Makers Progress

Projectosis

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:14:26 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

My life appears to be lived at the bottom of an unending barrage of interesting projects.

I feel the impulse, once more, to compile lists of things I want to do, make, create, build. Most of this will probably actually consist of SLASHING projects off that I don't want to do sooner rather than later. I don't need make work - I need make time.

Hm. "Making Time" sounds like a tempting blog title.

It sounds like dumping hardware projects for lack of funds is an excellent excuse. But given I just spent a wad of cash on stuff at a fabric sale, and it isn't enough for what I'm envisioning, I may be in for a penny, in for a pound. For that one, anyway.

What's more, as soon as I'd sidelined the RepRap, people I'd told about it sounded interested in splitting the cost. Ha.

Out of the Woods

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 02:14:50 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

it appears my fortnight of butting my head up against dbmail, ecryptfs, mysql, and sqlite is nearing its end.

My error in attempting to migrate from the Mysql to the SQLite database backend for dbmail became apparent as I began to import three months of mail archives dumped into mbox files through the dbmail IMAP4 server from the old mysql backend. It's somewhere on the order of 15,000-20,000 emails (I get a LOT of email). Once I got up and over ten thousand, the performance slowed down a lot. Even inserting new mail using fetchmail took a second or two per message. Some filtering and de-duping functions just plain stopped working, since they would always time out before completing.

So, it was back to Mysql. I now have most of the mail I've received since I deprecated the Mysql database dumped to mboxes and being transferred back via IMAP4 importation to the Mysql backend... and it's WAY faster, thank goodness.

To get here, though, I had to find a solution to my encryption problem, which is what drove me away from mysql in the first place. Well, no, not really. What drove me away was the fact that it's really not possible to encrypt SOME of a mysql database if it is required to be stored using the innodb storage engine. I had been trying to encrypt just the dbmail database, in its own folder. What was really called for was to just scrap the whole piecemeal and encrypt all of /var/lib/mysql wholesale.

At first, I was trying to do what I had been doing with the sqlite database, and symlink /var/lib/mysql to /home/nato/mysql . That would place the entire database space inside my encrypted home directory. Unfortunately, mysql would not, for reasons I did not investiagate throughly.

Instead, I just used the existing ecryptfs utilities to create a separate excryptfs encrypted file system just for the mysql database. That seemed to work great. All I had to do was tweak one file to make the mountpoint /var/lib/mysql .

So, now, I am celebrating, because my mail is now fast and usable once more. I can hardly believe it. It's been a depressing two weeks.

But, I win. Again. Through perseverance and patience. What a relief!

Now, on to that Google Wave preview I received from Jeff! It's a little slow, interface wise, but I'm digging it so far.

Self Visualization

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:55:08 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

My eureka moment this morning came in the form of a visualization of the mind in a manner similar to a circuit diagram. Nothing too novel, but inspiring from a drawing perspective. I have it here drawn in pen on a piece of paper, but it will take more time to get up to speed with digital tools. Maybe I should use a flowcharting tool.

Nonetheless, a written description will do for now:

First, a square. Inside the square is a person's body; outside is the environment. Divide the the space inside the square into four corners along two conceptual axes.

First, divide the body along the horizontal axis. On the left is the sub- or unconscious, consciousness to the left. Consciousness being the fuzzy thing that it is, it may be edifying to ditch the label entirely. One may substitute "I" on the right, and "brain" on the left. This was inspired by the confrontation I've had recently with the appearance of the brain being just as mysterious and unknown as the outside world. "We" are occasionally unable to explain our selves - our perceptions and our impulses - to ourselves, and to others. On those occasions, "we" do not seem to actually reside within the brain that we have always been most intimately located near. A key definition to self-identification seems to be self-awareness, self knowledge.

This is a little strange to me because of the common illusion that it is ignorance that provides us with agency. Ignorance is what we have about things external to us - like the environment, or with powerful impulses and sensations. It's the fact that I know what I want, and what I will decide, given whatever specific hypothetical circumstances, that grants me agency. I am not afraid of determinism. Being a machine changes does not change my experience of or interaction with the world one wit. It all adds up to normality. "Weep not for me, for I am machine - and no mere machine at that." A warm, sensitive, human machine - just like everyone else.

