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RobinsonTryonBlog


Hey! I figured that I should have some kind of blogging page. just, because I have these ideas and don't want to forget them.

Feel free to leave comments about anything, but please put them at the very end, or make them a different color (like green or something), or otherwise separate your comments from what I wrote. (thanks -- Robinson)

It's been a while since I've written anything here. I was just thinking about my code for information interchange?. I considered something similar in what I'd like for the new wiki --> a way to have different "webs", but for information to "bleed" or "share" across. Okay, it's hard to explain what I'm talking about, so here's an example:

I've got a DOSC web and a Dartmouth web. Now in my DOSC web, I write a little article about OpenOffice and how to do some basic things with the word processor? called Open Office. Now let's say that there isn't any article in the Dartmouth wiki with that name.

So in a wiki that implements my "information sharing", if a user searched for an OpenOffice node, they'd get the DOSC one (with a slight amount of markup around it indicating that it's from the DOSC web). As well, there would be a link or two (as usual) that would allow the user to create an Open Office node in the Dartmouth web (if that's what the user really wanted).

As well, even if the Dartmouth web had an OpenOffice node, it would still display a prominent link to the DOSC page (only if one exists with the same exact name). That way people could see if there was information overlap or if there was information in one web that wasn't present in another.

Anyhow, does that make any sense?

In addition to "shared webs", I'm thinking that it would be really useful to continue with the "code for information interchange" that I talked about on Mar 25th. In particular, I was just thinking about documentation for products and information about just about anything. Here's the thing: there are many different tools out there that help people through a sequence of steps. Most of us involved in computers or tech support have written pages of documentation, etc... that help users do something like install a piece of software.

But I've noticed a few of things:

  1. There is a lot of repetition -- I wrote up docs for Dartmouth about PuTTY, MacSFTP?, JellyfiSSH?, XonX, etc... but other people elsewhere are doing the same thing as me.
  2. My notes are in a Faq-o-matic and are kind of hard for anyone to use elsewhere, because of the markup.
  3. My notes are not under the FDL or a Creative Commons? license or something similar. If I asked, I could probably make them freely available, but if I wanted to grab information around the web, I'd have to ask lots and lots of people at different web sites.

So here's the idea: what if there was some kind of XML schema? that could be a standard for marking up "how-tos" ?? Not only could there be tools developed that could create and edit these thing, but the different FAQ/knowledgebase tools could then take the XML and format it however people wanted. Not only that, but imagine if there was standardized documentation about a bunch of different projects.

Pretty much every open source project out there, if this became an accepted standard, would write up a bit of documentation (like "man" files) that could be installed at the same time as a given product, either locally on a computer or on an institution knowledgebase. Then, documentation would only need to be written once or twice (twice -- if the first person did a really shitty job ... :^). Then we could all benefit from installation walk-throughs, etc...

Not only could this have tremendous benefit in software, but imagine a cookbook or a manual about car repair. Now before you laugh, remember that there's a tremendous amount of information available on the web, but it's all in myraid different formats, almost entirely copyright and locked-up by its creator. But what if even 25%-50% of that would start to be generated under open licenses, using standardized XML schemas? Then people could agregate it onto books or knowledgebases of recipies, etc...

well, it's kind of strange and silly, perhaps. I'll keep refining it.

-- Robinson

Anyhow, I've been having wicked crazy dreams for a while (which is really very wack... like I've been smoking something, although I don't, which makes it even stranger... :) but I was thinking about a 'code for information interchange?'.

That probably reminds you of something..... saaay, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange? (or ASCII), right? But I'm not talking about character sets here -- I'm talking about how to take information and wrap the gooey inner bits (the information) in a crunchy outer shell (markup and metadata).

Right now we have part of that in the form of HTML or XML where we have content that is marked up so that we can display the text in different manners on different devices. But what if we had hundreds of articles, with full-text search, all labeled with metadata about the subject, people in the article, specific topics discussed, etc... that would be cool, right?

Now there's a lot more cool stuff that could be added on top (such as programs that would auto-generate (or at least attempt to autogenerate) a bunch of the metadata and information summaries about content), but that's not what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about manipulating streams and filters.


