2008年 4月 29日

That’s where they are!

Posted in Bubblesworth Pty Ltd, Computers at 12:31 am by TBBle (Visited times)

As I documented in one of my much earlier blog posts, Where are they now?, I lost tbble.com nearly four years ago, and Google hits and archived links have been slowing dying/updating every since.

On the weekend just past I got an email from someone telling me they had recently come into possession of tbble.com, and as the owner of tbble.net, please click the included link to purchase it. (I only read the email tonight. That's how far behind I am at life.)

Barely restraining my hopes, I immediately clicked on the link fired up an ssh session to my fileserver and whoised tbble.com, discovering it to be apparently unregistered.

Continuing to restrain my now burgeoning glee, I went to do my Bubblesworth domain renewals, and idly popped tbble.com onto the shopping list, almost as if by accident. (No point tempting fate at this point. I've had tbble.com disappear from whois before but be snapped up before I could reclaim it).

$15 later (reseller price. ^_^) I'm the proud once-again owner of tbble.com, your source for all things TBBle. Although since I'd managed to migrate to tbble.net and tbble.org over the past four years, there's nothing good there. I really need to sort this stuff out.

I stopped restraining my glee at this point, and cheered near my housemate until he woke up and heard about my glee.

And now so have the rest of you. Sans cheering, unless you're using some kind of Text-To-Speech software which takes a fairly imaginative interpretation of the phrase "Text-To-Speech". If you are using such a program, let me know. I'll try and work some more amusing noises into my blog posts.

Anyway, that's TBBle 1, Evil Domain Registrars Who Jump On Expired .com Domains And Try To Sell Them Back To The Original Owners For $1500 Through A Shell Company In South Africa -$20 (or whatever a registrar pays Verisign for four years squatting).

Also on 0, but having had a bye this round, are Evil Domain Resellers Who Refuse To Process My Credit Card And Refuse To Release My Domain For Transfer Without Some Kind Of Fee They Added To The User Agreement Post Purchase Using One Of Those "We Reserve The Right To Modify This Agreement As We See Fit" Clauses. Recapping the earlier round, it was a draw. I lost one domain, and rescued five others without charge.

I'm gonna need a wider scoreboard...

Edit: That's not how you spell "amusing" or "restrain". "Gonna" on the other hand is correct.

2007年 1月 16日

Things to do in Sydney while the wireless is dead

Posted in CBIT Internet, Debian, Japan, Japanese, LCA07, Programming at 12:27 am by TBBle (Visited 217 times)

Well, now that I'm back on the 'net fairly reliably, I can post on what I've been doing for the past few days.

Firstly, I was off the Internet because I was flat-out busy on Saturday, in transit on Sunday, and wireless did not arrive at International House until about 11pm Monday night. That time I did spend on the 'net today, at the conference, was spent in a combination of processing CBIT emails since Friday, and wrestling with my wireless network card.

My local build of the d80211 version of the bcm43xx driver got signal, would even get traffic through, but when it tried to reassociate to a different AP (all the APs here are running on channel 11... Although I was sitting next to someone who saw one on channel 1, which I'm guessing was rouge... I also saw some IBSS networks on the same SSID....) it would corrupt something nasty, kick the screen brightness up to full and oops with slab errors in short order.

The 2.6.18 (2.6.18-3-powerpc Debian build) bcm43xx softmac driver didn't crash or anything, but generally performed worse, and when the Debian miniconf's theatre (Mathews A) was full, my connection suffered or would completely fail to dhcp. >_<

On the plus side, the presentations were great. AJ gave us a rundown of debian-devel (ie 12 months of flamewars) and other significant Debian going-ons. Keith Packard produced a whole bunch of neat X things slated for X.org 7.3 (input hotplugging, dynamic output selection and modesetting, which is exactly what I need to get the projectors I keep plugging into to work better than 640x480...). Russell Coker talked about the various security gaps still remaining in Linux.

In non-conference goings on, I was talking to someone on IRC who's gotten Second Life Viewer building under Linux/PowerPC (a previously unsupported platform) and I'm going to see if we can get a .deb built. I've already created an ELFIO package, and have the OpenJPEG source to try packaging tomorrow. I've also sent off an email to the person who ITP'd secondlife-client for Debian already, to see if he wants to co-operate, or if I'm just tooling about.

Speaking of tooling about, I decided it'd be a good idea to upgrade my bcm43xx-d80211 build to something more recent than mid December, but it seems the 2.6.20 workqueue changes mean I can't compile it against 2.6.19 anymore. The rt2x00 d80211 stack has backwards compatibility macros for the workqueue stuff, but I don't really feel like hacking those into bcm43xx, it's already a large and unsteady beast.

BTW, cogito's update could handle resuming better. Although it happily detected it was resuming a failed update, it had to keep refetching the packs. I eventually realised it would eventually time-out a fetch if I didn't ^c it and happily try again, presuming I had in the meantime walked outside or reloaded the driver.

Anyway, so I've decided tonight (while I was still off the wireless) that I'd finally bite the bullet and build myself a custom dscape.git kernel, to see if the pain I keep suffering from the bcm43xx-d80211 driver is just my cheap-ass backport. That was still building when the wireless came up, and then barfed because KConfig happily let me include both the PCI and SoC versions of the OHCI USB host driver, which provide the same symbols. I must remember to file a bug report about that, or at least check linus's git tree in case it's already fixed. (Both drivers recommended yes, but are patently incompatible as they require different endianness of the host interface). I've restarted the make-kpkg, hopefully that'll build overnight and I can try it in the morning.

I also put some time into my Remembering the Kanji book. I was going to do an hour, but after about a half-hour (with a break to configure and fire the kernel build off) I was yawning, and figured I'd prolly left the imaginative-memory zone. I was going to watch some Gokusen but thought I'd take a last wander over to the IH whiteboard to see if the wireless was up. Bizarrely, it was.

So I wandered onto the 'net, checked email, volunteered myself to package Thousand Parsec for Debian, added the Kanji I studied to Reviewing the Kanji (a web site for reviewing the stuff you learn in Remembering the Kanji) and updated my blog.

Which funnily enough, is where we came in

ごくせん Vol.1ごくせん Vol.2ごくせん Vol.3

2007年 1月 12日

LCA 2007 Ho!

Posted in CBIT Internet, Clubs, Computers, Debian, LCA07, Micro Forté, Programming at 6:04 pm by TBBle (Visited 170 times)

Well, it's nearly LCA time again. This is just a quick post mainly to see if my syndication at Planet Linux.conf.au 2007 is working yet.

I've been working at MF (Milestones just seem to come at you faster than the calender would otherwise suggest) and particularly in the last couple of weeks getting a good vector-math workout.

I've also been working at picking off RC bugs to try and help Etch along a bit, since kind of hoped to be upgrading to it in the half of January that's just passed.

I've also been looking for a CMS for the ANU Anime Society to try and resolve the fact that our web admins never seem to last as long as we'd like. At the moment, Joomla! is top of my list for trialling, as I'm familiar with PHP and looks to have the relevant modules (forum, calendar, eventing system that'll need modification to work for screening scheduling). However, I'm open to other suggestions, and will see if anyone at LCA has any useful suggestions.

And of course, by adding Planet LCA 2007, I've had to read it. And I came across ThreatNet, which is a distributed compromised computer identification system. It's actually really simple, you do something to identify a certain IP as a threat (the sample code scans postfix logs for "REJECT: noqueue" which usually comes from "no such user" although I noticed it also comes from greylister at CBIT) and sends that IP address to a nominated IRC channel. I dunno what's next, actually. Presumably, sites can block that IP address as they see fit, and if the responsible parties for the machine become aware of it, they can take action. I'll be adding this to my ever-growing list of things I need to consider implementation of at CBIT.

