Justin's Blog

June 29, 2004

Succesful disection of a Powerbook (kindof)

After sending my powerbook to Apple when I (ahem) erased the OpenFirmware, the fan would spin up and make a terrible noise. This got to the point when I had a weird look from Roger when it happened and Aimee decided that night she wanted to throw it out the window.

I decided to "fix" this by taking my favourite machine apart. After about an hour of fumbling with trying to get the keyboard off (there is a screw that connects the keyboard under the memory) I managed to get at the mainboard and the fan. Some muppet at Apple had decided to tape over the fan before putting the machine back together.

Apart from a slightly warped keyboard (after all the pulling) it all seemed to go well...

...until I powered it on an the mouse didn't work. I thought it wasn't that bad and I couldn't be bothered to open it up again (about 25 screws!) so I used my macally mouse instead. After going to write the Postfix chapter when I got home, the thing just turned itself off when I picked it up.

Slightly worried and concerned I then opened it up again an reconnected the mouse to the mainboard and jiggled a few wires and I am now working on a lovely, if slightly deflowered powerbook.

Let this be a warning, do not mess with your powerbook unless you do not have warranty and you think you can fix it (like a loud fan).

Now that I know how to open the machine up, I can upgrade my hard drive to a 60gig when Toshiba releases them. Nice!

June 24, 2004

IM Status

I found an IM status site that allows you to put lovely little icons on your site telling the rest of the world your online status. It does it by requesting an image from an IM listener that will check whether your account is logged in via the chosen IM network.

Very nice indeed.

Book is on Amazon

Not quite sure how, but the book Roger and I are writing is on Amazon. Slightly scary!

June 17, 2004

Harry Potter

Went with Aimee to see the new Harry Potter film. It was quite good. The story is a lot darker and under new direction, the film is more enthralling than previous attempts.

As usual with films that have been done by Cinecite, we stayed to wath all of the credits to see which of our friends got a mention. And quite a few did.

Aimee's film credit list as a production co-ordinator is growing quickly with Tomb Raider II, Ella Enchanted and Troy to name a few.

June 16, 2004

Logcheck RPM for 9.1

Saw your response James. I sorted out the problem, was a typo further up in the file that made the /etc/logcheck directory under RPM_BUILD_ROOT. Thanks anyway man. I have made the logcheck RPM and spec file available here.

Enjoy.

Derren Brown

Went to see Derren Brown on Monday night for a night of weird mind manipulation stuff.

His show is trully excellent, with a lot of really good magic and psychological tricks. One heckler got the come back of "If you don't keep quiet I can make you wet the bed with the rest of your life", and I trully think the guy could do it!

The second half which has been shrouded in secrecy in the press is fantastic, and I will not spoil it for you here. Needless to say it was great.

I have great admiration for the guy, the English David Blaine, with a lot more character and charisma, which let's face it ain't that hard. Go see!

June 12, 2004

Feeling poorly

Woke up yesterday with a bad throat, and it just kept on getting worse.
After having a bad day at a customer site with some SLOX problems that was the last thing I needed! On a good note, the netline developers are helping to resolve the problem with using a.n.other LDAP source (not OpenLDAP, but another BIG LDAP type of server). The Groupware part of SLOX seems to have a few hard coded LDAP serches that will not work with other LDAP server layouts, i.e. large user data split over sub trees in an LDAP server. Hopefully the guys will see this is a pretty big issue if they want it to scale.

I will probably post details of the work I have done to make SLOX highly available and very scalable (thousands as opposed to hundreds of users) once the project has finished.

SPEC file hell

Writing the RPM chapter of the book and I have created a spec file for logcheck for SUSE. The thing works 99%, but it keeps on barfing out saying it cannot find /etc/logcheck %dir and /etc/logcheck/* %conf. The thing is, the bloody files exist in $RPM_BUILD_ROOT. I have been trying to get this thing to work for hours and it won't budge:

%files
%defattr(644,root,root,755)
%doc CHANGES CREDITS README* systems/linux/README*
%attr(700,root,root) %dir /etc/logcheck
%attr(600,root,root) %config(noreplace) /etc/logcheck/*
%attr(700,root,root) /etc/cron.hourly/logcheck
%attr(755,root,root) /usr/sbin/logcheck.sh
%attr(755,root,root) /usr/sbin/logtail

Any see the problem ? Because I sure can't!

June 10, 2004

SCO 2nd quater con call part III

On Open Sourcing Solaris:

"Sun has the broadest rights of all SCO's licensee's and have been a good licensee"

"We [SCO] have opened a lot of Unix over the years"

"I [SCO] am confident that Sun will do the right thing by the SCO/Unix IP rights"

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Superb! The revenue from the SCOsource initiative is $11,000, that figures out at 11 people buying a 1 CPU license in the quarter.

SCO 2nd quater con call part II

They were just asked how they see winning the Novell case as there is no record of SCO's copyright claim.

