Moved back to plek.org

I've decided to run my own blog software again, so I'm moving from blogger back to plek.org. Any new content will be posted there. I've pointed feedburner at the new site, so the handful of people subscribing that way will just pickup the new site. This site will remain since some pages do get a few hits every now and then. I may import all my content into my new site, but that will take some work.

I intend to post more, but intentions mean nothign without actions. We'll see if how it really turns out. :)

The new site runs on my Slicehost slice, using Chyrp, a fairly new and lightweight blog engine. So far I'm quite happy with out. I still have a bunch of layout tweaks to do, so there will be subtle weirdness along the way. It's not like I actually get real traffic, so I just edit the live sites templates and CSS.

Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation

I'd bought Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation a while ago, Late October 1996 according to Amazon, and I finally read it. It's a very short book, and shouldn't take more than an hour or two to read. I hightly recommend it as a concise argument against religion. It's by no means comprehensive, and it's bevity leaves much unsaid, but it's well worth the hour or two.

Multiple Monitors with an Nvidia Graphics Card on Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy.

Since Hardy's out, I made a fresh install on my desktop PC. I have an EVGA GeForce 8800GTS driving two Dell monitors, a 2407WFPHC at 1920x1200 and a 2004FPW at 1680x1050. The default install detected both monitors fine but ran only in cloned mode. That's really not ideal, especially since I run differently sized monitors. The Monitor Resolution Settings wasn't of any help, and I didn't want to dig into the xorg.conf, but I found an pretty easy fix.

If you're lucky Ubuntu will let you know there are Restricted Drivers Available which will get this working better.

Click the little graphics card icon and install the NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver by checking the box under Enabled. That will install the driver and ask you to reboot, so reboot. In my case rebooting disabled my second monitor.

Now we need to install the NVIDIA X Server Settings tool. You can search for nvidia-settings in Synaptic to install it, or just open up a terminal and run:

sudo apt-get install nvidia-settings

Then from a terminal run:

sudo nvidia-settings

Click X Server Display Configuration and you should see this:
Click Configure and enable TwinView, then arrange the displays as you'd like them. I ended up with this:
You'll notice I checked Make this the primary display for the X screen in the settings for my larger monitor. This will determin which monitor most things run in, like the login screen and the panel. Click Apply, make sure it looks good, then Save to X Configuration File and finally Quit. At this point it's working but a few things look janky, like your panel runs across both monitors, some screens show up half in one monitor, half in the other, stuff like that. Just loging out and back in clears that up.

Enjoy!

Of note, you may later find System -> Administration -> NVIDIA X Server Settings, but that won't really work since it needs permission to write out your new xorg.conf. You can fix this under System -> Preferences -> Main Menu. Click Administration, right click on NVIDIA X Server Settings and select Properties. Add gksu to the start of Command, click Close, and you're set. Next time you run NVIDIA X Server Settings there will be a password prompt and it will be able to write out the configs for you.

Popular Social Networking Sites Fail at Email Validation

Back in the olden days, when I enjoyed things like running my own mail server, I used qmail's virtual domain support and .qmail files to create a unique email address for every website that asked for an email. This was handy for figuring out who let me address get into the hands of spammers, or just blocking sites that didn't unsubscribe me. I created these in the format sitename@plek.org. It worked out pretty well.

I'll get to my real point here in a second, so please stick with me. I've since outgrown any desire to run my own mail server. It's a pain, especially with the never ending fight to keep spam filters trained and updated. Thankfully Google stepped in an created a very usable solution in Google Apps. Some time ago I switched plek.org email over there (and this blog to blogger) and things work well. Since moving to Google Apps, I have a slightly different way to handle things. I don't want to make my primary address a catchall for @plek.org since the spam volume is way too intense. I ran that way for a while and I didn't enjoy the hundreds of spams per day, even though Googles filters work quite well, if there is ever a false positive, it's gone for ever in the sea of trash.

Thankfully Google has a nice solution. myaddress+sitename@plek.org works really well. If my address were spammy@plek.org, I could just tell Bebo to send all their mail to spammy+bebo@plek.org and all is good.

Here's the rub. Someone at Facebook, and someone at Hi5 decided they really needed to be extra serious about email address validation. Those handy myaddress+sitename@plek.org fail the validation. They don't accept them at all. Bebo does, MySpace does. iLike does (if we didn't I'd complain and make sure we fixed it). Facebook and Hi5 really need to fix this. It's stupid to even try validating email addresses like that. The only thing that really works is to send a mail to the user.

ADSL2 and my WRAP router.

Today I got upgraded to 10Mbps ADSL2. So far so good. Too bad Speakeasy was bought by BestBuy, but so far, the inevitable suckage hasn't started. I'll leave when it does. For now things are solid.

It's pretty fast, and latency is good.

For the last couple of years I've a ran m0n0wall, or currently, pfSense on a PC Engines WRAP for my router. They are great little single board computers. Sadly the ADSL2 proves too much for the WRAP. It's now the limit of my network connection. Various network speed tests max out just under 6Mbps. When I connect my PC directly to the DSL modem I get over 8Mbps.

So it looks like a PC Engines ALIX is in my future. Looks like the ones I want ship in the next couple of weeks and pfSense 1.2 will be out soon too.

Long over due EDIT: As you can see from the comments, I was just stupid and didn't update my traffic shaping rules. The WRAP does 10Mbps just fine.

My iPhone Just Got a LOT Cooler

Installer.app is awesome! Download the software, plug your iPhone in, and let it go. It adds a package manager to your iPhone that downloads software from the internet.

This is so cool. I have a real Unix command line on my iPhone without all the pain the previous methods brought. Nice.

Why the iPhone Doesn't Have 3G: Battery Life

Anandtech has a pretty good set of tests showing the compromises Apple had to make with the iPhone. Steve said it was due to size and battery life. These tests show that pretty clearly. The iPhone may have only 3 hours of talk time if it used 3G. That just wouldn't be acceptable.