I want one of these.

The fuloong experiments continue:

• The 1gb memory upgrade arrived from crucial today. Will see how this affects performance.
• DVI output seems to be working in X now, but bizarrely the video quality is much worse than VGA. Colours are wrong, and large areas of colour appeear to be "moving".
• Perl builds nicely and passes tests :)
• X is faster in 16 bit colour mode, but I'm wondering if that's related to my DVI problems.
• Firefox is by far the slowest application I've tried so far.

I recently bought a new Lemote Fuloong with the intention of running Debian Linux on it.

I've been trying to install following the instructions at How to Install, although strictly speaking they are for the Yeeloong rather than the Fuloong I'm using.

Discoveries so far:

• The machine comes with a RTL-8169 network interface. The wheezy netinst daily build images do not provide this driver. You can make the install work by downloading the full loongson kernel deb for wheezy, extracting r8169.ko, and packing it into the netinst initrd. Have reported this as a debian-installer bug.
• The installer sets you up to boot grub from pmon, and linux from there. This does not seem to work. Booting linux straight from pmon is very slow but seems to actually work.
• Whilst the system is moderately noisy, it's much quieter than discussions on irc had lead me to expect.
• The source I bought the system from shipped a EU power cable. It appears to be a standard "C5" laptop power cable, and I was able to buy a cheap UK replacement on Amazon.
• The DVI output does not seem to work correctly in console mode - I was unable to see the Debian installer or any boot information. This was fixed when I switched to a VGA cable.

Some photos of the new new DLR stations

On autopilot?

                _              _
 _ __ ___  __ _| |_ ___   ___ | |___
| '__/ _ \/ _` | __/ _ \ / _ \| / __|
| | |  __/ (_| | || (_) | (_) | \__ \
|_|  \___|\__, |\__\___/ \___/|_|___/
          |___/

People have a strange and worrying tendency to admit to things they have not, in fact, done

South Korean clinic treats web addicts

Tweetage Wasteland: The Action Movie Blog Post

This post is pretty good, as in fact is the entire blog.

So at the moment I'm interested in large datasets. Trying to collect some interesting links to what's out there:

• theinfo.org: A site to discuss large data sets, although it seems quiet
• Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network
• UK govt data site
• The London Datastore
• Datawrangling: some datasets available on the web
• Ordnance Survey OpenData
• Wikipedia database dumps
• Project Gutenberg mirroring HOWTO
• Amazon Public data-sets
• data.gov
• USPS Address Information Systems products (okay, this is commercial)

There's obviously some duplication here in terms of sites linking to other sites, I'm highlighting stuff I thought was interesting. I'll probably update this post as I find new data that seems interesting.

Brain scans hint excessive time online is tied to stark physical changes in the brain

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: More evidence of Net's effect on the brain

ep.io are pretty cool automated python hosting.

A couple more interesting links on free public datasets:

• Free, Public Data Sets
• Hacker news discussion on previous link

Recently discovered gooze and their interesting variety of cryptographic products.

I bought one of their OTP C100 one-time-password tokens to play with. They seem to implement the OATH standards, which works nicely with a variety of software.

I decided to try to get this working on debian with PAM as an authentication method.

So far the software I've tried to do this is oath-toolkit, which provides a convenient pam_oath PAM module to use. I've got this working on a home debian machine for testing, requiring a one-time-password from the dongle every time I login.

Rough steps to setup:

1. Install oath-toolkit as usual. You probably want to install from source or download the supplied debs, the latest version seems to be the thing to get.
2. Run ldconfig - this is one thing that's not mentioned in the instructions but was needed before my machine would see the new PAM module.
3. Put this in /etc/pam.d/common-auth:

   # this bit restricts oath checking to the specified user                        
   # you could use a group or whatever if you had more than 1 token                
   auth [default=1 success=ignore] pam_succeed_if.so quiet user = useryouwanttoauth
   auth requisite pam_oath.so usersfile=/etc/users.oath window=20 digits=6
   

   You should have created the users.oath file in the normal course of installing oath-toolkit.
4. sshd_config should have:

   ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes                                             
   PasswordAuthentication yes                                    
   

After that, things seem to work with at least sshd and su, but I'm still testing. Annoyingly, if there's a ssh authorized_key, it seems to override password authentication totally. Ideally I'd like to combine ssh keys and OTP, but I haven't worked that out yet.

I've also got one of the gooze OTP C200 tokens, which looks very nice, and uses time based passwords, which I'd really rather use, but it's not supported by oath-toolkit yet.

More of A&A's engraving work, I present keyrings.

Personally I think the wood one comes out much more nicely (and there's some fine detail you can't see because my camera isn't good at closeups).

After much popular demand from irc I am pleased to supply a photo of a round tuit. Well actually 4 of them.

An example of the fine Laser Engraving Services from Andrews & Arnold.

There's not much IPv4 left, it should be an interesting transition.

Cabell de Marcellus

Is multi-tasking a myth? (BBC News article)

• The acceleration of addiction
• Technology is heroin
• Tradeoffs (an interview about The Shallows)

Released aasms 0.6 with a few bugs fixed, and support for the new iccid based direct-to-SIM stuff.

More aasms hacking, v0.4 can now get the username and password from a config file, so you don't have to have them in the process name. (which is more or less why I started the whole exercise)

Finally setup my aasms module with nagios, which was really the point of the whole exercise.

