For quite a while I had been working on SUSE Linux Enterprise Thin Client, which is Novell’s diskful Thin Client solution. It had a lot of challenging aspects, not least of which was fitting a minimal GNOME environment + apps onto 128MB of flash. That work is mostly wrapping up, though, and I’ve moved to a new team.
At the beginning of the month I started working on SUSE Studio, which is a web-based appliance builder for SUSE. I wanted to get out of my comfort zone a little, and it hasn’t disappointed there. We’re using RoR, which I am really enjoying so far. Ruby was ridiculously easy to pick up. Rails confused me at first with the amount of magic that it does behind-the-scenes, but there is a lot of information on how that works so getting up to speed wasn’t too bad. I bought Agile Web Development with Rails which has been very helpful as well.
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I’ve updated the Novell Bugzilla Autologin greasemonkey script again. Just click here to upgrade your current version or install it for the first time. You of course need greasemonkey installed.
I’ve removed the “go to login page” step. It now just logs in directly via AJAX and refreshes your current page. It has also been rewritten to use jQuery (and jQuery.blockUI) which cleaned things up a bit and gives a nicer “please wait” message 
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I saw the following somewhat-strange line in my web server logs today:
216.34.181.45 - - [25/Aug/2008:10:23:51 -0500] “GET http://tech.slashdot.org/ok.txt HTTP/1.0″ 401 523 “-” “libwww-perl/5.812″
That web server is running on the IP of my home router. The requesting IP appears to be a Slashdot machine. My guess is that they are trying to find out who accesses their site through an open proxy. But why? Is there another reason they might send a request like that? Do they ban proxies if they find one?
UPDATE: Apparently, they do in fact ban open proxies (according to this). Supposedly a lot of comment spam comes from them. I wonder if it would help blogs at all to do something similar?
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A while back I posted about Mango Lassi and how awesome it was compared to synergy. I still think it is awesome, but every now and then something would freak it out and cause the association between machines to drop. I’ve fixed at least one cause of that problem now and published it in a git repo here: http://www.snorp.net/git/mango-lassi.git/
BTW, thanks for all of the great comments on the NAS situation. I’m looking at several of the options mentioned there along with a couple others. I think I’ve ruled out rolling my own, though, as I don’t want yet another linux box to maintain.
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Dear Lazyweb,
Does anyone have suggestions on what to use for centralized storage at home? I have a lot of music/photos here piling up and would like to put them on some energy-efficient NAS box. Ideally it would have some sort of of built-in backup solution as well. A lot of the NAS-in-a-box solutions seem to have RAID 1, but that really only helps for HA. I am more concerned with never ever losing this stuff than having it available 24/7.
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There has been a lot of buzz lately about the Firefox 3 fsync issue. The work I’m doing these days has me doing a lot of long-running disk-bound activies, so this one hurts me pretty bad. Firefox would stop responding for 30-40s at a time while my job was running in the background, which I think is pretty unacceptable. I have worked around it in the (hopefully) short-term with a LD_PRELOAD hack. I’ve posted it here in case anyone else finds it useful. Just unpack, cd to the directory, and ‘make && make install’ (not as root). A word of warning, though: if it breaks you get to keep both pieces. Kudos to Aaron for adding the ‘make install’ bits to the Makefile
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Ever since zypper came along I hated it. It was slow, buggy, and used a ton of resources.
Well, I installed openSUSE 11.0b3 yesterday and the zypper/libzypp there is massively improved. I don’t think it’s possible to overstate just how much of an improvement it really is. Normally I just make rcd/rug work on whatever new release comes along and continue using that. Zypper and PackageKit are so good now that I’m giving that up. So congratulations to the zypp team — I know they caught a lot of flack in the past, but I think this release will finally put a lot of that to rest.
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The other day I looked into switching away from synergy to Mango Lassi. I only use it between two machines, so I figured my use case was simple enough that it should work at this stage. I was not disappointed. I was getting some very strange behavior with synergy and vmware, and Mango Lassi has none of that. Plus it gives an OSD telling you which machine the mouse/keyboard are being used on, which is a nice perk.
Anyway, I was so happy with it that I made packages for openSUSE. You can get it from my build service repository.
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Recently I’ve had a couple of ideas for a project (like I need another one of those). The goal would be to make a library which allows applications to easily track their user’s interactions and log them in a central location. Project maintainers/contributors could then look at the collected data to help them make decisions about what they should be spending time on. For instance, a media player might log what types of files are played or if it was synced to an iPod-like device.
As far as technical hurdles go, doing something like this is pretty easy. The main questions I have are around the kind of policies that should exist for such a thing. Obviously, participation should be opt-in. But should it be on a per-app basis, or per-user? Or both? If it is per-app, you would likely get bombarded with a prompt on the first run of every app that uses this system. If that is a small number it might be ok, but hopefully that wouldn’t be the case :). On the other hand, maybe you don’t want certain sensitive applications (email client?) ever sending info.
Then there’s the question of who should have access to the data. My feeling is that the user should always be able to see everything that he has sent. But should he also be able to see everyone else’s individual data? What about the aggregated data? That leads me to the next question. Should there be a cookie that identifies a single user throughout all applications? Or even a cookie per-application? I think having a cookie across all applications would definitely make the data more useful, but I’m not sure if people would be opposed to such a thing. Of course, this leads to yet another question. How do we keep personal information out? I don’t believe there is a technical solution to keep things like this from making its way in. Developers will need to be very careful, and that kind of bothers me. If all of the data on the server is available to everyone then maybe public scrutiny will help keep things in check, but who knows.
These are just a few of the questions I have come up with, and I am sure others can think of plenty more. Is it possible to come up with something that benefits the development community without infringing on user’s privacy? Even so, would users participate? Comments are open.
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