Day: August 7, 2002

I see that blogtree has exceeded its bandwidth allowance.  Just show me where the paypal button is and I’ll donate, baby!

I couldn’t resist:

Via Tenorman via Radio Free Blogistan via David Watson via David Copeland, a reporter in Texas has been told to shut down his personal weblog by his employer, the Houston Chronicle.

I actually read about it earlier, but decided to post it now to show the weblog reporting chain.  It’s not telephone if you copy and paste.

Intel will have to fight the Megahertz myth: Banias, their new ultra-low power ultra-mobile processor will debut with a top speed of 1.6MHz.  It will be designed for notebooks and other low power or high density devices, but:

Like Advanced Micro Devices’ Athlon and other competing chips, Banias’ performance will actually be better than its numbers might indicate because it will complete more work per clock cycle than the Pentium 4, according to Intel and other sources.

The fuzzy Scott Johnson: A collection of his PHP articles all linked in one place.  There are some nice tutorials, howtos, and articles in there, good reading if you’re a php-head.

PXES: A tiny thin cleint Linux distribution, or what to do with those extra pentiums.

The Washington Post: A team of Maryland-based scientists and hobbyists are preparing a transatlantic model airplane flight.  It’s a great little article that I read over Cheerioes this morning.  It will take off from Newfoundland and land in Ireland if everything goes well.  Takeoff and landing will be done remotely, but most of the journey will be done via on-board navigation.  It’s a cool, recordbreaking idea, and it would be great to see these guys succeed.

Michael Lucas: “Hurried Sysadmin” install encounter with OpenBSD, a favorable review noting a few quirks that every fresh install seems to have.

OpenBSD has always been on my “must toy with” list, so the recent release of version 3.1 made it seem like a good time to check it out. The OpenBSD Web site shows that OpenBSD includes all of the usual BSD goodies; heaps of programs, an extensive ports tree, good documentation, and so on. Their security claims are intriguing, and some of the features (such as authpf) seem quite interesting. But marketing claims made on a Web site can be quite distant from reality, so I decided to install the OS on both a desktop and a laptop and see what I could do.

Significant *nix release of the morning: NMap 3.00 stable.  NMap is an excellent tool that you can run on your local network to see what ports are open, and which machines might be vulnerable to an attack.  If you’ve got a linux box on your network, I’d suggest running it just for the learning experience.  It’s nice and will even guess which OS each box on your network is running, with some degree of accuracy.  The 3.00 gzipped tarball is here and the freshmeat page is here.

Office toy warfare round up: Oh yeah!  Scroll down to the crossbow, that’s my favorite.

Also in todays freshmeat box is Simple Web Journal, with a little PHP and MySQL.  A demo site is here.

Microblogger: A weblog tool written in straight-up bash script, 2k worth.  How cool is that?  You can grab it via a gzipped tarball here.

MicroBlogger, as the name implies, is a small, simple, flexible, reliable weblog engine written entirely in bash script. It has absolutely no dependencies on any other programs–No PHP, no SQL, no CGI, no Perl, nothing. MicroBlogger is self-regulating, self-maintaining, and ready to fly straight out of the box. Just unpack the archive in your web directory, add a greeting, and whammo, you’re all set! MicroBlogger’s simplicity has another advantage; its fast, stable, and easy to customize!