List of Google domains is very inaccurate

I had to post this because it references my company: MarkMonitor :-)
The list of domains that appear to be owned by Google from yesterday was created using a method that is very susceptible to inaccuracies -- most in that list are not owned by Google. How can you spot a real Google domain? Look for MarkMonitor.

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So today I went to Peet's, bought some coffee, got my change and walked back to the office. I was checking out the Washingtons in my wallet and this stamped message caught my eye.



I looked up www.wheresgeorge.com and discovered this neat site. I'm sure everyone has had this idea once before, but someone actually took the time to implement it. This site is almost 8 years old and I've never heard of it until now. Anyway, the bill I got from Peet's in San Francisco actually came from Seattle. It was entered into the Where's George database back in March 2005. If anyone else out there has tracked currency using Where's George, I'd be interested to hear how far away your bill traveled.

Apple MacBook First Look

I'm going to go to the Apple Store tomorrow and post some personal comments about the new MacBook...I can't wait!

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So today one of those rare Linux moments happened to me. I was troubleshooting a box with some processes in the uninterruptible wait state and wouldn't die. The box was unable to access mounted network filesystems so I decided to reboot it so I could start troubleshooting from a clean state...only it wouldn't take my shutdown, reboot, or init 6 commands. I *could* have bugged the colo monkeys and requested a reboot, but then I remembered the Magic SysRq key that my manager enlightened me about a couple months ago.

If enabled in the Linux kernel, you can take back control of your system no less than three ways.

1) If you're on the console you can press the magic key sequence ALT-SysRq-[command key] You can look up the different command keys and read more about SysRq here Or if you have the kernel source handy just look for sysrq.c

2) If you are on the console or are connected over the network (such as via ssh) you can also echo the command key characters to /proc/sysrq-trigger (which is what I ended up doing)

3) Marek Zelem wrote an iptables module that even lets you send the magic SysRq command keys over the network. Now that's cool!

So here's my first video tutorial that I made using our Canon Powershot S400 and iSight (for the narration). The editing was done in iMovie HD. I've never used a stovetop espresso maker before, so I figure this might help someone else who might be interested in buying one but isn't really sure if it's for them. The Bialetti Mukka Express makes a pretty decent cappuccino (it also has instructions for making a cafe latte but I found it to be a little too weak tasting when I tried it). It's not as good as a professional grade espresso machine of course, but it costs under $100 and tastes just as good (maybe better) than that $3 cup of Starbucks...so in one month it'll pay for itself.

OK the mystery of the narcoleptic PowerBook has been solved. I searched high and low and I've tried every suggestion that I found to no avail. Finally I broke down and opened the PowerBook up to tinker around inside I noticed that the sleeping issue often happened when I applied some pressure on the right side of the keyboard, like right below the power button. This is the area that I'm talking about:



And a slightly closer pic:



This is one of the two ambient light sensors that is supposed to automatically adjust the backlit keyboard and screen brightness depending on the ambient light. Oh yeah, it also causes the laptop to spontaneously go to sleep at the absolute worst time. :-/



The sensor has these high density pins on the bottom:



I still don't know if it's just a defective sensor, or if it's losing its connection to the logic board sometimes and causing the system to freak out. All I know is my backlit keys stopped working a long time ago and I don't really miss it, and I like to max out my screen brightness so this sensor is now sitting on my desk at work until further notice. So far, removing it seems to have fixed the problem. The other thing I noticed that's changed is the strobing led on the lid button is now functioning again. I didn't even notice that it wasn't working before, but now when I close the lid and put the PowerBook to sleep the led strobes like it should be.

I've seen lots of posts on the Internet describing the same symptoms I have, but I have yet to read someone suggesting the ambient light sensor was the cause. I hope my case was not unique, and this can help someone else out there.

So this week I rolled out our YAM repository. This hosts all the .iso files for the different Linux distributions we use (currently I only have RHEL 4 i386 and EM64T versions) and it also logs into Red Hat Network and is able to download all the updated packages automatically (via cron). You can view the packages as files in Apache which is sort of ok if you already know what packages you're looking for.

