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OT Maths Jam
by Steve Engledow 26 Jul '12

26 Jul '12

Hi folks, Would anyone be interested in a Norwich maths jam? See http://www.mathsjam.com/ for (fairly vague) details or check the twitter account (@MathsJam). tl;dr: We get together in a pub on the second-to-last tuesday of the month and be geeky. I know, it sounds like the pubmeet; but this time we be geeky about mathsy things! I reckon there ought to be enough maths geeks among the linux geeks for this to be relevant :) Steve

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Pubmeet report
by Steve Engledow 25 Jul '12

25 Jul '12

Hi all, It's been a while since a pubmeet had a write-up but I thought it was worth a go :) On a suggestion from rlp10, last night ended up being somewhat of a PGP key-signing party. All of us around the table (there were 6 of us) - plus one passer-by that I happened to know - had PGP (or rather GPG) keys so, over the course of the night, we managed to each sign eachothers keys. There was even provision of ID and encrypted emails sent to verify identity and key ownership. A fairly textbook key-signing I'd say. Additionally, we collectively managed to get a sensible mutt config together for getting GPG integrated and working. For reference, the magical invocation to make mutt understand encrypted/signed mail from Macs and Thunderbird is: message-hook '!(~g|~G)~b"^-----BEGIN\ PGP\ (SIGNED\ )?MESSAGE"' "exec check-traditional-pgp" Stick that in your .muttrc and it all works nicely. (You need a `source /path/to/muttrc.gpg`) line in there somewhere too. The path varies by distro.) Aside from the PGP-related fun, katsmeat had brought an interesting old PC that had a built-in LCD display and ran Microsoft BASIC (I don't remember what the machine actually was) and I offloaded a load of old hardware onto rlp10 \o/ The food didn't seem as good as usual. The beer did. Until next month! Steve (Stilvoid)

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SyncNorwich
by Paul Grenyer 25 Jul '12

25 Jul '12

Hi All I just wanted to make sure you guys were all aware of www.syncnorwich.com, a new group for people in Norwich interested in Technology, Startups and Agile. Out next event is some lightning talks on the 16th August and there's a Norwich lunch on the 23rd August. -- Thanks Paul Paul Grenyer e: paul.grenyer(a)gmail.com b: paulgrenyer.blogspot.com t: pjgrenyer SyncNorwich: http://www.syncnorwich.com ACCU Member: License to code: http://www.accu.org

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kernel:journal commit I/O error
by Mark Rogers 19 Jul '12

19 Jul '12

I have an ARM box which was working fine until it went to site. It's running Debian and I only have access to it via SSH (although at the moment I have someone on site who can force it to reboot). Twice today I've received the error "kernel:journal commit I/O error" to my SSH terminal, after which point the root filesystem gets unmounted and I can't do anything even though the unit is still "up". Eg: $ ls -bash: /bin/ls: No such file or directory Any ideas what would be causing this? It's an expensive SD card in these units (not a cheap no-brand) This is the unit in case anyone is interested, it's running Debian 6: http://www.newit.co.uk/shop/proddetail.php?prod=DreamPlug_N I'd also be interested to know if there's anything I can do down an SSH connection to force it to reboot, given the lack of access to the filesystem to even run "sudo" never mind "reboot". I'm guessing that sending Alt-Ctrl-Del or Alt-SysRq-B via SSH are out... -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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linux apparel
by Peter Alcibiades 18 Jul '12

18 Jul '12

Hi everyone, I have three huge, I mean xxxl, linux apparel t-shirts looking for a good home. One looks like its been worn a couple of times since the brilliance of the yellow has faded slightly, the other two I don't think have been. Does anyone want them? They are fairly brilliant yellow, with a large black and white plastic penguin on the front, and on the back there is a black and white legend to the effect that this garment requires appreciation of open source freedom. Several years old. Maybe 10? Should have brought them to last Thusday, but I have not come to those for some time now. I can mail them if you let me have an address. Otherwise, its going to be the charity shop. Peter

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torcl
by richard.lee.parsons＠gmail.com 14 Jul '12

14 Jul '12

Hi all After some conversations with some Aluggers, I've thrown together a bash script for downloading torrents from the commandline. It searches isohunt, downloads your selected torrent file and kicks off the torrent client all from the warmth and safety of your favourite terminal. Perhaps it may be useful to some others on the list. https://github.com/rlp10/torcl It's pretty ugly scripting, so please forgive that. :) Richard

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Calendar GUI that has hooks for entering code when you click on a date
by Chris Green 14 Jul '12

14 Jul '12

I'm looking for a basic calendar display program that has a hook to allow me to execute a script (or other code) when I click on a date. Can anyone suggest anything like this? It can be desktop or Web. -- Chris Green

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[ALUG Announce] 3rd Monday Monthly Ipswich Social Meeting : The Mulberry Tree
by samwise 13 Jul '12

