Filed under: Old Advogato Posts | I dream of rain

[ from advogato, entry #100 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2007-07-11T14:55:38-04:00

"But here's the key: for internal use, not just for showing other people our photos."

"We need something that combines 'we'd like to show people some photos' with 'we have a lot of photos we just store and annotate.'"

These phrases are exactly what I asked myself a few years ago. After some heavy digging around, I settled upon Photo Organizer. I started customizing it to my needs, and ended up contributing so much that I eventually was handed maintainership of the project.

http://po.shaftnet.org is the project's current home.

It's not all that you asked for, but it wants to be. It's database-driven (PostgreSQL), fundamentally multi-user, and is intended to be a photographer's primary image repository. It has decent access controls (beyond "public" and "private", that is) and pretty good tagging abilities. It has good export capabilities, is GPL'ed, and runs on your own server, so there's no danger of lock-in.

As an added bonus you can group together multiple versions of photos. Its filesystem layout makes it fairly easy to back up, but there's no automatic mechanism for doing so. (I use a nightly cron job that does a database dump and an rsync)

My personal installation runs off a server at home, and currently manages just shy of 30K photos taking up some 113 gigs.

Photo Organizer sounds like it is a fairly close match for your stated needs, and is improving continually as new itches come up. :)

[ from advogato, entry #62 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2006-10-10T20:21:08-04:00

Doing my part to help the spamvogato problem go away.

Yo is one more cert from being deleted, but there's a large ring underneath that account that needs to be nuked first, so don't nuke Yo just yet...

[ from advogato, entry #61 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2006-05-16T15:03:43-04:00

Wow, it's been nearly three years since the last entry here. But as the saying goes, happy and/or busy people don't keep journals. But I apparently disqualify enough to post every month or so on my own self-hosted journal.

I haven't been too heavily involved with Free Software as of late; my staring at a computer hacking on code for a living has left me in a general "do anything except use a computer when I have free time" state. I'm sure many here would agree. Does that make me a luddite? I, for one, don't particularly care!

So what brings me out of my three-year hiatus here? Last week I inherited Photo Organizer, a PHP-based webapp designed to manage large (tens of thousands) of photographs. I've been using it for almost a year, and have made extensive changes to the codebase that were occasionally merged back into the mainline. The original author, Balint Kis, asked me to take over, and I graciously accepted.

Photo Organizer is yet-another-PHP-photo-gallery, but is intended for use by professional photographers to keep track of everything, instead of the "I need to post some photos online" usage pattern (and social networking) that most others follow. That's what initially sold me on it, and I intend to follow that philosophy for future development. It's scalable (although searching through hundreds of thousands of images can be a drag) and its main competition costs lots of money and requires proprietary OSes.

I still can't stand PHP. If it tells you anything I have to fight off regular urges to rewrite PO using mod_perl.

Meanwhile, I'm still maintaining linux-wlan-ng, although it's more or less considered obselete. Modern Linux kernels have vastly improved to the point where the only reason linux-wlan-ng has for existing is to support the Prism2.5/3 USB widgets, which are already hard to find. It would take less work to port USB support to the in-kernel drivers than it would take to bring linux-wlan-ng into the modern age. And that's me speaking as the project maintainer. So it gets updates to build/run on modern kernels, and that's about it.

[ from advogato, entry #60 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-08-05T04:05:04-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

0.2.1-pre11 is out. With Genesis mode support for RAM downloading of primary firmware images, and USB on 2.5/2.6. Whee, running out of things to do with that codebase.. but it's stabilizing quite nicely. And that's what counts with a driver, eh?

On a somewhat related note, 802.1x is a lovely hairball to implement. Cranking it out though. It's nice to be working on software for a change. At least if it's broken I can fix it, instead wondering if it's a hardware bug or just bad documentation... And being under NDA so I can't even rant about it appropriately. :)

Other hax0ring

After a few very close calls, it was decreed that my music array needed to be properly backed up. Rather than ending up with a stack of 600 or so CD-Rs, I picked up a DVD-R drive, whipped up some perl scripts and a database, and now I'm up to the 36th disk. Out of an estimated 95. Close calls included two disks going offline, a motherboard going on the fritz, then another disk getting knocked offline, then finally corruption introduced by a bad cable when being rebuilt. Fortunately, ext3 saved the day -- by having a massive journal at the head of the disk.. so only the superblock and the journal were trashed instead of the data..

The database of files and md5sums of my collection has also helped me begin to elimate duplicates and other stuff, and it's going to be the basis for some fancy playlist mangling stuff I have cooking around in the back of my mind.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Hippiness

"Golf's Ultimate Postgame Show" WTF? Isn't that an oxymoron?

Samurai Jack rocks.

Playing around with craft stuff is a lot of fun. I need to get some of these things out of my head before I go mad. though I have a lot of work to do on my technique. Ah, hell, just wanna have fun. And make pretty things in the process.

