Category: Geekitude

Evolution 2.0 and Kyocera / Palm syncing


A little while ago, in the wake of a rather cyclic day, my Kyocera 7135 phone decided to toss it’s cookies and lose all information stored on it. Not long ago, I wouldn’t consider this more than an annoyance, losing my games and some other tidbits. But since I’ve gotten addicted to having all my contacts and schedule at hand, this was a major hassle.
I had been syncing my phone to Evolution for the last couple months, keeping the contacts and calendar current on both my desktop and my phone. This has worked remarkably well (alas, it’s over a serial connection, so a tad slow, but really we’re only talking 2-3 minutes to do a complete sync), and this week it proved my lifesaver.
What I -was- worried about, though, was syncing back to a ‘blank’ palm device. I hadn’t actually restored a full backup from Evolution (which, to be fair, actually uses the Gnome Pilot for the syncing), so I was somewhat leery of just dropping the Kyocera into the cradle and hitting Sync.
The double-whammy was that between my last sync and now, I had also upgraded from Evolution 1.4.mumble to Evolution 2.0.3. All in all, this was a fantastically easy upgrade, with no data loss, and only minor bumps (such as losing my .signature associations with my Accounts) along the way. However, I hadn’t tried re-syncing the phone since I had upgraded.
I first backed up my addressbook (using the handy ‘evolution-addressbook-export’ utility, which dumps the addressbook into CSV or vCard format), as well as copying out my iCalendar formatted calendar file (now stored in ~/.evolution/local/system/calendar.ics) to somewhere safe.
Then, muttering a prayer to various deities, I cradled the phone and hit ‘sync’. (I had already checked my gpilot configuration to make sure it was still in place. It was). Lo and behold, a window popped up asking if I’d like to re-install my ‘User ID 1000, Dave Belfer-Shevett’ configuration into this seemingly empty Palm device? Why yes, please!
3 minutes later, the familiar “beedabooooooooo” sound, and voila! All my contacts, calendar entries, and software had been restored back onto the phone. Some of my phone settings were reset (probably not backed up initially), but all in all, everything went back to normal.
For such a dramatic upgrade in software (1.4.x to 2.0.3), as well as a cold-resync, I’m super-impressed with the results. Kudos to the Debian team for providing a seamless upgrade method, the Ximian team at Novell for continuing to build a fantastic project, and the Gnome Evolution folks for continuing to support the community and particularly providing support.

Spamming into the new year.

It should come as a surprise to no one, yet I find myself saddened by this latest development in the spam-wars.
One of the groups I enjoy working with does technical logistics and Roadie work for SF, Gaming, and Masquerade conventions up and down the east coast. We have a Wiki that we use to store some basic information that’s handy to have shareable, easily updated, and publically editable. Anyone can edit it and post content, and if folks don’t like a change, it can be re-edited, or reverted back to a previous version. Great!
Alas, this morning I woke to find that the wiki’s home page had been changed to ranks and ranks of links to mail-order drug sites. Sound familiar? You betcha. It’s spam, just in wiki-land.
Reverting the change back to a previous version was trivial, and there was no data loss, but I still feel like something I truly believe in (the concept of free-form information exchange) has been corrupted.
Again.

Geek Clothing!

See, now this is what I’m talkin about. High tech geeky clothing designed for, well, geeks! Embedded audio systems, communication gear in the collar, on-the-sleeve music controls. Tasty.
I’ve always wanted clothing that let me carry hardware around that didn’t make me look completely borg-like.
If only we could do an optical heads up display that was basically invisible. The closest I’ve seen is Don Papp’s work on embedding an optical system into a pair of sunglasses. It’s mighty hard to see the system from the outside. Now THATS sexy.

One step closer to ubiquitous computing

On Thursday I finally got the time to sit down and try and get PPP connectivity working over my Kyocera 7135 cell phone.
I’m on the Verizon network, which has a data service referred to as ‘1xRTT’, a high speed transport for digital communications. Most of the modern Verizon phones support it, and the 7135 was no exception.
The problem I had been having was with the PPP authentication setup. I could get it to dial, but configurations just didn’t link. I had been using KPPP to set up the connection, thinking it was the more advanced of the clients, but alas, it turned out to be the actual problem.
Another fellow pointed me to pppconfig, a nice dialog-based configuration utility. After a few run-throughs, setting up CHAP authentication, using the magical ‘#777’ phone number and the s00p3r s33kr1t Verizon authentication password (‘VZW’), and my cell phone number as the account login name (xxxxxxxxxx@vzw3g.com), voila! I was online and chatting!
Throughput is “okay”. Better than dialup, but slower than DSL. 🙂 My totally off the cuff test (ran apt-get update) was showing about 6kb/sec. Enough to browse webpages with some delays, but plenty for IRC, Email, and cvs updates / commits, and blog updates from the road.
As I type, I’m sitting in my car, my cell phone is in its cradle running off the car battery (this sort of full-time communication can really drain a phone battery), my laptop is cabled to the cell phone, and I’m online and working fine. (no, I’m not driving 🙂
With a little more battery power, this comes close to the magical ‘Ubiquitous computing‘ goal – online all the time, no matter where you are.

