Here’s me, wandering around on a Quake map. Or is it Half-Life? Cube? Counterstrike? Tomb Raider? Doom?

It’s dark. There are spots of reds or oranges, flashes of metallic blues and grays, and either green goop or red lava to fall into. Which room am I in? I don’t know. Which level? No idea. Which game?

Dancer (my husband) knows. He can glance at my screen and tell me how to get to the recharge point. ‘You go right from there, third left, keep going till you get to the lab, then go down the stairs. You should know the way from there.’

Lab? Which room was the lab? My brain is busy. I’m checking for movement, watching patterns of light and shade. I’m faster at spotting monsters than he is, and I have the patience and the reactions to be a good sniper. If I don’t get lost going between snipe spots. But I get lost.

Give me a map and I’m fine. Sometimes all it takes is a glance at a map, so I have an idea of the overall structure of the area. Once I have the top-down view to hook it onto, I know where I’m going and what I’m doing. Most of the first-person shooters don’t provide maps. Why not? Is there a technical reason? Or is it part of the ‘immersion’?

Some people think in spatial relationships, navigating by creating a grid in their head and mapping the game world onto that. They just know that this level is shaped like a hexagon with links at the north-east and south-east edges. Others don’t. Some navigate by landmarks - and games can’t provide the quality of landmark that the real world has. Have you ever smelt a particular scent and known just where you must be?

People who can’t make mental maps of game worlds are at a distinct disadvantage in first person shooters - especially in capture-the-flag or fox-and-hounds sorts of games.

Cycling maps, usually touted as a way to resolve this disadvantage, actually makes it worse for me. Just as I’m starting to get a feel for the layout of the level, it’s gone and I’m back at square one. Meanwhile, those with the right mindset have it figured out in the first round on the new map. Or that’s what they say.

Having a map available would resolve much of this disadvantage. Unless you are intentionally selecting for spatially-oriented minds (and it’s fine if you are, you have to make design decisions somewhere!), consider making a map available.

And watch your back. I’m hiding up here, waiting for you.

Do you need a map? Do you want maps to be available? How does your mind think?

Tomorrow I go up to Brisbane (Australia) to see my dying grandmother.

She was born in the first decade of the 20th Century, and was a young mother during the Great Depression. She remembers hearing her first radio and seeing her first car.

I was born the year man walked on the moon. I remember seeing my first VCR, and watching the first Space Shuttle mission. It’s not exactly the same thing as major technological changes go.

She grew up and got married in a time when the husband paid all the bills. If the bills weren’t paid, the tradesman who came to shut off the gas expected that Nan didn’t know the bill hadn’t been paid, and would come back tomorrow to see if she’d managed to get money from her husband. That was normal. When my grandfather divorced her, she had to be taught how to write a cheque. Later, she had to learn to cope with ATMs.

I’m a programmer and a writer. I earn my own money, negotiate my own contracts, and know the difference between stocks and bonds. If my bills aren’t paid, it’s my problem.

By the time she was my age, my Nan had two daughters. She would have two more, later. Her parents helped her choose her husband, and she would have had no financial security if she hadn’t married.

I have access to reliable, reasonably safe birth control. I am married, but if I had not chosen to, noone would have even raised an eyebrow.

She doesn’t know how to use a computer, and even if she were well enough, probably wouldn’t try.

I’m writing a book that neither she nor any of her children will understand. Some of her other grandchildren will, though.

She’s proud of me.

I’m proud of her.

I’m also grateful to her and her generation, and to my parents’ generation.

Nan supported Grandad, in an era without takeaway food or washing machines. In an era when drying the clothes in winter meant putting them in front of the fireplace even if everyone was cold.

Grandad helped develop the towns and cities that I have lived in. His generation built irrigation systems, road networks, rail networks, and housing that I rely on now.
My parents’ generation built electrical infrastructure, and improved on the systems Grandad and his contemporaries put in place.

Now its our turn. We’re relying on our parents and grandparents’ work. We’re building communications, and turning it into infrastructure.

And thanks to our parents and grandparents, we can do it without tying half the population to copper washbasins and wood stoves. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d rather be coding!

Thanks, Nan.

I love you.

Die peacefully, and know you are loved and will be missed.

I am interested in discussion of the legacy our parents and grandparents provided us, and on building on that legacy.

When I switched over to Linux full-time back in 1998, I had a run-in with a particular video card manufacturer. My how times have changed.

Yes, this manufacturer eventually released beta, binary-only drivers for Linux. No, they never followed up on their pledge to send me a prerelease GeForce 2 (wow, this was a while ago!) to make up for my pain and suffering with the TNT 2 driver situation. No, they never released source code for their 2D drivers. (That’s two fibs from one marketing guy — you’d think I’d learned my lesson.)

One of my points in pushing for open drivers was that the world of free Unix is not limited to Linux. It’s nice to see the manufacturer finally supporting FreeBSD. Of course, the closed source drivers may be causing the kernel swap daemon to crash. That’s unfixable; how are kernel developers to debug code they can’t read? Since this has bitten me several times in the past months, the binary-drivers are next to useless.

Far be it from me to rant and rave about just one video card manufacturer, though — especially as this all happened on the x86 platform. Back to the laptop.

To write effectively about Linux, I need to run it on my laptop. I’m also interested in Linux on alternate platforms (to become an article series). Not least, Mac OS X isn’t Free enough for day-to-day use. I’ve been pleased with Gentoo GNU/Linux on a server, so it seemed like a natural fit.

I found it pleasing that Apple is using an alternate video card manufacturer in their laptops. This is nice hardware; I’m very pleased. The company has been helping a couple of XFree86 developers write drivers for the video chipsets.

Unfortunately, the situation is much, much worse on the PPC platform. Not only are there many times fewer developers, but even though the company has recently released binary-only drivers, they support x86 only!

I’m writing this on an operating system built on a free Unix. I’m hardly the only person running an operating system composed of or including a free Unix on the PPC platform. My colleague Edd, for example, is running Debian PPC on his iBook. For the sake of argument, I’ll also consider everyone running Mac OS X to be another vote in favor of the viability of Unix on PPC. (You can’t swing a meerkat in my group at O’Reilly without hitting several people running some sort of Unix.)

