Matt Croydon::Postneo

Category: Open Source

  • OSX and KDE/Qt

    So Apple is using KHTML for its rendering engine.on Safari.  This begs the question: How easy is it to port KDE/Qt Apps to native OSX?  It obviously can’t be too hard or Apple wouldn’t have done it.  Have they secretly ported the KDE/Qt architecture to OSX in order to make their lives easier?  How does Project Builder handle a KDE/Qt-style app?  I’m rather ignorant on the subject, but I’m extremely curious.  If you post about it in your weblog, email me a pointer on the off chance that you’re not on my blogroll.

  • But How Does It Render?

    Mark reviews Safari from a web content provider’s standpoint.  I agree with his summary:

    The browser does not support tabbed browsing. I will never use it except for testing.

  • Mobile p2p

    I had some pretty interesting thoughts this evening while making a peanut butter and jelly sandwitch. I’m not quite sure how it started, but I like where it ended up.

    What happens at the intersection of internet-ready mobile phones and peer to peer networks?  Of course when the two technologies meet, whatever you end up wtih will be fully buzzword compliant.  I’m trying to see past the buzz.  Bear with me for a minute.

    Cellular phones are finally beginning to have a decent bit of power, a real operating system, they are java-enabled, wap-enabled, and mms-enabled.  Bandwith is still an issue but it is improving all the time.  What if several peer to peer networks were developed to solve specific problems.  Let’s take a peer to peer geographic-specific network.  Everyone with a phone that is connected to the network is constantly broadcasting their location, and everyone recieves information about phones with in an n feet/mile/meter/kilometer range.  You can query a phone within your radius, request a chat, meetup, collaboration, game, prank, or anything else you can imagine.

    The only problem that I see to a system like this is bandwidth.  Peer to peer networks are notorious bandwidth hogs.  The thing I love about wireless/mobile p2p networks is that developers wound be required to write tight protocols and code to work on these limited devices.  Another thing I was thinking about was the possibility of involving servers or gateways in this mobile p2p network.  I’m pretty sure that with JXTA you can have different classes of nodes.  It shouldn’t be too hard to set up server/proxy/gateway nodes and end user nodes.  The phone deals with the gateway which broadcasts lots of bandwith and filters out anything beyond the radius specified by the phone.

    The great thing is you could have a ton of different p2p networks that do things other than share music.  You could share resources available to your phone, collections of user-taken photographs, expert information about a perticular location or topic, or anything else you can conjure up.

    I see the advantages of a mobile mob of p2p networks outweighing the costs of building the infrastructure.  I have a feeling that much of the work could be done for cheap and much of the load handled by broadband connections at home.  How would that be for disruptive?

    I think that this rant was probably triggered by the stuff that Russ said earlier today, so thanks Russ!  I definately don’t have the time to tackle a project like this right now, but I’m going to throw it on the back burner and let it simmer.  Any thoughts?

  • NTP

    Glenn Graham has a good overview of NTP at O’Reillynet:

    If your server doesn’t keep accurate time, your log files are useless in the event of an incident that requires log-dependent information, including security breaches. E-mail servers and other clients depend on accurate time to relay, send, and receive data. What good is the date stamp contained in an e-mail if the server that passed that information is inaccurate? These programs all must be timed precisely to within 1/100 of a second.

  • Kannel

    Kannel is an open source project to keep an eye on.  It is a WAP gateway that supports the bajillion different protocols that fall under WAP.  According to the status page, the following protocols/features are working:

    • WSP: connection oriented and connectionless modes.
    • WML compiler from text to binary form. Supports a number of character sets.
    • WMLScript compiler: Converts textual WMLScript source code to a bytecode format.
    • WTP: class 0, 1, and 2. Error handling is not very much tested, though.
    • WDP: Supports only UDP bearer (GSM data and GPRS), no SMS bearer suppor yet.
    • SMS center protocols: CIMD 1.3, CIMD 2.0, SMPP 3.4, UCP/EMI 4.0. Also: SEMA SMS2000 OIS protocol for SMS centers over Radiopad and X.25. These work for SMS gateway, not WAP gateway. Kannel can also use some types of GSM phones and GSM modems as pseudo SMS centers.

    This project could lower the bar for entering the WAP field.

  • Red Hat 8.0.92

    OSNews kicks the tires on Red Hat 8.0.92 (Phoebe), the latest beta.  Hopefully we’ll see a more in depth article from them in the near future.

  • Cayenne 1.0a5-1 and Hibername 1.2.2

    Cayenne 1.0a5-1 and Hibername 1.2.2 have been released.

    Cayenne:

    This is a point release that fixes a few serious bugs found in Alpha 5 release, as well as a number of less crtitcal ones. This upgrade is really recommended for those using Alpha 5.

    Hibernate:

    Version 1.2.2 fixes a minor bug introduced in 1.2.1.

  • Samba 3.0

    OpenBSD Journal:

    More from The O’Reilly Network people. This one is about what is forthcoming in the 3.0 release of Samba. Samba provides file sharing and authentication services for Windows hosts from UNIX systems and is in OpenBSD ports. From the description of 3.0, this one looks like its worth trying out: active directory support and Kerberos look to be on the table.

    Has anyone tried this on OpenBSD?

  • Cqure AP

    Along the same lines as “Herbix”, Cqure AP is a single floppy wireless access point distro.  It supports Prism 2-based 802.11b cards and most standard 10/100 NICs.  I’m a little obblivious on the wireless side, but this looks like a cool way to save a hundred bucks or so, or whatever a wireless access point costs nowadays.

