New MUNG Authors.

Welcome to the MUNG team:

Mantis (Programming)
Launchpad (Gaming)
Randy (Novell, Apple)
Patch (Engineering)

Removing KDE from Debian Sarge install.

If you chose "Desktop" when installing Sarge from a net install CD it installs both Gnome and KDE. I'm not a KDE fan. Here is a list of most if not all the packages you need to remove to clean it off your system.

apt-get remove kde...

Aerial Mine Services.

The Aerial Mine is now open. If you would like access to the following services (including free web hosting):

HTTP
HTTPS
SSH
SFTP
Nessus w/ SSL
Ruby on Rails

I can make you an account. Just email joe@621.org with your info.


Additionally, I am looking for a few nerds to add to this blog. If you would like to post here about anything tech and interesting, contact me. You just need to have a blogger account and knowledge in any, but not limited to the following areas:

system administration
programming
linux/unix
windows
electronics

I would expect at least one post per week as far as commitment goes.

Google Integration.

Picture 2
Originally uploaded by zeusfaber.

Google is an interesting company. They seem to have there hand in everything, including seemingly unrelated areas. They have a larger plan in mind and I can't wait to see it unfold. I think they are planning a "one stop" approach for anything internet related. You can go to Google for search, instant messaging, advertising, email and more. As you can see in the pic (upper right corner), they just integrated the email user accounts to the search engine. You can setup a personallized search homepage and etc. This is the same username you use with instant messenging too. One username for all their services.

More Google tid bits.

Zimbra.

Zimbra is a new open source mail server that aims at replacing MS Exchange. It is written in AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript language and XML), which is a mouthfull. It allows you to "mouseover", drag and drop and etc in your web browser. Pretty cool. The Zimbra interface uses all of these types of features. It's worth taking a look at. An online demo is available here.

More Ruby on Rails.

I've been working on this stuff both at work and at home (last night til 3am). After I left work last night Craig (my boss) got it working with Apache2 and FastCGI, earlier in the evening we got it running on Lighttpd with FastCGI. Upon arrival at home I started work on my box to see if I could get it up and running, and did!

It is really simple and not very usefull yet, check it out:

Ruby on Rails on Apache2 Running FastCGI

(If it doesn't work it is probably because I'm working on something. Sorry.)

Here's what I did:

Installed ruby, rails, fastcgi (mod_apache), fastcgi ruby libraries, apache2 with apt-get
Loaded modules for fastcgi and rewrite
Changed the configs (below)
*It's a good plan to get it running with normal cgi first, then switch to fcgi.

Here is what my configs looked like:

Virtual Host File
Ruby .htaccess File

My 'dispatch.fcgi' had these active lines:

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/../config/environment"
require 'fcgi_handler'

RailsFCGIHandler.process!

I think that is about it. It seems easy now, but it was pretty frustrating last night, it felt the stars have to be aligned for it work. Anyway, once you create an app you it *should* work and you should be on your way.

Cell Microprocessor.

A lot has been said about the Cell chip from the big dogs IBM, Sony and Toshiba. And I'm not going to say anything new, but if you haven't heard or read anything about it this is a quick run down.

If you don't know, it's the new chip for the Playstation 3 and it's about as unique as they come. It's a interesting multi-core CPU but not really in the regular sense (think, AMD and Intel). It has a general purpose "controller" core based on the Power architecture (used in Apple machines) called the PPE (Power Processor Element). Additionally, it has eight SPE's (Synergistic Processing Elements) these are "simple" specialized CPU's that do the bulk of the work. They do the work in succession. One will finish and move the product along to the next SPE and so on. Both the PPE and each SPE have their own caches also. And according to IBM the CPU will be running at 4Ghz!

Connecting the CPU to the memory is the new Rambus XDRcontroller (memory bus) and FlexIO (system bus) interconnects that will provide over 25 and 76 GB/s of bandwidth respectively.

