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iPad SDK 3.2 Beta 4 Clears Up Facts About iPad Camera And Give Some Gestures TO Developers.

OCZ drops SSDs to below $100

Google Maps Adds Biking Directions

App Engine joins the Google over IPv6 Program

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

Tech Tour: Cambridge Innovation Center

Nippon Oil and Hitachi aim at mass-producing microbe-derived biofuel

Get your Jetpack soon!

exmwSxv7XJI

(title unknown)

SCALE8x, OpenVZ goodies, and new kernels (including 2.6.32)

Strategy: Planning for a Power Outage Google Style

The island phone system adventure… « Baby is 60 – Tim Panton on voice and computers

Frameless laptop screens expected soon

The blind camera shows you someone else’s pictures

Princeton TPM-ICN series Bluetooth bracelet.

YouTube Blog: The Future Will Be Captioned: Improving Accessibility on YouTube

Put a Spark into your Presentations with Ignite

muCPjK4nGY4&hl=en_US&fs=1&

Google Code Blog: Google PowerMeter API introduced for device manufacturers

Geektalk

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

Don't forget about BarCampTampaBay

RubyConf08, In Orlando

The LHC accelerates, and that's what it's all about.

Fun with mechanical turk

Sun's launch of xVM, live webinar

Microsoft to give away Hyper-V for free, live migration by 2010

Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex will be followed by Jaunty Jackalope

Why Xen traps negative segment offsets

Rails 2.1.1 more REXML bug fixes

ISO torrent for OS2008.11

Indiana OS2008.03 RN3 released - based on nv_b96

Skype Mobile Phone (Not in the US)

Youtube gets closed captioning support

Getting xVM to work on OpenSolaris 2008.05

Xen Memory Overcommit

Algae farming for biofuels

Mozilla Ubiquity

How a VoIP E911 call is handled

A critique of RDMA

MonetDB - a column based RDBMS, ideal for time series data

BarcampTampaBay

Intel's programmable matter

Nexenta Hackathon

The value of side projects

VMfaq's comparison of virtual storage IO

Xen 3.3 released

USB3.0 cables

Intel wireless power.

Xen and Solaris, a log of experience.

Adeona.cs.washington.edu

OpenSolaris CR#6654713 - 32G limit bug stemmed from bad USB hardware? Perhaps fixed?

Xen CPUID example config

OpenSolaris CommonArrayManager

Multiple zero capacity quantum communication channels can actually transmit non-zero amounts of data thanks to entanglement

Sharity-Light - smbfs derived samba clone

Drizzle, a thin mysql, generating buzz

VMWare to offer ESX hypervisor for free

Veedeeeyes

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog

Fan, the programming language.

Blackberry Thunder with Haptics keyboard

iPhone App Store Live Walkthrough now available

Google Protocol Buffers

Time to patch your DNS

Recent JVM benchmarks

Overclocking tool for the Mac Pro

ADO.NET Entity Framework (Microsoft's new ORM) given a non-confidence vote by beta testers

Ruby interpreter flaws make the case for JRuby

The Stalled Server Room

AdvFS - Tru64 filesystem ported to Linux

OpenSolaris 2005.05 repository update to b91 - follow these instructions carefully

SXCE can ZFS install as of b90

Vertebra: EngineYard's Next Generation Cloud Computing Platform

Skype 4.0 beta overhauls video chat

Mozilla org receives traditional IE cake

Toyota Prius to go entirely Electric

Bill Gates steps down permanently for philanthropic activities

Men write code from Mars, Women write more helpful code from Venus

SproutCore - a GUI event driven model javascript web development platform, rails based by the looks of it.

Finding ARPANET

DRBD LVM Xen = Bug. A rather nasty one at that.

Intel unveils Ct as an extension for C/C to encourage threaded programming for multiple cores

VMWare ThinApp - Run any Windows app on any version of Windows

JDBC adapter for HBase

JRuby-Rack <-- a JRuby port of Rack

Rack <-- a lighter cousin to Merb, fully threaded and no Mutex.

Datamapper.org <-- ActiveRecord like, with no need to do migrations, it just kind of handles that by itself internally automagically.

