Allerdings sehr lansam...Die Vorbereitungen f r Mundus Mercaturae (kurz Mumer), vor bald zwei Monaten angek ndigt, komme langsam voran. Ein Logo wird gerade von Jenny entworfen, w hrend ich mich um einiges auf der Serverseite gek mmert habe. Auf der Basis von Catalyst, einem Perl-Framework, entsteht die Webanwendung zum Abholen und Verarbeiten von Resourcen, und POVray soll einmal dynamisch die Residenzen der Bewohner zeichen, so dass diese sich ihr trautes Heim ganz pers nlich gestalten k nnen. Noch gibt es nicht viel Wahlm glichkeiten, aber immerhin schon zwei Zaunarten, im Beispielbild beide angebracht. Es gibt auch weitere Blickwinkel. Der gesamte Perl- und POVray Code ist per wsvn einsichtig, Kommentare und Patches willkommen. Vor allem was POVray angeht kann man sich leicht n tlich machen, wer Lust hat: einfach mal melden.

I was motivated, this morning, to look into whether my laptop chipset (Intel 915GM, for anyone interested) could do this funky multihead thing. Much to my surprise, it was (a) possible, (b) quite simple, and (c) incredibly useful. I now have a 15" Dell LCD screen on a cardboard box behind my laptop docking station. What is it useful for, you ask? Let me count the ways (with the help of the <ol> tag, of course):

1. I've gotten a couple of PDF versions of my current "must always have with me" technical books (Programming Ruby and Agile Web Development With Rails, since you didn't ask), and now I can stick them on the other monitor to refer to while I'm coding.
2. I can stick my xchat window up on the external monitor, so I can quickly glance at what's going on without having to touch anything. With the ability to stick a window on all desktops, I can have xchat no matter where I go!
3. If I want to show somebody else something, it's handy to be able to push it up onto the top screen so they can more easily see it without having to crane down at my laptop screen (plus, if they go "what about <smudge>that?</smudge>", it's work's monitor that's getting grotted on, not my laptop screen that I have to stare at for 10+ hours a day).

Since I rarely (read: never unless I'm forced to) reboot my machine, instead relying on the magical marvels of sleep/hibernate, I did have one major concern with this multihead thing -- when I'm out-and-about, obviously I'm not going to have my external monitor with me, so how do I view things that are up on the other screen (either because I left them there when I was in the office, or because the window autoplacer stuck them there)? It turns out to be a fairly trivial and rarely noticed problem (except when I shove the mouse at the top of the screen to hit a button and my mouse disappears off into the wilderness). The answer to the invisible window problem is trivial -- I wave my mouse around where I can't see it until the window I want is highlighted in the miniview, then hit Alt-M to lasso it, and drag the little beastie into the light. Much easier than trying to guess where the title bar is to bring it down. In the interests of sharing the love (and having a record of what I did for next time), here is the sum total of what I had to add to my xorg.conf to make it all work on Ubuntu Breezy (along with some comments to make it easier to understand what's happening):

Section "ServerFlags"
        Option  "DefaultServerLayout" "double"
        #Option "DefaultServerLayout" "Default Layout"
EndSection
# This Device section is effectively identical to the one for the
# primary screen, with the addition of the Screen 1 parameter to
# select the alternate display device.
Section "Device"
        Identifier      "vgaout"
        Driver          "i810"
        BusID           "PCI:0:2:0"
        Option          "MonitorLayout" "CRT"
        Screen          1
        Option          "DDC" "false"
EndSection
# external display
Section "Monitor"
        Identifier      "generic"
        # I kept all these loose because most monitors support
        # autodetection.
        HorizSync       27 - 96
        VertRefresh     50 - 110
        Option "DPMS"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "external"
        Device          "vgaout"
        Monitor         "generic"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                # I'd have added many more modes here, but
                # the amazingly crufty external LCD I'm using
                # only supports 1024x768.
                Modes           "1024x768"
        EndSubSection
EndSection
# xinerama layout
Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier      "double"
        # The 0 0 (I think) identifies this as the "root" monitor
        Screen          "Default Screen" 0 0
        # You can also use Below, LeftOf, or RightOf to position
        # your shiny subscreen
        Screen          "external" Above "Default Screen"
        InputDevice     "Generic Keyboard"
        InputDevice     "Configured Mouse"
        # Never, ever forget this option.  You'll get laughed at
        Option          "Xinerama" "true"
EndSection

