With all the networking gear and headless servers and whatnot I manage, I still frequently use RS-232 connections. Since it's been a long time since I had a computer with a built in serial port, I have a couple USB-serial adapters I use for this purpose. I just found another one in a drawer and thought it would be nice to have hooked up to my other computer so I don't have to move the adapters around. What I found is an old blueberry-iMac themed Belkin F5U103 USB-serial adapter. I connected it to a router console and to my computer and it was recognized by Linux 3.0.0 and attached to /dev/ttyUSB0, but despite the apparent flow of data (this thing has some status/activity lights) I couldn't get a router prompt or anything human-readable using kermit or minicom. This adapter has supposedly been supported in Linux for a long time, but I wasn't finding any useful info about making it work for me. I was about to give up and assume it was defective until I stumbled onto this post about FreeBSD users testing the same adapter back in 2003: http://markmail.org/message/6snsp5cndmakspzs

Hmmm... " an off-by-1 error in the speed setting code"? I reconfigured kermit for 4800 baud instead of 9600 and sure enough, it works. You just have to set the port speed to the next slower standard rate than expected by the connected device.

Shame on me for thinking Google would take a different tack on this.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/violetblue/google-plus-deleting-accounts-en-masse-no-clear-answers/567

The relevant part of their ToS states: "In order to access certain Services, you may be required to provide information about yourself (such as identification or contact details) as part of the registration process for the Service, or as part of your continued use of the Services. You agree that any registration information you give to Google will always be accurate, correct and up to date."

This does NOT say that you must register using the name on your birth certificate or government ID, etc. If you are known friends or fans by a name other than your given name then that is still an accurate, correct name.

They want celebs on Google plus, but are Google going to force Lady Gaga to register as Stefani Germanotta? Unlikely. I'm pretty sure this guy's name isn't listed on his driver's license as $0.50 either: https://plus.google.com/114809488257853535663/

EDIT:
The Google+ Content Policy also addresses the name issue, using different language: "To help fight spam and prevent fake profiles, use the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your full legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, either of those would be acceptable"

Some more good info on the topic here:
http://infotrope.net/2011/07/22/ive-been-suspended-from-google-plus/
http://infotrope.net/2011/07/24/more-comments-on-google-plus-and-names/

And a data collection effort for people who have had their profiles suspended, here:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dFZHSEZ6ZURPQkpyTldMMXFFNkJrU0E6MQ#gid=0

EDIT+:
Another good article on this subject:
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/07/27/google-misses-an-opportunity-privacy-is-an-important-part-of-openness/

There is yet another page at Google explaining their profile name policy and this one is more specific than the other two I've seen, stating that you must use the name you go by "in daily life".
http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1228271

...the radio star. Yeah. Anyway, I have a linksys WVC54GCA Network/IP camera that I've been playing around with. This camera is convenient because it's wireless so I can put it almost anywhere I want... or I could if the fucking piece of shit didn't lose it's wireless connection every ~24 hours and require a reset to get back online. So I have to run cat5 to the fucker instead. And it doesn't support PoE. Annoying, but it seems to work OK with power and UTP stuck up it's ass. Whatever. Remind me not to buy linksys again.

I've also been playing around with ZoneMinder and trying to get it grabbing video from the camera. That worked fine at 320x240 (jpeg) but not at 640x480 (jpeg or mjpeg). I finally figured out that it was a memory allocation problem. Even though I had followed a tip I found somewhere on upping the limit to 134217728, apparently that wasn't enough to grab high res from the camera. Finally I found this tip and I raised the limit to 268424446. Now it works fine at 640x480.

The most difficult part of the process was finding the URL's for grabbing video/stills directly. Through googling and experimentation this is what I came up with:

Linksys WVC54GCA - firmware 1.00r24

320x240 jpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/snapshot.cgi

640x480 jpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/snapshot.cgi?a
(I first tried ?res=640x480, which worked, but then I discovered that passing any argument at all gives you the larger jpeg)

640x480 mjpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/mjpeg.jpg
http://camera_ip_address/img/mjpeg.cgi
http://camera_ip_address/img/video.mjpeg
(I don't know whether there is any difference between these. I didn't notice any.)

