Planet LUGOR

Linux User Group of Rochester RSS News Feed: The LUGOR Meeting for Thursday, April 17 from 7:00 - 9:00pm will be held at RIT in building 70 room 70-1400. This will be a general Q & A meeting.

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 12:35:19 +0000

Paul Tomblin: Optimize this?

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:47:29 +0000

The main loop query of my waypoint generator app is kind of hairy. And trying to do an “explain” on a typical query shows why it’s so slow.

explain SELECT a.id, c.pdb_id, internalid, a.type, name,
address, state, country, latitude, longitude,
declination, main_frequency, elevation,
b.category, chart_map, tpa, ispublic
FROM waypoint a, type_categories b,
id_mapping c
WHERE a.type = b.type AND
a.id = c.id AND
country in (’US’, ‘CA’) AND
(a.type in (’AIRPORT’, ‘VOR’, ‘NDB’) or
(category = 3 and (chart_map & 7) != 0)) AND
deletedon is null;
QUERY PLAN
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
Hash Join (cost=4442.82..19955.46 rows=34752 width=111)
Hash Cond: ((a.id)::text = (c.id)::text)
-> Hash Join (cost=4.83..12938.32 rows=34752 width=107)
Hash Cond: ((a.”type”)::text = (b.”type”)::text)
Join Filter: (((a.”type”)::text = ANY ((’{AIRPORT,VOR,NDB}’::character varying[])::text[])) OR ((b.category = 3) AND (((a.chart_map)::integer & 7)
0)))
-> Seq Scan on waypoint a (cost=0.00..10759.48 rows=72467 width=103)
Filter: ((country = ANY (’{US,CA}’::bpchar[])) AND (deletedon IS NULL))
-> Hash (cost=4.37..4.37 rows=37 width=15)
-> Seq Scan on type_categories b (cost=0.00..4.37 rows=37 width=15)
-> Hash (cost=2091.77..2091.77 rows=127777 width=12)
-> Seq Scan on id_mapping c (cost=0.00..2091.77 rows=127777 width=12)
(11 rows)

Adding indexes on country and type doesn’t help. There is still that nasty looking “Seq Scan on waypoint a” line. And also, another “Seq Scan on id_mapping c”, which I don’t understand at all because the joining column, c.id, is a primary key, so shouldn’t there be an index involved?

I’ve got a few ideas on how to use the spatial capability of PostGIS to improve that query, so I’m going to have to run a few tests. The first few ideas I’ve had aren’t showing major improvements in “explain”. It looks like the whole “type in … or ((chart_map & NN) != 0)” is going to force a sequential scan on waypoint no matter what I do. Hmmm.

Paul Tomblin: We’ll just consider that drawing board “backed”, shall we?

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:24:13 +0000

Ok, I just added some indexes, and now the PostGIS version runs in 45 seconds. Phew! Man, I love “-d:DProf”.

Paul Tomblin: Back to the drawing board

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:11:51 +0000

In order to support a new product development I mentioned in an earlier blog post, I re-did my existing waypoint database as a PostGIS geographical database. I also added some foreign keys and some other cleanup that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. But obviously, I don’t want to support two databases, so today I’ve been converting one of my existing waypoint generator perl scripts to use the new PostGIS database instead of the MySQL database it was on before, but without any actual GIS functionality. And Houston? We have a problem. Doing a full US + Canada data load on the MySQL version takes about a minute and a half. Doing the same load on the PostGIS version takes twenty five minutes. Something tells me that I need to make some adjustments here.

Paul Tomblin: That was close!

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 17:13:00 +0000

The theme I have been using for a couple of years on this blog (Maple) didn’t work very well with Wordpress 2.5 and I can’t find an updated copy anywhere. Since I’ve hacked the shit out of it over the years, I decided it was time to make a fresh start with a theme that’s actually supported. So the first thing I did was copy the default theme, and try to make it look more like Maple. That wasn’t fun, and I’m not 100% satisfied with the results. So I decided to look at other themes.

I couldn’t find what I wanted at the official themes site, mostly because their search engine doesn’t categorize themes by category, and also because their “preview” function doesn’t work. But I found this other site, whose name I won’t mention but it had the word “free” in the URL. I found a bunch of nifty themes there, and downloaded them. I was just customizing one theme to add gravatar support and give the comments an alternating colour scheme, when I noticed something weird down at the bottom. It looked like spam. I grepped the theme code for the spammy urls, and couldn’t find them. But I figured the offending code must be in footer.php. Sure enough, all the themes I’d downloaded from this site had encrypted code in footer.php. I couldn’t read it or decrypt it, but it obviously was there to insert spam code in your blog. I tried replacing the footer.php with one from the default theme, and that broke other stuff. Crafty buggers.

Anyway, I’ve removed all traces of this crap, and I guess we’re all stuck with the psuedo-Maple theme until the official site starts working again.

Paul Tomblin: Hmmm

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:57:35 +0000

I upgraded my blog to Wordpress 2.5 because the damn thing was nagging me all the time about being back at 2.3.3. But now I discover that my theme doesn’t work right with the new code, and one of my favourite plugins, the LiveJournal CrossPoster, doesn’t work. Now I’ve either got to find a less ugly theme, or fix the old Maple theme to support the new comment code with the built-in Gravatars.

Update: I might have found the fix for LJXP!
In lj_crosspost.php, change

if(version_compare($wp_version, “2.1″, “< ")) {
require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/template-functions-links.php');
}

if(version_compare($wp_version, “2.3″, “< ")) {
require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/link-template.php');
} else
if(version_compare($wp_version, "2.1", "<")) {
require_once(ABSPATH . '/wp-includes/template-functions-links.php');
}

Update #2:
I officially hate this update. It keeps adding bogus </code> tags even though my tags are perfectly well closed before I saved them. Let’s try with block quotes instead?

Paul Tomblin: Bald Eagles!

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 23:37:02 +0000

It’s rare for me to get my second paddle of the season so quickly after the first (first was Sunday, second was today, Wednesday), but the weather cooperated and today was chicken wing day in the cafeteria so I wasn’t hungry when I got home, so away I went.

The creek was quite deserted by other boats, except for one flat bottom dinghy that two guys were fishing from. I’ve seen carp mating in that area, so that’s probably what they were after.

Considering that Sunday I saw almost no wildlife except geese, today was a bonanza day. I saw male red-winged blackbirds staking out their territories, several kingfishers patrolling their sections of the river (and raising their crests in alarm when I got too close), a few pairs of ducks, and I finally saw the famous Irondequoit Creek bald eagles. I rounded a corner and saw two soaring birds, one quite high and one just above the ridge line, nd immediately said “oh, turkey vultures”, but then the lower one spread his stunning white tail and I noticed that the head was bright white as well. I never did make out for sure if the higher one was a bald eagle as well, but I think it was. One thing that impressed me was that while it was soaring, it seemed to be moving back and forth much faster than a turkey vulture does. Maybe it’s anti-vulture prejudice, but it just seemed more, I don’t know, purposeful or something.

I also saw a crow or raven down fairly low, but he flew away rapidly as I got near so I didn’t get a good look. There were very distinct primary feathers curling up at the tips, which I think means it was a raven.

I went a little bit further than I did on Sunday, and I wasn’t as tired when I reached the weir, probably because I paced myself better. Probably just as well, because on the way home there were two stretches where I was paddling into a very strong wind. My weather widget says that the winds at the airport are 21G33 knots, or 24 to 33 mph, which I can easily believe. And when the wind is blowing in my face like that, my old canoe trip instincts say “paddle as hard as you can for the lee of the upwind shore, and don’t rest until you get there”, so that’s what I do.

Paul Tomblin: And it just gets worse

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:34:29 +0000

On March 25th, I ranted about a developer who had checked in a bunch of stuff that required a special “upgrade DVD” without telling the other developer that this would be required in Rants and Revelations » Developer dumbassedness. Well, it turns out it’s worse than that. Far worse. Not only didn’t he not tell us about the magic DVD, but he hadn’t even tested the damn DVD. It’s now 2 weeks later, and his DVD *still* doesn’t work.

So now I’m caught in a vice - I had to “rebase” my development environment to the new build in order to deliver some bug fixes, and now my development environment and my test system are at different builds, which makes it hard to test things, and especially hard to use the remote debugger in Eclipse. And I can’t get them back in sync until this damn DVD is ready.

I’d also like to mention that I did a much more ambitious upgrade DVD a few years ago, where his DVD is upgrading from CentOS 5.0 to CentOS 5.1 and reformatting the content partition from ext3 to xfs, mine was upgrading from RedHat 7.3 to CentOS 3.3. And I didn’t leave the rest of the developers out to dry because I tested the hell out of it on my test system, reformatting it back to RedHat 7.3 and running versions of my upgrade script over and over for weeks before I put it into the development stream.