I noticed some skk packages had maintained by Kawamura-san were orphaned because he became MIA. Unfortunately I dunno why he became such a status, but his packages, especially skk is very important for me and many users. It's hard and painful for me to input Japanese without SKK backend system (I'm using ddskk on Emacs and uim-skk on X as a frontend). So I picked up skk packages from orphan sea with Junji Yamashita-san and improved some parts of them. BTW I uploaded new CUPS 1.2 snapshot, svn r4841 to experimental.

I use a relatively unsophisticated but highly effective filter for blog comment spam. The system consists of several hundred keywords (mostly spam-related domain names which would never appear in a genuine comment), and a Turing test. The Turing test is a box at the bottom of the comment form, that says: “Do not put anything in this box if you are a human.” The Turing test catches between 10-25 spam comments per day; the keyword filter about the same. Every week or two, however, a human comes along, and fails the Turing test and fills in the “don’t fill in this box” box. I’m not quite sure what to do about that. Maybe the human thinks they are not actually human? More likely they just don’t read the text next to the box, although it is fairly prominent. Unfortunately, this seems to be a general phenomenon on the web. Many people have a tendency not to read text on webpages. For example, I’ve gotten a lot of questions along the lines of “How do I access my address book in SquirrelMail?” The answer, of course, is to click on “Addresses.” Similary questions arise with respect to my photo album software salonify — “how do I view a slide show of images?” (A: Click on “Slide Show.”) My hope is that the next generation is better able to process web content, but I’m not sure that hope is well founded. Getting back to the blog comment spam issue, it’s interesting to observe what sorts of topics appear most frequently in comment spams. Over the past several months, pornographic links referencing transsexuals seem to outnumber other topics. I wonder: do the spammers have a scientific method to their marketing?

I suppose I should really update the status of various things I've mentioned in the past. xsm: I gave up and just added the appropriate magic to my xinitrc to start my common apps. I tried fluxbox again for a while, but although it could cope with one of each app it didn't seem to do too well with half a dozen xterms. Maybe with a little effort it could, but xinitrc does the trick well enough. RSS reader: I've settled on Liferea for the moment, with my evil lj-openid-fetch script fetching LJ posts for me. Netgear DG834G: I wrote up a page of info about this, just to have something static. Unfortunately it seems that the Marvell 88E6060 switch chip used only supports port based vlans, which I think means you can split the switch up so that you can have completely separate ports, but doesn't allow the creation of a wan port on the device. This is a shame, as it means I can't use it to handle my setup unaided (I need wan, lan, wireless + adsl ports). X11 programming: I ended up using SDL, which gave me a framebuffer to play with. I suspect I could easily convert the code to run on /dev/fb0 directly, which is nice, though I should look at how to do the same with X again at some point.

Today our new DVD player arrived, as did the Linksys thingy to connect us up to Vonage. Nothing worse than having two new things to play with at once. The DVD player is cheap and nasty (you can flex the drawer) but it plays all regions and converts from PAL to NTSC, so it'll play all of our DVDs. It also does composite video, as does the cheapish and nasty LCD TV we bought, so it's all good. Minor wrestling with the TV and DVD player had them both agreeing to fill the entire screen (or thereabouts) with a movie. Vonage, on the other hand, took a bit more work to get up and going. It wasn't immediately obvious from their website what ports I needed to NAT through my firewall, and my home network is far from what they'd expect the typical customer to have, so I had to call up their support number. After about 3 layers too many of their automatic menu system, and too long on hold, I got to speak to a hard to understand Indian guy, who fortunately was able to tell me without too much prompting, that I needed to allow UDP ports 10,000 to 20,000 through. All good. Next, I was having problems logging in to their website. I'd requested a password reset via the site a few times to no avail, so another call to their support line, and another round of the pushing buttons and waiting on hold got me another hard to understand Indian who after trying to reset my password a few more times declared he was only good for "basic" support, and needed to put me through to the "advanced" people. The advanced guy reset my password again, and swore black and blue that he could log in as me. At this point, I twigged, and tried Internet Explorer instead of Mozilla Firefox. Worked fine. So I can't believe that

