BenLauPedia

Hacker Uncovers Chinese Olympic Fraud

Wed,20 Aug 2008 21:48 +0800

SkeptOlympics writes "A new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding China's women's gymnastics team opened today, as search engine hacker stryde.hax found surviving copies of official registration documents issued by China's General Administration of Sport of China. The incriminating documents, expunged by censors from the official site and from Google's document cache, still appear in the document translation cache of Chinese search giant Baidu, here and here, showing the age of one of China's gold medal winning gymnasts to be 14 instead of 16, the minimum age for competition presented on her government issued passport. Now that official government documentation is available, how long will the IOC be able to keep a lid on this scandal?" I imagine the answer is "Forever".<a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/1259253&from=rss"><img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rss&op=image&style=h0&sid=08/08/20/1259253"></a><a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/1259253&from=rss">Read more of this story</a> at Slashdot.
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Watchmen Delayed, Or Worse

Wed,20 Aug 2008 21:00 +0800

whisper_jeff writes "Due to some potential copyright issues, The Watchmen might be delayed, or worse. It seems that Fox claims it still owns copyrights which would prevent Warner Bros from releasing the movie. US District Court Judge Gary Feess decided that Fox had enough of a case that he's willing to hear things out. The geek in me hopes that it will be resolved quickly and the movie will hit theaters on time."<a href="http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/1231209&from=rss"><img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rss&op=image&style=h0&sid=08/08/20/1231209"></a><a href="http://entertainment.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/1231209&from=rss">Read more of this story</a> at Slashdot.
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States Throw Out Electronic Voting Machines

Wed,20 Aug 2008 20:16 +0800

Davide Marney passes along an AP story about the thousands of voting machines gathering dust in warehouses across the country after states such as California, Ohio, and Florida have banned their use. Many of these machines cost $3.5K to $5K each. Local election boards are struggling to find ways to recover any of the cost of the machines, or even to recycle them. The picture in Ohio is the most confusing, as multiple court cases limit the state's options and result in a situation in which the discredited machines will nevertheless be used in the presidential election coming up in November. The state's new (Democratic) attorney general has just issued a rule banning the practice of election workers taking the machines home with them the night before elections.<a href="http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/0212223&from=rss"><img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rss&op=image&style=h0&sid=08/08/20/0212223"></a><a href="http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/0212223&from=rss">Read more of this story</a> at Slashdot.
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Magpies Are Self-Aware

Wed,20 Aug 2008 18:08 +0800

FireStormZ writes "Magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror, confounding the notion that self-awareness is the exclusive preserve of humans and a few higher mammals. It had been thought only four species of apes, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants shared the human ability to recognize their own bodies in a mirror. But German scientists reported on Tuesday that magpies, a species with a brain structure very different from mammals, could also identify themselves. It had been thought that the neocortex brain area found in mammals was crucial to self-recognition. Yet birds, which last shared a common ancestor with mammals 300 million years ago, don't have a neocortex, suggesting that higher cognitive skills can develop in other ways."<a href="http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/0110230&from=rss"><img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rss&op=image&style=h0&sid=08/08/20/0110230"></a><a href="http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/0110230&from=rss">Read more of this story</a> at Slashdot.
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Why Corporates Hate Perl

Wed,20 Aug 2008 16:02 +0800

Anti-Globalism recommends a posting up at O'Reilly's ONLamp on reasons that some companies are turning away from Perl. "[In one company] [m]anagement have started to refer to Perl-based systems as 'legacy' and to generally disparage it. This attitude has seeped through to non-technical business users who have started to worry if developers mention a system that is written in Perl. Business users, of course, don't want nasty old, broken Perl code. They want the shiny new technologies. I don't deny at all that this company (like many others) has a large amount of badly written and hard-to-maintain Perl code. But I maintain that this isn't directly due to the code being written in Perl. Its because the Perl code has developed piecemeal over the last ten or so years in an environment where there was no design authority.. Many of these systems date back to this company's first steps onto the Internet and were made by separate departments who had no interaction with each other. Its not really a surprise that the systems don't interact well and a lot of the code is hard to maintain."<a href="http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/19/2335246&from=rss"><img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rss&op=image&style=h0&sid=08/08/19/2335246"></a><a href="http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/19/2335246&from=rss">Read more of this story</a> at Slashdot.
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FTC Bans Prerecorded Telemarketing Drivel

Wed,20 Aug 2008 13:51 +0800

coondoggie writes "In the ongoing battle to let us eat dinner in peace without being interrupted by amazingly annoying telemarketer blather, and in this case the even more infuriating recorded telemarketing drivel, the Federal Trade Commission today basically outlawed recorded telemarketing calls. Specifically, the FTC changed its venerable Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) to prohibit, as of Sept. 2009, telemarketing calls that deliver prerecorded messages, unless a consumer has agreed to accept such calls from a given caller/seller. Between now and 2009, telemarketers must provide an obvious, easy and quick way for consumers to opt-out of any call, the FTC said. Such an opt-out mechanism needs to be in place by December 1, 2008."<a href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/19/2229245&from=rss"><img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rss&op=image&style=h0&sid=08/08/19/2229245"></a><a href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/19/2229245&from=rss">Read more of this story</a> at Slashdot.
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Japan Demands Probe of iPod Nano Flameouts

Wed,20 Aug 2008 11:41 +0800

iminplaya sends in an item from TechNewsWorld that begins, "Several incidents of iPod Nanos bursting into flames have created consumer jitters in gadget-happy Japan. Apple is downplaying the problem, pointing out that no major injuries or damage have been reported. The problem is due to defective batteries, the company said, and only a tiny percentage of the devices have caught on fire." Japan has seen 14 such incidents so far, two in recent days. iminplaya adds, "I like that. Only a 'tiny percentage'... Is anybody beginning to understand why I would prefer that these devices not be allowed on airplanes?"<a href="http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/0054222&from=rss"><img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rss&op=image&style=h0&sid=08/08/20/0054222"></a><a href="http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/0054222&from=rss">Read more of this story</a> at Slashdot.
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SIGGRAPH 2008: The quest for more pixels

Wed,20 Aug 2008 11:00 +0800

Filed under: cons, newsLong before we started reporting on [Dan Kaminsky]'s DNS chicanery, he contributed a guest post about one of our favorite sources of new technology: SIGGRAPH. The stars have aligned again and we're happy to bring you his analysis of this year's convention. [photo: Phong Nguyen]
So, last week, I had the pleasure of being stabbed, scanned, physically simulated, and synthetically defocused. Clearly, I must have been at SIGGRAPH 2008, the world's biggest computer graphics conference. While it usually conflicts with Black Hat, this year I actually got to stop by, though a bit of a cold kept me from enjoying as much of it as I'd have liked. Still, I did get to walk the exhibition floor, and the papers (and videos) are all online, so I do get to write this (blissfully DNS and security unrelated) report.SIGGRAPH brings in tech demos from around the world every year, and this year was no exception. Various forms of haptic simulation (remember force feedback?) were on display. Thus far, the best haptic simulation I'd experienced was a robot arm that could "feel" like it was actually 3 pounds or 30 pounds. This year had a couple of really awesome entrants. By far the best was Butterfly Haptics' Maglev system, which somehow managed to create a small vertical "puck" inside a bowl that would react, instantaneously, to arbitrary magnetic forces and barriers. They actually had two of these puck-bowls side by side, hooked up to an OpenGL physics simulation. The two pucks, in your hand, became rigid platforms in something of a polygon playground. Anything you bumped into, you could feel, anything you lifted, would have weight. Believe it or not, it actually worked, far better than it had any right to. Most impressively, if you pushed your in-world platforms against eachother, you directly felt the force from each hand on the other, as if there was a real-world rod connecting the two. Lighten up a bit on the right hand, and the left wouldn't get pushed quite so hard. Everything else was impressive but this was the first haptic simulation I've ever seen that tricked my senses into perceiving a physical relationship in the real world. Cool!
Also fun: This hack with ultrasonic transmitters by Takayuki Iwamoto et al, which was actually able to create free-standing regions of turbulence in air via ultrasonic interference. It really just feels like a bit of vibrating wind (just?), but it's one step closer to that holy grail of display technology, Princess Leia.
Best cheap trick award goes to the Superimposing Dynamic Range guys. There's just an absurd amount of work going into High Dynamic Range image capture and display, which can handle the full range of light intensities the human eye is able to process. People have also been having lots of fun projecting images, using a camera to see what was projected, and then altering the projection based on that. These guys went ahead and, instead of mixing a projector with a camera, they mixed it with a printer. Paper is very reflective, but printer toner is very much not, so they created a shared display out of a laser printout and its actively displayed image. I saw the effects on an X-Ray - pretty convincing, I have to say. Don't expect animation anytime soon though (Side note: I did ask them about e-paper. They tried it - said it was OK, but not that much contrast.)
Always cool: Seeing your favorite talks productized. One of my favorite talks in previous years was out of Stanford - Synthetic Aperture Confocal Imaging. Unifying the output of dozens of cheap little Quickcams, these guys actually pulled together everything from Matrix-style bullet time to the ability to refocus images - to the point of being able to see "around" occluding objects. So of course Point Grey Research, makers of all sorts of awesome camera equipment, had to put together a 5×5 array of cameras and hook 'em up over PCI express. Oh, and implement the Synthetic Aperture refocusing code, in realtime, demo'd at their booth, controlled with a Wii controller. Completely awesome.
Of course, some of the coolest stuff at SIGGRAPH is reserved for full conference attendees, in the papers section. One nice thing they do at SIGGRAPH however is ask everyone to create five minute videos of their research. This makes a lot of sense when what everyone's researching is, almost by definition, visually compelling. So, every year, I make my way to Ke-Sen Huang's collection of SIGGRAPH papers and take a look at the latest coming out of SIGGRAPH. Now, I have my own biases: I've never been much of a 3D modeler, but I started out doing a decent amount of work in Photoshop. So I've got a real thing for image based rendering, or graphics technologies that process pixels rather than triangles. Luckily, SIGGRAPH had a lot for me this year.
First off, the approach from Photosynth continues to yield Awesome. Dubbed "Photo Tourism" by Noah Snavely et al, this is the concept that we can take individual images from many, many different cameras, unify them into a single three dimensional space, and allow seamless exploration. After having far too much fun with a simple search for "Notre Dame" in Flickr last year, this year they add full support for panning and rotating around an object of interest. Beautiful work - I can't wait to see this UI applied to the various street-level photo datasets captured via spherical cameras.
Speaking of cameras, now that the high end of photography is almost universally digital, people are starting to do some really strange things to camera equipment. Chia-Kai Liang et al's Programmable Aperture Photography allows for complex apertures to be synthesized above and beyond just an open and shut circle, and Ramesh Raskar et al's Glare Aware Photography evaded the megapixel race by filtering light by incident angle - a useful thing to do if you're looking to filter glare that's coming from inside your lens.
Another approach is also doing well: Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir's work on Seam Carving. Most people probably don't remember, but when movies first started getting converted for home use, there was a fairly huge debate over what to do about the fact that movies are much wider (85% wider) than they are tall. None of the three solutions - Letterboxing (black bars on the top and bottom, to make everything fit), Pan and Scan (picking the "most interesting" square of video from the rectangular frame), or "Anamorphic" (just stretch everything) - made everyone happy, but Letterboxing eventually won. I wonder what would have happened if this approach was around. Basically, Avidan and Shamir find the "least energetic" line of pixels to either add or remove. Last year, they did this to photos. This year, they come out with Improved Seam Carving for Video Retargeting. The results are spookily awesome.

