Ian's on holiday at the moment and I met up with him and Janie yesterday in south London. It's been too long since I saw them, but it's good to see that they're still together and doing well. Janie needs better shoes, but these things are fixable 
Unfortunately, they're also out of contact too. Their phone can't do incoming calls and I only have a vague idea of where they're staying. This would be fine except that Go Daddy nuked the freenetproject.org DNS (or possibly Ian renewed the domain too late) and it seems that only Ian can alter the account. This killed mail to imperialviolet.org too, but only briefly.
Thankfully, the /. story about Freenet linked to the other name for the website. (And do read that story, it's really good; well done Ian).
Firstly, an email I sent to the BBC Online Services Support list today:
Three sysadmins from Imperial College (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/csg), myself included, are temporarily living in White City - just up the road from the main BBC complex. We would very much like to see the Ogg Vorbis streams of BBC Radio running again. The last entry on http://support.bbc.co.uk/ogg/ reads (in part) "we simply do not have time right now to get the ogg streams running again" With this in mind, we would like to offer our services to help with this project in any way. Is there any way that this is possible?
Now, I'm almost certain that this will either generate a polite brush-off or will just be ignored. With this in mind, I've worked out how to do it myself:
Firstly, you need recent versions of libxml, libxslt, libvorbis and icecast2. The first three are pretty standard, but Icecast2 is only available from CVS snapshots. The modules you'll need are icecast, ices2 and libshout. libshout is required to build ices2.
You'll also need RealPlayer for Linux, since this is the only source of BBC Radio data at the moment. You could just pipe a radio into the linein, but the quality of this is likely to be a bit crappy. Though it would get rid of the nasty time lag in BBC Real streams.
We'll setup icecast in a minute, but we also need to download dsproxy. This traps data sent to /dev/dsp and outputs it as PCM data. Download and build dsproxy (needs root to insmod). I run devfs, so my /dev/dsp etc are just symlinks into /dev/sound/, so I can replace them at any time but realplay is going to need to see the dsproxy devices when it starts up. You could chroot RealPlayer and point the sound devices in the chroot to dsproxy, but I haven't played with that. At the moment I'm setting up the devices to start realplay and then switching them back to the OSS devices for normal usage. However you decide to do it, here are the device numbers:
So, for the moment, create the dsproxy devices as /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer (cd /dev ; rm dsp mixer ; mknod dsp c 121 2 ; mknod mixer c 121 3). Now we are ready to start the reader and realplay, so we configure icecast.
Icecast has two parts - the server and the source. The server is icecast, the source is ices2. My config for the icecast server is here. Note that the password is XYZ and it puts stuff in /tmp/icecast (you may need to create /tmp/icecast/[log|web|admin]). My config for ices2 is here. You may wish to have a look in the example configs as well to see the other options available.
You should now be able to startup icecast (pass the -c option to specify the config file). In another terminal goto the dsproxy source directory and run ./reader -x -e -s | /path/to/ices-2.0-Beta2/src/ices /path/to/ices-2.0-Beta2/src/ices.xml.public. That should start the source up, it will log to the terminal. Now start realplay and run the Radio 4 stream (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/realplayer/media/fmg2.rpm). You should be able to stream from http://testhost:8000/radio4.ogg.
It's pretty rough still, but it's working for me at the moment.
Bugger. While trying to get gdm working for the new Dept of Computing base install it looks like I screwed up a fair amount of stuff. That includes email from last night until now (I don't think it would have bounced - it just got vapourised), IV, comments etc.
So any important emails should be resent, please.
Oh, and the answer was that calling exec in any startup script (which is common practice here to change shells) causes gdm to fail with a completely unhelpful error message. I think we might be using kdm now.
I needed a book to read (had few days without a computer) and Altered Carbon seemed a good a choice as any and I'd recently read this /. review about it.
This book isn't going to be as influential as the /. reviewer thinks. As far as sci-fi goes it's mediocre. It's set in the future, rather than being an exploration of it. People in this world have the ability to digitise their minds and switch bodies as market forces allow. But this just provides a few neat plot hooks - it isn't an Egan like world here.
What this book does give is a really good detective story. Not a culture changing item, but excellent crime-sci-fiction.
