<p> Or '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moblog">mobloging</a>' for short. Basically it is using your mobile phone to add content to your blog. All very interesting, except when you get to the details. </p> <p> <a href="http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/">Stewart Smith</a> gave it a whirl ([<a title="first attempt" href="http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/?p=503">1</a>], [<a title="take two" href="http://www.flamingspork.com/blog/?p=504">2</a>]) with fairly predictable results. This is because the message you might receive is dependent on the phone manufacturer <em>and</em> the <aabr title="Multimedia Messaging Centre">MMC</abbr> does to your message. And that is before it might be mangled along the way via email. </p> <p> Basically most phones (or MMCs) will convert the content to either <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base32">Base32</a> or, more commonly, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64">Base64</a>. Generally the MMS is composed of only two parts, and then sent to an email address. From there you'll have to write something that takes the email and converts it into a blog entry. </p> <p> A while ago a friend of mine wanted to do the same, so I wrote some perl to do it for him. It seemed to work for him (with some tweaks) and it might be enough for you too. You can grab it <a title="Code to help with mobile blogging" href="http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/arch/projects/moblog--devo--1.0/">here</a> However you might find it simpler to use <a href="">GNU Arch</a> and register <code>http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/arch/projects/</code> and then browse in <code>wildfire@progsoc.org--projects/moblog</code>. </p>

# metadata <p> I woke, not for the first time today, and there were people all around. Dressed up and talking. And drinking. </p> <p> Ahh! I'd fallen asleep at a bar. <em>Again</em>. Fortunately that is enough off a clue for me to realise that I should go home. Getting home, is where this adventure starts. </p> <p> I started off at <a href="http://www.sydneypubguide.net/pubs/Cruise.aspx">Cruise Bar</a>, which has a great view of the Opera House [<a title="Sydney Opera House in the afternoon" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-in-afternoon.jpg">1</a>], [<a title="Sydney Opera House at dusk" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-at-dusk.jpg">2</a>], [<a title="Sydney Opera House at night" href="/~wildfire/aum/images/opera-house-at-night.jpg">3</a>] and (somehow) staggered my way to the <a href="http://www.sydneypubguide.net/pubs/Ship_Inn.aspx">Ship Inn</a>. Unable to flag down a cab in this area &ndash; lots of people going home around 23:00 &ndash; I resolved to get myself to North Sydney, where lots of cabs are. </p> <p> For those of you unaware, Sydney Harbour Bridge now has security personnel stationed at all pedestrian entrances and across its length. At least six of them "patrol" the bridge. </p> <p> By "patrol", I mean of course you'll be queried as to why you wish to cross the bridge. <q>Mate [sic], you can't cross the bridge. You aren't allowed here</q>. <q>Mate, are you fucking deaf?</q>. (on radio, to pals)<q>Yeah the fucking wog is crossing, shall I intercept him and hold him?</q> </p> <p> Followed while crossing the bridge. In my case I had (at one stage 3 security personnel behind and adjacent to me and 3 policemen ahead of me). And abused (I was repeatedly cursed at, racially slurred against, by the people from IVS Security) during your walk over the bridge. It amazes me that they even had police waiting to talk to me. Fortunately I know that the best thing you can do when confronted by the police is not to say anything. </p> <p> In this case there is nothing they could do -- since crossing the Harbour Bridge, and not responding to the security guards who harass you is not (yet) a crime. Today, 2 Nov 2005, though the Parliament of Australia is rushing through laws which might mean that I can be "detained" and held incommunicendo indefinitely. </p> <p> These laws &ndash; part of the War on Freedom &ndash; would make the rest of this entry illegal. </p> <p> I've been thinking about terrorism and Australia. How would you get access to restricted locations, determine sensitive areas and generally get information not available to the ordinary public? Become a security guard. </p> <p> In Australia, things like <a href="http://smh.com.au/news/national/braindamaged-man-told-to-pay-up-after-bashing/2005/11/01/1130823210703.html" title="victim of security guards">this</a> are not uncommon. (c.f. David Hooks killed by a security guard; a female security guard shooting someone, etc.). Worse is that security guards often enjoy a fairly close relationship with the Police. Meaning that if you join up, you also get to know some of the procedures that might be applied to deter you. Bottom line: every security guard is a potential terrorist. </p> <p> Terrorists, like modern-day Politicians, seek to curtail the liberty of others for their own purposes. The best way to do this is by planting fear and doubt into the hearts and mind of the general populace. In America, this was done via the September 11 plane hi-jacking; in the UK, by exploding bombs on the mass-transit system there. </p> <p> How, or where, should Australia be targetted? Australians are renowned world-travellers (I believe the figure is that 10% of Australians are outside the country at any one time), so attacking transportation isn't the way to go. You need to go after the life-style. </p> <p> Large community events, like Melbourne Cup day, the various Grand Finals and, of course, Cricket would be the perfect targets. High visibility (the media are already at these venues!), high impact (you are talking 30,000+ people in these stadiums), for minimal cost (a stadium has few seating area &ndash; probably 6 to 8 attackers could bring down most stadiums). </p> <p> Another good location would be to pick your local Westfield shopping centre / mall. Lots of people, lots of fear instilled. Plus we'd be rid of the stupid things. </p>

