Event sourcing is an excellent software design pattern. Instead of persisting current state of an asset and mutating it in place. An asset is represented by the events through its life cycle. When the current state of an asset is needed its re-computed from the events. Despite being a great way to solve many problems its somewhat scarcely applied. There are undoubtedly many reason for this, but…
"What the hell is GITN?" You might ask. GITN stands for glitchinthe.net, and for the past ten years it has hosted my blaagh, dns, email, IRC and more. It has served us well, went through a couple of hard drives but the rest of the hardware has stayed the same. Its pretty remarkable, actually, that it is has not keeled over many years ago. I guess when you have a machine in a nice environment it…
Samsung just recently released a new piece of kit, ATIV Book 9 plus. Its their top of the line Ultrabook. Being in on the market for a new laptop, when I heard of the specs, I was hooked. Sure it doesn't have the best CPU in a laptop or even amazing amount of ram, in that regard its kind of run of the mill. But that was enough for me. The really amazing thing is the screen, with 3200x1800…
Hypnotoad is all over the internet. By in large depicted in tiny animated gifs with horrible compression artifacts and other flaws. Behold hypnotoad in its full glory, a lossless animated svg format. You can now scale hypnotoad to unimaginable dimentions without doing it injust - ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD
I got myself one of the fancy shmancy netbooks. Due to a habit and some hardware issues I needed to compile a kernel. The problem here though is that it takes for ever to build a kernel on one of these things. No sweat I'll just build it on my desktop, it'll only take 5-10 minutes. But of course there is a catch. My desktop is 64bit and this new machine is an Atom CPU which only does 32bit. The…
Every six months the internet lights up with stories that Canonical & Co has done the unthinkable they have increased the number following the word Ubuntu. In other words they have release a new version. This is a well understood concept to differentiate releases of software. As the version increases it is expected that new features are introduced and old bugs are removed (hopefully more are…
Apparently Linux does not have any monitor hotplugging support which is quite a pain. Every time you want to attach a monitor to laptop you have to reconfigure the display layout. This is a tad frustrating if you have to do this several times a day. And it doesn't help that KDE subsystems are a bit flaky when it comes to changing display configuration. I've had plasma crash a on me 1/3 times while…
Flash is an absolute resource drain you've probably noticed how it completely hogs resources when you watch a video. Ever wonder how much more power is consumed watching flash over a regular video file? Is it a significant number? For those too lazy to read the rest, the simple answer is yes. And now to the details. Recently I was watching a hulu video on a 1080P monitor and I noticed it was a…
In reply to Josef "Jeff" Sipeks reply to my post entitle SMTP -- time to chuck it from a couple of years ago. This is a (long overdue) reply to Ilya 's post: SMPT -- Time to chuck it . [...] There are two apparent problems at the root of the SMTP protocol which allow for easy manipulation: lack of authentication and sender validation, and lack of user interaction. It would not be difficult to…
Recently my local LUG ( LILUG ) invited Eric S. Raymond (ESR) to come and speak. For those of you who are not familiar with ESR, he is one of the three largest icons of the Open Source/Free Software movement. Needless to say, it was an honor so see him speak. For the most part, his talk was quite tame but one of the points he raised seemed quite controversial. According to him the GPL and other…
I've finally caught up on rendering all the LILUG presentations. A total of 5 were posted within last 24 hours, among them the much requested Eric S. Raymond Q/A session. If your clock reads around 1236983978 UET then some of the talks have not been derived yet. That means you can't stream them or watch the thumbnails, but you can download them in the glorious OGG Theora format. Enough talking,…
If you have ever watched a wide-screen foreign film with subtitles you might have noticed that the subtitles are usually put inside the picture. I find this extremely annoying as it makes the subtitles harder to read. It doesn't make much sense, if you already have black bars from the aspect ratio adjustment why not use them for subtitles? Fortunately if you use mplayer you can. Just add the…
while(c1){ switch(c2){ case 1: aOk(); continue; case 2: liveToSeeAnotherDay(); continue; case 3: oopsyDaisy(); break; } break; }
I've gotten into a photo mood lately. Both shooting editing and organizing. With it I've discovered some new useful tools as well gotten to know the ones I've used before better. The first and foremost is digiKam its a photo manager. Its primary job is maintain a database of all your photos. Photo- managers are not something most people have used so it might need some getting used to. The…
