random neuron misfires

dyork, there’s actually a bit more to it than that. When I set up my CVS server (because SourceForge is still the most inept service I’ve seen to date to offer revision control), I started with cvsweb, until some serious security issues were found in it (both public and non-public issues). I moved to ViewCVS, and although it’s python, it’s much easier to manage.

Also, when setting up a cvs server that uses inetd.conf, and having more than 3-4 repositories can get tricky. I have about 40 repositories in my cvs now, for various things, public and private, and I had to resort to some trickery to get it working, both in CVS native as well as in viewcvs.

<hint>
#!/bin/sh
CVS="/usr/bin/cvs"
CVSARGS=" --allow-root=/cvs/repository_1  
          --allow-root=/cvs/repository_2  
          --allow-root=/cvs/repository_3 # .. n 
          pserver"
exec ${CVS} ${CVSARGS}
</hint>

C++

void *packed = mai.pack();
delete packed;

(which throws a bunch of warnings)

vs.

unsigned char* packed = (unsigned char*)mai.pack();
delete[]packed;

(which compiles cleanly)

C++ is not my best strength.

-pedantic -Wall -Wmissing-prototypes are my new best friends!

In other news…

WTF?! How much can we possibly take here, I mean come on…

<plug>

t-shirt design contest

</plug>

pilot-link 0.9.5-pre6

Whew!

A few more days of bug-hunting, then it’s RELEASE TIME!

Need a catchy name for this release. Something with a bit of technical “oomph!” Anyone got any ideas? shoot me an email

0.9.6 Wish List can be found here and some new conduit ideas here.

Lots of new stuff coming! (anyone care to donate a Handera or a Palm m505, or a Visor Edge for my testing/development needs?)

TRG? Palm? Handspring? Are you listening?

I need some hardware to begin supporting the CF, SD, Springboard support in pilot-link.

I can’t keep paying for these toys on my own (this doesn’t include my two Cybiko handhelds, my two iPAQs and wireless sleeve, my VTech Helio, and my numerous cards, Palm/PDA clip-on attachments, and other PDA gadgets).

Ok, now onto the Java source in the tree..

Long Time No Post

How much more of my life is going to implode before I do?

truck: dead

gnu-designs: monthly hosting charges just doubled, struggling to hold it up on my own

erika: lots and lots of pain, must fix, CV done, moving forward, don’t let go

work: [CENSORED]

health: lost too much weight, no energy, deteriorating, rationing meals, sleep erratic, more headaches followed by bloody noses, waif

code: what? completely different language to me now, it’s like Latin, parts of the words look similar, but the whole sentence doesn’t make sense

money: I haven’t seen it in so long, I forgot what it looks like, still haven’t done my taxes, Pfizer screwed me on my vacation pay, gnu-designs.com nailed me on business taxes, may have to cash out 401k just to survive

friends: who?

hardware: laptop_1: LCD dead, laptop_2: PCMCIA slot dead, home server: dead, year-old Hitachi 21″ monitor: dead

condo: white, white prison walls on all sides, no furniture, huge empty overly-expensive prison, trapped, suffocating

Now I’ve had to let go of two of my employees at gnu-designs. Relegated them back to normal users. If people are tasked with keeping up with billing our customers, and don’t… for over a year… what do you do?

I’ve been footing the bill for their (ab)use of the server, and received nothing in return, except a bill from the provider for bandwidth usage. Meanwhile these two employees get paid directly by customers in cash for their “design” of the customer sites. Not exactly a fair relationship.

gone.

PODS

mysql> select rowid,url,info from pods where 1 limit 0,1000; 523 rows in set (0.01 sec)

2½ weeks and counting.

Ok, I’m beyond frustrated now. I’ve sent my last two emails to my ISP. There will be no more. (message one and message two)

They have finally managed to close off every single open port outbound and inbound on their routers, and now I can no longer log into them at all.

Apr  4 21:56:36 broccoli pppd[4192]: rcvd [PAP AuthNak id=0x2 "Other Failure"]
Apr  4 21:56:36 broccoli pppd[4192]: Remote message: Other Failure
Apr  4 21:56:36 broccoli pppd[4192]: PAP authentication failed
Apr  4 21:56:36 broccoli pppd[4192]: sent [LCP TermReq id=0x2 "Failed to authenticate ourselves to peer"]

Both of their support numbers are busy 24×7, even though they’re not a 24-hour shop. They do not respond to my emails, even though they guarantee a 48-hour response time. I am being billed for this “wonderful” service, and can’t even log in to use it.

Basically, I’m calling my bank, and filing a claim against them to have the charges they’ve made on my account removed, and let them respond to *THAT* instead.

Palm Open Directory Syndicate: PODS

Well, PODS is going well, I now have 470 links (cleaned up some dupes) in the database. All of these links point to Palm-formatted websites, which can be used sans modification on the Palm. I’m trying to clean up the links and create a good schema to represent and edit them, and then wrap that in a dmoz-like interface for managing them.

You can see an image of what it looks like here

And now the legal mess. What sort of sticky goop am I getting in by publishing these links? Clearly this content is not linked directly from anywhere on the web, or if it is, it’s quite hard to find. It took a lot of URI massaging, google searching, and some other means to get this many links in there. It was so far, only a week’s worth of work. No “illegal” means were used to get these links, it was all publicly available.