    Of course if you use Cqure AP, you’ve got to plug in the biggest antenna you can find, cause you’re so that guy.

  • Pre-Bedtime Linkage

    Pre-bedtime news bits:

    • The Inquirer: Apple/AMD rumors continue.
    • OpenBSD Journal: NTP Basics.
    • Kerneltrap: NetBSD/Darwin binary compatability layer updates.
    • Use Perl; points to the latest Perl Review [pdf], which contains bits about parsing RSS with XSLT and other yummie nuggets.
    • Shelley doesn’t like the social implications of blogrolls.  I have seen similar things happen with Livejournal friends lists.
    • I’m going to hit a local computer show tomorrow in search of cheap stuff.

  • Mono News #(n+1)

    Here’s todays Mono news roundup:

    • Rachel has made Glade# use attributes so binding C# widgets to the designed widgets is now easier than ever. Alp has improved this to use implicit names as well.
    • Martin’s Mono debugger now has support for multi-thread debugging. Special feature: breakpoints can be defined in a per-thread basis now.
    • Daniel López has checked in his Apache module to integrate Mono and Mono’s ASP.NET support as an Apache module. Gonzalo has folded his new Mono hosting classes into this module (they are now shared between XSP and mod_mono). You can get the mod_apache from CVS (module name: mod_mono).
    • Mono Basic improvements: Marco has added support for more statements on the grammar.
    • Zoltan has posted his Code Coverage analysis tool for Mono.

  • Herbix

    Herbix 1.0-67 has been released.  Herbix is a floppy linux distro that packs http, ftp, smtp, dhcp, and irc daemons and a boatload of functionality onto that 1.44MB.  Looks like a good thing to have in your pocket if you want to serve on the go without disrupting your friend’s hard drive.  Mor details are on the freshmeat page for Herbix.

  • GTX+OSX

    Slashdot:

    GTK+OSX has released a native Mac OS X Aqua port of the Linux-based GTK+ open source graphical user interface library. GTK+ (GIMP Toolkit) is a popular widget library supporting graphical applications for Linux. GTK+OSX version 0.1 is an alpha release intended for developers.”

    The gooey details are at the project website hosted at sourceforge.

  • Kismet: An 802.11b Network Sniffer

    Kismet:

    Kismet is a 802.11b wireless network sniffer – it is different from a normal network sniffer (such as Ethereal or tcpdump) because it separates and identifies different wireless networks in the area. Kismet works with any wireless card which is capable of reporting raw packets (rfmon support), which include any prism2 based card (Linksys, D-Link, Rangelan, etc), Cisco Aironet cards, and Orinoco based cards. Kismet also supports the WSP100 remote sensor by Network Chemistry.

    Utilities such as this will become more important as 802.11 networks overlap, mesh, and do other stuff that we haven’t thought of yet.  There’s also another reason to covet a Sharp Zarus.

  • Gentoo Weekly Newsletter

    DIY Linux junkies will enjoy the Gentoo Weekly Newsletter:

    The GWN was started as a way of giving the Gentoo community one source of information about the Gentoo Linux project. The GWN will summarize issues and discussions from the community, as well as major news items and announcements, as well as security vulnerabilities, bugs and changes to the Portage tree. As we gather feedback from the user community, we will continue to add features and additional areas of coverage to the GWN, with the ultimate goal being to make this newsletter your main source of information about Gentoo Linux.

    [via Linux Today]

  • Zen and the Art of Comprehensive Archive Networks

    This is a great article for many audiences.  Anyone from geeks and programmers to sysadmins or architects of distributed storage systems would get a kick out of this article:

    It seems that there is a lot of interest in having similar archives for other languages like CPAN [1] is for Perl. I should know; over the years people from at least Python, Ruby, and Java communities have approached me or other core CPAN people to ask basically “How did we do it?”. Very recently I’ve seen even more interest from some people in the Perl community wanting to actively reach out a helping hand to other communities. This ‘missive’ tries to describe my thinking and help people wanting to build their own CANs. Since I hope this message will somehow end up reaching the other language communities I will explicitly include URLs that are (hopefully) obvious to Perl people. Note that I’m going to describe what things worked for Perl, translate appropriately for other languages.

    [via Use Perl;]

  • 10-Codes Over IP Followup

    Steve Makofsky (furrygoat) gets it:

    This would be awsome. Its simple, yet an effective means for location based services. Imagine a Pocket PC Phone specifing it’s current location based on cell towers, by the current Wifi access point it’s using, or some sort of integrated GPS – with little more overhead than a standard HTTP GET.

    Yep.  Isn’t that sexy?

  • Russell Beattie on the Universal Personal Proxy

    Russ outlines out loud about the universal personal proxy idea.  I had previously tuned out the personal proxy conversation because my head was already swimming to keep up with everything else floating around.  Now it looks like I should play catchup.  Read the outline if you want to dig into Russ’ head.

  • WSDL Wizard

    Simon Fell delivers again:

    Finally wrapped up RC1 of the WSDL Wizard. It supports doc/lit and rpc/encoded, SOAP headers, enumerations, complex types and import [most of the stuff that auto-gen’d WSDL uses, but not everything in XSD]

    Sweet!  Even more things to play with over the weekend.

  • Evolution 1.2.1

    Ximian Evolution 1.2.1 has been released.  The freshmeat page notes added features and bugfixes.