Here’s my postulate. Linux is worth supporting, as evidenced by quasi-open and truly open and even binary only drivers. Unix on PPC is viable, with so many people switching and quite a few weirdoes like me running Linux. Thus, does it not make sense that Linux PPC deserves a little support, let alone the venerable BSDs?

After four years of running Linux on my desktop, I’m used to being treated like a second-class citizen. Now that I’m on a different platform, I’m even lower on the ladder.

Hardware Manufacturers, wise up! If you’re going to support a platform (either hardware or software), don’t do it halfway.

Update, 02 December 2002: I forgot to mention the video card in question.

Am I nutty, or am I on to something here?

Well, its been three years since Betsy Waliszewski started promoting Perl’s prowess through this extremely popular series of success stories. 25 stories and 3 volumes later we can honestly say that Perl has gained, and continues to gain widespread acceptance as an important programming component in mission-critical applications within many small, medium, and large enterprises.

At O’Reilly, we’ve believed in Perl from the beginning and feel proud that we’ve played a part (some would even say a large part) in its rise to acclaim, and its with that sense of pride and a good amount of joy that I’m honored to post this first tale in the next generation of Perl Success Stories.

Luis Muñoz, a Systems Manager at Cantv.net, sent this story which details how Perl enabled him and his staff of *zero* to streamline and automate provisioning systems at the largest ISP in Venezuela. ¡Viva Perl!

Perl: A Jewel for an ISP

As part of my job at the largest ISP in my country, I’m in charge of all the aspects of the logical service provisioning for ADSL customers. Our network is not simple, as it combines equipment from several vendors with the joys of sharing the administration of the underlying transport equipment with our parent company.

For the sake of this story, let’s say that we inherited the ADSL network in a fairly unstable condition and my job has been, primarily, to stabilize it and get rid of a number of shortcomings in its initial design. At the beginning, this meant dealing with equipment located at several central offices. Piece of cake I hear you saying…

Once the network was up and running, lots of customers were brought in by our sales staff. Managing the network became more challenging. Service provisioning, manual in its beginnings, had to be automated. Worse, it had to support a number of different vendors’ devices with little in common. And errors were no longer tolerated, as customers had grown used to a reliable network pretty quickly.

This is where Perl really helped us make all this a success. Perl allowed the creation of sophisticated tools that could act as an interface between our homebred service management systems and our DSL gear. Thanks to this, provisioning time went down from two working days to a record-setting thirty seconds. Errors were almost eliminated thanks to the full automation. In fact, when we roll out our next version of these tools in a couple of months, our customers will be able to switch service speeds on demand and in real time (say, to download the next release of Perl) and return to their original connection speed after they’re done.

But this is only part of the story. There’s much more in managing a network than making sure every customer is getting the correct service level. Another set of tools allowed us to automate the process of applying changes to the network gear in real time and in a consistent way. We developed “agents” that could get into one of our network devices and carry out specific instructions, often constructed automatically out of an interaction with external (and formerly incompatible) systems.

Earlier this year, one of the nightmares of a network administrator came true. A new network architecture was called for, and it required significant changes in the configuration of our access concentrators, DSL modems and customer databases. At about at the same time, we learned the hard way about how sensitive some of those modems were to common threats such as CodeRed.

We had to perform a firmware upgrade on a device installed on the customers’ premises. Well, actually 29,000 of them. Had no staff to do it. Had no budget to do it. Had very little time to do it. Thank God we also had Perl to do it. Thanks to Perl, I managed to upgrade all of them, scattered through all of Venezuela while sitting in my desk. The customers didn’t have to worry about this either. It happened automatically and swiftly.

Next we needed to change the ADSL modem’s configuration. This involved altering the configuration in three different places at the same time, while making sure that after the customer’s modem was told to reload, it would come back online. To make matters interesting, we did not want to depend on any help from the customer, so the process had to be bulletproof and automatic. And it was.

This was not our first experience discovering the joys of Perl for ISP management. Our RADIUS server, which happily serves more than 1.5 million dialup accounts (out of a few modest PC-class servers running Linux, mind you), is also written in Perl. It allows us to quickly write a module that can interface with almost anything in order to provide authentication services for unlimited, prepaid and postpaid access.

We also have a DNS server written in Perl, which we use to spare ourselves from having to deal with old-fashioned zone files. This DNS server lets us keep information in database tables and query it in real time. It provides up-to-the-second information without human intervention, as data about the names is extracted automatically from the network devices’ configuration with tools written in Perl. Now if an administrator manages to break our DNS data by accident, we simply issue a rollback in one of our Oracle databases and move on to the next task.

This DNS server is so powerful in its ability to extract user information from various databases and external systems, that we use it to tell our mail system where each customer’s mailbox is located. Because we needed some custom functionality, we wrote the interface for the local delivery agent for our mail system in Perl.

In short, thanks to Perl we’re able to do many things in ways that are more scalable, easier and cheaper than our competition. And fun. Don’t forget fun.

Luis Muñoz

Cantv.net - Venezuela
Provisioning Systems Manager

To learn how large and small companies are using Perl to meet their goals, check out Perl Success Stories.

If you have a Perl success story of your own that you’d like to share, please let me know. You can reach me at: todd@oreilly.com.

On November 14, the Senate approved final changes to HR5469, a.k.a. the Small Webcaster Settlement Act of 2002, a bill which allows small webcasters — such as my favorite, SomaFM — to negotiate with the RIAA for a flat fee or a percentage of income or expenses in lieu of the crippling $.07 per song levied by the Library of Congress earlier this year. This compromise bill gives a little something to both sides: The independent webcasters get the chance to get back in the game, and the RIAA gets a couple thousand dollars per webcaster per year, and — more importantly — they retain their legal entitlement to royalty compensation for “Internet performance”. I’m not sure how I feel about this precedent, but at least the Internet airwaves have been somewhat redemocratized, if such a word may be used.

