I think I'm addicted to Above & Beyond.  Strangely, I can't seem to find the Anjunabeats Good For Me remix album, at all.  Even the one torrent I found seems to be dead (mostly because Demonoid is dead…).  Any ideas where I can pick it up?

Speaking of trance, I've been listening to a number of Armin van Buuren's State of Trance collections, lately.  The 2006 and 2007 year mixes are quite good.  I'll probably have to wait awhile for the 2008 version, though.

In other news, I'm finally getting some good use out of my new-ish Apple wireless keyboard (yes, the new tiny one that I waited for over a month).  Although I started out hating it, I've slowly gotten used to the small size and don't mind the tiny function keys.  I still have to reach up to my laptop for the PgUp/PgDn keys, and Del key.. annoying.

It looks like autumn has finally come to Charlotte, this year (for all of the three days it lasts):

Quite a blustery day, too.  I suspect all of the leaves will be gone by this evening.

On my way into a Regal theatre on Friday (saw American Gangster - it was pretty good), the kiosk we tried to use ended up rebooting:

I am betting they are not going to pass PCI audits… but you never know!

Over the past few months I've accumulated a number of photos, but failed to post them or categorize.  I think I'm almost caught-up, now.  Visit the photos page for more details.  Included are photos of my recent trip to Coudersport, PA, too.

Oh, this doesn't include labeling them.  That's a larger task.

I came across a few odd/funny/weird things, today…

• USB Necktie with Fan (via Engadget)
• A techno-ish album called ARPANET (I listened to a few tracks, it's not bad!)
• A USB vacuum cleaner

Today is the former fall back day for clocks.  Anything that is an hour behind needs to be updated!  For me, it's my Zaurus, Polycom VoIP phone, and Wii.  I'm actually surprised that the Wii hasn't been corrected during one of Nintendo's routine system updates.  The Polycom… lack of a support contract, and the Zaurus I don't care about.

It appears that router and firewall emulation has been on the rise, lately.

At first, only JUNOS emulators were available in the form of a JUNOS Olive, which is a plain ol' PC running Juniper's modified version of FreeBSD.  Next came Dynamips, which is a MIPS emulator that allows the simulation of several of Cisco Systems' routing platforms.

Now, we're seeing emulators for Cisco Systems' PIX firewalls and fully-featured JUNOS emulators, both based on customized versions of QEMU.  The PIX emulator, pemu is open-source, however, the JUNOS emulator, JQEMU, does not appear to be.

Here's a small list of your emulation/simulation options for Juniper and Cisco gear:

• Cisco 7200/3600/2600 series routers: Dynamips, which works on Linux and Windows under Cygwin
• Juniper M/T-series routers
  1. Olive on VMware Server or Workstation: installation is tricky, no multicast support on em (e1000) devices, and the dcd process will crash on JUNOS < 8.4
  2. Olive on a real PC: need eepro100 NIC's, but works well
  3. Olive on JQEMU: closed-source patch, so it only runs on Windows.  Slow.
• Cisco PIX: pemu

All of them require purchasing the operating system from the vendor, obviously.

I came across gltail (also has a RubyForge site) the other day.  It's an OpenGL log file visualizer tailored for IIS/Apache logs, and is very pretty.  Although watching Apache access logs from dax was interesting, I figured I'd extend it to parse NetScreen traffic logs (500-1000 sessions/sec), too.

Get the patch or browse the directory.  It's really a quick and dirty hack, as I don't claim to know anything about Ruby.