I was reading a very well written article this morning as I enjoyed my freshly brewed java, its been on slashdot, digg & the link has travelled over many networks since it was published two days ago. It deserve every possible spread tho, so here’s to you Dave Gutteridge, you sir, made my day.
Link to article; Windows is Free
Read about this project last year, but mananged to miss the release of the 1.0 version(15th this month). Saw the demonstration video posted on kudos.no via Hr. Dalands blog.
It holds the cream of the crop of open source applications, and its a fork of the amazing Pluto project.
Read more about it on its web page.
This my friends will be huge, they are allready struggling to meet the demands on their download, having over 10K downloads of a 600M cd will have impact on most websites & its link.
So till they have fixed this(should be this saturday), have a look at their demonstration video posted on google;
All hail open-source projects!
Now available in the pages menu, feel free to drop by & kick my arse or hang out & rant.
The ircd has now been migrated from IRCD-Hybrid to UnrealIRCd & its running in a newly created CentOS VPS. It has a Gentoo base system with VMware, the VPS will be migrated to Xen when the new box is up. CentOS has been slim-lined down to 740M so far, will continue stripping it down & see how small it can get. In addition to Unreal, Anope Irc Service is also setup.
The java client is Pjirc, and has many features that I have choose to leave out due to simplicity..
UPDATE_1:
After spending some time stripping CentOS last night I ended up with ~470M, and overall ram usage down to ~60M. Not good enough, so setup a minimal ubuntu server install today, only services running are sshd, crond, ircd & sendmail. Hdd usage dropped down to 280M & ram usage to 35M, not bad, but not that good either, especially seeing whats currently running on the system.
So I’ll take DSL & LFS for a spin tonight & see what kinda footprint they can offer with the services above.
Will update the post with results.
DISTRO HDD RAM
CentOS 4.4 470M 60M
Ubuntu 6.06 280M 35M
DSL 160M 30M
UPDATE_2:
After a few rounds with the above distros and lfs, gentoo & fbsd. I decided to call it quits. With the three criterias;
- small footprint
- little to no customization
- easy to maintain
..it was more a confirmation than a suprise that a debian based(ubuntu) distro got picked.
Average footprint on hdd & ram + a massive user base = done deal
So this niche VPS setup ended up well within my set limits; 500M HDD, 64-128M RAM, now how much will it increase if say 50 users are connected?
___
Id appreciate if as many as possible connect either via the web chat or directly using your pref irc client, so I can stress-test it as much as possible under the different scenarios. Thx
Rants(R)Us
First english post on rantville, we’ll see what happens in the future, the first impression on Icecream(what a name btw) deserved a broader crowd than the few native heads that skim through this blog. 
That being said, Im talking about two alternatives for distributed compileing Ive been trying out, the good “ol” distcc and Icecream (based on distcc, a opensuse project).
Been running distcc in many a odd combination, and aslong as I kept gcc versions synced on nodes all was pleasantville.. Since I have a few gentoo boxes on the lan that wasnt a problem, but add various other *nix distros that I wanted to lend some cpu time from and it became a tad too much to maintain..
The end result was a crippled cluster with only 1/3 of the cpu power used.
This is for the record my home segment we are talking about, there are 3 boxes that are in production state, the rest are a few work stations, and a load of oldish boxes thats up on demand(UoD)..
Anyways, at the peak of my distcc era even my old c600 laptop had a nice time updating world (gentoo)… ahh happy days(?!)
–> fwd 450d12h32m..ish –>
In comes Icecream.. the name alone made me curious, that it was based on distcc & maintained by the opensuse made me decide to try it out. (Im not gonna go into the recent association between novell & ms, enough has been said, lets keep an eye on it & see how it evolves eh?)
The introduction alone made my heart skip a few beats, scheduler and gcc irrelevant.. Running identical Icecream versions seems to be a must tho, but thats the least of our worries. 
I tossed it into 3 gentoo boxes and a kubuntu box, with these archs; amd duron & athlon, celeronM & Pent D940. Nice mix of archs, and the result? Very little work & all systems GO!
I could hardly believe my own eyes when I first loaded up icemon, it connected to the scheduler & voila in a few secs the nodes ticked up on the screen working “hard” as you can see from this picture;
This is just one of the views you can choose, for this small test cluster it was fitting tho.
As you can see on the top, the D940 with its dualcore doing a fine job, followed by celeronM(laptop), the amd duron & the athlon..
To stir it up further I ran various jobs on the nodes to see how well the scheduler responded.
The scheduler added jobs to the fastest available node in the cluster as it should, never did any of the nodes “suffer” in the compile rounds..
So.. to sum up the first days of Icecream splendour.. it looked good, tasted even better & boy do the other boxes wants some!
I’ll return with more info as the odd archs get tossed into the mix, for now, I give two thumbs up.
Som sikkert mange av dere har merket hviler aldri en spammer, og nye mÃ¥ter Ã¥ forsøple vÃ¥re innbokser blir til stadighet “utviklet” av disse idiotene.
Som tittelen tilsier vil jeg nå ta for meg en av de siste metodene deres, å sende bilder hvor alle deres fantastiske tilbud og aksjetips er skrevet i selve bildet. Etablerte mottiltak som spamassassin(aka SA) med pyzor, razor & opplæring av merkede mail vil ikke kunne ta dette da det rett og slett er ett bilde.
En av mulighetene er selvsagt å nekte enhver form for bildevedlegg igjennom mail serveren, ikke spesielt praktisk, men du verden så effektivt. Har fulgt med utviklingen av en ny plugin til SA; FuzzyOCR, for dere som kjenner til begrepet OCR vil dere nok nikke gjenkjennende på hodet med ett aldri så lite smil om munnen.
OCR=Optical Character Recognition, eller optisk tegngjenkjenning fritt oversatt er ett meget godt brukt verktøy til scanning av dokumenter bla, hvor du lærer opp programmet til å kjenne igjen fonttypen som er brukt og du vil få ett tekstdokument som output.
Denne metoden er tatt ibruk pÃ¥ denne plugin, den støtter per idag jpg, gif(ogsÃ¥ animert!) & png, og bruker samme metode som nevnt over, bildet blir “overført” til tekst, sÃ¥ gÃ¥r det runden igjennom SA og sjekker etter klassiske spam fraser for deretter Ã¥ enten slette skiten eller sende den til mottaker om bildet er ett.. ja, riktig, bildet. 
Har så langt kjørt igjennom alle de siste bildespam jeg har fått i min postkasse og kun 1 av de har så langt har sluppet igjennom. Denne hadde ulidelig stygg font i kursiv, var nok derfor OCR ikke tok den, FuzzyOCR er tross alt i sin spede barndom ennå.
Her en liten snippet fra en av de som ble stoppet i “tollen”, bilde som vedlegg og noen norsk tekst som fyllstoff;
kjetil(at)hoiseth.no: host hoiseth.no[82.194.202.62] said: 550 This message
scored 26.3 points. Congratulations! (in reply to end of DATA command)
Og her følger bildet;
Jeg noterer ett lite mål i vår favør i kampen mot Spamlaget, venter i spenning på deres neste trekk.. JAAAADAAA :/
