ACME Updates

What's new at ACME Laboratories!

03jan2005:

Added a trivial program to display a formatted date for a given file: file_date.

21dec2004:

We were off the net for an hour again this morning while SBC and Covad switched in a new phone line.

20dec2004:

Another XIP tweak, to throw an exception for one more type of malformed XML file.

19dec2004:

Trivial fix to XIP; the header file was missing a couple of consts it should have had.

17dec2004:

acme.com was off the net from 10am on Thursday the 16th until 1pm today - 27 hours! There was a real three-way clusterfuck going on between Speakeasy, SBC, and Covad. The SBC guy showed up promptly, checked the line, and said there was a short-circuit in Covad's part. Speakeasy then dropped the ball until I called them at 5pm. Covad showed up at noon Friday and said it's SBC's problem. They are going to meet here on Monday and sort it out. Meanwhile I can keep things going by rebooting the DSL modem whenever it loses the link.

14dec2004:

A couple of minor enhancements to the timegraph program in the date_parse package.

05dec2004:

First release of copy_exif, a little utility program for copying EXIF data from one JPEG file to another.

02dec2004:

We had an hour-long power outage this morning, but the system stayed up due to the massive UPS I installed this spring. It's an APC Back-UPS RS1500 ($227) plus an RS/XS auxillary battery pack ($123). Very nice.

28nov2004:

First release of graymilter, a very simple graylisting milter.

27nov2004:

TerraServer has added hi-resolution color images for some urban areas, so I added them to the ACME Mapper.

24sep2004:

Added sensor size, sensor type, and pixel pitch to the digital camera database. Also, we passed 400 camera listings!

14sep2004:

First release of sfcmilter, designed to work alongside spfmilter and plug a hole in the design of SPF.

28may2004:

Another new milter released: spfmilter, which implements the SPF mail-forgery prevention protocol.

18may2004:

First (very beta) release of blackmilter, a mail filtering module for blacklisting large numbers of IP addresses.

14may2004:

Wrote sample_milter, an example of a sendmail mail filtering module.

06may2004:

Acme.com is now running Clam AV, an anti-worm/virus mail filter. Before installing this we were getting about three worms per second, using up about 1/4 of the DSL line's bandwidth. Clam AV rejects them earlier in the mail transaction, saving some CPU cycles and possibly even some bandwidth by shutting them down before the entire worm gets transmitted.

01may2004:

Acme.com has switched to the real new server, still running over a DSL line to my office. Details on the hardware page.

17mar2004:

Acme.com has switched to a temporary new server running over a DSL line to my office. Details on the hardware page.

16feb2004:

In honor of Precedence Day, I made an HTML version of this table.

19dec2003:

Released version 1.19 of mini_httpd and 2.25 of thttpd.

26oct2003:

Released new versions of mini_httpd and thttpd.

18aug2003:

The digital camera database passed 300 listings today.

21mar2003:

And 1000 boards today!

18mar2003:

Boardfinder passed 900 boards today.

12oct2002:

Finished the initial data entry for the digital camera database. 189 cameras listed!

05oct2002:

Opened up a new database for digital cameras. Only 19 entries so far but I'll add more soon.

15aug2002:

Boardfinder reached 800 boards today.

23jul2002:

Added a date_merge program to the date_parse package.

26may2002:

Released new beta versions of mini_httpd and thttpd.

25may2002:

Completely updated the Build-A-PC page. I'm particularly happy with the redone memory page. Also the Boardfinder is now up to 582 boards.

17apr2002:

Added a few new features to the ACME Mapper: it remembers your previous settings and start location; you can mark a location and get the distance and direction from there; the Save Map page displays the "World File" parameters of the map; and you can turn the little red dot off if you like.

26mar2002:

Updated phoon to use the latest verison of date_parse.

18mar2002:

Added a new feature to http_get - now the exit status reflects the HTTP response code.

04jan2002:

Minor update to date_parse.

04jan2002:

Updated all my network software to be IPv6-ready.

02jan2002:

Added 18 fonts to the Label Maker.

19dec2001:

We are now serving our entire web tree via HTTPS as well as regular HTTP. Same content, slower but more secure service.

07dec2001:

Updated the FreeBSD firewall tutorial to reflect FreeBSD 4.x and IPv6.

04dec2001:

Rewrote some of the Boardfinder's shell scripts in C for speed. Now searching is basically instant.

29nov2001:

Updated the Boardfinder with about seventy new boards, cleaned up broken links, and added AGP Pro.