Now move to the vertical axis. As I've hinted already, on top we have sensation - input of signals from the environment into the body. on the bottom, we have motivation - signal outflow from the body into the environment. The senses serve as the gateway of input signals - light, heat, sound, etc., into the body. They flow into the body square on the top left - the subconscious/sensation corner. Signal ultimately flows out on the lower right - the conscious/motivation corner.

In order to travel from the first corner to the latter, signals have to cross one axis at a time. Sensation signals that cross the horizontal axis into motivation first are translated from stimulus to response subconsciously. They become instinctive impulses. Those impulses then pass across the other vertical axis into consciousness before being able to express themselves in bodily action.

Or, alternatively, the subconscious sensation signal could cross the vertical axis first, passing into consciousness, before being translated into motivational action by conscious processes. This is a familiar, transparent process, since it's done by the same conscious, self-aware, mind everyone has.

Of course, signals can exit the body without traversing the conscious mind (reflexes), so I would imagine strictly conscious sensation would be plausible too. It might be good to account for this by tilting the square into a diamond, and allowing for sensory and active gateways from the other two corners, as well. Perhaps our use of science, technology, and strict, formal, mathematical reasoning is what can allow us to bypass our subconscious, traditional senses - and their inherent sensory biases (such as those which produce optical or cognitive illusions of which we have been customarily unaware) - and receive signals directly within the conscious mind.

So here's the newest thought that inspired the diagram: There are two distinct signal filters in the mind. The subconscious filters our conscious sensation (attention), and the conscious filters our subconscious motivation (ethics). The filters are constructed to receive signals and eliminate some based on specific criteria, allowing only others to continue on.

I'm Not Liking Email Anymore

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:14:34 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I spent all night last night and all day today importing several months worth of email from the mysql backend of dbmail into the sqlite backend of dbmail using Claws-mail to import mbox files over IMAP. I have been unable to use fetchmail to load new mail, and unable to browse existing mail. the dbmail-lmtp daemon that receives it from fatchmail sporadically complains that "the (sqlite) database is locked". shouldn't this be able to do two things at once? I didn't have this problem with MySQL.

To make matters worse, the IMAP performance of jsut browsing mail has slowed intolerably. Apparently, sqlite3 can't handle a GB database of email messages as well as Mysql can.

*wince*

I guess it's time to figure out how to migrate back to Mysql.

I also recall never seeing the corruption/header mangling problem on the Mysql backend either. I've even developed a theory about how it happens. It always only pops up when there are single quotes in the message header, and the symptom is that the header message block, as stored in the database is missing it's trailing characters. sometimes they're just missing the ending carriage returns; sometimes they're actually missing trailing characters on the final header line as well.

Could it be that dbmail is properly escaping single quotes in preparation for insertion into the database, by adding backslash characters as customary, but the forgetting to account for the extra length those escaping characters add to the header string? If the escaped string isn't the same length, but the length isn't updated, it might be chopping off the characters at the string's end by mistake.

When I finally get my email back to where I want (if ever), I may file a bug report with dbmail. but fuck this.

Let's Charge People to Make things Harder to Read

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:39:46 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I'd like to state for the record that Scribd is an obstructionist asshole.

Parody Meat

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 20:21:01 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

So I saw this ad today...

"Nobody expects NATO! Our chief weapons are peace and security... and..."

Victory

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:24:03 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

The sensation of total control of your universe is indistinguishable from the commitment to total acceptance of it.

Accept how things are for long enough, and they become desirable.
Desire how things are for long enough, and one acts to make them so.

And when one acts to make something exactly what it is, one succeeds. Permanently.

Season

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:35:29 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

My attitude is changing once more.

For September and October, I was on an enormous productive streak. I think that ended on Halloween. While it's easy to blame the activities of that night, I wouldn't call it a slam dunk.

I took a sudden nap this evening. I am poorly motivated. I caught a tinge of being overwhelmed by all the projects I've been anticipating in weeks past.

I don't mourn it by any means. I still have some relative luxury of indolence. It might seem to be little more than a hibernation instinct following on the heels of ancestral harvest-time energy boost.

I lost a few pounds at my last weigh-in. It's not spectacular, but it may perhaps be a steadier, slow progress.

Happy is he who upon deconstructing the illusions of the world, concludes, not that nothing is real, but that everything is.