Paul Tomblin: That’s pretty cool

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:47:52 +0000

A couple of old friends from my time in the Army Reserve found my picture and post at Rants and Revelations » Lorne Scots SRTP 1979 and have left some comments. It’s great, especially Alex McKelvey’s precis of what happened to nearly everybody. All this time later, it’s hard to remember who you liked and who you hated, and it probably doesn’t matter much now, but Alex was one of the ones I liked.

Paul Tomblin: First paddle of the season

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:29:42 +0000

Well, I got out earlier than last season, but not as early as the previous year. The sun was shining, the air was warm (just a little over 60, I think), the water was freezing cold. All in all, a great day to be out. And obviously I wasn’t the only one, because the creek was crowded with boats, some who looked like they knew what they were doing, some who obviously didn’t. Three teenagers in a canoe lurching from bank to bank with no clue what they were doing (sort of a “sub-prime” canoe), a large gaggle of kayaks coming downstream together, a guy with his feet up on top of his kayak deck and a fishing rod between his feet, people in spiffy paddling jackets and wet suits, and people in t-shirts and shorts.

I wore my wet suit because I knew the water would be cold and I didn’t want to get cold legs on the bottom of the boat, nor did I want to get hypothermia if I tipped. I had planned to only go as far as the weir so I wouldn’t overdo it. But in hindsight I probably should have turned back sooner - I was tired and my elbows were sore by the time I got there. And when I turned back, there was a strong wind in my face countering any assist I was getting from the current.

The weir was impassible - the smaller gaps were jammed with debris, so all the water was flowing through the middle channel, and there was about a foot and a half or two foot drop there. I bet it would have been fun to paddle down, but as tired as I was, I wasn’t going to try paddling up it. I wasn’t even going to try portaging around it so I could shoot it. I just looked at it and said “no f-ing way”. There were a couple of people fishing the eddy below it. So avoiding the lines, I did an eddy turn and turned down stream. I was glad to see that the big mud flat that had sprung up last year just downstream of the weir had submerged again. Hopefully the spring run-off will scour the stream bed a bit deeper this year so it won’t re-emerge in the lower water season.

Not much wildlife in the marsh yet, except some sparrows and lots and lots of Canada geese. Most of the geese looked like they were getting ready to nest, but there was one on a dead tree that lies on its side in the middle of the creek who was playing dead as I splashed by. I wonder if she had eggs? Last year I noticed that a goose had tried to lay eggs on a semi-flat spot on that tree, but most of them had rolled down into a crack, and I guess she’d abandoned the nest. I hope she has better luck this year.

Paul Tomblin: Oh, that’s not good

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 21:51:27 +0000

I got an email from one of the sysadmins at NCF saying that the news directory has run out of space. After poking around a bit, I’ve discovered that:

cron jobs, including the nightly expire job, haven’t run since March 18th
I haven’t been receiving emails sent to the NCF news account, possibly for even longer than that, which is why I didn’t notice when the system throttled 3 days ago. Normally newswatcher sends these emails which I have forwarded to SMS so I don’t miss them.

The sysadmin wonders if the cron jobs not running has anything to do with the DST change. The machine is ancient, and running an ancient version of Solaris.

Of course, the fact that I didn’t notice the lack of the daily news admin email in my morning scan-and-delete folder isn’t good, either.

Justin Kirby: Qunu RIP?

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:01:44 +0000

First, I would like to apologize to everyone who put so much effort into qunu.

Current Status:

The server has been taken offline. There are no backups which are current, the latest is one month old.

Why:

The server that was just taken offline was to be a temporary home lasting one, maybe two months. We were then going to find a more permanent setup. As with most things that have a deadline it received no attention until it was necessary.

Apparently there was some confusion as to the date which the account was to be canceled. It was scheduled to be taken offline on December 21, 2007. However, the server was taken offline nine days before the scheduled time (e.g. today)

A few weeks earlier, Mickaël at process-one had generously offered to take qunu off our hands. So we had finally found the home we had been looking for. I had even started the process of getting all the data off the server. Unfortunately, the transition is not going as smoothly as I had hoped.

Once again, qunu will suffer through a period of downtime before it is finally resurrected again. Maybe qunu should be renamed Phoenix or Lazarus

At some point when all the kinks are worked out, probably next month, qunu will be started at its new home. Don’t hold your breath, but don’t give up hope either.

Justin

Justin Kirby: Selecting whole buffer

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 20:04:34 +0000

Just ran into this emacs key binding. Someday I need to just read the manual and mark all the stuff I wish I knew already for later study. But since I will probably never do that here is yet another cool thing in emacs which I didn’t know about:

C-x h runs the command mark-whole-buffer
which is an interactive compiled Lisp function in `simple.el’.
It is bound to C-x h,
.
(mark-whole-buffer)

Put point at beginning and mark at end of buffer.
You probably should not use this function in Lisp programs;
it is usually a mistake for a Lisp function to use any subroutine
that uses or sets the mark.

