Brian Jepson’s Weblog

I’ll be giving
a talk tomorrow (Monday, January 26) at MIT, 2-5pm, N42 Demo Center.
I’ll be talking about the bits of Mac OS X that differ sharply from
other Unixes: Directory Services, system startup, compiling source, and
more.

Update: You can download the examples
here and the slides
here.

(making something from a while back a little easier to find): Web
applications are complex entities with many interconnections that are
not obvious. Often, these interconnections are added in an ad hoc
fashion, and are poorly planned and never documented. After introducing
the established object-oriented analysis and design tools UML and
patterns, this
tutorial looks at how they can be applied to building web database
applications.

Part of my .procmailrc that looks for the virus (apologies for
dropping legit messages that match this):

:0
* > 30000
* ^X-Priority: 3
* ^X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
/dev/null

Here’s the part that gets rid of most of the erroneous server reports
that claim someone at jepstone.net sent them a virus:

:0B:
* ^From:.*@jepstone.net
* ^X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
/dev/null

Since everyone knows that the sender address is forged, who are
these people who set up their servers to bounce the message to the
forged address? What’s the point in that? You’re wasting my bandwidth
and yours.

I’ve heard about some full-time/permanent C# positions in the New York
metro area that need filling immediately. If you come across this post
within the next couple of weeks, and are interested, get in touch
(bjepson at jepstone dot net). It’s senior-level and there’s a lot of
customer contact.

I’ve posted my
slides from my O’Reilly booth demo on using Linux with GPRS and
CDMA.

MobileWhack:
“this year there’s more mobility than you can shake an all-but
ineffective flimsy pull-out handset antenna at.”

I installed Yellow Dog on a Lombard a little while back, and found a cool HOWTO on migrating the
Linux install to a firewire drive. I need to have Linux with me on the next
trip I take, and I need PC Card support, so Virtual PC was out, and I
didn’t want to take two laptops. The only problem is I’m a cheap
bastard, and the $25 Firewire PC Card I put in the Lombard is
mega-crap.

So, I took my FireWire drive out of its case, put it in the Lombard, and
installed YDL (I skipped the X configuration) on it this morning, and
then followed the instructions on that page starting from Step 3
(Modifying the initrd & booting Linux), and changing the filenames to
reflect my configuration. After I was done, it wouldn’t boot on the
Lombard any more (no surprise there), but I put it back in the Firewire case, and it boots
up into Linux fine on my 15″ (I didn’t need to do the open firmware
stuff in Step 3m, but held down Option when I botoed and selected the
drive).

After I bootd for the first time, it went through a lot of
hardware detection, and I had to reconfigure X by running Xautoconfig4,
and then editing /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to specify the fbdev driver. Then
I logged in as me, ran startx, and all was well.

Update: if you decide to base your yaboot.conf on the original
one that YDL set up, be sure to change the boot= entry to point at
a partition on the sda drive, rather than the hda drive. I forgot this,
and almost trashed my Mac OS X install with the ybin command; it was
pointing at hda9 (the bootstrap partition when it was in the Lombard) instead
of sda9 (the new device name as a firewire drive). Turns out that hda9
is the partition on the internal drive where Mac OS X is installed.
It’s safe to say you don’t want any references to hda in your
/etc/directory after you go external!

Bagelz in the
Kingston Emporium has free Wi-Fi for its customers, and Emory and I just brought up Wi-Fi
at the AS220 cafe for residents,
volunteers, staff, and members (and with membership starting
at $25/year, how can you go wrong?).

Found via IMDB.com:
The
Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath: A full-length feature film project by
Guerrilla Productions, inspired by
The Dream-Quest of
Unknown Kadath Graphic Novel

This excellent
picture from Simon’s Living in Dryden blog makes me really feel the
cold. I’ve got a frost picture of my
own that might warm you up.