HRBuckley.Net

Just bought one of these for home. I was impressed with it’s reviews, price and performance even before I knew it runs Linux and is extensible. For example, it is relatively easy to add NFS support to it.

This article discusses two things that all WordPress plugins should do.

Operation n » Writing Secure WordPress Plugins.

I’ve been trying to mash up a way to serve PK certificates (X.509) to Blackberries without the overhead of the whole BES server. It turns out that a very plan OpenLDAP installation (available for most Linux distributions) works very well. The quick start guide is enough to get the server up and running. It took a little work figure out how to get the certificates pushed into the server. It turns out that they have to be in DER format, while they are normally in PEM format. No problem OpenSSL takes care of that:

openssl x509 -outform DER -in incert.pem -out outcert.der

Then include the following line in your LDIF file for the user:

userCertificate;binary:< file:///path/to/outcert.der

I finally found that out from here.

Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introducing Ubiquity.

This is one of the coolest advances in Web utility I’ve seen in a very long time!

Since I won’t be flying tonight. I decided to tinker with the PVR. A few weeks ago I bought a PVR Plus 9242 for our Bell TV (formerly ExprssVu) satellite TV system. That is a bit of a long story, but one of the reasons I wanted the 9242 was that Bell had announced they were going to roll out storage expansion for the PVR through external USB drives. Apparently around about August 7th they pushed out the firmware upgrade. So a rainy day is a good time to check it out.

The official way to get expanded storage capacity is to buy a LaCie 750GByte drive from Bell. The list price (as I write this) is $199.00, which isn’t horrible, but Future Shop had a stack of them for $129.00 (also as I write this). I picked one up for the better half’s computer, but I have disk drives and USB enclosures around my office so I decided to see if the system was Bell specific, LaCie specific or open.

Good news it is open. I used a 120GByte Seagate Barracuda IDE drive with a USB 2.0 adapter. Followed the instruction from the Bell site above, wait for the PVR to format the drive, reboot and hey presto I have an external hard drive. Archiving shows is straight forward if not blindingly fast. One hour of HD takes nearly 20 minutes to copy over. The system is fast enough to watch shows from the external drive, and I don’t see any reason why one can’t buy as many external drives as one’s piggy bank will support to archive favorite shows.

Other bloggers have reported that plugging the drive into a PC once it has been formatted by the PVR will result in an automatic reformat of the drive. Since I have auto run disabled on my PC this did not happen when I connected my drive back to my PC. A quick check with PowerQuest tools shows two Linux EXT3 partitions one with about 1% of the capacity, the other with the remainder. Looking at the partitions with IFS Drive (a Windows EXT2 driver) shows the partitions unformatted, but PowerQuest indicates about 40MByte used on each, so either there is something non-standard, or it really was reformatted. Hmm, needs more investigation.

The really good news is you don’t need to buy the external drive from Bell if you don’t want to. The LaCie unit they specify should be a good one, but you may be able to get it cheaper at a big box store. Plug it in, format it, use it. It is really that simple.

While not exactly Open Source, releasing the information needed to customize the operating software on a piece of commercial hardware is pretty cool. When the hardware has an Arm CPU, display and keyboard for about $40 it is very cool.

Slashdot | HP Releases Hackable ARM-Based Calculator.

I have installed a new theme that does almost everything I want from a theme. I just had to fiddle with the default link widget to get my dynamic links. This theme is available from Bytes for All.

TCExam :: CBA – Computer-Based Assessment.

I’ve been trying to come up with a system to generate and manage quizzes and tests for my flying scholarship classes for a long time. It seems it has been here all along. I love the open source community. Now to install it and see if it is as good as it appears from the web site.

Here is an article on an interesting process to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. A dash of lime — a new twist that may cut CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels. Of course it is an operation on a huge scale, and unless the IPCC is right (something that I don’t take as a given) would be a lot of effort without much effect. In any case the effort is modeled on Open Source and the idea is worth researching, have a read.

I have been getting along quite well with Blackberry Unite. There have been a couple of upgrades though most seem to be house keeping with not much change to the User Interface since release. The most contentious property of Unite seems to be the one that makes it most useful, the IT Policy enforced on Blackberries paired with the Unite server. The policy options allowed by the Unite server are not very numerous, but there is some help if you find them too restrictive. A thread on BlackberryForums.Com (link below) has a great deal of discussion about, and if you follow the thread to the end, a BasicScript application that will allow you to modify the IT Policy to one of a few put together by Blackberry Enterprise Server administrators.

Unite ITPolicy modifications – BlackBerryForums.com.