I'm not a huge proponent of XML, but it does make for configuration files that are easily parsed by the application, a human, and a syntax checker.
Yes, XML imposes overhead. But it also brings some real advantages. Look at the Apache configuration file, particularly 2.0.
I really really despise configuration files that are dependent on the number and type of whitespace in a line to determine how the data is parsed, particularly what syslog does.
If cut-n-paste (generally converting tabs to spaces, etc) breaks your configuration format, then your configuration format was broken the day it was designed.
Seriously, just build a box with two NICs, and use your firewalling software of choice to allow the 'external' NIC to
only get a timestamp, and block everything incoming, and the 'internal' nic to only answer requests for NTP.
I knew a guy who tried this at his company... he doesn't work there anymore. As in 'summary dismissal for cause'.
I don't suppose you've seen the root hole in NTPd?
I don't suppose you believe that was the only root hole to exist in that package, and all possible future holes in the NTP protocol and implementations have since been fixed?
On further reading, it appears that the connector itself may just be the Japanese standard ISDN plug, and not something Dreamcast-unique. You still need a special cable to do the conversion between TTL and RS-232 voltages.
This conversion is a very common issue with a lot of products, schematics and chips to handle the adjustment are all over the net.
Elbows writes:
Yes, but is changing the arrangments of the pins
and shape of the connector on one end of normal
serial cable "innovative" or "non-obvious"?
Somehow it doesn't seem that way to me...
Actually, yes- I have seen some truly innovative means of connecting serial interfaces, including some really ancient IBM technology that is truly bizarre- looks like some sort of electroshock torture device, but apparently works really well:-)
The USPTO has been pretty lax about this sort of thing, pretty much pay your money and get a 'rubber stamp' approval without any real review.
Banning cables is even worse - it creates a notion of "pirates' tool", something tangible that can be used as a "weapon" by "bad guys" and should be kept out of the country.
Actually, in the UK, knives are something that can be banned from import -- they even restrict printed magazines that promote 'combat knives' on the basis that they are a tool only for the "bad guys".
The one good reference I had on the advertising restrictions was an AOL homepage that has since vanished... you'll have to do the research yourself if you won't take my word on the laws.
hmmmm... a patent covering the serial transfer of data over a twisted pair of wires accompanied by control lines limiting bandwidth in a controlled
fashion.
I assume you are being deliberately obtuse. Clearly the patent is on the connector, that is to say, the physical interface.
Sega can legitimately hold a patent on an 'innovative and non-obvious' mechanism for the physical contacts and plug configuration for their custom serial port. This can be a valid use of patents, even though we find it repulsive that they use their patent to restrict who can interface hardware to their system...
I've never seen ht://Dig before. Where I've needed search engines, I've deployed Harvest or WAIS.
Aside from the GNU license and association with SourceForge, I'm not sure what advantages ht://Dig has over the other free/commercial indexing products. Perhaps somebody has a comparison page?
When I was an Intranet webmaster at Motorola, we used 'FreeWAIS' for Intranet indexing, until Corporate security decided that indexing everything was a security risk:-)
Not kidding. I work for a very large multinational and the corporate search engine is an excercise in frustration. It's purpose in life seems to be to
return bizarre and obscure documents as the results of it's searches.
You actually got results returned from your search server?
Lucky bastard.
Our corporate Intranet search engine usually would just return 'Query Timed out'. Eventually they just took the search boxes off all the web pages.
I've since built a simple Harvest index for the Intranet.
It can be very interesting finding all of the 'cobweb' documents on intranet sites. Ancient documents relating to projects and managers long since vanished among other stuff that management would prefer to see forgotten...
There are some cool features that are unique to Google, but I'm not sure if 'Convert PDF to HTML' and 'highlight search terms' are worth $20K.
In the 70's it was Cap'n Crunch, now it's Pringles. Odds are P&G will soon be modifying the design of their "snack" packaging to make sure that 2.4 GHz waves can't use 'em.
I've been stockpiling the $1.19 WiFi antennas, but am running out of room for the dozens of little wave-shaped shipping protection cushions that I find in each can.
The cashier told me you're supposed to eat them, but I think he's just out to get me after I 'accidentally' tried to pay with the copper slugs leftover from waveguide construction. Hey, at 6AM after a long night of wardriving, it's an easy mistake to make.
