Category: it could be called work

where once we worshipped speed, we now seek efficiency

Intel’s Huge Bet Turns Iffy

It turns out, Dr. Schmidt told the audience, that what matters most to the computer designers at Google is not speed but power

Interesting article for both the lessons being learned by Intel/HP nd the direction indicated by Google. Having spent some time in large colocation centers, I can see why power consumption and its associated costs would be an issue.

So while Intel publicly carries the Itanium standard, it also has a hedge bet in Yamhill to counter AMD’s transitional 32 -> 64 bit chips.

Be careful when you use VNC

Notice that you might void your Windows XP license by running a VNC server on XP:
“Except as otherwise permitted by the NetMeeting, Remote Assistance, and Remote Desktop features described below, you may not use the Product to permit any Device to use, access, display or run other executable software residing on the Workstation Computer, nor may you permit any Device to use, access, display, or run the Product or Product’s user interface, unless the Device has a separate license for the Product.”
(from: Microsoft Windows XP Pro EULA)

POLA violation?

since I upgraded the snmp daemon on one of my boxes a few days ago as part of a portupgrade run, snmpd hasn’t been running. It seems someone “improved” the rc script for snmpd to check in /etc/rc.conf for snmpd to be enabled.

case “$1” in
start)
case “${net_snmpd_enable}” in
[Yy][Ee][Ss])
echo -n ‘ snmpd starting’
${net_snmpd_program:-${PREFIX}/sbin/snmpd} ${net_snmpd_flags}
;;
esac

<grumble>

Turns out, the maintainer mentions this in pkg-message, but I’m not likely to see that when I upgrade a bunch of ports: perhaps some kind of email or logfile would be useful for changes like this.

<UPDATE> The maintainer suggested I look for “heads up” messages in the logfile, which makes sense except for the fact there isn’t one unless you specify it. So one more step to the process: export DATE=`date “+%m-%d-%Y”` && portupgrade -aP -l /var/tmp/portupgrade.log.$DATE

resolving IRQ conflicts in FreeBSD on a ThinkPad A20m

(The wordy title is to help make sure anyone who needs it can find it.)

I have not had working audio on this laptop since FreeBSD 4.6 was released (or at least since I upgraded to it). Turns out I had an IRQ conflict with the internal PCI bus: the sound chip/card and the network interface were trying to share IRQ 11 and if the card was inserted at boot time, the sound driver (pcm) never attached to the sound card. Bummer.

After many, many Google searches and a couple of queries to the freebsd-mobile list, I finally hit on something that unlocked the puzzle. I saw some notifications about the sound driver’s failure to attach: that led to a discussion of an IBM tool (called PS2.EXE) that allows you to rejigger how IRQs are assigned. In my case I wanted the PCI bus to pick from more than one, in hopes the different drivers would take take separate ones.

It worked.
Continue reading “resolving IRQ conflicts in FreeBSD on a ThinkPad A20m”

user agent of the day

Google Search: “Microsoft URL Control”

Microsoft URL Control 6.00.8169: what is it? and what does it want?

Early reports suggest it’s either hunting out unsecured formmail.cgi scripts (circa 1995) or looking for unsecured mail relays.

The version number (if that’s what it is) makes me wonder if it’s part of IE 6, remembering the offline browser feature that was in IE4 and the associated consternation it created.

the truth can hurt: here’s how much

How to Get Bad News to the Top

Sidebar: How to Be a Good Bearer of Bad News
Nothing’s tougher than confronting your boss with a bombshell: A project is way over cost or off schedule, or a key part of the business seems to be doctoring the data. You want to give the boss the heads up — without getting your head handed to you. Fast Company’s panel of experts has this advice.

My response to that is here.

Worse than NIMDA/Code Red?

Linux Worm Hits the Network

On Sunday evening, Slapper had been in circulation for less than 40 hours and had infected over 6,000 servers, according to Mikko Hypponen, manager of antivirus research at F-Secure. By Monday morning, Slapper had infected 11,249 machines. "For reference, Code Red — which is known as the worst Web worm so far — managed to infect only a couple of hundred servers within a similar time frame," Hypponen said. "Code Red then went on to infect over 300,000 Web servers during its peak in July 2001 and is still alive today."

Check your OpenSSL version. And upgrade if you aren’t up to the right rev.

[/home/paul]# openssl version
OpenSSL 0.9.6g 9 Aug 2002