Yeraze's Domain 3.0

Lately I’ve installed several new extensions and addons for FireFox, and I thought I’ld publish a list (along with a screenshot) here.  Partly to share it with you, but largely so I can remember what they all are as I continually propagate my list of extensions between work, home, laptops, relatives, and various other computers I tend to interact with on a semi-regular basis.

In alphabetical order:

• Adblock Plus – Previously I used AdBlock & FilterSet.G Updater for this, but Adblock Plus combines both of these (with alot more) into a single extension
• Better GMail - From the folks at LifeHacker, this combines 20 or so very useful GreaseMonkey scripts into a single Extension
• BugMeNot – A great way to get around all those "mandatory registration" websites
• del.icio.us Bookmarks – An easy way to synchronize bookmarks across multiple computers
• ErrorZilla Mod – When a page won’t load, get an easy collection of buttons for Cache’s and Diagnotics
• FasterFox - A great collection of tweaks to get the most out of your browser
• Find Toolbar Tweaks – Works well with the "Search Marker"
• Firebug - a Must-have for web developers
• GMail Manager – A better version of the Gmail Notifier that handles Multiple accounts and shows message snippets in the notifications
• GreaseMonkey – Everyone knows this one.
• Linkification - Converts URL’s & email addresses into links
• MultiSidebar - Lets me have multiple sidebars, and dock them to any side I want
• NoScript - Disables unnecessary JavaScript & Flash, makes browsing much faster & eliminates alot of popups
• Search Marker – Puts markers along the scrollbar, indicating locations of searched text
• Snap links – Lets you draw a box (with the mouse) around links, opening each link within the box in a separate tab
• Split Browser – Lets you split the browser into multiple panes.
• Tab Mix Plus – Lets you drag-n-drop tabs, as well as lock & protect them.  Also incorporates a "Reload Every" function, replacing the ReloadEvery extension.
• Travissimo - An extension for fans of "Travian".
• Update Notifier – Notify you when an extension has been updated, with a quick-restart option

It’s a long list, but these really work well together.  A few interesting "synergies" of the collection:

• Travissimo insists on loading the sidebar on the left whenever you login to Travian.  Since I use a widescreen monitor, I typically keep my bookmarks sidebar open all the time.  With MultiSidebar, I can keep my bookmarks on the right side, and let Travissimo appear on the left.
• As I’ve mentioned before, Search Marker & Find Toolbar Tweaks work well together to put markers on the side whenever you use quick-search.
• AdBlock plus & NoScript pretty much eliminate every single ad you’ll ever see on the web.

And just to "show off", I’ve snapped a few Screenshots of my FireFox window.

	The DAAC website, with the window split & Pandora in the bottom
	My Travian Capitol, with the Travissimo bar on the left

[tag:firefox][tag:extensions]

Just found this pic of the "MareNostrum" at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain.

The MareNostrum is currently #9 in the world (according to the latest Top500 list), and it’s definately gotta be #1 in the most styling.  Why can’t more multi-million dollar computers look like this?

Pic courtesy of OpenRCE.
[tag:computer][tag:hpc][tag:marenostrum]

So, I spent today as I’m sure most of America did.  This morning I picked up a copy of the 7th (final) book in the Harry Potter saga, The Deathly Hallows.

10 hours later, I’m done.  I’m sore all over and my vision is a bit blurry, but I’m done.  The book’s pretty good, and got a great ending to it.  I won’t ruin it for you, but it’s a great way to wrap up the entire story.  You get a great glimpse on Dumbledore’s past, a true answer on Snape, and even a teary-eyed conclusion.  I would say more, but all my relatives read this blog occasionally and they’re all waiting for the book too.  If I spoil it for them, I’ll wind up in Azkaban too.

[tag:harrypotter][tag:deathlyhallows][tag:book]

One common trick in the Wide World of Windows (Also known as the WWW, not to be confused with the World Wide Web or Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes) is to prevent the user from running more than 1 instance of an application.  Try it sometime, open up something like Microsoft Word.  Then, try to open it again and you’ll find that it doesn’t work, it simply refocuses the previous session.  It’s a pretty useful trick and Windows gives you lots of ways to make this happen.

