2 Bit Hacker

I have been unable to find a device by the following specification, but I think it would rather handy to have. I suspect it wouldn’t have a huge appeal however. The device:

A small box with a USB port on one side and VGA, USB, and PS/2 cables coming out the other side. You connect the VGA, USB, and/or PS/2 cables to one computer, and the other USB to another computer, and it gives you a window on your screen that acts as a monitor for the other computer.

I think this would be great for people who have to work on machines in datacenters and the like, where sometimes you just need a monitor and keyboard, but lugging those around are annoying. Just plug this device into the server and your laptop, and poof! your laptop acts like a monitor for the server.

I don’t think it would be terribly hard to implement. You’d need some sort of video capture chip for grabbing the VGA input. PS/2 is basically just a serial output. The USB would just emulate a keyboard and mouse (perhaps via a virtual hub) to the “remote” machine. The other USB would be somewhat trickier, I’m not sure if there’s a standard video transport over USB.

You’d probably be able to sell them to system administrators, PC technitions, and maybe people who want to run a small server at home, but don’t want to switch back and forth all the time with a traditional KVM switch. The closest competeing product I’ve seen is a one-port KVM-over-IP box, which runs $500+. I think an ideal price point for this would be in sub-$100, prolly in the $80-$100 range.

So, there’s the idea, someone go turn it into a product and sell me one…

Thoughts and Ideas hardware

Now I remember, I was also trying to figure out what I want to do with my tax return. Part of me wants to do the responsible thing and use it to pay off my debt faster or to stick it into my somewhat sad looking savings account, but part of me wants to blow it on something fun like a new laptop or an HDTV or a Mac Mini or something like that.

I was also struck by the thought of registering 2 Bit Hacker as a business with the state, and start actively pushing my consulting a bit more. I think I’ve talked about that in my weblog before. But the thought occurred to me that a new laptop could then be considered a business expense. It would also be a good way of separating out any income I get from doing SimPro maintenance work.

Thoughts and Ideas

Last night, I was reading an article on Honda’s latest hydrogen fuel cell car. It sounds like the technology is almost ready to hit production, with decent performance, and reasonable range (about 130 miles per tank.) They covered a lot of info about the fill up process, involving connecting a grounding cable to the car and touching the pump before disconnecting the fill hose to prevent static sparks from igniting anything.

I’m left wondering though, what happens when one of these things gets in an accident? They’ve got two tanks of hydrogen compressed to 5000 psi when full. Seems to me like that could be sortof dangerous, you know?

Thoughts and Ideas fuel cell

It seems like all the girls I know either are or at one time have been on anti-depressants.

I think there’s something seriously wrong with the world.

Also, I’m tired of packing. My desk and computer bits and pieces are all in boxes now, save for the actively running system on which I am typing. I packed the foodstuffs and spices from the kitchen, but the dishes still need to be boxed, and I still need to dismantle the entertainment center. I am so not ready for this move. But it’s happening, somehow it’ll all work out, and by Monday, all my stuff will either be in the garbage receptacle or in the new apartment.

Thoughts and Ideas apartment, move

Every once and a while I get an idea for a stupid invention that I think would be pretty cool if anyone could actually figure out how to make it. Here are a few:

• Self Laundering Luggage: Ever been getting ready for a trip at the last minute, only to find that none of the clothes you want to take are clean? Well worry no more with the wonderful Self Laundering Luggage. Just toss in your dirty clothes and some detergent, and by the time you get to your destination, you clothes are washed and dried, just hang them up and you’re all set.
• Car Foam: Sure, airbags work pretty well, but wouldn’t it be a lot better to be completely restrained in case of a car accident? Car foam is the next generation in car safety devices. Upon impact, the foam is released into the passenger compartment, completely and safely surrounding all passengers and encasing them in a safe, non-toxic, breatable, fireproof, editble foam casing. Once the rescue crew arrives, they just spray the foam with a chemical agent to dissolve it, and you’re released intact and unharmed.
• Orbital McDonalds Construction: With the number of new McDonald’s restaurants that are built each year, it would probably make a lot of sense to build them in orbit then simply drop them into position. And orbital drops don’t need to stop with just the restaurant. Once space cows are perfected, they can be slaughtered in orbit, processed into patties, and dropped to restaurants as needed, being cooked automatically during re-entry.

I’ll try to remember more of these, or write them down as I think of them.

Thoughts and Ideas

For a long time, I had been a die-hard FreeBSD user, running it on all the servers under my control, my laptop, my home system, everything. Then one day I decided to give Gentoo Linux a try on my laptop. Got to know it, and at this point I find it to work better in that application than FreeBSD did. Since then, I’ve noticed the major difference between Linux and BSD. And it’s not a technical thing, it’s a social thing.

For example, it’s been my experience that when two BSD users meet, and ask each other what they run, it goes something like this: “Hey, I run FreeBSD” “Yeah, so do I” “Cool” “Yeah.” and that’s about it. However, when two Gentoo users meet, you get something like “Hey, I run Gentoo” “Yeah, so do I” “Cool” “What kernel do you run?” “Gaming-sources, how about you?” “Gentoo-sources” “Cool, how’s that working out?” “Pretty good, you run reiserfs?” “No, I’m on XFS” “Ah, interesting, I’d been thinking about that” and so on and so on, covering basically every option that one could select in Gentoo, from the kernel sources down to the syslogger. With BSD, you pretty much know what the system is like just by knowing what it is, with a Linux system, at least with Gentoo, each system is as different as the person running it.

This leads to Linux people, or at least Gentoo people, spending vast amounts of time talking to each other about what little tweaky things they’ve done, or what they want to try, and so on, which inevitably is overheard by other people, who will sometimes think things like “Hey, that sounds neat, I should give it a try.” And so it spreads. BSD people on the other hand, don’t need to talk about it nearly as much, sometimes discussing new features in a new release, but never to the extent that Gentoo people talk. This means less people overhear, and ultimatly less people go around trying to use BSD.

And while this individuality is great for conversation and tinkering and taking up vast amounts of spare time, from a business perspective, it kills. When looking for a Linux system admin, you need to take into consideration what distrobutions he’s familiar with, and what daemons he’s worked with, and what versions, and a bunch of other factors. And when that admin does finally get hired, he’ll need to learn how the last admin did everything. With FreeBSD at least, this happens a lot less, since a lot more of the system is standardized.

So, it’s basically my opinion that Linux and BSD each have their place. I am very much enjoying running Linux on my laptop, and now on my desktop at home, but there is no way I’ll be running it on a server anytime soon. It makes a great discussion piece, but it just doesn’t have the stability and standardization that I desire in a server.

Thoughts and Ideas

I’ve been thinking for a little bit about writing a perl module to interface with
Kismet, making it easy for people to write Kismet clients in perl. Basically, I envision being able to do something like this:

use Kismet::Client;
my $kismet = new Kismet::Client ( server => "localhost:54321" );
$kismet->add_protocol(NETWORK, "bssid,type,ssid", \&network_callback);
$kismet->run;
sub network_callback (
    my($info) = shift;
    printf("Found network %s (%s)\n", $info->{ssid}, $info->{bssid});
)

Basically, I figure it’ll work best as a series of callback for the various types of information that Kismet can provide, and have the module take care of enabling the various protocols and parsing the information out into hashes for easy access. Once I get my computer at home up and running again, I hope to actually write some code for this.

Thoughts and Ideas