Being a complete newbie to BSD (and linux too).. I installed OpenBSD 2.6 without a problem a couple years ago. Ofcourse I made good use of the resources available, I printed the entire FAQ [openbsd.org], read it for 2-3 days at work and when it came time to start installing, I made sure I had this [openbsd.org] handy.
The only way I think it can look intimidating is if you dive into it not knowing what to expect and not planning on doing any reading.
I had built many SVR4 systems and a half dozen NetBSD/FreeBSD servers before I tried my first OpenBSD installation, and the first time doing the hand-entry of filesystems/partitions to get OpenBSD up was not fun.
In fact, I'm spoilt after using the OpenBSD installer.. I wish FreeBSD had a text-only
install too, navigating through sysinstall's menus can be a pain sometimes.
Agreed. I do a lot of installs of OpenBSD on Sparc with just a serial console, and not needing to worry about terminal types and cursor key settings or alternate keys is handy.
One thing I really like about the Solaris 8 installer is they've gone back to the pure command line, no more 'Press F1 to continue`.
Not only is a command line a lot faster at low baud rates than a full-screen TUI, but the scrollback history is of infinite value to figure out where you went wrong when things start to go all wahoonie-shaped.
I have to agree regarding the Tecra. I've destroyed several Satellite models over the years, but the Tecra is still going strong.
Unfortunately, in the case of the Tecra, this strength brings with a weight penalty. Those are massive boxy laptops with thick dense plastic and a degree of metal framing underneath. Not fun to lug around.
The fastest way to kill a laptop is to drop it, especially if you can arrange it to hit such that a corner of the screen takes the impact. Instant paperweight.
I've been tempted to buy the 'Grip it strips' I see in catalogs- anybody tried these?
A good well padded case is worth the extra cost (and weight). My laptop has survived abuse that should have killed it, but for the rigid, padded bag.
Another reason I like Targus products- two years after I bought the bag, I noticed the shoulder strap was failing, the catch that holds the strap to the bag was deformed. Pure user abuse.
I emailed Targus about this problem with the strap, and they sent a new, improved shoulder strap by express mail. Free.
I agree. OpenBSD makes for good firewalls, right out of the box. I'm even starting to like 'pf'.
Part of 'secure by default' is that the base install omits a lot of fluff- this makes for quicker installs, and a smaller footprint.
...base install was 60 megs
One nice option for a firewall, there are plenty of cheap 64MB 'IDE FLASH ATA' devices showing up on Ebay, etc. These look like a laptop drive, work with any IDE controller, have no moving parts.
Compared to FreeBSD, there are drawbacks, the most glaring being the lack of SMP support.
Also, OpenBSD's installation process can be intimidating the first few times through. Where Free makes it easy, Open makes you think about disk partitioning and other low-level issues.
One benefit of being up early (not by choice) is that I'm getting some damn good download speeds from
the official FreeBSD mirror sites, as in 773KB/s... that's over 6 megabits!
Not all of the sites have the full set of files (yet), I had to hunt around a bit to find the '4.5-install.iso'.
Don't trust my math on transfer speeds?
local: 4.5-disc2.iso remote: 4.5-disc2.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (192.168.1.1,162,179)
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for '4.5-disc2.iso' (631341056 bytes).
602 MB 00:00 ETA
226 Transfer complete.
631341056 bytes received in 796.65 seconds (773.92 KB/s)
A cool feature of the latest FC-AL based systems from Sun, the OS includes commands to support hot-swap, including the ability to disconnect and/or power down one drive in a system without affecting the others.
I've attempted this 'live software disconnect/spin down' with other OS's using standard SCSI, but haven't had much luck. Solaris never supported it before, and now only on FC-AL.
One trick you can do with this is to have a 'warm spare' installed, a drive that contains a mirror of the system as of the last major change, but is not constantly running. By keeping the spare drive updated, installed, and ready, you can recover from a failed disk remotely, without any need for physical intervention. Combine this with the new "RSC" (battery-backed lights-out-management card with it's own ethernet and modem paging, and you really have something to brag about).
If the big Sunfires are out of your budget, a subset of the full feature set is in the LOM interface on some(?) Netra models.
One drawback of spinning down the disk (as I mentioned in another comment here), one of the most common failure modes is a drive that just won't spin up once you turn it off...
