Re:Ubuntu Hacks... thanks for the review!
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Ubuntu Hacks
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· Score: 1
Heh, that was me! Please, buy a copy!:)
Ubuntu Hacks... thanks for the review!
on
Ubuntu Hacks
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· Score: 5, Informative
Thanks for the positive review of Ubuntu Hacks. As one of its authors, I'm very pleased to see that the book is well received so far. We geared the book for the Dapper Drake release, and doing that was no easy feat as it was a moving target the whole time. We'd write a hack, and then we'd have to continually revise things as the code changed and new features got rolled in. I believe I rewrote the Java hack at least three times, thanks to the fact that Sun relaxed their licensing.
At any rate; I'm very pleased to see that the book is well accepted. Thanks again for the good review. I'd like to add that we're going to continue to update things at the http://www.ubuntuhacks.com/ blog - there's no real content there at the moment, but as we think of new things or there are new developments in the Ubuntu world we'll keep that site up to date.
I dumped my notes to my blog. I use an Ericsson T616 under AT&T's service. Works well enough. The solution I came up with involved horking a few scripts from Knoppix (thanks to Kyle Rankin for the excellent book Knoppix Hacks, which inspired me to try using GPRS in this manner. Made life real easy as I didn't have to mess with PPP chat scripts and the like - yuck.
It's trivial to login to an OS X box as root - unlike other posts, with this one you can do it from the GUI so you could wipe out your whole box from Finder.
1) From your user account with "admin" privileges, do a "sudo passwd root". It will ask you for your password, then it'll ask you for root's password (and a confirmation). At this point root is enabled.
2) Logout.
3) From the Login Window, hit "down arrow" to highlight the 1st user. Then hit "Option+Enter" and the login box will morph into a traditional UNIX username/password login.
4) Login as root with the root password you specified in step 1. That's it - you now have root on your box. It's kinda handy to have it here, in case you b0rk your regular user. But it's not visible from the login window - which is also nice.
I do customer support on LDAP servers for (part of) my job. For a long time now we've been referring to the master/slave relationship between LDAP servers that are setup in a replication environment as "Supplier/Consumer". This is one substitution that makes sense, as it accurately describes what each server does. However, our product can also do "Multi-Master Replication", where you have two servers that can accept writes from clients, but then replicate those changes to each other. No one's bothered to figure out a term for THAT configuration yet.
Nice try, troll. As I said, we are part of a larger organization - my immediate team has over a third of its workers fully remote, and the rest of us who DO have offices are allowed to work remotely if something outside of work requires our attention.
Let's take the performance metric, for starters. Our team of ~50 engineers is part of a ~500 member org. Our work (backline customer support) is task-based (think of a task as a call - but a task usually means something time consuming and difficult, like analyzing core files, or wading through logs to perform server tuning.) An average engineer in the larger org runs about 10 tasks in his/her queue at any given time. On average, our immediate group runs between 20 and 25 tasks. Nebulous metric... right.
Now, let's talk about the expense of providing a workspace. Sun DOES provide the necessary tools for FULLY remote workers. It doesn't provide those for people like myself, who do have offices, but for the people who DO work remote full-time - these people get desks, chairs, computers (multiple systems if the job requires it - our guys get two desktops and laptop, typically). Sun also provides phone (you actually get a "virtual extension" - people who are on a campus can dial a 5 digit extension and get you, and that virtual extension can be setup to "find you", ring your desk @ home, then your cellphone, then go to pager). Oh, yeah, and don't forget about broadband - they pick up that cost too. Oh, yeah, if you need a pager or cellphone they'll pick that up too.
Oh, and one more thing - the employee gets to take the nifty "home office" tax deduction each year. So, where's the net loss for the employee? No commute, closer to family, paid-for broadband, several computers, and a tax writeoff.
As far as the people who do have an office, like me - tomorrow I have to have my car serviced. Rather than busting ass trying to drop the car off at the mechanic and try to get to the commuter train before it leaves - I can drop the car off later on in the morning and have the mechanic shuttle me back to the house. I get to work from home, and see my kids during the day for a change, and run out and fetch the car later on.
Sun wins - I actually get 2 hours more work done because I don't spend that time in the car or on the train. I win - I get to do the things that A PERSON needs to do (I am not my job, y'know), and I get to hang with my kids. My kids win - I am already home and can actually have a nice sitdown dinner with them (I usually don't get that, simply because I get home too late due to the commute.)
Pollyanna, my ass. I haven't heard one employee who's actually participated in this program bitch about it. It's truly great - kudos for Sun for taking the risk, training the management on how to manage people who aren't local, and for backing the remote workers.
I'm a member of a large worldwide "virtual team" at Sun, and at least a third of our team works out of their house. It works surprisingly well, and our productivity is off the chart (the last metric "exercise" had us working at a 225% efficiency level!)