640x480 mpeg:
http://camera_ip_address/img/video.asf
(VLC 0.9.4 plays this perfectly, including audio)

I recently revamped my home and business networks and found myself in need of a way to automatically attempt hostname resolution in two different dns domains.

This can be easily acheived by editing /etc/resolv.conf like so:

search alpha.example beta.example

However, I use DHCP so I wanted a DHCP solution. DNS search domains can be specified using DHCP option 119, which is supported by both dnsmasq and isc-dhcp-server on Debian Squeeze. Client-side DHCP support for DNS search domains, especially multiple search domains, is reportedly rather limited; but fortunately it's supported out of the box by Debian and Ubuntu so it's just a matter of getting the server-side configuration correct. I had some trouble finding the correct syntax and as a result my first attempts (using apparently incorrect examples I found on the net) resulted in failure, as indicated by this log message on the client:

dhclient: suspect value in domain_search option - discarded

After fixing the server-side config (isc-dhcp-server 4.1.1) to match the following format, it works great:

option domain-search "alpha.example","beta.example";

If you use dnsmasq for DHCP, this should be useful:
http://lists.thekelleys.org.uk/pipermail/dnsmasq-discuss/2005q2/000231.html

I bought something on ebay and I want to know when it will show up. It was shipped by the United States Postal Serivce. Yay. The shipper has provided me with a tracking number. This is what the USPS website tells me about my package:

The U.S. Postal Service was electronically notified by the shipper or shipping partner on September 17, 2006 to expect your package for mailing. This does not indicate receipt by the USPS or the actual mailing date. Delivery status information will be provided if / when available. Information, if available, is updated every evening. Please check again later.

So, to paraphrase: on 2006-09-17, somebody told you that they will be mailing something in the future. You may or may not have received it and so it might or might not be on it's way here. Super.

Might I suggest an even more concise and effective way of conveying this [lack of] information?

17 Sept. 2006: We still don't know fuck about your shit. Come back tomorrow, bitch. - USPS

This wasn't the first time I've unsuccessfully tried to connect to an open wireless network from the command line using iwconfig (which should be a simple task) and this time I was determined to find the solution. In this case I was running Knoppix, but I've had the same problem on Debian and [XK]?Ubuntu as well.

I tried...

iwconfig wlan0 essid rasberry
iwconfig wlan0 essid rasberry mode Managed
iwconfig wlan0 essid rasberry mode Managed chan 1
iwconfig wlan0 essid rasberry mode Managed chan 1 ap 00:01:02:03:04:05
-etc-
dhclient wlan0

...but no matter what, I couldn't get an IP or even see any DHCP traffic from my device at the router. Furthermore iwconfig wlan0 would consistently report that I was not associated.

¡FRUSTRATING!

Lots of searches turned up little more than inapplicable solutions and unanswered questions.

So I checked dmesg to see if there were any errors being reported and found something like this:

deauthenticating by local choice, reason=3

OK... that's not MY choice, so WTF? Turns out that even though I started knoppix in runlevel 2, network-manager was running, which had wpa_supplicant running, (even though I was not connected to a network, have no predefined network profiles, am not running any network-manager clients, etc) and as I see it, wpa_supplicant was fighting with me for control of the wlan adapter config. So that was helpful... NOT!

I killed wpa_supplicant but it was immediately respawned by network-manager so I had to stop network-manager and then kill wpa_supplicant, and THEN, FINALLY, I was able to connect to the network with a simple:

iwconfig wlan0 essid rasberry; dhclient wlan0

I haven't blogged in a while. Oh well. I think I might be doing something blog-worthy soon, just now right now.

In the meantime, I have noticed lots of sad, stale, abandoned blogs on the net which make you wonder if the person died or something, but others concede that they have left their blog behind and went to facebook.

Well that just pisses me right off, and it prompted me to post this to make it clear that I am NOT on assbook. Nor will I ever be, because facebook sucks. I would rather volunteer for an unpaid role in a scatological porno than join facebook (eww).

I have not blogged because I didn't feel like it. Period. End of story.

Okay, I'm glad I cleared that up.