Heat was not just a problem affecting the memory card. It turned out the chips on the motherboard would pop out during shipping or pop out of their sockets after only a few hours of on and off use (heating and cooling caused the chips to literally wiggle out of their sockets). This led to the famous "two-inch drop" where owners would pick their machine up and drop it two inches to reseat the chips.
I've played with dbmail and have to say its very kickass. It's been about a 1 year and a 1/2 since i last played with it, but what i really enjoyed was the fact that all user email was stored in mysql/postgres...
this allowed me to hack apart a slightly broken web mail client for it, which allowed MUCH faster email delivery than the standard IMAP based webmail programs. It also made searches fly!!!
I also hacked together a simple XUL (mozilla) based email client,where the entire layout and "application" was stored on the server (saving a huge amount of time for "updates" to the client.
Basically, I wanted to make a better exchange. Their API is abstracted from the database calls, so I played around with porting to Oracle as well with limited success (they depend on a couple of column elements that are present in MySQL and Postgres which have no equivalent in Oracle).
Either way, if someone's interested in grabbing the code I started with reply to this message.
as an applicant for any job, if you have an interest in the job, your first responsiblity is to sell yourself to the company, THEN decide whether or not the company is a good fit for you. A good recruiter told me once that the biggest mistake engineers make during the prelimenary portion of job interviews is discussing the merits of the job to see if it will fit them before the current employees have even made a decision that they like you.
Yes, I know that this is a company picking you for an interview, but that does not mean that you are the only one they are considering hiring. Most of my interviews have come from recruiters and HR personnel who probably grepped through my resume looking for certain abilities. It is still up to you, the applicant, to prove to them that you are a deseriable candidate. And like I said above, why screw up the prelim by already trying to figure out if the job is good for you or not? Use that later, or perhaps after you get the job. A lot of times, the people hiring have sort of an idea of what they would like you to do, but within the first year you have can have the opportunity to shape the job in a form that you feel is more likely to allow you and the company to succeed.
I consistently see a recurring "hack" on a Board on my way home on 146 (from da Pike to Woostah).
Some conscientious objecter loves to place badly spelled and hard to read slogans such as "STOP BUSH BABY KILLER" over recruitment ads with spray paint.
So I ask, why bother with hacking? A good ol' can of spray paint will get the job done just fine:).
You won't sound like whining, and trust me, a lot of people here will tell a lot worse horror stories. Probably the people interviewing you have worse horror stories than that. Even I do, and mine aren't nearly that bad.
So, don't sweat it. If they ask tell the truth. It helps if the truth is "well, during my periods of unemployment I have been keeping my skills up to date, and have been working on X projects to keep me busy".
You should be able to pick up a used one pretty cheap. The lenses support both manual and autofocus, the view finder has support for the visually crippled (you can get a correct lens, so that if you are near-sighted, like me, you can still use manual focus), the camera has basic "point click" picture taking capabilities, but also allows you to alter just the Time-Value and automatically pick the "correct" aperture setting. Same with the other way round, or you can select good ol' manual manual mode:).
All in all, its my first and only SLR, I love it, and I've learned alot using it. The funniest thing I've discovered is that most pictures come out great on the regular "take the damn picture" setting, without playing with the settings. It really does come down to framing your shot most of the time.
oh yeah, and if at some point you want to get a digital SLR, there is a digital EOS SLR camera, which uses the same lenses as the 35mm ones.
It seems no one has mentioned yet good old Massachusetts politics, in other words, "everybody takes a piece of the pie".
Out here its not uncommon to call up one of the guys, who's getting paid by the state, to come by and plow a section of the road for you, and shoving all that snow into the car ahead.
This is called favors, and it loves to run rampant in this great state. Since most of the plow operators are independent self-employeed bunch, that own there own trucks, they probably don't take too kindly to the state wanting to keep tabs on them. But, at the same point, the my town (worcester) went into debt solely because of the snow storms last year.
Ah well. So thats why I think they don't want the GPS thingies. Don't wanna get caught doing two jobs at the same time.
I've read through the comments at score 3, and I'm surprised that no one has mentioned using the spamd utility that comes with OpenBSD 3.3 and above. Basically, it hurts the spamming mail servers, while although normally some poor machine caught in the crossfire, does make me happy to use.
Basically, for every email I get, it gets put through a baysien filter (bmf in this case) and handled through procmail correctly. However, the email is then passed through another program which constructs and adds to a whitelist and blacklist of IP's. Basically its a 3 to 1 ratio. If a mail server sends me a legit message, followed by a spam, it is still considered a legit server until I recieve 3 more spams from it and no more legit email.
