taking over the world...

2010-02-02T15:56:00.001+11:00

--
Andrew Donnellan <>< andrew[at]donnellan[dot]name
http://andrew.donnellan.name ajdlinux[at]gmail[dot]com
http://linux.org.au

Moving blogs

2006-08-04T10:11:00.000+10:00

I've decided to move from Blogger to Wordpress. The new site is at http://ajdlinux.wordpress.com.

There is an RSS feed at http://ajdlinux.wordpress.com/feed/.

I own my music! DRM is defective by design!

2006-06-14T18:42:00.000+10:00

http://iownmymusic.org http://defectivebydesign.org

I 100% agree with them - DRM sucks, we should be able to do what we want with music!

"PS3 too expensive," 88 percent say, as Wii dominates Japan

2006-05-31T10:19:00.000+10:00

Ouch the PS3 is expensive - 88% of Japanese gamers agree with me.

read more | digg story

March of the Penguins

2006-05-06T18:09:00.000+10:00

Went to see March of the Penguins at the theatre today. Quite a good documentary really.

It gave me a Linux analogy - male penguins stand there after having not eaten for four months, standing in minus 60 degree temperatures with winds of over 160km/h, with another 120km to walk after to find food, and yet they survive. Linux is like that, it survives practically anything.

Imagine a Windows penguin - dead after only a week without food, can only survive down to minus 30, knocked over by 50km/h winds ... you get the picture.

I've got an IBSN! (blog serial number)

2006-05-04T18:03:00.000+10:00

I have an IBSN (International Blog Serial Number) now. Doesn't seem particularly useful, but it's fun :)

My first accepted Slashdot story

2006-05-03T07:01:00.000+10:00

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/02/111245

Lego's releasing the Mindstorms NXT firmware source code and specs, which is making me very likely to buy one.

Several very annoying things

2006-04-30T19:31:00.000+10:00

These annoying things are all somehow related.

1. School. Tomorrow. Moral of the story: two weeks is never enough.

2. Chemistry assignment. Researching metals. Due Friday, this Friday. Around 10% complete.

3. Several weeks of distance ed work to catch up on for software design and development.

4. Broken ADSL modem. Overheating, dropping connection every minute or two. Buying new D-Link modem tomorrow.

Now of course 2 and 3 become harder because of 4. Warning: Do not buy Netcomm modems, especially not NB5580W models. They are a risk to your safety and a fire hazard. And they tend to fail sporadically because of the overheating. A friend of mine has to switch his modem off every night because the heat causes problems the next day.

Xara Xtreme

2006-04-28T18:42:00.000+10:00

I've just been trying out the Linux port of Xara Xtreme, the professional vector graphics program recently GPLed by Xara, and it has very quickly become my favourite graphics editor, even though it still has some major major bugs (porting bugs, obviously).

It's much more feature-complete than Inkscape, probably because of its history as a commercial program. I really can't imagine doing some of the things given as examples (e.g. a nearly photo-realistic cross-section of a car, with nearly everything modelled in) in Inkscape or any of the other vector editors for Linux.

With Xara you can literally create all sorts of things, e.g gel buttons for websites, company logos, etc. from scratch in less than 10 minutes. It's a great project with a lot of potential for Linux-using graphic artists (people unlike me.) My only major problems at the moment are the instability (which will hopefully clear up within a few weeks) and the lack of SVG support, which is a big problem if you want to interoperate with other programs. The one major feature it misses at the moment is a colour editor, although the developers say that will be there given a few weeks in the next recommended build.

You can download Xara Xtreme LX from http://xaraxtreme.org.

Artists who are actually against DRM

2006-04-27T10:49:00.000+10:00

The Canadian Music Creators Coalition are against DRM. Good!

Where did the .root TLD come from? (Part 2)

2006-04-26T09:35:00.000+10:00

Ever heard of the .root TLD? For those who haven't, visit this blog post by Karl Auerbach.

For those who have, I've done some research and found something quite interesting.

dig vrsn-end-of-zone-marker-dummy-record.root in any no longer returns a result. .root is no longer there apparently.

But look at the last few lines of the InterNIC root zone file.

From http://www.internic.net/zones/root.zone:

L.EU.DNS.BE. A 193.2.221.60 P.NIC.EU. A 195.47.235.130 VRSN-END-OF-ZONE-MARKER-DUMMY-RECORD. TXT plenus ;File end: -19353 ;End of file: 2006042401

Now read the third line carefully. What the heck? Who authorised this?

Debian Live gets a second entry in the Debian Weekly News

2006-04-24T20:16:00.000+10:00

"The Debian Live Initiative that aims to produce a pure Debian live CD summarises links to mailing lists, ISO images and other resources on their <a href="http://live.debian.net/">website</a>."

