds is now officially a US Citizen

Backin up quartet

Oh, hell yes.

Portland bike lanes get mario symbols

Skype RC4 claimed reverse-engineered

Best ever cease and desist

wkhtmltopdf - just awesome

Measurement Lab - Google IO BigQuery session is live querying 60 billion rows instantly

All you need is a little egotism, and $6

Examply punycode link

Convert IDN punycode to/from native characters

Sparkfun free day tomorrow: 1/7

websockets

C thulu ftagn recursion

Need a recursive DNS server? Use 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4

Google Public DNS

JIQL - Java JDBC wrapper for Google DataStore

OpenNebula

Trillions

ZFS L2ARC ZIL on SSD

Swimming in OpenCL

Unicorn == Mongrel delayed_job

Remus - Transparent HA for Xen

Go

What DNS is not

Crossbow Virtual Wire Demo Tool

Banner ads on flies

PoolParty

Eucalyptus MySQL SOLR RabbitMQ Varnish == Nebula.nasa.gov

Nebula.nasa.org

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC)

Evernote

Apple drops ZFS due to legal concerns

Peering disputes between Cogent and Hurricane Electric

Equinix to acquire Switch and Data for $689 million

We Are All Connected

Project kxen renamed project HXEN

Pomegranate Phone

Lessconf Jacksonville - followed the next day by Barcamp

Stick-figure guide to advanced AES crypto

Why you should pay attention to Google Wave

rails-primer - how to easily host rails projects on appengine

AppEngine-JRuby on google code

Ruby on Google AppEngine: appengine-jruby video

Dataliberation.org - The Data Liberation Front - a group concerned with moving data in and out of google

Detecting Spammers with SNARE: Spatio-temporal Network-level Automatic Reputation Engine

Proxmox VE - OpenVZ KVM Cluster appliance management

Sun/Oracle kill of SXCE: Sysadmins everywhere cry in horror.

Essentials of Metaheuristics

making water drinkable through nano-filtration

Pigin 2.6.1 adds Xmpp voice and video support

Opera Unite

Setting up a Layer-3 tunnel VPN using ssh 4.3 and -w option tun devices

shadowserver.org - botnet hunting resources

OpenBSC - a Siemens BS-11 microBTS or a ip.access nanoBTS == your own GSM tower

Voxbone's 883 country code

Apple keyboard firmware hack

Karesansui Project - a Xen management harness from Japan

eunicycle

Pygowave Server - Run your own Google Wave server

Happy Sysadmin Day!

Bokode

Bass cannon

Xen clocksource0 time went backwards

Internet vs World Population stats

BBC article on sat-3 cut

sat-3 cut

iPeak - RAIN

Asankya - RAIN

Apple pulls Google Voice app from iPhone - AT&T's fault

HadoopDB

live-android boot ISO - very neat

How to update your GeoIP information in addition to SWIPping

EATR

Google Wave hackathon on 20th/21st, if you happen to be in Mountainview

Did I mention OTOY here before?

NeatX - NX for Ganeti

STuPiD - STUN/TURN using PHP in Dispair

Aviary.com

Browser based Server-side 3D gaming from OTOY

Cisco's replacement for the WRT54GL is the WRT160NL

Spinn3r.com - Index the blogosphere

Team ARIN

Parts of galaxy Messier 87 are missing

DRAEGER ALCOTEST 7110 MKIII-C Evaluation of Breathalizer Source Code

Cyclops

Google's AJAX playground

How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wallstreet

Bruce Perens - A Cyber-Attach on an American City

How Google and Facebook are using R

adito - the new gpl fork of the old sslexplorer project

A date idea: forklift sunset

Psytechnics - VVoiP QoE

r1soft cdp

IP Address geolocation for free

Shapeways - $50 "3-D poem rings" until the end of the month

GrandCentral to become Google Voice

Wolframalpha is coming

Hosted Xen Project

VirtualGL X11 transport

TurboVNC VirtualGL == FAST network GL

Ben Rockwood's presentation at the OpenSolaris Storage Summit: ZFS in the trenches

The Crisis of Credit Visualized on Vimeo

10gen - a java based app hosting infrastructure

Engineyard Vertebra - another cloud infrastructure management harness

Eucalyptus - an opensource EC2 compatible hosting infrastructure

asciicasts.com

railsbrain.com <-- ajaxified rdoc

AP IMPACT: SWAT Teams Deployed in 911 fraud

Lessons learned by people who have quit Google

Makwana indicted for Fanny Mae malware

"physicalized" servers

Zentific svn repo: alpha available

Holographic Space-Time ?