Solaris Cluster Express (SCX) 6/08 released.

a-i-studio.com/cmd

CMDLogParserDemo

Changing solaris' default password hashing

Texas based service provider explosion affects 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers.

Jruby on Rails on Tomcat deployed as as WAR file

Rubinius

Milkfish.org SIP Router

42 more of the best Linux games

42 of the best Linux games

XenWindowsGplPv drivers

Use Google's cached ajax libraries

Arduino microcontroller with OS/X

The metasploit page describing the full impact of the poor RNG.

Holger Bert's blog post on the openssl RNG fiasco

Cayac - Cherokee MySQL PHP5 phpMyAdmin

ZFS very slow under an xVM kernel

VMWare's review-board.org

Google DocType

Dynamically editing libvirt xml configs while a VM is running to redefine reboot flags.

Chronoton - the time travelling robot who's best friend is a talking pie game

Endace DAG

Your pizza is done

Rietveld - Google's code review tool

Opensource multitouch displays

RTL8139 drivers supporting QEMU tcp segmentation offloading (XP's default driver does not) - doubles networking speed of Xen HVM networking without using the GPLPV drivers

Corporate map.

Ono - an efficient way to locate nearby peers

Solaris CIFS integrated AD with ZFS acls

Samba Winbind and ZFS acl working together

Why's unholy Ruby to Python .pyc compiler

Zentific poll daemon 1.0 beta

Solaris SAM-QFS NFS and OS/X

OpenSolaris 2008.05 final ISO image

Sat, 31 Dec 2005

Charles Mauch posted a very neat set of xmodmap files and a nifty trick for switching between dvorak and qwerty while at the gdm login menu.

The following is a rehash of his switching-to-dvorak blog post, archived here for my own future personal reference.

First, you need to download xmodmap.kludge, and xmodmap files for dvorak and qwerty. Then add these two lines to your .bash aliases (or equivalent: .bash_login, .profile, etc)


alias aoeu='xmodmap_kludge ~/.xmodmap.qwerty | xmodmap -'
alias asdf='xmodmap_kludge ~/.xmodmap.dvorak | xmodmap -'

Now at a terminal, simply typing asdf will swap layouts to dvorak, and striking the same keys in order in dvorak will switch back to qwerty.

His other trick is to add the following lines to your xorg.conf to swap layouts in X by holding down both shift keys at the same time.


Section "InputDevice"
Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
Driver          "kbd"
Option          "CoreKeyboard"
Option          "XkbRules"      "xorg"
Option          "XkbModel"      "logielite"
Option          "XkbLayout"     "us,dvorak"
Option          "XkbOptions"    "grp:shift_toggle"
EndSection

The important lines to notice are the last two. Both layouts are loaded by X, and it’s toggled with shift keys.

Slick.

Fri, 16 Dec 2005

Lelik P. Korchagin has written vblade-kernel, an AoE target emulator implemented as a kernel module for Linux 2.6.* kernels.

It is reportedly much faster than the user-mode vblade implementation. I'm playing with it now.

Mon, 12 Dec 2005

I've built a set of CME-681 rules to catch the common 6 english messages:

cme-681.cf

This particular Sober worm is also known as:

Sat, 10 Dec 2005

If you have a VoIP phone service, like Vonage, you can use tcpdump to capture entire phone conversations that can later be reassembled using only ethereal, rtptools, and Quicktime.

You should be able to do this on a PC using the Windows version of Quicktime player and cygwin or native ports of ethereal and rtptools.

The following steps are for a Mac:

Step 1: Record the phone conversation

Before you start your phone conversation, start the following on your network firewall, or any node that can capture both sent and received traffic from your VoIP device:

# tcpdump -i eth0 -s 1500 -n -w voip.pcap

This will create a file called "voip.pcap" containing all packets sent and received. Leave this running until your call is finished, then cntl-c out of it.

Sure, you can make this much more complicated, or even use other capture tools that output pcap packet capture dumps (like ethereal), but this demonstration is trying to stay as simple as possible for typical firewalls and hosts.

Step 2: Install some required software

To parse through the voip.pcap file and save each half of the conversation (both RTP streams), we will use ethereal.

