Read or add comments to this article

The Korg DS10

Read or add comments to this article

Ya know...  I've told many people this, but I'm not sure I've told you.  If I have, suck it up and listen to it again.

When I got married almost 6 years ago, I was preparing for the worst.  People told me that marriage was a jar to the system, the knock-out punch, the "learning" experience, and many other metaphors basically meaning that it was tough.

So, when I married my sweetheart, I was expecting just that.  The weird thing is - nothing changed.  We still dated, we laughed, we went to school, got jobs, and, ahem, enjoyed the varous benefits of actually being married.

I really was quite surprised.  The year after I got married was probably one of the best years of my life.  So...

Why the tite, "What I Miss Most"?

Well..  Just because marriage wasn't a jarring experience for me (quite the contrary, really), doesn't mean that life has been all pudding cupcakes dancing on the backs of unicorns (props to ya, Steve) prancing upon fluffy clouds that line the perfect rainbow.

Nope..  Why, you ask?  Well.. We had children.

Yeah.  Weeks after we had our first child, I knew something was different.  I need not go into the details, but holy cow.  If marriage was my my perfect gleaming castle, kids are definitely the dragon living therein.

I'd have to say, with children, the thing I miss the most by a long shot isn't the personal time I no longer have, nor is it the constant repetition for my seemingly deaf children to "clean that up" or, "mind your mom", or "please come here", or "go to SLEEEEEEP!!!!"...  Nope...  As annoying as those are, I'd have to say the winning prize goes to:

sleep.

Yup.  I've forgotten what it's like to actually get a good night's rest.  I know we're blessed beyond measure in that our kids are healthy, and we're doing okay financially, and we've got good parents and siblings and all that...  But, man...  What I wouldn't give to be able to lay my head down at night at 10:00pm and sleep for 8 straight hours.  How wonderful would it be to go to sleep and not have to worry about the nightly routine of being woken up for any number of reasons.  And I'm not even talking about my poor wife!

Holy cow...  She gets woke up at least 3 times as often as I do.  But...  All in all, I'd have to say that I'm glad I had kids, but man...

...I really miss sleep.

following kargig's post, i found the criticism extremely harsh. all the distributions that aim mostly on power users leave the resolving of blocking/breaking dependencies on the user. i 've never seen an official guide from debian on how to fix a _specific_ broken or unmet dependencies issue.

when i 'm not sure how to resolve such an issue, the first thing i do (before even googling it) is to search on gentoo related sites that usually host such kind of instructions. i did the same thing with the e2fsprogs thing, that started all this discussion, and i found exactly what i had to do in less than 2 minutes. i proceeded with the instructions and i met no further problem, including my vps server which is located in a place where i have no physical access.

i think we should be a little more lenient when it comes to community based distributions. besides, gentoo has taken all these one step forward comparing to debian, introducing portage 2.2 that tries to resolve blocking packages automatically. none of these e2fsprogs problems arose on portage 2.2 systems. (yes, i just upgraded my portage :P)

I own a car, probably one you'd not expect me to have (got it for little money used after my old car was broken in an accident):


Yesterday it wouldn't want to start so I had to call the ADAC (which is a club in Germany that, when you're a member, comes when your car is broken and tries to fix it or tows you to the next repair station for free).

I don't know a thing about cars. I know where the key goes, where I put in the fuel and other required liquids, but that's it. I just never invested any time into learning anything about cars cause it just doesn't interest me: My car is something that can transport me from A to B without me getting wet. I don't care whether it's pretty or clean (oviously ), I just want it to run.

So the guy came, my car miraculously started again and probably something hidden is broken that will fuck up some day soon for me (yay!). I guess this is how many people see their computers, they just want them to run without investing anything into learning how they work and after me telling you this short story you might think I support them and their position. But I don't.

My car is old, it has pretty much no electronics in it, it's simple. I don't care about it, because there are people that know that kind of stuff and can fix "bugs", but when I don't know about the internals I can still fully use it. When I run into a problem I might have trouble getting from one place to another, I might have to call a cab or walk or buy/rent another car but that's it. Inconvenience.

When you don't understand your computer and you run into trouble it's more than inconvenience: You lose access to your data, the binary representation of the things in your head. You often cannot just buy another computer cause you will have trouble getting to your data: When my car dies the Place I wanna go to is still there, when my computer is down, I might not be able to access the data I need and that might not be anywhere else (Yes backups rock, I got them, but how often are you called by people who wanna hand in their thesis paper and can't access it cause of a fucked up computer that don't have any backups).

Cars and computers are different because of one thing: A car is like a function. It doesn't keep internal state that matters to you (of course it has internal state), it just offers one functionality to you. A computer is like an Object: It offers functions but also keeps internal state that you care about.

You could turn your computer into a car-ish state if you moved all state data, all your files, all your settings, all your everything away from it, turning it into a thin client, but that just creates the problem of a server to administer and connectivity problems (plus what happens when your network connection is down?).

Cars and computer analogies are wrong.

