Why I’m happy that FreeWRT doesn’t need a web interface //at 15:37 //by abe

When I have to read things like drive-by pharming (via Heise, Symlink article), I’m really happy that there are free 3rd party router firmwares out there, that don’t need any shitty web interface.

My ASUS WL-500g Premium runs FreeWRT and the only possibility to change the configuration is to login via ssh and edit the configuration files as root.

I really pity all those out there who have to cope with the partially really sleazy web interfaces home routers currently offer.

Plugins in the Blosxom Project CVS //at 00:34 //by abe

Since yesterday, my Blosxom plugins are versioned in the Blosxom Project CVS repository together with those of most other Blosxom developers.

Cause for this is, that — besides first steps towards Blosxom v4 (we better forget about v3… ;-) and intergrating existing patches (e.g. the Debian config file patch) to Blosxom v2 — the Blosxom developers want to release a Collection of common Blosxom Plugins as a Plugin distribution so that no one needs to gather the often needed plugins from various sites on the net but get them from first hand and also in some kind of a supported way. A first release candidate is on it’s way.

And for those who thought good ol’ blosxom is dead: There never was so much traffic on the blosxom developer’s list like in the past two months — over 160 mails each!

Now playing: Eiffel 65 — Blue

FTP and port 80? //at 14:18 //by abe

Hmmm, I never thought that a URL could look some kind of schizophrenic or paradox, but this one truly does: ftp://ftp.port80.se/. (Found in ftp://ftp.*.debian.org/debian/README.non-US.)

Surfing on two screens? //at 22:31 //by abe

At work, I’ve got two screens on my Sarge workstation “snitch”. Since I want to switch virtual desktops independently on both screens, I don’t have a Xinerama setup but a Dual Screen setup. So my left and right screen do have different $DISPLAY (“:0.0” and “:0.1”) set.

This is neither a problem for FVWM nor xlock nor XScreenSaver. But it is a problem for nearly every modern web browser available which checks, if there’s already an instance of it running. So if you try to start a new instance of a web browser on the other screen, most graphical web browsers make more or less problems:

• Galeon 1.3 and Epiphany always opens new tabs or windows on the display where its first instance is running, i.e. ignores $DISPLAY completely except on the first call.
• Kazehakase (0.3.7) just opens a new tab in the running instance.
• Firefox 2.0 thinks it crashed and asks if it should restore tabs and windows. Haven’t tried any further.
• Opera 9.20 pops up a dialog, says, there seems already a copy of Opera running and asks if it should continue with startup. If you say yes, only the bookmarks of one of the two instances get saved, probably those of the one with the last added bookmark or the one which exited last.

The only graphical web browsers which simply just work on a Dual Screen setup are Konqueror, Links2 (called with the -g option for a GUI), Chimera 2, Amaya and of course Dillo. Unfortunately I’m neither a fan of KDE nor of Konqueror and I do want a web browser with CSS and tab support… And Amaya is, well, only a reference implementation… (Chimera 2 from Sarge btw. segfaulted on two of the four pages I tested it with. Seems to have problems with PNG images.)

So my current setup is to have Kazehakase as my main work web browser (with all the local web applications I need) on the right screen while I have Opera on the left screen for surfing, looking up documentation, testing web pages and other things.

BTW: I don’t use Gecko based browsers for surfing on that box at the moment, since there are some web pages (the spammer vandalised Kazehakase wiki for example, at least a few months ago) which manage to be rendered in such an ugly way by Gecko so that XFree86 with the binary Nvidia (at least the last five or six versions I tried) just crashes away — either at once or when you try to switch to a text console by pressing e.g. Ctrl-Alt-F1 while such a page is displayed.

wApua now in Debian Unstable //at 00:38 //by abe

Hey, the actual version 0.06 of my Perl written WAP browser wApua now is in Debian Sid!

It’s the first software written by me which has entered the Debian repository as its own package (since pum is included in the package pisg which is in testing now for a while) as well as the first software debianized by me which reached Debian Unstable.

Things are always exciting when they happen the first time. ;-)

Thanks to Myon for sponsoring the package.

wApua 0.06 released //at 03:33 //by abe

I today released version 0.06 of my WAP browser wApua (Release announcement at Freshmeat).

The one big new thing is user friendly documentation: wApua and wbmp2xbm (which has been renamed from wbmp2xbm.pl) now have POD documentation and therefore also man pages. Besides that a lot of minor bugfixes and enhancements complete the new version.

The other big new thing is that there now is a Debian package of wApua. The package should work fine on Debian Woody (3.0), Sarge (3.1) and Etch (upcoming 4.0) and probably also works on other Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu.

Thanks to sponsoring by Christoph “Myon” Berg the Debian package is also in the Debian New Queue and hopefully will be included in Debian Etch.

WML builds and runs on cygwin //at 01:26 //by abe

For a long time the Website Meta Language (WML) did not build on cygwin, but nobody knew why or how to fix it. At the end of last year, the WML maintainer changed to Shlomi Fish and one of his goals was to get WML run under cygwin.

Many probably didn’t expect it to really happen since WML developement has stalled for the last three or four years, but the Subversion 2.0.x maintenance branch of WML now builds and works on Windows under cygwin. This shows that there is really something going on in the WML developement again.

Congrats and thanks to Shlomi!