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Published by XPost

Since I knew that I was going to be unable to host my own email server for an unknown period of time, last week I began looking for an alternative. After looking around a bit, I found out that Google had created a program that lets you use their service to provide email for a domain. So far, it has done pretty well as an interim solution until I can begin hosting my own email service again. It lets me get email through POP3 which is sufficient (though I much prefered IMAP since I use multiple computers). It also provides a catch-all address which is necessary for me due to the sheer number of pseudo-real email address that I've given out of the years.



With regard to more pressing matters, I set a date for the moving people to come to my house to box things (another company is coming to actually move them). This means that I have to have figured out what I'm going to take by the 15th at 9am. This will probably involve me going through stuff and throwing much away.



Obligatory XPost news

Earlier this morning, I got a reply back from Tumblr about their not having an authentication-only option in their API and they said that was a good idea that just hadn't crossed their minds yet. Their response makes me think that they'll probably add such a feature in the near future. I was quite suprised that I got such a quick response from them (or any response at all, really). When I was having trouble with my blogger account, it took nearly a week to get a response. I wasn't even a member when I first emailed Tumblr and I got a response in under a day--very impressive.



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I added support for Tumblr to XPost a few minutes ago. Luckily, it had an API, so it worked the first time that I got it to compile successfully. As before, Tumblr support is currently only in subversion. I'll work on getting a release together sometime after I am in California.



The weird thing about the Tumblr API is that it seems to have no independent authentication mechanism. The only way to check to see if you have a valid username and password is to do a post and see if it works. I sent an email to their support group to see if this is indeed the case. Hopefully it isn't, as that is a lousy way of doing things (though I suppose it does send passwords in cleartext anyway...).



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So, I went ahead and generated a new PGP key. My public key is available from the standard places. My new key ID is 0x144FB8CA. If you're interesting in cross-signing, drop me an IM.



In other news, I'm beginning to get my move together. I was contacted today by both the people from the vehicle moving and home moving people to set up dates to move my stuff to Pasadena. Unfortunately, the home moving people can't give me a firm date for picking up my stuff and will only give me a range from June 18-23. Hopefully, I can get what I need sorted out so that I won't need to be here when they move me. I would be very sad to have to fly out 1 or 2 days before my first week of work...



Lastly, I've been working on MySpace support for XPost. I've made some progress in that I can successfully authenticate and can almost post. Unfortunately, I'm getting some sort of bizarre timing bug. I think it is related to the timezone settings, but I'm not sure. If anyone cares enough about mayspace to help me bang my head against it, I'd appreciate the help. I'm beginning to think the MySpace stuff is reaching the point where I need a fresh set of eyes. Incidently, MySpace is as irritating to reverse engineer as it is to use--perhaps moreso.



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When I installed thunderbird on my laptop, it also installed enigmail the PGP/GPG plugin for thunderbird. Since my laptop hard drive died in January, I hadn't bothered to reinstall enigmail, so I'd let my use of proper email signing go. Today I decided to look into it and found out that I had 4 PGP keys that had been created since I began playing around with PGP. Two of them were active and two were expired. Unfortunately, I only had copies of two of the secure keys--one active and one expired. I decided to revoke both of them since the one that was still active that I had a key for had no revokation date. Unfortunately, that leaves one key active that I don't have the private key for (I believe it was lost with my old hard drive). Luckily, that key expires sometime in November. I'll be generating a new key today, maybe this time I cna keep better track of the revocation file...



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A little earlier, I commented that I was annoyed that I couldn't just "Run Command" a firefox window. After poking around a little bit, I realized that it was because the of the way mozilla-launcher handles URL parameters. For anyone that's interested, all you have to do is change the try_running function in the mozilla-launcher bash script. My ugly hack for fixing it is below. I've testing it approximately not at all (aside from the fact that it seems to do what I want it to do), so YMMV.





try_running() {

declare s retval=2 # default == can't find an instance



# Try mozilla-xremote-client on each candidate screen.

for s in "${candidates[@]}"; do

DISPLAY=$s $remote -a ${progname} "$@"

retval=$?

if [[ $retval -eq 0 ]]; then

candidates=("$s") # for future calls

return 0

fi

done

# OK, now try again and see if we should prepend http://

if [[ $retval -eq 3 ]]; then

for s in "${candidates[@]}"; do

loc=$(expr index "$@" "\(")

words=$@

DISPLAY=$s $remote -a ${progname} "openURL(http://${words:$loc}"

retval2=$?