Before attempting the ethereal install, you will want to install the Apple OS/X Xcode dev environment and the Apple X11.app and Apple X11 SDK. Ethereal is not a carbon app.

To install ethereal quickly and easily, I recommend installing Darwin Ports and use a simple:

# port install ethereal

If you use Fink, you should be able to install it this way:

# apt-get install ethereal
or
# fink install ethereal

The other piece you will need is rtptools. Building it should be as simple as:

# cd /usr/local/src
# curl -o rtptools.tar.gz http://www.cs.columbia.edu/IRT/software/rtptools/download/rtptools-1.18.tar.gz
# tar xvzf rtptools-1.18.tar.gz
# cd rtptools-1.18
# ./configure
# make install

You will also want to download and install something like Ambrosia Software's WireTap Pro to record your audio while you're playing it back.

Step 3: Prepare rtpdump files with ethereal

We're really only using ethereal to filter the tcpdump into component packet capture dumps for each stream.

So, fire up ethereal:

$ export DISPLAY=:0.0
$ ethereal

When ethereal appears, open the "voip.pcap" file. This will open up an Analyze panel with the packet dump.

From the menu bar, select "Statistics". From that Statistics dropdown menu, select "RTP". From the RTP submenu, select "Show all Streams".

A stream selection dialog will appear. There will be a source IP and port and a destination IP and port.

Select the first stream. Look at the destination port number (say port 13456). Now click "Save as". Give this stream a filename that references the destination port number (like "voip-13456.pcap").

Select the second stream. Look at the destination port number (say port 12345). Now click "Save as". Give this stream a filename that references the destination port number (like "voip-12345.pcap").

You are now done with Ethereal.

Step 4: Create an SDP file for Quicktime, and start it up

Noting the above destination ports for each stream, we want to create an SDP file for Quicktime telling it what ports to start playing:

Open up Textedit (or vi, or just cat the following to a file):

v=0
o=icblenke 2890844526 2890842807 IN IP4 127.0.0.1
s=SDPTest
i=SDP file for G711 audio on port 10128
c=IN IP4 127.0.0.1
t=0
m=audio 12345 RTP/AVP 0 8
a=rtpmap:0 PCMU/8000
a=rtpmap:8 PCMA/8000
m=audio 13456 RTP/AVP 0 8
a=rtpmap:0 PCMU/8000
a=rtpmap:8 PCMA/8000

This defines two 64k G.711 audio streams on UDP ports 12345 and 13456 (one for each side of the conversation). You will want to change these port numbers with the destination port numbers for your streams.

Yes, Quicktime will play more than one audio stream at a time. No, the other fields really aren't all that important (my name, those extra numbers, the IP, etc).

Now "Open File" the SDP file within Quicktime. Quicktime will report "Connecting", which means that it is waiting for the streams from the step after next.

Step 4: Start WireTap Pro

Be prepared to start the rtpplay commands in the next step shortly after opening WireTap Pro and clicking the record button. You can always edit the recorded AIFF audio later to strip out any captured silence.

Step 5: Fire up rtpplay on the streams

You will need to open up two Terminal windows for this next step, or otherwise stack these so they start at the same time:

$ rtpplay -T -f voip-12345.rtp 127.0.0.1/12345
and
$ rtpplay -T -f voip-13456.rtp 127.0.0.1/13456

Your Quicktime will begin immediately playing the streams. You should hear both sides of the conversation.

Step 6: Stop WireTap Pro and transcode with iTunes

Once the rtpplay streams finish playing, you merely need to stop recording with WireTap Pro. WireTap Pro will prompt you for a filename. The file will be saved in an AIFC (AIFF compressed) format.

After saving, open the AIFC file by double-clicking on it.

Alternatively, Open "Applications > iTunes" (in the Finder, open the folder where you saved your aiff file and move your windows around so you can see the folder and iTunes). Drag your aiff file into iTunes.

Find the AIFC file. Depending on the size of your iTunes repository, you might just want to use the Search function and type in the filename.

With the AIFC file selected, select "Advanced > Convert Selection to AAC" (or MP3 if you have that in your iTunes->Preferences->Advanced->Import settings). iTunes will show a temporary playlist that reads "Converting Songs..." while it encodes the audio.

