Greetings List Lurkers,
First something completely different...
Who is Mr. Sal DiBlasi and how did he manage to take over the internet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XvC5ooVqJg
Sal is a middle aged, slightly balding craftsman who, as anyone who has
ever thought of installing tile in any room in your dwelling, is the king
of kitchen bathroom tile installations on You Tube. As you can see from
the cited example, Sal is the Master, and God forbid you end up on his
email list...
Sal operates at many speeds, he can complete a shower tiling on your
screen in a mere 39:03 (less commercials), or, in the comfort of his
papacy, painstakingly join in righteous condemnation, as his faithful
followers expose the work of the lesser charlatan pretenders that came
before them in the cyber-bathroom of failure. The sins of pre-mixed
thin-set, spot bonding, and all who would apostatize the gospel and ritual
of Schluter. In camera, on his thrown backed by his twin HDMI monitors,
he can barely contain his righteous rage!
For Sal, to Tile is human... to forgive is up to the National Tile
Contractors Association. For now do not seek Sal DiBlasi on Wikipedia,
for the intellectuals who apparently do not shower, are ignorant of his
crusade.
He knows the surfaces and coverings necessary to allow the faithful to
luxuriate in perfect comfort with the assurance that the loved ones that
surround you need not fear the compromise of your bathroom's water
barrier.
So, this weekend, after a nice long head-cold, I took the time to worship
at Sal's kneepads, and tiled our downstairs half bath. While my own
efforts did not feel like they were shot in fast motion, and are in fact
only partially completed, know all you Linux geeks, network architects,
transmission system, software specialists, and web-masters, that in the
end we are all of us working for Sal DiBlasi; Tileman/Virtuoso even now
soloing somewhere in the bathrooms of cyberspace...
Anyway, back to the usual Chaos.
TROPES
Tropes are a trope of Adult Swim... Ever since Jordy started us on the
path to tropes a few seasons ago, they keep poping into our awareness -
kinda like illegitimate children. If they are starting to grow we need to
make room for them. This trope may become a feature or it may die of
disinterest, only time will tell.
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/geekland#BOSITropes
KINDLE LIBERATION FRONT
The tale of Brett and the rooted kindle continues, as he has two microSD
cards, the business of loading a new OS on the beast should be doable. I
am fairly convinced from the email traffic that we need a working SOP and
an operating system image that is blessed by no less than the
Kindlemeister himself. This type of beautitue would no doubt benefit, in
no particular order
* DTG
* Effin
* Flint and of course
* Brett
So if you can you are welcome to follow the chaos here:
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/kindle
I would try the timeline... We need an Editor!
Now that I am over the Head Cold, 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
It has been a quiet week for the trantor, and I am gonna shorten up this
topic for now.
Summary:
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.
The Collection Grows:
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 check the copies, capture the cover art
using sexy Xerox scanner at the Aldrich.
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.
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.
Production:
Once we get connectivity, we will then deliver the Trantor Production
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...
With connnectivity, we will switch to the excellent hardware platform
that Marius delivered. This production case contains both USB2.0/3.0 and and a
DVDRW.
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.
Last month I concentrated on developing a VisualBash program to
automatically generate the individual and now seasonally colored ".rst"
reStructuredText files at the base level. 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
needs to be part of the process.
Development Cycle:
With a working version of enki, the vision of a reStructuredText website is
accomplished:
- Take 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 be opened as a separate tab
was beyond the current capabilities of sphinx. Good old sed takes care of
adding some code as a postprocess, and adding color backgrounds to each
individual requires a reSturcturedText "Raw" directive.
Further Development:
The trantor project now uses the new VisualBash include function to load
up various scripts with a suffix of ".shi", full-o-functional goodness.
Menubot is a program that generates a crude menu for a given include
".shi" type file. The scary part of this program is that in the final
analysis it may contain both a cgi and a gui capabililty, thanks to
bzinga.
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 bzinga, I am more convinced to use bash with zenity for a gui
interface, (see the Bash Zenity Integration page: http://bzinga.net/ :^).
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.
We need to write an include calle "movingday", that works with "sanity" to
allow you to move only the relevant components of trantor into a tar ball
for installation at another system. This might tie into the sanity
script.
The "Sanity" script 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...
Github Transporter Include?
Maybe sanity and moving day also have to do with keeping this up properly
on github. 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. Getting this up on git is something that will please
God, Chris Yarger (is there a difference?) and Kevin Cole. I really am
gonna get to commitment and update soon. Am I resistant to commitment?
I did get married...
With the bzinga project (see below) there is most likely to be a fifth
pass, with a bzinga based gui. Through bzinga I have become convinces of
adding a GUI control capability to the trantor control program.
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 seems 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
As you can see trantor is currently driving VisualBash, but several other
projects have benefited from VisualBash. These include:
* BOJ - A BeautifulSoup based web scraper.
* Chello - The first VisualBash program to implement seahorse based
Identification and Authorization (I&A).
* MTOC - The second VisualBash program to include I&A.
More includes from these are on their way.
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, currently enjoying the
restaurants of New Orleans, and I had 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.
http://docbox.flint.com:8081/visual.bash#ImportingFunctionBlocks
Both the Visual Bash home page as cited above and the 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
Besides buying a whole lot of plastic bags, TechnoRubble has been quiet.
The Central Vermont Solid Waste District seems like a bureaucratic
nightmare we do not want to become involved with. Instead we want to
follow up on the interesting angle to deploy TechnoRubble at Libraries.
At the meeting in Feburary, 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
