Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at February 2nd, 2006

On Friday of last week, I found that the screen of my iBook stayed black despite the fact that I’d turned the computer on. It booted up and was otherwise working so the computer clearly wasn’t dead. I connected it to an external monitor to test whether the screen could be dead.

The monitor also stayed blank.

Fiddling around resulted in the screen going on briefly, filling with lines, freezing, and never working again.

At that point, I was pretty sure the problem wasn’t the screen and went on to search Apple’s site. I found out that the problem was with the logic board and was covered by a repair program.

I ended up sending it to Apple to get repaired (for free) on Tuesday. It’s already been shipped back and I hope to pick it up at the Apple Store at Woodland Mall tomorrow. While I’m not wild about the logic board dying, it’s been a pretty good experience overall.

As good as it can be anyway.

UPDATE: I went and got the iBook back today, tried it out in the store, and promptly went about sending it back to be repaired again. The wireless card didn’t work. More accurately, the logic board wouldn’t recognize it. In short, someone had replaced my non-working logic board with a subtlely flawed logic board. You would think that they might test for that. Hopefully I’ll be able to pick up a working version of my iBook early next week.

Posted by Jim at January 30th, 2006

I’ve got a few thoughts that don’t really fit together, but aren’t developed enough to warrant their own entry. Rather than develop them, I thought I’d get them out of my head in one fell swoop.

This Blog
I’ve been thinking about getting a little more organized about this blog. Rather than just spitting out what happens to be in my head, it might be interesting to deliberately try to cover certain topics. For example, one day a week I might do commentary on a webcomic, novel or movie. Another day I might regularly write on programming topics, cooking or something else. Nothing is set in stone, but I’ve been thinking that more focus might help.

Webcomic?
I’ve been wanting to start one and have even done some preliminary character sketches, but haven’t. It’s a lower priority than my novel, so don’t expect to see it soon.

Novel
I’ve been having a good time working on it, but I’ve mostly been doing the background work that I should have done long ago. I’ve been working on character motives, plot arcs, thinking through thematic elements, and generally trying to set things up so that I can make the current draft go as quickly as possible.

Programming Projects
Let’s see… I’m trying to learn Ruby so that I can use it with Rails, and investigate AJAX. I’d also like to expand the PHP based content management system I wrote for work. I’ve been thinking that there’s a way we could use it to manage email lists and write/send our email newsletters.

And then there’s the master’s project…

Role Playing Games
Back in July when I first started messing with adapting Dogs in the Vineyard to my campaign idea, I thought up something I wanted to try. Unfortunately, it seemed to violate a person’s control over their own character. I’m thinking that I’d like to revisit that one in light of current discussions on Vincent’s blog. Apparently, he’s deliberately entering into that area.

General Blog Maintenance
I noticed recently that my blogroll doesn’t include half the blogs I actaully read. I should change that. I’d add the webcomics too except that the list is embarrassingly long.

Posted by Jim at November 27th, 2005

Now that I’m getting closer to finishing my masters project (and now that I’m starting my own small computer consulting practice), I’ve got to start finding new technical areas to care about instead of having them assigned to me.

I’ve got two basic categories of stuff to think about:
1. Stuff I care about for it’s own sake and have no idea how to make a profit on it. Examples of this would be data mining/warehousing, GIS, beowulf clusters, Grids, and some rather odd little distributed programming ideas I’ve had. Mind you, I know that someone’s making a living off of many of my examples. I just don’t know how I’d get into those myself.
2. Stuff I care about both out of interest and because people pay me to care. Largely this would be web programming/services (C#, Javascript, SQL, PHP, Ruby on Rails, AJAX) or networking (VPN’s and security issues). These are things I’m interested in out of fear as well as love. Basically, I need to keep up with things in these areas or risk not being hired.

A friend of mine once mentioned that he spent an hour a day for personal development, researching new developments in computers and learning new skills. It’s a pretty good idea if you’ve got the necessary persistence.

I wonder whether most computer professionals are that organized about keeping up with technology?

Posted by Jim at November 23rd, 2005

I’ve registered domain names for clients before but a couple days ago I registered one for myself for the first time. I also arranged hosting through Nearly Free Speech.

I plan on using the domain and hosting to promote my consulting business. I’m not sure precisely what will ultimately go there (i.e. nothing at this precise moment), but I suspect that it will be pretty boring stuff from the point of view of readers of this blog. Thus, it’ll probably be a list of what sort of things I do (system adminstration, programming), my resume and possibly some sort of blog to help draw people in and get me higher up on google.

Mind you, this blog will keep going. The other one will be devoted to such exciting things as computer resources for non-profits and small business. In short, I’ll probably update it once a week or so.

By contrast, this blog will continue to be used for random thoughts about children, role playing games, programming, food and all the non-business pieces of my life.

