Anna and the Bunches

I’ve recently started playing with twitter. A nice way to use it via the command-line (using curl) was suggested here. I have taken that and improved slightly on it.Here is the result:#!/bin/shecho -n “twitter> “read textwhile [ ${#text} -gt 140 ]; doechoecho “Message too long; used ${#text}/140 characters."echoecho -n “twitter> “read textdoneechoecho “Message is ${#text}/140 characters. Press enter to post, or Ctrl+C to cancel."readcurl –basic –user “username:password” –data-ascii “status=echo $text|tr ' ' '+'” “http://twitter.

I’ve been pretty busy the last month working on netjatafl. Netjatafl will eventually be a networked client for playing various board and/or card games. It was originally created for hnefatafl and other tafl games. However, I have designed it to be extensible; I’m working on adding mancala games, and it looks like my design makes it pretty easy to add a new game. (I’ve added most of the logic for mancala to the client and server in just a couple hours of work).

su -c “yum -y remove alsa-plugins-pulseaudio”2. su -c “reboot”

I recently purchased an Eee PC 1000HE. This is a very nice machine, and aside from one weird bug, Linux support is great. However, I’ve run into a very annoying problem with Fedora 10, and at the root of that problem is gnome-keyring-manager.Misconfiguration Most FoulWe begin our tale with NetworkManager. Since I connect to several wireless networks and a VPN, NetworkManager is a very useful thing to have working. Its initial setup was great; I loaded nm-applet in my fluxbox startup, it prompted me for a default keyring password, and we were off.

I feel the need to comment about this (and, subsequently, this and this).First, a summary, for those who get a case of the tl;dr’s. A woman bought a laptop to use for her coursework at a local college. She accidentally bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu on it. When she realized her ISP’s setup disk wouldn’t work, she tried to get Dell to swap the laptop for one with Windows. The Dell representative apparently convinced her to keep the one she had.

Every release of Fedora feels like a step in the wrong direction. I don’t say this lightly - I use Fedora at work and at home; it is my primary operating system. I have staunchly supported it in the face of critical Ubuntu fans for a while now.First, a little background. I switched to Fedora from a mixture of gentoo and slackware around the time I started my current job, since it was far easier to keep track of one package management toolset, and several things about gentoo’s packaging system had started to irk me.

I first encountered Clay Burell on his blog Beyond School, where he had started a series of Unsucky English Lectures. These posts were brilliant, engaging, and poignant, and I followed them to their tragically early conclusion. (Clay, if you’re reading this, pick those back up, man!) It turns out that Beyond School was actually a blog about revolutionizing education. I just happened in while he was doing a special series. I kept following his blog, though.

No, not an angry rant about proper gTLD usage. Instead, this is more of a Public Service Announcement: silenceisdefeat, my favorite provider of life-long free shell accounts, has had their domain name taken hostage. silenceisdefeat.org now redirects to an ebay auction for the domain name. As a result, they can now be found at:http://silenceisdefeat.comI have updated my previous link to their site (in this article) to reflect the change as well.

Total knowledge games are games in which all players involved have equal knowledge of the current state of the game, and the only factor that influences the game’s future state is the actions of the players. Chess, Go, and tafl are three such games that I play periodically.Recently, I pondered a fairly simple question: which of these games is the most complex? All of them are complex enough that new players have room to become stronger over time.

Recently, I was describing the personal setup I use to connect to my home machine over on watchingback (a group that has gone unfortunately silent). This setup combines port-knocking (with one-time sequences), disk encryption, and passphrase-protected rsa keys. Here’s a basic rundown of how it works from an end-user perspective (i.e., once everything is set up):First, the user (me) inserts a USB flash drive with an encrypted partition. He mounts up the encrypted disk on a local machine (I’ll call this machine the ‘client’ throughout this article), providing the necessary password, and runs a script called ‘callhome’.