Recent Posts

251

Living Room / Re: MakeUseOf.com: 15+ Podcasts Every Geek Should Listen To

« Last post by Gothi[c] on September 17, 2008, 12:54 PM »

Ridiculous. Not geeky at all.
All the revision 3 shows, and most of the other ones as well, while tech related, are not even close to geeky.

Ever since yuppies with money to play with electronics took over the word 'geeky' the threshold for what is considered 'geeky' has become lower and lower. When you get into the really geeky stuff, many of these shows (some of which depend on advertising) won't cover it because not enough people would care about it. If you're lucky they'll quickly and shallowly cover something mildly interesting, but nothing new to an actual geek.

However, it's still a nice list shows and podcasts. I just get frustrated that there isn't anything really geeky and fascinating that brings up really obscure stuff that an average (real) geek wouldn't actually know about yet.

252

Living Room / Re: Has the LHC destroyed the world yet?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on September 17, 2008, 08:36 AM »

In that video they mention an interesting data processing problem the LHC IT infrastructure needs to solve:

They need to detect some particular collission that occurs about 2x per year, keeping LHC running during that 2 year period at a rate of about 40 million collisions per second, of which generally about 100,000 collision events are stored.

Needle in haystack much?

253

Living Room / Re: Has the LHC destroyed the world yet?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on September 17, 2008, 08:06 AM »

Here's an interesting video showing a tour of the LHC computer infrastructure:

http://video.google....rgLG6tXJAg&q=lhc

254

Developer's Corner / Re: stackoverflow.com - programmers Q&A site by jeff atwood + joel spolsky is public

« Last post by Gothi[c] on September 15, 2008, 10:00 AM »

cool idea. should be interesting to see what questions evolve to the top as it attracts more users.

255

Living Room / Re: News Article: Insecure Cookies Leak Sensitive Information

« Last post by Gothi[c] on September 15, 2008, 05:32 AM »

And people say I'm paranoid for having cookies disabled by default, and only enabling them on-demand - and after use they are cleared again.

Yes, it's a pain having to type in your password every time you make a forum post etc.- but it's worth it imo. FF extensions like cookiesafe easily let you do this at the click of a mouse.

It's probably also an even better idea to have a separate, sandboxed browser environment to do your online banking on. (Or even use a vm just for the purpose).

256

Living Room / Re: Microsoft granted patents for PageUp and PageDn keystrokes!

« Last post by Gothi[c] on September 10, 2008, 08:43 AM »

Actually, they didn't patent the pgup/pgdown keys.

They patented scrolling up/down in equal amounts, and provided pgup/pgdown keys as example to trigger the functionality.

Equally, outrageous though.  

257

Living Room / Re: Hard Drive electrical failure... trash it?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on September 06, 2008, 06:45 PM »

You're so lucky, you have visual damage!
Even though it's unlikely that that little smd there is the only damaged part, it's worth spending the $1 on replacing the smd part. If it works you just fixed your hard drive for $1 and 5 minutes of soldering in a new smd part

If you don't know how, here's a video tutorial
http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=kAADFKkmqUg

258

General Software Discussion / Re: Xastir: What GPS, weather and radio have in common.

« Last post by Gothi[c] on September 04, 2008, 04:36 PM »

Hey, I found my old screenshots

Here's me making an approach to what I think was EBBR (Brussels Intl. Airport)



This more zoomed out view shows me flying from the UK to Brussels:



This shows Xastir tracking multiple airplanes (me + fs2004 AI aircraft)



It's amazing how accurate FS2004 actually is. I was sitting on the runway in-game, and with the satellite photo view loaded in Xastir it shows me sitting right at the start of the runway!!




Just goes to show that you can use Xastir to track ANYTHING Even your position in video games Anything with GPS data actually.

259

Living Room / Re: Hurricane Tracking/Info Website

« Last post by Gothi[c] on September 04, 2008, 04:28 PM »

Cool!

I have always used Xastir for that kind of stuff.

See my old post about it here:
https://www.donation...dex.php?topic=6623.0

Since many storm trackers also happen to be radio amateurs ( or is it the other way around?! ) you can get lots of hurricane+storm info over the APRS network.

http://www.findu.com/citizenweather/

It shows the predicted path of the hurricane/tornado/whatever etc too, almost exactly the way stormpulse.com shows it.

This page shows a replay of the track on hurricane Bertha. It uses JavaAPRS, so the map display kind of sucks, it would look a lot nicer on Xastit, but you get the idea
http://eng.usna.navy...bruninga/bertha.html:

260

Living Room / Re: Crazy modem/router on the rebound

« Last post by Gothi[c] on September 04, 2008, 03:22 AM »

A small update.

