stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley

Offline Thunderbird

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 12:21:00 GMT

Hi. I'm trying to work out a simple config option to have Thunderbird sync all of my folders when I go offline, instead of the ones I've had to select in the config dialog. I can't see any documentation on how to do that... Does anyone know if its possible?

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On the Sorkonian theme

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 03:12:00 GMT

That is, talking about Aaron Sorkin. Steve mentions that the West Wing wasn't as good after Aaron left. I'd have to agree with that, and you can tell from the scripts that Aaron had left... The dialog wasn't as clever, and the plot line became more about entrenched political positions and a failure to have a mandate than it was about hope and changing the world. Then again, the final season was pretty good as well -- even if they did have to rewrite the ending.

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The common thread

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 04:28:00 GMT

What do A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, and Charlie Wilson's War all have in common, apart from that I really liked them? They were all written by Aaron Sorkin. Therefore, I should like anything Aaron does. Noted.

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Via M10000, video, and a Belkin wireless USB thing

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 09:25:00 GMT

I've had a Via Eden M10000 literally lying around since soon after I moved to the US two years ago, and I finally decided that it was time for a full blown home workstation the other day, having got fed up with the small screen on my laptops. Sometimes I really miss my 30 inch monitor at work, and the 24 inch I am using at home is a much better substitute than a laptop screen.

Anyway, getting the machine working was surprisingly difficult given its a three or four year old design. The problems:

The PCI 802.11g wireless card didn't work. In fact, the machine wouldn't boot with it installed. I suspect this was a PCI version problem, as I have had pain with this card in the past.
The PCI 802.11b wireless card I tried next wasn't much better. The connection would drop out randomly, and the machine would occasionally lock up. This was the card I used as my first access point about six years ago (using hostap), so perhaps its just old. It got swapped out as well.
The Belkin USB 802.11g thingie didn't work reliably. It would stay connected to the network for five minutes before something went wrong. This made me annoyed, especially when it turns out this is because the latest release of Ubuntu (gutsy) installs an old version of the rt73usb driver, which is known not to work with this card. Following these instructions from the canonical wiki which tell you to install drivers from here fixed the problem. Its annoying that Ubuntu ships with known broken drivers though.
Next, video. The video card built into the mother board sucks. I'm running a t24 inch LCD at 1920x1200, and there was significant ghosting on the monitor. Additionally, I couldn't run at 24 bit, I had to use 16 bit because the video card was running out of RAM bandwidth.
Not to worry, I installed a Matrox G450 I had lying around, and now the monitor works nicely as well, with no ghosting.
Finally, the whole thing is much louder than I expected from an Eden machine (there is a fan on the board, a fan in the case, and the hard disk). Then again, given I built the entire machine for $90, I can't complain too much.

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Hurrah!

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 07:13:00 GMT

Catherine (who is in California while I swan around Texas) reports that the maliciously loud neighbours are moving out! Yay for sleep!

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Catherine is right

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 02:43:00 GMT

Catherine is right -- when we move back from America we wont be living in an apartment if I have any say in it.

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Satellite internet at Walmart

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 04:57:00 GMT

Apparently Walmart is going to start selling two way satellite internet starting at $60 USD a month. The coverage map is basically just North America, which is a shame because otherwise it might be worthwhile to import these into Australia.

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Long time not much write

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:01:00 GMT

I haven't written much in the last couple of months, but I have good excuses. Mainly, its a combination of joining a new team at work (its cool, but I'd have to kill you), playing with some cool toys, developing a new personal obsession, Andrew starting school, and not having much to say.

To make up for this, I give you a picture of me bowling last Friday:

I'll also give you a sneak peek at that new personal obsession:

"There is little data on the relative popularity of the various available SMTP server implementations. This data is of interest because it aids the development of systems which interact with these servers. For example, a potential DDoS protection system should be tested with the most common SMTP servers, as these are the ones that it is most likely to encounter in everyday use.

This poster will describe our efforts to measure the deployment of SMTP servers on the Internet, using a combination of passive observation of email traffic, as well as active probing of SMTP servers. A description of the methodology is provided, as well as early results."

That's part of my poster proposal for LISA 2007 which I will be attending.

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Scoble

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:38:00 GMT

Robert Scoble just seems to use his blog for complaining these days. First about how people said his stupid ideas are stupid, and then about how no one seems to love him any more. The videos are also insanely annoying -- they're all sales pitches for things which are of no interest to me. Unsubscribed.