If you didn’t know about this, enjoy.

Justin Kirby: Emacs, the lisp OS

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 16:36:59 +0000

Not only can you edit videos in emacs now, but you can also create music. My initial response was WTF!? However, after watching the demo videos, I can see the practical uses.

Justin Kirby: nyc erlang/ejabberd meetup

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 02:56:51 +0000

I am going to be meeting with Mickaël Rémond at an adhoc ejabberd meeting. afaik, the location is undetermined, however, I am flying out in the morning and have decided that Gramstand is as good of a place as any for now. (primarily thanks to stumbling onto a coworking blog). Will probably move onto a more pub-like venue later on.

I am hoping to meet a few erlang/ejabberd devs on this trip. If not, the chance to chat with Mickaël f2f will definitely be worth the 1.2hr plane ride.

I am taking Jetblue flight1 from Buffalo to JFK and landing around 10:00am. Then finding my way from Queens to Manhattan via the subway. It looks like I will have about 8hrs to play with in nyc.

If you have the time or inclination give me a ring at 585-705-1877 I will be hanging out at gramstand writing erlang.

Justin Kirby: Impressive Incompetence

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 15:51:21 +0000

Open letter to NYSIF:

https://www.nysif.com/include/BrowserDetect.asp?browserNM=Netscape

You should be congratulated. This is a level of incompetence of which I have not seen since ’90s.

My scathing insult aside, what is that? The world has moved on. There are ther platforms out there such as OS X and Linux which have fully capable web browsers. You really should look into hiring a new web team if thats the best they can do.

Justin Kirby: Lisp Tutorial

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 15:09:31 +0000

This is a good idea.

Lisp Tutorial

Justin Kirby: I am now a jaiku lemming

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 00:43:56 +0000

I have been avoiding these social hype sites for a while now. I have
simply failed to see the benefit. (besides sucking yet more of my time.)

Today, stpeter posted that jaiku had a jabber interface. Anything that
allows me to quickly utilize their service via emacs is very
enticing. Since I use emacs-jabber jaiku was
simple.

While I was able to setup a profile quickly and get it setup
in jabber via xmpp:jaiku@jaiku.com I
have yet to find anyone I know on there. I have 348 people in my roster
and not one of them is on jaiku. Oh well.

I suppose the price one pays when they ignore all the social crud
crusting up the edges of the web is that they don’t know anyone
there. (Also, not blogging for a while probably might have something to
do with it.)

Justin Kirby: presence pendanticity

Thu, 03 Aug 2006 17:17:05 +0000

I just had an interesting chat with hawke about presence and transports. It may seem pedantic, but I think it strikes at an important point. A lot of clients assume that a jid must have a node; miranda,iChat,gtalk come to mind. If that jid lacks a node then it must be a transport, e.g. behave fundamentally different than a typical IM client connection. In other words the jid is being used to determine the basic functionality of an entity on the xmpp network.

Below is the chatlog, but it can be summarized as:

hawke asserts that presence is a mutual agreement for communication
I assert that presence is a reflection of an entities availability

This post is a solicitation for opinions.

