Greetings List Lurkers,
I'm B-a-a-ck...
Fact is that I had to go and get a buddy's Chromecast working. Why people
cannot figure this out is beyond me (The second one this month :^). But
the first one was located just outside of Nassau in the Bahamas. Oh well
the sacrifices we make for our friends...
Anyway, I get back and things are in the usual state of flux...
KINDLE LIBERATION FRONT
As you recall Brett managed to root his new kindle, and now needs a
microSD card in order to load a new OS on the beast. DTG did his kindle
just because he was bored one cold night last month. Effin managed to
get Amazon to mail him a new unit. He has even posted his chat with
tech support for your analysis here:
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/kindle#AmazonChat
In my humble opinion this puts Effin back in the good graces of the
Kindle Liberation Community. Everyone loves an excellent social hack.
I will follow Brett's lead as soon as I can!
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/kindle
Following Effin's example, we need to get whatever he did up on the site
ASAP,. Now that this is on the table I am gonna have to try it myself.
I remain convinced that there could be a commercial opportunity in
customizing kindles. You would think that maybe Effin would be
interested...
I remain really want a version of the Universal Insight Virtual Realty
Glasses for the Kindle. 3d Teleconferencing way cool! Anybody see such a
thing? I am thinking about trying to fabricate one based upon the
original cardboard.
TRANTOR
This project is still operating in development at the library and it appears
that the powers that be in State Library Land are the delay factor in our
opening Trantor to the world, Hopefully this is not political struggle but
rather a period of waiting to get free software online in Vermont (see
"Connectivity" below).
The Collection Grows:
The good news is that in February I got Tom Kastner out to lunch in
Waterbury and he handed over 50 or so additional Linux Format DVDs. The
Tom Kastner collection starts with LXFDVD100 and goes to LXFDVD128 with
some blank spots... How this works out to 50 is beyond me... These
additional 50 or so disks he go us would go a long way to making the
collection complete. I have completed moving these iso images onto hard
drives and what remains is to capture the cover art using sexy Xerox
scanner at the Aldrich. Thus we are on schedule to get this latest tranche
of disks online this month.
Development and Test Systems:
Right now we are, using two of the original Gates Foundation grant based
Dell machines. One is the development and one is test. Aldrich is
donated four of these to the club. We now have one running as the
development system a rough to the test unit at the Aldrich.
So, once we get this working we will then deliver the Trantor v 4.0 machine to
the Aldrich, swap it with the existing 0.015 system, set up static IP, avahi
bonjour and things may actually be accessible via DNS for the world. Well a
fellow can dream...
Production:
With this is accomplished we will switch to the excellent hardware platform
that Marius delivered. This production case contains both USB2.0/3.0 and and a
DVDRW. This will be the production device.
Software Development
From a software standpoint, the first, second, third and forth(pun :^)
passes for Trantor are done. The third development pass, is in the Aldrich
Public library for evaluation, and the latest feature is there is a new
include that actually rebuilds the index.rst from the existing sub-rst
files. With the bzinga project there is most likely to be a fourth (forth?
:^) pass, and maybe a bzinga based gui...
Development Cycle
With a working version of enki, the vision of a reStructuredText website
is accomplished:
- Take the existing reStructuredText (.rst) files
- edit them with enki, a restful editor almost built for the job.
(a most difficult to install but rewarding bit of software)
- add the changes to the visualbash build files. Propagating the change
using this shell script framework (thank god for sed and awk)
- run "ctrantor.sh mkitso" which builds
-- new base .rst files from a manifest,
-- a new index.rst from the existing stuff, and then
-- builds new web site based upon this index.rst
- check out the result...
- lather, rinse repeat...
Note that having each DVD's "front porch" html open as a separate tab
was beyond the current capabilities of sphinx. Good old sed takes care of
it in a postprocess, and adding color backgrounds to each individual
requires a reSturcturedText "Raw" directive. Meh.
Again, I restate that reStructuredText, and sphinx now join my world through
the visualbash framework. I am completely convinced the trick to sphinx and
reStructuredText in general is enki, which is a royal pain to install, but
turns out to be a powerful new product. As we said about enki, the ticket was
to get this code to run under Linux Mint 18 and Ubuntu Trusty, which we
accomplished with help from the developers. Thanks to the gang at enki, pydocs
and sphinx this is done.