Read or add comments to this article

Read or add comments to this article

Read or add comments to this article

After Paul Butler’s Announcement of the end of JSSpamBlock maintenance, I was not really worried about the plugin itself, as it still did its job in a perfect way. If you think back, there are enough unmaintained plugins around, doing their job perfectly within a current Wordpress installation.

But you know about theory and reality by now, because in this case, some of the comment functions JSSpamBlock was using were changed and rendered the plugin unusable. The root of the problem is the new possibility to reply to comments from within the administrative backend. But however - Paul is not maintaining the plugin anymore due to lack of interest.

But Spam is getting worse here and the plugin was quite a nice way for taking load off the Akismet system. The case is obvious: I can either try to fix the plugin, rewrite or fork it or try to maintain it.

---

Copyright © 2007
Please note that this feed is for private use only. All other usage, including the distribution or reproduction of multiple copies, performance or otherwise use in a public way of the images or text require the authorization of the author.
(digitalfingerprint: 0f46ca51d0fa4e6588e24f0bf2b80fed)

The reportlab library for Python is great when it comes to generating PDFs, here's an example on how to generate Barcodes with it:

from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas from reportlab.lib.pagesizes import A4 from reportlab.lib.units import mm #I'll be generating code39 barcodes, others are available from reportlab.graphics.barcode import code39 # generate a canvas (A4 in this case, size doesn't really matter) c=canvas.Canvas("/tmp/barcode_example.pdf",pagesize=A4) # create a barcode object # (is not displayed yet) # The encode text is '123456789' # barHeight encodes how high the bars will be # barWidth encodes how wide the "narrowest" barcode unit is barcode=code39.Extended39("123456789",barWidth=0.5*mm,barHeight=20*mm) # drawOn puts the barcode on the canvas at the specified coordinates barcode.drawOn(c,100*mm,100*mm) # now create the actual PDF c.showPage() c.save()

If you run the given example, you will get a barcode, placed 10cm from the lower and 10cm from the left border, with a height of 20mm.

Other barcode types are available in the reportlab.graphics.barcode module.

I just got back from a lunch with a long-time friend.  You know the type...  The type of friend who has shown true colors throughout the years, and whose colors you've grown to love.

Yeah..  Anyway...

We got to talking about some pretty cool stuff that I thought I'd write down, just so I can go back and read them again.

The first topic worth mentioning is relationships.

There are very few (I can count them on one hand) things we take with us when we leave this earth and one of them happens to the point of discussion.  So... Are they important?  Yeah... I'd like to think so.

Interestingly enough, relationships sometimes are a point we don't emphasize enough, generally - considering how they affect our lives.

I guess some people think they can or ought to "make it alone".  That just ain't true from this man's standpoint.

Be it friendships, parents to children, children to parents, or spousal, good relationships undoubtedly deserve just as much, or even more, effort we're throwing at them.

The 2nd point worth mentioning is growing in the Gospel.

We talked about how each of us differed in our pathway leading to the levels of spiritual maturity.  I found it very interesting how different he was from me.  Honestly, I hadn't even considered what he went through as a possibility, but no doubt it is.

Whereas I have been putting too much emphasis on prayer and using God as a tool to help me find the way, he was doing exactly the opposite - yet his reasoning made perfect sense!  Has God not told us that Christ is the way after all we can do?  Has he not told us to not be slothful in doing good, not needing to be commanded in all things?  Sounds like a good argument to me.

There are plenty of scriptures to be found telling us to pray always, and pray about everything, so it goes without saying why I had a hard time understanding that God certainly wouldn't be annoyed if I made my mind up without imploring his will concerning my corn flakes.

Anyway...  I just found it very, very good to have a somewhat spiritually tuned conversation with a good friend over a burger and fries today - and I thought I'd let you know about it.

Yes, I surrendered to social networking...

I never had Myspace, Facebook, Flickr...

But twitter looks so cool, so: http://twitter.com/TopperH

Companies, especially big Companies, are very timid entities. They are scared of change because they are comfortable in a world where they feel they know the rules that guarantee success, and to a certain degree that is understandable: Companies move slowly and having them move costs a lot of resources so they fight change which forces them to move.

Success nowadays is often not measured in profits but in the value of the company at the stock exchange: Raising profits do of course have an influence as do many other factors. The term "shareholder value" isn't new but still dominates how many companies act: To let your stock drop is about the worst thing that can ever happen if you believe in the current economical dogma.

But companies can sometimes learn: They learn by example. If they see one company do something that leads them to huge success they'll try imitating that behavioral pattern since it seems to be successful.

What do companies learn today? Let's look at the stock market for a second, especially two companies, Yahoo Inc (YHOO, blue) and SUN Microsystem Inc (JAVA,red) (the image shows the last 6 months, click on the image to get to the page generating the diagram where you can see longer or shorter time intervals):



Both companies have been dropping constantly in the last months losing a lot of their worth. "What do both companies have in common?" is not just an academic question but also a question every manager will ask himself to avoid having his company follow those two. What's the answer?

One possible answer is a very dangerous one for the open source/free software culture: Both those companies have in the last months and years tried to be more and more open. Sun tried saving Java by opening it up, Yahoo released all kinds of APIs, the YUI toolkit and more.

So what is a manager supposed to learn here? Companies that open up will see their value go down the drain?

Of course the problem isn't as simple as that: Yahoo, that used to make money from advertising and its search engine has a new player in town that pretty much annihilated their old business model, Google. "Everything you do, I can do better" seems to be the song being sang between the two with it ending on Google singing "Yes I can!". Yahoo has not yet found a way to convince the stock market that their new, more open strategy is the only thing that will save them in the long run, since their old model has pretty much collapsed.

Sun, on the other hand, might have aquired a bunch of interesting open source based companies in the past few months, MySQL and Innotek (makers of Virtualbox), but they still seem to lack focus on what they wanna be: Their old business of selling hardware as in big-ass servers, mostly with Solaris, has been shrinking while other companies have gotten into the market selling server hardware that might not be as fancy as Sun's but a lot cheaper. JAVA might be liked by some as a language to write those retardedly overpriced cellphone games in and some "Consultants" might still tell you that for "Enterprisey Applications" you need a JAVA stack, but seriously, that mantra is getting old fast: The new "big apps" that everybody is so interested in (though most companies in that area don't have a business plan), apps like Facebook, like Youtube, like Twitter don't use the JAVA stack.

The problems of both companies are basically not their new found openness but mostly their lack of direction, their lack of a new business plan after the old one was getting its ass kicked by some new kid in town. But will managers and companies see it that way?

Open source based companies and services can obviously be successful and earn money: Amazon sells storage "in the cloud", Google's app engine will be a success and other companies earn good money by just taking care of installed open source solutions and allowing medium and small companies to rent a service instead of hiring their own IT staff. That message might be sent but is it received?

We'll have to wait and see, but at this point I think it's important not to focus on those companies that might have a lot of mindshare but no serious business plan but to focus on services and companies, based on open source, that do in fact earn money. It's time to stop talking about Twitter and talk about the (maybe smaller) companies that do in fact have a business plan that is not just the "Twitter model"

1. Become big
2. Become even bigger
3. Become so big that Google or someone else has to buy us

So where are the open source based companies and services that people should be talking about instead of laughing at Sun and Yahoo? Are they available on the huge scale? Or does it come down to smaller companies that offer very specific services?

• The MplayerWii port is sheer awesome: Small app installed and your Wii plays pretty much every media file from SDCard or USB mass storage devices. Best thing I ever installed on my Wii.
• If you have to generate professional PDFs in Python use Reportlab. It's easy to use and produces professional looking PDFs, including barcode generation.
• Another Python note: If you need an ORM for something not-Django, use sqlalchemy. Flexible, powerful, and easy to extend. Writing your own Widgets is really easy.
• "Stranded on Earth" by The Herbaliser is wicket cool:
  

Network connections fail all the time, we’ve all been there. There are so many things that can go wrong, the network adapter driver can fail, the dhcp server can revoke the lease, the wifi router can disappear, the routing may be wrong at some point along the line, the dns server can be overloaded, or the remote host may be down. Those are some of the possibilities, and it can be quite a pain to track down the problem.

But the first thing to do is to figure out exactly what is working and what isn’t. If you know that much then at least you know where to start. My goal here is to create a fairly simple test to examine the status of the network connection, leading up to a working internet connection. One constraint that I have is that I like it to be portable, so that I can carry it around along with my dotfiles. That means I would like it to work in any location just as long as I can get a shell, it should not require any dependencies.

A fully functional network connection looks like this:

What I do is try to detect the parameters of the network step by step, using the regular tools like route, ifconfig. Once I know what the hosts are, I do a ping. Now, a ping obviously isn’t a foolproof test; if you’re on a network that doesn’t allow outgoing icmp then it’s entirely possible that you can tcp out anyway. So what you really should do is tcp on port 80, not ping. But ping is extremely portable, whereas doing a tcp/udp probe is asking a lot more from the environment, needing something like nmap or hping.

Once you’ve established that the connection is working, and you want to know more about the network, you can go further with something like netscan.

The code is relatively stupid and messy, but that’s the way bash is.

#!/bin/bash
#
# Author: Martin Matusiak <numerodix@gmail.com>
# Licensed under the GNU Public License, version 3.
 
function havenet {
	local route="/sbin/route -n"
	local ping="ping -c1 -W2"
 
	local badrange="169.254"
 
	local rootname="A.ROOT-SERVERS.NET."
	local rootip="198.41.0.4"
 
	local inethost="yahoo.com"
 
	local creset="\\e[0m"
	local cred="\\e[0;31m"
	local cgreen="\\e[0;32m"
	local cyellow="\\e[0;33m"
	local ccyan="\\e[0;36m"
 
	### Scan networks

	echo -e "${cyellow} + Scanning for networks...${creset}"
	test=$($route 2>/dev/null | grep -v $badrange | egrep "^[1-9]")
	if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
		echo -e "    ${cred}none found${creset}"
	else
		local nets=$(echo "$test" | awk '{ print $1 }')
		for net in $nets; do
			local gw=$($route 2>/dev/null | egrep "^$net" | awk '{ print $3 }')
			echo -e "    ${cgreen}$net ${ccyan}/ $gw${creset}"
		done
 
