Author: Matthias

drop dropbox

For some time now, I’ve been evaluating dropbox. From time to time, I need to be able to store a file and have it available at another location in a synced fashion. First some history.
Before Dropbox, I was (ab)using gmail through the firefox gspace plugin, but, 1) you need firefox 2) you pollute your mail space 3) it’s buggy and bloated 4) but still doesn’t have all features I want. The reason I chose gspace back in the day, was because it was presumably cross platform through use of the firefox platform. That turned out to become limited functionality and eventually useless at all (may be fixed by now). It had also issues with having your gmail open in a tab at the same time. So I looked for an alternative and dropbox seemed promising.

My requirements for a ‘online storage’ solution are:

  • cross platform native clients: to allow sharing between work and home computers.
  • web interface: when you’re in the wild at someone else’s computer where you don’t want to install a client.
  • corporate-proof: can operate from behind different types of proxies.
  • server-side backup: when you accidentally overwrite a file from another location, or when syncing fails to do the right thing.

My nice-to-have’s are:

  • revision history: same as server-side backup but extended to multiple backups.
  • desktop integration: status overlay (aka tortoise stuff), context menu to perform web actions, for example, revert to some revision, make public, …
  • exclusion filters: handy when you don’t want your lock or temp files (due to editing) to be uselessly synced all the time.

Dropbox seemed to fulfill all my wishes except exclusion filters. Until recently. 🙂 At work, when I resume after suspend, the client doesn’t automatically sync back to the server (this can also be a proxy issue here at work, but it doesn’t work anymore and there’s nothing I can do about it, i.e. it’s closed source). But there are other things that bug me: 1) explorer integration is slow but not optional. So you have to live with it. 2) The (windows) client feels sluggish and quite heavy to load. 3) Linux client always lags behind and the desktop integration is only for gnome. Linux users had to wait long for a release, but even now, they are not treated very well. Then of course, there is the whole discussion of dropbox being closed source but the front-end part being open source, confusing people all around. 🙂 They give the impression they care about the linux users and open source, but in reality, they can’t make it true. In fact, I have no problem using a closed client, but it has to work very well then. 😉
Dropbox has free and paid accounts. The free accounts are limited to 2GB storage and only 30 days history. No problem for me.
So up until recently, I was quite happy with dropbox, but since the windows client fails to reconnect after resume and the linux fails to start, I guess I’m counting its last days. 🙂

If anyone knows a decent cross-platform alternative, please let me know.

But it did raise that thought again in my head: why not try to start an open source online storage sharing solution? Is it so hard? Why does it not exist yet? Of course, I’m not targetting a system which can take loads and loads of people uploading their latest torrents to share with the rest of the family *rolling eyes* 😉 But simply, you know, some system that can handle a few accounts (or even just private) which you can install on your own server and offers basic syncing functionality with some better-than-dumb compression/file-diffing mechanism. Personally, I also wouldn’t need fancy public web sharing like photogalleries and the like, so…

Maybe I’m missing something? 🙂

DIY old timer: Le Patron

Last weekend, I ran into an old pal from high school (Kenny Butstraen) and guess what: he’s building cars! Up until recently, he was mainly focussed on building Le Patron: a kit car based on a Citroen 2CV chassis. Last year, with this car, he was the youngest distributor at the largest car expo in Belgium. For Dutch reading people, there’s an interesting article by HLN.


Le Patron Le Patron

But his real passion is in building authentic replica’s or models of special vehicles, for example, for use in war movies. At least, that’s what I understood from the very short talk I had (we met in a DIY shop just before closing hour ;)) and what I find on the website 🙂


sdkfz1.jpg sdkfz2.jpg

Very interesting stuff! I’ll try to meet up with him and hope to get back to you with more pics from his work place! 🙂

Thumbs.db viewer

Sometimes when images get accidentally deleted, even the thumbnails are already useful to view and might save you a recover operation. As you know, windows creates a hidden thumbs.db file in every directory where you viewed an image in thumbnail mode. When the file gets deleted, windows does not like to clean up (no surprise here), so you can still view them.
I found this nice free tool which simply does the job (.net framework required).


thumbs.db viewer

Securing mysql

Everyone knows, first thing you have to do after installing mysql, is setting its root password. I used to do this using the mysqladmin tool like this:

/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'

For starters, you should not forget to do the same command for your other host names (-h option), but also there are still some other tasks like disabling anonymous access and removing the test databases. Today, having another mysql install, I noticed that the install script mentions this neat tool packaged with mysql to do just all that. 🙂

Just run /usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation and you’re done!