1. in this day and age, Firefox isn't supported for some stupid reason
2. it isn't a known issue, and they didn't ask

Being a naturally curious and networky kind of guy, I ran a tcpdump of the entire initial setup, from when I first turned the Linksys doodad on, but I'll save writing about that for another time.

Early musings, but I wonder if it's possible to sign up with Engin, and score a local Australian phone number, which pops out in the US, terminated on an Asterisk box? It's all technically feasible. The big question is, will Engin allow me to sign up? Initially googling implies that Engin will support Asterisk, which is cool in and of itself. Watch this space. I suppose I need to get Asterisk working now.

So I've been in the US for just over six weeks now, and I thought I'd reflect on the trials and tribulations of bootstrapping oneself in a foreign country. The Social Security Number is the primary key from hell I already had a fair idea of the importance of obtaining a Social Security Number (SSN). So much so, that after dumping our luggage at our temporary accommodation, the Social Security Administration office was the first place Michael and I went to, so we could lodge applications. We subsequently learned from another Australian who was about two weeks ahead of us, that you're apparently supposed to wait ten working days before lodging the application, to allow your immigration records to percolate through the bureaucracy that is the US Government. Our applications were duly accepted without any mention of waiting a bit, but we were sent away with a letter and a tracking number, saying that the SSA had to verify our existence with Immigration (this is despite the fact that we're standing in front of them with a passport with an I-94 stapled in it) and that it would take up to four weeks. So it's been six weeks, and still no sign of an SSN. Enquiries with the office are met with the same response - waiting on information back from Immigration. Apparently it can take up to three months. It's a real shame you can't start the application process when your visa is granted or something, as in order to apply, you need to quote your "alien registration number" (I still chuckle at how the US Government refers to me as an "alien" in all their paperwork), which is the number on your I-94, which you only get when you enter the country. So, whilst the SSN application remains pending, I cannot be paid, I cannot have my health insurance paperwork lodged by my employer, and whilst I'll be covered for health insurance retrospectively, I'm not technically covered right now, if I were to require medical treatment. Going back to how the SSN is the primary key of All Things... Next step is to open a bank account. We chose Citibank, because I've been told it's slightly easier to import money back into Australia with them. Fortunately we were able to open an account sans SSN, but it's called an "NRA account" (NRA standing for Non-resident Alien). We were told that we were only eligible for an ATM card until I had an SSN, yet they mailed me out a debit card about a week after we opened the account, and happily ordered one for Sarah, and a cheque book when we asked after opening the account. About the only thing it seems we can't do at the moment is transfer money back to Australia. No big deal, it's all coming the other way until I can get paid... Driver's licence requires an SSN ideally, so that's out of the question for the time being... Electricity, telephone and cable were all able to be provisioned with an SSN, although I think for credit-rating purposes, again, it is the primary key. We had to pay a deposit for the electricity, which is fair enough. The lady I spoke to on the phone when I got it connected said that they just treated us aliens like teenagers straight out of home with no credit history. I don't have a problem with that. It's just a shame that you can't import your credit history. Getting a cell phone account appears to be nigh on impossible with an SSN though. It was a battle just to get a prepaid SIM card for Sarah's phone, and this makes a great story of how much hoop-jumping is required. We walked up to a Cingular stand in a shopping mall to see what we could and couldn't do. I explained our situation (lack of SSN, lack of credit history, etc etc) to the sales droid, and he assured us it wasn't a problem to get a prepaid SIM card. He proceeded to take about 30 minutes to organise the SIM card. I watched as he entered a dummy SSN into the computer, and used his own driver's licence number. He was clearly battling the computer system to be able to do it. When we got home, and Sarah called up to try and put some credit on the phone with our Australian Visa card, she was told they only accepted credit cards with a US billing address. (So much for Visa being accepted worldwide). So we headed off again to Safeway to purchase a prepaid Mastercard. Funnily enough, when Sarah called up to activate that, she was initially asked for an SSN, so we almost had a dependency loop that we couldn't break, just to get a US cell phone. Fortunately they could cope with no SSN, so she successfully ended up with a prepaid Mastercard, with a US billing address, so she could put credit on her prepaid SIM. From what I can work out, a lot of the places that do request the SSN seem to using the last four digits as an authenticator, much like everyone just uses name and date of birth back in Australia, so I'm guessing for these organisations, I could probably just quote any old number that fit the pattern and they'd be happy. Just so long as they don't go trying to run a credit check against it... Foreign credit cards As I said earlier, a credit card with a non-US billing address is fine for most face-to-face purchases, but an amazing array of mostly telephone transactions will not accept them. Most notable was trying to add credit to a calling card for making international telephone calls. Couldn't be done. So it meant I had to forego any discounts or bonuses for topping up, and buy a whole new calling card. Car insurance and registration I'm not sure how this is going to go yet. Our Prius is supposed to be available around the 18th of January. I'm hoping I'll have my SSN by then, otherwise we'll have to import a heap of money to pay for it. I'm sure you can get insurance and own a car without an SSN, because you hear of people who do driving holidays across the US, buying a car on one coast, driving it cross-country, and then selling it. It might be more expensive, and I again, you can't import your driving/insurance history, so you have to start off at the bottom of the ladder again... In summary, I think you need to have relatively deep pockets to bootstrap yourself over here. You need to be able to function without getting paid for up to two or three months, and you need to understand that credit-wise and insurance-wise, you're going to be back at square-one again, irrespective of how good you might have been in your home country. The sooner you come to terms with these, and appreciate that you are moving to a foreign country, the sooner you can get on with enjoying the experience.