Further Development:
The newest include is likely to be called "movingday", and it works with
"sanity" to allow you to move only the relevant components of trantor into a
tar ball for installation at another system.
The "SanityScript" remains born but without love. Right now the vision is that
"sanity.shi" may be tasked with some combination of the following:
- Check that all the components you need are in place in terms of program
- Possibly check at to the validity of the includes and functions using MD5
- checking for variable conflict within functions. This is a big thing, but on
the other hand, so it sanity...
As an example I have enki running on trantor. Now that I have it running here
with the new version I will try again. The trantor project now uses the new
VisualBash include function to load up various scripts full-o-functional
goodness. Like everything else, We are attempting to maintain the Trantor
project on Github, but we are really not up to date, mostly because I don't
appear to be using git to it's fullest potential:
https://github.com/flintiii/trantor
As discussed, I continue to hack this into some type of organized format to put
up on git hub, but now I am considering adding a GUI control capability to the
trantor control program. Getting this up on git is something that will please
both Chris Yarger and Kevin Cole. I really am gonna get to commitment and
update soon. Am I resistant to commitment?
The trantor project benefits itself as you can cut DVDs and USBs with great
ease and facility.
http://docbox.flint.com/~flint/trantor/ ("Rick Roll version")
Before vacation, I concentrated on developing a VisualBash program to
automatically generate the individual and now seasonally colored ".rst"
reStructuredText files at the base level. When I went a little nuts and
decided to add a seasonal background color to each base rst file, I had no
idea how involved I would become. While this may have seemed like a very
good idea at the time, implementing this in reStructuredText was no
picnic. The base "rst" files based upon a csv manifest. A good thing, but
cleanup is in process.
Complete The Collection:
With the current reStructuredText Web Site: We shall soon have online a
complete set of disks starting from LXFDVD100, as we mentioned last week,
we sent Neil at Linux Format, an email in an attempt to expanding trantor
to include all the Linux Format DVDs since they started publication. He
writes back and says the first 19 issues of Linux Format had a CD. The DVD
was introduced from issue 20, when there was a choice of the DVD or dual
CD edition. From around issue 71, it was DVD only. So we have about a 104
CD/DVD gap in the beginning of the collection.
This small victory was that last week I mentioned how it occurred to me how
inaccurate the list of DVD's and issue dates really were. Imagine my surprise
to discover that there was nowhere on the DVD where the issue date was
available in a digital form, except for the actual ".png" which is a graphical
representation of the cover of the DVD. This resulted in my writing a kins of
successful OCR script, the result of which I shared with the boys in London at
Linux Format. So, we have in addition gotten a response from London, trust me
the OCR way to get date information on the DVDs turns out to be the only way.
No less than Neil Bothwick surveyed the damage and allowed that in future Linux
Format DVDs there will be a file called "issue" which will contain this
information.
Connectivity:
As it is installed at the Aldrich, next trick is to get trantor on the public
web, and the bad news is that looks like it may not happen in the immediate
future.
It seams that the Acting Head Librarian wants to wait on our request, and while
the email said rejected, what it meant according to my discussions with Sarah
Costa was that is is delayed till the politics stabalize. Meh.
Sarah the librarian still wants a press release. I hope that the concept of
Library Based Local Destinations has not been completely wiped out. The
entrenched powers would so much prefer that to raise revenue by concentrating
everything in the very expensive DII Data Center at National Life, likely for a
hefty monthly fee! I may still do a press release, and after talking to her
will no doubt have a draft for her to review on the Trantor web site shortly.
Other Digital Collections?
I am getting interest from some parties in contributing more stuff to trantor.
Do not be bashful (pun?). let me know if you want something faithfully curated
and The real question here is should I simply rebuild bosivt.org based upon
sphinx? Or, we could do it all in reStructuredText...
The hard part of this turns out to be getting:
1. Getting a State bureaucracy to recognize
Free Open Source Software (what's in it for them?)
2. getting the visual bash complete, with appropriate features.
3. making the system "sane" - a menu choice. Design questions include:
- Do individual functions call for particular software packages?
- Should the sanity program try to md5 sum the components.
- Should sanity also include operating and support system sanity?
- When does sanity become Configuration Management?
