Extreme geekiness
There are 700 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 48 of 70).
So I’ve got a few things going on between my home life, my work, and the various boards I serve on. I would never know where I was supposed to be without a decent calendar.
I’ve been using Google Calendar for most of my events and it works well for that. However, I want to keep a separate calendar for the East CAC that members can subscribe to. This can be done through the setting up of a CalDAV, ical, or WCAP-based calendar server.
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Amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley of Australia discovered Sunday that Jupiter had a close encounter with a massive object, one that left a “scar” the size of Earth on the planet. That must have been one heck of a big rock!
(Also notable is that Anthony imaged this using a Linux app called Coriander. Go open source!)
one giant leap for mankind. Happy 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing!
A rather inane AP story ran today, questioning whether the romance of space has worn off of Americans. While reporter Ted Anthony’s answer measuring pop culture impact isn’t the way I would gauge interest, the question does bear asking.
I think America had big plans for our space program and those plans were never fulfilled. Sure, the first moon landing was a momentous occasion but humans last visited the moon December 1972. While that was exciting while it lasted, it didn’t continue. We cheered the astronauts’ successes and dreamed of getting our chance.
We’ve had the pioneers. Now when do the settlers get to go?
What we had in the meantime was the space shuttle. The shuttle’s appeals to us as it looks like a plane, and in our minds we hold out hope that spaceflight is as simple as hopping a plane. Even then, the shuttle is nothing more than a 4 billion dollar dump truck, unable to rise above low-earth orbit. It’s space on training wheels. Woo hoo.
If spaceflight is to be exciting again, people need to be able to see themselves as astronauts. In the last 40 years, the closest the general populace has gotten to spaceflight has been private enterprise, with the development of Spaceship One. With that milestone achieved, armchair astronauts could revive their dream. For the vast majority of us, though, spaceflight will remain just a dream, and a dream that can never be fulfilled tends to lose its appeal.
I was invited today to tour the City of Wilson’s Greenlight municipal Internet system, so I took the day off and jumped at the chance. I’d helped win the latest battle against the anti-municipal broadband bill and the folks at the City of Wilson wanted to offer a tour to show their appreciation.
I arrived a little after 10 and met Brian Bowman, Public Affairs Manager with the city. He took me around the office and introduced me to other staffers (as a “famous blogger”…ha!) before giving me a ride out to the Greenlight offices in the city’s maintenance services building.
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I was geeking out a bit while I was cleaning this morning, thinking about how wonderful journaling filesystems are. My computers here at home occasionally lose power and crash, yet their filesystems almost always repair themselves.
Back in the Ancient History days, dropping power on a DOS and Windows 3.x box meant almost certain file corruption. That changed when Microsoft’s Windows 2000 added journaling to the NTFS v3.0 filesystem, and from that point on most every filesystem had a journal. (NTFS wasn’t the first journaling filesystem, but the first one for the masses. I believe the first was IBM’s JFS, released for AIX in 1990 and then for OS/2 Warp Server in April 1999.)
Now with improved manufacturing techniques and journaled filesystems, filesystems seem to last until the drive itself wears out. So now you whippersnappers know how good you’ve really got it!
I’ve discovered a few more swarm streamers for broadcasting multimedia to potentially millions of viewers: Coolstream, PPLive, and SopCast.
SopCast seems promising as it has a contributed Linux interface for the SopCast player, called (duh) sopcast-player. I’m still trying to figure out how to “broadcast” with this system, whether from Linux or Windows.
Coolstream looks interesting but not yet fully-baked. The website keeps insisting I log in, and none of the supposedly-active video streams appear to be working for me.
PPLive appears to have active users, but the channels using it as listed on the PPLive iKan site are all in Chinese. The other channel listing site, PP.tv, is also in Chinese. Clicking around seems promising but it’s hard to know what I’m looking at. And some of the clips seem to be blocked here.
There’s another service called TV Ants but the company’s website isn’t coming up for me. That is one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a channel with one of these groups. In order for any of this to work, you need to have at least one server to help seed the stream. If the company hosting your channel goes out of business then all of the channels that company hosts vanish as well.
Officials are blaming North Korea for the recent cyber attacks against U.S. and South Korean government websites.
Yeah, right. Have you checked out North Korea lately? While South Korea has some of the fastest home Internet connections in the world, North Korea has … well, maybe a 56k dialup connection? Broadband companies aren’t exactly falling over themselves to offer service there and I can imagine that the quirky communist government isn’t exactly encouraging it, either.
I know Kim II Jong is a movie buff but I’m betting money he isn’t exactly streaming his shows from Netflix!
Some of the neighborhood email lists I run over at www.eastraleigh.org were getting attacked by spammers. I don’t really want to lock the lists down as some of them need to be accessible to folks not on the list. I also didn’t want to run something like ASSP because while it’s good, it’s written in perl and also a memory hog. That’s when I looked into what Postfix can do on its own.
Almost all of the spam sent to the lists have fake SMTP HELO statements. Thus, the following two lines added to the bottom of /etc/postfix/main.cf made Postfix very effective against spam:
smtpd_require_hello = yes
smtpd_helo_restrictions = reject_invalid_hostname,reject_unknown_hostname
Problem solved!
Jay Ovittore has been following the broadband backwater fight and reports that the N.C. Senate version of the bill, S.1004 was gutted yesterday.
Says Jay:
S1004 will be in the Public Utilities Committee tomorrow and for the first time I don’t have to worry about it. The Senate used a procedural rule to gut the bill and replace all text with new text that allows Progress Energy to convert some of it’s Coal fired plants to Natural Gas.
The is not a mere mention of cable, municipalities, Time Warner, none of it.
HB1252 is still alive and I will track it as always.
For now we can all claim another victory against Big Cable!
Fantastic news.