Just finished reading Whirlwind, by James Clavell.. set in the first few months of 1979, during the thick of the Iranian Revolution. And the time when my family was um, encouraged to leave Tabriz. So yes, Historical Fiction can indeed hit home pretty close indeed... Because the people, places, events, and emotions are quite real.

Getting out? What's that? *grin* Going to be taking a road trip in September, up around Asheville, North Carolina. Just me and Nature and lots of photographs. But in the mean time, there are still a few parks I want to visit down here.

I need to find me some local drama for a change. But until then, there's always target practice.

[ from advogato, entry #59 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-07-14T15:58:05-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

0.2.1-pre10 rolled out this morning. With no changes for two weeks.. Mostly USB cleanups, but also made some shared variables volatile to work around some obscure bugs caused by register-localizing on some architechures. I want to get the 2.5/2.6 USB build working.. and then 0.2.1-final will go out. It's mainly a matter of sitting down with it, and I haven't had the time or inclination lately. But it's stabilizing nicely otherwise!

Other hax0ring

This weekend I waded into GNUMP3d and whipped up a patch to vastly improve the speed of the new tag cache code, and fix a few annoying..regressions that bothered me. Free Software at its finest -- it itched, and I scratched it.

It was my first foray into non-kernel code for quite a while.. and my first real perl hax0ring in more than a year. Quite a pleasant change, and instant gratification, as opposed to the "hey, it crashes less!" of kernel hacking.

GNUMP3d is one of those things that just.. works. It makes dealing with my massive mp3 collection manageable. I use it on a daily basis.. streaming music in from work. It was very nice to be able to contribute something back. Of course, whether or not it'll get merged is another matter entirely..

It got me thinking again about things I'd like to do with it.. the tag cache opens up the door for a lot of powerful things, automatic playlist generation in particular.. including thigns like "hate" lists and other such niceties. There are many things whirring around right now.. I'd like to see auto-magic playlist rewriting to take an on-disk playlist that works, converting it into something that can be streamed as-is, for example.

Other occurances

I'm finally feeling productive again, and it's showing in everything.. got a lot of work done around my apartment, cleaning, reading, hax0ring on strange code.. scratching all sorts of itches that have been nagging at me for a while.

I also finally pulled apart my Music server to remove a fan that's been rattling away for months now. It's amazing, how much quieter the room is.. there was also a thick caking of gunk over all of the fan inlets.

Unfortunately, my air filter thingey has croaked.. I keep hearing some kind of arcing every 30 or so seconds when it's on. It may be prudent to investigate something along the lines of that Sharper Image "Ionic Breeze" thingey, mainly because it's silent. the filter made an incredible difference in my apartment -- even more so when you consider I'm allergic to cats, and I have two of them.

Oh, shameless plug -- no self-respecting hacker would be without a beanbag couch. Combined with wireless networks, you can pretty much plop out, wriggle yourself comfortable, and hack away for hours on end in total comfort. I picked up a beanbag couch from Cord-a-roy's and I love it more every time I sink into it. Of course, it replaced a fairly uncomfortable loveseat.. and best of all, I can stretch out on this thing completely. As an added bonus the stuffing is contained within two pouches that flatten out into a pair of king-sized mattresses.

[ from advogato, entry #58 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-06-10T20:46:13-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

0.2.1-pre7 released this morning. Not much changed from -pre6, mainly a few more USB tweaks and changes to the tx_timeout code to make it work properly. Unfortunately there seems to be some kind of pcmcia-related issue on some systems; it would appear to be a script problem. Still soliciting feedback.

IEEE 802.1x

Adding in support on the supplicant side is actually pretty simple; primarily script work, plus the integration into the supplicant. Need to get one of these off-the-shelf APs flashed up and working so I have something to test against, and then the fun can commence.

Other hax0ring

My Dell Inspiron 4100 now has a 32M GeForce2Go grafix card in it. Managed to get my hands on that rare item, and replaced the 16M Radeon M6. They're more or less equivalent feature- and speed-wise, but the extra 16 megs of texture RAM makes an incredible difference. Unfortuntately, on 2.4 rivafb doesn't work at all, and under 2.5, I can't switch beyond 640x480. X locks up if I quit and restart it (both with the XFree 'nv' driver and binary 'nvidia' driver). And so far, apm suspend seems to be busted too. *sigh* Granted, the ATI card needed a lot of patches to the radeonfb code, but it did work with everything else. As for the suspending problem.. I may just go ahead and try to get the ACPI event scripts written and just abandon APM entirely. More experimentation is still needed, but the patched DSDT tables took care of the glaring ACPI problems, at least.

In other news

Ended up at Orlando Speedworld for the bi-annual Crash-a-rama. This is quite a social event, as evidenced by the amount of beer consumed and vehicles destroyed. The title event was the crazy-eight school bus races. Lots of blurry pictures are here, if you're interested. Other events included boat-trailer races and three different destruction derbys.

That evening was proof that I "need" to buy a better digital camera. One that handles low-light better. But in the mean time, it's not in my budget, and what I have works quite well most of the time.