if [[ $retval2 -eq 0 ]]; then

candidates=("$s") # for future calls

return 0

fi

done

fi





# Might as well do this error interpretation here

case $retval in

1) echo "Unable to connect to X server" >&2 ;;

2) echo "No running windows found" >&2 ;;

3) echo "Browser doesn't understand command" >&2 ;;

*) echo "Unknown error $retval from mozilla-xremote-client" >& ;;

esac



return $retval

}









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So, I mentioned earlier this week that I installed Gentoo on my Rose laptop. Thus far, it has been going reasonably well. I'm getting the full 1600x1200 resolution; I have a working media player, needed IDEs, etc. Now, there only appear to be three problems left to solve.



Firstly, I haven't been able to get the official ATI drivers working for the video card. The main problem is that I can't use the hardware OpenGL acceleration. I haven't yet had anything that I really want to run in OpenGL, but that will likely change.



Secondly, the W200 network driver is very buggy. It has a tendency to randomly drop connection (especially after an extended on time). Worse yet, it occasionally causes hard locks when it is being initialized. This is especially problematic if I turn it off and back on again after one of the random connection drops.



Finally, I've yet to figure out how to spawn firefox to a webpage from the "Run Command" dialog. It seems that if firefox is already running, calling firefox again does nothing. I'll probably poke around for at it a bit more. Overall, I'm rather happy with the setup.



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Today, I decided that I wanted to watch Full Metal Panic - The Second Raid. To do this, I needed some sort of Video player for my laptop which now runs Gentoo. To that end, I started playing around with various media players which were available through portage.

• mplayer - For the life of me, I was unable to figure out how to make it maintain aspect ratios on resize. The internet was less than helpful, so this one got rejected
• xine - This maintained aspect ratios, but studdered regarless of how I played around with the cache settings. I think it may have been a problem with h.264 support, but that is pure conjecture.
• kplayer - Yes, I realize that it is just a kde-ified version of mplayer, but for some strange reason it worked. It had no problems with aspect ratios, no problems with studdering (at least when playing from the local drive, playing from a samba share over wireless was...unpleasent).

So apparently the answer was kplayer all along.



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Well, it has been 5 or so days since I left Rose-Hulman and Terre Haute for the forseeable future. Since then, I've been sort of unproductive. I did manage to get pretty much everything moved from Rose to Anderson without incident.



I've been working on this and that. Today, I finished installing Gentoo on my laptop. It is nice because Gentoo now has a package for the W200 wireless card that the laptops from our year use (even if it is masked and requires some fiddling to make work).



I also, just a few minutes ago, fixed the Xanga support in XPost. Unfortunately, the fixes are only in subversion for now since I don't have a machine up and running to build the release for me. Also, I doubt that I will be nearly as concerned about Windows releases now that I don't use windows except for playing games (i.e., what it was designed to do).



I've been trying to get into contact with my relocation coordinator out at JPL to little avail. Apparently she was out of town until today and wasn't at her desk any of the times I tried to call today. C'est la vie.



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So, today I graduated from Rose-Hulman. I graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Computer Science. Tomorrow (Sunday), will be my last day in Terre Haute for at least months if not perhaps years. I intend to return now and then for events such as those put on by Theta Xi, my fraternity. Today, there were several people who I saw who I likely shall not see again for quite some time, perhaps ever.

• Imani, my on-and-off girlfriend for much of my RH career


• Greg, my former roommate and co-host of the 004 show


• Andrew, my roommate of 3 years + 1 summer (though I will almost certainly see him tomorrow, afterward is far less certain)


• Pretty much all of Theta Xi - Kappa Chapter (maybe next winter, we'll hope)

All of this has made me somewhat nostalgic and more than a little misty-eyed. I have enjoyed my time at Rose quite a bit and am very sad to leave it and all of my friends behind. Even now, most have scattered to the four winds, perhaps never to be seen again.







When I left highschool, I never particularly felt sad about leaving. I felt some apprehension about the new environment of college and "setting out on my own," but I was generally happy to be leaving Anderson and most of the people who were there. There were very few who I felt I would miss. At this parting, however, I find myself leaving behind people with whom I have a stronger attachment. This is not to say that I am not excited about going to California and joining JPL -- far from it -- I expect JPL to be one of the most exciting experiences of my life.







