I would think you could correct for many of these issues by laying down several inches of foam, putting the book in place, and then pressing it down with a sheet of glass. Maybe with one more piece of foam to prop up the short side when you are at the beginning or end of the book. You know, kind of like what a scanner does...
Of course, you'll still have to deal with lens effects like trapezoidal issues, or skew, but these I imagine are much easier to deal with than curl.
Personally, I've switched to mostly reading Gutenberg books, there's a lot of good stuff there. I've finished Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Around The World in 80 Days, and am working on A Study in Scarlet. They are books I can get in the format I want, at 3am when I'm looking for a new book to read before going to bed. I realize you may need books like textbooks that aren't available there, but if you have the option...
Yay! Pretty soon we'll be able to buy ringtones for our cars! Now kids won't have to go deaf turning their music up loud enough that everyone around can hear it. The Hip-hop ring tones will play on an outside speaker! Hooray.
This is something that I've been wishing we had some solutions for -- some multi-level cache whether it's like traditional hierarchical storage or not...
While we do have some ability to do things like put the journal or/var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_xlog on different spindles, and Linux will make use of excess RAM as cache, we don't really have the ability to make use of 80GB of SSD as just a straight cache for a 1TB drive.
This is something I've been wanting to write, but just haven't found enough roundtuits... I figure it could be implemented as a dm module in Linux sitting in front of the back-end block device, with fancy data-structures for handling infomration about what blocks to cache.
ZFS has recently added some ability to have the journal *AND* a cache device externally, but in my testing of it the performance really didn't improve.
I've also been thinking about the next generation of RAID cards... I can imagine them having some ability to augment their RAM-based cache with a much larger SSD. Volume X is just to be used as a cache for volume Y. Then you put 4 2TB spinning discs in as RAID-5, say, and 4 80GB SSD drives in as RAID-0 cache (if it's a read cache then all the data is redundant from the spinning discs anyway) or RAID-whatever if you are storing write cache information on it...
So who is going to get to market first? Intel with it's motherboards, or the RAID vendors? Adaptec already has a card with 4GB of flash on it, that it seems to just use as permanent storage for the RAM -- powered by a supercapacitor to give it the time required to write the DRAM to flash. They are pushing this as "A BBU that you never have to maintain". But I could easily see the fluash expanding to be much larger and being used to cache more.
A few years ago over the space of a week I got several phone calls from irate people telling me computers I owned were attacking them. They gave me the IP address it was coming from. Hmm, that's one of our NTP servers... I asked what port they were being attacked on. "Port 123". "Hmm, I see that the only packets flowing out from this IP address to yours are in response from a packet from your network. In other words, one of your systems is requesting the time from us and you are seeing the responses to that."
After the second such report that week, where the guy hung up on me, I decided to pull our servers off the ntp.org lists. The problem then went away.
I do think that we could be more active about making spam and other attacks stop, but that's really the governments job, not the population. The problem is that much of the crap doesn't come from the same country that I'm in... But, if someone implements a way to do this, I hope they are really careful not to make innocent NTP server operators be targeted.
Though, it does remind me of a joke I used to make: I want to invent a social networking site that connects spammers with people in their local area that own baseball bats.
The thing that makes me sad is that Linux is basically the only OS out there that isn't shipping with a root file-system that supports snapshots and other advance features. dm snapshots are useful for some things, but are a far cry from what you get from having it in the file-system.
btrfs sounds great and all, but it's going to be a few years before it gets to the point where I think it'll be usable for production systems. It would have been nice if we could have had ZFS in the interim, but that just isn't going to happen.
Tahoe ( http://allmydata.org/~warner/pycon-tahoe.html ) uses crypto to allow friends to share their storage space without exposing what is being stored.
So, you could get a bunch of friends to agree to get 1TB drives and set up Tahoe so that you could all push backups to these drives for backup purposes. However, I'm not sure how you would push the backups to the Tahoe file-system. Since the company behind Tahoe (All My Data) uses it to provide backup services, there must be some thought that has gone into this, but I don't know if the open-source side of it has any tools for it. I've heard rumors that something like Duplicity will support Tahoe as a backend, but I haven't looked into it.
But, this would take care of the off-site secure replication component.
As long as you don't lose your crypto key to the data when your house burns down, of course...
