Misfiring neurons of the unconscious grey matter
kwd, the gnome-pilot conduits work fine with your Palm, including Handspring Visor, TRG, and Palm devices themselves. They’ve matured quite a bit. Yes, there’s more things to add and fix, but it’s functional now.
You might want to revisit them. No HOWTO necessary, unless of course, you would like to augment my collection that I’ve been starting here:
I’d love to hear your experiences with the conduits, good or bad.
4:28AM PST
CVS Administration
I spent all night working on my cvs server, trying to get some things straightened out. I found some limitations in cvs in general, and with inetd’s limit on the number of values you can put in there for –allow-root=.. definitions
I managed to get around it by calling a script in inetd.conf which sets CVSARGS, and allows me to get more repositories out of it. Now it works well. Next I’ll have to fix this monstrosity and update it to include the other projects on the server.
#!/bin/sh
CVS="/usr/bin/cvs"
CVSARGS=" --allow-root=/cvs/first
--allow-root=/cvs/second
--allow-root=...
--allow-root=/cvs/infinity
pserver"
exec ${CVS} ${CVSARGS}
The next step is to get a –allow-list option in cvs itself, so I can put the repositories in a file (or a database) and then use –allow-list to read the list in. All worked well, but I’m still not satisfied with the number of hand-edited redundant scripts I had to fix (newlog.pl, loginfo, commitinfo, modules, etc. for each repository). I’ll have to figure out a way around that, or… maybe it will come in handy when each repository is chrooted into an anonymous ssh jail.
Hrm. More to think about, but it gave me some more data for my CVS seminar. That thing grows day by day.
Free Software Palm Development Network
First there was the Open Palm Group which died off. I should see about picking up the domain one of these days and officially revive it.
But now I’m offering a network for the sharing of information in the Palm Development space. Yes, it’s small, only 20 or so projects at the moment, but I am hoping that it will grow fast. Am I trying to replace them? No. Not at all. I am hoping to culminate the best and brightest Palm developers in the open source and free software space to collaborate, share, and grow here.
If you have a Palm® project, no matter how big or small, and want to have others help you develop it further, or have a secure place to retain the code and development of it, email me and I’ll set you up a repository and an area to continue development.
There’s a lot in store for this, definitely going to be some fun stuff coming. Jump onboard!
bz-LAAAAG
hoffman, bzflag and the much faster German updated
version definately support an AI mode. Look into the -solo when running the client app. It will bring in as many robots as you want. You definately want to use the German version of bzflag until the new UDP code is rolled back into HEAD on SourceForge
$10.00 to break into your car, sir?: A True Story
So there I was, driving in on Friday morning, all ready to go for a very long most-of-the-day meeting. I know I wasn’t going to get a parking space anywhere near 650 Townsend for free, so I planned on parking at the lot right outside the main doors and paying for it. At least it’s close, and attended.
As anyone who has had the pleasure (pfft!) of seeing my truck knows, my entire passenger seat is generally occupied by a large boom box and a cd case full of cd’s.
I love my music. Can’t drive a mile without it.
So the routine is that you normally pull in, pull towards the little shack in the middle of the lot, and the attendant takes $10.00 from you (used to be cheaper a few months ago) and you have your pick of whatever spots are left open. I typically pick a spot right near the entrance, facing the bus stop there.
And the day goes on, meetings go well, I get a lot of work done after the meetings, everybody leaves, and it’s nice and quiet.
Whew.
Time to hunker down and get some work done. I strap on the headphones and begin ranking away.
I managed to somehow blow up yet another Thinkpad hard drive, this time not even physically connected to any Thinkpad at all. So I’m reinstalling (yes, you guessed it, Windows) on the spare laptop drive to configure the Lucent wireless gateways (currently I had this particular wireless gateway locked in a ‘Closed Wireless Network’ configuration, so the only way to get to it was through a Windows-only configuration tool, and I had to have been broadcasting with my *REAL* Lucent MAC address to get to it, so VMWare was out of the question — it uses that PCNET32 interface, and a virtual MAC, so that fails.. anyway… where was I….)
So I get the laptop configured, all the drivers and goodies are loaded, and I pack up and begin to get ready to leave.
Standing back, looking at my desk as if I’m a shepard on a tall hill watching my flock, I survey the things on my desk, to see if I’m going to need any of them for the weekend.
“Ok, take this, no, leave that, and let’s not forget this…”
..you know the routine. The mental inventory comes around once a day or more sometimes.
Slowly I sling the backpack over one shoulder, grab some books and a legal pad, and walk out of 650 Townsend, up the escalators, over to the left, past the ATM, and straight into the parking lot for my truck.
“La la la lalaaaa….”
(thinking about what I’m going to do this weekend, so I can be ahead of whatever is about to bite into me on Monday). That Windows install went just too smoothly. Yes, 475 reboots, but it didn’t break.
“La la laaaa…”
(opens passenger side truck door to drop backpack and books onto the only space that can hold them, the passenger footwell area).