VISUAL BASH
GSD amd the bzinga project:
As mentioned above, I dusted off the Bash-Zenity project with the thought of
adding this to trantor as a GUI based control framework. So far it is
interesting, as GUIs now haunt my dreams looking for the best way to configure
things...
http://bzinga.net/
I continue to meditate on the discussion DTG and I had last month about
how GUI code needs to be non-blocked. So, the approach I continue to think
about for now involves putting the GUI code in includes that get included
only when you need them. The Visual Bash framework really works. Will this
work for adding a GUI with bzinga? And how does BNF fit into this?
Progress is slow based upon the trantor work.
But the line between bzinga and the Menubot function gets fuzzier all the time,
maybe the menubot program has a way of generating coefficients that the GUI
system can use to autogenerate GUI menues. Maybe using Backus–Naur form (BNF
or Railroad Notation). After some playing around with zenity, I am more
convinced that the use of zenity for a gui interface, (see the Bash Zenity
Integration page: http://bzinga.net/ :^) is not a bad plan. Beyond this we
really need to clean up the VisualBash page. Now that we have the "include"
function that is similar to the one in python (C and a lota other languages :^)
we need to git this.
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/visual.bash#ImportingFunctionBlocks
The Visual Bash git page needs to be organized. We need to reorganize all of
the visual bash functions into functional includes. Possible include files
are:
- ianda.shi - Identification and Authorization
- dvdusb.shi - DVD/USB utilities
- sanity.shi - System sanity tests
- maint.shi - Maintenance includes
- ops.shi - Operational includes
- dev.shi - Development includes
- sphinx.shi - Sphinx generator includes
- tiddle.shi - Tiddle includes...
- gui.shi - Graphical User Interface using bzinga
- movingday - Tar up what you need.
The problem is that I cannot resist the challenge of the GUI menu generator
"menubot.sh" that will allow you to test stub your "shi" files with a crude but
working "sh". Who knows where we go from there? Again, the Design questions
remain:
- Do individual functions call for particular software packages
by adding their local requirements to a file or memory variable?
- Should the sanity program try to md5 sum the components?
- Can the sanity program help resolve name-space issues?
Could 2017 may be the year of VisualBash? We have a presentation on the subject
due in June, and I may even begin to treat the presentation as a project.
It has been occupying my mind quite a bit.
TECHNORUBBLE
In the new year we want to follow up on the interesting angle to deploy
TechnoRubble at Libraries. At the meeting last month, J West came up with
this angle and I would very much like to set up at Kimball and the Aldrich
Libraries and see if this would work. I may also try to get some traction
at the Kellogg Hubbard. The famous Jessamyn West showed up at our meeting
last week and checked out the whole TechnoRubble Project. Hope she remains
interested!
- The Website http://technorubble.org,http://technorubble.com
- The new donation letter has been updated, but not used yet...
Again, we need more TechnoRubble. The TechnoRubble untangling and packing is
part of that effort. Part of this effort was the donation letter. The idea is
to get people to mail their TechnoRubble to us in a USPS Flat Rate Box. I am
going to complete the donation process page as soon as I can and post it.
Still very little to say in terms of 3DPRINT, TADA, ZOCKER and PITCHBOX.
I think that I am gonna kill ZOCKER for now.
Hopefully these will be discussed on:
https://hangouts.google.com/hangouts/_/flint.com/tada
Which with any luck this teleconferencing will start at 6 PM EST today.
Maybe the future holds promise for these languishing projects. Oddly
enough projects come and go...
To summarize, the meeting today is again at 40 Washington Street, Barre, VT
05641.
Topics for discussion as usual remain:
- Open Source Educational Human Development
I am working on an idea... I am changing the priority of our
eternal needs, and placing education first.
- Maker Movement A Maker Space in Barre? Why not? Could it be that the
commercial power centers do not yet appreciate the value? I need to
revise my paper on this subject and get it out. Here it is:
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/bb
who has good ideas about a Barre Maker Space. Why not do digital stone?
- Move BOSI towards reStructuredText. I am seriously considering a
tiddly2rest converter. This would allow us to become more git
centric... avoid the need to change to gittlywiki...
We still need to convert... Yea buddy... Shut up Effin.
- Blue Sky R&D, but in Vermont it will be Gun-metal Grey Sky(c) R&D.