Below is the chat log

[12:11] hawke> since most clients will show the quser
service as a transport, instead of (or as well as) sending the
message, just send offline presence.
[12:11] hawke> then they can just log back in
[12:11] hawke> instead of the ’status on’ message
[12:12] zion> thats a bit client specific though
[12:12] hawke> How so?
[12:12] zion> quser is not intended to be a transport
[12:12] zion> just because it doesn’t have a node in the jid
[12:13] hawke> I’ve not seen a client that determines
transport vs. other contact any other way.
[12:14] zion> emacs-jabber ;)
[12:14] zion> yeah… that semantic is annoying
[12:14] zion> so I don’t want to encourage bad habits
[12:14] zion> the client should disco to find out what it is, not use
the jid to assume
[12:14] zion> to many clients to that, and it sucks
[12:15] hawke> True
[12:15] zion> the jid is an identifier, nothing more
[12:15] hawke> But even so, the same thing applies to
quser as actual transports
[12:15] hawke> you still log on and off by sending
presence
[12:15] zion> no… there is not log on/off
[12:15] zion> I added that ability because it was requested
[12:16] zion> its a presence aware node on the jabber network
[12:16] zion> it doesn’t proxy your messages to another network
[12:16] hawke> I think the distinction between
“list/delist” and “logon/logoff” is pretty unimportant for this
purpoose.
[12:16] hawke> too many “o”s.
[12:16] zion> it is important actually
[12:17] hawke> oh?
[12:17] zion> if you go ‘away’ on aim/msn/yahoo then you are still
reachable
[12:17] zion> you are still connected to that network
[12:17] hawke> How does that relate?
[12:17] zion> so there is a diff between list/delist and logon/logoff
[12:18] hawke> Going “away” is different from logging
off though
[12:18] zion> thats my point!
[12:18] hawke> If I send offline presence to a
transport, I am logged off not set away
[12:18] zion> exactly
[12:18] hawke> if I send offline presence to quser, I
am delisted/no longer reachable to the qunu web service
[12:19] zion> there is NO logoff from qunu
[12:19] zion> you will not be listed
[12:19] zion> but quser can still contact you
[12:19] zion> since you are still on the jabber network
[12:19] hawke> Obviously.
[12:19] zion> qunu is a jabber service, not a transport
[12:19] zion> there is a distinct difference and the semantics of a
transport do not apply
[12:20] hawke> I know that; the logic is the same
though — log off/on.
[12:20] zion> if you log off aim, can the aim network still contact
you?
[12:20] zion> no
[12:20] hawke> Only the terminology is different.
[12:20] zion> no its not
[12:20] hawke> but that’s “can’t” vs. “won’t” isn’t it?
[12:21] zion> presence is significantly different than network
connection
[12:21] hawke> if I log off of quser, it
won’t/shouldn’t be inviting me to rooms.
[12:21] zion> inviting is only one activity
[12:21] zion> and there is no ‘log off’ quser
[12:22] hawke> Sure there is
[12:22] zion> *sigh*
[12:22] hawke> if I send offline presence, I am logged
off
[12:22] hawke> am I not?
[12:22] zion> if you send me offline … does that mean I am a
transport?
[12:22] hawke> I am no longer listed in the web
service, and I won’t be invited to rooms any more.
[12:23] zion> just because your client forces those terms in the UI
does not define it
[12:23] hawke> No. I’m not saying it is a transport.
I am saying that the particular action of sending online/offline
presence that applies to transports also applies to quser
[12:24] zion> right. if you send directed offline pres to quser, then
it will think you are offline and treat you accordingly
[12:24] hawke> Yes.
[12:24] hawke> though it will still respond to
messages.
[12:25] zion> I lost track of where we are… we seem to be
disagreeing about something, but saying the same things
[12:26] zion> you want quser to behave like a transport by sending
presence offline instead of using status on/off
[12:26] hawke> Let me restate my suggestion: The status
of quser should reflect the user’s listed status on the quser web
service.
[12:26] hawke> yes
[12:26] zion> my argument is that is not appropriate, because quser is
not a transport
[12:26] hawke> quser is a presence proxy.
[12:27] hawke> (and metadata bot, but that’s not
relevant for this purpose)
[12:27] zion> so quser should send an offline presence to the user
[12:27] zion> which will hide it from the roster ui
[12:27] hawke> I think so, yes. Sending the message,
so that they notice is also valuable.
[12:28] zion> but quser is not offline
[12:28] zion> and the user is not offline
[12:28] hawke> True.
[12:29] hawke> Well
[12:29] zion> imo, pres should indicate the availability of an entity.
[12:29] hawke> the user is “offline” as far as the
website is concerned.
[12:29] zion> not exactly correct. the website is just a jabber
client.
[12:30] zion> so the user is delisted from results, but not offline
[12:30] hawke> and with transports, presence doesn’t
indicate whether the service is available either
[12:30] hawke> it indicates whether or not you’re
logged in to it.
[12:30] hawke> For the purposes of the website, what’s
the difference between being delisted and offline?
[12:30] zion> currently, nothing ;)
[12:31] hawke> QED.
[12:31] zion> qed?
[12:31] hawke> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q.E.D.
[12:32] zion> ex: we are going to be incorporating pubsub into the
service
[12:32] hawke> OK..
[12:33] hawke> Does the users presence have any effect
on pubsub?
[12:33] zion> it should
[12:33] zion> e.g. if they are really ‘offlien’ vs ‘away’
[12:34] zion> if pres != chat || online then they are delisted
[12:34] hawke> OK..
[12:34] zion> if pres != chat || online || dnd || away || xa then send
them pubsub events
[12:35] hawke> So, only send them pubsub events when
they’re offline, or am I missing a status there?
[12:36] zion> only send them pubsub events when they are connected to
jabber, if they are offline don’t
[12:36] zion> there is a diff between ‘I am connected’ and ‘I am
online/away/xa/etc..’
[12:37] hawke> but surely you can send pubsub events
regardless of quser’s status?
[12:38] zion> of course… we could set it to offline and still send
stuff
[12:39] hawke> As I see it, the user sending directed
offline presence [to quser] means “I don’t want you to talk to me any
more”; quser then sends its own offline presence confirming that.
[12:40] hawke> So when quser decides “I’m not going to
talk to you any more” it should do the same thing.
[12:41] zion> you assertion is that presence is a mutual agreement of
communication
[12:41] zion> my assertion is that presence is a reflection of an
entities availability
[12:41] zion> regardless of its role
[12:42] hawke> OK, so amend that to add “…unless you
talk to me first.”

