Don't want djbdns installed in/usr/local? Neither do I. I want it in/usr/djb (don't ask). So I take the hugely complicated step of running:
echo/usr/djb > conf-home && make setup check
Confused by the datafile format? Think it's no good unless you spend all day looking at it? Well isn't that what sysadmins do? Once you're used to it (which doesn't take long), don't you think it's easier to add edit one config file and run make (copy and paste new entries if you still can't remember which symbol means "A record") than to edit at least N files where N is the number of subdomains for which you are authoritative, remembering to increase an arbitrary number and then possibly root about in another config file, placed in a totally separate directory?
Don't like the way djbdns does secondarying? Good. You aren't supposed to. The whole point is that you don't worry about delegating "masters" and "slaves" and waiting fifteen minutes for them to synchronise. You just ssh your cdb database on to each of your dns servers.
What? You meant that you REALLY NEED to support a secondary running bind? Well what's so hard about tcpserver 0 53 axfrdns anyway?
Don't like the licensing issue? Oh come on. So Dan gives you complete freedom to hack away and change what you like with the sole condition that you don't distribute modified binary packages. Oh how harse. Actually you might not have noticed but Microsoft don't let you pass Windows around (they call it privacy) but they don't let you see the source either, let alone edit it or distribute patches. Sounds like Mr Bernstein's licence is a bit less restrictive than others. Oh, wait, I forgot. It isn't GPL and any other licence is no good.
Folks you have to learn that the whole point of djbdns, like the whole point of qmail, is to redesign from scratch bad software. Is it so surprising that it ends up doing things differently? So it takes a while to learn how to use daemontools and ucspi-tcp. So the cdb files and their intermediates the data files can be confusing at first. Isn't this worth putting up with if it means you don't have to spend half an hour editing your configs, nearly as long again waiting for the server to restart (remember bind has to slurp everything into memory and it's unusable while it's doing this whereas tinydns just a new data.cdb as soon as it's available) and then running away with all your memory? Isn't it more in keeping with the unix tradition to have separate tools for separate jobs (tinydns, dnscache, axfrdns)?
Why don't you stop moaning (probably your bad moods are caused by incessant patching of bind) and open your eyes to the superior alternatives?
LOS ALTOS, Calif., Nov 13 2000. The "Hack Furby" Challenge
has been won.
Furby [TM Tiger Electronics] was the smash hit toy of
Christmas 1998 and after. Furby is a small furry doll with
an electro-mechanical interior that lets it run through a
pre-programmed repertoire of speech and movement. Furbies
gradually let out more speech and actions the more you
handle them, creating a powerful illusion that they learn.
In fact the customer has no ability to make a Furby act in a
way different to the way it was programmed at the factory.
Up till now...
The Hack Furby Challenge
In January 1999, Silicon Valley-based engineer Peter van
der Linden issued a challenge to the computer engineering
world through his website http://www.afu.com "Make Furby
re-programmable!" Author of several books on computer
programming, including the best-selling Just Java 2, van der
Linden explained his challenge thus: "Being an inveterate
gadget lover and tinkerer, I bought one of the first Furbies
available and dismantled it.
The potential for Furby to become a general purpose
computing device was immediately obvious. The thing already
has a CPU and is bristling with peripherals including
infrared I/O, several motion detectors, eye and mouth
movements, a loudspeaker and a microphone. All it needed was
a little encouragement from me to get a great set of Open
Source community engineers working on it." If Furby could be
re-programmed by its users, it would become a much more
interesting and educational device. Instead of listening to
your Furby talk "Furbish", you could play chess with it.
Instead of pressing your Furby's beak, you could have it
announce your email or calendar appointments. You can have
Furby record voice memos or phone calls for later replay.
You can program Furby to solve mathematical puzzles and
equations, to look for Mersenne prime numbers, or simply to
act as a speaking clock. Rework the mouth servo with
hydraulics to open beer cans, have the only speaking garden
gnome on the block. Heck, it doesn't really matter, the
point is to create individual conceptual art from
mass-produced ephemera.
Furby designer Dave Hampton strongly opposed allowing
sophisticated users to customize the device. Hampton had
seen earlier toys like Microsoft's "Barney the Talking
Dinosaur" product subverted by graduate students, who put
colorful expletives into the mouth of the purple behemoth.
The Redmond monopoly provided the software for the talking
Barney toy.
Tough Work
Hampton wanted to prevent owners from creating "potty-mouth
Furby" and Tiger Electronics (the Furby distributor) wanted
to frustrate competitors from copying the design. As a
result, the cpu and memory of each Furby are encased in a
tough shell of resin. There is no practical way to break
through to examine the electronics without shattering them
in the process. Furby hacking contrasts with the Lego
Mindstorms toy, which embraced and co-opted the freelance
development community, selling a lot more product in the
process. The active opposition of designer and manufacturer
made Furby hacking significantly harder. But the development
community views Furby's lack of programmability as a design
flaw or bug, and all bugs (no matter how tough) yield in the
end.