That is officially my first item in DWN.

Stupid fibre cable outage yesterday

2006-04-23T16:18:00.000+10:00

If anyone experienced slow internet from around 2am to 10am yesterday, you're not alone. As it turns out there was a problem with the Southern Cross cable link between here and the US, and Optus, Powertel and MCI (all the backend suppliers my ISP uses) have at least part of their international capacity supplied by the SX link. As a result browsing was extremely slow on many networks as they had reached capacity.

I decided to ask right from the top...

2006-04-21T14:33:00.000+10:00

This is a letter I sent through the Prime Minister's Office when I felt bored today. I don't expect a reply but if I get one I'll post it up.

===

Does the Howard government have any views on Free Software (in the meaning given by the Free Software Foundation, see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html) and Open Source, or any plans to implement laws to protect them?

With the signing of the US-Australia Free Trade Agreement, the infamous Digital Millenium Copyright Act and the problem of software patents are coming to Australia. The DMCA just encourages 'piracy', rather than discourage it, and also infringes on fair use rights.

Software patents are not going to help the software industry, but rather threaten small developers of both proprietary and Free/Open Source software. All the lobby groups that are pro-software patents are funded by large, tens of billion dollars proprietary software companies that 'innovate' by acquiring rather than actually inventing, then patenting very obvious ideas like double clicking and that sort of thing. All of them face a major threat from Free Software alternatives like GNU/Linux, Samba, Apache and MySQL and wish to enforce their patented 'ideas' against them.

If these laws come to Australia they will only discourage competition and encourage violation of copyright. Does the government have any plans to protect our fair use rights and protect Free Software as well as proprietary software developers from patent suits, many of which result in hundreds of million dollars settlements, leaving companies and sometimes individual developers bankrupt and reducing competition?

(More information on the problem of software patents can be found at http://nosoftwarepatents.com.)

Spam

2006-04-21T13:23:00.000+10:00

I just decided to clear out the over 1000 spam messages in my spam filter box - it shrunk my mailbox by 20 megs.

There's way too much spam now - around one sixth of my mail is spam. Just as I deleted the last message from my spam box another one arrived.

On a related note, my ISP had to shut down their mail servers for half an hour this morning because 26 customers has virus-infected PCs sending out 30000 messages over 8 hours - that's 3750 messages per hour, which is 1.04 messages a second, along with all the real mail that had to be sent.

Some people just like to ruin it for everyone...

Qt 4

2006-04-17T11:06:00.000+10:00

I finally finished compiling Qt 4 from KDE SVN and it is good! It looks much better than Qt 3 did. Currently compiling everything else now...

Qt 4 SVN...

2006-04-16T22:52:00.000+10:00

Crap it's huge! 24 megs bzipped2 and taking even longer when downloading by actual SVN. Then on my system it takes 1hr 20mins just for Qt 3.3, longer for Qt 4.

Someone on #debian said this was why they didn't use Gentoo...

The end of school (at last)

2006-04-14T07:13:00.000+10:00

The holidays are here! Only two assessments and three weeks of Distance Ed work to do! Unfortunately.

I got my wireless (at last!)

2006-04-06T17:08:00.000+10:00

Just yesterday I got a note from Startrack to say that my order from EverythingLinux Pty Ltd had arrived. Went down to the Industrial Area, picked it up, stopped by at a computer store on the way home to get an ethernet card, got home, opened up, removed crappy old modem, installed shiny new ethernet card, and did the easiest installation of *any* network hardware I have ever done.

Then came the hard part. D-Link products seem to use IPs in the range of 192.168.0.x, while Netcomm uses 192.168.1.x. I had a D-Link DWL-810+ wireless-to-ethernet with a Netcomm NB5580W router. And a computer whose OS had *never* been exposed to any form of external network. Combined with a person that doesn't know a huge amount about Unix network configuration.

Luckily I had network-admin installed... Yesterday I messed it up, this morning I tried again, and finally after I came home today I had it set up in about two minutes. Turned out I had to assign an IP in the 192.168.1.x range, set it to not use a gateway, and set the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0.

After all that, it works...

Slashdot has officially gone crazy!

2006-04-01T19:11:00.000+11:00

See http://images.slashdot.org/slashdot_fool.css.

Firefox users: Install Web Developer so you can turn it off.

Re Hemos' birthday:

(4, Funny) by algae(2196)

$ while true; do
> mail -s "HAPPY BIRFDAY HEMOS!!!!!" hemos@slashdot.org done

First time being a Slashdot mod!

