isimoin, easy MoinMoin wiki synchronization

By Ken | Published: November 3, 2006

I have been using Isimoin for a couple of weeks now and am quite happy with it. It does a couple of things:

  • makes it really simple to setup some stand alone MoinMoin instances on your desktop without having to configure a web server
  • allows you create a “slave” copy of wiki you have hosted somewhere else, assuming you have an account that allows you to rsync the MoinMoin filesystem

create-farm)
create_farm
;;

create-instance)
name=”$1″
create_standalone_instance “$name”
;;

create-slave)
name=”$1″
master=”$2″
create_slave “$name” “$master”
;;

synchronize-slave)
name=”$1″
synchronize_slave “$name”
;;

run-instance)
name=”$1″
run_standalone_instance “$name”
;;

I would like to add another function that assumes your local desktop wiki is the Master and the remote is a slave. Since I keep my primary personal MoinMoin instance on my laptop but like to back it up to a remote MoinMoin farm I have so I can access it from any computer if I need to. It would basically be reversing the synchronize-slave function. This is mainly because I cannot always guarantee that my laptop will be available via ssh for the rsync due to NAT/Firewall situations.

It would be cool to a simple tool like this that can use MoinMoin RPC Syncronization.

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DrmFree.org

By Ken | Published: October 3, 2006

Today is “Day Against DRM” , and in celebration I project that I have been helping bootstrap went live today, DrmFree.org. DrmFree.org is a federated search engine that can help you find music to purchase or download for free that does not use DRM. The basic principle is simple, if consumers are educated and shown that they have a choice, we believe they will choose to purchase music that is free of DRM. For more info check out the about page.

Posted in /geek, /music, /seattle | Leave a comment

Linux Tablet: P1510D

By Ken | Published: September 27, 2006

Back in January I bought a Fujitsu P1510D sub-notebook tablet PC. I had been using a powerbook at a previous job and had become quite fond of OS X, however when I decided to buy a laptop on my own dime, I really lusted for something extremely small and something not apple. A long time ago I bought a Sony Picturebook PCG-C1 sub notebook and used it for many years, its small size was great taking to conferences, I could slide it into pockets on some of my larger coats, and I really missed having a laptop that small. The fujitsu is very close in the size to the old picture book and has the benefit of a tablet swivel screen.

At the reccomendation of my roomate, I decided to try Ubuntu, he was running on his powerbook, desktop, and seemed quite pleased with it.
I started with the Ubuntu Breezy install CD booting off an external CDROM and did a normal install. Using the synaptic package manager (graphical interface to “apt”) I installed all the updates and proceeded to upgrade straight to the most recent release, Dapper. After completing the upgrade I was quite pleased with the results. I had sound and ethernet working. The Atheros A/B/G was recognzied. However configuring wireless throug the GUI tools was and still is quite problematic, I have never gotten it work right and resorted to writing a shell script to configure wireless. Basically what I found was that after “upping” the ath0 interface, the card refused to connect to the AP and would not change channels. However it would start to work if you chose the SSID “ANY” which for a lot of wireless cards means connect to whatever network you can find. So I ended up with this:

#!/bin/bash

INT=ath0

ESSID=$1

sudo ifconfig ath0 up

sudo iwconfig $INT essid ANY mode managed

sudo sleep 5

sudo iwconfig $INT essid $ESSID mode managed

sudo sleep 5

sudo dhclient $INT
A quick dirty hack to get working, now I just do wifi.sh desired-ssid.

At this point I still had a decent list of things to get working:

-Suspend to disk – out of the box this failed miserably, it resulted in my laptop powering down and the system going down ungracefully
-Suspend to ram – similar results
-Touch screen

-Tablet screen rotation

To get the touch screen working I tracked down a driver for xorg which can be found here.

After adding that to my xorg.conf and adding the following line to /etc/serial.conf:

/dev/ttyS0 uart 16550 port 0×220 irq 4
My touch screen was working in X, sweet.

For suspend to disk I ended up using Bernard’s kernel with experimental support for Suspend2. The fact that he has apt repository setup made it really easy.
So at this point I still had:

-Suspend to ram

-Tablet screen rotation

At some point along the way, probably in the kernel upgrades, suspend to RAM started working, however the screen would remain blank after waking up, very annoying. Adding a shell script in /etc/acpi/resume.d/ that did the following fixed it:

echo 4 > /proc/acpi/video/GFX0/LCD/brightness
So at this point, tablet screen rotation is the only major thing left. There are some buttons that would be nice, but I am not really concerned about them. Xrandr does not appear to work on this laptop with Dapper and Xorg 7.0, so the screen rotation is out for now. From what I hear, in the 7.1 it works fine, but upgrading to 7.1 is not something I want to undertake at the moment.