I've been so busy, I haven't had time to blog. Rather than putting it off any longer, I'll just dump what I can remember. Last Wednesday, Sarah arrived after her holiday in Singapore, and from all accounts, had a great time. Photos as well. Sticking with the whirlwind theme, the next day, we had a "building warming" party at work for the new building we'd moved into the week before Michael and I started. The next night we had the work Christmas party, which blew the socks off any work Christmas party I'd ever been to before, and then on Saturday night we went to a party in San Francisco that we'd been invited to. On a life in general front, I'm still waiting for a Social Security number. The lack of one makes life a bit difficult for a lot of things. It also turns out that Sarah's work permit will take about 90 days to approve, so she's going to be a lady of leisure for the next few months. I've finally been issued with a work mobile phone (or "cell phone" as they call them), and so can stop roaming and paying through the nose for the privilege. We've found somewhere to live. We take possession of a 2 bedroom townhouse (split-level) in a complex in Mountain View that is 3 miles from work on the 18th. The rent is $1725 a month, which is a bit better than we were expecting. The complex we're renting in does have shared laundries, which we'd not too keen on before getting over here, but they're quite modern and secure, and there's a laundry block close to our townhouse, so hopefully it won't be too bad. The whole place had been renovated about 5 years ago, so it's all in good condition. We could have rented a 3 bedroom apartment (single level) in the same complex for about $125 a month more, but we're trying to actually make some money while we're over here... Driving on the other side of the road becomes fairly "normal" after about a week of doing it regularly. Sarah's adapted fine. Lane placement is the hardest thing, because your body's used to being in a certain spot on the road, and it's all different sitting on the other side of the car. We've managed to open a rudimentary bank account, even with my lack of Social Security number. Unfortunately I can't get paid until I have an SSN. Upside of that is that if it doesn't happen until next year, I presumably won't have to worry about income tax for this US financial year. Downside is kind of obvious... By far one of the stranger things of everyday life here is the lighting situation in the average residence. Lamps are all the rage, to the point that light switches don't exist in some rooms (notably bedrooms). Take where we're currently living for example. There's a light switch at the bottom of the stairs, there's one at the top. There's a bank of four in the living room, two of which control lights in the kitchen, and one the hallway. The last one controls a lamp in the corner of the living room, which is connected to a power socket (or power point as we'd call it). The bedroom with the attached bathroom (en suite) has two bedside lamps, and that is the sole source of light. The bathroom attached has light switches, and the walk-in robe has a light switch. It's so weird. So walking into a darkened bedroom involves walking all the way in, and fumbling around with a lamp. It's often easier to turn on the light in the wardrobe so you can see what you're doing first. I can't think of any reason for it, except tradition. It's not like they're avoiding wiring the walls or the ceiling, because it's done partially already. The bedroom has a ceiling fan, but where in Australia, there'd be a knob on the wall near the light switch to control it, it has a little chain you yank on. To add to the strangeness, there are two switches on the wall, one of which seems to allow you to turn off the ceiling fan if it's already been switched on by pulling the chain. The townhouse we're renting has a similar lamp dependency, so we're going to be making a trip to Ikea for some lamps it would seem. That's about everything I can recollect right now... Oh, I should point out that I'm really loving it over here.

