31 August, 2009

Next-Gen Consoles

As EAs chief creative officer, Rich Hilleman says:
"I expect to see PlayStation 3.5 before we ever see PlayStation 4, or Xbox 560 before we ever see Xbox 720"
In other words, re-engineering and development on the console has become quite expensive when you take into consideration the performance-levels of today's gaming consoles. So we'll probably see additions, before we see machine-level upgrades on any console-systems existing today.


Hellz YeAh!

Dette liker vi vettu :P
Canadas "After Dark Film Festival" ga gull til den norske splatterfilmen "Død Snø" ("Dead Snow" på engelsk). Endelig begynner norsk film å anerkjennes skikkelig i utlandet! ;D Weeeee! Blir spennende å se hva som kommer videre i årene fremover.


Tragisk, men sannsynligvis sant...

"Det handler om hardkokte businessmenn som tar rotta på hverandre..."
--Christian Rubeck

"Alle er grådig. Det gjelder å kontrollere sin egen grådighet da slik at det ikke bare blir et blindt fråtseri"
--Fridtjov Såheim

"Rottenetter" er den nye norske filmen som tar for seg finansmiljøet i Stavanger by. "Finansmiljøet i Stavanger er et sted der en ekstrem kynisme og grådighet råder...", "...var interessant å se hvor tett opp mot virkeligheten filmens miljø faktisk var...".


Slackware Linux 13! Out now!

Yes, finally, the loooooooooooong development cycles of Patrick Volkerding and his crew are finished! And we have a completely new stable-branch, version 13!

Here are some links to the Slackware Linux 13, x86 install-DVD.




FAT, NTFS, FS-drivere...

Det ble annonsert for litt siden (sist uke?) at Linux ikke lenger vil kunne bruke FAT (File-Allocation-Table) driveren som finnes i kjernen, fordi den baserer seg på proprietær eiendoms-rett (Intellectual Property Rights).

Filsystemet (engelsk wikipedia-artikkel) ble utviklet av Bill Gates og Mark McDonald i 1976/77 som hoved-filsystem for IBM PC-DOS og Microsoft DOS, og senere som tillegg i Windows (helt opp til versjon 'Me').

Det finske selskapet Tuxera, som står bak driveren "NTFS-3G" (åpen kildekode versjon av Microsofts NTFS), har inngått et samarbeid med Microsoft i prosjektet "exFAT", eller "Extended File Allocation Table" som en videreutvikling på FAT, både for Windows- og Linux-bruk. Selskapet skal med deltakelse i prosjektet ha mulighet til å selge exFAT til maskinvare-leverandører (OEMer), som vil muliggjøre at exFAT brukes i apparater som kan få "Linux-compatible" stempelet.

Tuxera understreker derimot at utvikling av en åpen kildekode versjon av exFAT ikke dekkes av samarbeidsavtalen, men at de ikke har fått rettslig tilbakeslag av å legge ut NTFS-3G driveren de siste 10 årene. Mikko Vällimäki, talsmann for Tuxera, sier også at dersom du er en Linux-bruker, skal du ikke måtte uroe deg om rettslig forfølging av M$, fordi Tuxera tar opp alt juridisk som omhandler deres drivere direkte med Microsoft selv.


25 August, 2009

Open Communication?

Users of AT&T or T-Mobile in the U.S. can be safely assured their calls will NOT be publicly wiretapped for AT LEAST a few months. Mainly because security researcher Karsten Nohl will be releasing an open-source, distributed computing project, designed to crack the encryption used by regular GSM-devices on" transmission (also known as "A5/1").
[The whole point of the venture is to spur tele-carriers to improve the security-flaws of their respective service protocols. The bug Nohl is talking about in the link at the end of this post, has been known for over 15 years! So.., covert cellular surveillance has probably been going on for years by now...]
"We're not creating a vulnerability, but publicizing a flaw that is alreay being exploited, very widely", Nohl said in a phone interview.

Utilizing 80 high-performance computers to distribute the workload, will use about 3 months to generate a key-table. But if about 160 people on the Internet were to offer computing-power, it would take half that time to complete. Which is Nohl's vision for the project, and the end-result of this major computational task, is to generate an encryption-key reference-table by use of which will grant anyone the ability to de-crypt cellular transmissions.


iPhone vs Google Voice

From what I gather about this case, various people were protesting against Apple Inc. for dismissing Google Voice for the iPhone. But the thing is, Apple is still studying the app using their thoroughly developed app approval-routine.