[ from advogato, entry #57 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-06-05T22:42:07-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

0.2.1-pre6 is out. All sorts of internal changes and cleanups, especially with respect to the USB driver. Chris Rankin has taken up the task of deciphering that mess and has made an incredible difference in its reliability and robustness. Folks, this is how Free Software is supposed to work!

2.5 Synaptics Input Driver

Well, haven't touched it since then. Apparently there's another project underway to do the same thing, and their approach is a lot better in many ways. When I pick things back up again, I'll be working on that other code.

IEEE 802.1x

Spent many hours today pouring over the spec and the two open-source 802.1x projects. Unfortunately, they've both concentrated on the supplicant (client), leaving the authenticator (server) either unimplemented (802.1x)or in an uncompilable mess(Open1x). And since I'm mostly interested in the authenticator side of things, my work's definately cut out for me.

First up is coding this stuff from the perspective of a thin wireless chipset, then comes the harder part of making it work with the "smart" Prism chipsets. That still should be straightforward, at least on the client side of things, so I should be able to shoehorn the necessary client stuff into linux-wlan-ng without much effort.

Other hax0ring

My laptop's back together now. The screen hinges cracked; I guess a year and a half of [ab]use was too much for 'em. And it was out of warranty. But it's all good now. And only ran me $40 for the parts. Whew.

I've been itching for a new project lately; lots of things I could pick back up again (FreeSCI) or branch out and dig into things relating to my mp3 collection, such as a semi-intelligent playlist editor system, or re-creating parts of the now-completely-defunct Incanta Music Service. Somewhat related to that; I might be able to open-source a few parts of my work there; in particular I'm still quite proud of the Dynamic DNS stuff. Now if only I can come up with another practical use for it!

Essentially, you construct a special hostname that tells the DNS server what service you want and a few other optional doodads of information, and the backend will take things like your source ip, the service, available servers, failed servers, and all sorts of thigns like that, and spit out a response that's best for you. All using standard DNS protocols and zone tables. Sound tantalizing, anyone?

Life, Mis^H^H^HLiberty, and the pursuit of Happiness

The stupidest thing I've done in the past month or so was standing on the beach with a camera during a heavy thunderstorm. Didn't get any lightning shots, unfortunately.. and my camera really does suck in lower-light conditions.

I also jumped out of a perfectly good plane at 13,500 feet. Quite an experience; I highly recommend it, especially if you're afraid of heights. That said, it's further reinforced my desire to learn to hang glide. Once the canopy opened, I was in heaven. I can see myself liking freefall, but not when strapped to someone else.

And then I had my first experience on a dirt bike. Very different from ATVs, which I've had some experience with.. but I had quite a ball, once I got used to the handling. Had a couple of interesting wipeouts, though I consider myself fortunate to have walked away from it all with nothing worse than a nasty burn on my hand from landing on the exhaust manifold. Burnt through my glove. Yick.

Now all of this was in reverse chronological order. Yup, the lighting was the stupidest thing. :)

Getting out

On a slightly more [inter-]personal level, still trying to get out and meet people. With very little success, but I suppose that's mostly my fault. Anyone else live near Melbourne, Florida? It sucks when most people you know live some 500 or so miles away.

It's also eerie to find out that you're much better in chess than you thought, yet that you still suck. I think I just don't have the patience or .. mental picture to do well yet. So I've branched out, started playing Go. Anyone out there want to take pity on a very much-so newbie and show me a thing or two? I'm definately not losing as badly as I used to (vs gnugo) but it's a loooong way to go yet.

But.. been feeling even more out of place than usual lately. Like there's something wrong with [my perception of ] the world that I can't quite get a finger on. That in of itself isn't too bad... but.. it does make it that much harder to find a direction to go in. Still, I do what I can to make the most of what I have.

I need to try to stimulate the creative parts of myself again, but it's hard... well, coding is certianly creative, but it's still mostly to some external set of specifications rather than something I birth myself. My digital camera has probably been one of the best things along those lines so far. My dad's going to send me his old fully-manual SLR so I can learn how to properly take pictures.. and then I'll look into investing in something better on the digital front.

In the mean time, there's always the beach and books!

[ from advogato, entry #56 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-04-24T17:27:48-04:00

2.5 Synaptics Input Driver

Well, it's code complete. It's even feature complete, except for support for the four-button touchpads. Edge scrolling, dragging, programmable corner taps, multifinger support.. the works. (And it even works in the "standard" relative mode, if all you want to do is disable tap-to-click!)

Except for um, testing it out. :) That'll probably come tonight, after work. And then out goes a second release for those interested in testing. I know I'll need to export the various options to /proc or /sysfs or whatever, instead of module options.. but I want to leave that out until the rest of the driver is solid. Drop me a line if you want it sooner rather than later. :)

The Reality Construction Kit

Someone once told me, "Experience is a wonderful thing. It lets me see my mistakes every time I repeat them."

