I don’t want my PlayStation 3 “upgraded” beyond firmware version 3.15 which is the latest that supports the Other OS feature. When this misfeature was announced, I disabled networking since I rarely play PS3 games and I never do so online.

However, I just signed up for a Netflix streaming account. This necessitates network access via the PS3. At the same time, I want to alleviate the possibility of accidental firmware updates by myself or anyone else in the household who might not be fully briefed on the technical issues and would often be prompted to update the firmware. I can think of a few ways towards this goal:

1. Set up my own DNS server that the PS3 has to use and blacklist firmware download sites.
2. Set up a proxy that the PS3 must route through and blacklist the sites through there.
3. Play games with my broadband router (a Linksys WCG-200) and block traffic to certain sites that would check for and download new firmware.

Another tip I found whilst Googling was to set the PS3’s DNS address to something nonsensical, effectively disabling DNS lookup. This was advised for keeping local media servers running without inadvertently updating firmware (I guess an older firmware update was going to take away some media server functionality).

All of these options require knowing which addresses to blacklist. Alternatively, I could figure out which Netflix addresses I need to whitelist.

I went with a combination of approaches 2 and 3. Routing traffic through Privoxy, I assessed that blocking playstation.net achieves the desired result. I added that to the website black list on the router and all is well.

I’m not sure who Kontron is but I can tell you that they have some bold advertising campaigns. I found this piece of junk mail in my archives:

In this ad campaign, someone dies.

Good aim.

One day, I saw Suxen drol create a new page on the MultimediaWiki discussing something called the Peak codec. I was about to scold him for not uploading and linking to samples for this codec until I read closer. The Peak codec seems to refer to a theoretical best possible codec. Could such a beast really exist?

Based on everything I’ve read, perhaps On2’s VP8 is the Peak codec of lore: All things to all people.

So I’m sitting in the tracing discussion at this year’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. One presenter discussed a tracing facility called utrace. This got me thinking of all the different _trace utilities I could name off the top of my head: dtrace, ptrace, strace, and utrace. Then I wondered how many letters of the English alphabet already serve as prefixes to the word ‘trace’ as software utilities. My cursory research indicates 21/26 24/26.

Oh yeah, I looked them all up (and thanks to all who helped me fill in the blanks):

• atrace: astrange’s raytracer
• btrace: Tracing for Java
• ctrace: multi-threaded trace/debug library
• dtrace: Sun’s comprehensive framework
• etrace: The Embedded ELF tracer
• ftrace: Fast traceroute for Win32; also ftrace: function tracer
• gtrace: Graphical front-end to traceroute
• htrace: apparently an extension to windbg
• itrace: not Apple-related (see ktrace); this stands for instruction strace
• jtrace: Java rewrite of a speech recognition technique called TRACE
• ktrace: Kernel tracing for certain BSDs including Mac OS X
• ltrace: Linux utility to monitor library calls
• mtrace: Memory debugger in the GNU C library
• ntrace: Tracing for .NET applications
• otrace: Oracle database tracing
• ptrace: Process tracing in Linux
• qtrace: Another traceroute utility
• rtrace: Ruby-Trace almost qualifies
• strace: Tracing system calls
• ttrace: Tracing facility for multithreaded processes
• utrace: Linux tracing
• vtrace: System-wide profiling of WinNT or Win2K
• wtrace: Provides information to debug methods (pertains to Tivoli?)
• xtrace: Tracing for X servers
• ytrace: Nothing
• ztrace: Win32 tracing utility

So, if you must make a new tracing utility, atrace, etrace, rtrace, ytrace, and ztrace all seem to be open.

Thanks for sitting through another of my pointless surveys. Oh, and thanks also to Google for providing Summit attendees with free, unlocked Nexus One phones. I haven’t seen many other mentions of this. Maybe Google does this so often that it barely counts as news anymore.