So, as of sometime this morning, most of our worldly possessions were (in cartons) loaded into a shipping container bound for the US. Unfortunately, I don't finish work until Wednesday, so my lovely wife was charged with supervising the packers yesterday and today. My one word of advice with respect to packers is to be extremely careful, and assume that they will assume nothing. If you don't want something packed, don't leave it unsupervised or anywhere where it may be packed. My electric toothbrush was left unattended for slightly too long, and is in a carton somewhere. As was half of the bike rack until we raided a few cartons last night and rescued it. Obviously literacy doesn't rate very highly as a requirement to be a packer either. We had "stools" spelt as "stulls" and "wine rack" spelt as "win race" on some of the items packed. I'd also never seen a couch bubble-wrapped until yesterday. Pretty much no item was left exposed. Everything is either in a carton or bubble-wrapped with funked brown-paper-backed, branded bubble wrap.

More nice hardware running Debian. With rwhitby's help I've gotten Debian (little endian arm) installed on a nslu2 (donated by the nsul2-linux group, retails about $100). Tiny little box with USB, lots of nice applications. For those who are counting, that makes 10 computers running linux (7 Debian + 3 openwrt; 3 x86 + 3 mipsel + 3 arm + 1 armeb) here at the oh so rustic and old-timey farm. I hope d-i will support the nslu2 soon..

fEnIo learnt an important lesson about the kernel firmware loader: it (usually) does not work as expected for non-modular drivers. The reason is that the request_firmware() interface is synchronous. Since it's usually called in the initialisation section of drivers, the userspace firmware loader is not available yet if the calling driver is built-in in the kernel. The request_firmware_nowait() asynchronous interface was designed to replace it, but most drivers have not been ported yet. When a driver calls request_firmware(), a uevent is sent by the kernel to udev over a netlink(7) socket, requesting that a specific file is uploaded. udevd runs /lib/udev/firmware.agent, a simple shell script which will look for the $FIRMWARE file in a few directories and then copy it to the designated place in the driver $DEVPATH in sysfs. If the driver is initialised before userspace is started then the loader will not be available, and the request will fail. A possible solution is to run udev in the early userspace environment (initramfs), but just compiling the driver as a module is usually simpler.

