Cow. Chicken. Bell.

The way I copy files to my N800 is via SecureShell using scp. As I keep most of my files on memory cards, I wanted a quick way of telling scp to put it there rather than the home directory. I decided on just throwing a symbolic link (kind of like a shortcut for you Windows folks) to the two card mount points.

I am assuming you already have a terminal and ssh server installed and configured.

The mount points for the external and internal memory cards are /media/mmc1 and /media/mmc2, respectively. To create links to these, open a terminal window and type the following two commands:

~ $ ln -s /media/mmc1 ~/mmc1
~ $ ln -s /media/mmc2 ~/mmc2

Now if you want to move stuff.tar.gz to the files directory on the internal memory card, you would use the following command:
user@desktop:~$ scp files/stuff.tar.gz user@ip.of.n.800:mmc2/files/stuff.tar.gz

If at any point in time you want to get rid of the links, simply do a rm ~/mmc1. Only the link will be deleted, the data on your card stays intact.

I recently got a Nokia N800, and let me tell you, it is one of the coolest (and most useful) gadgets I have ever come across. Not only does it run a Debian based Linux OS, has a beautiful 800x480 screen, ample storage, Bluetooth, VOIP, and WiFi, but it also is completely hackable. Full command line access, huge catalog of packages (ssh, vncviewer, rdesktop, etc), and Internet connectivity anywhere via Bluetooth and my cell phone...the perfect sysadmin tool. Server trouble at work while you're out and about? No more two hour phone call trying to guide someone through all the commands trying to troubleshoot. Pull over, fire up the N800, ssh into the machine and go to work. Want a desktop? Set up a ssh tunnel and forward your VNC session. Windows machine? Use rdesktop or use rdesktop out of your VNC session. Problem solved in 5 minutes. Awesome.

I had come across the i Tech Laser Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard (VKB) before, and thought it would be a neat little toy, but that's about it. Now with the N800 I was looking for a Bluetooth keyboard. Ssh-ing into it is fine and dandy when you're at your desk, but on the road I don't want to spend forever trying to type out commands with the stylus. I found a VKB on eBay for a decent price, and decided to pick it up. Once I held it in my hands I knew that this is one of the most bad ass gadgets you could own (the geek factor alone is through the roof!!). It's small size (a bit smaller than my Leatherman Wave) makes it easy to take a long on trips. Now with just a cell phone, N800 and VKB I have a complete remote admin solution that is a whole lot more portable than a laptop.

Pairing it with the N800 is fairly simple:

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Every once in a while you notice a substantial increase in the volume of spam to a users address. The new spam all seems to come from dating sites, very interesting. Now, when looking for false positives, you happen to come across a reply from a spam bot to a sex ad posted by a user -- from their work account complete with company address in the signature! You get curious. You look into this more. And then you discover that the user's replies to sex ads outnumber legit business email by a factor of 5 to 1. User gets a talking to, illegitimate email traffic stops. Eventually the user leaves the organization, and you get to do the final email archive. And this is where the fun begins...

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We have a few Dell Laptops in circulation. On both Dell D420s and D620s running Windows XP SP2 we had problems installing and/or updating the signatures in McAfee Virus Scan Enterprise 8.0i.

The main symptom is Error fffff95B @ 2 in the McAfee Common Framework when trying to update the virus signatures and a "Failed to connect to computer '.'." error when trying to access the Virus Scan Console on the affected machine. Also, the McAfee Common Framework Service is not listed as an installed service in services.msc.

The error messages.

After more or less successful googling and trial and error, I have come up with the following fix.

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So I'm sitting in the office today enjoying an ID10T-free day, and this comes across from Pombo Jr...

PF,

I was asked what kind of audio do we need to provide you with?

My answer is Wave, Vox, or Tar. Did I write them correctly? Basically we can use any format.

However, as I looked at an old RFI I found this.

“If yes, what CODECs do you support and what is their compression rate? Currently we have customers and partners using the following compression with our software: G726, GSM, ADPCM (6 bit VOX), MP3, MP4, PCM Wav, G729 and several custom compression codecs"

So what is CODEC? Is that the same as Audio file? Or is that compression of the above mentioned files (Wave, Vox, Tar)?

I stared at my screen for a while...

True victory is victory over oneself.

Wikipedia rules. We all know it. It may not always be accurate but it will give you a pretty good understanding of most topics. It is actually quite impressive how fast vandalism gets corrected.