Granted, everyone on our team busts their hump every day, but we're managing our workload, and we're not TOTALLY buried all the time. I *do* have an office, but I also have the freedom to work remotely on days when I need to - it's great, I can watch my kids if my wife's got to go to the doctor's, then I head down the street to the local coffee shop that's got free wifi and login from my Powerbook. Thanks to wifi and my cellphone, I'm totally mobile, and I save the hour and a half commute into the office on the days I do need to work from home. Everyone wins.
As another poster said, you'll start to see this more and more often. People who goof off and abuse the privilege of working remotely won't succeed, while those of us who thrive will advance. It takes some technology and a slightly different management style to pull this off, but it's very doable, and can return huge dividends for both the employee and the company.
I had an Atari 400 - that was the system I cut my teeth on. Between that, and the 410 cassette drive, and the excellent BASIC manual, I was writing my own software in the third grade, without any classes. Learning BASIC that way, at that age, proved to be invaluable later on when I took formal algebra classes.
I cried when that machine died. But my mourning period was short - as my parents (thankfully) replaced that 400 with an 800XL, and I finally got to use a decent keyboard (the 400 had a craptacular chiclet keyboard).
I can't help but wonder what my life would've been like had my parents NOT got me that 400 for Christmas, so many years ago. I know they scrimped and saved for it, and I'm thankful for that and all the other great things they've done for me. I hope I can live up to their example and do the same for my two kids.
Hey, I remember Col. Wilma Deering.:) I've been religiously TiVoing and ripping the Buck Rogers off Sci-Fi everytime they show it. Yeah, the show sucks... but teh hottie Wilma... YUM.
RAID 5 isn't a backup solution, nor is it designed to ensure data integrity.
It's sole purpose is to ensure that your data is protected in the event one of the spindles (drives) dies. That's it. I've seen bad SCSI cables take out RAID arrays, as well as bad RAM causing the data to get corrupted.
Tape is possibly the best solution -- with DVD and CD-R coming in as lower cost, smaller capacity options. Write the data to the media, then get it offline and out of the drive before something happens.
The problem with GPS is that it's easily shielded. I've yet to see a GPS receiver that works indoors - which is where 90% of Wi-Fi usage happens. The GPS signal is pretty weak - even though the satellite pumps out a signal with approximately 500 watts of Effective Radiated Power, there is enough loss in the path (app. 21000 km) that the signal is fairly weak by the time it gets to your ground-based receiver. Add this to the fact that most ground-based receivers have pretty crappy antennas (and a Wi-Fi/GPS combo unit would, too - unless you wanted it to be HUGE), and you can see how basing your "perimeter" on GPS coordinates is impractical.
Looks like GPS will remain in use for wardriving - since you're outside with a clear view of the sky it works just fine for that.:)
If you're interested in more GPS facts, check out this Google Cache - I don't want to slashdot the main site.
I dug around for contact info at madchat, too, Ceren - couldn't find anything.
And thanks a lot, Anonymous Coward, for linking directly to those images. Jerk. Totally wiped out my little 768/768 DSL line - NullDevice.Net hadn't had ANY traffic in forever, and now all of a sudden, I'm/.'ed right off the net. So short term, the whole damn http server is shut off so I can enjoy dinner with my wife and kid. And when I do bring the server back up, those pix are going to be blocked. Hope you all got 'em before they disappeared. You'd think people would like to the HTML page, rather than the JPGs directly - I actually spent some time writing the damn article that was wrapped around those pix.
Well, in all of this, there's a couple of lessons to be learned: 1) If you are going to post pix of shapely ladies on your site, sooner or later, expect to get hammered. (Those pix have been up for over two years, and never been hit like today. All glory to/.) 2) If you've taken said action, check the webserver logs before troubleshooting your hardware. I replaced the NIC in the machine, removed a hub, switched ethernet cables, and logged into the DSL router at my ISP (I'm a part-time admin there) before I realized that it wasn't any of those - it was the/. effect...
And Ceren, sorry for the comments some of those people said above. Very juvenile behavior, you'd think people would know better.
Sounds like he's a couple miles northwest of me. I'm actually close to the "Raleys" (It's Nob Hill Foods, though - Raleys is their parent company.) - I walk there with my daughter from time to time to get fresh-baked cookies as a treat for her.
That just shows how odd earthquake shock waves can propagate through the ground - if your sister's father-in-law lives in the hills I'm thinking of - those hills are practically solid rock, which means that the whole home moves together as one piece. I'm in the flat, on more "standard" ground, and things tend to move helter-skelter down here.
And let me tell you, that quake was big. Not as big as the Loma Prieta quake, but large, nonetheless. Looking at the USGS map at the USGS, it appears that the epicenter was in the mountains just south of our house.
At the beginning, it felt like someone drove a semi into the side of the house. At first, I thought, "What the FSCK???", and then realized it was a quake. My pregnant wife and 2-year old daughter were on the couch with me, watching the end of Dinotopia. I grabbed the kid, stood up, and reached down to assist my wife, all the while things are falling and breaking around me. By the time I reached the archway in that room, the quake had ended, and we had LOTS of broken pictureframes and other things tossed out of cupboards.