It has a GPS and compass, wireless, maps and searching... And the full source code to the OS is available with a fairly good development environment, if you can cope with Java or wait for one of the other available scripting systems they're talking about. You want hackable? Do a "git" of the phone software source, and you can do a "make" to produce new firmware. With the exception of a few Google-only applications, like the gmail app, you've got everything you need. There are community members that are doing their own builds, I've had good luck with the jesusfreeke builds.
I've written several applications with a friend of mine -- nothing GPS-based yet, but an IP address calculator and an app that turns the Android into a webcam, and will automatically take pictures and upload them to an HTTP or FTP server. See http://slackey.com/ for more information.
The benefit is that if you can use it for your phone, it's not another device you have to keep with you and keep charged.
The down-side is that it only works with GSM phone providers.
The biggest thing for me has been that it's something I'd have to be carrying anything, for when I'm on-call. So, it's literally not another thing that I have to keep charged and with me. That's been the biggest issue I've had with the Palms and other GPS devices I've had, and the Nokia 770/N810.
It's a GPS that is SO much more useful than the typical GPS.
Of course, all IMHO.
Sean
IMHO, the telcos and cable companies are why we have some of the worst "broadband" access in our homes. They've been dragging their feet, similar to the way the RIAA has been, fighting tooth and nail to not give the customers what they want.
As much as I'm for better broadband, I'm extremely against giving it to the telcos to implement. We already gave them $2 billion to develop Fiber To The Home by 2000. As of 2009 I know of almost noone who has or even can get this service, it's only in a couple of hot spots where you can get it.
Worse, the telcos seem to see high speed home networks as competition for their business services, so they dramatically limit the outbound rates. 900kbps is a pretty small pipe to push backups of my home systems across, for example.
I personally like the ideas of "homes with tails", the home owners owning the fiber from their houses to a pedestal or "meet me" location, and then the providers can get access in there and users can get different options for that connectivity.
My company has been running all the machines that aren't at our data center encrypted, starting around August of 2007. On my laptop I honestly just have not noticed the overhead of encryption more than once or twice in that time. When I started it was on a 1.8GHz Pentium M box, so it's even less of a concern with my 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo.
As I said, it's worked out so well that it's now the standard setup on our laptops. The Eee's my wife and I got last week are running encrypted partitions as well.
Before I started, I was worried about the overhead of the encryption, but I was really worried for no reason. I've almost never noticed it, and none of the other folks in my organization complain about it either.
We are using the Linux encryption stuff running under LVM, so our swap is encrypted as well. Everything but/boot is encrypted. We are using "cryptsetup" (dm_crypt) (built into the Ubuntu Hardy and up "alt" installer and Fedora 10 and up). I'd recommend that for the Linux side.
I've heard good things about TruCrypt, but haven't used it. We don't use Windows or Mac, so the stuff that's built into Linux is our preference.
The dm_crypt stuff includes "LUKS", which allows you to have multiple keys for accessing the data. So you'd probably want to set up a "user key" and "company key" for each system, and if the user forgets their key someone can check out the company key and set a new user key.
So, in that way you don't need to worry about the user forgetting their password.
Also, you still need to have good backups of the file-systems, so if someone does forget their data you can at worst case recover from the most recent backup.
So the worry of losing keys is a no-op. If you don't have good backups, check out backuppc. I've been very impressed with it.
Finally, as far as the other poster saying that it's a "shotgun" approach for people who are too lazy to identify their important data... Do you also try to back up only your most important data? What if someone adds a new important data?
I started with only encrypting a part of the system (because full system encryption was difficult to achieve in older Linux releases). The problem is with leakage. As with backups, it's more provably correct to cover more data rather than less.
This is why for backups I only do exclusions instead of listing the data I want to back up. That way if more data gets added, I have to explicitly exclude it for it not to be backed up.
The same thing applies to crypto. Ok, so you encrypt your sensitive data. Do you have updatedb running? Or beagle? If someone looks at the "locate" database of all the files on your system, will that expose something you didn't want exposed? Like the list of your clients? It would for ours, because our document repository has useful file-names. Similar for the beagle database.
What are you leaking that you didn't intend to be?
KDE 4.0 was terrible. The reasons I had chosen KDE over Gnome were basically all gone. So I switched to Gnome in Fedora 9. Note that Hardy got this right, they had both KDE 4 and 3 available -- they obviously learned from the Fedora release...
However, when I upgraded to Intrepid, Gnome wasn't saving my sessions. Period. Whether I logged out, killed the session, or manually selected the "save current session" button, when I restarted it was a blank slate. I usually run with 23 open windows (a bunch of terminals in "work groups" of 4, IRC, 2 browsers, and Thunderbird).
Then I switched to Fedora 10 because of other problems I was having with Intrepid, and realized this wasn't an Intrepid problem but a Gnome problem. It was having the same problems.
So I tried KDE 4.1 and it was able to restart all of my session except Konversation (oddly enough).
In the end, I don't really care which one I'm using, I just care that it does what I need it to do. And currently, KDE 4.1 is, while not flawless, more usable to me than Gnome.
As previously mentioned, try switching to 5GHz if you can. It won't go through walls, which means that you need to locate the AP carefully to make sure you have coverage where you need it. But it does mean that your neighbors APs, if they switch to 5GHz as well, won't interfere as much with you.
Run your APs at the lowest power possible to still cover where you need, and have your neighbors do the same. Many people want to push the power up and up when they have problems. But that just leads to an arms race and more interference.
I only use the non-overlapping channels.
I use 802.11g on 2.4GHz, using the theory that sending the data in a smaller time will decrease the overall contention. However, 802.11b may be more robust.
If your systems have a setting for "Interference robustness", try using it.
Try setting the RTS threshold, possibly to a very low number.
You might want to try setting up an AP on two or 3 of the non-overlapping channels, with the same ESSID. Your systems *MAY* switch from one to the other if they run into interference.
I know it's not the best time to be looking for a job, but it doesn't really sound like you have much of a choice if you really want to go that direction. There *ARE* places out there that will let you do this. I have a friend who has been working 4 day weeks for over a decade.
This question comes at an interesting time, because I just switched to doing half-time. However, that's kind of easy for me to say -- I'm one of the founders. However, I have talked with a co-worker in the past about doing part-time (he chose not to, it was actually my idea), and we were seriously looking at hiring someone who would only do part time (he decided to go out on his own).
So, you can definitely do it without starting your own company. If you want to start your own business to reduce your hours, you are crazy (IMHO). Owning a business, there's always more you can do. My road to half-time started first by going from 60 to 70 hour weeks down to 40...
I stood in line with a couple of friends to buy the PS3 release at midnight when it came out. As one of the lucky first-gen PS3 owners, I haven't been able to play more than 30 minutes into the game without it locking up. One of the two other friends I was in line with had exactly the same problem, and it was widely reported with no fix.
The volume and snapshotting functionality in ZFS is quite different from that in the Linux kernel.
When you have the LVM and RAID inside the file-system, you can easily do things like do a RAID rebuild of *ONLY* the data the file-system is using. So if you have a 5TB file-system with 100MB of space in use, you can do a RAID rebuild in a few seconds instead of several hours.
Ditto for the snapshots. Linux's LVM implements snapshots, but you have to allocate storage to the snapshots specifically, where in ZFS you can use free space inside the file-system volume for snapshotting.
For example, one ZFS system I have currently has 229 snapshots on it, and I don't have to worry about any of them running out of space unless the whole file-system runs out.
So, saying that these are features that should be implemented outside of the file-system is easy to say, but loses a lot of the functionality you gain if they are all closely tied together.
As an IT manager who has commit privileges to the core Python repository, and can write hello world in half a dozen languages, I'd like to chime in...
IT management almost certainly isn't about doing the work. That's why it's management and not technical work. Management is about helping other people do things.
For example, technical people are notorious for being not very good with people. Having someone helping them interface with the rest of the company, get funding, run interference for projects and decisions, all of this is very important to getting coding done, and does not require an ability to code or even an understanding of what is going on with the people doing the coding.
Having a die-hard techie in a management position may not be as valuable as having a die-hard manager there. Because if the manager just really wants to be doing the techie work, that's really where his passion is, then he probably is in the wrong job. Just as if the person in the techie job's passion lies elsewhere...
If you have someone in the organization, management or not, that isn't pulling their own weight, then definitely look at what you can do to remedy the situation. But whether a manager can write main() { printf("hello world\n"); } is almost certainly the wrong test to be using.
Would you fire the techie who can't come up with $50,000 in funding for new workstations and servers?
But, I guess the "re-purpose people who aren't pulling their weight" headline isn't as easy to get on slashdot as "fire your IT boss".:-)
Sean
Alta Vista wasn't "great".
on
Google Turns 10
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I started using google sometime in 1996, quite possibly shortly after they started in January. I heard about this new search engine, possibly even here on slashdot, and gave it a try.
