I think we all knew that they where coming, and that they where going to bring out a 30 inch but they still shock as a stunning piece of technology that is beautiful to boot. The 30 inch is obviously massive, and sports a 2560 x 1600 resolution - enough for a full Final Cut Pro instance or well over a hundred logic channels. To achieve this is must be matched to an Nvidia 6800 Ultra DDL Graphics card - which is of course the new top of the range Nvidia GForce and a departure from ATI

Of course the new 20 and 23 are equally stunning and perhaps a little more managable in day to day use, not that alot of people would take this into account if cost where no option, but even so the prices arn’t bad for what is still a premium product from any manufacturer. I Want one!

Well, its been along time since the last post, since then I have been to Norway and back and had a great time. Got to see abit more of Norway as we borrowed a car and went for a trip to Hardangefjord, and stayed in a hotel in Lofthus with an amazing view.

I have uploaded the photos onto my photo share at: http://share.timc3.com/index.php?view=thumb&dir=norway so that you can see them.

The rest of the time as you can see was spent lazying by the sea and various lakes and eating with friends. I can completely recommend going to Norway if you get the chance.

In the meantime I have been back I have been getting back into the swing of things at work, got myself a Korg Electribe ER1 on ebay (probably more on that when I get the chance) and working on new versions of my Applications.

As reported by BBC news, those uncannily up2date Norwegians have been trying out TV on their phones, using a Streaming download service from network NRK. I presume as the users don’t have to have a player that its running from a Java applet, though the Nokia phone pictured does have RealPlayer installed by default.

So far the reported take up has been 2000 streams, which seems about right as although the countries new technology take up is high from what I gather from the last Norwegian dinner party I was invited to, its not always technology for technology sake that interests but purely gaining a better life for those involved. To what way TV on a mobile phone can improve life beyond relieving boredom on commutes or allowing the main users of phones, pre teens, to watch some pointlessly boring reality TV show remains to be seen.

Of course this isn’t stopping the BBC in offering its archive (cleverly already paid for by the Great British Public television licensing scheme and sales abroad) to mobile operators in the UK, which as reported by same news article could mean that the commute to work could be whiled away with a hotelier from Torquay battering a sapling against an austin 1300 instead of watching the next wave of incoming commuters on increasingly packed cattle trucks.

Though as a side note, if my other theory is correct we will just be sharing said cattle truck with increasingly gormless teens watching whatever rubbish our TV programmers have declared to be the next money making fad, perhaps even with phone integration to take a step towards 20 years of promised interactivity with our google-sets.

Been purchasing some new books and some secondhand bExpressions book from OReilly which I throughly recommend.

And then I have order several books secondhand from http://www.alibris.com/ and they have been in excellent condition, and you can find some real bargins

Found this very useful site the other day that has some interesting articles including these:

• Windows XP AVI problems
• Compression Utilities Comparison
• Serial ATA guide

In fact there are alot more interesting articles on there so go and checkout http://www.rojakpot.com

A while ago I posted that I had managed to get a VPN between Checkpoint NG and a smoothwall personal firewall. This setup was a rather regular one, with Express 2.0 release of smoothwall and r54 checkpoint running on a Nokia with the latest security patches enabled.

I’ve actually updated and had an even easier time with openswan on the same setup and for ease of administration through the Smoothwall web GUI I installed the modification VPN pack 3. This is great when both ends of the firewall have public IP addresses on the outside, but what happens when they are nat’td?. As it happens this is the same setup that I wanted to achieve with another network.

Firstly as I am using fairly standard linux tools on the smoothwall end there is no reason that you can’t set this up on anything that supports openswan and NAT traversing. Secondly the checkpoint was still on a fixed public IP and I haven’t tested this on anything else.

The easiest way of setting this up was to install the network traversal patched kernel which provides the 2.4.26 kernel with a ESPinUDP patch, this should be installed after all the fixes, openswan and VPN pack 3. Once this is installed and rebooted, input all the default information such as the IP address of the outside address, the inside subnet. And create a new profile. I was using just 3DES encryption so input these into the IKE and ESP parameters field, and saved. After this create a new connection.

The left address but the IP address of the Red (outside) interface, and in subnet put the inside IP address range with subnet. In the ID field put the outside IP Address of the router. The right corresponds to the remote interface, so in the address field put the outside IP address, and in the subnet put the inside network information with subnet. For the security information put in all the IKE and ESP as above. And thats basically it. On the checkpoint side see my old entry as this still applies and that should be basically it. Any questions send me an email.

A new release of Mozilla Firefox, 0.9, has been released. If you feel like an early adopter and losing most of your extensions and plugins then go and download it. Its good, perhaps in some ways better than the old version but I am finding some display bugs though this could be down to my PC struggling. http://www.mozilla.org

woohoo! So someone was good enough to give me an invite, yes its still invite only, to set myself up on gmail so I now have the timchild at gmail address with 1Gb of space. First impressions, its very google like, very fast and very easy to use (unless their DNS servers go haywire and then I might as well post email).

The next thing that I want to do is to import all my email from the last 10 years into here so I can nicely index and search on things (a feature that really works!). This would be a great feature, although already I know that one of the major uses of it is trading MP3s Not something that I would think google thought about with their 10mb attachment limit.

Other than that its pretty damn cool, though now I have so many addresses anyone wanting to get in touch will probably get overly confused, and my yahoo account has just gone up to 100mb. There search isn’t quite on the same level though.

So, you might have experienced some traffic outages or you couldn’t get to google, yahoo, microsoft or apple yesterday. As this: http://arstechnica.com/news/posts/1087311151.html arstechnica article explains it was down to Akamai having an outage with their DNS servers, and they provide the DNS for those and other sites as they are mean’t to be highly reliable.

Apart from the good side effect that they mean that you might actually get on with something more productive instead of wasting countless hours on the web it just shows how fragile the DNS system and parts of the internet could be. Thinking about it, most links now are quite fragile be it, your local hardware (computer, router, cabling), your power source and/or others, you ADSL connection and dialup-backup, your providers links and routes out into the internet, there equipment, their peering arrangements, routing protocols, DNS protocols, DNS caching and the list keeps going on.

The original DARPA project is but a distant memory for a few and for the masses just another part of techie history, but I would have thought that the legacy of redundancy it provided would have lived on but this isn’t the case. I can’t say I expect the local end of the loop to be redundent but I would have thought DNS and other services would keep on following.

DNS is now needed for large parts of internet traffic to flow correctly, from your email though to getting in touch of various servers it is all reliant on this strange system (even for someone that has read several books on the subject, reads the Bind list and runs a small DNS server it is strange), true IP addresses and IPv6 are nasty to look at and remember but they are the most fool proof solution we have at the moment. We will have to wait until a much bigger outage until something major happens to resolve these issues.

I really ought to remember how to do this, but I am upgrading my home firewall because I was running an older version of smoothwall and I forgot how to put the manual probing of the network card information in. For next time:

ne io=0×220,0×300 irq=5,4

I must say that smoothwall is coming on leaps and bounds with each release and if you need a firewalling or sharing solution for your home no matter how much knowledge you have this is a great product. Try not to use NE2000 (realtek) network cards and you will get on fine, otherwise you have to be probing around trying to find irqs and io addresses.

Out of the box smoothwall supports all the niceties that you can imagine from a firewall including, caching server, intrusion detection, DHCP - but if there is a feature that it doesn’t have the very active community probably has a fix. IPCop is also very good, but I prefer the Smoothwall community at the moment so I will be sticking with that for the foreseable future.