My office took the brunt of the quake in our home, with all my DVDs, books, and software flying off the shelves and piling itself in the middle of the room. (A strange earthquake phenonmeon - it looks like a ghost ran through the room and piled all your belongings in a huge heap.) Luckily, my computer rack remained standing, and my Linux box and Sun Ultra 5 were still humming along, with no damage. I wound up sleeping with my amateur radio and a flashlight next to the bed, just in case... And we had several aftershocks throughout the night, the most notable being about a 3.4.
We were lucky, we didn't have any structual damage (that I can see, anyhow, I plan on having a home inspector out within the week). A neighbor down the street had his chimney collapse, the gas station across town had a column on their roof get damaged, and the Wal-Mart's sprinklers went off, dumping a quarter-inch of water on the floor there and damaging lots of merchandise.
Anyone who makes light of earthquakes hasn't been in one that's 5.x or higher. A large quake is a true natural disaster, and something to be feared and prepared for.
chrisd, I'd be interested to find out where your sister's father-in-law lives - there's no way you could have barely noticed this sucker if you were in my house.
And it failed miserably. My uncle's got a DivX player that's near-useless. He should've got one that also played regular DVDs - but hey, he was an early adopter. I don't think limited-use discs or other media makes sense. People want to *own* the movies and music they buy. Otherwise, everyone would listen to the radio all the time, or get pay-per-view movies on their cable or satellite. But hey - what do I know? I'm just an American Consumer - I vote with my dollar. And my dollar won't be buying a use-once disc. Unless you can rip it to DivX;-).
I've got a Pontiac Grand Prix, and this car does some of the things you mention already.
1) The OBD-II computer system that manages the engine does have great troublecode information. However, it's stored as a code which is not human-readable. There is a dongle and software called "AutoTAP" that will let you see what the OBD-II system is doing in real time, but that requires a laptop or other PC to be hooked to the car. The AutoTAP also allows the operator to upload new ignition timing and injector parameters, as well as transmission shift points, to further tune the car's performance.
2) The car has an onboard display in the dash that displays:
Oil Life in % of estimated life
Tire Pressure Warnings
Various fluid level warnings
Fuel mileage and estimated range-to-empty
3) No firewire.:(
4) No voice control, but it does have steering wheel mounted controls for the stereo which also feed into: THE HUD.
5) Yes, the car has a Heads-Up-Display. This is my favorite part. It displays current MPH, along with blinker status, Hibeam indicator, and fuel warnings. When you hit one of the buttons on the steering wheel to control the stereo, the HUD displays what you're doing - I love being able to change the radio station without having to take my eyes off the road.
6) No alarm tiein, other than the factory security system.
I dig the car - it's fun to drive, has lots of room, gets decent mileage, and has lots of geektoys. I'm working out how to interface an old laptop into it so I can have MP3 and other multimedia tied into it. I don't want to lose the HUD functionality - it's one of my favorite features. Now, if some manufacturer would figure out that all of these features are what people want...
I'd agree with Rusty on the Picturebook. I've got a C1VPK - it's got the (fairly new) 667Mhz Crusoe, and it's got more than enough power to do what I need out of a subnotebook. And the battery life is good, too. On the battery the unit comes with (the "small" battery) I can watch a DivX movie on my trainride home (just over an hour trip) and have about 40% left on a charge. And this is under Linux; which, as Rusty said, has a horribly broken APM implementation on the Sony Vaio line. Longrun works nicely - the jogdial is fabulous - the camera's a great toy... but the ability to be banging out Perl scripts while listening to MP3s on the trainride home without worrying about my battery is one of the best things about it. I keep meaning to write a Linux-Picturebook HOWTO, but I can't seem to get together enough spare time to do that.
I've upgraded mine to 256MB of RAM using the third-party IO (Japanese) upgrade - that made a ton of difference in performance. I understand there's a new Picturebook coming... it's supposed to have the 733Mhz Crusoe.
And of course, the box runs fine under Windows. [ick]
Linkage: My review of the Picturebook SteveBarr.Com - the Picturebook Portal
Having worked in the disk industry for a while, and been involved with a company that made hard disk testing equipment, I know a bit about spindles and bearings. I haven't fooled with a Fluid Bearing (Hydrodynamic) in a while, but this is what I remember:
A Fluid Bearing Spindle has the following positive characteristics, amongst others:
It's quiet.
It's smooth (very low non-repetitive runout, low rumble, ideal for low flying height heads).
It also has the following negative characteristics:
Unidirectional (you can't run it backwards, or it self-destructs, but who cares for a drive).
Sensitive to orientation (The drive probably won't run upside down, or will suffer severe loss of MTBF if run upside down).
Generates more heat and has more drag than ball bearings. This will heat up the case and put more load on the power supply.
Requires very tight operating tolerances - if a part is a touch out of spec (as little as 50-100 millionths of an inch) it can toast the spindle.
