Matt Croydon::Postneo

Year: 2004

  • Long Time, No Linkdump

    • OSDir pointed to a new and improved Markup Validation Service at the w3c.
    • Jeremy pointed to these Pine first use statistics and thinks that we can extrapolate the adoption rate of Unix-like systems from it.
    • I’ve subscribed to the official Google blog.  I’m pretty sure that the version of Rawdog that I’m running can handle it.  Also of note is the recent Blogger relaunch.
    • I just installed the latest version of PmWiki.  I’m still really impressed with the quality of this wiki.  It reminds me a lot of JSPWiki but it’s extremely lightweight (no database requirements)
    • Mobiletracker points to a news story about a Sony Ericsson phone that is 9 cm tall, 3.9 cm wide, and 1.9 cm thick.  That’s a small phone.  It weighs about 69 grams.  NEC also has a slightly larger but much thicker camera phone.
    • FreeCache is the poor man’s Akamai.  More cool stuff brought to you by The Internet Archive.
    • Slashdot carries the news of the first BMW-numbered Pentium M: the M755.  It’s nice to see Intel bit by The Megahertz Myth.
    • Wireless DevNet reports that RenderWare is coming to the N-Gage platform.
    • Michael Yuan has the skinny on the J2ME MultiMedia API on the Nokia 6600 and 6230.
    • The Symbian Q1 2004 results look good.  Very good.
    • Gizmodo links to an article at USA Today.  Will the real Nintendo DS please stand up?

  • TechTV: Rest in Peace

    Last week we all found out that Comcast is firing 285 TechTV workers.  Today Slashdot linked to G4TechTV.com and a FAQ.  I have problems with the purchase and the merger on so many levels.  It looks like Leo will be out of the picture entirely, as Call for Help was not picked up on the new network.  I have no idea what The Screen Savers is going to look like when the new channel goes live on May 28.

    I used to catch TechTV in the background over satellite and cable years ago, and it’s been a part of my geeky existance off and on ever since.  I’ll have The Screen Savers from last night on while I’m getting ready for work today.

    I’ve always had a bit of a problem with G4.  They have a few solid hours of programming each day, but their filler far outweighs their content.  That’s not to say that TechTV doesn’t have its fair share of filler, but most of the time it’s half way decent.  I guess that I’m just not a hardcore enough gamer to watch the same old filler.

    I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to watch the new network once it goes live later this month.  The Screen Savers is already loosing my attention now that Leo has left.  If he leaves the network completely, my motivation level will lower further.  I may stop watching completely out of disgust.  I’ll definitely have to send a complaint on to mergerinfo@g4techtv.com.

  • Disconnectivity

    I apologize for the lack of updates.  It took me longer than it should have to troubleshoot and resolve connectivity issues at the house.  I’m back though, with a bit of a blog backlog.

  • Howard County Library Moves to Linux

    Newsforge:

    Over the past year, the Howard County (Md.) Public Library has migrated more than 200 public PCs from Windows 98 and Windows NT to Linux. These PCs are used both to surf the Internet and to access the library’s catalogues. NewsForge recently spoke with Brian Auger, associate director of the library, and the IT team responsible for the migration. We wanted to learn more about why and how it was accomplished, and how pleased they are with the results.

    Wow, that’s surreal.  I’m in Howard County right now.  They chose an interesting route: Linux from Scratch + Gnome, Mozilla, and OpenOffice.org.  A cron script is run twice a day to see if there are any updates to be downloaded from a master server.

    More information, including some screenshots can be found at LuMiXtech.

    Way to go, Howard County!  Stories like this and the library behind White Box Enterprise Linux give my warm fuzzy penguin feelings.

  • WS-WTF? (Devices Profile for Web Services)

    Infoworld notes that Microsoft and Intel have released a Devices Profile for Web services.  It builds on WS-Discovery and will allow enterprise level peripheral connectivity.

    Tying devices together today is too complicated

    Ahh yes, adding another layer of complexity on top is going to help.  Really!

    Furthermore, UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) 1.x used today is not enterprise ready, according to Allchin.

    My dream enterprise class peripheral connectivity platform would be built on top of Rendezvous/Zeroconf, would involve XML over HTTP (or something like that), and might even involve a little RDF.  It sure would not involve WS-anything and under no circumstances would UPnP be allowed to play.

    I’m sure that Microsoft and Intel want to make our lives easier, but WS-this on top of WS-that is getting on my WS-nerves.

  • Geronimo!

    Via Matthew, OETrends takes a look at the current state of Apache Geronimo, as well as what to expect in the future.  It looks like things are progressing quickly.  Congrats to the Geronimo team!

  • Wikis Help in a Pinch

    EWeek:

    For about six hours yesterday, the staff of eWEEK.com was treated to a lesson in emergency improvisation. But thanks to 123 lines of Python code, running on a $7-a-month personal Web site on an Apache Web server somewhere in California, you probably didn’t notice.

    This is an excellent story of improvisation at its finest.

  • Tapwave Update

    There is a new version (1.1) of the Tapwave SDK available to registered developers.  They will also be at E3 next week, showing off their wares and they are also eager to speak to game developers.

    The Tapwave Zodiac is a really slick Palm-based gaming platform, though I’m sure they haven’t sold as many units as they would have liked to at this point.

  • Tribes and Tribes 2 for Free

    As I mentioned last month, Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2 are available for free.  I may pick up Computer Gaming World just to save the download time.

    Just in case I’m 364th among 585 people in the queue.

  • Knoppix 3.4 Fresh from the Oven

    Via Slashdot, Knoppix 3.4 is fresh and hot.  I’m currently torrenting the 3.4 release, though it seems to have stalled out on me.  If I ever get it down, I’ll do my duty and leave the torrent open  You might also try your luck with one of the mirrors.  A quick peek at the package list is impressive for a live Linux distro, but I don’t see any Earth shattering changes.

    I feel like a bandwidth hog.  I just downloaded a 3.3 build yesterday.

  • Limited Unlimited Strikes Again

    The Wireless Development Weblog points to an article at Smartphone Thoughts about the limited nature of AT&T Wireless’ $49.99 Mobile Internet Unlimited PDA Plan:

    “AT&T Wireless further reserves the right to move a subscriber from the Mobile Internet Unlimited PDA Plan to the standard $79.99 monthly unlimited Mobile Internet Data Plan, without notice, if the subscriber uses more than 100 megabytes of data in each of two consecutive months.”

    Where am I, the UK?

  • Netstumbler 0.4

    I must have not been looking.  A new version of Netstumbler came out late last month.  The 0.4 release sports a help file and compatability with more cards.  There is also a new release of Ministumbler (for Pocket PC) out.  Thanks to a series of semi-dark tips on yesterdays The Screen Savers (which makes great background at 8am) for the heads up.

    On *nixen, Kismet is the wiffy sniffer of choice.  Kismac is supposed to be a really pretty but functional GUI interface for OSX.

  • Thunderbird 0.6

    Even though it’s old news for those that live on GMT, a slashdot story prompted me to download Thunderbird 0.6.  I’ve been using 0.5 since it came out, and I’d have to say that overall I love it.  IMAP support in Thunderbird has been great, and I’m hoping that things are just a little bit more refined in the new release.  The new logo is slick, and the upgrade seems to have gone over smoothly.  Time to poke around…

    Update: The junk mail filtering in 0.6 seems to be significantly improved.  It looks like passive junk identification is enabled by default (good) and I haven’t seen any false positives yet.  I tried to train 0.5 unsuccessfully but it either missed spam or produced false positives.

  • BeOS, Python, VB, and Worms

    Here are a few links for a lazy Sunday afternoon:

  • PmWiki: Tarball to Wiki in 60 Seconds

    Via freshmeat, PmWiki is a PHP-based Wiki with a clean but nice look to it.  I really like the editable sidebar.  Also, if you add a URL of a .gif, .jpg, or .png, it’ll display the image on the page.  Pretty slick.  The basic syntax looks good, though as with every other wiki on the plant, it’s just different enough to leave you constantly scratching your head.

    “which wiki planet am I on right now?”

    Update: Wow.  I decided to install PmWiki.  I was thoroughly impressed with how lightweight it is (no mysql neccesary) and how easy it was to set up.  I followed the installation instructions and went from a tarball to a working wiki in less than 60 seconds.

    Now to be fair, I should probably edit a few things in the config file in order to customize my wiki.  However, being able to go from a bunch of files to a working installation in a minute is awesome.

  • OpenBSD: First Impressions

    I took a bit of time this morning to download OpenBSD 3.5, fresh from the oven.  It took me awhile to find a near-ish mirror that had 3.5 on it, but I booted from the tiny CD ISO and away I went.

    Overall the install process was the usual no-frills text-based system that gets the job done but isn’t pretty.  I was pretty happy with it, except for one thing:

    Disk partitioning/disk labeling

    Jeez.  There’s really no excuse for this.  I’ve done my fair share of installing *nix systems.  My first experience involved downloading disksets of Slackware (in a subdirectory called slakware) over a 14.4 modem.  The whole process was new to me, but I got through it.  A, AP, D, K, etc.  I did a whole lot of rawriting.  The text install system was good but not pretty (albeit prettier than the OpenBSD installer).

    It worked.  I moved on.  I’ve since installed pretty much every major version of Red Hat in addition to modern Slackware, Debian, SUSE, Fedora, Mandrake, the BSDs, and more that I can’t even remember.

    I’m not a *nix newb by any stretch of the imagination, yet the OpenBSD disk partition/disk label system totally makes me step back and say “WTF?”

    After I look at the install guide and blink several times, it all comes back to me and I’m able to limp through the partitioning and disk label process.

    Hey guys, it doesn’t have to be this hard.  When I was lost at the partition prompt, I typed ‘?’ and was only able to see about half of the help.  Where was the rest?  Oh, it had already scrolled off the screen.  It’d be great to know that at the size: prompt 150M is an option.  It’s not obvious by any stretch of the imagination.

    All of my complaints aside, the rest of the process went smoothly and made a lot of sense to a veteran Linux user.  OpenBSD managed to find the el-cheapo NIC that is in my test box, DHCP gave me all of my settings, and away I went.  I opted to load the basic OpenBSD packages from CD.  They loaded quickly, and I soon rebooted the system in to OpenBSD.  SSH works great out of the box, and we should all thank the OpenBSD team for the glory that is OpenSSH.

    It’s lean and mean, baby.  It’s not like a default Red Hat install where you’ve got a bajillion processes running and a bajillion ports open.  In fact, it’s the opposite.  There are just enough processes running for the machine to be able to function.  This is the reason that only one root exploit has been found in the default install.

    Since installing 3.5, I’ve used adduser to add a non-root user to the system (remember to add youself to the group wheel if you’d like to su), set up and used X using xf86cfg, and added a few packages using pkg_add.  I’ll probably start playing with the ports collection soon.

    Summary: OpenBSD is a tight little secure distro that gets the job done.  The install process is bare-bones but makes sense except for disk partitioning/labeling.  You don’t get a lot by default, but if you only add what you need, you won’t have to deal with insecure bloat.

    Congrats to the OpenBSD team on a great release!

  • Open Sourcing Solaris: GPL? BSD? A Good Decision?

    Infoworld:

    Sun Microsystems Inc. may be selling servers running Linux, but that doesn’t mean it is cutting back on the evolution of Solaris. Among its plans, the company is considering offering a free, open source version of its flagship operating system, said Jonathan Schwartz, the company’s recently appointed president and chief operating officer.

    “Maybe we’ll GPL it,” Schwartz said of Solaris, referring to the GNU General Public License under which the Linux operating system is distributed. “We’re still looking at that.”

    Those are not words to be thrown around lightly.  Of course it would be more logical for Solaris to bre released under a BSD-like operating system, as it was derived from BSD code.  It is encouraging to see Sun thinking about such things.

    Solaris no longer has the clout that it used to.  People use it, sure, but many have migrated away from Solaris on Sparc hardware to a flavour of Linux on x86.  I’m sure that an open-source version of Solaris would give it a lot of publicity.  It may need such publicity in order to survive.

    Solaris 9 (and a preview version of 10) can be downloaded for free, but a per-seat commercial license does apply.

    Here’s another interesting tidbit:

    Sun will likely move “very quickly” to a free licensing model where Solaris revenue would come from a paid subscription, Schwartz said. He wasn’t specific about when this might occur or what the pricing of such a model might be, other than to say it would be “less than Red Hat.”