You now have an AAC or MP3 audio clip of your VoIP conversation.

Enjoy.

This was originally posted by Martin Regner on the ethereal-users mailing list. The above is merely my experience with this quick and dirty technique.

Tue, 06 Dec 2005

Xen 3.0 was released on 12/05/2005

It has initial support for unmodified guests when using Intel VT hardware (Intel's Vanderpool or AMD's Pacifica) like the new 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 662 and 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 672, or newer higher-end dual core Xeon Paxville 7000 series chips.

This would allow you to run Windows, unmodified, under Xen.

VMWare will soon be supporting the VT features as well

Unfortunately, you're not going to see a BIOS that supports enabling VT until early 2006 - everything done to date on this has apparently been in Intel labs. They haven't released a way to enable this in hardware quite yet.

Until you can get your hands on VTX hardware, however, you can still run Windows under Win4Lin Pro or QEMU without kqemu/qvm86. Without a kernel module helper to run ring0 virtualized, however, you're dealing with dead slow emulation.

At least one project has appeared recently to provide something like the as-yet unreleased XenOptimizer frontend for Xen: Enomalism. Looks oddly like the VMWare MUI doesn't it?

Sat, 03 Dec 2005

Luke Kanies mentioned that someone pointed him toward Freeride's Freebase "bus".

Looking into it, it's a neat programming model, though the bus doesn't seem to address transport issues or be intended to run across more than one machine. For that matter, it doesn't appear Freebase persists queues at all between restarts. It has a neat plugin architecture though allowing for easy extensions, and the Slot abstraction is a good idea.

Documentation is sparse though, reading the code is the best way to grok it.

As a reliable transport for messages on a system, I'm still most interested in Assaf Arkin's reliable-msg library.

Using Freebase with a Slot handler for a reliable-msg Queue would be neat though. I'm digging through Freebase and reliable-msg now to see if I can devise something.

Yes, this is getting into implementation rather quickly. So many alternatives and variables.

The idea is to get something going, to keep up the momentum. Release early, release often...

Sat, 03 Dec 2005

An extension of the DARPA UltraLog project, the Cougaar agent architecture appears to be a message bus based system.

The ACME framework is a ruby based control and test platform for Cougaar, so it's not Java centric.

It looks like Cougaar was the outcome of the DARPA UltraLog project for distributed agent development.

Q. Which Message Transport protocols are supported?
A. The Cougaar architecutre includes a Message Transport with pluggable "Link Protocols". The standard protocols are:
   - Lookback in-memory tranport (for intra-node traffic)
   - RMI
   - SSL-encrypted RMI
   - CORBA
   - HTTP
   - SOAP

Protocols include plain TCP Sockets, UDP, SMTP, and NNTP. Third-party developers can write new link protocols and plug them into Cougaar.

Thu, 01 Dec 2005

There has been much discussion on the SAGE config-mgmt list regarding Luke Kanies' effort toward a message bus for Puppet.

A number of folks in #puppet on irc.projects.net continue to talk about this new message bus and what it should accomplish.

The goals are:

  1. Create a message router that will allow agents to subscribe to message feeds
  2. Write agents for each subsystem or opensource component engine that either publish or subscribe to those messages.

These messages may range from simple syslog messages and SNMP traps to system stats, IDS alerts, netflow log snippets, or anything else that might concern a sysadmin.

The Runnel message bus needs two things:

  1. A data abstraction for the messages
  2. A transport to ship them around reliably.

For data abstraction, the primary contenders are RDF and microformats. Luke posted to the microformats list asking for their input on this matter.

For transport, we would like to keep it simple yet allow for the messages to be transported over any network topology. This might be as simple as messages transported over SMTP to messages sent over a direct TCP socket connection between an agent and the router.

The goal is not to make a message bus that will solve any computing problem generically. We're not trying to rework MQSeries here. In the end, this will solve a problem for Puppet, and potentially open up an avenue for communication between disparate systems like Request Tracker (RT), Nagios, SEC, and any other subsystems we can build agents to communicate over the bus.

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