Thursday, April 28, 2005

I hate...

Europeans who smoke like they have a divine right to pollute the atmosphere. This little fat portugese dude was here a half an hour ago smoking, and he came back to the lobby (from outside), just to smoke.

Theses are the same people who are concerned about gmo foods, immoral wars, green power, and driving high mileage cars but, giving everyone around them cancer apparently isn't a problem... I hope you die a horrible lung wracking death and people use your tar filled sack of a body to poison feral dogs you little french cigarette smoking shit.

Smoking portugese guy...

So um...

In a couple hours I shove off from Mozambique via the South African Airways aluminum tube mailer.

I have a couple thoughts and how far that african isp situation has come since I first came to .za 6 years ago. connectivty is nowhere near as thin now, there are more options, bust in general the serive is really better. This is compound of the problems the rest of us face as well, spam, bot infested machines, aging slightly unsuitable hardware, and good old fashioned half-assed african engineering. We have people who packet shape their exchange point connections... We have people who shape tcp connections both directions over satellite links... We have all sorts of crazy port filtering... We have double nats... We have transparent proxy servers that don't deliver webpages... We have isp operators who spend all day tweaking their packet shapers and port filtering in search of imagionary performance gains...

It's a strange world we live in.

joelja-out

Sunday, April 24, 2005

Shopping for a laptop

Want three things critically.

A large display with a pixel count equal or great to the current one (1600x1200)

Acpi sleep to work in linux.

Battery life somewhere north of about 5 hours from the batteries in the box...

Said laptop doesn't appear to exist, but if it did, it appears that it wouldn't have a pci-express ati graphics chipset. it appears that nvidia has spent some time working on at least some acpi support. The one that will probably work best is the intel media accelerator 915 (maybe) at the expense of being really slow (maybe).

In terms of decent sized displays, Dell latitude d810/Precision Worstation m70 (nvidia) look like the best option, maybe the older d800 (agp nvida) or the inspiron 6000 (intel) are in the right range as well. the inspiron 9300 might with with it's top of the line graphics accelerator but not the lesser ones. the latitudes can hold a second battery, but the remainder probably aren't really all that great.

I've recently entertained the notion of a 17" powerbook but it just seems to silly, not enough pixels, one button mouse, no support for the airport extreme (broadcom) wireless in linux, the fact that it's not an x86 etc.

Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Some URLs

guy follows cosplay girls around
http://www.juergenspecht.com/truestories/?number=5&page=1

more flooring
http://www.coveringsetc.com/pages/subcat_listing.jsp?i=153

Monday, April 18, 2005

Some url's

This application frankly looking pretty badass as a monitoring tool for windows boxen...

So...

Things were so dire towards the end of thelast week that on thursday I was watching a mad dutchman pour milk onto the central shaft of a cpu fan because as he asserted it might provide adequate lubrication. The only thing more shocking than the circumstances, would have been it had worked (it didn't).

Removing the fans to expose the heatsink, and reducing the fsb 133mhz to 66mhz basically making them pIII-366's instead of pIII-733's got us some thing like 20 more stable machines, before other people started to show up with rented pc's or additional loaners... In total in the last week we probably cycled through a 100 machines just to get 50.

PIII with heatsink exposed.


dead pc photos

Sunday, April 17, 2005

VIMTO



Tastes like nothing else one earth. Purple.

Ants!

So the ants here are working fairly hard at tearing the building appart... look for anything wood, and you may find that it's hollow. The piles of sawdust are in and of themselves impressive...



And here's the little bugger in question.

Distance you have to travel from the hotel in order to get mugged in Mozambique

About a 100 meters according to a member of our party who had the opportunity to try it out. Note to self, take cab to cross the damn street.

Friday, April 15, 2005

So Here's a story...

Some Italian call center company swaps out the pc's as they age and become unreliable... When they get a big pile of them together they ship them off to a non-profit that donates them to a project that places pc's in schools in countries like say Mozambique...

The company takes a tax write-off on whatever their remaining depreciated value is (probably as functional hardware), rather than paying to have them disposed of or recycled (lifecycle management). The folks in Mozambique get, you guessed it, broken pc's. Out of 65 in the batch currently sitting here maybe 20, possibly less were in working order. The most common problem is burned out cpu fans, some machines also have bad capictors, a few don't boot for varoius reasons, a couple are just dead...

So Africa is like the world's dumping ground for dead computer hardware. It's not like they can be demanufactured here, beyond the expedient of recovering the major steel and aluminum components. Thanks european jackasses, keep your own trash next time, save the rest of us some work.

Thursday, April 14, 2005

Some Notes

the fxs equipment we're using for the non-ip phones in .mz is grandstream handytone 286 one port analog fxs $70

http://www.voipsupply.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=12&products_id=35

First picture from Mozambique:

MAME console photos

grabbed these a couple days ago:


Mozambique

Pictures are uploading kind of slowly.

dsc02539.jpg 100% 222KB 1.4KB/s 02:40
dsc02540.jpg 100% 188KB 1.6KB/s 01:59
dsc02541.jpg 66% 164KB 0.0KB/s - stalled -

We have some kind of a cable modem here but the upstream is a satellite link. Note the net 10 address as well, cute...