The end of term involed the Union Summer Beach Party. Not quite sure about that name, there wasn't much beach involed. It did invole several days of setting up with miles of cables going round the quad. The photos are here. It looked pretty stunning and everyone seemed to have a good time. I'm afraid, however, that after working 14 hours on Thurs and 16 on Friday I went to sleep about 1am Saturday morning, leaving the rest of the crew to strike the fixtures. In my defence, I did have to be up at 7 to pack!.
Some pics of the photos
Ian:
Don't bother telling me that Freenet should be implemented in C++ unless you are willing to spend months illustrating your code on stretched leather with a carefully prepared pheasant feather while paying particular attention to the initial "#".
Well, I did do this and here's why:
I learnt C++ pretty well and it really is a messy pre-processor for C. There are hundreds of tiny quirks waiting to bite you, not just in the language, but with each different compiler (looking at Microsoft here). It's a mess and really shouldn't be used for anything, but it still is. And that's not just because the great unwashed masses haven't learnt about Java.
C++ is popular because it's actually a good tool for a lot of jobs - still riding C's wave from the 1970's. Interfaces are written for it and with it in mind and some people have done jaw-dropping stuff with such a mess of a language.
(I've never used C# - and I'm in no position to comment on it directly. I'm just using the general opinion that, in language space, C# is standing on Java's toes.)
But that certainly doesn't mean that everyone would be using Java and C# if C++ didn't have so much momentum. Despite great improvements, Java code is still just slow. Even on fast machines you can feel the lethargy of Java GUI programs. No amount of micro-benchmarks change this. And the Java library isn't just "artistically uninspired", it's cringe worthy - huge class names everywhere and interfaces designed by committee. At least C/C++ interfaces are generally short and to the point.
To some extent Ian is correct, however, that Java is more of an engineering language than an artists language. Java does manage to give programming idiots a language which they can use in a big organisation without giving them sharp objects to poke themselves with (e.g. pointers).
But if you are going to get away from C's perfectionism then I would suggest that Python is a far better place to be. Python for the times that you want brush strokes with C modules for the awkward details. Java/C# is to thin to cover with and too thick to touch up with.
Usually I shrug off a cold in a few hours but, right now, everytime I sneeze it feels like most of my throat is ripped out and I think my brain is trying to crawl out my left ear.
But anyway - X auto-configuration is quite painful. The basics (finding video cards) is pretty trivial, but how do you find the model name of the LCD connected? (possible) and how do you do that for each of a number of different video cards on the same PCI bus, each with multiple heads? From what I can see VESA just wasn't designed to handle multiple cards.
On the same project, how do you get a BIOS device number from a devfs name? Going from devfs => classical /dev just involves walking /dev/discs but, as far as I can see, there is no mapping to BIOS device numbers (needed for GRUB). For example, my kernel loads my SCSI MegaRAID before my Adaptec SCSI - but my BIOS does it the other way round. Aggh!
Ian seems set on making up for lost blogging time with a flurry of interesting posts. I'm sure he can't keep it up for long, so enjoy while it lasts.
Looking in my bookmarks:
Smyle Productions <- attempt to Googlebomb the company that did the Imperial Summer Ball. Unfortunately I don't have any photos from it (yet).
This is from a nameless person (not a student, however) in the Dept of Computing
my main computer has been disconnetted and Catherine Wang's hard-disk and keyboard connected to my screen.
I so wanted to ask her for a PS2+IDE to VGA wiring diagram.
I'm glad that Ian liked Equilibrium. Someone pointed this film out to me a couple of months ago and I argee this it's pretty fantastic. It's interresting what difference a marketing budget can do; in my opinion this film is better than The Matrix.
There's very little new in it - pretty much everything comes straight from 1984, Fahrenheit 451 or The Matrix, but you know what? It doesn't really matter because they've taken the good parts.
This year is the 25th anniversary of O'Reilly as a company. To celibrate O'Reilly had a boat party going down the Thames (the river that runs through London).
I wouldn't wish to pick out a few names from the numbers there so I'm not going to. But there were over a hundred authors, editors and members of the UK Linux/Open Source community there as well as the guest of honour, Mr O'Reilly himself (who was about 45 minutes late .
Free food, free bar, interesting people - what more could you want? I had a great time.
Read this if, and only if, you have seen the Matrix Reloaded already.
