Codehelp blog - Comments

Simon: FreedomBox

nospam@example.com (Simon) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 07:56:11 +0100

IPv6 is all but dead for home consumers. It isn't supported by a large proportion of deployed ADSL routers in most countries using ADSL as their main infrastructure. So even if ISPs want to support IPV6 there is a cost barrier to many for established users. So any system would have to cope with a large proportion of IPv4 users, so it might as well be built on the common ground between IPv4 and IPv6.

anonymous coward: FreedomBox

nospam@example.com (anonymous coward) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:10:21 +0100

hey. this project is a cool thing to do.

one particular way to model things would be to have a new and very simple model of authentication:

it will model the way we as humans build trust: we are being introduced to new people by our friends. this is the way our web of trust is formed. so basically, it would mean to have on each machine links to his neighbours, friends, people the owner knows. but instead of just linking to his friends by their hostname or ip address, we could have the link contain some cryptographic information about the target of the link, to make sure the target is exactly what we mean. (technically done with a hash of the addressed content or the public key)

the idea is very powerful because it really could make the web of trust a reality. we won't need to rely on top-down public-key-infrastructure, authenticating our friends to people we don't know. instead, everything would be embedded in a web of trust, each link identifying and authenticating its target.

the interesting thing about it, i think, is how it makes it possible to deal with errors. if somebody tries to forge a document or an identity, different people will have different links to - apparently - the same thing, which indicates an inconsistency. it is then a matter of humans (and their friends) to find out what is going on. so instead of solving the problem with a "grand public key infrastructure scheme", it would be solved by those who are affected.

for the scheme to work, every link would have to contain _both_:
a) connective directives, e.g. the ip address
b) information to make sure the target is what was meant by the person who set the link.

if every link was cryptographically secured, the web of links would emerge into a web of trust with very little cost.

the overall idea was described very well on this address: http://www.waterken.com/dev/YURL/

beginning with the quote:

"The reason cryptography is not in constant use in representing trust on the Web is that there is not, yet, a weblike, decentralized infrastructure."

-- Tim Berners-Lee in "Weaving the Web"

anon: FreedomBox

nospam@example.com (anon) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:25:38 +0100

why reinvent the wheel? can't we just build on and extend bittorrent's seeding mechanism, maybe adding a supported features broadcast section?
(actually this is one area where the ideas from google's wave could help, i wonder where their source code stands on a legal and reusability standpoint)

all the best

Neil Williams: mobile broadband connections

nospam@example.com (Neil Williams) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:34:44 +0000

Yes, I know HAL is deprecated but libhal 'justworks', policykit does not and I only need this functionality for a few months - unless someone expresses an interest in the package, at which point things like that can be considered.
Other distributions are also irrelevant unless someone expresses an interest in developing this code. HAL is not going to be removed from Debian within the time that I need this code.

funbl: mobile broadband connections

nospam@example.com (funbl) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 07:29:03 +0000

In case you are not aware, HAL is deprecated (upstream and in bleeding-edge distros like Ubuntu and Fedora):

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Halsectomy

Neil Williams: mobile broadband connections

nospam@example.com (Neil Williams) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 16:07:11 +0000

First thing I tried, in various permutations. Need specialised setup commands in the chatscript.

Jonathan Carter: mobile broadband connections

nospam@example.com (Jonathan Carter) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 15:59:52 +0000

Have you tried setting the username and password to "orange" in gnome-ppp?

Neil Williams: gpdftext in Debian

nospam@example.com (Neil Williams) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:50:31 +0000

Spanish is indeed missing, not through a lack of requests. If you have time, please contribute the es translation. If not, I hope someone else will be able to do so. I have Spanish translations wherever these are available in other projects.

(Fixed a typo in the post too - lack of an 'e' on Portuguese.)

Miriam Ruiz: gpdftext in Debian

nospam@example.com (Miriam Ruiz) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:35:15 +0000

Spanish seems an important language to be missing there too, being the 3rd most important language in the Internet [1], the 2nd in terms of native speakers [2], and always listed among the most influential languages

[1] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
[2] http://www2.ignatius.edu/faculty/turner/languages.htm
[3] http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm

Neil Williams: gpdftext in Debian

nospam@example.com (Neil Williams) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 11:14:18 +0000

? gpdftext may seem lightweight but the PDF files being handled are not. Extracting the text from a complete novel of several hundred pages, applying regular expressions across each page in the entire text, all takes appreciable resources. Even on a dual-core amd64 powerhouse like my desktop machine, it takes long enough to need a progressbar, even when handling a relatively short novel. This isn't a script like pdf2text or ps2pdf, Besides, why would a user need to reformat an eBook PDF on a phone? Reformat an eBook PDF on their desktop machine for *reading* on a small device, yes. I have a Freerunner, I'd never dream of using it as a text editing platform, beyond the limits of SMS or Twitter.

OpenMoko fan: gpdftext in Debian

nospam@example.com (OpenMoko fan) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 10:05:50 +0000

Seems like this could be ideal for using on the OpenMoko FreeRunner, you might want to advertise it on the community mailing list and the draft for the next Community Updates release:

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Community_Updates

Timo Juhani Lindfors: aspire1 mouse failure

nospam@example.com (Timo Juhani Lindfors) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:04:15 +0000

Forgot to mention: I was interested in this since I wanted to switch the places of Ctrl and Fn.

Timo Juhani Lindfors: aspire1 mouse failure

nospam@example.com (Timo Juhani Lindfors) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:29:06 +0000

Keyboard, touchpad, charger and flash in AAO are connected to embedded controller WPCE775L. It can interpret any keyboard/touchpad IO before it forwards it to the CPU. It also provides a fail-safe bios upgrade: if certain keys are held during powerdown it will automatically read bios upgrade from USB storage device and flash the bios with it. (I guess this is implemented so that the EC actually sends the CPU the upgrade code and the CPU accesses USB, not the EC itself).
The cr16 instruction set used by the EC is supported by binutils.

Neil Williams: Successful start . . .

nospam@example.com (Neil Williams) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:59:35 +0000

Depends if there is a free software interface to write those files and whether someone steps up to create the patches. Please don't discuss such things here, go to the bug tracker or ask on the mailing list.
http://lists.sourceforge.net/mailman/listinfo/gpdftext-devel

emag: aspire1 mouse failure

nospam@example.com (emag) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:41:13 +0000

This happened to me on my old Toshiba laptop a few years ago. Drove me _nuts_, because like you, I rebooted, pulled the battery, upgraded, checked BIOS, tried rescue disks, etc. A USB mouse worked fine, IIRC, but the on-board trackpad seemed *dead*. Then I hit the hotkey, and suddenly I had a mouse again.

I'm pretty certain this is some low-level sw toggle that sits below the OS, which explains why nothing that high up seems to do anything. Worse: on my current Acer AspireOne, I use the "windows" key w/ F-keys to switch desktops. And *that* is right next to Fn...