I found repoview and saw that it took package browsing to another level. Repoview uses createrepo's XML-based metadata files generated from the RPM packages themselves. With repoview you can get more descriptive details on the packages and also view a partial changelog. I think the coolest feature repoview has is the ability to generate RSS feeds so if you point your RSS client at it you can keep track of all the new packages that get added to the repository.

I was watching Attack of the Show and they had Tom Green come on and plug his blog site. I watched 3-4 video blogs and was kind of disappointed. I mean, it's cool that he's doing this for himself, and it sounds like he's genuinely interested in communicating with his fans...but the content was rather boring. Maybe I just didn't watch the right ones. I'll check out a few more since I kind of enjoy Tom Green's comedy style...might as well give it a chance.

So today I decided to install AdvanceMAME on my PowerBook G4 running OS X Tiger. I downloaded the source from the AdvanceMAME site, then typed ./configure and waited for my first barf...which happened about 45 seconds later. It couldn't find the sdl libraries so I typed sudo port install libsdl and after the libraries were installed I tried the configure script again. This time it went through all the way. Then I typed make and after 20 minutes discovered that this was going to take awhile so I went to watch 24. I came back an hour later and it was done. I received a whole bunch o' ROMs from my friend Rom (no kidding) but to my disappointment I couldn't get the half dozen that I tried to work in Advance MAME. He included the emulators along with the ROMs so I guess they are written in a different format. I had to play them on my XP box instead. Oh well...time to find some ROMs that will play I s'pose.

So a few days ago my Treo 700W stopped ringing when I received phone calls. I thought I looked everywhere, and did everything that seemed logical, but the problem ended up being the side buttons. I found a post on TreoCentral.com that mentioned turning the volume all the way down using the side button, then all the way up might fix the problem. Sure enough, that done did it.

OK, just a quick post to say the PMU reset didn't work. I tried a few other things that people have suggested, to no avail. The laptop still sleeps randomly and loves to cycle (sleep-wake-sleep-wake-nevermore-nevermore)...so I'm taking it to the professionals tomorrow. I'll post back results.

Sometime this week my G4 PowerBook started acting up. It would go to sleep spontaneously, and sometimes when I "woke" it up it would go right back to sleep. It started happening around the same time I applied an OS X update, so I feared that that was the culprit. Then a co-worker sent me this Apple article which describes how to reset the Power Management Unit (PMU). It was such an easy procedure that I immediately gave it a try even though I was in the middle of several things...these narcoleptic episodes were hurting my productivity. So I powered down, removed the battery, held down the power button for 5 seconds (mississippicized of course) then I popped the battery back in and booted up. That was about 7 hours ago and so far so good.

So today I discovered that Red Hat Linux (at least RHEL 4) includes the online ext2 resize support feature in the kernel. This is probably really old news, but it's news to me. This is incredibly useful (as long as it's safe, which I'm sure it is if Red Hat is including it by default). We've been using reiserfs on all our boxes that have LVM configured since support for online resizes for ext2 filesystems seemed like it involved more work than necessary. The syntax is similar to resize_reiserfs too.

ext2online -v /dev/VG01/LV01

This will extend the filesystem to fill the partition (by default, but you can specify a size if you wanted). I tested it out and it appears to handle large resizing just as easily as smaller resizing. I ran a dd command to write blocks to the partition while it was resizing and it had absolutely no visible difference. I'm stoked!

ThermalTake MiniFridge Mod

"So with all the focus on making a cold computer case, I decided to make a case into a drink dispensing refrigerator just in honor of the hard core overclockers." Via Makezine.

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Tonight I watched King Kong (2005) for the first time. Don't laugh. I don't really go out to the movie theaters a lot. It's expensive, most of the movies aren't worth $10, and I usually end up sitting in front of the seat-kicker twins. I built a home theater to enjoy a movie in a controlled environment...but this is one of those movies that I really wish I had seen on the silver screen.

In true Peter Jackson fashion, the computer-enhanced special effects were breathtaking. Breathtaking is actually understating it. My heart was pounding from beginning to end. It was a three hour roller coaster ride that was a bit reminiscent of Jurassic Park, but kept with the original screenplay most of the way. The biggest thing that set this movie apart from Jurassic Park was that the actors were believable. You actually cared about most of them. If you were a sap like me and missed this movie when it came out, go get the DVD now...you won't regret it.

