sorry about the rant today...

what is this guy doing in politics? If you haven't read somewhere else on the internet, the CentOS team recieved some threatening e-mails from the City Manager for Tuttle, OK (who claims to have 22 years of "computer systems engineering and operations" experience):

http://wwwf.centos.org/127_story.html?storyid=127

For those that don't know, CentOS is a free, linux based operating system. An operating system is a program similar to Microsoft Windows XP or Mac OSX. There are many linux based operating systems, the one I use for this website is called Debian.

What happened here was that one of (or a few of) the computers that run the websites for the city was incorrectly set up after a system crash. When this happened, a web page with an error message was displayed when someone tried to view the city's websites. This page is very common for anybody setting up websites, it basically says that your webserver is setup correctly and ready to have content placed on it. More than likely, the content didn't get restored after the crash.

So what did this guy do when his website was displaying this page? He chose to start accusing the CentOS crew of "hacking" his website. brilliant. Now, I think most people would just laught at an e-mail like the one the city manager sent and ignore it. Sure, the guy from CentOS replied in a mocking tone but when someone threatens to sic the FBI on you for a service you are providing them for free... and of course the guy doesn't apologize after realizing that CentOS was not responsible for what they were being accused of. CentOS went out of their way, found out exectly who the manager needed to talk to and what he needed to tell them. After all this, the manager blames them for not being more helpful.

This incident brings to light more than just how computer (il)literate this man is. Sadly, this story is flying around certain internet communities very quickly and *real* hackers, crackers, and script kiddies are targeting Tuttle, OK websites.

way to go man.

click here for more information

a bunch of links nobody will probably find interesting... well, we'll see...

• Mad City Broadband - Madison's city-wide wi-fi keeps getting closer; still not a lot of info on pricing...
• Secure Your Server - saw this on the o'reilly network today... and no, not the evil o'reilly... nice list of tips to secure a linux box.
• Using your Palm in Linux - tips on using your palm device in linux.
• NetSync in Linux HowTo - a HowTo on using pilot-link to do a NetSync with your palm.
• Another Palm/Linux Sync HowTo - name says it all... references pi-csd...
• ScummVM for PalmOS - again, name says it all... don't know what Scumm is? find info at this link.

some of what I didn't have time to read over lunch today... thought I might want these later.

so my grand plans for getting mame working on the box I'll be using for the MAME cabinet ran into a bit of a snag... I got debian setup and working great but when it came to setting up X to work through the TV, things didn't go well. I hit a brick wall with setting up the video card drivers... You know you're trouble when the support threads for the card give their replies in haiku form while forum posts labeled "Hardware to avoid" include your video card.

It seems ATI can't cooperate with linux driver developers for TV-out due to some IP issue with Macromedia and DMCA restrictions. damnit. ATI does provide proprietary linux drivers for their newer cards, and they work (with some work); but this Radeon 7000 isn't exactly new. The only work around to getting X running using TV-out is to use the "vesa" driver. What sucks about this, is that this driver has basically no options available to it: getting mame to run fullscreen using hardware stretching is therefore a no-go using this card.

Not wanting to spend much on the hardware I bought this NVIDIA MX4000 for cheap. Hopefully this should work. I'll find out in a few days...

Also, wanted to point out that the MySetTopBox.tv forums are an excellent resource on getting Tv-out working with linux. very helpfull community.

Wanted to post two links, one of which I'll probably be referring to a lot later tonight...

• World’s Fastest Digital Camera - Seems that UW-Madison is in the digital camera business these days... if you're ever in the market for a $6 million dollar digital camera that is.
• My Settop Box - This is the homepage for the people behind the KnoppMyth Live CD. I won't be using KnoppMyth tonight, but their forums have a wealth of knowledge regarding getting TV-out working in Linux.

Kellie's having a "girl's night out" tonight and I volunteered to be the on-call sober cab. My goal tonight is to get linux running on the spare box I'll be using in the MAME cab, get X running on it with TV-out, get xmame working, and see how well the box plays a game of Vasara. If the game runs fine, I be using this box. If not, we'll have to see... I really don't want to have to buy a new machine. This is a pretty hefty project for tonight, but it should be fun...

trying something new today that I've seen on other sites: links I've been reading today...

• Linux on a Palm Treo 650 Gets Real - there are less boundries to getting linux working on a Palm TX then there are on a Treo so this could be an interesting project. As is said in the comments though, power saving features are probably a long way off still.
• Contrstruction Begins for Madison's Citywide Wireless - They said they will be done with downtown, the airport, and the Alliant Energy Center by the end of March; the entire city should be done a year later.

really looking forward to citywide wireless. still haven't heard much about pricing though...

I recently picked up a Palm TX with a 2GB SD card. I really wanted something that I could surf the web with, carry around some of my study materials (which are almost exclusively in pdf format), and still have room left over for a few albums. Not a problem at all with this thing... getting everything up and running out of the box was a piece of cake. The user interface was extremely easy to get used to: everything just seems to make sense. Also, I couldn't believe how small this thing was; much smaller than I thought it'd be. So far battery life is also much better than I expected. There were a few problems though, but they ended up being blessings in disguise...

For starters, it didn't come with pdf support right out of the box. Sure, Adobe's pdf software for PalmOS was on the disk that contained the window's desktop app, but it's complete crap. You have to run any pdf you want to view through a converter program on a desktop and then hotsync it onto your Palm. That's way too much work for such a simple task not to mention making online pdfs pretty much unreadable. In order to do so you would have to first download the pdf onto your desktop machine, use the converter program on the pdf, and then hotsync your Palm. Thankfully there is an open source solution called PalmPDF. This is a true pdf viewer built on the popular open source xpdf. It works exteremely well, exactly as you'd expect any true reader to behave. just another example of why open source software is so awesome... xpdf enabling PalmPDF.

Further proof of why OSS is so cool... The TX came with a nice picture viewer / video player, but I can't get the video player to play anything but the sample videos that it shipped with. In their defense though, they probably don't have the codecs built in for most of the stuff I'm trying to watch. Enter The Core Pocket Media Player or TCPMP for short. Awesome open source video, mp3, and vorbis player software; lots of codecs included.

Another essential piece of OSS for the Palm: FileZ. The Palm TX does not come with a file manager. This is more than likely due to the fact that all files on a Palm device are stored in the same base folder. With only 100MB of free internal memory, there isn't a lot you'd really be able to organize anyway. The problem comes when you have a large capacity storage card (say 2GB) that you have a lot of different document types on... FileZ handles filemanager duty very well. As an added bonus, it has an internal preference viewer, it gives you information about your battery, and it lets you know when you last hotsync'd (sp?).

The last piece of OSS for the palm I've discovered, and the one I want to play around with the most right now, is Plucker. This is pretty much an offline rss/html/ebook/text/??? viewer that converts "stuff" into a format that is easily viewable on palm devices. It's extremely open and well documented so playing around with it after I get Linux set up is going to be a lot of fun.

Eventually I'm hoping to be able to capture TV using my ATI AiW 9800 Pro and have it converted into a fairly compact format for TCPMP. This might be a problem because, as said before, ATI aren't cool when it comes to driver support and Linux. Thankfully, there are people working to correct this shortcoming. I'm also really looking forward to this city-wide wifi madison will soon be getting... until then, I'll be plucking away...

god that sounds stupid :P

it's really too bad that this device ships without some very essential (imo) software. I guess I'm glad it didn't do everything they way I wanted out of the box. If it had, I might not have found all these great pieces of software. Then again, maybe the fact that this software is freely available (and so good) is why it didn't come shipped with something similar. Oh well, really no loss here...