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Tue, 21 Aug 2012

Finding forks.

github has become the place where a lot of code is made available.

It turns out that not everyone has the time or inclination to answer queries / questions or apply pull requests.

So, whenever I am investigating using something I've found, I always look to see what the forks are; if there are common issues, etc.

In the past, I've done this by hand, for small repositories it isn't too time consuming. Today, though, I sat down and wrote find-forks.py which will do this automatically.

Now, I find a project, clone it, run ./find-forks.py and settle down with gitk to examine the history and various other forks.

This works well for me, feel free to use or improve as you like. I hereby place this in the Public Domain.

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Mon, 25 Jul 2011

Licence stupidity in 2011.

As amazing as it is, there are still people who simply do not understand Free Software licences (but actually generate Free Software).

Consider this gem.

A project that is released as GPL cannot be used in any commercial product without the product itself also being offered as open source.

What? You mean like the Linux kernel? A GPL'd product used in many commercial products?

Even worse, he conflates "open source" with Free Software.

For shame, Kenneth Reitz, for shame.

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Wed, 01 Jun 2011

First steps with DNSSEC

As you all probably know by know, DNSSEC has been enabled on the root ('.') since July 2010.

And on most TLDs like .com shortly thereafter (in the specific case of .com, since March 2011).

The Debian guide to turning on DNSSEC is useful but some things you need to know (after using it for a week or so).

BIND loves IPv6.

If you have 'listen-on-v6', set to yes and you roam to a non-IPv6 network. Your name resolutions can take 30+ seconds.

Since I roam from a some networks they do have IP6 and some that do not, I have had to turn this setting off to achieve reasonable performance

Each new network requires manual intervention

Just like Andrew Cowie, I'm trying to get new features in NetworkManager. by blogging.

My use case is simple – if a bit geeky – use the local resolver on my system irregardless of what I get dynamically (via DHCP) or automagically (via SLAAC).

I can do this manually for each network I connect to, but it quickly looses its appeal.

Very little software takes advantage of DNSSEC (yet).

Apart from the happy DNSSEC campers, very little takes advantage of DNSSEC yet.

Kind of like the early days of IP6. It would be nicer if websites stored the fingerprint of the SSL website in DNS and it could be cross-checked against what was sent.

The effort to do so is underway at the IETF by the name of DANE.

In fact publishing SSH key fingerprints via DNS is already possible RFC4255 but I am unaware of deployed support.

Things are progressing, and I suspect now is a great moment to get involved if you have spare time, in making it significantly harder for 3rd-parties to censor the Internet for everyone.

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Sun, 25 Oct 2009

Policy-based routing in Linux

Just a quick note.

Most routing is done on the basis of the destination address, unless you have a BGP feed.

However occassionally you need to do routing on the basis of some other policy: in my case this weekend it was the source address.

I spent quite a few hours this weekend looking at various Google results, lartc.org, www.policyrouting.org (the latter has a fairly detailed book with some useful examples) before I came up with a solution that works for me. 

ip rule add from <source addr> table 203
ip route add default via <new default> table 203

You can also use the ToS field and act upon fwmarks thus linking your routing with your iptables policy.

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Fri, 18 Sep 2009

Firefox, Flash, FAIL!

(aside: I have a number of blog posts in draft – don't worry they won't spam the various planets – but this was timely so I pushed it out first)

The most recent version of Firefox 3.x will also prompt you to update your Flash plugin if it is out of date. According to Ken Kovash, the response has been phenomenal. Almost 10,000,000 click through.

That is 10,000,000 failures.

Like a lot of people, I provide technical support for my Windows using family (and some friends). So I get to see how badly Windows is in the 'update' space. It is pretty common to have: Windows, Anti-virus, Java and one / two other applications (e.g. Google apps, Skype, Yahoo IM, etc.) prompt you with little annoying notification bubbles.

Most of them have trained themselves to not look in the bottom right of the screen and to ignore requests to update.

Which means that whenever I see a big, important update, like the Firefox one — I end up having to remotely take over their machine and do it on their behalf.

The user experience was:

  1. Update Firefox.

    So far, so good.

  2. It prompts and say Flash is out of date.

    Excellent. Click on link.

  3. Adobe site says "click to upgrade".

    Great. It also includes, checked by default, a download of McCafe's anti-virus tool something or other.

