Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

Computer upgrades

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.

My main reason for getting it was to give me storage space for video capture, with the Pinnacle Studio Deluxe video capture hardware/software I bought a few months ago. The video capturing worked pretty well, but the existing 40GB hard drive I had just wasn't cutting it. The software has some issues, but nothing too major that I've run into.

Now I'll have ample storage to tackle one of my first big projects...converting our wedding video to MPEG format. This video editing thing is going to be interesting and fun I think.

Next upgrade will be adding an extra 512MB RAM (2x256 MB RDRAM). I should do it soon while RDRAM is still relatively cheap.

FORTRAN .NET?

Good lord, FORTRAN .NET????

What is this world coming to...

Half-life ragdoll physics simulation

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.

On my desktop

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.

Computer security

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.

Multi-function Camcorder

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.

Restructured blog

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.

Interesting web server log entries

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.

Kicking Fedora's Wheels

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.

A new box to play with

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.

Playing with Fedora

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.

Thank goodness for backups

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.

Good bye inkjet, hello laser

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.

Resurrect or replace my PDA

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.

Spirit and Opportunity computer guts

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...

A new PDA

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...

Cable modem hacking

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 is here!

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!

Blogging by PDA

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.

Tungsten T3 in x-ray

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.

Geek toys

I want one of these

Virus woes

Our hospital mail servers are being hit pretty hard with a nefarious virus that claims to be from the networking team. It's making email unpleasantly slow.

The first message I got came from the hospital-wide broadcast email address, just a :-) in the subject, "I don't bite! Password: 53321" and an attachment masquerading as a zip file. Naturally the first thing I did was delete the message, since didn't even remotely resemble anything that typically comes from the broadcast email address. Apparently, others did not think about the message as much and now chaos is ensuing.

There's also been a similar one claiming to be from the IT group about accounts being deactivated.

Subject: E-mail account disabling warning. Dear user of xxxxxxx gateway e-mail server, We warn you about some attacks on your e-mail account. Your computer may contain viruses, in order to keep your computer and e-mail account safe, please, follow the instructions. Advanced details can be found in attached file. In order to read the attach you have to use the following password: 35151. Best wishes, The xxxxxxxx team

So I've been getting about 4 or 5 emails every minute from various people I've never heard of on campus. Ironically, most of the messages aren't propagated by the virus...instead they're coming from people responding to the initial virus message saying stuff like "Why am I getting this", and people responding with stuff like "I don't know why I'm getting this either". Then these people click "Reply to all", so not only does the original sender get a response, but the entire hospital has to see the same message too, since the broadcast email address was in the From header.

So now hospital email (Groupwise) is all but useless because the mail server is bogged down with virus email, people responding to virus email and people responding to people responding to virus email.

Ugh

Database upgrades

After several months of waffling, watching and just general procrastinating, I finally took the plunge and upgraded the database server on my Sparc20 from MySQL 3.23.58 to 4.0.18. It wasn't exactly trouble free, but wasn't as much work or as difficult as I thought it might be.

Step 1: Create an SQL dump of all the databases: mysqldump -A -u user -p > dbdump.sql
Step 2: Shut down MySQL
Step 3: Run mysql_install_db from the MySQL4 installation
Step 4: Start up MySQL4
Step 5: Use the database dump created in Step 1 to restore the databases: mysql -u root < dbdump.sql
Step 6: Change password on MySQL root user and recreate database users.

Went pretty smoothly with a 30 MB dump file. There are probably easier ways, but this method seemed more straight forward.

Ended up losing a couple of tables because of column names conflicting with MySQL4 reserved words. Fairly easy to fix though. Just took time to go through all the databases and compare the tables to the dbdump.

So, next task is to learn about all the new things in MySQL 4. Then the next big thing will be to repeat the upgrade process on my main production server. I figure by the time I get around to that, MySQL 5 will be the production release :).

To do: Learn CSS

I suppose one of these days, I shall have to get around to fixing that problem with the side bar where it spreads out at the bottom of the page for short entries. That means I'll have to get around to learning CSS. Just another item on my List of Things To Do.

Maybe I'll just do away with the side bar on the archive pages. Or maybe I'll just make a shorter version of the sidebar to use on the archive pages. More things for my List.

