NSLU2 in a Tux Case //at 18:23 //by abe

It started harmless when Thomas asked on Linux User Group Switzerland mailing list if someone knows a tux-shaped alarm clock. But the topic of that thread quickly moved to two other things in tux shape: the Tux Droid, a device similar to the Nabaztag, but needs a Linux host with USB, and ACME Systems’ Tux-Server, a ETRAX CRIS based Foxboard inside a tux-shaped case.

We found out that Telion, the Swiss importer for Foxboards, also imports ACME Systems’ Tux Case — although the Tux Case is not mentioned on their website. Even better: They had a few old Tux Cases in stock which don’t fit anymore on current Foxboards since the position of the power socket changed. (So only one hole in the case was missing.) And they wanted to get rid of them quite fast: They offered us the Tux Cases for 10 CHF (6€) each instead of 28 CHF each (17€) if we buy all of them. Of course we couldn’t reject this offer and bought all five remaining cases.

Another part of the thread was about performance. Although ETRAX CRIS is used by its inventor AXIS in many of its products (they’re famous for the Linux based web-cams) many were not sure if the board’s performance would be sufficient for their ideas. Another disadvantage of the ETRAX CRIS architecture is that no mainstream Linux distribution supports it.

Another point was the Foxboard’s price (169€, ca. 268 CHF). Bones just mentioned that an NSLU2 costs only about 100 CHF (60€).

Probably on IRC someone (probably Bones, too) wondered if it’s possible to fit a NSLU2 into such a quite inexpensive Tux Case. We took Wikipedia’s picture of the NSLU2 board, compared the size of the USB ports on that picture, compared them with real-life USB ports and found out the size of the board that way. And when I got my Tux-Case I noticed that the NSLU2 board really could fit into the Tux-Case.

Since I’m already building a bigger NAS-like home server, I have no use for another, much slower NAS. But since I more or less gave up the also ARM-based Thecus N4100, another ARM-based machine in my hardware collection wouldn’t be bad.

So it didn’t took long and the idea was born to build the NSLU2 board into a Tux-Case and let the website tux.ethz.ch run on it. (I inherited its administration from Beat and it’s currently just a virtual host on one of our webservers.) Then it would be a server named Tux, serving Tuxes, looking like a Tux and running Tux’ operating system Linux. :-)

I ordered an NSLU2 at Brack for 117.60 CHF (ca. 70€). Played around with the original firmware for a moment, but it’s horrible from a security point of view: You can’t even change the admin password (default: “admin”) if no USB harddisk is attached. And no, a USB stick doesn’t suffice. So I didn’t wait long and tried to install Debian’s “armel” (ARM, Little Endian) port on it. But the NSLU2 refused the “new firmware” with the error message “Upgrade: no enough free space.”. While this is not in the Debian specific NSLU2 FAQ, it is mentioned in the general troubleshooting FAQ. As described in there, first upgrading to the most recent firmware version and then uploading the Debian installer worked fine.

After I had successfully installed Debian Lenny on a pqi 4 GB USB sticked into the NSLU2 and verified that everything is working fine, I opened the NSLU2 case and checked if it really would fit into a Tux Case.

It does, but very, very close. You’ll have to drill some holes and the ethernet socket will stick out Tux’s shoulder, but everything else should fit perfectly after a few mounting parts inside the Tux Case have been removed. As a proof of concept I laid the NSLU2 board on the Tux Case’s back:

Pictures taken with my Nokia E51

So later the LEDs will be in Tux’ one shoulder while the network socket will be in his other shoulder. And the USB stick will be inside his paunch via a USB hub.

Next Shell Quoting Talks //at 12:33 //by abe

There are a several events coming up where I plan to hold my Shell Quoting Talk: First, there will be the BarCamp Zurich on October, the 28th at ETH Zürich HG and then there will be the 8th Linuxday.at on November, the 18th at the HTL at Dornbirn (Vorarlberg, Austria) organised by the LUG Vorarlberg. It’s also possible that, in addition to the Shell Quoting talk, I’ll also give a talk for beginners about Commandline Helpers. (Probably all the talks will be held in German.)

