Older blog entries for jpick (starting at number 76)

Well, I got a Tor node setup in a Xen session running Debian (along with Privoxy). It's all very cool. It's a bit slow (not surprising really), so I'm using the SwitchProxy Firefox extension to switch proxies (duh). I set up the Tor server too, and registered it on the network. All this for a free T-Shirt. :-)

Harmony? I guess I'm just old.

5 May 2005 (updated 5 May 2005 at 15:44 UTC) »

I went to see Paul Graham give a SDForum distinguished speaker talk at PARC. It was quite an entertaining talk on "How to Sell a Startup" -- obviously a popular topic in the Palo Alto area. I certainly learned a few things. :-)

He's got a really good essay on the topic of startups I read a few weeks ago.

I carpooled with seth-trips co-reader Aaron Swartz, who's actually getting some money from the guy who gave the talk. I didn't really know who Aaron was, but everybody else seemed to know him already, he's sort of famous it seems -- and he's still a teenager!

25 Apr 2005 (updated 25 Apr 2005 at 19:34 UTC) »

Hey Stuart, good luck with the cancer thing.

I've been toying around with lots of neat stuff lately.

I finally tried out Scratchbox. It's sort of an interesting way of making a cross-compiler look like a native-compiler by running it inside a custom build environment. So it's a little different than building with a cross compiler, and a bit different than building natively on the target machine. I maintain a cross-compiler at work (cross-building Fedora RPMs), so I'm interested in this type of stuff. I wanted to play with cross-compiling to PowerPC, but they only had ARM ones - so I'd have to build my own.

Everybody seems to be writing a revision control system / SCM nowadays. Even Linus is getting into the act. Matt Mackall at work just made one that he's calling Mercurial. I tried it out, and it seems pretty cool, even though it's in the early days. I like some of his ideas.

I stumbled across the OceanStore distributed storage thing yesterday. This really has me excited. I highly recommend reading the paper. I've been excited about distributed hash tables since I was playing with Freenet and Frost about two years ago. Freenet is all about anonymity and non-censorability - it's great at that, but the performance sucks. Oceanstore is about performance and being able to do filesystem/database things.

Anyways, the OceanStore source code has been released on SourceForge under a BSD license, it's written in Java, and it's got some very interesting things in it. It's built around using Matt Welsh's SEDA programming model (Sandstorm is the core). You might know Matt Welsh's work from NBIO (the predecessor to NIO), or his "Running Linux" book from O'Reilly (my first Linux book).

One application is a global-scale distributed NFS implementation (ulnfs). This is something I could use right now. Theoretically I should be able to set up a node at home, and a node at work, and use nfs to read/write to it and get good performance in either place. A side-effect of using a DHT is you also can do time-travel on the data. If this works, it would be great for providing nfs-mounted /home directories on geographically distributed Xen sessions, or for mounting the whole root partition, and using it for hot-spares or clustering. And you get massive redundancy and bittorrent-like distribution for free. It sounds pretty fast - in the paper, they claim they got 4.6x faster than NFS for reading, and 7.3x slower than NFS for writing.

There are also some other cool looking applications, like an IMAP server, a webmail client, and a Palm-pilot synchronizer, with all the storage done in the DHT cloud. Very cool.

Some of the cool related projects are the Bamboo DHT, and OpenDHT. OpenDHT is cool - if you need some place to stuff some bits for a week, you could put it on their 200-300 servers scattered around the planet (for research, of course)

Now all I have to do is figure out how to get it all working. The code is all dumped out there, but you have to assemble the parts yourself, and there are a lot of them. I've now got enough Xen sessions and machines scattered all over the place that I can probably really test this stuff out.

Well, I got a 1GB DDR DIMM (Patriot PSD1G333), and two 4" putty knives, and installed it. I'm glad I bought two knives - it was a pain to get into the case. Anyways, the upgrade seems to be working.

Those putty knives are sharper than I thought - it took me a couple of seconds before I clued into where all the red smears on the Mac Mini case were coming from. I guess I should stick to software. :-)

I put Debian on the Mac Mini using Release Candidate 3 of the Sarge installer. It almost worked flawlessly - but it failed at the installing yaboot stage. I tried again, this time with my extra firewire drive unplugged, and it worked. That was too easy - much easier than I expected. The next step is to buy a putty knife, and do the 1GB DDR memory upgrade. Beyond that, I'm going to try to run user mode linux on it. I've also always wanted to try Mac on Linux. :-)

I installed Blojsom at work. Unfortunately, it didn't work on Kaffe. I'll have to dig deeper, but I think it found a bug in our regex code (but I could be mistaken).

I managed to cook up some Perl code so I could post from the command line using Net::Blogger from CPAN and the Movable Type API (my initial attempts using XML::Atom weren't as lucky). So now, when I do a build at work, the details of the build get posted to my little in-house blog. The next step is to write a bookmarklet that I'll be able to click on, and have the build automatically scheduled to run on one of my test machines. I'm quite excited by the concept of using blogging technology to glue together all the various testing scripts I'm working on. Once I get it all prototyped, I'll try to set the same thing up on the outside for Kaffe, and also for some other projects I'm playing with.

Happy birthday to me. I gave myself a second Mac Mini - I'm going to put Linux on it and replace my old and noisy Linux dhcp/fileserver.

I think I'll take a look at Blojsom for the Kaffe website. It certainly seems to have a lot of the right features.

My quest for a javascript-based terminal emulator continues. I tried out Anyterm - I got it to work, and it's open source. The terminal emulation is a bit weak though, and it's backend is based on C and a custom Apache module. I could see it working really well if the backend was replaced with something like JTA (with Unix PTY patch) or maybe Hush?

Well, I finished memorizing all my Hiragana for my Japanese classes. So I set about figuring out how to actually type it. It took me a few hours trying to figure out how to configure my Debian desktop. It was somewhat tricky, given that I'm not literate enough to read the Japanese documentation. I had the most trouble just with the trivial task of getting kmodmap and KDE to cooperate -- so I could remap the Windows key to be the Kanji conversion key. I never got kinput2 to work, but I finally managed to get UIM + anthy + gedit to work! Very cool.

I'm glad I'm using Debian - all the packages were just there. It seems like it will be a handy way to study, since retyping Hiragana involves me converting back to romaji so I can type it.

I found this link while googling around for javascript links - JS/UIX - a Unix-like OS/environment written in Javascript that runs in your web-browser (it works with Mozilla, at least). They've even implemented virtual filesystems and vi!

Mark told me to blog this when I got it done...

Kaffe 1.1.5 has finally been released, after more than a year since the last release. So go get it now.

I think our next release should be a "stable" / "production" release...

I finally got my Squeezebox. It was backordered for a month, but I finally got it (I notice they no longer have the colour boxes on the website). Anyways, it's great. I love it.

Slowly, I'm getting the server in shape. I set up a Xen session on it for Classpath -- Mark volunteered to be a guinea pig for it. I saw he logged in once, but I don't think he's done anything with it yet. This weekend, I'll migrate some of my own sites over. I had to patch some of the Xen python stuff because it annoyingly bound the consoles to all the ports, so they were accessible from everywhere -- and their default Domain-0 kernel for Xen 2.0.3 didn't even have iptables in it. Not good - I want secure console logins so I can run passwordless, and just use ssh keys.

I went to see Bram Cohen give a talk on bittorrent at Stanford (in the William Gates building. :-) It was a full house. He had some interesting insights, I though -- I was pretty impressed.

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