Kurt's Weblog

Last week, I ran into some odd behavior from the mac. I wanted to hook up a machine to the internet via the 2nd ethernet port on my desktop machine. I opened up the System Preferences application and went to networking. I use the en0 ethernet interface for the my connection inside the work firewall, so I need a different subnet. 10.x.x.x should be fine, so I setup en1 as 10.0.0.1. Then I went to Sharing-Internet and turned it on. Then I got a message saying that I have to turn on "Personal Web Sharing" so that the shared network can use the web. WHAT?. That is crazy. I then took a look at the output from ifconfig and discovered that dhcp has setup this new box at 192.168.2.3 (not on 10.0.0.x like I wanted). Look below and see that en1 has both 192.168.2.1 and 10.0.0.1. I now know that the mac can support multiple IP addresses on the same interface, but that was not what I was trying to do. At least it works for this instance. But what happens if in the future I must be able to pick the address range for dhcp? I guess this is when Apple tries to make me buy OSX Server. They should just roll the server capabilities into standard OSX and do away with making admin life difficult.

en1: flags=8863 mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.2.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.2.255
        inet6 fe80::216:cbff:fe37:6daf%en1 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5 
        inet 10.0.0.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 10.0.0.255
        ether 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx 
        media: autoselect (100baseTX ) status: active
        supported media: none autoselect 10baseT/UTP  
              ...  1000baseT 
en2: flags=8863 mtu 1500
        ether 00:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx 
        media: autoselect () status: inactive
        supported media: autoselect

Ugh... they are back. house centipedes. I hadn't seen the part before about them biting.

I am getting closer to having continuous build integration working (with quite a bit of help from Roland). I've been getting fink pacages crafted for the project. I had to update trac to 0.9.5 (from 0.9) and made the package force using the sqlite3 database format. I also have packages for bitten and trac webadmin.

• trac-py.info
• tracwebadmin-py.info
• bitten-py.info

http://www.scipy.org/SciPy2006/TutorialSessions - I wish I was going!

• "3D visualization in Python using tvtk and MayaVi"
• "Scientific Data Analysis and Visualization using IPython and Matplotlib."
• "Building Scientific Applications using the Enthought Tool Suite (Envisage, Traits, Chaco, etc.)"
• "NumPy (migration from Numarray & Numeric, overview of NumPy)"

I finally got around to submitting seismic-py to freshmeat. I got motivated by reading back through a paper before resubmitting it and realized that I need to change the segy-py to seismic-py and might as well send it to freshmeat at the same time. The tar is still named segy-py, but hopefully I will get around to fixing that soon.

http://freshmeat.net/projects/seismic-py

Freshmeat does not seem to have a place to put the link to the svn repository, so it is here: https://cowfish.unh.edu/projects/seismic-py/. Be warned that the svn trunk is currently very messy. I am trying to restructure the project to really look like a python module and I am nowhere near done.

I just found out that fink has a non-sourceforge home page:

http://finkproject.org/

There are many stories around of VMware being on the way for Mac OSX. Gimme! I am feed up with virtual PC.

http://blog.vrplumber.com/1524... more stuff for me to look at. The backlog just keeps growing.

I am currently having big issues with Apples Mail.app and iCal. I am just about at the point where I will be ditching them for Thunderbird and Sunbird. Well, maybe Mail.app can stay. Here is the solution for Mail.app from Apple's web sight:

1. Click "Show certificate" when Mail asks if you want to accept the certificate.
2. Press the Option key while dragging the certificate to the desktop. The certificate's icon appears on the desktop.
3. Add the certificate to your keychain by dragging its icon on top of Keychain Access. Tip: Keychain Access is located in the Utilities folder (/Applications/Utilities).
4. When Keychain Access opens, you may be prompted to select which keychain to import to. If this happens, choose a keychain and also select X509 Anchors.

Now why can't iCal cope with SSL? Apple discussion thread from MacLemmon... now how do I find the bug?

  The problem is that iCal does not allow you to subscribe to a
  calendar over https since it tells you that iCal doesn't recognize
  the URL scheme starting with https.



  This definitely is a BUG in iCal. I have filed this bug to Apple
  Radar on November 7th 2005 (4332054). Yes, almost half a year ago
  and it has been declared duplicate. It just hasn't been fixed by
  now.



  Apple, this should really be a simple fix. More than 5 months to
  correct this just is not acceptable.

http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/407: Debian Administration - Creating desktop notifications

I had never heard of xosd before, but it is in fink. I have to give osd_cat a try sometime.

AFS: network filesystem beyond NFS weaknesses... okay, so I loved using AFS both at Stanford and CMU. Do you know what zephyr++ means? The only thing that I was not in to was kerberos tickets running out after 24 hours.

Sean Kelly has now produced two videos. I didn't know about the 2nd until Myche pointed me to it. My real question is how did produce it?

• http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov
• http://www.archive.org/details/SeanKellyGettingYourFeetWetwithPlone

Why can't I do all that in under an hour?

I am always looking for better shoreline data...

Data: Improved WVS? Rival EVS? What's Going On?