Crazy me

Before you think that I've gone crazy (which is probably correct, but for other reasons :), think about it this way: On the road of life, there are passengers and there are drivers, but on the information superhighway there is creation (infusion of new content) and there is manipulation/agregation (using old content in a new way). In computer science, streams are powerful because you take a "continuous" flow of data and shape it in a new way. RSS feeds are an example of a stream, but when you take old data or data from many sources and shape it into something new, you're creating a "filter" of sorts on the old "streams" of data.

But hopping back on my train of thought?, imagine if data can be marked up like RSS feeds or like the "objects" that Jared's talking about for his "personal website" thing for SA Web?. Whether or not there exist central directories or wikis that bring all of the information together, using the streams one could assemble a number of different pieces of data in one place and on one website easily.

There are many techniques that would be great to implement, but many people don't deliniate (or fiercely guard) the content on their website.

Useful techniques could include:


But to give an example...

As an example of a possible basic goal, think about a subject such as mathematics. Using a wiki or directory, one could write articles about different subfields of mathematics as well as famous mathemeticians, etc...

I'm not exactly sure how to do it, but people could provide information in their meta-tags (or other markup tags on websites) that would allow "search engines" (of a sort) to collect the pages up and assemble them into an order, just like a directory.

If I wrote up some notes on topology, then a website that interpreted the "search engine" results could put those notes next to other notes on topology.


Obviously there are many issues to overcome.

One big issue is intellectual property rights?, and although some people do not want to share their IP (for whatever reason), I think that we can overcome most any issues. A lot of "free" content on the web is covered under the FDL (such as much of the LDP's work and the Wikipedia), but there is also content under the BSD license?, as well as tons of public domain? stuff.

Another large sticking point is the problem of trust. We might believe a friend of 20 years, but what about the lecture notes? of some random student that s/he posted online? Here we might rely on what I have termed a "web of trust?", similar to a trusted network of people through which you can get public keys? for cryptography.

As an example, let Sue be a student in England who took some notes on differential analysis?, during a class taught by her teacher Josephine and her TA Kurt. You (Sam), are a student at Dartmouth who knowns some people in the math department: Professor "Michael" and TAs Noel and Ophelia. Oh, and there are two other people (in the world somewhere -- location not important) named Yem and Zad.

( Great! The stage is set :^)

Now, you (Sam) go looking for notes on differential analysis?, and you find what Sue wrote, but are not sure if it's valid.

Now if Sue wanted people to trust her notes, she could ask Josephine to digitally sign? her notes, but that would be tiresome AND Josephine would probably want to review the notes to make sure that she wasn't certifying something with any errors. That would require too much work for this system to gain acceptance, and would be a big burden for everyone involved.

Instead, the professor Josephine could "certify" her trust in what Sue wrote (in general), by digitally signing something that indicated that she trusted Sue a certain amount. If Sue really understood her work, then for that class, Josephine could "certify" that Sue's notes (or anything else) written around that time could not only be trusted, but had a certain likelyhood of being correct mathematically.

Then, (as you've probably guessed), Michael would hopefully "trust" Josephine (perhaps through a third party, or perhaps directly if they'd met or done work together previously), and then Sam could trust Sue through Michael and Josephine.


Variations on a theme

Of course, the TA's could also be brought in on this system. Kurt might know Noel or Ophelia, and so even if Michael didn't really know much about Josephine or her University, one of the Dartmouth TA's might communicate with Kurt in England and do some kind of "certification of trust" through that.

Yem and Zad finally enter the picture, as they could serve as outside observers or reviewers. They could make comments about Sue's notes on some kind of information clearinghouse (or even on their own website). Direct commentary about a product appears on all kinds of websites today (such as Amazon.com), and so not only could you get reviews by individuals, but (if they were willing), could do a check on THEM, to see if they were a reputable professor at a well-known college, or determine if they were a discredited wacko or had a personal vendetta against the author (Sue, in this case).


How it works today

Current scientific papers reference other works and then build upon them or use their results to argue a certain position. In mathematics, for example, one does not have to prove "everything", but instead reduce the given problem to one or more problems that have already been solved, and finally mutter something about recursion and Q.E.D :-)

Whenever someone creates a proof of a difficult problem, the proof is circulated around the world so that it can be checked independently. Hopefully as notes and other work "circulates", it will be annotated and corrected by a thousand hands.