  4. Realise that pointless download of McCafe is about to happen. Cancel. Uncheck. Download again.

    Why is Adobe offering me more than just an upgrade of the product I am after? Apparently this is very common in the Windows world (think Safari included with iTunes, etc.)

  5. Adobe figures out I am using Firefox and sends, instead of Flash, a 'Download manager' plugin.

    It includes instructions on how to enable things so that this plugin is updated by Adobe all the time. I, rather pointlessly, ponder why Flash does not do this itself.

  6. Once installed, you need to restart Firefox. I do so.
  7. This time the "Your Flash is out of date page" does not appear.

    At this point a normal person would think that they are now secure. Nothing could be further from the truth. Adobe has stupidly decided that first you need to have their update plugin. Then you need to actually do the update. FAIL.

  8. I manually go the the '3.5.3' release note page, where it detects, again, that Flash is out of date.

    I click through to Adobe's site (again), this time, it figures out that it needs to update Flash. It autoinvokes the autoupdate plugin and does the update.

  9. Prompted to restart Firefox, again. I do so.
  10. Everything is now perfectly fine.

That was a total user experience failure.

Not Mozilla's fault but Adobe's.

But Mozilla can make a difference in this area. And work around the stupidity of Adobe.

  1. All plugins MUST register a https URL where their version can be checked.
  2. Periodically Firefox does the version checky thing (like with Add-Ons) and ensures they are up to date

That implies that there is a, separate "Your plugins are out of date page" distinct from "You've installed an upgraded version of Firefox"

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Tue, 16 Dec 2008

You make a grown man ...

... cry.

In my prior entry, I noted that I resigned from Debian. I also upgraded my system to Ubuntu.

This is my story.

The good
  • since the tools are based upon Debian, easy to upgrade to.
  • much usage of dpkg -P --force-depends && apt-get -f install occurred
  • most things Just Worked
  • always had either suspend or hibernate working before. Now have both working. Cool.
  • I like how Gnome has a 'personality', makes it even nicer.
  • splash-y boot is nice. Makes other people go 'schweet'.
  • Having the single-user mode option come up with a menu of options is good
    Unfortunately neither 'netroot' nor 'fsck' work correctly. The latter should NOT run the init scripts first.
The bad
  • managed to futz video
  • managed to futz networking
    Would be great if there was a command line network manager tool that connected to the network
  • managed to break sounds
  • stock Gnome, which I have been using for ages, sucks.
  • hard to just update to packages in jaunty/main.

    I want to switch all the 'core' packages over to the Ubuntu versions. This is seemingly impossible unless I do: apt-get -du upgrade and note which packages came from 'jaunty/main' (but I bet there is some easy fix)
  • why no OpenOffice 3.0?

    Odd that they are willing to break with Debian on: X, Gnome, Firefox, the kernel but not this.
The ugly
  • found 2 bugs; one already reported, gave a work-around
  • reporting bugs is painful (hello? why do I need a browser to do this?)

    I have found another 2 bugs but I do not have the time to interrupt my browser workflow to report them. Reportbug is basically perfect. Just re-use it. Whoever thought 'ubuntu-bug' using '-p' and '-P' is a good idea was ... not thinking clearly.
  • ubuntu forums typically have the error message

    But then lots of (rather) useless bleating and uninformed suggestions -- avoid them at all costs
  • the wiki is horribly outdated

    see KernelWiki e.g. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/Roadmap
  • no way to 'reset' things easily

    system-clean is okay, but what about terminal 1? Should ctrl-alt-1 work?
  • interesting, firefox has a 'ubuntu addon' that does specific stuff.

    Why not just use iceweaseal, and then add back in the branding and addon stuff if required? Would make for greater re-use.
  • why does the user switch applet default to showing your name?

    Who is not always sure of their name? Why take up so many pixels? Not clear.

Something that I think would be very useful, would be a script that took a stable Debian release and updated you to the latest Ubuntu LTS. In the past I used be okay with the release cycle that Debian had but now-a-days, I think I would prefer knowing an upgrade is coming every 24 months and be able to plan for it.

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Sun, 19 Oct 2008

How to get more developers.

Christian worries about how to grow the desktop share in the free desktop.

Some recent events (Chromium, Geode) have led me to believe that … We've won … already.