Once an email server is considered to be on my blacklist, my firewall redirects the next connection from that server to my
teergrube, which emulates an deaf man which you have to keep repeating yourself to rather loudly and slowly. The use of my resources is minimal.
For a more detailed explanation, take a look at
Annoying Spammers with pf and spamd.
for those of you without midlet capable phones, or any else of the new fangled stuff, try this.
1. Create an email address on you server (come on, any good blogger runs his server out of his speakeasy DSL connection).
2. Write a script, perl or something, that goes through and parses email sent to this address.
3. Send an email from your phone to this address, include some simple authentication mechanism, say like this in the body: r00t1sc00l blog blog blog blog. today i ate this things, slept, and thought about getting sex.
4. Script retrieves email, checks for the password (in this case r00t1sc00l), and sticks the rest into your blog.
5. You could do more with this, say a command between the password, and your dumbass thoughts that no one cares about, that could let you replace the current blog, edit something, etc etc.
Now... how hard is that? If only my nokia still works, damn this ancient phone of mine, only allowing recieving of email, instead of sending. At least I got it for freeeeeeeeeeeeeee. (as in beer, yay beer).
Is there any proof that Limewire on linux does this? I've just started using, and suggesting people use it (it is a quality app). But this will seriously piss me off its mangling my mozilla browser in anyway. I love my mozilla the way it is.
The joys and savings of cost of a dot-matrix. Not to mention the fact that there are pages out there designed specifically to create music while you print (for the speakerless/soundcardless of us out there).
Once again, easily solvable. Partition. Partition well. No, I do not run servers of that magnitude, as you can probably tell perusing my own site. But... I have crashed openbsd due to my own eniptude (would rather call it curiosity), and fsck will not spend time on partitions that are clean (ie partitions that were not having data being written to at the time of the crash).
Or at least thats how I remember it... Please correct me if im wrong (it was so long ago;-) ).
sigh, its been well explained that you don't need a journaling filesystem to be safe with transfering data to the harddrive. In fact, if you're clever enough, you can even get away safely writing without having to hold the entire system up (hence, softupdates). If you actually look through the interview, you'll find Theo actually pointing you to resources that quite seriously make this point (journaling not needed).
take a look at this
it can be frustrating being right, all journaling really seems to do is attempt to fix the problems ext2fs has by laying another piece of code on top of it, instead of fixing the primary problem, that is that ext2 is broken as far as the BSD hackers are concerned.
Is waiting for fsck to finish really that much of a problem for you?
CD's get scratched and worn from (ab)use over time. I have about one CD that plays without skipping once that I bought ten years ago. And that was before I could make a perfect copy, and instead copied them to tapes to play in my car. But now my car uses a CD player, and its been broken into once already, thankfully the cd's were out of it that time, but whose to say they won't be taken tonight if I forget to take them?
No, your argument that copying to prevent loss of quality and other damage (such as losing the damn thing) is gone is complete bullshit. Please try again.
yes, they've fixed that now. But for the longest time, this was a big problem. In other words, if windows was on the first partition, and linux on the second, many times it was just impossible to get linux to boot. this goes back about 3 years, but if an author claims to have x86 linux background, he should recognize something like that. Plus, keeping a seperate boot partition is a good idea.
Probably the oddest, part, although, is that you need a 10 MB boot partition. Coming from x86 machines, I didn't see this coming, but with the partition, things worked fine (while they didn't without it).
Uh, how long have you been linux/unix for? AFAIK, this is considered a good idea, whether or not the distro makes you do it. Remember lilo, and your kernel having to be in the first 512meg or so?
This is some pretty cool stuff. Hopefully Open and Net BSD will be able to take some of these improvements too. I run a webserver on an OpenBSD box, and with their model of "Secure by default" combined with the ability to finally not run apache as a root, this makes me real happy. Why? Because I'm not the best PHP developer out there, and have been responsible for more than my fair share of holes in an otherwise secure box for too long.
Some of the modern Lego kits have 50 unique Lego pieces, only found in one kit, and only suitable for making one specific model. The result is one extremely realistic model, but where was the fun in building it?
Probably just as fun as making a model airplane or tank, which comes in 50 - 10000 unique pieces suitable for making only one model. And can only be (heaven forbid!) put together once.
Slashdot Mirror
found my link after posting :)
Heat was not just a problem affecting the memory card. It turned out the chips on the motherboard would pop out during shipping or pop out of their sockets after only a few hours of on and off use (heating and cooling caused the chips to literally wiggle out of their sockets). This led to the famous "two-inch drop" where owners would pick their machine up and drop it two inches to reseat the chips.
http://www.wap.org/a3/a3library/a3faq.html
dropping it on one corner from a height of about 3 ft?
