02 Jun 2002
blanu and I were talking about low cost computers, which would be handy for my new job (more on that later). He sent me to idotpc.com which actually has (hold on to your seat now) a decent flex atx case with no ugly floppy drive hole. (Like I would put a 3 1/2 disk drive in a computer like that. The fact that people still use them is prove that the devil exists.) It even has USB ports on the front for game controlers.
So now I just need a Flex ATX MB with an AGP slot (or built in 3d with a linux driver) and I can get started on a combo PVR, game system (mame + snes9x + whatever), mp3 player, picture viewer.
02 Jun 2002
Tonight I’m frustrated with my GUI set up: I have too many window types. We have
- Normal X windows
- PowerShell Tabs
- Joe windows
I get lost remembering which key to hit to switch back to the last window.
If my gnome panel (which runs down the right side of my screen, where my mouse still naturaly goes to after so many years of not using a mac) wasn’t already full of konq windows, I would switch to rxvt some gui text editor.
02 Jun 2002
I think Mnet would become a lot more usable if we added two things:
- Achord routing and lookup - this is a nice solution because achord gives you some guaranties about the time to find something in the network and also some privacy. It’s yet to be seen if the XOR routing can be hacked in the same what chord was hacked to get achord.
- Expanded search fields - I want to be able to tell the content tracker as much as I can about a file, but I want everyone else to at least tell me a few things about their file. All files should have a bitprint, file size (in bytes, who decided that the file size should be in kb in the current version), and a type field. The type could be any string with len(str) < 50, but if it was set to certain value the content trackers would require other fields (for audio files, a musicbrainz track id, a trm signature, audio Sha1, artist, title)
The itch I can’t scratch is getting Octal to start OpenDBS up and running so we can reinstate the $$$ for all transactions again.
02 Jun 2002
Here’s an idea brought up by blanu and kherr on #infoanarchy: p2p phones.
Works like this, you have linmodem/winmodem with a voice driver, or a voice modem. You run this p2p app and it lists the exchanges that are a local call for you. If someone wants to call a number local to you, you would route the call for him.
This has the normal p2p problems (freeloaders, problems with the law, ‘but officer I didn’t make those calls.. I swear’), and plus I don’t think 14 year old hackers parents would understand why people they don’t know keep talking other people they don’t know on their phone line.
One solution to the parent problem is to put two linmodems in the 14 year old hacker box and reroute all the home phone onto this network (maybe this could be done with one linmodem, don’t know). BBS kids used to jack up the household phone bill, now they kill all long distance changes :).
It would be intresting to see how quickly you could put this together reusing as much code from other things as possiable.
02 Jun 2002
If you know anything about the state of the mnet code you know that what I like to do is make thing more usable to the average person. So tonight I had the pleasure of play with The Circle tonight. It’s got some cool stuff.
- you can share your debian apt cache (meaning all the *.deb files that you’ve downloaded, installed, but not deleted) with everyone else on circle, and added apt methods that will transparently try to get packages from circle before trying to get them from the normal site. (md5sums make the world go ‘round)
- the daemon script has an option that can be run to install an init.d script to bring the daemon up on reboot (not sure if the init.d scripts are in the debian package)
- some kind of shell extention where you can switch between circle and the shell (havn’t tried it yet)
I hope to bring some of these same UI ideas to Mnet right after I get the other two big things out of the way. (what are those? stay tuned.)