I should also put in a plug for Project Guetenburg? (sp?) here, which could also sit hand-in-hand with the idea of data and information flowing around the world. To continue with our example of mathematics, most books have a few small errors here and there (although Knuth's work should be mostly free of them by now :-). Hopefully many eyes and many hands can work to remove the errors and provide bountiful works of literature side by side with volumes of science, math, and the arts.

(Hopefully most of that made sense... perhaps I'll have some time in the next couple of years to work on different parts of that vision :)

g'night,
-- Robinson



I didn't sit down to write a lot, so hopefully this will be just a few sentences long. War has started with Iraq, and tons of stuff has happened. I don't think that I'm a pacifist through and through, but IMHO Bush really just rushed into war without the blessing of the international community?. Peace might have worked, but now there are American, British, and Iraqi dead because of this conflict. Have you ever seen someone killed? Just die there in front of you? It happens all the time on TV, and we're used to it, but we have to remember that the blood is real, the guns are real, and there are dozens of people who aren't going home tonight.

Anyhow, my little though for the day was about "freedom fries" and how @#$^% stupid they are. How childish can Bush and his political allies? get? Should I send the president a Tonka truck? so that he can make it go "zoom zoom!" across his desk in the oval office?? If they're annoyed at France, get on TV and say so -- get up and say "We don't like the French! They're a bunch of Frogs and they smell". Okay, so maybe that's not too much better, but it's what I'd expect from his rowdy band of hooligans. Being an articulate leader is what should be expected of the "leader of the free world?", and all of the senators and representatives should also act responsibly and civily, especially when talking about other countries. Certainly we should have our fun, but don't make an ass out of me (as a US citizen) while doing it. But I ramble....

I'm not a politician, I'm just a single college student?, and I say that we "play the game" if that's what our government wants. To confront the idiots on capitol hill?, I propose we flip it right around and change "freedom fries" back to "french fries".... but I'm not done.

Nope, instead of just sitting on our haunches, I propose a way for people to push back at the government (and have a little fun in the process). Whenever you see the word "freedom", just think "French" instead.

Back comes our "french fries", "french toast?", and "french food?", but don't forget any other "freedoms". Let the War be henceforth known as "Project Iraqi France?", (perhaps our new motives would be to bring cheese and wine to the iraqi people?? :^)

Remember your first ammendment? rights to french speach, french of the press, and the right to assemble (in) france.

But most of all, remember to "let France ring".


There are a lot of people talking about what's going on in the Middle East? and 24 hour coverage on CNN, MSNBC, and other TV stations? continues onward, even in the dull periods when they keep on rehashing the same information over and over and the times when they look like complete asses because they messed up and can't go to another field agent? playing "soldier" on the front lines.

But more important than all the details of the conflict, remember the sage words in that VW ad about the people who "write code for 24 hours straight" and "just need to unwind":

"in life, there is no reset button".

g'night,
-- Robinson



Everyone wants to make a difference, and everyone wants to be remembered for doing something. At least that seems like human nature?. As I've been searching for that special something? that would make me get remembered, I've been pretty certain that whatever hair-brained shenanigain? I think up would have to be fun.

And so, an idea came to me on such a special day?: the 3rd of March, 2003, or: 03/03/03.......exactly two months before my birthday.

Taking a lead from the marvelous antics of Rob Cockerham? at his WebsiteCockeyed.com?, I decided that the best way to get answers from Dartmouth Adminstration, Computing Services, etc... was to make the question-asking process be fun and be very public.

How public? Well, pretty much as public as we can get on the Dartmouth campus. I could put up posters, post stuff on the wiki, talk to friends, and even talk to random students? in different places on campus.

My basic plan is to have people pose questions in two different areas each week:

For the first type of question, we'd let the Oracle at Dartmouth? come up with something (hopefully part truth and part hysterical hyperbole).

For the second type of questions, we'd post whatever answer we received. If we got a full and completely satisfactory answer, we'd post it. For most tough questions, we'd probably not be satisfied with the results, so to take an idea from my high school? history teacher?, Dave Corkran, we could use a red "rubber stamp?" to mark the question with Explain Reasoning Further?", and continue to ask the necessary parties to answer the question, week after week.

(NOTE: my history teacher really did have a set of rubber stamps? that he'd use to mark up our papers. All of them were in red ink, except for the "Good" stamp -- that one was in blue ink.)