The problem with Wikipedia is that it never ends: you just have to follow the interesting links. You look one thing up and end up having 15 tabs open and hours of reading to do. I decided to keep track of my recent Wikipedia navigation and threw it into a flowchart. I find it quite interesting how one can start at Mayan calendars and end up at pregnancy, Russian tanks, radio guided bombs of Nazi Germany and binocular vision.

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As a tribute to one of the inspirations behind this site, I present...

The Infamous "Password" Logs:

Day One…

[14:44] “Password”: Hey PF
[14:44] PF Chang: hey “password”
[14:45] “Password”: I am reading your e-mail regarding Company X
[14:45] “Password”: Where did you come up with your stats
[14:46] PF Chang: it's based on one server processing 100 hours per day, which is the average we see with our current engine
[14:46] “Password”: Yes but where did the 1100 hrs of audio come from?
[14:47] PF Chang: it's 13000 files at an average of 5 minutes each, multiply
[14:48] “Password”: I don't follow
[14:49] “Password”: Each file is 5 min or 300 secs long
[14:50] PF Chang: 5 minutes times 13000 files = 65000 minutes = 1083.33 hours which is about 1100 hours
[14:50] “Password”: Ahh your rounding off
[14:52] “Password”: How did you go from mins to hrs
[14:53] “Password”: Did you divide the 65000 by 45 mins
[14:53] PF Chang: divide by 60
[14:53] “Password”: We need a caculator or tool
[14:54] “Password”: Are we working on that
[14:54] “Password”: Ihave one I should sent you
[14:54] PF Chang: i'm just using the calculator that comes with windows
[14:55] “Password”: I have one that breaks the volume of files by segments
[14:55] “Password”: It's pretty good
[14:56] “Password”: I will sent it to you for you to evaluate
[14:58] PF Chang: alrighty

Day Two…

[11:53] “Password”: if they Company Y has 21M files a year and each file is 240 seconds how many hours a day are generated?
[12:01] PF Chang: that's 3835 hours of files a day assumming 365 days a year
[12:02] “Password”: Ok take 50% of those 21M files
[12:03] “Password”: I get 1,050000 files
[12:03] “Password”: divide that by 12
[12:03] “Password”: I get 87500 files per month
[12:04] PF Chang: you're missing a 0
[12:04] “Password”: Ok
[12:05] “Password”: So I am not following how your getting the recorded files sorry for being brain dead here
[12:05] “Password”: Still on meds
[12:06] “Password”: What is the formula to get recorded files per day from 21M files per year
[12:06] “Password”: or at 50% of those files annually
[12:06] PF Chang: 50% of 21M is 10.5M per year
[12:06] PF Chang: divide that by 365 days
[12:07] PF Chang: that's 28,767 files a day
[12:07] “Password”: Ok I follow so far
[12:07] PF Chang: take that times 240 for the number of seconds a day
[12:08] PF Chang: that's 6904080 seconds a day
[12:08] PF Chang: divide by 3600 for hours
[12:08] PF Chang: you get 1917.8 hours of files a day
[12:08] PF Chang: which is 50% of that 21M a year
[12:09] “Password”: Why divide by 3600 hrs
[12:09] “Password”: Assuming 8 hrs a day?
[12:09] “Password”: 40 hrs a week?
[12:09] PF Chang: no...it's 3600 seconds in an hour
[12:10] PF Chang: you're going from seconds to hours

Cow Chicken Bell (or short CCB) is a site run by a bunch of geeks in the IT world. It is a collection of funny (and true) IT stories, hacks and code, rants, random humor and plenty more.

The title is derived from the inability of a former colleague to perform the simplest tasks -- type his password correctly, divide a number by the number of minutes in an hour (for some reason he insisted on an hour having 45 minutes), or use the Windows calculator. We joked that it would be best to get him one of these kids laptops, where the keys are replaced by animals. Cow, Chicken, Bell was part of his password -- unfortunately he had troubles remembering whether it was Cow Chicken Bell Monkey Bell or Cow Chicken Bell Bell.

Main players (in alphabetical order):

• FelixTheKraut likes to pretend that he knows how to fix a server, runs Ubumfu and occasionally climbs some rocks.
• MK1 aka MooseKnuckle is an ex karaoke DJ who churns out usable code once in a blue moon.
• PF Chang has his own office and now thinks he is hot shit. He also adds way too much MSG to everything he cooks.