random neuron misfires

2:14:53AM PST

Distracting Hacking

Tonight I managed to get a quick and dirty hack out to get the JPilot Backup Plugin working with the latest JPilot version. I’ll work on a much cleaner version later on this week if I get some spare cycles. There’s still some minor GUI tweaks I’d like to do to it. I’m not sure I like the little status window at the bottom. I’ll monkey with a status bar hack or some progress bar stuff later.

You can find the small hacky patch here.

I managed to get my external serial modem working over the Keyspan Serial->USB adapter, so now I can use my Palm on the serial port. Just some more testing. I need to figure out why the kernel module for it is locked at 9600. Perhaps some mods to modprobe a new speed into it would be in order. hugh, any ideas?

So far, I’ve been able to get three consecutive mouses working under X (at the *SAME* time, USB, PS/2, Trackstick), my modem or any other device on the Keyspan adapter reliably, sound, IrDA, USB, and some other small goodies consectutively on this laptop. Now it’s time to get some of this Thinkpad Hackery documented, so others can take advantage of it and play with devfs, reiser, and some of the kernel level crypto stuff.

ianmacd has this all down pat now, apparently, so I’ll trade him some CVS knowledge for his FreeS/WAN tricks.

Pain Comes In Many Forms
..and I hope this is the end of mine…

BBC Development

I’ve now taken a stand and stepped up to the plate to lead the Linuxcare Bootable Business Card project. Now that Duncan Mackinnon can no longer help us from the inside, I hope he will continue to help us in the community. It will continue onward, no matter what we are called, or who we are maintained by. Between schoen, ianmacd and myself, we will ensure the success of this.

Believe in that.

Seminar’ige (CVS, Group Calendaring, Windows Migration)

Well, it seems that I’m going to have to persue some SGML expertise to get my presentation done up for people to follow on my CVS talk internally. Once again, a wrench in the works, since Ancilla was one of the unfortunate ones to go on Friday. She was the one who tirelessly set up these internal talks, gathered the respondees, and tended to the projector, keys, and all of the organization. I’m trying to find someone to help me with this before my talk. I’m going to have to split the talk into two separate days, four hours each, instead of one grueling day on a weekend of 8 hours. Maybe I’ll have some ‘homework’ for the people who attend on Day One.

Two more seminars have come to mind recently, which I’ll have to begin working on soon:

1. Migrating From Windows (replete with full conversion examples, multiple options for Word docs, Excel, mail, etc like the migration from Word to Abiword or StarOffice/OpenOffice, Excel to Gnumeric, yadda yadda.)
2. How To Use Your Equipment (hardware hackery, centering on our “Standard Builds” and Thinkpads for the moment)
3. I’ve scheduled a BOF this week which I’ll be chairing on “The State of Group Calendaring”. I’d like to get some other outside people to dial in to help us with this. Maybe I can do a LUG on it at FourSeas.

Advogato Wishlist #247

1. Why is there no search option on Advogato?
2. Why do we not have <project>foo</project> tags?
3. Why does the Login page not give me a ‘Post Diary’ option on the success page? I have to strike the success portion of the URI and reload. Ugly.
4. No <code> #include <foo.h> </code> tags? <pre> </pre> isn’t good enough.
5. Can someone say <a name=#foo> tags to reference a specific day’s entry?
6. Why does this happen?

Palm Stuff

Lots of goodies coming around the horizon. Anyone who can lend some cycles, either in coding expertise, documentation, or anything (even pointers to some HOWTO documents) would be greatly appreciated. Here’s what I’ve got planned:

1. pilot-link 0.9.5 release
2. Various other conduits
3. XML outputs for pilot-link, pxd (pilot-xfer daemon)
4. New conduit to sync your Palm to a cvs server (local or networked)
5. Malsync updates (should help fix the Vindigo problems).
6. gnome-pilot updates for Calendar, Categories, and some other goodies. jpr and ettore are working on this one. Teaming up on this is crucial to it’s success.
7. Plucker Portal…
8. Work on the perl spider for Plucker
9. Plucker Desktop Buddy
10. Palmvogato. Yes, a way for you to enter your daily diary in your Palm, sync, and have it posted to the server. Makes sense if you’re on the road and want to still keep a record of your daily activities.
11. gnutrition conduit for the Palm. merge with on-Palm shopping lists.
12. Finish my Palm PPP HOWTO.
13. Strip gnome-pilot conduit fixed. It exists, just in a broken state.
14. Finish my Sony Clie USB kernel module.