On the plus side, I recently installed Debian on a Slug with a 512MB USB flash stick, and I'm going to see how Nagios performs on it. If it's up to scratch, I'll prolly shoehorn in a wireless card and see if I can monitor two disparate networks effectively.

2006年 10月 17日

Confessions of a mercenary programmer

Posted in Anime, Bandwidth Unlimited Pty Ltd, Clubs, Debian, Japan, Japanese, Linux, Micro Forté, Programming at 12:25 am by TBBle (Visited 1690 times)

Just a quick note, in the aftermath of the vote to decide where Anthony Towns, Debian Project Leader did something good for Debian, bad for Debian or indifferent to Debian with the Dunc-Tank.

I, Paul Hampson, hereby confess that I too earnt money for doing Debian work, specifically packaging FreeRADIUS and getting it sponsored into the archive in time for Sarge to ship.

Mind you, I didn't earn much money, since Bandwidth Unlimited (for it was they) went bust without paying me much, but they did pay me. And you might argue that I'd been looking for a package to help out with in Debian for nearly three years at that point, and I would have worked on it for free, and that when I was being paid serious money to administer an ISP, I didn't do much FreeRADIUS work at all.

To which I'd say that I'd never have picked FreeRADIUS were I not running an ISP, and I would not have been running an ISP had I not planned to become rich and buy the world's largest chocolate bar from the experience. And I didn't get a lot of my job functions done when I was running an ISP, so lower-priority things (like FreeRADIUS, cleaning my desk, a full night's sleep) were often pushed aside.

I have to say that until I recently became a professional, regularly paid, programmer, I was highly envious of people who get paid to work on Open Source stuff, let alone Debian stuff. Now I'm just envious, although that'll prolly upgrade back to highly envious after linux.conf.au 2007 (or as I like to think of it now, clitoris.conf.au)

This whole thing puts me in mind of my experience at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. I was one of the IT volunteers, and we basically picked up the less-interesting jobs the IBM-paid staffers gave us. At the time I felt a bit put out that I was there volunteering, and these guys were being paid to be there doing nothing that I couldn't have handled. Obviously that was decidedly unfair, and from my days of "I'm as good as or better than anyone else at computers" phase. But the unfairness of my attitude isn't actually the issue, the issue was that I really wanted to be paid to do that sort of thing, and didn't see why others should get paid but me not be.

Now of course I want two things: To get paid, and to do the things I love. I've finally reached the point where I can combine them, and I no longer begrudge those who, through luck, skill or otherwise, get paid more to do the same things, or get access to cooler toys to do them on. I'm envious, obviously. How do you not envy someone who gets to bring up Linux on a 128-way Power5 machine on the quiet? But that doesn't make me unhappy, it just makes me want to strive more, and work harder. One day I'll be the one submitting a paper to Linux.conf.au on some stupendously cool thing I've done. ^_^

Anyway, my short-medium term goal is to leverage the experience of the current MicroForté work, plus finishing my Japanese studies, to go work for a games company in Japan, combining my two favorite pipe-dreams into one, and making it reachable in a little as two years. Maybe I'll be lucky and MicroForté will open a Japanese office or something, or I'll luck out and end up working on a Japanese MMORPG with a Linux client and a measurable dose of serious cool. Or somehow end up programming at Nintendo.... Oh, sparkley eyes! *_*

And a by-the-by, it's two and a half months in, and I'm still totally thrilled to be working at a video games company. I mean, seriously, I'm like all, wow. I thought it was cool when I was working at TransACT, and my testing procedure involved firing up a video stream, and watching it on a TV. I had a TV on my desk, for work purposes, and that was the high-point of my career. Now I don't have a TV on my desk, but when I'm hacking on combat-handling code, part of my procedure involves firing up a game server, and playing.

I'm learning to take my time with things a bit more. I'm now much less worried that I won't speak six asian languages, play the piano, have my name someone in the Linux kernel that doesn't share a sentence with "blame", have invented an entirely new way of interacting with computers, master four different styles of martial art, earn my first dan in three different Japanese weapon styles, hold two masters degrees in disparate subject areas, earn infamy in the Debian community or even the admiration of my peers by 30. Or 40. I'll be pushing it to get there by 50. But the advantage of youth is that you get it when you're young, and only lose it if you let it go.

I guess on reflection, my goal has become to be a polymath ronin... For those familiar with anime, I think I want to be Kintaro Oe when I grow up...

Side-note: I'm now the secretary of the ANU Anime Society. Two days before the AGM, I wrote in an email to the then-executive committee that secretary was the one position I'd never take. Time makes fools of us all. ^_^ Congratulations to Cathy Ring on stepping up to the presidency, and to the other executives, old and new, for stepping up to what I expect (knowing Cathy) to be a hard-driven and successful year coming.

Oh, and someone asked this week about getting the GTO Live Action box set. So here's my AmazonJP links...

GTO DVD-BOXGTO スペシャルGTO

2006年 8月 14日

So you wanna be a domain-specific hero?

Posted in CBIT Internet, Japan, Linux, Micro Forté, Programming, University at 2:16 am by TBBle (Visited 717 times)

Wow. "Later this week" certainly took longer than I expected.

As of July 31st, I'm a (junior, for now) programmer at Micro Forté's Canberra studio. Two weeks in, and it's the best job I've had so far. ^_^ My first task involved trying out installation of the BigWorld MMOG server system as a new user so we could see what state the documentation was in, and for those who know how pedantic I am, a four-page file called whinge.txt is actually a positive sign.

It's an approximately eighteen-month contract, so I guess Japan and University will have to be put off at least that much longer. Still, I've pretty much wanted to write video games since I was six, learning Applesoft BASIC on the family //c, so no regrets. ^_^

I'm no longer working full-time at CBIT Internet, although I am still maintaining the ISP's servers there.

In celebration, I bought Guitar Hero, which neccesitated getting my Playstation 2 back from Richard, who'd in the meantime bought a PS2 EyeToy. I haven't tried the bundled game yet, but instructions exist to use the EyeToy as a windows webcam, and to use the EyeToy as a linux webcam.

This, plus the request of a nice young lady whom I only seem to face-to-face once every twelve months or so that I install Skype, got me playing with Skype again. Sadly, the 10 euros of credit I bought in 2004 and was unable to use (due to their system failing to transmit voice to the US at the time) have "expired", which annoyed me enough that I was boycotting them. The boycott ended the moment someone asked me to actually use it, mind you. ^_^

Of course, this led me into an exploration of open-source alternatives. On the Skype-protcol side, there's a paper from 2004 looking at how Skype 0.97 talked to the network as well as a recent claims from a Chinese company to have reverse-engineered the Skype protocol. Sadly, the latter is planning to commercialise their results, not publish them.

On the actual open-source side, I've been playing with SIP stuff again. I've had a SIP-based Asterisk server running here (You can try to call me via SIP although I don't always have a SIP client running) for a while now, and I recently got a chance to test it with some overseas friends, but due to poor codec choice, it quality sucked.

On codecs, I have to say that Speex is great and iLBC is awful. Both in voice quality, and for the fact that Speex is free open-source, while iLBC comes with a "no-commercial use" license.

Anyway, with a webcam, I've been toying with video-supporting SIP clients. For windows, the only free one appears to be X-Lite 3 which doesn't do Speex (although its commerical version, eyeBeam 1.5 does) but for my purposes (LAN to the Asterisk Box) I can do G.711 and let Asterisk do the Speex transcoding for me.