I'm still very much in the hermit mode. I don't think I have a whole lot to offer a mate; the big difference lately is that I'm finally having trouble seeing what a mate would have to offer me. I guess I'll just have to learn to give away things, instead of looking for deals. :)

I have had some interested parties inquire about splitting the cost of a RepRap, rather than having me put it off another year. That might work, but I still have my divorce and a 2 month rent buffer to populate before I start thinking about that.

Impulsive Announcement

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:39:03 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Before I change my mind, I want to do something impulsive, and tell the world.

I'm experimenting, and have been for a couple of years already, with the fabrication of sex toys. For me.

There. I said it. I don't think it will make much of a difference.

Now, to see how long I can go leaving this post public.

Deal with it, Mom.

Creative Scrutiny

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:12:00 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Doubt is at once more powerful, and more wonderful, than faith.

It is doubt that has raised our castles into the sky, by eroding away all the soft, inviting quicksand of our muddy thinking from the bedrock of undeniable, incontrovertible, immutable truth.

Statutory Rates

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:44:16 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Canada is a better place to be uninsured than the US.

Compromised Away

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:35:29 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

The House health care is looking more and more plutocratically compromised the more I hear about it.

I keep reading that the public insurance option in it is only really available to around 6 million people - the rest don't qualify, including more than a hundred million people currently uninsured. So the public option isn't any kind of option for most people. It's a public option in name only (heretofore: "POINO").

That being the case, it is almost as bad as the personal mandate to purchase insurance without a PO of any kind, as I've said before. It's one thing to subsidize insurance industry profits by spending tax dollars through Medicaid; it's another to force people to do it themselves. That's disgraceful. It's equivalent to raising taxes on the poor and middle classes, something President Obama has most clearly promised against. But if the "tax" is levied by insurance companies, and not government, he can get away with it on a semantic technicality.

Now, with that said, this particular bill might be better for me specifically, because I'm likely to be one of the few who can qualify both for the public insurance option and the expanded Medicaid subsidies. I won't know until I can see what's on offer.

Anything You Want, as Long as it's Not Together

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:15:57 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

It's peculiar how free market libertarians turn around when it comes to allowing "we the people" to do the same things they permit everyone else to do.

House of Representatives Finally Passes That Kidney Stone

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:18:48 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Well, well. Something passed the House, finally, barely.

Here's the inventory:
* Insurers are banned from rescission of customers with pre-existing conditions, as predicted. I don't know if they're banned from refusing new subscribers based on pre-existing conditions, however. They also lose their anti-trust immunity (which, frankly, I didn't even know they had to begin with).
* There's a public option! So this makes the preceding question moot, since the PO isn't going to turn anyone away on that basis - it's a federally-instituted health insurance co-op, in essence.
* There are subsidies for people with low incomes, paid for with what appears to be a tax increase on households making more than half a million dollars a year. And really, who cares about their taxes?

On the other hand:
* There's a personal and employer mandate. Everyone is required to buy some insurance. Given the existence of the PO, I can live with this. I won't have to give my money to for-profit thugs. I look forward to seeing what kind of plans the exchange will have when it gets off the ground.
* There was an amendment tacked on that prohibits the funding of abortions by PO plans or government-subsidized private plans except in the cases of rape, incest, or maternal endangerment. That's a bummer, but it's not a bad bone to throw conservatives. It was also obviously not a show-stopper.

Of course, we're not there yet. There is still the much more difficult Senate to pass, and the inevitable House/Sentate conference compromise process.

But it appears the cube has rolled onto a brand new side. It's progress. It's history. I approve.

Jiminy Jester Christ - Did I just say that about an act of Congress?

Not the God You Imagined

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 03:01:35 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

The biggest evidence for the existence of God is the incredulity one encounters at the hypothesis that human beings would invent a divinity so thoroughly and despicably cruel as Jehovah to serve as the object of their adoration and devotion.

DeBugmail

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 01:39:55 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

There is something terribly wrong with dbmail.

For some reason, it was mangling random email headers, such that the first line of the message body was being tacked onto the final line of the message header, minus one missing character on the end of the final header line.

I managed to isolate it down to the existence of at least two single quotes characters, which are not uncommon to find in the spam scan report tacked onto the header of each delivered message. dbmail does not parse it correctly when inserting it into the sqlite database - although it has never swallowed any messages whole, as far as I can tell.

