October 2003 Archives
I just noticed that I haven't wrote anything for past nine days.
Currently I am busy with my new Office 2003 on my laptop. And I have to admit that it was a worthy upgrade. Everything just got too much better.
Especially Outlook just got better, and now has an excellent junk mail feature.
The most noticing things after installation are:
1- All program icons installed in a separate group in Programs menu, instead of being in main programs menu.
2- All programs has a new prefix now. "Microsoft Word" is "Microsoft Office Word 2003", and so on.
3- The new toolbar and menu look and feel are nice.
4- InfoPath seems to be a very useful thing, but I haven't had the chance to test it completely.
5- OneNote is very useful. I was using it since the beta. The final version puts an icon in system tray to be accessible quickly at any time. Launcher just gets 360k of memory while running.
6- Visio has new stencils, which very good looking icons. I haven't had the chance to go thourhg all new features, but there seems to be a lot of them.
7- The most important thing to me was that all programs launchs much faster comparing to my old Office XP. Much faster.
8- The new research option which is integerated in almost all office apps, lets you search in encylopedia while working. Installation adds a new sidebar and button to Internet Explorer which lets you use "Research" while surfing.
So far, I am enjoying the new office. And I am sorry for OpenOffice 1.1 which didn't last more than one day on my compter.
I want a new laptop. Something with a big screen (at least 15"), too much memory (at least 512MB), a big hard disk (80GB would be fine), Built-in WiFi, Firewire, powerfull speakers, and of course a good graphic processor (ATI RADEON 9200 maybe).
HP Pavillion? Compaq Presario X1000? or maybe a Powerbook G4?
I can't get one of these for at least 2500 bucks, (shipment and accossories not included).
Oops, I was forgetting about a laptop backpack. A BP3 from Booq would be fine.
Phew.... I am going to add Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations" to my Amazon Wishlist.
crap! At least on Windows. I also hate its slow and CPU hungry visualization.
(Mac lovers, cat flames > /dev/null please).
I have made a comparison between iTunes and Windows Media Player 9, from system resource usage point of view. and iTunes was the loser. 
Still don't believe me? So check out this snapshot from my windows task manager.
iTunes and related processes (marked as pink) have occupied about 30 megabytes of memory, while Windows Media Player 9 (marked as green) has occupied only 9 megabytes.
Windows Media Player does everything I need. It plays all sorts of media, VCD, DVD, RIPs audio CDs lightning fast, has Radio Tuner, and best of all it is compatible with my jukebox.
I see no reason to even have iTunes on my laptop. I am tight on memory and disk space, and need them for better stuff.
Start -> Control Panel -> Add or Remove Programs -> iTunes -> Remove
update: The only cool feature of iTunes is its music shopping service which is not available in my region :-)
Mozilla Project now has nightly builds for FreeBSD on their FTP site site. Looks like FreeBSD is going to have an official binary with the next release of Mozilla Firebird.
Someone has performed performance benchmark on Linux 2.6, Linux 2.4, NetBSD 1.6.1, OpenBSD 3.4 and FreeBSD 5.1. Benchmarks includes TCP/IP stack, filesystem and memory management stuff. The results are interesting.
FreeBSD 5.1 has very impressive performance and scalability. I foolishly assumed all BSDs to play in the same league performance-wise, because they all share a lot of code and can incorporate each other's code freely. I was wrong. FreeBSD has by far the best performance of the BSDs and it comes close to Linux 2.6. If you run another BSD on x86, you should switch to FreeBSD!
FreeBSD 5.1 stands on second stage while Linux 2.6 caught the winner title.
Linux development team have done a very good job in this new release. I guess FreeBSD will catch them with 5.2-STABLE, hopefully.
OpenBSD was the last in the race. See their response here. They believe the benchmark was unfair!
I am currently moving this blog and my other stuff from this server to another colo server that we have in Dallas. Unlike this one, our dallas server is running smoothly on FreeBSD 4.8, which is my favorite.
[farrokhi@server:~] > uptimeThe most annoying thing during this migration is moving my blog.
11:02AM up 22 days, 17:12, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.02, 0.03
MovableType is a great piece of software, but without backup/restore function, it is just PITA.
The main problem is that MT is not able to export templates and other personalized settings, and all settings should be exported manually. It is even more pain if you customized many templates and added new forms.
It would be a great idea to add this capability to upcoming versions of MT (if there is any upcoming release planned).
And about the new server, I have Postfix+SpamAssassin+RBL in place, as well as Apache+mod_php4+mod_perl and all up to the minute softwares. I love portupgrade.