Hrm, this doesn’t look right. My entire bench seat is… empty. It looks like the same long, empty expanse you see when looking down a set of railroad tracks. I stand back and think..
“Hrm, did I bring my radio today? Or did I take it to my apartment to listen to some tunes?”
“No, I definately took the radio with me..”
(mentally plays back getting in the truck that morning)
My eyes slowly pan around the truck’s interior in the darkness.
“Hrm, every thing looks…”
(cold, icy feeling comes over me as I see the driver’s windows smashed, and all the glass in the darkness on the driver’s carpet, none on the seat.)
My radio is gone, because someone decided they needed it more than I did, and smashed my truck windows to get into the truck to get it.
They had to open the door (this radio is *VERY* large by the way, and always covered, it’s the one on the right in this picture) to get it out.
My glovebox wasn’t rifled through. My visors were not overturned. I even have a 120-volt to 12-volt invertor that plugs into the cigarette lighter to power the radio, and they UNPLUGGED THE RADIO from the invertor and took only the radio. I also have some pendants/necklaces and a “War Helmet” hanging from the rear-view mirror. Those were also left alone. I had a Jabra cell headset on the seat. They pulled the earcup off of it, and tossed them both on the seat. Gas tank wasn’t syphoned. Tires weren’t slashed. Nothing but a missing boom box.
They only took the radio.
Now I was left with a 12-mile drive home, in the dark, with absolutely nothing for sound but the whistling of the air going through the smashed remains of my driver’s side windows at 65 miles-per-hour.
“I love my music. Can’t drive a mile without it…”
I’ve lived my whole life in CT, growing up in Hartford, Willimantic, Norwich, and briefly in Brooklyn. I’ve never had any car that I’ve ever owned broken into (and some of them were quite worthy of it). Now that I live here, and drive a 13-year-old truck, my vehicle has been vandalized a total of 4 times in the past year alone.
I guess what bothers me the most, besides the inconvenience of being out of transportation for the next week or more, is that the truck was no more than 50′ from the front door of 650 Townsend, in an attended parking lot, and nobody saw this assailant smash my windows (3/8’s inch 4×4-package tempered glass, not easy to just smash with an elbow or even a rock), take out a nearly 3′ long, 14″ diameter radio, and walk away?
Not happy. Not happy at all.
“$10.00 to break into your car, sir?”
johnm, you know I don’t want to bicker about things like this, especially here. I don’t have the time, patience, or resolve to argue with you about the issues regarding pilot-link. In short, the reason I said it’s a mandatory upgrade is that the sync code that was in 0.9.3 is “questionable” and was removed because of potential GPL concerns.
It was completely rewritten from the ground up by jpr, and those concerns have been alleviated. We’ve talked about this on the list already.
Also, 0.9.3 will not work with most of the supporting applications that might continue to use it, such as Evolution,
gnome-pilot, and possibly others such as PilotManager, JPilot, etc. If people want to continue to use 0.9.3, and ignore some of the licensing issues, and an occasional corrupted record here or there, that’s fine. I’m not forcing anyone to upgrade, just that compatibility will break if they choose to use 0.9.3 with some of the newer GUI-based apps.
Maybe “mandatory” was bad phrasing. Let’s call it “necessary”, or “critical” or something else then.
As for the layout at tool launch time, that silly splash, reminder: It does say -pre5 on it, no? Any code can be added removed for a final release. It’s my intention to move all of the argument parsing out (probably using popt or getopt() in a proper lib), and make it uniform between binaries. Until I do, some will act different than others.
Speaking of patches… the only message I’ve received from you directly or on the list regarding pilot-link referencing patches (not general webpage or SourceForge banter) was on Thu, 19 Oct 2000 15:31:55 -0700 (PDT), referencing the PILOT_LINK_PATCH stuff. I’ve already fixed that (and screwed up the branch, which jpr had to resurrect).
If there are other patches I haven’t received, if you could email them to me, I will include them. Other than that, I haven’t seen anything, and you already know that I’ve been / including / patches, so you’re not being ignored.
I await your patches and suggestions to improve the package.
Time
It’s time to get out of the cube and into the Big Blue Room and go biking, camping, snowboarding, running, whatever. Next weekend will definitely be fun.
There are rougly three aspects to my life:
Her birthday is coming up. We’ve missed too many holidays apart, so I’ll try to do what I can to make this one special, given unbelievably constrained funds at the present time. At least my round-trip tickets from one coast to the other on 10 days notice (3,051 miles) were $200.00, saving $1206.25 on the full fare. Thanks to Priceline, of course.
Project Roundup
Well, it looks like the new Plucker website is a success so far. Still some small minor tweaks to do, but overall, it’s been doing well. 11,997 hits on it’s first night, nearly 13,000 the next day, and pretty stable on the third day.
Don’t forget to help out with the Plucker Artwork Contest. We need some T-Shirt ideas. Templates are available on the site, and I’ll be putting up everyone’s ideas there for everyone to see.
Oh, and go play in the Plucker Samples Section. I need some more ideas, content, stories, HOWTOs, etc. Just send them to me directly.
