I don’t know why I keep doing this, but here’s a roundup of current tech deals that seem enticing to me:

• HP tx2z laptop, $650. 12.1″ LED-backlit screen (multi-touch), a Turion X2 processor (AMD dual-core), a 320GB disk and Radeon HD3200 video card, webcam, fingerprint reader, and a DeskJet printer. Here’s the link at HP, which doesn’t mention how you can save several hundred dollars.
• Hitachi SATA 2.5″ notebook drive, 100GB 7200RPM with a 16MB cache. $39.99 at NewEgg.
• Acer X203Wbd, 20″ LCD at 1680×1050, $139.99 at NewEgg. Fairly good reviews, too.
• Linksys WRT54GL router, the one that runs Linux so well, $60 at NewEgg.
• Toshiba laptop, dual-core Intel, 15.4″ (with a crappy 1280×800 resolution), 3GB RAM, 250GB (crappy 5400rpm) disk, Vista Home Premium, and a “SuperMulti” DVD drive, $499.99 at NewEgg.
• USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter, $25 at NewEgg. Very handy. I guess it doesn’t support SATAII, but it’ll do SATAI and 2.5/3.5″ IDE, great for reading data off of old hard drives. (Or for people who want a backup hard drive but are too lazy to buy one in a case with a USB cord.) It includes a power supply so you can power the drives. Some people seem to be confused or have trouble, though I have not.

Some of us at work were talking over lunch about Google’s servers. There are apparently hundreds of thousands of them, and it’s well-known that they’re based on commodity x86 hardware. Otherwise, they’ve been pretty secretive.

The article came out on April 1st, so many are a little doubtful about its veracity, but its seems fairly believable. Apparently, the Google machines have integrated 12V batteries in lieu of UPSs, and the servers are hosted in shipping crates.

The Digg conversation also makes mentions of GoogleFS, their proprietary in-house filesystem that apparently makes it easy to stripe data across many servers. (Hadoop is loosely an open-source version of the same, though it’s not entirely the same.)

Edit: I included the link this time. After a while I started to doubt the veracity of this article. I’ll expand on some of my thoughts about why it seems odd in teh comments, but wanted to link to this Twitter post that seems to confirm the veracity of this article. Note that it’s dated April 2, which makes me think there’s better than a 50/50 shot that this is real. And this guy is either in on the prank, or corroborates that this was actually presented at a workshop.

This blog post isn’t about Firefox, the leading* web browser. I really do mean Foxfire.

I was going to open with a really nerdy explanation of bioluminescence, the scientific term for biological organisms (i.e., things that aren’t chemically-altered glowsticks) that glow in the dark. But that doesn’t sound interesting. (But do click through the Wikipedia link to see glow-in-the-dark waves.)

So I’ll cut to the chase. Foxfire is a mushroom that glows in the dark, and is apparently fairly common. What’s weird is that it appears as if it was widely known by people like Benjamin Franklin, but is now entirely unknown to people who don’t read my blog.

• Among my tech-savvy peers, at least.

Does anyone else remember the days when Nessus was a GPL’ed application? It was a top-notch security scanning tool. While nmap is a really powerful port scanner, Nessus was more targeted at helping administrators and auditors spot vulnerabilities in their network. As I recall it, people kept taking GPL’ed Nessus and trying to pass it off as their own commercial product, making a pretty penny on GPL’ed software. The Nessus developers were understandably annoyed, but they did something I wish they hadn’t: they became a commercial service.

It’s still a free download, but it’s kind of like anti-virus software (actually, a lot like anti-virus software) in that they steer you into paying for updates. The version I downloaded appears to be several months behind.

The reason I downloaded it was that I had heard it had been updated to detect Conficker machines. The media had hyped Conficker as an incredibly destructive virus, so I thought I’d set myself up with some tools to detect infestations. It’s always important to be prepared against infestations.

I certainly don’t wish malice on anyone, but I have to say that I was disappointed to see what a failure Conficker was. I don’t know a single person affected by it. It’s kind of like SARS, which after months and months of being hyped as the end of the world, turned out to cause something like 20 fatalities across the world. It was practically a joke. (Except to the 20 people who died.)

If you download the latest nmap, it’s capable of picking up Conficker-infested machines, too. If you check out the changelog, don’t miss “The compile-time Nmap ASCII dragon is now more ferocious thanks to better teeth alignment.”

People who watch their logs closely (or who drive to the datacenter and end up looking at the console on a front-end webserver) may occasionally see messages like “TCP treason uncloaked” on Linux boxes.

The conspiracy theorists say that it’s hacking attempts and that it crashes Apache. Most of these conversations are at least 5 years old.

The networking experts point out that this is nonsense, and it’s actually just a notification that the remote host shrunk its receive window size more than expected. It’s kind of a nonsensical condition, but it’s not exactly, well, treason.

But here’s a new one: it’s also sometimes caused by a kernel bug. It’s been fixed since 2.6.14 (based on the last comment here), but many, many people run old versions in production. Though actually, the systems I’m seeing this error on are newer than that, meaning it’s not affected by the kernel bug.

So for people seeing the error, it’s usually pretty much worthless data. (Similarly, lp0 is not actually on fire.)

Sorry April Fools’ Day lasted 3 days. I got kind of busy and forgot all about it until just now.

Also, is Fools’ (plural possessive) correct? I don’t see it spelled out often. Is it a day ‘owned’ by fools, or does “fools” refer more to “tomfoolery?”

Sorry I’m constantly rearranging the site. I just can’t get something I like. I tried to go for a more classic appearance this time. What do you think?

I suspect my situation really isn’t that different from a lot of people. I get a lot of e-mail every day. Easily 250 messages on a good day, and well over 1,000 on a bad day. I get a copy of every error that occurs on our site, an e-mail for every cron job that runs anywhere, and a whole lot of other junk. I have Exchange set up to filter my mail before it lands in my Inbox, which helps keep me sane.

Some mail I want to keep forever. I consult my “Sent Items” folder often enough that I don’t intend to ever purge it. Same goes for my “Archival – Keep” folder. But I also have a lot of folders on the mailserver that are basically holding tanks. Periodically I go through and clean out the accumulated crap. I realize I don’t need copies of errors that occured in January, or cron jobs from December, and go crazy deleting things.

There are a few problems with that. The biggest, really, is that it’s a waste of my time. But I’m sitting here blogging about it, so I can’t complain about that. 😉

The other one is that Exchange (and probably any other mailserver) really, really hates it when you highlight 10,000 messages and hit delete. And by “Exchange really, really hates it,” I mean you start hearing everyone in the office asking each other, “Is e-mail down for you, too?” So I learned my lesson and wrote nice-delete.pl, a simple little Perl script using Net::IMAP to grab a list of all mail in a folder and iterate over the messages, deleting 50, expunging the mailbox, and then sleeping for 3 seconds. That keeps the load down.

I’ve thought about extending it to run weekly via cron, download each message, and check the headers to see if it’s older than, say, 21 days, and just trash it if so. But then I realized: I use Thunderbird, which has an ungodly amount of plugins. Surely, someone has written this before!

Unless my Google-fu is failing me, though, no one has. Is it really that uncommon of a request to want to auto-purge certain folders after a while? And, more importantly, what does it take to write a Thunderbird extension?