2006-03-29T18:44:00.000+11:00

This morning I visited /. and found I had 5 modpoints for the first time. I've had metamodding privileges every few days for the past two or three weeks now, so now I've had an experience being a slashdot moderator.

How to become a Slashdot mod in 3 easy steps:
1. Login and set up autologin. You need to login more to become a mod.
2. Get your karma up to at least Good.
3. Wait.

School camp

2006-03-26T17:33:00.000+11:00

This week I had school camp on from Wednesday to Friday at Scotts Head (on the NSW north coast). Quite good really, going canoeing, walking along the (several kms long) beach, walking on the beach at 9pm when it's pitch black, walking up the hill next to the beach, using the games room (and adjacent skate park) at the site (just a 100m from the beach), eating food, etc. Only bad part was the mozzies (Aerogard!), the rain and the cabins stunk (we were going to sleep in tents, but it was too wet).

The joys of apt-cacher

2006-03-19T19:06:00.000+11:00

It makes creating Debian Live systems *so much faster*!

Debian Live

2006-03-19T18:55:00.000+11:00

Debian Live is now at a stage where it is usable and working live CDs can be built. I have built several discs so far and tomorrow I will start distributing them...

I've written some HOWTOs for making new 'flags' for make-live, currently a shell script with the package names hard-coded, on the wiki (http://live.debian.net/wiki). I'm guessing Daniel and Marco are already working on the configuration files and stuff like that (there is a planned program split soon).

As I'm typing I'm building a custom Live CD for a friend of mine who wants to try GNU/Linux for the first time (other than when he came around to my place), which includes KDE 3.5.1, OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird and a few games. Still only around 500-550MB.

When make-live becomes configurable I'll probably start a site where 'profiles' can be uploaded.

BTW, if you're using apt-proxy or apt-cacher and don't know why your live CD build is failing after debootstrap, make sure that you're using 127.0.0.1 and not localhost, because apt-get executes in a chrooted environment where it cannot read your /etc/hosts file.

Rewriting my CMS

2006-03-14T19:09:00.000+11:00

I've had an interesting time writing the next version of my LUGs CMS, which still does not have a single live real installation.

Now I've decided to rewrite the whole lot, using a system of storing files in a database, then using translators to change them to HTML, followed by a template to convert the whole lot into something that looks roughly human-readable.

It would work sort of like this -

Request made to http://example.com/index.php
index.php realises there is no pagename therefore it assumes /index.
Query is made to MySQL through DBFS for the file /index.
/index is read, the metadata shows that it is a normal HTML content file, using the built-in HTML translator.
The translator pretty much does nothing.
The template is loaded and applied to the content.
The user clicks a link to 'FAQs' on the main page
A request is recieved for http://example.com/index.php?page=/faqs
Query is made
/faqs is read, metadata shows that it needs the Knowledge Base translator
Translator loaded
Translator makes nice HTML table
Template applied.
Further requests are made to pages like /faqs/Example Category/Example Subcategory/Example Question, for example.

This would be more similar to the way Zope and other application servers work, and would be much more flexible.

The other advantage of this is that only one database table would be needed, and all further config after the database connection details could be stored in a special configuration file.

The first reading part of the file storage system has been started, expect code within a few weeks.

Birthday soon

2006-03-09T13:55:00.000+11:00

It's my birthday on Saturday! Yay!

2006 DPL debate, 16 March

2006-03-09T13:54:00.000+11:00

The 2006 DPL debate is on the 16th from 22:30 UTC (9:30 am 17th March AEDST) to 01:00 UTC 17th March (12:00 noon AEDST) I've got two questions: How easy is it for young people (ie < 18) to get involved in Debian? and Will you put more emphasis on documentation, especially of Debian specific software? I'm not going to be at the live debate (school : ( ) but there will be transcripts after the event. The debate will be held on irc.debian.org, channel #debian-dpl-debate.

Debian Live Initiative

2006-03-07T11:11:00.000+11:00

As Daniel Baumann reported in his blog, the Debian Live Initiative has been started with a basic website and wiki at http://live.debian.net and a mailing list at Debian Unofficial. The project aims to create a fully-Debian Live CD building system, possibly based on the Casper system used in Ubuntu. It will be 100% official Debian, run on as many archs as possible and be easily modified through a configuration file.

I've already suggested sharing at least some of the effort with Progeny's Componentized Linux project, which uses config files and the git SCC system to create a component-based Debian CD at the end. CL could benefit from Live output and Debian Live could reuse some of the config file reading and I'm sure a lot more.

Andrew

Blogger messes up non-HTML email-to-blog posts

2006-03-03T11:46:00.000+11:00

It seems that Blogger messes up posts made using Email Posting if they are not sent as HTML (as Planet LA readers may have seen). Oh well.

