Tue, 25 Apr 2006
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
For all of you readers that have a UNIX type operating system on the public
Intenet with a real IP address, do this for a laugh. Install the
ngrep
package and run:
ngrep -q -t -d <your ethernet device> -W byline . not port 22
Then watch and wait. If you're lucky you should see lots of traffic on udp port
137 and 138. These are
Microsoft
NetBEUI ports. Some of which are
advertisements for various companies that sell "registry cleaning" software.
Hi-larious!
posted at: 11:32 | path:
/hacking |
permanent link to this entry
Tue, 18 Apr 2006
RIP Coretta Scott King
Coretta Scott
King has died, long after her husband,
Martin Luther
King Jr. was assasinated by
James Earl Ray.
I attended the same college she did, though I attended it 48 years later. She
wrote a
particularly glowing yet naive article of the college her first year.
If you are still here after reading that...
and you should definitely read
it...I must comment on the relevance of the essay to the education I got from
Antioch between 1996 and 2000. Private, progressive, co-educational and
co-operative. That pretty much sums it up. I wouldn't be where I am today if it
weren't for Antioch College. It taught me how to take a risk no matter the odds
and stick with it. It proved to me that "almost any young person in any
high school can work out a vocational training for himself during vacations
from school, if he sets himself to it."
But I would like to write about my years on co-op differently. The co-op program was not a
vacation. I still describe my undergraduate education to others as a year-round
curriculum. That "vocational training" was not done during vacations,
it was done during my studies at Antioch, which are four years of my life I
will never forget.
posted at: 01:06 | path:
/antioch |
permanent link to this entry
Getting Real by 37 Signals
A book recommended to me by a friend. The advertising has the bravado of a
dot com wanker but hey, I use basecamp and everyone I tell about it loves it
too. Maybe there's something to
this book?
posted at: 00:20 | path:
/power |
permanent link to this entry
Mon, 17 Apr 2006
Macbook Pro Booting Linux Live CDs
I booted a macbook pro with three different live CDs today. None worked. Here
the list and the fatal problem.
- Knoppix 3.6, linux26 boot parameter. Display goes black after loading
initrd
- Debian Sarge installation CD-R, linux26 boot parameter. Installer loads but
cannot find any installation target. In other words, there is no hard disk
driver in the initrd
- Linux-BBC, 2.4 kernel. Keyboard driver errors eventually eat up all IRQ
time and init gives up
So while frusturating, all these CDs were a bit out of date. I'm going to give
it another round after burning some more updated ones.
posted at: 14:21 | path:
/linux |
permanent link to this entry
Ipod Hammer
I modified the
mp32ogg script to do ogg->mp3 and renamed it "ipod hammer" since
I changed it quite a lot. This is useful, for example if you have a large
collection of riped music in ogg/vorbis format and would like to share it with
someone who only has an ipod. It's lossy, so sound quality is effected. It is
obviously a band-aid until Apple gets their head out of their ass and listens
to their customers who use a real open source codec.
Download it.
posted at: 13:46 | path:
/hacking |
permanent link to this entry
Linux Audio Users SIP Conference Room
I made a conference room for SIP telephones on my Asterisk server. You can
connect to it at this URI <sip:lau@ash.97montrose.org>. Need to talk? Invite
your friends!
posted at: 13:46 | path:
/linux |
permanent link to this entry
Thu, 06 Apr 2006
The Gumstix kit I pieced together arrived today. It...is...totally...awesome.
The platform is an Intel Xscale CPU at 400Mhz with 64 megs of RAM and 4 megs
flash storage. The size of this platform is literally the size of a stick of
old school chewing gum. Not that new school dentyne ice or even the old school
bubalicious, but the regular wrigley style. It weighs about the same too.
The platform comes with a fully functional Linux kernel with a lot of userland
programs on the 4 megs of flash. It leavs only 400K to spare. busybox and
dropbear are there for big binaries, some other stuff stands on it's own. The
kernel is based on the 2.6.11 source and has modules for only the chipsets on
the Gumstix expansion boards. A notable module is the prism2_cs driver for
compact flash wifi cards.
The I/O expansion boards I got combine to give the tiny platform an ethernet
network port, compact flash, USB 2.0, serial terminal and audio
playback/recording. Connecting the serial cabled to a desktop and powering on
the device worked and presented a login prompt for a bash shell. After about an
hour of messing with the software, I could load all the drivers for all the
I/O, download an mp3 file and play it back over headphones. A little while
later I got ambitious and piped an mp3 stream via wget to madplay and it played
back internet radio.
The built in software also has sshd and a web server (boa), both advertised via
zeroconf (aka Rendevous, aka Bonjour) for auto discovery. And to make it even
crazier, the company maintains patches for lots of other applications and
instructions on how to build a new root filesystem and reflash the device. Any
open source software that can compile for the ARM archetecture can run on this
thing.
It is totally awesome. I recommend everyone with about $260 to spare go get one
right now. Considering everything it does it's cheaper than most PDAs and
portable music devices.
posted at: 11:00 | path:
/embedded |
permanent link to this entry
Tue, 04 Apr 2006
This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb
I have a sticker on my bike which is the name of a small punk band from Florida
I discovered in college. Their name is This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb. Good stuff. I
ride my bike everywhere and no authority figure has ever confronted me about
the blatantly obvious fact that my bike is not
literally a pipe bomb.
This fact gives me a small amount of faith in the NYPD, Port Authority, MTA
Police, and United States National Guard.
If you have not lived in New York, the agencies I just mentioned have at one
point or another assumed the responsibility of guarding the city's trains, buses,
bridges and tunnels from terrorist bombings. I have rode public transport in
said trains, busses, bridges and tunnels with my bike and it's accompanying
sticker. This did not seem to alarm any of these agents.
Unfortunately, other states are not so fortunate. There appears to be an epidemic at Ohio University of people
labeling their pipe bombs built inside of bike frames with red stickers
describing the contents as indeed containing a pipe bomb. That is the only explaination for
what happened last
Friday.posted at: 19:58 | path:
/power |
permanent link to this entry
Windows XP Professional Corporate
I get tired of having these pieces of paper lying around that other people give
me. I don't run Windows! I don't know what they are used for! I'm writing this
number here so I don't have to keep this piece of paper around. I don't know
what it does or where it came from so don't use it for anything.
XP8BF-F8HPF-PY6BX-K24PJ-TWT6M
posted at: 11:10 | path:
/goofy |
permanent link to this entry
Mon, 03 Apr 2006
Today is brought to you by the word...
...
martinet.
Get your
word of the
day, each day!
posted at: 12:00 | path:
/pop |
permanent link to this entry
