SolarScale Blog

The Internet Meltdown

Yesterday I watched a Google Tech Talk on IPv6 and specifically what transition technologies exist today. The speaker basically thinks we'll have a meltdown near the end of 2011 but seemed very calm about it. I yahoo'ed for it and found this article as well. Over here I've got IPv6 connectivity but I'm wishing that my VPS would have it as well and I've asked about it repeatedly. Maybe by next year, I'm hoping, as being available in both IPv4 and IPv6 land is a must after we run out of addresses.

OpenSMTPD bug (DoS) fixed

Yesterday I found this bug with Mouring on IRC. Basically if you have a very long string for an email address the smtpd will quit with a truncation error in lowercase(). Gilles Chehade put in this fix, revision 1.99 of lka.c, this morning (it should be noted it's Gilles fix, we only identified the bug and wrote to him). Everyone should update to this version or their smtpd will cease working when the DoS comes around that came around to Mouring.

Bruce Schneier has a new book out!

Bruce Schneier has written a new book. I've already ordered this and it should be delivered by march 30th, it'll be released march 15th.

Random Hackepedia

The RH for this week is FreeBSD.

Winter Star Sky

Yesterday for the first time this year the cloudy sky went away and I was able to use my dads camera to make photos of the star sky.

Check out more processed photos here.

Random Hackepedia

The RH for this week is IPsec.

The german translations are coming along at a rate of about 2 a day, like I said it'll be March when it's somewhat finished.

The American Manned Space Program

Well so much for the American Manned Space Program, of which I'm a big fan I must add. But let's review what happened in the last 10 years. 12 years. NASA built the International Space Station together with the Russians and other major contributors, starting in 1998. Then GW Bush announced the Moon to Mars program, probably because going to the moon was easier than going to mars. Then President Obama just recently cancelled the Moon-to-Mars program and what we're left with is a formidable space station in orbit and a space shuttle that's retiring at the end of this year (4 more flights).

So what has happened behind the scenes, elsewhere? Well we had the Spaceship One win the Ansari X-Prize and Virgin founded Virgin Galactic so that Spaceship Two can take passengers to a non-orbiting 5 minute view of the rim of space. Also scram-jet engines have been tested in Australia but I didn't find any conclusive evidence that they are building a scram-jet just yet. Also there is a company out in the US that proposes to shoot resources into orbit out of a cannon. They are promising cheaper launch rates than what the shuttle cost by a factor of 10 or so. Then there is the space elevator that everyone dreams of but the material isn't quite strong enough for it yet. And then there have been a number of private space companies that have launched payloads into orbit, these are fairly new.

Anyhow the president of the United States probably has more insight on what technologies are best and cheapest and makes his decision based on that. So perhaps one of these things appealed to him causing NASA to lose their manned space program. Obama must be convinced that there is a better way and we'll see in time what that may be, perhaps he thinks it's too soon to tell the world . Meanwhile I read somewhere, that Europe wants to go to the Moon by 2030 which is in 20 years time. But a lot can happen in just a decade. The original moon program of the US managed to land a man on the moon in 1969 in a decade of preparation with no experience on how to do so, but the cost was so tremendous that they had to give it up. So for this situation I can only look to myself when I was a boy and wanted something real bad. When I didn't get it, after a while I didn't want it anymore and I was glad I didn't make that decision. Perhaps this is what America faces today and they'll be glad they didn't go ahead with a moon program just yet. Time will tell.

Random Hackepedia

The RH for this week is Mutt.

24 Years of computing History

I started using a computer when I got a Sinclair ZX-81 from a neighbour. That was the year 1986. The thing had no tape drive and I had to keep it on while I painfully copied BASIC out of a book to play a game. Anyhow today I have the amd64 that you see in the chart below at the bottom. I'm planning to get a new computer in June that will hopefully blow all previous accumulations of CPU or RAM away. It'll run several VM's and perhaps I'll even dedicate a core to seti@home again, we'll see.

year  , computer type       , Mhz     ,acc. Mhz , RAM        ,accumulated RAM
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1986  , Sinclair ZX-81      , 1    Mhz, 1    Mhz, 4        KB,  4         KB
1988  , Commodore C-64      , 2    Mhz, 3    Mhz, 64       KB,  68        KB
1992  , IBM-PC 386-SX25     , 25   Mhz, 28   Mhz, 4096     KB,  4164      KB
1994  , IBM-PC 486-66DX2    , 66   Mhz, 94   Mhz, 8192     KB,  12356     KB
1996  , Intel Pentium 120   , 120  Mhz, 214  Mhz, 32767    KB,  45123     KB
1999  , Intel P-II-350      , 350  Mhz, 564  Mhz, 131072   KB,  176195    KB
1999  , Intel P-II-350      , 350  Mhz, 914  Mhz, 131072   KB,  307267    KB
2000  , AMD Athlon 1000     , 992  Mhz, 1906 Mhz, 262144   KB,  569411    KB
2001  , Apple G3 iBook      , 500  Mhz, 2406 Mhz, 131072   KB,  700483    KB
2001  , Apple G4 Cube       , 450  Mhz, 2856 Mhz, 131072   KB,  831555    KB
2003  , Intel Pentium 200   , 200  Mhz, 3056 Mhz, 65535    KB,  897090    KB
2005  , AMD Athlon64 3500+  , 2200 Mhz, 5256 Mhz, 4194304  KB,  5091394   KB
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh I should blog about the fate of these computers. The sinclair broke, the commodore was sold, the sx25 was stolen, the 486 abandoned when I left Canada. One PII-350 was passed down to my brother, One PII-350 was abandoned, the AMD Athlon 1000 went to my brothers in-laws, The G3 iBook broke, the G4 is passed down to my parents (I'm writing on it right now) and the P200 had a tragic fall out a 3rd floor balcony. And I only have the amd64 left of all of these.

Hackepedia in German

I'm working on translating the 150 documents that I have stored on solarscale.de into german. I have done 25 or so since yesterday and I want to slow the pace a little, I'm hoping to be done by march with this. Here is a sample.