The whole idea is banking on making the whole process fun and amusing for Dartmouth undergrads?. If we can get enough of them paying attention to the questions, then hopefully we can get them to take action if the Administration holds out and does not answer our questions.

Well, who knows if it's going to make a difference or not. Time will tell all, right?

ciao,
RobinsonTryon


Coolness. No, really. We're actually getting work done on sidecar for linux, and even if we can't get our mooky paws? on the original source, we can write something ourselves, and I can finally fulfill my dream of becoming a kerberos hacker?.

Actually, that's never been my life dream? or in any of my dreams -- unless you count that one time when I was living in a world where there were no different people, just a few billion instantiations of me walking around, kind of like that TNG episode with all of the Enterprises from different universes. I guess that there, somewhere, one of my incarnations was probably a kerberos hacker?. Of course, there was probably one of me walking around with a nice new laptop. Damn! If only I could have woken up as that guy. I could really use a laptop....

Anyhow, in sidecar news we had some good brainstorming going on about how to make a pop-up GUI for not only Kerberos Kinit? but for AFS Klog? as well.... I think that I will be able to get some good coding time over break and make some of it happen.

I sent a letter off to the Help Desk with some recommendations on offering both NiftyTelnetSSH and MacSSH support for MacClassic. I also suggested that they look into using JellyfiSSH? and SoftwareFugu? for SSH / SFTP support for the OSX side of things. The Help Desk people seem to be rather friendly, but often they don't have enough knowledge. As well, people just aren't connected, as this example shows:

The traffic has risen considerably on the linux-users? mailing list in the past couple of weeks, and a number of people have asked to be removed. I had some trouble sending out information to users because my initial email was bounced my MajorDomo? (it had the words 'subscribe' and 'unsubscribe' in it....in the examples of how to perform those actions.... :^).
  In the mean time, one of the people on the list (innocently enough) emailed the Help Desk, asking them how to unsubscribe from the list, but they didn't know.

But how did the Help Desk not know about the MajorDomo? system? The reason is that the information systems of the different groups of Computing Services are not linked together at all. Right now the Help Desk is using SoftwareRemedy, ResearchComputing is using a FAQ-o-Matic?, and StewStryker? over in Adminstrative Computing? is using a TWiki. Down in Kiewit, I don't think that anyone is using anything!

Of course, it's not immediately clear how these sytems are being used. What does seem to be clear is that someone should try to create a system that could bridge all of these groups. The system should be powerful, easy to use, and as flexible as possible. Try to make a system where people can interface with it from many different operating systems, and potentially even from handheld devices? or from the command line?.

I'm working on this TWiki tool for the Dartmouth community, and as it grows beyond the DLG and the undergraduates to include the faculty, I could definately see it as a poweful tool for the computing support staff?. I could see reasons why they'd like to have their own (or at least some kind of 'official namespace?' so that they wouldn't be sharing wiki space? with my Blog or nodes such as how to smoke pot? and tentacle porn :-), but in one way I'm hoping that it doesn't turn out that way. I'm hoping that we (i.e. me, Sam, Jared, and you... yes you! ....whoever you are, reading this page right now) can put a tremendous amount of useful information into this system and show the College that it is much more useful to have the community collaborate on adding content to the system. Think about all of the undergrads and grad students? who are certain smart enough to add relevant content? to the pages for their department....

Anyhow, computing services should really get all that information organized together so that people can benefit from it. I'm looking forward to a day sometime next term when I can walk down to the Help Desk and show them how much more information we have in the Wiki (or something that replaces it) compared to their small 'knowledge base?'. We are going to knock their socks off!

Two related ideas which I'll stick in my Personal Project Page:

g'night,
RobinsonTryon


Yet another day is breaking (or will in about 3 hours :-) on the lovely but cold campus of Dartmouth. As I while away the early morning hours copying over my cs68 homework (tortoise and prolog code), I had a chance to read up on the latest exploits of the **AA people. Imagine my surprise when I heard that Jack Valenti? and Hillary Rosen? were up to their usual tricks and were actively supporting legislation that would require colleges and universities to enforce copyright law. I mean, we just had the stuff about Direct Connect go around Dartmouth's campus, and it seems like our college is mostly cool about such stuff.... but what if Dartmouth had to play "mommy" to everyone on this campus?

