The ever helpful Joe Landman at Scalable Informatics is looking for good HPC folks around the South East Michigan area, contact info and a bit more information is on their website.
Category Archives: Computers
Breakin – stress test and hardware diagnostics for Intel and AMD systems
At the start of August Jason Clinton from Advanced Clustering Technologies Inc. posted a link to the “Breakin” tool that they created (and open sourced) for hardware stress-tests and diagnostics. He wrote:
We have a tool on our website called “breakin” that is Linux 2.6.25.9 patched with K8 and K10f Opteron EDAC reporting facilities. It can usually find and identify failed RAM in fifteen minutes (two hours at most). The EDAC patches to the kernel aren’t that great about naming the correct memory rank, though.
If you read the website though you’ll find it does a lot more than that, which is pretty cool. Be aware that it does use the Intel and AMD closed source maths libraries though if you’re sensitive to non-free software.
MythTV Electronic Program Guide HOWTO for Australia
Chris Smart has written an excellent little guide for getting a decent program guide into MythTV in Australia. It walks you through how to go from scratch through installing and configuring Shepherd to getting the data into the MythTV database. I’ve just used it on my Mythbuntu box and it’s looking good!
Next step – get it to record Time Team every time it appears.. 😉
Normal Service Resumed
An unfortunate clash between some old .htaccess rules for the WPG2 plugin and WordPress resulted in all subpages of this blog being unavailable for over a day! 🙁
It’s fixed now, but apologies for the inconvenience..
ISO rejects appeals against OOXML
So OOXML, the spec that nobody implements, not even Microsoft, and which isn’t even publicly available in its final form has had the four big appeals against it rejected. 🙁
A triumph of lobbying, committee stacking, hidden agendas and special interests over common sense and due process. I think ISO has just made itself irrelevant to future standards.
Warcarting
One of the techniques used by the MIT students in their MBTA report was the impressive Warcart.
The MIT WarCart (shopping trolley)
They must be off their (shopping) trolley! 😉
A Tale of Two Transport Hacks
In the USA a court has ordered that three MIT students not talk at DEFCON about their security assessment of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) fare cards. Apparently the court believes that “discussing the flaws at a public conference constituted a ‘transmission’ of a computer program that could harm the fare collection system“, which is pretty sad. There are more documents at Cryptome on the case. Their presentation was to include a cryptanalysis of the Mifare “Classic” card, which takes us to our second case..
Bruce Schneier reports that a group of Dutch researchers have won in court to be able to publish their own cryptanalysis of that very same Mifare Classic card, with the court stating:
Damage to NXP is not the result of the publication of the article but of the production and sale of a chip that appears to have shortcomings.
An outbreak of common sense that the MIT students could only dream of. I wonder if they could appeal and cite this case as grounds to have the judgement overturned ?
Linux is childs play
A lovely little quote from Russell Coker in an article about whether he has sympathy for Windows users:
Some time ago the 11yo daughter of a friend who was visiting asked if she could play some computer games. I gave her a Fedora CD and one of the PCs from my test lab and told her that she had to install the OS first. Within a small amount of time she had Fedora installed and was playing games.
Pretty cool..
Are you sure you want to take a laptop to the USA ? (Updated)
From the Washington Post:
Federal agents may take a traveler’s laptop or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed. Also, officials may share copies of the laptop’s contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption, or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, US Customs and Border Protection and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The full policy is available and it says that they have to destroy the information retained unless there is “probable cause“, except..
Copies may be retained by an assisting Federal agency or entity only if and to the extent that it has the independent legal authority to do so – for example, when the information is of national security or intelligence value.
So if you’re working for a company that competes with a US one you should probably be careful..
(Via)
Update: Steve Bellovin points out that this applies when you leave America, too..