random neuron misfires

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.

“I just love that gasoline smell!”

Wait, no I don’t.

Evolution

I finally got it working, but there’s still that annoying font bug. It sync’s with my Palms. I don’t really like the fact that it requires I use gnome-pilot to get my data. I don’t like running that daemon. I have to get a conduit in pilot-link for this.

Starting the daemon, sync’ing my data, and killing the daemon is not a model I want to continue to use. Still needs proper category support in the Contact records and a few other tweaks. Not quite production ready yet.

Also, what are we doing about group calendaring or rfc2447 compliance. Let’s start coming up with a good solution here.

Her

Things appear to be stabilizing. I just wish I was.

That Work Thing

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Work continues to be interesting. Unfortunately, there’s some internal projects I can’t elaborate on here. It’s rapidly become a great test of my mental strength and tolerance.

“The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us. If you can do that, and live that way, you are really a wise man.”

Palm

I’m unmotivated.

I found a bug in pilot-addresses, and some other redesign problems. The good news is that it appears that there are still several people successfully running 0.9.5 under OS/2. Small problems, but it works. Another “When I Get Time™” fix.

ianmacd, we should get you started on some small development tasks on the Palm©. As you know, there’s a ton of work out here in that space. I have a certain
project I think you could help us with.

It seems that my internal Linuxcare email diary from PalmSource 2000 made it’s way into the hands of PalmPower Magazine, unaltered. How it got there, I don’t know, but now they’re asking me to print it in their magazine.

Let me be clear: “If you print that material without my permission, you put your entire company in a very ugly legal liability situation.”

AvantGo is still at it on my server. This time they’re trying to subvert my $HTTP_REFERER tricks. They don’t realize what I’ve got running on that box. I just love seeing this stuff. A small reminder guys, I stay on top of my logs, and now so do they.

Stuff

• Have to work on my CVS For Secure Development talk.
• BBC Slides for LinuxWorld in New York.
• OLS Paper
• pilot-link fix, OS/2 builds, Autoconfiscation
• Capture all of my tweaks in the IBM Thinkpad HOWTO
• Finish the Secure Wavelan HOWTO
• Complete work on the Palm PPP HOWTO
• Begin the Palm, Linux HOWTO. The old one needs a serious update. Makes sense to do a complete rewrite from the ground up.

logic: well put:

“Christmas: Was there a class I missed out on in grade school that failed to prepare me for the efficient and thoughtful acquisition of gifts for significant others during holiday seasons?”

Take a breath, step back, relax.

I need to get back into writing. I’ve got so much work I need to capture on paper (electronically) and distribute to the community.

Weekends

• Well, another weekend gone and passed. This one was rife with boredom projects. I have pretty much given up on driving now. I hate my truck. It hates me. Normally driving is great “thinking time”, but not with the fear of the local LEO‘s and my CT plates still on my truck.

Diversions

• Been hooked on bzflag lately. If you haven’t played it, go. Use the server at themis.eng.buffalo.edu. #bzflag at openprojects

No, I’m not hungry…

• I’ve been doing an experiment on my body over the past 7 days or so. I’ve been starving myself, to try to verify what I think is true. Basically under extreme hunger (and I mean hours upon hours of stomach growling), my mind becomes more… focused.

  It’s hard to explain, but it’s very apparent. I seem to have much more motivation to get things done and answers seem to come faster to more complex problems. It’s very hard on me mentally, to fight the biological urge to eat, and the mental need not to.

  Definitely need to find out more on this. I guess it’s called Caloric Restriction, and there’s a lot of studies on it’s affects on aging and memory retention.

  “I wish I could dream a life that was real”

Jiggle the Cable

• My 21″ Hitachi monitor died last week. That was a $1400.00 investment. Not good. It was only a year old. I have to get the warantee information out of storage in Fremont, 31 miles away. I wonder if there’s a local Hitachi repair center.

Palm Programming

• I started hacking on a quick program to do advogato diaries from the Palm©. Tentatively called palmvogato. Initial cut of the code will just allow you to compose the diary with the html shorcuts being buttonized. I suppose the second build should include a sync of the diaries back down, so you could read them, but you can already do that with Plucker. The desktop conduit will execute the POST.

  Gotta kick myself in the butt and get pilot-link.0.9.5 out. At least I managed to fix the SourceForge mess and clean up the pilot-link page there.

  Spent some time this weekend working on POSE around the NetLibSend and NetLibRecv guts in Platform_NetLib_Sck.cpp.

  Managed to get a patch out of it, but now there’s a weird NetLibClose() problem I can’t seem to nail down. I was working with the author of PalmIRC on irc #palmchat (openprojects).

  We managed to patch it through (30a7 and 30a8), but there’s lingering bugs.

  At least I got a fully registered copy of his application for helping him. I’m going to use it for screenshots in my PPP + Palm HOWTO. We managed to get some more feature ideas added into his code.

  Collaboration like this makes me happy. Complete somehow.

  Have to remember to diff POSE 30a8 into my cvs with the previous releases.

  I wonder how hard it would be to write an app for the Palm© to do the equivalent of Pocket Mapblast. Perhaps PalmBlast? I use it enough, I should approach them with the idea.

