November 11, 2008 – 20:02
I recently got a digital SLR. I decided to pay more for the most recent consumer model over the earlier generation. Lots of places recommended the Nikon D40. But most sites recommended Canon system over Nikon in general. The XSi also had some features like live view, bigger LCD, and better kit lens that I […]
November 11, 2008 – 19:44
A few months ago, I got a new home server. I wanted to replace the old desktop with something quiet and low-power that could be left on all day. This led toward an mini-ITX motherboard. A fanless processor was better since I didn’t need the performance for video or anything heavy. I also wanted something […]
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I got my car back from the shop on Tuesday. The saga started two weeks ago when I went to drive home. The clutch went straight down and didn’t pop back up. I had it towed to the Audi dealer service center, which is close to work, the next day. The problem turned out to […]
September 21, 2008 – 11:27
I got the [Maemo](http://maemo.org) [SDK](http://maemo.org/development/sdks/maemo-4-1-diablo-sdk/) installed on Fedora 9. The instructions are pretty complete. First, Scratchbox needs the compat VDSO mode enabled. This is done by `echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/vdso_enabled`. Also, Qemu requires `mmap_min_addr` set to 4096. These can be set permanently by adding the following lines to `/etc/sysctl.conf`. # scratchbox support vm.vdso_enabled = 0 […]
September 20, 2008 – 15:01
The VIA C7 processor also has padlock encryption acceleration support. [Linux support](http://www.logix.cz/michal/doc/article.xp/padlock-en) was added a while ago. First, the automatically load the `padlock` module, add the `/etc/sysconfig/modules/via-padlock.modules` file. #!/bin/sh for i in padlock; do modprobe $i >/dev/null 2>&1 done Second, to use it for internal kernel encryption, add to `/etc/modprobe.conf`. alias aes padlock Third, OpenSSL […]
September 20, 2008 – 14:30
The [J7F4 mini-ITX motherboard](http://www.jetwaycomputer.com/VIA3.html) that I got for my home server has a VIA C7 processor. One of the feature of the processor is the [PadLock Security Engine](http://www.via.com.tw/en/initiatives/padlock/hardware.jsp) with hardware RNG. This is especially useful on a server since they are limited in entropy sources. Linux kernel has support for the VIA hardware RNG in […]
After OSCON ended, I went to the [Oregon Brewers Festival](http://www.oregonbrewfest.com/) on Friday afternoon. This is the first time I have gone after living in Portland for five years and loving beer. I rode my bike downtown; they had guarded bike parking. The cost was $4 for the mug, $1 for tokens which give a taste […]
On Friday, I made it to the morning keynotes. None of them were really informative but were entertaining and funny. I attended [ZFS: Bringing Terabytes Under Control](http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2007/view/e_sess/12312) by Jay Edwards. He mainly talked about using ZFS on Solaris for large storage systems. The biggest advantage of ZFS is the nice management tools for creating pools […]
After staying up late on Wednesday night, I slept late on Thursday and missed the keynotes. I went to Matt Tucker’s talk on [Jingle: Cutting Edge Open Source VoIP](http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2007/view/e_sess/13134) describing the Jingle extension to Jabber that allows voice chat and other multimedia. Jingle is the standardization of the Google Talk protocol for voice chat. One […]