zen.org Communal Weblog

I’ve adjusted our WordPress server in an attempt to block trackback spams. It involves tricking the server to inject a comment into a post, used primarily to throw up a bunch of product plugs and ad links. Gah. Some folks have put a lot of effort into combating this sort of junk. The goal is to give us all some sort of shelter from the commercial-ridden world we live in. I wonder if this post will be the equivalent of cutting an artery to beckon the sharks?

My mother sent me a cool link to a list of places in and around Dublin who stay open 24-hours a day.

In the mid-1990s, I picked up maintenance of a mailing list set up by some folks at MIT. Called CACI: Children Accessing Controversial Information, it was intended to offer a forum for parents, teachers, or just about anyone else to talk about the free anarchy of the Internet and its potential impact on children. With all the fear of porn and pedophilia lurking at every corner on the Net, we thought it’d be a fairly active list.

This is how the list describes itself:

CACI, Children Accessing Controversial Information, is a mailing list for
discussing children accessing controversial information through computer
networks. Can children be prevented from accessing materials which are
controversial? Is preventing access even desirable? We believe censorship is
not the answer. What alternatives do we have or could we provide? How do we
talk with children about these issues? What can we say to concerned parents
and school administrators? How and by whom are community standards set? We
hope to form a community of people interested in discussing these issues and
developing helpful materials.

For the last few years, however, it’s been pretty stagnant with only short bursts of conversation. I wonder if everyone is just so firmly set in their beliefs (filter my computer, don’t filter it, porn is good, porn will rot my child’s brain) that they see no need to talk about it and learn from others?

For ages, I’ve only been able to use billpay.ie with an old copy of the Opera browser (or, alternately, Internet Explorer in my VMware-resident copy of Win98). But today I tried using it to set up payment of our phone bill, and at the Confirm button, the JavaScript code didn’t fail!

Either they finally fixed the bug referring to an undeclared variable, or firefox is more lenient than previous Mozilla browsers—but I doubt firefox is letting people get away with bad code all the time. 🙂

We’ve been trying to get a replacement right hinge for a Dell Inspiron 7500. Asking Dell in Ireland, they referred us to a company called Upgrade Options in the UK. After a week and a half of trying to get a straight answer out of them, we finally said screw it and just ordered one from a company in America, paying $21 in shipping to get it here.

After an initial call where I needed to find out if it’s 15″ or 15.4″ (it’s 15″); he said they have right hinges for the 15.4″, but they were out of stock of those for the 15″ screen version of the Inspiron. But, he told me (and I noted), if I needed those they’d “be in soon.”

All further attempts to get the same person named Daniel failed. Three messages were left on his voice mail, and one call also had someone claiming to take notes to give to the right guy. Never got a call back. So today I tried again and another person took the information and said he’d look into it—only to have the call disconnected.

I called right back, and asked again for Daniel. Finally got him, said he recognized my name but wasn’t sure what I was calling about. Gahhhhhhhhh. I explained about my attempts to reach him, and he said he’d have to see what was going on with his sales team. He asked for the details again, and then I waited on hold for a moment. He came back to say he doesn’t know when they might get them in (when I pointed out the “be in soon” line, and asked if that would be within the next six weeks, his response seemed to suggest that he had no idea).

He told me that he knew of two companies in the US who had them now, and he could give me their number. I asked where they get their own parts (“the biggest collection of Dell spare parts in the UK”) since it’d help to know where they’d be getting them. Maybe something could be accelerated?

He started to respond, then click, the call was disconnected. Again. I’m not ready to theorize that their phone connection is faulty.

Thus we ordered one from a US company online, and will make sure to let Dell know that our experience with their support company in the UK was awful. If this is the only resource for people in the UK and Ireland for the care of their Dell equipment, it sure feels like we should go out of our way to use someone else’s product.

I got a letter today saying I’m still needed to appear as an expert witness at a trial in the High Court in Dublin. It turns out the settlement everyone was working on actually fell through. The punchline: I’m soon going to California for a week of meetings related to some new work (woo hoo!), and shortly after my return our family is going right back to America on vacation to play tennis with Elana’s parents and our niece and nephew.

The trial landed smack dab in the middle of those two trips, when I’ll actually be here in Ireland. Talk about lucky timing. For both sides, really. 🙂

My laptop, a Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046, has a built-in wireless ethernet card. It’s only 802.11b, which is slower than most these days at 10Mbit/sec. It works fine, but I see E using her iBook at 54Mbit/sec and can’t believe how fast things appear on her screen. (Part of this is because her Web browser doesn’t go thru a proxy, while mine uses privoxy to weed out the crap, but it’s still noticably faster.)

