A little grep has told me that RMS is going to announce something special
on olduse.net in two weeks time, on 27 September 1983.
Best not to speculate about the details, but this announcement will be
something people are still talking about thirty years later. So it's an
event you and your news reader won't want to miss.
I have set up an IRC channel #olduse.net on FreeNode, and we'll see who
first spots the post!
The first time I found this cute game, was around 2009, but for a bunch of reasons I haven t been able to get it into the archive until now. Pink Pony is a cute game in which you have to control a pink pony who s main goal is to last in the game more time than the other ponies. You might remember the game Tron, or the film, in which there were light cycles who left a trace behind, with which the other cycles crashed. Well, this is the similar game concept, only with cute ponies instead of light cycles. You can see a video of the game in action, if you want to get a feeling of how it is.
Thomas Weber (Ginko), has published a newer version of the game (1.3.1) a couple of days ago, and that is the one that has entered Debian repositories (sid) today. Thanks, Ginko, for this lovely game!
Even though the game might not seem too appealing for some of the adult users of Debian or Ubuntu, maybe some of their kids will like it as much as I do. The game is quite quick, though, so very young kids might have trouble controlling the pony. I would suspect it might be all right for kids above 9 years old, but I haven t been able to test my hypothesis, so if you find out, please tell me 
To register a new notification handler you need to: - create a file descriptor for event notification using eventfd(2); - open a control file to be monitored (e.g. memory.usage_in_bytes); - write "<event_fd> <control_fd> <args>" to cgroup.event_control. Interpretation of args is defined by control file implementation;Seriously? There is a POSIXly way to pass file-descriptors around, but smashing the decimal representation of it into a string is not the way to do that. Linux gets away with this hack because the kernel knows the process who wrote(2) that string in the first place, parse the string into an integer and look it up in the table of file descriptors for that process. Now the trouble for cgroupfs is, that it is not the kernel and even if it were, it wouldn't solve the problem because on Hurd there are no file descriptors (well there are, but that's only to appease all the POSIX programs out there). Instead Hurd has ports, and you can send messages to ports, and this is pretty much everything that you can do on a Mach system. Reading a file works roughly like this:
So I have upgraded my main workstation at last, but there are a few things I wanted to figure out. Some of these I found an answer to, but others I haven t and some answers open more questions:
Where did debian-menu.menu go and why doesn t lxlauncher have the Debian menu by default anyway? Answer: It seems this is a combination of debian bug 333848 and bug 722563 which I reported yesterday in that lxlauncher doesn t use the debian menus. Workaround for now: install menu-xdg and hack the lxlauncher menu file.
Why don t my xterm shells load .profile any more? Did I bodge that before without making a note?
How do I stop kernel or initrd or whatever it is configuring the network with the dhcp settings at boot time instead of the better wicd ones that are available once the system is up?
Continuing with networking, how did network-manager (which doesn t cope with my network configuration) get installed again? Answer: debian bug 645656 explains that debian is simply following a silly decision taken upstream and refers to attempts to make network-manager optional as the Crusade . Workaround: remove gnome and install its dependencies like gnome-core directly instead. Drawback: any new dependencies of gnome will have to be installed manually.
Why is the audio capture volume at 10% by default and what s the best way to change that? I suspect this might be 682731 but that bug is untouched in over a year. I m tempted to remove pulseaudio, but gnome-core Depends pulseaudio so this is yet more hardware-breaking caused by gnome dependency changes and the only way out of this one would be to remove gnome-core and install its dependencies. Or maybe I should just give up and finally remove gnome because its packages have jumped the shark. I installed gnome to make the system easier to use and it s broken it in at least two ways now.
One question that makes me hesitate is: why is gdm3 faster to start than lightdm?
I signed up to take part of an online, massive course Arte y cultura en circulaci n: crear y compartir en tiempos digitales (The circulation of arts and culture: Creating and sharing in digital times). As the activities of us the attendees are to be published by each on their personal blog/space, I will be publishing them here. I hope they are interesting to some of my other regular readers.
I am late in joining, and I should already be posting the second activity. Anyway, this text goes towards the first week's lesson: Qu es un autor: la (de)construcci n hist rica del concepto de autor a (What is an author? Historic (de)construction of the concept of authorship). Our homework is to find an example of a current discussion where the notion of authorship is discussed, and share it this way.
