No I haven’t forgotten about my blog, there just hasn’t been anything all that interesting to talk about. I’ve got the usual slew of work projects and a couple of personal projects I’m working on. Last few weeks I’ve been dawdling in Minecraft in my spare time.
Just haven’t had time to make a decent write-up for here and so I haven’t!
One of my friends blogs that I host was recently infected by one of the drive by infections called “Blackhole” which is completely useless description to disinfect it. Even more disappointingly, NO AV scanner was helpful in figuring out which page had hit it. Google’s malware tools/safebrowsing don’t see it because it very specifically hides from those User-Agents. AVG LinkScanner sees it but is completely totally useless because it doesn’t tell you where it came in at, it just stops IE.
Yup I know it’s been a while. I’ve been busy with Work Stuff ™. We’ve lost Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, and Robert Galvin all just recently. These men have either directly changed your entire life, or indirectly. Ritchie is the R of K&R C, better known simply as ‘C’ — the computer language that pretty much begat EVERYTHING we use today. Java, written in C. PHP, written in C. Windows? Yup.
Most of you probably don’t know, but I’m a horse lover at heart. I “blame” my mother. Just discovered a Kickstarter project for “Wild Horses & Renegates, Saving America’s Wild Horses” — I’ve added the Kickstarter widget for this project to the page even though it doesn’t fit the layout or anything because it’s something I believe in, I’ve also included the widget here in this article, though it’s an IFRAME so it might not work right.
I’ll quote from the official transcripts of the constitution found at www.archives.gov … you can skip over them if you like… I have included the whole thing below the fold…
“To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;”
OK so it says the government can make money, and assign some sort of value to it, and to foreign Coin (Bitcoin == foreign coin here), and set standards of weights and measure.
There’s been a LOT of morons out there spouting total crap about bitcoin. First, as of right now NO SENATOR OR CONGRESSPERSON HAS MENTIONED TAKING DOWN BITCOIN!!!!!! Quite frankly, with the distributed nature, it’d be impossible barring finding algorithm weaknesses and exploiting them. Second THEY ARE TARGETING SILK ROAD. Thats who they’re after right now.
Another point, Bitcoin isn’t money laundering. There’s a trail/trace of every transaction. Where the money came from, where it went to, who owned it along the way.
Yup, I’m officially a gadget whore. I bought a Verizon Motorola Xoom for delivery on launch day a while back. I’ve been busy moving and working so this is the first chance I’ve had to write anything up on it. iFixit has a great teardown of the Motorola Xoom. I’m going to talk some about the hardware, ups and downs, and the software a bit too.
The Hardware The Ups First off it’s definitely speedier than the HTC Incredible and it should be!
There’s been an alarming amount of “cybersecurity” legislation here in the US lately in the same fear mongering, and ill advised tune that got us the entire DHS and almost universally loathed TSA. The problem, as I see it, is members of congress trying to govern something that they firstly do not understand, and secondly, are not a part of. By and large the government (and even the public in general!
I finally jumped into the modern area of gaming machines, buying a nice beefy system. Everythings great, except ATI still sucks. I have an older ATI card in a machine that was relegated to a server, but is now no longer used, just sitting in my closet as spare/test equipment. And I swore then I wouldn’t buy another ATI for a good long while. This was around 2005.
Fast forward to 2010.
Don’t ever use MySQL FTS if you can help it. And if you do use it, in 5.1.x atleast DO NOT EVER USE IN BOOLEAN MODE. It’s like driving with the parking brakes on, seriously, it slows MySQL down that much. Why? No idea. But, like I said, you shouldn’t be using FTS anyway.
Files-a-copying, zones-a-serialized! YARRR we’re on the move! </pirate>
Ahem…*cough* 🙂 Now that that’s out of my system. I made a decision at the beginning of this month to move all of my hosting to an Amazon EC2 instance. While nowhere near ideal for web hosting and not really much cheaper than my current hosting arrangements, and quite frankly only cheaper as long as my bandwidth usage stays down! I decided to switch for a number of reasons.
Most people aren’t familiar at all with ASN.1, and some that are, have NO clue they’re looking at ASN.1 – SNMP MIBs are all written as ASN.1 definitions. I’m embarking on a new project and need to define a client/server protocol. I could build my own binary protocol, which I’ve done in the past. I could also use XML, or some other text based protocol, but for what this is, it’s not really appropriate, and parsing XML is a royal bear.
Nothing of note really here, I just took the time to put my blog up via Kindle. And no, I didn’t set the price. Blogs are fixed per month.
Right now I’m not 100% sure *exactly* how it’s rendering the site, other than it enters via my RSS feed gateways. What I’m going to do is check my logs, see if I can figure out what it’s visiting specifically and RTFM a bit more to see if I can actually improve the render/layout for Kindle or not.
I don’t quite know how I know but I know very well how the Linux TTY/Console driver stack works… Probably through so many years of slogging through code, and through tearing apart the Linux TTY drivers and line discipline stacks a few times for special projects and definitely with some help of the LDD3 (a MUST read for anyone trying to go spelunking for the first time in the Linux Kernel Land – no, I don’t know if/when an update will be made but 99% of whats there is still up to date).
By the time you read this Reuters may have removed the headline but they had a very interesting, somewhat, ok REALLY cheeky headline reading
Tired Gay succumbs to Dix in 200 meters I mean…wow…where the hell was the editor on this one eh?
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6622I420100703
In the previous post I didn’t have my wifi turned on so it didn’t init at all (the BT driver came up even though BT was technically off) so here’s dmesg while cycling the WiFi — interesting that it’s an MMC (SDIO) device!
[ 2517.261108] wifi_set_power = 1 [ 2517.261108] incrediblec_wifi_power: 1 [ 2517.567626] wifi_set_carddetect = 1 [ 2517.567626] incrediblec_wifi_set_carddetect: 1 [ 2517.567657] mmc0: card_present 1 [ 2517.567657] mmc0: Slot status change detected (0 -> 1) [ 2517.
OK, they’ve made things completely muddy. But here’s the rub. The HTC Incredible has 512MB RAM, a 512MB or so “boot ROM” for the kernel and base OS, then you’ve got about 768MB set aside for installing user apps. There’s a further nearly 7GB left for user *data*. This is *IN* the phone. You can add an SD Card and get more data storage, but w/o hacking the phone you’re apparently stuck with “only” 768MB of app storage space (which is a lot, this is just the user apps and their static data)
No, I’m not talking about physical exhaustion….I’m talking about IPv4 address space! IPv4 (32-bit addressing) has been on the ‘endangered species’ list for a long time now. And almost everyone agrees we’ve got until about 2011 or maybe 2012 (depending on where you live) before there will be NO more free IPv4 addresses. IPv6 (128-bit addressing) has been developed but ISPs (like my local cable modem ISP) have been slow-to-non-existent to adopt it.
In a recent google blog article Google mentions how ECPA has grown stale, and needs to be updated, and it’s desire (pledge?) to your (our) digital due process. Figured everyone might find this interesting.