TB RAID, here I come

Wow, is this sweet or what. A 400 GB Hitachi Deskstar hard drive in a 3.5" form factor. SATA and ATA interfaces too. And to think, just a little while ago I was happy as a clam when I stuck the 160 GB drive into my computer. Now with just 3 drives, I can have over 1 TB of storage at my fingertips.

The specs look reasonably decent. 8.5ms seek time isn't great, but for something this size it's not bad.

Let's hope that Hitachi's fixed the early drive failure problem that IBM was having with the Deskstar line.

Found at Slashdot.org

HTTP SEARCH Protocol attacks

Yesterday my server got hit by about 15 attempts to find what I guess to be some kind of buffer overflow vulnerability in my webserver using some kind of HTTP SEARCH method. Never knew there was such a method until now. At first, about the only verifiable reference I could find about it was an old W3C page indicating it was only a proposed method. No mention of it in the HTTP RFC 2616 document at all. Then I found (thanks to Google) a reference in someone's presentation on DAV properties starting here. Seems to be a DAV thing. I only found mention the SEARCH method in a draft document.

The client invokes the SEARCH method to initiate a server-side search. The body of the request defines the query. The server MUST emit an entity matching the [RFC2518] PROPFIND response.

The SEARCH method plays the role of transport mechanism for the query and the result set. It does not define the semantics of the query. The type of the query defines the semantics.

Of course now that I know it's a DAV thing, there's plenty of stuff out there about it.

Basically the attack consisted of sending a really long SEARCH request (similar to sending a HEAD/GET/POST request I suppose) containing well over 8K worth of \x90, \xb1, \x02 and probably followed by other things. Apache 2 logs it as "request failed: URI too long (longer than 8190)". I take that as a good sign Apache 2 isn't vulnerable to this kind of attack.

All of the requests came from very different IP addresses which points to some kind of DDoS type of attack.

Always a good idea to keep an eye on the log files. They can tell you a lot about what's going on with your system. One of these days I'll have to make like every other decent sysadmin type out there and set up some scripts that scan the log files and mail me the interesting bits.

Computer Hardware Porn

If you're interested in some of the latest up and coming goodies for your system, check out Tom's Hardware Guide's coverage of CeBIT in Hanover.

I'd heard about this new 0.85" drive from Toshiba, but I thought it was 0.85" thick. No big deal. Then I saw this, and realized that it was the platters that were 0.85" and have up to 4 GB capacity! Whoa! And I thought IBM Microdrives were small.

I think the Superpower case is particularly cool. And how about those motherboards...ooo yeah, baby...

Drool...

Blazing fast Firefox

Just installed the latest Firefox nightly build (20040326) and either I'm on speed or the Firefox guys have made some amazing speed improvements over the last nightly build I installed (from a couple of days ago). Or else I'm just imagining things. But at any rate, it sure seems a lot faster than it did a few minutes ago. Especially rendering pages with tables (one of the things I've always thought Mozilla could do better).

Firefox just keeps getting better and better every day.

Wrestling Samba

Samba is a very cool tool, especially if you have a mix of Windows and *nix servers and clients. But it seems like every time I have to do anything with Samba, it's like pulling hair and teeth to get everything to work properly. On paper, Samba is easy to set up and configure. In real life, I always end up wanting to pitch the Windows box out the window.

You read through the Samba man page, set up smb.conf to do what you want and then go to the Windows box and try to map the share you just set up. Then all you get are message boxes from Windows claiming the username and password are invalid. Or it works fine on one Windows box, but doesn't work on any other ones. Or only one account works, but none of the others. Nothing wrong with what you put into smb.conf. Works just fine on the server with smbclient. Just the stupid Windows boxes refuse to work properly.

Argh.

Update: Ok, finally got things to work nicely. Upgrading to Samba 3.0.2 did the trick. I guess the docs I was using and the Samba version I had installed didn't quite match up. Still want to pitch my Windows box out the window though.

Easy access to 6 years of Medical Physics

During the course of doing literature searches, I frequently find myself looking for back issues of Medical Physics. That means looking them up online or making a trip to the library to dig up the articles I'm looking for.