For example let's look at the reactions to Chromium (which I believe was released way too early):

I've just picked three links but the trend is clear. The digirati want to use Linux and Mac OS X to evaluate new technologies NOT Windows. Sure, some of them still have those boxes around for “client work”. But that is not what they use day-to-day.

Now let's take a look at Mozillas' Geode. Here is the Introduction to Geode. Look at the comments:

In fact the outcry was enough for lack of Linux support that is merited a follow-up Common Geode Q&As:

Geode is meant as a temporary solution to allow websites to experiment with geolocation today. … Skyhook is built in. A side effect is that Linux isn't supported for the simple reason that Skyhook hasn't implemented Linux drivers. Although not ideal. …

A year ago this would not have happened. This amount of push-back from the digirati that the new technology they are supposed to look at and evaluate is not available on their platform would have been accepted as a matter of course.

Now, though, they all expect it on their platform of choice. We've won, already.

Whilst the largest user-base remains the Windows market, if you want the digirati to look at and evaluate what you have to offer it needs to work on Linux & Mac OS X. Another example, while I remember, is Adobe releasing Flash 10 for Linux on the same day as other platforms.

Unheard of.

So what does mean for Christian's question?

  1. Within 12 months it will be inconcievable for software to NOT be released on Windows + Linux (and maybe Mac OS X)
  2. Within 24 months we will have power users asking for Free Software (probably not Linux but more likely OpenOffice 3.x & Firefox) routinely
  3. Within 36 months Linux will be 10% of the desktop market. Bigger than Mac OS X. That is a lot of people you can not afford to ignore if you are a company, it will mean that ‘web-based’ will be more and more common — integration between desktop and the web will be key.

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Mon, 30 Jun 2008

Finding bogons. And then fixing them.

No, I'm not talking about Melbourians (besides I believe that it is actually bogan). I mean bogon which is a quantum on bogosity and as applied to IP packets.

I run a number of nameservers, someone of them are slaves for some high-profile sites (e.g. gnome.org, linux.conf.au, openmoko.org, etc.), and some zones the nameservers are (dynamic) primaries for.

I had someone send me an email but my various systems refused to receive -- this I tracked down to BIND not returning any data when an MX request was received. This was particularly perplexing as my laptop, also running BIND, and some of my other test systems all had no trouble.

After much faffing about, including running BIND in debug mode on a production machine, I found this gem in the debug log: 

... ignoring blackholed / bogus server ...

Ah ha! Lights clicked and it all fell into place. The network was on the DNS bogon list.

In case you do not want to run the full bogon list, or keep it up to do, here are the IPv4 network you should filter out (from RFC3330). 

acl "rfc3330" {
        // Filter out any IPv4 networks specified in RFC3330
        // These networks (IP addresses) should rarely be seen
        // in the wild on normal networks.
        0.0.0.0/8;
        10.0.0.0/8;
        169.254.0.0/16;
        172.16.0.0/12;
        192.0.2.0/24;
        192.168.0.0/16;
        198.18.0.0/15;
        224.0.0.0/3;
};

I've just updated from bogon list 5.9 to 6.3 across all my DNS machines. If you can remember if you have, or haven't, it might be worth checking too.

Oh, and if you require some assistance with DNS stuff, drop me a line.

Update: July 6th. Fixed URL for RFC3330.

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Mon, 17 Mar 2008

IPv6 continues to grow

Interesting report on how IPv4 was shut-off and everything continued to work.

Especially interesting was Google and the interesting logo effect.

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Tue, 12 Feb 2008

Hiss. Hiss.

Like most people I like good company. Good company and free booze is even better.

If you are in London, you missed out, as last week was when flag and bell was on. If you are going be around for their next event – 4th March 2008 – drop Megan a line.

Yes, people, it really is good company. And free beer.

Speaking of beer, those of you when a penchant for all things Python may want to come along to the London Python booze-up.

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Mon, 16 Jul 2007

Is the Google indexing all it is cracked up to be?

Like a lot of people, I've install Google Desktop for Linux.

First off, I've installed Beagle and Tracker before. So, I've played with a couple of these things. Obviously since I've installed GDL I felt that none of the existing Free Software solutions worked as well as I expected.

A while back I read Joe Shaw's note about how Beagle is tested with ~180K files. I considered this for a moment and realised that is why Beagle would turn my system into a pile of steaming dog poo.