Meanwhile, SomaFM is already back on the air, preparing for their “official” grand opening on the 30th. You can find information and links to news stories on their website. Secret Agent channel, here we come!

I finally got around to setting up an XPath NG mailing list. Moving forward with XPath without the enormous complications of W3C XPath 2.0 has long been a topic of raging debate on XML-DEV, www-tag, and other fora. I have been keenly interested in such an initiative, and I hope this mailing list brings it to fruition. I am certainly encouraged by our roaring start. First of all, from my welcome message:

David Rosenborg, who has long worked on the FXPath - Functional XPath project outlined his initial ideas for and interest in XPath NG.

I then offered some procedural thoughts:

Jeni waded into the list with her usual brilliance. First she sketched out a suggested problem statement for XPath NG, and some core goals.

Then Jeni even contributed a stab at a core data model for XPath NG:

A side note: On XML-DEV, Mike Kay seemed to object to our using the name “XPath NG”. I and others feel there is no reason not to use this name, but some alternative name suggestions have been floated, including Jeni Tennison’s “FIXPath” and my “NextPath”.

Related link: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/phpckbk/

I’ve just received one of the first copies of PHP Cookbook. Modestly speaking, it looks good. :) They should be hitting the stores in the next few weeks — keep an eye out!

Related link: http://martus.org/

A month ago I wrote an
article
about a
presentation
made by human rights activist Patrick Ball. Dr. Ball and his friends
are following up rhetoric with action, creating a free software
project to aid human rights researchers.

Martus, developed by Jim Fruchterman of
Benetech,
is sort of a portal for reports about human rights abuses. The creators designed a whole
system for reporting on and searching human rights material in a way
that they hope beleaguered activists around the world can trust and
use easily.

I wanted to set up mailing list archive searching for the various Mailman lists hosted at lists.fourthought.com, which include the various 4Suite lists, exslt lists and the new XPath NG list. It was not a trivial process, so here are the steps I took.

The target server was a Mandrake 9 box which already had Mailman and Apache set up. Getting an RPM for ht://Dig was easy enough. I downloaded htdig-3.2.0-0.5mdk RPM for i586 from the RPM repository. One rpm -i htdig* later, and it was all installed.

I was able to glean a lot of valuable information from this excellent HOWTO.

I edited the config file (/etc/htdig/htdig.conf). The changes I made in diff form:

--- /etc/htdig/htdig.conf.orig	2002-11-18 20:35:31.000000000 -0700
+++ /etc/htdig/htdig.conf	2002-11-20 14:32:20.000000000 -0700
@@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
+#See http://www.scrounge.org/linux/htdig.html
 #
 # Example config file for ht://Dig.
 #
@@ -25,7 +26,7 @@
 # You could also index all the URLs in a file like so:
 # start_url:	       `${common_dir}/start.url`
 #
-start_url:		http://localhost
+start_url:              http://lists.fourthought.com/mailman/listinfo

 #
 # This attribute limits the scope of the indexing process.  The default is to
@@ -37,7 +38,7 @@
 # patterns. As long as URLs contain at least one of the patterns it will be
 # seen as part of the scope of the index.
 #
-limit_urls_to:		${start_url}
+limit_urls_to:          http://lists.fourthought.com/

 #
 # If there are particular pages that you definitely do NOT want to index, you
@@ -48,7 +49,7 @@
 # may not work on your web server.  Check the  path prefix used on your web
 # server.)
 #
-exclude_urls:		/cgi-bin/ .cgi
+exclude_urls:           /cgi-bin/ .cgi subject.html author.html date.html

 #
 # Since ht://Dig does not (and cannot) parse every document type, this
@@ -66,7 +67,7 @@
 # The string htdig will send in every request to identify the robot.  Change
 # this to your email address.
 #
-maintainer:		root@localhost
+maintainer:		admin@dollar.fourthought.com

 #
 # The excerpts that are displayed in long results rely on stored information
@@ -140,6 +141,19 @@
 #		Short short ${common_dir}/short.html
 # template_name: long

${common_dir}/${this_base}/header.html
+search_results_header: ${common_dir}/header.html
+search_results_footer: ${common_dir}/footer.html
+nothing_found_file: ${common_dir}/nomatch.html
+syntax_error_file: ${common_dir}/syntax.html
+
+template_map:   Long builtin-long ${common_dir}/long.html 
+                Short builtin-short ${common_dir}/short.html 
+                Default default ${common_dir}/long.html
+template_name: Default
+
 #
 # The following are used to change the text for the page index.
 # The defaults are just boring text numbers.  These images spice

Naturally, you’ll need to customize these changes according to your needs. The Mandrake RPM sets up ${common_dir} as /var/www/html/htdig, and places the example files at /usr/share/htdig. I made copies of these files in the common_dir location:

cp -R /usr/share/htdig/ /var/www/html/

Then I edited the copies in /var/www/html/htdig to customize the look and feel. Next I had to set up Apache. I edited the virtual host stanza for lists.fourthought.com in /etc/httpd/conf/vhosts/Vhosts.conf to add the following:

  ScriptAlias   /cgi-bin/       /var/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/
  Alias         /htdig/         /var/www/html/htdig/

Then I copied the htsearch executable to the Mailman CGI directory:

cp /usr/bin/htsearch /var/lib/mailman/cgi-bin/

Then I restarted Apache:

/etc/init.d/httpd restart

All that remained was to add a search form to each list information page. First I updated the mailman template for list info pages: /var/lib/mailman/templates/listinfo.html. I made the following changes:

--- /var/lib/mailman/templates/listinfo.html.orig	2002-11-20 15:02:23.000000000 -0700
+++ /var/lib/mailman/templates/listinfo.html	2002-11-20 15:15:51.000000000 -0700
@@ -6,7 +6,6 @@
   </HEAD>
   <BODY BGCOLOR="#ffffff">