MichaelCrawford, you raise an interesting point, and one of my pet peeves.. I grew up being told "this is the way things are, deal with it", and, more importantly, was continually told what I couldn't do. And like a dutiful student, I went along with it, with a deeply buried secret belief that there was more out there, and "the way things were" seemed rather futile and pointless. It took me many years to realize that, yes, everyone else really can be (and indeed, usually is) wrong, that I control my own fate, and that I could accomplish anything I set myself to.

I find myself encouraging everything and everyone I can these days. Yet sometimes.. I find that I'm the one who needs encouraging, falling back into the old traps, when there are things I can't directly do anything about and I lose my momentum.

Now once you throw in other people, realities can start to get pretty screwy indeed, but that's another matter entirely. :)

[ from advogato, entry #55 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-04-23T15:05:14-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

0.2.1-pre2 made it out, with a bit more than was originally intented going into it. But it's all good. Apparently it's still busted on SMP boxen, so it's looking like I'm going to have to audit everything again. Too bad my old BP6 board gave up the ghost.

Other kernel hax0ring

Whipped up a patch against 2.5.68 to allow Synaptics Touchpad users to disable the tap-to-click "feature". Hopefully this'll be the start of a native Synaptics absolute-mode driver, with all sorts of yummy features currently unpossible with the 2.5 input layer.

Now as soon as the 2.5 radeonfb is fixed, I can switch over. :)

Reality Construction Kit

MichaelCrawford, that was one of the most deeply touching essays I've ever read. Brought up lots of scary things from my past, and indeed present...

We make our own reality. So if it sucks, we ultimately only have ourselves to blame. And it's also ultimately on our shoulders to change it. But to change.. we have to open up to the myriad of other possibilities around us.. and most importantly.. we have to really, really want to change.. because it is so hard. And even harder when there's a physiological reason holding us down.

But the endless possibilites are daunting, even arbitrary.. so we choose the direction we want. But what if we don't really know what we want? What if we feel that it doesn't matter what direction we go in? Yet we also control what we want.. or do we?

Is the only way we can truly say we have power over ourselves is through denial? I don't believe so.. because that is analogous to destruction.. and true power is the ability to build, create, renew. Denial, without something better to turn to.. is terrible indeed.

So we must broaden our horizons. Learn, explore, create, succeed and fail. Always striving, never complacent. Good things will come, but only if we work for them.

Then again, as someone far wiser than I put it, "If you're going to have delusions, you may as well go for the really grand ones."

Don't worry, be happy!

[ from advogato, entry #54 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-04-17T15:18:23-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

About to spit out 0.2.1-pre2, with the usual small pile of fixes. Probably the single most useful change is that we now detect the Lucent/Agere/Orinoco firmware and die gracefully instead of just "undefined behaivor" :) I have to take my hat off to Pavel Roskin and Chris Rankin, as they've been responsible for most of the bug reports and patches that have come in in recent months.

It's becoming time to resume working on the wireless extension code for linux-wlan-ng. The problem is that from my perspective, at least, it'll actually reduce functionality. For example, the RedHat network scripts grok WEXT, but how do I tell their scripts that I'm at work instead of at home, and what networks to join in each case (not to mention things like WEP keys!) The problem with just enabling the WEXT stuff is that it'll interfere with the wlanctl-ng command set; I get my network joined using the linux-wlan-ng scripts, then 'ifup wlan0' and then RH's [mis-]configured stuff will proceed to blindly trash what I have set up.

Another possibility is to only implement sets for WEXT >= 15, which also implies the COMMIT ioctl, which would also let us cleanly handle the ifstate_enable stuff more easily. My main constraint on WEXT is to not break the wlanctl-ng method of configuration, as it's considerably more flexible, with things like scanning and per-network configuration.

On a somewhat related note, I'm still dissappointed to see that nobody with an 802.11a or 802.11g chipset seems to be willing to at least pay lip service to Linux driver support; not even with a binary release. Ah, well. Time will sort that out.

Work

The uncooperative hardware is slowly getting beaten into submission. Gotta love those "undocumented features". Fortunately there's no shortage of things to work on, so if I get stuck, I can switch to something else. Cranking out steaming mounds of code in the process, whee.

And in other news

In just two weeks (and a total of three sessions!) I've drastically improved with that .38 revolver; getting considerably tighter groupings at increasingly distant targets. The trick, as always, is to simply not think and just do it. It's incredibly fun to boot.

Just to show I'm not some crazed violent pyschopath I'm also broadening my reading horizons again; currently reading works by Aristotle and whatever else I can get my hands on. So I'm a well-read crazed violent psychopath. Hmm. I'll shut up now.

I need to get back to learning Go. Anyone care to help a poor novice get up to speed?

[ from advogato, entry #53 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-04-03T23:24:27-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

Rolled out 0.2.1-pre1. Decided to leave the -pre on there as there are a few known problems that I want fixed before a new "stable" release is done. The biggest thing new is 2.5 support. Unfortunately, prism2_usb is busted, as the USB API changed a bit. Shouldn't be too hard to fix, but it's work I hadn't planned on doing. and don't have the time at the moment in any case. :)

Work

Beating my head against uncooperative hardware with terrible documentation. But it's slowly getting there.