I’m quite curious on both events, for very different reasons. On the one hand, a BarCamp is something completely new for me and it sounds like a very interesting mixture of a real life Wikipedia meeting and a flash mob to me.

On the other hand, this year’s Linuxday.at will have several new facettes for me: First there were several changes in the organising team, so I wonder if and in that case how much this will change the face of the event. Then it’s the first Linxuday.at since I live in Zurich, which means it’s the first Linuxday without 1000km travelling during that weekend, so I also have some time to meet friends in the area in advance to or after the event. Yeah!

Die Rückkehr der Jedi-Ritter -äh- B*elefeldverschwörung //at 19:52 //by abe

Aufgrund diverser, beunruhigender Ereignisse brauchte ich heute einen Link zur B*elefeldverschwörung.

Da ich wußte, daß eine ungenannt bleiben wollende, aber mir persönlich bekannte Person einen Mirror des ursprünglich auf einem Server der Uni-Kiel gehosteten Ursprungsdokuments im Netz hatte, wollte ich dieses verlinken. Dummerweise fiel mir die korrekte URL nicht mehr ein, schließlich dürfen SIE ja nichts davon erfahren. Aber ich wußte, daß nachdem vermutlich SIE das Ursprungsdokument aus dem Netz entfernten, dieser Mirror u.a. bei Wikipedia verlinkt ist.

Also bei Wikipedia vorbeigesurft und in den Weblinks gesucht. Der Link war nicht mehr drin. Sowas. Waren da etwa wieder SIE am Werk? Doch was sehe ich stattdessen dort: Einen Link zur “Originalseite von Achim Held”? Achim lebt? Juchhu! Und ich dachte immer, SIE hätten ihn erwischt und aus dem Verkehr gezogen… Das muß gefeiert werden!

SCNR

Tagging with Technorati style in pure Blosxom //at 03:22 //by abe

Short summary: I can’t stay away from coding Blosxom plugins. Perl rules. PHP sucks. ;-)

• New version 0.04 of the tagging plugin, supporting Technorati style tag links to many resources.
• New add-on plugin pathbasedtagging to the plugin tagging, implementing Technorati style tag links in pure Blosxom without any help from Apache’s mod_rewrite.
• New plugin dept offering Slashdot like “dept.” lines for Blosxom postings.

Supporting Technorati style tag URLs

After releasing the last version of my Blosxom plugin tagging, I noticed that Technorati only seems to like URLs ending in “/tagname” but not ending in “=tagname” (as they do if you use classic query strings instead of the path info), even if the a tag has a rel="tag" attribute. And not only I noticed this but also some other users of the plugin. (Although I do wonder how Furl made it to a Technorati partner with URLs like http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=tags…)

So I somehow had to change the syntax style for my tags. This wasn’t very hard for the links, but I wanted them to still link to my blog and not to Technorati, Flickr, Wikipedia or any other external resource.

Implementing Technorati style tag URLs

The obviously easiest solution for someone who’s using and administrating Apache web servers for nearly ten years now was to use some mod_voodoo—eh—mod_rewrite:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/tags/(.*)$ /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?-tags=$1 [PT]

That way I could use Technorati style tags and had a well performing solution. But somehow this solution wasn’t that satisfying since it wasn’t pure Blosxom and therefore had some dependency including access to some Apache config file. (Even if the config file was called .htaccess. ;-)

A pure Blosxom solution

A few days ago I somehow noticed that in general a special behaviour on some URLs could also be implemented using Blosxom’s API. Using the entries function to modify the Blosxom internal path itself before Blosxom or e.g. the entries_index runs but not returning any hashes, allows to have some path like URLs not being treated as a path by Blosxom.

Unfortunately this couldn’t be incorporated into the tagging plugin itself, since plugins doing such path interpreting voodoo needs to be ran before any plugin supplying an entries function runs. But the tagging plugin must run after such a plugin. So I created the small add-on plugin pathbasedtagging which is solely thought for use together with the tagging plugin (but may have other, yet unknown purposes).