<p> First post. I too have decided to get into the whole blogging scene. </p> <p> I looked around at various pieces of software and only <a href="http://www.blosxom.com/">blosxom</a> and <a href="http://pyblosxom.sf.net/">pyblosxom</a> fitted my criteria. </p> <p> My criteria was pretty simple: <ul> <li>Plenty of features (comments, calendar, categories)</li> <li>No database (even though I prefer <a href="http://www.postgresql.org/">Postgresql</a>, I didn't want to have to learn a schema if I decided to migrate or it all went cactus</li> <li>Vibrant community</li> </ul> Both blosxom and pyblosxom have those but I found it easier to get blosxom setup and running. Eventually I'll write up a colophon about what I have and how it is configured. However, please excuse the very rudimentary setup I have &mdash; it'll get better in time. </p>

The 2005 Machinima Festival will be taking place in New York City at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY, starting November 12. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Machinima:

Machinima (a portmanteau word for machine cinema and/or "machine" "animation") is both a collection of associated production techniques and a film genre (film created by such production techniques). As a production technique, the term concerns the rendering of computer-generated imagery (CGI) using low-end 3D engines (as opposed to high-end and complex 3D engines used by professionals) in video games (typically, engines in first person shooters games have been used). Consequently, the rendering can be done in real-time using PCs (either using the computer of the creator or the viewer), rather than with complex 3D engines using huge render farms.

Have a look at the popular Red vs. Blue if you have never seen a machinima video. Checkout more stuff from the Machinima Archive over at the fantastic archive.org. I won't be at the festival, but I'm getting more and more interested in video in general and especially in machinima, so I'll probably create some films myself eventually. (via Digerati University and Slashdot)

… and for now, it’s 1.5rc2 that got in experimental. I made some changes to the firefox wrapper script so that it should be quicker to launch firefox in most cases. We don’t try to find the JVM version, since the ones we wanted to set LD_ASSUME_KERNEL for have been ABI incompatible for a while, and we don’t remove the XUL.mfasl and other problematic files since it is now correctly (I hope) by firefox itself. And if bugs arise again, we’ll try to fix in upstream code, not in wrapper script… I also fixed the dash bug and another one in xpidl. For what it’s worth, I did some testing with JVMs and firefox. I got success with

• Sun JRE 1.5update5,
• Sun 1.4.2_10,
• IBM 1.4.2SR3 (but not with java-package, see bug #338277),
• Blackdown 1.4.2-02 and 1.4.1-01.

