Memory upgrade

Sun, Oct 26, 2008  in Blog using tags Electronics

Some months back, I picked up a 1GB DIMM at a computer fair. It was cheap, which was about the only thing going for it, but I thought I’d take a chance on it. When I got home I plugged it into my PC, and it all started going horribly wrong. Needless to say, a few minutes later I was running memtest+ and finding millions of errors.


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Monotone hooks

Sat, Mar 22, 2008  in Blog using tags Uncategorized

I am now officially impressed with the extensibility of monotone.


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Web security

Thu, Mar 20, 2008  in Blog using tags Uncategorized

There are so many popular web applications around nowadays. Blogs, CMSs, Forums, Webmail, Site Administration, Project Management, Wikis, and many more. Yet I’m shocked at the lack of understanding of web security even among the authors of some of the most widely deployed applications.


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Playing with hardware

Mon, Mar 17, 2008  in Blog using tags Electronics

I decided to have a play around with digital hardware. Having been exposed to some verilog at work, and seen that FPGA development boards have become quite affordable, I thought I’d have a go.


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I’ve had a HP LaserJet 1010 for a few years, and I used to have it directly connected to my server, running lpd and samba. When I first set this up, I was plagued by “Unsupported Personality: PCL” errors. After much messing about, it was partially fixed, at least enough that Windows would happily print via samba, and I could occasionally print from NetBSD systems. Sure, I sometimes had to reset the printer, but most of the time it worked well enough.
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This is perhaps an instantiation of Murphy’s Law, mixed in with a little bit of a rant.


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NSLU2 and NetBSD

Sun, Jul 29, 2007  in Blog using tags NetBSD

I did some rearranging of the network infrastructure in my house recently. The main aim was to move anything that made noise 24/7 into a cupboard out of the way. The downside is that it left the printer and a bunch of USB serial ports without anything to plug into.

The solution? A Linksys NSLU2 running NetBSD.


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Monotone databases

Sun, Jul 29, 2007  in Blog using tags Uncategorized

For various reasons, I had ended up with a bunch of monotone databases copied all over the place. Clearly this was unsustainable, and I’d always planned that if I got to that point, I’d set up a single central database for all my projects in a place where I could easily sync with it regardless of where I was working.


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Sudoku solver

Sun, Apr 1, 2007  in Blog using tags Uncategorized

I’ve been working on my sudoku solver.


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Introducing Lightscript

Sun, Mar 18, 2007  in Blog using tags Lightscript

For a week covering the new year’s celebrations at the start of this year, I ran a lightshow for the IS, which is a pretty cool event for young speakers of Esperanto. It’s the second such event for which I’ve provided lighting, and I was keen to learn some lessons from the first time round.


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