Justin Kirby: unnecessary pain

Wed, 05 Jul 2006 07:58:35 +0000

No plan survives contact with the enemy. This was made abundantly clear when Qunu was released as alpha for the public to abuse. As with any alpha there were countless problems that I dealt with on a daily basis. Clients insisting that a jid must have a node, xdata limitations in iq:register, double subscriptions, broken muc support, etc…

For some of these problems I was able to hack up a work around, such as quser@qunu.com as a subscription proxy for quser.alpha.qunu.com. A few of them had no decent solution and I had to suggest other clients. The wiki page, http://qunu.com/wiki/index.php/Documentation, has a list of clients which have the bare minimum feature set.

The default gtalk client does not support muc or groupchat. Since a lot of people had a gmail account they naturally tried to use their gtalk clients. Making the brash assumption that gtalk behaved like every other xmpp server I directed them to the above list of working clients to try. After several confusing chats and some poking of my own I quickly discovered that gtalk is not xmpp.

That may sound rather harsh so let me qualify that. While google’s xmpp-like servers may follow the letter of the xmpp RFC’s they most certainly do not follow the spirit. The reason I say this is that the gtalk servers will block any stanza which their default client will not understand regardless of which client you are actually using. This means that even if you wanted to get cool new features by using another jabber client, gtalk will block the stanzas before they get to your client. Not only do you have to get a different client, but you have to use a different server. *sigh*

The biggest issue, at least for qunu, is muc invites. GTalk silently drops them regardless of which client is on the other end. disco requests are reported assuming the default client. iq:version is always reported as not implemented, again ignoring the client.

Of course there is no bug/issue report system at google. Thus this blog post. Hopefully someone at gtalk will see this and file a bug. Of course, if you need further clarification, feel free test this yourself or ping me at zion@openaether.org

Justin Kirby: announcement: open qunu trial

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 05:15:37 +0000

After many long nights and lots of bug squashing we are finally ready to open up Qunu for general abuse. This is an invitation for everyone in the jabber community to try it out. Let us know what you think and how Qunu can be made better.

So what is Qunu?

<marketing-speak>
In a nutshell, Qunu is a Jabber-based ‘ask-an-expert’-style service that you can ‘tag’ yourself with. Qunu allows you to use your existing jabber client instead of forcing you to lurk on a web forum, irc channel or muc room. In essence, people looking for help come straight to you, the expert.
</marketing-speak>

How it works

Someone on our site searches for help in an area in which you have tagged yourself. They can request an anonymous chat with you. We then send a MUC invite to your jabber client which you can accept or reject. We only send thru invitations when you’re online and available, and you can change your presence with us at any time. You have total control.

<marketing-speak>
It’s a great way to give your expertise back to the community in a non-annoying,
non-intrusive way. You can give help when it’s convenient for you, and best of all, you get to see the ‘thank you’.
</marketing-speak>

How to get in

In order to accommodate the various ‘quirks‘ of all the jabber capable clients out there we have setup lots of ways to get in.

Use the site at http://alpha.qunu.com. This is simply a custom jabber client via html and javascript.
Register with quser.alpha.qunu.com
Add quser.alpha.qunu.com to your roster via a subscribe request
Add quser@qunu.com to your roster

The end result of all this is to get quser.alpha.qunu.com on your roster.

Let us know
This is an alpha release. We would love your feedback.

General discussion is in alpha@muc.alpha.qunu.com. The wiki at http://qunu.com/wiki and of course using qunu via http://alpha.qunu.com/search/qunu

Lugor: Need Sign Language Volunteer

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 11:07:00 +0000

Hi Folks,

Does anyone who is going to the meeting know how to sign or would a friend/family member be willing to go and sign? A new member wishes to attend and needs someone to interpret. Send all replies to lugor@realtime1.com.

Thanks!

