Tue, 25 Dec 2007

Tokyo Thursday

At the start of the summer, I read an article by a journalist who successfully worked for his U.S.-based company while wandering South America for a month. No one knew that when he interviewed them over Skype, he said, he was thousands of miles away.

That sounded pretty good, so I wanted to try it. I was invited to speak on behalf of Science Commons, and Herbert had been to Japan but I hadn't, so I thought that this trip to Tokyo would be a good one to start with. Some basic notes (more later, hopefully):

Weekends are really useful. If you're working in the daytime, you'll miss out on lots of great things that can only happen in the afternoon.
You'll miss people from home. Some of them might miss you too, but you'll have less way of knowing that.
Plans are useful. Guide books that have walking tours with lists of places to go, marked on the map of the walking tours, are immensely helpful.
Seeing people takes time. If you're lucky (or if you're smart), you can arrange to see people in places you actually wanted to go in the first place. Maybe you can do what I'm doing today, which is (hopefully) seeing an act of a Kabuki play somewhere before meeting up with people, or maybe you can manage to chat with people as you walk through some nice park. Otherwise, be aware that you're adding to the places you have to go see.
Speaking French is fun, and it's one of the few activities where if people compliment you don't have to feel bad accepting the compliment.

Just before and after committing to my plane tickets, as I remarked that I was leaving Tokyo on a Saturday, I wondered, Maybe I should extend this so I have the weekend in Tokyo. The big lesson from this trip is, Yes, you need weekends. You weren't really able to use the weekend of the conference, and you could have predicted as much way earlier.

[/note/working-vacation] permanent link and comments

Mon, 24 Dec 2007

Git repository for Qtopia

(Cross-posted at http://qtopia.net/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=593&forum=1 and on the OpenMoko device owners list).

In order to make it easier to track updates to the Qtopia 4.3.1 snapshots, I made a git repository out of them.

What I'm doing is, automatically (every night), untarring the snapshots into a git repository at git://git.asheesh.org/qtopia_snapshot.git , which is readable in a gitweb at http://git.asheesh.org/?p=qtopia_snapshot.git .

Note that many snapshots contain the same contents; the automatic script only commits if the snapshots contains some new data.

My current primary interest in the Qtopia GPL edition is for my HTC Universal, which runs it very nicely including sleep and wake-up, SMS, and voice calls. My interest in the git repositories lies from wanting to publish a modified version of Qtopia that's easy to merge changes into as Trolltech updates their code. I'm sure there are Neo1973 users who would like to hack on the Trolltech code or have an easy source repository from which to get updates.

http://www.handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/Qtopia is where I'll be posting any is where I'll be posting any updates I have. If you're working on a fork of Qtopia, I'd love to give out git commit access so you can publish a branch on my git if you like.

Similarly, if people want to publish their Qtopia-based applications in a git repository, just ask me!

[/note/software] permanent link and comments

Sun, 23 Dec 2007

Linux on Unmodified Xbox

Here's a conversation I had with Lisa moments ago, mostly by accident:

<paulproteus> http://forums.xbox-scene.com/lofiversion/index.php/t71173.html <paulproteus> Er, that was meant for someone else. <paulproteus> I mean, you're welcome to read it, too. <paulproteus> It's actually interesting if you ask me why. (-; <lisaig_> Why? <paulproteus> Kevin Rose (supposedely) from TechTV (a then-famous, well, tech TV show) is looking for a co-founder of the Linux On Unmodified Xbox project, "lou-x". <paulproteus> That co-founder (supposedly; it's hard to figure who's actually who, but this one's credible) replies, "We got smoked by the Xbox-Linux project." <paulproteus> I came into the LOU-X project in late 2002 and donated bandwidth from JHU and a wiki I ran, and by mid 2003 preferring to help Xbox-Linux. <paulproteus> Actually, maybe my stint with LOU-X lasted only a month or two.

[/note/xbox-linux] permanent link and comments

Fri, 21 Dec 2007

Starting fetchvoicemail

I'm starting a new project called "fetchvoicemail". The idea is to have a little app that dials my voice mail, saves the messages, and extracts the metadata from the remote bot, and saves it all to local storage. That way I can write whatever UI I want on top of it. Think of it as POP3 for voicemail.

It seems there is already a commercial service that does this called "GotVoice Premium" that was reviewed by PC World.

So far, I'm in experiment and read mode. All I've yet discovered is that if you mess with ALSA settings, you make something strange happen so that your microphone doesn't actually record anything....

[/note/projects/fetchvoicemail] permanent link and comments

Help from Jesus

Sometimes I think it's irresistible to make fun of other people's names. Summary of the context here: Fixing the problem won't be too hard:

Jesus could look into the pyreadline source code

If he did, I wonder what he would see.

[/note/software] permanent link and comments

On marriage

Life advice:

<micah> also I cant figure out what the point of marrying or tattos are <micah> i get lover's strength from marrying i guess, but thats weak <stew> i think i assumed that tatoos were for charm, but I don't know what charm really does for you

[/scribble/marriage] permanent link and comments

Fri, 14 Dec 2007

Beautiful attacks

In Python, if you use smart libraries like SQLObject, SQLAlchemy, and Kid, you can't generate invalid SQL or HTML, so you're not vulnerable to SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and other attacks derived from input validation problems.

Unless you're really smart: