By now we all know that it is pretty easy to bypass geolocation blockage with a web proxy or vpn service. After all, there is over 2 million google results on “bbc vpn” … and I wanted to do just that to view a BBC show on privacy and the dark web. I wanted to set this up as cheaply as possible but not use a service that I had to pay for a month since I only needed one hour.

Well… I finally figured out that the ucb package isn’t installed on Solaris 11 by default (resource). Unfortunately, the Oracle docs are confusing to follow. Here is a cheatsheet for installing the ucb package on your shiny Solaris 11 install. Figure out the IPS installer, read man pages, get frustrated at lack of detail, run to Google. Find the package you want on http://pkg.oracle.com/, in this case compatibility/ucb Add the publisher link to your config, by the way, this link is not documented that I can find so I had to guess and check.

A few days ago, Linode.com announced native IPv6 roll out in their datacenters. Now, while I haven’t wrote about Linode in the past 6 months, I am still a happy customer. I am documenting the steps I took to migrate away from my HE.net tunnel. Set the TTL low on any DNS addresses that you will be changing. Ideally, do this a fair amount ahead of time. Send in a support ticket to get your /64 allocated.

As of writing today, my Android powered phone (Droid X) cannot send SMS messages to some people, but receive messages fine. This is because my address book has “+1” on some people’s numbers. Solution: Add/edit a number without the “+1” – in a connected world, I don’t even bother to “save” phone numbers, they get synced to me from third party sources (facebook). In this case, synced in such a way that it won’t work.

There seems to be a semi-meme going [around][2] on some of the planets I read. My concern is long directory paths and I wanted a dymanic solution for it. Surely, I cannot be the first person to think of it, but I haven’t seen it in use anywhere else. jolexa @ helios :: ~ %% and jolexa @ helios :: ~ %% cd projects/prefix-tinderbox/really_long_dirname_so_that_binpkgs_can_be_shortened/a/b/ jolexa @ helios :: .../a/b %% (the colors and wrapping are representitive only) and the code that produces that: _chomp_path() { local path=${1/${HOME}/\~} local last=${path} sedout= count=0 count2=0 sedout=$(echo ${path} | sed -e 's:/: :g') for i in ${sedout}; do (( count++ )) done if ((count > 2)); then last="..." for i in ${sedout}; do (( count2++ )) if (( count2 >= count - 1 )); then last+="/$i" fi done fi echo ${last} } PS1='\[\033[1;34m\]\u \[\033[1;32m\]@\[\033[1;34m\] \h \[\033[1;30m\]::\[\033[1;37m\] $(_chomp_path $(pwd)) \[\033[1;30m\]%%\[\033[0m\] ' If anyone wants to improve that function, let me know.

DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) is a standard to allow entertainment devices within the home to share their content with each other across a home network. In other words, stream content from my computer to the TV across the LAN. The cool part about this, is that my TV, the LN40B630, can play HD content native, meaning that the computer’s only function is to stream (not process the content, meaning my low power computer can ‘power’ the HD content).

If you are running PHP on a limited-resource box, like a [VPS][1] then you may have seen your PHP pages randomly hang. I was able to trace this issue down because the PHP pages were hung up and the normal html pages were still being served. The problem was ‘solved’ when I restarted the web server. Some research later, and talking to Thilo (bangert), I found out about PHP_FCGI_MAX_REQUESTS. This is an environment variable that PHP respects, it basically tells how many requests to serve before respawning fcgi.

The problem: $ dmesg |grep mtrr mtrr: no more MTRRs available I found on my ‘new-to-me’ AA1 that MTRR handling in the BIOS was messed up. Thanks to this [bug report][1] I figured out that I should compile the kernel with MTRR sanitizer enabled. That is: $ zgrep -i MTRR /proc/config.gz CONFIG_MTRR=y CONFIG_MTRR_SANITIZER=y CONFIG_MTRR_SANITIZER_ENABLE_DEFAULT=1 CONFIG_MTRR_SANITIZER_SPARE_REG_NR_DEFAULT=1 And output of /proc/mtrr is as follows. Before and after. $ cat /proc/mtrr reg00: base=0x0fffe0000 ( 4095MB), size= 128KB, count=1: write-protect reg01: base=0x0fffc0000 ( 4095MB), size= 128KB, count=1: uncachable reg02: base=0x000000000 ( 0MB), size= 512MB, count=1: write-back reg03: base=0x020000000 ( 512MB), size= 512MB, count=1: write-back reg04: base=0x03f800000 ( 1016MB), size= 8MB, count=1: uncachable reg05: base=0x03f600000 ( 1014MB), size= 2MB, count=1: uncachable reg06: base=0x03f500000 ( 1013MB), size= 1MB, count=1: uncachable reg07: base=0x000000000 ( 0MB), size= 128KB, count=1: uncachable after kernel modification: reg00: base=0x000000000 ( 0MB), size= 1024MB, count=1: write-back reg01: base=0x03f500000 ( 1013MB), size= 1MB, count=1: uncachable reg02: base=0x03f600000 ( 1014MB), size= 2MB, count=1: uncachable reg03: base=0x03f800000 ( 1016MB), size= 8MB, count=1: uncachable reg04: base=0x040000000 ( 1024MB), size= 256MB, count=1: write-combining This is needed for decent video playback with the on-board Intel 945 video.

The latest series of iPhone TV commercials really bug me. First of all it costs at least $99 to obtain access to the “Developer Program”. Then Apple has the guts to advertise that they have “the most apps evar!” to stimulate more iPhone sales. What is wrong with this picture? If Apple is going to exploit the work of apps developers, many of whom distribute their apps for free, then shouldn’t the cost to join the developer network be free as well?

The advantage of Open Source is not the price, it’s its open nature. Knowledge is freedom and Open Source is all about freedom, no closed source alternative can match that. But this not something so obvious when you’re new to Open Source. –Oliver Fourdan (Creator of Xfce) [[source][2]] Yup, sounds right. Explains why even in this global economy, people will still buy closed source products (ie. more expensive). They are comfortable with them and don’t care to learn otherwise.

Better but not great. As I previously wrote about how much iwl3945 sucked. The .27 kernel seems like there has been many iwl improvements. When I say, “seems” – that is what I mean. I mean that it seems like there is improvements, and the changelogs show alot of iwl activity. So, my current experiences with iwl3945 still show some “troubles” with being on B networks. But this time, mixed networks work better and G networks work flawlessly.

Well, not really Linux related but I ran across a post today about Open Source Hardware. I guess it makes sense, and it pretty cool. Consider the Linksys WRT54G series, one of Linksys best sellers nowadays because some people discovered it was running embedded Linux. This isn’t quite the same as OSHardware, but close. Now consider having a profitable company that releases all specs to the microcontroller that they are mass producing, very neat idea.

Old news…by about..2 weeks now. But in case some of you haven’t seen this yet, Linus Torvalds now has his own blog after “having [avoided][1] the whole blogging thing so far” Anyway, here it is for all you blog maniacs out there. http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/ [1]: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/first-post.html

Awesome? No, definitely not. I use the “oldbar” addon now which brings back the firefox-2 like address bar. You can get it here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6227 Note that it is still the ff-3 algorithm but the display is modified. YMMV, but I like it.

Update: (04/14/11) I see that freehg now links to an adult site. Hence, I have removed all the links. Just a small post to document the options with regards to “free” mercurial repo hosting. Many options are located on mercurial’s homepage here. I choose to compare offerings from [bitbucket][2] and freehg. I was rooting for freehg in my comparisons because they sound more “free” Anyway, the numbers don’t lie. %% time hg push http://freehg.org/u/jolexa/personal/ pushing to http://freehg.org/u/jolexa/personal/ searching for changes no changes found real 0m4.221s user 0m0.103s sys 0m0.011s vs %% time hg push http://bitbucket.org/jolexa/personal/ pushing to http://bitbucket.org/jolexa/personal/ searching for changes no changes found real 0m0.665s user 0m0.109s sys 0m0.011s and..

As jaervosz wrote the other day, the iwl3945 driver has some serious issues with it. I think I have it narrowed down to what conditions cause the problem. Problem: When downloading large files for non-trivial amounts of time, the download speed drops to <80 K/s. This is unacceptable, the whole pipe is limited to that by the way. I am not sure what exactly causes this but I have narrowed down the conditions to which it happens.

Some NFS “issues” .. /me rants about RHEL 4.. reboot fixed it.