port7 – co – uk

So this weekend has been one of thinking about refreshing some of my technical kit. First we had a visit to the Trafford Centre on Saturday and I took the opportunity to have a look at the G1 Google Phone in the T-Mobile Shop.

Was I impressed, to be honest on a touchy feely point of view, not much! From a UI angle, I still think the iPhone has the edge. In particular the finger gestures, pinch to zoom in etc. What I do like is the ability to sync Google Calenders, Contacts, Mail over-the-air. But I knew that without seeing one in the flesh. I was not that impressed with handset, if you can get a HTC Kaiser with Android then that would be my ideal. So despite all that, I will be moving to a Google phone, though when my iPhone contract expires, hopefully by that point there will be a few more handsets to choose from and any current bugs have been ironed out.

Then on Sunday evening, i decided to have some surfing time on the Macbook. And when I opened it the right hand 1/3 of the screen was all garbled. It looks like someone has stood on the laptop and broken the screen at that point. It still fires up and you can see some of the screen but from a usability point of view it is buggered. As to the culprit, we have our suspicions….

As Julie tends to use that one during the day she is now without a laptop. I don’t want to shell out for a new MacBook, as the next Mac I want is a PowerMac. But I think we will get some sort of netbook, prefrably with Ubuntu Netbook Remix on it. The current favorite is a MSI Wind, though that may change if there is one with an OEM Ubuntu.

So an expensive weekend, though both purchases can wait for a few months, and they are arguably optional.

Just got a mail from Visa, asking me to put my card details in to verify security!

The website is verified-byvisa.com, and the owner is a Mr Robert Thornton.

A more obvious phishing attempt could not be done! What a plank if he thinks people would fall for this.

Anyway if you want to send this guy some abuse here are his details

Registrant Name …………….. Robert Thornton
Registrant Organization ……… Robert Thornton
Registrant Address ………….. 539 Buffalo Creek Road
Registrant City …………….. Nashville
Registrant Province/State ……. TN
Registrant Postal Code ………. 37214
Registrant Country Code ……… US
Registrant Phone Number ……… +1.6158171380 –
Registrant Fax ……………… +1.6158171380 –
Registrant Email ……………. robert.thornton@interlayer.net

Had a very bizarre dream last night.

I was half-awake and really struggling with the problem of how to interface my crying daughter to an e-commerce platform for order dispatch confirmations.

Does that mean that I see my daughter as a software system or do I see my software systems as 2yr old’s who keep me awake at night?

So having a number of chats with various people about what we would like to see in a corporate twit platform.

Following from a blog post by friend and colleague Mr K, I have been thinking, could we build something?

That naturally progresses to, what do we want to build, how would we build it, and with what would we build it?

Addressing the first question, could we build it? The answer is of course yes, it’s just software and assuming we have a sensible set of requirements and some clever bod’s anything is possible.

The second question is what do we want to build, is possibly the tricky one. Why not just use Twiter? Well essentially my problem with that is that it is a hosted service, and for any corporate having potentially private and sensitive company info hosted on a server outside it’s control is just simply a no-go. Also on the privacy aspect, your company tweets could appear in the public tweet list.

So what do we want?:

• Ability to ‘follow people’
• Ability to create groups, and also to follow groups
• Ability to search posts, both all and people you are following
• Options for backend auth (LDAP, AD, OpenID)
• Logging, so all posts can be logged
• Ability to post and read by various means, IM, Web, SMS, etc
• Scalability, this should be able to scale to corporations of 100,000+ users

So with with what should we build it, given the requirements above, could this be done with the LAMP stack? Or do we need a proper daemon written in C? Not being a developer, I don’t know these things. My guess is that LAMP could do all the above, though the scalability requirement might be tricky (or not!)

Anyway I am throwing these thoughts out to the ether, feel free to comment, volunteer to do it, or just shoot me down

So there is a requirement with my current client to print barcodes from an application on HPUX. The current way this application prints is to simply output an ASCII text file and send that to the printer with a couple of control codes to set landscape / portrait mode etc.