Fortunately, there are ISO images of Medical Physics availble for 1997-2002 (hopefully 2003) soon, which you can download and burn onto CD (and which I have done already). Then you have to remember where you put those darned CDs. And if you're anything like me, that ends up being in the desk drawer with a bucket load of other things, and they end up getting all scratched up.

Then I stumbled on a couple of articles about building a virtual CD jukebox. What a fabulous idea!! And it's so easy to do! So that's just what I did. Took a while to FTP over a gig worth of ISO images to my Linux server, but once they were there it was a piece of cake.

And thanks to Samba, I have quick and easy access to 6 years worth of Medical Physics mapped to a network drive on my Windows computer. If I need to go any further back, I'll have to go online or to the library, but usually I'm not pulling anything from much later than 1997 anyway.

I suppose getting the article I'm looking for online isn't much more difficult. Just a few clicks away on the website. The virtual CD jukebox method doesn't really get me any more ease of use, but it is neat, and I did learn something from it. This has a higher geek factor I think.

Opteron Dually Mobos...Drool

Tech Report reviews 3 pretty sweet looking dual Opteron mobos.

I coud definitely do some serious number crunching with any of these motherboards. When it comes to working with large datasets, I'll bet the Tyan Thunder with a suitable NUMA-aware OS and over 9 GB/s memory bandwidth would run circles around most other workstations out there.

I need one for my next computer...Let's go shopping on Pricewatch

Part	Quant	Price	Total
Tyan Thunder K8W	1	$430.50	$430.50
Opteron 246 2 GHz	2	$675	$1350
512MB Corsair CM72D512RLP	4	$146	$584
Gigabyte 256MB Geforce 5950 Ultra	1	$391	$391
Maxtor 250GB SATA HD	2	$185.70	$371.40
Sony DRU-530A DVD+/-RW	1	$135	$135
Thermaltake V1000D case	1	$128	$128
Samsung 193S 19" LCD	1	$577	$577
Enermax EG651P-VE Power Supply	1	$133.50	$133.50
Extras		$100	$100

Total cost: $4200.40

I'd better start saving my pennies. Excuse me while I wipe the drool off my chin.

Storing binary data in MySQL

Just a post to remind me of how to do this stuff so I don't have to go searching for it again
Uploading binary files to MySQL
MySQL BLOBs

For sale: Visor bits

Two broken Visors means lots of spare bits lying around. Anybody wanna buy my stuff?

Handspring Visor USB cradle (Black) - $10
Handspring Visor Serial cradle (Ice) - $10
Handspring Visor Edge USB charging cradle - $10
SmartMedia Memplug Springboard module - $15
Handspring Visor Platinum - Used, case shows some wear. Digitizer is messed up, but could probably be fixed with a replacement screen. Button board recently replaced. Comes with or without a broken in Vaja case (missing belt clip) - $40
Handspring Visor Edge - Broken screen, but can be scavenged for parts. - $40

I think I may even have a few extra Styli for the Platinum that I can throw in.

Prices negotiable. All items will be shipped USPS Priority Mail upon receipt of payment. Payment via Paypal accepted. Email or leave a comment if interested.

I think I need version control

I've been looking at some of my PHP/web database projects lately, and deciding some of them are in need of updating. I also think I probably ought to use some sort of version control system to help me keep track of all the files and what I've changed, particularly since I'm looking at rewriting several projects and PEAR DB'ifying them. I've dabbled a bit with using CVS/RCS and Emacs a while ago, which worked reasonably well but not perfectly. I must admit that it probably wasn't perfect because I didn't really bother to learn how to effectively use CVS/RCS. Maybe I need to get this book.

Now I'm using Dreamweaver, which is supposed to have some checkin/checkout features, but it doesn't appear to do any versioning or keep track of comments and changes. Looks like all it does is keep two people from trying to edit a file at the same time.

In my current devlopment model, I create web pages locally using Dreamweaver MX, upload them to my test server to play and test. When I'm happy with the result, it either gets uploaded to the main server or goes into production on my test server depending on what project I'm working on. Sometimes I'll take stuff home to work on (where I develop and test using DWMX, Apache/PHP/MySQL on WinXP), then bring them back to work for uploading to the server. So I'll either need a VC system that fits into that development model, or I need to change my model.

I think I'll check out Subversion and accompanying TortoiseSVN GUI.

