Coredump

Recently read a blog about home-brew outdoor WiFi by way of the PLUG mailing lists and Migs Paraz's blog post . We have a somewhat similar project at PhilRice : Low-cost WiFi connectivity for Pinoy farmers , in partnership with the University of Southern Mindanao (USM), Preginet ( ASTI - DOST ), AFRDIS ( DA ), and DA BPRE . The USM team fabricates low-cost antennas from common household materials such as pots and pans for use on off-the-shelf indoor WiFi equipment (Cisco, D-Link, Orinoco). The low-power antennas can be used as access points and bridges for last-mile broadband connectivity. We have successfully deployed such configurations in our network clusters in Isabela, Nueva Ecija, Los Baños, Agusan del Norte and North Cotabato. Soon, we will be also working with ASTI and NTT (of Japan) on WIPAS , a fixed wireless access solution using the 26-GHz range and capable of throughput up to 40 Mbits/second.

Found a good read over at Poynter Online: "Debunking Myths" . Having been involved in editorial design since high school, I've come across some of these "design dogmas" that are nakataga sa bato . Of course, being an inept conformist, I've always managed to cut against the grain, so to speak. Ah, I'm mixing metaphors. Oh well, that's what a long weekend does to you.

Just discovered a cool feature in Flickr , an online photo-sharing tool: you can add notes to your photos! When adding notes, you can drag a marquee over any area in the photo, add your text, and voila! notes are added to your specified regions in the picture. Feature in action: Items in my diecast wishlist. Design for Gab's toy storage A corner bookcase for copying

Managed to finish printing the super's poster paper, after the unwieldy plotter refused to cooperate several times. I'm interested in the low-cost WiFi solution . I'm fairly sure there will be ways to coax a few more kilometers out of the home-brews. Tomorrow -- no, in a few hours, gah! -- will be the 18th National Research and Development Conference, which will focus on farmers' best practices. Lots of things to look forward, too. Too bad the LTSP didn't quite make it. It would have been a nice debut.

For now. The firewall's LAN port is totally fragged, and I can't even do one-to-one NAT ing on it just so I can punch a hole to the internet.I've given up on doing manual updates on Warty. I've ran into a circular dependency on perl and perl-modules . I need those packages to update libwww-perl , which in turn is needed by ltsp-admin . Yep, I could have struck a no/ignore-dependency switch, but I don't know what that would entail. So instead of totally trashing the Warty install, I've placed the server on stand-by for now. Sayang. We have these 30 cool, totally useless critters in small-form-factor boxes with 15-inch widescreen TFT monitors, and they're just gonna sit there until I've solved the more pressing problem with the firewall. Sure, I could just as easily put up an old box to add as a firewall, but again, that would take much of my time now that the R&D conference is just around the corner. I'd have to deal with the increased traffic on...

Here's an interesting article from Wired News: Alphabet Soup: Do You Speak Tech? . Reminds me of them days in high school: I did an essay piece on jargon, mouthing off something like "A PC-XT running DOS is much better than CP/M on a Commodore, and this will surely provide a big boost for cutting-edge 16-bit computing," and sounding really cool. :D God, my age shows.

Am gearing for the installation of a 30-seat thin client setup for our IT training facility. I've ditched Bayanihan Linux (bad media) for Ubuntu Warty. Installation was a breeze, but I got stumped when it came to updating and installing new packages through apt-get . Seems like a problem with the firewall. Have to negotiate with the net-ad on punching a hole through it so the server can pass through to the net happily.

Okay, I've given up on manual updates (downloading .deb s, running dpkg or dselect , looking out for dependencies, back to step one, ad nauseam). *sigh!* That's just too tiresome. I'm gonna ferret out the problem with apt-get not going through the firewall first. Problem is, the net ad (heh, I'm *just* a net janitor) is on a weekend holiday, and he forgot to give me access to the firewall. I think he disabled the LAN port. Yep, he's a BOFH. *evil grin* Well, then, the thin client installation is temporarily on hold — until Monday, at least — but I'm not losing hope. I've managed to set up remote access for the server, which now sits happily in the cold room, through some convoluted way. I'll try poking around tonight. Not tomorrow: it's a Sunday, full-time QT with the family. On Monday, I'm sure I'll get it over and done with, what with the docs I've pored through and the friendliness of Ubuntu. Till then... To be continued...

I've finally settled on using Ubuntu Linux for my LTSP installation. Let's just say my interest has been piqued by Debian (I'm a Red Hat/Fedora user) and I wanted to try it out. I'll be doing a step-by-step howto later on, once I've consolidated my notes. For now, this is a running commentary only, so sorry for the sentence fragments and grammatical lapses — I'm posting as I go. :) Here goes... Downloaded and burned Ubuntu WartyWartHog and LTSP 4.1. Installed Warty on the brand-spanking-new server (dual Xeon, 2GB RAM, 3x 200-GB SATA HDD). Well, tried to install Bayanihan Linux 3 first, but hit snags — bad media — so Ubuntu it was. Installation was a breeze. Logged in to the server. Gnome! Ack! Still cool, but I prefer KDE. Hmmm, maybe later on. Installed SSH and nfs-kernel-server . apt-get is so cool. Well, I'm familiar with it since I use that — and yum — on my FC box. Damn! apt-get can't retrieve sources from the net when I changed sources.ls...

Latest version of my poster paper for presentation at the PhilRice 18th National R&D Conference on March 15.

Sounds like Mission: Impossible , huh?I have to get the critters up and running in time for our National R&D Conference on Monday. The thing is, I just got notice *today*. It would have been okay since I was banking on the Bayanihan Linux Project's Thin Client Manager, which was launched about two weeks ago (I think). But when I went to their site -- no downloads available yet. Aarrghhh! So here I am, scrambling for quick-and-dirty installations to get one up and running. My eye is currently on Skolelinux, a Debian-based educational distro. <Keeping fingers crossed.>

Flickr has another cool feature: a "Daily Zeitgeist", a Flash thingie that, er, flashes my (or my contacts, mine and my contacts, everyone's -- you get the drift) recent photos in a sidebar button.

The 18th National R&D Conference is coming up, and the deadline for the poster paper is fast approaching (March 4). I have yet to submit a draft. Well, I *do* have a draft but it's not fleshed out yet. Plus the title looks geeky. How's " The Pinoy Farmers' Internet portal: A virtual gateway for the Philippine Agricultural Extension System "? Sound geeky enough?

There's this local bookstore here in the province that sells real cheap books — is Php30 cheap enough for you? Okay, so they're second-hand books, and Booksale prolly sells them for a lot less, but with the prices of brand new books nowadays — and paperbacks at that, not even the nifty (*and* hefty) cloth- or hardbound stuff — I'll take whatever blessing comes my way. But I digress: so there's the cheap-book store and I rummaged through their stocks, which were in dusty boxes all over the place, and here are my finds: John LeCarre's The Spy Who Came In From the Cold . Saw a DVD of this on evilBay , starring Alec Guiness, I think. The Falcon and the Snowman . Spy-stuff yet again. And a book-to-movie, too. White Light by Rudy Rucker. One of his early "Transreality" novels. Trippy, this one. A collection of Thomas Mann's stories, including Death in Venice . Heavy stuff: after The Magic Mountain , I dunno if I can take one more Mann. ;) Heh. Zen...