This is actually one advantage Mac's have, as much as some people don't dig the platform. As a longtime FreeBSD user/contributor, I love MacOS X.:)
When I grab a game for Mac, It's reasonably guaranteed that it's been tested on my exact hardware (DP533), and maybe even my widescreen 22" LCD. Why's this matter? Well, I know it will work perfectly, that I won't have to update my Geforce2MX drivers, and that I know it will most likely nicely support fullscreen at my aspect ratio.
That, and of course, because the OS is assured to be tested on your particular machine, you know at least that there will be no odd quirks as far as that, and probably will never have to install or update a driver. Sounds almost like how IBM used to market AS/400's, but it's true.
This said, it does suck that I'm going to have to play Civ III in VirtualPC for a few months. I've been fine with some of the delayed releases.. but I've been waiting for Civ III for 6 months now.
I almost feel guilty for not running a totally open-source desktop, and that my Athlon 900 now sits in a closet, but it sure is nice.
I'd definitely say WebDAV.
on
A Better FTP?
·
· Score: 1
It's usually through your webserver (Apache, IIS, Zope), so, it will happily use SSL (and many clients support it happily).
Not only that, but you can mount WebDAV trees from your OS! MacOS X and Windows 2000/XP do this happily, just give it a WebDAV URL under their 'connect to server' dialog. Unfortunately, 2000 (XP is supposedly much improved) isn't a full redirecter, so you can only use File Explorer & Office against WebDAV, not WinAMP, for instance.
You can also get a WebDAV mounter for Linux too.
It's also readily supported.. Office supports it, as well as some Macromedia & Adobe products I believe. Even Oracle has it.
Now someone just needs to make a nice multi-user WebDAV server for UNIX.. I'd love to move my Ogg collection to a WebDAV server, and have people upload it as a user other than nobody:)
Hopefully it can handle it.:) I can definitely say I love MacOS X, and without a doubt -- you can run more apps from MacOS X than any other OS, especially if you throw in Virtual PC.
I myself run WinXP in VirtualPC.. but I've been struggling to figure out why I bought VirtualPC other than to try XP? Is there really any Windows app I need?
Oh.. ya, Civ3 is being released for Windows first.. that's why I need it!
1. Select icon in Finder or on your Desktop
2. Hit Command-I (or select File->Show Info)
3. Select the "Open with Application" tab
4. Click Icon, select new Application
and if you want, click on the [Change All] button labeled: "Use this application to open all documents like this".
Not very hard.. much easier for newbies than Windows, imho.
Actually, some countries countries that are way ahead of us like Finland, have a REALLY low density. We're talking 17 people per sq/km.
So why does Finland and other low density countries have such a high density of cellphones (>65 cellphones per 100 inhabitants)?
Standards, Standards, Standards! Can you imagine if NetBIOS, IPX, and TCP/IP were all competing for WAN protocol usage on the Internet? The internet would be mostly useless. Buying different routers and adapters for compatibility, and still not be able to have an AIM go through each type - imagine!
Most countries in the world (exceptions being North America, Japan [PDC], South Korea [CDMA]), standardized on GSM for digital cellular.. and this was already back in 1992. Hence, there is probably 150 million GSM customers already, who can all roam between networks. The FCC eventually allowed GSM in, much against Motorola's liking, but on the 1900MHz band, thus making interopability a pain in the ass.
Take America for instance, while AMPS (analog) is dying for the most part as a protocol, you've still got CDMA (Alltel, Verizon), TDMA (AT&T - who is moving to GSM 1900 whenever the economy fixes up), iDen (Nextel), GSM 1900 (Cingular). That means, to cover all these phones, you need *5* base stations. Not only that, other than AMPS compatibility, phones do not generally allow for compatibility between them. So, you've got 5 types of phones manufacturers of all this equipment has to make up for.
GSM isn't the best, but it means real roaming with real coverage! I can take my Motorola Tri-Band GSM phone, and roam between Cingular in the US, Telia in Sweden, and whoever in Uganda. I can send SMS's between any GSM customer around the world. Try having a Verizon customer send a GSM to a Cingular customer.
