My sleeping habits have been strange lately. I seem to be sleeping during the day and up at night. Caryn described this as my summer schedule. I certainly hope not.
I watched Short Circuit via Netflix tonight. I haven't seen that movie in years. More Input!
I'm still trying to figure out an issue with one of my machines where two processes are crashing a lot.
I know this is strange, but I've been watching the Rockford Files on Netflix for a few weeks. They've got all six seasons of the show, minus two episodes from one season. I've got two episodes left to watch. Starting with season four, the show went downhill. Still, there are several good episodes. Season six features an episode with Tom Sellek and Larry Maneti prior to their work on Magnum, P.I.
The scary part is that my father tried to dress like that in the 70s.
I went to see the Dark Night this weekend with Caryn. The movie is excellent, but not for a young audience. It is a rather scary film; it is not gory, but just psychotic.
Anyone who hasn't seen this movie, better get to a theater. The IMAX version is awesome.
I've been more energy concious lately. My home PC has an Intel Core 2 Duo 6420 which supports intel enhanced speedstep technology. This means that the CPU can slow down when it's not being used to save power.
Laptop processors have supported this feature for years, but it's starting to crop up on many desktop systems as well. If your computer was built in the last two to three years, it may have this feature. It is not found on lowend processors like the celerons or slower Pentium D chips. You can confirm the features of your processor at Intel.com. AMD has a similar feature called PowerNow on their chips.
I found that Windows XP SP2 and higher support this feature, but have it turned off. Vista is much more friendly in this regard. If you have Windows XP SP2 or SP3 installed, you can turn on this feature by doing the following. Go into Power Options in Control Panel. Select Minimal Power Management.
To verify that your computer is using this setting, make sure no programs are busy running. (CPU utilization should be zero) Now, go into Control Panel, System, and view the CPU speed. You should see two speeds if it's working. The first is the maximum speed while the second is the effective speed.
My system seems to be running at about 1.6Ghz now while idle. In MidnightBSD, it tends to run much lower than that with cpufreq + powerd enabled. Now, my system can benefit a little in Windows like it does in BSD.
Anyone that uses a laptop can tell you the difference between the system when plugged in or running on battery. One of the common savings is slowing down the processor. This does something similar, but speeds it up if you do something intensive like playing a game or compiling a program.
Every little bit helps.
I did an experiment while streaming video on netflix. I set iexplore to use processor affinity + above normal priority. The result was a 10% cpu usage drop at first, and periods at 10%. Prior to that it was constant 60%.
It's interesting the performance difference. I wonder if it's cpu cache or changes in the scheduling.
I've been looking at cell phone plans. They all suck.
This is from a recent security advisory:
CoreImage Examples
CVE-ID: CVE-2008-2304
Available for: Mac OS X v10.5.x
Impact: Opening a Fun House document may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution
Description: Xcode tools contain an example application called Core Image Fun House that handles content with the ".funhouse" extension.
A buffer overflow may occur in this application when processing ".funhouse" files. Opening a maliciously-crafted ".funhouse" file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. This update addresses the issue through improved bounds checking. Credit to Kevin Finisterre of Netragard for reporting this issue.
I ordered a pizza today for lunch. I haven't bought a Jet's Pizza in months. The guy was very busy and cut me off during my order. Then, the pizza wasn't even started when I got there! They told me after I paid of course. They did throw in a free coke, but I wasn't very happy about the wait time.
The pizza was good at least.
Even my Apple TV had a bad day. It sounds like Apple is catching up the apple tv on quicktime updates.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2304
I've been working on getting into the office network at home. I have ssh access to one machine, a FreeBSD based server. The other end is a MidnightBSD desktop at home.
I found this tutorial:
http://tengu.us/vpn-ppp-ssh/vpn-ppp-ssh.html
It's quite nice. I decided to log my setup so far in my blog. You never know when another site like that will go down and there are a few ambiguities with the directions there.
Client setup:
Add this to /etc/ppp/ppp.conf
work-vpn:
set escape 0xff
# using ssh port-forwarding to connect
set device localhost:6669/tcp
set dial
set timeout 600
set log Phase Chat Connect hdlc LCP IPCP IPV6CP tun
# specify ip addrs for both ends.
set ifaddr 10.8.0.1 192.168.0.1
Now the first address is "made up" for my local machine and the second is a "made up" ip for the tun interface on the other end "server".
Also create a file /etc/ppp/ppp.linkup
in it, put this:
work-vpn:
add 192.168.0.0/24 HISADDR
Now the client is ready. You will need to setup a ssh tunnel between the client and server.
ssh -L 6669:localhost:6669 youruser@yourservermachine.whatever
The next step is setting up the server system. You'll need root to do this.
First, configure /etc/services
ppp-in 6669/tcp # Incoming PPP connections over TCP (ppp-vpn)
Next, /etc/inetd.conf
ppp-in stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/ppp ppp -direct ppp-in
make sure inetd is running and send HUP if you need to
/etc/ppp/ppp.conf
ppp-in:
set timeout 0
set ifaddr 192.168.0.1 10.8.0.1
/etc/ppp/ppp.linkup:
ppp-in:
# route traffic to home lan thru the connection.
add 192.168.2.0/24 HISADDR
start ssh tunnel as described above and then ppp on the client
sudo ppp -background work-vpn
verify it's up:
sudo tail -f /var/log/ppp.log
ping 192.168.0.1
This will get you in, but you'll still need to setup nat on the server using natd + ipfw or some other solution.
Last night, I caught Larry King Live on CNN. The topic was high oil prices . He interviewed the CEO of Chevron, as well as several others. There were several points of interest in this show.
1. The raw crude price is around $3.30 before refined or shipped to gas stations.
2. Price variations in the US are largely due to taxes in different states.
3. Gas is sold to stations at around $4 right now. The remaining cost is taxes, etc.
4. It would take many years to extract oil if we started drilling in the north pole or offshore leases. It may benefit us in the future, but unlikely to help with our current price points.
5. He encouraged the use of alternate energy sources, but thinks that we'll be dependant on fossil fuels for most of my lifetime.
I received a B- in statistics 360. Anyone who's familiar with my luck in math courses, will appreciate how difficult that was for me to achieve. Some would call that a miracle. It was not my first attempt at this course either. It brought my cumulative GPA from 2.97 to 3.14. (Pi lol)
I'm writing this on an experimental client for jj. Let's hope for the best.
Only two classes left and the semester is over. I couldn't be happier about that. No class on Thursday. I've got to write some scripts for work. Having trouble deciding on a language to use for the mac side. I could use php, perl or C to access mysql. I'm leaning toward php as I'm more familiar with it than perl.
Jewel's second video from the new album is out... it's I Do.
I just the album today.
test