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Category: computers

Car-Based Data Tank

Published August 8, 2008

I look forward to Wireless USB becoming a reality because then I can easily put some sort of large flash-based device in my car, powered from the car, and use it for backups. As my car is generally where I am I think that it would be reasonable to use such a device for backing up personal financial data and other things like that.

Sure, I’ll have to incorporate some manner of both encrypting the communication and the data on the disk, but that shouldn’t be too difficult.

It’d be interesting to try it now via Bluetooth, but it’d make the availability as a disk volume (for easy backups) a bit more complicated.

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How To Make an iPhone 3G Fail

Published July 20, 2008

A iPhone 3G at the Apple Store rebooting after I managed to crash it by viewing a 7MB JPEG.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been contemplating an iPhone 3G as a replacement for my aging (and failing) Nokia 6600. Today I went by the Apple store at the local outdoor mall†, Partridge Creek to spend some time playing with one. Unfortunately, I crashed it hard once and made the UI slow horribly another time. I also ran into one other potentially show stopping bug.

First, 3G was a lot slower than local wireless. When using 802.11 things zipped along nicely, but 3G was still wholly acceptable on both web pages and maps. I think it’d be just fine for mobile use.

I then wanted to try to see how it renders my personal site, including my photo gallery, so I loaded up a few things. Everything worked great, except for when I’d try and visit a full size image in the gallery, then the image wouldn’t display. For example, take this page. It worked great, except that large image of the P3 case just simply wouldn’t display.

Thinking that maybe the iPhone had problems with large images I then browsed to https://nuxx.net/images and tried to view this image. While downloading and rendering it (via 802.11) the phone got really slow, the volume buttons and ringer switch stopped responding, and then phone laggedly noticed that I’d turned it sideways. The whole phone was very slow, and after four or five minutes of being nearly unresponsive it gave up. The phone was displaying partially downloaded image and half-heartedly rotated screen (it must have noticed that I’d been moving the phone around) when it went blank and rebooted, displaying the screen shown above.

After the phone rebooted I made a point of disabling 3G, thinking that maybe the phone was somehow failing over to it and just let it go with 802.11. (This is done by turning on airplane mode, then turning WiFi on.)

The image was then able to load and display, although it took quite a bit of time. I can’t help but think that the iPhone just isn’t set up to deal with / display images of this size. With how popular digital photography and things like Flickr in particular are, I’d hope that Apple would have found a way to deal with it. Wanting to break things further I loaded up this 9.7MB JPEG panorama of a part of the USAF Museum at Wright-Patterson. This too caused the iPhone 3G to lag horribly and the UI to become unresponsive, but eventually (after maybe four minutes) it acquired the image and displayed it. This time the phone didn’t crash.

While I can understand that a mobile device might not be able to handle images of this size, I think there should be something in place to ensure that the end user experience doesn’t turn to crap. Also, I really don’t like how the image in my gallery silently failed to display.

† Speaking of outdoor malls in Michigan, check out the map of Twelve Mile Crossing at Fountain Walk, aka The Fountain walk, in Novi. See all the empty space? I don’t know what developer could possibly think that an outdoor mall in a state with Michigan’s drawn out, harsh winter and frequently rainy summers is a good idea.

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PSA: Wipe Your Computers

Published July 14, 2008

Censored screenshot of bank info found on a computer I found.

This is just a friendly reminder that before throwing out a computer you should wipe the hard drive, lest people find things like this. Yes, I added the black blocks.

I acquired a computer today, and when checking it over found this. There were also some credit card transaction screens (I think maybe the owner had been saving these or something) and family photos, but not much else obvious. I think the owner had attempted to clean it with some antispyware tools and by uninstalling things, but there still were plenty of traces left. I didn’t dig too deep before beginning to wipe it.

So, what should you do when disposing of a computer and/or hard drive? Use a (relatively) simple utility like Darik’s Boot and Nuke to give the hard drive a few wipes before putting it to the curb or giving it away. Or just do what I did last time I had to dispose of some tapes and hard drives.

Anyone want a few year old Duron system? It seems to work…

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Smart UPS 1400

Published June 27, 2008

Old Yuasa batteries from my Smart UPS 1400 and the new Rhino version (part SLA-17-12 from Rage Battery) which will replace them. Also shown are the cables, fuse, and fasteners.