If you have the money, buy a pair of top quality drives and mirror them. If you can't afford that, buy a couple of cheap drives and mirror them. Don't put important data on a single drive and expect it to be there when you get back from lunch.
Good advice.
One problem I have is that most of the times I have had drives die early in their lifespan, it has been a 'batch' problem, and had a purchased two identical drives from the same vendor, chances are, both of them would have died at about the same time.
Most mirroring solutions depend on using nearly-identical drives for the mirrored pair, right?
Another issue, I've had very few drives fail in service, where the system was running for years and then either just went dead or started getting disk errors, increasing over time. 99% of the failures I have encountered have been with drives that just would not come back up after a shutdown.
Sometimes you can hear the bearings going out, other times you shut the system down for just a few minutes, turn the power back on, and the drives just go 'clunk', but cannot spin up.
In the old days of 'stiction' this could sometimes be overcome by repeated powercycles or the old 'weak karate chop to the side of the drive' method.
Again, I've had multiple drives of about the same age fail in this manner, which in the case of a mirror, means losing the data...
I used to get 1-2 calls a week... not any longer.
on
Resume Spamming Redux
·
· Score: 2
Until about this past December I would get an average of 1-2 calls and 3-4 emails a week with job openings.
Over the last six weeks or so I've gotten a total of two calls.
Yeah, they are being overly fair to Shiftman... They probably don't want to have to deal with his "lawyers".
I've had to deal with the Tribune's lawyers, and unlike Shifman's, they have an actual physical existence and a shrewd grasp of the law.
Reading the article, it seems that Christine Tatum is giving Bernie the benefit of the doubt. But she does include the link to Pete Moss's site with all the details, and SpamNews, but no links to Bernie's site.
Looking around the Tribune web site, Christine is a staff report, but clearly not particularly tied to the Internet coverage.
If Jim Coates had covered this story, it would have been a lot less friendly to Mr. Shifman. It also would have gotten most of the technical details ass-backwards.
The article suggests that Nick is pulling Zim due to poor ratings- yet how can they expect good ratings when they randomly move the show to a new time slot every week? When they randomly show 'Wild Thornberries' in the slot Invader Zim was scheduled for, causing my Tivo to waste valuable recoding time? When they fail to supply episode descriptions 90% of the time?
In my opinion, the worst sin of Nicktoons is the 'splitting' of episodes, where they take the individual segments that make up a 30-minute episode of Zim, CatDog, etc and package it with some live action slime game or other filler into a fifteen minute slot.
Worse than that, they tend to start shows early and end them late, especially with these 15-minute half-episodes, so TiVo misses large portions of the cartoon.
With the cancellation of Zim, I have one less reason to bother turning on the TV anymore.
Zim was the only reason I would ever tune in Nickelodeon. The only other show I ever watched on there is CatDog.
Time to write Nick and your cable company- remember, if you want them to give a damn, send a paper letter, not just a quick email. Companies that totally ignore email will usually at least read a nicely typed non-form-letter via US Mail. If you're lucky, you'll get a form letter in reply...
I'd go so far as to say that Invader Zim is one of the best new shows in years, and by far the most original animated show on the air (only because Simpsons and Futurama have been pretty sucky lately).
No Zim, no more reason for me to watch any of the rest Nicks' sanitized freak show of a network.
Doing the original work is easier than cheating, only if you understand the concepts being used.
If you don't understand pointers, then an assignment on that topic might be impossible for you to complete- but it doesn't take much understanding to change variable names and move around non-pointer-related code.
Then there's the people who cheat by getting somebody who does know the subject to do their work for them...
People have been using 'CFS' to encrypt their home directories, etc for years, recently they added the ability to encrypt swap, with a moderate performance hit.
For the truly paranoid, a friend of mine is involved in a project developing hardware solutions for encryption between the CPU and RAM.
I have run into one major problem with using RFC-1918 addresses for internal hosts. Address space collisions. Not just duplicate IPs, but also overlapping netmasks.
When you use a random 10/8 subnet for some of your internal hosts, then your company buys/merges with/is acquired by another company that is using their own overlapping segment of RFC1918, somebody is going to be stuck with a major renumbering project or a really ugly NAT table.
I just got hit by this last fall. We bought a small company (500 employee), and needed to integrate them into the corporate WAN, but their production LAN with hardcoded IPs scattered all over 172.16.X.X, with everything on a flat/16 netmask (single broadcast domain).
