Create a bootable WinXP cd from the contents of your /i386 directory

This is a very useful article if ever interested in creating a bootable WinXP CD from using the contents of the i386/ directory. I must need to do this one of these days.

ThinkPads with IPS Technology

Someone asked a question "What does IPS mean?" while I was reading the fourms at thinkpads.com. I too asked myself that very same question the last time I read the specs for my T43P-H2U in the tabook. From what I can gather, of the responses to this question IPS stands for: Inline-Plane-Switching. This is another name for a Flexview display, which allows for better viewing angles.

X-Bit's Guide has great details on IPS and other LCD technologies. According to X-Bit's guide, the IPS technology was originally developed by Hitachi in 1996 and has since been improved by companies such as NEC, IBM, Samsung and others. IBM's improvement on IPS is better known as Dual Domain IPS (DD-IPS) and they do not share this technology with just anyone.

Come to Papa

I ordered my very first laptop (ThinkPad T43P 2668-H2U) from IBM on 2/2/05. It will ship on 3/14/05, so I should receive it on the 17th of March if everything goes well. I just wish IBM would ship sooner, but I know its worth the wait. The 17th will be during spring break so I'll have more time to play with my new toy then. I know if I received it now I would be totally distracted from doing other things. It's better I wait to spring break.

Remote backup with ease... I mean SSH

http://www.wsp.krakow.pl/~bar/DOC/ssh_backup.html

( cd SOURCEDIR && tar cvf - . | gzip -1 -) | ssh target_address "(cd DESTDIR && cat - > remotefile.tgz )"

A screen within a screen within a screen session

If you every have a screen within a screen within a screen session you will quickly find it very frustrating to detach the sub-most screen. Luckly I found a post on here on how to detach just the sub-most screen session. You must be within that sub-most screen you want to detach before you hit "Ctrl-A a a d". It is quit a mouth full but it gets the job done.

Senior Project moved to CVS

Now that I have the hang of CVS I have moved my old senior_proj folder to CVS as SeniorProject. It has been some time since I last worked on this project so I'll make a little note to myself for future reference.

cvs project name: SeniorProject
Vendor Name: Spring2004WBSCSS
Tag: ALPHA

The next tag will be Release1.0 when it is ready for production use.

picoFreeBSD

I never thought FreeBSD could fit on a single floppy. This reminds FreeSCO back in my high school days.

FreeBSD right off Press!

For the latest in FreeBSD press articles.

Get Java Plugin to work with FreeBSD with this link

Found this link on the web, for getting the java plug-in to work with FreeBSD. I have not tried it out yet but I may need this in the future as I have had problems getting the java plug-in to work in the past:

URL: http://archive.pilgerer.org/mharc/html/freebsd-stable/2004-07/msg00280.html

VIM takes forever to start!

Wow!! I just made several changes to my .cshrc file and later found out that for some strange reason, VIM was taking its own time to start. Apparently, VIM was trying to connect to the X server to get additional information.

After searching on Google I found that the -X options to vim would fix this delay and it did. Now vim starts up lightening fast like it used to.

It was probably enabling the DISPLAY variable in .cshrc, which triggered this slow effect.

Ruby, please stop Core Dumping...

It has been a while since I last ran cvsup on my ports collection. To my surprise I ran into a bit of a jam when I ran: cvsup -g -L 2 /etc/stable-supfile. I received a hideous error which looked something like this:

root@:/usr/ports> portupgrade -ar
[Updating the pkgdb in /var/db/pkg ... - 472 packages found (-1 +0) (...)/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/pkgdb.rb:467: [BUG] Segmentation fault
ruby 1.8.2 (2004-07-29) [i386-freebsd4]

Garance Alistair Drosehn made a post to lucky.freebsd.ports newsgroup, which in my opinion was the best result I found after searching for solutions to this fix. This post was as follows:

Try adding the following two
lines to /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf :

ENV['PKG_DBDRIVER'] = "bdb_hash"
ENV['PORTS_DBDRIVER'] = "bdb_hash"

Add them down where other environment variables are set, such as
ENV['PORTSDIR'] ||= '/usr/ports'

I must also mention that issuing:

root@:/usr/ports> pkgdb -fu

worked wonders and fixed the problem, now no more core dumps on portupgrade. I wonder what caused this problem.

Two editors deleted, another blog created! :)

I should have done this first, create a separate blog for OOD instead of adding my partners to my blog. This will just save a lot of headaches in the future.

Instead I created oodwithbaliga.blogspot.com and invited my two partners, Dave and Steven. :)

Two Editors added for OOD

I would like to humbly welcome Steven Peterson, and David Grochowski to My Almost Daily Blog (MADB). These individuals were added as a result of group formations for Object Oriented Design for Fall 2004. We are to use this blog to keep track of our projects logs, including the first project. In addition, since I will also be using the blog to keep track of what I learn as it pertains to computers I extend this option for you two as well. Feel free to post information of your daily learnings.

Fo' Shizzle

Yo.

List the 10 largest files in a directory

Taken from "BSD Fortune".
du /partition_or_directory_name | sort -rn | head
-- Dru

Free Virus Protection for Windows

http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/
http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php
http://www.avast.com/

Desktop Printing w/ FreeBSD

Whew! It is getting late and I need some sleep. I will read this article either tomorrow or within the next week. Since my LPT port is broken I will have to try out the examples in this article on another computer. Petes computer will be the best pick since more computers are networked to the server I setup. This will come in very hand when it is set up.

The article URL: http://www.ofb.biz/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=321

Encrypt GAIM Conversations

This works with Gaim-0.81 and provides transparent RSA using NSS.
More information on this later after using it for some time.
URL: http://gaim-encryption.sourceforge.net/

Brief Notes from Poul -Henning Kamp on GBDE

I am new to this GBDE (GEOM Based Disk Encryption) for now so I am just going to jot down information I find interesting or did not know about for later personal research.

These notes are from http://phk.freebsd.dk/pubs/bsdcan-04.slides.gbde.pdf

GEOM - The framework for classes which perform transformations on disk I/O:
- was developed under DARPA/SPAWAR.
- Is filesystem independent and works at the disk level. The good thing is that these encrypted disk/partitions look just like any other disk. Better yet, GEOM works with UFS1/2. Since I am using FreeBSD-4.10 Stable I may have to upgrade to 5.x if I want to use GBDE. I am really comfortable with 4.10 right not, but I know eventually I will upgrade. For now I will just read up on GBDE.
- Many other filesystems can be used with GEOM, including but not limited to FAT, NTFS, ISO9660 and many more.

How Good is GEOM?:
Well, it is said that unless AES is broken GEOM can not be cracked! That sounds good to me.

Another Good News Source

http://www.newsforge.com/ I found while reading a Slashdot post on the new GBDE-GEOM Based Disk Encryption for FreeBSD. This is something I will look into later.