Holidays

• I have no idea what I’m doing for Christmas or New Years this year. All of my friends are back in CT, and I know nobody here. For the past 6 or 7 years, I’ve spent New Years in NYC, never missing a year, but it looks like I’m not doing that this year. I’m not sure how I feel about that yet. Erika wants to do something. Now we try to figure out who flies to see whom. I really wish we could just solve this distance problem.

The Prison I Call Home

• This penitentiary I call my apartment has reached it’s last bit of usefulness. I’m dying here in this place. I have to get out. I can’t grow here. Need to get a bigger, cheaper place closer to the city. Maybe a place that allows cats. I miss my cat.

Projects

• Lots of projects on my plate. Began the conversion of the Plucker site into phpNUKE format. I have to tighten up MySQL on the box first. Can’t open a hole that wasn’t there before. Sek-yoor-a-tee.

gnu-designs

• Lots of upgrades happening on the server 3051
  miles away. Apache 1.3.14, cvs, ssh, a new kernel, MySQL, sendmail, ProFTPD, and some other things. It needed it.

  Blocked AvantGo again from the server. It seems they tried to get around my server ban with some external hosts. Do they really think I don’t read my logs?

Painted Man

• I sit every day looking at this arm. Before Mike kills himself on his bike, I want us to get this thing colored, and finished up. Probably another 20-30 hours of work. Flying back and forth from CA to CT for it is going to suck.

Us

• Are we drifting apart? Did I do something wrong? I’m so wrapped up in survival, I don’t see sometimes how other people are spiraling down in my vortex. I’m sorry.

  Building this diary, and reading those of others somehow motivates me further to continue to top previous days events. That’ll die off soon, I’m sure.

All in all, a pretty laid-back weekend. Lots to do when I get back to work tomorrow. I hope I can focus, without interruptions.

robk, you may want to take a look at OpenFlock and gctp. We’ve been working on it as much as we can “Find Time(tm)”, and I’m going to be responsible for the Palm-resident port of the OpenFlock code. You can see a screenshot here and my attempt at a group meeting icon here.

rasmus, I’ve tamed the J-Pilot exploit. Pretty easy fix. We’re talking about applying an interesting model to network and group sync’s now in the linux space. Much more to come. You know how I feel about security anyway…

johnm put on a good talk about GCC on the final day of PalmSource 2000. My only wish was that tools like par and the interoperability between the m68k gdb and gcc were touched on. Good stuff though.

On the last day of PalmSource 2000, I was able to meet some more interesting people. I met Dan Royea who is helping bring out the third edition of PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide from O’Reilly. I met Keith Rollin, author and present maintainer of POSE at his incredibly informative talk on the Emulator. I managed to meet Steve S., who makes Datastick.

I passed him some of my references at Perkin Elmer to help him productize this device. I may want to talk to him about some residuals on it for those valuable references. He’s had some trouble with getting to the right person, and thanks to my previous employer, I’ve actually sat down with the “Top 5” at that company for dinner. If it works out for Steve, I might want some “credit”. Looks like a great use of the Palm© device in any case. I was able to rant some more about AvantGo and some issues. Apparently he’s worked for them over the summer. Great. Maybe they’ll get
the word.

The weirdest thing is that we’d be talking in a circle in the hall or something, and people would walk by and see your name badge, then walk over and say “Hey, it’s glad to finally meet you!”, and I have no idea who these people introducing themselves to me were. Oddly surreal. I guess when you bury yourself into so many mailing lists over the years, people learn to remember your name.

What is with these women. It started Friday AM at PalmSource 2000 with one of the “door checkers” talking tattoos and piercings with me, then about college, then… Friday PM it’s the Pizzaria Uno waitress. AAHHH! I hope this isn’t going to be a point of conflict in the near future.

So now I’m working on cleaning up the Plucker homepage. I tried to get a shorter url going, since

plucker.com and friends was already registered. I may end up doing it in static html to prepare for a heavy test of the Slashdot Effect as we announce it on Freshmeat and PalmGear. I’ve been toying around the idea of a banner too, and doing some t-shirt sales from the website, so we can finally get some compensation to these developers who’ve worked so hard on this over the years. Once that onslaught is over, and we get some more bandwidth, the page will be converted over to phpNUKE. I like the ability to theme and layout the content separate from presentation. Nice.

More to do…

Plucker

• Plucker Web Engine
• Plucker Desktop Buddy
• The email gateway is 90% complete. That’s going to be the coolest thing.
• The perl spider has to be finished. I really wish others could jump on and help me with this. My perl is quite limited where it concerns parsing web content and dealing with pack() with binary data formats.
• Once these things are done, I can get back to actually putting code back into the application space itself. Too long away from it.

pilot-link

• 0.9.5 release
• Redocumentation, man pages, autoconfiscate it
• Work on the 1.0 roadmap
• Merge that ugly code base, and decrease the number of required binaries.
• Lay out a conduit SDK for pilot-link development
• Anyone that can help me bite into the TODO list, please do.

Home Life

• Move her over here. No more wondering.
• Relocate closer to the city. This apartment is killing me.
• Legal matters resolved re: relocation from CT to CA.

Work

• Enthusiasm. Have to… stay… focused… I can’t keep taking it personally when people quit and leave. This is not my fault, and I will not pick up their lingering work. I can’t kill myself for this.

Enough for now. I have to get back to hackery.