List of the April Fools Jokes for 2006

Wikipedia has a list of all of the big pranks that have happened. The list is growing fast, enjoy the hilarity.

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Print from your laptop to your wall using a can of spraypaint and string

This is the coolest thing ever! Two electronics engineering students in Zurich made this simple but intriguing way of printing from their tiny laptop to a wall of just about any size using a can of spray paint, some string, and two tiny motors. It's hypnotic to watch!

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So we received our Treo 700W's today. It felt like Christmas as we all scrambled to rip open the boxes and start checking the phone out. The verdict is still out as to whether or not I like the 700W. The screen resolution, color depth, and clarity puts the Treo 600 to shame. It's about the same as the 650. The built-in camera will let you take 1280 x 1024 resolution pictures...which means you can actually use this as a camera if you wanted to. The camera on the 600 was a joke. The really fun stuff began when I pointed the IE browser to my.orb.com and logged into my HTPC box at home. I selected a Seinfeld episode and hit play...and I didn't expect really much to happen. To my astonishment, it started buffering for about 5 seconds and then...it streamed Seinfeld to my phone using Windows Media Player. The quality was actually quite good for being a phone. I have to break open the piggy bank soon and get a 2 GB SD card so that I can take my shows to go. When you put the display in full-screen mode, it's totally watchable. The sound is great too. Neither video nor sound had any jitters. My manager in Boise hit my Orb service and said that he was able to view the video, but it was pretty jittery. Boise won't have EVDO service until around November 2006, so they're going to have to wait before they get to experience streaming onto a cell phone up there.

All in all, I was quite impressed. It still takes a couple seconds for my brain to grok the Windows Mobile interface each time I want to do something. The phone quality itself is average, although the real test will happen tomorrow when I take it down to the datacenter and try making calls inside the cage. Usually what happens is that I lose my voice because I'm yelling so loudly, my battery quickly drains because the reception is so bad, and the receiving end gets frustrated and annoyed since all they hear is 8 million fans drowning out my cries. I don't think this phone will be much better, but here's hoping.

A friend of mine sent me a link to this News.com article which talked about being able to use Slingbox on your cell phone. Now, I definitely think this is a very cool idea. I'm not a huge TV fanatic, however I do see the convenience in being able to watch TV while on the go.

I already spent way too much on my HTPC project, so the idea of paying another $250 for the Slingbox is not one I'm likely to entertain. Now, as coincidence would have it, my work is issuing out Treo 700W's to all the system / network admins this week. I think the combination of my HTPC + Orb + TCPMP will equal a pretty good project for me to write up about. If my friend does end up getting the Slingbox, I'll try to get him to write up a review on that as well. I don't think Orb's video is going to match up with the Slingbox...but on a 240 x 240 cell phone screen, will I notice the difference?

So today I got my hands on our Cisco Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) server. I don't know all the features yet, but from the outside it's literally just Linux on a Dell Poweredge server. When you login to the box you don't get a shell, it drops you into this Cisco environment where you can issue a bunch of commands like

packet display fa0/0

Which just runs tethereal and displays packets in realtime. This isn't impressive since you can just run tcpdump or tethereal on the command line and get the exact same effect. This isn't the IPS's main feature however, it's just one tool an admin can use to see what's going on.

Once you've fully configured the IPS server the real fun begins. It will analyze *all* traffic on your network and can automatically make ACL updates on your PIX, switch or router. You can setup event action filters, and use built-in and custom signatures in conjunction with risk ratings that the IPS will calculate in order to automatically deny packets that have a strong probability of being malicious. Once you set everything up, you can monitor the different packets that the IPS server sees as possible attacks, but not do anything with them yet besides logging. This will give you a better idea as to what the IPS sees, since false positives are inevitable. Once tuned though, I see this device being very helpful in keeping a 24/7 watchdog on what's entering our network.

The east coast office move was a success. I wrote the PIX commands that they would need to run once they powered on the PIX and consoled in. I made one minor goof that held things up for about 10 minutes while I figured out what was missing. I removed the inbound access-list lines and added them back in using the new external address. That seemed easy enough when I planned it ahead of time. The one thing that I forgot about was that as soon as you remove the last access-list entry, when you rebuild the access-list you also need to reapply them to the (external in this case) interface using the access-group command. One lousy line that was overlooked caused a bit of confusion...but at least I should remember this in the future. Hopefully this help anyone else out there that aren't Cisco experts already.