3G is the 'final solution' to this incompatibility mess I'm told. We'll see
IANACE (I am not a cellular engineer, just some one fed up with cell phones.. flame away at my ignorance!)
"KOffice does offer some benefits over StarOffice. KOffice is natively compiled for the machine platform on which it is executing, whereas StarOffice is a Java-based application. This means KOffice responds much faster and is less memory-intensive than StarOffice."
Since when is StarOffice based in Java? Yes, it's really slow to load under Linux/FreeBSD, but I'd bet part of this is the same reason that koffice loads somewhat slow (though faster since it's less complex).. the whole GCC C++ runtime mess.
StarOffice seems to load much faster when it's run off Solaris, and I'd be willing to bet part of that is due to the Sun Forte compiler's used. Of course, I'm sure it has plenty of it's own tweaks.
Anxiously awaiting StarOffice 6.0
I've actually been working on a solution, to go with a library of website cache that's been collecting for the last few years.
Unfortunately, it didn't work in this case. I've got a read-ahead public archived webcaching system, through junkbuster/squid, that I'm making public shortly.
I put a cache injector for foreign URL's on slashdot. Every 5 minutes, a ruby script checks for un-cached websites, and tries to browse them. This throws it into my read-ahead caching system, which is archived at http://www.webcache.org/
Unfortunately, this site was dead within 5 minutes, so it couldn't get injected. One solution is almost here, it's not just fully tweaked yet;)
I've been happily using Omniweb under MacOS X for some time, and there is a very nice near-equivalent feature you guys should know about. Hidden in OmniWeb -> Preferences -> Javascript, there is the following dialog:
Scripts are allowed to open new Windows:
* Always
* Only in response to a link being clicked
* never
The second choice of course, is the preferred choice. I'm glad that I'll be able to use Mozilla soon for the sites where Omniweb's javascript doesn't work, as the SMP bug under MacOS X now has an uncommitted patch! Too bad Omniweb will still look better for now;)
BTW, it should be complete, save for the mpeg's.. I killed those in the interest of saving my bandwidth. I'll re-chmod em back tommorow or so, but by then you should be able to get it from the real site or another mirror.
It's been a great week to test my read-ahead public web caching (not without it's bugs).. it automagically grabbed the site for me luckilly, though it took a loooong time. I'm not sure if this is still needed, but try My mirror of fractalus on 12sep2001
Has most of the images on it. Be warned, this poor box is already pseudo-slashdotted due to some other mirrored content at the moment, and my poor cable modem can't handle too much more pounding (I set Roxen to throttle at 40K/s outgoing).
So, please mirror it -- but ONLY if you post the URL to the mirror here. It's still grabbing some of the images, so be patient.
Seems to be holding up, the cable modem bandwidth is the restriction, not the box. It's my lonely home server Athlon 900 running on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT. Just static pages on Apache 1.3.20 so it aint no thang.
Luckilly it's not the old pentium box.. Good thing I needed something to do with the Athlon when I moved to MacOS X for my desktop.
Oh, and to the other poster who mentioned the 'do not copy' thing. I laughed my ass off when I saw that while I wget'd the site.. I just said "eh, go ahead and sue be for saving your poor box". It'll make a nice slashdot story if I do get sued, and then the box will be slashdotted all over again, and I'll mirror it again, and the cycle will be cyclic.
I've only got 50K/s outgoing, so I'm sure I'll get slashdotted too.. but it will at least give *some* people a chance.
Re:New Hardware Found! PCI Display Adapter
on
ATi Radeon 8500
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Heh, you wouldn't happen to be responsible for this error on the Arrivals monitor in Philadelphia airport:
http://profile.sh:81/2001-04/25-Philadelphia-Air po rt/P1010002.JPG
I couldn't believe they used 95 instead of NT or 2000 for this. Looks almost like they had the cute autologin setup when the box crashed, but it looks like the server did too! One of my more humorous photos;)
G4 is by far the nicest consumer case I've ever us
on
Case Tweaking
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I really wonder why none of the PC vendors I've seen use a similar swing-out case design.