What's holding the app back for the iPhone, is telecommunication giant AT&T. Because, in the U.S., iPhone was not offered by any carrier except AT&T. Sending text messages, listening to voicemail, calling, etc. can ALL be done through Google Voice, bypassing the normal GSM telenetwork infrastructure, and instead, sending the data as TCP datastreams over Internet connections. So.., AT&T is *NOT* happy about ISVs developing software that unifies all their own lines of services in one package, utilizing free-flow data-connections to transmit, instead of their own service-dependant charged mobile carrier lines.

BUT, Apple has released some of it's notations about the Google Voice app for the iPhone, saying that it's a matter of user interface design principals and technical functions that differ from that of the standard iPhone development. But if it's uniformity they want, why can't they also abide to other operating system UI-guidelines when they port their own software? This is one of the main reasons why I don't use Apple software on my own computers. Unless.., I buy a Mac.

Link to article @ www.latimes.com


Ok, I didn't experience any DIRECT trouble concerning the "NULL pointer dereference"-issue. But.., I DID experience trouble upgrading my running kernel to the newly "NULL pointer"-patched one though.

Thing is, I didn't pay much attention to which type of kernel the old one got replaced with. Patrick Volkerding (BDFL @ Slackware) announced on the Slackware security-list that slackers would have to re-generate the ramdisk image for the new "generic SMP" kernel before re-installing bootup.

...which of course, I failed utterly to do...

And by doing a remote reboot, I did not catch the "VFS kernel panic" message that popped up at boot-time.

The ramdisk image contains the (un)loadable driver-modules for the linux-kernel, which includes the ext3 filesystem and it's debugging facilities.

This then led to the kernel stopping at the multiuser runlevel, and locking itself into a panic...

Seems I'll be doing some tinkering and modification when I get home from work today...

Update, wednesday august 26th:

No such luck. Not only could I not find my rescue live-cd, I could not even find my Slackware install-DVD. Better fire up the ol' burner and make a few copies today. These are the incidents where I consider myself lucky not having to hold service-agreements and stuff related to production-servers :P *Phew*

Update, thursday august 27th:

B/c of lack of proper and decent concentration, I have failed miserably to ressurect my webserver once again. Now my downtime is nearing a 7-day period, which I have not had for over a year. I blame my PlayStation3 system, damn you excitingly-fun super-entertaining every-device-I'll-ever-need-rolled-into-one-wonderfantastic-awesome box! Yes, I *heart* my PS3 :P

21 August, 2009

NULL pointer dereference in Linux kernel

Lately there has been a lot of talk about the newly discovered (but 8 years old) bug in the 2.x Linux kernel series.

Personally, I always research such claims before going into an admin-panic, and surely enough, it paid off this time as well as before. Seems the exploits have to be executed in full user-space with at least standard shell-access. To me, local exploits are not that worrysome, because I'm the only one really using my Linux-machines physically, and the few users that DO have shell-access on them, are mostly friendly superusers with no ill intent what-so-ever.

One server is connected directly to my ISP-protected NAT access-ring, and configured with a reasonably (but strictly) secured firewall, it provides public web-services. This machine has not posed any problems, not with implementation nor security. It runs all-vanilla software and configurations.

My other server is placed in an internal LAN, 2 firewall-rings further in from the public machine, protected by a linux-based router-gateway with no public shell-access (so, no severe security risks so far). This internal LAN sever provides a webapp-database only reachable by the public machine for web-serving purposes, Windows file-sharing only accessible by the internal LAN and a mediaserver only accessible by my PlayStation3 system.

I'm not in a hurry to patch/upgrade any of them right off the bat, I'll do it when I have time...



UNIX, the monster monolith... 4 decades old, which really deserves attention and praise because, it is the only surviving old-school OS that has been in use, every day, ever since it's creation...

Since it's early days, where it was mainly developed to be a multi-user environment for mainframes (BIG super-computers, commonly found in universities and big IT companies), and by 1975, it had been chosen to be the base for the Internet backbone because of it's "presentation of several interesting capabilities".

