2007 Sep 15 - Sat
Full Text RSS Blosxom Feeds
I previously wrote about getting a basic
RSS Feed going. That feed had titles only in it. I wanted to get text into it as well. I had some
problems getting it going. I think that if I ran my content through a validator like
FEED Validator to start, I might have made progress faster. The key thing is that I need
to write my text articles with out ampersands in the titles.
Anyway, I used information from
Operational Dynamics web
site to figure out the special command to include formatted content with 'CDATA'. I also used his plugin.
Here is the content of my files (wget may be necessary to get the content pure):
By removing a couple of minor elements in head.rss, the plug in rss20 won't be needed.
I would really like to get blog comments going. I tried them once but got too much spam. My next project is to migrate to Moveable Type.
Hopefully they have better ways of handling comments.
[/OpenSource/blosxom]
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NistNet and Netem: WAN Empairment Emulators
A client was putting together and testing an equipment package that was to be
installed in their Disaster Recovery site. After getting everything up and running and
tested, they wanted to test the replication performance in a 'real' WAN environment. One
way to do this is to use a real WAN. The other way is to simulate a WAN. Consdering their
DR site is several thousand miles away, simulating the WAN would be logistically better.
To emulate a WAN, one needs to be able to control:
- variable delay
- delay distribution
- packet loss
- packet re-ordering
- rate control
In researching possible tools for emulating an WAN environment, I came across two open
source tools WAN emulation tools. The first one I saw was
NIST Net. Although it hasn't
received too many recent updates, it does still have an active forum. And it appears to be
quite sophisticated. It does require an x-windows for a library during compile time. With
X11 Forewarding, you don't need to burden the WAN emulating computer with a GUI, can
use another computer as a terminal. You can reference one of my
Cygwin pages on how to
remote X11 applications.
It is said that NIST Net is a bit better than NetEm as NIST Net has tighter controls on
its delay mechanisms.
I came across the second wAN Emulator purely by chance. In reading through some of the
NIST Net forum articles, one of the mentioned that the Linux Kernel already has one built
in: NetEm. One may
need to enable it and rebuld the kernel. It doesn't have a user interface, but instead
relies on command line utilities. Someone did do up a GUI for NetEm, but has removed it for
one reason or another.
A newsgroup article has a reference to where it can be obtained. Someone
else mentioned that MasterShaper could be used as an interface to the capabilities of NetEm.
Page 15 of a slide presentation
shows command line examples for running NIST Net as well as NetEm. Another
document
offers up an example of using NetEm.
I was able to get NIST Net built on a Debian box. But the DR equipment had to be shipped
out before I could actually give it a try. Oh well, I'll find another project to try it out
on. Here are some build instructions for a recent Debian Kernel. There are some variations
regarding availability of config.h depending upon the 2.6 kernel version you have available.
When obtaining the NistNet code in one of the commands below, some of the instructions
assume you've expanded the library in /usr/src. As such, when the library is expanded,
you'll need to change four lines in /usr/src/nistnet-3.0a/kernel/knistnet.c from
return ippt->func(skb, dev, ippt);
to:
return ippt->func(skb, dev, ippt, NULL);
You may need to comment out the following line in
/usr/src/nistnet-3.0a/kernel/nistnet_table.c:
/* typedef enum {false = FALSE, true = TRUE} boolean; */
You may need to add a dummy config.h in
/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.21-2-686/include/linux/ with:
#ifndef _LINUX_CONFIG_H
#define _LINUX_CONFIG_H
#include
#endif
You should also confirm that this file exists (depending upon your kernel version):
/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.21-2-686/include/linux/autoconf.h
Here are remaining installation instructions:
apt-get install vlan
apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.21-2-686
apt-get install x-window-system-core
apt-get install libxaw-headers libxmu-headers
apt-get install libxp-dev
apt-get install xaw3dg-dev
# might need:
ln -s /usr/lib/libXaw7.so.7 /usr/lib/libXaw.so
wget http://www-x.antd.nist.gov/nistnet/dist/nistnet.2.0.12c.tar.gz
tar -zxvf nistnet.2.0.12c.tar.gz
./configure
make
make install
depmod
modprobe nistnet
lsmod | grep nistnet
cnistnet -G
[/OpenSource/Debian/MasterShaper]
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Trading Site of the Day -- Trade-Ideas: Real Time Idea and Signal Generation
In another
article, I referenced the Trade-Ideas Blog. I don't recall ever making it
over to their web site. Today I made it over to their site by way of an article there on
Scalp Traders Access
Their Best Trades with Trade-Ideas. They have links from their to a page they have
whichreferences a bunch of their
signals. I've coded
several of those signals elsewhere, but this opens a whole new vista on possible trading
opportunities from a scalping perspective.
