fractalnavel : xo

i made coffee today !!

fractalnavel — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 16:44:00 GMT

and if you think that's trivial, you clearly hadn't seen my kitchen recently. all it took was a few hours of cleaning sinks, stove tops, counters, dishes, microwave, and stuff, and things, ... so now there's a (mostly) clear floor, and clear counters. still a lot more to do here. step by step, inch by inch ...

motivation ? i got a bag of white castle coffee on my last trip there. dammit, i wanted coffee, and i was going to have coffee - even if it meant cleaning ;-)

dead & dysfunctional thing update rambling:

i found the critter in the garage. the smell had stopped a week or so ago. poor little chipmunk. i need to put a critter door in the garage so any inadvertent captives have a way out. that, or make sure there's always several days supply of water, & perhaps food. i mean, put yourself in the trapped critter's place. jesus.

new router: the expedient thing to do was to cancel the "home wireless networking" package i had subscribed to, and just get the plain ol' cable modem from the store, since otherwise i'd have had to wait for a delivery - they don't stock the one that i had. it was actually very convenient - all in one modem / router / wireless access point. the isp would upgrade the firmware remotely every now & then, which was interesting, because my original 802.11b turned into .11g at some point.

now, i wasn't thinking this thing through. for some reason when i went to get the modem, i thought it would be like my old one, only no wireless - i.e., it would come with firewall & router. and then when i picked up the "wireless router" across the way, i thought it was only going to be a wireless access point. lucky for braindead me, those two mistakes cancelled out nicely. the modem is a plain old modem, and the router is firewall plus five port switch plus wireless (linksys wrt160n, for the geek-curious). which actually put me a bit ahead of the game, as i could retire the plain old switch i had been using.

the nice thing about the old setup was that the only unprotected line was the coax coming into the house. now, the ethernet port out of the modem is also unprotected, which is possible to inadevertently hook up to with an unprotected machine. the other thing i liked about the old device was the dummy lights - more informative than the net total of what i have now. and yes, i used to look over at them quite frequently; it's a reality check along the lines of "ok, nothing is supposed to be accessing the internet right now - so what the hell is that blinking for ?". etc.

pain in the ass reconfiguring again. i duplicated my prior network, which is more work, but this way the individual devices didn't need changing. the xo kept hooking up its wireless mesh networking to the .11n service, which was interesting, but not useful. and then there was the most pathetic hunk of shit software that i've seen in a long time, for its size: that damn auto-setup cvrap that comes with the router - over a gb of sheer uselessness.

on the bright side, i can make better use of opendns now. i still need to run my own dns server since i have a number of internal aliases in use. although - it seems that could be done on the router... hmm.

when i got the orginal "home wireless network" package, they also provided a .11b usb & pci card. i never noticed, but i guess those were outright purchases, since apparently they weren't recorded as leased equipment or anything. not that those things are all that useful now, but in case i (ever) have visitors with laptops & no wireless, those could come in handy.

oh, what else:

was surfing around in the scifi stuff, landed on scalzi's site for a while. remember katrina ? yeah, how soon we forget. well, there was a set of long comment threads on "being poor is ...", with a number of interesting links to other - opinions. something to be absorbed. and more personal motivation.

slowly weaning myself from the last couple of tech forums; these i've been frequenting since may. i had already called it quits on a couple of others that i had hung around on for quite some time. trying to put this summer's project(s?) on auto / unattended mode. this will leave me with one ocassional recreational forum, which i enjoy, actually.

mmm, coffee - second cup ;-)

tech notes: whistling in the dark

fractalnavel — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 17:50:44 GMT

been playing with auto-capturing daily twittering & posting here. not that i use twitter much; pehaps this auto-posting lack is why. at first i tried loudtwitter, but community server doesn't have a way of accepting what it provides out of the box - email (needs cs enterprise license), atom, xmlrpc (what api?). so i had it email to tumblr, and then mirrored the feed from there (needs cs pro license). you may have seen the recent example of that. either i did something grossly wrong somewhere, or either loudtwitter or tumblr is eating the markup. and the post naming would cause problems with my current url rewriting scheme - i just noticed that. huh - no wonder it didn't post last night.

none of this was very acceptable (or even workable). i suppose i could have figured out what xmlrpc was being sent from loudtwitter and then used that (a more portable solution - still wopuld have the bad post naming). funny that there's nothing about anyone doing this anyplace that i can see. just me, i guess. and no, still no a.p.p. in cs2008.5sp1 (i upgraded last week).

apparently, i chose the "roll your own" route (see below), but it's not finished. well, it works, but i need to tweak scheduling and formatting, and generalizing the configuration would be nice, as would fixing the credential security issue. but hey, this is just for me. all that detail stuff is a lot of work.

not a sterling example of code or design, but, well, any landing you can walk away from ...

fractalnavel.CS.Components.GetAndPostJob

/*
get xml, transform to post, post to blog.

***twitter specific at the moment.***

config is as follows for now, until controlpanel stuff is done:
    hrefget - get: string (must return results as xml; basically assuming a rest interface)
    useridGet, pwdget - get: authentication = userid, password (yeah, not very secure, need to do something different)
    hrefXsl - transform reference (url; this xslt is applied to the "get" xml, and will result in the post body)
    idBlog - post: destination blog
    useridBlog, pwdBlog - post: authentication (userid, password) (again, security issue)
    titleBlog - post title (appended with date)
    hours - how far back to look
    bPostNone - post when nothing was retrieved ?

also, should log processing status to events...
*/

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Xsl;

using CommunityServer.Blogs.Components;

using Telligent.Tasks;


namespace fractalnavel.CS.Components
{

    // the job
    public class GetAndPostJob : ITask
    {

        public GetAndPostJob()
        {
        }

        public void Execute(XmlNode node)
        {
            //do work
            GetAndPost gap = new GetAndPost(node);
            if ( gap.Get() ) {
                gap.Transform();
                gap.Post();
            } else if ( node.Attributes["bPostNone"].Value == "true" ) {
                gap.Post( "nothin'" );
            }
        }
    }