The 80s saw the arrival of the microcomputer chip, which led to the creation of the PC, and started a porting- and rewrite-project at Berkeley University, of UNIX-code to the common-affordable x86 instruction-set. These efforts culminated in the creation of several software-distributions for Personal Computers at different universities in the U.S., more commonly known as "BSDs", which is an acronym for "Berkeley* Software Distribution".

To name a couple of the popular ones available today: FreeBSD, DesktopBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, etc...

I would also like to point out my UNIX post from January 2008 ;)

* it is also known as "Berkeley UNIX"

20 August, 2009

Nettskyen + Apple?

Ifølge en artikkel i nettavisen digi.no, skal visstnok Apple Inc. bygge et datasenter på over 45.000 kvm. Prislappen på datasenteret er beregnet å være på utrolige 1 milliard dollar, spredt over de neste 10 årene. Dette melder DataCenterKnowledge.com.

Det skal være opptil fire ganger så stort som selskapets nåværende datasenter, annlegget i Newark California som Apple kjøpte opp i 2006.

Og i et Cult of Mac intervju, forteller redaktøren i DataCenterKnowledge.com, Rich Miller, at senteret blir et av de største i verden.

Update, 21.08.2009:
LoL! Of course they'd name it something like that ;P "The iData Center"

18 August, 2009

Links, ads and placement

It seems I actually learned something when I studied commercial/illustration/design-subjects @ school back in the day :P both my domain and my sub-domains receive approximately the same pagehits and referrals ;D the hits were actually just about even too between them! Awesome! :]

Utvikling, drift og Linux

Fant dette utsagnet i en artikkel om Linux-desktop vs Windows:

"De fleste hardwareleverandørene har, på et litt dypere teknisk nivå, nesten alltid et forhold til Linux fordi operativsystemene tradisjonelt sett har hatt god rot hos utviklere og driftsfolk. Selskaper som Cisco og IBM bruker også Linux som primæroperativsystem for å kjøre utvikling og testing."
Dette er uttalelsen jeg har letet lenge etter, og til slutt fant jeg det. Kunne ikke uttrykt det bedre selv ;) Kan også nevne at f.eks. Google også bruker Linux internt som primæroperativsystem (Google's egenutviklede Linux distribusjon), Android som mobilplattform og som annonsert diverse plasser på nettet: Chrome OS, som mer enn sannynligvis blir et Linux-basert system.

Spotify for Android! :D

Only thing is, there is no sign of a release date, or any further info on this application other than this YouTube-video and a post on the Spotify-blog from way back in May.


Fascinating stuff.., Google's custom filesystem architectures that is.

Was just reading about their new indexing system codenamed "Caffeine", which also delved into the backend works of what I'd like to call, the "Googleplex". In the early days of Google Inc., they created the Google File System, or GFS for short. Which powers the engine services behind their public infrastructure, like BigTable (distributed real-time database) and MapReduce (number-crunching platform).

While GFS works fine for these purposes, the introduction of AJAX-driven or multimedia-dominated services like GMail and YouTube, GFS just does not cut it.

10 years ago, GFS was a state-of-the-art master-slave scalable distributed filesystem, a single-master design (where a single master node communicates with several slave nodes), thus creating a rather monolithic infrastructure with a single point of failure. And while indexing and searching works fine this way, the new dynamic web-applications demand low-latency storage for faster i/o, which GFS was not designed for.

For the 21st century, technology-achievements and faster bandwidth allows for a faster infrastructure, so the last two years, Google has been buzy revamping GFS, into what is now known as GFS2. The main difference between the first revision and the new, is dynamic distributing.

"GFS2 not only utilizes distributed slaves, but distributed masters as well".

For now, Caffeine runs in a single Google data center, which seems to suggest they've only implemented GFS2 at that one location. And as to the matter of data migration at a later point in time, über-Googler Matt Cutts downplays the risk and hassle, saying it's a matter of taking one data center down at a time. And as demand for bigger and faster storage arises, and people want more interactive and dynamic content and services, this is a natural progressional step for information technology in general. But it hardly seems weird, taken the fact about how fast our personal technology has sprung over the last years.

"Today Google - tomorrow, the rest of the world..."

Google's main philosophy when it comes to storage, and multi-processing, is to unify their entire infrastructure, and make it treat it's vast farm of thousands of computers housed in data centers as one single big virtual machine. Or as defined in a Google Research paper, it is a "Warehouse-Scale Machine", or "WSM" for short.