Posted by Jim at November 17th, 2005

I administrate both windows and unix systems. I’m responsible for 10 publicly shared computers for one of my clients. As a result, one of my responsibilities includes keeping said computers safe from the random depredations of whoever happens to come along.

We’ve already had one rather disturbing incident that I’m not going to describe here.

As a result, my client suggested that I research our options in terms of really locking down the computers. Though there’s plenty of Linux based options for public terminals, converting these computers to Linux was not an option. Thus, I had to wade through a lot of websites that offer kiosk/public terminal software for Windows.

I needed a program that would:

1. Prevent users from viewing pornography. In fact, since these computers are mostly for data entry web access is unnecessary so cutting off all web access would work too.
2. Prevent users from installing programs on the computer or deleting system files.
3. Preventing spyware or viruses from taking the computer over.

I didn’t really have time to work on it last spring so rolling out something has been put off till this fall. In the meantime, I discovered that I could download a toolkit directly from Microsoft for free.

What’s cool is that it does all I need and more. Additionally, I don’t have to calculate how much licensing fees would cost (always too much for a non-profit). I plan on installing it next week or the week after. We’ll see how it works in practice.

Posted by Jim at October 20th, 2005

Originally when I started doing my master’s project, I wanted to do something that included peer to peer capabilities. One way of doing this was jxta. Jxta is a platform/protocol for doing peer to peer. Making use of XML, it is implemented in multiple programming languages (Java, C, Perl…) for multiple platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows).

I spent a couple weeks trying to understand the Java version of the library. Then I spent a couple more trying to implement something with it.

Last night I gave up and decided to write my own system (in Java) for filesharing among groups.

I probably should have known better than to even try Jxta, but I’m big into the idea of code reuse and the Jxta project is doing exactly what I need. In retrospect, however, there were a number of warning signs that should have scared me off earlier than they did.

1. Some other guys in a class I took tried to use Jxta and then gave up. From the questions they’d asked in previous classes, it had always seemed to me that I knew more about networks than they did and so I thought I mgiht be able to make things work. What I managed to conveniently forget is that it was also apparent that they were better programmers than I am.

2. Jxta focuses on creating a flexible combination of tools as opposed to solutions. Thus, there is no “share_files()” method. There are, however, many different types of pipes–and many ways to configure them. Again, this fits into Java’s way of doing things, but personally I’d rather have some standard solutions and then come up with strange configurations only if I need to rather than by default.

3. There’s a project based on Jxta called JAL. It does exactly what I just described I wanted out of Jxta. Unfortunately, the project was abandoned last year. I gather that the developers (who work at Sun) were frustrated with Jxta as a platform.

So now I’m reinventing the wheel. Hopefully my wheel will be less elaborate, but give a smoother ride.

Posted by Jim at October 5th, 2005

Here’s something that those of you who do any kind of web development might want to know about:

Email Injection

OK. Some of you, perhaps everyone but me, know about this already. Email injection is a way of putting header information into a form for email that will allow someone to:

Add headers
Replace “To” and “From” information
Add attachments
Send spam to other people via your online email form and from your smtp server

This, for obvious reasons, sucks.

I know that you can do this via a php based form, but hijacking forms written in other languages seem possible too. If you’re interested in more of the technical information, feel free to check here. There’s also some more information in the onlline php manual.

I don’t pass this along for idle entertainment. Someone appears to be attempting to do exactly this with a form that I created. Amusingly, it doesn’t seem to be working. Apparently my php coding style is idiosyncratic enough that the usual ways of doing things don’t quite work. On the other hand, they are obviously trying… So, I’m rewriting the code to make things as close to impossible as I can.

Posted by Jim at August 29th, 2005

This entry is far too geeky for most people to even care, but… I do care. My apologies to the 99.9% of humanity who doesn’t (very few of which are reading this blog…).

I’ve been messing around with my FreeBSD box lately, trying to make it habitable for personal use (as opposed to server use). Thus, I’ve been experimenting with window managers. Window managers (for those of you who don’t know and are yet still reading) are programs that dictate how your computer manages the windows in which programs appear. It manages how they look and all the things you can do with them.

All Microsoft Windows really allows you to do is minimize, maximize, close and switch windows. Some window managers allow you to do more than that. Enlightenment is one of them.