I had a bunch of old packages in my ~/debian/nbd/ directory, that didn't serve much purpose anymore, so I wanted to clean them out.

wouter@grep.be:~/debian/nbd$ rm -Rf *

After that finished, I realized that this directory also contained my CVS checkouts of the NBD upstream CVS. And one of those checkouts contained quite a lot of uncommitted code. Whoops. So, what do you do then? Stop writing to disk immediately. Pull the plug. Except this is a laptop, so, push the power button until you don't see anything anymore; and next, try to read the lost file from a different installation. That "different installation" was an easy one. I've always had a second, minor, 'play' partition on my laptop, that I use to try out all sorts of operating systems. I've used it to run Debian stable, Ubuntu, MacOS X. It currently contains Gentoo; I intend to try out FreeBSD for PowerPC some time. But the fact that it already had Gentoo meant I could use that one to run debugfs on the (not mounted) file system, and try to find my files back. Except that I'd never done that before, and I didn't know where to start. And since my gentoo installation isn't set up entirely right, I couldn't get networking to work okay, thus, no help through IRC. My first guess was to check the ext3 journal. There's a command to dump any random inode to disk in hex format (dump <inode number>, with the square brackets), so that should help. I thought. Hah I spent two hours looking at kernel code, trying to find out what the on-disk format of the ext3 journal is (which, as it turns out, isn't part of the ext3 driver; it is a totally different driver, called jbd), only to find out that it wouldn't help me; a journal obviously only contains information on the new data it's going to write, not on the old data it's overwriting. And seen how removing a file means you overwrite a directory inode block with newer information that does not contain the reference to the removed file anymore, that wasn't helpful. At least I learned what the ext3 journal's on-disk format is. Might be useful in the future. My next move was looking at debugfs again. Found that it has some command called dump_unused, which will dump the raw data of any blocks that are not allocated, provided that raw data isn't just zeroes. That's a lot of blocks; bzip2'ed, I had already 1.5G before I killed it. Fortunately, an easy 'bzgrep' told me that the file was, indeed, in there somewhere. I did a commit now. Just to be sure :-)

Did anybody try to use ipw2200 driver included in recent kernels?
I found out that most recent version of kernel includes this driver so I decided to switch from self-compiled 2.6.14.4 and ipw2200-source package for module to new version of kernel and driver compiled in it.
Unfortunatelly such compiled kernel can't find firmware either in /usr/local/lib/firmware nor /lib/firmware, although according to /lib/udev/hotplug.functions these directories are checked and firmware seems to be ok cause works fine with 2.6.14.4.
Is it at all possible to use this driver compiled in kernel (not as a module)?

I really like the simplicity of Blosxom as blogging framework and I also like Perl very much. But somehow this Perl 4 alike global variables madness of Blosxom v2 sucks in several ways: It effectively prevents Blosxom from being used with mod_perl and it’s just not what I would call an API. I would like to have a more object-oriented plugin API and it should be save for use with FastCGI, mod_perl or similar possibilities to cache the parsed script code instead of reparsing with each request. Another thing should be a tagging facility. Had to write that by myself for Blosxom v2. (Wasn’t that hard though.) But since Blosxom v3 development seemed to have stopped in May 2004, I have been thinking about and looking for alternatives. First thought was to write a Blosxom clone by myself using Embperl as framework (as I did with web galleries after not finding any web gallery software fitting all my needs). But since I got infected with Ruby recently, I also thought about writting a Blosxom clone in Ruby, which would give me quite a lot of Ruby experience and would make a good fit since Ruby as well as Blosxom have some kind of Zen (or KISS) philosophy. The next thought was: I can’t be the first to come up with that idea and googled a little bit. First thing I digged up was Rage, some kind of Blosxom on Rails. But I didn’t find any source code although the author seems to prefer open source software. Seems as if it is seems to be ready for production but not ready for public release. The next thing I found was hint to some Blosxom clones in the Ruby Application Archive (RAA). Unfortunately two of them (sakura and lily) seem to have Japanese only web pages. :-( But for luck the third Ruby based Blosxom clone found in the RAA, Blosxonomy, seems to be quite well featured, under actual development, has a english written web page and one of if its main concepts is taggability. And also the other core concepts sound fine: simplicity, extensibility and compatibility. Sounds really perfect and I’ll probably give it a try, but not on my current blog host: There is no Ruby installed and it’s not my own box.

