ForeverGeek » DarkBlue

Advanced Bash Scripting Guide

DarkBlue — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 11:36:06 +0000

An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting. A “must-have” guide for sys-admins, web-developers and programmers working on Unix-like systems.

This tutorial assumes no previous knowledge of scripting or programming, but progresses rapidly toward an intermediate/advanced level of instruction . . . all the while sneaking in little snippets of UNIX® wisdom and lore. It serves as a textbook, a manual for self-study, and a reference and source of knowledge on shell scripting techniques. The exercises and heavily-commented examples invite active reader participation, under the premise that the only way to really learn scripting is to write scripts.

GeoURL

DarkBlue — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 01:47:25 +0000

Following a rather long hiatus, the GeoURL ICBM Address service is up and running again. Now proclaiming itself as version “2.0 – beta”.

GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor’s blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you.

It’s great to have the service back online.

Laserpod

DarkBlue — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 23:44:19 +0000

It’s about time we had a sexy, geek gadget back on the front page of Forever Geek and I’ve found a stunner: The Laserpod.

Advertised as the “21st Century Version of the Lava Lamp”, the Laserpod is a desktop lamp that splits three laser and three high-intensity blue and ultraviolet LED light sources before projecting them through a hand-cut faceted crystal to create some of the most unique and beautiful ambient lighting you’ve ever seen.

By default the Laserpod will cast it’s mesmerizing and organic lighting display up to your ceiling and around your room. The changing patterns, colors and textures that are projected are simultaneously alien and soothing. Not alien in the Space-Marine eating variety, alien in the otherwordly moonscape variety.

You can even interact with Laserpod by placing on top anything optical. Glass, crystal or clear plastics will produce the most profoundly beautiful effects that will continually evolve in time. For the best Laserpod experience, the device should be activated in complete darkness when the subtler, more meditative and organic beams will be seen – these are quite extraordinary and are unique to Laserpod.

The Laserpod is a patented invention of the innovative UK light artist Chris Levine, whose varied and ground breaking work in light has ranged from light sculptures for the band Massive Attack and some of the leading edge fashion designers, to an historic hologram portrait of the Queen of England. His work is about the experience of seeing and the living power of light, an ethos that is distilled into Laserpod.

At $100 it’s an expensive desk lamp. But if mind-blowing psychodelic lighting is your thing (and isn’t it everybody’s?), this is surely the ultimate example of the genre.

Very Dynamic Web Interfaces

DarkBlue — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 22:46:04 +0000

The functionality, speed and usability of XMLHttpRequest is demonstrated extremely well by the likes of Gmail and Google’s stunning new Maps service (hey Google, when are you going to map out Great Britain?). But what if you want to build the next-generation web UI?

Fear not, Drew McLellan of All in the fame has come to the rescure of budding web-interface designers with his excellent introduction to XMLHttpRequest published over at xml.com.

McLellen’s “Very Dynamic Web Interfaces” is an easy-to-follow introduction into the fascinating world of XMLHttpRequest and should be recommended reading for all web-designers/developers.

Apache Rules!

DarkBlue — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 09:45:45 +0000

Netcraft notes that the open source Apache software is now serving more then 40,000,000 websites!

This month’s survey marks a significant milestone for Apache, which now serves more than 40 million sites. The open source Apache server reached 10 million sites in June 2000, 20 million in November 2001 and 30 million in November 2003. Apache was detected on 658 domains in the initial Netcraft survey in August 1995, when its 3.5 percent market share was dwarfed by software from NCSA (57 percent) and CERN (19.7).

Apache seems to have regained momentum in its ongoing battle for market share with Microsoft. After nearly no change in server market share in 2004, Apache extended its lead over Microsoft by 1 percent last month and another 0.4 percent this month, and now runs on 68.8 percent of web sites, compared to 20.9 percent for Windows servers.

The Force is strong in this one.

Commodore and Yet Another Owner

DarkBlue — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 01:16:21 +0000

Legendary computer hardware/software manufacturer Commodore (of C64 and Amiga fame) has been sold to yet another company, eleven years after the original company filed for bankruptcy.

The new owner – American online music distributor, Yeahronimo Media Ventures – has paid a whopping 24 million Euros for the beleaguered Commodore brand.