Ian has updated his blog with quite a long entry. Here's a reply I sent via email:
Whisper: Do you pad messages? I'm sure you have considered that the IRC backend still allows for traffic analysis, but I'm not sure how useful traffic analysis is in IRC style conversations. I've not played with C# much, but I don't think I would use it out of choice from what I've read about it. Any particular reason you choice it over Java for this? WebQuest: Not a new idea - but you would be the first if you actually got it to work nicly. The whole trick here is that it will get spammed to hell as soon as it becomes popular. You don't mention how you act against this. Using Google as a backend and tweaking the search query is a nice trick. "Collaborative Filtering" of course springs to mind and a trust web could solve your spamming problem at the cost of bootstrapping problems (you need people to form a trust web, but people are going to bother unless there are already people doing it). Kanzi: Shame it didn't work out as shareware - but I'm glad to see it going Open Source (at some point).
Systrace timing tests:
| Test | Normal | With Systrace |
| getuid | 0.871 | 1.38 |
| getpid | 0.871 | 1.38 |
| stat | 0.871 | 1.38 |
All 3 tests did a million calls of their respective syscalls. The first two were setup in systrace to allow everything. The filesystem test was setup to allow only if a regexp matched.
Conclusion: the overhead is pretty much fixed - and not really that huge unless you are really syscall dependant.
I installed a system with systrace and SELinux, but I haven't had time to play about with them much yet. SELinux, from first looks, seems very complex - probably too complex for most uses. Systrace, however, is small and sweet. I've not looked at how it's implemented yet, but I suspect it might have quite a system call overhead, however. Will have to benchmark it.
Saw Chicane live and he/they performed quite a lot of their new album which was very impressive. It was their old stuff which got the crowd going though. 16 18" drivers in a small venue hitting resonance is quite awe-ful*.
* - that's awe-ful not awful - which is defined as meaning what awful used to mean.
Coming up this week is O'Reilly's 25th anniversary (possibly just O'Reilly UK's 25 actually, now I come to think about it) and I get a free boat trip on Thursday to celebrate.
Go into Argos, buy something really cheap and leave. Wait (possible several days) for the ticketing system to wrap round (it's only 3 digits) and go and claim an (almost certainly) more expensive item with the same number (they never check the description, which is in a much smaller font). For bonus points, have a friend get the duplicate ticket and walk off with 2 of the expensive item after the friend complains that his never arrived.
Get a transmitter that triggers those resonance scanners that shops have at the exits (or just stick a tag on one, if you can). Wait for them to get so upset that they turn them off. (they are pretty much the only security in most shops). For bonus points get a transmitter powerful enough to trigger a whole shopping center.
Something that I really should have known before:
for x in `cat file`
... will tokenise file but
cat file | while read x
... will do line-by-line processing, which is often what you actually want.
The Hardened Gentoo project has put a box on the net with a public root password. It's running SELinux and, even with root access, it should be secure. Go give it a try if you like.
I'm building it at the moment to give it a play tomorrow.
Everyone is tidying up like mad around here because the Rector (head of the college) is visiting on Monday. We're showing off like never before (and have more funky, massive LCD screens than one can shake a stick at) so we're taking some pretty pictures to put on some SunRays (thin clients).
Dave is a little shaky with the camera, but...
and (if I keep it running over the weekend) pretty graphs!
Been busy listening to, taking part in, filming for and going to the concert of.
London feels like Los Angeles at the moment. Unfortunately it feels like the really hot inland areas of LA and not the constant-temperature-24-hours-a-day-with-sea-breeze bliss that is Santa Monica. The AirCon units in the dept are starting to fail.
But I'm afraid, Ian&Janie, that it isn't going to last. This is England, which means it's really going to piss down soon.
Here's a writeup of my notes on setting up TINIs
TINIs come with no firmware loaded and the first order of the day is to fix this. Even if your TINI has fireware loaded you may still wish to reload at as a method of extreme reset.
Firstly, grab version 1.02e of the SDK. Version 1.02f came out between my experiementing with the TINIs and writing this, so if you have problems you may wish to try it.
The SDK is written in Java and uses the Java Serial Port API to talk to the TINI. JDKs on Linux don't support this API so you either need to use a Windows box or (as I do) install RXTX. I'm using version 1.4 of RXTX. Follow the install instructions that come with RXTX (you need root for this). You also need to chgrp csg /var/lock (assuming you are going to run the SDK as a non-root member of group csg).