This post is being brought to you by a bit of energy supplied by new batteries which were just installed in the old Smart UPS 1400 in my office.

On Wednesday evening I ordered two new batteries from Rage Battery, part number SLA-17-12, which are direct replacements for the cells in the OEM Smart UPS 1400 battery. They were delivered today, so I used the parts from the old pack (bus, fuse, screws, nuts, harness) to build them into a replacement pack which I then stuffed that back into the UPS housing. After a brief test it’s now all sitting back on the rack, charging, smoothing power, and waiting to protect things at the next power glitch.

Thankfully the replacement TiVo HD was delivered today as well, so I think I’ll go put that into place while Danielle cooks dinner.

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Clean, Clean Feet

Published June 26, 2008

There is something surprisingly satisfying about washing one’s feet (and thus hands) after working a bunch.

After another very sleepy class today I stopped at Sears and picked up a small scale (inch pounds) torque wrench (the same as borrowed earlier) along with some bits. I then cleaned up parts from my bike a bit, confirmed the torque on parts like the cranks, hand grips, and a few other things. Come Monday (I believe) I’ll be able to reassemble it with the new wheels and brakes, and the torque wrench should make it lots easier.

Sweeping, cleaning, and lots of wandering around had turned the bottoms of my feet deep gray, so it was into the bath tub to wash them off. They feel really nice now.

I think now I’ll run out to Sears and return the bits, as is going to facilitate my acquisition of an adapter which will make them useless. Then I’ll grab some food, come back here, and probably start reading the Official (ISC)²® Guide to the CISSP® CBK® which I received in class today. I strongly suspect it’ll be more useful than the training materials I’ve been given thus far.

For what it’s worth, I’m taking the New Horizons Training for CISSP Certification. It isn’t a formal CISSP class and I’m finding it a bit strange. The instructor seems okay, but he’s living up to the stereotypes of someone who would teach an “ethical hacking” class, which he does. It’s a bit bothersome, particularly in the way which he’s made some direct, but inaccurate statements about technical issues. For example: no matter what it’s always possible to hack into a service listening on a port, DSL uses the unused phone wires coming into your house, an SMTP packet won’t contain a TCP header, and a few other things which I’ve forgotten.

The class is very pointedly designed to teach only the things known to be on the test. I would prefer a much faster paced class, but I think it’ll be useful as I’m now feeling reasonably confidant that I can pass the CISSP exam. I guess it’s a good thing I’ve worked doing what I do at EDS for so long; it means I have the paper / job qualifications to get the cert too.

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How To Use Consolas with cmd.exe

Published June 19, 2008

Consolas in cmd.exe.

Back in January I mentioned that I have switched to Consolas as my preferred monospaced font for on-screen work. As part of this I switched cmd.exe to using it as well, but doing so was not a trivial matter. If you wish to do so, here’s how in a couple of nice, easy steps:

1) Get a copy of Consolas. You can either get it here direct from Microsoft, or I also have a copy of just the .ttf files here.
2) Add the fonts to the machine by dragging and dropping them into %WINDIR%\Fonts (eg: c:\windows\fonts) or add them using the Fonts applet in Control Panel.
3) Add a string value called 00 with a value of Consolas to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Console\TrueTypeFont. Importing this .reg file will do this for you.
4) Start up cmd.exe and you’ll now be able to change the font to Consolas. I suggest saving the changed properties for future use.
5) Note that despite changing the selected font at this time, it does not actually change in the window. You must now reboot the computer (not just log out, but actually reboot) and then log back in.
6) Fire up cmd.exe and you’ll see that the font being used is now Consolas, as shown above.

Note that the window shown above has the font size set to 14 point. For what it’s worth, I run the console on my laptop (with a 1400×1050 display) at 14 point, with a window width of 150 characters and height of 70 characters, as can be seen here.

I also use Consolas in PuTTY running at 11 point, 80 columns and 50 rows and in Notepad++, also at 11 point.

One last thing to remember is that this font was designed to be used with ClearType, Microsoft’s implementation of subpixel rendering. Without this it’ll look like poop.

