Patrick’s weblog, featuring posts dating back to 2002 on topics including technology, open source, networking, and various technical adventures.
Last week I submitted a try and buy request to Sun for some equipment to us on some research projects at school. In particular, I’m excited about using it to scan the network for spyware. I was a little worried that my information was not…
Last week, Phil sent me an email about Sun Microsystem’s new T2000 series of servers, based on their Niagara core. Basically, this is a 4, 6, or 8 core system, each of which can execute up to four threads in parallel. It’s supposed to be…
Last year I wrote about some of the work that Seth Nickell was showing off regarding Luminocity, a GL acclerated fun fest of X. Well, times are moving along, and now it appears we’ve got a spat on our hands between Xgl from Novell, and…
Recently I’ve been getting lots of hits for my MythTV on Ubuntu Athlon64 writeup. I’m talking several hundred a day. This generates a decent amount of traffic over my little cable modem line. Realizing that I now had a product people wanted, I was off…
Here’s a prime example of what happens when programmers write error messages: This is an error that was repeated several times for different files when I was copying over some newly ripped CDs from my laptop to my MythTV box. Unfortunately, there are several things…
If you’re running MythTV on an Athlon 64 platform, you’ve probably noticed that the CPU throttles itself down when transcoding and cutting commercials despite the fact that your processor may show as being 100% utilized. This results in much slower transcoding than one would normally…
Another issue that I’ve been dealing with is spending too much time reading email and blogs, so I’ve decided to reduce those issues. To that end, I’m unsubscribing from a lot of mailing lists and putting lots of blogs on their two weeks notice. If…
Welcome to my first entry of the 2006 fiscal blogging year (which mere mortals know as the 2006 calendar year). If you’re an astute reader, you may remember that I did a similar entry to this two years ago. In that entry I lamented about…
After trying a new motherboard and all that jazz to get my HDTV tuner card working properly I decided to try a new operating system. The thing that prompted this was the notice that some people thought it might be a buffer related issue that…
During the cold war many “citizens” of totalitarian states were required to carry identification papers and show them on demand to authorities. This action was oestensibly done to check for criminals, but in reality the rulers of these nations had something more insidious in mind.…