The G4 case is a work of beauty. I'd love to see a PC version for the next time I decide to buy a PC (probably not for a while, it seems my Athlon will last me a while). Here is what I think is very slick about it:
* To do maintenance, you pull a handle on the side, the side swings out (as shown on the site). The motherboard pulls out with the side panel, meaning you no longer have to dig inside the machine to add memory or put in PCI cards, and you don't have to worry about using tools to open it. For an example shot, see the first few photos at http://profile.sh:81/Collection/Apple_G4_and_Cinem a_Display/ or the Apple site. This is by far the most easily maintainable consumer level machine I've ever encountered.
* All of the cables for IDE and such are very taught, and held onto the edge. No mess of cables to worry about accidentally loosening up when you add RAM.
* Handles are very convienent for moving it around. As a hidden feature, your machine is actually elevated slightly, rather then completely on the table. You don't have to worry about scratching the beautiful case, just the corner handles.
* The CD burner is nicely hidden from view, with a blue spring-loaded bezel over it. You hit the little blue eject button, and out pops the white cd-rom inside of it. No more worrying about color matching.
* Suprisingly good built-in speaker for the newer models
* Power light is nice bright & white, which fades in and out during sleep mode. This is just a cutesy thing though:)
Overall, it's of very high quality, I'd love to see a similar 3rd party type case for my Athlon. It's got a nice ColorCase brand casing right now. Any ideas on a similar case?
This would really annoy someone. At first glance, someone will say "this device just recorded garbage!". Of course, anyone who really wanted you bad would pass some statistical analysis through it, so if you suspect you are being tracked, do a lot of perl programming. The prevalence of %!(!@%$(!@*% will throw off the %'s
Step #2, USB!
Glad to use an Apple G4 at the moment (OS X!). Keyghost says:
* (MacOS & USB keyboards not currently supported).
Keep this in mind, though I'm sure it will be rectified in the near future. Of course, they could just stick a convertor behind your machine and hope you don't notice -- so buy a machine without a PS/2 or AT keyboard port.
Step #3, Kinesis
They sell a cute KeyGhost Security Keyboard, that looks like a natural keyboard of sorts. Insist on a Kinesis keyboard at work! Not only are these great keyboards, but when your boss (or FBI at home) see the keyboard, they will really say to themselves.. "huh?".
That, and you can get the QD model like I do with the dual dvorak/qwerty caps just to mess with their heads more.
Step #4, Run a less popular OS & Architecture
This one is primarily for software key loggers. If your in trouble with the law, the best way to play with them is to work harder. Like for firewalls, one of the best ways to keep yourself a little more secure is to use a less-common OS & architecture.
If you say, use a Sun Ultra at home (without USB), running preferably solaris, but insert any OS here. I'm sure they will have some choice swear words when they see that your mouse plugs into your keyboard, and your keyboard.. doesn't use any kind of adapter they have ever seen.
That and, I'd be likely to say that they don't run into many Sun workstations to sniff via software either, but feel free to run NetBSD on your Sun just to make them recompile it anyways.
I myself ran on a Sun Ultra 10 at home till I sold it for this dual G4. They can be somewhat palatable workstations.
Step #5, serial:
If you really want to mess with their heads, set the machine up to have video output, but take serial input. Get an old dumb terminal out, put it on the other side of the desk, and pump in some text.
When they come in a few weeks later and wonder why the keyboard plugged into your PS/2 port didn't log anything, they may wonder what the heck is going on.
And somehow I doubt they've got a nise Wyse compatible keyboard logger anyways.
Wow, it's an impressive little box. If anyone manages to get NetBSD up on it, give me a holler. I know there is ARM support for NetBSD, but not sure about the rest of the devices.
It'd be really cool to have a little box sitting in the corner of your desk with a tiny power light, pulsating if possible.. people ask what is that you say "Ya, that's my webserver". It should handle apache+php+mysql no problem, and you toss in a 128M compactflash card, and your set.
Me wants! I guess I'd have to get employed first again though.
In June of last year, I ran into a scary situation. After a long programming binge, I found myself unable to type for more then 20 minutes without having pain for the rest of the day. I had switched to a Natural Keyboard in 98 which let me off the hook for a while, but..