This thing finally died on me quite a few months ago during a power outage, i think it was, i don't remember 100%.
Solid red light of death, indicating hardware problem again.

Only, this time I could not connect to the ADAM2 bootloader in the few seconds window after you turn it on. It did not respond to anything at all anymore. After lots of tries, trying anything I could to get into adam2, I gave up and considered it dead. Then went to buy another modem/router/AP so I could get online.

I was pressed in time, because important work had to be done, and there couldn't have been a worse time for the thing to break.

I did not throw it away of course, since as any good geek, you keep it to eventually maybe recycle parts or whatever.

Now, many months later, I decided to dig it up again, and see if I could resurrect it, after reading about how you can upload a new bootloader using a JTAG cable.

So, I went ahead and opened it up, soldered together the simplest JTAG interface I could find (using only 5 100 ohm resistors on the parallel port), and fired up the jtag software.

Unfortunately, no go. I went onto IRC (#ar7 on freenode) where they have an openwrt-related channel for the ar7 platform routers, and queried about what could be wrong, and I was informed that I wouldn't be able to upload a new bootloader using only the 4 signals of this simple cable, and that I would need a 'real' JTAG cable.

Disappointed, I was looking over the PCB and noticed that only 4 paths were connected to the 12 pins of the JTAG port. I mentioned this in the channel, being confused that only 4 pins were connected. This seemed impossible. Eventually I noticed a second 12 pin connector on the pcb, on which all pins were connected. So then I started probing with the old volt meter to see which is the 'real' jtag port, and what the pin layout could be.

This router also has 2 6-pin serial ports somewhere. Someone in the channel noted that if I measure the voltage between the chassis and some of the 6-pin serial connector pins, I should get 3.3 Volts. (And indeed, I did get exactly 3.3 volts on 3 of the serial pins), then I could measure on those serial pins of which I know I get 3.3 Volts, with pins on the jtag interfaces, to determine which the ground pins are.

So I was probing around with the 'ol volt meter to find the ground pins on the jtag port, and I must have shorted something on the serial port (the pins are close together, so it's easy to accidentally short something with a voltmeter probe), as I suddenly noticed some LED's started blinking.

I ignored the behavior and continued probing, until I finally noticed the state of all the LED's. They indicated an OK state,- a successful boot!

Somehow in all the probing, somewhere I must have initiated some undocumented hardware-reset, which fixed up the bootloader again! I hooked it up to the PC, and it worked. Got an IP over DHCP and everything!!

Thus the old dead router is not so dead after all, and I fixed the darn thing AGAIN! Woohoo! Now I have a spare in case something bad happens to my new one.

(02:31) < Gothi[c]> +180mV
(02:31) < Gothi[c]> that's probably too low to be significant heh
(02:31) <@sn9> oh, you're meauring volts?
(02:31) < Gothi[c]> yeah
(02:32) <@sn9> 5 and chassis, then
(02:32) < Gothi[c]> hmm nothing
(02:32) <@sn9> see if it matches 2 and 5
(02:32) < Gothi[c]> 14mV
(02:33) < Gothi[c]> no
(02:33) <@sn9> is there a +3.3 on serial?
(02:33) < Gothi[c]> not sure
(02:33) -!- AndyIL [[email protected]] has quit [Connection timed out]
(02:33) < Gothi[c]> what pins do i measure on serial?
(02:34) <@sn9> 3.3 against ground
(02:34) < Gothi[c]> yep
(02:34) < Gothi[c]> exactly 3.3
(02:34) <@sn9> if you get 3.3, measure that 3.3 against the even jtag pins
(02:34) < Gothi[c]> i get 3.3 on serial on pin2 with chassis
(02:35) < Gothi[c]> good idea
(02:35) <@sn9> then measure serial pin2 and jtag pin2
(02:35) < Gothi[c]> hmm nope
(02:35) <@sn9> serial pin2 against all the jtag pins, then
(02:36) < Gothi[c]> i get nothing if i measure between any serial pin and any pin on that jtag port, heh
(02:36) <@sn9> is pin2 the only serial pin to have 3.3 against chassis?
(02:36) < Gothi[c]> no
(02:37) <@sn9> try the other ones with 3.3, also against all jtag
(02:37) < Gothi[c]> 2,5,6 all have 3.3
(02:37) < Gothi[c]> wtf
(02:37) <@sn9> so try 5 with jtag, and 6 with jtag
(02:37) < Gothi[c]> i just made a light blink lol
(02:38) <@sn9> sort the lights out later
(02:38) < Gothi[c]> interesting
(02:39) < Gothi[c]> omg
(02:39) < Gothi[c]> it's doing something
(02:39) < Gothi[c]> WTF
(02:39) < Gothi[c]> it looks like it booted
(02:39) < Gothi[c]> WTF
(02:39) < Gothi[c]> the LED's on the modem indicate a booted state!!
(02:40) < Gothi[c]> let me hook it up
(02:40) < Gothi[c]> i might have accidently have done some kind of undocumented reset thing by shorting that serial with something
(02:41) <@sn9> guess so
(02:42) < Gothi[c]> well hang on
(02:42) < Gothi[c]> let me see if it actually works
(02:42) < Gothi[c]> let me power cycle
(02:42) < Gothi[c]> and see what it does
(02:42) <@sn9> if the bootloader was ok, but the bootloader environment flashed itself, that would explain this
(02:43) < Gothi[c]> it boots normally now
(02:43) < Gothi[c]> crazy!
(02:44) < Gothi[c]> got an ip from dhcp and everything
(02:44) < Gothi[c]> fixed!