DACS - Distribution and Configuration System - version 2.0

Video of Cisco IOS attack talk at Chaos Computer Conference

Cosmic radio background noise 6 times higher than expected

We get a leap second tonight

Grow your own bioluminescent algae

Johnson and Ruby/Javascript

Two turntables and a git repo

Quartz Composer and Cruise Control status

Truthy and stupid.rb

The nature of truth

Get2Human

Sunay Tripathi's Solaris Networking Blog

Merry Christmas from XKCD

Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime

Prius Emergency Generator

German folk tune Jazz improv

Memcached speed improvements

FSF sues Cisco

Asterisk Vishing Alert

Google's Native Client... the next ActiveX?

Waterballs

YAGNI development assistant

HA-xVM demo video posted

Kemari 1.0 released - HA Xen

The Decline and Fall of Agile

Zone Alarm 2009 Free Tomorrow

kenai.com - xVM Server Project site

58% Spam Drop from one colo shutdown

Xenomips - a Xen friendly domU version of Dynamips - Emulate a Cisco 7200

Debian and Android dual-boot on the G1

Sipper (SIPr) - a SIP testing framework in ruby

DBslayer - a SQL abstraction layer using JSON

Clojure - JVM based LISP dialect with immutable persistent data structures that are inherently thread safe

Fingerworks keyboard in a MacBookPro

NfSen - Netflow Sensor

The Phoenix BIOS hypervisor is Xen

Do you live in a Constitution-Free zone?

Puppet presentation at NYCOSUG this month

Kemari - Xen lock-step HA

XenSmartIO - Infiniband IO for Xen

Starting with b100, OpenSolaris has virtual consoles

OpenSolaris testfarm build server interface now available

Firefox M9 Fenric - Maemo alpha

SystemZ - aka Sirius - a port of OpenSolaris to IBM System Z mainframe OS running in z/VM mode

40.8% efficient solar cell

FREDNET

World sunlight map

Solaris and ZFS on a Dell 2950, tweaking notes

Logstalgia

Early Access Windows PV drivers for xVM

Economics: The Theory of Interstellar Trade

COMSTAR Admin Guide PDF file

The Financial Crisis: What Happened and What's Next?

3.5" DIY SSD drive

Microsoft usurping ODF

Cisco to run Windows 2008 on their appliance virtually for services

Packetfence: an OpenSource Network Access Control system

Public.resource.org

persist.js - an alternative to gears

Chinese building "impossible" EM drive

Supertinykeyboard

COMSTAR SMTF - solaris FC, SAS, and iSCSI targets

Flexiscale - yet another control panel?

RightScale - cloud control panels?

GoGrid, a servepath company.

OSCON in 37 minutes

Criticial ESXi remote vulnerability in openwsman

Parasitic power

Microsoft FUD on VMWare: vmwarecostswaytoomuch.com

nmap builds zenmap topology maps

Mon, 27 Jun 2005
Mon, 27 Jun 2005

"The OpenSSI project is a comprehensive clustering solution offering a full, highly available SSI environment for Linux."

"Goals for OpenSSI Clusters include availability, scalability and manageability, built from standard servers. Technology pieces include: membership, single root and single init, cluster filesystems and DLM, single process space and process migration, load leveling, single and shared IPC space, device space and networking space, and single management space."

Simply put, with OpenSSI, a group of physical machines "look like" a very large and powerful single machine.