And since I got asked if they could use the tagging plugin to link to external tag URLs instead of the own blog, I included a ready to use list of more or less popular external tag URLs including Technorati, Flickr, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us and Wikipedia.

from the slashdot dept.

Since I’ve always liked the often sarcastic or even evil comments inside Slashdot’s subtitle alike dept. lines and since I’m also used to use them at Symlink, I wanted them in my blog, too. Time for a new plugin.

The basic work of parsing out the data from the text files the posts reside in was already written for the tagging plugin. So I just had to use that code, simplify it and add some little more code to get the dept plugin whose results you can see in my blog directly beneath the title of a posting since a few days now.

Update 02:52h

Hey, see my Technorati profile: It worked! Technorati recognised the tags! Yeah!

I changed my mind. I want a camera mobile phone. //at 02:29 //by abe

Today I read and wrote about Semapedia, a service respective toolset to encode Wikipedia URLs (and also others) as dot-matrix barcode, print them out on leaflets together with mentioning Wikipedia and the URL. Then any visitor with a modern camera cell phone can take an image of the barcode, decode it with the right software on your phone, which passes the decoded URL directly to the phones webbrowser.

This is the first useful application of camera phones I ever heard about. But I see it as so useful that I may consider buying me a camera cell phone with the next contract renewal, although until now, I focused all my search for a worthy successor to my Nokia 6310i on non-camera phones. (Update: And I’m not alone with the wish for a useful mobile phone.)

The 6310i had nearly everything I needed: A big memory, long standby times (1.5 to 2 weeks), WAP incl. WAP browser for reading Symlink on the road, GPRS, GSM 900/1800, T9, Infrared, gnokii support, the same battery bay than my former mobile phones (Nokia 6210 and 6130) and the Nokia typical, very intuïtive and blindly usable user interface. (Siemens mobiles suck!). It also had some things, I didn’t need yet, but sounded useful: Voice dialing and voice recording, Java for playing with own programs, Bluetooth for a cableless headset or so and GSM-1900 because perhaps also other countries than the USA use that frequency band. (I refuse to travel to the USA, so I won’t need the GSM-1900 there.)

It had nothing I didn’t want to have in a mobile phone: Camera, radio, MP3 player, standby time munching color display, e-mail client, MMS, MP3 ring tones or flip covers. The only thing I missed, was a more modern Java VM and even more memory when Opera Mini came out and maybe polyphone ring tones, so I could have the Monkey Island theme as ring tone. ;-)

So what now? Being able to use Opera Mini and Semapedia means to have a mobile phone with camera and — and that’s the drawback — a color display. Anyone knows a Nokia camera phone on which Opera Mini runs but without color display? And with the battery bay from the 6x10 series? No?

Or maybe I should just stay with the 6310i and get me a second one in better condition (no broken case) from eBay or so? There were also (yet unconfirmed) rumours that my GSM provider E-Plus will have the Linux based internet tablet Nokia 770 for a contract renewal plus 80€ to 90€… Difficult decision…

Uncyclopedia: Misinformation rules //at 02:20 //by abe

“Uncyclopedia is an encyclopedia full of misinformation and utter lies. It’s sort of like Congress or Parliament (or Funkadelic). Unlike Congress or Parliament (but not Funkadelic), however, we do have a sense of humor.”

Sounds a little bit like the German written Kamelopedia which has any information about camels, even that information, that doesn’t exist.

Now playing: J.B.O. — Verteidiger des wahren Blödsinns

Wikipedia at your fingertips //at 02:07 //by abe

Via nion’s blog I got notice of two other blog entries of two people of whom each wrote a shell script to display Wikipedia articles as plain text in a pager.

While the first one called wiki2 queries Google and fetches then the first Wikipedia hit there, the second one (funnily just called wiki) queries Wikipedia directly, supports different Wikipedia languages and has a lot of other nice features.

Since the idea and especially the second script definitely belongs to the group of programs you never thought about, but, when you found it, you knew, you missed it until now, I decided to use it as the first program, I want to package for the Debian project to be included in the next release which will be called Etch.

Because of “wiki” being a quite ambigous name, I plan to name the package wikipedia2text.