The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Mon, 31 Oct 2005

OpenWRT and OpenVPN

Duane Groth of CAcert has nice blog entry which links to his guide on Properly securing wireless networks on the cheap. He uses a combination of OpenWRT and OpenVPN.

I just discovered that two of my neighbours have set up wireless networks in my area (one unencrypted - woot!) so I have been meaning to get around to getting serious about security, which means some kind of VPN solution rather than relying on plain old WEP encryption.

Mon, 17 Oct 2005

On the Origin of Yak Shaving

The Jargon File definition for yak shaving is pretty boring. Here's a better description of this common activity. From some MIT guy:

"I was working on my thesis and realized I needed a reference. I'd seen a post on comp.arch recently that cited a paper, so I fired up gnus. While I was searching the for the post, I came across another post whose MIME encoding screwed up my ancient version of gnus, so I stopped and downloaded the latest version of gnus.

"Unfortunately, the new version of gnus didn't work with emacs 18, so I downloaded and built emacs 20. Of course, then I had to install updated versions of a half-dozen other packages to keep other users from hurting me. When I finally tried to use the new gnus, it kept crapping out on my old configuration. And that's why I'm deep in the gnus info pages and my .emacs file -- and yet it's all part of working on my thesis."

Go shave a yak today!

Wed, 12 Oct 2005

No Electricity

I was planning to work from home today but having not taken much notice of the recent letters from the electricity company was a bit surprised when everything powered down early this morning. I think I need a UPS for the wireless access point.

Actually a charged up car battery, a solar panel and a transformer to step down 12+V to something that my various devices would like could keep me going all day. Also, thank goodness for gas-powered stoves and matches. (-:

Fri, 07 Oct 2005

MONT 24-Hour

Went out yesterday to help set up our camp for The Mont 24-Hour which is a 24 hour continuous montain bike event. We have a pretty primo spot just off the last bit of track before the start/finish line, but away from the generators and parking area.

Last year was much fun, although I could only manage three laps of the 18km course. I think I can manage four this year, but we may not have enough time depending on how the day pans out. Actually this year should be easier, as we will have a full team of six (one last minute scratching last year due to illness) and slower riders so there may be a rest period of up to six hours between laps, instead of four.

There are forecasts of rain for the next three days, and the course is already wet (frogs chirping and running water alongside the track). I am skeptical in general of forecasts of rain due to the recent drought in Canberra, but we dug drainage ditches around the tents anyway.

Tue, 04 Oct 2005

Neat format for software release notes (NEWS)

mbp has a neat format for formatting the release notes for small to medium sized software projects. It's being used for distcc and Bazaar-NG. The idea is that changes in the piece of software are sorted into maybe half a dozen different categories with a short sentence or two, with attribution, is written about the change. The style is very much in the GNU ChangeLog format.

Here's the news so far for my PyWBEM project for the upcoming release:

pywbem-0.4  "Funky release name"  RELEASE-DATE

  BUG FIXES:

    * Correctly calculate value of Content-Length HTTP header to include
      opening XML stanza.  Reported by Szalai Ferenc <szferi@niif.hu>.

  ENHANCEMENTS:

    * Support for marshaling and unmarshaling CIM dates object into
      Python datetime objects.  Written by Szalai Ferenc <szferi@niif.hu>.

    * Experimental module for making asynchronous WBEM calls with
      PyWBEM in Twisted Python.

    * Add parameter type checking for object location classes.

  API CHANGES:

    * Change association provider API functions to take a fixed
      parameter for the named object instead of a keyword argument.
      This breaks backward compatibility.

    * Remove the CIMLocalNamespacePath class and replaced by a Python
      string.

  PORTABILITY:
 
    * Don't use UserDict.DictMixin base class as it only exists in
      Python 2.3 and higher.

  TESTS:

    * Add tests for parameter type checking for object location
      classes.

    * Add tests for string representation of object location classes.

The things I like about this format are:

• It neatly separates bug fixes from enhancements and improvements. Splitting up code changes into different categories like this gives a good overview of how the software project is going and the flavour of the release.
• It's easy to credit contributors of bug reports, patches and the implementation of new features. Attribution is such an important part of open source development, and failing to give credit for a contribution may discourage someone from submitting another patch or fixing another bug for you.
• You can add whatever categories you like as the format is fairly unstructured giving some freedom in what is written, but structured enough to write incrementally over a period of months as work on the project continues.

Suggestions for a funky release name for PyWBEM 0.4 will be gratefully received!