14nov2001:

New version of http_load with a bunch of new features - settable timeout, HTTP response-code histogram, random source-IP, SSL cipher specification.

12nov2001: Released new beta versions of mini_httpd and thttpd.

09nov2001:

Minor update to mini_sendmail.

26aug2001:

Added email capability to the Label Maker, License Maker, and Heart Maker. You can mail yourself the images you make.

14aug2001:

Had to reboot to change IP addresses.

10aug2001:

The ACME Mapper is open for business. This is a topographic & photographic mapping system based on Terraserver, with some significant improvements.

09aug2001:

Released coords, a set of geographical coordinate conversion routines.

01aug2001:

I finished a total re-write of my photography web pages & scripts. Now it's completely database-driven. The system currently has 1650 photos, using 329 MB.

16jul2001:

Added a few more boards to Boardfinder, bringing the total to 405. Also sped up the searching, which was getting a little slow with that many boards.

15jul2001:

mini_sendmail updated.

20jun2001:

A geographic / photographic database of Berkeley Creeks.

12may2001:

Released revpar, to reverse files by paragraphs.

11may2001:

Released http_ping, a little program to measure HTTP latency.

09may2001:

The folks at watches.acme.com sent me a free Zippo lighter engraved with "ACME LABS"! It's very nice.

08may2001:

A rolling blackout hit explosive.net, and due to a loose power cable the battery backup had much less capacity than planned. We were down for about half an hour.

23apr2001:

thttpd version 2.21b released - had to do a quick fix to a problem that was causing the server to hang.

20apr2001:

thttpd version 2.21 released.

02apr2001:

Added to the ACME family of vanity domain names: longpork.com and poskanzer.org. Also I officially enabled the free email systems on all the domains.

01apr2001:

The first month of ads from Aaddzz ended up bringing in $504.52, which is not bad. The distribution was uneven - there were many days with only a few bucks, and then there were a few days with more than $60. Anyway, I'll keep them for now.

The donations page has brought in $225.20 through PayPal, $167.80 through Amazon, and $200 direct, for a total of $593.00 in two months. That's also not bad!

14mar2001:

ACME Labs received a $200 donation from Maniacal Contributor Arvind Ghanekar. Woo hoo!

06mar2001:

Looks like that first $30 day at Aaddzz was some sort of fluke. $5/day is more like it. Oh well, that's acceptable. I'm making more off direct donations though.

05mar2001:

The first ACME Labs banner ad is up and running on Aaddzz. I made it using pbmplus and the labelmaker. It's not beautiful but it gets the message across.

04mar2001:

www.acme.com was down most of today due to a power plug being not completely plugged in at explosive. Oh well, I guess they're not perfect.

02mar2001:

We have started running banner ads from Aaddzz. They seem like a pretty good broker. For example, they let publishers set options like maximum ad size in bytes, and whether to disallow animated ads. First day's commissions were about $30, or $900/month, which is not bad at all if it keeps up. That's about twice what I was making at Burst! Media, my previous broker. I also got about $20 of "promotional" money, which can be used to run my own ads on other Aaddzz sites. Guess I have to come up with an ACME Labs banner now.

23feb2001:

Explosive moved their operation tonight, including this machine. About 3.5 hours downtime, no apparent problems.

21feb2001:

All your candy are belong to us.

20feb2001:

The Heart Maker was made Cruel Site of the Day. Another 10000 visitors!

15feb2001:

The Heart Maker got mentioned in memepool.com. Even though it was a day after Valentine's, it brought in over 6000 visitors.

07feb2001:

We were down for five hours today due to a car crashing into a utility pole down the street from my ISP.

06feb2001:

The License Maker got mentioned in memepool, bringing in about 3000 visitors.

28jan2001:

I started a trial run of this - voluntary $5 donations to support the site. We shall see if anyone goes for it.

18jan2001:

The California energy/finance crisis hit us yesterday - our co-location ISP explosive.net got blacked out for 90 minutes. Fortunately they have two hours of battery backup installed, and it worked flawlessly, so we stayed on the air.

06jan2001:

I noticed this morning that the short 06jan01 date format I like to use is now ambiguous. Furthermore, it will remain ambiguous for the next thirty years! Y2K wasn't enough to make me switch to four-digit dates, but this is.

25dec2000:

Boardfinder passed 300 boards.

11dec2000:

Added hail-to-the-thief.org to the ACME Labs family of web pages.