My instant message client of choice is centerim (a fork of centericq ). It does everything I need, send and receive messages in a very simple interface. Now this might sound like any ordinary client out there. But its special in that it runs completely in the terminal (ncurses based) -- and its good at it. I've tried some other terminal based clients and they all feel very cumbersome. One major…
I have accounts on many computer systems (around 10) which together add up to several hundred machines. And I often find myself having ssh sessions open to multiple machines doing different things simultaneously. More than once I have executed something on a wrong machine. Most of the case its not a problem, but every-now and I'll manage to reboot the wrong machine or do something else equally…
E-mail, in particular SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) has become an integral part of our lives, people routinely rely on it to send files, and messages. At the inception of SMTP the Internet was only accessible to a relatively small, close nit community; and as a result the architects of SMTP did not envision problems such as SPAM and sender-spoofing. Today, as the Internet has become more…
I mentioned earlier that we netboot (PXE) our cluster. Before NFS-root begins, some things have to take place. Namely, the kernel needs to be served, IP assigned, DNS look-ups need to be made to figure out where servers are and so on. Primarily 3 protocols are in the mix at this time, TFTP, DHCP, DNS. We used to run 3 individual applications to handle all of this, they're all in their own right…
You all probably know that the most important thing on any multi user system is a pretty MOTD. Between some other things in the past couple of weeks I decided to refresh the MOTDs for the galaxy and Seawulf clusters. I discovered 2 awesome applications while compiling the MOTD. First is a jp2a , it takes a JPG and converts it to ASCII and it even supports color. I used this to render the milky way…
I haven't posted many clustering articles here but I've been doing a lot of work on them recently, building a cluster for SC07 Cluster Challenge as well as rebuilding 2 clusters (Seawulf & Galaxy) from the ground up at Stony Brook University . I'll try to post some more info about this experience as time goes on. We have about 235 nodes in Seawulf and 150 in Galaxy. To boot all the nodes we use…
Many of the LILUGgers will remember that I talked about uncertain times coming up in the future of MythTV. One of the companies (Zap2it) that provided all the channel information was pulling the plug on the service. Well I just heard great news. A bit over a month ago I sent an email to Zap2it thanking them for their great service and support of the MythTV community. From: dotCOMmie…
LIRC is a software package under linux which allows you interface with remote control/controlled devices. LIRC is pretty much a must for any 1/2 decent MythTV configuration. For my Myth setup I use LIRC both to change the channels on the cable-set-top- box and as a way to control the mythtv interface from the couch. Although this is a quite common configuration its annoying to get working. The…
I thought the days of modelines in xorg (and linux in general) were over but I guess I'm wrong. The last 2 monitors I configured I had really difficult time with. One needed needed just a modeline but the other needed nasty config hacks. The first configuration was a Dell 21" monitor with a i945 graphics card and the other a 22" Chimei CMV-221D/A with an nvida GeForce FX 5200 card. The Chimei…
I hate browsers every single one that I've used. Every browser out there is a pathetic failure when it comes to user interface. Right now my favourite browser is iceweasel/firefox but in my book it doesn't have much going for it. Dialogues The browsers have a love for pop-up-dialogues. It's getting a little better but not good enough. I remember when in firefox if you mistyped a URL it would pop a…
Portmap by default listens to all IP addresses. However, if you are not providing network RPC services to remote clients (you are if you are setting up a NFS or NIS server) you can safely bind it to the loopback IP address (127.0.0.1) <Yes> OR <No> Maybe I'm slow or something but I really hate this prompt in debian. Which is accompanied by the installation of portmap. Seems like you need a degree…
After years of procratination I finally got around to whipping my mail system back into shape. Its quite common qmail+vpopmail+courier-imap+courier setup. What I really wanted was spamassassin and some more features in the web based front end (ilohamail). I've tried to setup spamassassin a couple time already but each time as I started reading howtos all the vigor would dwindle away. The whole…
I guess I in some kind of "documentation" mood. I've written up 2 linux how- tos one for using PPTP under linux and the other is an article for tuxmobile.org about installing Debian on a Dell XPS M1210. PPTP Howto Debian on Dell XPS M1210
I've spent the whole summer working at BNL developing a ethernet based FPGA programmer called n3c. Its based on a coldfire m68k chip an awesome platform. As soon as I get an ok to post (part of the) the sources I will. Now I have a few things in progress a cool PIC18F controlled fountain, some linux how-tos and school.