In related news: the venerable Amiga could enjoy a new lease of life with the Micro-AmigaOne and Amiga OS4 Developer Prerelease.

All we need now is for Sir Clive Sinclair to announce the relaunch of the ZX Spectrum and the circle will be complete!

Retro RAM

DarkBlue — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 00:56:48 +0000

When I was a kid, a favourite uncle of mine (favoured because he was rich and always brought gifts when he visited) showed me something incredible – a digital wristwatch with an LED display (yes, I’m that old)!

The watch face was totally black. But, when my uncle pressed a little button, red LEDs lit up and displayed the time. It was the most awesome thing I’d ever seen and I lusted after that watch for a long, long time.

Imagine my delight when I learned that LED character displays are becoming fashionable once more – on, of all things, RAM modules…

Corsair, famous manufacturers of highly-overclockable RAM, have introduced retro RAM – memory that “monitors module parametric data in real time” and displays it, on the DIMM, via a series of LEDs. Sadly, they don’t call it retro RAM, choosing instead the rather more mundane “XMS Xpert“, but it’s ultra-cool nonetheless.

These DDR modules constantly measure and display their current frequency, voltage and temperature. What’s more, you can program our own personal message that will scroll across the display. You’ve got up to 69 characters, so unleash your creativity. But these modules are about more than good looks. As part of Corsair’s legendary XMS family, they deliver blistering fast performance in high-transaction applications such as gaming or photo and animation processing.

Drool!

PowerBook G5 for Q2?

DarkBlue — Sun, 16 Jan 2005 02:43:56 +0000

engadget is suggesting that Apple might be ramping up for production of a PowerBook G5.

We knew that Apple was having a heck of a time getting the PowerBook G5 out the door (the G5 processor presents some mighty heat and power consumption issues to overcome), but we’ve got some good news to report. For whatever reason they sort of bury it in a chart that accompanies the story, but Digitimes says that Quanta Computer, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer that builds the PowerBook for Apple, has received a massive order for the PowerBook G5. Delivery date: Q2.

Can anyone lend me a ski-mask and a sawn-off shotgun?

Gates' PC Crashes During Keynote Speech

DarkBlue — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 23:34:51 +0000

This is so funny, I just had to share it:

In his seventh annual keynote speech at the International Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft’s chairman explained that the proliferation of high-speed Internet access and the falling price of data storage are compelling people to put music, photos, movies and other aspects of their life into a digital format.

“We predicted at the beginning of this decade that this would be a decade where the digital approach would be taken for granted,” Gates told hundreds of technology enthusiasts, who gathered for his kickoff to the world’s largest electronics show. “It’s going even faster than we expected.”

But while promoting what he calls the “digital lifestyle,” Gates showed how vulnerable all consumers – even the world’s richest man – are to hardware and software bugs.

During a demonstration of digital photography with a soon-to-be-released Nikon camera, a Windows Media Center PC froze and wouldn’t respond to Gates’ pushing of the remote control.

Better still, the embarrassment didn’t end there for “the world’s richest man”:

Later in the 90-minute presentation, a product manager demonstrated the ostensible user-friendliness of a video game expected to hit retail stores in April, Forza Motor Sport. But instead of configuring a custom-designed race car, the computer monitor displayed the dreaded “blue screen of death” and warned, “out of system memory.”

Way to go Bill!

Googling for Video Servers

DarkBlue — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 02:31:44 +0000

Axis Communications (amongst others) manufacturer security cameras with integral web-servers to provide browser-based monitoring. Unsurprisingly, many of these video servers are completely unsecured – broadcasting their security footage across the entire Internet.

It makes for fascinating viewing. Check them out while they remain unsecured.

It’s amazing what you can find with Google!

Credit: “Jerk Dentures”

Build Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) Replica

DarkBlue — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 00:01:00 +0000

Project to build a working reproduction of the 1964 prototype for the Block I Apollo Guidance Computer. The AGC is the flight computer for the Apollo moon landings, with one unit in the command module and one in the LEM.

Sounds like a great weekend project, but why build an AGC?

Early computers are interesting. Because they’re simple, you can (if you like) actually understand the entire computer, from hardware to software.

The AGC is the most interesting early computer because: it flew the first men to the moon and has interesting architectural features.

So there you have it. Please submit photo’s of your home-made AGC to the team here at Forever Geek in the usual manner.