Speaking of spooky: Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness. Sure, everything you see is photoshopped, but it's pretty astonishing to see this automated. I wonder if this is going to follow the same path as Seam Carving, i.e. photo today, video tomorrow.
Indeed, there's something of a theme going on here, with video becoming inexorably easier and easier to manipulate in a photorealistic manner. One of my favorite new tricks out of SIGGRAPH this year goes by the name of Unwrap Mosaics. The work of Microsoft's Pushmeet Kohli, this is nothing less than the beginning of Photoshop's applicability to video - and not just simple scenes, but real, dynamic, even three dimensional motion. Stunning work here.
It's not all about pixels though. A really fun paper called Automated Generation of Interactive 3D Exploded View Diagrams showed up this year, and it's all about allowing complex models of real world objects to be comprehended in their full context. It's almost more UI than graphics - but whatever it is, it's quite cool. I especially liked the moment they're like - heh, lets see if this works on a medical model! Yup, works there too.
As mentioned earlier, the SIGGRAPH floor was full of various devices that could assemble a 3D model (or at least a point cloud) of any small object they might get pointed at. (For the record, my left hand looks great in silver triangles.) Invariably, these devices work like a sort of hyperactive barcode scanner, monitoring how long it takes for the red beam to return to a photodiode. But here's an interesting question: How do you scan something that's semi-transparent? Suddenly you can't really trust all those reflections, can you? Clearly, the answer is to submerge your object in fluorescent liquid and scan it with a laser tuned to a frequency that'll make its surroundings glow. Clearly. Flurorescent Immersion Range Scanning, by Matthias Hullin and crew from UBC, is quite a stunt.
So you might have heard that video cards can do more than just push pretty pictures. Now that Moore's Law is dead (how long have we been stuck with 2Ghz processors?), improvements in computational performance have had to come from fundamentally redesigning how we process data. GPU's have been one of a couple of players (along with massive multicore x86 and FPGA's) in this redesign. Achieving greater than 50x speed improvements over traditional CPU's on non-graphics tasks like, say, cracking MD5 passwords, they're doing OK in this particular race. Right now, the great limiter remains the difficulty programming the GPU's - and, every month, something new comes to make this easier. This year, we get Qiming Hiu et al's BSGP: Bulk-Synchronous GPU Programming. Note the pride they have with their X3D parser - it's not just about trivial algorithms anymore. (Of course, now I wonder when hacking GPU parsers will be a Black Hat talk. Short answer: Probably not very long.)
Finally, for sheer brainmelt, Towards Passive 6D Reflectance Field Displays by Martin Fuchs et al is just weird. They've made a display that's view dependent - OK, well, lenticular displays will show you different things from different angles. Yeah, but this display is also illumination dependent - meaning, it shows you different things based on lighting. There's no electronics in this material, but it'll always show you the right image with the right lighting to match the environment. Weird.
All in all, a wonderfully inspiring SIGGRAPH. After being so immersed in breaking things, it's always fun to play with awesome things being built.Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Adobe Flash Ads Launching Clipboard Hijack Attack...

Wed,20 Aug 2008 09:54 +0800

bullyBEEF writes "Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks. In the Web attacks, which affect Mac, Windows, and Linux users running Firefox, IE, and Safari, bad guys are seizing control of the machine's clipboard (probably using the Flash command setClipboard) and inserting a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program. A number of legitimate sites have been seen to host acs carrying the attack — including Newsweek, Digg, and MSNBC.com. Researcher Aviv Raff offers a harmless demo of how it's done."<a href="http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/0029220&from=rss"><img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rss&op=image&style=h0&sid=08/08/20/0029220"></a><a href="http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/20/0029220&from=rss">Read more of this story</a> at Slashdot.
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New Multi-GPU Technology With No Strings Attached

Wed,20 Aug 2008 08:08 +0800

Vigile writes "Multi-GPU technology from both NVIDIA and ATI has long been dependent on many factors including specific motherboard chipsets and forcing gamers to buy similar GPUs within a single generation. A new company called Lucid Logix is showing off a product that could potentially allow vastly different GPUs to work in tandem while still promising near-linear scaling on up to four chips. The HYDRA Engine is dedicated silicon that dissects DirectX and OpenGL calls and modifies them directly to be distributed among the available graphics processors. That means the aging GeForce 6800 GT card in your closet might be useful once again and the future of one motherboard supporting both AMD and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations could be very near."<a href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/19/2312234&from=rss"><img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rss&op=image&style=h0&sid=08/08/19/2312234"></a><a href="http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/19/2312234&from=rss">Read more of this story</a> at Slashdot.
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Judge Rules Man Cannot Be Forced To Decrypt HD

Wed,20 Aug 2008 06:21 +0800

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "In Vermont, US Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier has ruled that forcing someone to divulge the password to decrypt their hard drive violates the 5th Amendment. Border guards testify that they saw child pornography on the defendant's laptop when the PC was on, but they made the mistake of turning it off and were unable to access it again because the drive was protected by PGP. Although prosecutors offered many ways to get around the 5th Amendment protections, the Judge would have none of that and quashed the grand jury subpoena requesting the defendant's PGP passphrase. A conviction is still likely because prosecutors have the testimony of the two border guards who saw the drive while it was open." The article stresses the potential importance of this ruling (which was issued last November but went unnoticed until now): "Especially if this ruling is appealed, US v. Boucher could become a landmark case. The question of whether a criminal defendant can be legally compelled to cough up his encryption passphrase remains an unsettled one, with law review articles for the last decade arguing the merits of either approach." Update: 08/19 23:49 GMT by KD : Several readers have pointed out that this story in fact did not go unnoticed.<a href="http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/19/2028235&from=rss"><img src="http://slashdot.org/slashdot-it.pl?from=rss&op=image&style=h0&sid=08/08/19/2028235"></a><a href="http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/19/2028235&from=rss">Read more of this story</a> at Slashdot.
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iPhone SSH client roundup

Wed,20 Aug 2008 05:30 +0800

Filed under: cellphones hacks, news, roundupConsidering an iPhone but not sure if you can live without SSH in your pocket? Have no fear! Hot off the press is this review of four SSH clients for the iPhone: iSSH, pTerm, TouchTerm, and SSH. All four clients have their strengths and weaknesses, and iSSH seems to be the best option so far. Although each of these is an early release, and therefore has its own idiosyncrasies, they've got improved features being planned for the next major release. Furthermore, they're surprisingly inexpensive (none of them are more than five dollars), and so you should give them a shot if you see the need to SSH without being bound to your terminal.iSSH is the best of the reviewed clients, giving you a good balance of usability and features. It has is share of problems, though, primarily related to the way it handles scrolling, pTerm comes in second, and is almost perfect. Its two rather glaring weaknesses are a too-large font that requires plenty of scrolling, and a lack of Ctrl, ESC, and Tab keys. TouchTerm, which comes in third, is the most configurable of the reviewed SSH clients,but is otherwise irrationally quirky. SSH is even quirkier than TouchTerm, and is a waste of your time and money. Between the idiosyncrasies of iSSH, pTerm, and TouchTerm, you're bound to find one that you like. Furthermore, these are initial releases; all three have exciting features on the roadmap (like implementing the ESC key) which should improve their usability.Should you give one of them a try? For five bucks, it wouldn't hurt.[photo: edans][via Waxy]Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Open options for cloud computing

Wed,20 Aug 2008 04:00 +0800

What do you use to run Windows applications on yo...