-    <MM-Subscribe-Form-Start>
     <P>
       <TABLE COLS="1" BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="4" CELLPADDING="5">
 	<TR>
@@ -35,6 +34,44 @@
 	  </p>
 	</TD>
       </TR>
+	  <tr>
+	    <TD COLSPAN="2" WIDTH="100%" BGCOLOR="#FFF0D0">
+	      <B>Search all mailing list archives on lists.fourthought.com</B>
+	    </TD>
+	  </TR>
+      <TR>
+	<TD COLSPAN="2" WIDTH="100%" BGCOLOR="#9999FF">
+<form method="post" action="/cgi-bin/htsearch">
+<font size="-1">
+Match: <select name="method">
+<option value="and">All
+<option value="or">Any
+<option value="boolean">Boolean
+</select>
+Format: <select name="format">
+<option value="builtin-long">Long
+<option value="builtin-short">Short
+</select>
+Sort by: <select name="sort">
+<option value="score">Score
+<option value="time">Time
+<option value="title">Title
+<option value="revscore">Reverse Score
+<option value="revtime">Reverse Time
+<option value="revtitle">Reverse Title
+</select>
+</font>
+<input type="hidden" name="config" value="htdig">
+<input type="hidden" name="restrict" value="">
+<input type="hidden" name="exclude" value="">
+<br>
+Search:
+<input type="text" size="30" name="words" value="">
+<input type="submit" value="Search">
+</form>
+	</TD>
+      </TR>
+
       <TR>
 	<TD COLSPAN="2" WIDTH="100%" BGCOLOR="#FFF0D0">
 	  <B><FONT COLOR="#000000">Using <MM-List-Name></FONT></B>
@@ -59,6 +96,7 @@
 	  <P>
 	    Subscribe to <MM-List-Name> by filling out the following
 	      form.
+        <MM-Subscribe-Form-Start>
 	  <MM-List-Subscription-Msg>
 	  <ul>
 	      <TABLE BORDER="0" CELLSPACING="2" CELLPADDING="2"

This will take care of mailing lists created from then on, but not existing lists. I had to modify the list info page for each. I did this through the mailing list Web admin UI. Just go to the list admin Web page for each list , click “Edit the HTML for the public list pages“, then “General list information page“. Just clear the text area in the resulting form and paste the template file.

For an example of the result, see the 4Suite mailing list info page.

You might also want to set up the indexer to run nightly, by creating a file /etc/cron.daily/htdig with executable permissions and the following content:

#!/bin/sh
rundig

Any tips on your own on this or other OSS search engine in association with mailing list archives? Please share.

Related link: http://www.radwin.org/michael/blog/archives/cat_apache.html

Yahoo!’s Michael Radwin is blogging ApacheCon 2002. Already posted: Tim O’Reilly’s keynote and Apache 2.0’s filters. (Link thanks to Jeremy.)

Related link: http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=06997

With all the talk about the Homeland Security Act, let’s not forget that the DMCA is still haunting us. TidBITS’s Adam Engst offers an overview of the current situation and where we can go from here.

I’m glad to see PHP is finally getting its own specialized magazines.
The premiere issue of php|architect is now available. And, it looks like an English-language version of the German magazine PHP Magazin called PHP Magazine will also be released this December. (Although, based on the names, I’m secretly expecting this is going to be exact same magazine as the German periodical, but with the letter “e” stuck onto the end of every other word.) Plus, there’s PHP Journal, which is also in the works.

I’m taking it as a sign of PHP’s strength that — even in this poor economy — publishers are taking on the challenge of getting people to pay for content on the Internet. I really hope the PHP community will support these magazines and don’t use the overwhelming amount of freely available Internet pieces as an excuse not to open their wallets. Free articles are good, but paid articles can be significantly better.

I don’t use Perl on a regular basis in my everyday life, but I still subscribe to two Perl magazines: The Perl Journal and The Perl Review. I believe in what they’re doing and cost is so low, just $1 an issue. Besides, many of their articles are just so damn good. And, they aren’t necessarily Perl-specific. Many pieces are interesting computer topics where the authors happen to be implementing their solutions in Perl.

Articles like Braille Contractions and Regular Expressions and Bricolage: Memoization are really interesting. (Or, they’re really interesting to me.) They’re worth a read. As it turns out, O’Reilly is reprinting many of the classic TPJ articles. The first collection — Computer Science & Perl Programming — is already available.

So, please keep an eye out for these new PHP periodicals and be sure to try them out when they arrive.

Related link: http://lists.osafoundation.org/pipermail/dev/2002-November/000296.html

This is a very interesting message by David McCusker of the OSA Foundation, the group founded by Mitch Kapor who are currently working on an open-source PIM. In it he gives a fresh, unbiased and practical view of RDF as a general facility in application architecture.

How does this stack up to the other RDF descriptions you’ve seen?

Here is a hilarious exchange between Dave Winer, John Cowan and Danny Ayers. I shall minimize my editorial comment (except in my choice of excerpts from messages). Draw your own conclusions.

In an XML-DEV message, Dave Winer says:

Reading your last paragraph, it would have been good if the RDF advocates
had recognized the work that had gone into RSS before they tried to hijack
it. To this day they don't recognize it. Look at the design of RSS 1.0 and
how disrespectfully it treats 0.91, which to this day dwarves its installed
base.

If RDF wants to be considered, it should make a thoughtful proposal -- not
be the bull in a china shop that it has been.

John Cowan responds:

One could equally well say that RSS 0.91 hijacks the RDF-compliant RSS 0.9.
A plague o' both your houses.  My company supports both.

To which Dave Winer rejoins:

Yes, I've heard a lot of people say that, but it's not true.

0.90 was not in any way RDF-compliant.

!

see the cached version of Netscape's RSS) 0.9 spec:
http://www.purplepages.ie/RSS/netscape/rss0.90.html

If you still have any doubts, try copying the sample into
the W3C RDF validator:

http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/

Lovely graph!
Lovely triples!
Valid RDF!

A certain amount of FUD is to be expected from vendors that have staked
their reputation (and probably their dollars) on a different horse, but this
is remarkable. On xml-dev. I'm speechless.