I have worked around this by altering the exim4 mail server configuration to replace any single quotes int he spam report before inserting it.

What a horrible bug.

Migration Geekery

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:03:36 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I'm settling into my new home on Ubuntu Karmic. It's taken a few days to migrate, clean, houskeep, prune, and integrate from it's home on the jaunty partition (and the encfs encrypted filesystem) onto the Karmic partition, which uses ecryptfs. It's all gone very smoothly, without a snag in sight.

It's startling when rox filer can fit every single file and folder in your home directory, including all the hidden files, into ONE screen. Neat.

I have also managed to get my dbmail email backend switched over from a mysql/innodb database to one using sqlite on my encrypted home. It was not difficult to discover the correct file permissions dbmail requires for the sqlite database file, and the dbmail IMAP daemon doesn't seem to mind that it's database is inaccessible until I login for the first time (the dbmail smtp mda runs entirely in userspace, so it doesn't mind either), and doesn't skip a beat when it becomes available on login. Not bad. I'm using fetchmail to transfer mail from my server to dbmail periodically.

Another great thing about ecryptfs is that, while yoru encrypted home is unmounted as soon as all your sessions are logged it, the kernel keeps your key on hand, just as long as you've logged in at least once, so any cron jobs that the user runs prompt the system to automatically re-mount the encrypted home partition before the cron job runs - and, of course, the partition is unmounted again when it completes. Pretty handy.

What this means is that all the authorized logins for my user will get access to the encrypted partition, so long as I have logged in with a password at least once since the last boot. As soon as the system shuts down, the keys are lost until I login again.

I still have to figure out what things to backup and what to delete, and reconstruct a remote backup scheme for everything. I have no fewer than *12* different places where email archives exist over the years; they need to be consolidated, de-duplicated, and stored in some uniform way.

I found a cache of old, old writings and music I was playing with from 2002 all the way back to 1998. That was fun.

Wild in a Can

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:40:58 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

"Natural ingredients" is an oxymoron.

Post-Reality

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:55:43 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

There is no "the" in future. There are many futures, all of which are real. The appearance of a single future is a cognitive illusion necessitated by the fact that we must decide and act.

Contraversion

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:03:11 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I am still focused on my own.

In some ways, I see self-absorption as a way to love everyone more, by loving particular people less. In plunging inward, I have been surprised to discover, not the things that make me a unique individual, but the things I have in common with the rest of my species.

I worry less and less about not caring about others. I don't know if that means I am growing callous. But I do fear it less.

I'm looking for the border; the place where the perspective shifts from that of a mind surrounded by the world to a world encapsulated by my mind. The edge of the eye's perch, where the curved paths of light bend apart, suddenly sweep the endless horizon of perception, and double back to flank and capture the reality that once isolated it. The checkpoint, where the outside can begin to be seen as just another world, a surface that gradually shrinks to a planet, then a globe, then to a bauble one puts on on the shelf and regards fondly from time to time.

The way through is in.

I am by no means anywhere near this. But I feel as if I'm seeing though all of evolution's commands, and supplying myself all I really want. It's like there's nothing left anyone else could do for me. I don't know what people are for.

and of course, evolution never designed individuals for their own sake. People weren't designed to be more satisfied; satisfaction was designed to make more people. Without obedience to commandments of reproduction, one's impulses make no sense. They're just ways to serve a structural motivation that isn't yours.

It's remarkable to revisit some of the same forms of nihilism, meaninglessness, and apathy from a context of peace and contentment, rather than the angst and desperation that first accompanied these subjects when I first encountered them.

I'm pretty happy with that.

Maybe Not

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:59:57 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Hm.

There is a difference between prohibiting rescission (insurers dumping customers for pre-existing conditions only when they get sick, AFTER they have been paying premiums for months or years) and banning the practice of denying enrollment on the basis of pre-existing conditions entirely. So the idea, previously floated, that I could "game the system" by not buying insurance until I needed it, may not be as viable as I thought.

But what is clear is that any public option - even any co-op - needs to be playing by the same rules as private insurers. But it seems to be the case that, by their very definition of their natures, that can't happen.