However, on a real multi-user operating system like Linux or Unix, such behavior is shunned.  You expect multiple copies of everything to be open at once since you may have multiple users running the program simultaneously.  Every now and then, however, it’s advantageous to get this similar behavior.  I ran into a case-in-point this week.  A user was running ezViz, my pride and joy, on one of the supercomputers.  He submitted several jobs, each one running several instances of ezViz serially.  Unfortunately, they all wound up on the same node, and he wound up running 8 versions simultaneously, each one wanted 3.5G of a 16G machine.  It wasn’t pretty. 

After thinking about it for a while, I thought it might be helpful to give the user a way to specify a maximum number of simultaneous runs.  Runs beyond that number would simply wait their turn.  First attempts were to implement something like ‘ps‘ to check the running processes and see how many were running.  Not only is this difficult, but there are alot of race conditions and such from multiple versions trying to check simultaneously. 

I did some research and a friend of mine suggested using a shared memory block with shmget to have each process ‘register’ itself in the shared space.  Each process could register and know how many other processes were going, and then decide whether to wait or continue.  While that’s definately an option, a similar but far better method is Semaphores.  Come on inside for more..
[tag:linux][tag:unix][tag:source][tag:semaphore]

This weekend (Thanks to my Dad), I finally replaced the last 802.11b device on my network.  This device, a D-Link Wireless Client that I used to connect my Wired-Desktop to my Wireless router, forced me to run my entire network at 802.11b with WEP, as it didn’t support WPA and couldn’t find the router when G mode was enabled.  It was a pretty significant impact to both the speed and security of my network, but it did a fine job of what it did so I can’t complain too much.  Unfortunately, it finally died so I replaced it with a much simpler Airlink USB key, identical to the one on my MythTV.

With this in place, I reconfigured my network to support both G & B devices (Of course everything was running at G now), and switched from a 128-bit WEP key to WPA Personal with TKIP encryption.  The laptop and the desktop connected without too much trouble, but the linux machine proved quite difficult.  At first I thought I could simply change the ‘wireless-key’ entry in the /etc/network/interfaces file to the new WPA passphrase and then restart the device.  This never worked.  After many failed iterations, I slunk back to my computer to dig through some google search results.

It didn’t take long before I found out that apparently Linux Wireless support is lacking WPA.  To remedy this, there is a tool called wpa_supplicant that adds this functionality.  Of course, I had to reset the network back to WEP, run ‘apt-get install wpasupplicant’, then reconfigure everything back to WPA again. Then I was finally ready to enable it.

The new /etc/network/interfaces file looks like this:

This is significantly simpler that the previous one, with the exception of the long "pre-up" line which starts the WPA daemon.  It uses the wpa_supplicant.conf file, which looks like this:

(Again, you don’t think I’m silly enough to post my key here do ya?)  This file is mostly generated with the wpa_passphrase command, which spits out that entire "network" block with your WPA Passphrase encoded into a very long hexadecimal key.  Also, you might notice the "ap_scan=1" which forces the card to do a full AP scan prior to connecting.  This fixes the problem I had before where I had to add a "iwlist scan" to get my network device to work before.

So, for all the pain I had in setting it up, it’s running 10x faster now and much more securely.  It took me about 2 hours to get this all figured out, and I had alot of help from various forums. (An Article from Enterprise Networking planet, Gentoo Wiki Instructions, and the VERY useful Linux Home Networking article).  So hopefully my experience can save you some trouble getting it working yourself.
[tag:wifi][tag:linux][tag:wpasupplicant]

Last night Laura & I went to the Midnight Premiere of Harry Potter: The Order of the Phoenix (the 5th movie in the series).  This was the first Harry Potter movie I’ve been to where I had read the book prior to seeing the movie.  That being said, my review of the movie is slightly biased since I went into the movie with a certain expectation of what I would see.

It’s a pretty good movie, although they deviated fairly significantly from the book.  Both through omissions of fairly important scenes and details, and through changing minor details, the movie was alot different that I expected.  This film also has a new director, making the look and feel of it quite different.  Of course, the 5th book has a drastically different feel from the previous ones anyway, his touch just makes it even more so. 