I got a Netgear WG511 card, but it doesn’t work out-of-the-box with SuSE 9.2 and its 2.6.8 Linux kernel. I followed the steps with SuSE’s YaST2 program to configure the card so everything ended up being put into the file /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-wlan-bus-pci-0000:01:00.0. (Even though it’s showing up as eth1, not a wlan* device.) Trying to activate the card failed. A little Google-digging, and I found the answer: use a driver from www.prism54.org. No luck, the server seemed to be down for days.

The Web server over at prism54.org finally came back up, so I was able to download the newer driver for the card to make it actually work. Part of making the prism54 driver work includes setting up a firmware update, which was made available for easy download to be installed in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware as the file isl3890. I did also have to make one tweak so the ‘make modules‘ command would work.

The combination worked like a charm. Now it’s zooming away happy as can be. 🙂

One catch: like most other PCMCIA cards for this laptop, they suck the battery dry like a purist enjoying his pint during a heated conversation in a pub. On the road, the internal one has far less impact on the battery, but within proximity to a power source the WG511 card helps convince you there’s no need to upgrade the laptop just yet.

Besides, the next generation of the Lifebook is using Intel’s chip instead of Transmeta’s, which is a real shame. For the religious, the next step is the Actius MP30 from Sharp. With their ongoing work with Sharp, I wonder if Transmeta’s going to do a chip similar to the ARM so the successor to my Sharp C860 described recently could grow to use a Transmeta chip instead? The basics of its Code Morphing software seem to me to imply the ability to emulate any architecture, not just the x86. So why not shoot for a chip that’s buried inside an awful lot of stuff these days?

We want the first of the year to be something of a cleansing, in part freeing ourselves of the too-often stressful holiday season. We’re clearing out the living room now, the enslaved tree now stripped bare—making me think of the turkey we consumed.

Yeah, in theory we should leave it all in place until the 6th of January. The theory of the various Christian faiths. I just finished reading the illustrated version of “The DaVinci Code”, a great gift from my aunt. If you have any tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, that book will feed it in spades. It helped encourage my ongoing skepticism anyway.

Didn’t help to learn about the image of a red-suited santa being the result of advertising by a beverage company, not anything more creative and natural.

So ours will be the first tree going into the town’s recycling pile. And we can spend some time in our restored living room figuring out the year to come.

I had been trying to use the Internet Wizard for setting up my D-Link DCF-650W wireless CF card, but everything was still in Japanese. Even working my way thru that, all I saw was WEP for 40-bit(64-bit) key, not a 104-bit(128-bit) one. This morning, instead of choosing Wizard in Settings->Network, I just did ‘Add’. A tabbed window of configuration bits appeared, all in English. Voila, on the WEP tab is a Key Type entry that includes both key sizes.

This post is being made using the SL-C860. Wahoo! I was able to use the CF card from our camera and copy a photo from it onto the Zaurus, which then used scp to bring the file over onto our Web server. (Had to Edit->Copy the image, then change the folder up to the Image Folder in the internal flash memory.)

I found that ssh works fine for root,but tried as the default ‘zaurus’ user you get the error

debug: Waiting for server public key.
Disconnecting: Bad packet length 1349676916.

A post talks about ssh protocol 1 vs 2 being a possible cause, but editing /etc/ssh/ssh_config for that didn’t seem to make a difference. Of course once I found that root worked fine, I put off more digging for now.

The NetFront Web browser it uses doesn’t display the WordPress weblog content properly. I don’t know yet if it’s due to what’s being emitted by WordPress or if it’s the fault of the browser.

Oh, and Patrick quickly moved on from playing with the drawing program to learning the inner workings of the C860.

E gave me the coolest gadget ever for my birthday: the Sharp Zaurus SL-C860. It’s only sold in Japan, which means it comes by default with everything only in Japanese. A company in the US has a business going for selling them in the US with 97% of the content converted to English after bringing them over from Japan. Unfortunately, my C860 was shipped without the required change being made.

Today I finally got the file used to do the conversion, but they didn’t include any instructions. Gahh. I asked for the details via email, but while I was waiting I decided to see if my original Sharp Zaurus SL-5500, bought with my buddy Doug a few years ago on a visit to California, could help out. Yup, got the SL-5500 going again (its fatal flaw is that if the battery dies, you lose everything you did since the factory copy booted) and was able to copy the file over onto the SDRAM card. Pop out the card, pop it into the new SL-C860.

But what to do with it? I was able to look at the Backup/Restore program on the old Zaurus, and find the program on the C860 that looked the same (even if all characters were in Japanese). That was enough to go through the steps to make it restore this image from the company, which did all of the work.

Next game is getting the CF cards for either wireless or wired networking to work. That’s okay, this was the impossible part (I sure hope). 🙂