I've gotten fed up buying my DVD's from Express.com in the US, who, while being cheap, tend to take a good 2 weeks to get to Edmonton because of customs holdups (I swear I'm on the customs hit list. They inspect EVERY package sent to me...) so I've found all kinds of worthwhile online stores based out of Canada. Thats a good thing for two reasons... one, you avoid duty and Canada Post's $5 "handling fee", and two, Canada Post XPress Post is _really_ cheap and fast within Canada. 2-3 days for a couple of bucks.
So, for DVD's, I'll reccomend www.cnl.com based out of Vancouver. I've only been dealing with them for about 2 weeks now but I've been very happy, and they come highly reccomended to me. Consider, around midnight on a Wednesday I ordered 5 DVD's. Late Thursday I got a shipping confirmation, and I had the DVD's in my hands on Friday afternoon. All for $8 cdn shipping. Prices are quite reasonable, only a little bit more than buying from Express once you factor in shipping and customs fees, plus you get 'em in 2 days (or less), not 2 weeks.
For CD's, I usually buy from Chapters Online, but the trick with Chapters is to only buy items that are listed as "shipping in 24 hours". If it says anything else, especially the dreaded "1-2 weeks", expect to be waiting 1-2 months, if you get it at all. Other options are HMV who's prices seem okay. I preordered Moby's new CD from them because I came across a $5 coupon.. hasn't shipped yet so I can't comment on service. Finally, A&B Sound, who despite the spartan website, are reported to have nice prices.
For books, again, Chapters Online is your best bet. Really good prices, especially with a Chapters One Card (you pay a $15 yearly fee and get 10% off everything, along with $5 in coupons for every $100 you spend). But again, only order if its in stock (shipping in 24 hours), otherwise its a real crap shoot as to when you'll get it.
For computer hardware, the best is easily Onvia. Great prices, and even better free shipping. Nothing better than buying a 21" monitor at a decent price and not having to pay for shipping. Service is great, shipping is fast (they courier it, so 2-3 days or so), and prices are competitive. Fairly often they have $25 and $50 off coupons, too. I've also done a fair bit of shopping from NCIX, based out of Vancouver. Their prices range from really good, to comparable to my local prices, to a bit high, but they're worth checking out. I got a killer deal on my IBM Deskstar 7200rpm 30 gig from them a while back, and got my Pioneer 10x DVD player from them last year when virtually no stores anywhere in North America were selling them. I'll definately continue dealing with both.
Someone forwarded www.goldfishlegs.com to me the other day, and they've got reviews of Canadian E-Tailers, along with coupons and other goodies. I didn't agree with some of their reviews, but it seems like a useful site to keep bookmarked.
In general, my dealings with various Canadian online stores have been positive. Through harsh experience I've learned how to deal with Chapters (thankfully they're very responsive to e-mails), and I've only been ripped off once (www.stupidcomputers.com, they closed up shop and dissappeared, taking a lot of people's money with them. VISA refunded my money, thankfully). In general I'm willing to pay the little bit extra to buy from Canadian stores (support the economy _and_ get it in less than 2 weeks), except for extreme price differences and/or unavailability in Canada.
I highly reccomend Webalizer for your web logs. It's the best I've seen, since it has an incremental feature, so deleting/cropping your Apache logs doesn't faze it, and it really tracks everything you could possibly want: views/hits/files/visits, referrals, search engine keywords, daily/hourly stats, generates pretty graphs, the works. I've got it cronned to run every hour, and it parses my logs in a few seconds on a p166. You can grab it from FreeBSD ports, or at its webpage here.
I'm curious as to why you'd have a need for SCP. I wouldn't dream of having one of the Axis camera's I'm using directly visible to the 'net, all of the transfers are done to an internal interface on my LAN. Since the only way into the LAN is through the FreeBSD box thats getting images from the camera's, and I doubt I have to worry about the kids in the daycare packet sniffing, so SCP would just be additional overhead). However, if its something your situation needs, it shouldn't be overly hard. I've contacted Axis's support people with questions, and have gotten very fast responses every time, and this might be a feature they'd want to incorporate in the future, so they may lend a hand... who knows:P
You can do it exactly like you said in your example in FreeBSD (I'm sure Open and Net are the same). Just SSH in, su to root, CVSup source, make world, build an updated kernel, and reboot. The last time I upgraded one of my webservers I did it (sorta) this way even though that machine does have a little mono monitor. I'm not aware of any Linux distro's that you can upgrade like this, but any BSD users with headless servers may be interested...