The pain around my knuckles and center of the top part of my hand got bad enough that I had to have an intern read/write e-mails for me at work. And rather then being a senior systems admin, I did staff training for various technical topics. Yippy. I took two weeks off of typing, and did a lot of research. This is what I ended up doing:
1) Kinesis Contour Keyboard. I was highly skeptical of this keyboard, being $250... but my hand pains were enough that I would try anything. I got it for home, the one with dual-dvorak/qwerty caps. I now swear by this keyboard so much that I would rather give up my Athlon and go back to a 486/33 if it was the only way to keep this keyboard. I then had work buy me one. It's hard to learn a new keyboard if it changes depending on where you are:) The primary advantage of this keyboard is no matter what keys you hit, your hands never move. Things that don't move, don't get stressed. I've also got some good photos of it's inards and some closeups.
2) Dvorak Keyboard Layout. I took the dive when I bought my Kinesis and immediately began learning Dvorak. Having my keyboard labeled with dual-dvorak/qwerty keys helped me a lot. Un-learning 12 years of QWERTY was by no means easy, but worth it. It was very rough to learn (took about 3 weeks to get back to normal speed), but because your fingers don't have to move as much for english words, my fingers are under a lot less stress. Doesn't help much with perl though, but Ruby's nicer syntax means my hands contort less anyways. Oh, you don't lose your qwerty skills. Whenever I type on a normal keyboard, my hand things qwerty. It associated Dvorak with the Kinesis keyboard.
3) Contour Systems Perfit Mouse. This was almost as important as the keyboard. It amazed me what a difference this made. These mice are custom to your hands. I got two 3-button mice for 7-inch hands, one lefty and one righty. I use the left handed mouse at home (my natural hand), and the right handed at work. It took some training on my right hand, but the balance makes it much less hurtful. I still get pains going to Microsoft mice or trackballs. I can't stress how excellently designed these are for your hands. Rather then pushing the end of your finger to click, you apply a very light pressure in the middle of your fingers. Less movement is less stress is less pain.
4) xwrits. This is software to remind you to take keyboard breaks. You can install it straight from/usr/ports/deskutils/xwrits in FreeBSD. This is the.xsession command line I use:
I'm going to have to set it so that locks me out of my workstation soon. I often will type "killall xwrits". Anyways, that's what I ended up doing for my situation. I can now type again quite happily, though I still get pains on normal qwerty keyboards like the one I'm on ATM at a friends house. Hand damage really sucks, I miss being able to use laptops without pain. Now I have to drag this Kinesis around.
IF YOU FEEL PAIN - STOP - TAKE BREAKS - FIX YOUR SITUATION! SEE A DOCTOR!. I cannot stress this enough. Not fixing this earlier has cost me.
Re:When Ruby will catch on... (Oreilly!)
on
Programming Ruby
·
· Score: 1
O'Reilly does have a book on ruby.
Too bad it's only in Japanese right now. O'Reilly even sponsored a Perl/Ruby conference recently in Japan. There is even a Larry Wall Interview from the event, on what he thinks about Ruby and what not.
Here are some workarounds:
* Use a backend database. LDAP is of course preferred, SQL and NIS work as well too. You'll have to set NIS into insecure mode to accept non root-port queries however.
* Give the account access to the shadow database. For instance, you can give cyrus read access to/etc/shadow. If you've got a security paranoid OS (*BSD), you will have to make a single line patch to libc so it doesn't ignore it, as it has a specific root check.
Of course, on the above security paranoid OS's, every time you use a tool that modifies the passwd database, your permissions get reset.
Slashdot Mirror
This is actually one advantage Mac's have, as much as some people don't dig the platform. As a longtime FreeBSD user/contributor, I love MacOS X. :)
When I grab a game for Mac, It's reasonably guaranteed that it's been tested on my exact hardware (DP533), and maybe even my widescreen 22" LCD. Why's this matter? Well, I know it will work perfectly, that I won't have to update my Geforce2MX drivers, and that I know it will most likely nicely support fullscreen at my aspect ratio.
That, and of course, because the OS is assured to be tested on your particular machine, you know at least that there will be no odd quirks as far as that, and probably will never have to install or update a driver. Sounds almost like how IBM used to market AS/400's, but it's true.