I think this might be the start of an inane blog cull.

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Bugger

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 16:30:00 GMT

I recommend you not fat finger a cron command, and type "crontab -r" accidentally. It just silently deletes your crontab, without giving you the chance to back out. Anyone notice that the r and e keys are next to each other?

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Some days you find something you know is useful, you just don't know why its useful yet

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 15:35:00 GMT

Some days you find something you know is useful, but you don't know how you're going to use it quite yet. Today's event was Sidecar, a system for inserting retransmitted packets into TCP streams capable of detecting the presence of a NAT. How cool is that? ACM link to the paper.

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Distributed scheduling recommended reading?

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:12:00 GMT

Ok, so part of why I'm hating the locking behaviour of MySQL is because I'm playing with scheduling a large distributed job for a personal project. I've talked to some folk about Beowulf, and it doesn't seem to offer me much... Does anyone have any recommended reading on how research clusters solve this sort of problem that they would like to share in the comments?

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On Akamai

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 12:35:00 GMT

Akamai has some interesting pages about their service that I want to be able to find later, so here they are:

Visualisation 1 -- attacks, latency and traffic maps. During the July 4 holiday in the US, traffic levels were 14% below normal!
Visualisation 2 -- performance comparison. Save nearly 60 milliseconds between Sydney and Cambridge, MA if you use Akamai.
Visualisation 3 -- at the time I write this, Akamai is serving 1.9 million hits per second.

Akamai must have some interesting logging to produce this reporting.

Akamai's technology at its core, applied mathematics and algorithms - has transformed the chaos of the Internet into a predictable, scalable, and secure platform for business and entertainment. The Akamai EdgePlatform comprises 20,000 servers deployed in 71 countries that continually monitor the Internet traffic, trouble spots and overall conditions. We use that information to intelligently optimize routes and replicate content for faster, more reliable delivery. As Akamai handles 20% of total Internet traffic today, our view of the Internet is the most comprehensive and dynamic collected anywhere.

So there you go.

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Found in New Zealand

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 10:19:00 GMT

Three Danger Mouse DVDs. These things rock.

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Programming note

Sun, 24 Jun 2007 02:12:00 GMT

Just thought I should say that I will be mostly off line for the next ten days or so. I wonder if the MythTV guide data for the US will be sorted out by then?

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Configuring the n800

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:47:00 GMT

In the battle to install ntpdate on my newish n800, I came across this excellent setup page. It was really very useful. I ended up with an NTP client from here.

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Mountain View solar cells

Tue, 22 May 2007 07:17:00 GMT

A photo taken by a friend recently of the basically-finished solar panel deployment at Google Mountain View.

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Yak shaving goal

Tue, 22 May 2007 05:03:00 GMT

Yak shaving goal de jour: download 1 million emails. Don't ask why. It's a long story. Oh, 32,000 done so far!

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Is yak shaving a good idea?

Sun, 20 May 2007 10:02:00 GMT

There is a common story told in computing circles. You're trying to get some work done, and before you can finalise it you find that you need to fix a small bug in a library you use. On the way to fixing that bug, you find that you need to improve something else as well, and so on. Eventually you look up and discover that you're shaving a yak, and that it's somehow needed to deliver that first project.

I have a theoretical interest in DDoS attacks and especially how they relate to SMTP servers on the Internet at the moment. Somehow that ended up with me reading a bunch of academic research from the ACM portal about email worm behaviour (hence the interest in the recent tech talk from Vern Paxson about the witty worm) and content delivery networks like Akamai.

Reading up on Akamai lead me to discover Planet Lab, which is insanely cool. I'm left with all these wild ideas for side projects to pursue from there.

Bring on the yak.

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The witty worm with Vern Paxson

Thu, 17 May 2007 07:44:00 GMT

I'm sitting in a tech talk from Vern Paxson about the witty worm, and he's just described how they could determine the state of the random number generator on infected machines when it sent probes to possible victims. Which gives you the uptime of the infected host, and they can see the distance between random numbers in the sequence, which means they can calculate the speed of the network link of infected machines, because they know the time distance between repeated probe attempts and how many packets were sent in between.

They can also determine the number of disks plugged into the infected machine, because a bug in the worm only re-seeded the random number generator when it trashed a disk block on the machine. It can only do that if that randomly selected disk exists.

The talk is being taped, so other people will be able to see it in a week or two.

Very cool.

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