1TB Email Storage

DarkBlue — Fri, 17 Dec 2004 14:36:40 +0000

Okay, Google’s Gmail is pretty cool, I’m sure you’ll agree. But it does have only 1GB of storage space for each account. What if you need more capacity?

Enter Hellacious Riders – with a massive 1TB of storage space for each user. Each account also supports 500MB attachments. Hoorah!

Why?

The answer is simple to help people store large amounts of information in a safe and secure environment…

We decided that yes a terabyte of space may sound rather extreme to some, others will not think so.

I don’t think so either. Hurry on over to Hellacious Riders and grab an account while you can.

The Powerstation for Your Laptop

DarkBlue — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 21:49:53 +0000

“New microengines could provide 10 times longer life than batteries for cell phones, laptops…”

It seems that those clever people over at Georgia Tech have been wondering how to get their laptops, cellular phones and iPods to run a little bit longer.

They have developed a microgenerator about 10mm wide (about the size of a fingernail) which, when coupled with a similarly sized gas-fueled microturbine, has the potential to deliver more energy and last around 10 times longer than a conventional battery.

The device’s magnet spins at 100,000 revolutions per minute (rpm), much faster than the comparatively sluggish 3,000 rpm of an average car engine. Speed like that is capable of producing 1.1 watts of power, or enough juice to run a cell phone.

If the project reaches its projected goal, it will eventually produce as much as 20 to 50 watts, capable of powering a laptop.

The research is part of a larger project funded by the Army Research Laboratory to create lighter portable power sources to replace the heavy batteries that currently power a soldier’s equipment, such as laptops, radios, and GPS systems. Researchers at the University of Maryland and Clark Atlanta University also collaborate on the project.

Web-Browser Archive

DarkBlue — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 10:40:04 +0000

Wouldn’t you love to see what your website looks like when viewed with the original NCSA Mosaic browser, or MS Internet Explorer 3?

Perhaps you’ve brought that old Commodore Amiga out of the closet and need to get your hands on a copy of iBrowse.

evolt.org’s “browser archive” seems to have, within its file-system, every version of every web-browser ever created, including the one that started it all: Tim Berners-Lee’s Nexus!

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

DarkBlue — Sun, 05 Dec 2004 10:13:27 +0000

If you want to learn computer programming you can’t go wrong with an education provided by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s “Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science“. Unfortunately, a MIT education isn’t available to everybody.

What if you could get a MIT education from the comfort of your Aeron?

MIT’s “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” course is available as a series of video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, and it’s all online!

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs has been MIT’s introductory pre-professional computer science subject since 1981. It emphasizes the role of computer languages as vehicles for expressing knowledge and it presents basic principles of abstraction and modularity, together with essential techniques for designing and implementing computer languages. This course has had a worldwide impact on computer science curricula over the past two decades.

The course leans towards the Lisp programming language, but the information presented in the lectures is valuable to programmers of any language.

The course requires a high level of commitment. There’s just under 22 hours of lectures spread across 30GB of MPEG video (DivX videos are also available).

SAM – Skype® Answering Machine

DarkBlue — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 23:21:20 +0000

Skype® is big news right now. The technology provides free telephony over TCP/IP. But what use is a telephone without an answering machine?

Enter SAM, the Skype® Answering Machine.

When you are away from your PC and there is no one to answer your incoming calls, SAM will pick up the call, play a greeting message and the “all-time clasic beep” so that the calling party will leave a voice recorded message.

Voice Over IP just keeps on getting better and better.

Free Programming and Computer Science Books

DarkBlue — Sat, 04 Dec 2004 22:55:25 +0000

We all love free stuff don’t we?

We all love tech books don’t we?

It goes without saying then, that if we can get tech books for free, we’re all going to be happy puppies.

TechBooksForFree.com is a great resource for the bookworms among you. The website lists links to online versions of some great tech books. Highlights include:

Time to don those reading glasses.

Visual Notifications: X10 and Lava Lamps

DarkBlue — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 05:01:49 +0000

Mike Clark has written an in-depth article on how he uses X10 and two lava lamps to create a visual software-build monitoring system.

Your software is being automatically built and tested on a schedule. It even sends you an email when the code doesn’t compile or pass its tests. You’re certainly ahead of most projects, but email is just so 90s. Even if you could manage to find those build failure emails amidst all that spam, you’re reading yesterday’s news. Indeed, you may already be ignoring the status of the scheduled build…

I love this. I would love to set up something similar to indicate web-server status!