Just FYI if you decide to go with this drive. I remember some years ago Seagate made some prototypes with this technology, they had zero time between failures. The company I used to work for also experimented with this technology, and every product was a flop. Your mileage may vary.
The university may be within its rights in taking down the server as it may have been their property - as crappy as it sounds, they may be within their rights to expel him. (IANAL). However, the student is within his civil rights to, as you put it, "bitch about the fascist administration".
Who are you to judge what's free speech and what's not? To quote the exact wording of the Bill of Rights:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or
the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Notice how it doesn't say anything about "only political speech", or "no whining". He's free to bitch and moan about the administration as he pleases. The key mistake that was made was (possibly) using university equipment to do that. Hypothetically, if he owned the server, and paid for the bandwidth, this would be a non-issue - but it sounds like this was a student-body site.
And FYI, pornography can be considered free speech. Freedom of the press. Just cause you don't like it, doesn't mean that you can dismiss it. If you don't like it, don't buy it, or turn your head if you see a Hustler in the 7-11. But I'll be there, grinning, reading the thing.
I'm affilated with a small, local ISP (South Valley Internet), and I can speak from personal experience on this. SVI has approximately 6000 customers in the Southern Santa Clara County, and has DSL agreements with GTE(Verizon), Covad, and NorthPoint. SVI also has an agreement with PacBell for DSL -- but unlike the others, PacBell charges SVI the same cost for the line as a regular consumer can get it for. There is NO wholesale price with PacBell DSL... as a result, what's the customer's incentive to go with SVI for a DSL provider? SVI is going to have to markup the line somewhat to turn a profit on that service, and they'll always be higher than PacBell, with no prospect of being competitive.
I had understood that deregulation was supposed to allow the smaller companies a chance to be competitive. Like the article says, though -- looks like your only choice soon will be the Bells.
Out of curiosity, are you saying that Orinoco's WEP doesn't work in Linux? Odd, cause I've been running it for some time... one just needs to specify the encryption settings in/etc/pcmcia/config.opts.
--WildBill
DukeOfUrl made a small error on his review of the Lucent WaveLAN/Orinoco equipment. This equipment supports 802.11b at 11MB, with fallback to 802.11 (2MB operation), ad-hoc and accesspoint mode, and WEP encryption (for the Silver card). (The Lucent Gold card supports a proprietary 128-bit encryption scheme.)
The WaveLAN/Orinoco gear also is supported under Linux - the newer PCMCIA source has drivers for the card included, and Lucent has a binary-only driver that you can download from their website and compile into the PCMCIA source. Both drivers work well.
I've got an article posted on my website that details setup and operation of the WaveLAN/Orinoco gear. You can get it by going to NullDevice.Net.
Maybe people would be hip to the coolness that is Linux. Or perhaps BSD would hit it big. That'd be sweet (more BSD Daemon Babes, please!)
Seriously, that's pretty unlikely. As an IT Professional , the most common arguments I hear about open source products are:
Who's going to support it?
If it's free, it isn't worth anything.
What happens when it breaks?
Open Source Programs are buggy. Look at how often they're updated.
What if the author gives up the project?
As an Open Source advocate, I know these arguments are based largely on FUD. We don't need to rehash this here. But I'd like to bring up a answer to the $1000 M$ operating system that isn't opensource (and watch everyone go nuts:
What about Solaris? Runs on the Intel Platform, and can run just about everything Linux can. Yet Solaris is backed by Sun - who isn't going away any time soon (much to Bill Gates' chagrin) and is a large name that IT managers and investors can trust. Sun's Solaris license is pretty liberal - at Linuxworld, they were giving copies of it away and telling people to install it on every desktop in their company. M$ would blow a blood vessel just thinking about ordering their PR guys to say something like that.
I think Windows has only a few years of life left in it. People are starting to get hip to the fact that there's high quality software out there for free, just waiting for a nice lil' Intel or AMD to call home. Once John Q. Public embraces this, Bill Gates could price Windows at $1.99 per copy and people would most likely select something else, as 99% of computer users know Windows is crap.
I didn't intend for this to be a MS bash post (but this is Slashdot, after all) - I just wanted to raise thoughts about other free OSs besides Linux and BSD. Yeah, Solaris has strings attached on the license. So what? You can get it for nothing, or next to nothing. It's high quality software, and the company will be supporting it for some time to come. Those are the selling point to John Q. Public and the IT management folks.
I've installed quite a few of the Lucent systems, and can answer most of your questions.
How does the coverage of the two compare? Are the wireless transmitters essentially the same? (Both seem to use Orinoco Silver cards, though the RG-1000's card isn't removable.)
The coverage of the two is comparable. The RG-1000 and Airport are basically the same, just the RG-1000 is repackaged, AFAIK. I've installed three RG-1000s, and they all exhibit similar range characteristics to the Airport, although I haven't opened up a RG-1000.
