wiredfool

The business will implode once you can download a movie, give it to your friends and not have a moral problem with doing it. Then we’re screwed. Literally, our very lives are at stake now. — Rick McCallum, producer of Attack of the Clones.

Literally eh? I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

The rest of the article makes some good points about DVD and home theater killing the movie theater since the seats are more comfy, the crowd friendlier, tickets cheaper, and the beer better. (Well I’m making up the part about the beer)

Existing floor is carpet over plywood subfloor. This a first floor room over a crawlspace area. Room is ~120sf, 10×12′

***Flooring Options:

1. Bamboo Hardwood Flooring at ~$10/sf installed. Looking at a planking system with a cherry finish. This is an ecologically sound flooring system, as the entire process is designed to be low impact on the envrionment. Sustainable development and all that. Planking is 1/2-3/4″ thick, and uses three layer cross grain construction. Should be dimensionally stable, suitable for a floating installation.
2. Pergo Presto, in cherry planked. This is not as good looking as the real wood, since the grain is printed on from a photograph had the texture is somewhat unrelated to the printed grain pattern. Should last long enough, is cheaper and thinner. Moulding is available to match. 3/8″ thick, ~$5/sf installed.
3. Existing carpet. (rejected option).

***Sub floor electrical radiant heat.
Ideally, this is something that will supplement the current inwall electrical forced air heater to make the floor nice and toasty when walking around in bare feet.

Generally several options:

Thinset Vs Gypcrete vs whatever else.

There are a few systems that use wires laid out then encased in gypcrete or thinset. I’f it comes to gypcrete, the radiant heating isn’t going to happen. (1″ of liquid mud laid down over the wires, which then dries.) That might be appropriate for a bathroom, but not this. Thinset might be an option, depending on compatibility with flooring.

I’ve also seen some references to electrical mat systems that lay out an entire mat instead of individual wires. This seems to be a better option, but there seems to be a lot less experience with this sort of thing.

10 or 15 W/sf

Most places I’ve seen say that 15w/sf is only appropriate for tile/ceramic flooring, but then turn around and suggest it for any floor put through their calculator. I’m guessing that 15w/sf would probably enough to heat the entire room without needing a bacup heater in the wall.

• Warmly yours Seems to have one of the easier products to install. It uses a 110 volt system and foil mats. (or rolls or plain mats.) These appear to be slightly more than $10/sf covered, but that will probably work out to abou $10/sf over the entire room.

  For a bamboo engineered plank floor, I’m looking at the 10w/sf mesh, since the foil requires installation between the flooring and padding. The mesh shoud be installed in 3/8″ of thinset or self leveling cement. coverage would be roughly 6″ from the wall on each side of the room, giving about 90sf heating coverage. This can be done with the 1.5′ wide roll @ 60 feet long, $895 + 149 for the (programmable) thermostat. Requires an 8 amps, on a 15 amp curcuit. Would probably not be a primary heating in the coldest times, but should be fine most of the winter. 1800-875-5285, has worked with tile specialists before.

• Advanced radiant can do a wire system in 3/4″ of dry set mortar. They need a dedicated 240v line. Lead time of about a week, about a day installation. Looking at ~2k. Will probably increase the height of the floor by 1/4″ or so. (ponder taking out the parquet in the hallway and putting in bamboo there. ) Mentioned that timbergrass is a good local producer of bamboo flooring.

Objective, 300w (300va) 12 volt? low voltage halogen cable system, in a v pattern running the long axis of the room. Roughly 26 feet total span, with the power coming in in the middle. There is one existing switched power tap in a recessed lighting fixure that may be removed. the switch in the room only controls that can, so it’s possible to replace the switch with an inwall dimmer if permitted by the system.

• Ikea has what looks like 60 and 150 watt systems, some including their fixtures and some not. They are < $100. I’d want 2 of the bigger ones, which would lead to contention for transformer space. (completely useless website. better off looking at the catalog)
• Seattle lighting Design (on second) appears to have a bunch of bits and pieces, but their fixtures are expensive. But, they give ideas.
• Home Depot has lighting from Hampton Bay, apparently 300w monorail track systems and 60w cable ones. Need to research if I can get a 300W cable transformer + cable from them. Nothing useful on line past what they have in the store. Nothing on Hampton bay lighting in google. grr
• Alfa Lighting: (web research) transformers 12V/300W and 24V/600, surface or hidden mount. They also have cables and widgets. They have an obnoxious website that like to pop up new windows instead of merely linking to content. Availiable online Looks like 300W transformers are ~$200+ depending on finish. Hidden transformers would be cool, but I’m not sure that I could install them without ripping out drywall.
• LightingFX has a transformer that appears to drop into a recessed ligihting fixture.
  here
  They also have a hidden transformer for $149 206-300dc that may not require as much space as the alfa ones. LightingFX also has some installation docs on their site.

