So we got to meet Scott and Candice’s new baby girl last night. Her name is Grace and she is adorable. I think all of us fell in love the moment we saw her. Congrats you guys! We took a few photos.

Mike showed me this nifty tool called tinydns-rrd that can log tinydns traffic to nifty graphs. I set it up on my primary name server here. Fairly easy to setup had I taken the time to read the one paragraph of instructions

Came across a really cool project this morning called MetroPipe – Portable Virtual Privacy Machine. It basically a little version of DSL that includes firebird, thunderbird, some anon browsing thingy, and a few other utilities. The cool thing is that unlike similar projects this isn’t run off a boot CD. Instead it uses some emulator called qemu (which I’ve never heard of but looks sweet) to run the Linux distro under Windows and Linux from a USB flash drive. I tried it out and it works (slowly). It even somehow establishes a network connection and everything. Very cool!

In the office we thought it might be handy to have some sort of IM system to limit the shouting back and forth to a dull roar. We don’t want to use a public service because our company stuff shouldn’t be leaving our network. I though jabber might be kind of interesting since it’s fully OSS. I looked into JabberD 1.4 from jabber.org and it look perfect and then I found this (mirrored here) that bundled JabberD and multiuser conferences / JUD together. Just what I wanted. Cool.

I just came across a project called monotone this afternoon. It’s a source control system like CVS, Vault, etc… but done differently. Where CVS and Vault users connect to a central source code repository monotone is totally decentralized. It basically gives you a single file versioning system you run locally and then it offers features to sync your repository with others over the network using a built-in server mode. It seems to have a fairly rich feature set and my brief tinkering with it this afternoon was rather interesting.

Unlike most revision systems I have used monotone does not stamp file versions with incrementing numbers. Instead if labels each file with the SHA-1 hash of its contents. A point in time in the repository is labeled by the SHA-1 hash of all the SHA-1 hashes of the HEAD files. It doesn’t make for really obvious labels but it’s easy enough to work with due to some features that make this less cumbersome than it sounds.

As far as I can tell each user of monotone will generate a RSA key and use it to sign their changes, comments, etc. Other users will import public keys of users they trust so that those changes will make it into their code. Or something like that. I’m still a little unsure on the details. I think you can even allow trust relationships to form. This key stuff also is used by the authentication mechanisms when syncing to monotone databases. The server must have the client key on file and the client must have the server key on file. This prevents malicious users from impersonating the client or the server. Yay! The authentication is just darn cool. Configuration to monotone is done in a RC file written in LUA (a embedded scripting language). Basically you provide implementations to functions that test if user is allowed to read/write a resource. You can do all sorts of neat stuff doing this.

This software is just cool. It’s a single executable with no dependencies on weird libraries. It uses SQLite for it’s data-store and LUA for config scripting. Both are embedded in the executable. It operates in client mode or server mode too out of the single executable. I love self contained stuff like this. Oh yeah. And to top it all off it runs on all the usual operating systems including Windows and Linux. This is right up there with cvstrac

Anyways. It’s really neat looking. I think I’ll start messing with it more here. It looks like it could work really well for what I do. I’m a little worried it won’t be able to handle large binary files. Usually sqlite imposes a 1M limit per row. I believe the data stored is gzipped in the DB but still I’d be curious if I can add arbitrarily large files to the repository.

So I just finished writing jalbum4.py my next generation photo album script and updating my albums to use that. I also dropped some junk and tried to organize them in a better way. I’m pretty happy with the result so have a look.

Upgraded a.vm.bluesine.com to 512M of RAM. Things run significantly better now. Also brought b.vm.bluesine.com online although it isn’t hosting anything yet. Looking into switching to umlazi. It looks rather slick. Similar to the tool I built but more powerful.

I got my server back from Tera-byte (shipped from Edmonton) yesterday and noticed a rattling / thumping in the box. When I got it home it turned out the harddrive had fallen out of the bracket in the case and was thumping around on the motherboard. Amazingly the machine still boots and the drive still works. I just installed Debian (sarge) on it this morning using the Debian-Installer businesscard CD image and it worked like a charm. Debian installs just got a whole bunch nicer. This machine will become b.vm.bluesine.com once I get another block of IPs from Nucleus.

Also came across tpp which is a text-mode powerpoint-esque thingy written in Ruby. It does rather a nice job considering it’s just curses based. You create presentations in a simple text markup language. I think I might try this for future CLUG presentations as it would let me just do the presentation on any network connected machine using SSH.

Kyle brought this nifty project to my attention this morning. It seems this project provides a toolkit for creating your own bootable Windows CDs. The CDs include a stripped down version of Windows XP and a few stock utilities and boot and run entirely from the CD making them ideal for rescue disks, etc. The toolkit also allows you to add your own packages to the CD and has plug-and-play support for a variety of useful stuff including Putty and Mozilla. It comes with a GUI that builds your custom ISO image (using your WinXP setup disk). I tried building just a basic version and it just worked with networking and everything.

The stock image is about 150Mb which seems small. Unfortunately this means big chunks of the windows API are cut out as well as supporting stuff like fonts, etc. It also imposes a 6 process limit and reboots every 24 hours. I believe these limits are somehow imposed by Microsoft. It also doesn’t support the encrypted file systems. Too bad.

Sometime soon I’ll have to try building one loaded up with network drivers and useful utilities.

As an experiment I’ve added google ads to the bottom of all the pages on jclement.ca. I get a reasonable amount of traffic so we’ll see what happens. I’m not expecting much