When Applications Go Right

There are times when it’s cool being a developer. Both Lisa and Sarah are being my sort of beta testers for CONGO, my conference management software. We’re using it to manage registration for Arisia. So far things have been pretty smooth, with only one serious “It keeps crashing!” situation.
Since I’m the sole developer of the system, I rarely get to enjoy hearing about other people using and testing the app, so sometimes it gets lonely doing all this cool development without a lot of feedback (the program is not in wide release yet).
A week or two ago I finished adding a “Template” function into CONGO. This lets you set up text templates for things like web forms and email notifications. If anyone has gotten email confirmation from Arisia pre-registration, that was all generated from my templates within CONGO, automatically.
I haven’t really told folks much about the templating engine inside CONGO, since I did all the setup for the mail notifications, and just told Sarah and Lisa how to get CONGO to automatically send mail when registering. This afternoon, Lisa sent mail to the registration alias saying she had built a new template, to be used to notify folks asking for babysitting at the event how to arrange it.
This is EXACTLY why I wrote the template editor, documented it the way I did, and put it online, so the registration operators can configure it without having to recode, recompile, or even edit the app. It’s all done through the web interface. Lisa did this with no coaching or even a nudge from me. She saw the value of the templates, how to use them, and implemented it without my involvement at all.
This so rocks my world. It not only means it was a useful feature, but it also tells me I did it in a way that someone could use it with minimal documentation, -and- could see its use without being prompted for it. WOW!
There’s a slight caveat here. The templates used in CONGO are very similar to how Movable Type, our blogging software, works. But still! Way cool!

Latest Firefox + Google fun…

Picked this one up this weekend. If you’re running Firefox, and you pretty much know what you want to find in google, just type the string in the URL field and hit enter. Firefox queries Google, and automatically redirects you to the first link Google returns.
Want to see the IMDB entry for someone? Type ‘imdb noah wyle’, and voila, you’re there. Internet Keywords basically without sending money to AOL or Microsoft, courtesy of Google, and this one works on any platform.
Seems to also work for ebay. Looking for a new calculator? Type ‘ebay calculator’.

Hyper-Geeking and field tests


Wow, what a day.
Yesterday I buckled down and finally reconfigured the CONGO servers to support the new workstations I’ve been accumulating to replace my iOpeners. It took a couple hours of noodling with LTSP configurations and SSH keys, but in the end I now have a cluster of 4 flatscreen workstations, all booting completely off a central Athlon 2.8gig Shuttle box.
The new workstations are Gateway Profile 1.5 machines. These are all-in-one K6-2/400 workstations with fantastic 1024×768 LCD screens. They are SUCH an improvement over the iOpeners in so many ways, but htey do have one drawback. They’re -heavy-. The iOpeners are maybe 4lbs each, and I can carry 6 of them in one carrying case without too much effort. The Gateways are closer to 13lbs each, and are larger, so they don’t fit into any of the road cases I have. That’s a challenge I’m postponing, but will have to address it at some point.

Part of the motivation for getting this stuff going was Tim’s birthday party last night. I had agreed to bring some machines over to his house so we could have some LAN gaming going on. The Gateways are a lot better than the iOpeners for this sort of thing as well, since they have very good, fast screens. The trick was to get the games installed on the server before I had to pack up the cluster and head out. I got everything running about an hour and a half before I needed to leave, so that didn’t leave much time. We ended up with 4 working Gateway Profile terminals, all booting properly off the network. Yay!
I rummaged through the Linux Gametome to get ideas, as well as asked some friends online about I should install. Of the 15 or so packages I finally ended up putting in place, a couple turned out to be real winners:

  • Tenes Empanadas Graciela is a Risk clone running under GNOME. The turn based system was a little time consuming, but the game looks to be quite good. Need more playing
  • Nethack is always the perennial favorite, even though it really -isn’t- multiplayer, it got some use.
  • By far, the favorite for the evening was Xpilot, which ran beautifully on the workstations. Ben did a great job figuring out the tweaks and fiddles to make the game runnable and we had a grand time chasing each other around.

The machines all behaved very well, and it was a great test of the new terminals. We had 4 running off the new Shuttle server, and everything just plain worked. Yay!