More insanity

There Is No Lesser of the Two Evils is one of the most insightful editorials I've read about the mess that is Iraq. Worth a read.

And in somewhat unrelated news; had my first constructive experience with a .38 revolver. Did a lot better than I thought I would -- apparently the trick is to simply stop thinking, which is exceedingly difficult for me. This is what happens when you have an experienced instructor showing what you're doing wrong, and more importantly, what to do about it. Towards the end of the session I ended up getting almost all of my shots in the same spot, off-center but consistently so; figuring out what to do, and what not to do. This is also the first time I've shot something after knowing that I'm left-eye dominant but right-handed, which needless to say, changes things somewhat...

[ from advogato, entry #52 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-03-25T14:18:43-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

More misc fixes trickling in. Proving to be pretty solid, I'll probably break with the -pre version numbering and just go with 0.2.1 when everything's said and done. :)

On stupidity

Meanwhile, for future reference, 'rm -Rf /etc' is a bad idea, when you really wanted to run 'rm -Rf etc'. A couple of hours later, I had my home directories backed up, and proceeded to perform a full re-install.of my laptop with RH 8.0.94, soon-to-be RH9. Joy. There are a few quirks with their included kernel, but that's easily remedied. :)

So I proceeded to install 2.5.65. And almost got everything working. X would lock up hard on initializing, but I never really tried to figure that out because of a considerably more annoying problem -- the radeon frame buffer driver.

radeonfb

There are apparently four versions of the radeonfb driver floating around. Or maybe five now. :) There's the one in the 2.4.x mainline, there's the "official" one in the 2.4.x ppc tree, there's the one in the 2.5.x tree (based on the last ppc release) and finally, there are two sets of patches floating around. One adds suspend/resume support to current hardware (M9 in particular), and is against the 2.4.x ppc tree. Then there's the patch by Peter Horton, against the 2.4.x mainline, which among many other things, adds accelleration and fixes many many bugs. This latter version is the only one which actually works on my laptop. Everything else just displays garbage or locks up solid. It's been out since 2.4.19-pre2, and I've been using it almost as long. But.. it seems to have fallen into the bit bucket, ignored by everyone else.

Anyone have an idea what's going on with the radeonfb driver? Is it even worth it for me to try and pick this back up and push it to the various maintainers, and/or adapt it to 2.5.x/2.4.xPPC? The latter should be fairly straightforward, but the 2.5.x fbdev layer's gone through a bit of a restructuring.

[ from advogato, entry #51 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-03-12T01:34:30-04:00

First new entry in a little while. What's that ancient Chinese "Blessing" -- "May you live in Interesting Times?". So let's take it from the top.

linux-wlan-ng Released 0.2.0 last week, after a mini-flurry of patches that crawled in at the last minute. It's high time the version got bumped, as it's quite stable and a lot's changed under the hood since the last release (0.1.15) But since the last prerelease, more card idents, bugfixes, and internal cleanups to make the codebase a little less unpleasant to look at in places.

But as to the future of linux-wlan-ng.. I'm running out of things to do with it, as the hardware isn't changing, and if anything, is beginning to become eclipsed by newer hardware. But in the mean time, there's still life left. I'm currently playing around with getting it to build with 2.5.x kernels, which has already prompted some changes since 0.2.0. Unfortunately, due to the drastically different build system, it isn't a trivial undertaking to make everything build with 2.2/2.4/2.5, including crosscompilers and whatnot. As soon as I figure out a way of handling the different target types cleanly (ie pcmcia/pci/usb) with the new kbuild stuff, I'll put out a new -pre for testing by very brave people.

The problem comes from supporting four different interface types with the same source files -- only differing in #defines. compile one set, link; compile another set; link.. they all ave the same filenames, so we cheated by placing the object files in another directory. But since kernel 2.5.x forces us to use its build system, I need to figure out how to pull off something similar, or else rearrange all of the sources. I've only been at this since last night, so I'm confident that it's doable.

Work has been quite busy as of late, which is good because it's kept me sane. Lots of fun hardware to play with (and write drivers for), and existing drivers to port to new and interesting targets. The old "secret project" now does full PCI DMA and as of today is completely bytesexual (ie Big/Little Endian). Runs circles around the old prism2 minipci card I'm using in my laptop. (I do plan to take a page from HostAP and hook up Rx DMA on the prism2.. but I digress..)

Slowly knocking out my to-do list, so I can get on with implementing things like 802.1x and the new "WPA" buzzword. It's a shame none of this stuff will likely ever see the light of open-source day, especially as the chipset companies have us buried under many levels of NDAs... I wish they'd pull their heads out of their asses and realize strong official linux support would only help them sell more hardware!

