Archive for March, 2006

Encrypting files (and GMail storage)

Saturday, March 25th, 2006

I have been looking for a replacement to the encrypting filesystem which was part of PGP v6 (international edition) for a while. I believe I have now found it – EncFS, which is described further in this presentation. (more…)

Linux file-systems

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

I am happiest with the overall compromises and performance of XFS for my data, used in combination with ext3 on the /boot and root partitions. The XFS partitions hold either /var or /home (or both), depending on what purpose the system is put to. In my setups, /home is irrelevant for server-only systems, /var is where Postfix, MySQL etc will do I/O.

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The global sex survey 2005

Saturday, March 11th, 2006

This is absolutely *hilarious*, and a must read: the Durex global sex survey 2005. Some gems follow. (more…)

Mr Winterbottom, I presume?

Friday, March 10th, 2006

Michael Winterbottom’s award-winning drama on the Guantanamo Bay prisoners is now available to view online (against payment, to Tiscali).

Keeping accurate time

Sunday, March 5th, 2006

For normal system maintenance, NTP (or its poor cousing, rdate) are the accepted standard mechanisms of synchronising time across an enterprise/set of systems.

In high-resolution time-sync applications, just syncing against the NTP server-pool results in insufficient accuracy. Darryl Veitch and Attila Pásztor have done research in this field, which has resulted in a proof that using a combination of round-trip-times (RTT) and the built-in high-resolution timestamp register called TSC of modern Pentium-class processors we can remedy this. (more…)

OS/X86

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

With the arrival of the Intel-based Mac’s an enterprising bunch of people who are hacking their way into the recovery DVD to enable normal PCs to run Apple’s gorgeous user-interface and system on their normal (SSE2-supporting) system. (more…)

Email virtual domain hosting using Postfix, MySQL and PHP

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

My present SMTP/IMAP setup uses a combination of flat-file configuration with MySQL user parameters. I recently found a web-based domain administration tool; Postfix.Admin. With this tool, you get 3 levels of management abstraction: server, domain and user.

Reference:

Streaming Flash Video

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

http://blogs.adobe.com/fms/ is the blog of the product lead behind Flash Media Server, Steve Wolkoff.

http://it.sys-con.com/read/173454.htm talks about open-source Flash (Actionscript & FMS) equivalents, Red5 and MTASC. HaXE is interesting.

Bluetooth on an OpenWrt router

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

I run OpenWrt on my Asus WL-500gx router, which is my principal defense against the Internet wilderness.

In addition to the main OpenWRT site, MacSat’s site contains useful information on configuration. (more…)

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

Saturday, March 4th, 2006

I just spotted Yahoo! has documented their design patterns! Read more on http://developer.yahoo.net/ypatterns/. Note also that they have released their JavaScript library for user-interface design.