Wed,20 Aug 2008 02:37 +0800

* Cedega
* Crossover
* VirtualBox
* VMWare
* Wine
* Other (please tell us in the comments what you're using)
* I don't need or want to run Windows apps on my Linux desktop

How-To: Hack a ThingamaKIT

Wed,20 Aug 2008 02:30 +0800

Filed under: home entertainment hacks, how-to, digital audio hacks
The ThingamaKIT is an anthropomorphic analog synthesizer kit from Bleep Labs. Using "LEDacles", photoresistors, knobs, and switches, it generates interesting high pitched vocalizations. Bleep Labs sent us a review unit and this article shares our experiences building and using the kit. We've also included a tutorial on making some hacks, modifications, and circuit bends to it. Skip to the end to see a video of our hacked kit in action.
Using the ThingamaKIT
While it may not be that useful for serious musical composition, the ThingamaKIT makes some nice bleeps and blips, even without modification.The LED to photoresistor input/feedback method is enjoyable to play with, by repointing the LEDacles and waving hands around the photoresistor. The ThingamaKIT is very easy to start using; just twiddle knobs, and it starts making its characteristic ridiculous sounds.The ThingamaKIT is an simple but fun circuit, and schematics are provided. Three Schmitt trigger oscillators, like the ones used in the previous Hack a Day synth article are used to control the first LEDacle. Because they have different frequencies, the LEDacle blinks in an interesting manner. A Schmitt trigger and op amp generate a triangle wave for the other LEDacle, with controllable waveshape and speed. Another Schmitt trigger generates the modulating wave, with a frequency based on either Photocell 2 or a potentiometer. The main oscillator, the XR2206, has a pitch controlled by Photocell 1, except when the output from the modulation is high, then it switches to a different pitch.Embedded above is Bleep Labs official demo video.
Building the ThingamaKIT
The instructions for building the ThingamaKIT are printed well and easy to follow. [Surachai]'s build time lapse, shown above, gives a nice overview of the process. We had no problem finding components and soldering them to the board. Though troubleshooting instructions are provided in the manual, our device worked fine, and we did not need them.If you are assembling the ThingamaKIT with the intent to hack it as shown in the rest of this article, there are a couple things you should do differently than shown in the instructions.
Cut the 4'' wires a little longer, closer to 6''. You'll need the extra length when fitting components.
Do not install the waveshape switch, unless you want to test the default ThingamaKIT unit without modifications.
Do not proceed to the casing steps until you have made modifications.
Hacking the ThingamaKIT
Bleep Labs has designed the ThingamaKIT to be easily circuit bendable, and there are many fun hacks that can be done with this unit. A few are briefly presented in the extra information given with the kit. While playing around with it and assembling it, we also discovered several more. We'll show you a few different hacks and circuit bends that you can do with an assembled ThingamaKIT.
Adding an audio input
Our favorite hack for the ThingamaKIT is to add an audio input. The ThingamaKIT will completely warp any audio input, crushing it to lo-fi fuzz and crunches. Here is its emotional rendition of The Police's "Every Breath You Take":To do this, you'll need a 3.5mm audio jack, like the kind used in the previous synthesizer how-to article and a SPDT (three way) switch. Solder a wire to the signal lug and a wire to the ground lug on the jack. Then, solder the signal wire (the blue wire) to the left hand pad of the .01 uF capacitor, which is outlined above in red. Our solder joints look like a warzone, but it all works. We swear.There are two places the ground wire can be soldered, and each has a different sound; we installed a switch so that both could be used. Solder the ground wire to the center lug on the SPDT switch. Solder one of the outside lugs to the board's ground, and another to the other pin of the .01 uF capacitor, as outlined in red above.To use the audio input, flip the SPDT switch to either outside position, then patch some audio to the input. Music, drum machines, other synthesizers and more all work to make an interesting sound.
Adding a waveshaper knob
In its default configuration, the ThingamaKIT only has a switch to select between triangle and square wave main oscillators. By replacing this knob with a potentiometer, you can transition smoothly between the two waveforms. However, there will be a significant attenuation (decrease in volume) when the potentiometer is near its center, as both outputs will have increased impedance. This is not easily corrected, except with active amplification, or a dual potentiometer with two different tapers, which we have been unable to find.To do this mod, you first need to remove the waveshape switch if you have already attached it. The easiest way to remove it is with a desoldering iron. Simply squeeze the bulb, place the hot iron over each pad (pads to remove are outlined in red on the image above), and release the bulb. Do this for each pad until all solder is removed, then remove the switch. Keep the switch, as it will be useful if you want to do the sine wave hack.Next, solder three wires to a 10K potentiometer, such as the one pictured above. The red wire goes to the middle lug, and the other two go to either end on the board. The waveshaper knob is complete, and you can now easily fade between square and triangle waves.
Adding a sine wave switch
While reading the datasheet (PDF) for the XR2206, the signal generator that the ThingamaKIT uses, we noticed a very easy way to change the triangle wave output into a sine wave, which has a softer sound.If you are doing this with the waveshaper hack above, start by taking the old switch, and removing one lug from its side. Then bend the other two down slightly, as shown. This will allow the switch to fit where the old one did on the panel, without being in contact with the board. Solder two short wires to the remaining lugs. Then, stick a piece of electrical tape over the top of the pads on the board where the potentiometer is now wired, and put the switch there, using a bit of hot glue to hold it in place.To one wire, solder a 220 ohm resistor inline; an extra is helpfully provided in the kit. Wrap the resistor in electrical tape to cover the exposed leads, then solder the two wire ends to pins 13 and 14 of the XR2206 as outlined in red above. The sine wave mod is complete!
Adding a spike wave switch
Another bend we found while poking around in the unit caused the main oscillator to create a "spike" waveform. It produces a nice lo-fi, glitchy sound. To add this bend, take any normal SPST (two way on-off switch) and solder a wire to each lug. Then, connect it to pins 8 and 6 on the XR2206, as outlined in red. The spike wave mod is done.
Packaging it all up
To finish up our ThingamaKIT, we followed the instructions provided with the kit, but with a few modifications. A couple of extra holes had to be drilled for the new potentiometer (5/16''), the spike wave switch (5/16''), and the audio input (1/4'').We had some difficulty getting all of the new components fitted into the case, but with some rearranging we managed. Be sure not to push the photoresistors up higher on the face then is shown on the drill jig, or you will have trouble fitting them around the LEDacles. The volume potentiometer was also mounted a little low, and we had to put the speaker toward the controls side rather then the LEDacle side of the case to fit it in.Check out the demo video below to see our glorious leader in action.
Further hacks
To hack your ThingamaKIT further, Dr. Bleep has some recommendations in the manual: using the extra oscillators on the board to add effects, replacing the variable photocells with resistors and buttons to make a keyboard, making a patchbay, and getting complete control over LEDacle 1 with potentiometers.That concludes our ThingamaKIT hacking. Have any of you built one? To see other custom ThingamaKITs, check out the Flickr group.Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

XBMC's Linux port lacks impressive features

Wed,20 Aug 2008 02:00 +0800

Opinion: Why Cadence gave up Mentor takeover

Wed,20 Aug 2008 00:00 +0800

Cadence Design Systems Inc. has issued a press release stating that it was abandoning the effort to acquire Mentor Graphics Corp.

Mitsubishi taps Pacnet to link Japan, China offic...

Wed,20 Aug 2008 00:00 +0800

Pacnet is selected by Mitsubishi Electric to deliver an Internet Protocol Virtual Private Network solution that provides reliable and secure network communications with its China operations.

Solar advocates beef up solar thermal efforts

Wed,20 Aug 2008 00:00 +0800

The German Solar Industry Association group and other European solar enthusiasts have come to America to make the case for solar thermal technology, an alternative to photovoltaics that attempts to harness the efficient phase change from water to steam.

iSuppli: Cooperation is key to resolve AMOLED iss...

Wed,20 Aug 2008 00:00 +0800

The worldwide AMOLED market will grow to 185.2 million units by 2014, up from 2.6 million units in 2007. iSuppli recommends that display makers should work together to accomplish these goals.

IR to review Vishay's unsolicited proposal

Wed,20 Aug 2008 00:00 +0800

International Rectifier has announced that Vishay gave the company an unsolicited, non-binding proposal of acquiring all of the outstanding shares of International Rectifier for $21.22 per share in cash.

Wi-LAN to drop TI in patent suit

Wed,20 Aug 2008 00:00 +0800

Wi-LAN Inc. has announced that Texas Instruments Inc. will be dismissed from Wi-LAN's legal action No. 2:07-cv-474 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

India 3G to suffer another delay?

Wed,20 Aug 2008 00:00 +0800

A spat between powerful ministries and a senior official on the basis for allotting 3G licenses to operate data service is threatening India's 3G plan.

IBM rolls out 'smallest' SRAM

Wed,20 Aug 2008 00:00 +0800

IBM Research boasts to have fabricated the world's smallest SRAM bit cell with joint industry and university development partners. The SRAM bit cell, which was cast using 22nm design rules, measures simply 0.1µ2.

Motor control by µPD78F0714

Wed,20 Aug 2008 00:00 +0800

This application note is intended for users who understand the functions of the µPD78F0714, and who design application systems that use these functions.

The MIPS32 34K core family: powering next-generat...

Wed,20 Aug 2008 00:00 +0800

A new multi-threading implementation of the MIPS architecture provides significant performance improvements with only a minimal increase in die size while leveraging existing software infrastructure.

Defcon 16: List of tools compiled

Tue,19 Aug 2008 23:30 +0800

Filed under: misc hacks, consZero Day posted a list of tools and applications that were released at Defcon 16. The applications run the gamut, from Beholder, an open source wireless IDS tool, to CollabREate, a reverse-engineering plugin that allows multiple people to share a single project. The list covers a lot of ground, and there's a lot for hackers to play around with and explore. It's nice to see someone bothering to maintain a list since the majority of conference tools just get lost in the shuffle and are never seen again.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Electric mannequin leg maraca

Tue,19 Aug 2008 23:00 +0800

Filed under: misc hacks[Richie Brown] created an electric mannequin leg maraca. The leg is filled with little bits of plastic, metal, and wood. Hook it up to a looping pedal, add a piezo disc mic, and you've got an unusual instrument with a lot of potential. [Brown] has other projects that encourage interaction and invite curiosity, from disembodied mannequin parts to repurposed piano keyboards. The creations come attached with contact mics that pick up noises as people touch, poke, and play around with them.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

New Scalix open source groupware is competition f...

Tue,19 Aug 2008 23:00 +0800

io9's Build a Lifeform contest

Tue,19 Aug 2008 22:30 +0800

Filed under: contests, misc hacksThere's still time to enter io9's Build a Lifeform contest. Synthetic biologists, get cracking on the design of that synthetic lifeform or BioBricks lifeform! The rules are pretty straightforward; you need to propose a lifeform design that would be scientifically viable. The BioBricks lifeform part of the contest requires that your design needs to not only be scientifically viable, you have to explain how you would create it in a lab, and you get extra points if you already have an organism. The deadline is August 25, 2008. You could win the opportunity to attend an all-expenses-paid trip to the Synthetic Biology Conference in Hong Kong or $1000 and a chance to get your creature drawn by a cool comic book artist.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Git 1.6.0 Released

Tue,19 Aug 2008 19:46 +0800

"The latest feature release GIT 1.6.0 is available at the usual places," began Git maintainer, Junio Hamano, announcing the latest stable release of the distributed version control system originally written by Linus Torvalds. Among the current changes, Junio noted, "with the default Makefile settings, most of the programs are now installed outside your $PATH, except for 'git', 'gitk' and some server side programs that need to be accessible for technical reasons." He continued, "by default, packfiles created with this version uses delta-base-offset
encoding introduced in v1.4.4. Pack idx files are using version 2 that allows larger packs and added robustness thanks to its CRC checking, introduced in v1.5.2 and v1.4.4.5." Julio highlighted several other changes, including the addition of a '.sample' extension to the default trigger scripts to be sure they don't execute in a default install, and the removal of the 'stupid' merge strategy. Other changes include:
"Git-gui learned to stage changes per-line; Reduced excessive inlining to shrink size of the 'git' binary; When an object is corrupt in a pack, the object became unusable even when the same object is available in a loose form, we now try harder to fall back to these redundant objects when able; performance of 'git-blame -C -C' operation is vastly improved; even more documentation pages are now accessible via 'man' and 'git help'; longstanding latency issue with bash completion script has been addressed; pager. configuration variable can be used to enable/disable the default paging behaviour per command; git-cvsserver learned to respond to 'cvs co -c'; 'git-diff -p' learned to grab a better hunk header lines in BibTex, Pascal/Delphi, and Ruby files and also pays attention to chapter and part boundary in TeX documents; error codes from gitweb are made more descriptive where possible, rather than '403 forbidden' as we used to issue everywhere; git-merge has been reimplemented in C."
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Hacking the Myvu personal video player

Tue,19 Aug 2008 19:31 +0800

Filed under: ipod hacks, portable video hacks, daily[jongscx] picked up a Myvu personal media viewer and promptly began scheming about improvements. He decided he wanted to be able to watch any input on the device, not just an Ipod.After some messing about with different inputs, he eventually calls Myvu to ask some questions. Surprisingly, he gets the engineer who designed the thing. The engineer turns out to be pretty helpful and is happy to help him hack the device. [jongscx] ends up finally getting it to work and posts the schematic for the world to see. He says his hands are full with some other projects right now, but hopefully he'll do an official write up with pictures of the final product soon.[DrNathan] wrote in to note that [RetroPlayer] was responsible for much of the work as well as contacting the engineer.[thanks, DrNathan]Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Linutop 2.2: A desktop where smaller is better

Tue,19 Aug 2008 16:00 +0800

NGINX instead of Apache?

Tue,19 Aug 2008 07:56 +0800

My friend Mario in Costa Rica sent me a short email about NGINX (pronounced engine-X). It is a web server and a bit more written by Igor Sysoev in Russia. Clearly, it isn't for everyone but if you have a very busy site that needs load balancing and some other performance stuff, it looks pretty interesting.
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Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet

Tue,19 Aug 2008 04:30 +0800

Filed under: cons, digital audio hacksPitchfork.tv is showing the documentary Blip Festival: Reformat the Planet for one week only. The Blip Festival is an annual chiptune event in New York City featuring musicians who use video game consoles as part of their production. The documentary has a ton of artist interviews and music from all across the spectrum. Most of the initial featured artists are using the Game Boy LSDJ tracker cartridge. [Nullsleep] has put together a tutorial for the device. You'll see a lot of other old hardware and hear discussions of coveted mods like adding backlights as well. [Mark Denardo] is shown using a PSP as part of his performance. Other people are using software like Fruity Loops to build tracks with Nintendo samples. Honestly, our favorite part was a clip of the loud objects doing a live soldering circuit bending performance on top of an overhead projector at the Bent Festival. Although not musical, Element Labs' Versa TILE makes a fairly mesmerizing backdrop throughout the film too. You can find links to all the featured artists on last year's festival page. Blip Festival 2008 happens December 4-6 in Brooklyn, NY.[via Waxy][photo: ziggy fresh]Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Transparency is just as important

Tue,19 Aug 2008 04:02 +0800

One of the advantages, touted by the Open Source community is that you can read the source code and make changes to it if you need to. Now to be honest, how many of us even bother to look at the source code? Come on, fess up. Yes, that is about what I thought.
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Meet Open Invention Network CEO Keith Bergelt (vi...

Tue,19 Aug 2008 04:00 +0800

64-bit Application Thread Creation Performance

Tue,19 Aug 2008 03:51 +0800

A recent discussion on the Linux Kernel mailing list noted that threaded 64-bit applications suffer a drastic slowdown in pthread_create performance when stack utilization goes above 4GB. Ingo Molnar offered an explanation of the problem, "unfortunately MAP_32BIT use in 64-bit apps for stacks was apparently created without foresight about what would happen in the MM when thread stacks exhaust 4GB. The problem is that MAP_32BIT is used both as a performance hack for 64-bit apps and as an ABI compat mechanism for 32-bit apps. So we cannot just start disregarding MAP_32BIT in the kernel - we'd break 32-bit compat apps and/or compat 32-bit libraries." The original report noted that once the shared stack goes above 4GB in size, thread creation can take as long as 10 milliseconds, a slowdown described as "quite unacceptable".
Ingo created a patch introducing a new MAP_STACK flag for glibc to be used instead of MAP_32BIT and avoid imposing the 32-bit performance limitation on threaded 64-bit applications. He noted, "glibc can switch to this new flag straight away - it will be ignored by the kernel." The new flag was quickly merged upstream, and changes were planned for glibc.
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Linux Journal Flickr Pool Roundup

Tue,19 Aug 2008 03:44 +0800

Linux Journal's Flickr pool regularly brings in fun photos from readers around the world.
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Hack a Day T-Shirt design contest

Tue,19 Aug 2008 02:30 +0800

Filed under: contests, newsWe need a new t-shirt. The current design, on the left, is entering its third year. Help us out by designing a new shirt to give away at conferences. Dash has donated a Dash Express for first prize.Some ground rules:
You must incorporate the skull and wrenches logo in your design. You'll find a larger version below.
You can enter as many designs as you like to hackaday.shirt@gmail.com (JPG, GIF, or PNG mockups only please)
The design can't violate any copyright laws or trademarks.
The design should be one color and the shirt doesn't have to be black.
By submitting your design you give us non-exclusive rights to use the image in the design of a Hack a Day t-shirt as well as for other Hack A Day promotional materials.
We reserve the right to choose no design at all if we don't like any of the submissions.
The contest ends September 15th.
UPDATE: [loopymind] has provided some files to help you out. [ EPS | PDF | DXF ][Phesarnion] found the long lost Hack a Day font.Yes, the contest is open to residents outside the US; we'll come up with an appropriate prize.
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Rocks clusters make sense for educational environ...

