s5h.net

2007-04-27 kernel patching guide

There is now a short guide on how to use the kernel patches on this site. I thought there was some point in putting it up as I noticed just how much data the Ubuntu update downloads. Does Mark have no concern for their servers network connections! It's obvious that they have the bandwidth and lots in reserve as I was able to get a constant 2mib/sec from their servers. That's pretty much amazing considering how fresh this update is.

The kernel patch thing was just me thinking about how easy it would be to save www.kernel.org some network traffic if we all used their patches, but there is no obvious links to how these should be applied on the kernel.org host.

2007-04-25 vista is not mac os x

Thanks to Richard Rasker for posting this to COLA. Nice to see someone letting people know just how MS "innovate".

2007-04-24 install vista in under 2 minutes

This is so funny, I just have to post it. I hope youtube don't remove this video.

        just knocked some java together

One of the things that I've spoken about before when loading objects is that a serialised load is much faster than perhaps running through the public constructors and creating a new object. In theory the serialised object should just be a simple JIT load (given my guess as the bytes on disk look a lot like bytecode) this should be much like copying a struct to memory in C.

Anyway, this snippet that I've bashed together tonight should just show that an object can be written to disk and then loaded back in. Given this knowledge it's possible to create a simple plugin system for your apps. Just create some methods in your plugin API as abstract, such as 'void onDataArrival( ActionObject a )' so when the plugins override this it can do something useful.

import java.io.*;

abstract class MySerial {
	abstract public void runThis();
	public MySerial() {
	}
}

class ClassData extends MySerial implements Serializable {
	public String myName;

	public void runThis() {
		System.out.println( "hello from : " + this.myName );
		return;
	}

}

public class SerialiseTest {
	public static void main( String []args ) {
		SerialiseTest st = new SerialiseTest();
	}

	public SerialiseTest() {
		ClassData c = new ClassData();
		c.myName = "class data";

		try {
			FileOutputStream fos = 
				new FileOutputStream( "test.dat" );
			ObjectOutputStream oos = 
				new ObjectOutputStream(fos);
			oos.writeObject(c);
			oos.flush();
		}
		catch( Exception ex ) {
			System.out.println( ex.toString() );
		}
		try {
			FileInputStream fis = 
				new FileInputStream("test.dat" );

			ObjectInputStream ois = 
				new ObjectInputStream(fis);
			Object o = ois.readObject();

			/**
			 * and here is the shebang of the whole example
			 */
			((MySerial)o).runThis();
		}
		catch( Exception ex ) {
			System.out.println( ex.toString() );
		}
			

	}
}

My only problem with J2ME is that it cannot handle object serialisation, it's not possible to load and unload large objects using serialisation. This requires that the tiny devices have to do a lot of work that could otherwise be done beforehand and simply loaded on demand.

2007-04-23 how to grind my gears

itunes really grinds my gears. AFAICS ipod nano on windows just about refuses to play music connected to the usb charger and run using the computer as the power supply. Unlike on the gnu/linux system where I can just `eject` the ipod and use the computer as the power source, itunes has to eject he ipod. I cannot find the appropriate place to eject it on the Windows system.

To make matters worse, itunes is a huge program that's bloated to death. Anyone who has seen Se7en and can remember the gluttony scene will know just what I'm writing about. This huge program has to load before I can eject it. This loading can take about half a minute on a good day.

So, recently itunes told me that my ipod database was corrupt. So I have to repair. I cannot play my music without doing this. Repair, doesn't repair, it just purges and formats. Wonderful. Music collection gone.

I take this on the chin and spend the day without music. That following evening I make no mistake and repopulate my ipod with a handful of recent music. Wonder in to the office and find that after plugging in the ipod, it resyncs with an empty database. The frustration this creates causes a stiffness in my neck that has not subsided for the past week.

So, why should a simple thing like running an ipod from USB become so much trouble? Isn't the ipod supposed to be the people's personal mp3 player? Everything about this player has turned into something so horrible. It's pretty much useless if the media does not have ID3 information. The lack of which has caused me to spend hours writing scripts to extract the information and reassign. I say hours because one script is never enough, the media format can vary so dramatically that it does require a new script on almost every album.