Dual action. Literally.

If you own a dual action gamepad, i.e. one with 2 sticks, Gunroar is a game you MUST try out. If you don’t own that, you might wanna try it out anyway as there are also game modes that are well playable without a gamepad.

To me, Gunroar is a typical old-skool action “shooter” game implemented using modern techniques (others may also want to call it a geometry wars clone). In other words: success. 🙂 The wireframe and polygon style rendering is refreshing, the action is fast, the music and sound effects perfectly fit the bill, did I mention fast action? 🙂 It really blows your senses. 🙂

What really puts this game apart, is it superb dual action gameplay. The game sports several game modes:

  • Normal mode: one stick to navigate. If you start to shoot, the navigation stick becomes a strafing stick. Also “torpedos” available.
  • Twin stick mode: real dual action 🙂 Use one stick to navigate, the other to aim/shoot.
  • Double play: if you thought twin stick was the fastest action your brain can process, try double play. You have to control two gunboats simultaneously! The combined position of the 2 gunboats determines the shooting direction. Your brain might protest in the beginning, but try it and you will enjoy. 🙂
  • mouse mode: use arrows for navigation and pointer to aim and fire. Don’t think this mode would be inferior because of the focus on gamepads in the other modes!

But the best part is: all this action seems so hyperkinetic and stressing, but once you get the hold of it, it all feels quite natural and works even relaxing 😉 Also, each game mode has its own distinct gameplay. It’s amazing what you can do with so little. 🙂

A few factoids to close. Gunboat is:

  • written by some Japanese guy Kenta Cho.
  • written in D
  • uses SDL
  • uses the ant build system
  • is not open source :/

Freenode raising the bar for routers

This week I noticed a strange problem with my irc client.
First day (Tuesday), it would fail to connect. Since my login to the campus network expired, I had to relogon, so I thought the problem was simply related to that and that the irc client wouldn’t recover until an application restart.
Second day, it still didn’t connect, which I thought was strange, but I didn’t have time to chat anyway, so I neglected.
Today, I frowned and decided to take a look 🙂

First of all, I noticed it wasn’t really a connect problem, it couldn’t even resolve the hostname. Heh? When I ran “nslookup irc.freenode.org” it spit out:

;; Truncated, retrying in TCP mode.
;; Connection to 192.168.2.1#53(192.168.2.1) for irc.freenode.org failed: connection refused.

mmm..
I went to the freenode site, to see if there were any news items reporting problems or outage. There didn’t seem to be a news section. So I assumed: no news == good news. 🙂

Then, I noticed the actual hostname for irc is really chat.freenode.net instead of irc.freenode.org. “chat” or “irc” in front works both. Indeed, that did work. So why did irc.freenode.org suddenly stop working? Was it because of a recent patch (although I couldn’t remember applying any in the last week)? Was it because of my firewall? Both answers are negative.

The friendly chaps at #freenode kindly tipped me off that the dns record had probably become too large to be transmitted through UDP and that TCP dns requests seemed blocked. Servers get added to the network on a regular basis, so that would explain why it suddenly stopped working. It became obvious that my dusty old router would be the culprit (quick tip: never blame your linux kernel first 😉 ). After all, according to contemporary standards, one could declare mine “ancient”.

Quite recently I already encountered some problems with it. After an upgrade of the campus network, I kept having strange packet loss when playing multiplayer games for more than 2 minutes. I had never updated my firmware, so I thought I might try that. Although the latest firmware release dated back to 2004, it did help! mattie=1, router=0.

After I pulled the router out of the chain, the dns problem was solved indeed! Unfortunately, updating firmware is no longer an option, so I guess the router and I are even now. 😉

On #freenode, I was told I wasn’t the first one to report this problem, so I guess a lot of people will need to update their firmwares, buy new routers, or simply use a more local dns name. 😉