blog.theamigan.net: Making sense of sense since yesterday.

Archive for the ‘FreeBSD’ Category

webpftable

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

It just dawned on me that I had never actually released webpftable. I wrote this little CGI utility many, many moons ago to allow “trusted” ports to be authenticated before their being opened up to the world on my pf box. I’m just going to paste the introduction to the README here, since I don’t feel like regurgitating it.

webpftable is a (very) simple CGI application that, upon successful authentication against
passwd(5), adds the client's IP address to a pf table.

It is available as a source tarball for FreeBSD (and possibly OpenBSD) systems. Enjoy and let me know what you think!

Site moved

Sunday, April 25th, 2010

First, I’d like to express my most sincere gratitude to Matt Juszczak and atopia.net/bitvenue for having hosted theamigan.net for over 6 years. Not having to pay a dime for hosting with shell and everything else (even root at one time!) on a fast server sitting on a decently fat pipe was quite nice.
But anyway, a while ago, Matt e-mailed me to say he was shutting down pluto (the machine theamigan was served by) and scaling back his webhosting operations. I decided that it was high time I moved my site over to my own server. Yesterday, this became a reality, as I moved the entire theamigan.net domain over to styx (using FreeDNS), my home server (sitting on a “lowly” 20/5 FiOS connection).
Along with this move, hopefully this blog will see more updates, and theamigan itself has a redesign to look forward to. Maybe I’ll actually put some new material up.

New Stuff

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

So, a bit has happened since the last update from the Dan-front. For example, I’ve been accepted to RIC and UMass Dartmouth so far (waiting on all the others still).

And with this foray into the world of post-secondary education comes the ever-elusive need for a laptop: sure, I might be able to get by if I just brought fez with me to uni, but I need a laptop, and that’s that!

Well, here’s some background. I started out as an Amiga user. I dabbled with Macs in elementary school, but was forced into the PC world like most people. I tried to rebel by running Linux and FreeBSD, but I could never be as hip as those PowerBook-toting gods.

Until now.

Basically, I knew before the hunt even really started that I wanted a Mac. Yeah, I used to bitch and moan when the Intel transition started, but I guess I’ve accepted defeat. And things aren’t all bad, I guess. I’ve used my friend’s MacBook quite a bit for recording with Madonna and Child, and it just reinforced my beliefs that OSX is probably the overall best desktop OS the world has right now. Sure, it may not be the absolute finest technically, but it’s pretty, and you can run shitloads of proprietary apps that we all need (Photoshop, anyone?) and open-source Unix apps side by side. How cool is that?

Honestly, this is what I need. Trying to do anything music-related on Unix is almost an absolute disaster (FreeBSD is right out for this, linux makes things a little better but it’s no walk in the park). I think the guys at Apple have figured out the multimedia thing pretty decently, though, and using windows is right out for me anyway.

All I’ll need is a MIDI interface and a firewire audio interface and I’m golden. And that’s just the music side of things. As some of you know, I only run windows these days to use Photoshop, because I can’t stand the Gimp. Now I can stay in one OS and do everything I need to do.

So anyway, my friend Joel has a previous-generation Core2 Macbook Pro 15″. And he says he loves it. I am looking at this model because I have this giant phobia of buying a machine that has no way to access its internal bus (i.e. the lack of an ExpressCard/34 slot on the MacBook). Plus, the backlit keyboard is just plain snazzy. And since the padre has offered to buy a laptop as a combo birthday/graduation gift (contingent on me giving him fez, something I have no qualms with), it works out nicely (no more selling off synths!).

So there you have it.

Dan out.

Ardour and friends

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007

A concession is in order here:

Linux is better at audio than FreeBSD.

Sure, it sucks for everything else, but ALSA is some damn cool shit. Coupled with JACK and Ardour and any PC can be a pretty damned powerful DAW for next to nothing. Beats shelling out all the money for a Mac and decent DAW software (such as ProTools) when you’re unemployed like myself.