The Writing Was On The….Web?

I’ve decided to begin putting my writings online for people to enjoy. Maybe I’ll do some sort of “page-a-day” story site or something, and let people jump onboard and read what I have. I’ll be fun, I promise. I still have lots of ideas in this space.. Celiac Times, some sort of Linux/Palm column, maybe some short fiction stories, and of course, the much-sought-for autobiography. I’ve got so much crazy things that have happened in my life, more than a dozen people have asked me to put them to paper, they’re so insanely unbelievable. Anyone who has spent more than a day with me knows that they’re all valid. Time to start penning my memoirs.

EEK! I’m turning 30 in less than 5 months!!

Miscellaneous

Lots more new stuff on the horizon. I hope I can devote some spare cycles to getting it all done in time. At some point, I have to deal with moving my whole life again to another location closer to San Francisco, moving Erika here with me (yes?), and putting myself through school, fixing my health and my teeth, blah blah… it’s all boring and I’ll spare you this time. This year is going to be a huge, productive year of reinvention, and churning out so much code it’ll be coming out of my ears.

If I have time…

Christmas

“A good conscience is a continual Christmas.”

I sit.
I code.
I wither.

I’ve never had a Christmas, and this year is no exception (not by choice). Looks like New Years isn’t going to find me in New York City this year. That will be the first time I miss that in 6 years straight. Last year in Times Square was a blast. I took the Metro North down with elorg.

Erika, I hope your Christmas is as happy as you hoped. You are wanted and needed by many people, and I’m only one of them.

perl

Playing with a very cool new layout idea I had for the Plucker site. There’s a new site launch coming up. I can’t quite get the “compartments” laid out right. Weird hash array references. Damn logic. I can’t process thought right now.

sub content {
if (exists $content{$action}) {
   if (ref $content{$action} eq "ARRAY") {
      for my $sub (@{$content{$action}}) {
         $sub->();
      }
   } else {
   $content{$action}->();
   }
} else {
  &blank_content_area;
}

and..

my $sub = do {     
   local $^W = 0;
    $content{$action} || &blank_content_area;
};

I’m sure dhd would be able to help me with it.

Hunger

The stomach has stopped growling as much as before, but now I definately feel some very specific physical effects of my little diet experiment. I am much “weaker” when I’m up and around. It seems like my joints are a bit less padded.

Walking down stairs feels like jamming my knees and hips now. I’m about to give up on this, and persue some focused eating habits with small, hyper-nutritious meals. It’s also played havoc with my rest periods.

It’s clear that my mind is an order of magnitude sharper with substantially decreased nutrition, however my body suffers. I’m not sure how to balance this out, or how far it can go.

Mountains of South City

I should get out of the house more. I really hate driving. The stress with the truck, and the threat of being stopped by the locals keeps me at home.

My bike seems to be calling out for me to get back on it and find a local trail. If anyone wants to go riding, and live in the Bay Area, contact me. I’m pretty gonzo in the woods, the more technical the better. So far, all I could find was this for a trail map.

I wonder if my PalmV gps would be handy in the woods out here.

Miscellania

Too much lingering. I’m trying to cut out the larger of the projects from my plate, so I can focus on the much more interesting projects. I bit too much off at once. Seems every time I ask for some assistance, people vanish, then complain that I’m not doing enough. I don’t really feel wanted when things get like that.

Stress is at an all-time high. Must relax.

Stuff

• Web stuff
• pilot-link stuff
• HOWTO stuff
• truck stuff
• tax stuff
• Erika stuff
• apartment stuff
• food stuff
• computer stuff
• perl stuff
• stuff stuff!