    // the work
    public class GetAndPost
    {
        private XmlNode _nodSettings;
        private string _strPostBody;
        private XmlDocument _xmldocAll = new XmlDocument();
        
        public GetAndPost( XmlNode node )
        {
            _nodSettings = node;
        }
        
        public bool Get() 
        {
            string href = _nodSettings.Attributes["hrefGet"].Value;
            int intHours = Int32.Parse(_nodSettings.Attributes["hours"].Value);
            // Tue%2C+27+Mar+2007+22%3A55%3A48+GMT
            href += "?since=" + ((DateTime.Now).AddHours(-intHours)).ToString("r");
            string userid = _nodSettings.Attributes["useridGet"].Value;
            string pwd = _nodSettings.Attributes["pwdGet"].Value;
            _strPostBody = GetTextFromHref( href, userid, pwd );
            _xmldocAll.LoadXml( _strPostBody );
            return (_xmldocAll.SelectNodes("//status")).Count > 0;
        }
        
        public void Transform()
        {
            string href = _nodSettings.Attributes["hrefXsl"].Value;
            XslTransform xsl = new XslTransform();
            xsl.Load( href, new XmlUrlResolver() );
            StringBuilder sbResult = new StringBuilder();
            StringWriter swResult = new StringWriter( sbResult );
            xsl.Transform( _xmldocAll, null, swResult, null );
            _strPostBody = sbResult.ToString();
        }
        
        public void Post()
        {
            Post( _strPostBody );
        }
        
        public void Post( string strPostBody )
        {
            string blogid = _nodSettings.Attributes["idBlog"].Value;
            string userid = _nodSettings.Attributes["useridBlog"].Value;
            string pwd = _nodSettings.Attributes["pwdBlog"].Value;
            string title = _nodSettings.Attributes["titleBlog"].Value;
            bool bPublish = true;
            DateTime dtNow = DateTime.Now;
            MetaWeblog.Post p = new MetaWeblog.Post();
            p.title = title + " " + (dtNow).ToString("yyyy.MM.dd");
            p.dateCreated = dtNow;
            p.description = strPostBody;
            IMetaWeblog metablog = new MetaWeblog();
            metablog.newPost(blogid, userid, pwd, p, bPublish);
        }

        private string GetTextFromHref(string url, string user, string password)
        {
            HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(url);
            request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential(user, password);
            WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(response.GetResponseStream());
            string responseString = reader.ReadToEnd();
            reader.Close();
            return responseString;
        }
    }

}

excerpt from communityserver.config

...
<!-- 2009.03.15, css: added for daily twitter summary post; daily update relies on daily app pool cycling !! -->
<Thread minutes="1320">
    <task 
        name = "fnGetAndPostJob" 
        type = "fractalnavel.CS.Components.GetAndPostJob, fractalnavel.CS" 
        enabled = "true" 
        enableShutDown = "false" 
        hrefGet="http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.xml" 
        useridGet="***" 
        pwdGet="***" 
        hrefXsl="http://blogs.no-ip.org/GetAndPost.xsl" 
        idBlog="fractalnavel" 
        useridBlog="***" 
        pwdBlog="***" 
        titleBlog="a day in a life" 
        hours="24" 
        bPostNone="false" 
        />
</Thread>
...

GetAndPost.xsl

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" >
    
<xsl:output method='html' 
            omit-xml-declaration="yes"
            version="1.0"
            encoding="UTF-8"
            indent="yes"
            cdata-section-elements=""
            /> 
    
    <xsl:template match="/statuses">

        <div class="divLTAll">

            <div class="divLTHead">
                via <a href="http://www.twitter.com/fractalnavel" target="_blank" 
                title="twitter!">@fractalnavel</a>: in the last twenty-four hours:
            </div>
        
            <div class="divLTBody">
                <ul>
                    <xsl:apply-templates select="status" >
                        <xsl:sort select="position()" order="descending" data-type="number"/>
                    </xsl:apply-templates>
                </ul>
            </div>

            <div class="divLTFoot">
                (pulled direct from twitter via custom cs job)
            </div>
            
        </div>

    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="status">
        <li><xsl:value-of select="created_at" />: <xsl:value-of select="text" /></li>
    </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

so the intent should be clear anyway.

there were a lot of links that assisted in one way or another, but the power went phlooey this morning for no apparent reason (interestingly, my modem/router was presciently bombing just minutes before that), so that combined with my laziness means you won't see them here. mostly just stuff on generic community server task creation, and the twitter api.

other twitter related stuff to-do:

do an updated CSModule for updating twitter when a post is created. there is an old one out there. somewhere. but my data stream is heading the other direction.
do a sidebar widget with ajaxy & configurable timeline display. have it update & scroll, that sort of thing. eh, for the addicts out there, sure, but for me ? nahhh...

i did finally do something twitter-ish on the xo: installed TTYtter. too bad there's not a sugar-ized gui client. and it seems any other linux friendly gui twitter clients will bloat too much once all the supporting stuff gets put in place. best to do that on an xo running linux on a stick. seriously, what's the issue with expanding the storage there ? for just a few bucks more, could increase it by an order of magnitude. but it's easy being an ~~armchair~~ couch quarterback.

xo: out with the old, in with the new - eh, never mind

fractalnavel — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 17:50:13 GMT

was poking around the olpc wiki the other day for some reason or another. oh that's right - it was the flash thing. i was tired of not being able to view any flash items in the browse activity. the xo uses exclusively foss, and the only option was a player that only did flash up to v8. i had remembered from past year that there were other players that could be added after the fact. turned out to be adobe's own. oh well; if i have to.