In the mid 1980s a new movement came about, a movement to free computer users from the restrictive model of software development. Up until this time most software developers (especially those in corporate environments) were intent on keeping their software source code in the dark; this way no one was able to modify or "steal their software." While today this idea is still the dominant one, the…
Been a while since I last posted an update. I've been mainly occupied with college, but yet I've managed to throw together some new projects. First of all I have started working on a php gallery script to dynamically make galleries using imagemagic (gdimage lacks different format support so I abandonned it during the first stage). Also I have finished a project of a different sort, installing…
I hope you all enjoyed my little prank. (Server was not shutdown by MPAA after all)
Happy Solistice all. A number of new an interesting things have unfolded on this front. First of all I recently finished my first semester in college. So huray! Now to the more geeky stuff. WE HAVE MOVED. This site has moved to new server (which I am renting together with some friends) You no longer need the :3080 at the end of the domain in the url ( http://dotCOMmie.net ) I have fixed some flaws…
During the begging of the internet boom many of the new workers thought that they had come to heaven. The field was open with opportunities, the pay was great and all the free coffee you could drink. Many of these workers came to work for start ups, they had their own reasons for doing so, some wanted a shorter climb through the corporate ladder while others wanted to cash in on the stock options.…
There are many different people who flock to Silicon Valley to live and work. They come to this Mecca from different places, religions and cultures with one uniting ideal, they all "worship" technology. This influx of tech-savvy individuals setting their roots in a valley just 10 miles across has dramatically altered this region. These changes encompass many, if not all, aspects of life. In…
As we look around ourselves today and ask the question, what in the past 40 years has influenced our civilization the most. Not too far down the list you would definitely find "computer revolution" as one of the key players. This revolution is not delimited by the meteoric advance in cold-hardware, but rather the fusion of both hardware and software. Without the artistic creativity of…
The Patriot Act was passed shortly after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. The goal of this act was to increase the resources which different branches of law enforcement could use to track and catch terrorists. Primarily focusing on allowing the law enforcement to use surveillance against alleged terrorist without much oversight by the courts and other federal agencies.…
Yesterday I competed in the LIBEC webdesign contest. It was quite lame of a contest, we only had an hour to work on a page and no gfx software. The contest involved in testing our HTML/frontpage skills. Using notepad I churned out one of the lamest pages I have ever made, pretty much just did what the asked for in the criteria. I placed 3rd. While not being 100% satisfied with my performance I did…
There are many flaws in todays political infrastructure. Just take a look around and and make a mental list of systems and policies set forth by the government that do not work. You'll then soon realize that some basic ideas of the governemnt might in essence be good but the approach spoils any benefit that the concept might deliver. For quite a long time I have seen this flaw but it was not clear…
BREAKING NEWS!!! ThinkGeek has just started selling a hat which I suggested them to make. It comes in black or white and has hacker written on it anyway check it out here. Also you can see the email correspondance for my proposal of the hat here.
Its a nice friday you come home from work or school. And as you cross into your personal domain you are greated with outmost enthusiasm by some of the most anoying things todays society has to offer. Let take it step by step probably the one of the first things you do is check one of the oldest remote communication systems in existance, postal service. This systems has served us well for centuries…
If you have ever talked to me online you must have noticed my infamous backwards smiley faces. And I bet you'r wondering whats the deal with that, you'r not the only one. I initially started using backwards smileyfaces when I used AOL Instant Messenger. I resented using this client as I truly hate anything to do with an immoral corporation such as AOL but I did not have much of a choice as too…