Google All For Digital Due Process

Keywords: #google
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.

Pretty Correct Colors!

Keywords: #asus #color #crt #datacolor #lcd #sony #sun
First off lets go back about a week in time… I am NOT a GUI guy, photo guy, etc. I traditionally have been a systems administrator, lately I’ve gone more whole hog into web application development. But I still don’t do UI. So color has never really felt that important to me. I know my display isn’t right, and it bothers me a bit but it doesn’t cripple me. Sometimes the grays wash out, they turn blue, colors just aren’t quite right.

Viacom wants content hosts to police Viacom's Copyrights

In a lawsuit against YouTube in which Viacom hopes to set some dangerous precedence against *all* content hosts and content servers, they want Viacom (and other’s) copyrights to be policed by content hosts. Effectively shifting the burden of content copyright enforcement AWAY from the content owners. It’s something I find scary, working for, and having worked for, sites and services supported by user created and published content. I understand what Viacom wants, but it is a copyright owners responsibility to ensure it’s copyrights are not violated.

Just plain shocking!

Adafruit Industries is one of a number of sits I visit regularly, and within the last few days the blog had this gem. Quite possibly one of the funniest things I’ve seen. It’s a video made by another set of tinkerers I’d not yet heard of, but will be sure to follow now!

Pogoplug[ged]

Keywords: #ARM9 #cifs #feroceon #hfs+ #JTAG #Linux #marvell #ntfs #orion #osx #pogoplug #samba #smb
So I recently bought a Pogoplug device, sort of on a whim. I needed a NAS device, and the fact that the Pogoplug had HFS+ (OS/X filesystem) support made it a clear winner for me. I’ve been living with mine for about a week now, mostly with single 320GB HFS+ formatted drive. The $130 device runs Linux, is supported as open (they give you the default root login and password on their site) and sports 256MB of RAM, 32MB of flash for the OS/on-board software, and what I’m pretty sure is a 1.

Google Voice to Text

Keywords: #google #voice
So, I’ll have you know first off I’m NOT on acid, nor am I on a major cocaine high or anything of the sort.I left a voicemail at google voice to a friend this AM, that he had it translate to text. About the only thing it got right was our names. We figured out “lost DVDs” was circuit IDs to give you an example of how bad it was. And I never talked about oranges.

And now for something COMPLETELY different!

A friend linked to this Times Online article about homeopathy in a recent Tweet, so I figured I’d share it here. In case any of you actually thought “homeopathy” was at a ll legitimate. Note carefully the paragraph where they admit knowing it’s bunk but sell it anyway because people believe it helps! Homeopathy has invented it’s own measurement system involving “C”, which is a measure of it’s dilution, higher “C” more dilution.

An attempt to explain IPv6 and IP Routing to the layperson

Keywords: #IPv4 #IPv6 #routing
Me again, yup. Been a while eh? Well, I’ve been busy. Rebuilding a pretty big site essentially from scratch. Trust me, I have plenty of things to rant about! This post though I hope to be another informative, less ranting, post about IPv6. I keep seeing a LOT of well meaning but mis-informed or mis-understood claims about IPv6, even in technical circles. What I am going to try to address here though is from the every persons point of view.

XKCD and the TSA

Keywords: #tsa #xkcd
http://xkcd.org/651/

Yet more Bresnan Fail

Trying to get some work done early AM again, atleast this time I got a callback hopefully coming in from L2/2.5 when they get in after 6A and start returning calls after 8A. But that took insisting on it. The unknown host was because of packet loss ( had to try 2-3x to get bresnan.com to resolve too!) I suppose thats a little better than yesterday where so few packets were getting through that I couldn’t even get THAT.

Gotta love Bresnan packet loss...TetherBerry FTW!

