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Finally finished out the IPv6 rollout at the house. Tunnelbroker.net tunnel from my 2801 to he.net up, domain hosted here fully IPv6 with email, rDNS, web, all going good. IRC client running v6 too! Only using a handfull of addresses out of my massive /64 they assigned.

Passed the he.net certification too! As of tonight, I’m highest you can get up to, theres only 1,207certified for it out of probably 12,000 total workingon certs.

Now for the hard part. Dual Stacking the office, datacenter, and all our customers! The crappy thing is the majority of our customers are on old routing hardware, which has no future for v6, so at some point, we’ll have to spend some money.

Progress at work: my BGP peer is up with he.net for announcing our /32, our upstream providers wont be giving us native IPv6 until middle of next year, so tunneling is all we’ve got unless we add on some more bandwidth from another upstream provider with native IPv6… possibility.. Need quotes!

I was trying to calculate average time in MySQL. I had a “time” field. After fooling around I came up with:

 SELECT SEC_TO_TIME( SUM(TIME_TO_SEC(actual_arrival))/COUNT(actual_arrival)) FROM arrival_times;

It actually is pretty fast too.

Epson Perfection 2400 Photo

Reviewed by Michael Palmer

Introduction

The Epson Perfection 2400 scanner is a USB 2.0 film/slide/print scanner for

the “Pro-sumer Market”.

I would only say the Perfection 2400 is a “Pro-sumer” scanner because it has

the ability to scan slides and negatives. Most casual users would only want

to scan prints.

I needed a new scanner that would still do prints, but also do negatives

and slides on a budget, while also supporting both Linux and Windows.

Basic Features

The Perfection 2400 comes standard with a good feature set.

  • 2400 x 4800 DPI
  • “Hi-Speed Scanning”
  • Included Film Strip adapter
    • Up to 6 negatives or 4 slides
  • Four Scanning Buttons
  • USB 2.0 Interface

Out of the box

Pulling the scanner out of the box, the first thing I noticed was the good

packing job, they used a ton of tape to protect the scanner from shipping problems.

Everything was real quick and simple. First, flip the ‘storage’ switch on the back to

unlock, then plug the light-lid into the scanner body,

next plug the power into the wall and into the body, last plug in the USB cable.

Software Setup

Windows:

Windows setup consisted of :

1. Put in CD

2. Follow directions by hitting next a bunch

3. Software loads and works

The Slackware mascot: Tux smoking a pipe like ...
Image via Wikipedia

 

This was a super-simple setup, less hassle than WinAmp.

Linux:

Running Gentoo at home, things are super easy to install. To install this scanner, I did

need to recompile my kernel, currently 2.4.22. I needed to include “USB Scanner Support”,

in addition to the usual USB drivers necessary.

SANE: Next I just ran an ‘emerge xsane’ which takes care of all

the dependences. If I was running Slackware,

I would have downloaded both the sane and xsane packages from linuxpackages.net, or grabbed the source

and compiles according to the instructions in the README or INSTALL file.

Sane Setup was as easy as editing my /etc/sane.d/epson.conf file and switching the port to “/dev/usb/scanner0″.

I’m not going to cover any more setup help, because I thought it was

super easy, If you are having problems, check some forums or something.

Samples

Right now, I’ve only got this: Sign Pic.

I will post more samples soon.

Other Notes

Epson meant for this scanner to only scan 35mm slides and negatives, however in Linux,

the software does not look for the transparency adapter when you are scanning using the

light-lid. I was able to get decent scans from 6×4.5cm negatives, but anything larger will

not fit. In windows, without the transparency adapter, the scanner sits for a while and then

will bring up an error.

Conclusion

The Epson Perfection 2400 is a great scanner for the money.

Advantages:

  • Easy to use
  • Works excellent in both windows and Linux
  • Scans Slides and negatives as well as prints
  • Super Quick preview
  • Fairly Quiet while scanning
  • Excellent Quality for the money

Disadvantages:

  • Doesn’t handle medium format. If I want to scan medium format and have all the same functionality,

    I have to buy the Epson 3200 Photo, or locate an old (now discontinued) Perfection 2450.

  • The blackout for the light lid is a little cheap/flimsy and not easy to put in when your hands are full

I’ve been using Postfix / Spamassassin / Amavisd-new / Procmail for a while now. The wierd thing is mail that goes to an alias from /etc/aliases doesnt get X-Spam-Status headers written to it.

I’ve been using a procmail recipe to fix this problem. Anyone have an idea of how to fix this within postfix?

Jeez, I keep forgetting to write about LinuxWorld.. First of all, sitting on a bed and using the laptop gets very uncomfortable after about 20 minutes in one position.

The weather has been great here.. high 50′s at night and high 60′s in the daytime.. The conference has been great, got so much free stuff, im going to have to get a box for all this stuff and check it as baggage. HP Announced this morning that they’ll be selling linux laptops pre-installed with SUSE 9.1. I thought that was pretty neat. After two days of drawings, I have yet to win the Sharp Zarus. One more chance tomorrow.. Intel had a pretty cool party last night, they had a guy with a chainsaw doing an ice sculpture of an “intel inside” logo.

I happened apon a sign that said “Gentoo Community Meeting” which was excellent, cause I got to sit around and have a beer with the Gentoo dev team and discuss current problems and upcoming ideas for about two hours.

Today I walked about 4 miles round trip to see the ‘Painted Ladies’ which is the victorian houses in the begining of the “Full House” TV show. It was pretty neat, used almost a whole roll of film on them.

Had some excellent chinese food for dinner with a “Fat Tire” which went suprisingly well together.

Anyways, tomorrow is the last day of the conference, then im back to Houston.

Made it to San Francisco this afternoon for Linux World. The weather is real nice, about 68 degrees right now.. The hotel is decent, but the wireless seems to be flaky, it’s acting like a linksys router or something.. every minute or so it drops me. I’ve got the same issues in linux and windows with both my broadcom b/g minipci and my orinoco gold.. so im using my orinoco with the externa mag mount antenna.. good thing i brought it, found another access point not owned by the hotel, which provides a much more stable connection, just a weak signal.

Walked around downtown SFA this afternoon, I ate at a subway. It reminds me a lot of NY, but not as busy. LOTS of homeless people, it was kind of scary with my camera on my hip, had to hold it so it wouldn’t get jacket.. I ended up wandering into the Apple store with the glass staircase. It was pretty neat. I got a pic in B&W of the staircase.

Nothing on TV, just making sure I’ve got everything on the laptop for tomorrow morning. I think I’m gonna go to bed pretty early tonight and get some rest so I can be up early tomorrow.

Been running SpamAssassin on the mail server for quite some time.
The following .cf files have reduced the amount of spam by a noticable bit.

http://www.stearns.org/sa-blacklist/sa-blacklist.current
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/mkettler/sa/antidrug.cf
http://www.merchantsoverseas.com/wwwroot/gorilla/bigevil.cf

Throw them in your /etc/mail/spamassassin/ directory and restart spamd. Oh yeah, make sure and : “mv sa-blacklist.current 50blacklist.cf“.
Make sure you keep them up to date, that way you will be blocking all the new stuff..