I've seen the stories about extending coverage by hooking an external antenna to the Apple Airports. Can an external antenna be attached to the RG-1000? If so, with or without hacking?
The RG-1000 basically uses the same Silver card as the Airport. As I said above, the two units are pretty much the same. Silver cards have a little plug on the end of the stub antenna that is removable. This is where the range extender antenna plugs in. If Lucent didn't change the card for the RG-1000, then it's possible to hook a range extender to the RG-1000. Again, I haven't had a RG-1000 open, so I can't say for sure if it's worth it. The design of the RG-1000 appears to have an antenna built into it, but I *haven't* taken one apart, so I don't know for sure.
The Orinoco FAQ says that about 30 clients can be supported by a single RG-1000. Apple's specs suggests 10 clients max. Has anyone used more then 10 clients with an Apple Airport and if so how well did it work?
I haven't used more than 10 clients with an Airport, but I've had 70 clients on a single WaveAccess Access Point at one time without adverse effect. I've also had 12 clients on my home machine (LAN party) and my home machine is merely a Linux box with a WaveLAN card jammed in it. Again, no adverse effects, and everyone was fragging wirelessly.
Both products can do NAT. Can you configure filters or open up ports with the utilities provided with either?
There are no packet filtering capabilities on the Airport or the RG-1000. If you already have a Linux firewall or some other form of configurable firewall running NAT, you are better off disabling the NAT in the Airport/RG-1000 and running it in bridge mode.
More info on WaveLAN/Linux is available at my homepage, NullDevice.Net
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, that was me! Please, buy a copy! :)
At any rate; I'm very pleased to see that the book is well accepted. Thanks again for the good review. I'd like to add that we're going to continue to update things at the http://www.ubuntuhacks.com/ blog - there's no real content there at the moment, but as we think of new things or there are new developments in the Ubuntu world we'll keep that site up to date.
- Bill
I dumped my notes to my blog. I use an Ericsson T616 under AT&T's service. Works well enough. The solution I came up with involved horking a few scripts from Knoppix (thanks to Kyle Rankin for the excellent book Knoppix Hacks, which inspired me to try using GPRS in this manner. Made life real easy as I didn't have to mess with PPP chat scripts and the like - yuck.
It's trivial to login to an OS X box as root - unlike other posts, with this one you can do it from the GUI so you could wipe out your whole box from Finder.
1) From your user account with "admin" privileges, do a "sudo passwd root". It will ask you for your password, then it'll ask you for root's password (and a confirmation). At this point root is enabled.
2) Logout.
3) From the Login Window, hit "down arrow" to highlight the 1st user. Then hit "Option+Enter" and the login box will morph into a traditional UNIX username/password login.
4) Login as root with the root password you specified in step 1. That's it - you now have root on your box. It's kinda handy to have it here, in case you b0rk your regular user. But it's not visible from the login window - which is also nice.
I do customer support on LDAP servers for (part of) my job. For a long time now we've been referring to the master/slave relationship between LDAP servers that are setup in a replication environment as "Supplier/Consumer". This is one substitution that makes sense, as it accurately describes what each server does. However, our product can also do "Multi-Master Replication", where you have two servers that can accept writes from clients, but then replicate those changes to each other. No one's bothered to figure out a term for THAT configuration yet.
Nice try, troll. As I said, we are part of a larger organization - my immediate team has over a third of its workers fully remote, and the rest of us who DO have offices are allowed to work remotely if something outside of work requires our attention.
Let's take the performance metric, for starters. Our team of ~50 engineers is part of a ~500 member org. Our work (backline customer support) is task-based (think of a task as a call - but a task usually means something time consuming and difficult, like analyzing core files, or wading through logs to perform server tuning.) An average engineer in the larger org runs about 10 tasks in his/her queue at any given time. On average, our immediate group runs between 20 and 25 tasks. Nebulous metric... right.
Now, let's talk about the expense of providing a workspace. Sun DOES provide the necessary tools for FULLY remote workers. It doesn't provide those for people like myself, who do have offices, but for the people who DO work remote full-time - these people get desks, chairs, computers (multiple systems if the job requires it - our guys get two desktops and laptop, typically). Sun also provides phone (you actually get a "virtual extension" - people who are on a campus can dial a 5 digit extension and get you, and that virtual extension can be setup to "find you", ring your desk @ home, then your cellphone, then go to pager). Oh, yeah, and don't forget about broadband - they pick up that cost too. Oh, yeah, if you need a pager or cellphone they'll pick that up too.
Oh, and one more thing - the employee gets to take the nifty "home office" tax deduction each year. So, where's the net loss for the employee? No commute, closer to family, paid-for broadband, several computers, and a tax writeoff.
As far as the people who do have an office, like me - tomorrow I have to have my car serviced. Rather than busting ass trying to drop the car off at the mechanic and try to get to the commuter train before it leaves - I can drop the car off later on in the morning and have the mechanic shuttle me back to the house. I get to work from home, and see my kids during the day for a change, and run out and fetch the car later on.
