Trolltech open source phone

I definetly wouldn’t mind having one of these for own to have and to hold. 

The Greenphone appears to be a working GSM/GPRS mobile phone endowed with a bootloader amenable to letting users re-flash the phone with modified Linux-based firmware, via a mini-USB port. The phone will not be available standalone, but rather as part of a development kit. The kit will be offered under separate licensing terms to open source developers, educational institutions, “major” software vendors, and to “phone designers and manufacturers,” Trolltech says.

Trolltech says it hopes the Greenphone will help foster a third-party application ecosystem around its Qtopia Phone Edition (QPE) Linux mobile phone stack. Such an ecosystem is “critical in satisfying growing customer demands, and shortening development and delivery cycle times,” it says.

Cortically Coupled Computer Vision

A really interesting concept, these researchers over at Columbia University are working on image processing algorithms that harness the power of the human visual processing to perform activity detection.

The brain emits a signal as soon as it sees something interesting, and that “aha” signal can be detected by an electroencephalogram, or EEG cap. While users sift through streaming images or video footage, the technology tags the images that elicit a signal, and ranks them in order of the strength of the neural signatures. Afterwards, the user can examine only the information that their brains identified as important, instead of wading through thousands of images.

This research was funded by DARPA in order to help operatives sort through reams of image data quickly, however I can see the results being extremely useful in identifying the areas in which current computer vision systems are currently lacking.

Yahoo IM and MSN Messenger Interconnect

This is I think the start of something really big. As of today (14-July-2006) users on MSN Messenger and Y! IM will be able to add each other to their contact lists and pass message between the two networks. I personally only have ever had one friend (hello Leah) who used the Yahoo client but I know that there are a lot of people outside of Australia who do – I personally use MSN and Google IM and cant wait for the time when all these networks will be able to talk to one another.

In Australia the majority of people (at least that I know) are running MSN but when I was living in the states it was quite incredible the number of people who were using AIM as the their one and only chat client and had never thought about logging on to MSN (even though it comes pre-installed on their computers). A friend recently pointed out to me the possibility of using a Jabber based client (like gaim, or google talk) to connect to a jabber gateway such as http://www.jabber.org.au/ which then does the connection to various networks for you. While this is a step more sophisticated than all-in-one wonder client like trillian, which could connect to multiple networks at once, it still doesn’t provide the ability to have a single online identity with which other users can communicate.

In many ways the current situation is very much like the early days of email when individual ISPs had their own walled gardens and communication between them was unthinkable. I think that the breaking down of these walls will also help propel IM into a much more useful communication tool. Imagine not being able to email a potential customer because he was on a different email network to you. I think it can only do good things for IM clients aswell as people realise they don’t need the addition bloat that go with the latest versions of the proprietry clients (I’m looking squarely at AIM and MSN here).

Moving my blog from Bloglines to WordPress

A long time ago I was headed overseas for the better part of a year and I decided that it would be a good idea to set up a blog to allow me to post my incoherent ramblings while travelling. I decided that it would be a good idea to set up a blog using the same service I use to read all my various feeds, unfortunately bloglines is much better suited to displaying blogs than it is to creating them. Unfortunately I didn’t realise this until I had a fair number of posts in my archives there, then when I started shopping around for a new service I realised that there was no easy way to export my archives to a new service.

I set up my wordpress blog on my home server with the dread thought in the back of my head that I would have to write a html scraping script to run over my old blog before importing into wordpress. Thankfully it didn’t come (quite) to that and I thought I’d share with you my solution for the ugly bloglines lock-in problem.

1. Get this bash script which will rip down and dump the bloglines xml-feed into a single file
2. Put the script somewhere you can execute it. If you don’t have cygwin or linux installed you can probably execute it from your hosting company server (if they give you shell access)
3. Run the script by giving it your user name and the range of months you were active on bloglines for: ie ./genBloglines.sh -u yourUserName -sm 1 -sy 2005 – this will get everything from Jan/2005 to the present month
4. From the wordpress admin panel choose the Import option and choose import from RSS feed
5. Select the file generated by my script (default is bloglines.xml) – you might have to download it to the local machine if you’ve run the script on your hosting server.
6. Voila – you are done

Bash Script Argument Parsing

Here is a little block of code that I use at the start of my bash scripts to perform argument parsing, I’m putting it here so that I have somewhere to grab it from

# Give default values
analyseOnly=0
fuseOnly=0
analyseList=""

while [ $# -gt 0 ]
do
if [ $1 = "-a" ]; then
    analyseOnly=1;
    shift
  elif [ $1 = "-f" ]; then
    analyseList=tmp/fuse.sim
    fuseOnly=1
    shift
  else
    analyseList="$analyseList $1"
    shift
  fi
done

Or if you listen to David you could use the getopt function but who wants to listen to David :p.

Handy Linux Environment

A very handy little binding to have when you are working in the bash shell… instead of pressing up many times to get to a previous command you can type the first few characters and then press Ctrl-P to skip all previous commands which don’t match what you’ve typed and go directly too it. This is incredibly handy when you have long commands and a have been prolific on the command line.

You can enable this by adding the following lines to your ~/.bashrc file

# rebind Ctrl+n and Crtl+p to search history based on command line rather than just browse through history
bind "\C-p":history-search-backward
bind "\C-n":history-search-forward

Also you can bind Ctrl-K to kill the entire line instead of just the portion from the cursor to the end of line with

# rebind Ctrl+k to delete whole line
bind "\C-k":kill-whole-line

Bandwidth test

Since I started hosting this site on my own machine I’ve been curious about what sort of bandwidth I’m actually getting. I have iiNet ADSL2/2+ connection which can theoretically give me a connection of 24,000Kb/sec – I think that all involved would be very suprised if I actually managed to get that much but the results were pleasant nonetheless. I am using the ozspeedtest site for my testing and it seems to be fairly closely mirror what I’m able to get when downloading ISO from the iiNet ftp site. I’d be interested to hear what anyone else on ADSL2 is actually getting and whether it is worth upgrading the modem to try and squeeze a bit more speed out of my connection (I’m currently using a D-Link DSL-500).

Test run on 10/07/2006 @ 6:45 PM

Mirror: Optus
Test type: Cable (15MB Test)

Your connection speed:

kbps: 6146.09
KB/s: 768.26
Mbps: 6.15

and according to my modem

			Downstream	Upstream
Line Status	ADSL Link Speed		7616 kbps	1024 kbps
	SNR		5.0 dB	0.0 dB
	ATEN		26 dB	17 dB
Line Error	ADSL layer	FEC	0	0
		CRC	0	0
	ATM layer	HEC	0	0
Frame Counter			795	1139

This says to me that I’m getting almost the entire 8,000Kb/sec bandwidth allowable by ADSL 1 and could probably benefit from a new modem…. just have to reconcile that expense with the new stereo amplifier and new computer that I also want If anyone has suggestions for good but cheap modems I’d love to hear them.

Zooomr – New flickr competitor

The zooomr site looks like it is a fairly straight forward rip of flickr (which you all know can do no wrong in my book) and from the quick look around that I’ve had I can’t see too many new and excitingfeatures which would persuade me to jump ship. You can add sound to photos, but I can’t honestly see anyone doing that more than once for the novelty factor. It does add two intersting features though, the first of which is the ability to label people who are in a photo. This feature could be one of the most incredible things for photo sharing if it is done really well, and will be a so-so affair otherwise. One of the first issues is that suffered by all community driven sites in that different people will label things differently (some of my friends call me James, I normally go by Jamie however) how then to realise that Jamie Cook in photo 782 is the same as James Cook in photo 1089? And also how to tell the difference beween James Cook (me) and say James Cook the famous captain who discovered Australia? I did see a site a while back that claimed to be able to perform face-recognition on photos to tell you who was in them which seems like an admirable task but I don’t think it’s how zooomr will be doing this.

I had an idea a little while ago while doing some work with image databasing and searching. Never really took it anywhere but then noticed that this new site had implemented the same idea in a pretty neat way. The concept is basically that each photo is tagged with geo-spatial co-ordinates as it is uploaded and then other images which were taken in the same area can be easily called up.

Pretty simple concept but I think that it will help to re-invent how we browse and search for images – well at least it will when all cameras come equipped with GPS by default anyways I’m trying not to get side tracked but it’s a pet peeve of mine when reading about “web 2.0″ and the “semantic web” (or community driven web) is that all the information required to make them useful has to come from somewhere and no one really says where it’s going to come from except “the users”. Now I think I’m a pretty dedicated and pedantic person but the thought of tagging all the photos I have in my collection makes me go cold all over. I think spatial information, such as geo-tags collected automatically via GPS, would be a great way to increase the automatically available metadata for photos.

So in summary I don’t see anything great that I don’t think flickr will be implementing shortly anyway

Nessus command line

Was trying to get nessus up and running on my ubuntu server but ran bang into the X dependency problem. Turns out getting it to run from the command line is a lot of a hassle, but this bloke had some tips for it.

The easy part:
1. emerge nessus
2. nessus-mkcert
3. nessus-user-add
4. register at nessus website to get the actiovation code for plugin feeds (FYI: #GPL plugins: 1299, #registered plugins: 9575), so unless you register you get a very small subset of (probably outdated) scanners.
5. nessus-fetch –register
6. nessus-update-plugins (it probably makes sense to add it to cron).Ok, now for scanning the most obvious choice is to run a nessus client with GTK interface. If we don’t want to do this we can either: – run the graphical console remotely – run a command-line interface.

The tricky part: Scanning using command line interface:nessus -V -q 127.0.0.1 1241

technorati tags:security, linux

DMCA comes to Australia

As part of the Free Trade Agreement between Australia and the US it is a requirement that Australia pass into law very similar legislation to the highly unpopular (with consumer groups anyway) Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

There are a number of reasons that I think this is a bad idea, firstly that in Australia we already have fairly counter intuitive copyright laws such as TV networks retaining the rights to the program guides (so you can forget about having a TiVo record shows automatically) and I don’t think that we need extra layers of legislation which make fair-use of media we’ve already purchased more difficult while doing effectively nothing to dimish piracy.

Some of the things which would be threatened by the new legislation include:

• "Unauthorised" DVD players which ignore region-coding and the ever lengthening "compulsory viewing" areas of DVDs which were so rare when DVDs were introduced, and growing longer and longer now they are entrenched.
• Programs which transfer “copy-protected” CDs onto your computer/iPod/mp3 player. See iownmymusic.org.
• Any device or software which does something the manufacturer doesn’t like in future. See Cory Doctorow’s ABC interview on this. The rumours that PlayStation3 games won’t be resellable are probably untrue, but we know they’d delight in having that control. It could be implemented today, and activated (or not) at their discretion, similar to the increase we’ve seen in use of "compulsory viewing" zones in DVDs. Similar restrictions could be applied to other media in the future, and if noone can create alternative players and readers, you’ll have no choice.
• Innovation: the best article on the effects of similar laws in the US was from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the world’s largest professional technology association. This month’s Spectrum article: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun06/3673
• Competition: you can’t compete if you have to get authorisation from your competitors or other parties to do so. This particularly applies to small industries, such as Free and Open Source software. No competition means no consumer choice.
• Free/Open Source Software: Australia has a strength in this area, and yet we don’t know if Open Source DVD players, or Linux clients to buy music off iTunes (SharpMusique) are legal. As a result, given the massive, aggressive and litigious nature of our competitors, they are not supplied with our otherwise-full-functioning Microsoft Windows replacement, restricting business opportunities for our growing Free/Open Source service and deployment sector.
• Our international leadership in Free/Open Source: Australia has a disproportionate number of FOSS developers, a history of groundbreaking Open Source work, one of the three key Linux conferences worldwide, and a reputation for government understanding at the state level. Yet this reputation can be scuttled if we show that the highest levels of government don’t care and don’t understand. We will not get this lead back, once we lose it.

More information is available from http://www.linux.org.au/law/ and there is a petition you can sign against this. There is also an interesting writeup on the topic from IEEE’s spectrum magazine – yes I stole their graphics for this post, I guess that would probably be illegal too.