"I knew it would be quite difficult to crack Furby security
and create a user-programmable version of Furby, so I
offered a cash prize as an incentive to try" said van der
Linden. Prizes of this kind were often staked by
industrialists in the early days of aviation, to encourage
new designs and faster progress.
And The Winner Is...!
The prize of two hundred and fifty dollars was won by
Canadian computer consultant Jeffrey Gibbons, who submitted
the winning prototype by Fedex. The design is being
published to the public under the terms of the competition,
and orders are being taken for a "Hack Furby" kit over the
Internet.
"The cash prize is just a token," explained van der Linden,
"The real prize is the bragging rights to the
accomplishment, and the benefit of sharing it with the
world. Computer Science departments can now base their
real-time programming courses on this very low-cost
equipment."
One of the first re-programmed Furbies will be sent to the
mother who contacted van der Linden early in the challenge.
She noticed the speech of her autistic son improved greatly
when interacting with the Furby. But she was despondent
about the gibberish that the standard Furby talks. That
mother was anxious to find a Furby that could be upgraded
with normal speech, to help autistic children relate to the
the real world. Her son's Furby will now be delivered in
time for Christmas, thanks to the "Hack Furby Challenge"
(subject to kit production). Parents of autistic children
everywhere will value the chance to transform Furby from a
trivial amusement into an educational aid.
A Challenge For Software Folks
There is always a higher mountain to climb, and van der
Linden plans to issue a new challenge. "Now that the
original problem has been solved, I plan to stake a new
prize for the first person to port a Java Virtual Machine to
this architecture. The Java 2 Micro Edition is wonderfully
suitable for driving the embedded Furby processor, at the
same time allowing programmers to write high-level portable
code." The first Furby challenge was for hardware folks;
this new challenge allows software experts to show their
skills.
A Java virtual machine has already been ported to the Lego
Mindstorms computer. TinyVM is an open source JavaTM based
replacement firmware for the Lego MindstormsTM RCX
microcontroller. The RCX is a programmable brick that comes
with Lego's Robotics Invention SystemTM. For further details
on the Java/Lego system see http://lejos.sourceforge.net/.
If Java can run on a Lego block, it can definitely run on a
Furby.
What of the original prototype, the world's first
user-programmable Furby? "It's standing on my kitchen table
right now, being eyed warily by my dogs" laughs van der
Linden, "I think I'll offer it to the Smithsonian in due
course".
Window Maker will let you assign hot key combinations for specific windows. Currently you can have up to ten. You choose what the hot key meta will be in the configuration and can then assign or deassign (is that a word?) the hot status to windows on the fly. I have the Left Windows and Alt combination as my meta and numbers 1-0 as the hot keys. So I can make a shortcut to this Netscape window with: Windows+Escape: enter window commands menu O, right cursor: select options S a few times, return: choose a shortcut Then if I switch to a new window with Windows+Tab and perhaps change workspaces with Windows+{8,9,0.-,=} (please don't ask why I chose these keys) I can instantly get this window back with Windows+Alt+1 - just in time to hit submit. Of course, this being Netscape, I have to reach for the mouse to find the submit button...
Well I've just had to create myself a login so I can reply to this. If you can't understand why people get annoyed about banner ads, consider those of us (such as Europeans like myself) who have to pay for internet access and can equate time spent loading banner ads to money going down the drain. You may well argue that we all receive junk mail through our letterboxes and we all walk past advertising hoardings on our way to work ([ "$HAVE_CAR" = "yes" ] && s/walk/drive/) but we don't pay for the privilege. Any adserver ip address that isn't shared with the webserver goes straight into ipfw add reject tcp from any to $IP 80 if I'm at home or ipchains -A output -s 0/0 -d $IP 80 -p tcp -j REJECT at the office. Surely the worst offender is the otherwise excellent freshmeat, the only site I visit daily. If you're going to waste our bandwidth advertising something, at least advertise something that we haven't all got. And isn't the point of advertising to make money? Who makes money out of advertising Apache? It's free for God's sake.