Sun wins - I actually get 2 hours more work done because I don't spend that time in the car or on the train. I win - I get to do the things that A PERSON needs to do (I am not my job, y'know), and I get to hang with my kids. My kids win - I am already home and can actually have a nice sitdown dinner with them (I usually don't get that, simply because I get home too late due to the commute.)
Pollyanna, my ass. I haven't heard one employee who's actually participated in this program bitch about it. It's truly great - kudos for Sun for taking the risk, training the management on how to manage people who aren't local, and for backing the remote workers.
I'm a member of a large worldwide "virtual team" at Sun, and at least a third of our team works out of their house. It works surprisingly well, and our productivity is off the chart (the last metric "exercise" had us working at a 225% efficiency level!)
Granted, everyone on our team busts their hump every day, but we're managing our workload, and we're not TOTALLY buried all the time. I *do* have an office, but I also have the freedom to work remotely on days when I need to - it's great, I can watch my kids if my wife's got to go to the doctor's, then I head down the street to the local coffee shop that's got free wifi and login from my Powerbook. Thanks to wifi and my cellphone, I'm totally mobile, and I save the hour and a half commute into the office on the days I do need to work from home. Everyone wins.
As another poster said, you'll start to see this more and more often. People who goof off and abuse the privilege of working remotely won't succeed, while those of us who thrive will advance. It takes some technology and a slightly different management style to pull this off, but it's very doable, and can return huge dividends for both the employee and the company.
I cried when that machine died. But my mourning period was short - as my parents (thankfully) replaced that 400 with an 800XL, and I finally got to use a decent keyboard (the 400 had a craptacular chiclet keyboard).
I can't help but wonder what my life would've been like had my parents NOT got me that 400 for Christmas, so many years ago. I know they scrimped and saved for it, and I'm thankful for that and all the other great things they've done for me. I hope I can live up to their example and do the same for my two kids.
Sniff. Can you feel the love in here? Sniff.
Hey, I remember Col. Wilma Deering. :) I've been religiously TiVoing and ripping the Buck Rogers off Sci-Fi everytime they show it. Yeah, the show sucks... but teh hottie Wilma... YUM.
RAID 5 isn't a backup solution, nor is it designed to ensure data integrity.
It's sole purpose is to ensure that your data is protected in the event one of the spindles (drives) dies. That's it. I've seen bad SCSI cables take out RAID arrays, as well as bad RAM causing the data to get corrupted.
Tape is possibly the best solution -- with DVD and CD-R coming in as lower cost, smaller capacity options. Write the data to the media, then get it offline and out of the drive before something happens.
Looks like GPS will remain in use for wardriving - since you're outside with a clear view of the sky it works just fine for that. :)
If you're interested in more GPS facts, check out this Google Cache - I don't want to slashdot the main site.
I dug around for contact info at madchat, too, Ceren - couldn't find anything.
/.'ed right off the net. So short term, the whole damn http server is shut off so I can enjoy dinner with my wife and kid. And when I do bring the server back up, those pix are going to be blocked. Hope you all got 'em before they disappeared. You'd think people would like to the HTML page, rather than the JPGs directly - I actually spent some time writing the damn article that was wrapped around those pix.
/.) /. effect...
And thanks a lot, Anonymous Coward, for linking directly to those images. Jerk. Totally wiped out my little 768/768 DSL line - NullDevice.Net hadn't had ANY traffic in forever, and now all of a sudden, I'm
Well, in all of this, there's a couple of lessons to be learned:
1) If you are going to post pix of shapely ladies on your site, sooner or later, expect to get hammered. (Those pix have been up for over two years, and never been hit like today. All glory to
2) If you've taken said action, check the webserver logs before troubleshooting your hardware. I replaced the NIC in the machine, removed a hub, switched ethernet cables, and logged into the DSL router at my ISP (I'm a part-time admin there) before I realized that it wasn't any of those - it was the
And Ceren, sorry for the comments some of those people said above. Very juvenile behavior, you'd think people would know better.
- WildBill
Sounds like he's a couple miles northwest of me. I'm actually close to the "Raleys" (It's Nob Hill Foods, though - Raleys is their parent company.) - I walk there with my daughter from time to time to get fresh-baked cookies as a treat for her.
That just shows how odd earthquake shock waves can propagate through the ground - if your sister's father-in-law lives in the hills I'm thinking of - those hills are practically solid rock, which means that the whole home moves together as one piece. I'm in the flat, on more "standard" ground, and things tend to move helter-skelter down here.
At the beginning, it felt like someone drove a semi into the side of the house. At first, I thought, "What the FSCK???", and then realized it was a quake. My pregnant wife and 2-year old daughter were on the couch with me, watching the end of Dinotopia. I grabbed the kid, stood up, and reached down to assist my wife, all the while things are falling and breaking around me. By the time I reached the archway in that room, the quake had ended, and we had LOTS of broken pictureframes and other things tossed out of cupboards.