Kill Bill

DarkBlue — Wed, 24 Nov 2004 02:09:31 +0000

Just found this great Kill Bill t-shirt via Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog.

You gotta check it out, it’s not what you think! :-)

IBM Benchmark Leaves Server Rivals Breathless

DarkBlue — Sat, 20 Nov 2004 10:13:52 +0000

IBM seems to have completely thrashed rivals at HP and Sun with its p5 595 server running the DB2 database on the AIX operating system.

Using the TPC-C benchmark, the p5 595 has bested its nearest rival by almost 200%!

Under TPC-C, the p5 595 has broken the 3m transaction per minute barrier. The previous record, also held by IBM, was just over 1m transactions per minute.

The new result gives IBM an excuse to bash HP and Sun Microsystems. IBM’s Power5 chip appears to be the most solid readily available high-end processor on the market, giving both Intel’s Itanium and Sun’s UltraSPARC IV fits.

Extending the Reach of Google's Desktop Search

DarkBlue — Fri, 19 Nov 2004 17:54:38 +0000

Back in October, I told you about Google’s new Desktop Search program.

While most of the resulting comments were favourable, there was some criticism of the limited scope of the search afforded by the facility – those same criticisms were also widely expressed elsewhere.

Larry Gadea is working hard to address these limitations. With the release of GDSPlus, Gadea has widened the scope of Google Desktop Searches considerably.

With GDSPlus installed, Google Desktop Search can now index additional file types including (but not limited to): .xml, .sql, .bat, .log (mIRC and Trillian), .cs, .vb (Visual Studio .NET source code), .frm, .bas, .cls (Visual Basic 6 source code), .wpd (WordPerfect) and .rtf (Rich Text).

In fact, if you’re prepared to get your hands dirty in GDSPlus’ configuration files, you can have Google Desktop Search index ANY text file!

This is such a cool hack.

Koders: The Source Code Search Engine

DarkBlue — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 15:59:05 +0000

Koders is a new search engine that enables developers to easily search and browse source code in thousands of projects hosted at hundreds of open source repositories.

The Koders search engine has options for searching source code in the following languages: ASP, C, C#, C++, Delphi, Fortran, Java, JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, Tcl, VB & VB.NET and provides a mechanism to search for code released under a variety of open source licenses.

I’ve written a couple of Firefox search plug-ins for Koders, for Perl, PHP and SQL searches.

iTunes Remote Control

DarkBlue — Fri, 05 Nov 2004 00:07:58 +0000

There could be something new on the horizon for iTunes:

Paul Mison noticed that iTunes 4.7 is advertising a _dacp._tcp service. It looks like they are preparing to support a remote control type thing. Ed Despard is guessing it’s a “digital audio control protocol.”. (This is from the daap-dev mailinglist, which doesn’t have a proper archive — daap-dev-subscribe at develooper.com to subscribe)

Awaiting further details…

The Rasterbator

DarkBlue — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 22:46:28 +0000

The Rasterbator is a web service which creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. The rasterized images can be printed and assembled into extremely cool looking posters up to 20 meters in size.

The Rasterbator is very easy to use. You can either upload a file from your computer or use any file that is publicly available in the Internet. After you have cropped the image and selected a desired size, the rasterbated image will be sent to you as an easily printable pdf file.

For unadulterated, jaw-dropping inspiration, check out the Rasterbation Gallery…

TV2ME: Changing the Way We Watch Television

DarkBlue — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 08:39:29 +0000

Electronics wizard, Ken Schaffer, has developed a media streamer capable of delivering high-quality, live broadcasts to your PC (with broadband connection) – regardless of your location.

The system is based on a custom video capture board and a Dell PC. It currently costs $4,500 – $6,500, but expect these prices to tumble as the system goes to production – particularly if you already have a decent PC and thus only need the video capture card and software!

So for example, when you are on the road you can still catch your local broadcasts and home team games, right from your laptop! It’s a new spin on the concept of video-streaming and P2P. Instead of sharing your video with others, you are accessing your own video from anywhere.

This is one of the coolest gadgets I heard of in a long time.

Found via: Minding the Planet.