I need to determine if I can install a hidden transformer in the ceiling without cutting it up too much, or if I should just replace the can with an exposed transformer. (mounting?)

I seem to be running into them all these days. Some weeks it’s just better to sleep in.

I’ve got a Dual g4/800 quicksliver that I babysit, 768 megs ram, 10.1.5, normally a load average around .5 with 25% processor usage.

Every so often, the machine (nearly) hangs. Ssh connections are refused, console access is lost, the only thing that works is static apache serving. I’m guessing that’s because all memory for apache has already been allocated and it’s just serving from a running process.

From the logs, I get the following:

Oct  8 22:56:20 Broccoli WindowServer[3390]: CGXDisableUpdate: Updates disabled 
   by connection 0x1d6cb for over 1.000000 seconds
Oct  8 22:56:36 Broccoli WindowServer[3390]: CGXDisableUpdate: Updates disabled 
   by connection 0xd377 for over 1.000000 seconds
Oct  8 22:56:47 Broccoli mach_kernel: (default pager): [KERNEL]: no space in 
   available paging segments; swapon suggested
Oct  8 22:56:47 Broccoli last message repeated 2 times
Oct  8 22:56:48 Broccoli mach_kernel: [KERNEL]: no space in available paging 
   segments; swapon suggested
Oct  8 22:56:48 Broccoli mach_kernel: (default pager): [KERNEL]: no space in 
   available paging segments; swapon suggested
Oct  8 22:56:49 Broccoli last message repeated 54 times

The last few lines repeat until the machine is restarted. In this case, for 2.5 megs of log file. There’s about 8 gigs of space availiable on disk for swap to grow.

I’m suspecting a window server bug, but google doesn’t match anything useful for the error string. yet.

A dedicated collegiate cyclist misses the team bus and rides to the race.

As a former member of Husky Racing, I have fond memories of our own time zone. It ran anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours late, depending on the importance of the race. It could have been a lot closer to PST or PDT if we has instituted this as a rule.

I suspect that my Jaguar installation has some corrupt fonts, preferences, or both.

Chimera won’t display or choose about half the fonts in the list, sometimes crashing, sometimes just not displaying the choices. Font inspector panels won’t select some of them and keep reverting to Lucida.

An md5sum of all of the fonts in my /Library/Fonts directory compared with another Jaguar machine only shows some missing, but no sig changes. Some of the sigs are the same, leading me to believe that perhaps I’m not getting the sum of all of the items within folder/file structures.

Any Ideas?

***Update

Nicholas Riley writes in that: It’s probably the font cache, not the fonts themselves. Either reboot in OS 9 or in single-user mode and delete the font cache files (all files should include “FCache”).

This appears to have worked to allow all the fonts to be displayed, but it appears that there’s an additional problem in Chimera’s prefs writing system. But that can be fixed by editing the javascript prefs file. (~/Library/Application Support/Chimera/….)

***IN PROGRESS

Ipsec is now possible on OSX 10.2 with built in tools. It takes a little bit of digging to get it setup, as there’s no gui for it yet.

There are 3 reasonably interesting configurations for ipsec, at least for my use:

• Host to Host – This is mainly a test case, if this doesn’t work then it’s unlikely that any thing else will.
• Host to network – This is a common VPN situation where your machine is using ipsec over the net to communicate with an entire network on the other end. This is your typical connect to the office type of situation. Traffic to other hosts will not be secured.
• Host to gateway – This is for secure wireless connections. Ip traffic between a something just on the other side of an airport hub and my laptop will be encrypted. Essentially, ipsec will be the default transport to the rest of the world. This will allow actual security on the airport network, instead of the joke known as WEP.