But I love that I'm usually able to work on the cool projects instead of the more mindless things like web interfaces. Lots of new stuff coming in on the pipleline in the near future as well. :)

Life has been... nuts, but things have a way of turning out for the better -- if only because of our blood, sweat, and tears -- so the future is brighter than ever. Shaking the tree of "friends" who aren't, and reinforcing bonds with those who really matter.

Watched a bunch of movies last week when a couple of friends came to visit me, including Moulin Rouge, Signs, Run Lola Run and Death to Smoochie. Many many to go on the to-watch list, and my to-read book list keeps growing too. But that's what the beach is for!

My lease is up in two months. Hard to believe I've been here for ten months now... I not sure if I'm going to stay or try to move to a bigger place, but I do like it here; the apartment complex is nice and quiet. And I am fairly happy down here in Florida; the weather is warming back up, the beaches are beautiful (as are the Beach Bunnies!) and of course the people I work with are also great. We'll see what the apartment complex has to offer in a bigger place. Ironically, my main motivation for getting a bigger place is so I can have more wall space to hang things like the silk carpet that went up on Sunday. :) Well, and I'd also like a kitchen with more than one drawer and four square feet of usable couter space. Because I like to cook. really!

I've been participating in a drum circle for the last two months; I keep getting better, which is a very good sign, as I used to think I was beyond redeption. I picked up a ceramic dhoumbek to supplement my little aluminum one (which has since acqured a new skin) and they both sound very nice indeed.. I'm learning how to make the drums make the sounds I want, and strongly considering buying more. Who'd have thunk it?

I still haven't managed to go skydiving yet, thanks to some unexpected expenses (medical, and @#@^%@$ taxes) but I'm undecided if I want to go through with it or just go straight to hang gliding, which remains what I really want to do, but requires a bit more time and money to get off the ground as it were. On the other hand, a tandem jump can be arranged with a couple days' notice and doesn't cost much.

The car's doing well, though I still need to change the plugs, belts, and generally tune it up -- this weekend, I promise. really. Main thing I need is some canned air to blow out the sparkplug recesses as to not get gunk in the engine. And the new tires are quite nice, slightly less grippy than the old ones, but otherwise better in other ways -- all in all probably the best ones I can buy in 215/60R15, and I'm still the weakest link in that car's handling. I missed the last autocross, maybe I'll make it to one this month and find out what I can really do.

I slapped an RF Modulator in my car, so now it has a line-in jack so I can hook up a MP3 player without having to deal with cassette adaptors and their angst. Unforutnately, the hard drive I was going to use is now powering my boss's laptop -- his failed, and he needed a new drive STAT. Fortunately, my curse on hard drives seems to have abated somewhat, as we haven't had a failure in more than a month -- unfortunately, we've had two machines eat sticks of RAM in the mean time, including my desktop. I'm just dangerous around computers, I guess. :)

I haven't acquired any new toys in a little while, but I've really fallen in love with my SLiMP3 widget. The server software keeps getting better and better; so my 117,000 or so MP3s are almost always playing. And on a somewhat related note, GNUmp3d v2.x is much nicer than v1.0; seems to run faster despite its pure perl rewrite. Through it I almost always have music streaming to my office at work, except when Sprint Broadband screws up their routers. Meanwhile the k6-500 in the media server is rock-solid, though one of the fans cooling the 480G RAID5 filesystem is dying a noisy death. But it's plenty fast for what it does.

The Laptop now has RedHat 8.1b3 on it. Generally I'm quite pleased and impressed, but I was forced to change my old AfterStep ways in favor of WindowMaker.. as AfterStep seems to have severe issues with XFree 4.3.0. So far the only thing I haven't managed to get working again is BINS, which means I haven't been able to update my online photo album in a while. Seems to be something breaking inside the perl XML libraries. I'm hoping it'll get fixed by the time RH 8.1 final comes out.. no response yet from the BINS author, or the perl XML::Grove author. *sigh* Anyway. The nicest thing to cme out of the new beta is the fontconfig-based desktop, and Mozilla/galeon fully anti-aliased and looking very, very slick indeed. And since I use WindowMaker, I don't take the performance hit of using Gnome or KDE, and things still look slick, yet extremely useable.

I haven't taken the plunge to 2.5.x yet, but I'll probably try it out soon -- I have it otherwise ready to go, but it'll wait until I get the linux-wlan-ng build stuff up to speed, or 2.5.65, whichever comes first. :)

Whew. time to shut up now.

[ from advogato, entry #50 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-01-22T22:31:06-04:00

My SliMP3 widget showed up on Monday; and I'm already in love with this thing. The unit's UI is qute simple and slick, and the server lets you control absolutely everything via its web interface -- complete with remote play controls.

And since all of the source is GPL'ed, I can barely wait to get my grubby paws on the server and start some major hax0ring. Even though I don't particularly have any use for it, I think I'll start with writing an alarm clock to get myself somewhat familiar with the codebase. As an added benefit, it's seems to be an oft-requested feature. :)

Further enhancements might have to wait until everything gets hooked up to a database backend; a lot of the things I have in mind will be much easier with that sort of arrangment.