To which Dave Winer makes response as follows:

What I meant of course is that RSS 0.90 was in no way a foundation for all
the dreams people have for RDF. It's basically an XML format, and not a very
widely supported one. Don't be confused. Dave

Am I the only one who did a double-take while ROTFL?

Today Malatesta, my Debian SID desktop died an awful death after an apt-upgrade that broke GNOME 2 sessions. Thanks to Edd Dumbill, my gracious virtual neighborhood Debian guru, I was able to restore things to working, but in the meantime I decided to get serious about completing the upgrade of my laptop, Borgia, to Red Hat 8.0. Since I’m so much more familiar with Red Hat, it’s useful to have a RH box around as a contingency when I’m having trouble with my main Debian machine.

Borgia is a Dell Inspiron 8100. If you also have one of these, you’re aware of the linux-dell-laptops FAQ, right? Good. The only problem keeping me from putting Borgia to full use was the woeful state of the wireless LAN drivers that came with Red Hat 8.0. They would complain that they’re really meant for Wavelan cards and not Prism II cards, promise to do their best, and then limp into service. But as soon as I put the network to any significant task, the drivers would wobble and eventually die in a storm of timeouts and resets. The solution is to install the linux-wlan project drivers.

Most of the pertinent information you need is listed or linked in Prism II entry in Jean Tourrilhes’s Wireless HOWTO. You should also bookmark the linux-wlan FAQ. Download the drivers. Red Hat 8.0 comes with 2.4.18-14 kernel, but a security advisory right after the 8.0 release urges update to the 2.4.18-17.8.0 release. If you keep on top of such advisories or use up2date, you probably have the latter kernel version. Download the kernel-wlan-ng-modules-* RPM that matches your kernel version. If your kernel RPM is neither 2.4.18-14 nor 2.4.18-17.8.0, or you built your own kernel from source, then download the source RPMs. You will also need to match your machine architecture (i386, i586, i686 and athlon are available). To check which kernel version and architecture, use uname -a:

$ uname -a
Linux borgia.local 2.4.18-17.8.0
     #1 Tue Oct 8 13:51:08 EDT 2002 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

So in my case, I got kernel-wlan-ng-0.1.15-5.rh80.i686.rpm
kernel-wlan-ng-modules-rh80.17-0.1.15-5.rh80.i686.rpm,
and kernel-wlan-ng-pcmcia-0.1.15-5.rh80.i686.rpm. rpm -i installs them, and you’re almost set. The last step is to edit /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.opts and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0. /etc/pcmcia/wlan-ng.opts contains the wireless-specific options. For most people, all they’ll need to change is the DesiredSSID line. I set it to DesiredSSID="", since my home Wireless LAN doesn’t have a security network ID. (In case anyone is planning to come camp out in my driveway trying to mooch off my Wi-Fi, remember that I just have Dual ISDN thanks to good old Qworst). /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 has the network settings for the wlan0 device. All I had to do was set ONBOOT=yes. DHCP is the default. After updating my config and running /etc/init.d/network restart, my network was all set up without a hitch:

# ifconfig
lo        Link encap:Local Loopback
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:72 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:72 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0
          RX bytes:4694 (4.5 Kb)  TX bytes:4694 (4.5 Kb)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:05:5D:D6:B2:11
          inet addr:192.168.1.8  Bcast:192.168.1.31  Mask:255.255.255.224
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:19 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:10 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
          RX bytes:2736 (2.6 Kb)  TX bytes:792 (792.0 b)
          Interrupt:3 Base address:0x100

I hope this info helps someone. Pass it on.

Do you have any tips of your own for Wireless Linux users, or tweaks for different cards or configurations?

One of the tasks we shall add before the 1.0 release of 4Suite is full-text search for documents in the repository. We actually had this support before (in 4Suite 0.11.1), using Swish++. It was implemented with quite a kludge: we’d use os.system calls to invoke the indexer on files which we temporarily copied to disk. Even this hack was undone by the confusion over the forks and future of the various Swish code-bases. It looks as if things have finally settled down under the Swish-E umbrella, but now we’re looking at all options.

Our preference is for a search engine with a clean C API to which one can pass text and get indexes back in a nice data structure. Another preference is for XML indexing features. Since we’d ask full-text search users to install that engine separately, a nice, clean install would be nice. And if it already came with a Python API, it would be save a good deal of work.

Bill Ellridge suggested mnoGoSearch (which has a horrible name from a PHB’s point of view), and he even tried his hand at a Python port of the Perl/C module for it. But I have not been encouraged that I am not even able to get mnoGoSearch working from an end-user POV. I tried to set it up as the search engine for the 4Suite mailing list, and no matter how much I tinker with the config file, the Indexer dies with an error.

So we’re still looking. The Open Source Search Engines page is a great resource, but its summaries don’t really give me the sort of in-depth information one needs to evaluate a search engine for such an intimate use.

This is a wheel I’d hate to reinvent, so I’d be grateful for any suggestions.

Do you have a favorite full-text search engine you would recommend for Python users? Or do you know of one with a well-designed C API?

Related link: http://news.com.com/2100-1001-965863.html

A welcome decision that many fought hard for. (Background in one of my
articles
and a follow-up
weblog
from October 2001.)

I saw href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html">William
Safire’s “You Are A Suspect” column everywhere yesterday — in the
newspaper on my kitchen table, in href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2305">Tim O’Reilly’s
weblog, on href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/11/14/1442242&mode=thread&tid=103">Slashdot,
and on plenty of mailing lists. Usually, the reference to the column was
followed up by outrage and suggestions on what to do about it. (I
suppose if I were a regular reader of href="http://www.darpa.mil/iao/news.htm">John Poindexter’s weblog,
I’d find a different spin.)

I agree with the outrage and encouragements to do something about
it. But that’s only a short-term solution. Comprehensive repositories
of personal information already exist and will only become more
pervasive. The challenge is not preventing their creation, but
adapting to the world that they create.