I'm a dial-up luddite

The other day I was reading this New York Times article (sign-up required to read) via AvantGo about how lots of people are still using dial-up to get online and are happy about it.

I'm one of them. I'm a pokey slow dial-up user and very content to remain that way.

All my friends with broadband say I should switch, and don't know why I haven't yet considering I'm such a computer geek. I tell them it's because I'm just cheap. No technical reasons at all. I'm just too cheap to pay for broadband.

Currently, I have dial-up through Earthlink, although not exactly by choice. First I was a Netcom subscriber, but they got bought out by Mindspring. Then Earthlink bought Mindspring/Netcom. So I'm a part of the Earthlink horde.

Cable broadband here comes from Comcast. Last time I checked, with Comcast, cable broadband was $40/month, but you have to subscribe to the premium cable package to get it, which would add an extra $10 (not including the extra "fees") to my cable bill on top of my current cable package, plus broadband costs. Otherwise it's $50/month.

DSL broadband here comes from BellSouth. Last time I checked, DSL was about $30/month, but you have to get the BellSouth CompleteChoice package which includes a bunch of services that I don't need, like call forwarding, call display and the like. That adds about another $10 to the phone bill on top of what I already pay, plus broadband costs. Without the CompleteChoice package, DSL is $40/month or something like that. I barely use my land line phone anyway and we've all but stopped answering it because the only calls we get are usually from telemarketers.

Either way, my cable bill ends up going up about $50/month plus "fees" or my phone bill goes up about $40/month plus "fees". Take out the $22/month I currently pay for dialup and the net increase is $28 and $18 for cable and DSL respectively plus "fees".

Is it worth it? Maybe. Do I need it? I don't think so, at least not yet. If I need to download something big, I'll do it at work and sneakernet it back home. Plus tying up the phone line keeps me from being annoyed by telemarketers. And on the rare occasions it actually is someone looking for me or my wife, they can just leave a message on the voice mail. I always check for messages after I get online anyway, so they usually never have to wait very long.

I suppose the other thing that keeps me from switching is inertia. I like my email address. I've had it for a while now and I don't want to change it. Changing it would only be a minor inconvenience, but still.

So go ahead, call me a luddite, or whatever. I'm quite happy with my pokey dial-up and have no desire to change at the moment.

Holy Bandwidth Batman!

Wow, talk about bandwidth. 6.25 Gb/s (gigabits/second) over a 11 000 km link.
10 minutes to transfer almost 500 GB of data. Talk about some serious bandwidth. Details are here

From Physics News Update

A LAND SPEED RECORD FOR DATA FLOW, 6.25 gigabits per second (average rate) moving over an 11,000-km course, has been set a consortium of scientists form the CERN lab in Geneva and Caltech in Pasadena.
This new result was announced at the Spring 2004 Internet2 Member Meeting in Arlington, Virginia (http://lsr.internet2.edu). The World Wide Web got its start at CERN, where particle physicists had to find ways of sending huge loads of data to collaborators. CERN will again need huge flow rates, perhaps at the 10-gigabit-per-second level, when they begin physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) now under construction.
(http://ultralight.caltech.edu/lsr/)

Decisions, decisions

Shopping around for a new PDA for my wife to replace the Visor Edge she stepped on. So the past week or so we've made visits and repeat visits to BestBuy and Circuit City. The local BestBuy has pretty much emptied their selection of PDAs, and only carrry a couple of models now, neither of which I would have recommended to my wife. So scratch them. The local Circuit City has a slightly better selection. And they all work too, not the cheesy dummy display models.

She wants:

• Camera
• WiFi
• Colour
• PalmOS

First I recommended the Tungsten C. Fortunately Circuit City happened to have one on display. She didn't like it much. Wasn't too fond of the keyboard.

My next recommendation was the Sony TH55. She likes the style, but the stuff on the screen is too small for her.

The Sony TJ37 was my next recommendation. At first she didn't like it too much, but after a second visit to Circuit City, she says it's starting to grow on her.

PalmOne has just released the Zire 72, which I was telling her about also. Showed her the specs, and we checked out the Zire71 at Circuit City yesterday. She thought it was cute, and put it on her list of possibilites. It doesn't have WiFi though. But that might not be a terribly big deal though.