Under linux, Linphone has video support (although the 1.35 Debian package is compiled without, and the build-deps to build it wanted to remove texlive in favour of tetex...) which I've not tried yet, but which a brief glance at the source suggests supports H.263-1998. Ekiga, the successor to GnomeMeeting, also supports video, via opal, but only H.261. There's H.263 code there, but relies on FFMpeg 0.4.7 patched to support RFC2190 for its video support. (It's actually FFMpeg's libavcodec that's being used, but very few people make the distinction it seems)

A brief aside on the video codecs at play here. H.261 is the older ITU-T video standard for ISDN, while H.263 was a newer standard which drew from H.261 as well as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, and which was the default video standard for H.323 computer video conferencing, thanks to things like Microsoft's NetMeeting and the open-source GnomeMeeting. However, along with MPEG technology comes murky and ill-defined MPEGLA patent issues. There's also H.263-1998, aka H.263p or H.263+, which adds some annexes to H.263 to support some more encoding features. For moving H.263 over RTP RFC 2190 was written. However, the stream format defined in RFC2190 couldn't support the data stream from H.263-1998, so RFC 2429 was published. Both H.263 and H.263-1998 can be carried in the RFC 2429 stream format, so in theory everyone should be using RFC 2429 streams, and we'd all be happy. Apparently, NetMeeting only support RFC 2190 and H.263 however, so that's the version that they implemented in Ekiga too (since Opal is a refactoring of the OpenH323 library's media interface, and Gnomemeeting's built on OpenH323. And the OpenH323 H.263 code was submitted by the same person who did the FFMpeg patch mentioned above.) Meanwhile, X-Lite supports H.263, H.263plus, and (according to my SIP debug logs on Asterisk) RFC 2429 streaming.

I spent most of today weighing up forwardporting the RFC2190 patch to FFMpeg, or updating libopal to support RFC2429. I didn't achieve much, but I weighed it up a lot. The final answer was wait for the current libopal refactoring (they've moved the video codec support out into plugins, and rewrote the H.263 code such that it's much easier to _add_ RFC2429 support) to reach my via Debian in some way, and then have a poke at it, if they haven't done it already. If it's not already done, I'm sure that submitted the code to make it work would make me an Open-source Telephony Hero

So to bring us back to the story, I've got a nice little Windows-based SIP client which does video but not Speex and needs to register with someone, a Linux-based client that does speex but which I haven't compiled the video for yet (Linphone), and a both linux- and win32-based client which claims to do Speex but barfs (Ekiga...) and which can't do the current video codec with the current video stream format, and depends on a slight fork of another library to do current video with the old format.

I can see why Skype's so popular...>_<

Incidentally, if you want a non-registrar-requiring Speex-supporting free but-without-video SIP client for Windows, I found PhonerLite seemed to work well. And frankly, if you're going to call me without warning at home, you might not want the webcam to show you whatever my current state of dress or undress is. ^_^

Talking to Chris Smart (of Kororaa) at CLUG's PSIG meeting last Thursday about webcams, Ekiga and kopete inevitably led onto the GPL and the Linux Kernel (he loves to talk about it, really! ^_^) and Chris pointed me at Greg K-H's take on Linux and Binary-only modules, which manages to draw the line between legal and illegal way way back there compared to where we all through we were. (On a sidenote, OLS looks like it would have been tremendous fun. I can hardly wait until I'm a jetsetting conference-attending Linux Kernel Hero.)

I've also been poking at the DeviceScape 802.11 stack for Linux. As well as happily running my laptop's Apple Airport Extreme2 card for the past few months, its software-based Access Point support appears to have progressed to the point at which I can start poking at it for Nintendo DS Wirelss Multi-boot infrastructure, which will bypass all the card-specific hacking people're having to do, as well as let it work on things that aren't RT25xx cards. It seems in the six months or so since I've looked hard at Nifi, a dude called masscat has picked up the ball and run with it, so I've almost 10 pages of forum thread, and then whatever code he's published, to catch up on. I'm pleasantly surprised, I thought with the advent of Wifi support for Nintendo DS Homebrew code interest in WMBing over Nifi would die. So here's my chance to get the dscape port done, and become an NDS Homebrew Hero.

I'm currently reading Perl 6 and Parrot Essentials and it's reinvigorating my love of Perl. ^_^ Shame MicroForté is a C++ and Python shop... Still, it's a nice change from reading The C++ Programming Language, 3rd Edition which I was reading for the six weeks between my first job interview and pretty much the weekend before I started at MicroForté. Of course, this means I'm tempted to spend my free time ignoring all the above ideas, and tooling about with Perl 6 and Parrot Especially with sheer coolness like Z-Code support in Parrot.

And for one final note, the real-estate agent is coming around next Saturday to inspect my flat, so I had to clean up. Luckily, it was mainly a case of emptying all the bins, although I need to run a quick vacuum around the place, it's a bit dusty in parts. I expect this inspection is because my lease expires in the next couple of weeks, and they want to know if they should kick me out or not. Given that I'm not working days in Watson with occasional evenings in Belconnen, I'm looking at moving anyway. Anyone know of a cheap one-bedroomer or two-bedroomer in Watson or adjoining suburbs? I'd like to be able to walk or bicycle to work. ^_^

Perl 6 And Parrot Essentials (Essentials)
The C++ Programming Language

Edit: Correct misspelling

2006年 5月 31日

Irrepressibility in the face of popularity, pixies and other illnesses

Posted in CBIT Internet, Computers, Programming at 1:26 pm by TBBle (Visited 869 times)

I'm home sick today, so of course it seemed like a good idea to update my blog...

After adding that new irrepressible.info banner to the sidebar it occurred to me that I should active the neat Sidebar Widgets feature... Of course, this required me to either give up my non-standard sidebars, or widgetise them...

Firstly I modified the Top 10 posts plugin (original version) to have a widget mode for the sidebar, and also to do everything in a plugins_loaded hook, since it may load before the widget support plugin itself.

I then knocked up a quick irrepressible.info widget, based on the Google Search widget that comes with the plugin, which produces random chunks of censored material from irrepressible.info. These widget things are quite easy. ^_^

I also quickly knocked up a Weatherpixie widget for the Weatherpixie, although I didn't go as far as to offer a drop-down for the troopers or countries. This way people still go visit the pixie-chooser page, where the author's Google Ads are. I don't feel bad this way, given I emailed the author a few months ago about this, and didn't get any reply.

I did all my uploading/editing in lftp, but I intend to set up an FTP mount of some kind on my machine, now that I'm trying to avoid sshing into the webhosting box. I'm also looking into chroot'd sshd or sftp, but the quick answer so far is "hard".

I started doing this post in the Performancing Toolbar for firefox, but after two paragraphs I decided I much preferred the normal Wordpress interface. I'll be uninstalling Performancing pretty soon.

I'll stick and updates or other Wordpress stuff in http://www.tbble.net/wp/ until such time as I can be assed putting them into version control, and fixing the bzr browser on bzr.tbble.net.

2006年 5月 10日

CeBIT: Keynotes

Posted in CBIT Internet, Linux at 12:57 am by TBBle (Visited 479 times)

Keynotes today from Telstra Enterprise and Government, Disney Internet Group and three parts of the Music-on-your-mobile supply chain (Optus, Sony BMG and Motorola). Telstra E&G's moving their backend to a single converged IP backend, and also positioning themselves as Solution Providers. Which is of course annoying, because that's where I'm trying to take CBIT...