So, "Today Caffeine - tomorrow, everything else..."

Update thursday november 12th:

I just found a schematic image of Google's "Project 02" data center. It can be found here.

17 August, 2009

Linux-art! No.2

This is a piece I made myself in March of 2008.

I wanted to do a simple mascot-picture, accompanied by the "slackware linux" insignia, but with the newer version of the Courier font-type to make it a little bit more modern.

If anybody knows the e-mail/website address of the guy who made the "Inkscape-tux" mascot, please, drop me a line! I can't remember where I found it, or who made it to save my life... :P

Linux-art! No.1

I've started a new subproject for myself, where I go image-scavenging on the world-wide-web :P and I found a post on linuxologist.com linking to an artist named "~Gegege-no" on DeviantArt.com who made this awesome piece called "Ubuntu Linux", or as titled on the blog where I found it: "The Ubuntu Rider", which I think is a more suitable title ;)

16 August, 2009

Illuminat(i)ed keyboard :P

Logitech Illuminated USB Keyboard, for those late "g33k-nights"...


13 August, 2009

The corporate environment

I'm sorry to say (not really, but I'll get into that later) that this looks like the last month I'll be working @ my current job.

I can honestly say I'm sick and tired.., nay, PISSED OFF at people with over-exaggerated opinions of themselves, driven only by their enormous power-seeking egoes...

Every time I have started work @ new office/business over the last 5 years, I almost certainly ended up working for these kind of people, which lately started to directly affect my work. And as a tragic turn of events, ended up giving the bastards more than one valid reason for discharging me, but they did not do so... Instead, they saw an opportunity to take major advantage of the situation and abuse my abilities to the fullest extent, while threatening with a dishonourable discharge if I don't comply.

It's not that I'm ungrateful for the advantages I've been given or anything like that, but being told I'm not that devoted to my work, when all I've done for my employers is sacrifising my free time and also giving 110% at the same time.

Not being devoted enough? For Fuck's Sake!

Firstly, while I was given "flex-hours" (governing your own work schedule), I was stripped of the opportunity to work overtime, which in turn meant a fixed-rate salary every month.., no matter how much I worked! B.S.!

Then, in the 1st Q of 2009, my boss hired a P.R. consultant. This in itself did not do much in terms of working arrangements or anything. But, eventually, it became clear to me (and the lead programmer of the company) that this P.R. consultant was in fact, quite incompetent in our area of expertise.

And, as if this wasn't enough, he was endowed with the title "Staff Manager", and why you ask? Because he had managed a pizza-shop full of teenagers before he ended up at our offices.

Yes, a pizza-shop manager ended up staff manager at an IT company specializing in business-2-business, business-2-customer and electronic invoicing. Go figure...

So, to show how much he appreciated my work, Mr.PR had kept an eye on me, the six months he had spent @work, noting non-standard conduct on my part, compiling a massive offensive. In my opinion, this is not showing respect. And not showing respect, yields nothing in return as a result, period.

You cannot expect to recieve respect, if you do not show any on your own part, *moan*-*sigh*, some people are just absolute fucking morons... no matter what.

Just to clearify, I'm not whining because I might not have a job in 30 days. I'm generally pissed off because you'd think that grown men over 40-50yrs would be more fourthcoming and blunt about the whole mess.

But instead, they're fussing about what I'm costing the company in these unstable times, and that they cannot afford to keep my position any further.

So, either they had planned this all along, over a whole year! Or, they're just serving me bullshit to try and scare me to do something stupid to push me off the edge of my career, which is *NOT* going to happen.

I'll keep on showing up in the mornings to come, smiling ear-to-ear, tearing THEM down, day by day...

P.S. (14.08.2009 12:20)
I am not trying to act out a fit, or deliberately pissing them off with a clear conscience. Rather, I'm playing them at their own game. They can't fire me because they need me, and I can't quit because I need the cash.

Coincidentally, I've already been to a few job interviews, and to my surprise, this time around it wasn't really that hard to get them like so many times before. What with my newly appended CV, stronger and longer working experience and better understanding of business in general. Actually I find my self-entitled "unemployed period" to be quite tempering.

Kind of a blessing in disguise if you think about it =)