Not fun. Ended up with a huge static NAT table condensing their hosts into a single Class-C of real routable space. Ugly and a pain to maintain.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, XML imposes overhead. But it also brings some real advantages. Look at the Apache configuration file, particularly 2.0.
I really really despise configuration files that are dependent on the number and type of whitespace in a line to determine how the data is parsed, particularly what syslog does.
If cut-n-paste (generally converting tabs to spaces, etc) breaks your configuration format, then your configuration format was broken the day it was designed.
I don't suppose you've seen the root hole in NTPd?
I don't suppose you believe that was the only root hole to exist in that package, and all possible future holes in the NTP protocol and implementations have since been fixed?
http://www.msg.net/utility/small/chuckmail/
Looks like an open relay, optionally acts like a teergrube.
This conversion is a very common issue with a lot of products, schematics and chips to handle the adjustment are all over the net.
Elbows writes:
Actually, yes- I have seen some truly innovative means of connecting serial interfaces, including some really ancient IBM technology that is truly bizarre- looks like some sort of electroshock torture device, but apparently works really wellThe USPTO has been pretty lax about this sort of thing, pretty much pay your money and get a 'rubber stamp' approval without any real review.
Actually, in the UK, knives are something that can be banned from import -- they even restrict printed magazines that promote 'combat knives' on the basis that they are a tool only for the "bad guys".
References:
The one good reference I had on the advertising restrictions was an AOL homepage that has since vanished... you'll have to do the research yourself if you won't take my word on the laws.
I assume you are being deliberately obtuse. Clearly the patent is on the connector, that is to say, the physical interface.
Sega can legitimately hold a patent on an 'innovative and non-obvious' mechanism for the physical contacts and plug configuration for their custom serial port. This can be a valid use of patents, even though we find it repulsive that they use their patent to restrict who can interface hardware to their system...
Aside from the GNU license and association with SourceForge, I'm not sure what advantages ht://Dig has over the other free/commercial indexing products. Perhaps somebody has a comparison page?
You actually got results returned from your search server?
Lucky bastard. Our corporate Intranet search engine usually would just return 'Query Timed out'. Eventually they just took the search boxes off all the web pages.
I've since built a simple Harvest index for the Intranet.
It can be very interesting finding all of the 'cobweb' documents on intranet sites. Ancient documents relating to projects and managers long since vanished among other stuff that management would prefer to see forgotten...
There are some cool features that are unique to Google, but I'm not sure if 'Convert PDF to HTML' and 'highlight search terms' are worth $20K.
I've been stockpiling the $1.19 WiFi antennas, but am running out of room for the dozens of little wave-shaped shipping protection cushions that I find in each can.
The cashier told me you're supposed to eat them, but I think he's just out to get me after I 'accidentally' tried to pay with the copper slugs leftover from waveguide construction. Hey, at 6AM after a long night of wardriving, it's an easy mistake to make.
One thing I really like about the Solaris 8 installer is they've gone back to the pure command line, no more 'Press F1 to continue`.
Not only is a command line a lot faster at low baud rates than a full-screen TUI, but the scrollback history is of infinite value to figure out where you went wrong when things start to go all wahoonie-shaped.
I've got a couple of them pulled from some old Dell servers, just wondering if they are anything special... TIA.
Unfortunately, in the case of the Tecra, this strength brings with a weight penalty. Those are massive boxy laptops with thick dense plastic and a degree of metal framing underneath. Not fun to lug around.
I've been tempted to buy the 'Grip it strips' I see in catalogs- anybody tried these?
A good well padded case is worth the extra cost (and weight). My laptop has survived abuse that should have killed it, but for the rigid, padded bag.
Another reason I like Targus products- two years after I bought the bag, I noticed the shoulder strap was failing, the catch that holds the strap to the bag was deformed. Pure user abuse. I emailed Targus about this problem with the strap, and they sent a new, improved shoulder strap by express mail. Free.
Part of 'secure by default' is that the base install omits a lot of fluff- this makes for quicker installs, and a smaller footprint.
One nice option for a firewall, there are plenty of cheap 64MB 'IDE FLASH ATA' devices showing up on Ebay, etc. These look like a laptop drive, work with any IDE controller, have no moving parts.Compared to FreeBSD, there are drawbacks, the most glaring being the lack of SMP support.
