Yearly Archives: 2006

05/23/06

Defective By Design?

Would you believe that some products that you and I buy today are designed to be defective? That is to say that these products could do things which the designers went out of their way to prevent you from doing with them? Why? Since when in a world when companies must out innovate each other to get a competitive edge did companies actually intentially place arbitrary restrictions to limit what users could do with them?

Seems crazy, but that’s exactly what happening with many popular products like iPods, music CD’s and DVD players. Recently, the Free Software Foundation started Defective By Design, a community website dedicated to increasing awareness about how companies are intentionally limiting products in order to harm consumers in order to make Hollywood and large media companies happy. Check it out!

05/22/06

Adaptec/Supermicro sucks

I’ve been fighting a drive apparently going bad for a little over two weeks now. One of four drives in a RAID 0+1 array apparently has some blocks going bad and neither the drive nor controller seem to be able to remap the blocks.

To make matters worse, the Adaptec controller won’t even tell me which drive has the problem. So after getting absolutely nowhere with Supermicro (whom is providing support due to the nature of their OEM contract) I’m having to replace all four drives in the array. Suck.

05/1/06

Chinese ticket spam

So lately it seems that a certain Chinese company has started going around and spamming Trac sites by creating tickets promoting who knows what (honestly, I have no idea, it’s all in Chinese). Once was annoying, twice pissed me off, so I added this to my httpd.conf:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www\.google\.cn/search?.*q=NEW\+TICKET.*
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.consumptionjunction.com/downloadsnew/cj_52447.jpg [R]

I wouldn’t recommend visiting that URL if you’re easily offended. Seriously, don’t go there.

04/22/06

Confidentiality in email redux

So maybe it’s just me, but it seems that these “confidentiality notices” in emails are on the rise.

Anyways, I’ve decided to do a little experiment. Many of these notices contain verbage to “notify the sender” if you receive the email… what will happen when I start replying? Hillarity? Confusion? Bogus legal threats? A bore? Only one way to find out…

04/15/06

7 Years under the DMCA

The EFF has written a great piece on how the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) has really effected the country. Unsurprisingly to many in the technical community, the DMCA hasn’t been used to stop would-be copyright infringers, but rather to stifle innovation, threaten scientists, restrict free use and threaten free speech.

Well worth reading.

04/13/06

Comedy Central censors pictures of Mohammed

So I’ll be honest, when I watched part two of “Cartoon Wars” and saw that Mohammed had been “censored” I figured it was just Matt & Trey (the creators of South Park) pulling a gag to make a point. After all, South Park had shown Mohammed multiple times in past episodes (“Super Best Friends” for example) and there was no censoring then.

But, it was actually Comedy Central which censored the episode. Apparently, CC thought that in the current climate it was “unsafe” to air pictures of Mohammed.

Anyways, even if you hate South Park, I would strongly encourage you to see Cartoon Wars episodes I & II. Matt and Trey do what they do best- making viewers re-examine current events from a viewpoint which encourages people to stand up for what’s right, even when it’s not the easy thing to do.

04/11/06

GSM + powered subwoofer == pain

So being a geek I enjoy your typical geek toys like my Treo 650 and home theater (just upgraded to an Onkyo TX-SR803). Anyways, ever since switching from Verizon (expensive, not great feature list, but good coverage) to Cingular (less expensive, more features, almost as good coverage) I’ve been fighting with interference between the phone and my powered subwoofer.

Anyways, long story short, is that this is apparently a common problem for TDMA/GSM phones and subwoofers which take line-level input. Basically, the phone traffic is picked up by the speaker and is amplified to an audiable level. Very annoying.

Apparently, having high quality shielded audio cables aren’t enough… your sub needs to be shielded as well. As it turns out, a lot of high quality subwoofers aren’t shielded, because shielding is usually only to prevent the magnents in the speakers from interfering with TV’s. Since most people don’t put their subwoofers near their TV’s (unlike satellite speakers) there isn’t usually any need to shield them.

So what’s the solution? Dunno. Maybe if I were to get a shielded subwoofer it would solve the problem, maybe not. Not really sure I want to make a $350 gamble. I’ve had one friend suggest wrapping it in aluminum foil and grounding it to solve the problem…. not sure that’ll go with the decor in the living room though.

04/6/06

Just how many replay tools are there?

So my friend Chris sent me this link to yet another tcpreplay copycat. There’s already IDS Informer and Traffic IQ.

Of course, the above tools have pretty GUI’s and have some features not found in tcpreplay, but the fact is that if you take tcpreplay, tcpdump, ethereal and NetDude you get 60-90% of the functionality at 0% of the cost.

Anyways, I’ll bet there are plenty of other tcpreplay look-alikes… If you know of any, leave a comment and let me know! Even better, if you’ve bought one of these tools, why did you pick it over the alternatives?

04/4/06

Making progress…

Well tonight, my allergies were going bonkers and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get any sleep until the drugs kicked in. Hence I not only found time to continue working on the new tcpreplay website, but also to make huge strides on moving all the packet editing functionality into a library which will end up shipping with tcpreplay 3.0.

As it turns out, one of the nice advantages of using Bruce Korb’s excellent AutoOpts package, is that you can make argument processing part of your library too, so people have the option of filling out the tcpedit_t data structure manually or let the library do all the work.