Disney's presentation in particular got me thinking about where I want to be. Their Toontown and upcoming Pirates Of The Carribena MMORPGs, along with all the cool stuff they're doing on Japanese mobiles are very very cool. And of course, I want to be part of something very very cool. I'm sure my chance will come, but I still sometimes wish I wasn't spending half my week slaving over a hot server, and the other half... I dunno... Doing stuff that comes up. I do still want to go into games programming, but at the same time, what I hear about the industry scares me off often. And I'm starting to get older than I'm comfortable being for my position in life. *sigh*

I came back to Sean and Julia's place (where I'm staying in Sydney) and Julia immediately echoed my sentiments about how I should be out there doing cool stuff. I explained to her that I'm both comitted to CBIT now, and also that hopefully CBIT will develop nice and quickly into a platform from which I can do the cool stuff. But even as I type that, I'm not sure it's the best answer. I guess my real fear (and it always has been) is the fear of squandered potential.

Chief amongst those worries is that people I trust to speak directly to me (including Julia and my Dad) are telling me that I should be doing more than I am... Then I start worrying that I'm letting my sense of loyalty and hatred of disappointing people keep me at CBIT when I am currently doing a job for which I am, although skilled, not brilliant. I'm also somewhat less than shining at the other things I have to concern myself with at CBIT (finding new clients, bookkeeping for the ISP part, etc).

Maybe I should focus on getting other staff trained up into my jobs, so I can move on? Admittedly, that's already supposed to be part of my focus. I guess I'll see how that part goes first, and see where I am from there. Maybe one of my projects will come good at the right moment, and I can retire to the bahamas. ^_^

On the other hand, if CBIT goes where I hope it does, then I'll be jet-setting around the world providing my highly-demanded services to clients for fabulous amounts of money by the time I'm 30. Kind of what I hoped would happen with Bubblesworth, were I not so incompetent a businessman...

And on top of that, I wish I was doing something cool in Open Source. I was looking at a Linux-based NAS today (along with various pieces of long-haul wireless equipment, including 802.16 WiMAX, proprietry and meshing) and thinking "Why am I a consumer of this? Why aren't I producing these?" I guess it's not really Open Source, but unless Canonical hires me, the only people I know of paying for Open Source development on a non-bounty basis is CyberSource, and they're a Red Hat shop. -_-

2006年 5月 9日

CeBIT: Prologue

Posted in CBIT Internet, Computers, LCA06, Linux at 1:19 am by TBBle (Visited 463 times)

Yup, that's right. I'm in beautiful Sydney for CeBIT. The joys of trains mean that not only am I out of the office for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but also Monday and most of Friday.

At this rate, all my holiday leave will be spent on trade shows and suchlike. The first three months at CBIT, I spent a week at LCA2006. This quarter, a week out for CeBIT. (Well, actually, that's the Feb-Mar-April quater's week). So now I'm looking for a tradeshow or other event that's both local, cheap and in the next three months... Then again, Clare's MedRevue is coming up, so I'll need to save a day or two for that.

Anyway, CeBIT. Having just spent an evening on dial-up Internet planning my schedule, here's how it looks:

Tuesday

10:15 - 10:55
Hall 6: Telstra
11:05 - 11:50
Hall 6: Disney
12:00 - 12:50
Hall 6: Music
13:00 - 13:45
Hall 6: LG - Mobility/Convergence
2 pm
Stand P1, Hall 4: Digital Broadcasting
3 pm
Stand D50 - Hall 2: The realities of Fibre to the Home
4 pm
Stand D50 - Hall 2: Digital Media and Convergence
5 pm
Stand D50 - Hall 2: Utilities and Broadband Power Line

Wednesday

Morning
Stand J1, Front of Hall 3: Future parc launch
11am
Stand P1, Hall 4: IT Services
12 pm
Stand D50 - Hall 2: Next Generation Networks, IP and VoIP
1pm
Stand P1, Hall 4: Open Source 1
2pm
Stand P1, Hall 4: Venture Capital
3 pm
Stand D50 - Hall 2: Fixed wireless broadband developments
4 pm
Stand D50 - Hall 2: $3 billion for Regional Telecoms
5 pm
Stand D50 - Hall 2: Mobile voice still the killer application

Thursday

10:30 – 10:45
Stand J1, Front of Hall 3: Ontologies and topic maps for smart information use
11am
Hall 3: CompTIA
13:00 – 13:15
Stand J1, Front of Hall 3: Disaster prediction, response and recovery
13:30 – 13:45
Stand J1, Front of Hall 3: Health data integration
2pm
Hall 3: CompTIA
3pm
Stand P1, Hall 4: Open Source 2
12 pm
Stand D50 - Hall 2: The battle between 3G HSDPA and WiMAX
4.00pm to 5.00pm
Stand J50, Rear of Hall 3: The BlackBerry Advantage for Small & Medium Businesses

In summary: All of the keynotes, all of the open-source stuff I can manage, and what time's left for Internet and Blackberry stuff. I think I'll have a short period to wander around the stands too, visit the Linux Australia guys.

I'm also meeting a vendor down here, with luck, so I'm feeling all well-travelled-businessmany today. ^_^

The disadvantage of being in Sydney is I'm on dialup, and also a few hundred kilometres away, so logging in to the office Terminal Server for email is a painfully slow experience.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll find an Internet cafe in the city where I can plug my laptop in and get some work done. ^_^

2006年 5月 3日

Sin, Certs and Wans; or Sun Tzu VS Bikinis

Posted in Australia, CBIT Internet, Computers, Linux, Programming, University at 12:31 am by TBBle (Visited 453 times)

I pre-ordered Sin Episode 1: Emergence on the weekend. It was cheap (AU$23 or so) and included a Steam version of the original Sin. This is partly my fault, I was hoping for a steamy version of Original Sin... (Sorry if you were hoping for a different original sin joke. ^_^)

I actually own Sin, but I don't know where the CD is. The original box is still on my shelf. So I'm taking the opportunity to actually finish the game, since the new one is set four years later. And it's still as I remember, one of the best-fun first-person shooters I've played... Dragged me right away from Half-Life and its expansion packs. (Although I'm finished Half-Life and Blue Shift now, and I think I'm close to the end of Opposing Force)

A recent topic on Slashdot about The changing value of certifications. Beyond the somewhat inaccurate summarising of the arcticle on Slashdot (certifications still attract a pay premium, they don't actively hurt your career) I think a rather important oversight was made in much of the discussion (ie. that bit which survived my threshhold) --- and maybe this was covered in the original research, I didn't bother trying to track down the report mentioned in the article --- that for some jobs a certification doesn't attract a premium, because it's a neccessity.

Certainly the terms of employment at CBIT require that I hold a certification of some kind within six months of joining. It originally specified MCSE, but they happily let me substitute my LPIC-1. I since discovered that my Windows NT4 MCSE is still valid, so I'm putting the MCSE upgrade on hold to get my CCNA done.

Then a lot of the posters proceeded to confuse certification with qualifications. Having both, I'm amazed that this happens. On the other hand, the people generating this confusion were usually on the "I didn't need stuffy boring university or a do-in-my-sleep MCSD, I just walked in and told them how I've been running Windows since I was six and they hired me" side of the debate.

I'm going to get condescending here. I'll let you know when it's over. I really think these attitudes go hand in hand, and are usually closely followed by "Why won't <large company> hire me as their CTO? I know as much as all these highly qualified lawyers and managers. They'll fail now, and it'll be all their fault for not hiring me," and then later followed by "I've been working this same $30k/year first-level support role for ten years now, because management are too short sighted to realise that I was just too smart to waste three years on a degree."Done with the condescending bit.