Now make sure that the TINI is wired up correctly. You should be supplying 7.5V DC into the power socket. The TINI docs say 5V, but it seems that the voltage regulator needs quite a bit of power. The polarity doesn't seem to matter.
You should also have a straight through serial cable running into the female serial port of the TINI (labled J6). In the end, I got fed up with wondering if the cable was actually correct and plugged the TINI into the back of the computer.
(from this point on, this information is in the TINI book)
Now try firing up the fireware app:
Select a comm port (if you don't see any, your RXTX install isn't correct) and click "Open Port". Now click "Reset". You should see the TINI talking to you. If you don't then try the other serial port and then look at the wiring carefully.
From the File menu, load tini.tbin followed by slush.tbin from the tini1.02e/bin directory. This will take a little time over the serial cable.
Now, in the SDK terminal window type these commands exactly, each followed by Enter:
The TINI should now boot. The default root password is tini
Once you have a root console on the TINI you probably wish to delete the guest user with userdel. You can then setup networking with ipconfig -d (uses DHCP). The ipconfig -C will save the setup to Flash memory for when you reboot.
The TINIs have a small java virtual machine and can run java class files so long as they only use the supported subset of the libraries. TINIs only support Java 1.1 code and then, only if it has been specially premangled.
Firstly you need to build the class files for each .java file you have
Once all the .class files have been compiled, put them in a directory and run the premangler on them:
See the 1-Wire chapter in the TINI book for details of the actual java. The driver for the temperature sensors had to be dug up using Google. It's called OneWireContainer10.java and I should have a copy if it's needed
| / | Root |
| Alternate | The Weird and Wonderful |
| Backlinks | What are backlinks |
| John Gilmore | What's Wrong with Copy Protection |
| Archives | Blog Archives |
| One | Archive 1 |
| Two | Archive 2 |
| Three | Archive 3 |
| Four | Archive 4 |
| Five | Archive 5 |
| Six | Archive 6 |
| Seven | Archive 7 |
| Eight | Archive 8 |
| Nine | Archive 9 |
| Ten | Archive 10 |
| Eleven | Archive 11 |
| Twelve | Archive 12 |
| Thirteen | Archive 13 |
| Fourteen | Archive 14 |
| Fifteen | Archive 15 |
| Sixteen | Archive 16 |
| Seventeen | Archive 17 |
| Eighteen | Archive 18 |
| Nineteen | Archive 19 |
| Twenty | Archive 20 |
| Twenty One | Archive 21 |
| Twenty Two | Archive 22 |
| Twenty Three | Archive 23 |
| Twenty Four | Archive 24 |
| Twenty Five | Archive 25 |
| Twenty Six | Archive 26 |
| Twenty Seven | Archive 27 |
| Twenty Eight | Archive 28 |
| Twenty Nine | Archive 29 |
| Thirty | Archive 30 |
| Photos | Poor People Caught on Film |
| Jack and the Beanstalk | Jack and the Beanstalk |
| RIP Scan | Results of a Stage Scan Fire |
| Yosemite | Yosemite National Park |
| Projects | Incomplete things from the lab |
| Seagull's Bane | Linux Automounter |
| bttrackd | BitTorrent Tracker |
| CAPTCHA | CAPTCHA CGI script |
| Conserv | Console Serving |
| Deerpark | Using Tor with Firefox/1.1 (Deerpark) |
| DNSFix | Fixing DNS |
| Xovers | XTA Crossover Control |
| IAFS | Archive Org Storage |
| JBIG2 | JBIG2 Encoder |
| Verify | PGP Key Verifier |
| MaxFlow | Maximal Flow in Python |
| PyBloom | Bloom Filters in Python |
| pyGnuTLS | Python wrapping of GnuTLS |
| Sxmap | Apache SuEXEC Map |
| Hellard | Union Server Notes |
| Recordings | Free recordings |
| ICSM Choir | St Paul's Church |
| School | Ancient School Stuff |
| Writings | Who knows |
| Cap Systems | Capability Systems |
| Intro | Introduction to me |
| Suprema | JMC2 Group Project |
| MP Letters | Letters I've written to my MP |
| Sound | Sound With Dramsoc |
| SyncThreading | The wonders of user-land threads |