This said, it does suck that I'm going to have to play Civ III in VirtualPC for a few months. I've been fine with some of the delayed releases.. but I've been waiting for Civ III for 6 months now.
I almost feel guilty for not running a totally open-source desktop, and that my Athlon 900 now sits in a closet, but it sure is nice.
It's usually through your webserver (Apache, IIS, Zope), so, it will happily use SSL (and many clients support it happily).
:)
Not only that, but you can mount WebDAV trees from your OS! MacOS X and Windows 2000/XP do this happily, just give it a WebDAV URL under their 'connect to server' dialog. Unfortunately, 2000 (XP is supposedly much improved) isn't a full redirecter, so you can only use File Explorer & Office against WebDAV, not WinAMP, for instance.
You can also get a WebDAV mounter for Linux too.
It's also readily supported.. Office supports it, as well as some Macromedia & Adobe products I believe. Even Oracle has it.
Now someone just needs to make a nice multi-user WebDAV server for UNIX.. I'd love to move my Ogg collection to a WebDAV server, and have people upload it as a user other than nobody
http://www.webcache.org/a/2001/10/27/www.mystatici p.com/homebrew/index.html
:) I can definitely say I love MacOS X, and without a doubt -- you can run more apps from MacOS X than any other OS, especially if you throw in Virtual PC.
Hopefully it can handle it.
I myself run WinXP in VirtualPC.. but I've been struggling to figure out why I bought VirtualPC other than to try XP? Is there really any Windows app I need?
Oh.. ya, Civ3 is being released for Windows first.. that's why I need it!
Do the CD's from Daemonnews come with the FreeBSD stickers?
The MacOS X flavor, anyways.. Login to AOL and type "Beta", and it's available for download.
:)
Strange that they require you to have a working AOL setup first before you download it.
Ahh, MacOS X.. the ability to enjoy all my BSD goodness, and get supported by the world in general, isn't life grand?
(I'll stick with my normal IP services through the other AOL branch, TWC Road Runner)
Here is how to do it on MacOS X 10.1:
1. Select icon in Finder or on your Desktop
2. Hit Command-I (or select File->Show Info)
3. Select the "Open with Application" tab
4. Click Icon, select new Application
and if you want, click on the [Change All] button labeled: "Use this application to open all documents like this".
Not very hard.. much easier for newbies than Windows, imho.
This will probably be moderated as off-topic, but the biggest victim for me to the WRS buyout was that stickers were no longer available..
Does 4.4 come with stickers? Anywhere to buy them individually? My new car is badly in need of them.
Actually, some countries countries that are way ahead of us like Finland, have a REALLY low density. We're talking 17 people per sq/km.
So why does Finland and other low density countries have such a high density of cellphones (>65 cellphones per 100 inhabitants)?
Standards, Standards, Standards! Can you imagine if NetBIOS, IPX, and TCP/IP were all competing for WAN protocol usage on the Internet? The internet would be mostly useless. Buying different routers and adapters for compatibility, and still not be able to have an AIM go through each type - imagine!
Most countries in the world (exceptions being North America, Japan [PDC], South Korea [CDMA]), standardized on GSM for digital cellular.. and this was already back in 1992. Hence, there is probably 150 million GSM customers already, who can all roam between networks. The FCC eventually allowed GSM in, much against Motorola's liking, but on the 1900MHz band, thus making interopability a pain in the ass.
Take America for instance, while AMPS (analog) is dying for the most part as a protocol, you've still got CDMA (Alltel, Verizon), TDMA (AT&T - who is moving to GSM 1900 whenever the economy fixes up), iDen (Nextel), GSM 1900 (Cingular). That means, to cover all these phones, you need *5* base stations. Not only that, other than AMPS compatibility, phones do not generally allow for compatibility between them. So, you've got 5 types of phones manufacturers of all this equipment has to make up for.
GSM isn't the best, but it means real roaming with real coverage! I can take my Motorola Tri-Band GSM phone, and roam between Cingular in the US, Telia in Sweden, and whoever in Uganda. I can send SMS's between any GSM customer around the world. Try having a Verizon customer send a GSM to a Cingular customer.
3G is the 'final solution' to this incompatibility mess I'm told. We'll see
IANACE (I am not a cellular engineer, just some one fed up with cell phones.. flame away at my ignorance!)
