September 2004 Archives

Bush-Cheney '04 meets The Onion

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Joshua Marshall says:

The first sign of the overnight take-over came when Charles Krauthammer led off with this morning's column in the Post charging Sen. Kerry with being insufficiently respectful and supportive of America's traditional allies.

Confirmation of the scope of the takeover came later in the afternoon when President Bush denounced Kerry for dissing American allies.

It is of course extra ironic when you read that overwhelmingly the World 'wants Kerry as president'.

I can never remember how to set it up, so here for my own sake:

First setup a virtual "pipe", for example one like this limiting whatever we put through it to 800Kbit per second:

ipfw pipe 1 config bw 800Kbit

You could also use say bw 70KB to limit to 70KByte per second. There are also a bunch of other parameters for the pipes, but the bandwidth limiter is the most useful for everyday use.

Now setup rules to push traffic through the pipe. For example right now I wanted to limit bittorrent traffic, so I made port 6881 to 6885 go through the pipe:

ipfw add 10 pipe 1 tcp from any to me 6881-6890
ipfw add 11 pipe 1 tcp from any 6881-6890 to me

You can see your pipes with ipfw pipe show (just as you see the regular rules with ipfw show.

Another example, limit the bandwidth from us to another host 10Kbit/sec:

ipfw pipe 2 config bw 10Kbit
ipfw add 15 pipe 2 ip from me to 64.81.84.114

With this then we can download however fast we want from 64.81.84.114, but they can only use 10Kbit of our outgoing bandwidth.

Pretty neat, huh?

update: many more examples on Luigi Rizzo's dummynet page...

Citysearch AIM robot

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Citysearch announced the AIM bot I made. Neato. If your mobile device can do email (or SMS to email) then you can also try the email "bot".

It totally needs some eliza, but other than that I believe it's quite useful. :-)

Speakeasy VoIP?

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The Speakeasy support phone number have a "Speakeasy Voice" option in the automated menu crap now. Are they building a VoIP service?

I'm thinking of switching from Vonage to BroadVoice to use their "Bring your own device" service. I have a TDM400P card that'd be fun to get setup with Asterisk again; the closed Vonage box is really no fun.

I'd use VoicePulse Connect for calls to Europe as BroadVoice's rates to cell phones are Really Really bad (more than twice as much as VoicePulse).

grrh, still on hold for Speakeasy...

update: 15 minutes later, still on hold. Double Grrh. Time to give up. [click]

update: they are indeed adding VoIP services, they are testing it

Nikon D2x announced

Nikon D2x DPReview are the first with an press release. Rob Galbraith has a review already. It looks very cool, except it won't ship until January 2005. I don't think they've announced pricing yet.

Earlier this evening someone had the Nikon Brochure (local copy) online. He also had a bunch of pictures of the camera (local copy).

The talk on d1scussion is positive so far.

In extra geeky news, the wireless add-on is now 802.11g rather than 802.11b.

In stranger news they also announced a new professional film SLR, the F6! Except for that japanese site I can't find anything about it online yet, but see what David from Nikon wrote:

From: David Dentry
Subject: [d1scussion] Nikon New Products - It's Official!
Date: September 15, 2004 11:02:05 PM PDT

HI

As has been speculated, today we are announcing lots of new stuff. For complete specs see the various Nikon web sites around the world, but the basics:

D2X
The D2X is our new "flagship" camera, a 12.4MP/5fps DX format CMOS sensor digital SLR. Replacing the D1X as our top end camera, the D2X looks and works much like the existing D2H, but has some great new features. (Pricing and availability - TBA)

-High speed crop mode which uses a smaller portion of the DX frame and allows you to shoot a 6.8MP image at 8fps with a 2x lens focal length increase (compared to 35mm film).
-Better color and image processing due to new ASIC chips
-Improved 3D color matrix meter
-GPS compatibility
-in-camera multiple exposures (Juergen won't get punched anymore!)
-in-camera image compositing
-RGB histogram display
-Customer user file naming
-Menu "history" display
-etc...

WT2
Offering faster transfer and easier operation this new wireless transmitter replaces the WT1A. We are adding 802.11G (faster) capability, PTP over IP support (easier setup), remote control, and improved software.

And for the rest of you...

F6
The F6 is the first film camera which is modeled after a digital camera and contains a lot of the technology of the D2X! iTTL Flash, 8fps, built-in data back, ...

300mm f2.8 G VRF lens
The latest in our line of fast, 300mm f2.8 lenses; we are adding VR to this version. Approx. 124mm (max. diameter) x 267.5mm length (measured from bayonet mount flange to front edge) Approx. 2,850 grams

After everyone has read the specs and looked at the web sites I'll answer any questions that I can. THANKS

-David

-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
David Dentry
General Manager, Technical Support
Nikon Inc. USA

How to remember, How to forget

"Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror ..."