And sure, I myself have been guilty of this. I still am, frequently. I think most of us in IT do it to some extent. This is also how we end up with the armchair lawyers, armchair managers, armchair accountants and armchair linguists that pervade our community. (I pick those because I've done them all myself. Ranter, berate theyself. ^_^) It might be a symptom of the type of person who succeeds in IT (self-confident, multi-skilled and widely read/educated) as compared to those who fail (obstinant, unfocussed and arrogant).

So why certify? I do it partly because I love training and learning, and having something to show for it --- Ignore that I waited five years to graduate my B.Sc --- and partly because it makes financial sense. I like to read when I go to bed... It settles me down and clears my mind. However, a $20 novel will only last two or three days. My CCNA INTRO book has taken me over a month to get about half-way into... I think because it's so dry, I can't read more than a few minutes. Either way, good value for $50.

Flicking through Planet Linux Australia as I do when I forget how much time it sucks up... Between the sordid tales of a Power5 lying with a SunFire --- Oh I wish I had a project to throw at them... Where's my multi-threaded Sudoko solver? --- I came across this gem of an idea for a Canberra-wide wireless mesh network. This is something I'd heartily endorse, and help with where I could... I'll have to dig out my old Gungahlin-wireless-mesh plans...

A quick aside: Another Rich Web with PHP talk from Rasmus Lerdorf. The content aside, the template is sweet. The template aside, the content is fascinating.

Another quick aside: Digital cameras have their own digital signature. I'm not sure if this is even vaugely practical for any use, but here's the original article's PDF. Someone in the discussion pointed me at a US Government scheme to convince colour laser printer manufacturers to encode printer identification data onto each page. It's a scary world we live in.

Last aside... Two more links: One to make you cry: Even if the author is being facetious, someone somewhere belives this; and one to make you laugh: Every workplace should have a plan on its books for how to deal with Viking Raids.

But what of the bikinis, I hear you ask... Or would, were I narrating this out loud instead of in my head... And you cared about bikinis more than you care about Sun Tzu... OK. This is an IRC story. You've been warned.

On one of the IRC channels I hang out on, discussion turned to bikinis, and one of the channel regulars (Io) mentioned that she doesn't wear bikinis.

Pseudo-aside: This is Io. I knocked up this image that same evening, as it happens. MSPaint's so much easier to use than The Gimp... I did the whole image in the time it took me to give up the other day on finding a "Draw a square" button in The Gimp.

Anyway, it seemed sensible at this poit to consult with my new TzuBBot. TzuBBot being my Art-Of-War-based-advice-bot. Here's the results.


03:00 < TBBle> TzuBBot: Any advice on the best way to get Io out of Brazil and into a bikini?

03:00 < TzuBBot> THE NINE SITUATIONS: 55. Hence he does not strive to ally himself with all and sundry, nor does he foster the power of other states. He carries out his own secret designs, keeping his antagonists in awe. Thus he is able to capture their cities and overthrow their kingdoms.

03:01 < TBBle> TzuBBot: Any advice on the best way to get Io out of a bikini and into my lap?

03:01 < TzuBBot> THE ARMY ON THE MARCH: 45. If a general shows confidence in his men but always insists on his orders being obeyed, the gain will be mutual.

The TzuBBot gives useful advice so often, it's scary...

Final note: My goodneess, but the move from Yurika to Dino has made this website soooo much snappier!

2006年 4月 18日

Still not dead

Posted in CBIT Internet, Debian, General, Linux at 1:20 am by TBBle (Visited 412 times)

Yup, still not dead.

The blog and my other site've just moved to a new server. Let me know if you see anything weird. It's supposed to be the same software configuration as the old server but whackloads faster... The joys of Debian/stable. (bzr.tbble.net's hgwebdir.cgi isn't running... No python or bzr on the new server yet, as it's the CBIT Internet shared webhosting server. I'm still weighing up whether to install it or if I can keep it all in the webtree somehow.

I'm now syndicated at planet.linux.org.au.

Oh, one more thing: were-virgin.

2006年 3月 11日

Certifiable Linux Professional

Posted in CBIT Internet, LCA06, Linux, Programming at 12:29 pm by TBBle (Visited 73 times)

My LPI exam results came on Thursday, but I only just read the email...

Score Report for Exam 101

Your Score: 660
Required Passing Score: 500
Status: Pass

Test Section Information
Percent Correct Section
 71%            Hardware  Architecture
 78%             Linux Installation & Package Management
 95%            GNU & Unix Commands
100%            Devices, Linux Filesystems, Filesystem Hierarchy Standard
 75%            The X Window System

Score Report for Exam 102

Your Score: 690
Required Passing Score: 500
Status: Pass

Test Section Information
Percent Correct Section
100%            Kernel
 75%            Boot, Initialization, Shutdown and Runlevels
100%            Printing
100%            Documentation
100%            Shells, Scripting, Programming and Compiling
 66%            Administrative Tasks
100%            Networking Fundamentals
 94%            Networking Services
 83%            Security

Given my intense need to know just how much cleverer I am than those around me, I went to the LPI website to find out just what the LPI scores mean. It turns out that they're scaled to give a mean of 480 and a standard deviation of 100.

If you're not familiar with standard deviation, Wikipedia to the rescue: Standard Deviation

This means that passing should be just under 50%. However, their stats say that the pass-rate was about 64% up to 2003, and the recent stats say they've given 100k exams and have 32k certified LPIC-1's --- you need two exam passes to be an LPIC-1. Well, I guess at least they're consistent over the years...

More importantly, this means that my 101 result puts me at the middle-high end of the 84.1 -- 97.7% block (1σ-2σ) and my 102 result puts me at the low end of the 97.7% -- 99.8% block (2σ-3σ). Which means a score between 780 and 860 is top-0.2%, for those playing along at home.

I'm quite pleased, given they only took me around 20 minutes each. ^_^

So how am I spending my weekend? Installing Visual Studio for a development project I've won. >_<

I also recently discovered a new prime number generation algorithm. Ask a client to submit all their new artwork for their website. Some portion of it will need scaling down. And some portion of that will have a dimension that is prime. O_O

2006年 2月 26日

Maginnis Magee

Posted in CBIT Internet, Food Diary at 11:42 pm by TBBle (Visited 1901 times)

Good
Light in Dark Corners: My Dad wrote this, and it's really really good. I've enjoyed it immensely, and highly recommend it. ^_^
Bad
Syriana: The movie was actually really good, but I felt bad after seeing it. It's a sad and scary world we live in, and that's over here on the easy side of it.
Educational
The AppleCare Protection Plan turns out to be good for keeping my laptop running.Since putting this into place, my laptop's not once dropped dead from overheating... I actually suspect if I'd configured the power settings properly this wouldn't be neccessary.

AppleCare Protection Plan 2AppleCare Protection Plan 1

That's actually the display box. We're an Apple reseller of some kind at CBIT, but due to lack of a front counter while the construction work happens out the back, all the display boxes are in my offfice...

Oh, the pain... I'm sitting here working on this entry at home, and the damn thing overheats. >_< I prolly should add a temperature sensor output of some kind to my desktop... Or at least bring the AppleCare Protection Plan home with me...

At least, I've a belly full of dairy-free pizza. Good on Dominos for publishing their list of allergens. ^_^

Edit: I forgot to give this post a clever title... I think this one's fitting. ^_^

2006年 2月 19日

Things to do in your loungeroom when you’re broke

Posted in CBIT Internet, Food Diary, LCA06, Linux at 8:27 pm by TBBle (Visited 959 times)

Meh. There's another weekend spent doing very little. And for a change, this didn't involve me spending any time either playing video games, or on IRC.