Slashdot Mirror
Link against dietlibc (http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/).
gcc -march=i386 -mcpu=i386 -Os -fomit-frame-pointer -c edftt.c /usr/src/dietlibc/start.o /usr/src/dietlibc/dietlibc.a -o edftt .note -R .comment edftt
ld edftt.o -nostdlib
strip -R
gzip edftt
ls -l edftt.gz
-rwxr-xr-x 1 iain users 751 Mar 19 10:44 edftt.gz*
uname -a
Linux hammerhead 2.4.1 #2 Fri Feb 2 11:09:50 HKT 2001 i686 unknown
Don't want djbdns installed in /usr/local? Neither do I. I want it in /usr/djb (don't ask). So I take the hugely complicated step of running:
echoConfused by the datafile format? Think it's no good unless you spend all day looking at it? Well isn't that what sysadmins do? Once you're used to it (which doesn't take long), don't you think it's easier to add edit one config file and run make (copy and paste new entries if you still can't remember which symbol means "A record") than to edit at least N files where N is the number of subdomains for which you are authoritative, remembering to increase an arbitrary number and then possibly root about in another config file, placed in a totally separate directory?
Don't like the way djbdns does secondarying? Good. You aren't supposed to. The whole point is that you don't worry about delegating "masters" and "slaves" and waiting fifteen minutes for them to synchronise. You just ssh your cdb database on to each of your dns servers.
What? You meant that you REALLY NEED to support a secondary running bind? Well what's so hard about tcpserver 0 53 axfrdns anyway?
Don't like the licensing issue? Oh come on. So Dan gives you complete freedom to hack away and change what you like with the sole condition that you don't distribute modified binary packages. Oh how harse. Actually you might not have noticed but Microsoft don't let you pass Windows around (they call it privacy) but they don't let you see the source either, let alone edit it or distribute patches. Sounds like Mr Bernstein's licence is a bit less restrictive than others. Oh, wait, I forgot. It isn't GPL and any other licence is no good.
Folks you have to learn that the whole point of djbdns, like the whole point of qmail, is to redesign from scratch bad software. Is it so surprising that it ends up doing things differently? So it takes a while to learn how to use daemontools and ucspi-tcp. So the cdb files and their intermediates the data files can be confusing at first. Isn't this worth putting up with if it means you don't have to spend half an hour editing your configs, nearly as long again waiting for the server to restart (remember bind has to slurp everything into memory and it's unusable while it's doing this whereas tinydns just a new data.cdb as soon as it's available) and then running away with all your memory? Isn't it more in keeping with the unix tradition to have separate tools for separate jobs (tinydns, dnscache, axfrdns)?
Why don't you stop moaning (probably your bad moods are caused by incessant patching of bind) and open your eyes to the superior alternatives?
Well I thought it was funny.
You don't spell unladen like that.
:g/^ */s// /
ggvGgq
Output:
Hack Furby Challenge Won!
LOS ALTOS, Calif., Nov 13 2000. The "Hack Furby" Challenge
has been won.
Furby [TM Tiger Electronics] was the smash hit toy of
Christmas 1998 and after. Furby is a small furry doll with
an electro-mechanical interior that lets it run through a
pre-programmed repertoire of speech and movement. Furbies
gradually let out more speech and actions the more you
handle them, creating a powerful illusion that they learn.
In fact the customer has no ability to make a Furby act in a
way different to the way it was programmed at the factory.
Up till now...
The Hack Furby Challenge
In January 1999, Silicon Valley-based engineer Peter van
der Linden issued a challenge to the computer engineering
world through his website http://www.afu.com "Make Furby
re-programmable!" Author of several books on computer
programming, including the best-selling Just Java 2, van der
Linden explained his challenge thus: "Being an inveterate
gadget lover and tinkerer, I bought one of the first Furbies
available and dismantled it.
The potential for Furby to become a general purpose
computing device was immediately obvious. The thing already
has a CPU and is bristling with peripherals including
infrared I/O, several motion detectors, eye and mouth
movements, a loudspeaker and a microphone. All it needed was
a little encouragement from me to get a great set of Open
Source community engineers working on it." If Furby could be
re-programmed by its users, it would become a much more
interesting and educational device. Instead of listening to
your Furby talk "Furbish", you could play chess with it.
Instead of pressing your Furby's beak, you could have it
announce your email or calendar appointments. You can have
Furby record voice memos or phone calls for later replay.
You can program Furby to solve mathematical puzzles and
equations, to look for Mersenne prime numbers, or simply to
act as a speaking clock. Rework the mouth servo with
hydraulics to open beer cans, have the only speaking garden
gnome on the block. Heck, it doesn't really matter, the
point is to create individual conceptual art from
mass-produced ephemera.
Furby designer Dave Hampton strongly opposed allowing
sophisticated users to customize the device. Hampton had
seen earlier toys like Microsoft's "Barney the Talking
Dinosaur" product subverted by graduate students, who put
colorful expletives into the mouth of the purple behemoth.
The Redmond monopoly provided the software for the talking
Barney toy.