Myanmar mission night

2006-03-02T18:17:00.000+11:00

Monday our church held a night about church planting in Myanmar (Burma). We had a guest speaker, Thang Bwee, head of the Evangelical Reformed Church of Myanmar, which has recently got a deal with the Australian Presbyterian World Mission.

There were about 60 people there, which was good, and we all learned a lot about the situation in Myanmar, the military government and the poverty. The ERC has around 35 churches especially in Chin State in western Myanmar. To get to these remote villages from Rangoon, it takes 1hr by plane or 2 days by 'express' bus, then 12 hours on boat, followed by 30km walking. Nearly three days! Recently they have been purchasing iron roofing for the churches, with help from APWM.

Of Myanmar's 52 million people only 4% are Christian, most are Buddhist. Many live on less than a dollar a day, and many also live in remote areas only accessible by walking through jungle.

In all it was a good night and we all learned quite a bit about the situation of the church in Myanmar.

Installing Win 98 all over again

2006-02-17T11:29:00.000+11:00

The other week that computer which I set up suffered a hard drive failure, so I have gone through and done everything all over again, except also installing Debian 3.1 on there.

At least Debian has easier driver installation...

School time!

2006-01-31T09:31:00.000+11:00

40 minutes and counting...

And the winner of the 2005 Award for the Advancement of Free Software is...

2006-01-26T12:01:00.000+11:00

...Andrew Tridgell, for all his hard work on Samba, the Linux kernel and rsync! (as well as that free BitKeeper client).

The finalists were Harmut Pilch for FFII and Theodore T'so for his work on the Linux kernel.

The FSF article and the Slashdot story.

Happy Australia Day!

2006-01-26T09:39:00.000+11:00

...and school starts in less than a week. Crap.

Interesting stock market game

2006-01-24T17:13:00.000+11:00

Real World Stock Market is a (fake!) stock market game where you make money by buying and selling shares. Interesting concept, the site needs some promotion though - there are only 18 members at the moment, and stock market games aren't particularly fun when you only have 18 people playing occasionally. Have a look - I've asked the author if he could release the source under the GPL, so I'll post more if that happens.

Installing Windows 98 is very annoying.

2006-01-20T12:16:00.000+11:00

Well the other night I had to install Windows 98 for someone - makes me remember one reason why I don't like Windows.

After completing the base install, I rebooted to find a VGA screen at 640x480, 4-bit colour. Then I decided to find the driver for the video card. That involved using the motherboard driver CD to install the network card drivers, then rebooting and setting up the network, then going to Windows Update and downloading it, and rebooting again, only to find that the video driver had crazy default settings, so changing that, then rebooting again, then downloading Internet Exploder 6, then rebooting, then applying the security patches, rebooting, etc...

In all, setting up Windoze 98, with IE6, Fx 1.5, Thunderbird 1.5 and OpenOffice.org 2.0.1, then defragging it took four hours and at least fifteen reboots. Setting up a Debian system could be done in less than an hour, and it would be much less annoying.

I'm now on Planet LA!

2006-01-14T17:56:00.000+11:00

I'm now syndicated on Planet Linux Australia!

Andrew

LA ctte nominations closed

2006-01-12T15:08:00.000+11:00

The nominations for the 2006 LA ctte election closed early this morning. Voting opens next week. Andrew

Email error leads to all U. of Alabama students being told they're dropped

2006-01-12T15:02:00.000+11:00

Timing error with an email. Over 21,000 University of Alabama students collectively freak out. You'd think that a university wouldn't have a mailing list system like that. Andrew The digg story.