The College is already exerting much pressure on all aspects of life at Dartmouth. Although the administration may not enthrall large segments of the undergraduate population, particularly the affiliated crowd, the College has a certain respect for privacy and personal responsibility such that they do not watch our every step and scold our every mistake. We grow, we learn, we fall, and we rebound.

Some people drink their cares away, and some people knit them away. Although everyone seems to have different ways of expressing themselves and taking "personal time?" away from the chores and bores of everyday life, we are all human and we all have come to the college that is Dartmouth. Love it or hate it, people are here to learn -- in one way or another. The honor code that helps to shape our actions here at Dartmouth can aid us in deciding what actions to take as we while away our terms in rapt concentration on either the professor or the cute girl who sits four chairs away. Persuing our goals and making decisions, we grow, we give, and we gain new insight into the world and into ourselves.

Even though you are certain by now that I have gone off on a tangent from my original topic, (as I do so often), it should be apparent that students at Dartmouth are growing into adults. Not just starched-shirt and pleated-pants or skirt adults, but the kind of people that interviewed me to come to this jolly old campus -- professional but playful inside and organized but still slightly impulsive. Dartmouth provides us with room & board as well as the teaching environment and our campus. Dartmouth is our ISP, giving us a huge 100Mbit internal network with which people can transfer large amounts of data or stream video and sound from point to point. Certainly we can use the network to illegally transfer copyrighted materials?, but why should Dartmouth be policing us with a choke-chain collar? If we are truly to grown into mature adults, we must take responsibility for our own actions. Dartmouth has no reason to watch over us, and unless we unfairly tax the computer network or create harm for members of the community, they have no reason to examine any of the things that we do.

Don't put schools in the position of doing the "dirty work" for the music industry or anyone else. We have academic work and research that can bring all kinds of usefulness to the world -- why don't we spend our resources on the things that matter to us and our community.



Well, finished off another week. AGORA was fun tonight (talked about Gun Control?. Last week's mention of Tentacle Porn came up again (a couple of times), and I think that it will somehow have to become a part of the history or perhaps an Octopus mascot?

In the Linux world, I still haven't gotten any information from Larry Levine or Rita Murdough?. School work has kept me busy, and some people think that I should just bring this stuff up to TheD (asking for an article). I dunno -- there were the two articles about Direct Connect, but who knows if the MS stuff will be front-page news as well.

I had a question about the whole Direct Connect system -- it got shut down because someone on the outside claimed that they had found copyrighted material on the campus network. ... But how did they determine that the information was there in the first place? And even more importantly, what if someone on the outside found out that students were using email or one of the other computer services at Dartmouth to transmit unauthorized copies of music or movies?

My single sign-on system? could potentially have problems if people could use their AFS space as publicly-readable storage. I mean, people can already do that if they have a CS, northstar, or webster/cobweb account (they can just toss stuff in public_html). Then, the college might have to be restricting those accounts (not that it would be at all difficult to control the accounts..)

The linux weekly meeting? went well today -- we had a small attendance, but I think that we got a fair bit of stuff done. After the meeting I started working on the Tux Stencils? -- so that we can spray-paint Tux on computers (esp. public linux machines).

Groups, Services, division of labor:
While we're getting stuff done slowly with our meetings, I've been trying to envision what I'd like to see in the future. What do I want with the wiki -- or do we want a new version like GreenIvy ? What kinds of groups do we want? What kind of organization of services created/run by students and/or for students? Are we just going with open source software ?

Actually, I half wish that I was just an '06 or '05 with a few more years at Dartmouth. The truth is that I'm graduating in about a term, and although I can start some things in action right now, I might not be around next year to help run the show. But to give a basic idea structure, here's what's going on in my little grey cells:

The student-computing group would not necessarily have any power over these sub-teams, but would help unify them and allow them to come together to work on bigger projects. Although the Basement and SA people have significant presence, smaller groups (or individuals) could find a voice (and an opportunity to work on projects) with the help of this group.

The group could also focus on ethical issues surrounding computing + students, and might be able to bring unique light on the policies and regulations of Dartmouth.