Lastly, for those who celebrate some sort of holiday this season, HAPPY HOLIDAY!

Phone Rape

I just received my January phone bill from PacBell. Total amount: $1294.18!!!!

Apparently they believe that I spent 8588.0 minutes on the phone last month. That’s sort of odd, considering I was in New York at LinuxWorld for about 8 or 9 of those days.

There will be a very loud session between myself and them. Last month, they ‘suspended’ my service because my bill had exceeded $174.00, but now they seem to think it’s ok to let me continue to happily dial along with a $1294.18 balance.

I need to find a local ISP in the Bay Area. Seems nobody has 650 dialups, and anything outside of about a mile radius of me is a “local long distance” call, so I get nailed with 0.15/minute during the nights and evenings and .30 during the day.

Anyone know any ISPs I could look into (that accept dialup, since DSL is not available here). I’m not that close to my COs (Central Office).

California is definately the worst place I’ve ever seen for bandwidth. WAY to spotty and random, and with these microscopic calling areas, it’s worse.

Eating is unhealthy

It seems that my ‘Caloric Restriction’ tests on myself were overwhelmingly successful, however now I’ve put myself into a very dangerous position of anemia. I’m seeing some aftereffects of that ‘experiment’. Fatigue, frustration, short temper, headaches, cloudy head. All of these are directly related to an extreme iron deficiency.

We’ll see what the doctor thinks.

I’m going to approach this much more scientifically soon. I need to get Gnutrition working on my box again. I think I broke MySQL on my box. Ack!

It would be nice if I could also sync Gnutrition with my Palm-side shopping list, so I could keep track of what goes where. Maybe a version for Celiacs too?

Yes, I read my logs…

I’m seeing some interesting SYN attacks hit my server lately. Time to tighten netfilter on the box.

I’m too furious to think of anything more at this point.

Too much work to do today.

A great disturbance was felt in the Force today.

Like everyone else, I’ve been so buried with billable things, community things, work things, health things, relationship things, travel things, and survival things, I haven’t had time to update my diary entry, so here’s a much better attempt at it.

Plucker Feature Freeze

Well, we’re once again coming up on a new release of Plucker. Lots of new things in this one, but we’re freezing the code this weekend (figuratively and literally, the cvs server is in the middle of a 48cm-laden town full of snow).

Some new things:

1. Possible to configure all hardware buttons for different actions
2. Fixed memory leaks
3. The database name is shown in the category form (Chris)
4. Unfiled is unselected when selecting categories for a “new” DB
5. Screen depth is set to the default screen depth for the device when the main form is closed (fixed several IIIc problems)
6. When showing a “large” image the toolbar (if any) will be removed temporarily
7. Beam directly from CF now (TRG Pro, requires their devkit to compile this feature in)
8. Fixed other minor problems

The website is coming along well, but I’m still stuck on a few things. I’ll manage to squeak them out in time though.

BBC Errata

It seems some of my slides at LWE on the BBC were actually wildly inaccurate. Erg. I hate last-minute project completion where some things get in, and some don’t. Much work to go on this, and on the website. Lucky for me, I’m not doing the website side of things this time.

Not yet anyway…

Truth

I’m glad we can finally feel open enough to get things out, at any expense. In this, we will find power.

i-CVS

There’s been some interest in my talk on “Secured CVS” configuration/etc. at Linuxcare’s main offices being multicast across the web. Not sure yet how or if we can pull that off, but at the very least, we can slap it in RealVideo.