When href="http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,17538,00.html">Scott
McNealy told us in 1999 that we “have zero privacy”, he was on the
right track. Extensive records of your commercial behavior already
exist in giant databases where
your Social Security Number is the primary key. If you are a “public
figure”, or the “relative” or “close associate” of one, then Factiva
is keeping track of
you. Face it: unless you are a meticulous, cash-only, cabin-in-the-woods dweller or are wealthy enough to wrap yourself in layers of international corporations and intermediaries, you already are a suspect.

By that, I mean that the collections of data already exist to mine
signficantly for detailed analysis of your possibly traitorous
lifestyle. Thanks to Supreme Court Nominee Robert Bork, your href="http://www.privacilla.org/business/videoprivacyact.html">video
rental records are safe, but just about everything else is fair
game. It doesn’t matter if it’s collected by the government or a
private company. The Fair Credit Reporting Act, which takes a stab at
regulating credit bureaus, href="http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/15/ch41schIII.html">explicitly
contains provisions allowing disclosure of information to government
agencies.

So how might we deal with this already extant world in which we leave
muddy footprints of data everywhere we spend, receive medical
treatment, travel by plane or train, make a phone call, use a href="http://www.ezpass.com">toll booth, or even carry a turned-on
cell phone?

David Brin wrote a book a few years ago called href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0738201448/">The
Transparent Society in which his solution to this problem is to
make more data available. Theorizing that the danger in
ubiquitous information collection is that those who collect it operate
in secret, his prescription is to collect lots of information on
everybody (including the collectors) and make it available to
everybody. There might be a surveillance camera in the employee
bathroom, but there’ll be one in the executive washroom, too. And
everyone can look at both video feeds. Shortly after reading the book,
I wrote about
why its solution is a bad idea. Among other reasons, it rests on
the notion of “if you’re not doing anything wrong, then you’ve got
nothing to hide” and places an implicit assumption of guilt upon
someone who voluntarily chooses to not disclose information.

Another potential solution could be a sort of reverse steganography, where
the valuable information is hidden among lots of decoys. This has its
beginnings in efforts like those to href="http://members.evolt.org/foop/blog/archives/000086.shtml">swap
your supermarket loyalty card with a stranger. It’s similar to
RIAA attempts to href="http://www.zeropaid.com/news/articles/auto/07052002e.php">poison
P2P networks with files that look like popular songs, but
aren’t. Obviously, this kind of approach could be harder to pull off
with more sensitive data (switching dental records with a pal is
tricky) but might be promising.

Large government databases
overseen by a convicted felon make me just as queasy as the next loyal
citizen. But there are going to be more databases and more
overseers. We ultimately must adapt to and gain from this technology.

How can we cope with our accumulated digital footprints?

Related link: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103021/2002/11/15.html#a472

Yesterday, Deutsche Bank Research (the think-tank of Deutsche Bank) released a document called “Free software, big business?” where they evaluate the current status of open source software (in particular for financial institutions). Check the above URL for more information and my translation of some of their conclusions.

Seems as though we are moving into interesting times…

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/15/obituaries/15HOWA.html

The creator of the first home satellite dish died last Wednesday in a plane crash. This New York Times obit has an amusing story on Howard trying to pay HBO for stealing their signal.

Related link: http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/XML/afng.html

Also:

• Architectures in an XML World

Related link: http://www.w3.org/2002/08/busy-spunge.html

As Reagle says:

“I spend a lot of my time typing things into various interfaces: such as a log of important/useful things I’ve done during the day, an outline of things I need to do, a list of interesting links and my thoughts on them, web site passwords, proto-ideas and scribbles, annotations/comments on things I’ve read, and travel information. Some of these things are stored in (different) html pages and some in (different) flat text files, and I use different editors/browsers for these files! I’d like to have a single easy to use interface for entering all these things. This will require a data store/model, an interface, and perhaps some syntactical conventions for easy freeform entry.”

Related link: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=oe=utf-8&selm=0qZV8.51942%24vm5.1927874%40news…

Alex Martelli presents a “good and simple custom metaclass example”

Related link: http://www.zoteca.com/wp/PythonEAIwp.html

Aron Trauring wrote this article advocating Python for EAI Journal. It explains what Python is, lists its advantages, explodes some mythos, and gives some examples of high-profile enterprises that make use of Python. All the while, it compares Python to Java, C#, C and C++.

So is this article far too uneven, or is it spot on? Did they miss any key points?

Related link: http://news.com.com/2100-1033-965070.html

The article cited above, seemingly just a kind of commercial press release, signals a
subtle victory in the movement to make Wi-Fi access a form of
universal Internet service.

Warchalking is a public acknowledgement that free Internet access is
going on over Wi-Fi. A lot of commentators in government and the media
have labeled both warchalking and the type of access it promotes in
the most scathing terms as a form of theft, as an intrusion into
corporate networks, and even as a national security threat! It
actually can be all these things, when it isn’t set up properly. But
it can also be a positive force.

Many businesses, such as Starbucks, recognize the value of offering
Internet access. Schlotzsky’s Deli has gone a symbolic step
further by adopting the language of the community network movement. It
shows the beginnings of a new view, as when politicians or TV
personalities started to show they were hip by picking up phrases from
rock or protest songs.

(Update, Nov. 13: A reader has alerted me to another news-worthy aspect of Schlotzsky’s announcement: they are offering the service free, whereas other establishments require a fee. That makes the announcement more significant, but this weblog is commenting on just the “warchalking” aspect.)

There’s an important difference between a private LAN using wireless
(where security is admittedly of critical importance) and a wireless
node provider who deliberately offers free service. This service, of
course, can be used to cloak Internet users in anonymity. But who will
dare to stand up and say that we should prevent anonymity?

Related link: http://www.sklar.com/myphp-0.1.tar.gz

My PHP Cookbook co-author, David Sklar, has put together a MySQL UDF that allows you to use PHP from within MySQL. Give it a try, he’s looking for feedback and comments.

Selecting and using an open source solution for a production application can be a challenge. It’s not hard to choose established applications like the Apache Web Server or Linux, but there are other open source projects sprouting up everywhere. How do you know when they are ready for prime time?

More importantly for some of us working in big companies, how do you sell them internally so you can use them?