Power tools redux, or “Daves tears stuff up”

With thanks to Macthud, a jigsaw was found, and [de?]construction continued. Using a couple tricks I learned on various modding boards, I cut a 10″x4″ window in the left side of the casing, and a 3″x3″ window in the right side. This was done using 1/2″ bit in a power drill to cut the pilot holes, and a single-speed jigsaw to cut the lines. I had already marked the lines in pencil, and masked out the rest of the case with duct tape to prevent the sliding jigsaw from damaging the finish.
The panels popped out fine, and I only had one bad moment of the jigsaw jumping around slighly denting the case. Next time I think I’ll use a better jigsaw, but for now, this was fine.
The next step was using 1/4″ clear plastic tubing for the ‘framing’ around the holes. That involved cutting the tube to lengh and slitting it lengthwise with an x-acto knife. I pushed that over the edge of the cut holes, and that gave me an interesting ‘silicon putty’ look around the edges of the windows.
I then cut 2 pieces of lexan to the right size (did you know that when after scoring Lexan with a carpet knife, breaking it sounds _Just_ like a rifle shot? Woke me up.)
A couple pieces of velcro on the inside of the case and the lexan was mounted. Voila! Looks great. Time to reassemble the case!
And there the problems happened. The tolerances inside a Shuttle case are -miniscule-. There’s enough room on the left side of the case for the internal mountings, but the right side with the smaller window… nuh uh. The case is -right- against the bracing hardware and the power supply.
So, the right side window had to come out. I think I’ll do an external mount on it, so it takes up no internal space at all. But for now it’s an open hole. I’m keeping an eye on the heat in the case, just in case airflow has been a problem. I don’t think it’s been affected too much, but it’s definately on the radar.
I really need to get a new camera so I can share the project pictures. Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

Dude, where’s my jigsaw?

Well, my very first casemod project has come to a screeching halt. I decided to mode the case of one of my Shuttle PC’s to give it a little more glitz and glamor. Since this machines are taken to shows regularly, and tend to be on display, I figure a little more whiz-bang would be good.
For those who don’t know what a casemod is, it’s a way of customizing your PC case using colored lighting, lexan windows, and other doodads to make it look cool. Some examples: a normal pc, and a Shuttle box like mine, but with a blue tinted case.

Continue reading “Dude, where’s my jigsaw?” →

Snarky Linux humor…

From Bioware’s notes on the Linux client for Neverwinter Nights, under ‘Things you will need…”

2. CD-Key: You will have to purchase a copy of the game to get a valid Neverwinter Nights CD-Key. Of course, with this purchase you also get a lovely Neverwinter Nights mapkin, a spiral-bound game manual, and three plastic-coated aluminum-reinforced W1nd0z3 brand coasters.

Platform customized Google home pages

This morning saw the release of Firefox 1.0, a grand day for browsers everywhere. While I haven’t installed it yet myself (I’m still running PR1), we have been chatting about it online.
Firefox has as its default homepage “http://www.google.com/firefox” which in fact, brings up a modified Google search page that looks like Firefox’s default theme.
Catching the scent of geekitude, we set about finding other interesting pages:
http://www.google.com/firefox – The first one we found, Firefox themed.
http://www.google.com/mac – Macintosh themed
http://www.google.com/windows – Windows theme
http://www.google.com/palm – Simplified view – which carries through to search results. Very handy
http://www.google.com/itunes – Not sure about this one, it automatically brings you through to Google Adwords.
http://www.google.com/linux – Tux goes Google!
http://www.google.com/ie – For that, other, less well known browser.
I wonder where Google is going with this? It seems incomplete and inconsistent. Unusual for Google.
Update 11/09/2004 12:55pm…
A few more fun bits were located by Tim and others…
http://www.google.com/bsd – Chuck has his own Google logo!
http://www.google.com/unclesam – For the patriots
http://www.google.com/universities.html – This one may not count, it’s an HTML page (doesnt’ work without the HTML), but it is a search interface to college sites.
Should be noted that Google has a webpage that mentions some (but not all) of these sites here.

Danger! Danger!

According to Astraware, a new version of the extremely addictive game “Bejeweled” is due for release in December.

Dubbed Bejeweled 2, the feature set is rumored to include:

  • Explosive new pieces: Power Gems, Hyper Cubes and Time Bombs
  • Stunning special effects
  • Awe-inspiring planetary backdrops
  • Four ways to play: Classic, Action, Puzzle and Endless
  • Five secret game play modes to unlock
  • Explore a galaxy of hand-crafted brain-teasers in Puzzle mode
  • Play for eternity and collect jewelry in relaxing Endless mode
  • Enhanced sound effects and epic soundtrack

Going by how addictive the original game is, I should simply chalk off December and assume no work will get done at all.