Note that I did previously try the documented firmware reset procedures etc (by holding the reset button for n seconds etc) all of which didn't work. Amazing

261

Developer's Corner / The New line character \n\n

« Last post by Gothi[c] on September 01, 2008, 11:56 AM »

I stumbled on the NewLine article on wikipedia today during some random browsing, and I never expected it to be so fascinating.

It shows some interesting history, and how many different Operating Systems have different control characters to represent a new line, and for different reasons.

There is also some confusion as to whether newlines terminate or separate lines. If a newline is considered a separator, there will be no newline after the last line of a file. The general convention on most systems is to add a newline even after the last line, i.e., to treat newline as a line terminator. Some programs have problems processing the last line of a file if it isn't newline terminated. Conversely, programs that expect newline to be used as a separator will interpret a final newline as starting a new (empty) line. This can result in a different line count being reported for the file, but is otherwise generally harmless.

wow... I never even thought about it that way. I guess it can be interpreted both as a separator and as a terminator. I can see how some interoperability problems could occur. This is one of those things that, when I really think about it, makes me realize that it's a small miracle that software as we have it today works at all! - When programs can't even agree on what a new line is, or even how to treat it.

It doesn't stop there, the problem persists on our internets:

Most textual Internet protocols (including HTTP, SMTP, FTP, IRC and many others) mandate the use of ASCII CR+LF (0x0D 0x0A) on the protocol level, but recommend that tolerant applications recognize lone LF as well. In practice, there are many applications that erroneously use the C newline character '\n' instead (see section Newline in programming languages below). This leads to problems when trying to communicate with systems adhering to a stricter interpretation of the standards; one such system is the qmail MTA that actively refuses to accept messages from systems that send bare LF instead of the required CR+LF.

262

Living Room / Re: What's the time? Ask WorldClock

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 29, 2008, 02:23 AM »

A clock thread and app didn't post in it?!
Outrageous.

263

Official Announcements / Re: August 26 had some slight downtime -- thanks to gothic for fixing it

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 27, 2008, 06:45 PM »

So, what caused the glitch, pray tell?

Ok, here goes a quick one-paragraph un-formatted attempt of explaining:

Well, the conntrack table was getting full, which is normal and common since it's max is rather retardedly low in centos. But increasing the max didn't seem to help. Upon further inspection it seems that some never cleared out of the table. Lowering the conntrack timeout settings didn't help either. I found some references online to an old kernel bug causing connections to not be cleared from there, though I'm not sure if that was the actual cause. It's likely though, since I was heavily monitoring incoming connections and at no point did we get excessively many. So at first to resolve the situation, I figured I'd just unload the ip_conntrack modules and it's depending modules. The only problem is, once loaded, lots of modules depend on it, so I ended up disabling too much of iptable's functionality, causing some weird fail weirdness in the firewall. Then today I actually broke down and recompiled the kernel without connection tracking support, which seems to have fixed it for now. I was hoping for a quick fix by unloading the module, but in the end recompiling the kernel without connection tracking was a quicker fix - typical. Annoyingly, the server went down, like 3 days in a row, every time I go to bed, and sleep for like 1 hour or so. It's like the server waits for the perfect time, stalks me, and then goes down at the worst moment just to bug me -- So when I recompiled the kernel, I also just went and grabbed the latest vanilla from kernel.org while I was at it, so to fix any old lurking bugs. So far so good, lets see if it borks out again tomorrow or not

264

Official Announcements / Re: August 26 had some slight downtime -- thanks to gothic for fixing it

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 27, 2008, 07:08 AM »

might still be bumpy today, i'm installing a new kernel today.

265

Official Announcements / Re: August 26 had some slight downtime -- thanks to gothic for fixing it

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 26, 2008, 01:41 PM »

  thanks mousie.