With this setup (and Hydrogen for drums) I was able to conceive, record, edit, and mix a D3ath D3sk song called “Aura” which, from what people tell me, is the best DD song to date (not saying much, of course…).

Now JACK itself, however, is some pretty cool shit. Case in point: my machine has two audio interfaces. One is the onboard AC97 audio which works perfectly, but the right channel on the line-in is shorted and hence unusable. Then I have a C-media chipset board which also works fine, except the line in generally sounds like complete and utter shit. The AC97′s is at least passable. Anyway, I wanted to use my ion as a hardware vocoder for the percussion track from hydrogen. I just patched hydrogen to the sound card outputting to the ion’s inputs, patched line in to ardour, and recorded. All done. It worked perfectly.

And school is done. But I still feel somewhat crappy. But that’s ok, I guess.

Dan out.

D3ath D3sk’s Aura

rand()

Sunday, June 17th, 2007

Well, uh, I probably should be doing something productive. 6 hours ago, I attempted to resign to the task of finishing my stupid-ass AP US History final project. Since then, I’ve done the following:

  • Napped
  • Procured iced coffee and ice cream

  • Installed Debian on my system (I need a DAW with MIDI….which FreeBSD is currently lacking =[)
  • Cleaned up my buddylist not once, but twice after signing on using pork on styx added a bunch (~80) of people I had long since removed
  • Upgraded pidgin to 2.0.2

Notice how said project is nowhere in that list. C’est la vie…

In other news, well, I don’t know. I have three days of finals next week, and then I am released from prison for about two months, during which time I hope to find work cleaning up after fat slobs after they finish yet another satisfying meal. Again, c’est la vie.

That’s it. Dan out.

amd64, dead babies, Charles Darwin

Friday, January 13th, 2006

I recently got the new drive (thanks Matt) and installed FreeBSD/amd64 on it. Suffice it to say that I’m not too impressed.

Firstly, compatibility on amd64 really needs improvement. I know work is currently being done on this, but it hasn’t been committed yet. But I can’t run opera (yet…), xnview, the nVidia binary driver (which is currently in the works, but they’re awaiting some “feature” that isn’t available in FreeBSD/amd64…personally I think it’s bullshit, but we’ll see), openoffice, and stuff crashes sporadically. So in short, this is a big showstopper, and is preventing me from doing a complete switch to amd64.

Also of note is that amd64 seems to use a little more RAM (for obvious reasons…sizeof(long) is now 64 bits).

There were also some small bugs in certain apps (that I fixed with only a few lines of code), namely because of the interchanging of int and long.

I’ll see how things pan out, but for now i386 is probably going to be my primary platform.

Also, I’ve heard quite my fair share of dead baby jokes these past couple of days. No, I’m not a necroinfantophile (that’s tounge-in-cheek, yay!).

And to end on a tragic note, someone fell to his demise after losing his grip while trying to ride the escalator handrail to the third floor at Providence Place. I just think it’s evolution doing its work, but that’s just me. Darwin awards, anyone?

Dan out.

Maps of myspace, among other things

Sunday, November 27th, 2005

Last night and today were quite productive; I merged in some changes to fakedbfs (breaking tons of shit in the process), wrote a program so I could use the multimedia keys on napoleon’s keyboard, and…uh…that’s it.

However, Dan and I had speculated a while ago, and myself recently, about what a map of myspace would look like. I’d imagine that besides it being huge, one could discern some interesting trends about geography and friendships; there would probably be clusters of people in the same geographic location, for example. You would probably see less of this trend if bands and such were counted.

On a semi-related note (only in the remotest of ways, though), the response to my last post about the “Finding Emo” article was quite positive. Of course, this is because I haven’t had any dumbasses read it (yes, I just said anyone who doesn’t think it’s good is a dumbass, for you…slower readers out there). I suggest you give it a reading if you haven’t done so.

So, I guess that’s it. I have to retool GopherOS’s VM subsystem. This will be fun.

Dan out.