"KOffice does offer some benefits over StarOffice. KOffice is natively compiled for the machine platform on which it is executing, whereas StarOffice is a Java-based application. This means KOffice responds much faster and is less memory-intensive than StarOffice."
Since when is StarOffice based in Java? Yes, it's really slow to load under Linux/FreeBSD, but I'd bet part of this is the same reason that koffice loads somewhat slow (though faster since it's less complex).. the whole GCC C++ runtime mess.
StarOffice seems to load much faster when it's run off Solaris, and I'd be willing to bet part of that is due to the Sun Forte compiler's used. Of course, I'm sure it has plenty of it's own tweaks. Anxiously awaiting StarOffice 6.0
I've actually been working on a solution, to go with a library of website cache that's been collecting for the last few years.
;)
Unfortunately, it didn't work in this case. I've got a read-ahead public archived webcaching system, through junkbuster/squid, that I'm making public shortly.
I put a cache injector for foreign URL's on slashdot. Every 5 minutes, a ruby script checks for un-cached websites, and tries to browse them. This throws it into my read-ahead caching system, which is archived at http://www.webcache.org/
Unfortunately, this site was dead within 5 minutes, so it couldn't get injected. One solution is almost here, it's not just fully tweaked yet
I've been happily using Omniweb under MacOS X for some time, and there is a very nice near-equivalent feature you guys should know about. Hidden in OmniWeb -> Preferences -> Javascript, there is the following dialog:
;)
Scripts are allowed to open new Windows:
* Always
* Only in response to a link being clicked
* never
The second choice of course, is the preferred choice. I'm glad that I'll be able to use Mozilla soon for the sites where Omniweb's javascript doesn't work, as the SMP bug under MacOS X now has an uncommitted patch! Too bad Omniweb will still look better for now
Much props to the Mozilla crew. Keep it coming
BTW, it should be complete, save for the mpeg's.. I killed those in the interest of saving my bandwidth. I'll re-chmod em back tommorow or so, but by then you should be able to get it from the real site or another mirror.
Yeesh.. 3 hours to get modded up.
It's been a great week to test my read-ahead public web caching (not without it's bugs).. it automagically grabbed the site for me luckilly, though it took a loooong time. I'm not sure if this is still needed, but try My mirror of fractalus on 12sep2001
Has most of the images on it. Be warned, this poor box is already pseudo-slashdotted due to some other mirrored content at the moment, and my poor cable modem can't handle too much more pounding (I set Roxen to throttle at 40K/s outgoing).
So, please mirror it -- but ONLY if you post the URL to the mirror here. It's still grabbing some of the images, so be patient.
Seems to be holding up, the cable modem bandwidth is the restriction, not the box. It's my lonely home server Athlon 900 running on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT. Just static pages on Apache 1.3.20 so it aint no thang.
Luckilly it's not the old pentium box.. Good thing I needed something to do with the Athlon when I moved to MacOS X for my desktop.
Oh, and to the other poster who mentioned the 'do not copy' thing. I laughed my ass off when I saw that while I wget'd the site.. I just said "eh, go ahead and sue be for saving your poor box". It'll make a nice slashdot story if I do get sued, and then the box will be slashdotted all over again, and I'll mirror it again, and the cycle will be cyclic.
http://profile.sh/high_speed_photos/
I've only got 50K/s outgoing, so I'm sure I'll get slashdotted too.. but it will at least give *some* people a chance.
Heh, you wouldn't happen to be responsible for this error on the Arrivals monitor in Philadelphia airport:
r po rt/P1010002.JPG
;)
http://profile.sh:81/2001-04/25-Philadelphia-Ai
I couldn't believe they used 95 instead of NT or 2000 for this. Looks almost like they had the cute autologin setup when the box crashed, but it looks like the server did too! One of my more humorous photos
I really wonder why none of the PC vendors I've seen use a similar swing-out case design.
m a_Display/ or the Apple site. This is by far the most easily maintainable consumer level machine I've ever encountered.