I keep falling into more pandora’s boxes of links and jump sites to more links. I’m interested in providing a broad range of content for the Palm users to use (with Plucker, Sitescooper, and similar client applications). I don’t want to defraud the content providers in any way, and in fact, I’d like to help them. I’ve already received two replies from people I’ve emailed to ask for the location of their “hidden” URI so I could point Plucker and Sitescooper at them.

[…] The person I am speaking of was graceful enough to allow me to use his writings but we have an agreement that the material not be distributed and he be kept anonymous. With this in mind, I must decline your request. The AvantGo platform does not allow copy/paste and is for this reason an excellent tool to slow down illegal distribution. I am not saying you would distribute this but we need to keep a policy which can be kept consistent.
[…]

…and another

[…] As a content provider, the nice thing about AvantGo is that I can insure that the only people who access the “lean” content are those using AvantGo. This insures that regular web surfers will always use the full version of the site, and therefore my advertising revenues continue. […]

It’s interesting that they both mention AvantGo in here with regard to providing access to this “lean” content. I don’t think making these links (all 470 and growing) public is in any way “distibuting illegal content”, nor would it defraud content providers of advertising revenue.

Contrary to what AvantGo may believe, AvantGo doesn’t own this content, nor have they cornered the market on distribution of “lean” content. There are better alternatives out there, guys.

Any comments? I’m interested to hear any and all sides of this.

Enough for now. Diary moresome later.

Long time no post.

Girlfriends and Barbeques

Flying my girlfriend in for the weekend. I managed to get on priceline at 5:00pm on a Friday, bid on a round-trip ticket for a next-day departure (Saturday), and get it… for $300.00. I saved $1903.85 on this bid. Not bad for 1/2 day’s notice.

I haven’t yet broken my promise of never paying more than $300.00 for a flight.

I’ll bet she didn’t expect me to follow through with that one. I called her at lunch and said “Hey, you want to come over for the weekend? rasmus is having a barbecue.” She said “Sure!” (thinking I was kidding). BwAHAHaHA!

Slurp!

Finished a new web page to slurp other Palm-formatted sites through. Took me awhile to figure out the rewriting of the links as they come across, so that relative links are converted to absolute, and all relevant HREF links are pushed back through my script, so I can re-slurp them when a user clicks on them. I’ll launch this soon. It’s all part of PODS I have to publicly thank dave0 for the help with the callback on this one. It’s still using a lot of hacky code, but it works, so I can begin tweaking more and more now.

${$response->content_ref} =~ s/Q$relE/$script?site_selection=$uris{$rel}/g;

PODS

Did some more work on PODS, and added some more links to it. This thing is going to be huge. Between this, palmliography, and the new Slurp thing I whipped up tonight, this could be quite the useful sack-o-tools for Palm users. rasmus was helping me convert the Catalog
CPAN module code (ugly, bloated, slow, and disgusting) over to a hand-rolled php script. I’m so impressed with the speed and level of compactness of the code.

CLIQ

Well, a debacle of connected events once again stops me from doing what I wanted to. I missed my talk at CLIQ by missing my flight out (a flight I paid for out of pocket, I might add). My truck was completely DOA, and wouldn’t even turn over. I called the three taxi companies in town. One of them had a circuit error (fast busy signal), the second rolled into some weight-watcher’s clinic, and the third no longer covers my area. Ugh. I was stuck. I spend two weeks on slides, and even lost a bunch at the last minute (sorry dsifry).

“I need to stop these dominoes from falling” -hacker

bratsche, I hope all is well with Chris. I hope our talk the other day on irc was at least somewhat uplifting. I feel your pain (literally in some cases). Things will go well. It’s important to understand what these things are, and to make sure to seek highly qualified help. I’m saddened that I didn’t have enough money or knowledge back when I had “issues”, but now I’ve learned.

Post-It Mirror

I’ve now begun sticking Post-It notes with my tasks on them on my closet mirror doors. Hopefully this will get me a bit more aware of what’s going on in my life, and work to get them all taken down. I don’t have my dry-erase board here, so I’m a bit limited with tools. The more I take away, the more of “me” I can see again in the mirror. So far, it’s working well.

Plucker 1.1 Released

Well, we’ve finally released Plucker 1.1, and the website is holding up (yes, I’m surprised). We went from ~5k hits to >31k hits a day now. That’s not bad for a little Palm project. It’s doing well, I just wish more people would jump aboard and help us out. There’s a lot of things to be done yet, and that damn python parser needs to DIE. It’s so damn slow!!

We have a Freshmeat Plucker Entry, one on PalmGear, one on Freeware Palm

I seem to be doing good on badger‘s external advogato stats page. I don’t have as many projects as wsanchez nor do I want that many. 20? Come on… I only have 13 at the moment, not including internal projects at $JOB[0].

So much to do, so much going on. I have to find new housing, I have to help my girlfriend find a good job out here and relocate her, I have to knock all these side projects off of my plate, deal with my truck, my health, and getting back into my training.

Enough for now…

“Sometimes you have to rustle the trees to scare the birds out. -setuid”

I’m done with OPN. I have outgrown their ineptitude.

dirtyrat: I may have a quick-and-dirty project that I could use some of your help with. You’ve got more gtk+ under your belt than I do at the moment. Take a look at something I started, and let me know if it’s something you could help me finish (shouldn’t take more than a day or two at the most).

Plucker Desktop Buddy