Another
page references how their
analysis engine uses different time frames, different data types, and different statistics
to come up with its signals.
I like how they do
mini charts to
provide an idea of daily and weekly price movements.
[/Trading/SiteOfTheDay/D200709]
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Burning Water aka Breaking Water Into Hydrogen/Oxygen aka Electrolysis
A few days ago, there was a much talked about article regarding
Radio Frequencies Help Burn Salt Water. Even
John Mauldin referenced it.
Many people have gone off the deep end thinking that this is the next best thing to water running
up hill. By looking a carefully at the video and reading the article, and doing a little research, one
can understand what is going on. First a little background:
I'd say the radio frequency energy acts in a
way similar to feeding electrical current directly through the salt solution (radio frequencies are the
byproducts of an oscillating electrical current). The video showed us 'something' using between 200 and
400 Watts, about the equivalent of four standard 100W light bulbs. They were careful to not show us the
frequencies used though.
Thinking more about how
the hydrogen is produced and recombined, I seem to recall article and/or video from many moons ago
about once you got
this burning reaction going, you could keep the mix running by continually adding water. (No this is not
perpetual motion because you are still supplying a source of energy--the water). Anyone remember
research on this type of thing? In some blogs, there were comments suggesting that even though
this a a decent
reaction, but because it was not self-perpetuating, it isn't good. I beg to differ. Just think about
oil for a moment.
Untold amounts of energy is spent in finding it, drilling it, pumping it, refining it, and
delivering it. Yet there is enough energy left over to fuel our cars and planes. Could it not be said
that even though we lose energy in breaking the bonds to produce hydrogen, that there may be more
energy left
over to do other stuff? Looking at it another way, electrical energy is used to break the bond, and we
get heat energy (although inefficient to use) when the bond is recombined.
I did find a reference to a
Water Engine, but
it wasn't quite what I was after. Besides, I think the scientist in that post misses the point.
Yes, you can't
use the same amount of water and expect to keep re-using it. But if you keep adding water into the
system, you keep refueling the system, just like putting more gas into your auto fuel tank. An in most
places, water is quite abundant. Burning water may be more or less as energy efficient as burning oil,
but if I recall correctly (!), there is more water than oil.
If someone could point me to a reference where some one demonstrates a 'burning water' engine--an
engine where you prime it with hydrogen, feed it water, and keep it burning--I'd be
most appreciative.
But all this is water under the bridge, in comparison to what the video was really showing. It shows
that if you can deliver the special particles to the site of a cancerous growth, and use radio waves to
activate the particles, you can kill the cancer cells and leave everything else intact. Now that is
what one would call 'precision bombing'.
Update: Through a Google link that passed through my site, I came across Stan Meyer and a Water Fuel Cell. If you
look those up, you'll see all sorts of stories, conspiracies, and strange information floating around. Who/What can you
beleive.
For other alternate energy systems, PESWiki looks interesting.
[/Personal/Technology]
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Word Lists with a Calculator
FreshMeat, contrary to any
derogatory images it may conjure in your mind, is a site dedicated to publicizing releases
of open source software. It is a great combo to
SourceForge.
Today on Freshmeat was a link to
Frink, "a practical calculating
tool and programming language designed to help us all to better understand the world around
us, to help us get calculations right without getting bogged down in the mechanics, and to
make a tool that's really useful in the real world. It tracks units of measure (feet,
meters, kilograms, watts, etc.) through all calculations, allowing you to make physical
calculations easily, to mix units of measure transparently, and ensures that the answers
come out right." It deserves a special link on my toolbar.
One of the things it know how to do is word searches. Cheating at Scrabble is one
suggested use. The interesting point, though, is that in one of the descriptions, he points
to word list he uses: Grady Ward's Moby, a lexicon project. It has a hyphenator, part-of-speach
definitions, pronunciator, Shakespeare, Thesaurus, and 610,000 words and phrases. It shows
as a last update being around the year 2000 or so.
[/Personal/SoftwareDevelopment]
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