Before then, I was mostly using Alta Vista. It was ok, but you really had to dig through the results to find what you needed. I remember that time as "all search engines suck, Alta Vista just sucks less".
Then I tried google.stanford.edu and never went back. Literally. Their index was much smaller than Alta Vista at that time, but their results were so much better. Alta Vista had all sorts of garbage on their front page, but that never really bothered me -- it was all about the search results, the cleaner front page was just a side benefit.
So, in response to the previous poster, I would argue that Google *WAS* some sort of a savior. Definitely back in 1996 they were.
Maybe those that came in later like 1998 to 2000 were coming from a much improved Alta Vista than I was, but in 1996 Alta Vista was really quite terrible in comparison with Google.
Back in 1996 I was doing HP-UX system administration, and we ordered a (small, maybe 10) number of software licenses for a pair of servers and they were packaged exactly like this. One license key on a piece of paper in each box, packed in a larger box.
This is because HP is a hardware company, not a software company. A software company ships bits, a software company ships boxes... Simple as that. "We just got an order for 16 of part number XYZZY, pull them from the shelves, box 'em up and ship 'em out". Shipping a license key is done exactly the same way as shipping a server or a multimeter, or a signal generator...
Plus, on the receiving end it is something that even knuckle-draggers in receiving can understand. "We ordered 16 part number XYZZY, here I have 16 boxes saying XYZZY on it. order received".
So, it's totally stupid in some ways, but I can see why they do it.
There's an easy way to do e-mail forwarding, which unfortunately is wrong. We no longer live in a world where you can just create a.forward file with the destination address in it (unless it's on the same server).
If you're going to run your own mail server, there are things you need to do if you want it to run correctly. One of them is that if you are forwarding to a mail server that does SPF, you need to do SRS. Though you probably also need to be doing all the spam rejection on your mail server as well, because otherwise you may be allowing mail through that you wouldn't otherwise.
For example, say that your server doesn't check SPF, and you do SRS. Now you're basically bypassing the destination server's SPF checking.
How to do SRS? I would personally probably just change my.forward file from the destination address into a small script that re-injects the message with a different envelope sender, but I'm sure there are already scripts that do this and much more fancy....
Ideally, you probably just want to move your mail for your domain directly to google, as another repondant says. Don't have it shunting your your own server if at all possible. If you have mail that you want handled directly on your server, either forward it from gmail to your home machine, or use a different domain ("address@homebox.example.com").
I'm a GTA San Andreas player who was not at all interested in money from Take Two because of the Hot Coffee content in the game. I'm not surprised that only a handful of people have taken them up on it, the game is limited to sale to a 17+ audience, an audience that already knows (except in the states whos names start and end with a vowel) that people have sex.
I *DO* however wonder how many of those 3,000 people were really offended by the Hot Coffee content, and how many were just going "Cool, free money!"
The Hot Coffee patch reminds me of ROT-13 encryption. It's trivial for someone to get at the content if they want to, but you have to deliberately go after it. You can't "accidentally" see it. You're saying "I know this might offend me, and I want to see it anyway".
We sadly live in a culture where it's more acceptable to beat up or kill a woman than it is to have sex with her. Which explains a lot of unfortunate things. It doesn't make them right though.
You want to know what is really offensive? And I don't think I'm alone here... I find it particularly offensive that someone would sue over this. And win.
I watch some of the big feeds, like Planet Python, which have dozens of posts a day. But I just can't keep up with that. About 6 months ago I started filtering these and some of the other feeds that I only occasionally have interesting stuff in through aiderss.com.
It's helped quite a lot. I don't spend much time following feeds, so getting the 100 cut down to 5 or 10 has been quite a help.
It's like the comment rating filter here on/., I have most of my feeds on aiderss turned up to "5" to cut down the volume.
Slashdot Mirror
I would think you could correct for many of these issues by laying down several inches of foam, putting the book in place, and then pressing it down with a sheet of glass. Maybe with one more piece of foam to prop up the short side when you are at the beginning or end of the book. You know, kind of like what a scanner does...
Of course, you'll still have to deal with lens effects like trapezoidal issues, or skew, but these I imagine are much easier to deal with than curl.
