Project Looking Glass

Project Looking Glass (screenshot) from Sun Microsystems is going to be GPL'd at JavaOne according to The Register.

Inspiration for GNOME 3.0? Or even incorporation >:->

tech/GNOME | 28 Jun 2004 | #

Static IP address

Contaced Telstra again yesterday about a static IP address.

*sigh*I can't get ADSL at my place because there's no spare copper in my street, but I can get cable. But Telstra don't offer a static IP address option for any cable customer.

This is typical for Australia's heavy-weight telecommunications carrier :-(

meta | 23 Jun 2004 | #

History never repeats...

O'Reilly have built on Eric Levenz's work and produced a nice poster showing the geanealogy of the 50 most important computer programming languages. As per usual with O'Reilly, they've made it next to impossible for someone in Australia to get their hands on a copy. For previous promotions like this, I've sent emails them emails, which have simply been ignored :-(

This sort of history keeping is very important, especially given recent attempts to change the history of Unix. Fortunately efforts like Grokline and Eric Levenez's Unix history, along with the rebuttals and clarifications of various people who would know exist to shine the light on this dishonesty.

With languages like Java and C# now being covered by patents, it's important to keep track of where these languages come from to protect the large code bases that the open-source community produce.

The theme of anti-open-source companies seems to be that if they can't win on technological grounds, they'll drum up a law suit, or pay some lobby group to say nasty things about open-source. Very sad to see - why can't they expend that effort into making their products more secure instead?

tech/code | 23 Jun 2004 | #

Webmail working

Took some effort, but squirrelmail and courier-imap are now talking together to provide access to my mail archive via the web.

Biggets problem was convincing woody to reinstall squirrelmail after I blew away a config file by mistake. I thought apt-get was supposed to be easy :-( What I needed to do was...

touch <missing-files>
apt-get install squirrelmail
apt-get remove --purge squirrelmail
apt-get install squirrelmail


Now I just have a couple of gigs of mail to sync up and I'm done. All with 9 days to spare...

meta | 21 Jun 2004 | #

The Mono stack

Found what I was looking for - but after I blogged :-(

The Mono stack contents vs Microsoft .Net API stack contents is mentioned in the Mono Beta 1 Release Notes.

There was a nice image comparing the two, but I can't find it now.

tech/code/C-Sharp | 16 Jun 2004 | #

One runtime to rule them all

Joel on Software writes, "How Microsoft Lost the API War", which details how Microsoft has in .NET devalued the win32 API and how this is going to cost them big-time going forward. Nice article explaining that you have to throw away cruft eventually.

The big argument is based on whether breaking backwards compatability will lose them some of the developer base. Joel argues that it affects end users (i.e. breaking legacy applications on recent OSes), and I don't disagree, but do developers care? He does suggest that engineers like to get things right, so wouldn't a change in the APIs, even if it breaks them, be welcomed if it meant that they are now just right?

Perhaps where they have gone wrong is by revealing their roadmap - Avalon, WinFX, WinFS etc - too early, meaning developers won't come up to speed on current .NET APIs now, knowing that come Longhorn everything will change. The vaccuum created is a great opportunity for Mono to move people to the Free Software Stack (tangental reference) using this new fangled C# language, instead of waiting to see what the long term path from Microsoft is.

Another thing that struck me was the developer tool angle - Microsoft won't be giving away their development tools for free because that will kill off all the other tool vendors (i.e. Borland) and create the monopoly that they'd like, but will be used against them in further anti-trust cases. This is another wonderful thing about gcc, gdb, vim etc. They're free. You can fix them. And no-one can compete with them because of these strengths.

It's very interesting to see that an admittedly pro-Microsoft commentator thinks the move to managed runtimes is a good thing. I've always hated using C on a Windows box because of segmentation issues, buffer over-runs crashing the OS etc. Glad to see that the lessons learnt under Unix and under languages like Ada and Java are finally being brought to Windows under .Net. Perhaps that's why C# is no great step up for anyone who's developed under Unix. It's also why developing C under Unix has been an awful lot friendlier than developing anything under Windows.

Lots of interesting thoughts in this article.

tech/code/C-Sharp | 16 Jun 2004 | #

Statistical spam filtering with bogofilter and dspam.

Geoffery spoke on Statistical spam filtering with bogofilter and dspam at LinuxSA on Tuesday night.

Good stuff - I need to move to something else as my current spam solution is letting too much gumpf through. As a result of Geoffrey's successes, I intend moving to Bogofilter soon.

tech/LinuxSA | 16 Jun 2004 | #

incoming mail in place.

Now for setting up incoming email. This was easier than expected, just a /etc/fetchmailrc and a ~/.procmailrc in place and it all just works.

Webmail is also there, and working for outgoing, but for some reason it's not seeing my Maildir folders. This is strange, last time I set it up it was just a case of installing an imapd and it all just worked.

One step away from beng a complete solution.

meta | 16 Jun 2004 | #

You will soon be returned to your normal program

After 6 days off work from sickness I'm back. Unfortunately J is still suffering - so I was up to him several times last night :-( Not what I need when I'm getting over it myself.