The ability for an insurer to deny enrollment alone, never mind coverage after enrollment, tilts the playing field in their favor. A public insurer, be it government or a co-op, is in the business of insuring people, not making a profit. Thus, all those with pre-existing conditions will invariably be forced to enroll in public insurance plans while private insurers cherry-pick healthy customers. Private insurers thus get the better end of the deal, because the costs to insure healthy people are less than the costs borne by public insurers who won't turn sick people away.

Now, on the other hand, public insurers save costs by not having pay for profits or marketing. It's hard to say, however, how this will balance out. It's like trying to weigh the amount of money you lose to file sharers who won't buy copies of your work when you release it for free distributions against the amount lost to those who won't buy it because they hate DRM, or don't even hear about it in the first place because you're too paranoid about piracy. Who will come out on top in terms of fiscal feasibility is hard to say without data - and there is none, because it hasn't been done yet.

Businesses often oppose competition by government on the basis that government has an "unfair" advantage in the marketplace. But this is a textbook case of exactly the opposite.

So, in order to truly level the playing field, either private insurers are going to have to be prohibited from denying enrollments of patients with pre-existing conditions, or we can leave it at prohibiting pre-existing rescission only. While prohibiting pre-existing rescissions is certainly called for, I somehow doubt that any public option or co-op plan will really succeed if it remains disadvantaged by a lopsided ratio of sick customers.

Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala"

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:21:14 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

After downloading the just-released Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" live cd via bittorrent at a blistering 800-900Kb/second (seriously, it took 20 minutes to download, and 10 to burn to cd. wow.), I re-partitioned my hard disks and took it for a spin via a clean install.

If I recall correctly, I haven't done a clean install of an operating system since I switched from Debian to Ubuntu many years ago (and I'm not even sure about that - I may well have pulled off some weird hack to upgrade from Debian to Ubuntu without a clean install, but I doubt it). This is a tribute to the stability of Ubuntu, the underlying Debian OS, and the GNU/Linux bedrock at their foundation.

Nonetheless, there's been a LOT of cruft and hackery that have accrued to my filesystem over the years, and I felt the need to make a fresh start and explicitly import the parts of my data and settings I know I wanted to, rather than implicitly submit to whatever deeply ancient and subtle things which may lurk in my filesystem after years of being forgotten.

So, with an eye toward the future, and buoyed by my success with installing the Karmic beta release alongside the existing desktop backup image on my laptop, I decided against just upgrading my existing Jaunty Jackalope release on my desktop PC (an operation that has always gone quite smoothly), and decided instead to exercise the live cd installer's option to install Karmic alongside Jaunty, and dual-boot into another partition. The results have been excellent, and smooth. I'm quite happy with it.

Now, those who know me know I've been a GNU/Linux user for about ten years now. When Ubuntu came out after 2004, it prided itself on targeting average, non-technical desktop users. Since my introduction to GNU/Linux preceded the development of Ubuntu's suite of graphical tools, I knew how to do everything on the command line, instead. This turned out to be a liability with Ubuntu - not because of conflicts with the tools, but because friends of mine using Ubuntu on their own would often find and use the graphical tools to do things I only knew how to do with the obscure command line hacks. With this install, I was pleased to finally learn how to use those, and do things "the Ubuntu way". And it did everything pretty much as I wanted it too. I've put a lot of work into developing and maintaining my own solutions for things, but I am keen to relinquish that and use systems other developers maintain, if they work just as well or better.

First, I used Gparted, rather than fdisk, to edit my partitions, resizing the Jaunty partition down, and adding two smaller 16GB partitions, one for the karmic installation, and one reserved for future use. I plan to mount the Jaunty partition and use it's home directory for both installations, so I can boot back and forth if necessary with the same home directory data. Resizing filesystem partitions takes a while, which is normal, but it went flawlessly.

The second big change I'm going to make is to switch my encrypted filesystems from Encfs to the eCryptfs-based file encryption standard Ubuntu has been developing. When released in Jaunty, last spring, Ubuntu provided users with an encrypted directory, Private/ , which existed alongside Documents/, Desktop/, Music/, etc., where users could move data they wanted to protect, and link to it from its previous location instead. This was pretty much what I'd developed for myself with Encfs, explicitly choosing what I want to protect. The big difference was that the eCryptfs system used the user's login password, rather than a separate one, to wrap the keys that unlocked the encrypted directory, meaning that the Private directory would already be mounted as soon as the user entered their password to login. With my Encfs setup, I had to enter a separate passphrase in an additional step.