    “Less than Red Hat” still leaves a good bit of room to be overpriced though.  Once again, I’m really stoked that Sun is thinking about such things, given how anti-open source they’ve been about Java.  Keep up the intelligent decisions, Sun!

  • Ewrt: High End WRT54G Firmware

    Via dailywireless by way of Wi-Fi Networking News, Ewrt looks like an excellent alternative firmware for the Linksys WRT54G.  It was forked from the Sveasoft distro (the bleeding edge Samadhi2 stuff is now non-free) and includes NoCatSplash, traffic shaping, SSH/telnet management, and lots more.

    This looks like a great alternative firmware for the WRT54G.  The WRT54G is on the top of my tech to buy list.  It’s so hackable.

  • XHTML in Easy Steps

    XHTML in Easy Steps
    XHTML in Easy Steps (subtitled Web Pages for the Desktop & Mobile Internet) is probably the best book on modern mobile markup that I’ve ever seen.  The book is part of Barnes and Noble‘s in Easy Steps series.  These books are $10, no BS guides to the subject covered.

    They remind me of what I would have liked the Visual Quickstart Guide series of books to be.  I’ve looked at serveral Visual Quickstart Guides, but have never been able to jive with the format and layout of the books.  They feel too cluttered, and too “hey look what I can do” for my tastes.

    In contrast, the in Easy Steps layout is simple but functional.  There’s usually some full page text discussion at the beginning of the chapter, followed by several examples.  A typical example page will consist of XHTML and CSS listings followed by (get this) the design as displayed by the Nokia browser as well as what it looks like in a shrunk down IE window.

    How freaking cool is that?  The author gets across basic XHTML markup concepts while keeping the user focused on “how is this going to look on a phone?”

    The huge thing for me is the audience that this book is geared for.  It’s not designed for bleeding edge developers who are eager to learn advanced mobile markup.  This is a boook that your mom might pick up if she had the sudden need to learn XHTML.  It’s going to be the cheapest tech book I’ll buy all year.  It’s absolutely wonderful.

    My hat is off to you, Mike McGrath and whoever is behind the in Easy Steps series.  Good move.  Freaking genius move.

    Update: it looks like Barnes and Noble has exclusive distribution rights in the US, but the book can be purchased for under 8 GBP at Amazon.co.uk.

  • Finding Bad Feeds in Your Rawdog Feed List

    Rawdog has been segfaulting on me for awhile now.  It was definitely not Adam Sampson’s fault, it was totally mine.  I aparently copied and pasted an HTML link to my feed list instead of an RSS feed.  Oops!

    Anyway, I’ve not been able to get my RSS fix for some time, and I finally got around to writing a few lines of Python to diagnose the problem.  In about 9 lines of code I’m able to read my config file line by line, check to see if the line represents a feed listing, grab the url from the line, print the feed url, and parse it using Mark’s feed parser (the same version that Rawdog is using).

    The feed section of a Rawdog config file (usually in ~/.rawdog/config) can look like either of the following:

    feed 60 http://postneo.com/rss.xml
    feed 1h http://postneo.com/rss.xml

    The top line is what the older version of Rawdog uses, the lower line is what newer versions of Rawdog uses.  Luckily each line is “feed” + <time> + <url>, so the string can just be split and I can grab the URL with foo[2].

    Here is the result of my two minute hack to figure out where the segfaults are coming from:

    import feedparser

    f=open('config', 'r')
    for line in f.readlines():
      if line.startswith('feed'):
        foo = line.split()
        print 'parsing ' + foo[2]
        data = feedparser.parse(foo[2])
    f.close()

    This will skip over any comments (lines that start with #) and other directives in the Rawdog config file.  I ended up making a backup, running the checker until I came across an error, commented out the offending feed in the backup file, and then removed all feeds in the file I was checking up to and including the offending feed.  This way I wasn’t hammering feeds in the beginning of the list.  Rinse, later, repeat.  It wasn’t until down at the bottom that I found the link that was causing the segfault: a link to one of my posts.  Sheesh.

    But hey, with a few lines of python and a few minutes, I’m back up and running.