And I'm somewhat in a hurry right now, so this will be hasty. But I didn't want to delay my (late) submission anymore!
In the Debian Ruby mailing list, Hleb Valoshka asks basically how deep should copyright recognition be. Because, yes, while copyright attribution is simple (simpler, at least) in literary / artistic works, computer programs (and even more those developed following the Free Software distributed fashion) are harder to properly attribute.
Is a two-line patch to a tens-of-thousands-of-lines project enough to warrant mention in the copyright file? Most of us would agree it is not. Few would contend this were the amount of changes to make up, say, even 1% of that scale of project.
In the coding projects where I am the main author (which, yes, are usually very small I cannot recognize myself as a good programmer, and the size of my successful works proves me), I try to take care to mention explicitly each of the contributors, even if their contribution is quite small. But were I to lead a larger development work, with enough following to generate on the order of one submitted patch a day, would it make sense for me to follow up with such detail the authorship information?
And as a minor side note: How much does the law require me? A very small patch can fix important functionality issues (think security or performance). If somebody sends a very small patch fixing an intellectually hard to grasp problem... I am sure it should be properly acknowledged!
Anyway, I have to flee now. I am just dropping some ideas on the table. Of course, if anybody is willing to discuss them further, I'm interested in any debate that springs off it!
(Meanwhile... I expect to spam you with this topic a couple of times. But it should not bug you much, as it's one of my usual blog topics!)
Many thanks to Vincent Meurisse who solved my node.js callback woe.
Some history of the blogspam service:
Back in 2008 I was annoyed by the many spam-comments that were being submitted to my Debian Administration website. I added some simple anti-spam measures, which reduced the flow, but it was a losing battle. In the end I decided I should test comments, as the users submitted them, via some kind of external service. The intention being that any improvements to that central service would benefit all users. (So I could move to testing comments on my personal blog too, for example). Ultimately I registered the domain-name "blogspam.net", and set up a simple service on it which would test comments and judge them to be "SPAM" or "OK". The current statistics show that this service has stopped 20 million spam comments, since then. (We have to pretend I didn't wipe the counters once or twice.)I've spent a while now re-implementing most of the old plugins in node.js, and I think I'll be ready to deploy the new service over the weekend. The new service will have to handle two different kinds of requests:
Here s some documentation about a hack I ve been working on to allow publication of RDF views for Tastypie resources (in Django applications).
While working on implementing support for RDF meta-data for descriptions of Debian packages for the Debian Package Tracking System rewrite, I ve tried and idetify which libraries/frameworks would allow to create some RDF views for Django model objects with a minimal effort.
Ideally, this would save the hassle of writing code, and could just be a matter of mapping some Django model fields to proper ontology attributes.
I haven t found an existing tool to do so, but it seemed to me that Tastypie could offer a nice starting point. Tastypie (I focused on v. 0.9.15 which is currently in Debian testing) offers some REST content-negociation support, and other niceties.
This post is an attempt at documenting an initial implementation for my problem. I ve implemented it as some code in the example blog application described in the Tastypie documentation. Unfortunately, it s not yet a patch that could be applied to Tastypie, to add this as a standard feature.
The code is available in my git clone of Tastypie, based on 0.9.15, and lies in the commit(s) between the example_myapp and rdfviews branches. It needs an up to date RDFLib to work (Debian s is too old, btw).
It basically relies on the addition of a _rdf_mapping dict in the Django model objects, and an RdfModelResource as a base class for Tastypie ModelResources.
To provide an RDF view for a ModelResource, it also requires to declare a particular MetaClass, and adding a few bits to its Meta subclass.
The principle is that the dehydratation steps of the Tastypie system will replace fields values by their RDF objects counterparts, as either RDFLib Literals or URIRefs. Then the resuting Bundle will be converted to some RDFLib Graph. It is then just a matter of serialization of that Graph to turtle (I ve not added another format, but it should be pretty straightforward).
There s a bit of hackish drak magic in the code, in particular when introspecting the Tastypie / Django resource / model objects to be able to dynamically add some dehydrate_FOO methods to perform the conversion to Literals or URIRefs.
Custom dehydrateFoo methods can still be written to process the fields in particular ways.
I ve added some LDP style paging along the way, so I hope it will be quite usable by LDP compatible tools.