:)
The G4 case is a work of beauty. I'd love to see a PC version for the next time I decide to buy a PC (probably not for a while, it seems my Athlon will last me a while). Here is what I think is very slick about it:
* To do maintenance, you pull a handle on the side, the side swings out (as shown on the site). The motherboard pulls out with the side panel, meaning you no longer have to dig inside the machine to add memory or put in PCI cards, and you don't have to worry about using tools to open it. For an example shot, see the first few photos at http://profile.sh:81/Collection/Apple_G4_and_Cine
* All of the cables for IDE and such are very taught, and held onto the edge. No mess of cables to worry about accidentally loosening up when you add RAM.
* Handles are very convienent for moving it around. As a hidden feature, your machine is actually elevated slightly, rather then completely on the table. You don't have to worry about scratching the beautiful case, just the corner handles.
* The CD burner is nicely hidden from view, with a blue spring-loaded bezel over it. You hit the little blue eject button, and out pops the white cd-rom inside of it. No more worrying about color matching.
* Suprisingly good built-in speaker for the newer models
* Power light is nice bright & white, which fades in and out during sleep mode. This is just a cutesy thing though
Overall, it's of very high quality, I'd love to see a similar 3rd party type case for my Athlon. It's got a nice ColorCase brand casing right now. Any ideas on a similar case?
Step #1, Dvorak:
.. doesn't use any kind of adapter they have ever seen.
This would really annoy someone. At first glance, someone will say "this device just recorded garbage!". Of course, anyone who really wanted you bad would pass some statistical analysis through it, so if you suspect you are being tracked, do a lot of perl programming. The prevalence of %!(!@%$(!@*% will throw off the %'s
Step #2, USB!
Glad to use an Apple G4 at the moment (OS X!). Keyghost says:
* (MacOS & USB keyboards not currently supported).
Keep this in mind, though I'm sure it will be rectified in the near future. Of course, they could just stick a convertor behind your machine and hope you don't notice -- so buy a machine without a PS/2 or AT keyboard port.
Step #3, Kinesis
They sell a cute KeyGhost Security Keyboard, that looks like a natural keyboard of sorts. Insist on a Kinesis keyboard at work! Not only are these great keyboards, but when your boss (or FBI at home) see the keyboard, they will really say to themselves.. "huh?".
That, and you can get the QD model like I do with the dual dvorak/qwerty caps just to mess with their heads more.
Step #4, Run a less popular OS & Architecture
This one is primarily for software key loggers. If your in trouble with the law, the best way to play with them is to work harder. Like for firewalls, one of the best ways to keep yourself a little more secure is to use a less-common OS & architecture.
If you say, use a Sun Ultra at home (without USB), running preferably solaris, but insert any OS here. I'm sure they will have some choice swear words when they see that your mouse plugs into your keyboard, and your keyboard
That and, I'd be likely to say that they don't run into many Sun workstations to sniff via software either, but feel free to run NetBSD on your Sun just to make them recompile it anyways.
I myself ran on a Sun Ultra 10 at home till I sold it for this dual G4. They can be somewhat palatable workstations.
Step #5, serial:
If you really want to mess with their heads, set the machine up to have video output, but take serial input. Get an old dumb terminal out, put it on the other side of the desk, and pump in some text.
When they come in a few weeks later and wonder why the keyboard plugged into your PS/2 port didn't log anything, they may wonder what the heck is going on.
And somehow I doubt they've got a nise Wyse compatible keyboard logger anyways.
Enough silly ideas, time to go back to sleep.
Anyone know how to detect if it's enabled? I'd rather just use mod_layout to forward any user to a page that says:
:)
"Sorry, this site is incompatible with TopText. You must disable or deinstall TopText in order to view the content available".
It'd be really nice if there was some cute ActiveCrash or Javascrape method of doing this.
So far it doesn't look to affect me anyhow, no apparent support for Omniweb under MacOS X
Reminds me of the sadistic game we would play as little kids, cruelly torturing a poor daisy, pulling at one petal at a time.
In excruciating pain, the poor daisy sat as we innocently tore at it's dress saying..
She loves me!
She loves me not!
She loves me!
She loves me not!
I wonder where we will sit with Solaris when all the petals have fallen out of our hands, drifting slowly to the earth, wafting through the breeze.