9 volt battery, a button, a lightbulb, and four pieces of wire.
your hand might work just as well.
I've played with dbmail and have to say its very kickass. It's been about a 1 year and a 1/2 since i last played with it, but what i really enjoyed was the fact that all user email was stored in mysql/postgres...
h tml
this allowed me to hack apart a slightly broken web mail client for it, which allowed MUCH faster email delivery than the standard IMAP based webmail programs. It also made searches fly!!!
I also hacked together a simple XUL (mozilla) based email client,where the entire layout and "application" was stored on the server (saving a huge amount of time for "updates" to the client.
Basically, I wanted to make a better exchange. Their API is abstracted from the database calls, so I played around with porting to Oracle as well with limited success (they depend on a couple of column elements that are present in MySQL and Postgres which have no equivalent in Oracle).
Either way, if someone's interested in grabbing the code I started with reply to this message.
I also have a openbsd + dbmail doc available
http://www.lemure.net/~chuck/openbsd_help/dbmail.
don't bother emailing chuck@lemure.net, dead due to spam. Send questions/comments about it here.
Either way, dbmail is a very clever idea.
gaim logs my IMs
:))
and i have grep/awk/sed
what else do i need?
sorry your wrong on this one man
as an applicant for any job, if you have an interest in the job, your first responsiblity is to sell yourself to the company, THEN decide whether or not the company is a good fit for you. A good recruiter told me once that the biggest mistake engineers make during the prelimenary portion of job interviews is discussing the merits of the job to see if it will fit them before the current employees have even made a decision that they like you.
Yes, I know that this is a company picking you for an interview, but that does not mean that you are the only one they are considering hiring. Most of my interviews have come from recruiters and HR personnel who probably grepped through my resume looking for certain abilities. It is still up to you, the applicant, to prove to them that you are a deseriable candidate. And like I said above, why screw up the prelim by already trying to figure out if the job is good for you or not? Use that later, or perhaps after you get the job. A lot of times, the people hiring have sort of an idea of what they would like you to do, but within the first year you have can have the opportunity to shape the job in a form that you feel is more likely to allow you and the company to succeed.
What do you think Red Sox chances are of winning the world series?
No sir, I don't like it. Old one better, new one silly looking.
No one's said this yet?
Poker? I hardly know her!
I consistently see a recurring "hack" on a Board on my way home on 146 (from da Pike to Woostah).
:).
Some conscientious objecter loves to place badly spelled and hard to read slogans such as "STOP BUSH BABY KILLER" over recruitment ads with spray paint.
So I ask, why bother with hacking? A good ol' can of spray paint will get the job done just fine
Ah well, at least it lightens my mood.
You won't sound like whining, and trust me, a lot of people here will tell a lot worse horror stories. Probably the people interviewing you have worse horror stories than that. Even I do, and mine aren't nearly that bad.
;)
So, don't sweat it. If they ask tell the truth. It helps if the truth is "well, during my periods of unemployment I have been keeping my skills up to date, and have been working on X projects to keep me busy".
That's it dude, trust me.
You should be able to pick up a used one pretty cheap. The lenses support both manual and autofocus, the view finder has support for the visually crippled (you can get a correct lens, so that if you are near-sighted, like me, you can still use manual focus), the camera has basic "point click" picture taking capabilities, but also allows you to alter just the Time-Value and automatically pick the "correct" aperture setting. Same with the other way round, or you can select good ol' manual manual mode :).
All in all, its my first and only SLR, I love it, and I've learned alot using it. The funniest thing I've discovered is that most pictures come out great on the regular "take the damn picture" setting, without playing with the settings. It really does come down to framing your shot most of the time.
oh yeah, and if at some point you want to get a digital SLR, there is a digital EOS SLR camera, which uses the same lenses as the 35mm ones.
It seems no one has mentioned yet good old Massachusetts politics, in other words, "everybody takes a piece of the pie".
Out here its not uncommon to call up one of the guys, who's getting paid by the state, to come by and plow a section of the road for you, and shoving all that snow into the car ahead.
This is called favors, and it loves to run rampant in this great state. Since most of the plow operators are independent self-employeed bunch, that own there own trucks, they probably don't take too kindly to the state wanting to keep tabs on them. But, at the same point, the my town (worcester) went into debt solely because of the snow storms last year.
Ah well. So thats why I think they don't want the GPS thingies. Don't wanna get caught doing two jobs at the same time.
I've read through the comments at score 3, and I'm surprised that no one has mentioned using the spamd utility that comes with OpenBSD 3.3 and above. Basically, it hurts the spamming mail servers, while although normally some poor machine caught in the crossfire, does make me happy to use.