2007-04-22 What a weird change

Seems there has been a fork on the webalizer code in debian that now supports kb in/out stats. Previously webalizer would use the combined LogFormat quite happily to produce the graphs, now we can see some more detail. For copy/paste here is the LogFormat line:

LogFormat "%h %l %u %t \"%r\" %>s %b \"%{Referer}i\" \"%{User-Agent}i\" %I %O" combinedio

What got me caught out is that the change was not part of any of the official documentation on the mrunix/software.html site, so searching for how to record kb/in could prove tormenting!

In other events, I have hit a cross roads, there is a running club that I would like to join, however, they meet on the same night as the Russian classes that I go to. It would be nice to be able to do both, but I don't think it's going to be possible. I cannot imagine that the Runners are going to kick off after 21:30 hours.

2007-04-16 reading too much

Why is it that I buy more books than I can ever Read? Perhaps it is possible to get by with only reading a portion of the book to find an answer. Well, Richard Dawkins - The selfish gene is on it's way, accompanied by Jacek Artymiak - RadioBSD Crier. The latter is by the same author of Building firewalls with OpenBSD pf.

I am unsure if membership to Artymiak's group can provide better pricing for the journals maybe a quick email could answer this.

Someone must have thought of this previously, but should civilisation be on the brink of destruction, what would happen to all the books? Has there been a digitalisation project for all influential books that are greater than 100, 75 or 50 years in print?

If so, should they be in a common format such as plain ascii text, HTML, XML?

2007-04-08 pigs *can* fly

Yes that's right, pigs CAN fly, Debian etch/stable is released.

In other news I noticed the one of the mail servers at work had yet another rogue user who was sending lottery scan spam. So, as usual I removed all the junk mail and prevented access again.

What's really worrying about this sort of spam is that it's tied into ID theft.

2007-04-06 whoops!

Today I made one of those fatal errors, dropping the shorturl table. All those who had short URLs registered would have been effected for around 30 mins or so. To my delight I still had all the data on my screen, but it was not in a database.

Thanks to urxvt wrapping the rows I was able to copy the data into a text file and run an almighty regex on the lot to convert it to insert statements to return the data.

That aside, the linux news reader has been dramatically improved today. No more URL wrapping. It's not got any "pre" tags any more, so it should be a little easier and friendlier to read.

2007-04-04 windows_live_messenger--

For those that don't know. One of my computers at work is MS based. Sometimes the only way to make things work is to remove the NTUSER.DAT file. Both Visual Studio 2003/2005 are installed with vim plugin. All the useful things like putty/perl/python are installed, so is GIMP, sylpheed etc.

Back to the point in hand. Someone told me that I was using an old version of messenger, so trustingly I put the later version on. I knew it would hurt. What the fook book trook?! It's crap. Full of wasted space. What were the form designers thinking? All that junk serves no useful purpose.

It looks to me as though the programmers are trying to cram a load of pointless features into something that should take up no space. Who needs this? More to the point, who suggested it?

If the programmers looked at the open source alternatives they might see that what the user wants is to have their desktop back. They do not want something that is going to make the HDD spin excessively to swap the program in and out.

Having lived in the computing world for the past 10-15 years exclusively I can say that people want more than anything else, simplicty. I've seen all sorts of messengers and I can pretty much gamble my life and state that they got bad around the time that Yahoo! rammed a load of junk into their messenger, that would have been around 1997. People who were a little more savvy looked for alternatives, one of the popular choices was Trillian. When some users migrated to Trillian, Yahoo! switched protocols. Disgusting that the programmers and network providers do to keep customers.

MS frequently do the same, they change protocols to prevent the alternative software users from accessing the networks. There will always be a large portion of users who stick to the 'current' mainstream fads. Perhaps this is the largest portion of the users.

One thing that sticks out beyond everything else is that open protocols and standards prevail. We need only look at protocols such as IRC, SMTP, HTTP, WAV, Torrent, DNS, IMAP, POP, etc, these all work so well because anyone can freely implement the protocol. When we look at other protocols that cannot be freely used or implemented we can note how they fail.

This all said and taken on board, I predict that people will have great sufferings with MSN until they open their protocols, which is perhaps never going to happen. ICQ is the next best choice, there are dozens of clients for this and the network is free to use.

2007-04-02 april fools

I was looking over some past April fools day techie jokes and I found a reference to the IP Evil Bit. In earlier days we had the infinite monkey protocol suite. There's always scope for a good April fools joke, such as the python on planes web development framework.

Just for fun, here's a questionnaire that you may wish to fill out, how dirty are you?