13 Jul '12

ALUG Announce Please send announcements to Announce(a)lists.alug.org.uk Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce ----- The monthly "Third Monday" ALUG Ipswich Social Meeting is back this week - Monday, 16th July, at 20:00: The Mulberry Tree 5 Woodbridge Road IPSWICH IP4 2EA Tel: 01473 225776 Email: mulberrytree.ips(a)btinternet.com Map/Directions URI: http://maps.google.co.uk/?q=IP4+2EA WWW: https://www.facebook.com/MULBERRYHOSPITALITY The Mulberry Tree, previously known as The Milestone Beer House, is a grade 2 listed building in the centre of Ipswich. It is located at the intersection between Woodbridge Road and the A1156, across the road from the old Odeon cinema and not far from the Regent Theatre. It re-opened on Thursday March 29th 2012 after a major refurbishment, under its original name of The Mulberry House and has already begun to regain a good reputation for its selection of beers and ales. It has a sizeable car park to the rear of the building. All are welcome, novices and experienced users. Feel free to ask for further information on the Main ALUG mailing list. After a stupidly quiet meet last time, let's see if we can drag a few more people down this month. I'll be there, and we may also have a couple of guests including, possibly, a friendly chap a few of us ALUGers met recently in the pub, who has a fair share of career stories involving the likes of Chris Curry, Clive Sinclair etc. and is currently involved in a project building unmanned aerial drones. Plus someone else may arrive armed with a MacBook who is looking to be persuaded why he should try out Linux ... Hope to see some of you there! Peter. ----- Send discussion replies to main(a)lists.alug.org.uk (Reply-To set) Unsub, change settings via http://lists.alug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/announce

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Strange code in DNS packet unravelling - any ideas why anyone?
by Chris Green 12 Jul '12

12 Jul '12

This is again related to my Nanode (Arduino lookalike) programming, it's more of a "why on earth is it like this" sort of question than needing to know how it works. The Nanode/Arduino sits waiting for things to do which are sent as requests to its ethernet interface. It also handles DHCP, DNS, ARP and other requests in the same loop. When it gets a DNS request it checks a few things and then does the following:- // // // Check if we have a valid query for us, compare name in DNS request with our name // p=(uint8_t *)settings.Name; // set pointer to our name stored at startup if (valid) // valid set by earlier checks { for (i = NBNS_NAME+1; i < NBNS_NAME+1+32; i += 2) { c = ((buf[i] - 0x41) << 4) + (buf[i+1] - 0x41); if (*p) { if (*p!=c) { valid=0; } p++; } else { if ((c != 0) && (c != 0x20)) { valid=0; } } } } The comment at the top is mine, I *think* that's what it's doing! However I really don't understand why it's doing that strange shifting and subtracting 0x41 (yes, I know it's 'A'). It's as if the name coming in with the DNS query is two bytes per character with a strange encoding as well. I can't see anywhere else in the code where characters are spread over two bytes, and the SPI interface seems to transfer 8 bit bytes all the time to/from the ethernet hardware. I also don't understand why it's comparing only 16 characters (is it just an arbitrary local limit) and/or why the name it's receiving in the DNS request is just the hostname, not a fully qualified name. It doesn't work for lower-case characters either, the name defined for the Nanode/Arduino has to be upper case for it to respond to DNS requests. If valid is still non-zero after this it sends its IP address back to the DNS requester. Have I missed something obvious or is this really wierd? Any/all ideas very welcome. -- Chris Green

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deb/alien dependencies
by Mark Rogers 11 Jul '12

11 Jul '12

I'm trying to install hamachi [1] on Debian (arm). I want the smallest install I can get away with, but at the moment I'm getting the following dependencies: alien at autopoint bc binutils build-essential bzip2 cpp cpp-4.4 cups-bsd cups-client cups-common debhelper dpkg-dev fakeroot g++ g++-4.4 gcc gcc-4.4 gettext gettext-base git html2text intltool-debian libalgorithm-diff-perl libalgorithm-diff-xs-perl libalgorithm-merge-perl libc-dev-bin libc6-dev libcurl3-gnutls libdpkg-perl libelf1 liberror-perl libgmp3c2 liblua5.1-0 libmail-sendmail-perl libmpfr4 libnspr4-0d libnss3-1d librpm1 librpmbuild1 librpmio1 libstdc++6-4.4-dev libsys-hostname-long-perl libtimedate-perl libunistring0 linux-libc-dev lsb-core lsb-release m4 make manpages-dev ncurses-term patch pax po-debconf rpm rpm-common rpm2cpio time It installs and runs OK but I don't want all that stuff on my box afterwards! Seeing alien in the list makes me conclude that this is a repackaged rpm and maybe that's what's causing the problem. However if I try to "apt-get remove alien" afterwards, hamachi gets removed. What are my options to work around this? Unfortunately Hamachi is not free and therefore I don't have access to the source. [1] https://secure.logmein.com/labs/ -- Mark Rogers // More Solutions Ltd (Peterborough Office) // 0844 251 1450 Registered in England (0456 0902) 21 Drakes Mews, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ER

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