Dilithium Crystalworks

Freeware App: VLC Media Player

VLC media player is a “does it all” multimedia player that can handle an assortment of audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, and so on). It can also deal with DVDs, VCDs, and several streaming protocols.

VLC can also be used as a server to stream audio or video in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Technorati Tags: free software, video player, media player, freeware, video formats, audio player, codecs, multi format, audio formats

Posted in Freeware, Internet, Music, Software, Video | No Comments »

SSD: Hard Drives With No Moving Parts

Anybody with even a slight understanding of how a hard drive operates knows that there are some problems that go along with it. Because many of the parts require high precision alignment it’s entirely too easy to mess that up. Just ask the guy who bought a new hard drive and dropped it on the way home (there’s almost certainly somebody in any area that’s done this at least once). The impact from dropping it can destroy the delicate alignment required.

Because there’s moving parts and a motor, there’s a noise problem. I have an old IBM 20GB drive that I stopped using a long time ago because it made this really high pitch whine when it was running. Because of my hearing loss *I* was not able to hear it but it drove my wife nuts.

The read / write heads need to move across the surface of the disk to access all of the sectors that hold pieces of the file. This not only limits access time considerably because physical mechanisms just can’t move as fast as the signals they’re carrying, it also means that fragmentation (a file broken up into many pieces stored in different areas of the disk) is also a problem with conventional hard drives because of that access time issue.

SSD’s today are made with the same kind of technology that flash memory is. They’re basically large blocks of Flash Memory that’s designed to act like a conventional hard drive. They have much faster read times than the one’s that are made with SDRAM or DRAM.

Because there are no moving parts, read times are very fast. You don’t have to wait for it to spin up to operating speed before you can read or write data. No motors mean they run completely quiet. Read times can be a LOT faster.

One of the biggest drawbacks to flash based Solid State Drives is the fact that they have a really huge, but limited number of read / write cycles and an active computer could probably reach that limit eventually. Once a particular block of flash has reached it’s write cycle limit it becomes unreliable and must be replaced. Typical flash SSDs today have a limit that ranges from 1 to 5 million write cycles. An active computer can conceivably reach this limit in a year or less.

I don’t think that given the write cycle limitation that flash based SSD’s are quite ready for prime time. If I shell out hard coin for mass storage, I want something that’s got a reasonable shot of still being functional five or ten years down the line. I suppose that sounds like an unreasonable expectation but there you are.

My recommendation is to NOT run out and switch to them just yet. Flash based SSD’s DO have a lot of potential but I’d like to see development go farther before trusting them with my data.

Technorati Tags: hard drive, ram, solid state drive, flash memory, write cycle limit, hardware

Posted in Computers, Electronics, Hardware, Tech, opinion | No Comments »

Don’t Worry, The Mouse Will Live

I don’t know quite what the deal is but lately I’ve been seeing stories that are trying to push the idea that the mouse as a computer input device is going to die out. The latest I’ve seen of these stories is an over dramatic Bold type headline on PC Magazine “Computer mouse heading for extinction“.

Yeah, there’s new things coming along and yeah, the Wii along with other new gadgets and ideas are making sweeping changes in how a lot of people think about input devices but I still doubt very seriously that the faithful mouse is going anywhere.

speaking of the Wii, have I mentioned how much I absolutely *HATE* the name of that thing?

In fact, I seem to remember very clearly how people made the same kind of predictions when the touchpad technology used almost universally on laptops to provide mouse functions today was first developed. Then, as now, there were all these fanciful predictions that the mouse would die out within a few short years.

Now nearly a decade or more since then most of us are still using a mouse. Heck, Mine isn’t even one of those fancy schmancy cordless optical things. It’s an old fashioned black three button/wheel device from Belkin with a cord coming out of it and ball in it that I’m going to keep using for quite a while to come.

Similarly, I don’t doubt that in five years (or even ten) the majority of computer users will still be using the same kind of mouse technology that they’re using now.