I took a troll through Planet Linux Australia (and also remembered to submit my blog there again...) and came up with the following links, for your eddification and mine:

So what else have I been doing? Well, I played with Google Maps until I identifed my current home, and the CBIT offices, although the latter's photo is slightly old now, as there's a sort of overhang thing over the entrance now.

I finished Every Which Way But Dead by Kim Harrison. Happily, the next book in the series is due out in June... Although lord knows how long it'll take to get here. I also this week finished The Shining City by Kate Forsyth. Sequel also due mid-year, and she's Australian so I am more hopeful of seeing it before next summer... I prolly should go to one of those 'enter my books' sites and record for posterity just how many books I've spent my rent-money on.

Speaking of rent-money, I'm at the broke end of the week, so went last night and spent $32 on food until Wednesday. This covered four pot-noodles, five microwave paster dinners, and five bottles of Caffiene-Free Diet Coke. Also some lollies, to cover sugar-cravings. Mind you, I haven't eaten yet today... Hmm, I'd better do that soon.

Of course, you can't waste a weekend if you have no plans. And this weekend, I was supposed to finish the new CBIT Internet Customer Administration interface... It's neat, and AJAXified (using the very neat xajax PHP-based setup) and the only thing I did on this this weekend was fix a problem I was having with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. I couldn't do this at work, because I'm developing under Linux on my PowerBook.

OK, I guess that's not all I did. I spent a few hours screwing with wine, trying trying get IE6 going under Win2K-mode (partly for the AJAX stuff, partly so I could run QuickBooks). I've gotten IE6 installed, but it seems to barf when making the AJAX calls, not to mention needing to be Ctrl-C'd when presenting a username/password box.

In the end, I grabbed the IEs 4 Linux script, which installed IE6 in it's own WINEPREFIX, like a charm. I'm well pleased with it. ^_^

I'm also gonna grab Opera to test the site against. Happily, not only do they have an Apt repository, they've also got a public beta program which includes Linux-PPC support. ^_^ This is really how commercial, closed-source software should be addressing the Linux community.

Also, Opera for Nintendo DS. I mean, like, wow.

Also wow, ABC's podcasts. I wonder if they'll do video podcasting soon? Not that I'm watching or listening to any podcasts, but...

I also wasted a few hours this weekend watching the latest episodes of TV shows from the US. Thinking about it, I watch: Battlestar Galactica, Boston Legal and House MD. I also watch Dr Who and Tripping The Rift when it's on... I know that Apple now sells TV episodes over their iPod store, and so I feel like I should be paying something to watch these shows, but I dunno what they're charging. I'd happily pay 50c per episode. I dunno if I'd pay more than that, though. Maybe if I had a better viewing setup, or planned on keeping the files and watching them again...

I also watched the Casanova BBC Miniseries last weekend. It was really really really good. ^_^ I was kinda iffy about the Heath Ledger movie, but Margaret and David thought it was leave-your-brain-at-the-door funny, and I'm now willing to give it a burl.

Hmm. I wish I was a large software corporation, so I could go try and do what Loki failed to do, but instead of buying the license and selling the game, I'd contract to the publishing houses to port the game for them, kind of like how many Mac-ported games seem to be done. I _really_ want to play GuildWars, but it doesn't yet work in wine, and don't want to reboot to Windows to do so. I _might_ give a burl to this partial success report for GuldWars on Wine...

And fun as Battle for Wesnoth is, I'm awful at it.

2006年 1月 28日

One conference to bring them all and in the summer bind them: LCA End of Days

Posted in CBIT Internet, Debian, General, LCA06, Linux at 6:48 pm by TBBle (Visited 1030 times)

My final LCA06 report from the land of Dunedin, where the shadows lie. Although I'm here until Monday, I doubt my Internet will be working for much longer.

Started the morning at the usual time, which gave me an extra hour of bumming around (reading my LPI book...) before the (10am) keynote of the day.

And what a keynote it was. Mark Shuttleworth (The Ubuntu guy for those who're playing along at home) gave a presentation about how collaboration works in successful projects, how it doesn't work in unsuccessful projects, how to get projects to cooperate with each other, and how to get localisation from people who aren't programmers. And he packed it in hard, leaving a fairly long period for questions. There were of course a few fairly long questions asked, so this was all for the best.

Amongst Mark's major points were that the barriers to entry for things like bug tracking systems and translations are too high. Anything that isn't debbugs needs you to register to post a bug, and you lose 50-70% of hits at that stage. Translation systems that aren't Gnome currently require you to email around .po files, requiring the translator to edit them in plain text, and some even muck about with more esoteric tools. Gnome provides a neat program, and apparently so does KDE, to handle all that for you.

Mark's other major point was that distributed revision control systems will turn the language of development from mailling lists to patches. A question from the audience pointed out that mailling-list review of patches (eg. linux-kernel mailling list, and we do this on FreeRADIUS-devel too) would probably suffer if people were just branching things, working on them, and then pushing them back upstream... It's an interesting puzzle, but between this and the translations stuff, I'm the closest I've ever been to looking at contributing to Ubuntu... Scary.

For the one scheduled session of the day I went to a talk from Matthew Garrett about projects dealing with the loss of maintainers or pvioltal people, and how they can deal with it. I can relate, since I am both a sucker (I was kind-of the FreeRADIUS 1.0.0 Release Manager), and soon after moved, changed jobs, and basically stopped posting to (but kept reading what I could of) the FreeRADIUS-devel mailing list. I've been lucky that FreeRADIUS is a good, stable package, and so I don't think my long periods of inattention have caused the Debian package to suffer.

After the barbecue lunch and ceremonial shaving of the luminaries (including Rusty's moustache!), I attended one of the best-of session, about The RepRap, an attempt to produce a low-cost von Neumann Universal Constructor. And not only is this cool as heck stuff, it was heartwarning to see a geek from a different field, and know that much as our interests diverge, we are united in geekness.

It was also good to see that there are good jobs for geeks, doing geeky things for the betterment of humanity. Especially when one of those things is building the world's largest nanobot.

At afternoon tea, I scored some Ubuntu 5.10 i386 CD sets, which I think I'll take back to work and put on a desk with "Free! Try Linux without risking your data." sign on it or something.

This reminded me that I haven't checked WhirlPool in a week and a half, and I haven't yet picked up Omiyage... Still, I will have tomorrow and Monday morning to do so...

Also sitting around the link, reminded again to try WorldForge and Thousand Parsec... Also to find the mesa 6.4 packages and see if the r300 driver's been updated.

And a note about Blender that slipped my mind for yesterday... It's awful without a mouse. In fact, a two-button mouse would be pretty awful, but shift-F11-touchpad is particularly not an easy thing to do with only two hands.

Went to the panel discussion, which was largely focussed on patents, trademarks, and how best to promote linux onto both desktops and SMEs.

Finally, was the conference close, where prizes were awarded for the programs for drawing the raffle, then the raffle was drawn, and during demonstrations of some of the other programs submitted, my ticket was drawn. >_<. Although I dunno if I really wanted one of the shirts, it looked like someone'd scribbled all over it, and it'd need some heavy-duty washing...

The total money raised for the John Lyons Chair was just over AU$48k, which is a sterline effort. We also raised NZ$1800 or so from the raffle for the NZ version of Kid's Help line, which is an excellent cause. Hack fest winners were announced, much thanking of those who have sacrificed so much to get this going, including Mike Beattie's second standing ovation (The only presenter I saw get a standing ovation was Van Jacobsen), which was well deserved.

