Nathan Bullock

Sony PSP Feature Requests

As I said in my previous post I absolutely love my PSP. But here are just a few minor items that I would like to see fixed.

Full page down, half visible lines of text. When you do a page down it shouldn't really scroll a true full page, a page down should always overlap by at least a couple of pixels. It is annoying how when you are reading some webpage a line can end up only half visible at the bottom of the screen, but if you do a page down it is still only half visibly, but now at the top of the page.

Page down at bottom of webpage. When you are reading along and you do a page down, your eyes immediately jump to the top of the page to keep reading, but if you hit the end of the webpage you find you have already read that line. This is because when you reach the bottom of the webpage the browser doesn't do a full page down, the browser just scrolls far enough that the end of the page is at the bottom of the window. At this point I find that it takes me a second or two to find where I was before I can finish reading. My solution for this would be that after a page down the previous location of the screen is faintly outlined for a split second and then fades. This would also be nice for half page scrolling.

How long is this page. There is no indication of where you currently are on a page. One of two solutions would be nice here. Either something like a 54% in one of the corners. This could possibly only show up when you press the triangle button, or the square button. The other solution is to allow the user to display a scroll bar along the side of the screen.

Praises for the Sony PSP

About a month ago my Palm E2 went the way of the world, or in other words went to PDA heaven. This meant that I had to find a replacement. I wasn't looking forward to this because Palm hasn't done anything interesting in about the last year and a half and Pocket PCs are ridiculously overpriced (in my opinion). So I made a list of what I wanted from a PDA and started to look at my options.

My list consisted of high priorities including things like a good web browser or some other way to read text (my journal, scriptures, manuals, notes, etc), I wanted it to have a nice screen, good battery life, reasonably small, good performance (jumping from page to page has to be quick), and a good amount of storage (preferably removable SD cards would be best). And lower priorities such as the ability to play audio files, connect to the internet, and write notes on it. The final item to consider would of course be price. I could get a new Palm E2 for just under $300 and wasn't interested in spending much more than that.

As I started to dig around I found Pocket PCs such as the Dell Axims, and the HP iPAQ, but to stay in my price range the screens were tiny or they didn't have WiFi, which meant that to get what I wanted just ended up being more than I wanted to spend. I looked at things like iPods to see if they could display the various texts that I wanted to have available to read, it looked like that might have worked in a very limited form, but I decided things didn't look promising there. I looked at some Palm devices, these looked okay and I decided that so far the E2 was still my default choice. I looked at BlackBerries, I don't think these would have worked very well for what I wanted (although I didn't look real hard). At this point the E2 was looking not bad, then I ran across the Sony PSP.

The Sony PSP originally didn't have a web browser and as such wouldn't have worked at all for me, but at some point a software update by Sony added a web browser to the device. I got a chance to play around with one and found that the web browser was actually really quite good. After scouring the web I had picked up enough info to decide that it looked like a reasonable choice. (I also took a quick look at the Nintendo DS but without a memory card it wouldn't really be good enough). So I took the plunge and bought a Sony PSP.

After about a month I can truly say that I love it. I love it way more than I have ever liked either of the Palm's that I have owned. I would most certainly buy it again, and probably my wife will get one in the next year as well. The screen is beautiful I would say it fits 1.5 to 2.5 times more text on it than my palm, it came with a 1 GB memory stick, the web browser is great, I love the wireless internet capabilities, the battery life is very good, I love that it just mounts as a USB mass storage device (no fancy software is needed to move files from my PC to my PSP or vice-versa), it plays MP3 files well, and then the movie and game playing abilities are just extra bonuses. The only downside is that text entry is painful, and writing memo's is nearly impossible, but these items were not high on my list of needs. I usually carry a notebook around to write notes on, and entering username, password when I check my gmail account isn't that bad.

One final note about protective cases. I have found that a sock works best, it might look funny, but it is cheap and effective.

Installing Fedora Core 5 using HTTP

Last Saturday I installed the new Fedora Core 5 on one of my computers using the HTTP (or network) install method instead of the more normal CD install.

The following is what I did:

On a second computer on the local network I downloaded the five iso CDs using bittorent. Next on this computer I mounted the five CDs using 'mount -o loop -t iso9660 <isofilename> <mountpoint>'. Next I set up apache so that all the contents of these 5 iso files were available from the location http:/192.168.1.1/iso/disc[1-5].

Now I was almost ready for the install I just had to burn disc1 so that I could use it for the boot disc.

Now for the install. Make sure everything is backed up on the computer that I am reinstalling linux on. Boot the computer with disc 1 in the CD drive. After it boots there is a prompt, I typed "linux askmethod", pressed enter, then when it asked for the method I choose http, then pointed the install at 'http://192.168.1.1/' directory 'iso'.