-- Franklin Roosevelt, 1933

Javier Marías describes Spain after the Madrid bombings in New York Times.

Here in Spain, we don't feel as if we are at war, because we aren't. And neither are the inhabitants of the United States, however vociferously many Americans may insist that they are. War is something else entirely. No semi-normal life can be led while a war is going on. The Madrilenians who lived through the siege of their city from 1936 to 1939 know that very well. The survivors of the daily bombardments of London during the Second World War know it, too. And those Americans who participated in that war know it also.

But there is no war against terrorism. There can be no such thing against an enemy that remains dormant most of the time and is almost never visible. It's simply another of life's inevitable troubles, and all we can do as we continue to combat it is repeat Cervantes's famous phrase, "Paciencia y barajar": "Have patience, and keep shuffling the cards."

(via Fred Wilson)

update

Stephen Evans: Fear on all sides. Stephen was in the lobby when the first airplane hit three years ago.

(via Stuart Hughes (yes, the journalist who lost a leg) via doc searls)

Lots of Perl Jobs!

Lots of listings on jobs.perl.org lately. A few random ones: Perl programmer for the Kerry-Edwards campaign or use Perl to build the next generation Intel CPUs or help releasing VMware (VMware just gave us their GSX product, it's great).

If you are in England, you can work with Matt at MessageLabs or you can go work for Netcraft. Fun, huh? :-)

Backwards scam spam

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From: kenbergstore01@fastermail.com
Subject: Sales Enquiry..............
Date: September 7, 2004 1:48:45 PM PDT
To: [hidden] perl.org

Hello sales,

I want to order for some items from your
store to my store and the shipment will be international to
africa(nigeria) mail me back for the type of payment you
accept and the list of items that i want.your responce is
needed urgently.

REGARDS,
KEN.

--
_______________________________________________
Get your free email from http://fastermail.com

Powered by Outblaze

How can anyone possible fall for that? "Mail me back the list of items that I want". How about a big wire cutter for your phone line so you will stop sending this junk? It's the special no-rubber version which will give you a big thrill if you try it on the power line too!

Ballistic testers

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I'm working on the new mailing list system for perl.org. Want to test? Email somelist-subscribe@empty.us to subscribe to the test list, somelist-digest-subscribe@empty.us to subscribe to the digest version. Email somelist-help@empty.us for more commands.

If you subscribe, prepare to get a bunch of test mails, of course. :-) Also, if you subscribe, feel free to send test mails to the list.

Sverything should be working like a regular ezmlm list. The initial version (where it is at now) is just a system for managing the list configuration in database and for replacing all the .qmail-* files with one(!) .qmail-default file calling one program. It's also written so we can make qmail (or another mailer) just write to a Maildir and have Ballistic pick up the mails from there (it emulates qmail-local / qmail-command). It's great.

(if you are curious, then the code is in Subversion, use guest/guest for the login. No documentation yet and I wholeheartedly will not recommend that you try using it just yet).

Broken mail servers

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It's fascinating to see how the mail server logs for the perl.org list server has changed over the years. Mostly because of all the new greylisting and rate limiting software. We don't mind the extra noise and server load on our side, qmail deals with it very efficiently. It's sad though to see all the broken software blocking our mail knowing there's someone on the other side who (presumably) wanted to get it but can't.

Greylisting software that gives us a temporary failure on the same mail for almost 2 weeks? A few other examples from the last hours of log files.

gmx.net / gmx.de's SPF checker is broken. Does anyone know a clueful admin there? If so, please tell them to fix their mail server if they want mail from the perl.org lists.

delivery 1875690: failure: 213.165.64.100 does not > 
   like recipient.
Remote host said: 553 5.7.1 {mx002} The recipient does >
  not accept mails from 'perl.org' over foreign mailservers.
553_5.7.1 According to the domain's SPF record your host >
  '63.251.223.186' is not a designated sender.
Giving up on 213.165.64.100.

The SPF checker says our records are OK ...

Other domains / services that are blocking us includes gawab.biz, bpsc.com.pl, I think those are because our new IP block from internap is in some blacklist.

There are also some exceptionally stupid mailers that are blocking mail from us because the mail server says "HELO $somename" where $somename isn't the same name as the PTR record for the IP address gives.

Mostly I don't care, but it nags me that some people can't get the list mail or gets it slowly because of their mail administrators or server vendors. (I want to say because they use clueless mail admins or vendors, but maybe that's too harsh).

Of course, you don't arrive at a morally profound motto like "don't be evil" without some serious thought. Here are some of the mottoes that Google tried out and rejected:

  • Google! Dance with the devil, but go home before it gets serious.
  • Google! We won't commit genocide in most circumstances.
  • Google! Don't eat no babies.
  • Google! We could do good, but we're like, whoa.
  • Google! Begone, demon!

The Banality of Google

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This page is an archive of entries from September 2004 listed from newest to oldest.

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