Mike mentioned afterwards that the photoblog prize had been completely forgotten, so hopefully they'll judge it anyway, and we'll have something pretty to look at on the CD. There's also supposed to be a written-blog prize, but I suspect my abuse of the "Excerpts" box may count against me. Unless the judges share my sense of humour. ^_^

I must say I have had an absolutly brilliant time. I've been rushed off my feet, exhausted, tired, I sat my second LPI exam tonight without having read the last three chapters of the Exam Cram book (It still only took twenty-two minutes by the wall clock... I hope I passed!) and on top of all that I've been coughy and snuffly when I wasn't writing in pain from my throat. And I'd do the whole thing again at the drop of a hat. Or preferably a spiral.

Of course, like anime.au (with which I've been involved on the other side a couple of times, but which is only one day, rather than six) these things take so much time and effort to prepare, that managing one every year is quite impressive, even though it's a new team each year. It's been suggested that 2008's LCA location be selected more than twelve months out to give them more time to prepare, but for me, my eyes are firmly fixed on LCA07, Sydney. (Their site's not up yet as of this writing, but yesterday it wasn't even in DNS. ^_^)

Unless I'm in Japan, of course. I was actually looking around yesterday afternoon in the link, at all these people, these luminaries of my industry and my passion, and wondering if Japan is the right choice... I mean, there's CBIT now, and I'd hate to leave that. But it's not what I want to do... And there's the other project I may have mentioned, which I will be having a meeting about next week, with luck... And yet, having come this far, how can I not go further? Maybe I should be searching harder for Open-Source jobs in Japan, and combine my interests. Sure, I love teaching, and I love teaching languages... But it's so scary!

I guess it comes down to Feel the fear and do it anyway. And I suspect if I do get to go on JET, as long as I have an Internet connection, I'll be able to spend more time on my hobbies than I do now. Or maybe not.

A final thought on LCA06... I hope everyone realised the sense of humour it must have take to aware LCA06 to a New Zealand team... ^_^

2006年 1月 26日

The PowerPC and the PHPassion: LCA Presentations Day 1 Afternoon

Posted in CBIT Internet, Debian, Japan, LCA06, Linux, Programming at 8:31 pm by TBBle (Visited 915 times)

Lunch: Spent so much time editing the morning's post, didn't get to eat, and then went to two wrong theatres and missed the start of the 32/64 comparison with x86 and Power by Olof Johansson. And they were out of pies so I bought sushi instead...

The 32/64 bit presentation was interesting. I'd seen discussion on Debian-Devel along the lines that PPC64 is slower than PPC, and therefore a pure 64-bit Debian port (ala. AMD64 port) was a poor idea (as opposed to AMD64). Olof presented benchmarks (which supported this) as well as a discussion of the way the both x86 and PPC's ABI's differ between 32 and 64 bits. It seems that the PPC64 ABI has actually added more overhead to function calls, and hasn't taken advantage of an ABI change to improve existing issues, while x86_64 has actually used the ABI change to make more use of CPU registers to improve function calls significantly.

An audience member mentioned that newer toolchains than those tested use a different function-call structure or something and should be more efficient. So maybe PPC64's problems aren't insurmountable. Mind you, PPC64 does seem to be mainly targetted at specific applications, rather than overall system support ala x86_64... I wonder how MacOS X on G5 does it? I presume its a 32-bit userland from this...

Following on neatly there's a PPC presentation on next from Paul Mackerras... I wonder if this issue will be addressed then too?

Either way, it was a quick session, and happily I was _just_ able to follow the stuff that was going on and the following audience discussion... ^_^

And the short session meant I got to eat my sushi before the next presentation

Paul Mackerras (Paulus)'s presentation on Recent Developments in PowerPC

Merging 32-bit ppc and 64-bit ppc64 architectures in the Linux kernel: Lots of duplicate code, ensures both architectures benefit from features, cleanups, bugfixes and drivers etc. So instead, there's one architecture powerpc which is now the default arch.

This explains why recently building kernel modules on my PowerBook G4 failed, unless I prefixed the make with ARCH=ppc... >_< I noticed rene's bcm43xx packages did the same thing in debian/rules, so it's not just me.

Interestingly, Paul said that powermacs are no longer supported in ARCH=ppc as of 10th January. So 2.6.16 I guess...

It's been a fairly fast project, having been agreed to last July, first hit the tree on 29th August, and by 19th November the PPC64 stuff was completely gone.

During a question from Dave Miller about the PPC handing of OpenFirmware VS Sparc64's handling I was passed a card to sign for Paul Mackerras's birthday. I can't imagine how the people sitting directly in front of him signed it without him seeing...

Further discussion of memory layouts (64kb hardware page support means lots and lots of addressable memory!) followed by a quick round of Happy Birthday rounded out the rather technical session nicely.

I spent the interlude before the PHP5 presentation (ie while everyone else was off getting afternoon tea) finishing the morning's posting, and jealously guarding my powerpoint.

Rasmus Lerdorfs's PHP5 talk was quite technical, fast and codery in nature, so I'll just be noting the cool points I wasn't previously aware of. The version posted on his site right now is slightly older (marked 2006-01-25) than the one he's displaying on the screen (marked 2006-01-26).

PHP's main aspects: Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Be Lazy. The greatest efficiencies come from solving problems you will never have.

Rasmus said that PHP has the unix philosophy of solving one small problem and solving it well. It's not a framework, or the complete solution, but it does what it does very well.

AJAX makes this even better because the layout stuff gets moved to the local browser side, meaning that PHP only really needs to serve up the data in a format like JSON or XML, and the client-side UI code is actually run on the client site.

AJAX appears (now that I've seen it on the code-side) to simply be javascript in the web browser sending requests to the server with updates and whatnot and dynamically changing the UI without refreshing the entire page. This is good stuff, and I probably would have understood it earlier if I had actually listened to anyone whom I'd talked to about it before now. I wonder if we'll be talking about this at the Perl BOF tomorrow...

I now also know what MVC means, and why it's not actually sensible for web applications. But we use AJAX to do something similar, seperating presentation and data (oooh, like XHTML!).

Oooh! A very very useful thing in PHP is the <<< construct. Like the << shell function, and it expands PHP variables that appear inline.

Coming soon from Yahoo!, some kind of useful library thing for AJAX and stuff. ^_^

Hmm. JSON is apparently a Javascript self-extracting object. Neat. And I didn't even know Javascript had an eval() function...

Man, the CBIT Internet customer manager interface is gonna be sooo cool when I'm done with it. ^_^

PDO is a new PECL extension for PHP5, and part of PHP5.1 which looks a lot like Perl's DBI. It lets you bind parameters which will also save a whackload of crappy coding on my part... Mind you, I didn't use the binding stuff in Perl5, but I should be doing so.

Things in PHP5 that make it good for AJAX stuff: XML uses libxml2 and dom now. This gets us XPath and XSL... and SimpleXML! This gives a PHP native object from the XML file....

<?php
$url = 'http://wiki.lca2006.linux.org.au/RecentChanges?format=rss';
foreach(simplexml_load_file($url)->item as $it)
  echo "<a href='{$it->link}'>{$it->title}</a> {$it->description}<br />\n";
?>

Huzzah. Two instruction RSS aggregator... I can't imagine why Planet takes so much code... ^_^

And with the demonstration of http://buzz.progphp.com/ and unsafe search (I wasn't quick enough on the URL, and the only thing Google will find is an old version of it, Rasmus's one had images. Images!) it was obvious that this is the future of the web.

OMG! I'm a Web 2.0 convert. CAPS LOCK CANNOT EXPRESS MY FANGIRLY JOY.