Tue,19 Aug 2008 02:00 +0800

Music Education With Linux Sound Tools, Redux

Tue,19 Aug 2008 01:58 +0800

Four years ago I wrote an article for Linux Journal about my use of Linux software for music instruction. A lot has changed since then, so I thought I should update that article to reflect my current use of Linux in my work as a music teacher. I'll follow the presentation of materials as I organized it in the original article, but first I'll share some observations about the changing nature of my trade.
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British bots compete for attention

Mon,18 Aug 2008 23:30 +0800

Filed under: robots hacks, newsThe British military held a competition to find the newest batch of robotic surveillance drones. The article mentions that they compete in a mockup village, but sadly we don't get to see any of the action. We strongly recommend watching the video so you can see some of the robots. There is an interesting helicopter concept that has angled props for better stability and lateral motion, but more importantly you get to see the little guy pictured above. He very well could be Wall-E's great grandfather. Though his constant buzzing around during the interviews is slightly annoying, his little camera mount looking all around is instantly endearing. If he doesn't win this contest, he may have a shot at the [crabfu] challenge.[via Engadget]Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

NimbleX 2008 is speedy but flawed

Mon,18 Aug 2008 23:00 +0800

Three Firefox extensions for Gmail

Mon,18 Aug 2008 16:00 +0800

Theme Zenlike Xoops

Mon,18 Aug 2008 10:30 +0800

Preview : hereDownload : hereDetails :- 3 columns- fullsize- based on Morphogenesis 2.10Credits :- original free template : Zenlike (Nodethirtythree.com / Freelayouts.com)- Morphogenesis 2.10 : xoofoo.org (Kris)Thanks to the 18 xoopsers who have selected this template to be ported to Xoops ! A new poll is organized here for next month with 5 free templates : do not forget to vote !@+

Looking for Python Programmers to Change the Worl...

Mon,18 Aug 2008 09:15 +0800

Ten years ago, the then CEO of Ericsson in Sweden wrote an internal article about digital convergence. He stated that within a very short time, all data produced in an analog way such as books, music, photographs, newspapers and so forth would cease to exist. Instead all content would become digital and we would render, view and listen to digital formats.
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Release of XOOPS 2.0.18.2

Sun,17 Aug 2008 23:11 +0800

The XOOPS development team is pleased to announce the release of XOOPS 2.0.18.2.In this release permission check ini imagemanager was fixed by dugris. A bug was fixed for custom session with regenerateId enabled.Meanwhile to prevent further confusing information about 'fct' parameter in admin.php that might concern XOOPS users, the parameter is now filtered.Read the full changelog for details.Download from Sourceforge Repository.

Ask Linux.com: Theft recovery, skeleton files, an...

Sun,17 Aug 2008 21:00 +0800

Spend your vacation getting started with OpenStre...

Sat,16 Aug 2008 21:00 +0800

15th Debian Birthday Gathering 2008 (HK)

Sat,16 Aug 2008 13:59 +0800

Start: 08/16/2008 - 19:30
End: 08/16/2008 - 21:30
Timezone: Etc/GMT+8
感謝 Ben Lau 組織今年的 Debian Party!
2008年08月16日將會是Debian 15歲生日的日子，世界各地都有不同的慶祝活動，籍著這個機會，就讓我們這班Debian（或其他衍生版本）的支持者出來聚一聚、慶祝一番吧！
歡迎新朋友加入!
註：場地有 Wifi及電源提供，最底消費為每人一杯飲品，但因為沒有包場，故請大家先報名，方便預計人數。
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The DNS Bug: Why You Should Care

Sat,16 Aug 2008 00:31 +0800

It's not every day that the New York Times writes articles about the Domain Name System, but then again this DNS bug is anything but normal.
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What Comes After the Windows Era?

Fri,15 Aug 2008 18:10 +0800

As a computer journalist for the last 25 years, I've received a lot of review copies of software. As something of an obsessive magpie, I've tended to keep most of it, “for reference”. Until yesterday, that is, when I finally threw out all those copies of OS/2, Lotus SmartSuite, and my entire collection of Microsoft software. This included Windows NT 3.5, Windows 2000, Microsoft Office and many, many more. What's makes this little spring-cleaning exercise particularly apt as well as cathartic is that all of us - and not just me - may finally be witnessing the end of the Windows era.
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Tux3 Hierarchical Structure

Fri,15 Aug 2008 10:04 +0800

"It is about time to take a step back and describe what I have been implementing," began Daniel Phillips, referring to his new Tux3 filesystem. He provided a simple ASCII diagram that detailed the filesystem's hierarchical structure, describing each of the elements. About one he noted, "the volume table is a new addition not central to the goals of Tux3, but a nice feature to have given that it comes nearly for free. One Tux3 volume can have an arbitrary number of separate filesystems tucked inside it, indexed by a simple integer parameter at mount time. People say they like this idea and it imposes no significant complexity, so it goes in." Daniel continued:
"Each volume has a metablock pointing at the forward log chain for the volume, a version table that describes the hierarchical relationship between versions (snapshots), an atime table to take care of that horrid legacy Unix feature, and an inode table containing files and attributes of files. [...] Versioning takes place in three places, versioned pointers in the atime btree, versioned extents in a file data btree and versioned attributes in the inode table. [...] Notice the absence of a journal, the functionality of which is provided by forward log elements that I described in the Hammer thread (and will eventually write a separate post about)."
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Monitoring Processes with Kill

Fri,15 Aug 2008 04:11 +0800

If you have a process ID but aren't sure whether it's valid, you can use the most unlikely of candidates to test it: the kill command. If you don't see any reference to this on the kill(1) man page, check the info pages. The man/info page states that signal 0 is special and that the exit code from kill tells whether a signal could be sent to the specified process (or processes).
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New website from Bertholdo Consultoria

Thu,14 Aug 2008 23:30 +0800

Hello Xoops Community!This is the new website from Brazilian Webdesign team Bertholdo Consultoria.The website was developed to be more interactive, with sections like Podcast, Blog, PortfÃ³lio (portfolio), Enquete (poll), Downloads, and more.We used the following modules: Liaise, SecurityImage, News, smartFAQ, wfChannel, wfDownloads, xoopsPoll, Debaser, xhld,rw_banner, xladmin.More info: Bertholdo' Website

Article Management System (AMS) 2.50 Beta 1 Relea...

Thu,14 Aug 2008 23:30 +0800

NovaSmart Technology proudly announce Article Management System (AMS) 2.50 Beta 1.This release considered not stableWhat Is AMSAMS is a highly modified version of the News 1.2 for Xoops, and adds a huge amount of features to give the webmasters a lot more control over their content while still maintaining an easy to understand and use interface. AMS is highly scalable, and is geared towards performance, and as such is well suited to large article repositories that attract high amounts of users.

Wii-Linux + T2 SDE Linux 6.0 + X Server Running X...

Thu,14 Aug 2008 23:15 +0800

This video is from nuvalo who writes: "This is the latest kernel from Wii-Linux, which supports USB, Bluetooth, etc. This video shows how it boots T2 SDE for PowerPC, with its X server and the login. The colors are messed up as the X server writes its colors in RGB format, and the Wii frame buffer only supports yuv2. Anyway, it is possible to run an X server without too much effort."
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Highlighting Interesting Mailing List Discussions

Thu,14 Aug 2008 06:00 +0800

New functionality has been enabled that allows logged-in users to highlight interesting mailing list discussions. This new feature has been provided out of necessity, as I'm finding myself with insufficient time of late for keeping up with the many mailing lists I track to post articles on KernelTrap. My goal is to inspire you to participate more in the process, occasionally clicking the new up-arrow on mailing list messages that you find interesting and worthy of attention. In the upcoming weeks, improved interfaces will be provided for navigating other people's votes, and for filtering on only the mailing lists you're interested in. Future KernelTrap stories and quotes will be selected from those that are highlighted by this voting process.
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2.6.27-rc3, "Things Really _Have_ Calmed Down"

Thu,14 Aug 2008 02:49 +0800

"Things really _have_ calmed down, and hopefully we've also resolved a lot of the regressions in -rc3," began Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.27-rc3 Linux kernel. He noted that much of the patch size was from the inclusion of the new ath9k wireless driver, with much of the rest of the patch size due to the renaming of many arch include files in the ARM, AVR32 and m68lnommu architectures. Linus continued:
"All the small changes are where the regression fixes are, and other random improvements. And they're all over. The ShortLog (appended) probably gives a taste of it."
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New Tutorial for MyTabs 2.0

Tue,12 Aug 2008 08:10 +0800

Burning did an awesome job with developing some cool tutorials for XOOPS. We are now in process of translating them into English from French. As first, we've translated the MyTabs 2.0 Tutorial. You can download it from SourceForgeWe definitely need volunteers for that, so if have some extra time, please help us. The beauty of it is that you don't need to know PHP or be programming expert to do it Also, if you would like to translate the tutorials into other languages, please let us know as well.And thanks to Burning for all his help & support, and to chco2, who developed the cover! Such community involvement and support it's what makes all this so rewarding and so much fun.

New Themes Gallery

Tue,12 Aug 2008 01:00 +0800

In our continuous drive to improve the XOOPS Website, thanks to Burning, we are testing a new Theme Gallery:http://www.xoops.org/modules/extgallery/which is based on the excellent ExtGallery by Zoullou!Please let us know what do you think about it, and if this would be an improvement over the current Theme Library. Which library is more user-friendly, and makes easier to find a theme?We very much appreciate all the help from Burning!!!

