Friday, November 25, 2005

Moment of uber-geekness...

Not entirely sure why, but I went hunting for myself on Google (actually, I must confess I do this every year or so...) and found that Google Groups has me way back in 1992!

"craig humphrey" - Google Groups

Thursday, November 24, 2005

RAID5 catching up with RAID0

It's long been well known that RAID5 creats additional overhead (thanks to parity information) which makes it slower than say RAID0 (striping).

While following up something I was reading today (distributed.net) I came across this 3ware page, touting the performance of their recent SATA2 RAID contoller. While their main point is to compare with their previous SATA1 RAID controler (and the performance increase that they've managed), just look at the RAID5 vs RAID0 performance.
Read is only 13% behind, write is only 9% behind, and across 8 drives, you've only lost 12.5% space.

That's pretty hot in my book, that's a paltry 11.5% penalty (if you want to think of it that way) to achieve coverage against single drive failure... Imagine how the 12 and 16 drive versions do!

BTW they don't mention how much on-board cache they're using, I'm guessing the full 256MB.

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Running Windows without a swapfile

I know i've done this every so often to do a good solid defrag, but I must admit, it had never occurred to me to run this way the whole time.

I've got two desktops and a laptop, all with 1gig RAM. My primary desktop would probably struggle (thanks to a Netscreen/Juniper java based console), I think the other two could be prime targets, at least until I start VS05 & SQL05 development again...

http://agileprogrammer.com/geeknoise/archive/2005/10/16/8673.aspx

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

How to Build an Intel Mac

Hmm... someone leaked an early release of Mac OS/X for INTEL...
So now the latest trend is showing everyone how you can get it working on XYZ Intel based hardware....

ExtremeTech

BuilderAU

Might have to see if I can locate a copy and have a little play...

Friday, November 18, 2005

Even more Sony DRM...

Wired News: Real Story of the Rogue Rootkit

More Sony DRM

Sony Yanks DRM Uninstaller - Because that was a security risk, too

Sony distributes DRM - Rootkit!

All the major players out there are trying to come up with the perfect DRM (Digital Rights Management) solution to stop all this CD/DVD pirating. So Sony starts shipping CDs with it's own flavour of DRM that auto-installs on your PC when you put the CDROM in. Only, they then try to hid the DRM software using XCP, which is basically a rootkit! XCP can be used to hide ANY process/file/folder/regkey that starts with "$sys$"! And it turns out it's also remotely exploitable! (Recieved a signature update for it just yesterday!).

Fortunatly the boys at Symantec have a free scanner/removal tool. So if you've recently bought a Sony Music published CD, you might want to give this app a run against any PC you've put it in.
Symantec Security Response - SecurityRisk.First4DRM

MS gets all leaky on us...

There's a bit of a bru-ha boiling on the net around some leaked emails/memos from Microsoft: Miguel de Icaza [memos can be found here]

Miguel and others point out that it's all a little bit suspicious and staged, which to my uneducated eyes appears true, though having seen some of the emails/memo/presentations that we get at my office... Sometimes the powers at be really believe (and write) this stuff.

Who knows, I have a love-hate relationship with Microsoft, I have to use their products (by-and-large) and they often do some really cool stuff, some of them are even relativly cheap. But when somethings not working, or you're trying to make that next logicial development step... they often start to fall short and the support isn't always helpful.

MS have learned a lot of lessions, through making a lot of mistakes, and the've come a long way, they and their products are definitly improving (and bloating unfortunatly), lets hope that things just keep getting better.

Thursday, November 03, 2005

VoIP phone Denial of Service!

Get lots of people to ring the same guy and shout "Boo"!

Field Notice: [Cisco] FN - 62121 - CP-7940G and CP-7960G May Reboot if Volume is Set to Maximum

Summary: The IP Phone may reboot if volume is set to maximum, a call is placed to it, and the caller makes a loud noise.