Tough Work
Hampton wanted to prevent owners from creating "potty-mouth
Furby" and Tiger Electronics (the Furby distributor) wanted
to frustrate competitors from copying the design. As a
result, the cpu and memory of each Furby are encased in a
tough shell of resin. There is no practical way to break
through to examine the electronics without shattering them
in the process. Furby hacking contrasts with the Lego
Mindstorms toy, which embraced and co-opted the freelance
development community, selling a lot more product in the
process. The active opposition of designer and manufacturer
made Furby hacking significantly harder. But the development
community views Furby's lack of programmability as a design
flaw or bug, and all bugs (no matter how tough) yield in the
end.
"I knew it would be quite difficult to crack Furby security
and create a user-programmable version of Furby, so I
offered a cash prize as an incentive to try" said van der
Linden. Prizes of this kind were often staked by
industrialists in the early days of aviation, to encourage
new designs and faster progress.
And The Winner Is...!
The prize of two hundred and fifty dollars was won by
Canadian computer consultant Jeffrey Gibbons, who submitted
the winning prototype by Fedex. The design is being
published to the public under the terms of the competition,
and orders are being taken for a "Hack Furby" kit over the
Internet.
"The cash prize is just a token," explained van der Linden,
"The real prize is the bragging rights to the
accomplishment, and the benefit of sharing it with the
world. Computer Science departments can now base their
real-time programming courses on this very low-cost
equipment."
One of the first re-programmed Furbies will be sent to the
mother who contacted van der Linden early in the challenge.
She noticed the speech of her autistic son improved greatly
when interacting with the Furby. But she was despondent
about the gibberish that the standard Furby talks. That
mother was anxious to find a Furby that could be upgraded
with normal speech, to help autistic children relate to the
the real world. Her son's Furby will now be delivered in
time for Christmas, thanks to the "Hack Furby Challenge"
(subject to kit production). Parents of autistic children
everywhere will value the chance to transform Furby from a
trivial amusement into an educational aid.
A Challenge For Software Folks
There is always a higher mountain to climb, and van der
Linden plans to issue a new challenge. "Now that the
original problem has been solved, I plan to stake a new
prize for the first person to port a Java Virtual Machine to
this architecture. The Java 2 Micro Edition is wonderfully
suitable for driving the embedded Furby processor, at the
same time allowing programmers to write high-level portable
code." The first Furby challenge was for hardware folks;
this new challenge allows software experts to show their
skills.
A Java virtual machine has already been ported to the Lego
Mindstorms computer. TinyVM is an open source JavaTM based
replacement firmware for the Lego MindstormsTM RCX
microcontroller. The RCX is a programmable brick that comes
with Lego's Robotics Invention SystemTM. For further details
on the Java/Lego system see http://lejos.sourceforge.net/.
If Java can run on a Lego block, it can definitely run on a
Furby.
What of the original prototype, the world's first
user-programmable Furby? "It's standing on my kitchen table
right now, being eyed warily by my dogs" laughs van der
Linden, "I think I'll offer it to the Smithsonian in due
course".
Window Maker will let you assign hot key combinations for specific windows. Currently you can have up to ten. You choose what the hot key meta will be in the configuration and can then assign or deassign (is that a word?) the hot status to windows on the fly. I have the Left Windows and Alt combination as my meta and numbers 1-0 as the hot keys. So I can make a shortcut to this Netscape window with: Windows+Escape: enter window commands menu O, right cursor: select options S a few times, return: choose a shortcut Then if I switch to a new window with Windows+Tab and perhaps change workspaces with Windows+{8,9,0.-,=} (please don't ask why I chose these keys) I can instantly get this window back with Windows+Alt+1 - just in time to hit submit. Of course, this being Netscape, I have to reach for the mouse to find the submit button...
Well I've just had to create myself a login so I can reply to this. If you can't understand why people get annoyed about banner ads, consider those of us (such as Europeans like myself) who have to pay for internet access and can equate time spent loading banner ads to money going down the drain. You may well argue that we all receive junk mail through our letterboxes and we all walk past advertising hoardings on our way to work ([ "$HAVE_CAR" = "yes" ] && s/walk/drive/) but we don't pay for the privilege. Any adserver ip address that isn't shared with the webserver goes straight into ipfw add reject tcp from any to $IP 80 if I'm at home or ipchains -A output -s 0/0 -d $IP 80 -p tcp -j REJECT at the office. Surely the worst offender is the otherwise excellent freshmeat, the only site I visit daily. If you're going to waste our bandwidth advertising something, at least advertise something that we haven't all got. And isn't the point of advertising to make money? Who makes money out of advertising Apache? It's free for God's sake.