*Other Stuff... *
We should also consider stuff that would be cool for the Dartmouth Linux Group to own or find a way to borrow. I already have a few things from the stencils, and we have a bunch of magazines for the start of the Tux Computing Library?. I think that a Digital Camera? would be a cool addition so that different groups of people could borrow it for a few days to take pictures of hardware and make our website look better.

In order to get work done on Linux stuff, I think that we should try to form some sub-groups and establish some roles. We have a few different pieces of software that we'd like to develop, but unfortunately Sam, Jared, and I just don't have enough time to work on all of them :^)

I think that it would be neat to split some people up into sub-teams, so that we have a few people who are keeping track of all of the projects, and then a few people working on each project. As an example:

I'm currently working on SIdecar for Linux?, the single sign-on system?, trying to figure out the best email client for Linux, as well as a stable BlitzMail client for public machines (JBlitz might be the best option right now...). And that's just a bit too much for me to handle :)

But if I could advise on these projects and delegate responsibility, I think we'd see results:

So that became less of an example, and more of a map of our current projects (heck -- it's useful to have them organized like that :-)

Basically, it seems to me that we just need 10-15 people who would be interested in spending some time each week to work on just one of the sub-teams. I'm sure that I won't be able to prevent myself from working a bit on each of the projects, but having other people lead each project will keep us more organized, and will help each of us focus on a small list (and not try to do everything --- which is often counter-productive for me :P )

anyhow, I'm going to try to config an AFS server and then auth. from the DND... let's see how difficult this turns out to be... :-)



Sure it's cheap (I just made the other blog entry a little while ago), but the day DID change, didn't it? LOL.

Oh well. Jared sure liked the suggestion that I go smoke some pot in Parkhurst. I'm sure that it would have calmed the Deans down just a little.... don't you think? (the fact that I don't smoke anything is beyond the point... :-)

So I'm finally deciding which one of the two subjects I should choose for my paper. I've already written a bit of an outline for both. For the single sign-on system, I could write about a lot of the components and making it all work. Of course, I've never set up an AFS server, and have no idea how hard it would be to make kerberos work with AFS, Jabber, Email (under linux), etc.... Maybe that's half of the fun/work, eh?

On the other hand, I could go with the GreenIvy system, and work on a collaborative online tool. I know that I could get a lot of it done, and I could certainly work on a number of different components that could build on existing software such as the GPLed TWiki stuff...

what to choose? ( thinking, ... thinking... )

DECISION: I think that I'll go with the Single Sign-on AFS deal (IntegratedNetworkSystem). Even if I can't implement all of the components of that system, I think that I can think about it and plan it, and perhaps get some work done on sidecar + Kerberos or PKI (either one would work for me...).


Boy am I tired. I still need to work on the OSX stuff for my meeting tomorrow. Actually, I've been reading through a few hundred pages of the OSX Administrator Manual (free pdf from Apple's site -- great documentation), and been impressed at how easy they have made system administration.

I think that they have finally packaged up Apache, MySQL?, PHP, etc... with the QuickTime? streaming server and bunches of other goodies, and made a pretty neat product. I have no idea what kind of price tag is attached (hey -- I don't pay those bills :), so it still might be cheaper to go with some other kind of Linux/Unix solution. Might not be as easy to admin, though.

On the MicrosoftCampusAgreement front, I haven't heard anything back from LarryLevine or RitaMurdough?. At least I have a CouncilOnComputing meeting this thursday so I can ask Larry at that time. Sam joked that I might get kicked off the council for asking such questions. (you were joking, right Sam?)

On a similar note, on the SidecarForLinux front, I finally got off my ass and emailed the people at CornellUniversity? to ask them if I could redistribute the source code for Sidecar. I got a response back from RonDiNapoli? (Programmer/Analyst...Dept. of Computer Science), who told me that: "Cornell has a policy of not releasing SideCar? source right now.", but that he'd contact someone at Dartmouth and see what their policy was on releasing the sidecar source. Then StephenCochran? (down in Kiewit) emailed me and we had a chat. He said that he was going to go along with Cornell and not release the sidecar source -- he thought that it could lead to "rogue copies" of sidecar floating around, and users might get confused and install them instead of the official version.

If people at Dartmouth are getting confused about where to get the official copies of software, then maybe it's time that we redesigned the website at Dartmouth and made it easier for people to download and install the software that they needed.