Sprint Picture Mail site lets anyone log in

Engadget's Evan Blass reports about some discussion on forums that there's a bit of a bug in Sprint's Picture Mail online that lets anyone log in to any Sprint phone's account, without a password.

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So we are getting ready to roll out our new fileserver at work. It's actually an old fileserver with new disks, but that's a helluva lot better than our current situation (our Exchange server functions as a fileserver, print server, and primary Active Directory server). Now that our office is growing, it's time to start distributing the load a bit and add in some redundancy.

We only have about 30 users in the office. Since some users are more technical than others, I've decided to stage the migration and do the engineers first, then sales, and finally the marketing and executives. I figure the engineers won't freak out if they suddenly have a new mapped drive.

Since I'm doing the move in stages, I needed a way to "rsync" their files from the current fileserver to the new one. I was considering using the Cygwin tools to accomplish this, but I was worried about NTFS permissions. There are programs out there that will "fix" permissions, but why resort to that when you don't need to? There were a number of solutions to pick from. My colleague decided Robocopy would do the trick. Robocopy is a tool based on Microsoft's XCOPY and is available on the Windows 2000/3 Resource Kit.

Not only will Robocopy handle file and directory permissions with ease, but it also has a number of other features that is going to make this migration really easy.

• Can auto-restart a copy in the event of a failure
  
• Will retry a user-defined number of times before giving up (for instance, if the file is locked)
  
• Use wildcard characters in file and directory names
  
• Delete destination file and directories that no longer exist in the source
  
• Schedulable to run automatically
  
• Monitor a directory for changes, then automatically start a copy
  
• Can copy files based on attributes such as last access dates
  
• Bandwidth usage can be controlled
  
• Has very verbose and legible logging
  
• Can use UNIX style switch flags (-foo instead of /foo) and path delimiters (/ instead of \)
  
• Can control how deep you want to recursively copy directories
  

So I'll post more news about the fileserver migration when it happens.

So this week your friendly neighborhood sys admin gets to don his network hat on and do some work on a PIX 525. We have an office on the east coast that is moving on Thursday. We have a lan-to-lan vpn tunnel connecting our office in Idaho with the east coast office, so once it moves and the external address changes the tunnel will break - that's where I come in. The PIX changes are minor, and the VPN concentrator changes are even more minor...but the fact that I get to do the work makes my geek salivary glands pumpin. I've always liked doing network work (even firing up tcpdump to aid in application troubleshooting is fun). Our main network admin is on vacation, so I get to live out my fantasies. OK, being a network admin for a week is a pretty sad fantasy...at least I'm being honest.

So after about 3 months of using Media Portal, I decided to give another application a shot. I've steered away from Beyond TV in the past because I was looking for a non-commercial solution. That was closed-minded of me. I decided I would give it a try since I could always go back to using Media Portal if I didn't like BTV.

I downloaded the trial version, and after 1 week of use I'm happy to say it has exceeded my expectations. BTV only does PVR duties, but SnapStream has other products (Beyond Media is the next one I'm going to try out) that extends the functionality by (for instance) allowing you to play / save DVD's, play downloaded videos, stream music, view pictures and stream to clients like a laptop or another computer. The amazing part for me was how fast it took from downloading the installer to being fully operational (two tuners; one for the DirectTV receiver and one for terrestrial HDTV). Media Portal took me several days to get everything working...BTV took me about 15 minutes. The interface is snappy too, compared to MP. MP kept the choices open for pretty much everything, including the TV listings. This is great for some people, but BTV let's you use their own SnapStream.net TV listings service which is as good or better than the service I used for MP. Being able to login anywhere and schedule remote recordings was a big plus as well.

I'm not done trying out the different HTPC / PVR software out there. Next on my list is GB-PVR, which is another freeware application that runs on Windows. I won't forget about MythTV either, although I won't be able to use my ATI HDTV Wonder card so I'll have to buy another Digital capture card before venturing in that territory.