So I had a look round the web and found a few solutions, that allow you to print barcodes from UNIX systems. They essentially involve a program that sits in the lpd print filter system and looks for various codes in the print stream, and then interprets them as barcodes. Reading the implementation guides for these systems, it seemed that they were assuming you were printing Postscript print jobs, but we wern’t, they were simple ASCII print jobs. When I was trying to find out about the print jobs, I did ask the team if they printed in Postscript or PCL, I just got a lot of blank states, and comments like ‘I don’t know anything about that techie sh*$e‘

So I had come to the conclusion that the application team are going to have to learn Postscript and start outputting reports in that. Which is not a bad thing as it will give them a lot more flexibility in their report formatting, and produce nicer looking stuff.

I then came across this project, which simply uses Postscript to draw barcodes based on variables that you stick in the Postscript print job.

You just have a Postscript report template that includes a bunch of stuff that will allow it to correctly interpret the codes you give it into working barcodes. After a hour or two of furtleing about, which included a long drawn out hunt for someone who knew what type of barcodes we use, I managed to create a print that duplicated a working current barcode.

So it seems like we have a winner, an Open Source project that will give us barcode capability from a key application, and will also move us towards using Postscript, which is not a bad thing.

Top Stuff!!

Last night I had the opportunity to see Richard Stallman speak, he was in Manchester speaking at an event arranged by the Manchester Free Software Group.

I had seen Richard speak previously at FOSDEM a few years ago, but as the opportunity to see him doesn’t come up very often, especially on my doorstep I thought I had better go.

Richard spoke on Free software in general, first talking about the 4 Freedoms and why they are important, then onto the history of the GNU Operating System and also a little on Digital Restrictions Management. After that he took questions from the audience in his own distinctive style . He also an introduction to the Church of EMACS, which drew lots of laughter from the audience.

It was a really enjoyable night, so thanks to all the people who worked hard behind the scenes to organize the event. I came away with renewed respect for Richard and his views, I hope he continues as he is for many years to come.

Dear Lazyweb,

Can someone please tell me what the difference between NLPOS9 and IRES2 is? And what do I get over NLPOS9 by going with IRES2?

Is it drivers, is it admin tools, is it support agreements? What is it!!??

Prompted by a mail emergency yesterday, I needed ssh access to the outside world from my current assignment. I am on a network that only allows outgoing http and https connections.

After some digging, I stumbled across gotossh.com a useful service that allows you to essentially ssh from a webpage. I guess they use some sort of ajaxy java magic to encapsulate a ssh client. I know there are questions to be asked of the security of such a service, but it was an emergency and got me out of a hole.

One of the things it did allow me to do, was to ssh to my colo box, and join #manlug via irssi, and I got talking to rjek who said I should try ssh’ing to port 443, through the work proxy. Now I am sure I had tried this before without success, but still I thought I would give it a go. I set my colo sshd to listen on 443, configured putty to use the on-site proxy, and connect to my colo on port 443, and lo-and-behold it worked!

So I am now a happy bunny, with a few options for getting out to the world. I have since discovered corkscrew and also putty with file based config storage (rather than in the registry). Which is nice.

If anyone is getting mail bounced, they might want to check that the mail server is not configured to use ordb.org as I found out today.

I seems if your mail server is set to check ordb.org for spam purposes, it will blacklist everything, as of 26 March 2008.

See this article for info.

Interesting post here on the Capgemini CTO blog, contemplating a future (if I read the post correctly) where licenced software products are a thing of the past.

It’s interesting in the fact that this has come from Capgemini, one of the big consultancies beloved of big business, are they ‘getting it’? This is where Open Source comes into it’s own, in value added services and support costs.

I am reminded by a statement from Mark Shuttleworth a few years back where he claimed that he saw the day some years in the future where the Open Source model would be the dominant model of software development and also delivery.