Personally, I've switched to mostly reading Gutenberg books, there's a lot of good stuff there. I've finished Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Around The World in 80 Days, and am working on A Study in Scarlet. They are books I can get in the format I want, at 3am when I'm looking for a new book to read before going to bed. I realize you may need books like textbooks that aren't available there, but if you have the option...
Sean
They can tell me if the person I'm talking to online is wearing pants.
Sean
Yay! Pretty soon we'll be able to buy ringtones for our cars! Now kids won't have to go deaf turning their music up loud enough that everyone around can hear it. The Hip-hop ring tones will play on an outside speaker! Hooray.
Sean
This is something that I've been wishing we had some solutions for -- some multi-level cache whether it's like traditional hierarchical storage or not...
/var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_xlog on different spindles, and Linux will make use of excess RAM as cache, we don't really have the ability to make use of 80GB of SSD as just a straight cache for a 1TB drive.
While we do have some ability to do things like put the journal or
This is something I've been wanting to write, but just haven't found enough
roundtuits... I figure it could be implemented as a dm module in Linux
sitting in front of the back-end block device, with fancy data-structures
for handling infomration about what blocks to cache.
ZFS has recently added some ability to have the journal *AND* a cache device externally, but in my testing of it the performance really didn't improve.
I've also been thinking about the next generation of RAID cards... I can imagine them having some ability to augment their RAM-based cache with a much larger SSD. Volume X is just to be used as a cache for volume Y. Then you put 4 2TB spinning discs in as RAID-5, say, and 4 80GB SSD drives in as RAID-0 cache (if it's a read cache then all the data is redundant from the spinning discs anyway) or RAID-whatever if you are storing write cache information on it...
So who is going to get to market first? Intel with it's motherboards, or the RAID vendors? Adaptec already has a card with 4GB of flash on it, that it seems to just use as permanent storage for the RAM -- powered by a supercapacitor to give it the time required to write the DRAM to flash. They are pushing this as "A BBU that you never have to maintain". But I could easily see the fluash expanding to be much larger and being used to cache more.
Sean
A few years ago over the space of a week I got several phone calls from irate people telling me computers I owned were attacking them. They gave me the IP address it was coming from. Hmm, that's one of our NTP servers... I asked what port they were being attacked on. "Port 123". "Hmm, I see that the only packets flowing out from this IP address to yours are in response from a packet from your network. In other words, one of your systems is requesting the time from us and you are seeing the responses to that."
After the second such report that week, where the guy hung up on me, I decided to pull our servers off the ntp.org lists. The problem then went away.
I do think that we could be more active about making spam and other attacks stop, but that's really the governments job, not the population. The problem is that much of the crap doesn't come from the same country that I'm in... But, if someone implements a way to do this, I hope they are really careful not to make innocent NTP server operators be targeted.
Though, it does remind me of a joke I used to make: I want to invent a social networking site that connects spammers with people in their local area that own baseball bats.
Sean
There'll be punch and pie. It'll be free. And the OS I'll show off will be the latest Ubuntu and Fedora releases.
Sean
The thing that makes me sad is that Linux is basically the only OS out there that isn't shipping with a root file-system that supports snapshots and other advance features. dm snapshots are useful for some things, but are a far cry from what you get from having it in the file-system.
btrfs sounds great and all, but it's going to be a few years before it gets to the point where I think it'll be usable for production systems. It would have been nice if we could have had ZFS in the interim, but that just isn't going to happen.
Sean
Tahoe ( http://allmydata.org/~warner/pycon-tahoe.html ) uses crypto to allow friends to share their storage space without exposing what is being stored.
So, you could get a bunch of friends to agree to get 1TB drives and set up Tahoe so that you could all push backups to these drives for backup purposes. However, I'm not sure how you would push the backups to the Tahoe file-system. Since the company behind Tahoe (All My Data) uses it to provide backup services, there must be some thought that has gone into this, but I don't know if the open-source side of it has any tools for it. I've heard rumors that something like Duplicity will support Tahoe as a backend, but I haven't looked into it.
But, this would take care of the off-site secure replication component.
As long as you don't lose your crypto key to the data when your house burns down, of course...