Osx uses the KAME ipv6/ipsec stack like most other BSD implementations. Helpfully enough, other people have written some howtows on getting this up and running with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. I addition to getting ipsec working between Osx hosts, I’d like to get interoperation going with FreeSWAN, the standard linux implementation. These are some good starting links:

• http://www.kame.net/newsletter/20001119/
• http://www.daemonnews.org/200101/ipsec-howto.html
• http://www.freebsddiary.org/ipsec-tunnel.php
• http://www.kame.net/newsletter/20001119b/

Racoon and setkey are the two main programs that will be of interest. Racoon is a daemon that negotiates keys and identity information for ipsec sessions. Config files are in /etc/racoon, and it must be run as root. Setkey deals with policy decisions about which packets are to be sent or recieved with ipsec and which are to be run through the normal ip stack. Setkey needs to be configured before racoon runs, or alternately, racoon needs to be restarted after configuration changes.

Host – host

A basic script for resetting and adding ipsec policies follows. This script requires that traffic between MYIP and REMOTEIP is run through ipsec using the ESP/transport option. It will encrypt the contents of the packets but not the headers. (??) This was slightly adapted from one of the KAME tutorials. Note that this script will need to be run on both ends of the connection, with the MYIP and REMOTEIP values reversed.

#!/bin/sh
MYIP=192.168.1.116
REMOTEIP=192.168.1.126
# These commands need to be run on node A
# The next 2 lines delete all existing entries from the SPD and SAD
setkey -FP
setkey -F
# Add the policy
setkey -c << EOF
        spdadd $MYIP/32 $REMOTEIP/32 any -P out ipsec esp/transport/$MYIP-$REMOTEIP/require;
        spdadd $REMOTEIP/32 $MYIP/32 any -P in ipsec esp/transport/$REMOTEIP-$MYIP/require;
EOF

Racoon’s config files are reasonably close to working as shipped. They will attempt to match identities using a fqdn and a preshared secret key. Since all Jaguar macs will have this shared ‘secret’, it’s a real good idea to change the secret/method to something a little more secure. Preshared keys are stored in /etc/racoon/psk.txt. You can either create them based on ip addresses or on user names. Note that this file needs to remain secret, so it should be root readable only. (chmod 600 psk.txt). If you change to address based shared secrets, you will need to change /etc/racoon/racoon.conf from username to address verification. Look for lines like:

	my_identifier user_fqdn "macuser@localhost";
	peers_identifier user_fqdn "macuser@localhost";

And change them to

	my_identifier address;
	peers_identifier address;

With these changes, ipsec should be ready to go between your two hosts. Run the shell script (as root) on both sides of the connection, then start racoon as root. You will probably want to have console access for this, as it’s possible to configure yourself out of a remote system.

Try pinging the remote machine. Pings should get through. You can verify that the systems are communicating through ipsec by using tcpdump from another machine on the same network segment. (ADD example).

Host – Network

Host – Gateway

FreeSWAN interop

I’ve installed Jaguar and lived with it for a week or so. It’s been pretty good so far, but I’m still wondering about a few things.

One of the features that was advertized was iTunes playlist sharing by auto-discovery. I haven’t seen it anywhere.

Ipsec is there, but it’s there in a ‘you’ve gotta google then write shell scripts’ sort of way. At least I don’t have to recompile the kernel. I have gotten host-host (both sides Jaguar) ipsec working on the lan. Next on the list to try is Freeswan interop and host->network combinations. Ideally, I’d be able to have tibook -> airport -> freeswan firewall/gateway -> world working.

Antialiasing is nearly readable on LCD screens now. Certain fonts blatantly advertize the different vertical and horizontal resolution with the sub pixel antialiasing. Lucida Grande isn’t bad in the menu size, but in iTunes (for example) it’s terribly inconsistent. Some i chareacters are one pixel wide and black, some are two or three and grey. Speaking of text rendering, terminal doesn’t render Monaco 9 as fixed width. I’m hoping that this is just a bug and not by design. It almost appears that the character width is .05 more or less than a pixel, so every so often characters are compressed together or too far apart by one pixel. I would think that you could actually improve the horizontal resolution of text by using sub pixel rendering of letter placement without antialiasing. With an LCD, you could get 1/3 pixel placement accuracy horizontally.

Oh well, I’m sure that it will look incredible on this. Or just stick with monster CRTs.

As discussed at Nicholas’s while having really good food. (and turkish coffee that resembled the stuff made by my french press)

• Chipotle Tomato Soup
• Finger Food Pancakes