while there, i noticed that the latest system build numbers have been creeping along. last time i looked the latest version no longer included the original pre-packaged set of "activities"; instead, these had to be installed separately after an upgrade in a fairly clunky manner, requiring external storage devices, etc. yuk. but now, this has changed. there's a control panel allowing one to install / update activities from an "activity group" that can be configured, in this case, for g1g1.

so i was like, what the hell, i'll try it. supposed to be a non-destructive installation process that can be rolled back, as long as it's done the right way. so after looking at the release notes, i proceeded.

and - as it turned out, it was a fairly smooth process. a bit of a surprise there. most technical things have their issues. but i rolled back anyway. which was again fairly smooth, but there had been some changes. and now i had only 7% free space left - !

why roll back ?

i didn't like the slightly new interface. while the original was no champion either, this new one felt less useful. you'd have to see them to compare - but there wasn't any explanation of this change immediately apparent in the wiki. whatever happened to "what's new" sections ? just me - i didn't look: 8.2 GUI and usability improvements. eh, my fault.
i could install and update activities from the control panel - but not remove them. nothing will get listed there unless an update or new activity exists. which kinda stunk, because about 160MB of crap in the default set of activities was a major contributor to to nearly filling the "disk" (flash memory). returning to get rid of some things - oops - you can't. and some of what is installed is considered to be "collections" - just content put together that is stored locally for offline use. well, i had gone ahead and installed it all to see what the full experience was going to be, planning on getting rid of much of it later. that's when i discovered the no-removal thing. and then i discovered that there wasn't a good way of backing out collections. have to do that from the command line, and then run other things to rebuild an index, etc. nope, this isn't exactly documented (adding stuff is), have to pick up the pieces of this knowledge from various pages in the wiki. i did remove the wikipedia "slice" activity, gaining back about 90MB, arriving at 85% disk use.
so i tried the old stand-by, the "xo-get" activity that used to work for add / remove purposes - nope, no longer runs.
hey, what happened to the "news reader" activity (rss) ? after installing separately, discovered that this no longer runs either.
i checked the various things i had played with at the linux system level (ntp, ftp, http, smb, wine, thunar, and all their dependencies, and more), and sure enough, they were all gone. really, the only thing preserved in the update is one's history (the "journal"), and most of the /home/olpc folder. some of the stuff in there changes, which was apparent after rolling back. rolling back did restore all of those extras
everything in /root was gone. huh. guess i should have expected that.
after poking around, ok, there was some cool new little stuff & features, but nothing worth the update, really. nothing worth redoing my other work, certainly. i was hoping maybe for some holes to be filled, like the stripped out cifs kernel module finding its way back into the linux layer, but i didn't even bother to check.
from my last playing, i had learned about the yumex package, a gui for the yum utility (think software installer / finder / updater). the thing to do was start with that ("yum install yumex" - worked fine), then start installing my extras using yumex. but i could never get it to load completely in the upgraded system - locked the box up, requiring a power-cycle. resource shortages ? not worth finding out.

other notes on the upgrade / rollback:

93% disk usage ? really ? yeah, i'm aware that a copy of the previous state is made during the update process. lesson learned: clean out the current system before updating. that will prevent all kinds of temporary files from becoming enshrined in the backup copy of the system.
i did find where the old system copy was kept, and all the stuff i had changed / created was there. of course, i would have to re-install the extra software (again) into the new system first. see the yumex comment above, and also consider that there's not enough disk space left to do this.
so, say one is satisfied with the new system - what's the "correct" way to clean up the backup copy ? what happens during the next upgrade ? this is getting ugly. more explanation and guidance on these issues is needed.
i guess i can still use the alternate boot process to go back and forth between the two images i have now. but there are some things i would have to keep undoing / redoing in the /home/olpc area, or make other provisions for.
yeah - rolling back - i now have some duplicate (really? or new versions?) activity items, and duplicate "library" items. something clearly wasn't completely thought through as they were changing how this stuff was stored, configured and backed up.
so now i have two images that need cleaning up. i guess just do each clean-up job while each system is active. probably be able to clear up close to 200MB that way.

probably more stuff i can't recall today, but you get the idea.

and i'm glad i have my little additional programs installed. can't really cut / paste the long magic command line incantations from the olpc wiki pages to any of the stock xo terminal windows, but i had installed "terminal" as part of my xfce toys - cut//paste works like a charm there.

oh - and that flash business ? after rolling back i installed adobe flash, and removed the foss player (gnash). it's like they warned: the xo really doesn't have the horsepower for flash video. well, at least i have the option now.

xo - it's ba-ack

fractalnavel — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:14:52 GMT

Give One, Get One, from Nov. 17
http://www.amazon.com/xo
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/G1G1_2008

$199 to give one, $399 to give one, get one.

more resources and news at olpcnews.com

after-market examples:

tech notes: what, again ?

fractalnavel — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 01:50:20 GMT

so i’m yakking with craig yesterday, and he mentions that stuff on this blog is broken in firefox – version 3. i’m like, cvrap, it was working in v2…

well, took a tweak here & there over the last couple of days, and some leftover config of community server that i hadn’t done, and things are working again. even works on my xo’s browser now, so i’m guessing it’ll work on other stuff where it wasn’t before too. not sure if it still works in ff2 now, but hey, i don’t care – upgrade :-p

mostly had to do with adapting to more recent changes in the mozilla / gecko dom, javascript, xslt & other components. nah, you don’t really want the details…^[1]

and apparently feedburner was not (any longer?) accepting server-side xmlhttp requests without a user agent set, so i took care of that too. kind of strange, though – they were returning a 404, where maybe a 403 of some sort would have been more appropriate.