My home directory has, normally, over 1,000,000 files (currently 893790 as I deleted some things before I fired up gtk-gnutella).

Considering Google handles web indexes significantly larger, you'd assume that their desktop search would be more than capable.

Alas.

I've had it installed for a week and it has achieved a 5% index. At least it does not chew up memory and only causes excessive CPU load. Oh, and the fact that it must have a browser (seemingly only Iceweasel will do) to use makes it even less useful. I'd let someone know but Google is also in on the whole "Let's make it as arduous as possible to report a problem" caper that seems to be common nowadays. Oh, well.

They went to all that time and effort to make a Debian package, why not put in the extra few minutes of work so that reportbug Just Works.

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Tue, 06 Mar 2007

postgresql forward / backward incompatibilities

Today I had "ERROR: column i.indisvalid does not exist" appear in both a client system and on the database backend. My initial searching lead me to a possible problem in pgpool but since I don't use that, that couldn't be it. I quickly jumped onto #postgresql on Freenode and the guys there (specifically Gavin Sherry) suggested it was either because I hadn't vacuum'd the database -- in my case I have autovacuum on -- OR there was a version mismatch between client and server. It turns out it was the later: client was 8.2 and server was 8.1 From time to error to solution was 15 mins -- that's what support is all about. Awesome. I'm just blogging this here so that in case anyway else gets the same error there is a chance a search engine might return a useful result.

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Fri, 24 Mar 2006

Some random odds and sods as well as some ACID

Horms, why not use gworldclock?

Martin, I think you are after tra.

Andrew, you do realise that you could do that with yum – which has been in Debian for a while now. You'd have probably heard about it earlier if Mako could be bothered to get Atom 1.0 support working on Planet Debian.

Rodney, Nokia phones generally use Netfront as their default. If you want to use Opera you have to specify it. I'd be highly skepticle of KHTML being used anywhere memory footprint mattered.

It looks like it might be WebCore (dervied from KHTML) instead. But that is only on very recent phones (first half of 2006).

Oh, and that is likely to be Yahoo merchant crawler. Yahoo probably thinks you are a corporate whore or something ;-).

Finally is it just me or does it strike anyone else as odd that the Mozilla Corporation, with all of its' money, is not able to get a crack group of hackers together so that Firefox 2.0 can render ACID2? At least two of the competitors can already do it, so, what's the go, Joe? (or in this case Mitchell).

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Thu, 16 Mar 2006

Back down on the (VCS) farm

Interesting how Sun have also come to the same conclusion[1] as I have with respect to Distributed SCMs. Only bazaar, git and mercurial matter.

Also interesting is that for immediate targets they also recommend Subversion. Maybe I've been channeling Bill Joy or something? Anyway, earlier I couldn't decide which of the three to use.

Now I know that git is the way forward. The (multiple) interfaces help enourmously (cogito, git, StGit, P(atchy)g, etc.). It means if you have some funky interface, you can migrate slowly by reimplementing what you use with git plumbing.

Just as Carl Worth talks about reimplementing Hg using git. Another major factor is the culture on the mailing list(s). List culture encourages/discourages other participants. And the git list culture encourages lots of people to share very small changes.

Which has meant that git has caught up very quickly and eclipsed everything out there[2]. It really is odd reading that email and seeing just how far git has come.

Anyway it looks like what Sun are considering doing is that they might reimplement the interface of their internal tool (teamware) on top of git. If they can make that available, it'll advance things for everyone (again).

  1. http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/program-team/2006-March/000172.html
  2. http://mail.off.net/pipermail/codeville-devel/2005-April/000013.html

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Tue, 14 Mar 2006

Here a VoIP, there a VoIP, everywhere a VoIP.

I've been using VoIP for many years. Some thoughts.

Asterisk has never really appealed to me. I can't put a definite finger on why this is so but it feels like having email printed. A half-step along the way. It is a good halfway point but doesn't feel like a full solution.

What does is something which turns PSTN into SIP; then you can use a SIP router (SER, OpenSER, partysip, sipXrouter and many others) to do what you need.

That kind of device is something like a Sipura 3000. Very easy to setup to register to your own SIP router, where you can do the heavy lifting. Of course, you don't need to interface to the PSTN to take advantage of VoIP.

I have SIP accounts at bbpglobal, ekiga, fwd, iptel, openwengo, sipme, sipgate and voipuser. As well as few other, more private, networks.

NOTE: openwengo requires some work to retrieve the SIP id.

I've also been playing with gaim2 recently. It is the reason I'm only vaguely online – gaim2 breaks sound on my laptop – and that interferes with the VoIP stuff I do.

Anyway, one interesting feature of gaim2 is that it supports SIP IM extensions (presence basically). I was trying to debug why this wasn't working which meant I was doing some tcpdumping and noticed some SIP messages go past — I normally have twinkle (currently the best SIP softphone on Linux) running, so this wasn't unusual.

What was, is that the originating machine wasn't my own. It was my mothers computer. I decided to investigate.

It turns out that Yahoo Messenger (which my mother has signed up for so she could speak to her nephew) can actually speak SIP. This could also be part of the impending MSN / Yahoo IM networks interop. that is being completed.

I'm not sure how they will achieve that but from looking through the packet traces of Yahoo's "PC-to-PC" calling, some kind of negociation takes place of the YMessenger channel and a SIP channel is established between the client and a seperate set of (Akamai-sed) media servers. It also seems like they have some kind of SIP proxy which normal/old clients can speak to and which speaks back SIP.

From the network traces I've done, one side sends a cookie down the YMessenger protocol pipe, and the other side responds via the SIP pipe. From further traces no Linux client can (currently) interoperate with Yahoo's service until the client supports SIP over TCP, SIPS, RTP and RTCP, not to mention Yahoo's special cookie scheme.

Now both networks, Yahoo and MSN need to open themselves up so that they provide presence information externally (via SIP) and allow users to talk to anyone with a SIP address anywhere. You know, just like you can with email.

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Tue, 17 Jan 2006

Old McDonald had a version control system …

The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from

The same, of course, goes for VCS. I've used RCS, CVS, Subversion (svn), Arch (larch, tla and baz), Mercurial (hg), git, Bazaar-NG (bzr), svk and no doubt a few others I've forgotten, or wished I had.

The current state of the art in Free Software is Subversion IF you have to interoperate with developers who use Windows. That's it. Don't read further if you have Windows-based colleagues.

If, though, you get to choose the technology, then based on my experience with all of the above you then you should pick between: git, hg and/or bzr.

None of RCS, CVS nor svn are useful in the long-term since they do not allow for distributed development and branching. Yes, it can be done — a good example is svk — but not without difficulty and lots of gnashing of teeth. In svk's case, you need to be careful when merging since svn (which is what svk uses underneath) does not keep history or context.

I hit onto Arch and was lucky enough to stumble upon Robert Collins who guided my understanding of it and changesets. Unfortunately Arch was led by Tom Lord, who has real issues with generating a community of people around him. His first effort (larch), stagnated was re-written (by Robert) in C++, and called barch, while he wrote tla.

tla development also stagnated and, eventually, Canonical forked it and called it baz. I was very skeptical about a company like Canonical sticking to their promise ("we'll develop it until version 1.5 where it should be a good transition point to our next system"). I wasn't surprised when they renegged on that committment. It is their right of course, but it is a shame. Right now, if you have to use Arch — and you haven't used it before — use tla. If you have run into the limitations of tla, then use baz but bear in mind that baz is stone-cold dead as far as development is concerned. tla, is only cold dead.

Which brings us to bzr, hg and git. All three of these systems are very similiar.
Distributed development? Check.
Portable to everything (but Windows, and that is changing too)? Check.
Implement the same generic object-based filesystem? Check.

I've stayed away from bzr since Canonical is supporting it; that isn't bad but it does mean it'll forever be tied to what they want. It also means the community around it is extremely small. bzr is interesting in that it classifies everything as an object (directory, file, etc.) and stores them in pre-classified directories. In particular it stores file data in a 'weave' format (similiar to SCCS).

hg has a small, vibrant community around it but the problem is the community is small. And, like bzr, it also stores object in pre-classified direcoties – although in a delta-compressed format for space reasons. Both are written in Python (more about that latter) and have nice graphical tools to do things like quilt and three-way merges as well as visualising development history.

In the end I've chosen git as my future revision system; it has a development leader who encourages rather than discourages. The documentation overshadows everything except CVS and svns – and is on par with them. It is fast. it has a large community behind it. You can use it at a number of levels (git,cogito, stgit, etc.).

