Fnord.

I have a friend in Illinois who likes Sun hardware, preferably running OpenBSD. We used to hack a lot together, but since I moved he’s gone rather hog-wild on Sun gear. Thanks to Midwestern house sizes, he has a large-ish closet full of gear that I am very impressed to see. I had to share; the following are his pictures and text.

Main stack, first picture

Main stack, second picture

Other tower 1

Other tower 2

The photography leaves a lot to be desired, but I think you get the
idea. The pics labelled tower1a and tower1b are the “main stack,” if
you will. Starting from the top down: little black box is cable modem
from Comcast. Under that is a sparcstation 5 which is the firewall/router.
Under that are two sparcstation LXs. Next, two sparcstation 4s (one of
which is my home ftp server), two sparcstation 5s, two sparcstation 10s,
two sparcstation 20s, two ultra 5s (of of which is the main fileserver
connected to the 711 6 disc external array in the foreground of the
second pic), two ultra 1s, and a beastly ultra 2 complete with
two 400Mhz processors and a whopping 2G of RAM. Considering when
this thing was first on the market, it’s a true godbox! On the floor
are two APC smart ups, monitored by the two ultra 5s (and whence by all
the others). To the right you’ll see a couple 16 port network switches
which may be replaced shortly by one 24 port switch. Under them are two
Lightwave ServerSwitches, cascaded together with 8 ports each. Using these,
all 16 of the sparcstations/ultras are connected to a single keyboard, mouse
and monitor up in the library. And ’cause they’re Suns (the cool older kind),
they can be remotely powered on and off via the keyboard. Cool, eh?

Of less interest are the HP laserprinter and a couple generic boxen
running Windows 2k pro (for Jodie) and Ubuntu (pour moi). These are
connected via kvm extenders to our keyboards, mice and monitors in the
library.

The second pair of pics (tower2a and 2b) are of the other tower located
in the closet with
the furnace, water heater and water softener. From the top down are:
sparcstation IPX and IPC, sparcstation 1, sparcstation 2, an LX and
a Classic, sparcstation 4, two ultra 5s, a 24 port network switch,
another pair of Lightwave ServerSwitches, an Ultra 1, another fully
loaded ultra 2, a sparcstation 10, a sparcstation 5, and a sparcstation 20.
One of the ultra 5s is a backup for the main fileserver. The sparcstation
5 is connected to the 711 box on the floor and also monitors the APC smartups
1500 you see (it’s the black box on the floor). The IPC and sparcstation 2
netboot via the sparcstation 5. All of these are operated via a keyboard,
mouse and monitor in the next room (this is in the basement). The older
suns (anything before the classic) can’t be powered on/off via the
keyboard. One project is to wire some remote power switches for those.

Waiting in the wings, so to speak are three more IPCs, three more IPXs
(one of which is new – never used), a couple classics and LXs,
a sparcstation 2, 5, 10, 20 and
an ultra 5. Several of them are fully operational and updated with the
latest version of OpenBSD. The ultra 5 actually has Solaris 8 loaded.
Oh, and guess who just scored a sparcstation 1+ and another ss2 off
ebay? If you were counting, you’ll have noticed two empty ports on
the Lightwaves in the second “tower.” I’ll put the ss1+ there and
maybe one of the extra IPXs.

All of the boxes in the towers are fully operational running OpenBSD 4.7.
Dmesgs available upon request. Many of them are fully loaded with RAM.

I’ve had some stacks in my time, but damn! Mad props and extreme jealousy, even though my current server probably is faster than all of those combined.

I got a Cat Cam for Christmas, and recently tried it out on Rasputin. Here’s the result (11MB, quicktime):

Note that this is mostly blurred and often dark images – I had a few hundred images off of the camera, and just dropped them into iMovie HD to create this.

Looks like she definitely cruises the hillside and hangs out on the front roof – cool!

The problem:

At work, I plug my laptop into a 30″ display. So far, so good, so spoiled. However, sitting unused in the corner is a forlorn 24″ display. This cannot stand!

The solution is $43 from Amazon:

Kensington display driver, with silicon by DisplayLink. Unlike the IOGear version, this one can drive widescreen and has no problem driving 1920×1200.

A quick action shot:

For those of you keeping track at home, that’s 4480 pixels wide!

So far, speed is decent, I’m going to use it mainly to display web pages and terminal windows, so performance is good enough for that. If I can find another monitor, you can have more of ‘em attached to the same machine…

Supposed to also work with Windows, haven’t tested that.

Recommended.

For a while now, we’ve been using our iMac as a television, video chat box, movie screen and bittorrent server. (If you are hooked on a Canadian sitcom, bittorent is your best solution). Netflix streaming is especially good, and even the Vancouver Olympics worked reasonably well.

(As an aside, I hope it’s ok to be jealous of Anna. She’s growing up with free video chats with grandparents, and iPhones. Add flying cars, and the Jetsons will be old news to this generation.)

Last night I was reading the Ars Technica iPad review; another device I plan to get when I can convince Chris. Smack dab on page ten was news of iPad/iPhone software that, for $5, lets you view live or recorded TV on your handheld!

