Tim Elverston's latest kite appeals to the computer geek …
http://www.windfiredesigns.com/timbofolio_pages/PointerKite.html
He promises more to come in the OS series of kites …. probably Windows :-(
]]>The server doesn't run a GUI of course, so I do music playback from the commandline with programs like mpg123 and mp3blaster.
I decided to dedicate the first text console to playback, so I needed to replace the login prompt with the mp3blaster program. I hadn't noticed that Ubuntu no longer has an /etc/inittab file, because it has switched to the more flexible Upstart system, so it took a few minuted to find out how to get this set up.
The first port of call is the /etc/event.d/tty1 file, which by default is running getty for us. I'm keeping getty (although other tty programs are out there and may do the job in a nicer way), so I need to ask it to run different “login” program, using the -n and -l options. Just for luck, I also set the TERM type explicitly.
getty doesn't like to send arguments to the login program, so I had to set up a small script to do the hard work. Make sure that the filesystem this script lives in is available when Upstart is started … however I suspect that Upstart is actually smart enough to figure this out :-)
/etc/event.d/tty1
# tty1 - getty # # This service maintains a getty on tty1 from the point the system is # started until it is shut down again. start on stopped rc2 start on stopped rc3 start on stopped rc4 start on stopped rc5 stop on runlevel 0 stop on runlevel 1 stop on runlevel 6 respawn #exec /sbin/getty 38400 tty1 exec /sbin/getty -n -l /usr/local/bin/jimp3 38400 tty1 linux
Next, the helper script; I need to invoke mp3blaster autostarting a playlist, but I also want it to run as my user, rather than root. Good old su is a simple way of achieving this.
/usr/local/bin/jimp3
#!/bin/sh /bin/su -c '/usr/bin/mp3blaster -a /home/jim/allmusic.lst' -- jim
No need to reboot the server to get this all running! Use the initctl command to find the ‘tty1’ job that is currently running a login shell, stop it and then restart it.
# initctl list control-alt-delete (stop) waiting logd (stop) waiting rc-default (stop) waiting rc0 (stop) waiting rc1 (stop) waiting rc2 (stop) waiting rc3 (stop) waiting rc4 (stop) waiting rc5 (stop) waiting rc6 (stop) waiting rcS (stop) waiting rcS-sulogin (stop) waiting sulogin (stop) waiting tty1 (start) running, process 5622 tty2 (start) running, process 4235 tty3 (start) running, process 4236 tty4 (start) running, process 4230 tty5 (start) running, process 4231 tty6 (start) running, process 4238
# initctl stop tty1 tty1 (stop) running, process 5622 tty1 (stop) pre-stop, (main) process 5622 tty1 (stop) stopping, process 5622 tty1 (stop) killed, process 5622 tty1 (stop) post-stop tty1 (stop) waiting
# initctl start tty1 tty1 (start) waiting tty1 (start) starting tty1 (start) pre-start tty1 (start) spawned, process 6469 tty1 (start) post-start, (main) process 6469 tty1 (start) running, process 6469
Job done! You should now have a copy of mp3blaster running on the first virtual console, playing your playlist for you, as your userid … and if you quit the program, it'll restart straight away.
]]>http://www.windfiredesigns.com/timbofolio_pages/PointerKite.html
He promises more to come in the OS series of kites …. probably Windows :-(
]]>Well, there's the point. On Twitter, you're not really talking about things, it's too lightweight. You can't say anything subtle, unless it's an in-joke. I'd rather have a few high-quality interactions than a flood of noise.
It's an interesting experience to look out at a social network of friends of friends, but a touch voyeuristic. So, my account is now deleted. Perhaps I'll get round to more blog entries now …
]]>The copyleft premise is this: source code has been published in a written form, therefore copyright law restricts your ability to distribute copies of it. A Free Software license grants you an additional license, allowing you to distribute copies; but only if you follow certain conditions.
