nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Detroit Zoo

February 7, 2005


Click for more…

Yesterday I woke up earlyish (for a Sunday) and headed out to the Detroit Zoo. I hadn’t been there since 1995, so I figured it was time for a visit. That, and I wanted a chance to use my new camera. I would really like to get a good feel for it before I go on a more lengthy vacation. Taking a bunch of crappy photos wouldn’t be much fun, nor would not having a good grasp on how to properly handle the camera.

So, if you click the picture above or this link you can check out the whole photo gallery from that trip. Most of the photos aren’t so great, but some came out pretty well, I think. After picking through, I ended up with 167 total images.

The photos which I find notable for either their quality and/or content include:

· Tiger
· A Seeing Eye Dog puppy playing with the otters: 1 – 2
· Snow Monkeys fighting over a stick
· Baby Elephant Sculpture
· Wanda, one of the two elephants to be moved to Columbus
· Giraffes visiting
· An Ass (I think)

moved from livejournaloutdoors

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…

computerselectronicsmoved 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.

computersmoved from livejournalnuxx.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!

computersmoved 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?

computersmoved from livejournal

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?

computersmoved from livejournal

..//..

February 3, 2005

So there’s this coffee shop on the way to work, right in Utica, called The Daily Grind. All over the store and it’s cups I see this “Coffee For Independent Thinkers” logo, so I decided to look into it. Well, it seems that this is the branding of CrimsonCup, a distributor specifically designed to work wtih independent coffee shops. Well, that’s good… The first coffee place to open directly on my way to work happens to be independently owned. Not bad.

It’s interesting, I live in Shelby Township and I have to go at least 3/4 of a mile out of my way to get to any of the (numerous) Starbucks. Thusly, I’d almost never go.

foodmoved from livejournal

:D

February 2, 2005

Ahh, nothing like a good old February car wash to brighting the spirits. There is something I rather enjoy about sitting in the self-serve car wash bay all bundled up, spritzing the wheels with Simple Green (it does a great job on brake dust when it’s too cold to scrub), soaping the car up with the brush, then cleaning it off with the pressure washer. Sure, it doesn’t look as great as it would in the summer, but at least all the salt and such is off…

…for a few days, at least.

automotivemoved from livejournal

Winter Morning in Michigan

February 2, 2005

[Crossposted to and .]


Click for full resolution…

While this wasn’t taken with a dSLR, I figured some people might be interested in it. This was taken Monday morning, just out in front of my condo, showing a nice February morning in Michigan. The density of ice fog just amazes me, and with the sun just barely up, everything had a wonderful blue glow to it.

For what it’s worth, this was taken with a Nikon Coolpix 5400 and hand held. I wish I’d gotten more shots that morning, but I’ve only got the piece of demo CF that came with the camera. With any luck the new 1GB piece will be here tomorrow. I should have had it sooner, but Amazon delayed half of the order… < grumble > Fortunately ZipZoomFly has the same Lexar Professional 80x 1GB pieces for $100, with free second-day FedEx.

moved from livejournalweather