What I like about Enlightenment:
–It looks good. Better, at any rate, than most window managers for Unix.
–It allows you to keep programs on your desktop as the bar on top of the program (you know, the one that says the program’s name), but everything else disappears. Mac OS used allow you to do that, but I haven’t been able to find out how in OS X.
–It allows you a lot of other options as well, but I really haven’t used them

What I dislike:
–The common problem with open source stuff… There are so many options that they intimidate me and I’ve never gotten around to using even a third of them.
–The way it handles multiple desktops. In Unix, after all, you typically have access to 4 desktops instead of just one. If you move your mouse pointer slightly too far to the left or right, you automatically move over to the next desktop, causing all the programs you’re working with to disappear and leaving you to wonder what happened. Undoubtedly this will seem second nature to me at some point, but it isn’t yet. It just makes me think of the stupid windows menu key on my keyboard, something that I only hit accidently, constantly knocking me out of the program I’m working with and into a menu I didn’t want to open.
–Desktop clutter: In addition to the icons that I’ve dumped on the desktop, there are three other windows that are always open by default. Two of them show little representations of what’s open on the 4 desktops available (2 desktops per window–this is, admittedly, kind of cool). The third shows representations of what all your minimized programs look like–also cool. Sadly, I never really need them and thus they just clutter up my screen.

Overall, I do like the enlightenment window manager, but the things I don’t like grate on my nerves at the moment. We’ll see if they do in the future.

That being said, I should mention that the last time I used enlightenment (5 years ago…) it was notoriously unstable. It isn’t anymore (I’m using Enlightment 16 now). It works just as well as anything else.

Posted by Jim at August 18th, 2005

I work for a variety of small non-profits, organizations too small to afford a full time IT person. These sort of organizations generally don’t have a lot of money. Nonetheless, they sometimes need things that larger organizations need.

One example: a calendar sharing program. Once you get to a certain number of people, you just have to expect that you won’t be able to keep track of everybody’s schedule.

Not every office is going to be able to afford (for example) Microsoft Exchange. Nonetheless, pretty much every office is a candidate for Exchange because Outlook comes with Microsoft Office. Unfortunately, Exchange isn’t made for a small office. If your office is going to get its email through another provider rather than having the IT person handle it, you probably don’t want to install Exchange just to handle the calendar. It really isn’t worth it.

The thing is, people in the office are probably already using Outlook’s calendar and most likely don’t want to learn a new one.

What’s interesting is that there are a number of open source Exchange replacements out there. I looked over a few of them. Unfortunately, the office that wants a shared calendar is an all Windows shop including the servers. There are good and bad reasons for this that I won’t get into, but, the upshot is that these Exchange replacements don’t run on windows. They’ll service Outlook clients, but the server won’t run on Windows.

Fortunately, Rainlender appears to be an open source calendar program that can synchronize with multiple clients, runs on windows, and reads a person’s Outlook files.

If it works, it could be exactly what’s needed. I’ll try it out next week, I think.

UPDATE: With a little more research it became obvious that that Rainlendar is really made to allow one person to synchronize multiple calendars as opposed to allowing an office to view each other’s calendars. Sigh… The search continues.

Posted by Jim at August 3rd, 2005

Owing to the fact that my master’s project is written in java, I’ve decided to bite the bullet and install native java on FreeBSD.

This is a more complicated business than you might expect thanks to Sun’s licensing restrictions. Basically, Sun doesn’t develop for FreeBSD anymore. They leave that to the FreeBSD project, allowing FreeBSD developers to download the code, make the necessary patches and install it on FreeBSD. This is good. What’s not quite so good is that the licensing does not allow them to distribute the resulting binaries. Thus, you can’t download a working JDK (which would allow you to write java programs) or even just a JRE (allowing you to use java programs).

This is okay bearing in mind that if there’s one thing FreeBSD is good at it’s distributing and compiling programs from source with minimal hassle. FreeBSD just downloads the necessary programs and libraries automatically after you type “make install clean” into the appropriate directory.

Except… Thanks to Sun’s licensing issues, FreeBSD can’t just download the necessary stuff automatically. You have to do it manually. This is not an incredible hassle, but it does make things more complicated than it needs to be.

So… here’s what you need to get java working on FreeBSD:

1. The ports collection. You should have downloaded this during installation, but you can still do it now.
2. Ideally (but optionally), the source code for everything on your computer. You could have done this during installation too. This is just worth doing if you’re going to use ports in general–not a real requirement.

So you go to a JDK directory (for example: cd /usr/ports/java/jdk14) and type “make install clean” and you discover you need:
3. the patch for the current version of this JDK. You download it from here.
4. Then you’ll discover that you need a binary from Sun. They’ll give you a link to it in the error message when you’ve uselessly tried to compile.
5. Then you’ll discover (after another fruitless compile) that you need the actual source code for the JDK in question.
6. After that, you’ll try again and discover that you now need to download a linux binary of a JDK. As ever, the link is in the error message.

Once all these files are in “/usr/ports/distfiles,” you will finally have a halfway decent chance of getting java working.

As I understand it, there is a project that attempts to minimize the hassle of doing all this while simultaneously complying with licensing restrictions. Unfortunately, it only applies to JDK 1.3 at this point. Bearing in mind that my project depends on having JDK 1.4 at minimum, this is not an option.

Sigh.

On the bright side, JDK 1.4.2 is happily compiling in the background as I write this. For the moment life is good–assuming I don’t have to download anything else.