After I picked all the appropriate settings it started the install by formatting my hard drive then promptly crashing. A dialog came up and I was able to find out that it couldn't find http://192.168.1.1/iso/disc1/Fedora/RPMS/gjdoc-0.27-3.1.i386.rpm. That was because this file is actually on disc 2. Even when I managed to fix this I had even more of these type of errors. So to fix them all in one step I copied all the RPM files out of the five discs into one directory that was available at 'http://192.168.1.1/iso/RPMS/' and then added the following rules to my apache configuration:

RedirectMatch 301 /iso/disc1/Fedora/RPMS/(.*) /iso/RPMS/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /iso/disc2/Fedora/RPMS/(.*) /iso/RPMS/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /iso/disc3/Fedora/RPMS/(.*) /iso/RPMS/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /iso/disc4/Fedora/RPMS/(.*) /iso/RPMS/$1
RedirectMatch 301 /iso/disc5/Fedora/RPMS/(.*) /iso/RPMS/$1

After that the installation went smoothly.

Printing in Debian (Sarge)

I have normally used my printer by directly hooking it to my desktop computer, that has always been a rather easy task, plug it in and it works. That is one of the nice things about using Linux, you almost never even have to install a driver, they are all already there.

Anyway the family recently moved our desktop computer into the living room upstairs and we didn't really want to bring the printer into the living room. Nor did I want to go out and buy a network printer, so that meant hooking the printer to the Debian Sarge box that was in the utility room and using that computer as a print server.

Here is what I did, thanks to help from Debian Administration. I plugged the printer into the parallel port and then rebooted the machine.

First 'apt-get install printconf', this grabbed a number of packages, and then asked me a couple of questions and tried to auto-configure my printer. The auto-configure said that it didn't recognize my Samsung ML-1740. printconf directed my to linuxprinting.org.

Now that cups was installed I went to the web based configuration page with w3m at http://localhost:631/. It didn't seem to have any drivers for my printer.

I then found my printer (I actually found the Samsung ML-1710 but they are supposed to be very similar) in the database at http://www.linuxprinting.org/ and went to the cups setup instructions. It said that this printer uses a GDI driver which is part of Ghostscript. Running 'gs -h' told me that the version of ghostscript on my server had this driver compiled in. Next I downloaded the supplied ppd file and put it in /usr/share/cups/model and then restarted CUPS '/etc/init.d/cupsys restart'.

Went back to the web configuration, added my printer, (gave it the name 'printer'), selected the Samsung ML-1710 driver. Tried printing a test page from the web interface, it worked. Tried printing a test text file with lp and that worked as well.

Now to get it working from other machines. I opened cupsd.conf edited BrowseAddress to 192.168.1.255. Set location /> to Allow from All. Set location /admin> to Allow from All.

Went to my Fedora box and added a cups printer at (server:631) /printers/printer. Printed test page. PERFECT. Well almost, it could probably be centered on the page better but I don't feel like fiddling with it.

Hopefully I didn't forget any of the steps I took.

No More Primus TalkBroadband (VoIP)

Well I earlier wrote about Primus' TalkBroadband service and gave a reserved thumbs up of there service. It seemed to work okay, a little hastle in getting it set up, less than perfect voice quality, but very inexpensive, in all the tradeoff was worth it for my family.

Well that has all changed. We ran into our first real glitch and had to try to use their customer support. About three days ago our phone just mysteriously quite working, realize this is our only phone, so I sent them an email telling them the situation and asking what I needed to do. They ignored that email. About a day later I sent another email. Ignored. What sort of company just plain doesn't respond to technical support requests? Okay so I phoned them from work, I got to someone very fast, so they weren't that busy. He told me I had to be at home for them to be able to help me. What? My phone at home, which I am trying to fix, doesn't work, how am I supposed to phone from home? I asked if we could communicate using an instant messenger service while I am at home. Nope.

Well Primus was an experiment. It seemed to work okay while it lasted. But if they can't help you fix their equipment when it doesn't work... Anyway it looks like we are going to get a new cell phone today and officially cancel our Primus TalkBroadband account, although in reality they cancelled it three days ago.

Palm Tungsten E2

I have nothing all that special to say about the Palm Tungsten E2. Just that I gave Kelli one for her birthday a number of months ago. She has enjoyed using it, it seems like a very nice little machine. And I liked it well enough that I got one for me this last week.

And just a quick plug. The best way to read anything on a Palm is by using the excellent Plucker viewer.

Nintendo Game Boy Advance (GBA) SP

We bought a Nintendo Game Boy Advance (GBA) SP for the children (or was it for me?) a few weeks ago. All I have is praise for this little device. The screen is bright and crisp, the battery seems to last very well on each charge, and it seems very solid and durable.

