Boy on a Bike » Technology

Technical Announcement

admin — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 15:09:20 +0000

If anyone is still accessing this site from http://ankle-biter.net, please use the “normal” domain, http://anklebiter.net. The ankle-biter.net domain was a stop-gap measure when my last web host (most certainly a guy running a few machines in his basement) went down for close to a week. I don’t feel the need to own this domain anymore, so at the beginning of October, it will no longer be mine. Consider yourself warned.

The Magic of the Internet

admin — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 20:54:58 +0000

Thanks to this nifty tool using the Google Maps API, I present to you my morning commute.

The Hand That Feeds You

admin — Sat, 15 Jan 2005 20:32:46 +0000

Slashdot has a good discussion going on about this article about former virus writer Marek Strihavka. Strihavka apparently ran with a gang of Russian programmers (known collectively as 29A), but has reformed himself and now works for an internet security firm. He claims he did not distribute the virii he wrote and his work was merely research oriented — he wrote the virii to see what could be done about them. First problem — someone had to distribute the code. If it wasn’t Strihavka, it had to be one of his cohorts. If he was working as some sort of guardian angel, trying to make the internet a better place, why wasn’t he at a university or AV company from the start?

Oops

admin — Mon, 19 Apr 2004 17:18:49 +0000

Perhaps it’s time I modify the defaults for MT to avoid the embarrassment of turning on comments and turning off line breaks. Sorry for the utter goof-up last night….

Open Source Usability

admin — Fri, 02 Apr 2004 12:36:22 +0000

John Gruber has written an excellent essay on the state of usability in open source software. The essay is a response to Eric S Raymond’s recent essay on being unable to use the Linux CUPS interface to connect to a printer. Gruber does a fine job dissecting Raymond’s arguments (distilled version: developers have to dumb down interfaces so non-technical users can use the software). His most important point? Interface design is quite different than writing software. Lots of folks can write printer drivers, or print sharing systems, but few understand the concepts of design well enough to create a usable interface for them. Hence the reason why top technical schools like CMU have Human Computer Interaction schools.

Behind the Scenes Update

admin — Mon, 12 Jan 2004 13:44:28 +0000

I finally wrestled the anklebiter.net domain name from our lame hosting provider, which means that everything now points to the same servers as ankle-biter.net. Including email. The old provider’s service would just mysteriously disappear every so often. That shouldn’t be the case anymore, though. Hoo-ray!

Jumping Ship

admin — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 15:26:39 +0000

Well, if all goes well, I may be returning to the dark side for my employment. In preparation for this, I’ve starting playing around with Mono, an open source implementation of the various APIs used by ASP.NET. This project, led by the founders of Ximian, is geared toward a fully functionality .Net library for Linux platforms. This has obviously met with some strong resistence from the open source community, since there’s concern that this gives Microsoft inroads to the open source community. Personally, I don’t have time for this religious discussion, as the .Net platform has some really nice features that are currently lacking in Java and Java-based web frameworks.

Anyway, I think I’ll spend part of my off day re-learning C# and .Net forms (though I had to refresh my knowledge prior to a tech interview). Right now the biggest advantage of the Mono implementation is that I don’t have install Windows on any of our machines at home….

SCO, Again

admin — Thu, 11 Sep 2003 15:17:08 +0000

In case you don’t really follow this (which you probably shouldn’t, since it’s incredibly silly), SCO CEO Darl McBride wrote this error-filled open letter to the open source community. And, of course, the open source community responded. The response is thoughtful and concise, but I’ve got one question to all these folks who have made it their life’s purpose to fight SCO in the media. Who are you writing to?

If you’re writing for just the media, well, that’s very noble of you. And I’m sure that you may, in fact, change some people’s minds about SCO. But I suspect that most people, unless they are employees of Microsoft or SCO shareholders, understand that SCO is completely out of their collective mind.

And if you’re writing directly to the folks at SCO, well, you’re wasting your time. Do you really think you’re going to change Darl McBride’s mind on the subject? Do you really believe he’ll read an article by ESR and think “Wow! These guys are right. I’m going to drop this lawsuit immediately!”?

Some level of defense from the open source community should be expected. But this is too much. At this point, you’re not furthering your cause. Let SCO run out of steam, and let the courts tell them to pound salt.

More SCO Madness

admin — Wed, 03 Sep 2003 19:06:08 +0000

SCO, in yet another incredible move in their claims about intellectual property in the Linux kernel, will be sending invoices to companies currently using any flavour of Linux. SCO’s claim is, of course, that since they believe the Linux kernel contains their IP, these companies owe them licensing fees for that property. Let the class action lawsuits begin!

This is, in fact, illegal. You cannot invoice a company for something that you did not directly provide to them. Note that this sort of thing is actually listed on the national fraud alert website.

Will they never learn?

Linux on a Laptop

admin — Sat, 16 Aug 2003 14:44:40 +0000

Well, I finally went ahead and did it — I wiped the hard drive on our laptop and installed Linux. It was about that time, as it took Windows 2000 nearly 10 minutes to completely boot, and with the iMac (and Office for Mac), we didn’t really have any good reason to keep a copy of Windows around.

I was really expecting an adventure, figuring that at least one piece of hardware on the laptop (an older Dell Inspiron 7500) wouldn’t play nice with Linux. Well, I was partially right. First, I tried to install Slackware, but that crashed and burned quite early, the installer complaining that it couldn’t find a driver for the PCMCIA cards (despite the fact that when autoprobing for drivers, the driver the NIC needed scrolled by on the screen. Oh well…next….

I had downloaded Mandrake’s 9.2 beta release, and figured I’d give that a shot too, since it had the latest and greatest Gnome packaged with it. The install went well, and it found and activated the PCMCIA NIC. w00t! Then the troubles began. Something went all wrong with the Window Manager, and while X11 would start just fine, I could only log into an X-Term session, which just isnt’ exciting enough on its own. After tweaking the configurations, I managed to get the Window Manager working about half the time, but I decided enough was enough (and knowing that the issue probably had something to do with the beta release), I gave up again and tried Mandrake 9.1.

This install went fine, but it couldn’t find the NIC driver modules. After spending an evening reading newsgroup posts, I thought I had it all figured out, but nothing seemed to work. At this point I started to download the latest version of Red Hat, but I thought I’d give 9.2 another try….

And, it worked. The X11 installer managed to do everything correctly, and here I am, adding this post on my Linux laptop. There are only two problems so far….

1. Mozilla Firebird can’t seem to find the right fonts. Even the application fonts are system courier fonts, which look terrible.

2. And related to this, I can’t get Flash 6 installed properly. I believe there’s a font package I just don’t have, and can’t seem to find. I don’t think I’m going to spend too much stressing over this though, considering the full release of 9.2 should be out soon, and that should fix many of the problems.