SCO says: "They feel very strongly about the case" and "we are waiting on a return from the Judge on whether to dismiss or move to a federal court". No definitive answers from SCO on that one then!

--

Also, SCO say they would have gone out of business if they had not sued the relevant parties as the damage to their IP would have crippled them. I would have thought the fact that SCO's products were being beaten by Linux solutions would have done that for them, not the IP.
Oh. hold on a minute! How would they fix that. Maybe they should damage Linux as much as possible in court, BINGO!

--

SCO 2nd quater con call

Just listening on the SCO 2nd Quarter Financials Conference Call. Maurin O'Gara is grilling Darl at the moment and she does not seem to like what Darl is talking about. Darl seemed to make a point about the fact that the pipeline of 3Q is "quite" strong, from their Unix business and not the SCOsource revenue. They blame the slowdown in SCOSource on Novell "slandering" their claims for the IP in Unix. Of course Darl reaffirmed that SCO has retaliated by taking Novell to court.

Not much was said regarding the IBM case, which I assume is because of recent news from the courts in IBM's favour.

Updates as they come

June 09, 2004

Evo and Ximian

As most people who know me know (eh?!), I am a big Ximian/Evolution fan. Watching the news sites recently, I was glad to see Nat talking sense with the way he sees Novell going with their Linux strategy. Talking of Nat, the work on dashboard seems really cool. Hopefully it will be fully integrated into Gnome or Ximian in the future.
On the Evolution note, seeing as Novell has OS'ed the Exchange connector, I would love to take a look at trying to write one for Domino. Not sure how easy it would be or whether Lotus/IBM uses open protocols (WebDAV maybe ?). Jon, what do you reckon mate ? Can it be done ?

Jesus H Christ!

Got home this afternoon and washed up while Aimee was tidying the front room. I put my hand in the washing glove and felt as if something was in the glove. Pushed it from the outside and thought I would leave it while I washed up, then it started to irritate me and I took the glove off and a BIG FUCKING SPIDER fell out. I shat myself, nearly literally. Much profanity and shouting five minutes later I calmed down and carried on with the washing up. What the hell is happening to the world that would make a vloody spider crawl into a washing up glove and "rest". Little git.

June 08, 2004

BB

Well, Big Brother is well into the swing of it now and I am slowly getting hooked. It is great that BB is a lot more evil this year, providing us poor saps with telly that is blatently a reflection of our car crash mentality. But all good clean fun. Feel slightly sorry for the two people in the house who have got it on as they talk to big brother about their feeling more than they do to each other. Michelle seems to have fallen head over heels for the guy (Stewart I think his name is) and the feelings are not reciprocated. Poor lass!

June 04, 2004

Why should Java be open source!?

Why is ER making so much fuss over Java being open source !? I just do not understand it. Companies still need an edge over competition, and if Sun's JRE is faster than the competition, then so be it. Kudos to them! The Java API is open, we have open source Java environments (blackbox is an example).

I have always believed in the idea that if you write it, they will code! (ala Field of Dreams) Java is not loved by everyone, but it is a good system to run pervasive code on. It is used in business logic because of J2EE, and it is an open standard! We do not NEED anything more than that for Java. People say open source developers write the best code, so prove it, write an alternative to Sun's Java and make it faster and better. We are a technical community, and business is not what seems to be a driver for most of us. Business is a financial community, and technical reasoning is not a driver to excel. Money is.

I thought open source developer were supposed to build code that excelled in quality. Do you not want a challenge anymore ? Take blackbox and make it better, but do not expect Sun to open source Java, it makes no sense to them and would not help us in anyway. We can stand on our own two feet thankyou very much!

Oh and before people send dumb comments about me being a capitalist... ...Money drives the world, it will not change. If it is not money that exchanges hands, it will be beans, or grains of sand. We are a socialogical entity that needs to feel we have achieved, and to do that we need recognition of our work. Regardless of whether it is kudos from the Linux community, or catching fish to feed our family. At the end of the day, you don't get something for nothing, humans cannot cope with that concept regardless of our ideals.

June 03, 2004

TCP/IP

Just finished the TCP/IP chapter in the book. I now realise how hard it is to explain TCP/IP to someone who has not done any networking before. People assume that it all works as if by magic, but quoting Mike Knell in an email to me:

"Yeah, there are some difficult concepts to get across - explaining one thing tends to uncover a whole bunch of other things which need explaining for the first thing to make sense. Try explaining that TCP and IP are two completely seperate protocols and you suddenly have to talk about UDP, whereupon you have to talk about stream and datagram protocols to explain why TCP and UDP are different, and then talk about end-to-end error correction and network resilience to explain why we need TCP at all, and before you know it you've rewritten Tanenbaum. Summarising networking in a few pages is nigh on impossible."

Kinda sums up what I was thinking really! If there is one chapter I am worried about it is the TCP/IP as it will either be to difficult for some or to high level for others. Although I did stop at putting in the layout of TCP/IP as that would just confuse the hell out of new people.