266

Living Room / Re: What do you do during your free time?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 15, 2008, 02:17 PM »

I think many will agree, that when coders have free time, they ... code
Only, on personal projects instead of work projects

267

Living Room / Re: What is a mouser? What does it mean to mouser someone?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 15, 2008, 02:11 PM »

  I love this post!

Yes, mouser has been known to vanish, IN THE MIDDLE OF A CONVERSATION with NO WARNING, for 8 hours or longer. And then, when he finally makes it back and you ask wtf happened, he'll say "oh, I went to bed, I guess I should have said something." 

268

General Software Discussion / Re: What would your ideal Operating System be like?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 14, 2008, 05:16 AM »

error free.
no surprises.

One can dream I think this is one of the most unachievable things so far

269

General Software Discussion / Re: What would your ideal Operating System be like?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 14, 2008, 01:27 AM »

1) no appearance customization /skinning. enforce a completely standardized user interface.  I think predictability of user interface and good guidelines for coders is important.
2) no different distributions of the OS.  i recognize how cool it is that there are so many linux distributions but i just tend to prefer a more standardized controlled predictable approach to the core OS (im not saying anything about application "packs").

I wouldn't want your OS Nice way of pointing out the direct opposites of my perfect OS
Just proves that one size doesn't fit all theory

7) a focus on eliminating all hidden system settings.. do not use a registry system.  software should be install-less, and installing a piece of software should be a simple matter of copying files to a fixed location.  uninstallation would be just a matter of deleting the files.

I'm all for having to do less work, but the last thing I want is a "user friendly" OS, where I'm assumed an idiot. I like to be prompted where I want things to be installed, in fact, I'd rather move it there myself. I don't trust automation. I want full control over these things. It would be OK to have the install-less software as feature for other people, but it should be optional

270

General Software Discussion / Re: What would your ideal Operating System be like?

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 14, 2008, 01:23 AM »

• Free as in Freedom and Beer.
• Clean, object oriented, documented code.
• As customizable as possible, both with scripting and plugins on every level.
• Lots of modularity and choice for different purposes. Once size does NOT fit all.
• Has a mysterious new method of spreading the cpu load of applications across multiple CPU cores, on an OS level instead of an application level, so developers don't have to deal with complex threading, mutexes, etc, just to write applications that work efficiently with modern mutli-core systems. Yet the traditional threading model should still be available.
• Due to it's modularity and scalability it should run on older computers as well as new hardware efficiently.

[edit]

• Efficient resource usage, no waste to bloat. Ie, it doesn't make a 3GHz box feel like an old P300MHz

[/edit]

• Secure, the ability to do full-disk encryption etc...
• A sad reality is that it will have to have hardware compatibility with so many different types of hardware, both new and old. ( Sad because, I'd really like to see some new architectures, but the truth of the situation is that old legacy hardware is cheap, and anything new would be out of my price range )
• And then, the most important thing, I guess, is not the Operating System, but the Applications. The best OS will be worth nothing without good applications written for it. But since this thread is about the Operating System, I'll stick to that and end the list here:) Though it's all just from the top of my head - i'm sure it's full of flawed logic

271

Official Announcements / Re: DonationCoder/Veign Programming Contest Results Posted

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 11, 2008, 06:42 AM »

Many who write for the web seem to believe that accuracy in language is irrelevant. 

Accuracy in language on the web is irrelevant.
In fact, language inaccuracies on the web are so burned into it's very culture that they are starting to change language itself, beyond the web.

272

General Software Discussion / Re: Linux is Not Windows

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 09, 2008, 12:21 AM »

I could have sworn i posted this before. Maybe I forgot. But I think I do remembers showing mouser Great post.

273

Mircryption / mircryption-compatible script for irssi

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 08, 2008, 03:06 AM »

[ Invalid Attachment ]

I created an irssi script that lets you use mircryption (and FiSH) compatible encryption.
It supports both ecb and cbc modes.

You could already use FiSH with irssi, which is compatible with mircryption, but it has some security problems (and is generally written very sloppy, not to mention it's a pain to compile/install), hence the new effort.

Getting plain ecb to work was easy, but there was some serious debugging to do trying to resolve a weirdness/limitation/bug in perl's Crypt::CBC cpan module. (which mouser pretty much resolved for me-- THANKS!!)

Click to get the script.

274

Developer's Corner / Re: Essay: Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it

« Last post by Gothi[c] on August 06, 2008, 02:33 AM »

I hate usable software....

let me rephrase...

I hate software that assumes i'm an idiot, with big buttons and limited functionality.

I like things just the way they are :p

275

Living Room / Re: !-NSFW - GoatSE invades the Spore realm - NSFW-!

« Last post by Gothi[c] on July 30, 2008, 10:55 PM »

Best laugh of the month