On the other hand,

• IBM 1.3.1SR8 segfaults,
• Blackdown 1.3.1+02a and 1.3.0-FCS are built against libxpcom.so with older C++ ABI, so ld can’t find __vt_17nsGetServiceByCID,
• Sun 1.3.1_10 can’t load libstdc++-libc6.1-1.so.2.

... if not told it is in there:

     ssize_t wasread = read(fs,buffer,toread);
     if( read > 0 )  
     

I’m getting increasingly tired and frustrated by the inability of X, Emacs’ php-mode to properly indent a mixture of PHP and HTML. Mixing HTML and code inline was, like, a feature of PHP. And the fucking mode can’t deal with it. Tired of that shit. Found mmm-mode and HtmlDeluxeMode on the Emacs wiki. Sort of worked in XEmacs, but the cure is worse than the disease. Doesn’t work at all in Emacs. (on a Sarge system) Still looking for a solution. At that point, using another editor is an acceptable solution, but it must not require X. If you’ve got any suggestions to share, do not hesitate to mail me. Vi vs. Emacs trolls don’t count ! :-)

When I took over organising the CLUG meetings, I managed to replace most of myself with a small shell script (I even have the t-shirt). Now that I'm leaving Canberra, Steve Walsh has kindly taken over the running of the script. So I've done a bit more work on the script, and added a public front end to it, and made an RSS feed (my very first). So until yesterday, to work out the fourth Thursday of the month, I'd been calling a Perl script that used Date::Manip, when I decided to investigate doing it with PHP natively. Tony gave me some initial code, but I ended up with this:
function nth_day($instance, $dow, $month, $year)

    $first_dom = date("w", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 1, $year));
    
    if ($first_dom <= $dow)
        $first_instance = date("j", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 1 + ($dow - $first_dom), $year));
     else
        $first_instance = date("j", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 8 - ($first_dom - $dow), $year));
    

    $instance_we_want = $first_instance + (($instance-1) * 7);

    $date = date("j", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $instance_we_want, $year));

    return $date;



Sometime over the years, I've managed to forget, or block out, most of my memories of the time in high school when I used BBSes, before the internet. Even though I still have friends from back then, and even, come to think, host a rack of computers at the house of a guy who was once a sysop. Those couple of years (how many?) are mostly a blank, and not something I think about much. I can't remember the first time I used a BBS. I can remember clearly and crisply the first time I used a unix system. A bit of it came back when I didn't pirate the BBS Documentary, an epic 8 part series of interviews with the people who brought us the likes of XMODEM, fidonet, pcboard, and ansi art. Highly recommended. Amazing how just looking at so many of the people immediatly reminds me of the BBSers I knew at the time. Its producer, Jason Scott, also runs textfiles.com, a huge collection of all sorts of text files from the 60's through 90's, which mostly originate from old BBSes. His historical bent in preserving and documenting this stuff really appeals. I poked around the net today, managed to find some docs about one BBS I remembered using, and nothing about a couple of others. Logged into a telnet BBS or two and remembered just how angry fruit salad and silly to use those systems really were, and also how much they probably contributed to my enduring enjoyment of unix, muds, and email. I thought it would be nice to not forget about this stuff, and so I coded up a reminder, merging the ancient plain text files with what's currently new and spiffy (weblogs natch), and creating this webblog which has a random text file posted to it each day. Of course, the subjects range from anarchy, to programming, to phone phreaking, to porn, so view at your own risk, just as if it were 1992, and you were were dialing a number your war dialer had found while you were away at school. Would you like to play a game?

I have been getting into all the productivity geekery stuff, and now have all my GTD setup done in the way I wanted it on my LifeDrive. Now all my work life as I know it is contained in my beautiful LifeDrive. Today, the 4 month old LifeDrive touchscreen stopped working. Bad. So I called Palm support, after ages traversing their site to find the telephone number, cunningly hidden so people won't call them. After five minutes of hold music, I spoke to somebody on a very poor telephone line, who was religiously following a script. After a painful amount of time "registering" me, we finally got to talk about the fault. Except, we didn't. Instead he starts asking me to perform various resets and so on. Even though I've explained it's clearly a hardware fault. I've done those, I say. Now he wants me to do the complete hard reset again, but this time while the machine's on the charger. The charger that mysteriously fixes loose connections, I can only assume. I repeat that it's a hardware issue and I'm not an idiot. "I know, but we can't go on until we've done this". A proper hard reset takes 30 minutes on the LifeDrive. Really. I ask him if he knows this. Yes. So he's prepared to sit in silence with me for 30 minutes while I pay the telephone bill. Maybe I should ring back when it's done? Yes, you could do that sir. He gives me a twelve (twelve!) digit ticket number. A conversation with friends reminds me that I have lots of wonderful rights under the Sale of Goods Act. So, to Amazon this time. Alas, they make it very hard to report faults if you're outside their 30 day guarantee period, so I sent them email. A few hours later come back the instructions on how to return the product to them. No quibbles. I don't know if this exasperated saga is the best way to end a month's hiatus of writing here, so I apologise. It really isn't of any significance.

Coding Mistakes

I broke my debian administration website yesterday. Predictably enough I’d woken up around 9AM and thought that it would be a good time to make significant refactering changes. Tested them on my laptop, committed them to CVS, then updated the live site. Had a quick play to make sure nothing had obviously broken - but didn’t try to leave a comment on an article. Went to sleep and woke up around 4pm to find 15 emails telling me things were broken. Most mails on the site in a single day! Should be fixed now. But I’ll never again make changes before lunchtime, I’m just not good with the whole sleepy-coding thing.

Things I have never coded: 1

Inspired by Joey Hess’s “Ten years of free software”. Things I have never coded part 1. I have never coded a text editor. *shock* In the past I have written simple wrappers around the various text controls in different environments - for example under Windows I once coded a tabbed text editor called MyNotepad, which featured a novel dockable tree-control to the side which allowed navigation and loading of files easily. When I first started working with Java I coded a similar thing, but with the ability to load external Java .class files as plugins. This editor was called Rosetta, inspired by the band Rosetta Stone (who were in turn inspired by the actual Rosetta stone ) At times I think about text editors. I use them daily, obviously, and I love working with some more than others. My editor is usually GNU Emacs but I’m also partial to Vim. I will use both happily; although neither is pleasant without my personal customizations. Simple text editors are a traditional project for coders, and freshmeat is littered with their discared corpses. Probably the only reason I’ve not started - that and apathy. My ideal editor would be:

• Both curses and x11 based.
• Scriptable (Lua is love?)
• Extensible.
• Portable between (at least) GNU/Linux and Solaris.
• Modeless.

This article on debugging and fixing a bug in Windows without the source is engrossing, in the way that an accident is engrossing. Sometimes you forget that 99% of the source code for the programs you use daily is available for free, and things like this can be changed easily. God I love Open Source... Speaking of which, do you love Open Source? Opened Hand are on the look out for interesting developers; skills in embedded Linux, GTK+, and DBus are an advantage. If you think you are up to it, email us. NP: August and Everything After, Counting Crows

Hey, no one asked me, but here are my endorsements for tomorrow’s city council election:

• Mayor: Maura Hennigan. I actually think Tom Menino is doing all right, and he will obviously win, so this is more of a “strategic” vote. I think it’s generally bad for elected leaders to be too certain of their grip on power, and voting for the challenger hopefully will keep them on their toes and more responsive to the community. It also may lay the groundwork for a better challenger in the next election four years from now. (This is why I voted for Bobbie Rush in Chicago in 1999, even though he had no chance of winning).
• City Council - At Large
  • Felix Arroyo: Hands down the best guy on the council. I heard him referred to as a “rock star” on WBUR this morning. I can’t think of anyone I would prefer for Mayor in 2009.
  • Matt O’Malley: I agree with him on just about every issue, plus there’s a strong Roslindale “home town” feeling for Matt. Someone showed me some of his campaign literature from the last time around where he was unfairly critical of Felix Arroyo, but my feeling (and hope) is that he has matured significantly since then.
  • Sam Yoon: Yoon seems to have the best chance of the newcomers/outsiders of actually getting elected, and he has been absorbed into the progressive fold with Arroyo, Chuck Turner, and Charles Yancey. That would be a nice block to have on the council. Certainly having the first Asian-American on the council would be a good thing as well.
  • John Connolly: Mostly, I just prefer him to the remaining four candidates. Although I’m a bit torn because I would also like to see more women on the council, I’m not convinced that Patricia White is the candidate to do it. Ed Flynn’s entire campaign platform seems to be “veteran,” and he opposes reproductive rights and same-sex marriage, so he’s (way) out. Steve Murphy lost my support when the only house in our neighborhood to sport large Bush/Cheney signs also posted Murphy signs. Michael Flaherty lost my support when he procedurally squashed a resolution that would have opposed the PATRIOT Act.

In any case, if you’re a Boston voter, be sure to participate tomorrow, whomever you choose to support.

It so happened that my ibook had a 8GiB free space area at the end of the hard drive, and therefore I decided to wanted to use that for MacOS X instead of the 2GiB partition that was used for it before. Trying to avoid problems with bad partitions, I booted from the OSX installation/rescue CD and opened Disk Utility.

To play safe, I locked the existing OSX partition for editing and then assigned the 8GiB free space area to a new hfs+ partition. When I committed, suddenly the existing partition label went blank. WTF??? Had Disk Utility decided it should format what that partition as well? Great, now I'd have to reinstall anyway instead of copying things over.

I rebooted to check partition numbers in linux, but instead of the yaboot prompt I got an alternating question mark / happy face, and after a couple of seconds it booted from the rescue CD again which was still in there. Apparently my bootstrap partition got messed with too. Not funny.

I powered off and inserted a bootable linux CD to chroot into the existing system and rerun ybin. However when I tried to mount the linux root partition it would not want to do so. I checked the partition numbers with fdisk and suddenly my stomach felt like it was tied into a knot: instead of using only the free space as told, Disk Utility had wiped the entire drive and created a 2GiB partition at the beginning and assigned the remaining 28GiB to the new partition instead.

So now I'm left with a ibook shaped paperweight for the time being. Luckily I did not keep anything really important on the laptop, but I did lose some uncommitted programming work, and some of my wife's old mail. Not to mention the time I'll lose by being unable to use it the first few days and having to reinstall it instead. So people: never trust a tool tailored for dummies to something as important as disk partitioning. And to Apple: FIX THE FUCKING PROGRAM SO IT DOES AS IS IT TOLD TO DO AND NOTHING ELSE!

Daniel Silverstone asks about ternary operators, and whether people like to use them. Well, I know I do. In fact, it's the single operator I like to use a lot. Too much, in fact -- sometimes I abuse it in horrible ways, such as nesting the thing three times, or so. Which is stuff that gets removed after a first reading, of course. Most of the Microsoft languages have IIF, a function that does basically the same thing (as in "iif(condition, trueval, falseval)"). I find that a bit more intuitive than the ?: construct, but the difference isn't that important since it's semantically the same thing (and, more importantly, the ?: operator requires less characters, so is nicer). I'm not sure about most other languages. I have learned a lot of programming languages at school, but it's been way too long, and I don't use most of them anymore. I'm quite positive that COBOL does not support it, so you need to type it out in a full 'if' structure. But that's okay, because writing COBOL feels like writing a novel anyway.

From now on, I’ll be using dato(at)the-barrel.org as my main address, instead of asp16(at)alu.ua.es. (But this second one, provided by my Uni, will continue to work for some more years, and not unlikely forever.) I was not that dissatisfied with the MX host for alu.ua.es, but it has been getting on my nerves on occasion during the last five years, so I decided it was better for my health to make the change. Kudos to Alberto Gonzalez Iniesta (agi@d.o) for being my postmaster from now on, since I really didn’t feel like running my own mailserver. The story behind the-barrel.org is certainly not unrelated to this Google search.