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Download Tools

Published June 11, 2008

You all know those shiny download tools which open loads of connections on a file to try and get it quicker? Those are crappy and put lots of unneeded load on servers. Here’s an example:

I host this simple page for a friend of mine in the UK for when he needs US-based hosting or some place high speed to distribute files from. As part of this he hosts the animations found on this page, which overall aren’t very big. However, someone in Thailand (125.24.191.195) is deciding to get them as quickly as possible using some stupid download tool.

What I see is that the workload on the httpd is at ~277, up from it’s typical of 2 or 3. netstat shows lots and lots and lots of connections (currently 276) from that box, all of them established.

The http log currently shows 9291 these:

125.24.191.195 rowla.dyndns.org - [11/Jun/2008:16:58:34 -0400] "GET /justin/img/piston_std4.mpg HTTP/1.1" 200 32768 "http://www.wis.co.uk/justin/deltic-engine.html" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.00; Windows 98)"

Load on the box itself is .23, which is tolerable, so I’ll probably let this continue. If it’s still going at midnight I’ll take some action, but for now it’s just a bit of irritation. Yes, I know I could limit connections on a per-IP basis, but I prefer not to do this unless it’s actually a problem. If I do need to block that IP, I’ll probably just fail to return anything on that vhost to that netblock. Hopefully they’ll finish getting their file sooner than that.

If you’d like to see it, here’s the current netstat: netstat_11jun2008_1.txt
Here’s a capture of a minute or so of 45 seconds of traffic with that address. Note that each GET results in a whole conversation of only 10k or so: 11jun2008_weird_1.cap.gz

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SiI3124 Not Working… Right

Published May 5, 2008

Top view of the Koutech PSA421 on the antistatic bag. It has four internal single lane SATA ports.

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday today. You all made me smile lots. (Yes, I do share a birthday with Karl Marx, and yes, I am now 30.)

I received the SiI3124-based disk controller mentioned earlier, but it didn’t wish me a happy birthday. In fact, it just didn’t work as I hoped. For some reason its on-board option ROM isn’t starting up when the rest of the computer does, so it’s not initializing the disks and making the main BIOS aware of their existence. This prevents me from booting off of them. FreeBSD can talk to the disks on it just fine, but without the BIOS it’s not useful to me.

When I tried the card in my MAME cabinet and it works fine there, so I think something like the following is occurring: The on-board SATA / RAID controller is a SiI3114, and when I disable this via the BIOS, perhaps this somehow disables the SiI3124? Or, perhaps when the controller is enabled, the option ROM from one is interfering with the other? After all, the SiI3114 BIOS still loads and displays. I did also try changing the PCI enumeration order and tried the cards in other PCI-X slots and the lone PCI slot, and none of that produced positive results. The SiI3114 always enumerates first (or not at all?).

As a test I put a classic Adaptec AHA-2940UW (can you believe this card is more than 10 years old at this point?) card in the box and its option ROM displayed just fine. So, the motherboard seems to handle disk controllers in slots, just not this one.

Instead of the SiI3124-based card I really would like a 3ware 9550SXU-4LP, but its $319.99 price tag is a bit hard to stomach. Maybe I’ll just return the card and stick with the onboard controller and software RAID.

Oh, and if you want to see them, there are more photos of the Koutech PSA421 in banstyle.nuxx.net here on page 3 of my gallery.

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Southern Tier’s Back Burner

Published April 29, 2008

Souther Tier's Back Burner Barley Wine poured into a glass.

Things have been a bit boring around here lately, with me working at my job, working on the new server, riding my bike, and trying to relax a bit, so I just thought I’d post this photo of Souther Tier‘s Back Burner, a decent (and quite hoppy) barleywine which I drank while watching The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Danielle on Sunday night.

Today I got GEOM-based disk mirroring working on banstyle.nuxx.net, but in doing so I realized that the on-board SiI3114 controller only supports SATA/150 (aka SATA I) and thusly no NCQ, which disappointed me. To remedy this I ordered part number N82E16816104007 from Newegg.com, a Koutech PSA421 4-Channel Serial ATA & Serial ATA II 64-bit PCI Host Controller which appears to be a reference (or very standard) implementation of the SiI3124 PCI/PCI-X to 4 Port SATA300 chipset. This should fit in the one usable slot in the case and provide the SATA interface that I really want. I just wish it’d arrive sooner.

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