My father still uses dial-up. I signed him up for an AllVantage dial-up account because it was only $5 a month. Recently AllVantage got bought by PeoplePC. There were two problems. PeoplePC charges $11 a month, and they require you to use their Windows only software for connecting. It seemed like a no go, so I called to cancel. The woman offered to only charge $4.47 for six months, I said no thanks, so when the woman said, $4.47 a month indefinitely, I figured it was worth figuring out a way around the requirement for the Windows software.

I first emailed their tech support address. I asked if I could just use PPP on a Mac. This is the response I got:

“Regarding your concern, we suggest you to reload PeoplePal Toolbar.”

I wrote back saying I just wanted to know about PPP and Mac support. I got this back:

Regarding your concern, we would suggest you to first connect to PeoplePC Online service using the PeoplePC dialer and then try accessing Internet explorer and Outlook Express.

That route was clearly a dead-end. I decided to just try it. First, I tracked down a local access number. You get a list here. (I had erroneously been looking for them in the support documentation.)

The rest turns out to be remarkably simple. Your username is simply your PeoplePC email address (username@peoplepc.com) and your account password.

With these three items in hand, PPP dial-up works flawlessly.

I went to check out the Boston LinuxWorld Expo today at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. I didn’t expect much, but it was free, so I figured I’d stroll around. (See here for photos)
My prediction of it being a bore fest were pretty accurate. The only news I’ve seen so far on the web is about Unisys’ little fire mishap. You know when the biggest story of a Linux expo has nothing to do with Linux that it isn’t very exciting.

I walked around for a while, hoping to spot some cool little gadget running linux, or someone giving out free shwag that didn’t stink, but no such luck.

Instead I found many “win a free iPod” contests. You’d think that maybe people would want to win the product you are selling, not an MP3 player that doesn’t even officially (via iTunes) support Linux. Further irony, Apple had a small booth showing off their Xserve and Xserve RAID hardware, but did not have a “win a free iPod” contest.

The .org pavillion was a little more in the Linux spirit. A couple rows of booths with people who are interested in Linux for philosophical reasons not necessarily to make money. Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Gnome, KDE, and several others had booths. In the middle of it was the “Slashdot Lounge” which was pretty sad. Poor CmdrTaco and his cohorts sat awkwardly playing games. No one was talking to them presumably because they were preoccupied, or perhaps because all the 13 year olds have moved onto to digg.

The buzzword that I kept hearing was “virtualization”, something I’ve been waiting to mature for a few years now. I heard it mentioned several booths including AMD, RedHat, and obviously VMWare (who did actually announce that they are opening their virtual machine disk format.

After a few laps around the floor, I wandered the convention center a bit. It a new building. So new Google Earth’s aerial imagery doesn’t have it yet (oddly Google Maps does). The place is mammoth.

I can now confidently say that the with the exception of a Steve Jobs keynote, the usefulness of an Expo has passed. If you want to learn about a product or communicate with a company, the Internet is just much more efficient.

Weird. On my ubuntu breezy box this works:

rawrec -s 44100 -c 2 -t 5 -d /dev/dsp foo.raw

This doesn’t:

/usr/bin/rawrec -s 44100 -c 2 -t 5 -d /dev/dsp foo.raw

Identical commands except that the second is a full path to the binary. This page seems to confirm the same experience. It simply displays the list of options rawrec takes without any further error message. My only theory is that there is a bug parsing the arguments.

I sent an email to the developer, but rawrec hasn’t been updated since 2002, so I suspect it is no longer being maintained.

It isn’t a big deal, but I’m still on the look out for yet another alternative. (I’ve already passed on mpegrec and sox)

At work, we recently set up a couple new 64-bit servers. We went with AMD64 Ubuntu (Hoary on our production server, and Breezy on our development server). Everything went quite well. Then we go to install Real Producer… a 32-bit binary. It turns out that running 32-bit binaries along side 64-bit ones isn’t quite there yet. After searching for an answer, it appeared that the best solution was to set up a 32-bit chroot environment and run Producer out of there. People recommended this route to get other (source-not-available) binaries such as Real Player, Macromedia’s Flash player working. It is also necessary for MPlayer that use 32-bit Windows libraries for playback.

I went through the trouble of getting a chroot environment set up. It actually worked pretty well. Using dchroot makes running the binary transparent. However, it still seemed like overkill to set up an entire alternative universe to run a single binary. After more searching, I finally came across Debian documentation: Using a IA32 chroot to run 32bit applications. From the title, and quick skim, it looked like the “official” answer was in fact to use a chroot. I showed the page to Seth to show the explanation, and he actually reads the section titled, “The quick way”, which I had apparently skimmed completely over. Turns out there is a ia32-libs package that contains, “minimal set of IA32 libraries packaged for use in a 64bit Debian system”.

Installed the package (also available on Ubuntu) and sure enough Real Producer runs without issue.

Fed up with Tivo’s recent waning interest in providing useful features to Mac users and customers in general, I’ve decided to take the plunge and build a MythTV PVR. I’ve been doing research here and there for weeks and things are a mess. I’m still baffled that someone hasn’t made a business from selling a box with everything you need that guarantees compatibility.

I’ve ended up doing research on tv tuners, cpu’s, motherboards, infared recievers, remote controls, and on and on. And I haven’t even gotten to the point of making the dozen software components working together.

Deciding enough is enough, this morning I ordered the last of the main hardware that I’ll need to get the system up and running. I still need to figure out the whole remote control aspect. But here is what I ended up going with, fingers crossed it will all work.

Definitely more expensive than a simple Tivo with a lifetime subscription, but with the extra functionality and control it is worth it… as long as it works… All the above links go the Newegg.com product page which is where I bought it all from.

Product notes:

More updates to follow.

I installed a base install of Ubuntu 5.04 today. I’ve only looked at it for a couple minutes and so far, nothing is different enough from the previous release for me to notice. My main motivation was to see if Firewire would work. I had lots of problems with the previous release. (more…)

KernelTrap: No More Free BitKeeper

This has already been discussed at length on Slashdot etc. Most people were distracted by whether RMS was right, or whether the Kernel is better off thanks to the past 2 years of greater efficiency.

So I’ll bring up another point. By Linus effeftively saying, “I’ll use this non-free product until something better comes along” he killed the chance of a alternative getting off the ground. He plugged a leak with a rag, and no one felt the need to step up and fill it right. My hope and prediction is that a Free alternative will now make an appearance and can be used as an example for other software “crutches”.