I am just pretty happy that everything else works. Thanks to the people who posted the following pages documenting their experience with the P1510d, it made my life so much easier:

 http://www.psionik.com/p1510d/

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/fujitsu.html 

http://www.xmission.com/~bmidgley/p1510/ 

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Toorcon Workshop

By Ken | Published: September 14, 2006

Myself and Matt will be doing a workshop at Toorcon 8. It will be a one day workshop covering the basics of boot strapping an embedded wireless device ( Soekris based ) and setting up a wireless mesh using OLSR. Participants in the class get an embedded wireless device from my company Metrix that they take home with them in addition to learning the skills required to continue hacking on it. Pre-registration ends this Friday and is currently $1200, after Friday it will be $1500 at the door any open seats will likely sell out fast. There are currently 5 seats left. If you have a group of people (3-5) interested, we might able to get you group discount ( email me: ken at ipl31 net ). But you need to act before Friday midnight!

Posted in /dev/random, /freenetworks, /geek, /seattlewireless, /travel, /work, cons, pyramid | Leave a comment

Fall Ultimate

By Ken | Published: September 14, 2006

So I finally got off my ass this year and joined one of the Disc Northwest ultimate leagues. Its a “hat league” which has people of varying skill levels. Some how I managed to end up the captian of the Central District team even though I probably know less about Ultimate than anyone else on the team.

The league teams are based on Seattle hoods, which is why our team is the Central District, however I am one of only two people on the team who actually live in the CD :) . I am slowly but surely learning about the offensive stack, zone defense, forcing and all other sorts of good stuff.

Posted in /me, /seattle | Leave a comment

MadwifiNG at Hacknight

By Ken | Published: August 23, 2006

So tonight at hacknight we are sitting at Cal Anderson park, I was able to fire up a Metrix box running Pyramid Linux with a lithium ion laptop battery to act as a repeater from the local cafe. The cool part is that we are using a single radio which is simultaneously a STA (client) and Access Point using the capabilities of the next generation Madwifi drivers. With MadwifiNG you can create multiple virtual interfaces one being a client and one being an AP but both existing on the same physical radio. Some caveats are that you have to be using the same channel on both virtual interfaces, and you have to create the interfaces in a certain order. You need to create the Access Point interface first, and then create the STA interface. In Pyramid Linux adding the following to the /etc/network/interfaces file, just replace the ssids:

auto ath0

iface ath0 inet static

address 192.168.91.1

netmask 255.255.255.0

broadcast 192.168.91.255

post-down wlanconfig ath0 destroy

pre-up wlanconfig ath0 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode ap

pre-up iwconfig ath0 essid “SWN-Hacknight” channel 01 rate auto rts off frag off

pre-up ifconfig ath0 up

pre-up sleep 3
auto ath1

iface ath1 inet dhcp

post-down wlanconfig ath1 destroy

pre-up wlanconfig ath1 create wlandev wifi0 wlanmode sta nosbeacon

pre-up iwconfig ath1 essid “Metrix” rate auto rts off frag off

pre-up sleep 3

Posted in /freenetworks, /geek, /seattlewireless, pyramid | 4 Comments

Freenetworks.org move

By Ken | Published: August 15, 2006

The server hosting freenetworks.org moved last week. Those of you on the unwired and nycwireless mailing lists may have noticed some glitches, however they should all be resolved. My ex-employer who graciously hosted the box for over six years has dismantled their rack at Internap. Luckily I was able to move into the Seattle Community Colo Project. Who by the way, is a great resource for any non-profit or linux/unix hobbyist looking for affordable colo.

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Metrix.net

By Ken | Published: August 15, 2006

So a while back I took over part ownership of a company. As of June 16th I left my full time Security Engineer to become part engineer, part sales person, part support person and part bean counter.  Running your own business is something I would suggest everyone do at least once, even if its in a small/part time capacity. It’s very rewarding and an incredible learning experience that I would imagine never really stops teaching you things. Now that things have settled down a little from the transition, I will try and keep things a little more up to date around here.

Posted in /geek, /me, /work | 2 Comments

NoCatSplash binaries for Pyramid Linux

By Ken | Published: June 19, 2006

Nocat Splash binaries for pyramid linux. Tested and seem to work ok.

Posted in /freenetworks, /seattlewireless, /work, pyramid | Leave a comment

gpsd for pyramid linux

By Ken | Published: April 28, 2006

At the request of Darrin, I just built gpsd for Pyramid Linux. I don’t have all the gps gear to test it fully but I loaded it up on a soekris board at home and it starts up with no problems. I stuck here for now: http://ken.ipl31.net/pyramid/

 

I stripped out all the man pages per usual, and did not include the python scripts and binaries the make file puts in /usr/bin, its just the gpsd binary and supporting library. Untar it from / and it will stick stuff in the respective /usr/local directories.

Posted in /geek, pyramid | 1 Comment