Basically, for every email I get, it gets put through a baysien filter (bmf in this case) and handled through procmail correctly. However, the email is then passed through another program which constructs and adds to a whitelist and blacklist of IP's. Basically its a 3 to 1 ratio. If a mail server sends me a legit message, followed by a spam, it is still considered a legit server until I recieve 3 more spams from it and no more legit email.
Once an email server is considered to be on my blacklist, my firewall redirects the next connection from that server to my teergrube, which emulates an deaf man which you have to keep repeating yourself to rather loudly and slowly. The use of my resources is minimal.
For a more detailed explanation, take a look at Annoying Spammers with pf and spamd.
Don't we get hit by metores everyday?
I'd consider that closer.
for those of you without midlet capable phones, or any else of the new fangled stuff, try this.
1. Create an email address on you server (come on, any good blogger runs his server out of his speakeasy DSL connection).
2. Write a script, perl or something, that goes through and parses email sent to this address.
3. Send an email from your phone to this address, include some simple authentication mechanism, say like this in the body:
r00t1sc00l
blog blog blog blog. today i ate this things, slept, and thought about getting sex.
4. Script retrieves email, checks for the password (in this case r00t1sc00l), and sticks the rest into your blog.
5. You could do more with this, say a command between the password, and your dumbass thoughts that no one cares about, that could let you replace the current blog, edit something, etc etc.
Now... how hard is that? If only my nokia still works, damn this ancient phone of mine, only allowing recieving of email, instead of sending. At least I got it for freeeeeeeeeeeeeee. (as in beer, yay beer).
Is there any proof that Limewire on linux does this? I've just started using, and suggesting people use it (it is a quality app). But this will seriously piss me off its mangling my mozilla browser in anyway. I love my mozilla the way it is.
Bastards
The joys and savings of cost of a dot-matrix. Not to mention the fact that there are pages out there designed specifically to create music while you print (for the speakerless/soundcardless of us out there).
Once again, easily solvable. Partition. Partition well. No, I do not run servers of that magnitude, as you can probably tell perusing my own site. But... I have crashed openbsd due to my own eniptude (would rather call it curiosity), and fsck will not spend time on partitions that are clean (ie partitions that were not having data being written to at the time of the crash).
;-) ).
Or at least thats how I remember it... Please correct me if im wrong (it was so long ago
sigh, its been well explained that you don't need a journaling filesystem to be safe with transfering data to the harddrive. In fact, if you're clever enough, you can even get away safely writing without having to hold the entire system up (hence, softupdates). If you actually look through the interview, you'll find Theo actually pointing you to resources that quite seriously make this point (journaling not needed).
take a look at this
it can be frustrating being right, all journaling really seems to do is attempt to fix the problems ext2fs has by laying another piece of code on top of it, instead of fixing the primary problem, that is that ext2 is broken as far as the BSD hackers are concerned.
Is waiting for fsck to finish really that much of a problem for you?
CD's get scratched and worn from (ab)use over time. I have about one CD that plays without skipping once that I bought ten years ago. And that was before I could make a perfect copy, and instead copied them to tapes to play in my car. But now my car uses a CD player, and its been broken into once already, thankfully the cd's were out of it that time, but whose to say they won't be taken tonight if I forget to take them?
No, your argument that copying to prevent loss of quality and other damage (such as losing the damn thing) is gone is complete bullshit. Please try again.
yes, they've fixed that now. But for the longest time, this was a big problem. In other words, if windows was on the first partition, and linux on the second, many times it was just impossible to get linux to boot. this goes back about 3 years, but if an author claims to have x86 linux background, he should recognize something like that. Plus, keeping a seperate boot partition is a good idea.
Probably the oddest, part, although, is that you need a 10 MB boot partition. Coming from x86 machines, I didn't see this coming, but with the partition, things worked fine (while they didn't without it).
Uh, how long have you been linux/unix for? AFAIK, this is considered a good idea, whether or not the distro makes you do it. Remember lilo, and your kernel having to be in the first 512meg or so?
This is some pretty cool stuff. Hopefully Open and
Net BSD will be able to take some of these
improvements too. I run a webserver on an
OpenBSD box, and with their model of "Secure by
default" combined with the ability to finally
not run apache as a root, this makes me real
happy. Why? Because I'm not the best PHP
developer out there, and have been responsible
for more than my fair share of holes in an
otherwise secure box for too long.
Some of the modern Lego kits have 50 unique Lego pieces, only found in one kit, and only suitable for making one specific model. The result is one extremely realistic model, but where was the fun in building it?
Probably just as fun as making a model airplane or tank, which comes in 50 - 10000 unique pieces suitable for making only one model. And can only be (heaven forbid!) put together once.