		### Detect ips
 
		local ips=
		for net in $nets; do
			local r=$(echo $net | sed "s/.0$//g" | sed "s/.0$//g" | sed "s/.0$//g")
			local ip=$(/sbin/ifconfig 2>/dev/null | grep $r | sed "s/inet addr:\\([0-9.]*\\).*$/\\1/g")
			ips="$ip $ips"
		done
 
		echo -e "${cyellow} + Detecting ips...${creset}"
		test=$(echo "$ips" | egrep -v "^[ ]+$")
		if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
			echo -e "    ${cred}none found${creset}"
		else
			for ip in $ips; do
				echo -en "    ${cgreen}$ip${creset}   ping: "
				test=$($ping $ip 2>/dev/null)
				if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
					echo -e "${cred}failed${creset}"
				else
					local t=$(echo "$test" | grep "min/avg" | sed "s/.*= \\([0-9.]*\\)\\/.*$/\\1/g")
					echo -e "${cgreen}$t ms${creset}"
				fi
			done
 
			### Detect gateways
 
			echo -e "${cyellow} + Detecting gateways...${creset}"
			test=$($route 2>/dev/null | grep UG)
			if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
				echo -e "    ${cred}none found${creset}"
			else
				local gws=$(echo "$test" | awk '{ print $2 }')
				for gw in $gws; do
					echo -en "    ${cgreen}$gw${creset}   ping: "
					test=$($ping $gw 2>/dev/null)
					if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
						echo -e "${cred}failed${creset}"
					else
						local t=$(echo "$test" | grep "min/avg" | sed "s/.*= \\([0-9.]*\\)\\/.*$/\\1/g")
						echo -e "${cgreen}$t ms${creset}"
					fi
				done
			fi
		fi
	fi
 
	### Test inet connection
 
	echo -e "${cyellow} + Testing internet connection...${creset}"
	echo -en "    ${ccyan}$rootname  ${cgreen}$rootip${creset}   ping: "
	test=$($ping $rootip 2>/dev/null)
	if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
		echo -e "${cred}failed${creset}"
	else
		local t=$(echo "$test" | grep "min/avg" | sed "s/.*= \\([0-9.]*\\)\\/.*$/\\1/g")
		echo -e "${cgreen}$t ms${creset}"
	fi
 
	### Detect dns
 
	echo -e "${cyellow} + Detecting dns servers...${creset}"
	test=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf 2>/dev/null | grep nameserver)
	if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
		echo -e "    ${cred}none found${creset}"
	else
		local dnss=$(echo "$test" | awk '{ print $2 }')
		for dns in $dnss; do
			echo -en "    ${cgreen}$dns${creset}   ping: "
			test=$($ping $dns 2>/dev/null)
			if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
				echo -e "${cred}failed${creset}"
			else
				local t=$(echo "$test" | grep "min/avg" | sed "s/.*= \\([0-9.]*\\)\\/.*$/\\1/g")
				echo -e "${cgreen}$t ms${creset}"
			fi
		done
	fi
 
	### Test inet dns
 
	echo -e "${cyellow} + Testing internet dns...${creset}"
	echo -en "    ${cgreen}$inethost${creset}   ping: "
	test=$($ping $inethost 2>/dev/null)
	if [[ $? != 0 ]]; then
		echo -e "${cred}failed${creset}"
	else
		local t=$(echo "$test" | grep "min/avg" | sed "s/.*= \\([0-9.]*\\)\\/.*$/\\1/g")
		echo -e "${cgreen}$t ms${creset}"
	fi
}

Download this code: havenet_networktest.sh

Recently I started thinking about writing my own automatic installer that would set up my system exactly the way I want.
(See http://dieter.plaetinck.be/rethinking_the_backup_paradigm_a_higher-level...)

I looked at the official Arch install scripts to see if I could reuse parts of their code, but unfortunately the code was just one big chunk of bash code with the main program and "flow control" (you must first do this step, then that), UI-code (dialogs etc) and backend logic (create filesystems, ...) all mangled up and mixed very closely together.
Functionality-wise the installer works fine, but I guess the code behind it is the result of years of adding features and quick fixes without refactoring, making it impossible to reuse any of the code.

So I started to write AIF: the Arch Linux Installation Framework (actually it had another name until recently), with these 3 goals in mind:

• Make all code modular, reusable etc. Everyone should be able to add/change/remove change certain aspects of an installation procedure easily or build custom installation relying on existing code where appropriate
• Port /arch/setup and /arch/quickinst, so you get (almost) the same installer as before, but using totally refactored code.
• Write my own automatic procedure for my own custom needs

Right now most of the hard work is done and the ported version of /arch/setup seems to work more or less.
I've posted to the arch-general mailing list and the responses I got were very positive.
This is what Aaron Griffin (lead developer of Arch Linux) said:

My honest opinion is that this is awesome. You're the reason I love open source 8)

That said, we haven't release a 2.6.27 ISO just yet, and I need to go
in panic mode and get it out this weekend. But for the next release,
or even a smaller release before then, I'd *love* to incorporate this.

(...)

