New job

So I'm leaving the military-industrial complex tomorrow to go work back in the private sector for Blackboard.com (BBBB) doing storage engineering. I'll be off for a week on vacation, then start at the new job on Tuesday September 4th.

I lucked into this position thanks to LinkedIn, which I only bothered with because of an invite from a former co-worker. I highly recommend it, it's worked well for me so far.

Best IPv6 post evar

Proposed IPv6 Cutover By 2011-01-01

After hearing folks at work talk about messing around with IPv6 over the past half a year, this made me laugh out loud. Hah!

I am

5 US Senate terms
7.5 US Presidential terms
15 US Congresses
20 cycles of Moore's Law
30 years
120 seasons
360 months
1,560 weeks
10,950 days
262,800 hours
15,768,000 minutes
946,080,000 seconds old today

NOAA's hurricane satellite politics

Slashdot post + commentary: Say Nothing About the Failing Satellite

Article from the Miami Herald: Candid storm chief gets a lashing

There's some informative discussion on Slashdot between former NOAA folks and JPL folks regarding the design, launch and technical details on the QuikSCAT satellite, in addition to political commentary.

Dell now shipping PCs with Ubuntu

Dell is (finally) shipping PCs, specifically Dimension E520 N + XPS 410 N desktops and Inspiron E1505 N laptops with Ubuntu Linux installed as an alternative to Microsoft Windows. Cool.

While it may be hard to find the links to the Ubuntu systems from their front page, you can go to http://www.dell.com/open to order their non-Windows systems.

Blame Xerxes

or Ancient Dead Persians Can Have Enormous Influence on Information Technology

Did somebody order a server wrong?

Blame Xerxes.
Blame Xerxes.

Did somebody fat-finger a config again?

Blame Xerxes.
Blame Xerxes.

Machine room overheat on the weekend?

Blame Xerxes.
Blame Xerxes.

It's just not fair, it's just not right.
We tried so hard and he put up a fight.

He's two thousand years old and covered with dust
but we just can't win, he's got that ancient Persian stuff.

My own Google Maps mashup

So it's not really a mashup. I'm not using the Google Maps API, but the new My Maps functionality within Google Maps. Very easy to use, even with cut-and-paste data.

The data comes from a BusinessWeek article on The Biggest Metro Areas with the Lowest Rents. Kinda neat, gives a nice at-a-glance representation of the cheaper bigger areas to live in the United States. Minus one outlier (Salt Lake City), it's all in the Midwest and South; and 15 out of the 20 are inland. Only two (Houston and Jacksonville FL) are on the ocean.

I've drawn a polygon encompassing the "central" area of large metro areas with lowest rents, and it's interesting that the polygon is centered on the Mississippi River and Ohio Valley. You've also got Texas + Oklahoma + northern Alabama and Georgia, but half of these metro areas are on or near the big river valleys and the Great Lakes.

Cisco VPN Client and Linux Kernel 2.6.19

Was trying to install the Cisco VPN client for Linux on a Fedora Core 6 (kernel 2.6.19) system and ran into some errors. First it complained about linux/config.h not being present and accounted for. Did some googling, turns out that you should be using linux/autoconf.h instead of ye olde linux/config.h. That's cool. But even after doing a

sed -i 's/\/config\.h/\/autoconf\.h/' *.c

I still got a bunch of build errors from interceptor.c, specifically "CHECKSUM_HW undeclared" and "too many arguments to function skb_checksum_help". Great. More googling. Turns out that CHECKSUM_HW got replaced by CHECKSUM_PARTIAL and CHECKSUM_COMPLETE (see kernel.org for details), and skb_checksum_help's argument list changed.

So more googling, and I found the terribly helpful page put up by Alexander Griesser on Cisco VPN Client and Linux Kernel 2.6.19, which includes a vpnclient-linux-2.6.19.diff file you can use for easy patching. w00t!

What graphics card do I buy?

Got an email from a friend asking about buying a new graphics card for a PC, thought I'd post my reply up here in case other folks get a "what the heck do I buy?" reaction when they look at the universe of PC graphics cards on the market.

a coworker of mine wants to buy a new video card for his PC but is a tad overwhelmed by the array of choices (and price ranges.) He's into Call of Duty and games like that. Can you recommend a good card that won't break the bank (sounds like a game enthusiast as opposed to a diehard GAMER.)

What video card you can use is highly dependent upon your PC's motherboard. Recent PCs (something purchased within the last 12 - 18 months) probably have a PCI Express slot for graphics cards, older PCs (2 years or older) likely have an AGP slot for graphics cards. Don't confuse PCI Express slots with a plain old PCI slot. Check your PC's specs first, or crack the case open and check yourself, before spending actual money. If unsure, find someone who can tell the difference and get them to check.

Having said that, you're really just limited by the amount of money you want to spend and how much power you want to pay for per hour that you have your PC turned on. Modern graphics cards can suck a lot of power and run very hot, necessitating extra cooling, which means more power.

Once you get above $100 (the "budget" range), there's not really any bad choices between ATI-based cards and Nvidia-based cards. You're really just differentiating on price, features (like TV-out support) and performance. I normally don't spend more than $150 on a given graphics card, and for that much, you can typically find a decent enough card for occasional to frequent gaming (5-20 hours/week). You can certainly pay more than that, and depending on what your games need for good performance, you may want to shell out up to $300 if you spend a lot of time in front of your monitor (40+ hours/week). Paying more than $300 is really just silly, in most cases; if your games are still running slow with a $300 graphics card, you need to fix or upgrade other components in your system.

Right now, you'd want to get at least an ATI Radeon x1600-based card or an Nvidia GeForce 7600-based card for gaming, with a minimum of 256MB onboard memory. Higher product numbers typically indicate newer, faster hardware, and for Nvidia chipsets, you also have "trim line" codes (GS, GT) which indicate either lower-end (GS) or higher-end (GT) components on the card. If you want to spend the time geeking out and reading AnandTech or Tom's Hardware or HardOCP or other hardware review sites to see which chipsets and manufacturers give the optimum performance or best bang for the buck, you certainly can; but in general, if you spend more money, you'll get a faster and more capable card.

There are many many many different graphics card "manufacturers" (ASUS, Sapphire, XFX, Diamond, eVGA, MSI, Powercolor), but for the most part, they're producing reference implementations of either ATI or Nvidia chipset designs on their cards. Some folks look for cards that bundle free copies of games or software with the card, others look for faster memory or better cooling on the card, but honestly, there's not a huge amount of difference between them. I've had good luck in the last 5 years with Sapphire (midrange cards), Rosewill (low-end/budget cards) and eVGA (all price levels). Best thing to do with a given card is check user feedback to see if there's multiple complaints about a single issue (drivers, overheating, poor manufacture quality) and if not, it's probably fine. Real lemons do exist, so look for products that lots of other folks have tried out to make sure you don't end up with one.

Try checking on newegg.com for cards, they have a huge amount of user feedback on their items, plus competitive prices, excellent shipping and wonderful customer service.

Microsoft XNA Game Studio Express released

Microsoft announced the release of their XNA Game Studio Express developer tools, which allow developers to use C# and target both Windows and the XBOX 360.

Slashdot is all over this, with some folks debating the usefulness of tools that require a $100 subscription to publish your games (in some cases), but this seems like an awesome tool release for small-scale game developers.

The $900 HP DV9005US laptop

Wowsers. $900 (after rebate) at Circuit City for all this:

• Dual-core AMD Turion 64 @ 1.6Ghz

• Windows XP MCE

• 1024MB DDR2 SDRAM (expandable to 2GB)

• Nvidia GeForce Go 6150 UMA w/ up to 128MB shared memory

• 100GB 5400RPM SATA hard disk

• DVD+/-RW w/ DualLayer + LightScribe support

• 17" WXGA+ HD BrightView widescreen display @ 1440x900

• 802.11b/g wireless

• 5-in-1 media reader

• 4 USB ports, standard audio ports, 1 FireWire port

• 10/100 ethernet

• 15.16" L x 11.65" W x 1.57" H

• 7.8 pounds

See HP's specs for the DV9005US for more details.

I'm not really in the market for a new laptop, but this is pretty nice if you go for the desktop-replacement-and-some-gaming approach.

MS Word vulnerability

from the advisory:

Microsoft is investigating a new report of limited “zero-day” attacks using a vulnerability in Microsoft Word 2000, Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Word Viewer 2003, Microsoft Word 2004 for Mac, and Microsoft Word 2004 v. X for Mac, as well as Microsoft Works 2004, 2005, and 2006.
...
Recommendation: Do not open or save Word files that you receive from un-trusted or that are received unexpected from trusted sources. This vulnerability could be exploited when a user opens a file.

Well, that's just peachy. Time to fire up OpenOffice.

addition: 0959h 2006-12-06

Slashdot has a discussion on the MS Word vulnerability.

Bill O'Reilly on the PS3, gamers & iPods

So Mr O'Reilly has a new target for his disassociated reactionary rants - GAMING. Yup, it's the new Communism, this year's War on Christmas, worse than heroin or alcohol or tobacco:

Bill O’Reilly Slams PS3 Launch, Gamers, iPods, Digital Tech (not in that order)

There's a good discussion on Slashdot on the article at http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/21/1648247

I like this quote in particular:

"I don't own an iPod. I would never wear an iPod… If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it's going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them?"