Technorati Tags: new technology, computer mouse, mouse, new hardware, input device, new input device, hardware

Posted in Computers, Hardware, Misc, Tech, opinion | No Comments »

Head Up Displays For Cars

I just saw an interesting article about some research GM is doing that is aimed at eventually having cars equipped with a HUD (Head Up Display).

The article goes out of it’s way to emphasize the fact that this is intended to benefit older drivers but it’s plainly obvious that such a system could easily benefit any driver regardless of age. (I guess they’re pushing the ‘good for older drivers’ thing because the boomer generation is getting up there in years.)

It’s based on a clear coating on the windshield that glows when hit by ultraviolet light. A computer driven laser will paint things on the screen to enhance stuff already in view. such as paint a line on the windshield that follows the edge of the road so that it’s easier to keep track of in dark, foggy or rainy conditions. That function alone would be worth the whole project in my opinion.

If the system detects a person or animal in the road it will put an outline around them on the windshield, which will make sure they’re seen, avoiding countless collisions. If a driver is speeding it would put a pink box around an approaching speed limit sign to call their attention to it.

I think it’d also be very helpful to allow the driver to set the system to display the most commonly used dashboard instruments on the windshield. Not full images of the instruments, but a digital readout for speed, fuel, engine temp, oil pressure, essential fluid levels, Etc. That way there would be that many fewer things that would have the driver looking away from the view ahead because the main instrumentation would be part of that view.

Technorati Tags: ultraviolet coating, head up display, hud, gm, avoid collsions

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Ubuntu Install Gone Bad

I was trying to install Ubuntu 8.04 today and ran into a problem.

The machine is a 333mhz pentium 2 w/ 384mb ram. A couple days before I had booted the ‘live cd’ and run it for a while to try it out and it worked fine. Today, I changed the hard drive for one I didn’t mind formatting and decided to go for the install.

Once again I booted from the Cd and selected the “install ubuntu” option.

It looks like everything is working fine and then there’s a few errors that I’ve no idea what they meant and that’s followed by a stream of errors that’s hard to read because they’re flying by so fast but it looked like some kind of block read error followed by a 8 or 12 digit hex number

When it finally halted this was showing:

vfs_rename+0×42f/0×470
__lookup_hash+0xb9/0xf0
sys_renameat+0×1d5/0×210
sys_stat64+0×1e/0×30
sys_rename+0×27/0×30
sysenter_past_esp+0×6b/0xa9
unix_stream_sendmsg+0×1a0/0×390

Followed by a really long string of hex codes that I wasn’t even about to try copying by hand.

If anybody has got a clue what the problem might be and more importantly, what the fix might be I’d really appreciate it.

Technorati Tags: help needed, ubuntu install error, install error, error messages, ubuntu, install failed

Posted in Computers, Electronics, Misc, Software | No Comments »

The Buyback Movement: Cash For Old Gadgets

With the oil companies doing their level best to put the economy belly up, lots of people are turning to more and more ways to conserve the cash. One option that many have overlooked until now involves getting some cash out of old hardware that they’re not using anymore.

Lots of people, when they get a new cellphone, computer, ipod, blackberry or whatever, the old hardware doesn’t actually get thrown out unless it’s physically damaged. Instead, it just gets put away somewhere to collect dust and take up space.

Now, companies like TechForward offers a guaranteed buyback plan for those who replace their gadgets within two years. Among other things, you can get cash for laptops, desktops, DVD and MP3 players.

One thing however that I’m certain that many people aren’t thinking about is the privacy factor. Face it, that old computer could still contain a lot of stuff on it that you’d rather didn’t turn up in the wrong hands such as account numbers, passwords and so on.

Same thing goes for your old cellphone. Unless you take the time to follow the often complicated instructions, then your address book, stored SMS messages and so on are still in that phone. It may be a royal P.I.T.A. but it’s well worth making sure that it’s been wiped clean before passing it on to somebody else.

With computers you’re best off uninstalling all of the software that isn’t part of windows and then using something like the freeware app “Eraser Portable” to deleting all of the files that you don’t want passed on and then, just for good measure, wipe the free space on the drive and then finally format the hard drive completely. Once you’ve got that done you can optionally re-install Windows (or better yet, Linux!) with the bare bones install.