The only game we have for it so far is Super Mario 3. A game that I played on the original Nintendo (NES) when I was a child. The children really like playing, although the game may be a little too difficult for them, and the best part is they really like to watch Kelli and I play.

Anyway as we were trying to decide what sort of a game machine to buy one of the best resources we found was WikiPedia. They have a very good description of the Game Boy Advance and a good description of the Game Boy Advance SP. Realize that a lot of the information in the Game Boy Advance article is also relevant for the GBA SP.

Using Hooks to Modify Subversion Log Entries

I have been trying to get Subversion to automatically add a list of all the files that were affected in a commit, to the log entry for that commit. I first thought the proper place to do this was in the pre-commit hook; but this looked fairly messy as I could not find any tool to easily modify the svn:log property. What I finally figured out was that in the post commit hook I could use the 'svnadmin setlog' command to do what I wanted to do. Now that I have figured out the basics it shouldn't be too hard to make things even fancier if I need.

The following is the basic code for my post-commit hook.

REPOS="$1"
REV="$2"
LOGFILE="/tmp/log.$REV"

# Make sure that the log message contains some text.
LOOK=/usr/bin/svnlook
ADMIN=/usr/bin/svnadmin
ECHO=/bin/echo

$ECHO "Log Message:" > $LOGFILE
$LOOK log -r "$REV" "$REPOS" >> $LOGFILE
$ECHO "" >> $LOGFILE
$ECHO "Files Affected:" >> $LOGFILE
$LOOK changed -r "$REV" "$REPOS" >> $LOGFILE
$ADMIN setlog --bypass-hooks "$REPOS" -r "$REV" $LOGFILE

/bin/rm -f $LOGFILE

Lectures on Faith

The Lectures on Faith are a set of seven lectures that were prepared in 1834 for the School of the Prophets in Kirtland, Ohio. They were then included in the original Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in 1835. These lectures were removed from the Doctrine and Covenants in 1921 due to them never having been formally accepted by the church as doctrine.

I purchased a copy of the Lectures on Faith a number of years ago and have found it very interesting. Since they were originally published so long ago the text is no longer under copyright and I believe I legally have the right to reproduce the text. As a result I have taken this opportunity to put the text up on this website.

This text and especially this publishing of it are my own doing and has not been endorsed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Please realize that the text here may have mistakes in it, although I have tried to make sure that this is not the case. Also I will still be going through it once or twice more in the upcoming months.

Primus TalkBroadband (VoIP)

About 4 years ago I had a little dispute with Telus, the local phone service provider for Alberta, over a promotional offer that was less than what they had advertised. Shortly after that Kelli and I signed up for a cell phone through Rogers and we cancelled our local phone service. I have always been a believer in the mantra 'vote with your wallet'. And for the most part exclusively using a cell phone has worked well for us.

Now we have a second option, voice over internet protocol (VoIP). We signed up with Primus' TalkBroadband service in the middle of February, received the phone about a week later, and then had to wait about another week for them to set up our account. So far I think it is working okay, not great, but okay, the only problem is that there are occasional short blank spots in the sound. To make it all worth it though, local phone service using Primus' service only costs 15 dollars.

Since I run this website from my home server our TalkBroadband setup is not done in the recommended way. Normally you are supposed to have the TalkBroadband box directly connected to your cable modem. I have the cable modem connected to my Debian box which acts as a webserver and router, I then have a 4 port switch connected to the Debian box and from that switch I have both the TalkBroadband box connected and my Fedora Core desktop computer. The setup seems to work very well although the phone can be a slight bit jumpy. I am not sure if the telephone quality would improve if I followed Primus' setup instruction.

Just as a couple of suggestions for other people looking for a VoIP provider. Primus has been very good so far, the setup was completely simple, just plug it in and it works. Even through my Debian boxes firewall. I didn't have to open any extra ports or do any port forwarding. The only thing I found a little odd was that they sent us the TalkBroadband box almost a whole week before our account was set up. So what happened was we received the TalkBroadband box, opened it, and plugged it in. We had a dial tone and tried phoning our cell phone. The phone rings but the cell phone never does. Okay so we try it the other way, our cell phone tells us the number we have dialed is not in service. When we phoned the help line they told us that things weren't quite ready yet and that we had to wait 5 days. When they finally got things set up though it just worked, and it seems to work well.

LDS Music Radio Station

A couple of weeks ago I was looking for good LDS music. I ran across an LDS music radio station called KZion. So far I have been pleased with the music as well as the quality of the feed. You can listen in both a streamed MP3 format and a less useful WMA format.