I also managed to squeak out a few more patches into pilot-link, and get a release of pre5 on the website. Download it if you’re using 0.9.3 and use this for now until the final version is released. Just a few more additions to the code, and I’m going to cut it, if there’s no major breakage. It fixes a lot of problems people have had, and it’s going to be a mandatory upgrade when it’s released.
The CVS Seminar I am going to be giving at the offices seems to have grown in interest, and now it may be turned into a University Course to deliver to partners. Doesn’t matter either way to me, since I’ll be retaining the rights to the material, so it comes with me. This also means I can turn it into a book. There’s really no good in-depth books out there on CVS, including this one and this
one. Depressing. I’m going to try to fix that.
Looks like there are some other new projects coming my way. I just hope I’m given the time and flexibility to dig into them. Lots of new chewy ideas, just need to start coding away and implementing them.
“How do you eat an elephant?”
More Public Speaking
Looks like I’m going to be flying around again speaking at CLIQ, the Colorado Linux Info Quest. I’ve never been on a panel before, so this should be interesting. I’ll be on the panel with Havoc Pennington, Andy Hertzfeld of Eazel, and others.
Sounds like fun.
Of course I’m terrified.
I’ve never done slides or a presentation on pilot-link before. Time to get cracking!
At least I can use my iPAQ now to remotely control my MagicPoint presentation on my laptop over 802.11 wireless. Whee! The joys of geek toys!
Why do people even use Microsoft products anymore, really. I mean with all the instability, patches, and blatently open security holes in it. Even PowerPoint has security holes now… How did that even get past QA?
We need a “VBA Viruses For Dummies” or “Writing Successful Microsoft Viruses in 24 Hours” book on the open market. Any takers?
I have to laugh though, I was in my local CompUSA recently, and someone was commenting on my iPAQ running linux, and my ThinkGeek ultra-spiffy perl t-shirt, and this guy says:
(him) “Why don’t you run Windows, it’s so much better than that Linux stuff”
(me) “Why do I need Windows, I already have a Playstation…”
(him) <blank stare>
(me) “In a few years, when their OS gets to the point where it actually becomes useful, though highly unlikely, I might consider it, but that’s probably 5-10 years off, and I have work to do now. I can do exponentially more things with Linux as it existed a year ago than I can with Windows today.”
(me) <walks away>
Picture seeing this tall, ominous-looking person covered in tattoos saying this to “Joe User(tm)” in a CompUSA. It’s always funny when it happens.
Ok, that’s enough for now.
2:11AM PST
Time to get some food, and get some more code cranked out before I have to roll back into the cube at 7:00AM PST.
I hate driving.
I hate my truck.
5:40 am PST
3:12 am
This diary entry intentionally left blank.
More to come in a few hours.
3:04am
I don’t have much time tonight to post, but…
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
dirtyrat, I just emailed this to you as well, but for the rest, I’ve converted it into Plucker format (took 10 seconds to spider and convert). Now everyone can enjoy it!
The Cathedral and the Bazaar in Plucker format!
The viewer (you need one of these)
The compression lib (I compressed the text, so you’ll need this also)
I built it with one command:
plucker-build -f /tmp/catb -H "http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/" --zlib-compression --bpp=4 --stayonhost --maxdepth=3
thrase, you might want to grab plucker-1.1beta1.tar.gz if you want the latest build of Plucker, or hit the cvs.
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.gnu-designs.com:/cvs/palm -z3 co plucker
(password is nothing, just hit ENTER)
Welcome aboard!
I held my first-ever BOF on Group/Shared Calendaring under linux and the State of Affairs. Looks like there’s a lot of really neat stuff to work on here. We’re in the beginning stages of stitching it all together (as is everyone else). My not-even-complete slides are here (there are only 4 of them for now). I’ll be updating them as the weeks roll by. The next BOF we have will be externally open to the public and we’ll provide a Sprint dial-in line for those who want to join in.
I have several more talks to give, both internal and externally. I’m still working out the hundreds of slides for my CVS talk at the main Linuxcare offices. It was going to be a full 8-hour session, but now I think I’m going to split it into two days of four hours each, perhaps with some ‘homework’ on the first day for those in attendance.
Next talk is on the migration of Windows Applications and Data Interchange to Linux. It should get some people stuck in the mud at work to think about running a proper OS. Windows users are propagating, and it has to stop.
My LWE proposal is in for August’s Linuxworld Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’ll be a shortened version of my Secure CVS for Distributed Development Projects talk that I’m giving at work
Struggles
My life is rife with uncertainty…
…and I do not like it.
I’d like to know what’s going on with [CENSORED]
I will not lose her, and everything else in my life, most of all my sanity, for this.
BBC
schoen, not to worry. The BBC will survive, and we will manage through these resource-constrained times. We just need some more time to focus. I seem to be so distracted with a million things, I’m whittling them down one by one.
“Nibbled to death by ducks…”
I need a sense of accomplishment.
Depression crawls closer.
I must be strong.
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