Technology Blog Dietmar Zlabinger

Abstract Syntax Notation 1 (ASN1) is probably one of the worst encodings the Internet community has seen. Unfortunately this encoding is a key component in Internet security. Peter Gutmann, professor at the University of Auckland, NZ has not just written “How Not to Design a Crypto Protocol/Standard“, but also an ASN1-dump C-program.  I added a Java-script port written by Lapo Luchini to my homepage under http://www.zlabinger.at/asn1dump.

This version uses the top certificate of the TKK as an example.

In a test-setup I put 561GByte of data onto a 1 TByte harddisk. The first disk is formated with ext3, the other with xfs.
Here are the results:

df -h
/dev/sdc1 932G 561G 372G 61% /media/disk1_1T
/dev/sdd1 917G 561G 311G 65% /media/disk2_1T
mount
/dev/sdc1 on /media/disk1_1T type xfs (rw)
/dev/sdd1 on /media/disk2_1T type ext4 (rw)


Ok, by default ext reserves 5% for root-only usage, after removing that reservation ext4 ist still behind xfs:

tune2fs -m0 /dev/sdd1
Setting reserved blocks percentage to 0% (0 blocks)

df
/dev/sdc1 932G 561G 372G 61% /media/hd51_1T
/dev/sdd1 917G 561G 357G 62% /media/hd53_1T


Conclusion: ext3 reserves 15GByte more administrative space.
Of course, it’s not all about efficiency.

You may call it a PC, you may call it a low-cost Mac-Mini, Microsoft calls it an ULCPC – an ultra low cost PC, I call it an ideal home server. If your Linksys NSLU2 is great but lacks RAM and performance but you do not like the noise and power consumption of a standard PC, then read on.
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Most people have a number of computers and need at NAT device to connect them to the Internet, but in my case I had to solve the opposite problem – I had two internet connections, but just a single computer. With other words: I wanted the computer to be reachable from two different public addresses within two different subnets.
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The Drei “Internet to go” mobile broadband prepaid-package comes with an Option Icon72 USB modem. The original driver supports MS Windows, but of course, running it under Linux is much more interesting.

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Exif infos can be used to rename photos  For example, including the photos date and time into the filename helps to keep photos organized.

I use Irfanview to rename the files. My standard format is _-.jpg.

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At the time of writing there was an ongoing DVB-H trial in Vienna on UHF channel 36 (center frequency 594 MHz).

DVB-H is just a variant of DVB-T, so my idea was to use a DVB-T USB stick to receive DVB-H on my Linux-PC.
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You connecting flight is late. Ok, then let us kill time. First thing you need is a Nokia E61. The list of features sounds great, but when it gets to configure VoIP things become wearied.

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You can find photos taken with my Nokia N70 camera-phone at http://www.flickr.com/photos/zlabinger/ and photos taken with my Sony-Ericsson K800 at http://zlabinger.blogspot.com/ (old photos) and http://zlabinger2.blogspot.com (newer photos).
Dietmar

The official start of the DVB-T simulcast phase in Austria will start in October 2006, but the Kahlenberg station has started test transmisions in July (channel 61, 794 MHz). Now also the Himmelhof Station is on air (same frequency, simulcast with the Kahlenberg station). In lower Austria the Jauerling has begun to transmit DVB-T on channel 68.

A good time to add a DVB-T stick to my server so that I can cache the programming. For now there is only a single channel active, therefore a single USB-stick is sufficient to catch all programs (ORF1, ORF2 (partly split into regional version for Vienna (W) and Lower Austria (NÖ) and ATV).

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