No_AirPortI hate giving Apple more money than I have to. Sure, I own a MacBook Air and it's wonderful, but I chafe at Apple charging me $99 for an AirPort Express just to stream music wirelessly to my stereo. I don't need another Wi-Fi base station, anyway. So I decided to build my own AirTunes server with a Raspberry Pi. Here's how to do it really easily. Continue reading →

IDream Cheeky USB pushbutton picture've been very decorated at my job in organisation operations over at SecondMarket, trying to get our infrastructure in shape for many changes coming down the piping. On the business side, the JOBS Act passed by Congress back in April means that the ban on full general solicitation of accredited investors is being lifted, and and so we expect to be able to abound our client base as a result.

More clients means more features needed to cater to them. On the applied science side nosotros take been working hard to deliver modest packages of features faster, rather than in one large biweekly release: in other words, continuous delivery. I'm looking forward to the mean solar day when we can finally hand over the keys to engineering & have developers deploy whenever they desire, using our Jenkins continuous integration arrangement. Operations people have no business organisation being a roadblock to software developers who desire to become features out the door as quickly as possible. As long as the lawmaking is of high quality and doesn't crash the servers, I'm comfy with whatever gets deployed into production. It also means that engineers are 100% responsible for both the success and failure of their code — a simultaneous carrot & stick towards increasing quality.

The whole give-and-take around push-push button deploys has led us purchasing an bodily USB pushbutton. Made past a company called Dream Cheeky, this push — absolutely a little more flimsy than information technology appears in the picture — ships with only a Windows driver. Fortunately, someone has written a RubyGem and a Mac driver to interface with it. We're taking the adjacent logical step and making information technology possible to deploy with literally a button push. Continue reading →

My Christmas break projection was to build a Hackintosh out of a Dell Mini 10v. The Mini 10v is a $299 NetBook that, I swear, is deliberately manufactured with on-board parts suitable for creating a Hackintosh.

There are tons of guides out in that location with alien instructions on how to create a Hackintosh on a Mini 10v. I'll just share with you lot what worked for me, in a really brief way, considering I know yous're busy and want to get working on your new Hackintosh! Continue reading →

This isn't the most intellectually stimulating post, but I recently needed to build a custom serial cable to hack into an APC AP9606 Spider web/SNMP Direction Menu. (I bought one off eBay for $35.00 installed in a MasterSwitch Plus remote ability strip, and the default password had been changed.

Now, I hate soldering. The terminal time I had to solder a serial cablevision was to build an RS-422 so a friend and I could get onto the console of a salvaged Claiming Fifty, but that was a real hurting. This time, I just needed a one-off to emulate an APC 940-0024 UPS communications cablevision.

I ended upwardly merely going to Above All Electronics and picking upwards a pair of RJ45-to-DB9 adapter kits — 1 female, and one male person — and wiring the correct pins together. For the purposes of series communications with the MasterSwitch, you actually only need the following connections:

  • Pin #2 Female person to Pin #2 Male
  • Pin #three Female to Pin #1 Male
  • Pin #5 Female person to Pin #9 Male

Everything else I merely wired randomly to make it slap-up and clean.

Then, just take a regular Cat5e network cable and connect the two adapters you built and presto, a custom serial cablevision!

Thanks to the folks on tek-tips.com that provided instructions for how to reset the admin countersign on the card.

Today I sent some other SATA hard drive back to Seagate because it failed. Y'all might recall that I have had a bad track record with SATA drives: since purchasing this PC almost two years ago, I'd gone through about 3 Western Digital SATA drives (all replaced under warranty due to failure) until I finally got fed up most six months ago and bought a pair of Seagate Barracuda 250 GB drives. One of them failed after iii months, and the other died just this past weekend. Fortunately, my PC is RAID-1 protected (and I have all the data backed up on DLT) – but seriously, why are SATA drives and then decumbent to failure? Proceed reading →

It's that time of year again when I start to think most what computer upgrades I might want to do. I've had some annoying things happen with my desktop PC recently and accept considered either replacing information technology entirely, or implementing some much-needed upgrades. Continue reading →

Highpoint has finally updated their Linux Open up Source Commuter for the RR174x series of SATA RAID adapters. I'm hoping that this will resolve the inability to compile the driver nether newer versions of the Linux kernel, such equally for the updates that take been issued for Fedora vii. However, my Linux box at home is currently turned off, since I'thousand on holiday. I won't have a hazard to test it until I get dorsum, but I thought other users of this hardware might be interested!