Geeks tend to be more social, IMHO
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Geeks vs. Nerds
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· Score: 1
Up here at the U of A, in the Undergraduate Association of Computing Science, we've had this discussion before. Basically, we decided that nerds and geeks were independent definitions, and do not require the person to like computers to belong to either group. The biggest difference being someone who is a geek is more socially active, both amongst fellow geeks and non-geeks, whereas nerds are the stereotypical loners. Some other stuff came out of the conversation, such as the agreement that being called a geek is a compliment, while a nerd is somewhat derogitory (at least for us socially active geeks:P). We were also able to identify geeks we knew who had no interest in computers (i.e. some anime fans we know), as well as nerds (some people in Math). Really though, definitions tend to vary depending on the circles you belong to. On IRC, I've talked to people who fit what I'd call a geek referring to themselves as nerds, sooooo....
If you check out the Matrox Users Resource Centre's news story for August 7th, you'll see a some info from within the latest driver release showing the G800 will be using something called FCRAM. Apparently thats "Fast Cycle" RAM, and is more or less a faster SDRAM. There's a short article here about what FCRAM is. It's built by Fujitsu and is supposedly better for multimedia applications where there is a significant amount of random access. There must be something to the tech, otherwise Matrox would be going with the more standard DDR SDRAM, which must be cheaper to produce because everyone is using it...
http://209.204.196.48/hosts.zip
Grab that file. On a Windows box, find the directory that your HOSTS.SAM file is, and extract the HOSTS file in this ZIP into that
directory. With modification, you could use it on a *BSD or Linux box. It's a BIIIGGG list of most of the known ad servers in the world, and from my experience, it gets almost all of them.
A friend of mine from IRC found a small list, and added his own additions to it and passed it around, and as a result, I haven't had
to look at a banner ad in a long time. Basically what it does is override the IP->host mapping with 127.0.0.1 (i.e. localhost) for all
known adservers... so you get almost the same effect as junkbuster or whatever, but without needing to use proxy software, and its instaneous, no lag.
Erg, wtf? The fact that they're dissalowing VPN's isn't the big issue here. If you read the terms of service: AS AN END-POINT ON A NON-COMCAST LOCAL AREA NETWORK OR WIDE AREA NETWORK, OR IN CONJUNCTION WITH A VPN (VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK) OR A VPN TUNNELING PROTOCOL; or you'll see something much more interesting. "an END-POINT" would be a *BSD NAT box, or a Linux IPMASQ box, and the local area network would be your machines you're NAT'ting too. Why the story talks about the VPN aspect is beyond me, since that's a relatively minor issue in comparison. And yes, this also bans Windows Internet connection sharing.
When I first started using the web, waayyyy back on Windows 3.1 with Mosaic, I was quite happy to start using Netscape when it first came out. I continued using it all the way up to version 4.something when I just couldn't take its instability, lack of speed, and general unpleasantness. So I switched to IE, which was a technically superior browser on the windows platform. Sure, supporting Microsoft sucks, but blind zealotry isn't my game... I use what gets the job done, and frankly, Windows does a better job at playing Diablo2 and running Photoshop, so that's what I use for graphics and gaming. If I need to grab something from the web, I'm not going to install Netscape which is even less stable than windows, and I'm certainly not going to boot back to FreeBSD, start up X and open Netscape there (Which is only marginally better than the Windows version). Of course when I'm doing real work under FreeBSD and I want to check the weeb, I do so with Netscape, but more and more, I'm finding myself using w3m, which is just about the niftiest web browser I've ever used. Sure its text based and doesn't do graphics, but it has EMACS-esque navigation, colors, it renders tables and frames, and hell, even slashdot looks nice in it. All things considered, I can't win. IE is a better browser in terms of doign things like, say, working, but it's insecure as hell. I'd like to use Netscape, but its a big pile of crap. I'm happy using w3m, but it doesn't do graphics... Mozilla may be the answer but not yet. Now, from a webmaster's perspective, over 95% of the hits on my site are with IE. I don't do any crazy stuff, so it works in pretty much any browser, but it's pretty clear what the masses are using...