If you fail to follow the conditions, you are not allowed to claim usage of the Free Software license; therefore full copyright law is in play, and you cannot distribute copies at all.
However, in the US at least, it hasn't been clear whether the conditions attached to these Free Software licenses have actually been “conditions”, and aren't just “contractual covenants”. It makes a big difference when you break them; in the latter case, you are penalised for breaking a contract, and that's all. It would probably result in some monetary damages being due, and they're difficult to assess when the original product was generally available without charges being made. However, given that these clauses are now known to be “conditions”, breaking them means that you have no license at all, and you are infringing copyright – and there is no confusion here regarding money or lack of money.
So, a high-quality precedant from the US legal system supporting the copyleft principal.
]]>See /articles/rmsrnz/index.html for the full transcript.
]]>… He sat up, and, having sipped some tea, turned over his letters. One of them was from Lord Henry, and had been brought by hand that morning. He hesitated for a moment, and then put it aside. The others he opened listlessly. They contained the usual collection of cards, invitations to dinner, tickets for private views, programmes of charity concerts, and the like, that are showered on fashionable young men every morning during the season. There was a rather heavy bill, for a chased silver Louis Quinze toilet-set, that he had not yet had the courage to send on to his guardians, who were extremely old-fashioned people and did not realise that we live in an age where unnecessary things are our only necessities, and there were several rather courteously worded communications from Jermyn Street money-lenders offering to advance any sum of money at a moment's notice and at the most reasonable rates of interest.
]]>Rather than assume that he'd made a mistake, I tried it. It doesn't work, just like he said. A bug!
We're both using Ubuntu, so I turned to the Launchpad and checked for bugs on the adduser package. There was a “fixed” bug that said it fixed a specific failure, the inability to remove the Ubuntu default symlink ~/Examples, in 2006. I checked my test machine, and this was exactly the problem I was seeing – everything except ~/Examples had been removed OK.
Further testing showed that the --remove-home option worked just fine. Hmmm …
Luckily, deluser isn't an executable, it's a perl script. So I was able to do some digging, even though my perl is quite rusty (thanks http://perldoc.perl.org/ !) I added some debug comments and managed to categorise the problem … which lead to a fix … and a small patch file, all submitted onto the launchpad bug.
Usually I stop at the categorise-and-report stage. It's nice to be able to propose a fix too :-)
]]>I have an Excel spreadsheet, with some currency values formatted as “Accounting”, which provides nice alignment of the currency symbol and decimal point.
When these cells are cut/paste'd into Word, the presentation of these cells is “preserved” by simulating the alignment with multiple spaces … but actually these cause the presentation to break, and the cell contents split onto multiple lines, and no longer align.
So, the hack would be to replace all those extra spaces, wouldn't it? Except MS Word doesn't have greedy matching! You can't replace, say, 8 spaces with a pattern of <space><star> … or even <space><at> (which is the “one or more” operator). You have to manually repeatedly do replace-all for decreasing explicit numbers of spaces; e.g. repeat “replace-all <space>{8} with <space>” until there are no matches, then repeat “replace-all <space>{4} with <space>” until there are no matches, then {2} …
]]>Therefore I have to use just the one incoming number – it belongs to work, not me. And my outgoing personal calls have to be separated out from the work ones for expenses purposes, too.
I've been waiting for the sensible option – a phone that can hold two SIM cards at the same time. That way, you can differentiate between personal and work calls both incoming and outgoing; and if you change employer you don't lose all your contact data and have to change your number!
While reading a post about the OpenMoko GTA02 getting into production, I spotted a google ad for “Dual SIM phones”, and ended up on a page from a Malaysian company, DuoSIM. It looks like the world is finally catching up on what people really need from their technology, eh?
(Now, what will be more fun? An OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner or the new iPhone? Both with Wifi, touch screen, bluetooth, GPS, accelerometer, similar battery life; the iPhone has significant data storage that the Neo doesn't (but it will take microSD), but has a mostly-closed development environment …)
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