It has great support for importing to everything except bzr and I'm yet to find any particular issue with it. Plus it merging is very good. In fact, as Linus points out you can have any merging startegy you like. So, any theoretical advantages of hg and bzr are just that, theoretical.

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Wed, 07 Dec 2005

dead:cafe::6

Or, how to get thyself onto IPv6. A lot of people when I mention IPv6 say Yeah, but who else is using it?. As of last year (2004) there are roughly 200 million Windows XP (or better) machines with IPv6 defaulted on. [1] [2]

That doesn't include Linux, *BSDs, etc. If all these people have got IPv6 (oh, that is just those without NAT) then you've got to wonder just how many people in total have it enabled.

The next question I commonly hear is Yeah, but what can you do with it?. Of course you can run things as you were before and that's fine.

Actually it is more than fine. Here is me pinging my default gateway.

IPv4
eve:[~]% sudo ping -c 1000 -f 203.7.227.129
PING 203.7.227.129 (203.7.227.129) 56(84) bytes of data.

--- 203.7.227.129 ping statistics ---
1000 packets transmitted, 1000 received, 0% packet loss, time 415ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.209/0.237/0.720/0.076 ms, ipg/ewma 0.416/0.564 ms
IPv6
eve:[~]% sudo ping6 -c 1000 -f 2001:388:c0c5::1
PING 2001:388:c0c5::1(2001:388:c0c5::1) 56 data bytes

--- 2001:388:c0c5::1 ping statistics ---
1000 packets transmitted, 1000 received, 0% packet loss, time 263ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.174/0.195/0.577/0.016 ms, ipg/ewma 0.263/0.196 ms

IPv6 is faster to process on the same hardware. Gentoo ricers take note! Okay, so you can run all your same protocols on top (and get a speed benefit) but what else?

Well things that require peer-to-peer connectivity, like VoIP and filesharing can particularly benefit. For example, gtk-gnutella recently acquired IPv6 support. And most 3G phones also use IPv6.

At the moment, though, most people are expending effort actually getting connected. Within Australia there are two way

You can use either mechanism but if you have a dynamic IPv4 address the tunnel broker will be a better option as it will mean your IPv6 addresses will be fixed. If you are using Debian you will need to install the tspc package – let me know of any problems as I am the maintainer.

If you have a fixed IPv4 address you can use 6to4. 6to4 converts your IPv4 address (which is 32 bits) into hexadecimal and then adds '2002' to the front. Here is a quick example: 

IPv4 address: 138.25.6.65 (decimal)
              8a.19.06.41 (hexadecimal)
IPv6 address: 2002:8a19:0641::/48

You would then set your default router to be the 6to4 anycast address of either 192.88.99.1 (IPv4) or 2002:c058:6301:: (IPv6) — 10 points if you worked out the IPv6 address in advance.. That will get you to the closest topological point of interconnection between you (IPv4 mongrol that you are) the pristine shinyness of IPv6. In theory.

In practise, there are closer points at AARNet (ipv6.aarnet.net.au, 192.231.212.5) and at Telstra (203.14.5.7) but they are not advertised by the routing system. Which is why I currently recommend that even with a static address you use the tunnel broker — it's faster.

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Thu, 24 Nov 2005

All webbrowsers suck...

eve:[~]% firefox
*** glibc detected *** free(): invalid next size (fast): 0x08bc9228 ***

eve:[~]% amaya
04:22:56: Deleted stale lock file '/home/anand/amaya-anand'.
*** glibc detected *** free(): invalid pointer: 0x0a47bb30 ***
*** Amaya: Irrecoverable error ***zsh: abort (core dumped)  amaya
eve:[~]% galeon
*** glibc detected *** malloc(): memory corruption: 0x081dcbf8 ***

eve:[~]% epiphany
*** glibc detected *** free(): invalid next size (fast): 0x08561540 ***

Fortunately I can still browse the web within Emacs but not Vi (or vim). For anyone else experiencing the same problem, MALLOC_CHECK_=1 might allow you to run some programs further (doesn't work for me though).

Update: It turns out my problems were related to SCIM and an upgrade solved my issues. One things I did learn is that firefox --debugger=gdb will give you a chance to get a decent backtrace, especially if you have the relevant -dbg libraries installed.

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Thu, 10 Nov 2005

Plugins I have installed

Michael Still writes about Trackback pings.