Anyhow, I have to come up with a paper topic (and draft) for tomorrow's cs99 class. I have some work done on the whole NewNodularStructureTool (esp. GreenIvy), and I'm also looking at the IntegratedNetworkSystem -- which would be the whole single sign-on system with kerberos and AFS. While I don't know how many papers there are on sidecar, I'm tempted to make sidecar + kerberos the topic of my paper so that I can get a bit of work done on the opensource linux version. But it's really not as interested as the other two -- well, I guess I'll figure it out.

g'night,
--Robinson


Well, not too much going on today (well, it's about 12:45, and I'm coding up my cs44 assignment in sudi.)

I got to meet some of the people on SAWeb today. They are cool and enjoy using free software like us linux people -- well, of course Sam and Jared are on the team so that might be part of the reason, but whatever :) They are interested in recruitment, which is cool and good, and they are also interested in having educational sessions about MySQL?, PHP, Linux admining, etc... That's really neat, expecially because it means that linux-people can help and benefit, and because SA has some money and the DartmouthLinuxGroup isn't getting any official funding (yet).

Hopefully we can get weekly meeting going for linux, and I think that we could get a bigger community of open-source types, which would be cool if lots of CS majors started coming and working on projects, etc...

well, it seems as though my level of writing isn't so hot, probably because I'm a bit tired. Time to get some caffeine from the machine of liquid wonders outside 001 :-)

Oh -- anyone know of a good book on running OSX or "Xserves" ? -- I'm setting up a few of the Xserves, and I could probably use a good book to help me figure out how to set them up, etc...

g'night,
--Qubit


Talking about Linux....
So we've got this wiki thing set up here, and Sam's got the FAQ-O-Matic going as well. Personally I'd go with the wiki, but it does have a bunch more odds and ends, and the FAQ tool is a lot simpler for the average person. Obviously we could have both, but then it's a bit harder to figure out what information goes where, and how we can organize it. I was just looking at a skin that someone made for the TWiki tool, (one of the plugins mentioned at http://www.twiki.org), so perhaps we could spend a few hours setting that up and make the website look really cool.

Hopefully this friday we can have the meeting we've been planning to have for many weeks. We need to figure out the website for linux, and it would also be nice to figure out WeeklyMeetings.

WeeklyMeetings:
My idea is that we could have a meeting every week or two where lots of us geeks get together and talk about neat stuff. Lots of us are interested in linux, so perhaps that would be a primary topic, but we could also talk about HamRadio or ExplosiveChemistry? or even MechanicalEngineering? stuff. We don't have to get anything done, but one of the main ideas is to have fun and get people together who want to do some cool stuff. It seems like I'm pretty busy with school and work, so maybe we can attract some other people who have time to work on the linux website or to work on the GUI interface for the SidecarForLinux project.

I just finished up a paper for ComputerScience99 about Microsoft's licensing polices and how they were pretty annoying and unethical. Although I could have done a better job on the paper, it also got me a chance to communicate with some of the people on Dartmouth's campus who work in ComputingServices.

What I was trying to do was find out about the MicrosoftCampusAgreement that we've bought. This agreement is basically a $200,000+ chunk of change that we shelled out that allows us to use basic MS software (OSes, Office, etc...) on pretty much any machine on campus. The problem is that this "Agreement" was just slipped into the budget over the summer and pretty much no one mentioned it to the school. Computing services has just a little blurb on one of the pages for the ComputerStore (see here: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~store/sales/mscampus.html), and when I tried to ask questions about it, people basically told me that they couldn't talk to me about it. (I'm still trying to find out more information, so check the Campus Agreement page for more ....)

The point is that I still don't know how much this agreement is costing me and the school, and especially in our current budget crunch it seems innapropriate for the college to be spending lots of money on MS Software. If you're reading this page and you are a member of ComputingServices with lots of power, please consider using FreeSoftware alternatives.... I think that we could save a lot of money, and we wouldn't have to deal with a lot of the Licensing and EULA issues that we have with the Microsoft software we're currently supporting.

Hmmm. anything more to say today?

well, I'm going to try to add something to my blog every day or two, and I'm going to try to add a new "topic" to the TWiki every day. Hopefully, if I just keep on adding topics then I can grow this wiki up and make it be something cool for the Dartmouth campus.

g'night, --R




RobinsonTryon - 03 Feb 2003