^[1] silly stuff:

javascript “eval” changed – can’t eval a statement fragment
xml doc “evaluate” changed – must use the xml doc being evaluated against
error object changes; error message changes (better, but different)
cs config: needed to prevent web.config inheritance for my cross-domain feed proxy
xslt change – doesn’t just blow off msxsl:script anymore
xslt even wraps <xsl:output method=”html”/> results in a “transformiix” node if there isn’t a single root node in the result – needed some changes for this to allow proper “refresh” with my transform behavior

i don’t even think that’s a complete list. good thing i had already built-in a lot of tracing / error handling when i went through this cross-browser stuff last winter.

silly xo tricks

fractalnavel — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:33:45 GMT

been taking the xo places lately:

at the conference last weekend, xo made a tiny splash. self was overshadowed by the machine, and rightly so. the clip is from a youtube video someone cobbled together. well, ok, self's knee is lookin' good too ;-)
a couple of days later i was up at four am thinking about some recent website configuration i had changed for a customer, decided it wasn't going to work quite the way it needed to. so, sitting on my couch, i pick up xo and rdesktop in to the server and make revisions to the settings. teeny tiny font sizes, but does the job.
sitting at the neighborhood bar - yesterday ? - i happened to have xo in tow, i log on to centerim (yum'ed earlier), and instantly there's craig talkin' at me.

this thing really reaches out for wifi access points. couldn't find one from inside a customer's location, though, which is a good thing.

xo: chugging along

fractalnavel — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:17:19 GMT

spending some quality time with the xo lately:

yumex ("yum install yumex", ~500kb) is a graphical yum front-end which is helpful digging through the repositories, already installed items, and available updates. still have to do something about logging my installs, though.
yumex helped me discover that rdesktop was already installed, works like a charm accessing my windows boxes from the xo. best with the full screen option (-f). still need to set up the tools to do this sort of access in reverse.
does this thing form mesh connections with itself sometimes ? i'm pretty sure there's no other xo around here, but it hooked up with essid "olpc-mesh", 100% connection quality. that's better than with my ap twenty feet away. i need to get this thing to do that again & share an app, see what's what.
networking: a tip i saw - "iwconfig eth0 rate 54MB" will speed things up, assuming you have 802.11g. out of the box, xo is configured for 1MB, apparently a power saving move.
correction to an earlier posted figure: xo is delivered with a bit over 300mb of space used, not the 200mb or so i originally thought (where'd i get that ?). so i've added a bit more than 100mb through installs & just everyday usage (logs, files, etc.).
i posted about determining system imaging options, came across this stuff: How to (hack) customize a built for XO. there's lots more info on the olpc wiki: customizing nand images (also some info here on removing journal history and other initialization / cleaning tasks); and some more through googling for "save-nand". caveats and potential future directions in this thread: any drawbacks to using copy-nand and save-nand to install XO images. more: Backing upthe XO?
i finally got around to getting a developer key for the box; just insurance for now.

xo: because, just because

fractalnavel — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 20:58:55 GMT

so, y'know, i haven't done taxes, or even summarized cash flow from last year, and it's like one in the morning, so of course, being supremely rational, i decide it's time to install an http server on the olpc xo ^[1].

^[2]

your mission

not just any server; i go for the micro_httpd. i first saw this years ago when my router coughed up 404s; apparently this is what they use on its embedded system (along with other stuff, because it apparently supports asp pages as well). and i had been familiar with acme labs from long before that. one of those grandaddy-of-the-web sites.

sure, a lot of other options are more reasonable in terms of feature & configuration flexibility, but this one was appealing for several other reasons:

at under 200 lines of c, it can be torn apart like an old watch
i had already downloaded it through the xo's "browse" activity - so where does it put the files ?
binaries are not distributed, it has to be "made" locally (or is the proper past tense there "maked" ? or "'make'd" ?)

and i only really want an absolute minimum of features anyway.

part of the way this thing achieves its micro-ness is by offloading the network comms to inetd - or, in the xo's case, xinetd. more on that later.

button, button, who's got the ...

first step: where the hell is that damn thing that i downloaded anyway ? oh yeah - back to that mess of a datastore that the xo uses ^[3]. managed in the guise of its journal, all downloaded files (and many other things) are not stored under their original names, the names have been changed to ~~protect the innocent~~ hashes. thankfully, they still maintain their original type information (i could see this in thunar, but not through ftp). digging back into the journal, i could see the date of the download, so it wasn't too difficult to determine which file was which (/home/olpc/.sugar/default/datastore/store/2ced633e-7f17-4233-8ad5-a5642e6f), but this is still silly.

anyway, copied it to a working directory & changed its name to the original, and started from there.

oh, sure, using wget would make more sense, given these circumstances. i'm just following along a la "tao of xo".

go ahead, make my day app

so the instructions say "just do a make". right. well, this is an xo, there ain't no such thing. luckily, unlike the removal of cifs (module?), this is still available as an installable package. so - "yum install make".

what about a compiler ? as is well documented everywhere, all linux distros come with gcc. nope, not the xo. so - "yum install gcc". which comes with a couple extra mb in dependencies, for a total of 8mb.

finally, "make [install]".

yeah, ok, that was straightforward. sure. but well, i will be needing those tools anyway, eventually. one of the reasons for doing http this way, remember ?

con-fig-u-ra-a-tion

more instructions:

To install it, add a line like this to /etc/inetd.conf:

micro_http stream tcp nowait nobody /usr/local/sbin/micro_httpd micro_httpd dir

Make sure the path to the executable is correct, and change "dir" to be
the directory you want to serve.
Then add a line like this to /etc/services:

micro_http port/tcp #Micro HTTP server

inetd, eh ? nope - again, the xo has no such thing. something so basic to unix / linux. then again, i can see why. it has the potential to open up all kinds of security issues, and certainly these machines are not intended to provide network services. and in any case, xo's base os ^[4] is an adaptation of fedora, which uses xinetd. nope, that's not on the xo either. here we go again - "yum install xinetd". i think i've added more than 10mb so far.

