Author Archives: ward

solid state disks

Posted on April 27, 2007 by ward

So Dell now has 32GB solid state disks as an option on the Latitude D420 and the Latitude ATG. They’re still a bit pricey (almost $500 extra) and not very big, but that will change soon. I wonder what percentage … Continue reading →

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Massachusetts should use free software

Posted on April 21, 2007 by ward

The Myissue.devalpatrick.com website has a new issue listed about the use of free software in Massachusetts government. If you are a resident of the Bay State, please support this issue!

Posted in Free Software/Open Source | Leave a comment

a new record

Posted on April 19, 2007 by ward

This morning, a user on one of our machines (inadvertently) created a mail loop with a bad procmail script: 09:42:05 up 120 days, 9:23, 20 users, load average: 3367.40, 3265.08, 2751.75 I had seen machines go up to about 200 … Continue reading →

Posted in Free Software/Open Source, Sysadmin, Xen | Leave a comment

gigabyte m57sli-s4 with extra bios socket

Posted on April 18, 2007 by ward

ST wrote up a nice howto on adding a PLCC socket to the m57sli-s4. This is a great alternative to de-soldering the original chip to add a socket. He still needs to do some more testing, but this sure looks … Continue reading →

Posted in coreboot | Leave a comment

FLASH-PLAICE

Posted on April 17, 2007 by ward

Bari Ari wrote to the LinuxBIOS mailing list a couple days ago announcing FLASH-PLAICE: a programmer, logic analyzer and in-circuit flash emulator project that will speed up LinuxBIOS development considerably. The project is based off an inexpensive Xilinx Spartan FPGA … Continue reading →

Posted in coreboot | Leave a comment

the beginning of the end for DRM on music

Posted on April 2, 2007 by ward

Good news this Monday morning: Apple is going to sell songs from the entire EMI digital music catalog without DRM, starting next month. Non-DRM”d tracks will come at a premium price ($1.29), but also with better quality – 256Kbps AAC. … Continue reading →

Posted in DRM | Leave a comment

m0n0wall

Posted on March 24, 2007 by ward

I purchased a Soekris 4801-60 with a LAN1641 plugin board for my parents’ home, to replace a Debian-based internet gateway on an old pc that I set up way back in 1999. The idea was to replace the old, coax-based … Continue reading →

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Gigabyte m57sli-s4 LinuxBIOS build tutorial

Posted on March 19, 2007 by ward

I’ve written up a LinuxBIOS build tutorial for the Gigabyte m57sli-s4. This tutorial still works off Yinghai Lu’s big MCP55 patch, but a patch from Ed Swierk hit the list today which resolves the last issues for building the m57sli … Continue reading →

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MaxedOut

Posted on March 15, 2007 by ward

Went to see MaxedOut tonight in a special showing at Harvard Law. Highly recommended – catch it if you can. It’s also very timely now that (subprime) debt is “suddenly” a big issue because a couple of big lenders are … Continue reading →

Posted in Finance/SRI | Leave a comment

it boots!

Posted on March 12, 2007 by ward

I finally managed to get the Gigabyte M57SLI-S4 to boot LinuxBIOS today. Turns out that some kernel boot parameters were required to make it do the right thing with the IRQs. It’s not perfect yet: the network interface doesn’t work, … Continue reading →

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