Mon, 27 Jun 2005
Mon, 27 Jun 2005
Mon, 27 Jun 2005

The syndication module in bloxsom is causing me some grief. Rather than fight with it at the moment, I've removed the entire right-hand column from my layout. I've also removed the Full Category Index at the bottom of every page. The static content should be much smaller now.

If you still find you're having problems, you can insert "/blog/" after blenke.com, but before the path you're looking for. This uses the dynamic page generation mode of bloxsom, which while slower, is much better about rendering things directly. By default, all pages (save those generated by the search function) are statically rendered, and should load immediately now.

Sun, 26 Jun 2005

Requirements:

  • Integration with the Prius bluetooth handsfree.
  • Addressbook sync with the Prius via obexpush (via Multisync, etc)
  • Act as a wireless access point using bluetooth DUN uplink via Verizon 3G
  • Act as a wardriving packet recorder at all times.
  • Play audio via FM transmitter
  • Potentially install the ViewTech unit to permit live DVD, video game (MAME, et al), and/or a live wardriving report ala kismet.

For integration with Vonage over a Verizon 3G phone:

Sun, 26 Jun 2005

Ugh, this is so maddening. All I wanted to do was have a home VIA EPIA-M based system that could drive a TV for Myth while simultaneously driving a dual-screen desktop setup. You would think this would be easy (ok, I would think this would be easy).

Ideally, what I was looking for was a way to run two simultaneous X server instances. Display :0 would be the dual-screen nVidia Geforce2 MX/400 PCI card. Display :1 would be the onboard Unichrome VIA chipset driving the TV.

Unforunately, there exists real limitations on Linux Virtual Console support. Unless you're using kernel framebuffers for each video card, you only have the builtin VGA console. Spawning an X server allocates a VC from the VGA console driver, and you can only have one active at a time. Sure, you can spawn a single X server to drive all of the displays simultaneously, but this has a number of drawbacks if you wish to run a inputless PVR/MythTV display.

If you use kernel framebuffers, you run into other problems. The VIA Unichrome support, for example, destroys any hope of getting hardware MPEG or accelerated 3d graffics working. Likewise, the nVidia driver can have issues with the rivafb driver. And don't even think about using vesafb or vesafb-tng and getting both to work.

So I've done a bit more research and found that the linuxconsole project is mentioned quite thoroughly in the XFree Local Multi-User HOWTO. There is a "backstreet ruby" for 2.4 kernels which was backported during the 2.5 dev cycle, and a "ruby" 2.6 kernel patch which applies beyond those things that were integrated into the mainline kernel. The premise is to use the latest development tree ("ruby-2.6") against a 2.6.x kernel (see their CVS repository), and append the "dumbcon=X" option at boot time to allocate extra "dumb consoles" for X servers to use.

The first step was easy, if not CPU intensive: emerge an optimized Gentoo build, following various guides on the EPIA wiki.

The second step was to figure out how to "patch" a recent 2.6 kernel for this Ruby nonsense. Rather than a kernel patch, the project apparently expects you to copy a CVS checkout overtop your kernel build tree. Looking at the Makefile, it appears the CVS tree is a delta against 2.6.12.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/linuxconsole login
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/linuxconsole co -P ruby-2.6
rsync -av --exclude=CVS ruby-2.6/ /usr/src/linux/

Now the kernel is building. Time for sleep. More on this soon.

Sun, 26 Jun 2005

The v9fs filesytem is an implementation of the Plan 9 network filesystem for Linux. It may soon become part of the 2.6.13 standard kernel tree.

It sounds like LANL is considering v9fs as part of their xcpu cluster job submission and general job management. Interesting.

Sun, 26 Jun 2005

The successor to the AVFS project, FUSE has made it back into the 2.4 and 2.6 kernel trees as a userspace harness for rapidly developing filesystems.

  • Wayback is a versioning filesystem for Linux (think CVS or Subversion meets filesystem)
  • Phonebook is a deniable steganographic encryption filesystem (multiple encryption keys, each presenting an entirely different filesystem)
Fri, 24 Jun 2005

Robert Hamburger, of RealUltimatePower.net fame, has published his book: Real Ultimate Power : The Official Ninja Book.