Here s the result :
First, listing all resources :
$ curl -H 'Accept: text/turtle' "http://localhost:8000/api/v1/entry/"
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix ldp: <http://www.w3.org/ns/ldp#> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix sioc: <http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#> .
@prefix xml: <http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
</api/v1/entry/#list> dcterms:hasPart </api/v1/entry/1/#post>,
</api/v1/entry/2/#post>,
</api/v1/entry/3/#post> .
Then, details of one particular post :
$ curl -L -H 'Accept: text/turtle' "http://localhost:8000/api/v1/entry/1"
@prefix dcterms: <http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix owl: <http://www.w3.org/2002/07/owl#> .
@prefix rdf: <http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#> .
@prefix rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> .
@prefix sioc: <http://rdfs.org/sioc/ns#> .
@prefix xml: <http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace> .
@prefix xsd: <http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#> .
</api/v1/entry/1/#post> a sioc:Post ;
dcterms:created "2011-05-21T22:46:38+00:00"^^xsd:dateTime ;
dcterms:title "Another Post" ;
sioc:content "MESSAGE: This will prbbly be my lst post. /MESSAGE" ;
sioc:has_creator </api/v1/user/1/> ;
owl:sameAs </posts/another-post#post> .
One feature of syslog-ng PE is support for wildcard file sources, meaning you can give it a wildcard, like /var/log/apache/*.log, and it will automatically notice new files being created or old ones disappearing. This is a very useful feature which has been missing from the open source edition, and one that is being worked on, but is far from complete, and will not make it into syslog-ng 3.5. However, at least on GNU/Linux, there is a way to implement something similar, although in a fairly crude manner. Yet, it works surprisingly well in most cases. You only need to abuse a few things...The trick itself is pretty easy, and is based on the same underlying kernel feature that syslog-ng PE uses under the hood: inotify(7). What we will do, is use incron to monitor a directory, and create syslog-ng config file snippets whenever a file creation event occurs. We also set up syslog-ng to include these snippets, and reload the configuration after each event received. This way, we immediately notice newly created logfiles without the need to poll the directory, and with config snippets created on the fly, we do not modify the main syslog-ng configuration file, either.To do this, we first need to create an appropriate syslog-ng configuration:
@version: 3.5
destination d_all_logs
file("/var/log/all.log");
;
include "/etc/syslog-ng/conf.d/notify-*.conf";
The config itself is a dummy: it has no sources, no logpaths, just a destination, which we will use in the snippets. Next, we create the script that will create these for us! It takes a single command-line argument: the filename of the newly created logfile.
d_all_logs destination defined in the main configuration file, and reloads the configuration afterwards.Now, all we need is to tell incron to call this script. Assuming we saved it as /usr/local/sbin/syslog-ng-wildcard-notify, this is how the incrontab entry would look like:
/var/log/remote.d/*.log IN_CREATE,IN_MOVED_TO /usr/local/sbin/syslog-ng-wildcard-notify $@/$#And that's about it! Now whenever a new file gets dropped into the directory, syslog-ng will get notified. There is a downside, however: when a file gets deleted, the configuration is not removed. That part is not so simple, though: we want syslog-ng to finish reading the file before reloading the config, so that makes it a bit trickier. But if we don't care about that, we could just add an
IN_DELETE event, and write another script that looks up which snippet is responsible for the file, delete it and reload. Doing that is left as an exercise for the reader!
Last week, the third and last milestone of the Havana development branch of
Ceilometer has been released and is now available for testing and download.
This means the end of the OpenStack Havana development time is coming, and
that the features are now frozen.
New features
url=http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/preseed-wheezy.dat
deb http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox wheezy main
wget -O - http://www.reinholdtsen.name/freedombox/BE1A583D.asc \ apt-key add - apt-get update apt-get install freedombox-setup /usr/lib/freedombox/setup
Support privacy-respecting network services! Donate to Riseup.net! There's a lot of news recently about some downright orwellian surveillance executed across the globe by my own government with the assistance of major American corporations. The scope is huge, and the implications are depressing. It's scary and frustrating for anyone who cares about civil society, freedom of speech, cultural autonomy, or data sovereignty. As bad as the situation is, though, there are groups like Riseup and May First/People Link who actively resist the data dragnet. The good birds at Riseup have been tireless advocates for information autonomy for people and groups working for liberatory social change for years. They have provided (and continue to provide) impressive, well-administered infrastructure using free software to help further these goals, and they have a strong political committment to making a better world for all of us and to resisting strongarm attempts to turn over sensitive data. And they provide all this expertise and infrastructure and support on a crazy shoestring of a budget. So if the news has got you down, or frustrated, or upset, and you want to do something to help improve the situation, you could do a lot worse than sending some much-needed funds to help Riseup maintain an expanding infrastructure. This fundraising campaign will only last a few more days, so give now if you can! (note: i have worked with some of the riseup birds in the past, and hope to continue to do so in the future. I consider it critically important to have them as active allies in our collective work toward a better world, which is why i'm doing the unusual thing of asking for donations for them on my blog.)