To begin with, here are some rules to follow when evaluating an open source package. Before opening your mouth and committing to delivering an application by a fixed date, consider these:

 1. Please… Wait until at least a “1.0 release”!

I know it’s tempting. I’ve been there and had to pull myself back from the edge. But if you commit to going to production using a product that’s not ready, you may find yourself in the computer room at 1 am the night before acceptance testing checking flight schedules to Jamaica or surfing monster.com.

 2. Look for an active committer base.

I don’t mean one person either. Look for projects where there are commits from a dedicated group happening every day. These are the teams that respond quickly when a major bug is found.

 3. Monitor the email lists for a while.

Are questions routinely answered the same day (or within minutes or hours) by 2 or more people? Imagine that the questions asked were yours - and that hitting launch date was dependent upon somebody answering. Do you trust that someone would be there for you?

 4. - Most importantly, use the software.

Find some little out of the way application where you can test it out. The application doesn’t have to be big - but it should be something you use for a while to see how things go.

For example, I’m going to have to build an e-mail processing app next Spring and I’ve been considering using Jakarta JAMES for it. JAMES has some very cool technologies for building mail apps that may be really useful. So I installed James on one of our servers and built some JUnit tests for testing code I have right now that sends e-mail. Everytime I do a build now, I’m running these tests that excercise my e-mail code by sending email to JAMES and reading it back.

Over the next few months I’ll monitor the testing to see if I ever lose messages, or if I have to restart the server often or have other problems. Hopefully I’ll get a good feeling for how reliable it is.

So once you’ve convinced yourself, how do you convince your DLPHB (Dilbert-Like Pointed Haired Boss)?

So how do you convince management you should be using open source? By managing these two words: Fear and Greed.

The Greed part is obvious. Your manager wants to get ahead, right? They get ahead by saving money, hitting deadlines and delivering quality. Open source can help them do all of these. Use these arguments:

 1. Open source means no cost. This translates to:

    - No spending time with sales people
    - No getting purchase orders signed
    - No annual maintenance agreements to budget for
    - No user licenses to keep track of
    - No contracts for review by the company lawyers

 2. Hitting deadlines can be easier:

    - Support responses in minutes or hours
    - Having source code helps isolate bugs faster
    - Drawing on the experience of other users is easier

 3. Delivering quality because:

    - “Many eyes on the code” means bugs are found quickly.
    - All bug listings are on-line. If there are bugs, you know about them.
    - If all else fails, you can fix the code yourself if you need to.

Managing Fear is trickier, though not impossible. It can be harder, because most of the things managers are afraid of can’t be easily quantified. Managers fear things like:

  4. The open source project will disappear.

Successful open source projects don’t just go away. Assuming you’ve done your homework and this project is good, the user base will stick around. Even if the project goes away, you still have all the source code - which is more than a vendor going out of business will give you.

  5. The open source project is some ‘cool’ technology that you want to play with.

Managers sometimes think programmers just like to play with new technologies all the time. That’s because many programmers actually do like to play with new technologies all the time.

Look in the mirror here. This is where you make or break the decision. Have you used the product internally for a while? Do you have a prototype? Can you give a demonstration? You can succeed here if you’ve done your homework and you can communicate things clearly.

Communicating clearly sometimes means talking in ‘business terms’. It means talking about saving money, or speeding up delivery, or having an easier time hiring experienced people.

As an example of how to put together a presentation on for management, I’ve made available a powerpoint presentation to help sell manager-types on using Jakarta Struts. It’s yours to use free - you can download it at the companion site for my book, Struts Kick Start.

How have you convinced your management to let you adopt open source? Has it succeeded, or backfired on you?

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/politics/09COMP.html

The Pentagon is planning a comprehensive system for mining personal
data and tracking “potential enemies operating inside the United
States.” Billed as an anti-terrorism measure, it will instead strike
most Americans as a key element of an upcoming totalitarian order.

There are plenty of healthy reasons to distrust this system, which bears the moniker “Total Information Awareness”
and is designed to “break down” the boundaries between government and
private data. You could potentially lose a security clearance or find
FBI agents at your door because of a university course you registered
for or a book you bought online. And the innocent people (or those who
commit minor infractions, like Los Alamos researcher Wen Ho Lee) who
find themselves harassed by this system will probably never learn
exactly why.

But there are some more subtle reasons to oppose the data mining
system, even if you support a bigger role for law enforcement.

Profiling becomes policy

U.S. law enforcement agencies often insist, “We don’t single out
particular groups.” (There are hard-fought exceptions, such as an FAA
system for profiling airline passengers.) Any algorithm for searching
data for clues is inherently a form of profiling. Whether or not the
system explicitly flags particular racial or national characteristics,
it will probably cause more snooping and harassment of particular
ethnic groups.

To be sure, some experts say that the only way to provide adequate
security in a large society is to do profiling. This issue should at
least be debated publicly, instead of quietly resolved by Pentagon
directions to computer programmers. Personally, I don’t care in this case if profiling is necesary for security, because I consider profiling to be a basic
violation of human rights. It constitutes a form of collective
punishment for all people associated with misbehaving individuals.

No one takes responsibility for computer decisions

Since holding prejudices and following hunches are a necessary part of
any police work, one might feel safer entrusting the filtering
decisions to a computer program instead of leaving them in the hands
of individuals. But this begs the question of who makes decisions. As
Joseph Weizenbaum pointed out thirty years ago in Computer Power and
Human Reason, one is asking for trouble by making computers issue
decisions that require subtle judgments about human life and
motivation. One ends up with near-parodies of the prejudices of the
programmers.

Basic tenets of privacy policy implode

The basis of the U.S. policy toward privacy in the computer era has
been to let businesses do pretty much what they want, on the basis
that they are private actors. If you don’t like your health data
shared with pharmacies or your marital status shared with department
stores, that’s something for you to balance in purchasing
decisions. There are many opponents to this view, but it has remained
the justification for the “self-regulation” and general government
hands-off policy in the U.S. for at least twenty years.

