Technology Archive

4/22

Posted April 22, 2011 By Landis V

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/04/22/165217/How-People-Broadcast-Their-Locations-Without-Meaning-To?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot+%28Slashdot%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Companies are like evolving living organisms.  Think of the dotcoms – they are the genetic offspring of business and the internet – two different families in the genetic hierarchy of “things”. They areimpacted by their environment (which businesses and the Internet are also kind of a part of… maybe not entirely unlike nature/nurture), but also by microorganisms like employees.  Employees certainly represent the cells and systems of the business organism, but also viruses that impact the development of the organism.  That may lead to the collapse (“extinction”?) of certain types of, or even individual businesses, as viral organisms overtake them and make them unfit for survival in their environment.  Interesting train of thought, could easily develop into an entire post of its own.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1037918 and to a lesser/secondary extent http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1041077 Fascinate ROMs on Mesmerize.  Radio improvements.  Better 3G speeds, faster GPS lock?

Well done Nokia “Your decision to partner with Microsoft is as sage and wise as allowing your balls to be shaved by a mental patient.” DrXym (126579), /. Comment #35906170

Olympic National Park

http://www.static-cisco.com/assets/sol/ent/cin/technology_pcast.xml Need to read up on how to properly do podcast, look to see if there are any good android apps to auto-download and arrange, and find my tunecaster.

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4/20

Posted April 20, 2011 By Landis V

http://www.google.com/mapmaker/pulse

Dwarf Fortress – game

http://numericalmethods.eng.usf.edu/ splines

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4/15

Posted April 15, 2011 By Landis V

http://www.politicsforum.org/images/flame_warriors/index.php

Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin

n2h2p on sourceforge – finally, a way to convert a proxy to allow URL filtering on Cisco routers.

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4/7

Posted April 7, 2011 By Landis V

Thoughts on changing passwords daily (possibly multiple times daily) on any non-personally owned systems. There are a couple of potential pluses for this thought: if your password is ever compromised, or if it is subpoena’ed for any purpose, it has likely already changed by the time an attempt is made on the account. Cons: incredibly unwieldy to manage for multiple or all accounts; would have to be managed by an automated process on a personally owned system, with a method to sync/provide the updated password to end user in real time; providers might see as suspicious; tracking what characters are allowed in passwords for what providers; managing password resets if required (and syncing back to the changer controller, as it would have to know a changed password in order to be able to update it).

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

http://www.aviary.com/ – like an online Photoshop

http://designfestival.com/the-cicada-principle-and-why-it-matters-to-web-designers/and the related previous article on CSS seamless tiles.

“But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules l surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; If I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am responsible for everything I do.” (“The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”, 1966) Heinlein?

http://dev.pulsed.net/wp/ Interesting projects.

http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Great story

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AT&T DSL cap

Posted March 18, 2011 By Landis V

Saw a note from dslreports.com (http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Exclusive-ATT-To-Impose-150GB-DSL-Cap-Overages-113149) that AT&T will be capping DSL at 150GB and U-Verse service at 250GB, with a $10/50GB overage charge.  I generally hate metered services, but if they are up front about it, their caps and overage charges seem relatively reasonable to me based on the little I know of them (the article is the extent of my knowledge).

Assuming you have the highest bandwidth DSL package currently offered by AT&T that I am aware of – 6Mb download – your maximum possible consumption in a month comes out at just under 2TB, assuming you are both very close to the CO or RT and that you download continuously at 6Mb (that’s bits, not bytes) 24×7 for your average 30-day month.  My formula for that was 6/8 * 3600 * 24 * 30.  Obviously, at that rate you would be paying some hefty overage.

This is a departure from the norm for me to say this is a reasonable offering, and indeed I would probably prefer to see them simply rate-limit connections that exceed their monthly allotment (or at least provide that as an option) instead of just tacking on surcharges.  As it stands currently, I see this plan as generally fair, but it’s hard to say definitively until we see how it’s really implemented.

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Android – moving to AOSP from PnP

Posted March 17, 2011 By Landis V

Good link describing CWM Red and how to load:

http://forum.androidcentral.com/verizon-fascinate-rooting-roms-hacks/66202-how-install-use-clockworkmod-recovery-w-screen-captures.html

Link to AOSP v0.9 with instructions:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=995220

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Much going on

Posted March 11, 2011 By Landis V

My world is eventful at present, and it seems to be preventing me from properly accomplishing much of anything.  Last Saturday my wife and I got new cell phones, finally extricating ourselves from Verizon (don’t get me started…). US Cellular has done well for us thus far – my wife has already had a support issue, and it was handled to resolution in a courteous manner.  My experience with Verizon was always courteous, but never resolved.  As part of this, I finally have an Android phone – very exciting, and I am enjoying it a great deal.  I have loaded the Froyo pre-release ROM, and it’s doing fairly well.  Haven’t had enough time to really play in detail (phone is the Samsung Mesmerize… another good reason to get away from Verizon; no locked down, eFuse Moto’s here :)).  Was hoping to port my old Verizon number to my Google Voice account since they are now allowing porting of mobile numbers, but it appears that BFE Nebraska is not on their list of locations which they can support porting from.  So, I will have to see if US Cell can port it to my new phone post hoc.  Wish me luck :/.

Have also been trying to get the WordPress app for Android to work with my blog, but that doesn’t seem to be happening just yet.  Had some issues with the client on my BlackBerry as well, so I think the finger currently points at the hosting provider configuration and not the phone(s).  Will work on that when (if?) I get the time.  Will also get back to my experimentation and testing of LxC’s hopefully sooner than later.  However, with my wife in Chicago from Saturday through Monday and myself on parent duty, it will probably be later rather than sooner.

Did experiment a little bit with the live disc for Clonezilla recently.  Acquired a bunch of systems, some of which will be finding new homes as soon as I can get them finished.  For the handful that came with drives, I had built a Windows image on one of them and tested replicating it to others.   Since the systems were all of similar-to-near-identical configuration, imaging was surprisingly fantastic and generally fast.  Imaging to a test VirtualBox on my daily driver Ubuntu box didn’t work quite as well, but I suspect there were a number of factors impacting that including 32-vs-64-bit processor config.  Again, something to worry about later since the actual PCs did great.  Kudos to Clonezilla on that one.

Have been looking at some of the descendants of FreeS/WAN recently, specifically StrongSwan (don’t bite me on the case tonight, I’m friggin’ tired!).  Looks neat, and I was hopeful to get a chance to run a test drive with it.  Don’t think that will actually happen unless I can somehow get it done tomorrow night (yeah, right).  May perhaps do so at home if I get the time.  It has pushed me to a somewhat better understanding of IPSec (I think), especially Main Mode vs Quick Mode.  I will continue to look at it and hope to at least make it work in a lab environment in case I ever have need of it in the future.  My current direction, as a result of tight time constraints, is probably going to be the ASR series of Cisco routers if their licensing proves tolerable, and something in the 7206 G2/VSA category if not.  I’m hearing 1.8Gbps throughput on those boys at the low end (though I assume that’s with 1400 byte packets, it’s still quite something).

Anyway, have to call it for tonight and work on some POs.  Just really needed to get some of what was going on out of my head and down on “paper”.  There is something at least mildly therapeutic about writing 🙂

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