Tonight’s HackNight was pretty slow. Marsh has been sick, Wilson had been using the cafe as an office all day and bailed out early (before 5!), and Casey, Michael and Peter figured they could just check in from the train (next week they want to do a video conference). Luckily, Joe showed up, so it wasn’t just me n Rob overdosing on coffee and donuts. We ended up continuing the discussion on VMWare from a few weeks ago, but we didn’t really get any real work done.
On another note, I broke down and ordered a Zipit Messenger last night. Looking at the various options for backlighting, it looks like woven fiber optics and LED would provide a good light with less power than adding an EL panel and inverter. Hopefully there will be enough room in the shell to cram in all the needed parts. If not, I suppose I could just make a new one.
The Washington Mutual Bank on Broadway has a free scale. While I was standing around waiting for Rob to do his bank biz, I stepped on the scale, took my bag off and noticed a delta of 10lbs. After I stepped off the scale, someone behind me stepped up and did the same thing. He was carrying five pounds worth of stuff. Rob finished up with his teller and found that he was carrying nine.
How much crap are you carrying around?
Aibohack has instructions for re-flashing your Zipit Instant Messenger to run a bit more user-unfriendly but definitely hackable version of Linux (the Zipit already runs Linux). I don’t have one yet, but having a pocket SSH console with qwerty does seem pretty cool (s60 putty really isn’t doing it for me). I think I would probably pick one up today if it had a backlight, because although taking my laptop to a dark bar with WiFi always seems like a good idea at the time, it generally ends in a dent or broken plastic. Hm… Maybe with something like the Lik Sang Afterburner Kit…
Thanks go to hackaday for this one!
If you’re using AIM for IM, you should go download an Off-the-Record Messaging Proxy or pick up a client that uses it. OSX people can go grab the Adium Beta. OTR makes end-to-end encrypted client chat Just Work, and it does it in a pretty clean way. If you want to see why this is better/different from all the other approaches, go read the docs.
This May, I will be on a panel at MobiHoc, smackdab in the middle of flatland. Frank pointed out that it’s right next to Terre Haute, Indiana. I had no idea. I will take pictures.
Closer to home, in June, I will be speaking at Gnomedex, a geekathon by the folks at lockergnome
Also in the mail today, WSFII 2006 is going to be held in India, possibly Goa. Planning and Prepcon will be held at this years london summit, WSFII 2005 in October.
Tonight I got to show off a neat little project I’ve been working on. It’s a web based Rendezvous beacon catcher that uses the Apple mDNS tools. Mostly a proof-of-concept (slow, kludgy, really bad code), it’s designed to run on a linux AP or link local host on a wireless network and pick up any service announcements it sees on the multicast. Following all of the rules of the demo, it broke the second I let someone else try it. It looks like the bug is an easy one, so I should be able to fix it and have a bit more functionality to bring next week. Adding to the weird/dumbness of this particular task, the whole thing is running on Metrix Pebble under Virtual PC on my new 12″ iBook. It’s really nice to have spare cycles again…
Also discussed, was the possible r00ting of casey’s light switches, irritating problems with VirtualPC (the host can’t talk to it’s VMs over the virtual switch), the ever degrading status of snownet, and how it seems to be New Laptop Month in SeattleTM (there were 4 new laptops at the table, and 3 were *Books).
As usual, the coffee was quite tasty and tonight’s most ordered food item was Apple Fritter Space Rocks.
Casey’s train shenanigans are documented on Seattlest today. Last week he had 6 people connecting through his mobile node… I wonder how many folks with laptops will be cramming into Car 403 tonight?
I didn’t make it to HackNight this week, but Rob has the details here.
As a followup to my earlier post, StarOS, Not your friend., a very interesting post to the BAWUG list has Lonnie’s response.
There’s a lot of Drama(tm) in the wireless world. Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s not, but it definitely adds to the noise floor and reduces everyone’s signal. Maybe someday there will be a PayPerView grudge match on SeattleWireless TV.
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