01dec2000:

Added 13 more boards to the Boardfinder, including the first Pentium-4 boards. Since the only current chipset for the P4 requires the use of RAMBUS memory, I had to add that into the system too, which is unfortunate cause it sucks.

01dec2000:

We got Slashdotted yesterday and I didn't even notice! It was for this amusing palindromic C program that I grabbed off the net years ago. Not even my own code. Traffic approximately doubled for about ten hours - not too big a deal.

30nov00:

Added 33 new boards to the ACME Boardfinder, including ten with DDR memory.

27oct00:

Updated the Build-A-PC page. Actually it's now pages, I split it up into separate files by topic. Memory prices have been falling a lot, down by almost 50% since the previous update five weeks prior.

19oct00:

Finally got around to adding all the historic license plates to the License Maker.

08oct00:

Added -all flag to select, and fixed a bug with schema-mode databases.

05oct00:

Added the AES and RC6 cryptosystems to the Acme.Crypto Java package. AES is the just-announced Advanced Encryption Standard, and was formerly known as Rijndael. RC6 was a candidate for the AES and didn't win the competition, but is still quite good.

30sep00:

Added ignore-case flag to select.

27sep00:

thttpd 2.20 released.

24sep00:

Added name searching to the ACME Boardfinder.

13sep00:

New version of http_load with a couple of enhancements and bug fixes - max & min timings, SSL random-number seeding fix, proxy support, timer improvements.

06sep00:

Two weeks before their patent was to expire, RSA has released their public key encryption algorithm into the public domain. This means I can add actual RSA programs to the bigint package, instead of just including directions for performing it with the bic calculator.

06sep00:

Started the ACME Updates file.

04sep00:

Medium-sized update to the Build-A-PC guide. The sample Athlon design changed from Slot-A to Socket-A. The sample dual-Pentium design changed from Slot-1 to FC-370. The sample compute-server design changed from a Celeron to a Duron.

23aug00:

I added a motherboard database to the Build-A-PC page.

11aug00:

select, a little ASCII-database program.

27jul00:

bigint, a new large integer math package.

18jun00:

closest_fractions, a little program to find the rational numbers closest to a given real number.

18may00:

I've been working on a gigabit ethernet testbed.

09may00:

A colormap sampler.

21mar00:

Wrote a Build-A-PC guide.

28jan00:

Added referer-checking to thttpd, to deter bandwidth parasites.

25jan00:

thttpd now supports IPv6. It's the first Unix web server to do so out of the box, without patching.

18jan00:

The ACME Calendar.

31dec1999:

http_post, a little program to do HTTP POST requests and return the results. Same idea as http_get.

16dec1999:

K-Mart's web site BlueLight.com went on the air, powered by thttpd.

10dec1999:

mini_httpd now handles SSL/HTTPS. It is almost certainly the smallest/simplest web server to do so.

25nov1999:

www.acme.com is now running on a 450 MHz K6-2 box co-located at explosive.net. Here's a rundown of the changes:

Old setup New setup

ISP Best.com Explosive.net

OS FreeBSD 2.2.8 FreeBSD 3.3

CPU 200MHz shared 450MHz dedicated

Server bestwwwd/2.4 thttpd 2.07

chrooted no yes

Disk space 70 MB about 6 GB

Bandwidth limit 200 MB/day 5.4 GB/day

CGI CPU limit 1000 seconds/day 86400 seconds/day

Cost $50/month $100/month

24nov1999:

	Old setup	New setup
ISP	Best.com	Explosive.net
OS	FreeBSD 2.2.8	FreeBSD 3.3
CPU	200MHz shared	450MHz dedicated
Server	bestwwwd/2.4	thttpd 2.07
chrooted	no	yes
Disk space	70 MB	about 6 GB
Bandwidth limit	200 MB/day	5.4 GB/day
CGI CPU limit	1000 seconds/day	86400 seconds/day
Cost	$50/month	$100/month

weblog_parse, a program to parse and extract data from standard web log files.

27oct1999:

ACME Labs now has a privacy policy. This is intensely boring, but apparently necessary if you want to carry any ads from IBM.

17sep1999:

Released mini_httpd. This is an old-fashioned forking web server, making a new process for each request, just like the first version of NCSA before they invented pre-forking. It's intended as a simple testbed for trying out things like SSL. It's surprisingly fast, though. On my old 100MHz Pentium it clocked 70 ops/sec, 90% as fast as Apache on that platform. I suppose forks are pretty fast when the program's size is minuscule - the executable is only 8KB.

12sep1999: