i summon one kim

Hans Rosenfeld ported EtherIP support from OpenBSD to NetBSD 2.0. Today I’ve committed that work to NetBSD-current, to be included in future releases of NetBSD.

EtherIP (RFC-3378) makes it possible to bridge Ethernet networks using tunnels over the Internet. While you could already use tunnels for IP traffic, now they can be used for any Ethernet traffic. I’m looking forward to using the Internet with my friends to play legacy networked games that only use IPX for LAN communication.

To setup a bridged network using tunnels, you need to create gif(4) interfaces for the tunnels, and a bridge(4) interface to connect the tunnels and the Ethernet (LAN) interfaces. (more…)

I finally got around to upgrading Apachce::Gallery to version 0.9.1. The upgrade is relatively easy: just edit your templates to change variable expansions from $FOO to {$FOO}. If you are using a copyright image, you now have the option of using a text string in the config (rendered using a TrueType font of your choice). It’s worth glancing through the manual (use perldoc Apache::Gallery to see the manual).

If you are having a problem with new pictures not showing up, check the version of imlib2 you have installed. I had to downgrade to 1.1.2nb3 to be able to generate cached images again. There is possibly some glitch between p5-Image-Imlib2 and the new imlib2 1.2.0 code. I’ve filed PR pkg/29054 as a reminder.

I’ve upgraded the leafnode package to version 1.10.7 in order to get Xref: headers in the XOVER responses. There was a bug since 1.9.50 that inadvertently caused Xref: to be dropped out when creating the overview database.

If you think it is no more deja vu when reading an article again, this could be the reason. At least nn depends exclusively on overview data for the Xref: header contents when determining cross-posts you have already read.

I’m beginning to like OneNote a lot for making notes. The key features I like are:

• ability to flag any item for follow-up, and to get a summary of all such items
• ability to search all my notes (can’t do that with paper)

I started using it after reading some comments about it and looking at the tutorial videos. Yes, it is M$ stuff, but it is really nice. I haven’t found any Open Source products like it. (It also integrates nicely with Outlook…)

OneNote also supports collaborative editing over the network. It seems like a cool feature, but currently I have nobody to try it out with. Another way to share or centralize notes is to use regular Windows folder synchronization or SharePoint. I’d like to see if I can just use a DAV-capable web server to achieve centralization for myself.

Slashdot had a pointer to a very interesting article on Wired about the pirate distribution networks. It included a quote which reflects how I and many of my friends have felt about MP3’s for quite some time: they are the modern version of cassette tapes used for evaluating music, and eventually leading to album sales.

In fact, [Bruce] Forest believes the scene will eventually go legit, and he’s even started a company, called Jun Group, that uses the topsites to promote movies, musicians, and TV shows. “The topsites don’t care where their files come from, as long as no one else has them,” he says. Last summer Jun Group dropped a collection of live videos and MP3s from Steve Winwood on the topsites. “We got 2.9 million downloads,” says Forest, “and album sales took off.”

Source: The Shadow Internet by Jeff Howe, Wired, Issue 13.01, January 2005

The 30 second samples offered by online CD resellers are a very useful feature, but their quality does not compare to the real album. For me the recommendations of friends lending their purchases for some quality listening in my own home are the number one reason for getting into the music of an artist new to me. Imagine if you could just visit the artist’s website to listen to a “best of” collection or other samples.

After 10 years of NNTP access to mailing lists through news.gw.com, I have decided to discontinue the service. The HTTP access was consuming a lot of resources and not working reliably. Some people were abusing the NNTP access with constant polling for new messages. The basic gateway functionality didn’t handle cross-posting. I would need to migrate the gateway to a new server this year.

Given that I don’t see any opportunities for me to fix any of these problems, and that there are public services already at a much grander scale that do everything but just much better, there don’t seem to be any good reasons to keep news.gw.com running.

Personally I think I’ll be doing casual browsing of mailing lists via gmane.org. I recommend taking a look at it. They offer two different HTTP interfaces as well as NNTP (including posting, if I understand correctly).