バカな火星人 – Page 12

A day of extreme something

http://martian.org/marty/img/xpday-oscon-2003.jpg

Our Day of Extreme Programming tutorial was extremely stressful before lunch. When everyone arrived we realised that the room was too small, so we moved to a slightly larger one.

Then we encounted another one of the now infamous OSCon wireless network problems: about half of the laptops could not connect to the CVS server. They were receiving incorrect IP addressed from a dodgy DHCP server. We spent too much time trying to work around this.

Despite the problems, most of the attendees seemed to enjoy their day as extreme programmers, and that’s really what matters. It would be great if they also learnt something as well.

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Playing Together

This afternoon at OSCon I presented my Playing Together tutorial. I was happy with how it went; I hope the audience liked it. Some of the useful information was in the talk, not in the notes.

Tomorrow will be A Day of Extreme Programming.

San Diego WiFi

I had read that San Diego had a free public WiFi network operating at the bay end of Broadway, so I went looking. I discovered lots of open networks, but I couldn’t find any info to tell me which one was deliberately public access. I think they need to WarChalk themselves, or at least put useful technical info on their website.

Cheers, Microsoft

Microsoft like to keep their lawyers busy. Today they seem to be doing something useful: suing spammers where they can, and trying to change the law elsewhere. Bill’s boys have enough funding and legal cunning to destroy nations, so I’m sure they’ll have no trouble with the spammers.

Bitten by an Apple

I installed NetAtalk today, and then tried to get some Macs to use the server. Sharing home directories was easy, but the Macs couldn’t see anything in the documentation directory.

It turned out that Macs don’t like read-only folders, like my documentation dir. They don’t mind read-only contents, but they expect to be able to write information to help them draw the folder on screen. This seems a bit insane, but it probably looks good.

It wasn’t a new problem, so the NetAtalk can handle it: if you want to export read-only directories you must provide a writable dbpath for them.

Having a Kwiki

I installed CGI::Kwiki today. Kwiki rocks!

There are lots of wiki flavours around, all with different features. I wanted one that was simple to install and easy to tinker with. Kwiki was trivial to install, and it’s designed to be easily reconfigured and extended. Also, it happened to use my preferred set of wiki formatting rules.

I liked it so much that I wrote a MovableType Kwiki formatting plugin to use it. If you can read this, it works!

Ironically, wiki words in MT::Kwiki version 0.01 don’t link to anything. The next version will allow you to configure your target wiki.

Debian does Dell

A few days ago I tried to install Debian on a new Dell PowerEdge 1600SC. The PXE Linux boot worked perfectly, but Linux couldn’t find the hard disk! It seems that the new Dell uses a MegaRaid card that doesn’t support RAID yet.

I was happy to discover that this new MegaRaid card is supported by the driver in the 2.4.21 Linux kernel. That hasn’t been released yet, but I compiled 2.4.21rc3 and the disk appeared.

Since I was doing well with pre-release software, I decided to try the new debian-installer. Unfortunately, it only partially worked for my needs. It didn’t appear to support reiserfs, and it failed to make swap. It’s still alpha, or pre-alpha, so I breifly used the older installation system to create the swap and reiser partitions. After that, the debian-installer was happy to continue.