2010 is starting out nicely.

I finally got my ATI DCT setup working properly with Windows Media Center, today.  It only took the technicians five trips to my condo, four CableCARDs, two Cisco STA1520 tuning adapters, and tons of eMails and phone calls with Time Warner Cable (they were, of course, very helpful!).

So, now I can tune and record all HD and premium channels (including SDV ones) on my Windows 7 box.  Unfortunately, most of the channels have the broadcast flag set, so the recorded WTV files are pretty useless.

The guide isn't half bad, but the whole thing is pretty laggy.  Maybe I'll shuffle around PC parts when I pick up a Core i9, if Intel ever releases it.

WordNet cracks me up, sometimes:

(dax:19:32)% dict -d wn frigid
1 definition found

From WordNet (r) 2.0 [wn]:

  frigid
       adj 1: sexually unresponsive; "was cold to his advances"; "a frigid
              woman" [syn: {cold}]
       2: extremely cold; "an arctic climate";  "a frigid day"; "gelid
          waters of the North Atlantic"; "glacial winds"; "icy
          hands"; "polar weather" [syn: {arctic}, {gelid}, {glacial},
           {icy}, {polar}]
       3: devoid of warmth and cordiality; expressive of
          unfriendliness or disdain; "a frigid greeting"; "got a
          frosty reception"; "a frozen look on their faces"; "a
          glacial handshake"; "icy stare"; "wintry smile" [syn: {frosty},
           {frozen}, {glacial}, {icy}, {wintry}]

So, umm, it's COLD outside, today.  I'm going to avoid the word frigid, I think.

 _   _                           ____   ___  _  ___  _ 
| | | | __ _ _ __  _ __  _   _  |___ \ / _ \/ |/ _ \| |
| |_| |/ _` | '_ \| '_ \| | | |   __) | | | | | | | | |
|  _  | (_| | |_) | |_) | |_| |  / __/| |_| | | |_| |_|
|_| |_|\__,_| .__/| .__/ \__, | |_____|\___/|_|\___/(_)
            |_|   |_|    |___/                         

I spent the last hour or so of 2009 trying to fix Wi-Fi deauthentication errors on my Wii, after putting Linux on it, for some reason.

Did Fox go out for any Time Warner Cable subscribers?

I saw Avatar (in 3D!) on Saturday.  Although the plot was fairly simple, I thought the special effects, character development, and magical-like "aura" (for lack of a better term) surrounding the Na'vi and Pandora itself was outstanding.  However, as with James Cameron's last blockbuster, the theme was pretty simple.  It's something like this:

• Titanic: Rich people suck
• Avatar: Humans suck

Ok, perhaps that's a little generalized, but honestly that's how I left the theatre after seeing both movies.

In other news, I thought this was humorous.

Merry Christmas!

We had a large family gathering at my parents' house and lots of presents.  Two of my interesting gifts included the following:

It's an infrared thermometer.  Apparently my IBM T42 is 36.4°C.

I saw quite a few mentions of Scapy as I was flipping through the book.  Should be a fun read.. or at least a good excuse to exercise my lack of Python knowledge (although I have been writing some little Python scripts to talk to the BlueZ stack via D-Bus, over the last few days).

I got fed up with the inability to turn off the camera sound on my Nokia E72, so I started searching around for a fix.  Two things I found:

• cCam: Alternative camera software for S60 3rd edition phones that features silent operation.
• CenRepPatch: A patch to disable the camera sound when the "Warning Tones" option is switched off.

I went with the second option.  It worked.  No more annoying camera sounds!

It seems more and more operating systems are moving away from the IPv4-mapped IPv6 address transition mechanism and setting the socket option IPV6_V6ONLY by default.  Is it too soon for this?  Is this going to hurt IPv6 deployment?  Think about scared system administrators who deploy dual-stack and then find out later that all their IPv6-aware applications suddenly start rejecting IPv4 connections…

What are these IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses that I speak of?  If you didn't click on the Wikipedia link above, it's part of a transitionary mechanism that allows applications to easily convert to a dual-stack model by listening on an IPv6 socket only.  With the transition mechanism in place, any application binding to :: will also cause the kernel to open up a corresponding listening socket on 0.0.0.0, allowing the application to listen on both IPv4 and IPv6.  Any IPv4 connections to the application will be seen as ::ffff:.  For example: ::ffff:192.168.1.1.  The IPV6_V6ONLY socket option disables this behavior.

Section 5.3 of RFC3493 apparently says the default option is off.  Does this mean that operating systems that enable IPV6_V6ONLY by default are violating the RFC?

FreeBSD enabled IPV6_V6ONLY a few years ago in the form of ipv6_ipv4mapping="NO" in /etc/default/rc.conf.  It's easy to disable by setting ipv6_ipv4mapping="YES" in /etc/rc.conf.  Debian recently added net.ipv6.bindv6only=1 in /etc/sysctl.d/bindv6only.conf as part of the netbase 4.40 upgrade.  This, of course, generated a bug report on the subject.  Rationale for the change, as listed in the bug report, is here.

For me, I need IPV6_V6ONLY disabled on both FreeBSD and Linux.  jabberd2 on FreeBSD has major dual-stack issues (I reported one of them awhile back, but it's yet to be fixed) and Courier IMAP on Linux seems to still rely IPV6_V6ONLY being off due to the presence of IPv4-mapped IPv6 addresses in all the logs.

Well, I tried to upgrade to VMware Workstation 7.0 on my aging IBM T42.  It doesn't work, since the Pentium M 745 processor doesn't support PAE.  VMware has a KB article discussing the change:

Due to changes in how Workstation 7 runs virtual machines, a new requirement is that host system CPUs must support PAE (Physical Address Extension) instructions. This was not a requirement in Workstation 6.x or earlier. Contact your CPU vendor to determine if your CPU has support for PAE.

I guess this is yet another indication I should toss the T42?