- I fought the DREK and the DREK continues to win. Remember, What
really is holds us back is DREK!!! DREK is what happens to your
workspace (both hardware and software) when you fail to put stuff
away, or you let your friends or relatives use it. This is a cosmic
law. I am still fighting the DREK. How to get over it? The secret
may be empty pellet bags. Is TechnoRubble organized DREK?
These five points are quickly becomming more than our policy, and more like a
prayer...
Anyway, we have the technology and we will have Pizza tonight 5-7 at Hedding
UMC.
This is the official notice of the Barre Open Systems Institute (BOSI) Adult
Swim. For those coming in via the Google Plus and the Internet, and there are
folks who are gonna try, the swim stars at 6:00 PM EST.
Our ongoing major objective is to continue to try to figure out how to
invest the time and resources to turn the Barre Open Systems Institute
into more than just the Adult Swim technical clinic and more into a real
learning facility, and figure out where our good chairs went. One
direction we have been working on is to begin thinking about classes. The
curriculum that I am most interested in is teaching documentation.
Once again, the goal of the meeting shall be as usual, to get organized and try
to get the various projects moving forward, despite DREK. We continue to wonder
about how to build the BOSI curriculum to this webpage:
While http://bosivt.org/classes, does not work,
http://64.5.53.104:8080/bosivt.org/classes does.
Any idea why?
Take a look if you dare...
Remember, the BOSI Adult Swim is essentially about helping out fellow users of
open source products in a clinic environment. Despite my very best of
intentions, the Adult Swim is really almost a perpetual Linux install-fest, and
only secondarily a learning environment,
The ever growing list of projects (now on our web site :^) includes:
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/vm - A Docker copy of VM370
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/kindle - The Kindle Liberation Front
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/pyrs - A pythonic interface to Income Tax?
- http://ledroid.org - Ok, this is a real project eh?
- http://bzinga.net - What happens when you combine Bash and Zenity?
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/nodejs - ok, it is on the list.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/snobot - jesum they love this robot
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/furmon - monitor that pellet furnace
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/arduino - moving in the arduino groove
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/javajive - to get better at Javascript
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/tsp - Temperature Sensors Project
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/robotsrules - The quest for Roberts Rules -
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/visual.bash - Yea, I am not kidding...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/mrtg - remedial raw mrtg for the slow...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/raspberry - all versions
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/strembot.org - maybe a very cool project.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/organized - oh please let me be organized!
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/music - this may be the least organized
site ever!
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/bb - A big noble idea.
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/grantbot - A less noble idea to feed the
big idea...
- http://docbox.flint.com:8081/gitlywiki - is tiddlywiki5 the answer?
Otherwise, Barre indeed remains a great venue for a Linux and Open Source
Software discussion and general system rejuvenation. Expect to be remotely
preached at on the various topics of Open Source and how I am confident it
shall cure all the evils and ills of this wicked world. In a perfect meeting,
people would come in, sit down, see the stuff we have been doing and hopefully
help us get the DIY stuff we are doing done, or maybe just fix a laptop.
So, do not forget that the Barre library stocks "Linux Format", and the latest
issue is on the shelf, and it is good. The DVD's are available to checkout and
copy, we shall to continue provide copies and isos of each and every one. I am
continuing to duplicate about a years worth of DVD's which is quite a task. You
may want to watch this space for developments.
Anyway, come and do open source stuff. For more information about the BOSI
Adult Swim meeting time and location try this:
*** Note this is broke as of this newsletter ****
http://bosivt.org/directions
Show up at Hedding UMC if you have questions or are interested in Linux or the
concept of free and open systems. Again, we are in the basement of the Hedding
UMC facility which is actually working out pretty well.
Somehow we need to make progress not more projects!!!
If you wish to be included on the "Linux_adult_swim" mailing list, send a
response to this note.
This is Flint signing off... I gotta go and get trained as a Justice of the
Peace, and maybe catch the flue from the City Clerk.
I will continue to refactor this newsletter at some point in the future (do not
hold your breath :^)...
Kindest Regards,
Paul Flint
(802) 479-2360
(802) 595-9365 Cell
/************************************
Based upon email reliability concerns,
please send an acknowledgment in response to this note.
Paul Flint
Barre Open Systems Institute
17 Averill Street
Barre, VT
05641
http://www.bosivt.org
http://family.flint.com/flint
skype: flintinfotech
Work: (202) 537-0480