So I got pet peeved by Carlos Laviola in relation to by recent pondering about how MacOS X's SSH agent starts up on login. Perfectly reasonable grounds for complaint. I have had people contact me in relation to blog posts in the past, so it's obviously not impossible. People know I'm a Debian developer and can put two and two together and wind up at db.debian.org. Anyway, I'm the first to admit that my blog probably has too many of the Weblog Usability Top Ten Design Mistakes (something for me to work on). To date, I've been avoiding plastering my email address on my website because I didn't want to get it harvested. I try and use a per-list email address for this reason as well, and I haven't enabled blog comments because of comment spam, and because I haven't been clever enough to implement comments with Blosxom full stop. So I started getting an idea for reversibly encrypting my email address on my blog after reading about Hashcash for Wordpress the other day. I first started playing around with the Vernam cipher in High School, when I wanted to easily reversibly obfuscate some data for something. I'd read about this cipher in a magazine or something and seen it implemented in Pascal (it's not exactly hard). So I happened upon the idea of encrypting my email address with the Vernam cipher. Turns out another chap's already got a page for encrypting and decrypting on the fly with JavaScript. It even generates the JavaScript for putting in your own web pages. I had to use a different key to avoid getting dollar signs in the encrypted string, as this confused the tripe out of Blosxom (and me for a while when I tried to figure out what was going wrong). Then I thought it'd be nice to explain to people who had JavaScript disabled what they might be missing out on, so I fiddled around with some DOM stuff, and had some text get displayed if JavaScript was disabled. When JavaScript is enabled, this text is replaced by the decrypted text. So of course, like the Wordpress Hashcash, this is largely relying on the inability of spam bots to grok JavaScript. Once they can, this obfuscation technique is all for naught. Meanwhile, you can email me bit more easily now if you get the urge. View the source of my blog for an example of the implementation.

From the headers of a mail I just got:

Received: from master.debian.org ([146.82.138.7])
   by sccrmxc11.comcast.net (sccrmxc11) with ESMTP
   id <20051105044942s1100j9crge>; Sat, 5 Nov 2005 04:49:42 +0000
X-Originating-IP: [146.82.138.7]
Received: from wproxy.gmail.com [64.233.184.204]
   by master.debian.org with esmtp (Exim 3.35 1 (Debian))
   id 1E7EfR-0004zq-00; Mon, 22 Aug 2005 10:56:58 -0500
Received: by wproxy.gmail.com with SMTP id i34so340646wra
   for <edd©debian.org>; Mon, 22 Aug 2005 08:56:47 -0700 (PDT)


Translation for non-propellerheads: Someone with a Google Gmail account emailed me on August 22. It took eleven seconds to get from Gmail to Debian (once you consider the different timezones), but Debian's mail system took until today, November 5, to deliver it to Comcast, my ISP.Yikes. So if you, anonymous reader, happened to have emailed me lately and are still awaiting a reply ... please consider the possibility that I may not have received your mail yet. I should add that the underlying problem has been rectified at Debian's end as one of our hard-working admins stated yesterday.

Name Overload?

First there was Debian Planet then along came the Planet Debian, unfortunate naming collision, but something we could mostly get used to and understand. If you’re not confused yet: well done. You soon will be:

• http://www.planetdebian.com

Guess which site that is? A third completely new name comprised of the two words “Debian” & “Planet”. WTF? Think that was fun? Lets try again. Stick with me: First there was Debian Help - now there’s another new site which is comprised of the two words “Debian” & “Help”:

• http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/

*Ugh* Now I’m personally of the opinion that competition is a good thing, but please people - can we all just get along without confusing our users/visitors? I’ll sidestep the whole trademark issue, in case my site is in trouble too