Damn!

What’s more, the hardware required (Elgato eyeTV One) is under a hundred bucks!

You also need an HDTV antenna, under $40, and the iPhone software. Voila, free-ish TV!

I had a gift certificate for $100 for Amazon, so this’ll be a present for Chris the PBS addict.

Caveats:

• Free channels are limited, and I don’t know if the tuner will work with cable or satellite.
• I suspect that we’ll watch most of the shows on the iMac; the iPhone screen is too small to really enjoy it.
• This may induce you to purchase an iPad as a better viewing device. This is My Evil Plan ™.
• Video files burn serious disk space. Might need a cheap USB drive to store them.
• Unlike bittorrent, these recordings have the advertisements, sigh. Worth a google to see if I can find a solution for that.

On the plus side, one more reason to not bother buying a television.

PS I had some images to spice up this post, but WordPress is being problematic at the moment, will revise and add them later once I solve the problem.

PPS Sorted. Missing php libraries.

Via Lifehacker:

That, my friends, is a ‘QR code‘ generated by this site. All this one encodes is the URL ‘fnord.phfactor.net’. You can also make one with text, phone number or SMS (text message.)

On the iPhone, I’m using the QuickMark app to decode ‘em, which seems to work pretty well and also does old-school barcodes.

Pointless? Check this usage out, and be sure and watch the linked video.

There are some other uses as well. You’ve got roughly 7KB of data, depending on encoding and error correction. Amazing times we live in, eh?

A lot of people criticize Apple for its prices, but I have to say in response that taking the time to polish all the edges and simplify really helps. Consider this: I have had a few Bluetooth mice over the years, from Microsoft, Logitech and Apple. The latest Apple mouse is the only one where today it warned me that the batteries are low:

It’s a little thing, but for once I know to go get batteries, before the mouse just stops working.

It’s a nice mouse even without that feature, but taking a little bit of time to add software and hardware for voltage monitoring, it’s just easier to have and use.

In really high-end watches, the inner bits are polished and finished by hand to astounding degrees, even the parts that will only ever be seen by a watchmaker doing the service. Perfection is it’s own reward sometimes.

Alexander Stepanov is the main driver behind the OMFG-that’s-amazing Standard Template Library for C++. I rather agree with him on object oriented programming (OOP):

I find OOP technically unsound. It attempts to decompose the world in terms of interfaces that vary on a single type. To deal with the real problems you need multisorted algebras – families of interfaces that span multiple types. I find OOP philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object. Even if it is true it is not very interesting – saying that everything is an object is saying nothing at all. I find OOP methodologically wrong. It starts with classes. It is as if mathematicians would start with axioms. You do not start with axioms – you start with proofs. Only when you have found a bunch of related proofs, can you come up with axioms. You end with axioms. The same thing is true in programming: you have to start with interesting algorithms. Only when you understand them well, can you come up with an interface that will let them work.

The rest of the interview is quite good as well.

I woke this morning to a slew (here defined as ‘62′) of ssh dictionary attacks:

There were already 20 or so last night. Looks like a new botnet/attack wave or similar. I’m using DenyHosts and quite frankly, you should be too.

If you’re running Debian, there’s a nice package for it that I use and recommend. I’ve set mine to trigger on 3 attempts, but I’ve few users and most use ssh keys and not keyboard auth.

Might be a good time to run chkrootkit and change some passwords!

A couple of weeks ago, the car lost its second taillight. Same one, in fact, driver’s side brakelight. This time, after replacing the bulb (standard 12VDC 1157 dual-filament) I did some research into LED replacements. After all, LEDs are longer-lived, can be as bright or brighter, and turn on faster for a teensy bit more reaction time for people behind you.

After a bit of Amazon research, I found the Vision X HIL-1157R:

It’s a drop-in replacement, same shape, should fit most vehicles. However, our car (2005 Allroad) doesn’t like it. Audi, in their finite wisdom, chose to have additional circuitry to check for blown lights, and beeps incessantly if it finds one missing. The LED bulbs don’t satisfy the test circuit, so hellish beeping is the fate of anyone who tries this.

So I’m out $20 and have a spare pair. Email me, I suspect they’d work in cars without the check circuit.

So I got a new laptop at work, and based on some good data I wrangled the solid state drive instead of a conventional hard drive. I had to go on a file jihad to make space (down to 250GB, ug) but the results are astounding:

Writing a 10G file

Y’know, for a laptop that’s nothing short of astonishing! Easily 3x the old drive. The read is even faster:

Note the 122.49MB/sec and almost zero CPU while doing so!

Wow. This is easily the most noticeable speedup since the days of the Celeron 300A. The 256GB drives are currently a $585 premium on the Apple store, and even at that I cannot recommend them strongly enough. Programs and data just snap now, even sluggish stuff like the Komodo IDE, ipython, Firefox and Photoshop.

Don’t wait for your next laptop, just buy an SSD for your current one and enjoy the ride.