Now playing: Rolling Stones — Ruby Tuesday

Today our new DVD player arrived, as did the Linksys thingy to connect us up to Vonage. Nothing worse than having two new things to play with at once. The DVD player is cheap and nasty (you can flex the drawer) but it plays all regions and converts from PAL to NTSC, so it'll play all of our DVDs. It also does composite video, as does the cheapish and nasty LCD TV we bought, so it's all good. Minor wrestling with the TV and DVD player had them both agreeing to fill the entire screen (or thereabouts) with a movie. Vonage, on the other hand, took a bit more work to get up and going. It wasn't immediately obvious from their website what ports I needed to NAT through my firewall, and my home network is far from what they'd expect the typical customer to have, so I had to call up their support number. After about 3 layers too many of their automatic menu system, and too long on hold, I got to speak to a hard to understand Indian guy, who fortunately was able to tell me without too much prompting, that I needed to allow UDP ports 10,000 to 20,000 through. All good. Next, I was having problems logging in to their website. I'd requested a password reset via the site a few times to no avail, so another call to their support line, and another round of the pushing buttons and waiting on hold got me another hard to understand Indian who after trying to reset my password a few more times declared he was only good for "basic" support, and needed to put me through to the "advanced" people. The advanced guy reset my password again, and swore black and blue that he could log in as me. At this point, I twigged, and tried Internet Explorer instead of Mozilla Firefox. Worked fine. So I can't believe that

1. in this day and age, Firefox isn't supported for some stupid reason
2. it isn't a known issue, and they didn't ask

Being a naturally curious and networky kind of guy, I ran a tcpdump of the entire initial setup, from when I first turned the Linksys doodad on, but I'll save writing about that for another time.

Every now and then I set a day for myself to bring my big old desktop CPU to an internet cafe to update my Debian and Ubuntu installations, dchroots and pbuilders, because I only have a dialup connection at home (and of all things, from a softmodem.) It became such a habit that I decided to make the most of it, and use the time it takes for me to go and update to go around every internet cafe in town and see how people would react to my GNU OS Today was one such day. I went to one particular internet cafe in front of Daet Elementary School this afternoon, and with my CPU I proceeded to try to get it working on their local network and feed off its Internet connection. Unfortunately for me, however, I went there just in time for their renovation of their place, which involved moving the individual computer nodes out of place and causing some confusion, all in the name of installing some type of cafe management software (aka a Sub7-type BB tool) which ultimately caused them to use static IPs for each node on the network–waah, no DHCP! Had this been a year ago, this might have been a big problem; but now, I run the excellent pdnsd, the proxy DNS server, in conjunction with resolvconf and squid. I originally intended this amazing duo to work so that I was able to serve a nameserver 127.0.0.1 for each of my dchroots, saving me from copying my main /etc/resolv.conf to each dchroot; but now, I have surprised myself again with this, since pdnsd cached just about enough DNS entries for me to be able to just the most-frequently used parts of the Web (Google, FreeNode, etc.) It took me a while before getting down and dirty with /etc/pdnsd.conf and pasting the example “root-servers” in /usr/share/doc/pdnsd/examples/pdnsd.conf , and allowing myself full Internet access without DHCP. Now, I got my pbuilders updated, but not the dchroots; I only got a max of 7 kilobytes per second of download compared to the usual 25, Sigh… you just can’t have too much of everything…

Unfortunately, this quick note will most likely not reach the people it needs to, but it needs to be said in any case: When contacting myself or other people who produce free software, please use the mailing list for the project in question unless you have a really good reason to keep the conversation private. The reasons:

• Other people can benefit from, and contribute to the conversation. They might also be more interested than I am in the problem at hand, or at least want to hear about how it's resolved.
• It gets archived, and therefore people can find it via search engines in the future. This is critical when you want to be able to point people at archives that led to decisions that affect the project.
• It creates more sense of 'community'. Most successful open source projects are not the fruit of only one person's labor. Perhaps they are initially, but at a certain point, everyone is better off if a community grows up around the project, and keeping conversations public helps that process along.

Please pass this along - hopefully people will start to get the idea.