Things have been pretty quiet in wireless linux land. Working on fun stuff, but I can't talk about any of it.

In other news, I've finally put my photo album up online. This little Canon Powershot S330 is one of the best purchases I've ever made, though I'm already wishing it was more than 2 megapixels. I've been using BINS to generate the static HTML and all of the other stuff that goes along with the photos, and it has a lot of potential.. I'm gonig to start playing around with themes and whatnot to get it looking just right. Still, 578 megs and growing rapidly. What would I do without rsync. :)

[ from advogato, entry #49 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-01-10T20:24:00-04:00

I purchased a SliMP3 widget yesterday; should get it towards the end of next week. This little toy has some serious hacking potential; not because the hardware is particularly capable.. but because the hardware is so dumb, and the server software handles all of the magic. It'll be a very nice springboard for my jukebox-related song selection ideas. Even the firmware is GPL'ed. Now if only it had build-in 802.11 wireless... :)

Finaly waded back into a big pile of books last night; time to broaden my horizons once again. A suprising amount of truth to be found in fiction, and it has the added bonus of not preaching. Which reminds me, I should buy another bookshelf. But I will make it to the beach this weekend, even if I do nothing other than sit on a pier and read a book.

[ from advogato, entry #48 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2003-01-04T15:11:16-04:00

Wow, been a while. And what a while it's been, too. Life's been interesting, to say the least. And I'm even more of a nut than I used to be, apparently.

linux-wlan-ng 0.1.16-pre8 was released just under two weeks ago, right before I hit the road for my giant Xmas/New Year's road trip. (I'm at mile 1470 right now, it'll be another 550 just to drive back home, plus another hundred or so for misc detours before I leave Atlanta.) Lots of misc fixes and other incremental changes; nothing earth-shattering going on these days; mostly concerned with trying to make it more stable. A few fixes went in that might alleviate the remaining SMP issues. The lists have been pretty quiet, but that'll probably change when I get back and start causing problems again.

I've done such little work on Free Software lately, I'm almost embarassed. I need another good side project to hax0r on. FreeSCI is something I should wade back into, as there's once again a lot of sound stuff to hack on with the new VM and whatnot.

But my main interest right now is replicating bits of the now completely-defunct Incanta Music Service. More specifically, the psuedo-random song selection process. Given that I had re-written the IMS stuff a couple of times.. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do. The bigger problem is the server backend. It's a lot more elaborate than merely generating static playlists. I'd need to take an existing MP3 "push" service, like icecast or perhaps the SLiMP3 widget's server, and tie in the song selection to that. Most importantly, I'd need to write some sort of feedback mechanism, so I can tag songs with preferences like "never play this again" and also the ability to generate/add to specific playlists. In the end, I'd want to be able to use it in the "random" mode (by genre), by artist/album, by specific song, and finally, by playlist. I know what I need to do, but I need a solid server backend to hook this all up to.. The simplest thing to do would to re-create one of the Incanta Servers.. but that's horrible overkill, and due to IP issues, it could never be Free Software.

It's going to be an interesting transition, getting back into the "work work work" frame of mind. Since Thanksgiving, I've been out of town for the better part of a month; longer if you count my weekend trips. Lots of frequent flyer miles!

2002 was a year of change. 2003 should be less turbulent. things are finally falling into place, in no small part due to the very hard shaking that's been going on for the past few months. I'm where I want to be, I'm doing what I want to do. And working on combining it, so I can have wi-fi access while walking along the beach. It's been too long since I've instigated something. Time to get the old juices flowing again and keep life interesting.

Oh, I also plan to jump out of a perfectly good airplane in the near future.

[ from advogato, entry #47 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2002-11-12T12:14:05-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

Nothing much to say about it; accumulating bugfixes and misc stuff. -pre6 has come with massive script improvements, and hopefully -pre7 will be better; fixing up the main remaining problems (namely handling SSIDs with spaces, and other "special" characters). Ah, the joys of shell scripting. Too bad I can't rely on perl for this stuff. :) But have I mentioned just how much I like the ability to just plug in a card and Bang, connect to the right network no matter where I am?

life, and other stuff

My car's so ... quiet now. I can once again hear all other little noises the car makes. And not huffing fumes at every light is a very nice bonus. :)

Nearly everyone in the office is off in Hawaii for an 802.11 meeting. *cries* Leaving Bruce & I to hold down the fort.. which leaves me to do all of the techincal stuff. But it's amazing how much work I been getting done. At least until um, other distractions kick in and leave me dazed and more than a little overwhelmed.

It's been a couple of rather intense days emotionally. *skaking head* Unfinished business seeking closure. But sanity is overrated, eh? Life's too short to waste it on unhappiness; so if you're going to have delusions, might as well go for the really good ones!

[ from advogato, entry #46 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2002-11-01T16:20:40-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

-pre5 out today, marking the culmination of a complete script and configuration system rewrite. One set of shared library functions used by all scripts, including pcmcia, hotplug, and init/rc scripts. And one set of configuration files that's considerably more flexible than the old stuff. And integrated support for scanning and automatically joining the appropriate network! '/etc/init.d/wlan start' will fire off a scan, and join my office, home, friends'.. whatever network is on the "allowed" list. And each network has its own configuration files (for WEP, etc), or a systemwide default.