Also, OpenBSD's installation process can be intimidating the first few times through. Where Free makes it easy, Open makes you think about disk partitioning and other low-level issues.
Not all of the sites have the full set of files (yet), I had to hunt around a bit to find the '4.5-install.iso'.
Don't trust my math on transfer speeds?
(Yes, that transfer went via a proxy firewall)I've attempted this 'live software disconnect/spin down' with other OS's using standard SCSI, but haven't had much luck. Solaris never supported it before, and now only on FC-AL.
One trick you can do with this is to have a 'warm spare' installed, a drive that contains a mirror of the system as of the last major change, but is not constantly running. By keeping the spare drive updated, installed, and ready, you can recover from a failed disk remotely, without any need for physical intervention. Combine this with the new "RSC" (battery-backed lights-out-management card with it's own ethernet and modem paging, and you really have something to brag about).
If the big Sunfires are out of your budget, a subset of the full feature set is in the LOM interface on some(?) Netra models.
One drawback of spinning down the disk (as I mentioned in another comment here), one of the most common failure modes is a drive that just won't spin up once you turn it off...
One problem I have is that most of the times I have had drives die early in their lifespan, it has been a 'batch' problem, and had a purchased two identical drives from the same vendor, chances are, both of them would have died at about the same time.
Most mirroring solutions depend on using nearly-identical drives for the mirrored pair, right?
Another issue, I've had very few drives fail in service, where the system was running for years and then either just went dead or started getting disk errors, increasing over time. 99% of the failures I have encountered have been with drives that just would not come back up after a shutdown.
Sometimes you can hear the bearings going out, other times you shut the system down for just a few minutes, turn the power back on, and the drives just go 'clunk', but cannot spin up.
In the old days of 'stiction' this could sometimes be overcome by repeated powercycles or the old 'weak karate chop to the side of the drive' method.
Again, I've had multiple drives of about the same age fail in this manner, which in the case of a mirror, means losing the data...
Over the last six weeks or so I've gotten a total of two calls.
Perhaps I'll give it another try.
The article suggests that Nick is pulling Zim due to poor ratings- yet how can they expect good ratings when they randomly move the show to a new time slot every week? When they randomly show 'Wild Thornberries' in the slot Invader Zim was scheduled for, causing my Tivo to waste valuable recoding time? When they fail to supply episode descriptions 90% of the time?
In my opinion, the worst sin of Nicktoons is the 'splitting' of episodes, where they take the individual segments that make up a 30-minute episode of Zim, CatDog, etc and package it with some live action slime game or other filler into a fifteen minute slot.
Worse than that, they tend to start shows early and end them late, especially with these 15-minute half-episodes, so TiVo misses large portions of the cartoon.
With the cancellation of Zim, I have one less reason to bother turning on the TV anymore.
Time to write Nick and your cable company- remember, if you want them to give a damn, send a paper letter, not just a quick email. Companies that totally ignore email will usually at least read a nicely typed non-form-letter via US Mail. If you're lucky, you'll get a form letter in reply...
I'd go so far as to say that Invader Zim is one of the best new shows in years, and by far the most original animated show on the air (only because Simpsons and Futurama have been pretty sucky lately).
No Zim, no more reason for me to watch any of the rest Nicks' sanitized freak show of a network.
If you don't understand pointers, then an assignment on that topic might be impossible for you to complete- but it doesn't take much understanding to change variable names and move around non-pointer-related code.
Then there's the people who cheat by getting somebody who does know the subject to do their work for them...
People have been using 'CFS' to encrypt their home directories, etc for years, recently they added the ability to encrypt swap, with a moderate performance hit.
For the truly paranoid, a friend of mine is involved in a project developing hardware solutions for encryption between the CPU and RAM.
When you use a random 10/8 subnet for some of your internal hosts, then your company buys/merges with/is acquired by another company that is using their own overlapping segment of RFC1918, somebody is going to be stuck with a major renumbering project or a really ugly NAT table.
I just got hit by this last fall. We bought a small company (500 employee), and needed to integrate them into the corporate WAN, but their production LAN with hardcoded IPs scattered all over 172.16.X.X, with everything on a flat /16 netmask (single broadcast domain).
Not fun. Ended up with a huge static NAT table condensing their hosts into a single Class-C of real routable space. Ugly and a pain to maintain.