Just letting you know: I'm not silent because I don't care. I'm silent
because I'm watching and drooling 8)

You can read the whole thread here: http://www.nabble.com/Fifa:-Flexible-Installer-Framework-for-Arch-linux-...

I've also built packages to make it easy to install on a current installcd. The package also comes with a readme and howto that explain how to install and use AIF.

Right now I encourage people to try it out. All known bugs are documented in the TODO file, there are probably more that I didn't discover yet. But it should work pretty well.
I'm very curious for input on the code/design level as well.

Hopefully the Arch guys can set me up with a bugtracker and make some sort of announcement to the community to try it out...

I recently had to rename a repo on my Github account. Github has made this very easy but it's just one side of the issue. Obviously you must also update any references to this remote in other clones, otherwise pushes, fetches etc won't work anymore.

You can do this in two ways:

• open .git/config and modify the url for the remote manually
• git remote rm origin && git remote add origin git@github.com:$user/$project.git

That's it! All will work fine again.

We’re getting older every year - that’s a fact we cannot deny, even if we try to. But the cruel thing is, that discussion boards, web services and even friends are sending their greetings to remind you, that you’re older again. But Rei already noticed by herself.

---

Copyright © 2007
Please note that this feed is for private use only. All other usage, including the distribution or reproduction of multiple copies, performance or otherwise use in a public way of the images or text require the authorization of the author.
(digitalfingerprint: 0f46ca51d0fa4e6588e24f0bf2b80fed)

Click [here] to read the article.

When you hear people talking about Linux you'll probably hear either one of these two positions:
Pro-Linux Person

Installing and keeping software up-to-date is so much easier with Linux than with Windows or MacOSX, package repositories are the shit

Anti-Linux Person

Installing software in Linux is so hard, and it never has the software I want. Windows' setup.exe dance is so much better

And if you involve an OSX person he or she might tell you:

I have all my apps in my profile folder and can easily take them with me when I copy my profile.

The way software is handled is one of the aspects where the three major operating systems differ and it is somewhat of a religious war (but that happens a lot when it comes to operating systems ).

Let's look at all three options real quick:

• Windows: You go to the software maker, get a CD/DVD or download a "Setup.exe", run it and you have it installed. Windows offers a remove tool for software that installed that way. Updates are not handled if the program does not do it by itself. Disadvantages: No centralized update.
• Linux: For most software you just pick the package from your distribution's repository. Software is removed the same way- via a centralized package manager. Users can provide their own repositories that integrate nicely. Updates are done in a centralized way, the software itself does not have to bother updating. Advantage: All packages are automatically kept up-to-date. Disadvantage: When you copy your profile to another computer you might have to install some software cause the software itself does not come from your profile.
• OSX: You go to the software vendor, download a file, drag and drop things around for a while then the software is installed into your home dir. Updates happen if the software does it by itself.Advantage: Your programs "travel" with you. Disadvantage: No automatic updates.

Now I read more and more how people love the OSX way and how it is so much better that what the free software world has and I see how someone might only see the advantages: Backup your home dir and you've got everything. How nice - how convenient.

But there's a problem with the OSX way: Your programs all have to repeatedly write the same stuff all over again. Write an updating component over and over again. No dependency checking so you either bundle every library you might need or you force your users to jump through hoops left and right to get something running.

With the advent of web-based applications the notion of installing software locally got a bad reputation: Why use an installed local office application if you can use Google Docs or something similar? The online version is always up-to-date, works on whatever computer you are using and keeps your data in a centralized place.

I think in the long run neither OSX nor Windows will get away with not offering centralized update facilities for installed software but it still does not take care of either dependencies or the actual installation.

For commercial vendors that is a big problem actually: If you are Apple or Microsoft you cannot just let everyone push his package description into your "blessed" repository which means you are establishing a structure of the "haves" (those in the "blessed" repo) and the "have-nots" (those not in the blessed repo).

But as much as the Linux (and unix) way might get bad press or reviews from time to time, this is actually the aspect of the whole operating system thingy, that free operating systems like Linux und the BSD family beat all the competition: The ease of installing packages and keeping them up--to-date.

But there's always room for improvement. Debian's "tasksel" application for example is a great example that gets too little publicity in my opinion.

"tasksel" allows you, upon installation to select tasks you want your system to fulfill: If you check "Desktop" for example, you get the X Window system and a desktop environment preinstalled, if you select LAMP server, you get a stack of Apache, PHP and Mysql (just examples).

This is a great way to the problem we sometimes hear from new users: "I don't know which software to install, there are so many!"

Ubuntu is not my preferred distribution but they do one thing right: They identify the most common use cases and chose one application for that use case. One Image Editor, one office software, one browser. More are available if the user wants of course.

Now let's move away from packages/programs and think about "tasks" or "activities": When I think about Photo management for example I could just install F-Spot, but I'll reach limit really quick. How about we define an "Activity" Photo Management that does not just include an image viewer or organizer like F-Spot but also a real image editor that allows advanced image processing? How about we define the "activity" podcasting: It installs audio editors, VOIP software and a preconfigured stack of audio libs that allow the easy creation of podcasts.