Well, if you have any special camera needs you might be better off with the camera server, as opposed to the camera. I don't believe the standalone camera axis sells supports the use of different lenses, so if thats a requirement, your best bet would be the axis camera server 240. It's pricy, but you can connect any kind of camera you want to it, so you could have one with a lowlight lense, an infared camera, a wide angle lens, and one in an outdoor enclosure, all running off the same server. Flexibility has its price:/
When my parents opened a daycare here in Edmonton earlier this year, one of my jobs was to get a web camera system set up. After looking at all the options, I eventually turned to Ask Slashdot myself, and the overwhelming response was to go with the Axis system. We've been highly pleased with it, thus far. We picked up two Axis Camera Server 240's, which connect to our LAN via normal ethernet, and each can take coax input from four seperate video cameras (we use normal CCTV cameras with auto-irus lenses). These badboys have their own webserver built in, which you use for configuring the device, as well as viewing images (the java push one is particularly cool). Since we're running so many cameras and serving to multiple people, we didn't want to have people directly hitting the camera servers, so we use the Eye_get script they make available on their webpage (its for Linux, but works just dandy on FreeBSD) which I have set up to grab images every 5 seconds. Basically, for the last 7 months, every 5 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 8 images are downloaded to a SCSI disk on our FreeBSD webserver and made available to the web (password protected, of course). That's pretty damned reliable if you ask me =) We haven't had a single hiccup during that time frame, and we're planning on adding another camera server (along with another SCSI disk to reduce the load on an individual disc) in the near future. I give them my wholehearted reccomendation. Now, it seems to me you want a self contained unit, not a server + cameras, and they do sell one of those... can't recall its exact model name, but its the same deal, an integrated camera and webserver with an ethernet port. If you've got any other questions, feel free to drop me an e-mail.
For those of us who are BSD inclined, #freebsdhelp on EFnet is a great help. There are quite a number of knowledgable people there and they've got a page set up with user submitted FAQ's and such for commonly asked questions. The URL is www.defcon1.org.
FreeBSD 4.0 ships with IPV6 support
on
IPv6 Over OpenBSD
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· Score: 2
FreeBSD 4.0 has IPV6 support right out of the box (or FTP install, whatever the case may be). In fact, if you goto www.freenet6.net you can hook yourself up with an IPV6 tunnel and start playing around with it immediately.
Back when I was playing Baldurs Gate multiplayer, I head no end of troubles because they used DirectPlay. Essentially, that meant that a random port between 2300 and 2399 was chosen and thats what you were stuck with. I just setup my FreeBSD boxes NAT to forward each and every one of those ports to the specific IP on my network. It's not terribly hard to figure out the ports you need to use, but you can always look at the forums/tech support pages for the game. I believe there was a BG FAQ entry that mentioned the ports you would need to forward.
http://scifi.ign.com/tv/4151.html Be afraid. It looks horrible, and I can't remember where I was reading it, but there's a rumor floating around that there won't be any variable fighters, which just ain't right... Of course, I'm a Macross fan, not a Robotech fan, but it still offends me =)
Wait a second here. Unlike eBay, Yahoo doesn't make a cent from things sold on Yahoo Auctions. Whereas with eBay you pay a listing fee based on the opening bid price, and then a percentage of the final sale price, all auctions on Yahoo are free. That's why you get a lot of people there spamming AllAdvantage crap, people selling a few hundred things from their house with minimum bids of 50 cents, as well as bootleg items. Yep. They're quite prolific. I understand why the companies would be pissed at Yahoo, but I don't understand how they can claim Yahoo is making money off this. Anybody know whats up?
