One thing that’s bugged me about my Mac is its lack of RS-232 serial ports. Well, it turns out that Keyspan makes USB Serial Adapters. A high speed DB-9 serial adapter is pretty reasonably priced at $45. The mini port replicator has a 2-port USB hub, serial, and parallel port adapter for $75.
ABCNEWS.com: Reason for War?
Officials inside government and advisers outside told ABCNEWS the administration emphasized the danger of Saddam’s weapons to gain the legal justification for war from the United Nations and to stress the danger at home to Americans.
“We were not lying,” said one official. “But it was just a matter of emphasis.”
…
The Bush administration felt that a new start was needed in the Middle East and that Iraq was the place to show that it is democracy — not terrorism — that offers hope.
Linux config:
- Special tasks at login [was Re: Automatic login script execution] – there should be a better way to dynamically generate motd on login (well, putting it in cron I suppose)
- Debian Reference – Tuning a Debian system
- Field Guide to System Administrators – I remember reading this from way back, will have to keep this in mind when I’m running low on HD space:
MANIAC:# cd /home
# rm -rf `du -s * | sort -rn | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'`;
Hopefully this shows up soon
The Red Hat -> Debian switch took one reboot (LILO problem due to active boot partition misassignment), and slightly longer than it should have due to some conclusion. About 4 hours for the switchover, the rest has been misc setup. Hopefully I’ll be finishing that up tonight. On the bright side I think I understand boot loaders slightly better.
- IBM DeveloperWorks: Dual-booting Linux
- RedHat: Options in /etc/lilo.conf
- Guide to IP Layer Network Administration with Linux
- Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control HOWTO
- Exploring your current configuration
- Load sharing over multiple interfaces
- Prioritizing interactive traffic
- What’s the “debian” way to bind multiple IP addresses to a single NIC???
System going up and down for maintenance.
One of Mark’s recent boingboing posts was on USB flash key memory. I mentioned in the conversation that the Lexar JumpDrive 2.0 Pro seems to give the best bang/buck, being competitively price $80/256MB ($50+ cheaper than an equivalent sized Fuji USB 1.0 drive), and with very fast reads and writes (6MB/s and 4.5MB/s, respectively, vs the Sony USB 2.0 drive that has a decent read speed, but crappy writes (5.5MB/s read, 1MB/s write)).
I had done some research a few months ago for a friend, and one thing that was disappointing to me was the lack of cross-platform disk image encryption. There’s actually a recent Ask Slashdot on the topic. There were some decent posts, including one on why encrypted volumes would be desirable and how it might be possible.
Unfortunately, it seems that there really are no good solutions. Encrypted .DMG seems like it would be a great solution, but it’s OS X only. The only real solutions seem to be using file level encryption, like bcrypt or GPG on a tar file. I suppose one could cobble together binaries and GUIs together to carry around on the key disk?
1 Pixel per meter – wow, this is awesome. Too bad dragging only works in IE.
SBook: SBook5 is an extremely fast, AI-based personal information manager for computers running the Mac OS X operating system.
/. came across (again this morning) the Unix-Haters Handbook last night, which always raises some spirited discussion.
Probably the biggest reason I don’t use Linux on the desktop is because of impossible system niggles, like Copy and Paste. I mean, Jesus, it’s Copy and Paste. Can it be that frickin’ hard to get it to work in a standard way (or at all) across applications?
- Mini-Box M-100 – world’s smallest mini-ITX computer (very neat looking, 1U, 2×20 LCD, silent option) – only 1x100BT though (has 1 PCI slot, but it doesn’t look like ther’s room to fit anything in it – no backplate certainly)
- Hush Mini-ITX PC – silent, all metal case (any US dealers?)
- MSI-Mega PC – compact form factor multimedia pc
Earlier post