Sean
It has a GPS and compass, wireless, maps and searching... And the full source code to the OS is available with a fairly good development environment, if you can cope with Java or wait for one of the other available scripting systems they're talking about. You want hackable? Do a "git" of the phone software source, and you can do a "make" to produce new firmware. With the exception of a few Google-only applications, like the gmail app, you've got everything you need. There are community members that are doing their own builds, I've had good luck with the jesusfreeke builds. I've written several applications with a friend of mine -- nothing GPS-based yet, but an IP address calculator and an app that turns the Android into a webcam, and will automatically take pictures and upload them to an HTTP or FTP server. See http://slackey.com/ for more information. The benefit is that if you can use it for your phone, it's not another device you have to keep with you and keep charged. The down-side is that it only works with GSM phone providers. The biggest thing for me has been that it's something I'd have to be carrying anything, for when I'm on-call. So, it's literally not another thing that I have to keep charged and with me. That's been the biggest issue I've had with the Palms and other GPS devices I've had, and the Nokia 770/N810. It's a GPS that is SO much more useful than the typical GPS. Of course, all IMHO. Sean
When I was young and wasn't studying hard enough, my evil stepfather would always say "Do you want to end up a ditch digger?"
This post makes it sound much more appealing than he ever did.
Sean
IMHO, the telcos and cable companies are why we have some of the worst "broadband" access in our homes. They've been dragging their feet, similar to the way the RIAA has been, fighting tooth and nail to not give the customers what they want.
As much as I'm for better broadband, I'm extremely against giving it to the telcos to implement. We already gave them $2 billion to develop Fiber To The Home by 2000. As of 2009 I know of almost noone who has or even can get this service, it's only in a couple of hot spots where you can get it.
Worse, the telcos seem to see high speed home networks as competition for their business services, so they dramatically limit the outbound rates. 900kbps is a pretty small pipe to push backups of my home systems across, for example.
I personally like the ideas of "homes with tails", the home owners owning the fiber from their houses to a pedestal or "meet me" location, and then the providers can get access in there and users can get different options for that connectivity.
Sean
My company has been running all the machines that aren't at our data center encrypted, starting around August of 2007. On my laptop I honestly just have not noticed the overhead of encryption more than once or twice in that time. When I started it was on a 1.8GHz Pentium M box, so it's even less of a concern with my 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo.
As I said, it's worked out so well that it's now the standard setup on our laptops. The Eee's my wife and I got last week are running encrypted partitions as well.
Before I started, I was worried about the overhead of the encryption, but I was really worried for no reason. I've almost never noticed it, and none of the other folks in my organization complain about it either.
We are using the Linux encryption stuff running under LVM, so our swap is encrypted as well. Everything but /boot is encrypted. We are using "cryptsetup" (dm_crypt) (built into the Ubuntu Hardy and up "alt" installer and Fedora 10 and up). I'd recommend that for the Linux side.
I've heard good things about TruCrypt, but haven't used it. We don't use Windows or Mac, so the stuff that's built into Linux is our preference.
The dm_crypt stuff includes "LUKS", which allows you to have multiple keys for accessing the data. So you'd probably want to set up a "user key" and "company key" for each system, and if the user forgets their key someone can check out the company key and set a new user key.
So, in that way you don't need to worry about the user forgetting their password.
Also, you still need to have good backups of the file-systems, so if someone does forget their data you can at worst case recover from the most recent backup.
So the worry of losing keys is a no-op. If you don't have good backups, check out backuppc. I've been very impressed with it.
Finally, as far as the other poster saying that it's a "shotgun" approach for people who are too lazy to identify their important data... Do you also try to back up only your most important data? What if someone adds a new important data?
I started with only encrypting a part of the system (because full system encryption was difficult to achieve in older Linux releases). The problem is with leakage. As with backups, it's more provably correct to cover more data rather than less.
This is why for backups I only do exclusions instead of listing the data I want to back up. That way if more data gets added, I have to explicitly exclude it for it not to be backed up.
The same thing applies to crypto. Ok, so you encrypt your sensitive data. Do you have updatedb running? Or beagle? If someone looks at the "locate" database of all the files on your system, will that expose something you didn't want exposed? Like the list of your clients? It would for ours, because our document repository has useful file-names. Similar for the beagle database.
What are you leaking that you didn't intend to be?
Just encrypt the whole damn thing.
Sean
KDE 4.0 was terrible. The reasons I had chosen KDE over Gnome were basically all gone. So I switched to Gnome in Fedora 9. Note that Hardy got this right, they had both KDE 4 and 3 available -- they obviously learned from the Fedora release...