| Symmetric | Public |
| 80 | 1024 |
| 112 | 2048 |
| 128 | 3072 |
| 256 | 15360 |
| MD5 | 2^20 |
| SHA-1 | 2^60 |
| SHA-2 | No known attack (so SHA-256 would have 1.2 * 2^128) |
| MD5 | 2^123 |
| SHA-1 | No known attack (2^160) |
| SHA-256 | No known attack (2^256) |
[mon.noname-admin] mon addr = [::1]:6789The monitor will be renamed to mon.admin internaly.
[global] ms bind ipv6 = true
[global] osd crush chooseleaf type = 0
[global] auth supported = none
[global] auth supported = none log file = $name.log run dir = osd pool default size = 1 osd crush chooseleaf type = 0 ms bind ipv6 = true [mon] mon data = /$name [mon.noname-admin] mon addr = [::1]:6789 [osd] osd data = /$name osd journal = /$name/journal osd journal size = 100 [osd.0] host = devel
$ ceph-authtool --create-keyring keyring --gen-key -n mon. $ ceph-authtool keyring --gen-key -n client.admin
$ mkdir $mon_data $ ceph-mon -c ceph.conf --mkfs --fsid $(uuidgen) --keyring keyringAfter that just start it:
$ ceph-mon -c ceph.conf $
$ ceph -c ceph.conf osd create $ ceph -c ceph.conf osd crush set osd.0 1.0 root=defaultThen setup the OSD itself:
$ mkdir $osd_data $ ceph-osd -c ceph.conf -i 0 --mkfs --mkkey --keyring keyringAnd start it:
$ ceph-osd -c ceph.conf -i 0 starting osd.0 at :/0 osd_data $osd_data $osd_data/journal $
$ ceph -c ceph.conf health HEALTH_OK $
A while ago I wrote a small web application called You-Say-First. It allows multiple users to join a chat room where they can, besides chatting, enter moves that are only shown to everyone once everyone has submitted one. This way you can play games like Rock-Stone-Scissors or Diplomacy online, even if you want to play by your own strange rules that none of the standard, game-specific web sites support. Or even make up many kind of games on the spot! 
Anything is possible, you could even end up becoming a NASA Astronaut.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <malloc.h>
#include <limits.h>
int foo(void)
fprintf(stderr, "an error\n");
return INT_MAX;
foo.c should remove these lines:
- #include <malloc.h> // lines 2-2
The full include-list for foo.c:
#include <limits.h> // for INT_MAX
#include <stdio.h> // for fprintf, stderr
---
$ smartctl -a /dev/sda [...] Error 1341 occurred at disk power-on lifetime: 17614 hours (733 days + 22 hours) When the command that caused the error occurred, the device was active or idle. After command completion occurred, registers were: ER ST SC SN CL CH DH -- -- -- -- -- -- -- 40 41 02 1f c0 9c 40 Error: UNC at LBA = 0x009cc01f = 10272799 Commands leading to the command that caused the error were: CR FR SC SN CL CH DH DC Powered_Up_Time Command/Feature_Name -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---------------- -------------------- 60 f8 08 20 c0 9c 40 00 41d+01:51:50.974 READ FPDMA QUEUED 60 08 00 18 c0 9c 40 00 41d+01:51:50.972 READ FPDMA QUEUED ef 10 02 00 00 00 a0 00 41d+01:51:50.972 SET FEATURES [Reserved for Serial ATA] ec 00 00 00 00 00 a0 00 41d+01:51:50.971 IDENTIFY DEVICE ef 03 45 00 00 00 a0 00 41d+01:51:50.971 SET FEATURES [Set transfer mode] SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 20511 156170102 [...]The status of the degraded RAID array looks like this:
$ cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 sdb7[1]
409845696 blocks [2/1] [_U]
md0 : active raid1 sda6[0] sdb6[1]
291776 blocks [2/2] [UU]
The [_U] means that one of two disks has failed, it should normally be [UU]. There are two RAID-1s actually, a small md0 (sda6 + sdb6) for /boot and the main md1 (sda7 + sdb7) which holds the OS and my data. Apparently (at first at least), only sda7 was faulty and got kicked out of the array:
$ dmesg grep kick md: kicking non-fresh sda7 from array!Anyway, so I ordered a replacement disk, removed the dead disk (I checked the serial number and brand before, so I don't accidentally remove the wrong one), inserted the new disk and rebooted. Note: In order for this to work you have to have (previously) installed the bootloader (usually GRUB) onto both disks, otherwise you won't be able to boot from either of them (which you'll want to do if one of them dies, of course). In my case, sda was now dead, so I put sdb into its place (physically, by using the other SATA connector/port) and the new replacement disk would become the new sdb. After the reboot, the new disk needs to be partitioned like the other RAID disk. This can be done easily by copying the partition layout of the "good" disk (now sda after the reboot) onto the empty disk (sdb):
$ sfdisk -d /dev/sda sfdisk /dev/sdbSpecifically, the RAID disks/partitions need to have the type/ID "fd" ("Linux raid autodetect"), check if that is the case. Then, you can add the new disk to the RAIDs:
$ mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdb6 $ mdadm /dev/md1 --add /dev/sdb7After a few hours the RAID will be re-synced properly and all is good again. You can check the progress via:
$ watch -n 1 cat /proc/mdstatYou should probably not reboot during the resync (though I'm not 100% sure if that would be an issue in practice; please leave a comment if you know). Also, don't forget to install GRUB on the new disk so you can still boot when the next disk dies:
$ grub-mkdevicemap $ grub-install /dev/sdbAnd it might be a good idea to use S.M.A.R.T. to check the new disk, just in case. I did a quick run for the new disk via:
$ smartctl -t short /dev/sdb # Wait a few minutes after this. $ smartctl -a /dev/sdb [...] SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 22 - [...]Looks good. So far.
It has been nearly six years with a netbook and five since I last wrote about wifi roaming from the bus to stay on irc without a costly celluar link during the daily commute. Since then, some readers have asked me to share my refinements to the method in a followup post. So here it is.
The software
On the server:
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
network=
key_mgmt=NONE
network=
ssid="default"
key_mgmt=NONE
network=
ssid="linksys"
key_mgmt=NONE
...
Since you ll be using ssh repeatedly to connect and it has to be fast, make sure your server is set up to accept your key and use ssh-add so that you only have to enter your ssh key password once.
You can tweak isc-dhcp-client to make connections faster. In /etc/dhcp/dhclient.conf, use:
backoff-cutoff 1; initial-interval 1;Here are a few scripts I wrote to facilitate quick roaming from one open AP to another and reconnect to irssi running in screen, to break a connection and try the next one, and to recover from occasional lockups (more about that later). ~/bin/screen_reconnect This is a script to reconnect continuously via ssh to a screen session:
#!/bin/sh reset while ! ssh -t 10.9.8.7 'screen -UDr' 2>/dev/null ; do echo -n "." ; sleep .1 ; doneJust substitute the IP of your own server here. Using an IP instead of domain name makes the connection faster because a DNS lookup is not required. ~/bin/wifi_reassociate This script closes any open ssh sessions and informs wpa_supplicant to attempt to connect again.
#/bin/sh /sbin/wpa_cli rea killall ssh >/dev/null 2>&1~/bin/wifi_killall This optional, somewhat ugly script addresses an issue I hope you never have. On my ASUS Eee PC 1001PX, occasionally scanning stops. When this happens, and I have never figured out why, apparently ACPI events are blocked. At this point wifi becomes unusable and ACPI sleep is inhibited. By trial and error I found that if you bring down the interface, kill all network-related processes, and bring it up again, ACPI events are unblocked and wifi is usable once more (and any pending request to sleep will finally happen). The script requires sudo, and to use the openbox key binding, gksudo.