Slashdot Mirror
I've gotten fed up buying my DVD's from Express.com in the US, who, while being cheap, tend to take a good 2 weeks to get to Edmonton because of customs holdups (I swear I'm on the customs hit list. They inspect EVERY package sent to me...) so I've found all kinds of worthwhile online stores based out of Canada. Thats a good thing for two reasons ... one, you avoid duty and Canada Post's $5 "handling fee", and two, Canada Post XPress Post is _really_ cheap and fast within Canada. 2-3 days for a couple of bucks.
.. hasn't shipped yet so I can't comment on service. Finally, A&B Sound, who despite the spartan website, are reported to have nice prices.
So, for DVD's, I'll reccomend www.cnl.com based out of Vancouver. I've only been dealing with them for about 2 weeks now but I've been very happy, and they come highly reccomended to me. Consider, around midnight on a Wednesday I ordered 5 DVD's. Late Thursday I got a shipping confirmation, and I had the DVD's in my hands on Friday afternoon. All for $8 cdn shipping. Prices are quite reasonable, only a little bit more than buying from Express once you factor in shipping and customs fees, plus you get 'em in 2 days (or less), not 2 weeks.
For CD's, I usually buy from Chapters Online, but the trick with Chapters is to only buy items that are listed as "shipping in 24 hours". If it says anything else, especially the dreaded "1-2 weeks", expect to be waiting 1-2 months, if you get it at all. Other options are HMV who's prices seem okay. I preordered Moby's new CD from them because I came across a $5 coupon
For books, again, Chapters Online is your best bet. Really good prices, especially with a Chapters One Card (you pay a $15 yearly fee and get 10% off everything, along with $5 in coupons for every $100 you spend). But again, only order if its in stock (shipping in 24 hours), otherwise its a real crap shoot as to when you'll get it.
For computer hardware, the best is easily Onvia. Great prices, and even better free shipping. Nothing better than buying a 21" monitor at a decent price and not having to pay for shipping. Service is great, shipping is fast (they courier it, so 2-3 days or so), and prices are competitive. Fairly often they have $25 and $50 off coupons, too. I've also done a fair bit of shopping from NCIX, based out of Vancouver. Their prices range from really good, to comparable to my local prices, to a bit high, but they're worth checking out. I got a killer deal on my IBM Deskstar 7200rpm 30 gig from them a while back, and got my Pioneer 10x DVD player from them last year when virtually no stores anywhere in North America were selling them. I'll definately continue dealing with both.
Someone forwarded www.goldfishlegs.com to me the other day, and they've got reviews of Canadian E-Tailers, along with coupons and other goodies. I didn't agree with some of their reviews, but it seems like a useful site to keep bookmarked.
In general, my dealings with various Canadian online stores have been positive. Through harsh experience I've learned how to deal with Chapters (thankfully they're very responsive to e-mails), and I've only been ripped off once (www.stupidcomputers.com, they closed up shop and dissappeared, taking a lot of people's money with them. VISA refunded my money, thankfully). In general I'm willing to pay the little bit extra to buy from Canadian stores (support the economy _and_ get it in less than 2 weeks), except for extreme price differences and/or unavailability in Canada.
Hope this helps =)
I highly reccomend Webalizer for your web logs. It's the best I've seen, since it has an incremental feature, so deleting/cropping your Apache logs doesn't faze it, and it really tracks everything you could possibly want: views/hits/files/visits, referrals, search engine keywords, daily/hourly stats, generates pretty graphs, the works. I've got it cronned to run every hour, and it parses my logs in a few seconds on a p166. You can grab it from FreeBSD ports, or at its webpage here.