We are too focussed on our applications itself, a bis mistake that our desktops also show: The default desktop in KDE or GNOME has the taskbar where every application has its little button, but is that what we want to know?

I don't really care how many GVIM windows I have open, but this window I'm working in right now belongs to one certain browser window and those two windows (regardless of the applications) together form my activity "write a blog post".

Our desktops and our package managers should move to an activity-based model, which would make it easier for new users to know what to do: You want to program in Python? Get the "programming (Python)" activity which gives you a great working environment without having to chose between all the available editors. Of course you should have the chance to add that one program that your prefer, but the environment is already complete at that point: You are not building the environment, you're merely customizing.

Gentoo's portage system knows something called "sets" that are pretty much an aggregation of packages, but that is not exactly what I mean: An "activity" should come with a good default configuration, one that works. Coming with too much configuration and patching is often a bad idea. You introduce new bugs and the documentation of the software might no longer correspond to your distribution (the "Ubuntu problem"), but if somebody choses an "activity" everything should be set to reasonable defaults that allow things to work. Let me give you an example:

Let's define the activity "anonymous browsing": It needs a browser obviously. Then we add Tor for anonymity but in order to work with a browser we also need a proxy that tunnels things through tor, for example Privoxy. Currently installing Privoxy does not set it up for Tor which makes sense: How should the package maintainer know what the users want to do with the proxy? Too much configuration wouldn't make sense here. But if the user installs the "anonymous browsing" activity he or she obviously wants to use Privoxy to use Tor with his browser which means that the configuration should automatically connect Privoxy and Tor.

We could of course model activities as "meta-packages", Packages without real content (apart from configuration probably), but that wouldn't help: Where users didn't find the right package before they don't find the right activity now in the big list of all the packages. Activities are on a higher, more abstract level, and should be seen as something different than packages, there should be a very simple interface to look at activities and install them.

What do you think? Should we keep on focussing on applications or are we at the point where the old system works well but could use some improvement?

A very interesting idea…. and I really start to like this guy!

A lot of really bad “comedy” movies have been made to portray the despair of suburbia. People whose lives revolve around work in a big supermarket or other chain, empty most of the time, so they try to find something, anything, to distract themselves from the daily routine.

The premise for Chuck is the same. He’s a geek, he has a pity-friend geekier than him. He works at a big electronics chain. And he has a “normal” sister who wants him to be “normal”.

Then it happens. His old college buddy, a CIA agent gone rogue, sends him a message containing every government secret he’s stolen in his “rogueness”. Chuck somehow absorbs the whole thing, the computer breaks, and now he’s the only one with the secrets. Except he’s still the geeky suburbia guy, so two agents from competing agencies show up to make sure nothing “happens” to him. Needless to say, he cannot divulge anything to his sister or his friend, so he has to pretend like nothing has changed. The agents, in turn, get jobs near him and have to fit into the suburban landscape.

You’re probably thinking “with a premise like that it could so easily suck”. And I’m with you. But it doesn’t. Chuck is pretty good in his role, and the whole spying thing is sufficiently farsical to be funny, but not so overdone that it’s stupid.

As some people already know I’ve joined the army since 2 months ago, this makes it somewhat difficult for me to keep up with the latest updates for every machine I use. Today I tried to upgrade a machine running stable (x86) Gentoo Linux after more than 15 days since the last upgrade and I [...]

i read it here and i liked the idea :)



• grab the nearest book.
• open it to page 56.
• find the fifth sentence.
• post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

so here is my choice:

"stage two: an enzyme tightening the molecule's hexagonal ring into a pentagon, transforming the spare vertex into a protruding cluster, more exposed and reactive than before."
~ from "permutation city" by greg egan

Ya know... I didn't know if I was going to blog about anything this weekend, but something just happened definitely blog-worthy.  Nothing insane, but something that I think people might find interesting.

You know, I've always heard that cats have nine lives, but I've always kind of been the one to keep that in check.  No, I don't shoot cats, and no, I don't hate em', either.

Quite the contrary, actually.

Since as far back as I can remember, I've always had a cat.  Even during my mission, in one area I lived with a family who had a cat named Misu.  The problem is...  All my cats die.  As time has passed, I just have kind of accepted it as an irony of the universe.  I, who love cats, can't keep a cat for more than a year without it dying - no matter what I do.

Anyway....  About a year ago (or two or three... I don't really remember) My wife's (before she married me) roomate's cat, who later became my wife's cat, who later became my wife's brother's cat, who later became my family's cat, and who I thought was dead 2 months ago decided to show up on our window-sill today.

Yes... I've heard the stories of cats who disappear for months at a time, are considered dead, and then resurrect somehow to appear at their owner's place to live another day.  But I've never experienced it.

Riley, our cat, disappeared about 2 months ago and we haven't seen anything of her, and I just thought it was another fate of the universe telling one of my cats it was time for her to disappear, never to return.

Oh well...  It's kind of good to have her back - although she hates our other cat, Silver, who is the only cat I've had for more than two years, solely because he is afraid of his own breath.  He never goes outside, and runs as if demons were attacking him whenever anyone other than our family comes into the house.