Unfortunately, you need relatively new firmware for the scan stuff to work, due to bugs that can result in the hardware locking up when you issue a scan. :) And the hotplug stuff isn't quite right yet, but it looks like it's just an issue with my hotplug arrangement.

The new scripts also require /proc to be enabled to properly function, but in all fairness, so does a lot of other stuff on a modern Linux box. And embedded systems will use much more carefully crafted scripts anyway.

In other news

The powers that be bequeathed a Mitsubishi NX85 18.1" flat-panel screen on me yesterday. Damn, this thing is nice. 350:1 contrast ratio, and an obscene viewing angle for a LCD screen. The only problem now is that I don't have a place to put my Russian Dolls of Clinton and his women. But for now, I'm doing the dualhead thing; though this old screen is shot to the point where I'll probably just chuck it soon.

I have *five* screens hooked up and running right now. sheesh. Only four machines. :) I think I need more desk space.

Also finally received my new Y-pipe for the car. Didn't come with the necessary gaskets, and unfortunately, the dealer is out until next Wednesday. It's just as well; I don't plan on doing the work myself.. and it'll take a few days for a shop to squeeze me in. It'll be nice to not have to breathe exhaust fumes when idling at lights!

Oh, and I'm heading off to Turkey the day after Thanksgiving. Don't people normally go TO Florida during the winter? Silly parental units and their strongarm tactics. :)

[ from advogato, entry #45 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2002-10-21T20:52:19-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

Up to -pre4 now, with a few fixes already in place for -pre5. Fixed a very-long-standing race that resulted in deadlocks on SMP boxes and theoretically uniprocessor machines too. Also added in a workaround for a hardware "feature" that basically means we can't perform two concurrent buffer transfers on PCI boards. So far it's better on SMP machines, but my one ginuea pig has a BP6 board (and old card firmware) so identifying the cause of card hangs is getting trickier. No feedback yet on the USB unload rewrite.

But it's getting better! I try my best to make sure any prism2-specific changes that make it into our internal tree also go into linux-wlan-ng, but the codebases are diverging very rapidly. There are a lot of things I want to backport.. but in the mean time, I'll just hope that someday we'll be in the financial (and legal) position to release our internal driver tree as Free Software. But in the mean time, we need to put food on our plates.

[censored] project

It now has full host-based AP functionality. Which means that all future hardware drivers also get AP stuffs for free. Yay! All that's left now is to write the en-fragmentation code, and of course, the inevitable mountain of bugfixes. :) The interesting thing is just how little extra work it took (compared to a station driver).. two days. Of course, having a well-written driver core helped immensely.

Defragmentation, very detailed per-peer statistics, full AP operation, seperate tx queue+bh (needed for powersave, but helped overall throughput).. lots of new stuff; lots of rewriting the clunky old codebase. And lots of work to go.

Let's see.. peer aging (for signal strength numbers and proper peer "expiration"), The new sniffing infrastructure needs finishing and an ethereal dissector, en-fragmentation, powersave (both station and AP.. fairly complex, as it affects quite a lot of things), 802.1x authentication and (longer-term) the ability to support AES encryption.. the list goes on and on..and this is just generic p80211 stuff. :)

This sure as hell beats java middleware!

[ from advogato, entry #44 ]

Solomon Peachy — 2002-10-04T17:31:38-04:00

linux-wlan-ng

No news is good news, I guess. Very quiet on the feedback front. Meanwhile, a compile few fixes with certian versions of wireless extensions (v11 in particular) and a few more GETs are in. Jean Tourrilhes (creator/maintainer of the wireless extension API) stepped in with some much-appreciated feedback and some clarifications. By themselves, they're not really worth releasing another build just yet.

Jean also pointed out why some people get intermittent crashes on hot-unplug with the USB driver. Baiscally, we have linked URBs present on unload. When they finish, their callbacks fire and hit freshly-unloaded driver code. Instant panic. Unfortunately, it's a bitter pill to swallow as TheRightWay(tm) will require a fair amount of internal hax0ring, thanks to some overly-complex driver internals. Fortunately, it only affects a very small subset of users, so I can take the time necessary to do this correctly.

Meanwhile, I'm beginning to wonder if I'm going to have to write a first-pass at the scan/profile scripts. While I have a good idea how I want it to be done, I really don't feel like working on it anytime soon. Come on, folks, contribute some time &| code..

[censored] project

The chipset-specific driver is rock-solid now. Memory leak fixed, WEP problems "correctly worked around" (It's a firmware bug), and it happily handles ping floods without batting an eye. Oh, the generic 802.11 layer now fully implements the 802.11 infrastructure state machine, handing roaming and other mifty things like that. I still need to implement "absense of beacon frame" detection, but that's not necessary for this project.