Monthly Archives: September 2011

Facebook tracks users through the ‘like’ buttons…

Posted on by
5

ouch, apparently even if you logout, you’ll still be tracked by sites that have the ‘like’ button…

Well that just sounds creepy so I’ll remove them from my site.  I don’t think there was all that many people mentioning this blog on facebook outside of some brief ‘save officer spock‘ thing but at the same point I don’t want to participate in some larger big brother thing.

I just hope G+ doesn’t do anything like that (haha!)

Another OS/2 Synchronet BBS

Posted on by
1

It’s always cool to see them pop up in the wild.  So here is the quick writeup on gabucino.be going over some of the trials of setting up bbs.gabucino.be ..

And apparently he’s had far better luck getting the modems to operate well more like modems.  So no cheating as I did by using passive mode FTP to transfer QWK packets in & out of the system.  Its all very cool, and of course powered by OS/2 on Qemu so that makes me happy!

There isn’t a flash/java based page, so I’d recommend using syncterm.

HP 12c

Posted on by
Reply

Old guy with old tech

Personally I’ve never been into calculators.  Oh sure they are ‘fun’ typing in 80087335 and other vital things, but what I always wanted was a real hand held computer.

Yes the HP graphing calculators could be programmed but really, it’s 2011 and the fact that the market is largely unchanged is just freaking criminal.

Then enter the new / old HP 12c.  This is interesting as it isn’t some ancient 1980s era junky calculator but rather an ARM embedded processor emulating the old software.  And of course that means that this baby is 100x faster than the old 1980’s model.  Well that is refreshing since the last time I looked at a calculator it was frustratingly slow today as it was then.

What is more so interesting is the price, $80 for the financial version and $100 for the engineering version.

But I digress what I’d rather have is something like the old OQO, a hand held PC that can run any real software.

What is interesting to me is a small resurgence in old machines repackaged, and of course resold to their original nostalgic market.

What I’d really be interested in is some DEC VT-100 terminal that comes with its own VAX-11/780 emulator… It’d be a midrange system in a terminal form factor!  But I don’t see HP doing that anytime soon.  In the meantime I guess I can always score a Commodore 64.

Beats by DrDre

Posted on by
4

A typical 'beats' user trying to look smarmy.

First of all let me say I’m sick of the spam I’m getting for this crap.  Second of all ‘Dr Dre’ isn’t even a physician.  Instead he just hires wankers in the media to hock his overpriced headphones.

Really who buys audio equipment from someone who tries to pass themselves off as a physician, who doesn’t know the first thing about the inner workings of the ear?

What makes it even better is the paring of such audiophile nonsense with star power, in the hopes of bigger and better sales.

Justin Beiber Approved!

I mean really, who on earth would buy this crap?

This must be brought to you by the same people that make the ‘super SATA cables’ that magically improved the playback of MP3’s. Sheesh.

It really comes as no surprise that these “high end wankophile” electronics are manufactured by none other than…

Monster. What a surprise!

Indeed it just goes to show that some old ‘stars’ from the 80’s will whore themselves out to no end for whatever shitty ‘audiphile’ product, because a dollar is a dollar, meanwhile in the rush for some bucks they team up with Beiber. lol.

 The only thing missing here is beats for Dre’s wallet, and of course the insane in the brain special edition to anyone who buys anything from Monster.

So there you go, I’ve reviewed your shitty product “dr” Dre, now leave me the fuck alone!

ownCloud

Posted on by
Reply

So I was reading through a friends blog (wintellect!) and I came across this page about ownCloud…  Well I thought this was very interesting as I’ve pulled a lot of my external email mess inside (on my own Exchange 5.5 server on MS Virtual Server 2005!) .. So I like this whole idea.

I’ve got this VPS that has a few extra gigs of space, and it’d be SUPER convenient to map some drives for backups, or even back it up by copying some files..  It’s a simple AMP program setup, so I had it up and running in a few seconds.  The ‘hard’ part was mapping the drive from Vista.  Naturally it came down to reading the instructions, namely:

  1. in Services, enable the Webclient service (might be enabled already)
  2. in the Registry, change HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters\BasicAuthLevel from 1 to 2
  3. go to My Computer → Mount Network Drive
And that is about the size of it.

Emulation vs Simulation

Posted on by
Reply

I saw this creep up on a mailing list, and it never really occurred to me that there really was a difference.  But there is.  Anyways a simulation is done 100% in software with no hardware assist.  While emulation has some kind of hardware component (Originally it was microcode on the IBM 709 to run IBM 704 programs).

So there you have it, programs like SIMH, Qemu are simulators, while programs like KVM-Qemu and VMWare are emulators.

Hope that clears that up.

cloning an IDE Linux machine with netcat

Posted on by
11

I’ve ran into some weird instance of this old RedHat Linux machine that is starting to die.. The old 30GB disk is clicking rather loudly…!

To make matters worse, the computer is not only in another country but on another continent.  And no the users won’t let me take it down, ship it or let local techs work on it, they want it virtualized, and they want it to be done without taking it down…

All I have to work with is an old Windows 2003 server with a big external USB disk, and I don’t even have administrator privileges on the 2003 server so I can’t install anything ‘fun’ like VMWare, VirtualPC, VirtualBOX or anything else.

So I thought I’d go old school with this and use netcat.

Thankfully there is a win32 version of netcat, and the Linux PC already had it installed.  So it really was trivial I must say knowing what to do once all the bits are in place.  From the Windows machine I just ran:

nc -p 2222 -l |gzip -dc > disk0.raw

And on the Linux PC I ran:

cat /dev/hda | gzip -c | netcat 10.0.1.10 2222

So on the Windows side, netcat will listen on TCP port 2222 and then decompress the stream with gzip and save that into the file disk0.raw.  On the Linux side, it’ll read the harddisk, compress the data with gzip and then using netcat redirect the stream to the Windows host.

It took about 30 minutes, I suppose if the disk wasn’t in a questionable state I’d have cleared out the empty space to speed it along, however I felt that doing a large amount of writing to a questionable disk is just asking for trouble.

Once the transfer was complete I was able to then fire up Qemu 0.15.0, and have it mount the raw disk image, and it worked perfectly!  I added the modules for the AMDPCNet card (pcnet32) and I was able to use the user mode NAT via Qemu, and redirect a local TCP port into the VM’s sshd …. Something like this:

qemu -L pc-bios -m 256 -net nic,model=pcnet -net user -hda disk0.raw -no-reboot -redir tcp:3333::22

And that was that.  Now we have a perfect copy of the machine!