Prototype Global Shoreline Data (Satellite Derived High Water Line Data)

This just made slashdot...

Carnegie Mellon Researchers Teach Computers To Perceive Three Dimensions in 2-D Images - Program Automatically Generates 3-D Models From a Single Photograph

Today I had some fun with C++. Roland and I want a class behaves sort of like the C++ ostream concept. At first that seemed pretty easy. I figured I'd go look at the gcc ostream header and I'd be ready to go. I did alright creating operator<< functions, but hit the wall when I tried to make an endl manipulator. So back to ostream I went...

  template<typename _CharT, typename _Traits>
    basic_ostream<_CharT, _Traits>& 
    endl(basic_ostream<_CharT, _Traits>& __os)
    { return flush(__os.put(__os.widen('\n'))); }

Got that? Yeah, that is what I thought. A whole lot of template magic. I finally bit the bullet and posted to comp.lang.c++. My usual experience with posting there is not that productive. But then again, who is really reading net news these days? I pretty much switched to just a couple mailing lists back in 1995. Well, turns out the folks in comp.lang.c++ were awesome. In an hour and a half with 9 messages I had a working solution. They all wanted ostream, but here is my ostream-less solution.

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
class slog {};



slog& operator<<(slog&s, slog&(*manip)(slog&));
slog& operator<< (slog &s, const int &r);



slog& endl(slog& s) {
  std::cerr << "endl called" << std::endl;
  return s;
}



slog& operator<<(slog&s, slog&(*manip)(slog&)) {
  std::cerr <<"manip op\n";
  return manip(s);
}



slog& operator<< (slog &s, const int &r) {
  std::cerr << "Hello: " << r << std::endl;
  return s;
}



int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
  slog log;
  log << 1 << 2;
  log << 3;
  log << endl;
  return (EXIT_SUCCESS);
}

Here is what it does when it runs.

make && ./slogcxx-test
g++ -o slogcxx-test slogcxx.cpp -Wall -g
Hello: 1
Hello: 2
Hello: 3
manip op
endl called

Doesn't actually do what I was aiming for, but does a nice job of proving that I can have things like stream manipulators. Definitely a learning experiences. It is always wild to see what is going on inside the compiler headers.

Migrating from x86 to PowerPC, Part 1: Robots and networked appliances on a shoestring Low-cost real-time development with Linux on PowerPC [ibm developer works]

Finally... Google SketchUp for the Mac

I gave buildbot and cruisecontrol. I was a bit frustrated with the two of them. Cruisecontrol didn't build and I'm not an expert at Java build error messages. Buildbot's configation system is pretty confusing. Maybe if there was a tutorial for svn+c++ and svn+python projects all on one host, then I could at least give it a go.

I posted to the trac mailing list and quickly got some good feed back:

• Lots of comments to use bitten
• DamageControl's matrix lists a good number of systems.

I hope bitten does the trick!

emacs 22 new features is worth a read.

This is on me "to read" list...

Abusing Mach on Mac OS X by nemo@felinemenace.org

'Red tide' brings shellfishing ban

Chris Nash, the shellfish program manager for the N.H. Department of
Environmental Services, said hundreds of thousands of gallons of
sewage flowed into offshore areas during the recent rainfalls.



Following that event, paralytic shellfish poisoning - commonly
referred to as "red tide" - was detected, resulting in the May 3
closing of shellfishing of all species in the New Hampshire tidal
waters of Little Harbor, Hampton/Seabrook, Great Bay, Little Bay, the
Bellamy River and near shore areas of the Atlantic Coast.

DIY GPS logger [make.com]

Lassen iQ FAT16 Data Logger

Take a Lassen iQ, an SD memory card, a LPC2138 ARM processor, mix in
some FAT16 firmware and you get the new GPS logger from Spark Fun
Electronics. The Lassen iQ FAT16 Datalogger takes the GPS data from
the Lassen iQ and records it onto the SD card in pure, beautiful text
file format. This means you can record up to 440 hours onto a 256
megabyte SD card. That's two and a half weeks of every-second GPS
location data!



Pete also got a bit spunky and programmed in a KML mode. This mode
interfaces nearly directly with Google Earth. Pull the SD card, insert
it into a card reader, cut and paste the specially formatted data into
a KML file, and wammo - you can see what Casey did over lunch with a
satellite image overlay. Take a look at the example screen shot. You
can see what lane Casey was in! When he stopped at the light, his data
points piled up. Fancy. Real fancy. Speed is also datalogged - it's
like Big Brother in the palm of your hand...  

http://www.panbo.com/yae/archives/001310.html

I'm pretty sure that Maptech was the first to add panoramic photos to
its electronic charts, but now they're everywhere. Nobletec Passport
Deluxe, Navionics Platinum, C-Map MAX, and Garmin BlueChart G2 all
have their own (or licensed) panoramas. But Maptech has upped the
ante, at least on the SRN/i3, figuring out how to georeference the
whole photos, not just where they were taken, so your boat can be
overlaid on them. It is not critical for navigation, but it is cool.

