Al Hoang

This article is
already a week old and probably has been slashdotted, digged, and whatever other verbs
comprise the act of many people hitting some news site and all of them simultaneously pummeling the
original story site.

The small gathering of invitees (of which I’m never one) get together and talk about the paths one
would take to making the web in 3D. (Here’s a lame suggestion, perfect hologram technology then think
about 3D). Lots of talk on problems and issues in building the software tools to move to a 3d
environment it seems. Hopefully some of those problems and ideas will be published to the web somewhere
for all to peruse and ponder. The highlight seems to be some Croquet
developers showing off their system and turning the heads of EVERYONE to look at it. Running code beats
high level ideas any day of the week. I predict Croquet will start having a significant impact once
the following criteria are hit:

1. 1.0 finally hits a full release
2. A rather stable API for 1.0 is documented
3. A HOWTO for Croquet users AND developers become available and actively updated
4. Many more thorough documents on working with Croquet besides lame blog entries like this one
5. There are at least 3 to 4 dedicated servers running some Croquet worlds that people can connect to
6. They deal with NAT somehow.
   (Current networking model has issues with NAT a far as I know)
7. More support for being able to trade data with more 3d modelling tools. (Especially good
   Blender support)

I think the first one will happen soon enough. I think the harder parts are 2 and 3 since these need
to be continuously updated to be successful. Searching through a mailing list archive or bug database
all the time for an answer to an issue does not cut it.

Read it yourself

One Attempt at documentation (thanks DMU)

I’ve been using Gentoo a bit lately and one thing that is nice is the portage system which tends to
configure your systems rather sanely but there always needs to be tweaks…

If you install postfix and are using syslog-ng which is the default syslogging tool for Gentoo.
You’ll notice all of your postfix messages go into /var/log/messages by default. Note this sucks
since sending all syslog events to one big file is a bad idea when it comes to troubleshooting.
After googling around I dug up a perfect
thread
describing how to configure postfix log to something more sane like /var/log/mail.log

For you lazier folk here’s the punchline. Put this in /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf
(Note you’ll need to actually do some editing rather than just blind cut & paste):

——

source src { unix-stream(”/dev/log”); internal(); pipe(”/proc/kmsg”); };

log { source(src); destination(console_all); };


——

Read it yourself

Seeing something like this when trying to update your Ubuntu box?

# sudo apt-get update

W: GPG error: http://jp.archive.ubuntu.com breezy-updates Release: The following signatures were invalid: BADSIG 40976EAF437D05B5 Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key

W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems

It is probably related to the following:

• Synaptic GPG Error
• Apt-get GPG Errors
• Ubuntu Bug 18088

The basic fix is to wait a day or two and try again and hopefully it’ll be fixed. If that doesn’t fix
it, you need to run apt-get foo –some-obscure-option-thats-never-mentioned-in-the-manpage.
Glad to know security bites the good guys and bad guys equally.

The Hardware Recycling Initiative (HRI) is an open source project with the goal to port Linux (or its microcontroller clone - uClinux) into onto publicly available residential router hardware.

Small grammar fixes by me. I just read too much grammar damaged
Engrish to put up with cutting and pasting
that stuff into my own blog posts.

In spite of funky grammar, the projet looks great. I was able to dig up
information on what is
inside
my Linksys BEFSR41C-JP router to get an idea if Linux could possible run on it.
(Seems like there might be a chance. There’s a sourceforge project for
the ARM-based system on chip here

The next question is where to get the toolchain and how to actually access
the device to do any real hacking on it.

References

• Linux Devices Article on the KS8695
• The Manga KS8695 Project (Seems it hasn’t been updated since 2004)
• uClinux Thread on the Micrel KS8695
• KS8695 Product Brief (PDF)
• A comp.os.linux.embedded post saying it can run