Oh yeah... Riley hates our kids, too.  Ohwell...  Welcome back, Riley.  May you live yet another year.

Here's a pic of her taken today.   Skin and bones, but happy as a hamster to be back with people who will feed her.

A Network Attached Storage(NAS) has been in my wanted list for quite a long time, thanks to Live Search Cashback program to make it happen: a Western Digital MyBook World Edition(500GB). More information about the hardware specification:

• ARM926EJ-Sid(wb) [41069265] revision 5 (ARMv5TEJ) 99.73 MHz
• Memory: 32M
• VIA Networking Velocity Family Gigabit Ethernet
• WD5000AAVS-0 500G HD

I believe 100MHz ARM CPU is powerful enough to drive this tiny box, but the limited capacity of memory cripples it as a lame duck. The sustainable file write(85G using lftp mirror) rate is approximately 3.8MB/s. It hardly qualifies any service beyond file server. Now, it is time to hack.

Jailbreak and SSH

The first thing to do is to create a user in the web interface of MyBook as root with null password is banned for security reason. Log on with admin and 123456, create a user JOE and setup the password for later use.

Run the script discussed in the wiki, and ssh with JOE. Now you can su to root with blank password, 0wned!

User management

MyBook takes a very intricate way to manage users:

All Samba users are granted shell access, but unix password sync = yes is not set, the /etc/shadow and /var/private/smbpasswd are updated individually by a Perl script via the web interface. The only reasonable explanation is the minimized Samba lacks PAM support.

All user names are capitalized. I assume this is a brutal force approach to address the difference between Samba and Linux native accounts: Windows user name is case insensitive, while Linux is case-sensitive.

As the password scrambled in /etc/shadow, it is easier to add/delete/update users via the web interface, then fine-tune the corresponding files. The user administration executives are hidden in /usr/www/nbin.

Share with Samba

The default exported directory is /share/internal/PUBLIC, the permission of the directory is set as rwsr-sr-x, and the owner is www-data, YMMV. So any file/directory created will be owned by www-data. If you are unhappy with the name, you may add a user, e.g joe as discussed before, then add joe to www-data group:

remember to change the default mask in /etc/smb.conf:

Package management

Though I am a big fan of Gentoo, it is a little bit paranoid to build everything from scratch. A precompiled package management, like Optware makes more sense. Check out this tutorial for bootstrapping.

The essential packages for daily administration imho are screen, lftp.

Feature requests

There are some itchy miss features, if you happen to know a solution or hint, please drop me a message in the comment:

Access Anywhere No mionet, just SSH. If you are a perfectionist, consider to port this Delphi application to MyBook to host MyBook in your preferred domain.

Download Manager A web front-end to listen to download requests from Firefox/IE plugins, then delegate it to wget backend with cookie support. A more aggressive approach may support megaupload happy hour.

The laptop I used as my home server passed away yesterday and needs to be replaced.

I bought this on ebay and it is going to arrive me on tuesday/wednesday.

Of course I'm going to install gentoo.

I don't have a monitor to attach on it (it's gonna be an headless server), so I asked the seller to setup the bios for cd boot.

I will do all the installation via ssh but I know for sure that both the gentoo livecd and systemrescuecd need user interaction to have ssh up and running (you have to setup a root password).



Probably there will be no problem to it blind:

1. insert the cd
2. power the machine on
3. wait for a while
4. type "passwd" "******" "******"
5. type "/etc/init.d/sshd restart"

But I guess if there is a live distro that has a fixed root password and starts ssh and dhcp by itself.
I've been told on irc that xbox's distros can do that, but I don't think I will be able to chroot in an x86_64 enviroment from that...

Does anybody have a better idea?

I don’t know about you, but I have on a lot of different places a directory called ‘hg’ with lot of different mercurial clones inside. Whether on the home of my several computers for my own projects, or inside other directories for external projects, and so on.

Now, remember one important aspect of distributed source control : your clone is actually both a repository and a working directory. This is why you usually (git and others do the same) have two different commands : one to synchronize the  repository (pull) and one to update the working directory (update).

Updating comes with a risk : you can have conflicts. This is why I never update a svn repository without thinking first (do I have local modifications ?). But pulling is a lot less problematic. And, especially on my laptop, I often want to ’sync them all’ as soon as I have some internet connection. Until now i had a script syncall with the path of all (svn,unison and) mercurial repositories hardcoded. This does not scale, and I now need that in at least 5 different places. I dont feel like maintaining such scripts.

And now comes the magic alias that made my day. I’m usually lame at shell scripting, so I’m sure there are better ways. But it works, now, on my computer. And this is so useful.

alias hgbulk '\ls */.hg -d | cut -d\/ -f1 | xargs -i bash -c  "(cd {}; hg pull )"'

(yes, I use tcsh, but i’ve tested that in bash too. Don’t ask why I use tcsh.)

I occasionally need to use windows for clients. And I often transfer files via thumb drives. I needed a new drive so I slipped of to Costco to buy a 3 pack. I copy the files from linux, and put the disk in the windows machine and it starts install

I don’t know why they didn’t post this on the Gentoo front page, but obviously the October GMN is not coming.  If you are on the ‘Gentoo-dev-announce’ mailing list, you would have seen Anant mention what’s going on with the GMN.