So far, the topics I’m proposing for my talk are:

1. Using cvs over ssh with anonymous ssh (no credentials)
2. pserver installation, configuration, and current exploits
3. CVS over ssh with a trusted user accounts (credentials)
4. CVS and box hardening techniques
5. CVS tricks and tips (pre/post commit magic)
6. Using CVS for daily work, web development, codebase maintenance
7. Web interfaces to CVS (ViewCVS, cvsweb)
8. GUI clients for CVS under Windows and Linux (pharmacy, WinCVS, JavaCVS, TclCVS, others.)
9. Establishing quotas on unsecured cvs accounts using ssh
10. chroot jailing your CVS repositories
11. Multiple repository maintenance and administration
12. How do use CVS with your /etc and ~/ directory to provide backups and security of data
13. rsync’ing a CVS repository, anonymous and trusted

OpenFlock, GCTP

Time to get cracking on some fun projects, including <project>OpenFlock</project> and gctp for Group Calendaring. Anyone else interested, please email us, or check out the project’s homepage.

No, we are not trying to reinvent the wheel.

Advogato Wishlist #739

Why do we not have a <project>Foo</project> element, and a <code>for i in foo;</code> element? Anyone listening?

PROJECT{n..10}

So much to do, and still more fun projects coming around. I hope those people who flipped me their cards at LWE were genuinely serious about me speaking at their conferences as well. I was terrified in our booth talking, but I can definately present the material, if I’m familiar with it, and PDA and embedded devices, wireless, handhelds, serial protocols… these are things I know. We’ll see how it turns out.

Independant Author

A new tangent in my writing career could be soon on my horizon. I’ve received nothing but good praise about my recent work in writing. My ability to clearly articulate thoughts, feelings, “move” the reader. Might be time to start a column somewhere.

Perhaps “Celiac Times” or something similar. Erika, you with me on this one?

Enough for now, my body needs food. Much more to do tonight, and even more to do tomorrow.

I’m back from LWE, with more wonderful airline stories to follow. I have to unpack, but I just realized there’s a small buglet in Advogato‘s diary recall code. Basically I wanted to stick a link in my email headers which would show all of my diary entries in one long page. I tried this:

http://www.advogato.org/person/hacker/diary.html?start=100

…which shows some very peculiar results (miscounting). More on this later I suppose.

I had a great time at Linuxworld, and I wanted to publicly thank everyone for making it happen, even if I didn’t get to walk around on the showroom floor. Too busy in the booth doing demos on the Transmeta Webpad and the iPAQ.

Full report coming soon. Lots of new, exciting things coming up in the next few months.

In some small way, I feel recharged.

<plug>Oh yeah, certify me!!!</plug>

I’m sitting in a hotel on a network that can’t stay up (and paying $9.95 a night for it), while I’m here at LWCE, so I won’t be putting down much here for the moment, but I had a great idea.

Firstly, I have to credit jimw for sparking this idea in my head.

If Advogato’s copy of recentlog.html had a Last-Modified header, I could determine when the person at the top of recentlog.html ailed off the bottom by parsing it with some Perl, thus making sure there’s no duplicate entries in the Plucker database.

I can then make a copy of it available on the site in the Samples section, and update it regularly with a Perl script on the server.

Comments anyone?

Its no secret, I hate the SuperBowl. It represents everything I hate about manipulation, money, and greed. It’s practically a national holiday now.

Presenting the instant replays in “Matrix-style” doesn’t mean that now they’re going to attract the analytical technology sector. I have better things to do with my time. For what they spend on 15 seconds of commercial time could buy me a nice house out here in the Bay Area.

I’m so glad I don’t own a television.

Perl and Python Experts Required, Apply Within

It’s that time again. Time to canvas the technology masses to help us work out the bugs in the Python parser for Plucker, and in the Perl version as well. The perl version as it stands now (though incomplete) is still about 700% faster in execution time than the Python counterpart, based on timings used purely on the gather-content portion of the code.

I don’t know enough about Python yet to help with that part, and some of the things in perl I’m trying to do are a bit outside of my current skill level.

Pain At 40,000 Feet

Another plane flight to the other coast. Let’s hope my ears and headaches can handle the altitude. I should be racking up these miles, but I never end up flying on the same airline. Ugh. I’ve got over 20,000 in the past year alone. Could I bring my snowboard and stay the weekend? Maybe my mountain-bike? I need to get out more.

Is she going to come out and see me?

So once again, my gut was right.