Speaking as someone who has (somehow) managed to become a tax-paying fully-employed married adult with children, despite all of the horrible influences of computers and video games in my life since the age of 5 or 6 years old, I have absolutely no idea how anyone talks with me. Not a bit. I mean, I can barely even write coherent sentences in my native language, let alone carry on a conversation, or, say, teach high-school students how to speak effectively and defend an argument. Or write business proposals. Or conduct meetings, or training sessions, or interview job candidates.

<boggle>

While I agree that a lot of mass-marketed entertainment can be a low-fidelity lossy replacement for reality, that's not really a new problem, or something that the Sony PS3 or Apple iPod introduced.

To a large degree, people from my generation and younger generations play video games the same way our parents and grandparents play card games, board games, darts, bowling or other not-so-physically-active forms of entertainment. Multiplayer games, networked or not, are the way we hang out and de-stress and enjoy each others' company. My 16-year-old brother-in-law and I don't sit down in front of the TV to watch football games, we play Madden. Or Halo, or Red Faction, or another fun multiplayer game.

Any form of entertainment can be addictive, but calling gamers irresponsible and witless is no more true than exculpating Scrabble players or someone who enjoys a hand of solitaire for their moral weakness.

In the words of today, WTF, Mr O'Reilly. Are you just an old fool too removed from your own listeners to have any idea of what people do with their time? Or does this look like an inflammatory target, something that can be easily railed against, not targeting a traditional minority group like gays or blacks or Jews which would generate backlash, and generate angry call-ins, attract listeners and ad revenue?

Maybe you should walk down the hall from your broadcast booth to visit the sound techs and radio engineers working in that building, and see what they say. Maybe talk with them, see if they can carry on a conversation. Or the folks who host your website. Or the accountants tallying your revenue from podcast downloads, online advertising and TV broadcasts. I'm sure you interact with some IT support people from time to time, try asking them what they enjoy doing in their spare time, what they're interested in, if they have families, if they're active in their communities, if they go to church, if they (gasp) fire up a PC or console game from time to time.

You'd be surprised.

DriveImage XML

So I was looking for a decent alternative to Symantec Ghost, and stumbled across DriveImage XML which is a nice drive-image utility for Windows.

I'm still testing it out, but it can use volume shadow copy on WinXP (= copy your HD while you're running Windows), split and compress your backups, browse saved images... looks pretty nice.

TreeSize Free

Since I've switched to my new Dell XPS M1710 laptop, I've been trying to find good Windows-style ways of doing what I'm used to doing with Ubuntu. One of my favorite *nix one-liners is `du -k | sort -r -n | less` to list the contents of the current directory by size - it's an easy way to figure out what's taking up space in a given directory or filesystem.

There's tons of software in the Windows world that does this, but most of it is shareware or commercial-ware, which is fine, but I don't plan on spending money for something that two tiny shell utilities can manage to do. Then I came upon TreeSize Free from JAM Software - Windows Freeware, which does exactly what I need - show which directories are eating up the most space - and is free. Works fine with my Windows XP install, it takes a little while to chew through the directory tree on my C: drive, but I'd expect that.

General Dynamics GoBook XR-1 Rugged Notebook - US

General Dynamics GoBook XR-1 Rugged Notebook - US

Apparently GD makes laptops, in addition to Stryker combat vehicles and nuclear submarines. This machine is MIL-STD 810F compliant, works from -23 to 60 degrees Celsius, is sealed against dust and water, and can be completely immersed in a bleach solution for decontamination. And features an Intel Core Duo 1.83Ghz CPU, ATI graphics card, up to 2GB DDR2 SDRAM and a 40GB or 80GB SATA hard drive! Woo, who needs a Dell?

Remember remember the 0-days of November

Remember, remember, the 0-days of November!

Or, um, instead of being like Guy Fawkes and trying to blow up Parliament, you can set the kill bit on the XMLHTTP CLSID:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/927892.mspx

This seems like a particularly nasty Internet Explorer bug, since it affects all versions of Windows except Windows Server 2003, and the workaround kills XMLHTTP functionality, which is one of the key features that attracted developers to write for MSIE in the first place.

Performance tweaks in Firefox 2.0

Since FasterFox doesn't work with Firefox 2.0, here's a brief recap of common performance tweaks to use on the latest greatest Firefox:

• network.http.pipelining = true

optionally set network.http.proxy.pipelining = true, if you use a proxy and it supports HTTP/1.1 pipelining. More details are in the HTTP/1.1 Pipelining FAQ.

