Posted in Computer bits

I'm stoked. Stuffed a new 160GB hard drive into my computer over the weekend. Best Buy had an amazing deal on them last week. Retail price $199. With $100 in mail in rebates, the price was $111 with tax. 70 cents a gig...can't beat that.

So now I've got the 40 GB that came with the computer, 160 GB partitioned into 30/140 GB and an old 3 GB drive that I've now dedicated to virtual memory. Had to take out the 2nd CD drive, but it wasn't getting used much anyway.

Good lord, FORTRAN .NET????

What is this world coming to...

This is pretty cool. It's a simulation done in Flash using the rag-doll physics incorporated into Half-Life. You can spin around the skeleton, drag it around and even pepper it with bullets and watch it dance.

Last week, while I was walking around the yard at my wife's parents' place, I ran across this largish dragonfly. It seemed like it would make a neat picture, so I took a photo. I thought it turned out pretty good, so I made it my current desktop photo.

This article (found at Slashdot.org) goes to show that your computer can be as secure and uncrackable as possible, but if you don't have physical security, then you might as well not have any security.

Talk about balls.

This is pretty cool. DVStreamer turns your DV camcorder into a tape drive and lets you back up 8.7GB of stuff off your computer. There were still a few bugs and glitches with the software according to the Tom's Hardware Guide review, but it seems like it could be a really cool bit of software once the problems get worked out. And with DV tapes being relatively cheap, it could become an easy (albeit slow) way to backup your computer.

I've restructured the way my blog is organized to try to make blog rebuilds faster. One of the problems I was running into was that the MT plugins I was using in the side panel was causing the rebuild process to take sufficiently long enough that the server connection would time out before the rebuild process finished.

So, to get around this, thanks to some ideas I got at the MT support forum, I turned the side panel into a separate index page, and use PHP to include() the side panel into each page.

This way, the plugins only get processed once per rebuild instead of once per page per rebuild. Makes a really big difference when you have lots of blog entries. The downside is that all of my page extensions changed from .html to .php, breaking any search engine links. I'll be leaving the .html around for a little while, but eventually they'll be going away.

If you find anything that's broken, let me know.

UPDATE: Figured out how to add a redirect in my server config so that anybody looking for the html version of my blog pages will be redirected to the php version.

The last few days, I've been 'tail -f'ing (no, it's not what you think) the webserver logs just to see what kind of traffic the server gets. Most of it is internal, lots of spiders and web crawlers, and more than a few crack attempts. Then this morning I saw one I'd never seen before

211.21.44.211 - - [20/Oct/2003:08:31:32 -0400] "CONNECT 1.3.3.7:1337 HTTP/1.0" 200 9612 "-" "-"

A Google search yielded many promising results including this very informative one.

netstat or ps didn't reveal anything usual at the time. A lookup of the IP told me the IP address was part of a block registered to Cool Er Ke Ji Ltd in Taipei, Taiwan. A portscan of the offending machine didn't reveal any open ports out of the ordinary.

Well, I'm pretty sure my server is still reasonably secure. A couple of mods to my server config should keep anybody from trying to use it as a proxy server. A lesson to sysadmins: Keep an eye on those logs.

With Redhat's recent decision to end support for Red Hat Linux in favour of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I've decided to give the new Red Hat sponsored Fedora Project a try.

A few people around here have installed it already, and gave it favourable reviews. I've found a machine to install it on (might need to cannibalize a few other machines to get enough HD space and RAM), and am in the middle of downloading the 3 ISOs to burn onto CD. Now all I need is to find a place to put the computer I'm going to install on.

This should be an interesting adventure.

Have a new Fedora box to play with. The only machine I could scrounge up to install it on was an old Dell Optiplex GX1, 400 MHz Pentium II with 128 MB and 4 GB hard drive. Not the fastest machine in the world, and probably a little underpowered, but it was the best one I could lay my hands on. Should be enough for me to see how it behaves.

Managed to shoehorn a fairly complete installation, although it only leaves me with about 600 MB of disk space to play in. I'll have to see about scavenging another hard drive to put into this box.

Installation was pretty simple, and similar to installing Redhat Linux 9. Boot off the CD, select the packages you want and let it go. Installation on this box took about 2 hours to install about 3 GB of stuff. Like I said, not the fastest machine around.

Too late to play with for today, so the fun will have to wait until Monday.

Spent some time this morning poking around inside the Fedora box I built on Friday. Overall, I'd say it's pretty similar to RedHat 9. Some of the software is newer (GCC 3.3.2, Perl 5.8.1 were the first ones I found). Apache and MySQL were a version behind, but since those just came out a couple of weeks ago, not unexpected.

Haven't really pushed it too hard yet, although since it's on an old 400 MHz PII, I can only push it so hard. It runs pretty well on the old box I stuffed it into. Web pages were served up pretty quickly. OpenOffice apps took a while to load, but ran fine. Seems stable enough. Now to read through some of the Fedora mailing list archives to see what interesting things people are discussing.