My office took the brunt of the quake in our home, with all my DVDs, books, and software flying off the shelves and piling itself in the middle of the room. (A strange earthquake phenonmeon - it looks like a ghost ran through the room and piled all your belongings in a huge heap.) Luckily, my computer rack remained standing, and my Linux box and Sun Ultra 5 were still humming along, with no damage. I wound up sleeping with my amateur radio and a flashlight next to the bed, just in case... And we had several aftershocks throughout the night, the most notable being about a 3.4.
We were lucky, we didn't have any structual damage (that I can see, anyhow, I plan on having a home inspector out within the week). A neighbor down the street had his chimney collapse, the gas station across town had a column on their roof get damaged, and the Wal-Mart's sprinklers went off, dumping a quarter-inch of water on the floor there and damaging lots of merchandise.
Anyone who makes light of earthquakes hasn't been in one that's 5.x or higher. A large quake is a true natural disaster, and something to be feared and prepared for.
chrisd, I'd be interested to find out where your sister's father-in-law lives - there's no way you could have barely noticed this sucker if you were in my house.
And it failed miserably. My uncle's got a DivX player that's near-useless. He should've got one that also played regular DVDs - but hey, he was an early adopter. I don't think limited-use discs or other media makes sense. People want to *own* the movies and music they buy. Otherwise, everyone would listen to the radio all the time, or get pay-per-view movies on their cable or satellite. But hey - what do I know? I'm just an American Consumer - I vote with my dollar. And my dollar won't be buying a use-once disc. Unless you can rip it to DivX;-).
1) The OBD-II computer system that manages the engine does have great troublecode information. However, it's stored as a code which is not human-readable. There is a dongle and software called "AutoTAP" that will let you see what the OBD-II system is doing in real time, but that requires a laptop or other PC to be hooked to the car. The AutoTAP also allows the operator to upload new ignition timing and injector parameters, as well as transmission shift points, to further tune the car's performance.
2) The car has an onboard display in the dash that displays:
Oil Life in % of estimated life
Tire Pressure Warnings
Various fluid level warnings
Fuel mileage and estimated range-to-empty
3) No firewire. :(
4) No voice control, but it does have steering wheel mounted controls for the stereo which also feed into: THE HUD.
5) Yes, the car has a Heads-Up-Display. This is my favorite part. It displays current MPH, along with blinker status, Hibeam indicator, and fuel warnings. When you hit one of the buttons on the steering wheel to control the stereo, the HUD displays what you're doing - I love being able to change the radio station without having to take my eyes off the road.
6) No alarm tiein, other than the factory security system.
I dig the car - it's fun to drive, has lots of room, gets decent mileage, and has lots of geektoys. I'm working out how to interface an old laptop into it so I can have MP3 and other multimedia tied into it. I don't want to lose the HUD functionality - it's one of my favorite features. Now, if some manufacturer would figure out that all of these features are what people want...
I'd agree with Rusty on the Picturebook. I've got a C1VPK - it's got the (fairly new) 667Mhz Crusoe, and it's got more than enough power to do what I need out of a subnotebook. And the battery life is good, too. On the battery the unit comes with (the "small" battery) I can watch a DivX movie on my trainride home (just over an hour trip) and have about 40% left on a charge. And this is under Linux; which, as Rusty said, has a horribly broken APM implementation on the Sony Vaio line. Longrun works nicely - the jogdial is fabulous - the camera's a great toy... but the ability to be banging out Perl scripts while listening to MP3s on the trainride home without worrying about my battery is one of the best things about it. I keep meaning to write a Linux-Picturebook HOWTO, but I can't seem to get together enough spare time to do that.
I've upgraded mine to 256MB of RAM using the third-party IO (Japanese) upgrade - that made a ton of difference in performance. I understand there's a new Picturebook coming... it's supposed to have the 733Mhz Crusoe.
And of course, the box runs fine under Windows. [ick]
Linkage:
My review of the Picturebook
SteveBarr.Com - the Picturebook Portal
A Fluid Bearing Spindle has the following positive characteristics, amongst others:
It's quiet.
It's smooth (very low non-repetitive runout, low rumble, ideal for low flying height heads).
It also has the following negative characteristics:
Unidirectional (you can't run it backwards, or it self-destructs, but who cares for a drive).
Sensitive to orientation (The drive probably won't run upside down, or will suffer severe loss of MTBF if run upside down).
Generates more heat and has more drag than ball bearings. This will heat up the case and put more load on the power supply.
Requires very tight operating tolerances - if a part is a touch out of spec (as little as 50-100 millionths of an inch) it can toast the spindle.
Just FYI if you decide to go with this drive. I remember some years ago Seagate made some prototypes with this technology, they had zero time between failures. The company I used to work for also experimented with this technology, and every product was a flop. Your mileage may vary.
The university may be within its rights in taking down the server as it may have been their property - as crappy as it sounds, they may be within their rights to expel him. (IANAL). However, the student is within his civil rights to, as you put it, "bitch about the fascist administration".