Tom

Lugor: LUGOR January 19 Meeting Announcement

Thu, 12 Jan 2006 02:28:00 +0000

Hi Folks,

    The January 19th meeting will take place from 7:00 - 9:00pm at RIT first floor lab in building 74 at RIT. This building is adjacent to building 70. This will be an Linux distro and applications install and customization meeting for those of you currently having install or customization problems. Please bring in your PC any extension cords, power cords and power strips you may need. Please e-mail me at lugor@realtime1.com with your install/customization problems prior to the meeting so we can prepare.

    I would like to get some volunteers to bring in copies of their favorite Linux distro and volunteer to be installers, customizers, etc.... Please e-mail me at lugor@realtime1.com if you wish to volunteer with your expertise and what Linux distro you can bring included in the email. Thanks.

    I will post the list of installers and distros available on the LUGOR lists and Planet LUGOR. Hope to see you there!

                                                                             Tom

Rob Raiman: Is Two Really Better Than One?

Wed, 11 Jan 2006 20:26:00 +0000

A lot of days I come home from work and don't want to look at computer problems. My main system before the 'Big New System' is 'psycho' a 3.2 gHz P4-HT and it's running sweet and all I want to do is veg out and surf the web.

My explanation, excuse, on why I have left the story of BNS aka 'titan' hanging.
I have twice upgraded the bios and my key click and strange mouse problems are reduced enough that I can do an update all. After an update everything works OK, kinda.

I wiped the system and installed Fedora Core 4 x86_64 and updated it. My disappointment is that too many applications I want to use are non existent or not really written to take advantage of x86_64. When you add the pain of removing the 64bit version of firefox and installing the 32bit one so that flash, realplayer and java work correctly it just isn't worth it. Xine and mplayer were quite unstable also. maybe it's me.

I wiped the system and installed CentOS x86_64. It was more stable than FC-4 but still had all the pain. By the by, I got the most stable results with FC-4 and CentOS by loading the system then using the 'dag' repositories to upgrade. I like that site.

Next I tried kubuntu, the kde based version of Ubuntu. I like it. I am using kubuntu 5.10 x86 and things just work. The install is dead easy and the user account, other than the window behavior focus, is very well configured. Fonts look good the desktop and applications locations are very well thought out. Kubuntu is a single disk install and very basic with some quirks. I can understand needing to run 'apt-get install build-essentials' to set up the development environment but why isn't the installer smart enough to know wht processor(s) I have. I also needed to run 'apt-get install linux-686 linux-686-smp'. Not hard but you have to know you need to do this. Nothings perfect. If anyone is interested in installing [k]ubuntu I strongly suggest registering on the ubuntu forums site. Very active and very helpful. After a little searching I added some repositories and was able to easily add and upgrade everything I needed.

This is not the whole story by any means, I installed and wiped 9 different distros and now I am going to leave titan alone for a while and get more familiar with kubuntu.

My current final word on this story is that I am less than impressed with AMD Athlon 64 4200 x2. With 2 gigs of ram fast disks and more I expected the system to be faster. Doing things like image conversion with xnview and gimp I don't think the system is as fast as my 3.2 gHz Pentium 4HT. However, when doing more than one thing at a time, I mean why should I wait to convert 200 images or burn a dvd or some such, the AMD x2 shines. So, some things take a little longer but I'm not waiting for it.

Lugor: Worms

Tue, 10 Jan 2006 11:18:00 +0000

Well, I only received 223 worm e-mails yesterday. I want to thank all those Windows users out there for reminding me again (and again....) why I use Linux. With people using phones over ip when will it be a crime to harbor worms when it delays the ability to send out a 911 call due to the high volume of e-mail traffic? I 'm including the owner's of the Window's machines that send out the worm e-mails and not just the creator of the worm as basically partners in crime. If you don't discover and remove the worm in a timely fashion shouldn't you also be considered a criminal like the creator of the worm?

Lugor: Distro Request for Meeting

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 03:00:00 +0000

Hi Folks,

Could someone bring Debian Sarge, SuSE 10, Mephis and Ubuntu to the meeting?
Thanks. See you tomorrow.

Tom

Lugor: CPU Power To The People

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 03:04:00 +0000

I found an article about a $100 laptop in development at MIT that will run Red Hat Linux. I guess it will be a way for third world children and others to move into the computer age one person at a time. The article also indicates the laptop will be available for retail sale to others for about $200 dollars. What impact it will have on the world is unclear to me as you'll need more than a laptop to move into the computer age (isp, access point to isp, printers, etc...), but it is a starting point. The article can be found at TECTONIC: MIT $100 laptop to run Redhat.

Lugor: Geeks and Turkeys

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 11:24:00 +0000

Found this great article on wired about where geeks and turkey cooking collide. This is a fun read. See the article here Turkey Lovers Gobble Up Tech. Have a happy thanksgiving all.

Lugor: New Planet Lugor URL

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 00:40:00 +0000

Good news! Planet Lugor now resides at the same server as our web site. You can now use the url
http://planet.lugor.org to reach Planet Lugor. I will shutdown the one at www.realtime1.com by this Monday.

I want to thank all those that have helped make this possible. They include Gabe Shepard, Ralf Durkee and Justin Ziemniak to name a few.

Long live the planet! Now blog your brains out!

Rob Raiman: Fear and Loathing in Computerland

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 15:37:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I started in on a new computer system.
Gigabyte GA-K8N Ultra-SLI motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200 dual core cpu
NVIDIA 6600 GT graphics
Couple of 250 gig SATA hard drives
Optical ...yada yada.

First problem was that although the motherboard said I had a dual core cpu Fedora Core 4 didn't think so. I threw on Windows just to check and Windows also thought I had a single cpu.

Gigabyte said the motherboard was suitable for X2 dual core, what's up?
Nick Francesco of Sound Bytes fame has 2 repeating cures for computer problems.
1) Update the bios
2) Reinstall the O.S.
He was right with #1, there was an update for the bios only available at Gigabyte's Taiwan site and not at any mirrors and it's beta. But it worked and a reinstall of the O.S as per #2 worked. Tada!

After installing Fedora Core 4 I set up user accounts and the root configs and all is well. Fast machine!
I used 'yum update' and then installed the NVIDIA graphics driver, version 7676. All hell broke lose. The mouse started jumping all over the screen doing random clicks all on it's own. Screens opening and closing, fonts changing and colors flashing. Yikes.

I replaced the ps2 mouse with a usb mouse and rebooted. All was well for a few minutes until the keyboard repeats started to go crazy.
% rpm -Uvh would look like rrrrrrpppmmmmmm -------UUvvvvhhhhhh
Then the mouse went wacky again.

OK, I tried installing Kubuntu. Kubuntu was happy, happy but I don't really know the idiosyncrasies of Kubuntu and I don't want to learn right now. Plus I couldn't get a DVD to play smoothly. Did I mention that I also had this problem with Fedora Core 4?

I tried CentOS version 4.2 which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linus v4. It's a commercial OS and should be more stable than Fedora. I skipped the NVIDIA driver because I suspected it was the problem.

Well, the mouse was happy but the key repeats was still with me. I could and did turn off keyboard repeats and that was that. But I like keyboard repeats!
DVDs didn't play smoothly either. Things were kind of sluggish. Hummm, nothing in messages.

After a great deal of google'ing I found out that they (and they know who they are) broke the kernel. By default Fedora Core 4 uses the 2.6.11 kernel and I used this while setting up the system. After the yum upgrade I would have a 2.6.13 or 2.6.14 kernel and it has issues with SLI motherboards and X2 cpus. I thought it was NVIDIA because I did all at once but not so.

I reinstalled FC4. One thing I really hate about yum is that I can't configure it to ignore new kernels, it's all or nothing.

A co worker suggested apt-get and the 'dag' repository. I went to http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/
install the version of 'apt' found there and upgraded my new system with all upgrades, but not the kernel then, because I like to live dangerously, I installed the NVIDIA driver.

That’s it. It’s the kernel. Somewhere after the 2.6.11 kernel SLI and X2 support was broken. There are still problems with the 2.6.14 FC4 kernel and I have not found a patch yet. But currently my DVDs play fine and the keyboard and mouse are behaving themsleves.

Lugor: New Planet Lugor Logo

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 10:52:00 +0000

Planet Lugor now has a new logo thanks to Justin Ziemniak of Computer Link Magazine fame. Thanks Justin! Thats all for now.

Lugor: Planet Lugor Update

Tue, 22 Nov 2005 02:31:00 +0000

    Planet Lugor now has a style sheet and some more photos of our subscribers. I think it's starting to look pretty good.

    Remember, I'm still looking for volunteers to help design style sheets and a Planet Lugor logo.

    That's all for now.

Lugor: Planet Problem

Mon, 21 Nov 2005 00:49:00 +0000

Found out that the keyword "keyword" in the config.ini file causes Planet to stop working correctly.
That's why none of the rss feeds would import correctly. Removed the offending keyword and all is well,
Guess I'll have to drop them a line and let them know..