I snapped this shot at an airport I was passing through recently. I could write a lot about my experiences with the airline industry during travel, and I’m sure most of you could, too. This picture gives a very good general description, though, so I’ll save my words.
Oh, that terminal was still like that when I went back, so I know it took at least two weeks for Windows 98 to shut down on that beast! hehe
I feel like this is the sort of thing that happens to Austin Powers, not me. They better not make them any smaller. Seriously, this is getting ridiculous.
While reading up on the dd command at a post on linuxquestions.org
I came across the following tutorial advice:
Ok, say you want to find out if your girlfriend or wife is cheating on you, having cyber sex, or just basically misbehaving with her computer. Even if the computer is secured with a password, you can boot with the:
CD and search the entire drive partition for text strings:
dd if=/dev/sda2 bs=16065 | hexdump -C | grep 'I really don't love him anymore.'
haha, nice try you bitter bag of linux, but you should have used double quotes around the single-quote-containing-string…
This rivals the time I was browsing the online commit log for some software and found buried in one of the commits the comment: “I hate that fucking bitch“
It’s official, the TUFDefender project is open-sourced! Enjoy the eye-feast here, and look forward to the source code later. (Make sure you click on it and check it out up close… personal)
Here are a few basic rules I’ve learned about file systems, partitions, and raid devices:
I apologize in advance for this post being so long, but some things must be blogged.
First, the specs:
Full tower ATX Chassi with specialized cooling system (Xclio twin 25cm cooling fan side panel), blue lighting in the paneling, VR fan speed control with on/off, built-in thermal sensor and LED temperature display on external casing. By far, the coolest thing about this case is that it is a tool-less style case, meaning that all components are “snap-in”. No screws, or other shit. Total price $129.99
Rosewill sli-ready power supply with 2 x Silent 80mm Ball-bearing Blue LED Fan (that’s right, fans on power supply, chassi, and CPU!!!), fan speed control switch, also blue led paneling, and a special SLI mode that I don’t know I’ll have a chance to use. Biggest concern about this fan is the 550v max power. Total price $59.99.
Standard lightscribe dvd-rw with 2MB cache operating at 8x DVDW. Total price $32.99.
4GB Corsair DDR2 module with excellent timing. 2×2GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) with 4-4-4-12 timing and custom heat sinks. All I can say about this RAM is FAST FAST FAST. Total price $134.99.
1TB of 7200 RPM drives split as 2×250GB drives and 1 500GB drive. Don’t worry, there won’t be as much left when I RAID it. Total cost ~$600.00.
ASUS motherboard equipped with an AMD dual socket suitable for Athlon FX processors, and using the Nvidia nForce 680a SLI chipset (Quad SLI!!!!). Other hotness includes dual gigabit ethernet, onboard 7.1 surround sound, 12 SATA ports, IDE RAID controllers, tons of slots (pci, etc.), support for 8GB of RAM, and even an external SATA port. Interestingly, this motherboard doesn’t even try to perform on-board graphics. No vga, dvi, or other port. Also interesting, why do boards like this insist on shipping with traditional ps/2 mouse/keyboard ports?! Total price $319.99.
AMD Athlon 64 dual-core 3.0 ghz processor what can I say this chip is fucking badass. Total price $149.99.
Other components include a graphics card not worth mentioning and a front-side card reader with about 6 card types supported.
Total investment: $1,427.94 US
No computer is complete without a name. This one is named Ulalume.
I have dual-booted the machine with OpenSUSE 10.3 and Kubuntu 7.10 (the Gusty Gibbon), and using the XFS file system. Of course, my data drive will be protected using TrueCrypt. Right now display/input is running through a kvm hooked into my normal computer and one of its monitors.
Unresolved issues and unanswered questions:
- How can I get the IDE raid to be a bootable partition? Linux doesn’t seem to want to cooperate on this one…
- Surge protection and battery backup solution
- External room fans/cooling solution
- Monitor/graphics card
- Overclocking (availabile in the BIOS, but seriously, why would I want to?)
- Offsite backup solution
- blu-ray dvd-rw
- tv tuner card / MythTV
- faster ethernet switch/hub for network serving files faster
What will I use it for?
I don’t know, computing the largest prime number to date? Optimizing TSP problems? Foreasting the weather? Solving the Netflix challenge? Or maybe just gaming….
The long anticipated BlueStone Blog has finally arrived! We here at the BlueStone Laboratories are excited to begin sharing with the world whatever we have the mind to blog about. Stay tuned for a wealth of upcoming posts in any number of categories. There’s really no telling what you should expect….