This movie starts with Harry & Dudley fighting it out in the local park, when they suddenly get attacked by Dementors.  From there, Harry is expelled from Hogwarts, put on Trial for underage wizardry, reinstated into Hogwarts, and begins his usual school year. But this year there are forces working to undermine Dumbledore & Hogwards in the form of the new Defense against the Dark Arts appointee, Dolores Umbridge.  It’s a good story, and Imelda Staunton makes a perfect Umbridge.

But with all the Action, and the sheer size of the book, the movie feels "rushed".  Just as one scene starts to get interesting, they whisk you away to something else.  It feels like you never really get a firm grasp on what’s going on because things move so fast from one topic to the next.  As a quick analysis, I pulled the movie runtimes from IMDB & the book pagecounts from Google & VeritaSerum.com and made the following chart:

So pretty quickly you can see that they’re covering material 1.5x faster than the previous movie, 2x as fast as any other movie.  Also, they leave out several major parts of the book.  SPOILER ALERT, Don’t continue reading if you want to be surprised.
[tag:harrypotter][tag:orderofthephoenix][tag:movie][tag:review]

More than meets the eye, indeed.  When I first heard of the Transformers movie, I was really excited.  But the more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be a complete trashing of the childhood cartoon I loved.  Once the original cartoon went off the air, Transformers pretty much vanished for a few years before they returned with the popularity of CGI animation.  Then, Beast Wars came around.  This was a complete departure from the original cartoon, now with the Autobots and Decepticons (called the Maximals & Predacons) fighing off some kind of virus that turns them into Animals.  After that series, pretty much every cartoon started from scratch.  One cartoon had the transformers in hiding, searching for "Energon", while another cartoon had them widely known and accepted as the saviors of mankind.  Each cartoon was a pretty significant departure, and it was pretty unknown which one they would go with.

Then word came out that Micheal Bay was directing it.  Micheal Bay has a.. Spotty career.  He’s directed movies I love, like The Rock, and movies I didn’t, like Pearl Harbor.  He’s also directed some oddball films like Playboy Video Centerfold, so with a Micheal Bay  movie you never know what to expect.

I was pleasantly surprised by the movie, however.  This films takes bits and pieces from several cartoons and conglomerates a pretty good story.  This time the Autobots & Decepticons (Only 3-5 of each) are searching for "The Cube", also known as the "All-Spark", the artifact that alone holds the power to create new Transformers and rebuild their home planet of Cybertron (now destroyed).  Starting with Bumblebee, several of the classic characters are introduced, each with a decidedly 2007 sports-car twist.  There’s alot of humor involved, and the film has some pretty good jokes involving "lubricant".

It’s a good movie, and the effects are really impressive.  The action scenes are frantic and frequent, but the camerawork leaves alot to be desired as the action is frequently so close-up that you can’t tell which transformer’s giant metal hand is flying across the screen in a blur.    Nonetheless, it’s a great movie.  Peter Cullen returns to voice Optimus Prime, which was a real treat for someone familiar with the original series.  There are also rumors of a Transformers 2, which would fit well with the ending of the film.  WIth the sequel, tho, they would need a much stronger plot as I think most of this film is being carried on the "Wow" factor of seeing the transformers on the big screen. 

Gotta give this one a 5/5.
[tag:Transformers][tag:movie][tag:review]

Here’s an idea I had just the other day.  Of course, everyone knows about Automobile License Plates.  Serving double-duty as both a Vehicle Tax and an Automotive Registration system, they’re a requirement of every vehicle in the United States (and most other countries).  What if we could expand their functionality a bit further?

What if the state offered specialty plates (Like Vanity Plates), for a slightly higher price, that allowed the owner such benefits as a higher speed limit?  Imagine paying an extra $200 for a plate that lets you drive an additional 10 mph over the speed limit.  The tradeoff being that you can pay $200 once a year for the priveledge, or take your chances and get a $200 ticket plus the dent in your Automotive Insurance for the moving violation.  This could be coupled with your drivers license (To ensure you’re capable of managing 10 mph over) and your Inspection Sticker (to ensure your vehicle can handle 10mph over). 

Maybe there would need to be restrictions (eg. It doesn’t apply in construction areas, It only applies on Interstates & 4-lane highways, etc), but the idea seems not only desirable but a decent revenue stream for the state.  Exchanging the hit-and-miss income of Tickets for the guaranteed income of the plates.
[tag:idea][tag:licenseplates]