#/bin/sh sudo ifdown wlan0 # in case any of these are hung sudo killall dhclient3 sudo killall wpa_cli sudo killall wpa_action sudo killall wpa_supplicant # in case any of these are *really* hung sleep 1 sudo killall -9 dhclient3 sudo killall -9 wpa_cli sudo killall -9 wpa_action sudo killall -9 wpa_supplicant sudo dhclient -r sudo ifup wlan0Openbox Since certain actions need to be performed repeatedly and quickly, it is useful to have hotkeys bound in your window manager to the scripts. In ~/.config/openbox/rc.xml, key bindings for <alt>-r to reassociate and <alt>-d to disconnect a hung connection would look like:
<keyboard>
<!-- My keybindings -->
<keybind key="A-R">
<action name="Execute">
<execute>/home/synrg/bin/wifi_reassociate</execute>
</action>
</keybind>
<keybind key="A-D">
<action name="Execute">
<execute>gksudo /home/synrg/bin/wifi_killall</execute>
</action>
</keybind>
</keyboard>
Putting it together: on the server
There is very little to do here. Just start screen, and start irssi in screen. Running screen on the client as well as the server means you should either bind the screen meta keys to a different key sequence on each system, or else learn to press meta twice to pass through meta to the server screen as needed. I use the latter approach. Alternatively, you could use a tabbed terminal on the client, or separate terminals per client process instead of screen. This is a matter of personal taste.
Ready to roam
Here is a typical setup for roaming on the bus:
In a terminal (I use urxvt), first ssh-add, then start screen with these three processes running in separate virtual terminals:
> select_network 5 ... > reconfigureYou can use tab-completion in wpa_cli to type these commands quickly or else just abbreviate the commands. Another common scenario is when you pass through a business area with many captive portal hotspots. These rarely make good choices because they either require a password not known to you or else you can t click through I agree in time before the bus moves on. In this case, you might just disable the catch-all stanza and let the common open network stanzas you listed ( default , linksys , etc.) do the work:
> disable_network 1Become a type ahead wizard While running, a continuous stream of periods fills the screen, which provides you with a highly visible cue that no available APs are in range. When the movement stops, you know a connection is being attempted. While waiting to connect, you can type ahead any comments you want to make in the current irssi window (taking care to remember which one you are in!) While having periods interspersed in what you type may be disorienting at first, you get used to it. There is a point when a connection is first established and ssh is accepting input, but anything you type can no longer be seen while you re typing. Depending on whether the connection was completely successful or not, what you type now may or may not finally be sent. For best results, only type ahead before the dots stop moving. Eventually you can become skilled enough at this to type ahead a comment in one channel, switch channels with /win # and continue typing ahead in the new channel, all buffered until the next few seconds (or even fraction of a second) of connection time. Fine-tune antenna direction with wavemon When the bus has come to a standstill, you may find wavemon useful to pull in a weak signal. Because wavemon has continuously updated signal level and link quality bars, you can use it to fine-tune the antenna position. Just turn your laptop until the bars are at their maximum. Captive portals I have not figured out how to do any automation for this, so it really is a crapshoot, as it is likely the bus has moved on by the time you ve managed to manually navigate the login through a captive portal. But in rush hour, you may have the luxury of time to connect to these as you pass them. I have recently learned about the CoovaFX Firefox plugin which automates logins to captive portals. I m going to give it a try to see if it helps. Update: I can t recommend this plugin, as it is not compatible with Iceweasel >= 23.0. Also, the standard it is based on, WISPr, appears to have an uncertain future. That, coupled with the fact that the plugin appears to not be open source means I m still looking for alternatives. Summary If all of this sounds a bit nuts to you, well, it probably is. But after half a decade enjoying free access to irc from the bus, it all seems perfectly natural to me! If you try this method and like it, please let me know in the comments. Likewise, if you have any improvements to the process or scripts, please share them!
To all who might be interested:
The first meeting for organizing Debconf in Mechelen will happen next
sunday, at 3:00 PM, in the NixSys offices in the Battelsesteenweg 455e
in Mechelen, Belgium.
It looks like some of those who were interested might not be able to
make it at that that time. If you're one of them, and you would like your
availability to be considered for the next meeting, please send me an
email with your preferences (that meeting should probably happen in
about a month or so).
(First point on the agenda: set up a mailinglist, to make this sort
of communication somewhat easier ;-)
Next.