My friend Casey once told me:

“If you have all the facts, and it still doesn’t make sense, you’re being lied to…”

Linuxworld Expo 2001

Well, it’s that time again. Time to rack my brains at the last minute to come up with something so incredibly outstanding that people will say “Huh? What did he just say?”. My talk is on the Linuxcare
Bootable Business Card this year.

A lot has changed, and a lot will be mutating into this behemoth. It’s a good thing. Come see the show. We updated a ton of things, but also ended up breaking a lot of other things. D’OH! We’ve already fixed a major number of items, and will be providing a fixed ISO location at LWE.

Long Time No Post

Well, $PROJECT[1] is tailing off, and finally I’m feeling a sense of accomplishment. I still have a TON of overdue tasks to deal with, but one bite at a time, I’ll get them done. The new Plucker Portal is coming along nicely. You can see some of the progress here:

• newpluckersite-builder.gif
• history-of-plucker.gif
• newplucker_site_design.gif
• newplucker_site_viewcvs.gif
• newplucker_site_changelog.gif

I’ve changed the way the Plucker Configuration Builder looks:

Screenshot Un and
Screenshot Deux

I’ve been thinking about sprinkling some Javascript into it to make it more Wizard-like, but I hate Javascript, and it’s unpredictability on various browsers. Only as a last resort.

Too many community responsibilities have been laid by the wayside. I can’t let this happen. Just as much as I have a responsibility to our clients, I also have a responsibility to the community.

Linkthrough

We’re now linked from Michael Holve’s Linux Portal site in various capacities. He linked to Plucker from his links frame also. Thanks Michael. I emailed him about a feature-add I wanted to put on this portal page so we could bring it into Plucker without images. I asked for the implementation of ALT tags on the page, and within an hour, he had emailed me back, and added them. Now that’s the internet at work!

Evolving

It seems as though Evolution is shaping up. I managed to fix some of my bugs and slowdowns with it, and it’s aaaaaaalmost usable for me. Until I can successfully sync any of my Palms to it, I can’t use it full time. There’s still some small buglets with gnome-pilot. I’ll see jpr and ettore at LWE, so I’ll chat with them about it. It seems to barf on every conduit except Calendar. Not good.

The Only One

Vacation in Keystone Colorado was somewhat relaxing, although I didn’t really get into the swing of things until Wednesday. I’m going to have to claim off 3 days of my vacation time to work, and expense out those horridly expensive phone calls to retrieve my email. We’ll just bill it off anyway, since it’s project related. Came off the vacation little sore from some pretty hard falls on the mountain (3.7 mile runs), but it was fun. I can’t wait to get back on the snow again, and get back into snowboarding more often.

Erika is finally moved out of the house. Well, moved a second time, that is. Manipulative landlords needed to be dealt with. Now she has her own place in town, and is settling in. Happiness will follow.

My lease is up in May, so I’m hoping to be out of here into a new place with her in San Francisco very soon. I want a nice, large, spacious flat or studio. Something to grow into, and out of. We both need time to cool off right now. Stabilize. I hope the stress of “certain events” doesn’t rip us apart. I have to be the strength for both of us when we’re both feeling weak. She is me, and I am her.

Merginating

Well, as many have heard, we’re being acquired. I am optomistic about it’s possibilities. It’s like taking on an orphaned child. We have the power to shape and mold the combined company into something very powerful. We’ve been slinged through enough mud, let’s get some sunshine into our cubes now (literally and figuratively). Too many good people have been slain by the sword. No more.

I’m still not on the guru
page. DAMNIT!

Packet Loss

I’m still getting 70% or more packet loss to gnu-designs, and I’ve proven that the problem exists upstream of us, at a providers router. I’ve emailed him, and he shrugged it off, since it’s not directly affecting him. ARG! It’s affecting about 30 domains I host, as well as my production work, my cvs, and my development projects.

FIX YOUR DAMN ROUTER!!!

