Archive for March 2003

Go download Mozilla 1.3

Mozilla Logo I’ve just updated my [Debian][] system for the first time in a long while, and part of the update was Mozilla 1.3. Mozilla was already the best browser out there, but it’s just got even better :-)

What really cought my eye with this release is how smooth everything is. The whole interface looks absolutely fantastic thanks to antialised fonts everywhere. Antialised fonts really make a huge difference in the visual appearance making Mozilla look much more professional and it’s also much easier on the eyes.

I also installed livehttpheaders which makes it possible to see the HTTP headers that Mozilla sends to webservers and the responces it get in return. I’ve already found this very useful for testing the latest CVS version of [PhpWiki][] which caches the output from parsing the WikiMarkup. This should lighten the load on the webserver, for now it’s possible for it to return a 304 Not Modified header instead of the actual data. I’m not sure how much the processing this skips on the PhpWiki side, but it does reduce the bandwidth. I’ll put that version here on GimpsterDotCom when I’ve moved my patches to the old version. Since I’m using PhpWiki as the backend of GimpsterDotCom, I’m also changing it in small ways all the time. I try to get these changes back into the CVS repository when I can, but there’s always a difference between the “stock” CVS version and the code I have.

Back from Aalborg

I’m back at [Skejbygård][] again after visiting my mom, dad, and Kristoffer in the weekend. As you can tell from my schedule I don’t have any classes on Fridays, so I could get on a train for Aalborg Thursday evening — it had been a long time since my last visit to Aalborg and then of course it was my dads birthday.

This bunny killed censorship I left my computer on while I was away with FreeNet running. I checked on it regulary over a SSH connection (I really love SSH, it’s so cool to be able to login securely when you’re away from your machine!) to see how the load was and to read some mail.

My node saw an incredible amount of requests, the average number of requests per hour was around 30,000 most of the time, but I also saw it rise to 60,000(!) once. This made my node reject all incoming requests most of the time because all threads were in use. I can raise the number of available threads and open connections, but it wont be before I get a new computer, for I simply don’t have enough RAM and CPU power to do it.

I am connected to the Internet through Bolignet-Aarhus and there was a constant load of about 90 KiB/s on the connection. This was split between 25 KiB/s downstream and 65 KiB/s upstream. And it wasn’t me who asked my node to download this stuff — my datastore had grown to over 7.5 GiB when I got home, when I left it was about 6 GiB.

So, FreeNet it definitely working. Whether or not the contents on it is interesting is another thing, but the techonoligy works and that kind of cool.

More about FreeNet

This bunny killed censorship The network has been buzzing with activity after FreeNet got mentioned on SlashDot, I’m seeing a constant total throughput of about 50 KiB/s from my node, split between about 35 KiB/s upstream and 15 KiB/s downstream.

This means that the effect of “plausible deniability” is starting to make sense. This is the argument that I cannot be blamed for the things on my machine because I probably didn’t put them there myself. Or rather, it’s a defence against the case where someone requests some information from FreeNet and sees that my machine supplies it to them. Every node on FreeNet knows the IP addresses of it’s neighbours, and it know where it got each piece of information from.

But things work a little different on FreeNet than on most other networks. The mere act of requesting information moves it around the network, so just because you got it from my machine, it’s hard for you to justify your claim that I had something to do with it. It could infact be your request that made my machine go get the information from another node, so who’s to blame now?

It’s these questions that make FreeNet interesting from a teoretical point of view. If you’re interested in the legal implications of technoligies like FreeNet, then you should go and read this article from the UCLA Journal of Law and Techonology.

New computer

I’m beginning to play with the idea of buying a new computer — my old system feels old, especially after I’ve begun using FreeNet.

The focus on my new machine will be low noise — I aim for no noise at all, but that’s probably a bit hard to achive. As it can be seen here, it is actually possible to build a desktop PC without any moving parts(!) but the performance suffer.

So a little noise is probably innevitable… but there’s no reason to put in more fans that I have to, so I wont buy a motherboard or graphcscard with a fan on it. How come every little chip needs acitve cooling these days?

I’ve been browsing the ‘net a little, and have come up with a list of components, but I’m still very open to suggestions, if any of you have experience with building low-noise systems.

Intel Pentium 4 at 2.8 GHz: This should be a nice step up from the AMD Athlon 900MHz I have now…

Zalman CNPS7000-Cu: The tests I’ve read indicate that this is a good low-noise cooler.

Asus P4PE: This board has onboard LAN, audio and serial ATA. Does anybody know if the onboard audio works in GnuLinux? I’ve read that some boards support “Dual DDR RAM” which should increase the memory bandwidth further — is this something that works?

512 or perhaps even 1024 MiB DDR-SDRAM PC3500: I hope this fits together with the CPU and motherboard? From what I’ve figured out about these numbers, PC3500 RAM is the same as DDR433? But I haven’t seen a motherboard that supports this speed, infact I’ve only seen motherboards supporting up to PC2700. Any comments?

proSilence silentmaxx proSilence: This is a power supply without a fan! The idea of having a power supply without a fan sound absolutely wonderful to me, for it’s my current power supply that produces most of the noise from my current system. But I wonder how this will affect the air-flow in the case?

There’s a very recent English review here. It actually looks like this unit is very new, it’s in back-order everywhere I’ve looked, including http://www.silentmaxx.de/ which appears to be the main reseller.

Seagate Baracuda V SATA: From what I’ve read around the ‘net, this should be the most silent harddrive available. Or rather, the Baracuda IV should be the most silent drive available, but I would rather have this newer model.

If you have any comments or suggestions for my new super low-noise system, then please either mail them to me at mgeisler@mgeisler.net, or place them directly in the page. Just write some stuff, I’ll always be able to edit it after I’ve read it.


Sounds like a pretty cool system. For my next pc I’ll definitely also go for an Intel P4 CPU. –Kristian Kristensen

Yes, now I just have to find out when this funky power supply will be available in Denmark, and how much it will cost. I’m afraid that it will be rather expensive though…

Visit GimpsterDotCom in FreeNet!

Activelink for GimpsterDotCom I’ve now succesfully inserted GimpsterDotCom in FreeNet using the fcptools package. Go to GimpsterDotCom/1// and give my site a try! Like every other site on FreeNet, GimpsterDotCom has it’s own ActiveLink — it’s the little image on the right. So if you stumble over this image while browsing FreeNet, then click on it :-)

The site will be edition based, so that I can insert a new edition whenever I feel like. I’ll try and make a new edition a couple of times a week as the WikiWikiWeb at GimpsterDotCom is updated. Because the FreeNet edition is a mirror of the live www.gimpster.com then it’s easy to put comments on the pages by editing them on the real Internet. I know that this is isn’t anonymous, but on the other hand: there’s nothing at GimpsterDotCom that should require you to be anonymous. But I could insert a NIM (Near Instant Messaging) board if it seams worth is.

Ups, wrong key!

Some of you might have noticed, that the link above has changed from edition 6 to edition 1. This is because I’ve generated a new set of keys. I suddenly realised, that I had managed to use the public key with fcpputsite where it expected the private key. So my site ended up under a third key with a nice mixture of private and public keys in the links in the HTML code :-) I hope I’ve got things under control now.