Cameron's Thoughts

Site Remake Still Underway

Way back on Jan 13th of 2008, I made a post about how I was planning to rewrite the code behind my Cameron's Thoughts site. While that got side tracked for quite a while, I did at one point have a mostly working redesign done. But it wasn't to my liking and then I pretty much pushed that project to the side and didn't work on it. That is no longer the case however. For the last couple months, I've been back on course with redoing this code. I now has some decent progress made. I have the code opened up for all to see the progress at Github. I also now have the beginnings of some actual documentation behind the code as well.

Workout Songs

I thought I'd share the songs I currently have on my workout playlist. I'm curious as to any suggestions people have to add to this.

J99 by Oxide And Neutrino
Get Your Body Beat by Combichrist
Stronger by Kanye West
Linchpin by Fear Factory
We Come Alive by BK
Sandstorm by Darude
Master Of Puppets by Metallica
Around The World / Harder Better Faster Stronger by Daft Punk
Let It Rock by Kevin Rudolf

Trip to the Liquid Web Holiday Party

Last night was the Liquid Web holiday party at Enso. It was really nice, and like usual, the party had outdone all previous that Liquid Web has hosted. The trip there ended up being a bit interesting. When driving onto the I-96 entrance ramp at Pennsylvania St, around the curve I hit some ice and dig a nice fishtail that had me end up in the ditch. I attempted to drive out, but with all the grass being covered in snow and ice, my attempts were futile. I wasn't the first person to end up in the ditch. A little further up the entrance ramp, there was another car that was in the ditch on the other side of the road. Thankfully, that other car had already called for police assistance as a cop car showed up within a minute of me ending up in that ditch. The cop came over and let me know that a tow truck was on its way and I could just stay in the car to stay warm.
The cop car stayed and blocked off one of the lanes of the ramp in an attempt to get cars to slow down. I wasn't sure how good of an idea that was, as that meant that not only did people have to slow down, but they also had to unexpectedly merge lanes. Things were going well for a while, but I was getting worried as there were a lot of people fishtailing around that corner. I started to feel like a sitting duck, only took one other person to lose control and they were hitting me. Eventually that came really close. A car lost control and did a 360 going toward me, ending up on the side of the road, maybe 15 feet from my car. Was somewhat of a scary moment. Not long after that however, the moment I was expecting to happen took place. Yet another car fishtailed and lost control. That guy however crashed into the cop car. It was at that point I felt much less stupid about being in the ditch. At that point the cop moved his car and completely closed off the ramp. The highway entrance was probably closed for a good 20 more minutes. Eventually the tow truck came and pulled me out.
I am generally a pretty good driver and have only been in a ditch two previous times. Once 12 years ago when my brakes went out, and another time 8 years ago during a whiteout near Grand Rapids and a miscalculation on where the road was. Both those times I was able to get out. This was a somewhat embarrassing situation for me. It didn't help that I was all dressed up, and was also in the car with Rachael and Brian. Thankfully, in the end, my car was totally fine and no one was hurt. I luckily slide in between two of the roadside reflectors so those didn't do any damage to my car, and the car fairly easily was able to be pulled out. We all ended up making it to the Liquid Web party, and had an interesting story to tell.

Michigan Smoking Ban

Not certain my feeling of the new smoking ban in Michigan. I'm not a smoker, but it seems like the free market has been creating non-smoking establishments on their own. Don't think the government needed to intervene. There are many non-smoking restaurants and there are non-smoking bars as well. If more people quit going to businesses that had smoking and went to the non-smoking places, everything would have worked itself out on its own. It will be nice to not stink like smoke after going out to the bar however.

PHP and the pcre.backtrack_limit

Just came across this today. Looks like in PHP 5.2, they decided to add a 100000 byte limit to regular expression matches. This can stop a lot of searches on long strings, and the worst part is that PHP doesn't throw any error when that limit is reached. If you are using the perl-compatible regular expressions in PHP, you will likely want to change the pcre.backtrack_limit in the php.ini file to something larger than 100000.

WebOS 1.3.1 and Auth Changes

I purchased my Palm Pre the morning it came out. Within a couple of days, people had already figured out how to gain root access to the underlying Linux operating system. I've setup access since that time (early June). Since that time, everything has worked great. Update after update, Palm has never tinkered with anything related to the SSH access. After I installed WebOS 1.3.1, all of a sudden I could no longer access my phone over SSH. Unlike all those iPhones that just got hacked because they had enabled root access with no password, I have direct root access over SSH disabled. I have a separate SSH user created, which is just security common sense. Unfortunately, it seems that Palm had updated the /etc/passwd file in the latest update which removed my SSH user. Had I left the system insecure, I could have still logged in with the root user, but I didn't. I don't recall how I initially enabled the root access, but I seem to recall that it required connecting the phone to my computer and it didn't work on Windows 7. So, that was going to require that I load up a virtual machine on my desktop and figure it out again. Instead, I was able to install the Terminal application from Preware and was able to get a root console that way. I don't know why Palm made this change, but I now see they also updated the hostname on the device for some reason. Before, the hostname was simply 'castle', which was the Pre's codename. Now the hostname shows as 'palm-webos-device'. Hopefully this is the last time Palm makes this change as I like having control over the phone.

WebOS 1.3.1 Released Today

The latest version of WebOS came out today, and the third big update since the Palm Pre came out. I'm about to download it here shortly. Precentral has details of what's included in the update. I have been using Preware to install patches to my phone, so this update also means it's time to remove those patches, and then reinstall after the update. For my own personal note-taking and to share what I have installed, here are the current patches:

4x4 icons v3
Call Block/Rejector
Call Duration in Call Log
Character Counter
Default to Month View
Enable Add/Delete Pages
Enable Forwarding
Enable Landscape Email
Enable Vibration
Hide Nascar App
Hide NFL App
Just Charge By Default
Lower Swap Threshold
Match State to Area Code
Reduce Minimum Brightness
Show Wifi SSID
Sound Toggle - Grey
Unhide Dev Mode Icon
Unthrottle Download Manager
Virtual Keyboard

A lot of this stuff is indeed included in other phones by default, and I will admit that webOS is lacking in some features. Thankfully, the hacking community is really great and they have made the phone very nice.

Also, anyone running Preware should probably make the following modification to the phone. This will stop updates from occurring automatically. It's possible that you could really mess up the phone if you install an OS update over all the patches, so it's best to have control over the updates instead of letting Palm do them automatically. What this does is simply remove the execute ability from the update application. You need to have root access to do this. Once you are logged on as root, run the following:

mount -o remount,rw /
chmod -x /usr/bin/UpdateDaemon
mount -o remount,ro /
killall UpdateDaemon

Then, on days like today when once you've removed all the patches, you can reverse this and re-enable the updater by doing the following:

mount -o remount,rw /
chmod +x /usr/bin/UpdateDaemon
mount -o remount,ro /

Then restart the phone.

Time Related Items I Hope to See in My Lifetime

Here are two things I hope to live to see:

1) Elimination of daylight saving time

2) Elimination of timezones

The daylight saving time thing has bugged me for the longest time. It especially became an enemy of mine when we went through the whole change in when the date of the DST changeover took place. That required a couple days of code updating I had to do at my previous job. Living in a computerised world, having the time of day change really just causes complications in general. For example, how many minutes are there between 3:00PM Dec 1st 2007 and 3:00PM Aug 1st 2007. If you forget to calculate for DST, you will be off.
Daylight saving time seems to be more suited for the agricultural based society of the past. The only solid argument I've seen for DST is the fact that kids have to get on the bus early in the morning when it's dark. It seems to me that a much better solution would just have school start an hour later during the winter months. I see no reason the entire country should change time itself when schools would be very capable of simply changing the start and end times.
The elimination of timezones is something that is probably less likely in my lifetime, but is still something that would be nice to see. It's something that would likely receive a lot of resistance, especially in the metric-system-fearing United States. The idea would be to just have all time run on Greenwich Mean Time. I can imagine this taking at least a good year for people to really get used to the switch once it took place, but I don't see it being overly too difficult. This of course would change time the way people are used to and have grown their whole lives being accustomed to. For instance, what time the sun goes down and such would change. However, it's not like we don't already have a fairly arbitrary system. It's currently based solely on the sun. It's not like we wake up exactly at noon and go to sleep at midnight. The times at which we do things are completely arbitrary as it is. The average person generally wakes up around 7 or 8. Works 9-5. Who would really care at the end of it all if 9-5 became 1-9? We live in a globalized world and I think we have to start thinking of time in a global sense and not just a local sense. The creation of time zones were actually in effect the first step toward that. Before timezones, time was relative to the city you were located in. People in the late 19th century were able to change their way of thinking and moved to timezones to more easily make things easier on a national level. It's probably time we move to the next step in that progress.

Brett's Birthday and Other Various News

It's once again been quite some time since I've written a blog post. Much has taken place since my last posting. Today was Brett's 5th birthday. This was not planned out all that well this year due to the fact that I didn't realize it was coming up until last week. I did however get him the one and only gift he asked for, which was a Batman costume for his Build-a-Bear tiger. I plan to get him some more gifts before the weekend. I'm going to try and throw some type of party for him on Saturday.
Work has seemed busy for the last month or two for some reason. The economy doesn't seem to be affecting my employer too much. I've been really interested in space again for some reason. I've been hitting Hulu pretty hard with various space series such as Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos', and the History series 'The Universe'. I'm also starting to catch up on the new season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. I wish HBO would create some way to subscribe to it's programming online. I'd be more than willing to pay to watch Curb and Bill Maher, I just don't feel like getting an entire cable TV package to do so. So for now, I am a little behind while I have to find episodes after they are released.
In personal news, I have gone over two weeks now without taking any type of medication. And I'm feeling extremely healthy. I'm almost certain at this point that my anxiety medication is somehow causing my nausea. In the two weeks that I haven't taken the anxiety pills, my stomach has been completely fine. It's very relieving to not be controlled by those pills though. At one point, I had trouble going more than a couple of hours without the medication and I was taking up to six pills a day. I think I might be to the point now where I might be able to stay off of them for good. Up until now, I could never go more than three days between medication. I have sure been trying since around March to take longer and longer gaps between each pill. I think breaking that three day mark was the big key to getting off of this. Anyhow, I have to get to bed. With the kids in school, my alarm is now going off at 6:30AM. It's not good.

Palm Pre Installer

I created a little install script for my Pre. It makes it easy to install homebrew apps. This requires root access. There are some apps that allow you to install directly from the Pre and also apps that work if the Pre is connected over USB. I don't really prefer these methods as I never connect my Pre to USB, and copying and pasting URL's on the Pre isn't too user friendly.

# /bin/sh
mount -o remount,rw /
ipkg -o /var install $1
luna-send -n 1 palm://com.palm.applicationManager/rescan {}
mount -o remount,ro /

You can then just name it something like install and chmod +x install and easily install any ipk file either locally or over the internet like so:

./install http://forums.precentral.net/spe_attachment/download-24521-com.palm.app
.switcharoo_0.9.0_all.ipk

That installs the Switcharoo wallpaper switch app.