The [I] in ISP Must Mean Inept

My ISP has now reached the last straw. They have been slowly blocking ports through their network now, so that I can no longer use ports 21, 22, 25, 53 or 6667. This means no ftp, ssh, smtp, or irc without intricate tunneling. I’ve emailed them without a single response. Since they bought out my last ISP’s dialup accounts, and transparently moved them over, I was never told of this, and certainly would not have agreed to this change. I basically told them to correct their “errors”, or I would simply cancel my account, and deny all previous charges as fraudulent on my credit card. Again, no response.

I can’t think of anything else, but there’s a lot more to write. More later, I suppose. Until then, for users of Plucker, I’ve been cooking up some test content and little ebook-style samples to try in Plucker. Go here and here to grab them and test them out. They’re all compressed with SysZLib, so you’ll need that and the viewer application to make it work, but it’s well worth it.

I’m hoping to release pilot-link at Linuxworld Expo, as well as get my “Secure CVS” slides started.

“Slowly I’ll whittle this tree into a toothpick…”

Hunger takes me.

dsifry: I created a project for OpenFlock here. Add yourself. Your sites aren’t routing, and only one is up, with lots of dead links. Yes, I know, we all have no time left. Once I clear my plate, I can help you with this if you still need it.

CVS

Have to work on my Secure CVS talk. Seems that the need for anonymous ssh access to a secured CVS in a chrooted jail with non-privileged accounts and quotas is getting more and more popular. Well, maybe not, but some people need it, namely me, for $PROJECT[937].

Perl

More perl goo for my portal.

if ($nummatches > 0) {
   $lastmatch = $max+($set-1)*$max;
   $lastmatch = $nummatches if ($lastmatch>$nummatches);
   for ($i=($set-1)*$max;$i<$lastmatch;$i++) {
      $file = $matches[$i];
      $ip1 = $i+1;
      my($ksize) = ($sizes{$file}/1000);
      $size = &round($ksize,1);
      $date = &formattedDate($dates{$file});
      # convert the url for the forum messages
      $url = $file;
      foreach $dir (keys(%forums)) {
         if ($file =~ /$dir/ && $file =~ /(.*)/(.*).txt/)
{
            $url = "$forums{$dir}?msg=$2";
         }
      }
      $resultstr .= "<p><b>$ip1.</b><a
href="$url">$titles{$file}</a></p>";
      $resultstr .= "<br /><b>URL:</b>
$config{'webaddress'}$url";
      $resultstr .= "<br /><b>Size:</b>
${size}KB, <b>Date:</b> $today_date";
   }
   $numsets = int($nummatches/$max)+1;
   $next = $set+1;
   $previous = $set-1;
   $qstr =~ s/&set=(.*[0-9])//;
   $qstr = "$config{'scriptsearch'}?$qstr&set=";
}

Flights

I hate shopping around for cheap flights. Can’t someone get this scam in order? Guliani could probably get the Mob in line and get this thing regulated. One site has a flight for $700.00, and another has the same flight for $408.00. ARG!

Work

Some days, I feel this incredible rush of productivity. Today was one of those days. Other days, I just feel like everyone else was productive, because I was doing their job for them, forgoing my own responsibilities.

No more! I can’t be responsible for voluntary ineptitude.

Employee Retention

We lost another one. I fear that if we don’t start treating employee retention as an important topic, we won’t have many more
employees left to retain.

“I can’t do everything, I can only do enough…”

Palm

Contributions are starting to come in for pilot-link now. A few OS/2 users are contributing patches. This is great! Keep up the incredible work guys.

n9mtb is going to help us shore up the python code in the tree now as well.

Stumbled across this yesterday. Looks like a good start for a server-based clipping application server. I’ve started something similar here about a year ago, though not nearly as thorough. I like the term “renderings” regarding the transcoding of the web content. Makes more sense then “channels” that AvantGo uses.

Plucker Desktop Buddy needs some TLC. Any GNOME guys want to help me fix this?

Someone gave me yet another idea for a Palm application today. A Flash viewer! Now that we have Open SWF, this should be easier. I’ll stick it on the long-term TODO list.

Anyone want to volunteer some time to come up with a good technically accurate Functional Requirements Specification for this?