Shallunge Theme

Mon,11 Aug 2008 21:00 +0800

XOOPSLand is glad share with Xoops community a new theme.SpecificationName : ShallungeVersion : 1Width : 910pxColumns : 3Template : system_redirect.hymlDemo : hereDownload : here.

mygallery theme

Mon,11 Aug 2008 17:00 +0800

This theme was designed last year ( by MorÂ·phoÂ·genÂ·eÂ·sis 1.1.0) and today I adjusted it for xoops 2.3 Specializations :==> 3 Column==> Width: 900pxdownload: heredemo: our gallery

Dr. Usage 2.07

Mon,11 Aug 2008 11:46 +0800

This is a simple graphing system for system visits and usage, it will be extended further in the future but I hope you like this simple graph. You will need to add the block to the pages you want it to track the usage on.With XOOPS Usage Graph you can follow the progress of your Xoops Usage with visits and click with this useful tool. This module requires the XOOPS Framework version of 1.35. This also tracks is integrity which should never drop below 100% unless you have some form of paranormal activities happening within your domain which in this graphs early stages of deployment we even noticed there was in our system.This will display a graph over your selection of hours which will show you the user usage of your system. There is also multiple levels of Quarantine Tiers, you can expand this at your own means.Download: â¢ xoops2_drusage_2.07.zip â¢ xoops2_drusage_2.07.zip.torrentFeatures: â¢ Data Quarantine â¢ Easy to read graphs â¢ Rolling Display â¢ Multiple Staged Quarantine â¢ Clearing Timer System Requirements: â¢ Xoops 2.x.x â¢ Frameworks 1.35Demo: â¢ http://www.chronolabs.org/usage/ â¢ http://www.chronolabs.org.au/usage/

LVM Snapshot Merging

Sun,10 Aug 2008 02:02 +0800

Mikulas Patocka announced new patches introducing snapshot merging for the Linux kernel's logical volume manager. He explained, "snapshot merging allows you to merge snapshot content back into the original device. The most useful use for this feature is the possibility to rollback [the] state of the whole computer after [a] failed package upgrade, [or an] administrator's error". The patches are for the 2.6.26 kernel, with device mapper 1.02.27 and LVM2.2.02.39.
Mikulas noted that there are three types of merges supported, --nameorigin, --namesnapshot, and --onactivate. The default merge method is --nameorigin, which can merge a snapshot into the origin volume, which can be mounted at any time after the merge starts. The --namesnapshot method merges into a snapshot, which can then be mounted. And the --onactive method schedules a merge to happen the next time the volume is activated, such as during a reboot. Mikulas noted, "this implementation of snapshot merging is meant to be stable, report any possible bugs to me."
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All our modules are Xoops 2.3 compatibles (News, ...

Sun,10 Aug 2008 01:20 +0800

Hello,We are happy to announce you that all our modules were tested (and corrected) and are declared compatibles with Xoops 2.3.All those releases were not created to add new features but to ensure that they are compatibles with Xoops 2.3.So there's no change in the translations.Our modules are still compatibles with Xoops 2.0.18 but you can also use them with Xoops 2.3We encourage you to upgrade every module of your site.Download the modules you need, uncompress them and copy their files to your website then update them in the Xoops modules manager.We used this test time to update the other modules we have maintained or modified recently like Mydownloads and Birthday.Here is the full changelog for each module (each module's name brings you to its full description and his download link)News version 1.62- The module is now Xoops 2.3 compatible- Many corrections in the use of the deprecated TextSanitizer functions- Modification of tcpdf to be able to see pictures inside PDFs (thanks colossus)- TCPDF was updated to its version 4.0.017 (don't forget to create a file for your language in /xoops/modules/news/pdf/config/lang)Newbbex version 1.6- The module is now Xoops 2.3 compatible- Many corrections in the use of the deprecated TextSanitizer functions- Some bugs corrections in the attachments- I have removed some warnings- Correction of a typo in the english blocks.php fileMarquee version 2.46- The module is now Xoops 2.3 compatibleShortcuts version 1.7- The module is now Xoops 2.3 compatible- A warning was removed in the module's index pageMyIframe version 1.6- The module is now Xoops 2.3 compatible- Bugs correctionsiSearch version 1.8- The module is now Xoops 2.3 compatible- Bugs corrections in class/blacklist.php- Minor change in the searchUserPage version 1.3- The module is now Xoops 2.3 compatible- Minor changes in a page titleBoox version 1.5- The module is now Xoops 2.3 compatibleXoopsCare version 1.22- The module is now Xoops 2.3 compatible- Minor changes in the module's administration- The module now clean the cache in XOOPS_TRUST_PATHMydownloads version 1.6- The module is now Xoops 2.3 compatible- Many corrections in the use of the deprecated TextSanitizer functions- In the form used to submit a new download in the user side, the download url and the file's size were not visible anymore- Some warnings in the module were removed- I have made a change in include/search.inc.php because of Php 4- You will get this warning : Warning: Class 'XoopsTree' is deprecated, check 'XoopsObjectTree' in tree.php in file /class/xoopstree.php line 45 It will be changed later.Birthday version 2.2- The module is now Xoops 2.3 compatible- Minor change in the module's administration- The module will not add asterisks to forms under Xoops 2.3- Correction of a bug in the commentsWe remind you that as of yesterday (8/8/2008); Php 4 is DEAD, so all our modules are now only running with Php 5 and we encourage you to upgrade your website if you are still using Php 4.Best regards,Instant Zero

Btrfs 0.16, Improved Scalability And Performance

Sat,09 Aug 2008 03:02 +0800

"Btrfs v0.16 is available for download," began Chris Mason, announcing the latest release of his new Btrfs filesystem. He noted, "v0.16 has a shiny new disk format, and is not compatible with filesystems created by older Btrfs releases. But, it should be the fastest Btrfs yet, with a wide variety of scalability fixes and new features." Improved scalability and performance improvements include fine grained btree locking, pushing CPU intensive operations such as checksumming into their own background threads, improved data=ordered mode, and a new cache to reduce IO requirements when cleaning up old transactions. Other new features include support for ACLs, prevention of orphaned inodes so files won't be lost after a crash, and a more robust directory index format. Chris noted:
"There are still more disk format changes planned, but we're making every effort to get them out of the way as quickly as we can. You can see the major features we have planned on the development timeline. [...] the btrfs kernel module now weighs in at 30,000 LOC, which means we're getting very close to the size of ext[34]."
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[問] compile problem using 'make' command

Fri,08 Aug 2008 23:30 +0800

dear all,
   i downloaded the no-ip client and wanna install it to my debian 4.0. but
when i input make there is tons of compiling error which is about missing
the .h files like stdio.h, stdlib.h..........many many .h files missing....
   i have installded the gcc, and also the related lib such as libc6,
libc6-i686 etc.
   what can i do to solve the problems. thanks a lot.
kit

Comparing HAMMER And Tux3

Thu,07 Aug 2008 23:25 +0800

"The big advantage Hammer has over Tux3 is, it is up and running and released in the Dragonfly distro," began Daniel Phillips, offering a comparison between the two filesystem. He continued, "the biggest disadvantage is, it runs on BSD, not Linux, and it so heavily implements functionality that is provided by the VFS and block layer in Linux that a port would be far from trivial. It will likely happen eventually, but probably in about the same timeframe that we can get Tux3 up and stable." This led into a lengthy and interesting technical discussion between Daniel and HAMMER author Matthew Dillon, comparing the design of the two filesystems.
Matthew reviewed the Tux3 notes and replied, "it sounds like Tux3 is using many similar ideas [as HAMMER]. I think you are on the right track. I will add one big note of caution, drawing from my experience implementing HAMMER, because I think you are going to hit a lot of the same issues. I spent 9 months designing HAMMER and 9 months implementing it. During the course of implementing it I wound up throwing away probably 80% of the original design outright." Daniel noted that he's been working on the Tux3 design for around ten years, "and working seriously on the simplifying elements for the last three years or so, either entirely on paper or in related work like ddsnap and LVM3." Matthew cautioned, "I can tell you've been thinking about Tux for a long time. If I had one worry about your proposed implementation it would be in the area of algorithmic complexity. You have to deal with the in-memory cache, the log, the B-Tree, plus secondary indexing for snapshotted elements and a ton of special cases all over the place. Your general lookup code is going to be very, very complex. My original design for HAMMER was a lot more complex (if you can believe it!) then the end result. A good chunk of what I had to do going from concept to reality was deflate a lot of that complexity." The friendly conversation offers a very detailed look at the design choices made in each of these file systems.
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2.6.27-rc2, "A Lot Of Random Changes"

Thu,07 Aug 2008 14:44 +0800

"So it's been a week since -rc1, and -rc2 is out there," began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.27-rc2 Linux kernel. He noted, "there's a lot of random changes in there, and I'm hoping we're starting to calm down, but one particular _kind_ of random change is probably worth pointing out explicitly due to the things it can result in: the fact that a number of architectures ended up using the 'lull' after -rc1 (hah!) to do the 'include/asm-xyz' => 'arch/xyz/include/asm' renames." Linus explained that for people actively developing and merging code with git, "be aware that we've recently had more renames than the rename detection limit in git defaults to, and as a result, if you have a rename<->data change conflict, you may want to increase the default limit." Linus noted that developers with sufficient ram can set "renamelimit=0" to completely disable the limit, and others can set it to a high value such as 5,000, "the default limit is pretty low just to not cause problems for people who have less memory in their machines than kernel developers tend to have..."
Linus continued, "the dirstat (with rename detection on, so as to not show the movement as huge changes) is fairly usual, with most of the changes in drivers, along with an ext4 and xfs update making 'fs' show up pretty high too". He added:
"The shortlog is still a tad too big to make it on the list (again, as usual - normally I end up posting shortlogs for -rc3 and later when they become more manageable) but let me just say that it isn't really all that interesting. Theres' a lot of small changes here, but nothing that makes you go 'Wow!'. Not that there _should_ be anything like that in -rc2, of course, so I'm not complaining."
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Linux Job Board