of course, xinetd's settings are handled differently than inetd. mostly it's a straightforward translation though. here is the xinetd.conf version (only the relevant bits; well, ok, and some others):

defaults
{
    log_type    = SYSLOG daemon info 
    log_on_failure  = HOST
    log_on_success  = PID HOST DURATION EXIT
    cps         = 50 10
    instances   = 50
    per_source  = 10
    v6only      = no
    groups      = yes
    umask       = 002
}

service http
{
    disable     = no
    id          = http
    wait        = no
    socket_type = stream
    protocol    = tcp
    user        = olpc
    server      = /usr/local/sbin/micro_httpd
    server_args = /
    port        = 80
    only_from   = 127.0.0.1 10.11.128.0/24
}

this is actually divided between /etc/xinetd.conf (defaults) and /etc/xinetd.d/microhttp-server; xinetd.conf has "includedir /etc/xinetd.d" as the last line. and those are really "defaults", that section is unchanged from the xinetd install.

note that i've exposed the entire system to browsing; at least, the parts that the olpc user can see. and i've contrained access to my lan (and the xo itself). assuming i don't hook up with some dhcp somewhere with the same segment configured, i should be ok.

see me, run mee-ee-ee ...

finally, i can test all this out. turns out the xinetd installation already handled the chkconfig stuff for me (runlevels 345), so "/etc/inet.d/xinetd restart", and voila. well, not really; i had some issues differentiating between underscores and hyphens in filenames, but once i got that dyslexia straightened out, http popped right up ("fuser -vn tcp 80" is one way of checking).

what does this let me do ? just a simple way to browse the filesystem, mainly. but it was also a learning experience.

time of completion: 7am ? it was light out, anyway.

observation: really, how "micro" was all that ?

i'm thinking i may want to change some of that source code to give me something other than the classic acme labs green as a directory listing page background color default, but y'know, it has its, uh, "charms".

finis

so now i have acquired a few more tools one usually finds in linux, at the cost of more used space. being such a newb at this, i still have to chase down log file usages and make sure these things are being properly limited and / or rotated. certainly don't want to suck up disk space like that. plus i need to figure out how to clean up xo's journal (i remember seeing stuff on that somewhere). also, is there a log of everything i've "yum"ed ?

yet again, i'm struck by how obtuse this whole linux thing is. in some cases, elegantly obtuse, where "they" have gone out of their way to automate really boneheaded stuff (assuming one knows the proper magic incantations), instead of shifting paradigms. well, that shift is happening anyway.

another recent musing has been that the linux community creates a huge amount of churn. no way that will ever be able to keep up with more focused efforts from players like microsoft, etc. and in fact, whenever something threatening does pop up out of the open source world, the big guys just scarf the concepts up and move on.

and that part is good. the backyard mechanics can play as much as they want, and every now and then a Good Idea^TM gets cranked out. then the big machines take it from there. no little guys, and we'd have the same old shit. but the little guy needs to get a grip: although he is the source of some innovation and it's good to have gadflies, it is not the same thing as being a player himself. yet their contribution is invaluable.

bottom line is that we need both. they are part of the same machine.

^[1] what i am not doing here is creating any sort of multi-user website hosting system. that's a very different proposition best handled with other http daemons. a number of options for this target functionality are available as yum packages ("yum info *http*"). there are some good comparisons of footprints & features out there; just search. acme labs' thttpd is available. lighttpd also looks like a reasonable option. apache (httpd) looks bloated.

^[2] why this pic ? what is this pic ? it's from the missouri botanical garden, part of some rotating art displays (the diplays rotate, not the pieces of art :-P), or so i am told. really is remniscent of that head from the movie zardoz, in a warped sort of way. there are some perspective problems with that first pic, as you can tell if you look closely. it also has tiny legs underneath ;-)

why, then ? because the grotesqueness and context inappropriateness and screwy perspective and zardoz reference is just so in synch with all this linux and xo crap. also, just because i wanted to share them with you ;-)

pic credits: passed on by craig, currently on assignment at mobot. photographer: (a) ? (b) Jay Paige.

^[3] the original post started as:

"Right before leaving One Laptop per Child, I was tasked with re-architecting the tremendous mess that is the OLPC datastore, Sugar’s persistent data storage subsystem for applications. The system was written by an external contractor without OLPC oversight (after I interviewed him and explicitly warned against his hiring!), and is generally a stunning show of incompetence both in software design and implementation. It eventually shut down and rendered inoperable — even after reboot — hundreds of XO laptops in Uruguay, OLPC’s first deployment, a day before the children were supposed to leave for their summer vacation. Left unfixed, it would have soft-bricked all seven thousand deployed machines.

At the time, it wasn’t known that the problem was in the datastore code, and as these things go, I was thrown in to make the issue go away while everyone else headed home. In a scene straight out of a MacGyver episode gone horribly, awfully awry, I needed to write a userland NAND flash dump tool, send it to my Uruguay contacts, download the resulting disk dump, diagnose the problem, write a patch, QA it, issue it to Uruguay, and follow up to make sure the problem is indeed resolved. By myself. On a nine hour deadline. Needless to say, it was about as fun as sticking red-hot nine inch nails into each of my eyelids.

Ah, such fond memories. ..."

[retrieved from google cache 2008.04.12]

i think this is an important perception to be preserved. since it's my responsibility for digging this up and posting this here, and the original post was (apparently?) self-censored, you may as well consider this as fiction - but interesting fiction, nonetheless.