Apache 2.0 and SSL (HTTPS)

When it comes to keeping some of the content on my site private. Usually just visible to me and other family members I just use basic authentication. Nice and simple.

The problem is that the username and password are passed back and forth in a completely open manner for the whole world to look at. So it was time to set up SSL on my machine. I found a site telling me how to do it for Apache 1.3 but I wanted to start using Apache 2. It was tough work finding any tutorial on Apache 2 and SSL, but I finally did find one the only problem being that it was in a language I don't know...luckily I could read between the lines well enough to figure it out.

The basics are create an ssl certificate using apache2-ssl-certificate the resulting two files are put into /etc/apache2/ssl. Next you need to add port 443 to your /etc/apache2/ports.conf file. Last of all you need to add another virtual server to your setup which contains something like the following:

NameVirtualHost *:443

<VirtualHost *:443>
# SSL STUFF (START) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SSLEngine on
SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl/7d529501.0

# see http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/ssl/ssl_howto.html
# for the meaning of below.
# The following enables only the seven strongest ciphers.
SSLProtocol all
SSLCipherSuite HIGH:MEDIUM
# SSL STUFF (END) +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Text Based Browsers

As I was looking at what packages were installed on my Debian server today I ran across a program called w3m. I checked out its manual page and found that it was a text based web browser. I was a little surprised. I know about Lynx and I had run across something called ELinks in the log files for my website. So I gave it a try.

Wow. I was completely blown away. I had at one point tried using Lynx...it was almost impossible. I had gone to Google, couldn't even figure out how to enter text in the search box, I could do some basic navigation but that was it. This wasn't the case with w3m, I could do Google searches, I could load my website and it actually looked okay, I could browse the web and it looked and felt okay.

Then I did a little more searching on the internet and found Links and ELinks. I used apt-get to retrieve them (this is what makes Debian amazing) and three minutes later was trying both of them out. I think they are even better then w3m. I had no idea there were actually people working on text based browsers. If I am in a situation now where I only have access to a terminal window I wouldn't hesitate to use them for browsing the web. I also have a new appreciation for the HTML alt tag on images.

Does it look nicer?

So does the site look nicer? I just finished a fairly large reworking of the site. None of the content has changed, the look has changed a little, and the software that generates the pages has changed significantly.

I am also no longer using pyblosxom to run my weblog, instead I fixed up PureContent so that it can handle weblogs. This means that my weblog is no longer dynamically generated and, more importantly, it is easier to get my weblog to look similar to the rest of my website. Prior to this update my weblog didn't really match the rest of my site.

There will be quite a few little changes taking place to the website over the next week or so as I find little problems with the new design. Also I don't have the new version of PureContent available for everyone to use since it takes time to package it up for general consumption and it isn't a high priority at this point. If you want a copy just ask but it won't have any pretty packaging.

Baking Bread

It's been a long time since I last wrote.

I just finished making bread. I think it has now been about two years since I actually bought bread. When I first started making bread about two years ago I used a smallish Sunbeam mixer. It took a fair amount of trial and error before the bread turned out how I really wanted, but I enjoyed even my worst attempts far better than what I bought at grocery stores. Now days I use a Bosch mixer which is far better suited to making bread. It is amazing how little Bosch mixers have changed from 20 years ago when I was a little child and my Mom made bread and cookies in her Bosch.

Just in case anyone wants the recipe here you go:

1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup warm water
1 1/2 Tbsp yeast
Mix together and let soak (I usually use a large drinking glass for this.)

10 cups flour
3 cups hot water
1 cup milk
1 Tbsp salt
1/4 cup margarine

Mix together briefly, add yeast mixture, finish mixing. I usually let the bosch run for about 5 minutes on high to make sure everything is good and beaten up. Also as it is mixing I usually slowly add more flour to get it to the consistency I want it. It should be just past the sticky stage. This might take a few tries before you figure out how you like it.

Let it rise until it has doubled in size, punch it down, put it in four bread pans. Let it rise again until it is just above the top of the pans. Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 25-30 minutes.

Now this isn't exactly how I do it because I usually do two batches when I make bread. So what I do is make two batches (mix them seperately since the Bosch can't handle that much dough.) Then I split all this dough into three equal groups, I put two of these into plastic containers and throw them into the freezer and I let the third group rise and make three loafs of bread out of it. Then when I need more bread I pull one of the groups out of the freezer, let it thaw overnight, punch it down once it has thawed, let it rise again, put it into three pans, let rise and bake.

I find making two batches at once is much nicer since you only make a mess half as often. Also the butter I use comes in 1/2 cup squares so I use a whole one each time instead of having half used squares sitting around.

Anyway. I think my bread is almost finished baking and ready to eat. Yummy.