However, when I upgraded to Intrepid, Gnome wasn't saving my sessions. Period. Whether I logged out, killed the session, or manually selected the "save current session" button, when I restarted it was a blank slate. I usually run with 23 open windows (a bunch of terminals in "work groups" of 4, IRC, 2 browsers, and Thunderbird).
Then I switched to Fedora 10 because of other problems I was having with Intrepid, and realized this wasn't an Intrepid problem but a Gnome problem. It was having the same problems.
So I tried KDE 4.1 and it was able to restart all of my session except Konversation (oddly enough).
In the end, I don't really care which one I'm using, I just care that it does what I need it to do. And currently, KDE 4.1 is, while not flawless, more usable to me than Gnome.
Sean
As previously mentioned, try switching to 5GHz if you can. It won't go through walls, which means that you need to locate the AP carefully to make sure you have coverage where you need it. But it does mean that your neighbors APs, if they switch to 5GHz as well, won't interfere as much with you.
Run your APs at the lowest power possible to still cover where you need, and have your neighbors do the same. Many people want to push the power up and up when they have problems. But that just leads to an arms race and more interference.
I only use the non-overlapping channels.
I use 802.11g on 2.4GHz, using the theory that sending the data in a smaller time will decrease the overall contention. However, 802.11b may be more robust.
If your systems have a setting for "Interference robustness", try using it.
Try setting the RTS threshold, possibly to a very low number.
You might want to try setting up an AP on two or 3 of the non-overlapping channels, with the same ESSID. Your systems *MAY* switch from one to the other if they run into interference.
See this URL for more information on what I've had success with: http://www.tummy.com/Community/Articles/pycon2007-network/
Sean
Sean
I know it's not the best time to be looking for a job, but it doesn't really sound like you have much of a choice if you really want to go that direction. There *ARE* places out there that will let you do this. I have a friend who has been working 4 day weeks for over a decade.
This question comes at an interesting time, because I just switched to doing half-time. However, that's kind of easy for me to say -- I'm one of the founders. However, I have talked with a co-worker in the past about doing part-time (he chose not to, it was actually my idea), and we were seriously looking at hiring someone who would only do part time (he decided to go out on his own).
So, you can definitely do it without starting your own company. If you want to start your own business to reduce your hours, you are crazy (IMHO). Owning a business, there's always more you can do. My road to half-time started first by going from 60 to 70 hour weeks down to 40...
Sean
I stood in line with a couple of friends to buy the PS3 release at midnight when it came out. As one of the lucky first-gen PS3 owners, I haven't been able to play more than 30 minutes into the game without it locking up. One of the two other friends I was in line with had exactly the same problem, and it was widely reported with no fix.
So, I feel your pain...
Sean
Every 6 months pyweek.org runs a game contest. Join forces with a team that has the programming side but needs someone for the story side of it.
Seems like it would be the perfect way to show off and hone you skills.
Sean
The volume and snapshotting functionality in ZFS is quite different from that in the Linux kernel.
When you have the LVM and RAID inside the file-system, you can easily do things like do a RAID rebuild of *ONLY* the data the file-system is using. So if you have a 5TB file-system with 100MB of space in use, you can do a RAID rebuild in a few seconds instead of several hours.
Ditto for the snapshots. Linux's LVM implements snapshots, but you have to allocate storage to the snapshots specifically, where in ZFS you can use free space inside the file-system volume for snapshotting.
For example, one ZFS system I have currently has 229 snapshots on it, and I don't have to worry about any of them running out of space unless the whole file-system runs out.
So, saying that these are features that should be implemented outside of the file-system is easy to say, but loses a lot of the functionality you gain if they are all closely tied together.
Sean
As an IT manager who has commit privileges to the core Python repository, and can write hello world in half a dozen languages, I'd like to chime in...
IT management almost certainly isn't about doing the work. That's why it's management and not technical work. Management is about helping other people do things.
For example, technical people are notorious for being not very good with people. Having someone helping them interface with the rest of the company, get funding, run interference for projects and decisions, all of this is very important to getting coding done, and does not require an ability to code or even an understanding of what is going on with the people doing the coding.
Having a die-hard techie in a management position may not be as valuable as having a die-hard manager there. Because if the manager just really wants to be doing the techie work, that's really where his passion is, then he probably is in the wrong job. Just as if the person in the techie job's passion lies elsewhere...
If you have someone in the organization, management or not, that isn't pulling their own weight, then definitely look at what you can do to remedy the situation. But whether a manager can write main() { printf("hello world\n"); } is almost certainly the wrong test to be using.