There are a couple of reviews on the new Zire 72 and TJ37 so I'll have to show them to her and see what she thinks. Personally I'm leaning more toward the Zire72 since it's got the better camera and processor, even though it lacks WiFi. It does have BT though, so maybe my T3 will finally have something to talk to.

Darned SPARC

PHP5 RC2 and GCC 3.4.0 are both released, but I can't get either of them to compile cleanly on my Sparc20. PHP5 RC1 built cleanly. Also have GCC 3.3.3 running (which I'm using to build GCC 3.4)

Maybe I just need to replace the Sparc20.

Problems with PHP5 RC2 start with

/bin/sh /export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/libtool --silent --preserve-dup-deps --mode=compile gcc -Iext/standard/ -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/ext/standard/ -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/include -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/main -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2 -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/Zend -I/usr/local/include/libxml2 -I/usr/local/include -I/export/home/eugenem/Apps/mysql4/include/mysql -D_POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/TSRM -g -O2 -prefer-pic -c /export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/ext/standard/filters.c -o ext/standard/filters.lo
/bin/sh /export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/libtool --silent --preserve-dup-deps --mode=compile gcc -Iext/standard/ -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/ext/standard/ -DPHP_ATOM_INC -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/include -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/main -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2 -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/Zend -I/usr/local/include/libxml2 -I/usr/local/include -I/export/home/eugenem/Apps/mysql4/include/mysql -D_POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS -I/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/TSRM -g -O2 -prefer-pic -c /export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/ext/standard/proc_open.c -o ext/standard/proc_open.lo
In file included from /export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/Zend/zend.h:244,
from /export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/main/php.h:34,
from /export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/ext/standard/proc_open.c:23:
/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/Zend/zend_hash.h:39: error: parse error before '*' token
/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/Zend/zend_hash.h:39: error: parse error before "uint"
/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/Zend/zend_hash.h:39: error: `ulong' declared as function returning a function
/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/Zend/zend_hash.h:49: error: field `h' declared as a function
/export/home/eugenem/Temporary/apache/php-5.0.0RC2/Zend/zend_hash.h:50: error: parse error before "uint"

and just go downhill from there. First I figured it was a messed up download, but redownloading didn't help much. Now I'll have to dig into the files and explore.

PHP5 fixed

Oh goody, the problem I was having building PHP 5.0 RC2 seems to have been fixed. I can go back to experimenting again.

FIX: Solaris compile failure.

Daniel Fahlgren reported that following Wez Furlong's latest changes to proc_open(), PHP will no longer build on Solaris. Daniel had a quick fix for this, but Wez foresaw implications for other platforms in his workaround, and suggested areas where the Solaris build problem might be genuinely resolved. Daniel took this on board and came up with a patch that was acceptable to all, which now happily lives in the PHP source tree. This will be included in PHP 5.0.0.

A new PDA in the house

We now have one of these, a Sony TJ37. The wife decided she just couldn't wait any longer and decided she needed to have one of these. And since she wanted to listen to MP3s, we needed to get a Memory Stick. Of course that also meant we needed to get a Memory Stick reader for the computer. I decided on one of those multiformat memory card readers that reads CF I/II, SM, SD, MS, Microdrive and several others. I was trying to avoid this Flash media bloat, but now it's unavoidable. My digital camera uses SM, my PDA uses SD, and now her PDA uses MS. All small little bits ot try and keep track of.

So now, several hundred dollars later my wife has a PDA again, and she can go back to organizing her life again.

It's actually a pretty nice little unit, although I think Sony could have made it more attractive going with a Virtual Grafitti area (DIA). MP3s are stored and played off the MS card, and pictures can be stored either to RAM or MS card. It even comes with a little strap that you can use to hang onto it with. Put your hand through the strap, and no worries about accidentally dropping the thing. Stylus leaves a lot to be desired though. It's pretty thin, and I can't imagine using it to write for any length of time.

Navigating with the jog roller is pretty easy, although the buttons can be a little tough to press. They're small and nearly flush with the surface, so if you have big fat thumbs or fingers, pressing them might be a bit of a challenge.

The pictures it takes are fairly decent quality. Not great, but acceptable for quick snapshots. Max picture size is 640x480. If I can get it away from her for long enough, I'll play with it a bit and maybe post a few pictures.