Some irritating news in the wireless world.

This kind of whining sounds alot like record companies “losing” millions because of Napster. How can we make people realize that you can’t lose money on a service you didn’t provide? That just because you think you have a monopoly, noone is obliged to use your service / product / ideology?

Of course, airports aren’t exactly ‘public property’… I wonder how the FCC will side with interfering with use of the public airwaves. There’s a reason that the 2.4Ghz band was deregulated…

What about peer-to-peer networking? Or even Bluetooth? Are we going to start seeing 802.11 and PCS jammers installed in every terminal?

Related link: http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0%2c4586%2c2686947%2c00.html?chkpt=zdnn_r…

Yes, unapproved third-party security auditing and reconnaissance for cash can be profitable! But would you dare go public? Network Solutions already has.

Have you ever noticed how Apache annoyingly chops off filenames in directory listings?

You can always make it show the full name by changing IndexOptions line in httpd.conf:

IndexOptions FancyIndexing NameWidth=*

While you’re at it, you might find this tweak useful. Many people (myself included) don’t want to allow directory indexing on /home/*/public_html by default, so users don’t “accidentally” publish something just by copying it to their public_html directory. So, the typical user entry in httpd.conf looks something like this:

<Directory /home/*/public_html>
    AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
    Options MultiViews FollowSymLinks Includes
</Directory>

…with some LIMIT lines thrown in for good measure. The problem is that sometimes you WANT to turn on indexing (say, for a local file repository.) You could hack the httpd.conf to allow this in each case… However, if you add a couple of entries to the AllowOverride line:

<Directory /home/*/public_html>
    AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit Options Indexes
    Options MultiViews Includes
</Directory>

…then you can turn on and off directory listings at will with a per-directory .htaccess file. Create an .htaccess in each directory that you want to enable indexing with this line in it:

Options Indexes

And magically, these directories are now indexed. There’s the added bonus that you can now use AddDescription lines to this .htaccess file, like so:

Options Indexes
AddDescription "Lucent Wavelan drivers" wavelan
AddDescription "Nessus security scanner" nessus
AddDescription "OpenSSH and Libraries" ssh
AddDescription "Some photos" pix

These descriptions will now show up under the “Description” column in your browser. And the big bonus: your users can do this without ever bothering you for sysadmin intervention.

I like to think of myself as a competent Unix Admin. Over time, I’ve built what most people think of as an esoteric vernacular. Stuff like:

cd /home; du -sk * |sort -rn |head -10 > ~/hitlist.txt

just rolls off my fingers with scarcely a conscious thought. Exotic and little known switches of the various nuggets that make up the Unix toolbox are second nature:

tar cvf - htdocs/ |ssh -2 -C -c none -x outland tar vxf -

(And don’t forget the -C or we’ll be here all night!) I know I’ve still got a long way to go towards Mastery, but I’m happy with the progress I’m making.

So why is it that whenever I start ‘xchat’, I end up cowering in a corner?

Why is IRC so horribly complex? Exactly what is the difference between ’secret’, ‘private’, ‘invite only’, and ‘moderated’ channels? Why should anyone ever need to ‘kick’ or ‘ban’ a user from a channel, when they can just ‘ignore’ them?

And don’t get me started on the typical ircd configuration. Why does the ircd.conf read like a badly hand-hacked sendmail.cf at the wrong end of a UUCP line after 4 consecutive double espresso’s at 11:45 on a Friday night?

I’m astounded that the black art of IRC is still with us. Really, all I want to do is talk to a couple of friends, and occasionally get into a group discussion. A file transfer or two might be nice as well.

Enter the world of AIM.

I just got gaim running on my workstation. It’s really pretty spiffy. Simple, intuitive, and reliable. Group chats are easy. I really like knowing instantly when my ‘buddies’ are available for consultation. And with perl’s Net::AIM, the bizarre implications of random bits of perl to IM are simply staggering (yeah, I know that IRC has been instrumental in bringing the world the miracle of the Infobot, but I’m trying to make a point here.)

The point is, gaim is easy. Which I suppose is the whole point of America Online. And as far as I can tell (with the exception of the AIM transport for Jabber), AOL has something of a monopoly on the IM world.

Where are the free AIM-like servers? I’d love to cut AOL out of the IM loop and run my own in-house IM server. Hell, give it a gateway to IRC so you can use either tool to talk to each other. “But Jabber does all this!”, you say.

Have you tried compiling the AIM transport for Jabber lately? What if I just want simple instant messaging capabilities, without the whole ever-shifting Jabber infrastructure to cope with?

This is rapidly turning into a pointless rant (which is why I’ve weblogged it.) I’m just surprised that in this age of distributed Quake 3 Arena, getting a little window to talk to my buddies has to involve a steep learning curve, or registering my identity with “America’s #1 Internet Service Provider”.