^[4] i think it's funny (ironic?) that years ago one big fuss over windows was that originally it was overlayed on dos - just like currrent linux guis are overlayed on their bases. of course, there were some accompanying architectural issues as well, such as the use of segmented address space, but still...

xo: connectivity

fractalnavel — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 22:47:08 GMT

been spending some time trying to get this xo box more connected:

remote desktop access ? i don't mean ssh or the like here, i'm talking something along the lines of vnc or rdp. there is some interesting info relating to this on the olpc wiki, but i figure that this will probably be the more complicated task, so i move on. nomachine looks more promising than what i saw on the wiki, depending on the specifics, of course.

done how about ftp access ? to the xo from elsewhere, i mean. getting a good graphical ftp client running on the xo won't be all that useful, if my experience with the thunar graphical file system manager thing is any indicator - it gets a bit crippled when run outside of its intended gui desktop environment.

there does seem to be ftp over ssh installed on the box, but that's not what i'm looking for. vsftpd seems the best candidate, in terms of power vs. footprint (in all senses). took some time to get it configured properly, since i was basically just looking for secured full access for the root account, not in managing user accounts, and default ftp configuration is specifically set up to disallow that (i kept missing something obvious that i already knew about).

found out that the latest version of smartftp (3.x) now supports ftp over ssh, so i guess i could have gone that direction, but that wouldn't have quite given me what i wanted.

then there's access to windows server file shares from the xo. this gets sticky, because apparently the files system types i would need have been stripped out of the kernel, one (smbfs) because it's deprecated and no longer in fedora core (as of quite some time ago), and the replacement (cifs) because apparently the olpc folks were insane about reducing their kernel size (and insanely anti-windows as well). so even after messing with samba & samba-client installations, these filesystems are expected to be compiled into the kernel, and that leaves me with the not so pleasant prospect of having to do this myself. not a problem if this was a widely available linux version on widely available hardware with normal peripherals, but since this is not the case, i need to get the xo backup & rebuild provisions in place first.

the samba stuff looks cool, by the way, and i could set up the xo to have shares available to the windows systems, but that's not what i'm looking for. i need to have external server based storage available from the xo. not too big a footprint, either.

the final access item was http access to the xo, but that looks relatively simple and is also not really what i need, being a read-only protocol (without enabling all kinds of server-side processing, which bloats fast). i'll save this until later.

other: mentions of email, skype, various im clients & other human-to-human communications protocols are in the wiki. not high on my list, but i can see where it would have been good to have some of this built-in for the olpc target audience. but the more i dig into this, the more i wonder about the real political hurdles they had to cross that forced the technology into its current shape. intra-village comms ok (mesh chat, school server, etc.); but not inter-village! wider external information flows are incoming only. would xo-packaged versions of these tools be accepted ?

a correction to an earlier post: thunar reported total file space usage around 2.5gb, apparently due to counting linked objects in addition to physical ones (?), resulting in a lot of duplication. the real total persistent memory size (flash memory, not a drive) is 1gb, as documented. the originally installed xo os & ancillaries weigh in at just under 200mb. after being used to multi-gig windows behemoths, that's quite eye-popping.

currently i'm at about 400mb total space used, with a most of the non-built-in stuff being the "activities" i downloaded earlier. with multi-gig sd cards & usb drives (and external hard drives of all sizes do reportedly work just fine), i'll be able to stretch a bit. i'd like to reconfigure things such that an sd card could be considered & used as if permanent as far as the os is concerned, which would give a lot of breathing room, but i suspect i would need to be rebuilding & partitioning devices from scratch. that would seem to be a better approach though, where the base system resided on the built in device, and all extensions, user & other volatile activity used the removable devices. that would be tricky. also makes me wonder about their 1gb internal storage - if sd cards can be so much larger, why not also what's inside ? since these things don't take kindly to being filled up & don't recover easily from that situation (numerous reports of this), trading off more hardware cost to reduce the frequency of this scenario of unusability would make sense. risk management, eh ?

that discussion covers the pre-networking connectivity needs, sneakernet. but since external devices are also needed for backing up, looks like i need to invest there as well.

unless - i wonder - has anyone out there been able to use "regular" imaging tools on their xo's ? like norton ghost or acronis true image. sounds like another research avenue.

xo: the joy of the command line

fractalnavel — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:27:40 GMT

had a lot of flashbacks going back 10 & 25 years, to unix & dos times. i never really felt comfortable with a system until i could graphically browse the directory structure. getting around with cd & memory (that's "change directory", not "compact disk", and the memory in question is my own) just isn't a whole lot of fun. luckily i remember some minimal stuff from an assignment ten years ago that bumped into unix a bit, enough to find my way around.

see, the xo's primary user interface (a graphical one) tries very hard avoid any sense of a folder or directory structure. the result is interesting, but not very helpful, especially for someone with gearhead tendencies like me. i found that i pretty much ignore most of the pre-packaged applications this thing came with, and instead - well...

i made some progress on that list in my last post, but not in any organized manner. the xo is supposed to be an ad-hoc learning tool, so i figured ok, i'll just play & do what i like. so i grabbed a few "activities" from the olpc wiki page of that name, almost all of the game variety. that just leads to trouble with me, resulting in a few lost days spent on golden moldies like doom and simcity and the like. yes, one of the xo packaged applications is a crippled version of doom. that'll teach those third world children what they need to know.

can't remember off-hand now what got me digging around in the os (maybe it was the hardware clock being off by an hour, or trying to get access to local dns server settings), but i got tired of the ls / grep / cd thing, found a mention of a linux based graphical file manager, and dinked around with that until i got it installed. that exercise took me through even more command line playing.

anyway, some stuff that isn't really obvious about this machine: it's got no hard drive, it's got some sort of flash memory instead. all ~~3.5gb~~ 1gb^[2] of it. ~~only~~ about 800mb of that is free when the box arrives. now, this is good hardware for its mission in terms of low power consumption & physical robustness, but it's, well - odd. peripheral storage is through usb connections & an sd card slot. i've seen no mention of it yet, but i wonder if this thing will work with a usb connected external hard drive, not just a usb thumbdrive.

