Torsten Curdt’s weblog

Around the last Cocoon GetTogether I’ve implented a first proof-of-concept version of java continuations. Stephan picked up my work and completed the Cocoon integration. Addtionally he rewrote all the parts that used Brakes. (Thanks for your efforts, Stephan) So now finally we have an implementation under Apache Software License that ships with Cocoon!

The most important thing that is still missing is the auto-compilation feature. But this can be added as soon as the license discussion about the CompilingClassloader has reached a consensus.

Today my inbox was so full of spam again that mails were starting to bounce. I exceeded my quotas! I AM SICK of this spam! This is no fun anymore! In the beginning it was only few presses on delete. But now I am losing time and sometimes even mails that are drowning in this mass of sh*t. All the current approaches trying to solve this issue (that I know of) are futile. What does it help to have all the frickin’ spam automagically sorted into a special “unwanted” folder like e.g. web.de does. I still have to login and kill it because of the huge amount of spam that fills up my inbox. This does not work if you get about 100-200 spam mails as a daily average.
I guess accepting only mails with some kind of fingerprint is the way to go. It would help to get rid all those fake sender spam. If the sender would be reliable it would solve a lot of our spam problems. I am wondering if there is already such a project …otherwise I’d be really tempted to start setting up something like that by myself. Things have to change!! And someone has to start!

I am so glad I did buy the Linksys WRT54G… Today I’ve spent some minutes and installed the batbox tools on my router. It is running Linux and after some tweaking you can log in and add software as you like. Which is so cool!

The batbox distribution does only support Linux and MacOSX. So I just booted my Knoppix CD, dragged the batbox onto the desktop and did run the wrt54g.sh script. After a few seconds the java client installed the software onto the router and …voila! I was able to login.

This all works through a bug of their web interface. (Yeah, yeah, yeah …you better be careful what you do with request parameters!) In the new firmware this bug was supposed to be fixed. But their fix was …well – not optimal :) So it worked for me although I’ve upgraded the firmware to US 1.4.23 (because of the broken dyndns support in earlier versions).

Now if you look into this little linux system you find all kinds of stuff. A mini webserver, a cron daemon (how cool is that!) and some tools to control the hardware settings. After some research I found that you can adjust the transmission power. Usually it comes with a default of 19mW but you can tune it up to 84mW! But there is a good chance you fry your router with that. Anyway I heart that 48mW should be reasonable and so this little command gave me some more power:

Hope my router is doing ok with it. And I am very curious to try out some more tools. Especially a socks proxy would be nice. And I am not yet sure what to do with a cron daemon on my router …it’s definitly an exciting toy :)

# /usr/sbin/wl -i eth2 txpwr 48

What do *you* use when it comes to create illustrations for presentations, articles or books? I know quite some people are using M$ Powerpoint do draw their figures and export them into their articles. But this cannot be it! Any recommendations? Just wondering what’s out there – totally OS agnostic…

Now it’s official. On the 5.4. I am going to join Marcus and Michael working at ManageSoft! I am excited! Thanks for the other interesting job offers …but I decided to give working the Oz-way a try :)