This calendar month in ACM Queue at that place'southward an interesting and lengthy commodity entitled The Long Route to 64 $.25, which addresses why, xv years afterwards after the 64-bit MIPS R4000 was announced, most systems are still not fully 64-scrap clean. I use the discussion "clean" to mean that near systems practice non run entirely in 64-bit mode; many systems are running 32-bit operating systems on 64-bit processors, or even when a 64-scrap operating organization is in use, running many 32-fleck programs in compatibility mode.

The commodity is a fascinating account of how technological decisions that were made all the fashion dorsum in the 1970'due south, both with respect to hardware and compilers, still impose limitations today. Although many of the hardware compatibility challenges have at present gone away — for example, system designers at present know enough to trap address bits that they are not using for addresses rather than letting "clever" programmers get away with using them for data — the assumptions that were made by programmers back in the days of xvi and 32-fleck machines with respect to the size of C data types continues to hinder the porting of programs from 32 to 64-bit. One can't just make and hope one's pointers all piece of work. As Mashey puts it, some programmers got sloppy and assumed things similar

sizeof(int) == sizeof(long) == sizeof(ptr) == 32

All this may sound really abstract to readers who don't have a hardware pattern background (admittedly, mine is minimal, but I empathize enough of the general concepts) then allow's talk about how this impacts us end-users. Nosotros run into problems similar "at that place is no 64-fleck web browser that can execute Java and Flash" because the Java and Flash plugins haven't been ported to 64-chip make clean versions. In some ways, this is an instance of shocking fail on the function of software vendors like Sun and Macromedia (pardon me, Adobe). Bug Number 4802695, entitled "Support Java Plug-in on 64-bit AMD Opteron", has been open with Sun since January 14, 2003, and later on three years there is still no resolution in sight. This should be embarrassing for Sun, which is a vendor of 64-bit Opteron and UltraSparc IIIi workstations.

Keep reading →

Spurred on by a recent thread on the TAUG mailing list, I've been thinking about the cost vs. benefits of Power over Ethernet (PoE). PoE is a way to employ the extra 4 wires in 10/100/1000-baseT Ethernet wiring for powering devices. The obvious application is to power IP telephones. Cisco has been doing this for a while using a proprietary solution which is like to the PoE standard, IEEE 802.3af, which defines a protocol for detecting whether a device (or PD) is capable of receiving power prior to applying information technology, so that non-PDs don't get fried by sending 48VDC downward the wire. The protocol also determines how much current the PD will draw, and classifies the PD into a device grade. All of this is well-described by this Wikipedia article.

There are two main advantages to using PoE, so far equally I can see:

  1. No need to become a separate ability brick for each device
  2. PDs can be centrally powered from a UPS in case of mains failure

The primary con is the added toll, since y'all now need to purchase a PoE-enabled switch (which volition and then draw quite a bit of power, as it needs to power the devices).

What kind of toll are we talking about here?

  1. HP Procurve 2650 48-port switch (non-powered): USD $812.99
  2. HP Procurve 2650-PWR 48-port switch (PoE): USD $3,312.99

This works out to about USD $50/port, which I still think is a bit high. Just maybe one time the cost drops to effectually USD $25/port, information technology will exist worth it.

Originally I was going to mention that purchasing PoE power injectors is some other solution. A power injector has two Ethernet ports and a power brick attached to it; one of the Ethernet ports is an input from the regular non-powered network, and the other is a PoE output port to your PD. But I did some digging and detect that the cost of a power injector is greater than USD $l, so I suppose this would only be feasible for a pocket-sized deployment.

Step dorsum for a moment and y'all realize that the cost of implementing the logic for PoE is far, far less than USD $50/port. The manufacturers are clearly just capitalizing on the fact that this is "new" engineering science and making a huge turn a profit on information technology. Equally such I predict that there will definitely exist wiggle room on the price in the futurity which volition make PoE deployments more cost-effective.

Looks similar someone has started putting together some informal documentation for NetworkManager.

In a completely unrelated note, the upgrading of my Fedora Cadre 5 Thinkpad T42 to kernel 2.6.17-1.2139 has broken wireless (again). Whatsoever attempt to apply NetworkManager with it causes ipw2200: Firmware error detected. Restarting. to be seen in the dmesg. Nevertheless, if I run wpa_supplicant manually and and so dhclient, information technology works.

I'm really looking forrard to the day when all this is stock-still, although I suspect wireless is such a bleeding edge problem infinite that the day won't be coming soon.