Thats a lot processor and IO... Consider the benefits for Playstation type uses of this processor. Graphics are floating point calculations. The floating point ability on this CPU will be huge. It will be much like the video cards used in todays gaming computers but multi-core and less specific (not just used for graphics). In the end it should be a nice blend of specific use and generic processing that should make the PS3 pretty awesome.

Needless to say this going to be a sweet architecture. I think we will see more of a trend to this style of design in porcessors. Moving away from the single core, monolithic style processors we all use today. To single processor multi-core chips that have cheap and easy "co-processor" cores controlled by a one multi-use core. Spreading the load among more CPU's is the name of the game. We are already seeing this happening in both the Intel and AMD camps. The Pentium D and the Athlon X2 are the beginnings of what will be a big change in CPU's.

Moreover, I think we will also see a trend toward more specialized CPU's, ones that are made for a specific purpose or at least that can handle generic use but have a specific slant to them.

For instance, 5 years from now when you buy a PC to connect to your TV and home stereo that machine will have a CPU honed to that sort of purpose. Instead of the CPU being completely generic and avgerage at everything, including stuff you won't be using it with, it will have a job it is really good at and below avgerage on everything else. Why use a Swiss Army knife to cut a tree down when you could use a chainsaw. Other than the performace advantages, a driving force to this style of CPU design is the cost. It is finially getting to the point where is it affordable to manufacture single or similar use CPU's.

Regardless of what I think, the new Playstation is using the CPU and I looks to be if nothing else a pretty interesting design.

"But you don't have to take my word for it." ~Reading Rainbow

More info:

ArsTechnica Part #1
ArsTechnica Part #2
IBM Journal Research and Development

mod_security for Apache.

Something I have screwing around with lately is mod_security and I have to say I like it. It adds a lot of usefull features to Apache such as extended logging and filtering. I especially like the filtering. You can even set it up to block URLs that could be a security risk. Based on word matching like this:

SecFilter "!php"

or pattern matching :

SecFilter "<[[:space:]]>*script"

or even SQL like this:

SecFilter "delete[.*]from[[:spce:]]*"

It's possilbe to filter out stuff you don't want to, so use discretion when creating them. Used properly this can be a really nice tool. There is much more to mod_security than said here. If you run a Apache web server you should check it out.

Once set up, use Nikto to run a vulneribility scan against your machine. See how it goes, I would expect it do better under those conditions.

More info can be found here:
mod_security
Nikto

Laptop Hard Drive.

My IBM's laptop woke me up this morning around 6. Cause: The hard drive was in the process of failing. Woo hoo!

Sony Rootkit.

Prehaps the start of a new trend in DRM...corporate rootkits. It looks like Sony is backing off though.

More info:

Slashdot
CNet FAQ
Slashdot 2
F-Secure

Friendly Reminder: Don't forget that we have 'fair use' with the products we purchase and don't let your rights fall to corporate bullying.

Skype on Debian.

Skype is a great tool. The Skype developers are tools. They can't seem to fix the Debian packages in their repository or website, even after many complaints in their forums. At any rate, I fixed the package. It shouldn't have the dependency problems that the old one did.

It can be found here:

Skype-1.2.0.18

If this site or package doesn't work, blame me. Sorry for any speed issues, I'm hosting it on DSL.

Ruby on Rails.

Tons of hype surrounding this new development platform. After working with the last couple nights, I have to say it's pretty sweet. The platform takes care of a lot of work and configuration for you. It creates the directory structure/framework for you.

Suppose, you want to connect it to a DB, all you have to do is tell it where the DB is localed (localhost, etc) and the username and password. Done. It figures out which DB you want based on the name and the name of the controllers and etc you created. It even knows the difference between plurals. Name the DB 'rabbits', name the project 'rabbit', it knows that they are one in the same and syncs them.

The system as a whole has few lines of code. I only had to write a few to create some decent features. Pretty interesting stuff.

Want to check out more?

Video
Starting Guide

First Post

Here is my new tech only blog. Woo hoo!