I don't know about you, but I'm PUMPED just thinking about it. Totally sweet.

Fri, 24 Jun 2005

Plan:

  1. Get a Verizon PocketPC phone with unlimited 3G service for $45/month.
  2. Install a SIP VoIP client on it.
  3. Get Bluetooth networking working with Prius CarPuter
  4. Potentially get Bluetooth handsfree working.
Thu, 23 Jun 2005

If you play with packaging systems long enough, you begin to see patterns.

  • Slackware has tarballs.
  • Debian has dpkg, and the wonderful apt dependency resolution tool.
  • Redhat, SuSE, Mandrake, etc have RPM and various dependency resolution tools like YUM, apt for RPM, and others.
  • Gentoo has portage/qpkg.
  • Mac OS/X has the installer, OpenDarwin ports, and Fink
  • Freebsd has ports and packages.
  • Solaris has pkgtool
  • HP-UX has sdux.
  • AIX has LPP

etc, etc.

Moving back toward Unix think, it would be great to add metadata forks directly to files in the tree.

To find what package a file belongs to, you might check the blongs_to metadata fork for example.

To find what packages depend on a file to exist, you might check the requiredby metadata fork (requiredby={package},{package}). Each new package install would tag files it requires with its own package name listed in the resource.

Files might then have a "version" metadata fork. Binaries that have vanilla names (like "/bin/ls") would then have a reliable exposed interface for checking the version of that binary.

Packages themselves would still require a repository, primarily as an anchor for metadata about the package (package dependencies, conflicts, etc). I would argue that the "repository" be a directory structure of text files; each text file would list all of the files in a package (a quick forward index, negating the need to walk the entire filesystem to enumerate the files in a package).

It's just an idea, I'm sure others have thought of it, and it only works if you can tag files with metadata (or provide a userspace metadata overlay that isn't too obnoxious). This would require Yet Another Packaging System though, and I'm not sure the world really needs that.

Thu, 23 Jun 2005

Developed by Coraid, ATA Over Ethernet (AoE) has become a part of the core 2.6 Linux kernel.

There are two pieces to AoE, as there are with iSCSI. The initiator has only one implementation, that is included in recent Linux 2.6 kernels. The target has an implementation in the aoetools project named "vblade", and there is rumored to be another that Alan Cox once cobbled together.

The spec is open, however, so there is nothing stopping other implementations of AoE for other platforms to surface (in fact, I would expect to see at least a Windows implementation from Coraid at some point).

Thu, 23 Jun 2005

iSCSI - RFC3720 - SCSI tunnelled over IP packets.

There are two pieces to iSCSI, the initiator and the target.

An iSCSI initiator is the "client" that sees the drive on the host that mounts it as a filesystem.

An iSCSI target is the "server" that exposes a target drive.

There are now a couple of iSCSI target implementations for Linux:

Likewise, there are a number of iSCSI initator implementations:

Tue, 14 Jun 2005

So I'm told to put together a network FAXing solution for a group of laptops running Windows XP (each with firewalls, that may or may not be at a home office).

What else better to use than Hylafax.

There is at least one great guide on configuring hylafax on a debian box, just look around. This is the easy part, really.

The problem is really with clients.

Option 1: http://winprinthylafax.sourceforge.net/

This option requires a client piece to be loaded that installs a printer driver to present the user with a FAX printer. When the user prints, a simple dialog box pops up asking for the phone number and email address to send the result of the FAX job to. When the FAX is sent, or errors out, the server will send a result email to the provided email address.

Simple. Almost too simple. No coverpages. No multiple FAX numbers. No contact addressbook to save FAX numbers to. Not much of anything. But easy to understand. Also: FREE ($0/seat)

Downside: requires client install.

Option 2: http://www.ifax.com/content/view/36/88/

HylaFSP. This option is like Option #1, but uses Microsoft's "Windows Fax Wizard" instead of the simple dialog box. This is commercial, $36/seat.

Fairly simple. Very user friendly. Actually supports multiple recipients and groups of FAX numbers, though we will need to test to see if it works with Lotus Notes' Addressbook.