Hi Folks,

I’ve been extremely busy traveling & attending conferences for the last few weeks and will be required to continue the same for atleast 2 weeks more; and nightmorph is just recovering from his failed hardware. As a result, there will be no October issue of the GMN. We hope to resume to normality by the end of November.

Apologies.
–
Anant

As a S197 Mustang GT owner, I never thought I'd write about this particular subject, but then again...

...I had never actually seen one on the road, either.

All I have to say is - Wow.

Dodge definitely did their research on this one.  Although it was all due to the success of the S197 mustang body style, of course, but man...

That car is gorgeous.

The photo to the right is the one I actually saw.  Obviously the phone-taken photo doesn't do it a lick of justice.

The photo below is a stock photo.  Still doesn't  even come close to what presence the car has on the road.

Really, I seem to be fond of activity graphs those days. I have reused part of this previous code, but this time I parse the emerge log file to display the activity of your successful emerges. Think of it as a graphical view of ‘genlop -l’.

Those examples are the emerge activity of my two main computers.

The current code does the bare minimum, and  I need to add at least command line options for

• logfile to use (currently/default : /var/log/emerge.log)
• filename to create (currently/default : activity.png)
• width/height of the image (currently/default : 800×600)

The usage is straightforward:

orzel@berlioz EmergeActivity% ./EmergeActivity.py

There are 9896 emerge completed successfully

Created the file 'activity.png'

orzel@berlioz EmergeActivity% xv activity.png &

You can grab the source (browse, tarballs, mercurial clone, even RSS) from :

http://sources.freehackers.org/hg.cgi/EmergeActivity/

Since I can't write anything worthwhile today I thought I'd give you a picture me an Annette took while we were in Edinburgh a few weeks ago. The "Camera Obscura" is a museumy kind of thing that has all kinds of different optical illusions or tricks, one of them being a large heat-sensitive cam, which was great fun.

This weekend I spend getting the srtm data (thanks NASA) into postgres to use it. To do that I used Sjors way to do that which is with python. I got it to work in no time on my Gentoo-amd64-dev-box. That was Saturday.

Now Sunday I spend all day trying to get it to work on the dutch openstreetmap server. Which was quite a bigger challenge. Since well on CentOS 5 not all packages were correct. So I ended up compiling a lot myself, this however is pain in the ass if it turn out you have to compile almost all dependencies yourself to.

But it works! Check it on altitude.openstreetmap.nl. There you won’t find much but check the wiki page for more info on how to get data out of it. We only host the srtm data for the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. This since the data is quite large and well, I am not the only one using the server.

But back to the title. YOURS is an OpenStreetMap routing service. Which is kick-ass by the way. YOURS supports the altitude data and give the altitude profile of your route. Right now only a plot of the altitude is shown but I guess we get some nice stats soon!

Now for a little problem YOURS does not work really well when using Konqueror. I tried to figure out why but I’m not really a java script expert. So if you are and have some free time. Please find the problem

Now for another project idea of mine (probably around Christmas): porting Sjors python implementation to C. This since well. I love C.

I'm not in the mood to write much, but I figure that since work is kind of slow today, that it would do me good to watch and write about a conference talk right about now.

Elder Perry's talk seemed to talk about a topic which would benefit a lot of people today - simplicity.

As far as I go, I can think right now of one specific thing which I could definitely improve in my life as far as unnecessary complication goes.  I'll leave the details to myself, but it was good to do a self-analysis anyway...

I wonder how much peace I must be missing out on by unnecessary worries and concern over things I can't control.

I guess a good way to look at it would be, "Take what life gives you, and do the best you can with it.  Don't burden yourself with worries about anything else."

Although I don't feel particularly inspired by Elder Perry's words, I do find a lot of utility in the concept.

Yesterday Sander and I released a new version of QtMPC (0.4.1).

However when thinking about some of the features we would like to have in QtMPC we once again got annoyed by the MPD protocol. One of the main issues we had was that it is not event based, or even publish-subscribe. You have to ask for every little detail you want. This is a choice and it is true that this way you do not get unwanted messages thus generate unwanted network traffic.

But we feel that some sort of event based protocol will do a better job here. Lets say in the default nothing is send as well. That way mobile clients can still control the player without receiving anything unwanted. Or just subscribe to events related to playback. This way mobile clients are still supported but again. They do not have to request the status ever x seconds. They just get a message once had changed.

For full blown clients event bases is also a positive thing. For example the reaction time. When adding a new song. Right now this has to be noted by the client when requesting the version of the playlist. A simple message from the server saying playlist current newsong …….. (or something like that) could be send right after the song is actually added. It just makes things easier.

Another thing that kind of bother us that there was no inotify support. This would be great however. Lets say you have a music server running on your server. And add some new music to the collection. It would be best of course if it would find the new music. Add it to the database and notify the clients of a change in the music library.

Now we have not written any code yet. But we are thinking about it. For the music playback part we are planing to use gstreamer. Since well it already supports a lot of audio formats. And why reinvent the wheel right?