Posted on September 26, 2005 by dre

your tax dollars at work!

Posted in lj | Tagged | 2 Comments

Serenity

Posted on September 23, 2005 by dre

I very rarely go out of my way to recommend things like movies or tv shows, but tonight I will make an exception.

I just finished watching the last episode of Joss Whedon’s Firefly, and I am seriously in awe. It’s the best sci-fi I’ve experienced, by any measure.

I hadn’t even heard of it until recently, when Damon recommended it very highly. One of the downsides to having no TV is that occasionally I miss out on amazing stuff like this – until it comes out on DVD. I post this in the hope that somebody else might not have heard about it and will love it as much as I do.

… and the movie comes out on September 30!

Posted in lj | Tagged | 4 Comments

NerdTV

Posted on September 10, 2005 by dre

NerdTV. Good stuff, interesting insights and anecdotes.

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FSM

Posted on August 25, 2005 by dre

This is definitely the most hillarious / astute parody I’ve seen in a long time. I bought t-shirts. Now I just need to find some pirate regalia…

Favorite quote:

For example, a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 10,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage.

Posted in lj | Tagged | 1 Comment

G5 unsick

Posted on August 23, 2005 by dre

After one month and one day in repair, my g5 is finally back in action. The problem was that it would spontaneously reboot when under moderate to heavy CPU load. I deduced that it was a cooling problem by manually cranking all the internal fans up way high, which made the problem to go away. Observing temperature sensors, I noticed that one CPU seemed to run quite a bit hotter than the other.

They replaced the power supply, both CPUs, and the logic board. Problem didn’t go away, so they replaced the logic board again. Now it’s cool, and the CPU die temps are a lot closer to each other. Those parts would have cost me $2663.12 (were it not under warranty), meanwhile I paid $2070 for the machine in the first place… woof.

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Posted on July 28, 2005 by dre

This is going to sound hopelessly nerdy.

I fed my first patch back to the open source community today! It’s for this app called imapproxy, designed to sit between webmail apps and imap servers and do connection caching. It was purported to only work on older versions of os x, but now it works in panther and tiger too :) So for all you uh… thousands of people out there running webmail on apple hardware worried about hammering your imap servers with webmail clients constantly turning over their connections, well… now you can upgrade your old os x boxes that are running imapproxy ;)

Finally, iPlanet imapd is poopy for not supporting SORT. I mean, come on.

andre@werk[work/imapproxy]telnet dirt.apple.com imap
Trying 17.216.22.117...
Connected to dirt.apple.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK dirt.apple.com Cyrus IMAP4 v2.2.12-OS X 10.3 server ready
2 capability
* CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 ACL QUOTA LITERAL+ MAILBOX-REFERRALS NAMESPACE UIDPLUS
ID NO_ATOMIC_RENAME UNSELECT CHILDREN MULTIAPPEND BINARY
SORT THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT THREAD=REFERENCES ANNOTATEMORE IDLE
2 OK Completed
^]
telnet> quit
Connection closed.
andre@werk[work/imapproxy]telnet mail.apple.com imap
Trying 17.128.115.171...
Connected to mail.apple.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK Messaging Multiplexor (iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 Patch 2 (built Jul 14 2004))
2 capability
* CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 ACL QUOTA LITERAL+ NAMESPACE UIDPLUS CHILDREN
LANGUAGE XSENDER X-NETSCAPE XSERVERINFO AUTH=PLAIN STARTTLS
2 OK CAPABILITY completed
^]
telnet> quit
Connection closed.

When squirrelmail is configured to take advantage of server-side sorting, large mail boxes (say, around 5300 messages) load in like 2 seconds, compared to like 12 seconds. But only if the imap server supports SORT…

Posted in lj | Tagged , | 2 Comments

reasonable people

Posted on July 10, 2005 by dre

I finally bought the upgrade.

Now that LJ supports tags, I think I’m going to start logging new tracks here. Sorry :P

7-5-05 and 10-26-03 are the two vignettes for show and tell today. As you might have guessed by the date, that second one’s been sitting around a while.

It’s a very worthwhile upgrade, all in all. Specifically, the mastering suite is encouraging me to dig up old tracks and make them sound decent. It was always sort of a pain to get really decent level out of Reason, for one, er.. reason or another. Now, just drop in the mastering combi and you’re pretty much good to go, without even adjusting anything.

Also, the new combinator device has finally encouraged me to start creating patches – combi patches. I never really spent a whole lot of time building instruments or sculpting the sound, but now that I can save and recall arbitrarily small or large configurations of different devices, it’s become a lot more fun to do exactly that.

Posted in lj | Tagged | 8 Comments

Posted on July 8, 2005 by dre

This site is great :)

Posted in lj | Tagged | 2 Comments

Posted on July 2, 2005 by dre

Departed SJC at 6:40 a.m –> MSP –> DET –> PIT = *YAWN*

Waiting for mom to arrive on her flight from FL. Granddad is picking us up, and does not yet know that I’m here. Mom and I have a clandestine plan to surprise him :) BTW, internet, don’t tell anybody :)

Airline peanuts now cost a dollar (well, for a small pack, not per peanut, but still…).

Posted in lj | Tagged | 3 Comments

Posted on June 20, 2005 by dre
  • Going to PA for the July 4th weekend for a shindig with the extended fam. Should be fun as I haven’t seen most of them for quite a while
  • The book I contributed to (the firewall chapter) is finally shipping, though I have yet to receive my free copies
  • I like silly putty
  • Net::LDAP works pretty well
Posted in lj | Tagged , | 1 Comment