I frequent the forums of a local LAN party called the OKGG. Recently, some have taken issue to the avatar of a certain forum admin. So I wrote a GM script to replace everyone’s avatar with the offending image.
Without further ado, here is the OKGG Poopifier.
You’ll need to save it as nimda.user.js , then drag it into your FireFox window to install it. My upload script butchered the extra period in the filename.
Enjoy the poop!
-LightningCrash
I was interested in reading an article on Slashdot about the world’s biggest SANs. That is, until I got to the site it was hosted on. Holy crap, guys, what the hell is that? I hate it when sites interrupt their contiguous textspace with crap like ads and related material. Stash that stuff outside of the text body, guys. Just look at it, in all its ugly glory:
I’m not saying I’m a design guru (you can tell that just by looking around here), but I won’t read articles on crappy layouts like this. Most of the width of the page is taken up by garbage.
Guess I won’t be reading their poop!
Until next time!
-LightningCrash
Call me blasphemous, but I still would rather have a Nokia N800 than an iPod Touch or an iPhone.
This article on TabletBlog puts the N800 and the iPod Touch head to head, and is extremely thorough, covering many different aspects of usage, performance, and capabilities. He even benchmarks throughput on the WiFi browser.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to annoy my coworkers now.
Until next time!
-LightningCrash
It looks like you will soon be able to acquire a 25-watt AMD Athlon64 3100+ in the AM2 package, per this article on Linuxdevices.com. This is great news for embedded applications, as the Geode was a poor performer even by old standards.
I think these CPUs will find huge value in custom DVR boxes. Sure, MPEG-4 acceleration is fine when you just want to record or watch TV, but what if you want to compress those recordings? A custom DVR with a 3100+ could run compression jobs when the tuner’s not active, giving you even more space on your DVR’s drive. Assuming a performance profile on par with the Athlon 64 3000+, it should be more than enough for XviD encoding. You won’t get any stellar x264 encode performance, but such is life for anyone who doesn’t have an overclocked 4-way box as their media center.
Now we just need a mini-ITX AM2 board that supports 4GB of RAM and firewire, and we’ll be set!
The Linksys WRT54G….is there anything it can’t do?
I already think it’s possible to control a CNC mill with a WRT54G, but apparently someone has used one to pilot a robot, and that is fantastic.
You can already build a temperature sensor into the WRT54G (or any 1-wire device, for that matter), as somebody else has demonstrated. I wish I was more EE inclined, I’d be all over tinkering with this.
I wonder what other crazy stuff you can do with a WRT54G….hmmm…..
Until next time!
-LightningCrash
Today when checking the page, I noticed that a few of my Digg buttons pointed not to Digg links for my site, but for bizlead or some nonsense. It seems to be pretty common, as a number of commenters on the story echoed the same story.
Is this some sort of XSS bug that’s being exploited? I don’t know. It will be interesting to see how it pans out, though. Maybe there are some DB problems on the Digg end.
Either way, I’ve deactivated the Digg button on my posts until further notice. This isn’t a big deal, as the wonderful SU users make up about 90% of my traffic anyway. Digg, not so much.
I’ll post more about this later when I figure out what’s going on.
Edit: looks like the offending Digg submission is gone. I’ll consider turning the digg button back on later.
Until next time!
-LightningCrash
Make sure you have ‘beep’ installed. Try it out by executing beep at the command prompt. If you don’t have it, just ‘sudo apt-get install beep’ and you’ll be on your way.
Now, open up a terminal, and paste this in:
while true; do sleep $(($RANDOM/1000)) && beep -f 2000 -l $(($RANDOM/100)) ; done
Lock your terminal and go to lunch. When you get back from lunch, just CTRL+C to stop the annoyance.
Until next time!
-LightningCrash
(No I’m not a BOFH….most of the time.)
Per this news article, it seems as though the next SCO-style legal fight could be over advertising, or more specifically, software that blocks ads from appearing.
What’s next, the AIAA sending you subpoenas because you run AdBlock Plus in Firefox? Rubbish. I think this will be a very short-lived legal fight indeed. It’s one thing to violate TOS for a website, it’s another to go after customers. We’ll see how this pans out.
Until next time!
-LightningCrash
smbpasswd -U username -r domaincontroller
It’s that easy.
So if you’re a Linux guy stuck in a Windows workplace, there’s your solution, no RDP/VNC/VMware/walking over to Windows box needed!
Until next time,
-LightningCrash
I wrote before about my experiments in Ubuntu boot times and mentioned doing a fresh install and just disabling the dhcp and network manager. I got a lot of good input and wanted to expand upon that.
Setup
My secondary workstation is a Dell GX270 with a 3.0GHz P4 processor, 1GB of RAM and a 40GB Seagate ST340014A hard drive. I blew away the existing install again, reinstalled Feisty with the default settings, specified my static IP, and updated via apt-get. The current kernel version is 2.6.20-16-generic i686.
Getting started
I installed bootchart via sudo apt-get install bootchart and rebooted. My boot time was 29 seconds.
My /etc/network/interfaces file again contained entries for eth1, eth2, ath0 and wlan0. I deleted all of these.
Again, the if-up, if-down, and pre and post-up had entries for wireless and avahi stuff i didn’t want, so I removed the following
sudo -s
rm /etc/network/if-down.d/avahi-autoipd
rm /etc/network/if-post-down.d/wireless-tools
rm /etc/network/if-pre-up.d/wireless-tools
rm /etc/network/if-up.d/avahi-autoipd
rm /etc/network/if-up.d/avahi-daemon
exit
I rebooted and checked my boot time again
I reprofiled my boot sequence, then rebooted: 23 seconds.
Sysv-rc-conf
At this point I installed and fired up sysv-rc-conf (sudo apt-get install sysv-rc-conf)
I disabled the following:
bluetooth
cupsys
hotkey-setup
hplip
powernowd
rsync
wpa-ifupdown
Boot time after removing the services: 22 seconds
At this point, bootchart seems to be limited by a few particular processes:
Disk-related:
khubd
scsi_eh 1
modprobe
rc
CPU Related:
udevd
ckbcomp
hald
Xorg
It looks like udevd is still loading wacom junk
sudo find /etc -name '*wacom*' -type f -delete
hehe, took care of that.
I also enabled concurrent shell scripts while I was at it.
Still at 22 seconds.
I cleaned up /etc/acpi, as there were a ton of modules loaded that I didn’t use: 22 seconds.
I installed prelinking and then rebooted: 22 seconds.
I blacklisted ipv6 and a handful of other modules that were loaded for no reason whatsoever: 22 seconds.
I reprofiled and rebooted: 20 seconds.
At this point it looks like readahead itself takes up about 5 seconds of uninterruptable I/O.
Now to try out some of the stuff that my readers posted.
mgarces said to try initNG. So I grabbed the deb files for initng and the initng ifiles from initng.org and did a dpkg -i initng*.deb
But it didn’t boot……so I googled and ran across this page. I followed the directions there and got it to boot. HAL is complaining and I don’t feel like troubleshooting it right now.
But wait, bootchart isn’t working either. Crap.
Oh, even better, eth0 didn’t come up.
sudo dpkg -r initng
sudo dpkg -r initng-ifiles
Bye-bye initng!
So I figured, why not play with the schedulers?
CFQ=22 seconds
deadline=23 seconds
noop=23 seconds
as=23 seconds
So, even now, nothing really helps.
Well, I’m really getting burned out, maybe there will be a part 3 for this sometime.
Until next time!
-LightningCrash