hmm - i keep forgetting to look for how it uses ftp. i'm not sure their browser (something that sounds firefox derived, but stripped down) will handle this, and command line ftp is of limited use, so maybe i'll be looking for another linux application soon.

as for linux - that world, too, is odd. people actually seem to think it's an advantage to have to cobble stuff together from all kinds of bits & pieces found all over the web. i'll have to say, though, that i wouldn't have learned much about the nuts & bolts of computing, and what makes me a well rounded software developer today (relatively speaking), if i had only been exposed to gui's. the world needs both, but for very different reasons.

and the olpc undertaking itself has its own peculiar set of idiosyncrasies relating to what it thinks education is, its purpose & priorities. they are pushing a distinctly non-neutral worldview, whether they realize it or not, and it's often condescending & pretentious. however, there is a worthwhile kernel wrapped up in all of these technical & socio-political trappings. at the very least, the whole enterprise will provide a useful case study for future endeavors of a related nature. sure, they haven't been pulling it off as well as a big corporate machine, but that's the whole point. and their flaws, well, we've grown accustomed to the many serious flaws found in the status quo and no longer notice them. the fact that we're sensitive to new ones in a new approach only reveals our humanity, not (necessarily) something fundamentally wrong in the project.

so - i'm having some out of town visitors stop by tonight, and they have my 14 year old nephew with them. i'm thinking i may just secure the root account on this thing^[1] and hand it to him, see what he makes of it while the rest of us go out on the town.

^[1] yeah, it's wide open. there's mention that future os releases will have that account "disabled", but that's not completely acceptable either. it should just be appropriately secured, is all.

^[2] the documented value is is 1gb, my mistake - see later post.

xo: toy story, part 1b

fractalnavel — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:33:21 GMT

so it didn't take too terribly long to get this thing connected to my network, but i needed to dig around in their wiki first; i needed the mac address so that i could maintain security here. hey, if i had been just a little bit more of an experimental mindset, i would have found it myself quick enough. (arrow on activities bar - click on it - doh!)

if it hadn't been for my own lan security it would have connected immediately. also noticed that it really picks up on all kinds of other wlans in the area. the range seems to be as good as they say, much better than anything else i have.

lots of immediate observations, but i'm mainly focused on:

network connectivity - done
post to my blog - in progress (not this post)
disk storage management & access (incoming / outgoing)
backups
new software acquisition & installation
(5b) security
os learning
eventually, development

i am so far from that last item. but i'll just play for a while.

the browser "activity" (applications are "activities") is my first focus. and i can't help a lot of head scratching over the keyboard and other controls as well. so kids over yonder are supposed to figure all this out for themselves through trial & error, without internet access ? interesting. that will develop an interesting subculture in itself, of gurus & dependents and myth & reality.

physically, it is tiny, but works rather well. the weight is mostly in the screen part, which is unbalanced feeling unless the thing is placed on a hard surface. the display is nice & clear, resolution & colors good. the networking stuff is the cool part; a village full of these would be - well, revolutionary, perhaps even literally. imagine kids at night in their mesh network chatting in the dark while the villages sleep, plotting - what? - needs a scifi story here. that's where this thing will reach its true power - sharing.

the one thing i keep tripping over is not having touch pad tap-to-click capability.

the built in camera is nice, but i can't take a picture of it with itself. thank me for not subjecting you to the accidental pictures that i took of myself as i was figuring out special keys ;-)

the browser: what is it based on ? all that work i did recently on making my sites firefox friendly has no effect on this one. well, the javascript & css work paid off~~, but behaviors ? forget it~~.^[1] which means my main site barely renders at all, like before. also noticed that my chosen font for my sites (trebuchet) is not available, and it falls all the way back to times roman. i need to put in a reasonable set of fallback font families, but y'know, it doesn't look bad that way.

anyway, my main priority now is just to prevent myself from screwing things up permanently as i experiment, or to protect myself from that if it happens.

meanwhile, this thing was withstood the initial dust bunny assault well, and may even be soon be subjected to the accidental beer spill test. the environment here is not a lot less electronics hostile than some other destinations this machine was designed to withstand.

security: hmm - hope this thing is robust against attacks. does it need firewall, virus, worm, spybot, etc. protection ? at home, i should be ok (?), but elsewhere, i'm not so sure. added 5b above.

philosophy, very briefly: just as computers do not "get" humans (yet?), humans do not intuit computers. that's still a huge gap. animals & people "get" each other far better, yet also still, very clearly, incompletely. these things have "personality" - unintended perhaps, or maybe only vaguely conceived - but not even in an "understanding alien intelligence" sort of way. yeah, how long until these kids figure out the linux os internals all on their own ? yeah, right. they are dependent on being spoon fed "activities" and knowledge, until some threshold is crossed. before that, it's all myths, magic and superstitions - not so much different than the average computer user anywhere, i guess, especially in corporate america.

he who controls the stories, controls the world.