Who are you to judge what's free speech and what's not? To quote the exact wording of the Bill of Rights:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Notice how it doesn't say anything about "only political speech", or "no whining". He's free to bitch and moan about the administration as he pleases. The key mistake that was made was (possibly) using university equipment to do that. Hypothetically, if he owned the server, and paid for the bandwidth, this would be a non-issue - but it sounds like this was a student-body site.
And FYI, pornography can be considered free speech. Freedom of the press. Just cause you don't like it, doesn't mean that you can dismiss it. If you don't like it, don't buy it, or turn your head if you see a Hustler in the 7-11. But I'll be there, grinning, reading the thing.
There's an unofficial fan site that's got TONS of pictures -- Erin Gray Unofficial FanSite
I had understood that deregulation was supposed to allow the smaller companies a chance to be competitive. Like the article says, though -- looks like your only choice soon will be the Bells.
Out of curiosity, are you saying that Orinoco's WEP doesn't work in Linux? Odd, cause I've been running it for some time... one just needs to specify the encryption settings in /etc/pcmcia/config.opts.
--WildBill
The WaveLAN/Orinoco gear also is supported under Linux - the newer PCMCIA source has drivers for the card included, and Lucent has a binary-only driver that you can download from their website and compile into the PCMCIA source. Both drivers work well.
I've got an article posted on my website that details setup and operation of the WaveLAN/Orinoco gear. You can get it by going to NullDevice.Net.
-- WildBill
Seriously, that's pretty unlikely. As an IT Professional , the most common arguments I hear about open source products are:
Who's going to support it?
If it's free, it isn't worth anything.
What happens when it breaks?
Open Source Programs are buggy. Look at how often they're updated.
What if the author gives up the project?
As an Open Source advocate, I know these arguments are based largely on FUD. We don't need to rehash this here. But I'd like to bring up a answer to the $1000 M$ operating system that isn't opensource (and watch everyone go nuts:
What about Solaris? Runs on the Intel Platform, and can run just about everything Linux can. Yet Solaris is backed by Sun - who isn't going away any time soon (much to Bill Gates' chagrin) and is a large name that IT managers and investors can trust. Sun's Solaris license is pretty liberal - at Linuxworld, they were giving copies of it away and telling people to install it on every desktop in their company. M$ would blow a blood vessel just thinking about ordering their PR guys to say something like that.
I think Windows has only a few years of life left in it. People are starting to get hip to the fact that there's high quality software out there for free, just waiting for a nice lil' Intel or AMD to call home. Once John Q. Public embraces this, Bill Gates could price Windows at $1.99 per copy and people would most likely select something else, as 99% of computer users know Windows is crap.
I didn't intend for this to be a MS bash post (but this is Slashdot, after all) - I just wanted to raise thoughts about other free OSs besides Linux and BSD. Yeah, Solaris has strings attached on the license. So what? You can get it for nothing, or next to nothing. It's high quality software, and the company will be supporting it for some time to come. Those are the selling point to John Q. Public and the IT management folks.
How does the coverage of the two compare? Are the wireless transmitters essentially the same? (Both seem to use Orinoco Silver cards, though the RG-1000's card isn't removable.)
The coverage of the two is comparable. The RG-1000 and Airport are basically the same, just the RG-1000 is repackaged, AFAIK. I've installed three RG-1000s, and they all exhibit similar range characteristics to the Airport, although I haven't opened up a RG-1000.
I've seen the stories about extending coverage by hooking an external antenna to the Apple Airports. Can an external antenna be attached to the RG-1000? If so, with or without hacking?
The RG-1000 basically uses the same Silver card as the Airport. As I said above, the two units are pretty much the same. Silver cards have a little plug on the end of the stub antenna that is removable. This is where the range extender antenna plugs in. If Lucent didn't change the card for the RG-1000, then it's possible to hook a range extender to the RG-1000. Again, I haven't had a RG-1000 open, so I can't say for sure if it's worth it. The design of the RG-1000 appears to have an antenna built into it, but I *haven't* taken one apart, so I don't know for sure.
The Orinoco FAQ says that about 30 clients can be supported by a single RG-1000. Apple's specs suggests 10 clients max. Has anyone used more then 10 clients with an Apple Airport and if so how well did it work?
I haven't used more than 10 clients with an Airport, but I've had 70 clients on a single WaveAccess Access Point at one time without adverse effect. I've also had 12 clients on my home machine (LAN party) and my home machine is merely a Linux box with a WaveLAN card jammed in it. Again, no adverse effects, and everyone was fragging wirelessly.
Both products can do NAT. Can you configure filters or open up ports with the utilities provided with either?
There are no packet filtering capabilities on the Airport or the RG-1000. If you already have a Linux firewall or some other form of configurable firewall running NAT, you are better off disabling the NAT in the Airport/RG-1000 and running it in bridge mode.
More info on WaveLAN/Linux is available at my homepage, NullDevice.Net