[root@munnion etc]# traceroute twin.uoregon.edu
traceroute to twin.uoregon.edu (128.223.214.27), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets
1 196.200.223.254 (196.200.223.254) 2.021 ms 1.939 ms 1.936 ms
2 10.9.0.1 (10.9.0.1) 7.427 ms 10.330 ms 14.444 ms
3 cust241-0.netcabo.co.mz (196.46.0.241) 12.176 ms 11.893 ms 9.085 ms
4 cust250-0.netcabo.co.mz (196.46.0.250) 242.844 ms 203.353 ms 141.051 ms
5 cust134-224.netcabo.co.mz (62.56.224.134) 197.791 ms 148.935 ms 180.743 ms
6 80.255.57.161 (80.255.57.161) 679.842 ms 696.145 ms 718.193 ms
7 fus-rt001-ge-0-bh3-0-v2.core.globalconnex.net (80.255.39.65) 771.821 ms 895.245 ms *
8 nyc-rt001-ge-0-3-0.core.globalconnex.net (80.255.34.113) 871.065 ms * *
9 ge-6-3.car1.NewYork1.Level3.net (64.156.82.13) 708.728 ms 869.097 ms 802.693 ms
10 ae-1-52.bbr2.NewYork1.Level3.net (4.68.97.33) 948.645 ms 1007.794 ms *
11 so-3-0-0.mp1.Seattle1.Level3.net (209.247.9.121) 843.986 ms * 1018.470 ms
12 ge-11-1.hsa2.Seattle1.Level3.net (209.247.9.58) 1025.157 ms ge-10-0.hsa2.Seattle1.Level3.net (209.247.9.86) 995.208 ms *
13 * unknown.Level3.net (63.211.200.246) 929.022 ms *
14 ptck-core2-gw.nero.net (207.98.64.138) 975.106 ms * 937.675 ms
15 eugn-core2-gw.nero.net (207.98.64.1) 973.093 ms 1040.275 ms 998.536 ms
16 eugn-car1-gw.nero.net (207.98.64.165) 905.859 ms 867.904 ms 750.254 ms
17 uonet8-gw.nero.net (207.98.64.66) 919.165 ms * 973.031 ms
18 ge-5-1.uonet1-gw.uoregon.edu (128.223.2.1) 1111.872 ms 940.330 ms 872.119 ms
19 * twin (128.223.214.27) 869.595 ms 881.798 ms

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

So I'm sitting...

In this bizarre Lufthansa lounge which seems to have nothing in the way of food except gummi bears and of course lots and lots of beer... 6 more hours till I board, goody.

Monday, April 11, 2005

Saturday, April 09, 2005

Some URLs

http://www.gerbertltd.com/cork_tiles_designer/index.htm

http://www.gerbertltd.com/rubber_flooring/ecopave/index.htm

http://www.johnsonite.com/products/default.htm

Some URLs

http://www.afrotechmods.com/

in particular

http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hdspeakers.htm

Friday, April 08, 2005

electroplankton

electroplankton

not sure what it is but it looks kinda cool. DS.

joelja
--
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joel Jaeggli Unix Consulting joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu
GPG Key Fingerprint: 5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2

Tuesday, April 05, 2005

Requirements for next mobile phone...

Currently I use a Nokia 3650 purchased Sept 2003. which is starting to show it's age, never the less it has a few features I'm begining to find it hard to live without.

  • Web browser - I paid for the opera for series 60 OS, it's functional if not exactly pretty, typing is the only real impediment to complete usage. It's very useful for checking the weather, flights, news and so on.
  • Calender - The calender is functional... It can be populated by ical via isync on a mac, which is what makes it trully useful. nokia pc suite can probably do that as well but since I try and avoid running windows as much as possible, there you have it.
  • Camera - As it turns out, a camera in a phone isn't a toy, it's a business tool. the camera in the 3650 isn't great, but it's usable.
  • Bluetooth - syncing from your pocket is nice, no cables, no ir , beautiful.
  • Speakerphone - Useful, use it way more than I ever did similar functionality on my desk phone.

Things I realy wish a new phone would have...

  • Qwerty keyboard, would be a massive lifestyle improvement for some applications.
  • Slightly better camera would be nice.
  • Higher resolution screen, current one is 176x220.


So uh? What phones meet those criterion? hm... Maybe the Treo 650, which suffers the affliction of palmos. The Nokia 9300 has no camera, the sidekick 2 has no bluetooth, the nokia 9500 has pretty much everything but it's also kind of a brick. Sony ericsson p910?

Sunday, April 03, 2005

PSP - Bigger than Cocaine?

So my premiss as I explained over a couple to many beers the other day to some folks is that as long as sony doesn't fuck it up, the psp will probably end up being the biggest handheld computing platform ever (there are more than 30 million ps2s in the US)... How would the fuck it up you say? Break applications developed for it, wrap all the content in drm, agressivly prosecute people who come up with novel uses for the thing, abitrarily restrict the use of the wireless networking... The ps2 has more or less resisted being used as a general purpose computer, despite the ability of the orignal model to take a hard-disk, the availability of a linux development kit, and general purpose i/o through usb, it's still just a game platform that you reboot everytime you swap games with little or no persistent storage other than the tiny memory card...

Of course there's also the nintendo DS which has some obviously more novel input methods, but nowhere near as much storage, cpu or expansion potential.

psp irc client
http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000613038689/

psp web browser
http://www.base2.org/~fugimax/weblog/

linux on nintendo ds
http://www.dslinux.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=45&st=220&p=2057&#entry2057