Technorati Tags: eraser, privacy, wipe, buyback, security, secure delete, buy back, old hardware, recycle

Posted in Business, Computers, Electronics, Hardware, Privacy, opinion | No Comments »

Sun Java Finally Open Source

Good news for Linux users, According to a recent Slashdot article, Sun Microsystems is finally moving on a decision to open-source Java.

Once it’s done and released, this will clear the way for Open source linux distributions like Debian to be able to include Sun Java in their distributions.

Apparently Sun has spend a LOT of time negotiating with various companies and software writers that own parts of the code that makes up Java. Most, it seems, have been eventually willing to open-source their code, which allows sun to keep it in their new open source version.

Other companies and software writers haven’t been so willing to open source their code and so Sun has had to rewrite those parts of Java from scratch

The last two holdouts were code involved with raster graphics and 2D graphics and a sound-related component within Java.

The first turned out to be owned by a company that didn’t want it released as open source but after some negotiations agreed to open source the code.

The second is joining the ranks to code bits that are being completely rewritten

The end result ought to be showing up soon and we can finally welcome Sun Microsystems to the Open Source community.

Technorati Tags: java, sun java, open source, source code, rewrite, sun microsystems

Posted in Business, Linux, Misc, News, Programming, Software, opinion | No Comments »

Basic Cookie Management In Firefox

Cookies are not just the sugary, crumbly treat they used to be. Now they’re all about websites and advertisers having your browser store information that they can call back up and among other things, allow advertisers to track your online habits from the websites you visit to the purchases you make or topics you research in search engines.

The key to privacy is to not just simply allow your browser to blindly go ahead and accept every cookie that comes along. Instead, a few simple settings in Firefox can allow you to establish rules about what sites are allowed to set cookies and whether they can be persistent or restricted to the current session only and deleted when you close the browser.

The first step is to change the default which allows all cookies all the time. On the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Privacy tab on the top of the box that appears. Then in the middle of the box will be a place to choose the basic options for how you want Firefox to handle cookies.

In the normal course of browsing the web, cookies are needed by a lot of sites for legitimate reasons such as remembering logon information and preferences. Lots of sites also use temporary cookies as part of how their site’s navigation system or checkout system works, so you’re really best off if you check “Accept cookies from sites”. But since we don’t need just any cookies, we’ll do some basic cookie management and choose “ask me every time” from the dropdown box and click “ok”.

When a site tries to set a cookie, Firefox will ask you what to do with it.

Since it’s actually pretty seldom that a site will set only one cookie, it’s a good idea to check the box for “Use my choice for all cookies from this site” so that you only have to decide what to do with cookies only once for each domain or sub-domain. If you want more information about the cookie that it’s asking you about, you can press the “Details” button to get a look at the raw cookie data. Most of the time this is going to be nearly indecipherable.

The Choices you have are “Allow“, which means that cookies from that domain or subdomain will be accepted and will last beyond the current session. “Allow for Session“, which means that cookies from that sub-domain or domain will be accepted and then deleted when the browser is closed. “Deny“, which means that that domain or sub-domain will not be allowed to set cookies at all.

In the example above, I selected “Allow for Session” because I’m willing to allow the site to use temporary cookies so that it’ll work, but I don’t think that .abcnews.go.com needs to have a cookie that does not expire for three years!

Generally speaking, most cookies will fall into “Allow for Session” or “Deny” categories. Only sites that you use frequently would be set to “Allow”. For example, many of you are regular readers here and of course you trust me implicitly (insert hypnotic stare here <grin>), so when your browser asks what to do with cookies from the domain dilithiumcrystalworks.com, you naturally set it to “Allow”.

Once you set a rule for a domain or subdomain, all future cookies from there will be handled according to that rule. Persistent cookies will be allowed to exist between sessions and Session cookies will be deleted when you close the browser. You can look at the rules that have been created so far by going back into the Options box and selecting Privacy. In the Cookies part of that tab, click “Exceptions” and you’ll see a box like the one below.