Thu,07 Aug 2008 04:19 +0800

We have partnered with HotLinuxJobs to provide KernelTrap readers with a new Linux Job Board dedicated to helping you find employment in free and open source technologies. The list of jobs on our website will be automatically updated as new jobs come available, and can be found by clicking the 'Jobs' link in the menu at the top of every page. When you find a listed job that you're interested in, follow the link from the job board to sign up for the free Jobs Email List. A HotLinuxJobs recruiter will then personally work with you, interviewing your over the phone before sending your resume to the potential employer, and protecting your confidentiality. You may sign up for the Jobs Email List even if you currently find no matching jobs, and a HotLinuxJobs recruiter will contact you when a match is found. Their website explains:
"[HotLinuxJobs is a] search firm specializing in the placement of Linux / Open Source professionals, providing both contract and direct hire services to our clients. Our knowledge of the Linux / Open Source landscape and employment marketplace make us your most efficient recruiting resource. If you are looking for exciting opportunities and want to work for leading companies adopting Open Source technologies, please contact us and send us a copy of your resume and sign up for our jobs email list."
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[問]set web server & ftp 應從何入手

Fri,04 Jul 2008 22:57 +0800

請各位有經驗的c兄指點下，想自己set 個web server & ftp, 真係唔知從何入手，我己裝了web min，又申請咗ddns，就係塙唔掂個web server, 裝了一個星期都唔掂，有住在何文田或附近的高手嗎，如果要收錢我都願，但唔好太貴啦，求教、求救，勁急。有高手願幫助就call我啦 jackybox@hotmail.com thankyou

[問] xandros = debian ?

Mon,30 Jun 2008 22:53 +0800

大家好，本人買了一部 eeepc 所以想多學多了解 linux 。
從多處的文章給我的訊息是 xandros 是 debian 的一種，但實質上又有什麼分別呢？
另外，本人在嘗試安裝 wine 1.0 時發現有部份的 dependency 用了 xandros 取代 etch 的，這又是為了什麼呢？

多謝各位高手幫助回答。

[問] Debian 4.0r3 認不到網路卡

Sat,28 Jun 2008 13:29 +0800

請問在安裝Debian 4.0 r3的時候，它找不到NIC 應該怎麼辦?
我用的是Broadcom corperation Net Xtrame BCM5722 Gigabit ethernet pci express <---- 裝了CentOS 5 顯示出來的名稱!
因為本人是新手，找到一些英文版的文章可是不太了解!! 有沒有中文版? 或者有大大可以教路嗎?

求救.....第一次用debian, 想自己在家做...

Sun,15 Jun 2008 21:42 +0800

想在家做個server比自己用，起初想加plesk一起用，裝了一個星期都唔掂，有住在何文田或附近的高手嗎，如果要收錢我都願，但唔好太貴啦，求教、求救，勁急。有高手願幫助就call我啦 jackybox@hotmail.com thankyou

想問問如何安裝 sun-java6-plugin

Fri,06 Jun 2008 19:16 +0800

唔該想問問如何安裝 sun-java6-plugin，我是 debian linux 新手，經已看過 http://wiki.debian.org.hk/w/Install_Sun_Java_with_APT 多次，常試過多次，但都不成功，請問可否詳細說明如何修改 /etc/apt/sources.list 檔案，用 debian 什麼軟件修改，因我在這裡 http://packages.debian.org/etch-backports/i386/sun-java6-plugin/download 下載 sun-java6-plugin 後，
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[問] 改變語言設定

Wed,04 Jun 2008 00:35 +0800

我是新手！有安裝RedHat 9, CentOS 5.0 經驗. 今回試試安裝debian 4 (在Vmware 5.5 workstation)
安裝時選擇中文(繁體)/香港, 可是我不懂怎樣改變語言介面為日文(最好EUC-JP),
而且我的host operating system 是Windows XP, 安裝了Symantec Endpoint Protection,
大槪把VMware Virtual Ethernet Adapter for VMnet1, VMnet8 的traffic都堵截了, 不能從DHCP 取得IP, 和靠apt 出街取package.
應該在哪裡加裝語言套件呢?
King

DSA-1571-1 openssl -- predictable random number g...

Thu,15 May 2008 23:04 +0800

Date Reported:
13 May 2008
Affected Packages:
openssl
Vulnerable:
Yes
Security database references:
In Mitre's CVE dictionary: CVE-2008-0166.
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Debian Lenny in HPT37x RAID1 install

Wed,14 May 2008 11:04 +0800

Debian Lenny in HPT37x RAID1 install
2008, May 13, 2:55 PM

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QNAP Announces the NVR-1012 Network Surveillance ...

Tue,22 Apr 2008 00:58 +0800

QNAP Systems, Inc., the leading IP surveillance solution provider today announced the NVR-1012 network surveillance kit for home and office. The NVR-101 is an instant surveillance system providing professional grade live video recording and real-time remote monitoring/playback service. The complete system is built-on the Linux OS for its proven superb performance yet power-saving feature. In order to bring users more convenience and extra benefits in setting up a network surveillance system, QNAP has considerately selected two value-plus IP cameras for the NVR-1012 kit. The kit can be set up instantly in a few simple steps. All the system configuration and recording/monitoring functions of the NVR are carried out through Internet Explorer and absolutely no complicated software installation is ever required.

IBM developerWorks : This newsfeed has mov...

Thu,06 Sep 2007 23:01 +0800

Moved to IBM developerWorks Linux RSS

Embedded Linux Talk: Developing Your Own Embedded...

Mon,21 May 2007 19:14 +0800

Date: 2007-06-09Time: 14:30 To 16:30Venue: OEE1017, 10/F, Oen Hall, East Wing, Ho Sin Hang Campus,HKBU(香港浸會大學溫仁才大樓東翼10樓OEE1017講堂)District: Kowloon TongSpeaker: Andrew Ip (葉昊軒)Language: ContoneseFee: 0Organizer: Opensource Application Knowledge Association & Science Faculty of Hong Kong Baptist UniversitySponsor：SWPearl ( http://www.swpearl.com )Online Registration: http://www.linuxhall.org/modules.php?name=LoopEvents&func=load&eid=210

Open Source Orgs Invited to Fourth Annual SoCal L...

Sun,06 Nov 2005 01:12 +0800

SCALE is inviting all Open Source organizations to participate in SCALE 4x, the fourth annual Southern California Linux Expo.

Haven't Updated for Long Time

Tue,23 Aug 2005 17:41 +0800

Sorry for All, I havn't updated for long time since I was busy with My Job. But there is a news. Apple][e Emulator has been updated for Changing Disk and Control Key Mapping. Please Stay Tune or Send a Email To me h i l a r y c h e n g @ y a h o o . c o m.

Z4CK - New Zaurus cyber thriller reaches Amazon

Tue,23 Aug 2005 17:39 +0800

Kevin Milne has written Z4CK, a cyber thriller based around Duncan Steele, a hacker who creates the 'magic bullet' that lets him by-pass any network security. Duncan uses Z4CK meaning Zaurus-ACK, compiled on the OpenZaurus OS to do this. Unlike Films like 'The Net', Z4CK gives a realistic insight into hacker tools and techniques. The book was written with a Zaurus SL-5500 and PocketTop keyboard. Z4CK features wireless hacking with the Zaurus, and a view of how an Open Source future might be.The first 6 chapters of the book are FREE, in PDF, Plucker or Palm DOC format. The full electronic version is $3. Surf to <A href="http://www.z4ck.org">www.z4ck.org</A> and take a look. Signed copies are available from the website at £7.50,

TimeSys Introduces Built-to-Spec Custom Linux Dis...

Thu,04 Aug 2005 09:38 +0800

Embedded Developers Can Configure and Order Custom Linux Distributions for Designs Targeting PowerPC, Intel, MIPS and ARM Using Web-based Configuration SystemPITTSBURGH, PA – August 3, 2005 – TimeSys ® Corporation, the leading provider of Linux Customization Solutions for the embedded device market, today announced the availability of Built-to-Spec Custom Linux Distributions for embedded developers using Linux in device designs based on PowerPC, Intel XScale/IA-32, MIPS and ARM architectures. Built-to-Spec Custom Linux Distributions provide a low-cost starting point for the thousands of “roll-your-own” embedded developers looking to customize Linux to the unique feature, footprint and processor requirements of their device design.

Nokia announces patent support to the Linux Kerne...

Thu,26 May 2005 14:05 +0800

After the introduction of Nokia's Linux Handheld, the Nokia 770 Internet Table device, Nokia Corporation announcaed that it allows all of its patents to be used in the further development of the Linux Kernel. The Press Release:"Espoo, Finland - Nokia Corporation announced today that it allows all its patents to be used in the further development of the Linux Kernel. Nokia believes that open source software communities, like open standards, foster innovation and make an important contribution to the creation and rapid adaptation of technologies........................................................................................"Source: Nokia announces patent support to the Linux Kernel (May 25, 2005)

New domain name - embedded.hk

Mon,18 Apr 2005 00:00 +0800

On behalf of Hong Kong Embedded Linux Interest Group, I am pleased to announce that a new domain name of our site is effective to use. The former URL was http://elig.linux.org.hk but it will be replaced by http://embedded.hk .It is believed that having an easy-to-remember domain name is the way to help people to find out the newest information about embedded Linux and embedded systems development in Hong Kong. We hope our site should benefit the society.Although the old and new domain names are synonymous and interchangeable, it is highly recommended to update your bookmark. For any enquiry about the new domain or any issue about Hong Kong Embedded Linux Interest Group, please feel free to write us an email to info< at >embedded.hk. (Replace < at > to @).Thanks you for your attention to our group.