Back to work today - state of the project is <undefined>. Trying to stop the free-fall - would have been better if Kevin wasn't on leave, but am thankful that he covered for me while I was away. Need to make a release later today or early tomorrow - at least we have our release management process down pat which should make life easier.

tech/misc | 14 Jun 2004 | #

Easter 2004 Photos

As a test to see if I've got gallery properly configured, I've put up the photos for Easter 2004 "Moana" camping trip.

Update: Darn that gallery - today we had a power failure during a 70+ file upload. Gallery's file upload (from a URL or local directory) broke such that a) it didn't recognise the in-progess upload when I attempted again, and worse b) wouldn't allow the same files to be uploaded again. Eventually traced this down to the browser session cookie which simply neeed deleting. Sigh, not a good example of [[OSS]] robustess :-(

social | 09 Jun 2004 | #

Exim now talking SMTP

Another piece of the puzzle down - I've got Exim handing SMTP traffic to my ISP. Doesn't sound like much, but up until now I've been using sendmail and since my web presence is doing Debian, I should be following suit.

All it required was:

    smart_route:
      driver = domainlist
      transport = remote_smtp
      route_list = * mail-hub.bigpond.net.au bydns_a

that to go into the routers section, and the following to go into the transports section.

    remote_smtp:
      driver = smtp

Easy once you've done it once :-)

meta | 09 Jun 2004 | #

advogato

Advogato is still down :-( Disappointing as it has been, this has been a good push along to get my own weblog up and going. And SMTP. And offline-imap. etc. So when advogato comes back eventually, I might truy and do the jdub thing and mirror at both places. A little redundancy can't hurt, right?

tech/blog/advogato | 08 Jun 2004 | #

Planet LinuxSA

LinuxSA needs a planet.

I will do it.

tech/LinuxSA | 08 Jun 2004 | #

linux australia website redesign started

Currently re-designing the linux australia website, after excellent work by Stewart et al. Still some work to be done, but here's the obligatory screenshot.

tech/linux-australia | 08 Jun 2004 | #

First Post

This is the first post in my blog.

tech/blog | 03 Jun 2004 | #

On writing...

Essential English for Journalists & Writers, Harold Evans (Pimlico, 2000)
Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande (Pan Macmillan, first published 1934)
Lend Me Your Ears, William Safire (W. W. Norton & Co., 1997)
Troublesome Words, Bill Bryson (Pengion, 1987)
Death Sentence, Don Watson (2003)
http://www.selfpromotion.com

tech/books | 01 Jun 2004 | #

Stuff

Playing with orkut like everyone else. Cool stuff.

Getting sick again - trying to wrap up the budget for Linux.Conf.Au 2004, while doing Linux Australia committee things, while hacking dashboard (trying to get something ready for submission), and some python/gtk hacking for demonstration at LinuxSA next month, while trying to earn some brownie points with Susie - I owe a lot after this past year.

I need 30 hour days.

tech/misc | 01 Jun 2004 | #

Linux Australia f2f Meeting:

Friday: Flight to Melbourne via Virgin Blue, ok except for the very bumpy landing. Met Pia at the airport and drank the first of my 8 coffees for the weekend. Caught up with all the SLUG and LA gossip in the cab on the way to the hotel - passed a protest on the freeway which prevented Stewart coming and getting us.

Met a bunch of LUV guys at the James Squire, and then onto a little SouthBank restaurant called BonBons for food. Talked with Mike, a RedHat contractor, on the likelihood of Fedora succeeding, about yum vs up2date vs apt, and why I should use his sources.list file. Also had a good chat with Andrew Chalmers - one of the other people who ran for committee membership this year. Got his take on a few issues which was pretty valuable.

Saturday: Up early, breakfast was more coffee and ham and cheese croissants. 1/2 hour walk uphill to Trinity College, next door to Melbourne Uni and met up with Daniel Stone who was our doorman / sysadmin for the day. Thanks DanielS for providing the great facility!

Talked all day with the committee, minutes soon to be available, achieved big things. Very positive atmosphere.

Met conz for lunch somewhere in North Carlton. Nice food, and a nice day to sit around and drink (yet more) coffee.

Back to Trinity College, and covered lots more. Everyone asymptotically approaching stuffed state. Did the committee keysigning and orkut thing :-) and then finished up 6-6:30pm. Took everyone back to the hotel, shower, and off to the pub. This time the Metropolitan. Pia foolishly stated she'd do the 7 pint thing, so I dutifully reminded her of this all night :-) She didn't like that :-)

Talked for ages, on everything from Linux to .Net to religious issues to OSS adoption to LUV/MLUG politics. Good night.

Back to bed late, needed the wake up call early on Sunday.

Sunday: Out the door before 8am, looking for shops that are open to do some shopping for my wonderfully supportive family back home. Nothing was open until 9am, and most shops didn't open until 10 or 11am. So much for a city that claims it never sleeps.

Did the touristy thing. Walked bits of the yarra river, the shopping district and around Crown casino. Afterall, what do you do when the shops aren't open, you've done the technology thing to death, and you have 2 hours to spare?

Introduced Pia to Haigh's chocolates - best in the world. It's always nice buying a great SA product interstate.

Cab back to the airport, just in time for my last coffee of the weekend. Hudson's Marble Mocha is pretty good. Completed Essential Python and the chocolate bullets I bought at Haigh's on the flight home. Really glad to see the family. I hate travelling without them. Once home, crashed on the sofa.

tech/linux-australia | 01 Jun 2004 | #