I’ve recently seen GCC processes consuming as much as 1GB RAM for it’s resident set size (ie, what it actually consumes in memory). I also have an i7 processor, which means I’d like to run compiles at -j8 and higher (to compensate slightly for disk IO). I have 4GB of RAM. Now, at 8 processes, each consuming 512MB of RSS, I’m starting to push into swap quite considerably, resulting in much slower actual compiles, and I can just as well be using -j2 wasting a LOT of resources by it just sitting there and not getting utilized. A plan had to be made. Read the rest of this entry »
Preventing GCC from trashing the system
December 31st, 2011Nokia N9 – first impressions
November 11th, 2011For once I decided to get myself a really snazzy phone. I must say, I’m impressed. After listening to the amount of crap others had to go through to get android based phones “rooted” this was a breeze in comparison. Simply activate developer mode, realize you get a terminal option added, open the terminal, go devel-su, enter “rootme” as the password and … et voila – the phone will now bend to your will with a unanimous “yes master”.
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VoIP – the toll fraud risk
February 21st, 2011So two separate clients of mine got nailed separately during the week. In both cases the root cause was a combination of weak passwords on SIP accounts, and public Internet connectivity.
For VoIP service providers obviously public Internet connectivity is not negotiable. Often clients are able to set their own passwords. Usually you get bent over the table pretty quickly – fortunately in the latter case one can just have a disclaimer which purely serves as an income protector – it does NOT save your business relationship with your client. In the case of PABX systems usually they are behind a firewall that only allows connectivity from the local network, but we had one case now where the router “accidentally” (misconfiguration due to misunderstanding of how the router’s DMZ and port-forwarding functionality works – not configured by ULS) forwarded SIP traffic to the VoIP server (router was set up to forward all traffic instead of just TCP/22 for ssh).
So in the case of a publicly accessible VoIP service – what can be done to protect both your client and yourself?
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The LID and the LCD backlight
January 22nd, 2011So I noticed that what I close the lid on my laptop the backlight doesn’t switch off. This is pretty bad for obvious reasons, primarily that it’s a waste of power, and secondly that even though not much it does radiate some heat and in a confined space it does escalate (and not mention that it’s an easy way to save a few watts of power when running on battery and waiting for some task to finish). So something had to be done. Read the rest of this entry »
