Petals Around the Rose

Here is a fun little brain teaser that took me about an hour to figure it out. Bill Gates took longer, but didn't have the advantage of looking at a series of previous rolls (he memorized his). The answer to the roll above is 2.

Chaos Manor Reviews

One of my favorite writers, Jerry Pournelle, has been publishing his Chaos Manor column in Byte Magazine for darn near forever. It was one of the first magazines I subscribed to in High School and only gave up the subscription after Steve Ciarcia moved on to create Circuit Cellar Ink. Jerry has one of the first 'blogs' at his www.jerrypournelle.com site and I have been reading that for years now -- well before there were such things as 'blogs'.

CMP, the owner of Byte, has finally pulled the plug on it and now Jerry and some of the other columnists from Byte are running their own site at Chaos Manor Reviews. Its worth checking on a daily basis, as is the main Jerry Pournelle site.

pyGTK for Cross Platform Development

I've been debating the pros and cons of various development environments, from VC++ 6 to the new C# Express from Microsoft to MinGW with GTK+ or wxWidgets. I've finally settled on Python and GTK+ and Glade as the best choice.

This wil provide me access to the massive Windows client base while retaining my love for Linux and elegant designs. Python allows rapid application development, can be packaged up as only the compiled python code for distribution and can be optimized by writing processor intensive sections in c and linking them in.

That said, I now need to go write some code.

Grokking the source

Back in the 'good old days' if you wanted to tweak a program on your system you downloaded the source from the author (if you hadn't already), made your changes and were done. It isn't quite as straightforward these days.

I'm trying to tweak cpufreq to idle down the CPU when the laptop lid is closed. Normally that would be a good use of the acpid event system. Execpt that my lid only generated an even when its closed, not when it is opened back up! So I'm going to add an option to cpufreq to check the lid status in /proc/acpi/button/lid/LID/state and when its closed set the CPU to its minimum frequency. Should be easy, right?

Nope. Not when you are running Fedora Core and their modified version of cpufreq. Apparently their startup script passes it a nice level (-n ). This wouldn't be so bad except that it gets passed by the daemon function and doesn't appear in my debugging echos. Arrgh.

So, I guess I'll do things the 'redhat way' and create a new diff for my changes and rebuild it as a rpm.

Progress? Maybe. But I'm starting to feel like a unix curmudgeon.

ssh and the GNOME Desktop

As much as I hate the bloat of the GNOME desktop, I tend to use it on most of my machine. Its easier than trying to maintin something else. I also use openssh extensivly, and normally have a shell or 10 open to different machines. My laptop is seutp to run a backup once a day to one of these remote machines, it uses rsync over ssh so I have to either enter my password (hard to do in a script launched from cron) or the ssh agent needs to have the key loaded.

The easy way to do this is to have it ask you when you login. This is really easy to do:

Go to Desktop->Preferences->More Preferences->Sessions->Startup Programs

Click on 'add' and enter /usr/bin/ssh-add then click on close. Log out and back in and you should have a dialog asking you for your ssh password.

Now if I could just convince Firefox and Thunderbird to use ssh-agent for their authentication...

.cp

Microsoft Windows Kill Switch?

I came across this article over on Bruce Schiener's blog. Apparently Microsoft is refusing to respond to reporters valid questions about WGA and the possibility that they may be able to disable your system sometime in the near future.

As we have mentioned previously, as the WGA Notifications program expands in the future, customers may be required to participate. [emphasis added] Microsoft is gathering feedback in select markets to learn how it can best meet its customers' needs and will keep customers informed of any changes to the program.