GeoZui3D did this quite a while ago, but is not use that heavily outside of NOAA and UNH. And hey, Viz and VEVI did this type of thing back in 1995-2000.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1974390,00.asp

What ever happened to the virtual reality, 3D world of the web? Back
in the late 90s, all the hype was about VRML-Virtual Reality Markup
Language-which would turn the web into an immersive environment that
you'd maneuver around to get to the information you wanted. We're here
to tell you that the reports of the 3D web's death are greatly
exaggerated. As evidence, we present three 3D browsers that will use
that graphics card for something other than gaming: 3B, Browse3D, and
SphereXPlorer.



As further proof that the 3D web isn't dead, an XML format called
3D-a free run-time architecture that can "represent and communicate
3D scenes and objects using XML"- is starting to take hold. You can
find more info about it from The Web3D Consortium which is very active
in its efforts to add one more dimension to the web as we know
it. There's even a mobile browser for X3D, so that you could, for
example, navigate around a city you're visiting on your handheld PC.
...

See what New Hampshire looked like in 1893... http://historical.maptech.com/

As a special service to the mapping community, Maptech is proud to
host this collection of historic USGS topographic maps. This ongoing
project is headed by historian Christopher Marshall and compiled
through the efforts of many individuals. We are honored to be the
stewards of this fine collection, making it available to all via the
World Wide Web.



For a discussion on the evolution of USGS maps, please check out the
section on "Historic Topographic Maps". Select "About the Collection"
for information on how you can help expand this library. Maps are
scanned and processed by volunteers who share an interest in historic
maps. Maptech sponsors their efforts by providing free web space for
this collection.

Instructables: step-by-step collaboration

Stephen just lent Roland and I a copy of this cd. Damn! How cool is this. memtest and much more.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

Seems like it has virus checkers and more.

Student projects 5: ship.bldg

I just went through a batch of attempted Linux installs. I haven't done this in about 2 years. I used to be a Mandrake fan, but have become frustrated with the RPM packaging system. I want a system for at work that would be along the lines of what the IT guys prefer. I dropped and talked to them. I got the suggestion of trying CentOS. After downloading the latest 4 CD distribution, I gave it a go. It feels like a RedHat/Fedora system. It installed alright on one older laptop, but did not quite get the video right. The other older HP laptop, it completely failed. On the machine where it installed, it was a bit behind on the compilers of where I would want to be and I was not sure how upgrade it or was I at the latest? I figured I'd give Fedora Core 5 a go on both laptops. I had basically the same results as CentOS, but the installer was a bit slicker. Also, I was able to figure out what I had done wrong with the video (the old Dell laptop is only happy in 1600x1200 mode). With that installed and an update done, the laptop was deployed to the field where it will be a data logger. I like older laptops mostly because they have actual serial RS232 serial ports. USB-to-RS232 adapters are not that fun.

I then had the HP laptop left. I tried Knoppix to see if I could get a Linux system fully working. After popping in knoppix and waiting a few minutes, I did indeed have a happily working Linux system. I then used it on a cranky server down the hall that would not boot off of it's current configuration. Knoppix rocks!

Finally I have been wondering about Ubuntu, which has been getting a lot of hype lately. I was lent a 5.05 DVD. After hours of grinding, I decided the old laptop's DVD reader might just be a little too old. Looking at the ubuntu web site, I found the 1 CD Live/Install disk (6.06 Dapper Drake). After the download and burn, I dropped the CD in and had a working system just like knoppix with the addition of an install icon on the desktop. I clicked that and the install was a snap.

The install software icon was somewhat helpful, but I had to dig into the system menu to find a package manager (System - Admin - Synaptic). Then I was able to find the python serial module. Now the machine is happily logging serial data.

How to install ANYTHING in Ubuntu

I tried an aqua emacs a couple years ago and was very disappointed. Perhaps now is a good time to try again.

http://aquamacs.org/

I ran back into this via this article: aging powerbook upgrade.

I always like it when people respond to posts I make about things and I especially appreciate it when it is the author or creator! I got this one today (which Apple's mail.app called SPAM... boo hiss) from the author of Shed Skin. I stand corrected. All my main machines are ppc, so I will have to sometime log into a remote x86 box and give it a try.

	From: 	  mark.dufour 
	Subject: 	shed skin
	Date: 	June 5, 2006 12:05:29 PM EDT
	To: 	  kdschwehr@ucsd.edu



Hello Kurt,



Looking for my own compiler, I came across a link from your blog (thanks! :D):



http://schwehr.org/blog/archives/2005-09.html



| "Sounds like what what was done eith JIT with Java."



However, this is not true: SS is a completely _static_ compiler,
comparable to C++ compilers. A JIT compiler performs optimizations
during run-time. Psyco is more of a a JIT (and specializing) compiler
for Python.



Btw, if you look at my thesis at mark.dufour.googlepages.com, you can
see that code runs on average 12 times faster using SS than when using
Psyco. But this is mostly due to the fact that Psyco does not optimize
the x86 code it directly emits.



Thanks again, and please refer to mark.dufour.googlepages.com if you
mention SS again, as its the new homepage since a few weeks.



Thanks,
Mark.