I'm curious as to why you'd have a need for SCP. I wouldn't dream of having one of the Axis camera's I'm using directly visible to the 'net, all of the transfers are done to an internal interface on my LAN. Since the only way into the LAN is through the FreeBSD box thats getting images from the camera's, and I doubt I have to worry about the kids in the daycare packet sniffing, so SCP would just be additional overhead). ... who knows :P
However, if its something your situation needs, it shouldn't be overly hard. I've contacted Axis's support people with questions, and have gotten very fast responses every time, and this might be a feature they'd want to incorporate in the future, so they may lend a hand
You can do it exactly like you said in your example in FreeBSD (I'm sure Open and Net are the same). Just SSH in, su to root, CVSup source, make world, build an updated kernel, and reboot. The last time I upgraded one of my webservers I did it (sorta) this way even though that machine does have a little mono monitor. I'm not aware of any Linux distro's that you can upgrade like this, but any BSD users with headless servers may be interested...
Up here at the U of A, in the Undergraduate Association of Computing Science, we've had this discussion before. Basically, we decided that nerds and geeks were independent definitions, and do not require the person to like computers to belong to either group. The biggest difference being someone who is a geek is more socially active, both amongst fellow geeks and non-geeks, whereas nerds are the stereotypical loners. Some other stuff came out of the conversation, such as the agreement that being called a geek is a compliment, while a nerd is somewhat derogitory (at least for us socially active geeks :P). We were also able to identify geeks we knew who had no interest in computers (i.e. some anime fans we know), as well as nerds (some people in Math). Really though, definitions tend to vary depending on the circles you belong to. On IRC, I've talked to people who fit what I'd call a geek referring to themselves as nerds, sooooo ....
If you check out the Matrox Users Resource Centre's news story for August 7th, you'll see a some info from within the latest driver release showing the G800 will be using something called FCRAM. Apparently thats "Fast Cycle" RAM, and is more or less a faster SDRAM. There's a short article here about what FCRAM is. It's built by Fujitsu and is supposedly better for multimedia applications where there is a significant amount of random access. There must be something to the tech, otherwise Matrox would be going with the more standard DDR SDRAM, which must be cheaper to produce because everyone is using it...
http://209.204.196.48/hosts.zip Grab that file. On a Windows box, find the directory that your HOSTS.SAM file is, and extract the HOSTS file in this ZIP into that directory. With modification, you could use it on a *BSD or Linux box. It's a BIIIGGG list of most of the known ad servers in the world, and from my experience, it gets almost all of them. A friend of mine from IRC found a small list, and added his own additions to it and passed it around, and as a result, I haven't had to look at a banner ad in a long time. Basically what it does is override the IP->host mapping with 127.0.0.1 (i.e. localhost) for all known adservers ... so you get almost the same effect as junkbuster or whatever, but without needing to use proxy software, and its instaneous, no lag.
Erg, wtf? The fact that they're dissalowing VPN's isn't the big issue here. If you read the terms of service: AS AN END-POINT ON A NON-COMCAST LOCAL AREA NETWORK OR WIDE AREA NETWORK, OR IN CONJUNCTION WITH A VPN (VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK) OR A VPN TUNNELING PROTOCOL; or you'll see something much more interesting. "an END-POINT" would be a *BSD NAT box, or a Linux IPMASQ box, and the local area network would be your machines you're NAT'ting too. Why the story talks about the VPN aspect is beyond me, since that's a relatively minor issue in comparison. And yes, this also bans Windows Internet connection sharing.
When I first started using the web, waayyyy back on Windows 3.1 with Mosaic, I was quite happy to start using Netscape when it first came out. I continued using it all the way up to version 4.something when I just couldn't take its instability, lack of speed, and general unpleasantness. So I switched to IE, which was a technically superior browser on the windows platform. Sure, supporting Microsoft sucks, but blind zealotry isn't my game ... I use what gets the job done, and frankly, Windows does a better job at playing Diablo2 and running Photoshop, so that's what I use for graphics and gaming. If I need to grab something from the web, I'm not going to install Netscape which is even less stable than windows, and I'm certainly not going to boot back to FreeBSD, start up X and open Netscape there (Which is only marginally better than the Windows version). Of course when I'm doing real work under FreeBSD and I want to check the weeb, I do so with Netscape, but more and more, I'm finding myself using w3m, which is just about the niftiest web browser I've ever used. Sure its text based and doesn't do graphics, but it has EMACS-esque navigation, colors, it renders tables and frames, and hell, even slashdot looks nice in it. All things considered, I can't win. IE is a better browser in terms of doign things like, say, working, but it's insecure as hell. I'd like to use Netscape, but its a big pile of crap. I'm happy using w3m, but it doesn't do graphics... Mozilla may be the answer but not yet. Now, from a webmaster's perspective, over 95% of the hits on my site are with IE. I don't do any crazy stuff, so it works in pretty much any browser, but it's pretty clear what the masses are using...
Well, if you have any special camera needs you might be better off with the camera server, as opposed to the camera. I don't believe the standalone camera axis sells supports the use of different lenses, so if thats a requirement, your best bet would be the axis camera server 240. It's pricy, but you can connect any kind of camera you want to it, so you could have one with a lowlight lense, an infared camera, a wide angle lens, and one in an outdoor enclosure, all running off the same server. Flexibility has its price :/
When my parents opened a daycare here in Edmonton earlier this year, one of my jobs was to get a web camera system set up. After looking at all the options, I eventually turned to Ask Slashdot myself, and the overwhelming response was to go with the Axis system. We've been highly pleased with it, thus far. We picked up two Axis Camera Server 240's, which connect to our LAN via normal ethernet, and each can take coax input from four seperate video cameras (we use normal CCTV cameras with auto-irus lenses). These badboys have their own webserver built in, which you use for configuring the device, as well as viewing images (the java push one is particularly cool). Since we're running so many cameras and serving to multiple people, we didn't want to have people directly hitting the camera servers, so we use the Eye_get script they make available on their webpage (its for Linux, but works just dandy on FreeBSD) which I have set up to grab images every 5 seconds. Basically, for the last 7 months, every 5 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 8 images are downloaded to a SCSI disk on our FreeBSD webserver and made available to the web (password protected, of course). That's pretty damned reliable if you ask me =) We haven't had a single hiccup during that time frame, and we're planning on adding another camera server (along with another SCSI disk to reduce the load on an individual disc) in the near future. I give them my wholehearted reccomendation. Now, it seems to me you want a self contained unit, not a server + cameras, and they do sell one of those ... can't recall its exact model name, but its the same deal, an integrated camera and webserver with an ethernet port. If you've got any other questions, feel free to drop me an e-mail.
For those of us who are BSD inclined, #freebsdhelp on EFnet is a great help. There are quite a number of knowledgable people there and they've got a page set up with user submitted FAQ's and such for commonly asked questions. The URL is www.defcon1.org.
FreeBSD 4.0 has IPV6 support right out of the box (or FTP install, whatever the case may be). In fact, if you goto www.freenet6.net you can hook yourself up with an IPV6 tunnel and start playing around with it immediately.
Back when I was playing Baldurs Gate multiplayer, I head no end of troubles because they used DirectPlay. Essentially, that meant that a random port between 2300 and 2399 was chosen and thats what you were stuck with. I just setup my FreeBSD boxes NAT to forward each and every one of those ports to the specific IP on my network. It's not terribly hard to figure out the ports you need to use, but you can always look at the forums/tech support pages for the game. I believe there was a BG FAQ entry that mentioned the ports you would need to forward.
http://scifi.ign.com/tv/4151.html
Be afraid. It looks horrible, and I can't remember where I was reading it, but there's a rumor floating around that there won't be any variable fighters, which just ain't right... Of course, I'm a Macross fan, not a Robotech fan, but it still offends me =)
Wait a second here. Unlike eBay, Yahoo doesn't make a cent from things sold on Yahoo Auctions. Whereas with eBay you pay a listing fee based on the opening bid price, and then a percentage of the final sale price, all auctions on Yahoo are free. That's why you get a lot of people there spamming AllAdvantage crap, people selling a few hundred things from their house with minimum bids of 50 cents, as well as bootleg items. Yep. They're quite prolific.
I understand why the companies would be pissed at Yahoo, but I don't understand how they can claim Yahoo is making money off this. Anybody know whats up?