Boy've I've been looking for a place to use that last one. I can't find the website I saw it on, but as soon as I saw it, I know I had to write it somewhere. ^_^

And then just to finish off (and whet our appetites for tomorrow's "Fast and Secure websites" presentation) Rasmus pointed us to APC, a PHP Opcode Cache which Yahoo! is happily running on their servers. One server he pulled up has taken 87 million hits in the past few hours, with 20k cache misses. O_O

And then there's the XHTML problem which I really need to sit down and unblithe my pages about...

BOFs... VoIP. I visited PowerPC, but on consideration this one's actually more important to me.

VoIP BOF links for my own reference: MacOS X softphone, Platronics nice USB headset which can be bought from Harris Technology.

Interesting things pulled off Planet LCA2006: Gumstix - Small, small small computers; CryoPID - Freezes processes so they can be migrated across ttys and even machines. CryoPID was actually described at the lightning talks at LCA05, and received many oohs and aahs at the time at the idea of screening processes after they'd been started.

After the BOF, went to do my LPI 101 exam. As mentioned, I've been studying from LPIC 1 Exam Cram 2, which the LPI's Books page describes as ...the most up-to-date publication reflecting recent changes in LPI exam objectives.. Mind you, it fails to mention that they've since (as of October 1st 2005) merged the DEB and RPM exams... Mind you, I hadn't checked the errata since I was actually only going along to ask a question about the exam proceedure. Having since checked the errata, there's six pages of corrections, and there's still some whoppers missing. The above change to the exams, and the fact that Linux doesn't have an "Archive" bit...

Either way, it took 20 minutes of the 90 allotted, and I feel really good about it. Still worried about the second exam, will prolly put that off until Saturday and push hard to finish the book first.

And another episode of S.O.S watched, as this site was being slow for some reason... It's so wrenchingly painful to watch, but I can't possibly stop until I know what happens...

Either way, an excellent day topped off with way too much Japanese food. ^_^

Oh yes. If I get a chance, I must ask Dave Miller at the presenter's panel about the IEEE 802.11 stacks...

2006年 1月 23日

Debian bunfights, AJ sells his soul, and Battlestar Galactica: LCA Miniconfs Day 1 Morning

Posted in CBIT Internet, Debian, LCA06, Linux, Programming at 10:21 am by TBBle (Visited 411 times)

Happily, wifi works in the theatres. ^_^

First up in the Debian minconf was just enough of S2 Ep1 of Battlestar Galactica to remind me of where the Australian TV season's up to, and probably frustrate those who haven't already seen it.

Next was a presentation by a Ubuntu MOTU member regarding Debian/Ubuntu collaberation. A bit of interesting information about how Ubuntu's Debian-collaberation stuff works, a few buns thrown, and a fair bit of jovial back-and-forth. Just what I was hoping for. Interesting link: http://revu.tauware.de/~lucas/versions/ - Version comparisons between Ubuntu and Debian.

Interlude: Coffee, chat, and the next 20 minutes of the BSG episode.

Anthony Towns and his way of trying to get people to pay him to work on Open Source projects. It's kind of an inverse bounty where he posts what he wants people to work on, and people put up money to what they want done. It involves a Supply and Demand curve pair apparently, but he didn't post slides... So here's the link to it: AJ Market. The discussion evolved into a look at "betting markets" as a replacement for bounty systems. The idea is, you bet $x against something being implemented. If it's implemented, you got your feature. If it's not implemented, you get your money back, plus money that was bet _for_ it being done. People working on implementing it bet on it being implemented, and share the winnings if it is implemented. Obviously this places a bit of risk on the side of the implementors, but it's a fascinating idea.

Overhearing a conversation about this while I was packing up, apparently part of this also involves the buy and selling of "bets", which actually turn out to be more like shares... The idea being that a programmer can pick up cheap shares (eg. because the project's been ignored for ages, and is seeming very unlikely) and then complete it, realising the full value of the shares. This requires that any initial investments are made on both sides of the bet. This situation would encourage people to ignore things they know they _could_ do until it's worth it to do it, but at the same time if you want something done, you can buy your shares on both sides, and give away the "will be done" shares to a likely candidate, which gives them an incentive to get it done, as the shares are only on paper until the project is completed.

I'm sure AJ's blog has more useful information, or will do really soon now. I'm interested, myself. Anyone wanna bet me that I can't do Linux WMB for things other than ralink cards? ^_^

An interlude in the history of PHP...Rasmus Lerdorf is actually presenting a tutorial onPHP5 behind Web2.0 (AJAX etc) stuff which I'm probably going to go to on Thursday afternoon, much as it clashes with the tutorial on programming Asterisk PABX at serveral levels and the latter is highly relevant to what I'm supposed to be doing for a living.

This afternoon, however, it'll be the Perl 6 session at the Damien Conway miniconf in Burns 7. ^_^

Welcome to your new home in meatspace: LCA Prelude

Posted in Anime, CBIT Internet, Debian, Japan, LCA06, Linux at 7:38 am by TBBle (Visited 516 times)

Wow, linux.conf.au 06... Wow. ^_^

My first international trip started inauspiciously, as I came down with Tonsilitis on Thursday night. On reflection, going to see Underworld Evolution instead of finiding a late-night medical clinic was a poor choice, but happily Queanbeyan Hospital's emergency department was not busy. So I left Canberra at 2am with a prescription for a week's penicilin and some throat lozenges.

Got to Julia's place by 6am, and left her with my car. Met up with nearly a dozen LCA people on the same flight in the departure lounge, and had more time together than I expected because the plane was 20 minutes late taking off. I managed to sleep through most of the flight, and in fact only realised we were on the east coast of New Zealand when I realised there was ocean in front of us.

Dunedin's nice. I stayed at the Kiwi's Nest on Friday and Saturday nights, basically bummed about and was social with some of the other people staying there. This is probably the biggest improvement over last year, where my socialisation was largely limited to IRC since I was driving in and out from home, so wasn't really getting involved in the extra-curricular bits.

On the downside, I've been largely off the Internet since Thursday night. I did go to an Internet cafe for an hour on Saturday, which was enough time to check my email. Nothing seemed to have horribly caught fire at work, so I'm relaxed. ^_^ Also, the girl on the desk was _very_ cute.

Dunedin is frankly the sort of place I'd love to flee to if Australia's legal situation goes much further evilright. It's pleasantly cool (ie. a fan in summer would be sufficient), sufficiently focused (ie. One long main drag of shops) and has a cute girl at the desk of the Internet cafe. What more could I ask for? (Also, a large and apparently quite successful university, and lots of pubs.)

Anyway, on Sunday I moved onto campus, into "Unicol". It's nice, but the network wasn't working last night, so I still managed to not be on the Internet until now. Registration went well, and after a Subway dinner I spent the evening in a pub with some people who're here hanging around with a friend who's come to linux.conf.au, discussing politics, sport, comics and animation, Japanese culture, and whatever else seemed appropriate. I stayed sober the whole time due to the aforementioned penicilin. ^_^

I've also started watching Stawberry on the shortcake, at long last. It's been on my hard disk for two or three months, and I suspected it would be a heavy-going drama. Instead it turns out to be a hilarious at times, sad as hell at times (I think it's going to end sadly, if I've guessed the ending correctly. Only seen to episode 3) but both excellent and fascinating drama. It's really interfering with my LPIC reading... ^_^

Anyway, time to head over to the Debian Miniconf where someone's suggested to me that we don't have wireless, so I'll sign off here.

Oh, and in case anyone's wondering, my student card is current this time. ^_^

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