All posts by John Goerzen

I Want Something eBay Doesn’t Have

Software,

I always have time to think while mowing the lawn. And today while mowing the lawn, I got the notion that it would be great fun to play Colossal Cave and other early text adventure games on a teletype. And, of course, since Linux has teletype support in its genes, if I played my cards right, I could probably get a login prompt to my workstation with the teletype, too.

Now, at this point, I am compelled to take a small diversion and explain just what a teletype is — for those of you, like me, who are too young to remember them. (I will graciously omit comment on those of you too old to remember them!) Teletypes have been around since about the 1930s or so, but the ones I have in mind are the ones that were used to interact with computers in the 1960s and 1970s. Instead of a keyboard and monitor, you’d have a keyboard and printer. Believe it or not, surplus teletypes were the interface of choice for teletypes even in the later years because they were so much cheaper than video terminals.

So anyhow, back to the plot. Teletypes operated at speeds ranging from about 40bps to 110bps, but it seems that the most common protocol was Baudot-coded 50cps 5N2 serial format — that is, 5 data bits, 2 stop bits. Amazingly, the serial UART in modern PCs is still capable of communicating with these devices (though it may take some circuitry to tweak the voltages), and at least one person has made it work with Linux.

So I zip on over to eBay to look for teletypes. What do I find? NOT A ONE! A few manuals, and apparently there is a GPS named the teletype. And some company that has something they think *might* be compatible with a teletype, but they don’t know.

eBay has sorely let me down. An antique geeky item should be right up their alley, and zilch. They can sell everything from cars to advertisements on some guy’s bald head, but not a teletype? C’mon!

So anyhow, I am afraid I will have to improvise. Perhaps I can find a dot-matrix printer with a serial port (or, I guess, a parallel port would do too) and an unbuffered printing mode. Then the trick would be getting keyboard input. Perhaps I could rig up a pty to do this, input from /dev/console, output to /dev/ttyS0. It would still be old, but not quite the real deal.

So if any of you have a working teletype you’d like to get rid of, do please let me know. I’ll send you a photo of the printout of me getting lost in Colossal Cave.

Oh, and for those keeping track at home, I guess you can add this to the list of old technologies I’m interested in: Gopher, typewriters, teletypes… they’re all alike, right?

Asus violating GPL again?

Linux

There was a small firestorm last year when people realized that Asus was not releasing source code to GPL’d components of the EeePC. At the time, they eventually did post source code on their website.

Recently I bought an Eee 901. Asus has modified the kernel’s ACPI driver. They released the source code to that on an 8G surf model, but the 901 has additional hardware features in the ACPI space (bluetooth radio power toggle, for instance) that are not in the source they released back then. There are no sources released at all under the 901 section of their website.

Anyone know whom to contact at Asus about this?

Weird Firefox Problem

Software

Once again, I find myself turning to this wonderful series of tubes for help on a weird problem.

I have Firefox (Iceweasel) on all the computers I regularly use. One of these computers has had a persistent problem.

After using it for awhile, it takes a really long time to look up hostnames in DNS. And after upgrading to Firefox 3, it got much worse. Not only did name resolution get slow, but sometimes page loads would get exceptionally slow as well. I could have 5 tabs open, and all of a sudden at the magic moment, nothing would load on any tab. It was as if I was being hit by 75% packet loss. And new pages wouldn’t load, either.

tcpdump showed Firefox not even sending out packets at these times. After a few minutes, it might be back to normal. But I could always quit and restart and it would be fine.

Now, here’s the weird thing: I’ve eliminated every possible difference I can think of between this one machine and the others I use Firefox on. My plugins and extensions are the same set with the same versions. My configuration is the same. When this problem is happening, other network-related programs (even other web browsers) on the same machine are working fine. Nobody else here seems to be having this problem.

Any ideas?

The Eee 901: Awesome

Uncategorized

An Eee 901 showed up here recently, and I’ve had a (little) time to play with it.

What an awesome little machine that thing is. The keyboard is better than I expected, and so is the screen.

I got annoyed at the lack of things like Emacs on the default Xandros install, so decided to zap it and install Debian. But first, I wanted to take a backup of it.

I was thinking to myself that this is a Linux environment, but I can’t just boot up a Linux rescue thingy to get stuff off it because it’s not a regular PC.

Oh wait. It IS a regular PC. It is so small that I wasn’t even thinking about it in the right terms. So a little dd, gzip, and nc later I have my backup image.

Debian went on smoothly — booted from a 16MB image on a USB drive. X, suspend/resume, etc. all worked out of the box. Compiled the wifi driver and it works.

This is, I think, the perfect laptop size. Also the price is good, it’s solid… what’s not to love?

Seen in the Haskell wiki

Uncategorized

Someone on the Haskell Cafe mailing list pointed out the Haskell humor page on the wiki. Here are a few snippets:

<shapr> In my experience, Flash is mostly used as the hi-tek replacement for <BLINK>

”sigfpe”: Haskell is so strict about type safety that randomly generated snippets of code that successfully typecheck are likely to do something useful, even if you’ve no idea what that useful thing is.

Cuil looks useless

Software

So lots of technology sites are all excited about the launch of cuil.com, yet another in a long line of companies that the hype says could dethrone Google.

I went to cuil.com and searched for Amtrak.

It came up with hits for various routes, a historical society, etc. Everything except the actual homepage of Amtrak, amtrak.com, which has the most useful information about Amtrak.

hit on Google.

If Cuil can’t get that right, why bother?

OSCon Update

Software

On Wednesday, OSCon really goes into high gear (and the wifi croaks) at OSCon. The people that aren’t going to the tutorials all arrive, and aren’t yet sluggish from the late-night vendor parties and BOFs.

The keynotes were OK, and after that, I listened to Keith Packard talk about the future of X. Then it was off to finish the preparation for my own talk on Linux on the corporate desktop. It was the first time I spoke at OSCon, and it seems to have gone well. I keep running into people that were at the talk and thought of some more questions — and of course I chatted with a number of people right after as well. There are a number of other companies that are planning on doing what we’ve done, or even started down the implementation path already. It’s some effort making something of OSCon quality (Damian Conway suggests something like 10 hours preparing for every 1 hour presenting — I didn’t do that), but I’m glad I did.

The Expo Hall opened Wednesday as well. Met some interesting folks there — Open Lina, a company that sells Linux hardware, an Open Source groupware product I hadn’t heard of before (they are apparently working on Debian Packages too), and some others I can’t remember right now…

Tuesday I had dinner at Andina, a Peruvian restaurant, with fellow Haskellers Bryan O’Sullivan and Don Stewart — the first time the three of us Real World Haskell folks met in one place.

Today brought Nat Torkington’s excellent keynote, and also r0ml’s great talk this afternoon (“I started this talk in 2003, and it’s run a bit long.”) Another great time for some networking in the hallways and expo hall. One of the LinuxFest Northwest folks had attended my talk, happened to see me as I was stuffing one of the may free t-shirts that vendors were giving out into my laptop bag (by afternoon, they were getting quite in your face about it), and struck up a conversation.

Went for sushi over lunch with a couple of folks from on IRC, then dinner with Debian folks.

Been a busy week, but met lots of people. I didn’t go to as many talks as I planned because I was so busy talking to people — guess that means the conference was a hit.

First 2 Days of OSCon

Software

I’m really enjoying OSCon this year. I’ve been here two days and just Tuesday afternoon actually went to what I had planned to go to. There’s an XMPP summit here (wasn’t on the schedule), and I dropped in there a few times. Got one of the XMPP developers to look at my system and figure out why Empathy isn’t doing video chat with the N810 right.

Had an OSCon moment yesterday. I was sitting at a table with my laptop, trying to meet up with someone I had only met online before. We were chatting over Jabber. And I realized that person was about 20 feet away. This pattern has repeated itself several times now.

We went to McCormick and Schmick’s for dinner. Great seafood and everybody there seemed to really enjoy Jacob too.

The People for Geeks talk was fun. They talked about how geeks tend to apply the tact filter in input, and everybody else on the output, which causes frustration for everyone. Though somebody in the audience asked why that applies to computer geeks but not theater geeks — an interesting question, and one I wish they had probed a bit more.

I keep running in to interesting people here. One day I was talking to someone about alternatives to cfengine (he suggested parrot). This morning I was talking to someone that works for IBM, who is involved with their project to convert desktop machines to Linux and was interested in how we fared. I’ve met several people that spot my Haskell ribbon and are interested. One of them told me at breakfast that he heard there is this new Haskell book coming out that’s about using Haskell in the real world. Another OSCON momemt when I told him I’m one of the authors of that book. The surprise was fun.

Damian Conway had a great talk Monday night on “how to give a great OSCON talk.” I haven’t found his slides anywhere.

Bicycling to Work Update

Outdoors

Back in May, I wrote about starting to bicycle to work. My plan was to do that 3 days a week. My ride is 10 miles each way, with the first 2.3 miles on dirt, gravel, and sand roads.

It’s been going well. Yesterday was the first day that the ride really felt easy. It’s been getting more and more fun, too.

And I’ve been getting faster. My worst time lately was 49 minutes, also yesterday morning. I really was riding slower than I felt normal, just taking it easy. But I had a headwind, and when I started my normal time in calm conditions was 60 minutes or more. That’s almost a 20% improvement already.

Due to vacations, holidays, and weather, I haven’t been able to average 3 days a week. When it’s raining, or has rained recently, our roads get muddy and pretty much impassible on bicycle. Though some days, my ride is 2 miles longer because the short route is too muddy but the long route isn’t.

So, overall, I’ve been enjoying bicycling, and plan to keep doing it.

Kernel interrupt weirdness?

Linux

I’ve had a problem with recent kernels. (I think it’s the kernel that’s doing this.) When my workstation is doing heavy I/O, it repeats keystrokes. For instance, while I was typing this paragraph, audacity was writing audio to disk, and I got this word:

heavvvvvvvvvvvy

It seems as if it thinks I haven’t let up on the keys.

I’ve seen this on two different machines and it seems to have started with 2.6.24 or 2.6.25.

Has anyone else seen this? Any ideas where I’d go to fix it? Incidentally, I’m in X when this happens. I don’t use the console much when there would be a chance for it to happen.

This is such a weird problem I’ve struck out googling, and I’m not even sure which mailing list to take it to.