Would you fire the techie who can't come up with $50,000 in funding for new workstations and servers?
But, I guess the "re-purpose people who aren't pulling their weight" headline isn't as easy to get on slashdot as "fire your IT boss". :-)
Sean
I started using google sometime in 1996, quite possibly shortly after they started in January. I heard about this new search engine, possibly even here on slashdot, and gave it a try.
Before then, I was mostly using Alta Vista. It was ok, but you really had to dig through the results to find what you needed. I remember that time as "all search engines suck, Alta Vista just sucks less".
Then I tried google.stanford.edu and never went back. Literally. Their index was much smaller than Alta Vista at that time, but their results were so much better. Alta Vista had all sorts of garbage on their front page, but that never really bothered me -- it was all about the search results, the cleaner front page was just a side benefit.
So, in response to the previous poster, I would argue that Google *WAS* some sort of a savior. Definitely back in 1996 they were.
Maybe those that came in later like 1998 to 2000 were coming from a much improved Alta Vista than I was, but in 1996 Alta Vista was really quite terrible in comparison with Google.
Sean
Back in 1996 I was doing HP-UX system administration, and we ordered a (small, maybe 10) number of software licenses for a pair of servers and they were packaged exactly like this. One license key on a piece of paper in each box, packed in a larger box.
This is because HP is a hardware company, not a software company. A software company ships bits, a software company ships boxes... Simple as that. "We just got an order for 16 of part number XYZZY, pull them from the shelves, box 'em up and ship 'em out". Shipping a license key is done exactly the same way as shipping a server or a multimeter, or a signal generator...
Plus, on the receiving end it is something that even knuckle-draggers in receiving can understand. "We ordered 16 part number XYZZY, here I have 16 boxes saying XYZZY on it. order received".
So, it's totally stupid in some ways, but I can see why they do it.
Sean
There's an easy way to do e-mail forwarding, which unfortunately is wrong. We no longer live in a world where you can just create a .forward file with the destination address in it (unless it's on the same server).
If you're going to run your own mail server, there are things you need to do if you want it to run correctly. One of them is that if you are forwarding to a mail server that does SPF, you need to do SRS. Though you probably also need to be doing all the spam rejection on your mail server as well, because otherwise you may be allowing mail through that you wouldn't otherwise.
For example, say that your server doesn't check SPF, and you do SRS. Now you're basically bypassing the destination server's SPF checking.
How to do SRS? I would personally probably just change my .forward file from the destination address into a small script that re-injects the message with a different envelope sender, but I'm sure there are already scripts that do this and much more fancy....
Ideally, you probably just want to move your mail for your domain directly to google, as another repondant says. Don't have it shunting your your own server if at all possible. If you have mail that you want handled directly on your server, either forward it from gmail to your home machine, or use a different domain ("address@homebox.example.com").
Sean
I'm a GTA San Andreas player who was not at all interested in money from Take Two because of the Hot Coffee content in the game. I'm not surprised that only a handful of people have taken them up on it, the game is limited to sale to a 17+ audience, an audience that already knows (except in the states whos names start and end with a vowel) that people have sex.
I *DO* however wonder how many of those 3,000 people were really offended by the Hot Coffee content, and how many were just going "Cool, free money!"
The Hot Coffee patch reminds me of ROT-13 encryption. It's trivial for someone to get at the content if they want to, but you have to deliberately go after it. You can't "accidentally" see it. You're saying "I know this might offend me, and I want to see it anyway".
We sadly live in a culture where it's more acceptable to beat up or kill a woman than it is to have sex with her. Which explains a lot of unfortunate things. It doesn't make them right though.
You want to know what is really offensive? And I don't think I'm alone here... I find it particularly offensive that someone would sue over this. And win.
I had so much hope for our species.
Sean
I watch some of the big feeds, like Planet Python, which have dozens of posts a day. But I just can't keep up with that. About 6 months ago I started filtering these and some of the other feeds that I only occasionally have interesting stuff in through aiderss.com.
It's helped quite a lot. I don't spend much time following feeds, so getting the 100 cut down to 5 or 10 has been quite a help.
It's like the comment rating filter here on /., I have most of my feeds on aiderss turned up to "5" to cut down the volume.
So far it's been working well.
Not affiliated, just a happy user.
Sean
>"I am working on a PhD [...]
Why would you want to be a doctor when you could be a MASTER?
Sean