Downside: requires client install.

Option 3: http://inconnu.isu.edu/~ink/new/projects/smbfax/

This is a completely different way of handling the print jobs. There is no client piece to load - the user merely maps a printer to the Samba server and prints their job as Postscript. The server then sends them an email with the URL to click on to access a web page for setting the phone number and coverpage to use when sending the FAX.

SMB Client -> Samba -> smbfax -> SMTP -> cgi-bin -> smbfax -> hylafax

Easy to support (nothing to load on the client), but perhaps detrimental to workflow for the user (they will need to check their email and click on a web link to finish the FAXing process everytime they send something to be FAXed).

Option 4: http://www.boerde.de/~horstf/

This uses a Samba print server like Option 3, with one change: instead of running a web server, there's a small Delphi GUI application that asks for the number to dial. The way this works is a bit different: the FAX server connects back to the client that printed the FAX on TCP port 5555 and the client machine fires off a GUI Application window asking for the number to dial.

This requires a hole to be punched in their XP firewall. In a closed environment, I would love to do this, but with laptops that are coming in over dialup connections.. not a good idea.

For more info on this, see Option 5.

Downside: requires client install. Upside: the client install is generic and simple.

Option 5: http://www.adixein.com/fax/

This is basically option 4 with a different GUI. It does a better job of explaining what is going on with Option 4, however.

Option 6: http://www.uli-eckhardt.de/whfc/

This starts the "thick client" method of talking to a hylafax server. This GUI is free, and provides the user with a bit more information than they really need for faxing things. Also, very simple and messy (raw tiffs and postscript files). Not something I like. The neat bit here is a FAX admin tool for viewing pending FAXes incoming and outgoing.

Option 7: http://www.cypheus.de/frmhomee.htm

Like Option 6, only commercial. Much easier to use. ~$30/seat.

For Mac OS/X workstations, there only seems to be one solution:

For Linux workstations, there are a few solutions:

If you're looking for a FREE Global faxing system, check out tpc.int, a network of hylafax servers all over the planet that will gateway your faxes free of charge (as local calls).

Tue, 14 Jun 2005

First, two GPL'ed Broadcom "vendor" drivers, rather than the vanilla 2.4 kernel's asplodey bits: one for bcm4400, and the other for bcm5700.

Second, VMWare Workstation 5.0.0 build 13124 requires vmware-any-any-update91, and has a different vmware-tools-distrib set of kernel modules for those VMWare images I use for testing our new builds.

Thirdly, QEMU 7.0.0 now supports a VMWare like virtualized CPU kernel module. It looks like Fabrice isn't fully GPLing kqemu, but he deserves to make a living with all of his great work.

Things that need some followup:

  • Opensourcing my "kerncob" harness for building debian standard kernels with all of the handbuild kernel modules and patches we use outside of debian proper.
  • Starting a public apt repository along the lines of backports.org for those of us stuck maintaining large farms of Debian/woody servers.
Tue, 14 Jun 2005

6/14/2005 - Opening day for OpenSolaris.

Were you one of the first 5000 to grab a shirt?

With neato things like ZFS and zones, I'm downloading it now to play with it a bit under VMWare.

Sun, 12 Jun 2005

AdiumX is a wonderful multi-protocol instant messaging client, but it lacks Jabber MUC bookmarks. Someone has a creative AppleScript to create Adium Group Chat Bookmarks outside of the app.

Also a great guide toward scripting other Cocoa apps.

Sat, 11 Jun 2005

J-EAI is an XMPP-based Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) platform (also known as ESB, the Enterprise Service Bus). It is composed of several components, including an Erlang XMPP server core, connectors that support Open Adaptor and XSLT, and several distribution mechanisms, including publish and subscribe and content-based routing.

Sat, 11 Jun 2005

OpenAdaptor can be loosely classified as EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) software. It is highly extensible and provides many ready-built interface components for JMS, LDAP, Mail, MQ Series, Oracle, Sybase and MSSQL Server as well as data exchange formats such as XML. New components are regularly added.

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