First, define some new notification commands more or less like this:

define command{
	        command_name    notify-host-by-sms
			command_line    send-aa-sms --file=/etc/nagios3/aasms.config -d $CONTACTEMAIL$ -m "***** Nagios *****Notification Type: $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ Host: $HOSTNAME$ State: $HOSTSTATE$ Address: $HOSTADDRESS$ Info: $HOSTOUTPUT$ Date/Time: $LONGDATETIME$"
}

# 'notify-service-by-email' command definition
define command{
	        command_name    notify-service-by-sms
		    command_line    send-aa-sms --file=/etc/nagios3/aasms.config -d $CONTACTEMAIL$ -m "***** Nagios *****Notification Type: $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ Service: $SERVICEDESC$ Host: $HOSTALIAS$ Address: $HOSTADDRESS$ State: $SERVICESTATE$ Date/Time: $LONGDATETIME$ Additional Info: $SERVICEOUTPUT$"
}

/etc/nagios3/aasms.config should be replaced with an appropriate config file for aasms readable only by nagios. Then define a new contact:

define contact{
		contact_name                    mstevens-sms
		alias                           Michael Stevens (SMS)
		service_notification_period     24x7
		host_notification_period        24x7
		service_notification_options    w,u,c,r
		host_notification_options       d,r
		host_notifications_enabled      1
		service_notifications_enabled   1
		service_notification_commands   notify-service-by-sms
		host_notification_commands      notify-host-by-sms
		email							your_mobile_here
}

Just add this contact to appropriate groups, and you should now get SMS notification of outages.

The key advantage of all this over the curl example on the A&A site is that you don't have to put your account details in the process name, and they can live privately in a nice config file instead.

Very minor tweaks to Proc::InvokeEditor, created a github repository for it, and uploaded the shiny new to CPAN.

While I was there, noticed some very old versions of some modules I had on CPAN, and deleted them.

Hooked on gadgets, and paying a mental price

(the cynic in me suggests the recent surge in articles on this topic is related to the forthcoming book from Nicholas Carr)

Author Nicholas Carr: The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains

Further SMS hacking, added a command line script, now available at aasms 0.2.

How (and Why) to Stop Multitasking

(Yes, I know I keep going on about this every 5 minutes to anyone who'll stand still long enough)

Hacking a bit on some Python code to talk to A&A's SMS service.

Doesn't really do much yet, but put up a github repo to play with at http://github.com/mstevens/aasms.

After many years of membership, first of Amicus, then of Unite, I've now left and am no longer a union member.

I like the idea of union membership to some degree, but I thought, amongst other things, the phone call telling me to vote for Gordon Brown was the last straw.

Been fiddling with the home network / general computing environment the last few days out of a general plan to make things cooler and also have more reliable internets.

Done so far:

• New 5 port gigabit switch for connecting desktop and phone and anything else that comes along
• Got VoIP phone from A&A installed and setup.
• Switching to running the ADSL on a phone line managed by A&A in order to have a single point of contact when it doesn't work. Line installed, waiting for them to sort out providing ADSL over it.
• Got the final bits to setup the new OpenBSD router, in particular a USB to serial adapter.
• Spent a while trying to build a new image for my Nanonote. Got it building now, and reported a couple of missing dependencies in the build process.
• Acquired a USB to micro-SD card adapter and copied all my music onto a micro-SD card for use in the nanonote.

I was amused to note it took a guy from BT Openreach about 2.5 hours to install a phone line. And he went to the wrong street initially. Still, he did turn up quite early, which is a positive.

Stuff I'm still working on:

• Waiting for BT to actually provide the ADSL on the new phone line they're supposed to. Apparently there's a "line plant" problem.
• Actually building the new OpenBSD router, rather than just owning the pile of bits.
• Waiting for the new 8 port gigabit switch for another room (with more computers) to arrive, and installing it.
• Installing new mattress (okay not strictly computer related).
• Doing a bit more hacking on the Nanonote to get it going as a media player.
• Fixing the broken bookcase whose brokenness I spotted whilst moving things around so the BT guy could install another line.

I am very pleased with the VoIP stuff so far and can't recommend A&A as suppliers enough.

Ars Technica have, as you might expect, reviewed the iPad.

Actually kinda puts me off the thing, although a lot of the problems sound like 1.0 issues.

The Pen Addict is giving away free pens

I love Linux, it's so great. Output from the mount command...

//server.example.com/mstevens on /export/mstevens type cifs (rw,mand)
//server.example.com/mstevens on /export/mstevens type cifs (rw,mand)
//server.example.com/mstevens on /export/mstevens type cifs (rw,mand)
//server.example.com/mstevens on /export/mstevens type cifs (rw,mand)
//server.example.com/mstevens on /export/mstevens type cifs (rw,mand)

• xkcd have gone command line
• A&A drop that nasty legacy "IPv4" protocol
• Google launch new animal translation service
• Google Docs launch some new features
• Charlie Stross announces new literary direction
• More Charlie Stross news
• The iCade, a great new iPad accessory
• Google choose new name
• New video format from YouTube
• kernel.org move to australia
• Exciting new Starbucks offerings
• The true perspective on atheism
• New direction for PostgreSQL
• Apache Software Foundation sell to Oracle
• New use for Circle Line

More on the day as it develops.

My ISP have just started providing IPv6 Coffee. Excellent.

Keeping computers from ending science's reproducibility

I think this is a hugely important issue that doesn't get enough attention.

Modern procrastination

Started the setup on the new etla.org server, now to be called eris.etla.org. Hoping to get people and services moved over in the next week or two.

All must watch zefrank!