But in this release, Ubuntu has continued to improve this system. Now a user's entire home directory can now be encrypted, rather than just the Private/ sub-folder. These two improvements on my Encfs setup go a long way toward making encrypted protection of user data seamlessly transparent, and it's a wonderful advance for the privacy of the Ubuntu OS.

As to the details of installation, I had ZERO problems. Sound just worked (Pulseaudio and all, which frustrated me so much previously that I uninstalled it entirely), networking just worked (Network Manager now grants more user control), the installation of restricted Nvidia graphics drivers just worked (complete with Compiz-powered OpenGL desktop effects eye candy), installation of restricted extras like the Adobe Flash plugin, and mp3 codecs just worked, and a few annoyances I'd been tolerating for years have now disappeared.

Furthermore, it's even snappier in performance. Nautilus file management, Firefox 3.5, and the gedit text editor all loaded and responded noticeably faster than on Jaunty. My boot time was 20 seconds to login, and an additional 15 seconds to desktop - not mind blowing, but definitely better than Jaunty on the same hardware.

I've also noticed something on my laptop - since I installed the Karmic beta on it, I've left it on for longer periods, and it has not tended to overheat, hang, or spontaneously shut off as much as it did on Jaunty. Advertised Improvements to power management seem to be contributing to this.

I'm just tickled pink - this is a very solid release.

Unwitty Competition

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:20:47 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

What do you mean, Stewart and Colbert don't have any comedic competition coming from the political right? Who do you think they're lampooning?

The difference is that Stewart and Colbert know they're telling jokes.

Streamfeed: back to HTTP authentication

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:15:01 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

So, yeah. After I clicked on a link in my HTML StreamFeed page to the wordpress blog of a friend of mine, he clicks on the referer string that appears in his logs, and gains access to private content before he even knows he's 'hacked' my Facebook account.

Now, granted, StreamFeed is a read-only application that neither requests nor requires any write permissions to your Facebook account - so the danger was limited. It's still unacceptable, from a privacy perspective.

So, it's back to HTTP authentication we go. It's just way too easy to circumvent otherwise.

If you've been using StreamFeed, please be sure to update your feed URLs from the current version. Old ones will be deprecated in the future.

From here on, HTTP authentication support is going to be required of newsreaders using StreamFeed URLs. I did have one newsreader I tested choke on the long username and password fields in previous URL formats. I have remedied that by posting most of the long string as a get parameter, and only a short but critical piece of it in the password credential. Without both, the feed URL won't work, but the password will be handled by applications with appropriate care needed to safeguard users' privacy.

Sketsh

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:41:29 GMT

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I have finally completed (mostly) a piece of software I've wanted for a long time.

I don't know how to nutshell it, exactly. It's a frontend for unix shell commands and terminal emulators that gives me flexibility in how it executes commands.

If I want to run a command in a terminal emulator:

# sketsh ls -al

a new terminal window pops up, executes the command (in this case, getting a file listing), and then drops me into a bash shell so I can enter more commands. in the meantime, it has added the command to my bash history so that it is immediately accessible for editing (in case I do something wrong). Simple and handy.

Now let's say that I'm writing a shell command or script that interacts with my graphical desktop environment, but isn't intended to use a terminal window at all. Like many programs, I use the console output to print debugging messages that aren't normally needed. If I execute a command by prepending sketsh with it's -C option,

# sketsh -C ls -al

it will skip executing the command in a terminal window entirely, and just run in the background. If something isn't working right, I can just delete that option from the command line in the script, and the command will execute in a window so I can see the output. When I've fixed any problems, I can then put the -C option back in, and the terminal goes back away. Neat and tidy.

At other times, I want a terminal window to pop up to execute the command, but I don't want it to hang around when it's done (unless, as before, I'm debugging it). For that, there is the -H option, which explicitly tells sketsh to close the window immediately after the command completes. To debug, simply take that option out of the line it's on, and a full terminal pops up and sticks around, with the command already in history for examination.

In this process, and over the years, I have learned a LOT about skillful BASH shell scripting - and how much more there is to it. This pleases me.

It's the perfect century to be a hacker.