Firebird 0.7, Mozilla 1.5 and Thunderbird 0.3 has been released all together.
Firebird is fast, simple and standard compliant. I am using it for a while without any major problem. If you are not familiar with firebird, take a tour here.
Q: Is aebrahim planning to release an optimized P4 SSE2 build soon?
A: I hope so!
update: aebrahim's optimized build here.
Recommended Links:
With the wireless internet anywhere now, the wifi connections are easier to go for. Using a wifi phone will let you make calls through skype without a pc. The affordable call rates are not a thing of the past with the wireless phone service. And the wireless keyboard can offer upto 30 feet away services.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
$out = qx(tail -50 /var/log/maillog | grep -i \"lookup error:\");
if (length($out) != 0)
{
$hostname = qx/hostname/;
$date = qx/date/;
open MF,"| mail -s \"RBLCheck Warning\" root";
print MF "Server: $hostname";
print MF "Date: $date";
print MF "maillog snippet:\n----------\n$out----------\n";
close MF;
}
Notes:
1- This script emails a short report to
root. It would be a good idea to change it to your own user.2- I am not a perl geek, but I love to code in perl. If you think you can optimize this code, go ahead and do it.
3- I am using Postfix. You may need to check the lookup string if you are using other MTAs.
4- Depending on your mail server traffic, you may change the number of lines in tail. I check last 50 lines.
5- I run this script every fine minutes from cron. Again, depending on your mail traffic you may want to change this.
6- Suggestions? Post it to comments of this entry.
Team Cymru, which is well known by their Secure IOS Template and Secure BIND Template, has another interesting project that automates blocking of bogon routes in a network.
Bogon Route Server Project realizes a simple idea: Injecting an up to date list of bogon routes into your network that you can easily route them to Null. You do not need to maintain a long list of static routes and keep track of updates from IANA and update your list periodically. Team Cymru takes care of the tracking, and updates their bogon list once a new allocation takes place.
The only thing you should do is to contact them and setup a Multihop eBGP peering with one of their route servers in order to receive the list of bogons, and also performing some route-map stuff to route injected addresses to Null.
Team Cymru is operated by Rob Thomas of Cisco Systems and a group of individuals that are active in networking field. Their goal is to share their valuable experience with other Networkers via their website.
What a UNIX geek wants?
- 440MHz, 500MHz or 650MHz UltraSPARC® processors
- 14.1" XGA or 15" SXGA+ TFT LCD
- Integrated CD-ROM or CD-RW/DVD
- Up to 80GB internal disk storage
- 100% SolarisTM binary compatible
- 802.11b wireless networking
- Up to 2GB DRAM
and all in a gorgeous notebook from Tadpole.
It costs something between 3,000 - 6,000 bucks. A little bit expensive for a typical geek. :-)
An complete review of this mobile monster can be found here.
No, thanks. I do not shop online!
I just opened up my mailbox and had 8 emails. Look what I've got:
"T-h:e natio'na_l i^nfr^ast;ru-ctu_re i.s f`al;li-ng... njpjmscvav"
"'Large -DI'C-K, or :MO^N;E^Y *back ..."
"Try Viagra"
"Alert: Ambien is the Best f2g0a03p"
"Before the Bell: (TDST) Enabling the Telemedical Revolution."
".WS (WebSite) Domains Still 75%+ Available (But Going Fast)."
Well I have DNSBL and SpamAsassin in place! But spammers find a new way to bypass filters everyday.
Jeremy Zawodny has suggested to start a game against spammers. Lets beat them at their own game.
Won't you join the fun? Post a entry with a similarly spammy subject on your blog. TrackBack this entry. Link to it. I'll link to yours. Let's abuse our PageRank in a way that'd make the spammers jealous.
...., he could have taken down the internet in 3 hours. Seriously.
Having a look at decompiled source for Blaster virus, you will find out that this simple program could be an evil but it is not.
Networkers know the power of "TOS" and "Precedence" bits in IP header. All routing information packets and control information in a network have tweaked TOS and Precedece in their layer 3 header. It means they will not be delayed in queues and are transmitted on the network with the highest priority. Now assume that this worm has tweaked TOS and Precedence to the highest priority, and boooommm!
Got the idea?
There is a collection of custom built Mozilla Firebird browser binaries located at Pryan Website.
My favorite is "P4/G7 w/SSE2" build from aebrahim. I am using it right now, and it is amazingly fast.
Use AIDA32 to findout what features are supported by your processor.
