Posts
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Google Talk Openness
So here’s an interesting tidbit from the Google Talk developer info: (hat tip arstechnica)
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Linux WPA
I’ve had a background task running that steals a few cycles whenever I should be sleeping and checks out what it would get to make the laptop I have from work do WPA. I have a Thinkpad R51 I inherited, and while I wait for my laptop to come in I’ve been playing around with it to see what I could get working. The work wireless network uses WPA-PSK, and that’s something that’s always been a pain for Linux. So here’s my quick description of getting the Thinkpad R51 (using the Intel ipw2200 driver) working with WPA. I’m using Ubuntu as the distro by the way, 5.04 in particular. So maybe these instructions will actually be relevant to someone!
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Google Talk: Services? Server to Server?
Okay, not that I have the time to play with something new, but I had to get this out of my system cause I haven’t seen other comments yet (Well, except this one). One of the reasons I got really jazzed about Google Talk running XMPP underneath is because XMPP is a more distributed protocol than the IM systems. What I mean by that is that there’s supposed to be server to server communication. Even though I run my own Jabber server at bitsplitter.net I can still talk to folks at jabber.org because the servers figure out how to talk. Kinda like the way email gets from one place to another. When the jabber.org server sees thatguymike@bitsplitter.net, jabber.org knows to open a connection to bitsplitter.net and start delivering messages. So not only can you create plugins to Jabber by creating things that emulate clients, you can toss a whole server into the mix. And all the other servers can communicate with it by default cause the domain based naming scheme for Jabber accounts takes care of telling the server how to find each other. Sweet. Except this doesn’t seem to be true for talk.google.com. My username is “miker@gmail.com” but the service to connect to is at talk.google.com. Hmm. Maybe miker@gmail.com@talk.google.com works? Doesn’t seem like it. Maybe from the Google Talk side I can add my bitsplitter.net account? No go, looks like the Google Talk folks have server to server communication off. That sucks. Turn it on!
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PSP 2.0 Firmware
I snagged a PSP a while ago, figuring it would be fun for games but mostly wanting to hack on it. Sony really doesn’t like people being able to do what they want with Sony devices, so the thing is rife with all sorts of crippling roadblocks to innovation (I think the technical term for this is DRM, but I just call it teh suq). Unfortunately my PSP had an updated firmware when I got it from the store, so I haven’t been able to install any software on it. I’ve been eagerly awaiting the release of the PSP 2.0 firmware (PSP World). Why? Well, as far as I know no one has a hack for these versions. However, the 2.0 firmware does have a web browser, and browsers are normally buggy and nasty bits of code. Especially in their earlier versions. I’m really curious if there are any buffer overflows or similar defects in the browser that could be used to execute arbitrary code. Anyone else wondering the same thing? Does the PSP have a non-executable stack? I haven’t been following PSP-dev so I have no idea. Of course, even with a protected stack there’s plenty of nasty kinda stuff to be done.
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Cultural Differences in Expectations of Modelled Worlds
The session on Community Modelling from BARcamp got me thinking about large scale simulations again, so I’ve been reading Terra Nova more carefully than before. This article really caught my eye today, Terra Nova: I say tomato. You say it’s a warm day. I loved this quote from the article:
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Lucky Monkeys
Apparently monkeys are being given a new drug to counteract the effects of sleep deprivation. And I’m sitting here drinking my Mountain Dew like a sucker. Now I admit it’s been a while since I’ve been to the zoo, but I do see the occasional monkey flick on one of the nature channels. It doesn’t seem to me that there would be a real market in monkey stimulants. Except maybe for the big guy, who had tanks and airplanes to contend with while carying a screaming Faye Wray. That looked pretty stressful. I just can’t see your average monkey pulling too many 30-36 hour hacking sprees. Now silicon Valley, there’s some monkeys who could use “facilitated attentional processes related to speed.” It would have come in really handy at BARcamp I bet. I say this is unfair discrimination. Why are the monkeys getting all the good drugs first?
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Baroque Barely Even Begins to Describe
There are two great posts over at Linux, Unit, /etc/:
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Process Virtualization/Host Virtualization
I’ve thought about systems like Mosix and their process migration ability with relation to moving about from one system to another. I would love to be able to just take a session from my desktop at work and start it up on my laptop or my desktop at home. I figured it would be great to have something like the Intel Personal Server to enable that. But apparently there’s another effort called SoulPad (via Rootprompt) in the works as well. It’s a migration layer for a whole hosted operating system. Nice. I would love to see it based on Bochs instead of VMware, but mostly I just want it.
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BAR Camp!!!
The kick ass folks over at SocialText are hosting BAR Camp in Palo Alto while FOO Camp is going on. Definitely very cool! I’m right down in Palo Alto, so I should be able to make it. Friday might be a bit rough… but it’s not like I have to wander too far away. Gotta figure out what to demo though… It’ll have to be some mobile sideproject. So many things to choose from!! Python hackery for Series60 is always easy to toss together. I had a good idea for an app which I’ve never implemented all the way, maybe this would be the time. I was gonna use Python and Flickr to pull thumbnails for everyone in my address book who has a Flickr account. That way little faces would pop up next to caller ID info. That’s always sexy.
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Peotry of Brains Future Salon
Next Friday (August 19th) there’s a Future Salon titled Poetry of Brains. Spencer pinged to say he was going, and it’s been too long since I’ve been to a Future Salon event. And I admit it, I’m a silicon AI fan. Despite the failure of efforts so far to create working models, I just can’t read Neuromancer and not think about how cool it would be to have an AI wandering around somewhere scheming against its creators. Or Ghost in the Shell? Come on, admit it. You thought about how to write a polymorphic self-replicating expoit program too.
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