This box allows you to see what the rules are for any domain or subdomain that has ever set a cookie. You can remove any or all of those rules, which means you would be asked about it again the next time you visited the site that set cookies for them. You can also directly enter a domain and set a rule for it in this box. Odds are pretty good that you won’t be seeing much of this box though.

Close the exceptions box and back on the privacy options, click “Show Cookies”. This will give you a list of all cookies that have been set.

The little folders on the left indicate the names of domains and sub domains that have been allowed to set cookies. When you click on the “+” to the left of it, the folder will open and you will see all of the cookies that have been set for that domain. You can select any cookie and see what it contains and you can click “Remove Cookie” to delete any cookie. You should use care when on this screen because the “Remove All Cookies” button will do exactly that, remove EVERY cookie immediately.

What cookies Should I Allow?

Generally speaking the only sites you would want to “Allow” are those that you use frequently and either trust or consider any logon or preferences data the site would store to be sufficiently non-critical that the convenience of the persistent cookies is worth more than any possible information leak (such as by a malicious site using javascript to read the data from all cookies stored on your system). I personally have 70 domains that are set to “Allow” (yes, I counted them) and I consider that to be a high number but then again, I don’t believe that my browsing habits are exactly typical.

What cookies should I “Allow for Session”

Most of the sites that you allow to set cookies should be set to “Allow for Session”. This way sites can set cookies that will allow it to work properly and then they’ll be deleted at the end of the browser session when you close Firefox. The slight inconvenience of having to log on to a site the first time you visit it in a new browser session is well worth the privacy that you gain by not allowing most cookies to exist beyond the session.

What cookies should I “Deny”

The cookies to “Deny” are the ones that aren’t actually a part of the site you’re visiting. Usually you can get a good idea of whether or not to deny a cookie by looking at it’s domain. If it contains words like “tracking” or “metrics”, I would “Deny” them along with any cookie whose name ends in “.112.2o7.net”

Generally speaking, if the name of the domain or sub domain sounds like it’s tracking, then I’ll probably hit the “Deny” button. I’ve also recently discovered a good size list of tracking domains that can serve as a guide for which cookies to “Deny”.

This process of “training” Firefox in what cookies to allow starts out being pretty intensive. At first every cookie it encounters gets you another “what do I do with this?” box and you can’t do anything else until it’s dealt with. Fortunately as you visit all of the sites that you frequent, the box appears less and less often as the list of rules grows.

In another post I’ll talk about third party cookies and how to implement a hidden Firefox 2 setting that’s intended to not allow them.

Technorati Tags: cookies, persistent cookies, block cookies, how to, session cookies, cookie management, tracking cookies, tutorial, firefox 2

Posted in Internet, Misc, Privacy, Software | No Comments »

DOJ Overseeing Development of “Windows 7″

Well, it looks like *somebody* has learned a lesson. According to the folks at Microsoft watch, the Justice Department is overseeing the development of “Windows 7″, which is the version that’s supposed to replace the disaster everybody loves to call veeesta.

This government sanctioned “Technical Committee” is overseeing Windows development and make certain that Microsoft complies with the terms of the November 2001 Justice Department settlement with Microsoft and the final court judgment that was issued a year later.

They’ll be investigating any complaints about Microsoft abuses and making regular reports on their compliance.

Technorati Tags: windows, vista, microsoft watch, windows 7, microsoft, justice department

Posted in Business, Computers, News, Software, Tech | No Comments »

Multiple Security Holes Found In Ruby 1.8 and 1.9

Of interest to Ruby Programmers I just read about some serious vulnerabilities were discovered in Ruby by Drew Yao, a member of Apple’s security team.

According to the article about it that I read, these vulnerabilities could be exploited to allow the execution of arbitrary code or lead to a denial of service situation. It also makes it pretty clear that these holes are “exploitable from trivial user-specified parameters”, which means that it’s entirely possible for a knowledgeable user to compromise a ruby application.

Fortunately, there are patches available to fix these vulnerabilities in both versions 1.8 and 1.9

Technorati Tags: ruby, arbitrary code execution, user specified parameters, vulnerability, denial of service, security, exploit

Posted in Computers, Internet, News, Programming, Software | No Comments »