I have a screen shot from my latest A-life project which features a tile based environment that grows, and some little snails that crawl (only in one direction currently).
The johnleach.co.uk site (and all the other sites I host) has moved to our new server hosted at the very cool and expensive InTechnology in Harrogate. See trantor.org.uk.
“If [our encryption algorithm] is so bad, then how is it that [it] has now been acquired and is available for use in thousands of U.S. Government computers and even by more corporate users worldwide?” -Saul Backal, Ralph Lotkin, Meganet.
These guys are right. Instead of rigorous open analysis of crypto algorithms, we should just make a list of who have already bought it and make our decision based on that. We could do the same for choosing an OS.
I’ve added a page documenting and providing my patches to the RedHat AS OS. Check it out
The Debian ipsec-tools package doesn’t work properly with the Debian 2.4.21 kernel (you can’t specify “ipsec” as policy, it only recognises “discard” and “none”). Herbert Xu helped me out and I’ve rebuild the packages against the 2.4.21 kernel sources, and now it seems to work ok. I’ve made the packages available here.
I’ve been benchmarking EXT3 and ReiserFS on RAID 5 and RAID 10 (1+0). You can see my results so far online.
I’ve also been fiddling a bit more with OpenGL, but the vector maths are slowing me down at the moment.
I also bought an Xbox, which has slowed me down even further. It’s now chipped though so I’ll be fiddling with Linux on it. I love things with ethernet ports.
I’ve ported my Ethereal ELOG patch to the latest version (0.9.14) and fixed a bug handling pcap captured alerts. Created Debian debs for powerpc and i386. Matt is working on some RPMS for RedHat 9
RedHat’s latest change of support plans for RedHat Linux seems to be doing what was intended, getting more people to purchase Advanced Server (and the new Enterprise Server and Workstation) rather than leeching off them. Good for RedHat. There have been too many idiots selling RedHat Linux-based solutions expecting the coloured headgear company to do the hard work of beta testing, bug fixing etc.etc. for free.
I have greenfly crawling into the vents on my powerbook. This is because I am sat in the park and connected via wireless ethernet. My access point seems to waver in and and out of range, but a steady 30% signal seems to be maintained. With an external antennae on the house I could sit even further away. I’ll be fending the war-drivers off with sticks though. I need an EMP gun.
I’m back from my holiday in the Czech Republic.
I’ve rejigged my website a little to make it easier to see where things are on the front page.
I produced the web albums using Gthumb by Paolo Bacchilega. I need a little feature it seemed to lack (or a bug prevented it) so I wrote a patch to add it. This patch changed the behaviour of the Tools->Change Date tool. For each file that it changes the last modified date, it now also sets the comment date. You should be able to do this in Properties but a bug causes all images to be set with the first image’s date. I couldn’t see how to add this functionality there anyway. According to Paolo, this is now fixed in ver 2.1.3 so this patch is redundant.
Whale communications have invented something very secure, and very special. To the naked non-technical eye, their marketing material seems misleading and misguided, but this is the state of the art of security technology. It does some stuff to ensure undefined things do or do not happen.
Quote: “The patent-pending air gap switch keeps sensitive systems and data physically disconnected from untrusted networks and users, and transfers application-level data in real time. It is a high-speed, solid-state analog switch that connects a 512K memory bank to one SBC at a time via a SCSI interface. The air gap switch contains no Operating System, no TCP/IP address, no programmable units, all of which protects the appliance from being compromised. It hides internal addresses, preventing hackers’ mapping of internal network and any tunnelling threat. It protects confidential information such as private keys and configuration data by placing them behind the “air gap.”
It’ll also apparently cure all known ailments, gives you a full head of hair, and a long life free of pain.
Most 802.11g cards allow only Managed or Ad-Hoc modes. With the hostap Linux driver for Prism based wireless cards, the Master mode becomes available, allowing to run your own access point. I now have my central box (babaracus) as an access-point and the client laptops in Managed mode. This has severly increased throughput as I could usually only manage less than 1Mb but now can utilise the full 11. Using the userspace hostapd you can do clever things like Radius authentication and dynamic WEP keys, but I’ve not played with that yet. I’ve had a few problems (lock ups on an SMP and loss of clients after restarting the AP) but it’s early days yet.
I’ve setup and old Pentium 100 Toshiba laptop with a wireless card and Debian as a “dumb-ish X terminal” at home over my 802.11b wireless network. It works rather well and very quiet. My girlfriend now has all the wonders that RedHat 9 brings, without having to lug a big heavy expensive power-hungry laptop around the house. Up until now I’d had a hacky ssh remote session thing running, but now I use XDMCP (X -probe IP) to login directly using gdm listening on the central box. A firewall attempts to protect the XDMCP and X11 services, with minimal privacy provided by WEP. I’ll have IPSEC implemented soon enough though.
I’m also working on a fail over redundant MySQL cluster setup at the moment and hope to write a quick HOWTO on it, covering Heartbeat and MySQL 4’s replication system. I’ll announce it here as usual.
I’ve written up some example configs to get a Cisco PIX working with FreeS/WAN over IPSEC with a pre-shared key. I’ll probably do one with RSA keys soon too.
Apparently there is an endian-ness problem with the Radeon drivers on powerpc when in dual monitor mode. I’ve managed to get Michel Daenzer and Ben Herrenschmidt’s attention (with the help of Simon Urbanek) so hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.
I spilt pineapple juice on my PowerBook. It’s sticky now and the speaker clicks.
