Bodington 2.4.2

Well Bodington 2.4.2 is finally out the door. The new feature in this release is the intergration of Guanxi. Hopefully I can get on with hacking away at code again.

Linux on an Access Point (WRT54G)

I've had a Linksys WRT54G for a little while and have never managed to get it working in client mode (joining a network as a client, like a wireless bridge) correctly. I had been using the Sveasoft WRT54G firmware but without much sucess. I then found a page about doing client mode with OpenWRT and after a bit of tinkering with WEP keys and the like, I now have it sucessfully joining the wireless network and providing network access to my Playstation 2. My inital problems were that I still had lots of settings in NVRAM from the earlier firmwares and I should have reset the nvram first with the command "mtd erase nvram". Ohh well you live and learn. OpenWRT is a nice distribution for the WRT54G if you are reasonably comafortable at a linux shell. It provides a very basic install and then you add on the packages you want (I just added a ssh server/client; dropbear).

LAMS and Open Source

I found out from a Auricle post that LAMS has finally been release as open source software. Now it's good that people are adopting open source software, but it seems that LAMS at the moment doesn't have open development model. They have release (under the GPL) version 1.0 of LAMS but this is no longer being developed and they are now working on version 1.1 which is a change in architecture (significant rewrite). They are releasing documents about 1.1 but is seems that the development process is still very closed to outsiders (no public mailing list/forum/bug tracker). This will probably come shortly, I am just used to seeing projects on sourceforge where you can get a feel for a project by glancing through the mailing list archives and looking at bug reports. But they do have a nice simple clean website (where is the RSS news feed?) which is missing from another piece of open source software that shall remain nameless.

Google Maps UK

We finally have Google Maps UK, thanks to davblog for finding this.

Buying a Parking Ticket

I went to buy a ticket for the car park today. I inserted my pound coin and waited for ny 40p change and parking ticket. However instead I got 30p, a parking ticket and a credit note for 10p. It seems the machine was out of change. Is a parking meter allowed todo this, I didn't get prompted if I found it acceptable to get a credit note. My credit note just metions the value, nowhere does it say where to get your money back. Bah enough moaning.

Java finally block

Just had a quick discussion about finally blocks in Java code. If an exception is thrown in the catch block does the finally block still run?

class Test
{
        public static void main(String argv[]) throws Exception
        {
                try
                {
                        System.out.print("Hello");
                        throw new Exception("E");
                }
                catch (Exception e)
                {
                        throw new Exception("F");
                }
                finally
                {
                        System.out.println(" World");
                }
        }
}

The answer is:

java Test
Hello World
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.Exception: F
        at Test.main(Test.java:12)

Election Shutdown

vle@jiscmail.ac.uk has shut up shop while the election(UK) is being help on advice from the Cabinet Office. What is the UK coming to?

The Different Worlds of Open Source

The original world of Open Source software came from a UNIX background, where the aim was to produce better tools (I think of things like BSD UNIX, GCC). In this world things are reasonably easy, the aim is to produce a technically good tool. If we make an analogy it is like making a good hammer (bash in UNIX), people might prefer slightly different hammers, but the job is clearly identified. With projects like Bodington where we are trying to build a VLE (or something), it is similar to creating a building. There is an idea of what it has to do, but even that is not set in stone. Things are never simple. I want a set of blueprints.

No digital TV yet

I'd been looking forward to getting digital TV in our new house but when I came to check reception I found that we were not able to get Freeview. Now I can understand this (we are at the bottom of quite a steep valley). I was hopeful that the transmitter that our ariel is currently pointed at was going to be upgrade in the near future. However I was unable to find any plans on the web about the schedule of tranmitter upgrades (Freeview sites didn't help). I finally found that the government had prouced a Guide to Digital TV which outlined that basically if you can't get digital TV now you will have to wait until the analogue tranmission gets turned off!! Now looking on the digital TV website the Carlton ITV region won't have it's analogue trasmissions switched off until 2011. Only 6 years to wait, will you people get your arse in gear. And no I don't want to pay Sky/NTL/etc a subscription.