^[1] well, ok, spoke too soon there. the behaviors part is working; it's the specific xml transform behavior that is the problem. should be able to figure that out, when i get around to it. and of course the css work has an impact. i just (over)reacted with my disappointment that everything didn't just work, i guess.

xo: toy story, part 1

fractalnavel — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 03:38:25 GMT

so me & self are pulling in the drive on the way back from the beer store, fog everywhere, and a nice cedar fire burning somewhere in the neighborhood, and self notices something on the dark porch. "what's that?" i wander over to take a look - and surprise, surprise - the xo is here !

i had pretty much given up on this until april at least, given some statistics & such that someone had recently worked out on deliveries. but yeah, it just suddenly appeared, no knock or anything, and i was home all day (unless it got here before ten & i was still asleep). i checked specifically yesterday, nothing.

somehow i was expecting a white box with green markings. glad it was less conspicuous than that.

so now what ? it's late-ish, i'm sipping suds, perhaps now is not the time to dig into the unknown and unboxing. not sure why there's two boxes, though. oh, ok, what the hell, i'll just do some unpacking then. not like i'm missing anything good on tv tonight. self says "take some pictures!". fine. *eye roll* "but first get another beer!"

well, here's box #1: hey - what the ... ?! that's candy !! aww, shucks, the olpc people are trying to make nice ;-)

no, wait a minute - that's an american express thing. says "... please enjoy this ... as a thank you for attending one of our By Invitation Only^® experiences in 2007. ..." um, sure - where exactly have i been this last year ? skiing, and a bunch of graduation trips that i will probably never write about (too rich for words). but ok, whatever - chocolates are in hand, and they're never going back.

in fact - i hadn't even used my ax platinum card last year - i haven't used ax for years, it seems - until a few weeks ago, when i forgot my usual card of current choice. maybe it was a welcome back gesture. or maybe someone's using my card - i guess i should check my statements. nope - nothing unexpected there either.

anywho, back on track - where was i ? "*nudge* pssst - xo" oh, right. but the chocolates...

weird how those two packages arrived at one time. man - peanut butter bonbons, "la parisienne" cocoa, "exotic" truffles, and a small bar of - what - "buddha leaf" - "malaysian pandan leaves + dark chocolat" - that one's not even on their lists.

best i can tell is that this stuff falls somewhere around $60-70 - ! just lifting the lids of the boxes - and not breaking the seals - the aroma is amazing.

hate to say this, but at the moment i'm more excited about the chocolate than the xo. check the video on their about page. i'm impressed.

so if you want to really blow away your significant other, get one of their $300-400 gift boxes - complete with champagne.

i'll get to the xo manana...

xo: propagating electronic entropy

fractalnavel — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:49:33 GMT

xo news - you get it when i do:

From: service@laptopgiving.org
Sent: 2008.02.20 18:30:25 Eastern Standard Time
Subj: Update On Your XO Laptop

Dear Donor,

We wanted to update you on the status of your XO laptop.

Our production schedule is still on track and we expect to deliver your laptop by the middle part to end of March. Your donation is in queue and ready for shipment as soon as we receive additional laptops.

You can continue to check on your order status at www.laptopgiving.org.

If you have any other questions regarding your XO laptop, please do feel free to reply to this email or contact our Donor Services team at 1-800-201-7144.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding.

Sincerely,

OLPC Donor Services

so why send me stuff when nothing has changed ? are we that short on attention span ? this is how all their bad g1g1 pr trouble started in the first place.

i often do the same thing when i'm not sure that something i'm trying to communicate is getting across. i start to repeat myself, elaborate on the topic, try to put things a different way, etc. bad habit. it could also be my reaction to what are bad listening habits in others. i think people get used to those bad habits in each other. i sometimes get odd reactions when i do that "active listening" thing, giving feedback on what i just heard. no acks/nacks in the world, it's all open loop comms. not good.

xo: 1, 2, 3, ...

fractalnavel — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 16:46:42 GMT

you'd think there'd have been an accountant or a production manager on staff there. it's a simple counting problem. something they want the kids to learn, maybe ?

From: service@laptopgiving.org
Sent: 2008.01.31 01:48:35 Eastern Standard Time
Subj: Update On Your XO Laptop

Dear C,
Please accept my apologies for the delay in receiving your XO laptop. Give One Get One was such a phenomenal success that we over-taxed our order processing and payment systems. Demand exceeded supply.
Additional XO laptops are being built now and will be delivered in 45 to 60 days. If you wish to reconsider your contribution in the face of this delay, we will issue a refund to you. We have set up a dedicated phone line for these requests. The number is 1-800-883-8102.
In the meanwhile, please know that laptops are in the process of going to Mongolia, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Haiti as part of the "give one" side of the equation. Fortunately, OLPC's mission of getting laptops to the children in these countries has not been delayed. In Mongolia , the children are already enjoying themselves and learning new things with their XO laptops. Please see: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Ulaanbaatar.
Eliminating poverty through learning is gaining wider acceptance thanks to support like yours.
Sincerely,

Nicholas Negroponte
Chairman
OLPC Foundation

well, ok, i guess i have also donated my patience so that they can learn these things and improve their performance on their mission elsewhere. think of what may have occurred if they had not had this kind of visible experience. or, are things really just as bad, yet unpublicized, with their core program ?

so anyway, i don't expect much of an update on this until march / april.

on the bright side, being rushed into the donation / purchase in the first place was undesirable. didn't give any chance for bugs to be worked out of the system, etc. but that was the only purchase period available. now, this delay should mean that fixes will have had a chance to have found their way into the hardware & software, meaning more reliable boxes. just a chance.

this was kind of my original expectation, delivery in the spring, whenever they got around to it. they should have stated those uncertainties a bit more strongly for some people, instead of getting strong-armed into the over-promising game. i suppose i'm used to reading between those lines. i was surprised at the earlier emails making noises about a january delivery.

there's something to be learned here for everyone, but especially in the software profession: stick to your realistic estimates. giving in to customers who can't face reality won't change reality.

xo: [thumb twiddling here]

fractalnavel — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 07:41:38 GMT

From: service@laptopgiving.org
Sent: 2008.01.24 02:30:26 Eastern Standard Time
Subj: Your XO Laptop

Dear Donor,

We wrote you several days ago to let you know that your donation is in our shipping queue for the shipment of your XO laptop.

We are awaiting the arrival of new inventory so that we may ship your laptop to you. We will send you another update in the next few days when we have specific shipping information.

We appreciate your generosity and patience.

Sincerely,

OLPC Donor Services

kind of what i thought. not a problem. shouldn't the kids come first anyway ?