First Cell-processor computer released

2006-01-11T20:02:00.000+11:00

This is what I want for my birthday! ;) And it's powered by Linux! This is the whole page minus images. Andrew From: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS3591350722.html Jan. 10, 2006 The first product based on IBM/Toshiba/Sony's Cell processor has shipped, reports Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury's Cell Technology Evaluation System (CTES) is a 470-pound behemoth with one or two dual-Cell blades running Linux. It targets defense, medical, and industrial inspection markets. The CTES system is available with one or two of Mercury's Dual Cell-based Blade units. Each Blade features two Cell processors clocked at 2.4GHz, and running Linux in SMP (symmetric multi-processing) mode. Each Blade also has 512MB of "XDR" SDRAM, a 40GB hard drive, and dual gigabit Ethernet interfaces (dual PCIe Infiniband HCA add-in cards will be available in Q2). The Blades run a net-bootable Yellow Dog Linux variant called "Y-HPC" that was developed by Terra Soft Solutions, one of Mercury's VARs (value-added resellers). The CTES system is housed in a 19-inch, 11U IBM Blade-Server chassis with a Web-based management module, dual gigabit Ethernet switches, and an "acoustic attenuation module." Additional components include a 17-inch flat-panel display with integrated keyboard and touchpad, 2000-Watt power supply, and an Intel Xeon-powered IBM xSeries 336 PC Server development and simulation system (a dual-PowerPC alternative will also be available) running RedHat Fedora Core 4 Linux. The system measures 34.4 x 20.5 x 24 inches, and weighs 470 pounds. On the software side, an included IBM SDK offers compilers and gdb's (GNU debuggers) for the Cell processor's PPE (Power processor elements) and SPE (synergistic processor elements), along with a Cell simulator, and PPE and SPE libraries that support 32-bit PPE applications. CTES additionally integrates a variety of Eclipse-integrated Mercury middleware, including its MultiCore Framework (MCF), aimed at managing the distribution of data across multiple computing elements working in tandem; its Scientific Algorithm Library (SAL); its Parallel Acceleration System (PAS); and its Trace Analysis Tool and Library (TATL). Randy Dean, Mercury's VP of business and technology development, stated, "Our customers have expressed high expectations with the implementation of the Cell Technology into their application development." Availability The CTES is available now to "early access" customers at an undisclosed price. Additional details can be found here.

Compets and a game review - Crack Attack!

2006-01-11T19:41:00.000+11:00

Crack Attack! Just found this game on my system today. It's quite addictive and can get very very hard. It is sort of like Tetris, except the blocks come from the bottom. Your aim is to get rid of as many blocks as possible by swapping them with the one next to it. This would be a great subgame for Compets, except I think it uses OpenGL. I'll try anyway. Compets Anyway, more on Compets - I have so far got three responses from my SF ad for a C++ programmer, but still none for an artist/graphic designer. Currently I am still working out how to use the ParaGUI library callbacks and other things like that. Most of my effort is in the C++ GNU/Linux client and the PHP server. I have done 85-90% of the coding changes for the Splash Attack subgame and I am looking for an artist for the GFX and levels. The PHP server is based on a 'command factory' model from the book PHP Game Programming by Matt Rutledge. In the second-last chapter, he discusses making an MMO using commands that are all extensions of a base class called CCommand. This seems to work quite well and provides an easier way for recovery through a rollback system. So far I have got a system that allows you to sign up, then sends you an activation code through the email, and allows you to activate and log in. I have also got some graphics borrowed off CrystalSVG. The client is starting to come together. The ParaGUI library seems quite capable and reasonably easy to use. The XML layout files are very easy to use and you can then attach functions as callbacks. One question I have though - is there any easy way to detect a network connection through SDL_net? Because when the internet connection is down, the system 'freezes' up when it is really only waiting for a response from a server that doesn't exist. Andrew

Linux Australia 2006 Ctte Elections

2006-01-06T20:08:00.000+11:00

Nominations for the Linux Australia Committee election will be closing in a few days. All Linux Australia members are able to nominate and vote in this election. Nominations close on the 11th and voting is open from the 18th through to midnight server time 24th/25th, just before the AGM at LCA Dunedin. Results will be available from the website at midnight server time 24th/25th January. All members can have their say! If you are a member remember to vote, and if you aren't, consider joining!

HLGCMS (read: CrapCMS) 0.1 released

2006-01-06T19:59:00.000+11:00

It has been released! MyCrapCMS 0.1! (with AJAX pages, the only even close to innovative thing in it).

Why HLGCMS won't be out tonight

2006-01-05T20:15:00.000+11:00

HLGCMS won't be released tonight because I can't find my thumbdrive. Oh well :( Tomorrow maybe.

Games I'm currently playing

2006-01-05T14:09:00.000+11:00

Blob Wars : Metal Blob Solid
um...not much else - I'm usually too busy coding games to play them

Writing a CMS

2006-01-04T21:35:00.000+11:00

Tomorrow I will (hopefully) release version 0.1 of my LUG's CMS - HLGCMS. This CMS is *really really ground breaking* because it has, um... raw HTML pages... a login system that doesn't do much... and an experimental AJAX page system, which is the only cool thing in it.

Anyway, sometime tomorrow it will be available on my website - if you wanted a stupid CMS, you got one!

Hello and welcome to my even better blog

2006-01-04T21:04:00.000+11:00

This is my new Google-powered blog which is somewhat better than Drupal's blog module. Not much to report as yet.

The M$FT Report, January 2006 M$ is still going strong and people still need to be informed about the alternative, GNU/Linux! Not much news this early in the year.