Murphy's law strikes again. Go figure. The week the only two people who know anything about the server (I'm one of them) go away is when it dies. And die it did, sometime Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, after everyone had left for the holiday. As near as I can tell, something happened to the root file system. Restored data from backup, and it's partially OK, but it only boots off the floppy. Seems to be having some bootloader issues on the primary hard drive. Ugh. At least there was no significant data loss. Data was restored from a backup done on Tuesday.

So now there's a bunch of blogging that I had planned to do while I was away at RSNA that I'll have to do retroactively. Stay tuned.

We finally decided to dump our old Cannon BJC-210 and replaced it with an HP LaserJet 1012. Office Max had it on sale for $150, so we figured what the heck. It's a pretty sweet little printer. It's light, with a relatively small footprint.

Installation was a snap on WinXP. Pop the CD in, install the drivers, plug the printer into a free USB port and let Windows do it's magic. First page out in 10 seconds, 15 ppm, manual and auto feeders and 1200 dpi. It's only a simple B/W printer (2 bit greyscale), so the print quality isn't as great as something like a 4500. But for home use, print quality looks just fine. And 15 ppm sure beats the heck out of the 2 or 3 the old BJC used to do.

Printer configuration and diagnostics are done through a web interface and web server running on your computer. It's something that can be turned off though, if you're leary of an unknown webserver running on your system.

At $150, definitely a good deal if you're tired of that pokey slow inkjet.

The touch screen on my Visor Platinum is starting to flake out on me. Taps on the left side of the screen bounce wildly about, making it difficult to use. My wife gave it to me for Christmas about two years ago, and it's served me well since then. So, do I take this opportunity to shell out more money to replace it with a new and improved PalmOS 5 model (I'm kind of digging the Palm's T3), or go the much cheaper route and just buy a replacement screen.

I like my Platinum, and have grown attached to it. With the Memplug and 64 MB card, I have plenty of space to hold stuff. My trusty Stowaway lets me write and enter data quickly.

I'll probably just replace the screen, because after Christmas, we're pretty tapped out at the moment. Or I might be tempted with a refurb from Handspring. They've got some pretty good deals going on there.

First I think I'll take it apart and see if reseating the cables helps.

A post over at Slashdot and an article over at Space.com talk about the computational innards of the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. They're surprisingly low-tech, but work well and NASA seems to find them reliable.

From the Space.com article,

RAD6000 microprocessors are radiation-hardened versions of the PowerPC chips that powered Macintosh computers in the early 1990s, with 128 megabytes of random access memory (RAM) and capable of carrying out about 20 million instructions per second.

Not as powerful as one might think, but then again I suppose you don't need much computing power to operate a robot. They did jam it full of memory though.

What I think is more cool is

In addition to VxWorks' reliability, the system allows users to add software patches -- such as a glitch fix or upgrade -- without interruption while a mission is in flight. "We’ve always had that [feature] so you don't have to shut down, reload and restart after every patch," Blackman said, adding that some commercial desktop systems require users to reboot their computers after a patch

Now if only Microsoft could make Windows do that...

Decided to go for the PDA upgrade, so in a few weeks, I should have a new Tungsten T3 to play with.

A few people around here with Tungsten C's asked why I didn't get one of those with the cool wireless capabilities. Wireless is nice, but not important to me for what I want to do. I wanted the larger screen to make it easier to deal with the spreadsheets I use while I'm testing equipment.

Can't wait till it gets here...

SecurityFocus has a really interesting article on hacking cable modems. The article talks about a clever hack to Motorola Surfboard cable modems to replace the firmware on the modem with something more customizable, and the obvious security implications. Imagine eavesdropping on your neighbours through your cable modem. An interesting article definitely worth reading if you have cable modem service.

There is hubbub over at Slashdot.

My T3 arrived today! Woooo!!! Gotta wait for it to charge before I can play though. Looks pretty cool though. Got the wireless keyboard to go along with it. The keyboard is bigger than I expected...it definitely isn't a Stowaway keyboard.

Next task is to find a decent case for it.

Charge T3, charge!

Testing a Palm conduit (plog) that lets you write blog entries in an app you load onto your PDA, then sync them to your blog. It uses MT's XML-RPC interface to create the blog entry. So now you can blog from anywhere! Of course it doesn't show up until you sync, but for us non-wireless PDA plebe/owners, it's better than nothing.

One of the things I like about my job is that I get to play with x-ray machines, and you can get interesting pictures of things using x-rays. I think x-rays always give an interesting perspective on the way things look.

This is what the insides of a Tungsten T3 look like with the slider opened. Click on the image for a larger version. I've annotated some of the more obvious bits that can be easily recognized. The rest are just components on the motherboard. If you look closely, you can even see the ribbon cables on the right side of the button pad and lying over the battery.

For those of you wanting the technical details on how I took the image, I used an 8"x10" CR cassette, 40" source-image distance, 80kVp 1.5mAs, small focal spot (0.3 mm) in a Siemens Axiom RF room. Tungsten T3 was placed on the cassette. Cassette was read on an Agfa ADC Compact+ CR reader using flat field processing.