2008 Aug 28 - Thu

Console to Cisco Device from FreeBSD

I'm now involved in running an ISP. An existing ISP. One that has been through severval hands already. One that has many strange corners and alleys. Unknown servers. Inconsistent switch configurations. I could go on, but suffice to say, my job is to make it all work.... better. And in the mean time, bring my self up to speed on a bunch more technologies. I've been mostly a Linux hack todate. I get to add FreeBSD and NetBSD to my list. Baby steps first.

The task of connecting a Cisco device to the serial port of a FreeBSD computer and communicating with it turned out to be quite easy. So for my reference (which I found at O'Reilly BSD DevCenter):

cu -l /dev/cuaa0 -s 9600

This uses the first serial port at 9600 bits per second. Connection and remote access is as simple as that. To exit the session:

~.

[/OpenSource/FreeBSD] permanent link

2008 Aug 22 - Fri

DNS Tools

For my reference, a command for looking at ownership of w.x.y.z:

 dig +trace  z.y.x.w.in-addr.arpa.

DNS Operations List

DNS List: NameDropers: IETF DNSEXT working group.

DNS Operatins

[/OpenSource/Linux] permanent link

2008 Aug 07 - Thu

Labour Saving Devices (Software Wise)

Today's Dr. Dobb's Report via email from Jonathan Erickson has a reference to Michael Abrash's book Graphics Programming Black Book. Based upon the book's table of content, the content covers many interesting algorithms in and outside of graphics programming.

However, to download the book, one has to download over 76 individual files. What a pain, especially if one is using Windows.

Actually, it isn't so bad. I manually downloaded the preludes and afterwords. Cygwin came to the rescue for automating the chapter downloads. By starting a Cygwin shell, putting the following content in a file called 'getch', and running it, I was able to automate the download of the 70 individual chapters. For those running Linux or BSD directly, then this little script can be used directly.

for (( i = 1; i <= 70; i++ ))
do
  wget http://www.byte.com/abrash/chapters/gpbb$i.pdf
done

The 'wget' program is a useful tool for downloading web pages without using a browser. And by creating a for loop with a variable substitution, one can iteratively download each of the chapters.

[/OpenSource] permanent link

2008 Aug 06 - Wed

Market Notes for August 6, 2008

This article really isn't about today. Nor is it about yesterday. It is about Monday. But becuase I only read Mark Hulbert's colummn today, which he penned yesterday, which is about Monday's 332 point gain, I've dated my article for today.

Mark's point of the day revolves around another rule of thumb: the day was not a 9-to-1 up day. This type of day is when 90% of the volume of shares that rose or fell in price was in shares that went up. The term was coined by Martin Zweig, who used to publish several investment newsletters. On Monday, for the NYSE, it was only an 8.1-to-1 day.

According to his 1986 book called "Winning on Wall Street", Zweig states "Every bull market in history, and many good intermediate advances, [has] been launched with a buying stampede that included one or more 9-to-1 up days".

In Mark's article of yesterday, he mentions that valuations are still a little high. As such, a bull market may not be in the offing yet. So far July 15 is considered our low of the current bear market.

I think because of additional mortgage resets happening later this year, we may not be completely ready for bullish thinking. Maybe a nice little volatile rally, but we may see some more lows.

[/Trading/MarketNotes] permanent link