• network.http.pipelining.maxrequests = 8

8 is a good start, bumping this higher may cause some webservers to throttle your connections down or deny access.

I'm still tracking down about:config options for 2.0, since a lot of the previous ones from 1.0 or 1.5 have gone away or have been replaced by better default values.

Also see the Lifehacker Top Firefox 2 config tweaks for more good stuff.

Working in Iraq

One of my friends from college just went back to Iraq. He had served one tour previously in the Army, was wounded after being attacked while on guard duty, came back to the States for a while, and now he's back in the Sunni Triangle, embedded with an Iraqi battalion, providing training.

The one thing he's asking for in care packages is Strawberry Pop Tarts (frosted or non-frosted).

Ubuntu DapperDrake -> EdgyEft Upgrade

So I upgraded from Ubuntu DapperDrake (6.06) to EdgyEft (6.10) on my Dell Latitude D810 yesterday.

It wasn't too bad - I followed the instructions on the release notes:

gksu "update-manager -c"

That failed after running into the immutable flags I had set on the /etc/rcS.d directory and the /etc/init.d/cryptdisks script (chattr +i /etc/rcS.d, chattr +i /etc/init.d/cryptdisks). Whoops. Turned those off (chattr -i /etc/rcS.d, chattr -i /etc/init.d/cryptdisks), then ran apt-get dist-upgrade a few times. I had to do a manual apt-get install of the remaining python packages that were left over.

Time to reboot.

Cryptdisks wouldn't accept input on console during boot and didn't mount my encrypted volumes. Hmmm.

So I googled and found Bug 62751, edited the /lib/cryptsetup/cryptdisks.functions script, commented out these lines:

#if [ "${stdin#/dev/null}" != "$stdin" ]; then
#    exec /dev/console 2>&1
#fi

and pasted in these lines instead:

if [ "${stdin#/dev/null}" != "$stdin" ] && [ "$ON_VT" != "yes" ]; then
    exec env ON_VT=yes /usr/bin/openvt -f -c `fgconsole` -w $0 "$@"
fi

Rebooted, now can enter password, but it shows on the screen. Rrrrgh.

Edited /boot/grub/menu.lst to remove "splash" from # defoptions, ran update-grub, rebooted.

Now it works, and doesn't show the password entered on the screen.

Tried putting in a GRUB splash screen (following instructions from Unofficial Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) Starter Guide), it comes up but for some reason the selection highlight in the GRUB menu disappears. Makes it kinda hard to figure out what to boot.

So I took that back out after booting into my Dell utility partition and into single-user mode on the -386 kernel.

Upstart runs really really really fast. Wow. I always spend some effort on any OS trying to reduce boot times (disabling unnecessary services, pulling out unneeded components, symlink /bin/sh to dash instead of bash, recompile the kernel and remove all the crap I never use, play with InitNG or runit) but this is impressive.

Oh wait, for some reason I'm getting this error: Xlib: extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display ":0.0".

Turns out EdgyEft turns on the X Composite extension by default, and this horks up the ATI binary fglrx driver. fglrxinfo was showing the Mesa OpenGL implementation (software) instead of the ATI driver (hardware). Yuck.

Thanks to Felipe Alfaro Solana, I figured out that I needed to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and append:

Section "Extensions"
        Option "Composite" "false"
EndSection

Then log out, restart GDM (CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE; or CTRL-ALT-F1 to switch to tty1, log in, run /etc/init.d/gdm restart), log back in, and run fglrxinfo:

display: :0.0  screen: 0
OpenGL vendor string: ATI Technologies Inc.
OpenGL renderer string: MOBILITY RADEON X600 Generic
OpenGL version string: 2.0.6011 (8.28.8)

w00t!

I'm pretty happy with it. Looks nice, especially after grabbing some cool GDM themes and backgrounds from GNOME-Look.org. Had to poke around a bit to see where to twiggle off the mauve background that pops up when GDM starts (matches the Human theme, but not much else) - it's around lines 416-417 in /etc/gdm/gdm.conf, #dab082 by default, which I switched to #000000. Any color you want, so long as it's black.

So far I like Firefox 2.0 as well. It takes a little adjustment to have the close-this-tab [X] button on the right side of each tab, rather than on the far-right of the tab list, but hey, whatever. More like Konqueror I guess. And you can switch back to the old tab close buttons by setting `browser.tabs.closeButtons = 3` in about:config. The automatic session restoration is nice, especially if you're playing around with Xgl/Compiz and Beryl crashes on you unexpectedly.