Back from Cuba

I'm just back from a trip to Cuba. Sorry for the abrupt disconnect. I expected to have limited connectivity there, whereas I actually had none at all except for 23 minutes! I hope the other members of the cooperative and the editorial team stepped in suitably well. I'll check in with them now and then start on the emails, but I wanted to put this broadcast out first for those who are watching closely and wondering...

Syndicated 2008-05-12 15:58:47 from MJR's slef-reflections

Updated GnuPG Key Expiry

I'm still alive, so it's past time to update the signature on my gpg key into next year. The key phrase in the handbook is:

"The expiration time is updated by deleting the old self-signature and adding a new self-signature."

but somehow I always have to look it up, so I thought I'd make a note of it here.

It looks like debian-keyring should update now I did --send-key to it, but I guess I'll find out in a few weeks.

Syndicated 2008-04-28 12:42:37 from MJR's slef-reflections

Computer things that puzzle me today

About gobolinux

I can suspend my laptop and it restarts happily enough in X, but playing video results in a strange green square. I've found that starting and killing another X server (like X :1, wait for the grey mesh and then zap it) fixes the problem and I can switch back to my original :0 X and play video again. I wonder if these notes on X suspend and video BIOS by Matthew Garrett explain it.

About debian

Why on earth did someone change the .changes format so swiftly and why does a change that breaks a common upload process (build in a VM, sign on a stable system) only warrant a -devel-announce paragraph under the headline Misc Development News (#6)? "Small news" - my foot!

Syndicated 2008-04-27 17:09:25 from MJR's slef-reflections

UK mobile micropublishing choices?

My communications connection

I'm going travelling this summer. I don't know what internet connection I'll have (if any) but I'm pretty sure I'll have fairly cheap SMS access from my phone. Maybe even MMS. So, I want to use one of the mobile micropublishers to try to avoid sending international SMSes to lots of people.

Facebook doesn't look good - it gives a shortcode (which would cost me extra to use and I don't know whether it works while roaming) has no number for SMS that I found and it looks like O2 is the only UK carrier it knows - bizarre.

LiveJournal has mobile access but the FAQ makes it look like it's only for paying users. If I was sure it was going to work, I might pay and support the GPL'd codebase.

Jaiku is cost-free and gives an SMS number, but is joining the Goolag and I don't see how to download their Java applet.

Twitter is cost-free, gives an SMS number and looks like it plays nice with Jabber (which is already on my phone), so that looks good but I found some complaints about whether SMSes get through.

20six is a German-based cost-free service which takes SMS and email (which is also on my phone), so that also looks good, but there are some old doubts about whether it will stay cost-free.

Is there a service you'd recommend?

Syndicated 2008-04-26 01:08:35 from MJR's slef-reflections

Dangling the Bluetooth Dongle in front of the Penguin

Tux likes this fish-like object.

I finally got bluetooth file transfer working between my phone and laptop a little while ago. It wasn't particularly hard, although there were a couple of dead ends.

The basic bluetooth layer is petty easy. Start dbus, start hcid, start passkey-agent if you've not paired the two. It seems to be a bit simpler to start the pairing from the phone. Then use sdptool browse to check the phone is seen clearly.

After that, it got a bit complicated. obexftp worked well enough as far as it went, putting items onto the phone and getting files off the phone, but I couldn't work out how to get some items off the phone. They just didn't appear in the obexftp or obexfs listings. So I wondered if it night be easier to start the transfer from the phone.

There's an obexftpd, but I didn't figure out how to send it files. I also tried to compile opd but I think it offer patching for modern gccs. (Anyone got these working?)

What I did get to work was sobexsrv - just tell it a directory and it puts any files it's sent there. Works a treat.

One other thing that has been really useful is anyremote. It's a command server for the GNU/Linux side and a Java client for the phone. The phone mostly picks from option menus or preprogrammed keys, but editable fields are also possible. You can run any commands that the server configuration allows, including starting file transfers. I think that's possible because remote control and object transfer are on different bluetooth channels, but I don't really understand it yet.

I've improved the RSS reader to use xsltproc and added shell commands to it. Once I'm fairly sure it's reliable, I'll upload it near here.

(Posted in part due to an ALUG thread which reminded me about this forgotten draft.)

Syndicated 2008-04-22 00:43:38 from MJR's slef-reflections