Mark Turner

Revolutionary Rocker

dan_zanes2A few weeks ago, Netflix delivered Revolutionary Road to our DVD player. During the middle of this excellent film is a bar scene with a band. As the camera focused on the characters in the foreground, I noticed the guitarist in the background looked oddly familiar.

Then I suddenly knew who it was: musician Dan Zanes, his trademark spiky hair combed into a pompadour for the role. In real life, Zanes has perpetual bed-head at all times, so it was just as amusing to see him spike-less as it was to see him at all.

Raleigh will host the spiky-haired version of Dan Zanes when he plays Saturday at the N.C. Museum of Art in a rare show this far South. It should be a good time.

Journaling filesystems

I was geeking out a bit while I was cleaning this morning, thinking about how wonderful journaling filesystems are. My computers here at home occasionally lose power and crash, yet their filesystems almost always repair themselves.

Back in the Ancient History days, dropping power on a DOS and Windows 3.x box meant almost certain file corruption. That changed when Microsoft’s Windows 2000 added journaling to the NTFS v3.0 filesystem, and from that point on most every filesystem had a journal. (NTFS wasn’t the first journaling filesystem, but the first one for the masses. I believe the first was IBM’s JFS, released for AIX in 1990 and then for OS/2 Warp Server in April 1999.)

Now with improved manufacturing techniques and journaled filesystems, filesystems seem to last until the drive itself wears out. So now you whippersnappers know how good you’ve really got it!

More swarm streaming systems

I’ve discovered a few more swarm streamers for broadcasting multimedia to potentially millions of viewers: Coolstream, PPLive, and SopCast.

SopCast seems promising as it has a contributed Linux interface for the SopCast player, called (duh) sopcast-player. I’m still trying to figure out how to “broadcast” with this system, whether from Linux or Windows.

Coolstream looks interesting but not yet fully-baked. The website keeps insisting I log in, and none of the supposedly-active video streams appear to be working for me.

PPLive appears to have active users, but the channels using it as listed on the PPLive iKan site are all in Chinese. The other channel listing site, PP.tv, is also in Chinese. Clicking around seems promising but it’s hard to know what I’m looking at. And some of the clips seem to be blocked here.

There’s another service called TV Ants but the company’s website isn’t coming up for me. That is one of the biggest drawbacks to creating a channel with one of these groups. In order for any of this to work, you need to have at least one server to help seed the stream. If the company hosting your channel goes out of business then all of the channels that company hosts vanish as well.

Don’t piss off a musician

Flying to a gig, the band Sons of Maxwell were shocked to see their guitars being thrown around by United Airlines baggage handlers. When singer Dave Carroll’s guitar came back broken, United was apparently less than helpful in atoning for the mistake. That led the band to take their complaint to YouTube with a video and song called United Breaks Guitars

Catchy song, Sons of Maxwell! Bad, bad, PR move, United!

Update 11 Jul 2009: Taylor Guitars is having some fun with this, too! Also, check out Dave’s latest video statement.

Cheap Thoughts: Have a nice day

If you tell someone “have a nice day” and they do wind up having a nice day, do you get to take some sort of credit?

“Thanks for telling me to have a nice day, Chuck. I wouldn’t have thought about it if it wasn’t for you.”

“Hey, that’s what friends are for!”

Cyber attacks … from North Korea?

Officials are blaming North Korea for the recent cyber attacks against U.S. and South Korean government websites.

Yeah, right. Have you checked out North Korea lately? While South Korea has some of the fastest home Internet connections in the world, North Korea has … well, maybe a 56k dialup connection? Broadband companies aren’t exactly falling over themselves to offer service there and I can imagine that the quirky communist government isn’t exactly encouraging it, either.

I know Kim II Jong is a movie buff but I’m betting money he isn’t exactly streaming his shows from Netflix!

Postfix’s anti-spam capabilities

Some of the neighborhood email lists I run over at www.eastraleigh.org were getting attacked by spammers. I don’t really want to lock the lists down as some of them need to be accessible to folks not on the list. I also didn’t want to run something like ASSP because while it’s good, it’s written in perl and also a memory hog. That’s when I looked into what Postfix can do on its own.

Almost all of the spam sent to the lists have fake SMTP HELO statements. Thus, the following two lines added to the bottom of /etc/postfix/main.cf made Postfix very effective against spam:

smtpd_require_hello = yes
smtpd_helo_restrictions = reject_invalid_hostname,reject_unknown_hostname

Problem solved!