Well, I’m currently being saved by TetherBerry because my Cable ISP Bresnan is losing 50+% of it’s packets for the last several hours. Host Loss% Snt Last Avg Best Wrst StDev 1. 192.168.1.1 0.0% 11 0.8 0.9 0.8 1.1 0.1 2. 10.24.128.1 0.0% 11 7.1 7.4 6.4 11.3 1.3 3. 72.175.110.32 0.0% 11 11.5 10.1 6.5 21.5 4.9 4. 72.175.110.5 0.0% 11 7.3 8.1 6.9 15.2 2.4 5. 72.175.110.10 70.0% 11 8.

Educated like it's 1984

The folks over at Screaming Circuits keep a blog, or at least one of them does. I tend to read it occasionally. Recently Duane Benson made the point that colleges tend to educate EEs like it’s 1984. I think it’s important that students get exposed to thru-hole because they’relikely to be able to unerstand that better, but they do definitely need to learn SMT in this day and age. Thru-hole lets you see whats going on, and is much more clear to diagnose and troubleshoot.

When +12VDC....Isn't or Why to avoid cheap wall warts

First excuse the err…crude “Screen Shots” – I don’t have my ‘scope setup yet for proper screen captures so I just took pictures. For a while now I’ve had a +12VDC wall wart that I use occasionally. It always caused weird heating though in regulators. I was never sure why, the multi-meter read it as having a fairly stable +12VDC. I finally hooked it up to an oscilloscope today…well now atleast I know why…

Backups are NOT archives

After reading this article in the Boston Globe Someone needs to inform the paper, the legal system, and maybe even their IT department that Backups ARE NOT ARCHIVES. An archive in this example would capture and keep a copy of everything seperately, not take a snapshot of the Inbox. It’s entirely possible that they intentionally deleted things (maliciously) but even if they did, there should be an alternate archive system.

About Open Software Ecosystems

Keywords: #olpc #osx #qt #trolltech #windows
Many people make a big deal about open source and open software. But FAR more important than that is open standards for hardware and software and *portability* for software. The game console platform industry has shown this quite clearly. With the advent of higher performance consoles, and more portable coding games now often release on many platforms at once. Portable software tool kits won’t necessarily do everything, but they sure help one hell of a lot!

What would you make?

Keywords: #avr #molex #reflow #smd
For the few people who actually read this you may or may not know I’m an amateur/hobbyist electronics nerd. I’ve recently gotten back into building custom circuits. I’ve got a couple prototypes on the way and am in a sort of holding pattern until they arrive. One of which I realized I fudged up, but I think I can fix it with some judicious application of green wire. SO! While I’m waiting for those, I was wondering, by comments, if you could make something what would you make?

PyGRUB foiled by newer mke2fs

Keywords: #debian #opensolaris #pvm #pygrub #solaris #xen #xvm
So a buddy of mine about a week ago decides to put together a machine whose software setup is similar to the machine which runs DotBlag here. Solaris or OpenSolaris, running Debian inside of a Paravirtualized Machine under Xen (xVM in Solaris). This process sucks a little bit because unlike everyone else Debian still doesn’t support PVM inside of their installer. So you have to fire up a full HVM environment and use debootstrap, OR, convert that (HVM) environment to a PVM.

PaperMORE! Not Paperless!

Keywords: #backups #paper
I just saw this on a different (Coding Horror) blog and had to post it here as well. It’s not super practical for large backups but it is pretty cool. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001292.html

So who has egg now?

I originally wrote this back in about August, and WordPress apparently lost it during an upgrade or something. Most likely the fault of a beta version of WordPress. I have a bit of egg on my face. I trusted the LSI people a bit too much. There was a critical race problem in their driver for the 84016E … to their credit they fixed it in June. I found a workaround before we figured that bit out, thank god Solaris’ fault management systems, psradm to the rescue, since it was a race problem with unaligned mutexes, using that and offlining all the other CPUs solved it a treat.

It want's my monies! But not all of them...

American Science & Surplus is a great little place a friend of mine just introduced me to. It is what it says, like Army/Navy Surplus, but for geeks! They have some interesting stuff, but beware, it IS SURPLUS! Good stuff nonetheless