Well, it looks like it’s time for consumers to demand that all
information on their purchases and behavior be destroyed. Businesses
are no longer private actors–they are an arm of the Pentagon. What
the businesses store is a matter of public policy, and should be the
concern of everyone who interacts with them.

Innocents suffer while sophisticated criminals evade the system

People unfairly smeared as “potential enemies” have little recourse
but to suffer whatever disruption that causes in their attempts to
pursue ordinary lives. But terrorist organizations can watch cases
carefully and pick clues about what is likely to land a person on the
hot seat. The profiling system will become a cat and mouse game, with
law enforcement constantly tweaking the criteria for flagging
suspects–and trying them out on a largely innocent population.

Nobody would claim that the Pentagon or law enforcement has an easy
job, and few would have the temerity to suggest that the right path
forward is clearly lit and delineated. Still, we can apply some basic
criteria to judging inititiatives.

We know that over-eager or panicky law enforcement agents have caused
lots of unwarranted suffering for innocent people. And we know, from
the truncated investigations of the September 11 attacks as well as
other incidents like the Washington-area sniper, that agencies don’t
make the best use of the information they already have.

There are always trade-offs between giving law enforcement new tools
to do their job and giving them power that will inevitably be
misused. The conceptual weakness–apart from any technical problems
they’ll run into–of the current Pentagon project marks it a bad
idea. It is up to everyone who values privacy and the First Amendment
to resist and protest the system. Even though such resistance and
protest–this is one aspect one can count on–will increase our
chances of ending up flagged by the system.

After returning to Germany from this years OSCON I emailed Tim O’Reilly a couple of times to discuss something he said in the closing Town Hall, which was that O’Reilly had thought about an OSCON in Europe. However in the emails, Tim said that at the moment there were no real plans for such an event.

Even though (most of) Europe has a single currency - we still lack that single major open source conference. Last year the ApacheCon Europe was scheduled to take place but was cancelled due to the conference producer pulling out.

In the last six months or so the open source scene in Europe has started to move into the fast lane. In particular the awareness for open source solutions inside corporations and government is growing steadily.

At the same time, at the regional conferences that take place, presentations on open source solutions are always well attended. As the use of open source spreads, so does the need for people to get information on the software, new developments, use cases, inside views etc. However, many of the conferences in Europe lack the standard and pull of OSCON, because much of the information is presented second-hand as opposed to coming straight from the initiators themselves.

One great example for the increasing awareness for open source will take place in Gent, Belgium on the 19th of November. What originally was planned as the small birthday party of a small company has now turned into the largest gathering of Apache Cocoon fans on the planet. Nearly 100 people have registered to hear the latest on the XML platform. The advantage of this “conference” being that many of the speakers make up the Cocoon core development team.

One of the most interesting things about this get-together is that the attendees were attracted without a single cent of marketing money being spent. Using just mailing-lists, weblogs and word-of-mouth, people will be attending from Belgium, Holland, Germany, Austria, France and even the US.

Multiply this number by the number of open source projects being used and you have the potential for quite a large open source conference. in Europe.

The current economic situation is forcing more and more companies to look closely at open source as one way of lowering costs and yet retaining innovation. This would now seem to be an ideal climate for an event such as EURO-OSCON.

Please.

EURO-OSCON - what do you think?

I write articles for O’Reilly and other publishers on a variety of topics, including Python, XML, RDF, Linux and open source. This forum should allow me to put out information that doesn’t merit a full article on its own.

I also maintain a diary on Advogato. I’ll continue to use it for matter that is not pertinent to O’Reilly Network.

Related link: http://radio.weblogs.com/0103021/2002/11/08.html#a454

My take on where this Halloween stuff is leading. Microsoft will eventually join the party. They will have to.

Way off? Or nearer the truth than you may think?

Related link: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/10/21/community.html

My article on building online community spread pretty far; I followed referrer links back to see what people were saying. The feedback was valuable. (As a writer, it can be frustrating to realize that for every comment you receive directly a hundred people didn’t take the time to respond.)

A significant portion of the referrers were from established communities. Many of these were message boards of the kind I had in mind for some sections. A few were well-established, and most were not as technically minded as my examples.

Of the link blurbs that provided a bit of analysis, there were two main camps. One said, “Here’s an interesting article full of things I’d never realized.” The other said, “Here’s an article full of common sense, but not saying anything really new.” I’m pretty pleased with that — I’ve been participating in communities of this sort for over a decade, but I haven’t been studying them seriously. What I wrote, I had to discover on my own. It doesn’t surprise me that smart people have learned the same things.

It was also nice to read, more than once, “It says things I knew but could never put into words.”

Several of the linking communities were in the midst of change. A few were trying to recover from difficult times. Some were trying to find new directions. Hopefully my article gave the people in charge some good advice.

It surprised me to realize how far this little article could spread. There are a lot of communities out there — something I knew but didn’t understand until I traced links back. Wow.

One reader took the time to send me a very valid critique (after posting a somewhat stronger criticism on his favored message board :). Wingnut from Canada pointed out that I’d completely overlooked MUDs and MOOs as online communities. He’s right — I have little experience there. My guidelines
for the curve of writers versus readers won’t apply. It’s much harder to lurk on an online game.

Wingnut also thought I concentrated too much on growth as a goal. That was the point of the article, but there are definitely other excellent goals. I should have made this clear: the number of users (or the happiness of your users) is by no means the only measure of success. If you have another idea, feel free to pursue it.

I’m very happy with the feedback. Thanks for the links and comments, everyone.

Do you have a good experience with online feedback? Let’s talk about it.

Related link: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/

This should interest anyone who cares about making the
computer field more welcoming for women.

Most

Linux HOWTO documents
(fabulous volunteer contributions) are technical tracts on the order of “Root
over nfs clients & server HOWTO” or “HOWTO Use a Compaq
Remote Insight Lights Out Edition for a Headless, Remote
Linux Installation” (actual titles!). It’s a bold step
to put out this social commentary, a collaborative
effort put together by many women.

The level of information given may seem depressing low, but
I trust that the authors have proven it necessary.

What else is being done to promote professional use of computers by women?