The Paladin
A long time ago, actually immediately after finals my senior year in college, I headed up to Toronto with my friends Jim, Seth, and Matt. We ended up at a party with Seth’s DJ buddy Marty McFly. Amongst other people spinning at the party (than Marty) was “The Paladin”.
As Seth rightly pointed out, when you book Paladin, you book a party. I thought that the guy was fairly entertaining to watch walk around in some pseudo space suit the whole party, but as it turned out he was the headliner. And then he laid down the vinyl. Oh man. I have never heard such great mixing and music selection. I have not ever forgotten that party, nor that music. I really wish that I could hear him again, but I really haven’t been involved in this stuff in the past 5 years or so.
I have photos of this event somewhere (taken with my then-advanced 640×480 resolution camera). I will try to post them once I find them.
If this guy has any mixes online I would be indebted if someone were to point me to them. I haven’t seen them anywhere.
Linux on the Laptop
I must admit, I’m impressed. A few years ago I bought a PowerBook G4 to replace an aging Sony Vaio (PCG-FX220). The Vaio really had seen better days, the solder on the memory socket was coming loose so that only one socket now works, its a fairly old P3, and well, it looks like a beast by modern standards.
All of that aside, I picked it up and put a Debian testing install on it with Gnome as the desktop OE. I must say that I’m very impressed. Running with only 256MB of memory I am able to do everything that I want to with that laptop. I can surf, read email, and ssh off to other machines, using this one as essentially a glorified X term.
I’m not going to be giving up any of my macs any time soon to run only on this, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well it ran.
Java Development with Vim
I found a great page that has a bunch of howto’s for Java development within Vim, which is something that I do all day long.
I put this entry in hoping that I would read the article in more detail later…
Still left to do with vim:
- Figure out how to get vim to interact as the eclipse editor
- Figure out how to get vim to receive debugging information from eclipse
Update: I found a piece of software called eclim that acts like a glue between eclipse and vim, but it seems to be crashing with Java 6. I’ll probably keep playing with this because it does seem like it has potential.
Fun with Cygwin
I have been using cygwin, well because I have a windows machine basically I have to. In the same time, a co-worker pointed me at the Cygwin Putty patch. This turned out to be a must for me because I was really not liking the cygwin command interface.
One of the nice things about the setup with the Cygwin Putty patch is that you are logged into the system on console, and you’re not doing a trick to ssh back to local host. This opens up some nice possibilities because you can now interact with the system as though you are on console.
The first thing that I did was to create a gvim function:
function gvim {
$GVIM $* &
}
Where I have my gvim installation defined elsewhere. Yeah, this could be done through an alias, and I will probably switch it to that, but now at least gvim functions in cygwin like it does in a linux console situation.
Secondly, if I’m going to use windows, I’m at least going to want to have access to the windows explorer. If you’re on the system, you may as well use the parts of it that you want to your advantage. So I added this function next:
function e {
if [ -z $* ]; then
path=`cygpath -wa $PWD`;
else
path=`cygpath -wa $*`;
fi
explorer /e,/root,$path
}
This allows me to open an explorer with the root dir of the explorer window set to either:
- my current directory (if I do not give a directory as an argument)
- or a directory of my choice that I pass in with the command.
The e function has probably been one of the more useful functions for me in my daily life on a windows box.
The stars have aligned
I run Debian Unstable on a bunch of my systems except for on my laptop, where I run Ubuntu (Edgy). I don’t like to build MythTV from source because of how involved it can be and I would like to watch TV on my laptop occasionally. Now I haven’t checked in a while so I’m sure this has been out for some time now, but I’m happy to see that Edgy appears to have MythTV 0.20 to line up with the version that I’m running on the rest of my systems.
Just happy about this for a chance. On top of which all of my systems seem to be in a relatively good state. Yay.
Updating IVTV Modules in Debian
Also after a kernel upgrade, remember to build the latest modules:
module-assistant auto-install ivtv
Never mind that, just do:
apt-get install ivtv-modules-2.6.18-4-686 (or whatever kernel you’re running) as Greg says to. Just make sure that you get the firmware from the IVTV site and put it in the /lib/firmware directory. I am also putting a line for ivtv in /etc/modules and udev seems to pick it up by default.
Quick debian lirc howto
In order to remember this the next time I upgrade a kernel on my myth client and hopefully go through a little less pain:
- apt-get the latest linux kernel source
- load the default configuration for the kernel you just installed (from /boot/config-2.6.xx)
- unpack the lirc source in the /usr/src dir
- run dpkg-reconfigure lirc-modules-source and let it build the modules.
For my homebrew IR module I need to do the serial setting with the defaults for the settings. Make sure that I say no to “generate software carrier”.
OpenWRT Success
I setup my Linksys 54G router with OpenWRT on it. I had big issues getting this going at first but then I realized that I still had a bunch of junk in the NVRAM from when I had the Sveasoft firmware on it until I realized that the OpenWRT firmware met my needs much better than the Sveasoft one did and cost much less (free).
This machine is replacing an OpenBSD box that I had there as my router. Although I’m sad to see that machine go, I’m happy to have a much smaller footprint for my firewall/router.
I have the basic machine setup, a firewall setup keeping the wired network separated from the wifi network, and a dns/dhcp server running. My remaining todo list is this:
- ChilliSpot WAP Management Software
- FreeRADIUS Integration with ChilliSpot
- IPSec opening in the FW to allow me to tunnel into my internal network
- Move the router somewhere to get better reception or buy better antennas for the router
The ChilliSpot software is actually installed, I just need to take the time to learn about FreeRADIUS and RADIUS servers in general to see how they work (I also supposidly have FreeRADIUS setup on my server as well, but I haven’t attempted to authenticate off of it yet).
I’m also not planning on implementing IPSec on the router because, as was pointed out by my friend Greg in his experiment, the router really doesn’t have the power to do this. I will most likely use Open/SWAN on an internal machine and use that to connect to through the WIFI (only, not the external network for now), just making sure that the router allows the traffic through.
I also either need to move the router or find better antennae for it since I cannot get reception all over the house.