Owelp, I'll just install FreeBSD then.
Wow, it's an impressive little box. If anyone manages to get NetBSD up on it, give me a holler. I know there is ARM support for NetBSD, but not sure about the rest of the devices.
It'd be really cool to have a little box sitting in the corner of your desk with a tiny power light, pulsating if possible.. people ask what is that you say "Ya, that's my webserver". It should handle apache+php+mysql no problem, and you toss in a 128M compactflash card, and your set.
Me wants! I guess I'd have to get employed first again though.
The pain around my knuckles and center of the top part of my hand got bad enough that I had to have an intern read/write e-mails for me at work. And rather then being a senior systems admin, I did staff training for various technical topics. Yippy. I took two weeks off of typing, and did a lot of research. This is what I ended up doing:
1) Kinesis Contour Keyboard . I was highly skeptical of this keyboard, being $250... but my hand pains were enough that I would try anything. I got it for home, the one with dual-dvorak/qwerty caps. I now swear by this keyboard so much that I would rather give up my Athlon and go back to a 486/33 if it was the only way to keep this keyboard. I then had work buy me one. It's hard to learn a new keyboard if it changes depending on where you are :) The primary advantage of this keyboard is no matter what keys you hit, your hands never move. Things that don't move, don't get stressed. I've also got some good photos of it's inards and some closeups.
2) Dvorak Keyboard Layout . I took the dive when I bought my Kinesis and immediately began learning Dvorak. Having my keyboard labeled with dual-dvorak/qwerty keys helped me a lot. Un-learning 12 years of QWERTY was by no means easy, but worth it. It was very rough to learn (took about 3 weeks to get back to normal speed), but because your fingers don't have to move as much for english words, my fingers are under a lot less stress. Doesn't help much with perl though, but Ruby's nicer syntax means my hands contort less anyways. Oh, you don't lose your qwerty skills. Whenever I type on a normal keyboard, my hand things qwerty. It associated Dvorak with the Kinesis keyboard.
3) Contour Systems Perfit Mouse . This was almost as important as the keyboard. It amazed me what a difference this made. These mice are custom to your hands. I got two 3-button mice for 7-inch hands, one lefty and one righty. I use the left handed mouse at home (my natural hand), and the right handed at work. It took some training on my right hand, but the balance makes it much less hurtful. I still get pains going to Microsoft mice or trackballs. I can't stress how excellently designed these are for your hands. Rather then pushing the end of your finger to click, you apply a very light pressure in the middle of your fingers. Less movement is less stress is less pain.
4) xwrits . This is software to remind you to take keyboard breaks. You can install it straight from /usr/ports/deskutils/xwrits in FreeBSD. This is the .xsession command line I use:
xwrits typetime=50 +finger=japanese +clock +mouse +beep +breakclock +multiply +top &
I'm going to have to set it so that locks me out of my workstation soon. I often will type "killall xwrits". Anyways, that's what I ended up doing for my situation. I can now type again quite happily, though I still get pains on normal qwerty keyboards like the one I'm on ATM at a friends house. Hand damage really sucks, I miss being able to use laptops without pain. Now I have to drag this Kinesis around.
IF YOU FEEL PAIN - STOP - TAKE BREAKS - FIX YOUR SITUATION! SEE A DOCTOR!. I cannot stress this enough. Not fixing this earlier has cost me.
O'Reilly does have a book on ruby. Too bad it's only in Japanese right now. O'Reilly even sponsored a Perl/Ruby conference recently in Japan. There is even a Larry Wall Interview from the event, on what he thinks about Ruby and what not.
Look at SASL (the pwcheck module in particular). This is what Cyrus, and others, use to get around the 'needs root' problem.
Here are some workarounds: * Use a backend database. LDAP is of course preferred, SQL and NIS work as well too. You'll have to set NIS into insecure mode to accept non root-port queries however. * Give the account access to the shadow database. For instance, you can give cyrus read access to /etc/shadow. If you've got a security paranoid OS (*BSD), you will have to make a single line patch to libc so it doesn't ignore it, as it has a specific root check.
Of course, on the above security paranoid OS's, every time you use a tool that modifies the passwd database, your permissions get reset.