Embedded Linux閑聚 (2005年4月8日)

Mon,04 Apr 2005 00:00 +0800

簡介ELIG將於本星期五（4月8日）舉行一次閑聚活動，目的是為嵌入式Linux的開發者及有興趣的人士提供一個輕鬆環境作交流活動，是次的主題將圍繞開發嵌入式Linux應用的經驗分享及就亞洲地區的發展交換意見。屆時會邀請幾位嵌入式Linux開發者出席，並歡迎任何有興趣的人士參與。(討論內容或供一份中港市場研究使用)詳情地點：灣仔鷹君中心太平洋咖啡店 (近灣仔碼頭)日期：4月8日星期五時間：晚上7時活動查詢：http://elig.linux.org.hk/modules/contact/

Symbio Technologies' VAR Network Grew from 1...

Fri,04 Mar 2005 10:29 +0800

NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y.-- March 3, 2005--Symbio Technologies, an innovator in server-centric diskless thin client computer systems, said today that it grew its VAR network from a single outpost in Canada to 27 value-added resellers worldwide in 2004. "Last January we set out to commercialize our server-centric diskless thin client computing model," said Roger Del Russo, co-founder and COO of Symbio Technologies. "Back then, just one reseller -- Systems Aligned in Brampton, Ontario -- constituted our 'VAR network.' But we have worked to spread the word that we have something special, and quite obviously, VARs around the U.S. and the globe agree." The newest members of the authorized network of Symbio Technologies VARs include....

ITTIA announces support for db.* on the ARM platf...

Thu,03 Mar 2005 08:44 +0800

Almost all devices made these days have a microprocessor, and microprocessors will become ubiquitous as time passes. Many devices are based on ARM processors. ARM is a leader in producing cost-effective and power-efficient processors for mobile devices and ITTIA is proud to announce that it has confirmed db.* support for Linux on the ARM processor. This announcement opens up thousands of new development possibilities. Since ITTIA announced its support for db.* last August, developers have been learning about this open source, fast, small-footprint embedded database. The ARM processor is already used in thousands of Linux-powered devices, including routers, cell phones, cameras and other devices, and db* will make it possible to make these devices even better.

EmbeddedLinux Talk: Building the Global Linux Sma...

Fri,18 Feb 2005 09:33 +0800

Building the Global Linux Smartphone Business andThe Latest Embedded Linux Development in Hong KongDate: 5th March, 2005 (Saturday)Time: 2:00 - 5:00 pmVenue: Lectrure Theatre 8 (LT8), Academic Building, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong.Organizer:- Hong Kong Linux User Group (HKLUG)Co-Organizer:- Joint Universities Computer Association (JUCA)- Embedded Linux Interests Group (ELIG), HKLUGVenue Sponsor:- Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong.Media Sponsor:- Linux Pilot Ltd. Target Audiences:- HKLUG members, JUCA members- Staffs and students of City Univerisities of HK- Readers of Linux Pilot- and any interested parties are all welcomeQuota: 120Online registration: http://www.linux.org.hk

My New Blog Site

Fri,17 Dec 2004 11:10 +0800

Finally, I have brough my blog back to online and migrate to WordPress. Here is the link http://hilary.e-fever.org.

GPE On My C860

Fri,17 Dec 2004 11:03 +0800

Finally, OpenZaurus has released a new version. Now, GPE can run On C7x00 and C860. Although it got lots of bugs, it is great improvement of GPE.

davej: Friday 10th December 2004

Sat,11 Dec 2004 07:19 +0800

The most bizarre thing has happened with the AGPGART code.
So, it's been working fine for months. Until recently, when
I disabled the 4g/4g patch in the Fedora kernel (currently
still in 'updates-testing'), and people started noticing X
random oopses and lockups on logging out of Gnome.
This led to much head-scratching, and various theories.
Today Alan did an audit of the agpgart code, and opened
up a real can of worms. There are a number of PCI posting
bugs, CPU cache flushing bugs, missing TLB flushes,
and god knows what next. The more I look into it, the
uglier it gets. It's a miracle things work at all.
Worms. Everywhere.
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Robert Love: Ninjas are Mammals

Sat,11 Dec 2004 04:41 +0800

I recently learned that my
book
is used in the operating system design
course at
Columbia (that is the Ivy League, to you). Happy to hear that!
The other day, I was debugging a hard lock in my experimental rewrite of
inotify's locking. I finally got some sort of back trace out of the kernel
before it choked, so I wrote down the trace, register dump, etc. on my
whiteboard. I spent the next day or so studying my whiteboard, tracking down
the problem:
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Advogato diary for John Levon

Fri,10 Dec 2004 23:00 +0800

davej: Thursday 09th December 2004

Fri,10 Dec 2004 07:19 +0800

Went into the office to do battle with the build system.
Came off worse for wear. After much 'it works' 'no it doesnt'
to'ing and fro'ing, things seem in better state.
I think I broke a record. Yesterdays kernel build took
26 hours to complete.

Robert Love: Dying Dollars and Cool T-Shirts

Thu,09 Dec 2004 17:10 +0800

The other day, I read the latest figures on the dollar's performance: Over
the last three years, it has fallen some 30-odd percent against the euro
and 20-something percent against the yen.
While a lot of people are pulling for a weaker dollar, the
world needs to get serious about the current global financial system before
we all regret it. To be fair, the blame for the dollar's current state is
largely--although not entirely--domestic. Our deficit is huge
and reckless and expected to get larger. With that, the dollar will only
weaken and those willing to finance our debt will only dwindle (or demand
higher returns). Our current fiscal policies suck and absolutely harm the
dollar's reserve-currency status. We need to stop blaming Europe and Japan's
slow growth and
starting listening to Greenspan
and begin a change in US policy toward a stronger dollar, beginning with a
reduction in the deficit.
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Robert Love: Dying Dollars and Cool T-Shirts

Thu,09 Dec 2004 17:10 +0800

davej: Wednesday 08th December 2004

Thu,09 Dec 2004 07:19 +0800

Got a little backlogged after yesterdays fun. Decided to stay
home and try to dig my way out of the patchmountain I was
buried under. Got most of the way through it by the end of
the day.

James Morris: Recent Developments in SELinux Kern...

Wed,08 Dec 2004 18:04 +0800

IntroductionThis article covers some recent changes in the SELinux kernel code including a performance patch from Kaigai Kohei of NEC and related updates to the selinuxfs API. Currently, these changes are waiting in the -mm tree for merging into Linus' kernel in 2.6.10, and are also available in the development Fedora and RHEL4 Beta kernels. This article should be useful to sysadmins who are looking to understand SELinux performance and generally also to curious people.
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davej: Tuesday 07th December 2004

Wed,08 Dec 2004 07:19 +0800

Went in early to attend a meeting hosted by the desktop folks.
After a quick intro by Havoc, we found out that the rest of the
day-long meeting was going to take place at jrb's place.
Drove there, did stuff, had fun, found out I suck at super bomberman.
When we were leaving, it had been raining quite a bit, and the cold
wind had turned it all into ice everywhere. Fun.
The people shipping our belongings seem to think our stuff is
in New York again for some reason. It's starting to get silly.
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davej: Monday 06th December 2004

Tue,07 Dec 2004 07:19 +0800

Up early to go to the dentist to finally get the swab taken
out of my dry socket. Everything aparently all in order now,
though it still aches like hell. Took some painkillers,
and got a warm gel-pack to put on my face for a while.
Spent the rest of the day catching up with mail & patches.

Linux: FBGUI - Frame Buffer GUI

Mon,01 Nov 2004 09:20 +0800

FBGUI is just announced in KernelTrap. It is lightweight GUI which drawing thought Linux Kernel. It has its own window manager. It seems a great stuff for Zaurus for providing a more robust environment.Linux: In Kernel GUI

Software: TuxCards for pdaXrom

Thu,28 Oct 2004 14:26 +0800

TuxCards is a software for hierarchical notebook. It is good software to organise a large bunch of information. You can download it thought the following links.TuxCards for pdaXrom

Well........

Wed,27 Oct 2004 10:51 +0800

These few days, I am playing with OpenZaurus, pdaXrom. Finally, I choose pdaXrom as my PIM. Becoz, it works much more smooth than OpenZaurus. OpenZaurus doesn't work as easy as pdaXrom. I can easily change my USB settings but it is not at others. But I don't like the windows manager in pdaXrom. Since pdaXrom team like to make Zaurus run like a Desktop PC. They use Gaim while they are using Browser. So they don't like the wm to maximize the windows during startup. For me, I pretend to write an applet to get message from gaim rather than from a windows. All the stuff are small already. If I put two windows on the screen at the same time, it is very un-readable.Also it is very unconvenience for me to use stylus and keyboard at the same time for pdaXrom. I don't think a portable should behave like this. When I hold my C860, I use both hand on my keyboard. When I use stylus, I can't use my keyboard. Finally, I compile latest matchbox including matchbox windows manager. It allows to maximize the windows. I wanna to rewrite some useful utilities with C rather than Python. (While Should I use Python in a Handheld Devices)...... It is not too slow and not robust. I want a robust environment like other handhelds.