Category: computers

Photo People…

February 7, 2005

Hmm, here’s a question. It seems that my new camera does a resolution that when resized to 25% of it’s original size, it’s 648 x 486. My gallery currently resizes photos to 640×480 for their normal, standard-viewing size.

I’m wondering if I should change it so that the photos are done at 648×486, because resizing to 25% original size could possibly produce a better resized image, as it’s exactly 4:1 instead of 4.05:1. I’d think that sampling exactly four pixels down into one would just be better and less likely to induce moire.

Thoughts?

Broadcom BCM95805

February 4, 2005

Okay, so I just won an auction for a Broadcom-based hardware crypto card. Since this is supported under FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE for accelerating crypto(4), ipsec(4), and random(4) operations, I’d like to do some benchmarking of it to see just how much it does speed things up. I’m thinking of the following for doing a before/after test of random(4):

bornslippy:~% dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=100
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
104857600 bytes transferred in 16.046981 secs (6534413 bytes/sec)
bornslippy:~%

I’m also looking at maybe using John the Ripper as john –test if I can determine if it actually uses crypto(9). I think that OpenSSL’s benchmark openssl test would be a good idea, because it will provide the ability to look at the effects of the card on OpenSSL, as I’m fairly certain that it does use crypto(9).

Does anyone have any other ideas as to what might be a good benchmark? I don’t think I can really test ipsec(4), but since I won’t be using it, I don’t think it’ll matter too much.

Hmm, I hope my understanding of how the driver registers itself and what it utilizes it is in line with reality…

computers electronics moved from livejournal

:::[—]:::

February 4, 2005

So after eating today’s lunch over at Somerset Mall (sorry, The Somerset Collection) we took a walk through the Apple store. Turns out they had a demo Airport Express for $99, so I picked it up for the living room. Not a bad deal, I don’t think, seeing as student price is $119. It’s a little scratched up, but it’ll be tucked behind the stereo, so that doesn’t matter.

Also, all my email has been moved in to nuxx.net and is being accessed via IMAP. I’m still trying to figure out a good mail client to be used from home. Squirrelmail isn’t bad for web-based stuff, but it has two problems. One is absolutely massive CPU utilization when opening a large mailbox, which may be tweakable by either adding an SSL accelerator to the box and/or a Squirrelmail setting to have it cache stuff. The second is that (as far as I’m aware) I can only send email through it using the account which I logged in with.

I’m also wondering if moving the mail to a database instead of the filesystem would make sense. This will be a more drastic change, though, so I’m not so certain I want to do it.

The last idea is to upgrade the mail server, but there’s no reason why a P2-500 (which is what bornslippy.nuxx.net is) can’t push big quantities of IMAP. I think the clients are a problem.

Oh, and yes, I’m looking into using mutt. That’s one of the things on my plate to get working today.

computers moved from livejournal nuxx.net

Yay SOCKS!

February 3, 2005

Well, I got the SOCKS thing figured out. It seems that current builds of Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird and IE (?!?!) don’t support doing name resolution on the remote side of a SOCKS proxy. They all try to resolve the name locally, then use SOCKS for the actual connection itself. That just does’t make sense to me. heh.

Anyway, after digging around online for a few hours I found a two-year Bugzilla thread which discusses this. It finally looks like it’s coming around. So, I grabbed the most recent Mozilla nightly and… What do you know… There’s a checkbox for the option and it works great. Whee!

computers moved from livejournal

SOCKS v5

February 3, 2005

Has anyone here had any luck making Firefox and/or Thunderbird work properly with a SOCKS proxy? I’ve got one running via PuTTY and it works great for AIM and SOCKScap. I can’t get the damn thing to work with IE, Firefox, or Thunderbird. It appears that the apps are attempting to do their name resolution locally, so they don’t know where to connect to…

Any ideas?

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Protected: !!!

February 3, 2005

computers moved from livejournal work

Mail Suggestion

February 3, 2005

[Crossposted to and .]

So, I need a suggestion…

See, I normally use a number of different email addresses to handle things like mailing lists, LJ, ebay, online ordering, etc. This works out great, as Mail.app (the Apple mail client I use) does a good job with multiple accounts.

Currently I use POP3 at home set to download the mail, and delete it 5 days later. When away from home I check mail with Squirrelmail, which uses IMAP. This setup allows me to access my last week of email remotely, with everything being available and archived at home.

I also will send email from these accounts, especially the admin one, my personal one, the lists one, and the ordering one.

I would like to switch everything around so I have a single IMAP account which I log into with both Squirrelmail and Mail.app. Inbound email will get forwarded to the IMAP account, then filtered into folders based on each account / mailing list / mail type / spam / whatever. This part is easy. Procmail seems to make this trivial.

Here’s where I’m running into a problem… From time to time I will need to send email using an account other than the main IMAP one.

Does anyone know of an easy way to do this? The only way I’ve had to do this in the past is to use Eudora and set up an account with only the outgoing address and SMTP server set. I don’t believe you can do this under Mail.app nor Thunderbird. So… Any other ideas?

computers moved from livejournal

BIND?

February 2, 2005

Does anyone who reads this have a preference for a web-based BIND administration tool? I’m kinda sick of editing zone files by hand.

computers moved from livejournal

ATI HDTV Component Adapter

January 11, 2005

Has anyone here ever tried one of these, the ATI HDTV Component Video Adapter, with their Mac. See, this device can adapt a DVI-I output to be component video out, but supposedly only with certain ATI cards.

Well, with the advent of the Mac mini, and relatively cheap bluetooth mice / keyboard bundles, I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this…

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Kernel Core Dumps

January 10, 2005

I hope someone here can help me out with this…

I’ve been reading through Apple TN2118: Kernel Core Dumps and it seems pretty straight forward. There is one thing I’m not quite getting, though. I can’t seem to find a way to make a machine panic and then dump core to the local disk. It only seems possible to dump to a remote machine running ‘macosxkdump’, not the local disk.

And, well, since I’ve only got one Mac at home, and macosxkdump hasn’t yet been ported to any other OSS platforms (an OpenBSD port would be stellar right about now), I’m kinda sunk.

Has anyone else done this, or come up with a way to get dumps to go to a local disk?

UPDATE: It appears that kdumpd from the network_cmds part of OpenDarwin is all that one needs to handle this. I’ve found postings online which say it’s trivial to port, but I don’t have the skill to do it. :( Would anyone else be up to this task?

computers moved from livejournal