Perhaps the real difficulty that I am fearing is that of finding a new "in-group." For me at Rose, my group of friends generally consisted of my roommates, Imani, and (during my senior year when I joined) my fellow Theta Xis. When I arrive in California, I will have none of them, nor will I have any family withing 1000 miles. I will, for the first time, be truly on my own. I think that I can do alright, but I suppose I'll just have to dive in and see what happens.







Anybody know of any rocket scientist RPing groups in Pasadena? Perhaps that would be a good place to start...



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So I went to Anime Central this weekend with the Rose-Hulman Anime Society. Acen is a yearly convention in Chicago where people from the "anime community" get together and do panels/watch anime/dress up/etc.



I hadn't gone last year as the year previous hadn't been very fun, but I found this year to be quite enjoyable. I went to a fair number of panels, got some free zombies, and bought a 1-up mushroom. All in all, a quite enjoyable event.



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Since I was in high school, I have been the owner of several domain names. In total, I own about a dozen. Maintaining registration of a domain name is a rather simple affair, one just has to pay a registrar to renew it every year or renew in bulk for several years at a time. Today's irritation, however, comes from a company called Domain Registry of America (dmoa.com). I'm not linking it because I don't want my PageRank vote to go to them.

What DROA does is rather ingenious. Whenever a domain is about to expire, they send a letter to the technical contact of that domain name (real letter, post office-style) telling them that they need to renew and that they can do so by returning the simple form at the bottom of the page or going to their website and paying the $30 renewal fee. Of course, I have never had a domain registered through them, so what they are actually asking me to do is to perform a transfer to them. I find this whole thing to be insufferable because it does not matter how many times I tell them to remove me from their mailing lists, they still continue to send these to me. Today, I accused them of running a scam (which sending things that look very similar to bill might rightly be called), and got into an argument with their customer service person. I was told that I had to "back up what I say" if I was going to go "throwing acusations."

Essentially, the business model of this place seems to be to prey on people who do not understand how the DNS registration system works. These people are the ones most likely to accidentally begin transfers in response to such letters. I don't believe that switching registrars is ever something that one simply wants to get up and do because it often is somewhat time consuming to correctly configure a new registrar (I should know, I've changed registrars twice in the last year). Unfortunately, their business model must be working because I've been getting as many as 8 of these a year for the past 5 years.



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So, I make use of several things to entertain me from time to time on the internet. Two of these things are Digg and StumbleUpon. Recently, I have seen an irritatinly high number of pages in both of these services relating to Ubuntu.

Now, I like Linux-- I run it on most of my boxes in fact. I don't, however, have any particular love for Ubuntu. The thing about Ubuntu that most people blithely ignore is that the stupid thing is just Debian with more up-to-date packages and a faster release cycle. These are things that Debian has always needed and its great that someone is finally doing it. What I don't like about the hype surrounding Ubuntu are the claims that it is somehow easier to use and better than other distributions. I installed Ubuntu on one of my machines (my router) and it was no easier or more difficult than installing Debian. Perhaps I just "don't get it."

Regardless, neither Debian nor Ubuntu particularly light my fire. I've like Gentoo better. Although it is nice to use binary packages for low-end systems, I do somewhat like being able to decide which features are compiled into my packages.

Ah well.

In other news, I've had to update XPost as it appears that Blogger has stopped providing a particular field in its feed list. I've also added support for DeviantART journals. I'll probably post the new version later this week as it is a giant pain in the ass to upload things to SourceForge/



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So, over the last break, I spent most of my time working on a drop-in replacement for
Crosspost. I had intended to announce its
creation some time ago, but was unable to as my Blogger
account hadn't finished migrating to the "New Blogger." Now, however, I am able to announce
the release of

XPost

.





XPost is a program for posting to multiple blogging services simultaneously. Currently, XPost supports

• Livejournal


• Windows Live Spaces


• Xanga


• Wordpress


• Other Metaweblog compatible blogging programs

XPost was/is written in C# Mono and uses
GTK# for its windowing environment.





On compatible system (ie, linux/X11 with GTK# and mono installed), XPost allows users to preview
their entries in a lightweight html renderer (gtkhtml).





Finally and most importantly, XPost is free software released under the
GNU GPL.



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