I'm still not used to blosxom and how everything fits together but I thought I'd enumerate the plugins I've installed.

categorytree
I've actually got this named as 01categorytree, so it runs first, but it gives me the listing of topics I've posted too
extrensionless
I'm a big fan of Cool URIs, this helps me almost get there. Bonus points to those who can work out where I don't quite make the magic happen seemlessly. Oh, named 02extensionless.
atomfeed
As every good blogger knows, syndication is the name of the game. While you got use the deprecated RSS, Atom is where is it at. I've actually disabled RSS feeds in preference to atom
breadcrumbs
On permalink posts, you'll see a click-trail. All professional websites have them, so I figured I should too.
calendar
Presents a calendar with all the posts you've done on various days highlighted, so you can quickly determine when someone has been sleeping or has been an insomniac
config
Comes with the Debian blosxom package, and originates with the author. Allows you to customise configuration dependant on where the post is in your heirarchy and other magic.
directorybrowse
If you have deep category hierarchies this makes all the elements of the paths clickable. It's cool, you want it.
feedback
Part of the blogging scene is to allow other people to comment upon what you've written. This gives them comments and trackbacks. I've modified this somewhat and still need to fixup how comments are previewed but otherwise this plugin is gold
flavourdir
Also part of the blosxom package, this means you do not have to have your blog entries intermingled with the page templates (known as flavours) used to display them
interpolate_fancy
For large plugins, like feedback, you might end with some text on your template that you only want displayed some of the time. This enhances blosxom so your template (flavour) can have conditionals, comparisons and whatnot.
multcat
Not everything can be easily catagorised into one thing. This lets you put a post into multiple places. It'd be nice if all the categories a post was under was displayed as part of the category path
rendertime
Calculates the amount of time the page took to render

On my todo list is to convert from a table based layout to a fluid CSS one. It'll probably be a 3-columned look with fixed-width sidebars since negative margins looks are harder to get right.

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Wed, 09 Nov 2005

Blogging with a phone

Or 'mobloging' for short. Basically it is using your mobile phone to add content to your blog. All very interesting, except when you get to the details.

Stewart Smith gave it a whirl ([1], [2]) with fairly predictable results. This is because the message you might receive is dependent on the phone manufacturer and the MMC does to your message. And that is before it might be mangled along the way via email.

Basically most phones (or MMCs) will convert the content to either Base32 or, more commonly, Base64. Generally the MMS is composed of only two parts, and then sent to an email address. From there you'll have to write something that takes the email and converts it into a blog entry.

A while ago a friend of mine wanted to do the same, so I wrote some perl to do it for him. It seemed to work for him (with some tweaks) and it might be enough for you too. You can grab it here However you might find it simpler to use GNU Arch and register http://www.progsoc.org/~wildfire/arch/projects/ and then browse in wildfire@progsoc.org--projects/moblog.

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Thu, 03 Nov 2005

IPv4 Link Local addresses

James Henstridge notes that zeroconf can cause large amounts of network traffic. Yes, that was true back in July. A bug was filed and then fixed within 2 days.

This was because I was at DebConf and able to see how zeroconf performed in a large environment. Basically there are two tests you do to determine whether an ARP packet is destined for you. And at the time, zeroconf, was only doing one of them.

Update: 18:20 AEST

Davyd asks why would you use zeroconf over NetworkManager. I haven't been able to put my finger on exactly why, but I feel the design is wrong.

I do believe there should be an overall co-ordinating process looking after networking on the user-space side of the fence though. I've been thinking about writing something which would do it too; but I haven't fleshed out my ideas enough to commit my editor to coding.

Oh, one bug that NetworkManager does have is that it only allocates IPv4LL addresses when it fails to acquire one from the DHCP server. This is wrong and goes against RFC3927.

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Wed, 02 Nov 2005

Yay!

First post. I too have decided to get into the whole blogging scene.

I looked around at various pieces of software and only blosxom and pyblosxom fitted my criteria.

My criteria was pretty simple:

Both blosxom and pyblosxom have those but I found it easier to get blosxom setup and running. Eventually I'll write up a colophon about what I have and how it is configured. However, please excuse the very rudimentary setup I have — it'll get better in time.

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ॐ (aum) - what was, what is and what will be, wildfire's musings

Anand Kumria
wildfire@progsoc.org

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